Delia Sherman's Blog, page 15

Fairytale Guest Blog!

Katherine Langrish is the author of Troll Fells and a wonderful book about a changeling called The Shadow Hunt, which you should go out and read immediately, because it's good folklore and good history and very moving and exciting besides.  She also has one of the most interesting fairy tale and folklore blogs I've seen in quite a while, called Seven Miles of Steel Thistles (try saying that 5 times fast).  Not long ago, she asked me (and a bunch of other wonderful YA and children's mythic fiction authors) to write a guest blog talking about a fairy tale that had had some effect on our lives, our writing, or our thinking.  And why, of course.

Mine is on "The Snow Child," and you can find it here.  While you're at it, go back and read some of the earlier guest blogs.  They're all wonderful.

The Merry Wives of Windsor

Back to Pace University Friday night, where The Royal Shakespeare Company is bringing 2008's Globe production of The Merry Wives of Windsor to New York.

Merry Wives is an odd play.  Last year, we read it at our traditional Twelfth Night play-reading, and finally gave up on it not long after the buck-basket scene.  Shakespearean prose is a lot harder to read than Shakespearean poetry, and even Our Learned Shakespearean Friend and I, who have more or less committed Shakespeare's Bawdy to memory, couldn't follow some of the more obscure jokes and puns. Also, when you're reading aloud, you (or at least I) can't help noticing that 16th century humor is pretty vicious.  It's not just Merry Wives.  Malvolio gets thrown into a lightless prison, Kate is starved, deprived of sleep, and humiliated, and servants and slaves are beaten with sticks pretty much every time they open their mouths, all in the name of good fun.  The excuse, of course, is that they deserve what they get because they have already made themselves ridiculous by stepping out of their proper social roles.  The humiliation is just society's way of bringing them back into line.  Personally, I'm not a big fan of the comedy of humiliation, even in Shakespeare's hands (paradoxically, I love Twelfth Night, but what's life without a little paradox?).  So a whole play that revolves around the ritual humiliation of a man who is already fat, arthritic, alcoholic, impoverished, and not as young as he used to be, is more likely to have me gritting my teeth than falling out of my chair with helpless laughter.

Yet, that is what I was essentially doing as Falstaff folded himself compactly into the buck basket to be hauled away, with considerable effort, by two struggling servants in livery, and even when Master Ford began to beat Falstaff (in the person of the Old Lady of Brentford) with a poker.

The fact is, nothing dates faster or more completely than comedy.  One age's dirty joke or comic cruelty is another's bewildered shrug or personal trigger. The only way to make Merry Wives funny to a modern audience is to play it as broadly as possible, with gestures to underline the obscure sexual slang and double entendres, and to defuse the cruelty with a measure of good nature.  As the RSC is nothing if not brilliant at physical comedy, double-takes, stage business, funny walks, slow burns, and, yes, good nature, this production was very funny indeed.  I loved Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, who very clearly had grown up together and played pranks together and had seen each other through fair times and foul.  They have a little clapping secret handshake thing they do when they come up with the Herne plot that is a slightly anachronistic but perfect expression of the length of their relationship and their satisfaction at their own cleverness.  They're at the emotional center of the play, not Falstaff, who Christopher Benjamin plays as a guy who has been around the block so many times he doesn't paying attention to the traffic signals any more.  This Falstaff rushes to meet humiliation and is reasonably philosophical about meeting it, which makes him (to me, anyway) a lot funnier and less pathetic than he is on the page.

As always with the Globe productions, the music is authentic (except for the settings of the songs, which I found poppy and saccherine, even played on sackbuts and rebecs) the set inventive and spare, and the costumes gorgeous.  I loved Mistress Ford's embroidered stomacher almost as much as I loved Mistress Page's green velvet overgown--although, for sheer magnificence, nothing could outdo Master Shallow's lime green and scarlet paned hose and doublet, with little slashed shoes to match.  I'd give a lot for those shoes.

For those of you in or near New York, it ends November 7.  Even with a glowing review from The New York Times, the house wasn't full, so discount tickets should be easy to get.

I'm loving this Pace Shakespeare season.  Next up is Merchant of Venice, with F. Murray Abraham.  I can't wait.


