Delia Sherman's Blog, page 13
February 4, 2011
Driving Miss Daisy
Despite dire predictions of a winter storm and plummeting temperatures, on Monday night we consulted the evidence of our own senses, put on our stickiest boots and fuzziest coats, and marched (carefully) up 97th Street to take the subway to see Driving Miss Daisy.
I'd really agitated to see it, the play a Pulitzer Prize winner of its day and all, and (unlike A Free Man of Color or The Scottsboro Boys) popular enough to have its run extended into April. Also, it stars Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones, two actors I would gladly pay to watch reading the telephone book, much less a famous play that had been made into a 1989 movie (which I think I saw, but don't remember much about) starring Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman. On the whole, I'm glad I did. The production was professional and imaginative, the acting wonderful, the audience warm and appreciative. It's just too bad that Driving Miss Daisy is, well, kind of a thin and simplistic play about a very rich and complex subject--prejudice and racism in the American South.
The argument of this play (I won't call it a plot, because it isn't one, not exactly) is this: Boolie Werthan, a middle-aged Jewish business man in Atlanta, GA foists an out-of-work chauffer called Hoak Coleburn on his 72 year old mother after she wrecks her car and the neighbor's garage. Fiercely independent, unthinkingly prejudiced, extremely self-willed, extremely anxious, she gradually lets Hoak into her life, growing dependent on his kindness and help, teaching him how to read as he teaches her, well, what? Not to think through her prejudices--she treats him like a servant throughout the play, even as he drives her to a dinner honoring Dr. Martin Luther King. And not to look outside her own narrow life or to become less relentlessly self-centered. It's clear by the end of the play that she likes Hoak better than she likes her own son, but then Hoak takes care of her more consistently and a lot more sensitively than her son does. "You're my best friend," she tells Hoak in the climactic scene of the play. Which is sweet, but demonstrably one-sided and arguably self-serving. As Ben Brantley put it in his New York Times review, "Mr. Uhry allows audiences to feel both patronizing toward, and admiring of, its geriatric odd couple. This combination of sentiments tends to make people glow with a pleasant righteousness, especially when the implicit subject is crossing a racial divide."
Which leaves us with watching James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave injecting this rather thin text with theatrical life. For the most part, they succeed. Vanessa Redgrave, as always, plays Vanessa Redgrave playing a role, but she does it with a panache that would make Cyrano gnash his teeth with envy. Her Miss Daisy is more New England school marm than any kind of Southern woman I'm familiar with (and I'm related to a good few Southern women)--brisk, acid, oddly confrontational. And yet she still makes it clear that a good portion of Miss Daisy's occasional meanness grows out of her fear of losing her autonomy. Sometimes she stretches the text to breaking point; sometimes, she plays against it. It makes mice feet of some of the Uhry's more sentimental set pieces (not that I'm complaining, mind), and it doesn't always make a lot of sense to what the play is trying to say, but it sure is riveting to watch.
James Earl Jones, on the other hand, belongs to the chameleon rather than the peacock school of acting. He is Hoak--body-language, accents, facial expressions, everything. He shows us Hoak's desperation and fury as an aging black man in a white man's world as well as his genuine kindness and compassion for an old woman raging against the dying of the light. I can believe that his Hoak loves Miss Daisy like family--out of knowledge of her strengths and vulnerabilities, her faults and her virtues, out of duty and necessity and even his own loneliness and need to be needed. And that's a real feat, given the two-dimensional nature of the character as written.
I want to say a word about Boyd Gaines, too, whose Boolie serves as Miss Daisy and Hoak's line to the outside world. He's the only character who lives in a larger community, who has to negotiate the complex world of business and politics and family. I absolutely believed in Boolie, irritating and bonhomous, sometimes incredibly dense and sometimes remarkably insightful. Which means that Boyd Gaines is probably a chameleon, too, and a very good one. If he's not as drop-dead charismatic as Jones or Redgrave--well, there wouldn't have been room for the three of on the stage.
The run's been extended through April. If you like period pieces or wonderful performances--and your blood pressure can stand the play's simplistic liberalism--it's well worth seeing. Neither Jones nor Redgrave will be treading the boards forever.
I'd really agitated to see it, the play a Pulitzer Prize winner of its day and all, and (unlike A Free Man of Color or The Scottsboro Boys) popular enough to have its run extended into April. Also, it stars Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones, two actors I would gladly pay to watch reading the telephone book, much less a famous play that had been made into a 1989 movie (which I think I saw, but don't remember much about) starring Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman. On the whole, I'm glad I did. The production was professional and imaginative, the acting wonderful, the audience warm and appreciative. It's just too bad that Driving Miss Daisy is, well, kind of a thin and simplistic play about a very rich and complex subject--prejudice and racism in the American South.
The argument of this play (I won't call it a plot, because it isn't one, not exactly) is this: Boolie Werthan, a middle-aged Jewish business man in Atlanta, GA foists an out-of-work chauffer called Hoak Coleburn on his 72 year old mother after she wrecks her car and the neighbor's garage. Fiercely independent, unthinkingly prejudiced, extremely self-willed, extremely anxious, she gradually lets Hoak into her life, growing dependent on his kindness and help, teaching him how to read as he teaches her, well, what? Not to think through her prejudices--she treats him like a servant throughout the play, even as he drives her to a dinner honoring Dr. Martin Luther King. And not to look outside her own narrow life or to become less relentlessly self-centered. It's clear by the end of the play that she likes Hoak better than she likes her own son, but then Hoak takes care of her more consistently and a lot more sensitively than her son does. "You're my best friend," she tells Hoak in the climactic scene of the play. Which is sweet, but demonstrably one-sided and arguably self-serving. As Ben Brantley put it in his New York Times review, "Mr. Uhry allows audiences to feel both patronizing toward, and admiring of, its geriatric odd couple. This combination of sentiments tends to make people glow with a pleasant righteousness, especially when the implicit subject is crossing a racial divide."
