Whatever its faults, I was sorry it ended: Jim the Boy

Jim the Boy, a novel by Tony Earley, Little Brown (2001).

I enjoyed reading this novel, and came to feel that the young boy, Jim, his bachelor uncles Zeno, Coran, Al, and his mother Elizabeth were people I knew. Earley writes in a plainspoken, intimate manner that is just right for the characters of this rural town in North Carolina in the 1930s. Throughout the book, Jim the boy's father, who died just before Jim the boy was born, is a ghostly presence. The boy yearns to know him, to hear stories about him. To be like him. His widowed mother is courted by a man that her brother Zeno (the head of the family) approves of, and yet she cannot stop her by now morbid devotion to her dead husband. Jim the boy's search for his father ties the different chapters and stories, and small town events together. There are a number of small narratives that intersect, including Jim's awkward friendship with Penn, a boy who is both his best friend and his strongest competitor (though the character of Penn seems a little unfilled).

I sometimes felt the sentiment in the work put a kind of sentimental haze over the characters. The uncles and Jim's mother are so lovingly depicted, they seem a little too saintly. But their mishaps and pain are real enough. Earley's plain style helps prevent the sentiment from overwhelming the stories and characters. Whatever its faults, I was sorry the book ended.

Dancing at Lughnesa -- something truly lived

Dancing at Lughnesa, a play by Brian Friel. We saw the Sunday afternoon performance at Wellesley Summer Theater, June 2, 2013. Directed by Nora Hussey and Marta Rainer.

From the description that I read in the Globe, I expected a sad dark play. Five adult sisters living together on a remote farm in Ireland in 1936. Their frail elder brother returns from his missionary work in Africa after many years, his mind wandering and perhaps broken. And the sisters' lives get worse, as the oldest sisters loses her job as a teacher, and two of the younger ones lose their piece-work knitting jobs.

Whoah. But it's darker and more sorrowful than that. The play is narrated by the adult Michael, the son of one of the sisters, many years later as he reminisces about that summer of 1936, when uncle returned from Africa. The very device of reminiscence in a play, of knowing that the people depicted are long dead, of course pulls us into a sad, doomed world.  I liked it a lot.

The slight bits of humor delighted us, as did the dancing and the loud brash sisters. They were all wonderful performances by the cast. I felt heartsick at the end, and wished that some of the sadness and sentiment had not hit us so hard, yet I felt that I had seen something truly lived. And I wouldn't change it.

"Childhood, Boyhood, Youth" -- what a great title!

Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, by Leo Tolstoy. Translated by Judson Rosengrant. Penguin 2012 edition. The three main chapters represent the narrator's description of those early parts of his life growing up on his family's country estate, moving to Moscow, and on to his early university days.

I found myself wrapped up in this little trilogy of...what, memoirs? Autobiographical writings? Fiction in the form of memoir? I came to love the family characters and friends. Surely, it must be Tolstoy himself. He surprises me, as when he writes lovingly of his father, but then bluntly alludes to an affair his father had. It's Tolstoy. The unexpected details, ideas, perspectives. The lovingly detailed passages of happiness and sadness. Some of it gets tedious. There is lots that is unformed. But it's Tolstoy. I could happily re-read it.

Was Mozart really a childish jerk?

We saw Amadeus, the Peter Shaffer play about Mozart and Salieri, at New Repertory Theater in Watertown, on May 26. Directed by Jim Petosa. Here is a Boston Globe review that I mostly agree with.

I vaguely remembered the movie from the 80. It was a very popular play and movie back then. If it is true, the story of the envious Salieri steadily blocking the superhumanly gifted Mozart in his career and finally poisoning his life to the point of killing him, makes for a good story. On the web, I've read that the play's story is greatly exaggerated, and there's lots of evidence that Salieri and Mozart actually liked and worked with each other. But that's probably not important to the play -- the story doesn't have to adhere to the historical truth, and the truth can be hard to figure out.

Marilyn was enthusiastic about the play, and I less so. There is lots of good ensemble work. The scenes where Mozart (played by Tim Spears) actually plays at the harpsichord and devises music are wonderful. The performances were uniformly good. McCaela Donovan, as Mozart's wife Costanza, stood out for her cool and modulated style. This woman was really out to promote Wolfgang's career and life. And Russell Garrett, as Emperor Joseph II, was very good.

My main complaint is the story itself. Mozart is represented as an cartoonish adult adolescent, and is a stereotype for the childish artist who is a "genius" at his art but a childish jerk otherwise. I just don't buy that the scheming older Salieri ground down and scared the genius Mozart to his death, even in the context of the play.

A great play, A Raisin in the Sun, at the Huntington

A Raisin in the Sun, at the Huntington Theater, Saturday, March 23, 2013. By Lorraine Hansberry. Directed by Liesl Tommy. Here is a good review by the Boston Globe's Don Aucoin, with which I largely agree.

I think most theater lovers know the story of the Younger family, who are poor and live in a claustrophobic flat in Chicago's black neighborhoods, how the mother comes into insurance money from the death of her husband, how the erratic son Walter blows a good chunk of the money on a liquor store scheme when one of the partners absconds with the money, and how they're move to buy a house in a white neighborhood is accomplished over the objections of the white neighbors, who are willing to pay the Youngers to not move there. There are a lot of stories going on in this play. It's a flood of stories. And that's not bad. Better always to have too much going on than too little. For me, the story of Walter (played by LeRoy McClain), his weakness, and his ultimate resolution and redemption, is the one that stood out.

