Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 133

AU Exchange is open!

The Alternate Universe Exchange is open with 122 stories in 89 fandoms.

What if the bad guys won/the good guys won? What if Bucky Barnes went to Narnia? What if Kylo Ren was a chicken? What if Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters was haunted by the ghosts of all the dead (or temporarily dead, or dead in a different timeline) X-Men?

Come back and comment if you read and liked something!

I will return with more recs in varied fandoms when I have read more, but for now, I highly recommend my two fantastic gift stories. They're both for Stephen King books, and they're both GREAT and you should read them if you like the books.

Star Shot and Gravity Bound. The Dark Tower. AU: Space Opera setting, Susan Delgado as gunslinger, and several others I'll leave you to discover. This beautifully captures the atmosphere of longing and doom that's one of my favorite things from both the books and a certain type of space opera, and does an amazing job of translating book details into a new setting.

She took her Moira up, singing a little under her breath. An old song, a gunslinger hymn:

Home is the sailor, home from the sea

And the hunter home from the hill,

But the hull needs the hole that the gunslinger gives,

So frost-fire is homeward for thee.

Roland had sung that to her once. Once and once only—for all Susan knew, she’d had the words wrong for years. Had Roland’s people even said thee and thou?

There was no one else left to sing it. That made her version true.

Take the House. The Stand. AU: Canon Divergence. Nadine Cross reaches out to Flagg pre-flu, causing a huge ripple effect of divergences. Beautifully written, with great canon Easter eggs and sharp commentary on what we expect of men and women.

There had been the night in college with the Ouija board

(HOW I LOVE TO LOVE NADINE)

and you could, if you wanted, call that their first date.

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Passing Strange, Hey Presto, and Caligo Lane, by Ellen Klages

“Passing Strange” is a standalone historical fantasy novella, mostly set in San Francisco in 1940. In the present day, an elderly woman sells the original chalk painting of a pulp horror magazine cover, an action which is clearly part of an elaborate, years-spanning plan. Then the story goes back in time to when the painting was created, and focuses on the queer women who have created a vibrant community despite having to live partly (but not entirely) in hiding.

I absolutely loved this story, but it’s hard to review because a lot of it is unpredictable and more fun to discover unspoiled. For instance, while the rough outline of what happens at the end is somewhat predictable, other fairly basic plot elements, such as who the love story is about, take a while to become clear.

It’s full of Dick Francis-worthy fascinating details about all sorts of things – how to use fish to make fixative for a chalk painting and why you need to, laws against women wearing fewer than three items of feminine clothing, what people called avocados and pizzas in 1940 (alligator pears and tomato pies) and where you’d go to get them in San Francisco, how to magically rearrange space with origami – and it’s all both fun to read about and necessary to the plot. The characters and place and milieu feel incredibly real and vivid, and the language is lovely.

Contains period-typical homophobia, sexism, racism, violence, and past child abuse. But it’s not about how people are ground down and destroyed by oppression and trauma, it’s about how people survive and thrive and find happiness and build community within a system that doesn’t even acknowledge their humanity, and so is a story that was particularly good to read right now.

“Hey Presto” and “Caligo Lane” are short stories about supporting characters from “Passing Strange,” and are both in Klages’ collection Wicked Wonders.

“Hey Presto” is about Polly, a teenage girl who wants to be a scientist and whose father is a stage magician, and is about how they begin to repair their previously distant relationship when she has to sub in for his assistant. It’s sweet and has nice stage magic details. (Note: I’m reviewing it as part of FF Friday only because of its connection with “Passing Strange;” to my recollection, Polly’s sexual orientation never comes up one way or another in either story.)

“Caligo Lane” is a lovely, heartbreaking short story about Frannie and her magical shortcut-creating origami. Either it’s set several years after “Passing Strange” or isn't quite consistent with it, as her abilities seem significantly stronger here. It has a long, beautiful description of her doing a work of topographical magic that’s clear and detailed enough to read as an instruction manual, and hypnotic enough to be a spell itself.

Wicked Wonders[image error]

Passing Strange[image error]

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What is this stuff on my kale?