Which leaves us with watching James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave injecting this rather thin text with theatrical life. For the most part, they succeed. Vanessa Redgrave, as always, plays Vanessa Redgrave playing a role, but she does it with a panache that would make Cyrano gnash his teeth with envy. Her Miss Daisy is more New England school marm than any kind of Southern woman I'm familiar with (and I'm related to a good few Southern women)--brisk, acid, oddly confrontational. And yet she still makes it clear that a good portion of Miss Daisy's occasional meanness grows out of her fear of losing her autonomy. Sometimes she stretches the text to breaking point; sometimes, she plays against it. It makes mice feet of some of the Uhry's more sentimental set pieces (not that I'm complaining, mind), and it doesn't always make a lot of sense to what the play is trying to say, but it sure is riveting to watch.
James Earl Jones, on the other hand, belongs to the chameleon rather than the peacock school of acting. He is Hoak--body-language, accents, facial expressions, everything. He shows us Hoak's desperation and fury as an aging black man in a white man's world as well as his genuine kindness and compassion for an old woman raging against the dying of the light. I can believe that his Hoak loves Miss Daisy like family--out of knowledge of her strengths and vulnerabilities, her faults and her virtues, out of duty and necessity and even his own loneliness and need to be needed. And that's a real feat, given the two-dimensional nature of the character as written.
I want to say a word about Boyd Gaines, too, whose Boolie serves as Miss Daisy and Hoak's line to the outside world. He's the only character who lives in a larger community, who has to negotiate the complex world of business and politics and family. I absolutely believed in Boolie, irritating and bonhomous, sometimes incredibly dense and sometimes remarkably insightful. Which means that Boyd Gaines is probably a chameleon, too, and a very good one. If he's not as drop-dead charismatic as Jones or Redgrave--well, there wouldn't have been room for the three of on the stage.
The run's been extended through April. If you like period pieces or wonderful performances--and your blood pressure can stand the play's simplistic liberalism--it's well worth seeing. Neither Jones nor Redgrave will be treading the boards forever.
January 28, 2011
Back On My Head
OK, I'm out of excuses. I'm well again, the house is as picked-up as it's going to get until just before Passover, and I have several hard deadlines giving me the stink-eye. Over the next four weeks, I will:
1) Write copy and a bio and generally collect useful information so that Gavin Grant of Big Mouth House can successfully publish and promote my forthcoming late-middle-grade historical novel Freedom Maze so that it gets lots of reviews and readers and earns its considerable keep.
2) Write an introduction to a best of Lucy Sussex collection of short stories, to be called Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies, and published by Ticonderoga Publications later this year. The best part of this will be squeeing (intelligently, I hope) over her series of slightly creepy doll stories, most of which are new to me, and which I love immoderately. There's nobody who does the things with history and fiction and how the past haunts the present and imagination informs fact quite like Lucy, and that's a fact. Huh. I think I can use that.
3) Clean up and post the minutes for the all-day Annual Meeting of the IAF Executive Board earlier this month, which is a perfectly easy task, except for the bits where I was talking and not taking notes and the parts where three people were talking excitedly at once (happily, I assure you) and I couldn't tell what was going on.
4) Pull together a passably professional course description and book list for my course this summer so Hollins can order the books (and I'll be having a question to ask you Children's Lit folk out there about teachable books, so stay tuned)
5) Finish a story I started early last summer, which I should have done by now, but I lost traction on in a big way, and now it's almost due, OMG, and I need time to rewrite it at least twice before sending it in.
Can I do all that? Sure I can. I better. Somebody will be disappointed if I don't. And I'll do just about anything to keep Somebody from being disappointed.
Here I go.
1) Write copy and a bio and generally collect useful information so that Gavin Grant of Big Mouth House can successfully publish and promote my forthcoming late-middle-grade historical novel Freedom Maze so that it gets lots of reviews and readers and earns its considerable keep.
2) Write an introduction to a best of Lucy Sussex collection of short stories, to be called Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies, and published by Ticonderoga Publications later this year. The best part of this will be squeeing (intelligently, I hope) over her series of slightly creepy doll stories, most of which are new to me, and which I love immoderately. There's nobody who does the things with history and fiction and how the past haunts the present and imagination informs fact quite like Lucy, and that's a fact. Huh. I think I can use that.
3) Clean up and post the minutes for the all-day Annual Meeting of the IAF Executive Board earlier this month, which is a perfectly easy task, except for the bits where I was talking and not taking notes and the parts where three people were talking excitedly at once (happily, I assure you) and I couldn't tell what was going on.
4) Pull together a passably professional course description and book list for my course this summer so Hollins can order the books (and I'll be having a question to ask you Children's Lit folk out there about teachable books, so stay tuned)
5) Finish a story I started early last summer, which I should have done by now, but I lost traction on in a big way, and now it's almost due, OMG, and I need time to rewrite it at least twice before sending it in.
Can I do all that? Sure I can. I better. Somebody will be disappointed if I don't. And I'll do just about anything to keep Somebody from being disappointed.
Here I go.
Errata: Freud's Last Session
Today I got an email from the media relations man for Freud's Last Session, saying that the play is in an open-ended run, with no plans for closing in the immediate future. So if you're in or around the city and you love Freud, Lewis, philosophy, theology, mythology, well-crafted plays, solid acting, beautifully-decorated sets, and cool architecture, go see it. Y'hear?
Cymbeline
Well, I made it. I hoicked myself off the sofa, got dressed, and subwayed on down to the New Victory Theatre, where the wonderful Theatre For A New Audience is mounting the Fiasco Theatre's production of Cymbeline, which played to great acclaim last year on Off-Off-Broadway .