 

The Broken Kingdoms

I just this moment finished the second book in N.K. Jemisin's trilogy, and Ellen's not home, and I need to tell someone about it, and you all are here, so--Hi!

Once I began to get over the sheer deliciousness of it all (suffering gods and art that is magic and some really flaming hot sex, Goodness Gracious!), I noticed that this is a book written by someone who has thought deeply about religion, its uses and abuses, about love and compassion and hunger (emotional and physical) and power (physical and political), about life and death.  I know Nora thinks about these things--we've talked about them.  But I'm really impressed at how they permeate her novel without overshadowing the story, the characters, or the sensual delight of her world.

Not everything is to everyone's taste, I know.  One woman's feast is another man's WTF (and vice versa).  But if you're in the mood for an intelligent, well-written, thoughtful fantasy with a very cool world and real-politik, both temporal and religious, and many truly remarkable characters, both mortal and not so much, you have to read this book immediately.  It doesn't even matter if you didn't read the first in the series--the plot and the world are perfectly comprehensible without prior knowledge of Sky and its inhabitants (which is a crafty trick in and of itself, as any writer of series can tell you). 

WFC 2010

I've been going to World Fantasy Cons since 1975.  I missed a bunch in the 80's and some here and there in the 90's and 00's, but a loose count comes up with 24 or 25 out of 35 (I can't remember if I went to both Tucson cons, or only one), which is a lot of World Fantasies.  Some have been transcendent.  Providence in 1979, Nashville in 1987, New Orleans in 1994, London in 1997, and Minneapolis in 2002 were particularly memorable for personally significant conversations, parties attended, panels heard and spoken on, friendships begun and cemented.  I gotta say, Columbus in 2010 was right on up there.

It's hard to put a finger on why the good ones are so good.  For one thing, it's both personal and unscripted.  All the things the con-com has been laboring so hard to organize--panels, greenrooms, goodie bags, a hotel with good service and a central gathering place--provide the background to that unexpected hug, that drink with an admired acquaintance, that dinner invitation that begins or crystallizes a friendship that will end up lasting for years.  I remember Ellen taking me along to a dinner in Nashville that included Patricia McKillip, Steve Brust, Stephen Donaldson, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, and Suzy McKee Charnas, who accepted me as a colleague and not just a Jenny-Come-Lately with nothing but a couple of short story publications and a novel contracted to Ace but not yet out.  I remember meeting Jonathan Lethem at a Bantam cocktail party (although I can't remember which one--before 1997, anyway), right after Gun, With Occasional Music came out from Tor and talking to him about fandom and books we both liked and the importance of cadence in prose.  I remember Pat Wrede and Mercedes Lackey and I all going out to lunch together in Providence when they were just beginning to publish and I hadn't sold my first story yet and talking about how intimidating it was to be surrounded by all these established writers who'd known each other for years.

From this con, I'll remember a hilarious dinner with Kathe Koja, her husband Rick Lieder, Mette Ivie Harrison, author of The Princess and the Hound, Holly Black, and ellen_kushner , where the conversation ranged from Kit Marlowe and the Elizabethan stage to Arthur Rackham and the illustrators of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to thrift shop trawling to micro-plotting to heaven knows what because we kept splintering into sidebars and cross-table comments and passing bites of our extraordinarily good dinners to each other on bread plates.

I'll remember sitting in the bar with Holly and hunkering down with the beginning of her current WIP and the end of mine and having a useful and intense talk about narrative structure, emotional plot, and the use and placement of set pieces, which has completely upended my writing plans for the next week--in a good way.

I'll remember yuki_onna  lighting up like the Fourth of July when Ellen handed her the ARC of Welcome to Bordertown, and the lovely "Pilgrims and Bustles" party introducing Habitation of the Blessed and M.K. Hobson's The Native Star to an adoring crowd, which gave me the perfect excuse to wear my striped bustle-jacket and the steampunk necklace and earrings I bought from laurieopal .  I'll remember watching matociquala  and truepenny  hold court in the bar, the bright lights of their generation of writers, sparkling and strong and beautiful, and watching la_marquise_de_ draw a map of the United States for elaine_brennan, and meeting scbutler  's brand-new baby.

Yep, this was one of the Really Good Ones.

