Why does the play "Grounded" get so much attention and praise?

Grounded, a play written by George Brant, produced by the Nora Theater Company, starring Celeste Oliva.

We saw the new play "Grounded" last night, and neither of us liked it. I'm surprised at the generous reception it's gotten, including in this review by the Boston Globe's Don Aucoin. It's played in ten different theaters recently, around the country.

I was bored with it after the first few minutes. The main character, a female fighter pilot, has almost no depth to her character. She's a sort of male jock-pilot, in a woman's body. Her entire 83 minute monologue is delivered in a harsh, terse and unvarying voice. The predictable events, sketchy themes, and what little drama there is -- a female pilot is assigned to pilot drones flying in the Middle East looking for enemies to kill, from a base in Las Vegas -- seem straight out of the recent headlines and columns. There is no doubt good material here -- the moral drama of killing at a safe distance, with your own life kept in god-like security, is good stuff. But it's largely undeveloped. The pilot's language and expression stays close to cliche throughout. The slight uptick in interest at the end, when the pilot hallucinates the presence of her own young daughter onto the video screen, and thus refuses to pull the trigger to kill the "guilty" bad guy, is just not enough. It felt more like an artificial ploy to give the play a climax.

This struck me as more of a sketch for a play than a finished play. So why does it get so much attention and praise? The professorial-looking Cambridge audience gave it a brief standing ovation at the end. Was it the female character in a role overwhelmingly filled by men, a gratifying salute to liberal sensibilities? Was it the insertion of the little girl, the target bad guy's daughter, that humanizes and evokes sympathy for a man otherwise vilified as a terrorist?

Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" -- is it really "bad writing"?

Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Translation Constance Garnett. 

My first reaction as I read Crime and Punishment was that this must have blown the minds of Russian readers in the nineteenth century. Reading this novel is to live in the paranoid, obsessive mind of Raskolnikov. He barely has a grip on reality. I wondered how he had managed to get as far as he had as a student! That he carries out the brutal murder of two women (one who is an innocent that happens upon the scene of his murdering the first) is not surprising, and seems strangely logical. The murder scene is mesmerizing.

And although he believes himself above the law, that is, that the criminal law does not apply to him because he is an extraordinary person, he is aware enough to try to avoid and evade the law and the investigators as they pursue the murderer. He hides the  stolen money. He prepares his words carefully to throw suspicion off him. It's an exhausting book -- I'm not sure I enjoyed reading it.

It's startlingly different from reading Tolstoy. With Tolstoy, the nuances of the dialogs and narration are always clear. Not so in Crime and Punishment -- people speak in loopy sentences and paragraphs often negating their own meaning within the same sentence. With Tolstoy, you come to understand and feel sympathy for almost everyone. But in Crime and Punishment, almost everyone remains an enigma. There are endless dialogs that I can hardly follow. There are tedious long sequences, sometimes semi-comic, such as the dinner scenes and the domestic dramas among the poor denizens of the neighborhood. I don't know what role Garnett's translation played. I believe I read that Nabokov had problems with Dostoyevsky, and preferred Tolstoy.

And yet, amid all the dead wood, the book comes to life and surges with power. You've got to know what Razumikhin has in mind to help Raskonikov, and why he's so loyal to him. You've got to know if  Raskolnikov's sister Avdotya will fall in love with Razumikhin. You've got to know how Porfiry Petrovich will cunningly bring about Raskolnikov's confession. It deserves to be read. These people are so painfully real -- their rants, scuffles, smells, cowardice, paranoias, avarice, delusions -- all of it takes hold of you and you forgive Dostoyevsky for the "bad" writing.

Bedlam's "Saint Joan" -- engrossing and jarring

Bedlam Theater Company's production of George Bernard Shaw's play "Saint Joan" at the Central Square Theater.

I found Bedlam's Saint Joan engrossing and jarring. The story of Joan of Arc, a young girl who leads the French armies to victory after victory over the invading British (who, of course did not see themselves as invaders) until she is captured, tried as a heretic by the British, and burned at the stake, is a story I don't know well. The play does a wonderful job of introducing the audience to that story, and that's one of Shaw's accomplishments. The tension between the British church authorities and their military/political interests was interesting -- at least some of the churchmen wanted to save Joan, if only she'd recant her testimony and deny that she'd actually had visions from God, which she almost does, until she realizes that doing so would still leave her in a stinking prison the rest of her life, which she cannot bear.