Ah, Cymbeline. GB Shaw had no mercy for it: "It is for the most part stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order, in parts abominably written, throughout intellectually vulgar, and judged in point of thought by modern intellectual standards, vulgar, foolish, offensive, indecent, and exasperating beyond all tolerance."
He wasn't altogether wrong, mind you. In insensitive or over-reverent hands, Cymbeline is not only as full of plot-holes and inconsistencies as a bad Star Trek episode, but massively boring as well. A few years back, we saw a production at Lincoln Center that lasted approximately 20 years and (as I recall--I don't seem to have reviewed it) left me wishing the entire cast would just die in the climactic battle and put everyone (including the cast) out of their misery. As far as I could tell, they left in everything--repetitive speeches, throw-away scenes, looong transitions, Cymbeline's endless whining and the Queen's endless plotting, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all.
The Fiasco Theatre took a very different approach, notable for a firm hand with the text and a strong sense of the ridiculous. The result is a reasonably trim tragi-comedy with a strong through-line, some truly inspired staging, some interesting doubling, and a surprising number of genuine laughs. With six actors, everybody (except the actor playing Posthumous) doubled and tripled their roles. Cymbeline, Cloten, and the apothecary Cornelius; Iachimo and Arviragus; The Queen, a Frenchman and Belaria; Posthumous and the Roman Captain. The actor playing Pisanio was pretty much everybody else.
They were all good enough with their voices and bodies that I was never for an instant confused about who I was watching or what was going on--not even at the end, where they had to leap in and out of character and bits of costume during the revelation cascade. I also loved their use of music to set the scene--the Italian scenes, for instance, were introduced by everyone singing an Italian madrigal, and in the mountain scenes, Belaria and her "sons" sang traditional American mountain tunes while playing banjo, guitar, and washboard. Very well, too. The song they sang over Fidele's body was Shakespeare's words set to trad music, seguing into an old American hymn. It worked perfectly.
It wasn't perfect--I wasn't enthralled with the Queen/Belaria, who was acting her socks off without ever giving me the feeling that she was inhabiting either of her two characters. And Imogen did better with the romantic/comic parts of the script than the tragic ones. But what this production did wonderfully was to catch the gallimaulfry of genres, influences, registers, styles, and conventions Shakespeare put into this play. It has Romans AND Italians, a beheading AND a false poisoning, a plotting queen AND an evil seducer, a successful kidnapping AND an unsuccessful rape. Plus an on-stage battle, two scenes of raging jealousy and despair, two (or possibly three, depending on how you count) instances of mistaken identity, a flight to the green wood, an angry and unreasonable father with no political sense, misplaced or stolen love-tokens, a trunk, a trio of lost children found, all ending in forgiveness and love all around (except for the evil queen and her son, who are dead and utterly unmourned). It's all too much--much too much--and Fiasco reveled triumphantly in its too muchness.
In the end, I was reminded of nothing so much as a kind of rarefied episode of South Park, with Cloten as Cartman and Posthumous as Kyle (or possibly Stan). And there's nothing wrong with that. There was even Something Important We Learned Here Tonight:
The power that I have on you is, to spare you;
The malice towards you to forgive you: live,
And deal with others better.
I can't imagine anybody dealing better with Cymbeline than the Fiasco Theatre Company. But I'd love to see them try.
Ah, Cymbeline. GB Shaw had no mercy for it: "It is for the most part stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order, in parts abominably written, throughout intellectually vulgar, and judged in point of thought by modern intellectual standards, vulgar, foolish, offensive, indecent, and exasperating beyond all tolerance."
He wasn't altogether wrong, mind you. In insensitive or over-reverent hands, Cymbeline is not only as full of plot-holes and inconsistencies as a bad Star Trek episode, but massively boring as well. A few years back, we saw a production at Lincoln Center that lasted approximately 20 years and (as I recall--I don't seem to have reviewed it) left me wishing the entire cast would just die in the climactic battle and put everyone (including the cast) out of their misery. As far as I could tell, they left in everything--repetitive speeches, throw-away scenes, looong transitions, Cymbeline's endless whining and the Queen's endless plotting, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all.
The Fiasco Theatre took a very different approach, notable for a firm hand with the text and a strong sense of the ridiculous. The result is a reasonably trim tragi-comedy with a strong through-line, some truly inspired staging, some interesting doubling, and a surprising number of genuine laughs. With six actors, everybody (except the actor playing Posthumous) doubled and tripled their roles. Cymbeline, Cloten, and the apothecary Cornelius; Iachimo and Arviragus; The Queen, a Frenchman and Belaria; Posthumous and the Roman Captain. The actor playing Pisanio was pretty much everybody else.
They were all good enough with their voices and bodies that I was never for an instant confused about who I was watching or what was going on--not even at the end, where they had to leap in and out of character and bits of costume during the revelation cascade. I also loved their use of music to set the scene--the Italian scenes, for instance, were introduced by everyone singing an Italian madrigal, and in the mountain scenes, Belaria and her "sons" sang traditional American mountain tunes while playing banjo, guitar, and washboard. Very well, too. The song they sang over Fidele's body was Shakespeare's words set to trad music, seguing into an old American hymn. It worked perfectly.
It wasn't perfect--I wasn't enthralled with the Queen/Belaria, who was acting her socks off without ever giving me the feeling that she was inhabiting either of her two characters. And Imogen did better with the romantic/comic parts of the script than the tragic ones. But what this production did wonderfully was to catch the gallimaulfry of genres, influences, registers, styles, and conventions Shakespeare put into this play. It has Romans AND Italians, a beheading AND a false poisoning, a plotting queen AND an evil seducer, a successful kidnapping AND an unsuccessful rape. Plus an on-stage battle, two scenes of raging jealousy and despair, two (or possibly three, depending on how you count) instances of mistaken identity, a flight to the green wood, an angry and unreasonable father with no political sense, misplaced or stolen love-tokens, a trunk, a trio of lost children found, all ending in forgiveness and love all around (except for the evil queen and her son, who are dead and utterly unmourned). It's all too much--much too much--and Fiasco reveled triumphantly in its too muchness.
