Broken Glass, a play by Henry Miller that could have been left on the shelf

In September, we saw this New Repertory Theater production of Arthur Miller's play, Broken Glass.

A Jewish woman in New York in the late 1930s falls is mysteriously paralyzed. Her doctor, whom she seems to fall in love with, cannot find the cause of her paralysis. Her husband is cold, and seems to hate his own Jewishness. She dwells on the rising harassment and persecution of German Jews, and we get the sense that her paralysis is somehow related.

It had some interesting themes (self-hatred and Jewish identity, being a Jew in a WASP company in 30s New York) but seemed overwrought and a bit long. The characters seemed stereotypical, although the cast (especially the beautiful Anne Gottlieb as Sylvia, and Jeremiah Kissel as Phillip Gellburg gave good performances with some nuance within the limits of the play). The possible affair between Sylvia and her doctor made me wince. The play does seem dated. I wondered what the intention was in reviving it.

I still have never seen Death of a Salesman.

"The Full Catastrophe" -- James Angelos's fine book about Greece

The Full Catastrophe: Travels Among the New Greek Ruins, by James Angelos (Crown, 2015)

A belated blog post about this fine book. We read it before our recent trip to Greece. Below is a re-working of an email I sent Angelos. 

 

I am grateful that James Angelos wrote his wonderful book, "The Full Catastrophe". He avoided the sentimentality and attractive cliches about the "undying Greek spirit", "the Greek love of life", and all the rest, and wrote about Greeks accurately, as I have always known them. I felt as if I knew everyone in the book. No doubt, he'll get some flak from some Greeks for the disturbing overall portrait that emerges. I've seen other web reviews that call him a "self-hating Greek", which is absurd. Everything in the book struck me as true. If you love Greece, you love it even though so many around you seem to be gleefully conniving, scheming, cheating, and evading.

I was especially happy to read his pages devoted to the Jewish community of Thessaloniki, and the profound ignorance that so many Greeks express in regards to those lost lives. My wife and I visit the Jewish Museum in Thessaloniki on each visit, and we invariably find ourselves the only visitors.

Obviously, I don't know what Greece will be like in five years, but I think "Full Catastrophe" goes a long way in explaining whichever road Greece takes -- slow, agonizing reconstruction, or more agonizing disintegration.

I did have a few minor issues with the book. After reading about the various clerics in the book, non-Greek readers might have the impression, "Whoah, this is, like, a really religious country!" But in my experience, that's not quite true. There are churches and priests everywhere, and almost everyone seems to superficially observe some Orthodox rituals. Yet outside the major holidays, not that many people actually go to church (not even the rabid faithful) and very few people follow the more rigorous church traditions and fasts. You go to a church in Thessaloniki on an average Sunday and you see mostly some pensioners, and a few younger mothers dragging their squirming kids. Of university-educated people, there are almost none. Of the Left, none at all.

So how much influence does the clergy actually have on the population? Perhaps they have a little more influence lately, during this time of crisis when people feel broken. But I think that outside of a core of conservative faithful, their influence is very shaky.

This doesn't take away from Angelos's excellent descriptions of Prokopios and Maximos and the others clerics in the book; it's simply there is this paradox about Greek religious life -- it is more fragile than it would seem. After all, to me it was a sign of the weakness of the church that Golden Dawn and its khafiedes can appropriate the church's symbols and language of national unity. The clergy allowed this to happen.

Regarding the refugee crisis, I thought Angelos was a little hard on ordinary Greeks who are reacting badly to the waves of poor migrants. Even in Athens, many Greeks are essentially from small towns and villages, with a village mentality. They have no real knowledge of or understanding of the Africans and Syrians and Pakistanis showing up in their neighborhoods. They're aghast and terrified. These Greeks have been largely abandoned by their political leaders, and are now trapped in a steerage with people even poorer than they are. People act out in nasty ways when that happens. Angelos was a bit harsh on these people (though I appreciate his outlining the paradoxical xenophobia, bizarre anti-semitism that has always been part of Greek life -- right next to the famous Greek philoxenia).

There are some Greeks that I wish were represented a little more in the book. They are the ones who want to end the shambolic practices all around them, who want a functioning government, who want to start businesses and run them without paying off an endless stream of bureaucrats and political hacks, who want hospitals where relatives don't have to bring daily meals to their relatives, and on and on.There are a lot of these Greeks, and they desperately want to stay in the Euro zone as the only hope. These Greeks were somewhat absent from the book (and if things keep going as they are, these people will soon be absent from Greece as well, as they head to Germany, Australia, and elsewhere to find work).

These are minor issues. None of it reduces my feeling that this book is a great achievement.

Joseph Conrad's "The Nigger of the Narcissus" -- what matters is the captain's orders

The Nigger of the Narcissus, by Joseph Conrad. Published in 1897.

I don't use the word "nigger" except in the context of referring to its use by others, such as in the title of Conrad's novel, published in 1897. Its use in the title raises some issues worth thinking about. I believe the word had pretty much the same connotations back in 1897, when Conrad published this novel about the African sailor, James Wait, on board the Narcissus, a cargo ship sailing from India to England. I get the impression from the narrator (who is not necessarily the author, Conrad himself, but seems to represent Conrad) that he uses the word because it was in common usage then on sailing ships as a coarse insulting description of a black African. The narrator himself doesn't seem to hate Africans, or James Wait. At the very least, the word was commonly used among sailors in that time. And no doubt, Conrad used the word in the title knowing that it would help draw attention to his novel.