We're in Cleveland now, visiting Ellen's parents.  There was a big family dinner last night at her brother's house, with Spaghetti Puttanesca and the best Italian wedding soup I've ever had (Ellen's SIL is a notable cook) and much family news exchanged.  Today, we're going to the Cleveland Museum to look at reliquaries.  Which sounds about right for my current state, which is flat-out mental exhaustion.  Then home for a week, then down to Louisiana for a few days, then back to my Dulce Domum, which, like Mole's house in Wind in the Willows, has been patiently waiting for me to return from The Wide World, and loves me, and misses me.  As I am missing it. 

Plus, I got A LOT of writing to do.

WFC Schedule

Here it is!  My schedule for World Fantasy.  Two panels; no readings (wait until next year, when I will actually have a book coming out I can read from!)

FRIDAY
2010 Oct 29 
10AM 
 Panel B06:  The Fairy Tale as a Specific Form. Gabe Dybing (m), Delia
 Sherman, Leah Bobet, James Dorr, Terri-Lynne DeFino

SUNDAY
2010 Oct 31 
 11AM  Panel A20: What Is Left to the Imagination. Lawrence Connolly,  
   Madeleine Robbins, Delia Sherman, Martha Wells (m), Gregory Wilson
 Panel B26: EC Comics and Their Influence. Andy Duncan, Gini Koch,
 Robert Jeschonek, Scott Edelman (m)

Plus, there's the signing at B&N on Saturday from 11am-1pm.  I'll also be at the mass signing at the con on Friday night.   Feel free to come up and say hi at any time--don't be shy.  For me, this is a Social Con, where I get to talk to friends, new and old, the more the merrier.

Now, all I have to do is pack.  And find my business cards.  And print out some new CFP's for Interfictions Zero.  And finish this fairytale thingy I promised to write for a friend's blog.  Urk.

A Free Man of Color

I love going to the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center.  It's a beautiful house (on the inside, if a little 60's industrial on the outside), with nice acoustics and good sightlines and fairy comfortable seats.  The productions are grand but not glitzy, and even when Not My Cuppa, are always thought-provoking.

A Free Man of Color was so thought-provoking, I hardly know what to say.

First of all, it's wonderful to see a play about history and race that's historically accurate, undeniably tragic, and killingly funny. Jacques Cornet (played by Jeffrey Wright) is a free man of color in Spanish New Orleans, where everyone knows the exact proportions of their blood, and uses a specific word to describe it.  Cornet is extremely wealthy, having persuaded his white father to make him his sole heir, and is much courted by the society of New Orleans, black, white, and mixed.  A notable dandy and Don Juan, he is beloved by all the women, distrusted but flattered by their husbands, and, when the play opens, absolutely certain that his devil-may-care, privileged way of life will continue indefinitely. 

Ha!

There follows nearly three hours of an amalgam of European and American history, in which the plot and the scene leapfrogs from Napolean (in his gilded bathtub, with a back scrubber), Tallyrand, and Josephine arguing over muslins and the English to Toussaint Louverture begging the French and the Americans for help in his quest for freedom and democracy to King Carlos IV of Spain to Thomas Jefferson arguing with his secretary, Meriwether Lewis, at the beginning of his presidency.  During all of this, Santo Domingo gets turned into Haiti, New Orleans gets flipped from Spain to France to America like a hot potato, Le Code Noir is revoked and invoked, Napolean's brother dies in Santo Domingo of the Yellow Fever, Cornet kills his half-brother Zeus-Marie Pincepoose (how I love that name!) in a semi-fair duel, and the laissez-faire racial gumbo of late 18th c. New Orleans is sifted and sieved into the indigestible, fear-driven repressive structure that has determined the American discourse on race ever since.

Not that New Orleans in 1801 was a perfect place for all POC.  Jacques Cornet himself owns slaves--most notably the long-suffering Cupidon Murmur (played by Mos, who also plays Toussaint Louverture, and is apparently a rap artist when he's not acting the hell out of two very difficult parts in a 3 hour play, part of which is in verse, omg).  Women of all colors are pretty universally are exploited, disregarded, and disenfranchised, by the playwright John Guare (who wrote Six Degrees of Separation) as well as by the society he's showing us.  And Cornet himself, though funny and clever and passionate, is also an egotistical, self-aggrandizing, womanizing opportunist, who promises to free Murmur and then doesn't, and repulses his half-brother's mistress, who is carrying his child. 