In the end, I was reminded of nothing so much as a kind of rarefied episode of South Park, with Cloten as Cartman and Posthumous as Kyle (or possibly Stan). And there's nothing wrong with that. There was even Something Important We Learned Here Tonight:
The power that I have on you is, to spare you;
The malice towards you to forgive you: live,
And deal with others better.
I can't imagine anybody dealing better with Cymbeline than the Fiasco Theatre Company. But I'd love to see them try.
January 27, 2011
Freud's Last Session
I meant to post this last weekend, but the flu intervened. I'm sorry for the delay, but really, I couldn't. Better now, though.
Last week was Nephew Week here at Chateau Riverside--Ellen's beloved eldest nephew AJ, stopping by NYC on a snowy evening to visit his Wacky Aunts on his way back up to Skidmore for his final (how time flies!) semester before braving the Big Bad World. We took him to the theatre, we took him to the ballet, we took him to the Metropolitan Museum to look at furniture and boxes. It was like being a tourist in my own city, which I always enjoy, since I get to goof off broaden my mind without feeling (overwhelmingly) guilty about the things I am not doing.
So, most Aunts (however Wacky) take their nephews to Broadway when they come visit--to something fun and splashy, like Billy Eliot. What do we take our nephew to? Freud's Last Session, a two-hander by Marc St. Germaine at the West Side Y about the imaginary meeting of Freud and C.S. Lewis in London in 1939, on the day England declared war on Germany.
The play takes place in Freud's London study, decorated by his daughter Anna to replicate his study in Berlin, lost to him when he fled an increasingly repressive and dangerous Germany two years earlier. Freud is suffering from cancer of the mouth, and Lewis has just published Pilgrim's Regress, in which he paints an unflattering portrait of Freud. Of course, Lewis expects to be called on the carpet for essentially calling Freud a pretentious windbag. Of course, Freud hasn't read the book--although he has heard of it. Equally of course, Lewis wants to get Freud to admit that God might exist and Freud is equally anxious to get Lewis to admit that his vaunted conversion is, at best, delusional, stemming from his mother's early death and his father's coldness. Needless to say, nobody's mind is changed, but a great number of interesting things are said, and some moments of true power as both men face their mortality in the face of a war that is all too clearly going to spill out of the battlefield and into their homes.
Inevitably, it's a talky play, whose tension and interest depend heavily on the two actors playing Freud and Lewis. For my money, Martin Reyner as Freud mops the stage with Mark H. Dold's rather colorless and square-jawed Lewis. Reyner's walk made my back and legs ache in sympathy, and watching his wry wit zoom over the Lewis's extremely earnest head was a delight. My only real (and very subjective) criticism of the production was, in fact, that (despite passing references to Minto and his experiences in WWI), I missed the complex, conflicted, half-Pagan Lewis I've always loved. Granted, the Lewis in this play is only 41, close on the heels of his conversion, with the Narnia books and Joy Davidman still ahead of him. And Lewis straight-up on Religion is never as charming (or convincing) as Lewis coming at the divine side-on, when his heart had a chance to trip up his head and show him up for the animist I believe he always was at bottom. But still.
It runs until January 30, and there are cheap tickets available on Broadway Box. The theatre is charming, the building remarkable.
Next night (that would be Friday), we went to the Koch Theatre at Lincoln Center to see a ballet program. I do love watching the ballet, but can't think of much to say about it. For me, it's a blessedly non-verbal experience, and this one more than most, since I went into it tired and came out of it even tireder. So I fear it must go un-commented upon, at least by me. The curious can consult The New York Times review for a full analysis.
Oh, AJ enjoyed both performances very much. We had a lovely talk about Freud and Lewis and atheism and faith and conversion and Narnia and WWI afterwards, over pommes frites (AJ), tarte tatin (I'm a sucker for tarte tatin) and bread-and-butter (EK). He was as tired as I was after the ballet, so we didn't talk about that, but I know he got a kick out of the architecture.
As I lie here on the sofa typing and looking out at the clumps of snow falling off the trees in Riverside Park, it seems inconceivable to me that we'll be going out to see Cymbeline tonight, but that's the plan. I'll let you know how it pans out, shall I?
Last week was Nephew Week here at Chateau Riverside--Ellen's beloved eldest nephew AJ, stopping by NYC on a snowy evening to visit his Wacky Aunts on his way back up to Skidmore for his final (how time flies!) semester before braving the Big Bad World. We took him to the theatre, we took him to the ballet, we took him to the Metropolitan Museum to look at furniture and boxes. It was like being a tourist in my own city, which I always enjoy, since I get to goof off broaden my mind without feeling (overwhelmingly) guilty about the things I am not doing.
So, most Aunts (however Wacky) take their nephews to Broadway when they come visit--to something fun and splashy, like Billy Eliot. What do we take our nephew to? Freud's Last Session, a two-hander by Marc St. Germaine at the West Side Y about the imaginary meeting of Freud and C.S. Lewis in London in 1939, on the day England declared war on Germany.
The play takes place in Freud's London study, decorated by his daughter Anna to replicate his study in Berlin, lost to him when he fled an increasingly repressive and dangerous Germany two years earlier. Freud is suffering from cancer of the mouth, and Lewis has just published Pilgrim's Regress, in which he paints an unflattering portrait of Freud. Of course, Lewis expects to be called on the carpet for essentially calling Freud a pretentious windbag. Of course, Freud hasn't read the book--although he has heard of it. Equally of course, Lewis wants to get Freud to admit that God might exist and Freud is equally anxious to get Lewis to admit that his vaunted conversion is, at best, delusional, stemming from his mother's early death and his father's coldness. Needless to say, nobody's mind is changed, but a great number of interesting things are said, and some moments of true power as both men face their mortality in the face of a war that is all too clearly going to spill out of the battlefield and into their homes.