It's little raised, yellowish lumps which seem to be part of the leaf - you can't scrape them off with a fingernail without damaging the leaf. On the other side, there are corresponding pinprick holes.

I'm so aggravated. I bought enough for several meals, I have other ingredients ready that all depend on the kale also existing, and now I have a giant bagful of kale with creepy lumps all over it. Maybe I should just go out to eat.

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Original FF on AO3 short story recs

There's some really good original fiction posted on AO3, so here's a few recs for original FF short stories. I think all of these came about via fic exchange prompts for original fiction with pairings like "Female mob boss/female advisor" or "queen/female knight."

Like the Knight Loves the Queen, by Scioscribe.

Smoking hot noir about a 1950s mob boss and her advisor/lover, with metaphors and atmosphere worthy of Raymond Chandler.

Kate had plucked Rose up from the perfume counter at a department store: she liked to say she came in for hyacinth and left with Rose. Rose said that was just a line. “She’s straight Chanel No. 5. No hyacinth. Rose and jasmine.”

Dear Patron, by Selden.

Hilarious and cleverly structured epistolatory story about a librarian and a patron with a very overdue library book. Tags include mild implied gore, mild implied eldritch abominations, and misuse of library books.

The following items have not been returned despite previous reminders and this may affect your borrowing privileges. Fines may be accruing. Please return or renew them as soon as possible. You can renew items and view your potential or actual fines (if applicable) by signing on to ECHOLAND (accessible via internet, Summoning circle, or blood ritual) and selecting My Account.

underneath the marula tree, by polkadot.

An African queen seeks out a champion in this thoughtful story with a lot of worldbuilding and characterization packed into a relatively short length.

Thandiwe was forty-six, and in the thirtieth year of her reign. She knew how to manage advisors (and make them all feel as if their opinion had been considered), how to lead armies (the trick was to not show fear, and have good generals), and how to balance a budget (very carefully).

Road, Wind, Cactus, by Neverwinter Thistle.

An atmospheric, gritty yet hopeful story about a post-apocalyptic coffeeshop, full of believable and intriguing details of exactly how that would be run and what (and who) it would serve.

There is a long highway that stretches through a desert with many names, and somewhere on it sits a coffee shop.

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Dreadful Company (Dr. Greta van Helsing # 2), by Vivian Shaw

The second and equally delightful (thankfully, less gory) novel in a series of urban fantasies about an doctor to supernatural beings.

Greta is in Paris for a very specialized medical conference when she’s kidnapped by an edgelord vampire with poor fashion sense and a lot of unhappy minions, kept in a dank catacomb, and fed on nothing but coffee and chocolate croissants. (The person tasked with feeding her isn’t very imaginative.) If you’ve read the first book, I don’t think it’s spoilery to say that her compassionate and earnest presence makes the sad minions begin to rethink their life choices.

Though I missed Greta’s interactions with her usual crew, that crew is present, just separated from her for most of the book. I still find her romance with Varney the Vampyre completely and utterly inexplicable given the chemistry between her and Ruthven, but Varney is very sweet, there are several likable new characters, and the general atmosphere of people supporting each other, caring for each other, and trying to do the right thing is still present. Also, there are a whole lot of absolutely fucking adorable teeny monsters.

There is some death and violence, but this is overall an extremely cozy, comforting book that gives you hope for the world.

The first book, Strange Practice (A Dr. Greta Helsing Novel)[image error], is currently on Kindle for $2.99.

Dreadful Company (A Dr. Greta Helsing Novel)[image error]

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Henry V: OSF Ashland

I regret so much that I didn’t see Henry IV parts I & II, because they had continuing characters including the astonishing Daniel Jose Molina as Henry. Veteran OSF actor G. Valmont Thomas had played Falstaff in those, and he died this year; doing the scenes where they mourn him must have been incredibly difficult or incredibly cathartic (or both) for the actors who did the earlier plays with him.

Henry V, directed by Rosa Joshi and performed in the little black box Thomas Theatre, had a three-quarter stage with raked seating; you can never be more than 10 feet from the stage. At opening, we see a bare stage except for a wall of made of gray boxes, and four ropes hanging down.