After the initial introduction of James Wait to the crew, I don't think the word nigger appears much. After the opening pages, when James Wait first appears to the ship's crew, the other sailors call him "Jim", "Jimmy" or "James", and the narrator refers to him as "Wait". He is a full character, who pulls the sympathy of much of the crew to him when he falls sick. Given the motley characters and their behaviors on this ship, Conrad does not describe James Wait as having any less a soul than the others, or as inferior to them.

As for the novel itself, I liked it, but not that much. Many scenes are over-long, and the mix of characters seem a bit cliched, as if Conrad had to catalog every type of human behavior in this little universe of the Narcissus. The story is a good one -- how to keep a group of people working together despite class divisions and racial divisions, when their lives are in danger. Ultimately, Conrad seems to say you have to bow to the control of a single man, the captain. And that's all that matters.

The play "Saving Kitty" -- Jennifer Coolidge makes it work

Saving Kitty, a play by Marisa Smith, at Central Square Theater, Sunday, August 2, 2015. Directed by Lee Mikeska Gardner. Starring Jennifer Coolidge. With Alexander Cook, Lydia Barnett-Mulligan, Lewis D. Wheeler.

A young woman who works as a TV or film producer brings her fiance, a rising evangelical school principle, home to meet her Manhattan parents. They are not happy, the mother is appalled and she works to end the engagement. This is a decent comedy, but the main reason it worked for me is Jennifer Coolidge. We didn't know anything about her film TV work. As the monstrous mother, she imparted a strange magic to her lines and the character. Jokes that really weren't funny became hilarious thanks to her intonation and edge. She was a combination tyrant and vulnerable victim at the same time. It's hard to imagine anybody else doing the role. It was a very good cast, but Coolidge covered over the play's flaws and made it worth seeing.

I have a problem with some of the premises of the play. The young man character (well played by Alexander Cook) is barely realistic as a committed evangelical believer. He gives no sign of actually having any faith, at least none that is much different from the others around  him (which is to say none). But the real problem is the mother, Kate Hartley. We are meant to believe that she lives by the liberal values of wealthy Manhattan. But that's not what we see. We see a bigoted, crass, neurotic blowhard from the very start. That she objects to her daughter's choice of an evangelical believer seems irrelevant -- her reactions and behavior didn't really make sense to me.

The Minions movie -- ten minutes of laughs at the start, then tedium

We saw the movie Minions (produced by Illumination Entertainment) last week, and laughed hard in the first ten minutes or so at the hilarious Minions creation story -- dinosaurs, slapstick armies, courage, fortitude. But sadly, the rest of the film quickly becomes kind of a bore. We have the three cute minions Stuart, Kevin, and Bob, searching for a meaningful life for their Minion tribe. But the level of jokes never goes beyond the Three Stooges, and never quite reaches the Stooges' level of plot and character (which is saying something). A few laughs here and there, but too predictable.

There's something ethnically odd about the yellow minion creatures. Their names -- Stuart, Kevin, Bob. British, or Anglo certainly. They do end up in England, and there are some Britishism jokes (the tea-drinking Bobbies in the absurd chase scenes, British accent jokes). So what is the British connection? And how come all the people in the scenes are basically white? I think the time was 1965, or thereabouts, but even then, I'm sure New York and London must have had lots of Asian and African faces. Is there some message here about the minions that I'm not getting?

So that was The Drowsy Chaperone....okay.

We saw the musical, "The Drowsy Chaperone" (book by Bob Martin and Don McKellar and music and lyrics by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison) on Saturday, July 11, at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, with friends.

It's hard not to like The Drowsy Chaperone. I liked it. We both liked it. We all liked it. It's a parody of 1920s musical comedies, where an old  professor-type plays his favorite 20s musical album, and the musical is acted out on stage for us. The plot is incidental, typically "madcap". The very good, New York-level production and performance included some wonderful tap dancing (wish I'd learned), the usual high-volume singing, and corny stereotypical jokes. It's never not entertaining, and never rises to anything absorbing or provocative. It's strangely comforting. 

"Writers and Age", by Esther Harriott -- a wonderful introduction to five great writers (Pritchett, Kunitz, Lessing, Gallant, and Davis)

"Writers and Age: Essays on and Interviews with Five Authors" by Esther Harriott (McFarland, 2015) -- the five authors: V. S. Pritchett, Stanley Kunitz, Doris Lessing, Mavis Gallant, and Russell Baker.

I know the author, Esther Harriott, and like her work. I loved the close readings that Esther gives each of the five authors she writes about in her book, "Writers and Age".  She takes us on tours of specific stories or poems, focusing on her main subject -- how advancing age is depicted and confronted by these writers. At first I wondered how that was going to work, if it would be boring (all those quotes and excerpts). But no. These were vivid little trips; I felt as if I had read the story in many cases, and got caught up in the drama.

The interviews Esther conducted with the writers are wonderful discussions about the effects of age on their work lives (they each cope in their own way), and on the works they create. Thanks to her rapport with these writers, their characters really came through.

Aside from its obvious subject -- age -- the book serves as a great introduction to these writers. Many young readers and literature students won't know these writers. I'm embarrassed that Russell Baker was the only one of the five that I'd read extensively, and I'm glad to have learned so much about the others. The book inspired me to read more of Pritchett's stories, and I'm now reading a book of Mavis Gallant's stories, "Home Truths".

Finally, I just found a hopeful sensibility in the book. To read how these five continue to work productively gave me a sense of hope. I want to emulate them.

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!