Inevitably, it's a talky play, whose tension and interest depend heavily on the two actors playing Freud and Lewis. For my money, Martin Reyner as Freud mops the stage with Mark H. Dold's rather colorless and square-jawed Lewis. Reyner's walk made my back and legs ache in sympathy, and watching his wry wit zoom over the Lewis's extremely earnest head was a delight. My only real (and very subjective) criticism of the production was, in fact, that (despite passing references to Minto and his experiences in WWI), I missed the complex, conflicted, half-Pagan Lewis I've always loved. Granted, the Lewis in this play is only 41, close on the heels of his conversion, with the Narnia books and Joy Davidman still ahead of him. And Lewis straight-up on Religion is never as charming (or convincing) as Lewis coming at the divine side-on, when his heart had a chance to trip up his head and show him up for the animist I believe he always was at bottom. But still.
It runs until January 30, and there are cheap tickets available on Broadway Box. The theatre is charming, the building remarkable.
Next night (that would be Friday), we went to the Koch Theatre at Lincoln Center to see a ballet program. I do love watching the ballet, but can't think of much to say about it. For me, it's a blessedly non-verbal experience, and this one more than most, since I went into it tired and came out of it even tireder. So I fear it must go un-commented upon, at least by me. The curious can consult The New York Times review for a full analysis.
Oh, AJ enjoyed both performances very much. We had a lovely talk about Freud and Lewis and atheism and faith and conversion and Narnia and WWI afterwards, over pommes frites (AJ), tarte tatin (I'm a sucker for tarte tatin) and bread-and-butter (EK). He was as tired as I was after the ballet, so we didn't talk about that, but I know he got a kick out of the architecture.
As I lie here on the sofa typing and looking out at the clumps of snow falling off the trees in Riverside Park, it seems inconceivable to me that we'll be going out to see Cymbeline tonight, but that's the plan. I'll let you know how it pans out, shall I?
January 22, 2011
On Being A Fool
I'm on my way out into the cold and snow (yes, even in NYC) to meet with a young writer over a story she won a critique on, but I couldn't wait to get this post out into my part of the blogosphere. It's Terri Windling on the importance of Foolery to creative work, the courage and blind faith it takes to put yourself out there, ass's ears and angel wings and all, when you're making art. She quotes Cynthia Heimel,
![[info]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1380442897i/1319734.gif)
ellen_kushner
, and me, but mostly she is her own wise and lyrical self, and she certainly made me want to find a windmill to throw my bonnet over (metaphorically speaking, of course) in the story I'm working on, because lord knows, it needs one.
But first, Engagement With A Text In Progress. Which I love. For me, critique sessions like this are warm-up exercises for writing. I shall have a lovely veggie lunch, a lovely critique, and then I'll come home and WORK.
ellen_kushner
, and me, but mostly she is her own wise and lyrical self, and she certainly made me want to find a windmill to throw my bonnet over (metaphorically speaking, of course) in the story I'm working on, because lord knows, it needs one.But first, Engagement With A Text In Progress. Which I love. For me, critique sessions like this are warm-up exercises for writing. I shall have a lovely veggie lunch, a lovely critique, and then I'll come home and WORK.
January 4, 2011
Nesting
The Carbonnades a la Flamande just boiled over into the squash and yams and carrots roasting for the soup. I don't expect a little concentrated beer and beef stock will do them any harm, since we're not expecting any vegetarians for dinner anyway.
There's nothing like cooking to make the house smell like someone lives here.
We've been away too much. I like travel and I adore my in-laws (and the fact that I have them, being decidedly short of family of my own) and warmth and sun in midwinter is never bad. But there's something in me that would have liked to spend the last week here at home, cooking and doing some House Things that need doing, and, oh, yeah, finishing my stupid book, doh. At the NYRSF reading last month, when I said that I began this puppy in 1987, somebody from the back row very reasonably pointed out that it was old enough to go to college and I should let it go already. Which I will. But not until I've read the last 100 pages aloud and made sure Beau's name-change is consistent all the way through the ms, and that I've managed to incorporate that really important thing I just learned from a book on sugar culture in Louisiana that I wish I'd known about in 2005 when it came out rather than two months ago when we went to visit Laura Plantation.
But I digress.
Since we're not exactly quitting the travel thing cold turkey, I've decided that I'd like to live more mindfully in my home when I'm in it, for however long or short a time that happens to be. I've got deadlines coming up, so a good deal of time must be spent with my nose to the grindstone, but when I'm not writing, I'd like to be cooking and hanging pictures and doing something about the kitchen curtains and the piles of books I have read and don't want to keep that I trip over in the hall. Not all at once, (I Will Do All The Things!!!) but in bits and bobs, over a couple of months. Except for the cooking. The cooking should be a constant. As should inviting people over to share it with us. Because, hey, woman doth not live by literature alone.
Which is a great last line, and I really ought to leave it at that, but while I was chopping onions, I was listening to a program about the translation of the King James Bible on BBC1. How much do I love the wifi radio in the kitchen? How much do I love shouting "Cranmer! What about Cranmer!" while the on-air expert witters on about how Tyndale changed the course of the English language? And how long will it be before I chance upon a spot as absolutely up my alley as that one?
There's nothing like cooking to make the house smell like someone lives here.