While everyone’s still taking their seats, two actors dressed in plain dark clothing came on and started to push the wall. It was on wheels, and rotated; it seemed heavy. The actors were lost to sight as the wall made a full rotation, and when it came back around it was being pushed by a different pair of actors. The wall seemed to get heavier and heavier as time went on, so the last set of actors were leaning over almost horizontally to get it moving. Before the play even began, you had a sense of an enormous, exhausting enterprise; and one which, now that I think about it, was ultimately futile: the wall turns and turns, but nothing really changes, and it ends up exactly where it began, only having swallowed up a number of people in its wake.

Twelve actors performed the play; the speeches of the chorus were broken up between them, sometimes line by line. On that bare stage in their unadorned clothes, all the lines about having to use your imagination to create a war on bare boards worked so much better than they do in more elaborate productions. (Actually, this production was pretty elaborate in a way, but its art and craft was geared toward an appearance of simplicity.)

This was probably the most easily understandable Shakespeare production I’ve ever seen. I could follow every single line of dialogue, including parts that I’ve never really been able to completely get in performance before. Whoever their dialogue coach was, they did one hell of a job. I also realized, while watching, how nicely constructed a play it really is. Henry V has a lot of tonal variance and the transitions can seem jarring; in this, every scene was compelling, and the entire story had a drive almost like a thriller.

Everyone was terrific, but the particular standouts for me, apart from Molina, were a funny and kind Fluellen, and a replacement actor, Rachel Crowl, who played Lord Grey (one of the traitors) and a swaggering Pistol. She has an extraordinarily expressive face and voice, and this was the first time I’ve ever really cared about Pistol. Jessica Ko, the commanding Dou Yi from Snow in Midsummer, was a heartbreaking Falstaff’s Boy, a sweet and funny Princess Katherine, and a Montjoy who developed a real relationship with Henry across their several meetings. Daniel Jose Molina, who looked about twenty-two, was a fiercely intelligent Henry, always watching and calculating, desperate to prove to himself that his war was a right and justified decision. He made all his speeches feel as if he was coming up with those words for the very first time.

(I had mentioned in an earlier post that the company seemed very diverse. I looked it up later. The acting company is currently 70% people of color. It's diverse in other ways too. Here's a fascinating article on Rachel Crowl: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-ca-mn-trans-visibility-hollywood-rachel-crowl-20170713-story.html#)

The ropes, of course, got swung on and climbed on. They also created royal hangings to frame a throne solely by their position onstage, and were used to hang Bardolph. He slipped out of his jacket as the rope jerked upward, leaving it dangling from the rope, and walked across the stage to fix Henry with a chilling glare before he vanished into the shadows.

The entire set consisted of the wall and the gray boxes it was made from, which the actors moved on and off. (They didn’t usually literally remove them from the wall, though they occasionally did.) They were stacked to become a throne and dias, they were lit from within to become the bonfires burning around the camp, they opened to reveal the insulting gift of tennis balls, and so forth. Large ones became coffins; small ones placed onstage opened to reveal actors from previously unseen trapdoors, climbing out of tunnels. It was seriously one of the best sets I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen other “modular boxes” sets that did not impress me. It was just so well-done.

With such a small cast, the war was created primarily with movement. The soldiers sometimes swapped coats to distinguish sides, and sometimes didn’t; at one point the army of France starts to bolt offstage, then does nothing but turn around in unison to become the English army that’s ruthlessly pushing them back. The entire war was shown by means of an unnerving sound effect halfway between a trumpet and a siren, some cannon fire, boxes being slammed down and shoved across the stage, and red clothing.

The red clothes were a take on the old “red streamers are blood,” only they were long-sleeved shirts and a few gloves. They were pulled out as entrails, they puddled on the floor to become pools of blood, they covered missing limbs. Once an actor stretched one over his face in a screaming death mask. As the battle went on, they started piling up on the floor. There was a very haunting double vision of the shirts as blood or bloody rags of flesh, and the shirts as the discarded clothing we’re used to seeing at the scenes of mass death by violence.