This production itself is amazing. The four Bedlam actors play twenty-some roles! And we always seem to know which character they're playing. You have to mention Andrus Nichols, the actress who plays Joan. She's sturdy (physically and emotionally), and she projects a woman worth fighting for.

In this production, parts of the audience had to move between acts in order to move seats, to fit the design of Bedlam's interpretation. I didn't mind this (we weren't the ones moved), although this required a bit of good-natured, comic coaxing from the stage hands and actors, which seemed to jar us all out of the play, at least momentarily. Furthermore, some of the comic interpretations of the characters (I'm thinking in particular of the swishy tea-drinking, British nobles straight out of Monty Python) were so broad and stereotypical that I winced. The three hours running time seemed a bit long. It did make us want to see a full production as Shaw wrote it. Perhaps we can see it some day at the Shaw Festival.

There was an odd coincidence in the play to a news event earlier in the week. The Islamic State in Syria released a video showing their terrible execution by fire of their unfortunate captive Jordanian pilot. ISIS reveled in their barbarity. Shaw presents the British as being conflicted, with some churchmen and soldiers repenting of the manifest cruelty of burning alive a young girl. And of course, Shaw's Joan had a trial, of sorts.

Not unlike Arkady: reading Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons"

Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev (Oxford World's Classics), translated by Richard Freeborn

Unfortunately, it's been a few weeks since I finished this great and moving novel. But the characters are still alive in my head. Arkady Nikolaevich Kirsanov, the insecure young graduate (of course, most graduates are insecure) and his doting father, Nikolai Petrovich. Nikolai's aristocratic, pretentious brother, Pavel. The most alive, of course, is Evgeny Vasiliev Bazarov, the rebellious nihilist who says he wants to sweep away all the old junk of Russian life and and replace it with...what exactly? He says at one point that it's not for him to say what should replace it all. But it's all got to go!

Bazarov is chrismatic and brilliant (he's a doctor, and we're led to believe he's an excellent up-to-date doctor), and Arkady is under his spell. I was struck by the modernity of his character. He's not somebody you find in Tolstoy's novels. Little warmth. Little compassion. Unimpressed by emotion. His own objectives and projects are what count. He won't allow even his parents (who desperately want their brilliant only son near them) to interfere, and he treats them as if they were frustrating impediments. I'm glad that Arkady eventually summons the courage to put some distance between himself and  Basarov, but sad about Basarov's tragic end. Strange, how much I came to like him. Not unlike Arkady.  

Honorable Mention for my "Egg Tuesday", at Glimmer Train

I received an email from Glimmer Train Press telling me that my short story "Egg Tuesday" had won Honorable Mention in their August 2014 New Writer Award contest. The version I sent them is currently at the right, in the column of my stories. They said it had made it into the top 5% of over a thousand entries. 

How do I feel about "Honorable Mention"? Not bad. It's not publication, or an award, but it's not bad. Better than what I've managed before!

A (somewhat lengthy) concert with Boston Cecilia -- what exactly was the Czech-American connection?

We went to the Boston Cecelia concert on Sunday, October 19, at All Saints Parish Church, in Brookline. The concert was titled, "The Czech-American Connection". Nicholas White is Music Director and conductor. They performed Dvorak's Mass in D Major, Otce nas (the Lord's Prayer) by Janacek, Solo Songs by Mahler, Chichester Psalms, by Bernstein, and a Nicholas White arrangement of Going Home, by Dvorak.

All Saints was nearly filled. Cecelia has a pristine sound -- they sing with a real clarity that came  through to us many rows back, despite the difficult acoustics of the church (it has a very high vault). I liked the Dvorak mass. We did feel that the concert was a bit long, and the pieces a bit slow in their pacing. For me, going much beyond an hour and twenty minutes for choral music gets kind of hard, especially in those church pews. And we didn't fully understand the Czech-American connection theme. Yes, Mahler was born in what is now the Czech Republic, and he conducted the New York Philharmonic years later, and yes, Leonard Bernstein conducted the same Philharmonic for many years. Didn't seem like that much of a connection, however. At least not musically.