We've been away too much. I like travel and I adore my in-laws (and the fact that I have them, being decidedly short of family of my own) and warmth and sun in midwinter is never bad. But there's something in me that would have liked to spend the last week here at home, cooking and doing some House Things that need doing, and, oh, yeah, finishing my stupid book, doh. At the NYRSF reading last month, when I said that I began this puppy in 1987, somebody from the back row very reasonably pointed out that it was old enough to go to college and I should let it go already. Which I will. But not until I've read the last 100 pages aloud and made sure Beau's name-change is consistent all the way through the ms, and that I've managed to incorporate that really important thing I just learned from a book on sugar culture in Louisiana that I wish I'd known about in 2005 when it came out rather than two months ago when we went to visit Laura Plantation.
But I digress.
Since we're not exactly quitting the travel thing cold turkey, I've decided that I'd like to live more mindfully in my home when I'm in it, for however long or short a time that happens to be. I've got deadlines coming up, so a good deal of time must be spent with my nose to the grindstone, but when I'm not writing, I'd like to be cooking and hanging pictures and doing something about the kitchen curtains and the piles of books I have read and don't want to keep that I trip over in the hall. Not all at once, (I Will Do All The Things!!!) but in bits and bobs, over a couple of months. Except for the cooking. The cooking should be a constant. As should inviting people over to share it with us. Because, hey, woman doth not live by literature alone.
Which is a great last line, and I really ought to leave it at that, but while I was chopping onions, I was listening to a program about the translation of the King James Bible on BBC1. How much do I love the wifi radio in the kitchen? How much do I love shouting "Cranmer! What about Cranmer!" while the on-air expert witters on about how Tyndale changed the course of the English language? And how long will it be before I chance upon a spot as absolutely up my alley as that one?
December 24, 2010
Big Apple Circus
I am a child around circuses, except, perhaps about being very particular about what I like.
I like:
Clowns who aren't all about humiliation or being hurt.
Being close enough to the acts to see the muscles ripple and the concentration on the faces.
Wire acts and unusual animals and things that are as much about imagination as strength or skill.
The Big Apple Circus makes me very, very happy.
This is a time of year I need a certain amount of distraction, or I melt into a pool of sad meltiness. Ellen is very good about finding distractions. We've traveled, we've gone out to dinner, we've watched Miyazaki movies. And all are good. The Big Apple Circus is EXCELLENT. It's good-natured. It's skillful. It's multi-cultural and diverse and very, very entertaining.
Highlights were: The Chinese acrobatic troupe who did things with unicycles and lariats that don't look like they should be actually possible; a wave of snow-white miniature horses breaking into and around the ring, stopping to allow the little kids sitting ringside to pet their noses, because that's what kids really, really want to do; the goat (yes, goat) who (goats are definately "who," not "that") wandered here and there during the dog act because, really, who can expect a self-respecting goat to hang out obediently on his stand while a stupid dog is getting all the attention?; The Kenyan Boys, who occupied a pole (and each other's shoulders and waists and arms) in wonderful and inventive ways; the Ethiopian juggler, who juggled with a plexiglass construct shaped like a bookstand in a way I could never have imagined and was utterly charmed by. Also his smile.
The Mongolian contortionists were wonderful, too, except that contortionists kind of squick me out. I keep thinking of what damage they might be doing to their ligaments and joints and what it's going to be like when they're 50.
The Russian woman on the--what?--flying rope? Extra-long trapeze? was very special, too. I'm so glad she had a harness, though, or I wouldn't have been able to bear to watch her.
And the clowns were excellent. We went with a friend who had studied at clown school with Barry Lubin, who plays Grandma, a carpetbag-toting, red-garbed, pearl-necklaced facilitator of good times. So we got to talk to Grandma/Barry at the intermission, which was really interesting. He was both in and out of character--engaging with us as individuals and ON, in that particular entertainery, sparkly way. On-stage, he had excellent chemistry with the dancer/geek/clown Mark Gindick (who has, according to the Big Apple site, played Grandma as well). And the juggler/clown Rob Torres was simply magnificent--appealing, charming, approachable, human as a guy with a suitcase and an appalling suit who just wanted to be loved and kept all the applause he got in a box.
Like Dylan Thomas's hero, I can't imagine a noisier, nicer Christmas Eve.
And I wish all my LJ friends, who patiently read my effusions about theatre and travel and dinners, kindly ignoring my impressionistic spelling and chronology, the very Merriest of Holiday Seasons. I love knowing you're out there and interacting with you in comments and replies and (often) in your own blogs. Thank you for extending my very small family, and bless you for your support and your interest. It means a great deal to me.
I like:
Clowns who aren't all about humiliation or being hurt.
Being close enough to the acts to see the muscles ripple and the concentration on the faces.
Wire acts and unusual animals and things that are as much about imagination as strength or skill.
The Big Apple Circus makes me very, very happy.
This is a time of year I need a certain amount of distraction, or I melt into a pool of sad meltiness. Ellen is very good about finding distractions. We've traveled, we've gone out to dinner, we've watched Miyazaki movies. And all are good. The Big Apple Circus is EXCELLENT. It's good-natured. It's skillful. It's multi-cultural and diverse and very, very entertaining.
Highlights were: The Chinese acrobatic troupe who did things with unicycles and lariats that don't look like they should be actually possible; a wave of snow-white miniature horses breaking into and around the ring, stopping to allow the little kids sitting ringside to pet their noses, because that's what kids really, really want to do; the goat (yes, goat) who (goats are definately "who," not "that") wandered here and there during the dog act because, really, who can expect a self-respecting goat to hang out obediently on his stand while a stupid dog is getting all the attention?; The Kenyan Boys, who occupied a pole (and each other's shoulders and waists and arms) in wonderful and inventive ways; the Ethiopian juggler, who juggled with a plexiglass construct shaped like a bookstand in a way I could never have imagined and was utterly charmed by. Also his smile.
The Mongolian contortionists were wonderful, too, except that contortionists kind of squick me out. I keep thinking of what damage they might be doing to their ligaments and joints and what it's going to be like when they're 50.