After a fairly long sequence of this, you really did feel like you’d seen a war. The distinction between armies broke down fairly early, so it was just anonymous people fighting and dying. When Henry finally asks Montjoy if the day was his, you understood why he didn’t know. At the answer, his barely-there composure starts to slowly break apart until he was having a sobbing breakdown (right in front of my seat, that was nice) and was comforted and cheered up by Fluellen. Which marks the first time that scene has ever not seemed incredibly jarring to me, but actually made sense.

The scene with the princess was funny and charming, with nice awkward chemistry between them. But of course, that’s not the end. The end is the chorus breaking into the happy ending to tell us that Henry died young, and all his works were undone and for nothing: “They lost France, and made his England bleed.”

And the entire company turns to the wall and starts pulling open the boxes, which we hadn’t previously realized were drawers, and are packed full of the red clothing. That had all been taken away for the scene at the court of France, but now it starts piling up on the floor again, even more than at the very end of the battle, as the lights fade to black…

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Snow in Midsummer, by Frances Cowhig: OSF Ashland

A US premiere by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, based on the classical Chinese drama “The Injustice to Dou Yi That Moved Heaven and Earth,” written by Guan Hanqing, (1279-1368.) The world premiere was at the Royal Shakespeare company, directed by Justin Audibert, who also directed this production with a completely new cast.

“Buy palm-frond phoenixes and dragons, made by the widow Dou Yi!”

With the house lights still up on the audience, the sweet-faced young widow Dou Yi, wheeling a bicycle, hair braided and wearing ordinary working clothes, charmingly coaxes us to buy her products, making a pitch both for our pity (she’s a poor widow! This is her only source of income!) and more usual motives (they’re pretty! They symbolize good things!)

And then the lights go down. When we next see Dou Yi, she’s a vengeful ghost, white-faced and clad in white rags, lips blood-red, black hair streaming down, stalking the town she has cursed with a drought until someone will drag the truth of how she died and why into the light. And then, maybe, the rain will fall.

The town’s inhabitants seem like a pleasant bunch. They include Handsome Zhang, the young factory owner, and his fiance Rocket, who are preparing to move abroad to somewhere with rain. Zhang’s old nurse adores him and supports their relationship, as do his friends, her friends, and the deaf owner of the local bar.

Even the introduction of Tianyun Lin, a businesswoman from the city looking to purchase the factory on behalf of her company, goes well. It’s not a hostile takeover; Zhang is hoping to sell, and Lin is hoping to buy. She’s even brought her young adopted daughter, Fei-Fei, who is eight or nine. Only Fei-Fei seems to have intimations that anything is wrong, but her mother chalks it up to the influence of her superstitious old nurse who told her too many ghost stories.

Things start getting eerie fast. Fei-Fei dreams of a snow girl who says her name is Dou Yi, and says she needs better clothes and boots. Her puzzled mother first assumes this is Fei-Fei’s vivid imagination, then realizes something is up when the townspeople react to the name with alarm followed by a wall of “Let’s not talk about her.” While Lin is putting Fei-Fei to bed, something starts to stir in the shadows at the back wall. At first it seems like it might just be the curtains rippling in an air current. Then an indistinct shape, a clot of shadow, emerges and begins to crawl across the stage toward them and us, its long black hair hanging down…

Stage plays don’t often aspire to “scary.” That moment made me and everyone practically levitate out of their seats.

If there’s any chance you can see this play live, don’t read further. It’s well worth seeing unspoiled, and I’m going to spoil literally everything. Otherwise… ( Read more... )

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A Palm for Mrs. Pollifax, by Dorothy Gilman

Just a heads-up that Palm for Mrs. Pollifax (Mrs. Pollifax Series Book 4)[image error] is currently on Kindle for $2.99. It's # 4 so I haven't read it yet, but I bet it's good and I suspect you could start there if you like.

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Love's Labors Lost: OSF Ashland

Love's Labors Lost is a very odd play, rarely performed because the language is so difficult. I think it probably reads better than it performs unless the cast and direction is extremely good. In reading, I like it for its sense of a kind of delicate bubble of time, all sunlit foolery and innocent youth, and how the ending shows exactly how evanescent the whole thing was. It also has a very beautiful last line.