The Huntington, and this cast, did a great job. It's a long, almost three hour play, but it passes quickly. I wondered about LeRoy McClain, the actor who plays Walter. The role of Walter seems almost too much for one actor. There's too much happening to Walter in three hours. McClain pulled it off, inhabiting a man who jumps from elation to near insanity. Physically and mentally, how does he do it night after night?

I liked everybody. The smart daughter Beneatha, was charming, funny, and combative (I assumed this was Lorraine Hansberry herself; was saddened to recall that she died of cancer at 34). The mother Lena was tough and in charge, and described nicely. There are plenty of Greek children who would recognize a Greek mother in her. Ruth Younger is at the end of her rope.

The rotating stage, revealing different rooms of the small Younger flat as it rotates, seemed like a hell of a lot of engineering trouble for not much theatrical effect. The sex scene between Walter and Ruth Younger was too bizarrely graphic -- it was if the director was inexplicably trying to revoke the dignity of these two people. Seeing the ghost of the deceased Mr. Younger on stage, in the background, distracted me a little in the beginning, but I got over it, and it did set up the powerful scene towards the end of the play when the older man puts his hand on Walter's shoulder, and Walter finds the strength to refuse the money of the white neighbors.

Dutch Psycho

The Dinner, a novel by Herman Koch (2012)

I was first impressed and absorbed by the characters of this novel, the couples Paul and Claire, and Paul's brother Serge and his wife Babette. It's a dinner at a very expensive restaurant, and that doesn't sound eventful, but it is. Koch reveals the underlying drama slowly, manipulating us to keep turning the pages. And I did. Once we realize that their children, the cousins, have done something criminally terrible, I was turning the pages even faster.

At a certain point, Koch reveals that Paul and Claire are not just morally complex people -- they're practically monsters, actively concealing and rationalizing the work of their son with the cool of a Nazi bureaucrat. It turns out that Serge, the famous liberal politician, and the butt of Serge's narrative, is the only one here with a conscience and any sense of right and wrong. Two thirds of the way through, I understood that Paul is a violent psychotic. Claire is right behind him. Their son is a violent weirdo.

It's finally confusing and frustrating. We have to believe in Koch's compartmentalization of the characters' actions. Can these human beings who form an affectionate "happy family" engage in evil only in small instances? I suppose if they are mentally, clinically sick, the could. But even the main narrator, in his thoughts and actions, is quite clear in his understanding of the world -- he does grasp reality, as when he lampoons the work of the restaurant host and waitresses. We just suddenly get these acts of blind violence in which he seems disconnected from reality. I just didn't feel they were real humans any more, but concoctions of the author.

It didn't help that there were some strange incongruities at the heart of the novel -- would Serge, a famous man, want to talk about their sons, with all the attendant yelling and crying, in a restaurant, surrounded by other diners? How is it that a man who is manifestly criminally violent and psychotic (he's put innocent people in the hospital) has not been jailed? He seems to suffer no punishment (unless that's Koch's point about the laxness of Dutch society and the justice system). How is it that no one else has recognized the boys from the online videos?

The memorable Glass Menagerie at American Rep Theater

The Glass Menagerie, a play by Tennessee Williams. At the American Repertory Theater, Cambridge.

This was the second time we've seen this play. We saw an excellent production years ago in Buffalo, at the Studio Arena. Today's production was memorable. The review by Ben Brantley in the NY Times is glowing, and I agree with it. I can't imagine a better Tom than Zachary Quinto. Cherry Jones as the neurotic Amanda, Celia Keenan-Bolger as a frail and beautiful Laura, and Brian Smith as Tom. All great.

I thought about Tom's abandonment of the two women -- this wasn't just a leave-taking to save his own life, though it certainly was that, it was an abandonment. Those two had no other support for their lives. Laura and Amanda are not capable of holding jobs. What Tom did was surprising and cruel, and though we know that his action haunts him the rest of his life, in the end it colors my feelings about him. He abandoned them.

A pool of water surrounded the darkly lit stage. Occasionally, the characters came to the edge and looked into the quiet dark surface, seeing their reflection. It emphasized the the family's isolation, as if they're on their own little psychotic island. It was a good touch by the set designers.

Laura had only her little glass unicorn on her box. In the old production we saw, years ago, her entire menagerie of animals was out, on display. Somehow I liked that better, because Laura lives through those animals, an entire cast of glass animals, each with its own personality.

The great and showy style of Joe Wright's movie Anna Karenina is worth seeing

I've read some harsh reviews of director Joe Wright's movie, Anna Karenina. We saw it yesterday. The harsh reviews are right about some things. The surface of the movie depends on its surreal staging, part theater, part ballet -- the director sets the movie in an old theater, and intersperses scenes of the natural world throughout the narrative. You can criticize it for being all showy style. The depiction of Vronsky doesn't quite work (he seems like a Nutcracker toy soldier rather than a seductive masculine cavalry officer). And there is the problem of compressing a huge complex and wonderful novel into a movie slightly more than two hours. So, I don't feel the same hot connection with the characters, as I do in the novel. Yet, it's a great showy style! I loved the flashes of humor in the philanderer Stiva, Karenin's cold determination to maintain his dignity, Levin's befuddlement, Anna's jealousy toward the end. Yes, it's all accentuated by the style of the movie -- we jump from one fragment to the next -- but I think Wright has chosen the fragments well. The heart of the novel -- a young socialite woman who wants to live and is willing to abandon a life of virtue, and the consequences of that decision -- is there. Anna is played by Keira Knightly. I don't have much to compare her to, as Anna Karenina. She is good in the role, though the style of the movie is not a vehicle for expressing a range of subtle emotions and expressions.

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.