The Russian woman on the--what?--flying rope? Extra-long trapeze? was very special, too. I'm so glad she had a harness, though, or I wouldn't have been able to bear to watch her.
And the clowns were excellent. We went with a friend who had studied at clown school with Barry Lubin, who plays Grandma, a carpetbag-toting, red-garbed, pearl-necklaced facilitator of good times. So we got to talk to Grandma/Barry at the intermission, which was really interesting. He was both in and out of character--engaging with us as individuals and ON, in that particular entertainery, sparkly way. On-stage, he had excellent chemistry with the dancer/geek/clown Mark Gindick (who has, according to the Big Apple site, played Grandma as well). And the juggler/clown Rob Torres was simply magnificent--appealing, charming, approachable, human as a guy with a suitcase and an appalling suit who just wanted to be loved and kept all the applause he got in a box.
Like Dylan Thomas's hero, I can't imagine a noisier, nicer Christmas Eve.
And I wish all my LJ friends, who patiently read my effusions about theatre and travel and dinners, kindly ignoring my impressionistic spelling and chronology, the very Merriest of Holiday Seasons. I love knowing you're out there and interacting with you in comments and replies and (often) in your own blogs. Thank you for extending my very small family, and bless you for your support and your interest. It means a great deal to me.
December 13, 2010
NYRSF Reading!
It's that time of year again, when
ellen_kushner
and I do The Family Christmas Reading at NYRSF. It's a week later than usual, owing to Ralph Vicinenza's memorial service being scheduled for the usual time, and results in NYRSF and KGB occurring on consecutive nights rather than a week and a day apart, so it's extra-special.
I will be reading from The Freedom Maze (if I can get the scene I want to read edited to my satisfaction by then). Ellen will be reading "The Duke of Riverside," which will appear in the forthcoming Windling/Datlow anthology Naked Cities. NYRSF reading (in case you haven't been recently) have moved to the Soho Gallery of Digital Art, 138 Sullivan Street, NYC. Things start at 6:30, although the door opens before then. There's a $5 suggested donation toward refreshments and taking the readers out to dinner afterwards.
See you there, I hope.
ellen_kushner
and I do The Family Christmas Reading at NYRSF. It's a week later than usual, owing to Ralph Vicinenza's memorial service being scheduled for the usual time, and results in NYRSF and KGB occurring on consecutive nights rather than a week and a day apart, so it's extra-special.I will be reading from The Freedom Maze (if I can get the scene I want to read edited to my satisfaction by then). Ellen will be reading "The Duke of Riverside," which will appear in the forthcoming Windling/Datlow anthology Naked Cities. NYRSF reading (in case you haven't been recently) have moved to the Soho Gallery of Digital Art, 138 Sullivan Street, NYC. Things start at 6:30, although the door opens before then. There's a $5 suggested donation toward refreshments and taking the readers out to dinner afterwards.
See you there, I hope.
December 5, 2010
The Scottsboro Boys
I'd love to write a long and thoughtful piece about this play, about rage and art and history and how to make it all palatable enough to a modern audience so that they'll take in what they need to hear and not simply walk out at intermission (or in the middle of a production number, since The Scottsboro Boys is played without intermission). I'll certainly do my best. But Freedom Maze is due at the end of the month, and 'tis the season for parties and rejoicing, and I haven't seen most of my friends for far too long, owing to All The Traveling in the World, OMG. Not to mention, you know, Daily Life. So here goes.
Can rage make good art? There's certainly a lot of art that's grown out of rage, from Aristophanes through Swift to (arguably) Tony Kushner. Some of it's good, some of it's bad, and (like any other kind of art), its quality tends to reflect the extent to which the message is mediated through the medium. "I'm really mad about This. This is HORRIBLE. This makes me so angry I could spit!!!!! And if it doesn't make you angry too, then you're a subhuman bottom-feeder, and I hate you almost as much as I hate This" is not good art. Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," which sets forth a pseudo-serious plan for solving the population problem in Ireland by culling Irish babies for the British pot, is. It's queasy-making, certainly (I hated it when we read it in school, in 10th grade, I think). The subtext of anger, horror, and loathing is not very far under the surface. But the surface is genuinely, if savagely, funny, and startling enough so that the reader immediately (even if temporarily) must see the problem (in this case, the English subjugation and exploitation of the Irish) from Swift's point of view.
And what does this have to do with The Scottsboro Boys?
Well, in 1931, nine young black men between the ages of 12 and 19 were dragged off the box-car they were riding to Chattanooga to find work and arrested for raping two white women, one of whom later testified that she had lied about the whole incident. Even given the total lack of evidence, all nine of them were found guilty. Every time a higher court or an appeal awarded them a new trial, the verdict came in the same: guilty. The four youngest were eventually released, three were paroled after years of hard labor, and two died in prison, having served more than half their lives for a crime they absolutely did not commit. No matter what way you look at it, it's not exactly a story that makes you say, "Oh! That would make a wonderful musical comedy!"
And yet, somehow, it did.
The Scottsboro Boys is not an easy play to watch. The musical idiom John Kander and Fred Ebb draw from is the Southern minstrel show, which (as the program itself points out) "is a uniquely American art form, built on racial stereotypes and blind bigotry." The action is directed by Mr. Interlocutor, played by the remarkable John Cullum, the only white member of the cast. The other white characters--the Alabama sheriff, the judge, the lawyers--are played by Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo, the traditional minstrel end-men and clowns. All the other characters, including the women who accused the boys of rape, are shared among the actors who play the boys. Everybody, except the boys themselves, is played broadly, stereotypically, over-the-top, for laughs.