This production went in more for broad comedy that takes a sudden shift to seriousness in the last ten minutes. Performed on the outdoor Elizabethan theatre, the set featured a lot of party balloons including a giant inflatable pig on the top balcony, and a rock/pop band onstage. Due to smoky conditions, we ended up waiting in the audience for half an hour while whoever was in charge of safety decided whether or not to cancel the show. Finally someone stuck her head out the top window and gave us a thumbs-up to rapturous cheers. The audience and performers were obviously really excited to have the show go on at all (I learned later that multiple performances had been canceled or moved to a local high school due to wildfire smoke, and this was the first time they'd performed on the stage in weeks) and all attempts at getting audience participation went extremely well.

The comedy was really funny, and I liked the songs. There was a lot of fourth wall-breaking, and some anachronistic added joke lines. The king and his buddies, and the princess and her ladies, start the show in all-white outfits (monastic for the men, cute sailor dresses with color accents for the women), and the men take their vows of chastity by planting a colored paint handprint over their hearts. As the play goes on, the colored paint gets used more and more - they paint emblems on their outfits, attack each other with paint, etc - as they increasingly lose sight of their vows, and they end up with rainbow outfits. Those then switch to red for Act II, and to black for the finale.

The king was the same actor who played Henry in Henry V, which we'd seen that afternoon! Getting to see actors in different roles over the same day or couple days is one of my favorite things about OSF, or any repertory theatre. He was charming, but Berowne, Sir Adrian Whatsisface, and his page stole the show. (Our waitress at the pre-show dinner was an understudy for one of the princess's ladies!)

It was generally a very nicely-done and enjoyable production of a difficult play, though it wasn't at all clear who some of the supporting characters were (Holofernes and those guys - I think they're academics?) and IMO, if there is a giant inflatable pig in Act I, it should descend or ascend or be used in some way by the end. Overall it was a lot of fun, but my least favorite of the four plays I saw. I'd like to see a production that was more delicate and less broad - more like my experience of reading the play.

Edited to add pig.

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Ashland Shakespeare Festival

My friend Halle and I just got back from a trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where we saw Love's Labors Lost (nearly canceled on account of wildfire smoke; featured a giant inflatable pig which inexplicably just sat onstage, completely ignored, for the entire play) and The Book of Will (a modern play about Shakespeare's friends creating the First Folio three years after his death) on the outdoor Elizabethan stage, Snow in Midsummer (a modern ghost/revenge drama loosely based on the Chinese classic play The Injustice to Dou Yi That Touched Heaven and Earth) on the large indoor Bowmer stage, and a very intimate Henry V in the teeny Thomas theatre, where you are never more than ten feet away from the stage. My favorites were Henry V and Snow in Midsummer; Halle's were Henry V and The Book of Will. But everything was of a quality well worth taking a trip for.

I was impressed by how much OSF was putting its money where its mouth was in terms of commitment to diversity and fostering new voices. Out of eleven plays at a festival mostly known for Shakespeare, six were by modern playwrights (if you include an adaptation of Sense and Sensibility), three were world premieres and one was a US premiere, four were by women, and the entire company - actors, writers, directors, and probably backstage as well - was multiracial and not in a token way. I'm sure none of the modern plays that don't have ties to classic western works sell as many tickets as the Shakespeare plays, so there's some real risks being taken.

We also ate some really great food and got driven around by an exceedingly charming taxi driver named Marco of A-Town Cab, who I am going to go rave about on Yelp right now. We're definitely going back next year - they're doing Macbeth and Paula Vogel's Indecent, about the true story of how a 1912 Yiddish play was translated into English, performed on Broadway including Broadway's first onstage lesbian kiss, and got the entire cast and also the producer arrested for indecency. Luckily, the producer was also a lawyer....

I could do longer write-ups of the plays I saw if anyone's interested. I'm a bit torn though as what was most interesting about Snow in Midsummer and to a lesser degree Henry V involved staging that's best encountered unspoiled, and the former also had lots of surprising plot twists. On the other hand, probably most of you will never get a chance to see these productions anyway...

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