Every day, reading a little less of the Boston Globe

I've been trying a cheap trial digital subscription to the Boston Globe. So far, it's not working for me. True, the site is updated constantly, so I see the latest news headlines, there are videos to go with the news stories, I can search the news for a particular item, and I can read it on any of my machines, including my iPad mini. But the screen display is of a bunch of headlines with various font weights, some with the first line or two of the story. What I see is a random display of headings -- I don't know what's important at a glance. With a paper newspaper, the locations and layout of the pieces help me create a quick strategy for how I'm going to spend the next twenty minutes reading the paper. I can see how long the articles are at a glance -- I don't have to waste time and click on each headline link to get the gist of the story.

Worse, there are ads on the display, whereas there are no ads on the front page of a paper. It's not always immediately clear on the screen when you're looking at an ad -- "Shocking prediction by CIA insider" (an ad) looks like it's an actual news story when it is next to "US, allies, launch more air strikes in Syria, Iraq" (a news headline). I have tried the e-paper version, which shows the actual paper version of the pages, but I found it cumbersome to keep enlarging the screen and scrolling.

The overall result is that by the end of the day, I'm simply reading less of the Boston Globe.

Why Socrates Died, by Robin Waterfield -- a very readable book about the workings of Athenian democracy

"Why Socrates Died: Dispelling the Myths" by Robin Waterfield (Norton 2009)

This was a fun read. A well-written, engaging book. Waterfield goes to great lengths to describe the context and background of Socrates's execution in 399 BC. We learn a great deal about Athenian political and cultural life, the Peloponnesian War, and the habits of Socrates and his friends. Waterfield made me feel as if I personally knew Alcibiades and Socrates and the many other characters. There is plenty of historical detail, without being too heavy.

Waterfield elucidates the case against Socrates over many pages. He sums it up on page 191, quoting from the book: "He was a clever arguer and taught young men to be clever arguers; he usurped their fathers' roles in education and in general was perceived to be subversive of inherited values..." In a time of unrest, of conflict between democracy and oligarchy, and the war with Sparta, Athenians were fed up with Socrates's undermining of the traditional faith and conventions. That was enough in the Athenian democratic system, to be a crime.

There was more, of course. He was young Alcibiades's teacher, the most prominent young Athenian if his time. Alcibiades was brilliant and handsome, an oligarch, and went on to play a traitorous role in the war with Sparta. Socrates also seemed allied with Critias, a member the The Thirty tyrants, who briefly took power in Athens in a coup that led to civil war, although Socrates himself played no role in the tyranny. Socrates was not a friend of Athenian democracy, as it was structured.


It reads to me as if there are parallels in the struggle between democrats and oligarchs and today's progressive liberals and small-government conservatives. The democrats constantly worked to hedge and contain the power of the few wealthy oligarchs, and believed in collective decision-making and the betterment of "the many" at the expense of the oligarchs. The oligarchs believed in reducing the role of democracy and its conventions and bureaucracy, of promoting the progress of the state by promoting the progress of "the best", of the brightest and most capable men (who were of course oligarchs).

Hemlock could not have been an easy way to die. You didn't simply go to sleep painlessly. You apparently are asphyxiated as your diaphragm stops working. Socrates is said to have willingly taken hemlock rather than escape at the urging of his friends. As Waterfield presents him, he is filled with what we would regard as faults, but not what we could call crimes. And certainly not faults worthy of execution.

The movie, "A Most Wanted Man" -- how plausible is the ending?

We enjoyed seeing A Most Wanted Man, the last movie that Phillip Seymour Hoffman starred in. It's fairly well directed (director Anton Corbijn), with lots of detail piled up on the workings of German anti-terrorist intelligence spies. The story (a very complicated one), involves a Chechen-Russian guy who washes up in Hamburg, is somehow immediately latched onto by Intelligence, is taken up by a (naturally) beautiful young immigrant rights lawyer, and gets unwittingly involved in a scheme concocted by Hoffman and his spies to catch a Moslem professor terrorist-financier (or at least he's suspected to be a terrorist-financier by Hoffman's band). Hoffman is really good in a limited role. He's sort of a caricature of a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, hard-boiled disillusioned spy master.

Hamburg is filmed as a claustrophobic, bleak warren of tenement streets coated with graffiti, and with an occasional high-rise office tower looking down on the poor, hard-scrabble immigrants and their families.