Yes, it's funny. Yes, quite a lot of it is painful to watch. The most painful (and the most moving) number is when Haywood Patterson--who died in prison because he refused to confess to a rape he hadn't committed at his parole hearing--begins by delivering his testimony serious and straight, and then, in response to Mr. Interlocutor's badgering him to tell the truth, delivers it again, shucking and jiving and drawling and dancing like a good little gollywog, with all the other characters grinning and nodding in response. The woman sitting next to me (white, as was much of the audience) sat forward, sat back, ruched around in her seat through the whole number. And cried near the end, when all the Boys came on, in full black-face, to tapdance and sing the bare, horrible facts of their lives after prison. As did I.
If they'd left it there, the play would have been unbearable. But they don't. Throughout the play, a slender women in a print dress and glasses, carrying a black purse, lingers in the margins of the action, reacting, weeping, watching, sending cake to the prisoners, standing up when the Interlocutor wants her chair--bearing witness to the whole sorry spectacle. At the end, she sits in one of the chairs that make up the set and refuses to move when the Interlocutor, dressed as a bus attendant, tells her to move to the back of the bus. That scene, quietly and naturally played, makes me cry even to remember. It doesn't take the horror out of what has gone before, but it does make the play bearable.
And how is this going over with the New York theatre-going public, at $100 a pop? Well, the play is closing December 12, after 49 performances. There's an article about it here. I think this is a pity. On the other hand, it opened on Broadway at all, which I don't think it would have 10 years ago. Those who love it, love it a lot. Those who hate it are, I think, as confused by its interstitiality (minstrel show/social realism/musical/political statement) as offended by its content. Does every minute of it work? No. Sometimes over the top isn't significant, it's just over the top. But I'm glad Kander and Ebb put it together, and I'm glad it got produced, and I suspect it will be popping up here and there at regional theatres from time to time because it's got some wonderful parts in it, and some really good numbers. And then you can go see it and judge for yourselves.
Can rage make good art? There's certainly a lot of art that's grown out of rage, from Aristophanes through Swift to (arguably) Tony Kushner. Some of it's good, some of it's bad, and (like any other kind of art), its quality tends to reflect the extent to which the message is mediated through the medium. "I'm really mad about This. This is HORRIBLE. This makes me so angry I could spit!!!!! And if it doesn't make you angry too, then you're a subhuman bottom-feeder, and I hate you almost as much as I hate This" is not good art. Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," which sets forth a pseudo-serious plan for solving the population problem in Ireland by culling Irish babies for the British pot, is. It's queasy-making, certainly (I hated it when we read it in school, in 10th grade, I think). The subtext of anger, horror, and loathing is not very far under the surface. But the surface is genuinely, if savagely, funny, and startling enough so that the reader immediately (even if temporarily) must see the problem (in this case, the English subjugation and exploitation of the Irish) from Swift's point of view.
And what does this have to do with The Scottsboro Boys?
Well, in 1931, nine young black men between the ages of 12 and 19 were dragged off the box-car they were riding to Chattanooga to find work and arrested for raping two white women, one of whom later testified that she had lied about the whole incident. Even given the total lack of evidence, all nine of them were found guilty. Every time a higher court or an appeal awarded them a new trial, the verdict came in the same: guilty. The four youngest were eventually released, three were paroled after years of hard labor, and two died in prison, having served more than half their lives for a crime they absolutely did not commit. No matter what way you look at it, it's not exactly a story that makes you say, "Oh! That would make a wonderful musical comedy!"
And yet, somehow, it did.
The Scottsboro Boys is not an easy play to watch. The musical idiom John Kander and Fred Ebb draw from is the Southern minstrel show, which (as the program itself points out) "is a uniquely American art form, built on racial stereotypes and blind bigotry." The action is directed by Mr. Interlocutor, played by the remarkable John Cullum, the only white member of the cast. The other white characters--the Alabama sheriff, the judge, the lawyers--are played by Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo, the traditional minstrel end-men and clowns. All the other characters, including the women who accused the boys of rape, are shared among the actors who play the boys. Everybody, except the boys themselves, is played broadly, stereotypically, over-the-top, for laughs.
Yes, it's funny. Yes, quite a lot of it is painful to watch. The most painful (and the most moving) number is when Haywood Patterson--who died in prison because he refused to confess to a rape he hadn't committed at his parole hearing--begins by delivering his testimony serious and straight, and then, in response to Mr. Interlocutor's badgering him to tell the truth, delivers it again, shucking and jiving and drawling and dancing like a good little gollywog, with all the other characters grinning and nodding in response. The woman sitting next to me (white, as was much of the audience) sat forward, sat back, ruched around in her seat through the whole number. And cried near the end, when all the Boys came on, in full black-face, to tapdance and sing the bare, horrible facts of their lives after prison. As did I.
If they'd left it there, the play would have been unbearable. But they don't. Throughout the play, a slender women in a print dress and glasses, carrying a black purse, lingers in the margins of the action, reacting, weeping, watching, sending cake to the prisoners, standing up when the Interlocutor wants her chair--bearing witness to the whole sorry spectacle. At the end, she sits in one of the chairs that make up the set and refuses to move when the Interlocutor, dressed as a bus attendant, tells her to move to the back of the bus. That scene, quietly and naturally played, makes me cry even to remember. It doesn't take the horror out of what has gone before, but it does make the play bearable.
And how is this going over with the New York theatre-going public, at $100 a pop? Well, the play is closing December 12, after 49 performances. There's an article about it here. I think this is a pity. On the other hand, it opened on Broadway at all, which I don't think it would have 10 years ago. Those who love it, love it a lot. Those who hate it are, I think, as confused by its interstitiality (minstrel show/social realism/musical/political statement) as offended by its content. Does every minute of it work? No. Sometimes over the top isn't significant, it's just over the top. But I'm glad Kander and Ebb put it together, and I'm glad it got produced, and I suspect it will be popping up here and there at regional theatres from time to time because it's got some wonderful parts in it, and some really good numbers. And then you can go see it and judge for yourselves.