Many spy films are something of a stretch, with the plots asking us to ignore some implausible connections. This one has its share. The Hoffman character uses the Chechen-Russian guy, Issa, as bait to catch the larger fish, the professor, even though they have no connection to each other. The professor is being spied on by his son, who ostensibly loves his father. And in the end, the Intelligence higher ups betray Hoffman's band and their schemes by nearly killing them all and arresting everybody in sight. I know that spies and their agencies have their rivalries and mistrust. Things go bad, as they do in all parts of life. But this ending strikes me as implausible. We're being asked to believe that German higher ups are willing to perhaps kill their own operatives and sabotage their  work on the streets of Hamburg simply in order to assert their authority. Perhaps it could happen. But if that's true, then we're all in even bigger trouble than I thought.

And what's with the cellphone Hoffman is using? In most scenes, it's a smallish Android type phone, but in one scene close to the end, the Apple logo reflects in the light, as if it were an iPhone. An obvious placement, and it looks like an out-of-context mistake by the film crew.

The book, Time's Shadow: "...when you children were at home and we all worked together"

Time's Shadow: Remembering a Family Farm in Kansas, by Arnold J. Bauer (University Press of Kansas, 2012)

In this 150 page memoir, Bauer recalls his life growing up on his family's 160-acre farm in Kansas, starting in the 1930s. It's an affectionate, but not sentimentalized, portrait of that world. His great grandparents were among the homesteaders who staked out plots and farms in Kansas. Most of them were European immigrants, mostly German, many of them Mennonites.

I liked Bauer's plain, unadorned writing style -- it suited his descriptions of his sisters, parents, cousins, and neighbor farmers. They were a tight community, despite the distances between individual farms. Bauer notes at one point that because of the distances, he didn't see his friends, except at school, and when family or neighbors visited in the evenings. Not that he had much time for friends -- he worked hard on the farm as soon as he was old enough.

They were not wired for electricity until 1939 (there was no light for reading in bed, which was very important to me when I was young). The book is divided into short, self-explanatory chapters: Family, Houses, Anna Alexander (Bauer's mother), Electricity, Church, School, Having Company, War, and finally Swept Away, in which Bauer describes the economic forces that brought about the demise of the small family farms.

Bauer writes that, growing up, his gruff, demanding father never hit him, nor did he remember that any of his friends' fathers hit their children. He remembers one slap across his face by his mother. Reports of wife-beating were rare. Not that there weren't other types of abuse, such as emotional abuse, but a husband who struck his wife would have been disgraced and shunned. He speculates that the reason for this was that all the family members were committed to the family enterprise -- the farm. Husband and wife depended on each other, and couldn't do without the other. This acted as a brake on hot-headed impulses.

The theme of interdependence, within the family and within the community of farmers (they often helped each other in times of sickness or need) is played out throughout the book. Always, it was their farm that they worked together -- their cows, their tools, their wheat, their livelihood. Late in the book, page 100, when Bauer asks his aged father when were the best years of his life, he answers, "The thirties, I think, when you children were at home and we all worked together." (As a son who worked many hours growing up in my family's diner, soda fountain, and candy shop, I was moved to read that.)

Bauer describes how the small family farms largely disappeared by the 1960s, sold to housing and business developers, and to successful larger family farms. Hundreds of thousands of farm families moved to the towns and cities, where life was less arduous, less isolated, and more stable. He and his sisters all left the farm, leaving his parents mostly alone in their old age. Despite the notable successes of Bauer and his sisters (he's a distinguished professor of Latin American studies at UC Davis, while one sister enjoyed a long career in the foreign service) the last chapters describe a sad, familiar story of sporadic visits to the farm, of auctions, moves to nursing homes, ending of course in the death of their father. The houses and farm buildings had caved in, the cousins and their families largely scattered.

It is a beautiful book.

A valuable book for Greek Americans: Stavro Nashi's memoir "Ithaka on the Horizon"

Ithaka on the Horizon: a Greek-American Journey, by Stavro Nashi (2013). Available on Amazon.

I just finished Stavro Nashi's wonderful family memoir, "Ithaka on the Horizon". I think it's a valuable book, particularly for Greek Americans and their families. Many of us will read our own family histories in the book. It's particularly interesting to read about Nashi's having been born and grown up in Constantinople/Istanbul. The episodes of the anti-Christian pogroms in the 50s, and his family's sad decision to leave their home are timely and worth reading.

My own parents brought me to America when I was two years old, in 1957, from Thessaloniki. Both sets of grandparents came to Thessaloniki via the refugee route from Smyrna and Asia Minor. I thought Nashi's book affectionately presented those refugees and their plight, and their resilience. It's a bit sentimental at times, but that's okay. He captures an important sadness for us that's hard to describe -- as Greek Americans, if we are aware of the sacrifices made by our parents' generation, how will we ever live up to their expectations? You can't repay a mother or father for having abandoned the village or neighborhood that they loved so they could emigrate to America to raise a family.

I thought it was a good thing that Nashi went on at length about current Greek realities, since even many Greek Americans (most) are unaware of what Greece is going through. But it's hard to summarize those realities in a few chapters. There's a lot to love in Greece, but frankly, there's also a lot to dislike.

Regarding some of what Nashi says on Greek political life, I thought he got a lot of that right. I would note that many Greeks learn Left-leaning and often anti-American ideas from their youth. At times in Greece, even among friendly Greeks and family, it seems everybody believes America is behind everything bad or destructive. Greek culture values rebellion and independence, the Left has been very strong in Greek life for a long time, and the Right wing dictatorships there left a corrosive legacy. It'll take a long time for new attitudes to take hold.

I think Nashi is a bit hard on modern American life (that kids are overprotected, that we're essentially selfish, that we've forgotten our core values). Yes, I can agree with him on a lot of it (kids are overprotected, and we are often pretty selfish, a ton of other stuff), but the society children grow up in now is not the one we grew up in fifty years ago. There are also big improvements in our society that are easy to forget (the greater visibility of racial minorities in all walks of life, the greater freedom afforded to handicapped people, the technological advances). True, the changes can drive you crazy, but a lot of people have benefitted.

I enjoyed reading this book. I'm grateful to Stavro Nashi for making the effort to write and publish it.

The daughters doted on the father, the sons stuck with the mother - Rosamund Bartlett's biography of Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy: A Russian Life, by Rosamund Bartlett (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).

I enjoyed Rosamund Bartlett's biography of Leo Tolstoy for the large picture she paints of Russian life and history, and Tolstoy's place in that picture. As a reader, I of course knew about Tolstoy's importance as a novelist -- War and Peace and Anna Karenina are enough to keep his name alive for many future generations -- but I did not know the impact Tolstoy had as a political and spiritual thinker. Tolstoy societies and communes, pacifist movements, vegetarianism, opposition to despotism, an inspiration to Gandhi, a threat to the church and the Czarist government -- Bartlett wonderfully describes all of these currents around this great, irascible, and conflicted man.

I sometimes felt that Tolstoy himself seemed a bit obscured in the book. There are surprisingly few quotations from Tolstoy's letters, diaries, essays or fictional works -- surprising for a man who documented so much of his life. We briefly and abruptly read about events in his life -- of Tolstoy holding a dying brother in his arms, of Tolstoy angry with his wife Sonya (which he frequently was), of Tolstoy as a shrewd businessman negotiating with publishers for his work -- but we don't see enough Tolstoy in his own words or in his day to day life. It's minor criticism to what I think is otherwise a wonderful book.

Tolstoy's importance as a foundational figure in the growing Russian intellectual opposition to the czars, and even as an inspiration to the Marxists and Socialists came as a revelation to me. Not that he was a revolutionary (Bartlett makes pains to show that he was not, and he did not advocate the overthrow of the czarist government), but his voluminous writings on peasant education, the immorality of the caste system, the immorality of war and nationalistic fervor, the corruption of the capital system, all of it made him a patron saint to the Russian opposition.

Poor Sofya Bers, his wife. Bartlett sympathetically depicts her struggle to run a huge household and act as secretary to a writer who became a semi-religious saint of biblical proportions. (In fact, Sofya almost has as much flesh and blood in this book as Tolstoy himself.) Leo wanted to relinquish his wealth, give up his copyrights, become a wandering prophet, spend his time in religious and philosophical discussion. Tolstoy was stern and endlessly demanding. How could a practical woman like Sonya have put up with him all those years? And how could he with her?

Interesting that the Tolstoy daughters revered and doted on their difficult saintly father, while the sons tended to rebel against him and sided with their mother.