Not that any white (or whitish) character in the play is any better.  Napolean is obsessed by beating the English, King Carlos is in thrall to his spoiled daughter's whims, Jefferson is more interested in what's for dinner and playing his violin than in governing the country, the gentlemen of New Orleans are interested in sexual conquests and money and the appearance of power.  This is not a play that has much good to say about the nobility of human nature.  The closest it has to a hero is Toussaint Louverture, who the playwrite allows to speak for himself, with quotes from his letters to Napoleon and Jefferson, and he is denied tragic status, shuffled off-stage as he was off the stage of history.

As you can probably tell, this was another case of 10 pounds of play in a 5 pound sack.  What with all the leaping to and fro (and in and out of various beds), it was hard to tell where or when you were, or what was going on at any given time.  Towards the end, the playwright, probably anxious that his point wasn't clear, sticks in a lot of long speeches, pointing out this irony or that connection.  And the end, which should  be harrowing, feels stuck on and anti-climactic.

And yet, and yet.

When a nice gentleman waiting in line for a glass of $7 white wine asked me how I liked it, I said I loved it.  And I wasn't just being polite.  I haven't been to a lot of new plays that have that much life and thought and scholarship in them.  Every play Lincoln Center does has a companion issue of the Lincoln Center Theater Review, which you can buy for $1, containing articles about writing the play and the history behind it and other interesting bits and pieces.  This issue is a doozy, and contains, among other things, an article by Ned Sublette on the influences of the Haitian revolution on New Orleans and the importance of the theater in early 19th C. culture.  Reading it on my way home on the subway, I realized that all of that had been in A Free Man of Color, too, as well as a meditation on the emptiness of celebrity and the dangers of idealism and the essential selfishness of human nature.  Plus some truly dazzling language and meaty, thoughtful roles for actors of all colors.  What (from my point of view, anyway) was not to like?  I hope it runs and runs, but I fear it won't.  Too scary.  Too negative.  Too ambiguous.  Too long.

Romeo & Juliet

I haven't actually seen a lot of live productions of Romeo and Juliet.  I've seen a bunch of movies, from Zefferelli's lush fantasia to R&J, and an all-male, just-the-good-parts version with the whole cast dressed as English schoolboys.  So I was very excited to see the Acting Company's production, part of Pace University's Shakespeare at Pace program.

Two households, both alike in belted linen coats and newsboy caps, in fair Verona, circa 1910, from ancient grudge break to new mutiny with furled umbrellas and sword-sticks.  It really worked remarkably well, with the Capulet and Montague factions brawling not entirely soberly in front of an ancient-looking wall updated with turn of the century electric light fixtures, and the guests doing the Turkey Trot to a gramaphone in the party scene.  They played Romeo as a rash teenager, and the actor was perfect--angsty, passionate, with no more ability to judge the likely consequences of his actions than a rabbit.  It was unfortunate that he had much more chemistry with Mercutio and Gratiano (who were both excellent)--and even with Tybalt--than with Juliet, who was acting a 13 year old without really seeming to engage with the actual character--or anyone else on the stage.  I found her most affecting when Romeo wasn't actually present, although what she did with the potion speech was kind of disappointing.  The Nurse was far too young to have suckled a 13 year old, and wasn't actually very funny.  But Friar Lawrence.  Ah!  Friar Lawrence.

When we saw this at the Delacourt in Central Park a few years ago, Friar Lawrence was a doddering old fool--also a very bad actor.  He didn't ruin the play--both Romeo and Juliet were excellent, and the production was interesting--but he certainly brought comic relief where it wasn't really needed.  This Friar Lawrence, on the other hand, was smart, strong, genuinely pious, and also a bit of a political intriguer.  He had a character, a temper, and an agenda, and more lines than he usually gets when the director is focusing entirely on the romance and less on the political turmoil that surrounds it.  The effect of all this was a Romeo and Juliet that was as much about the futility of one man trying to fix a political mess by emotional means as it was about star-crossed lovers, and a Friar Lawrence who will remain the gold standard of the part for me, probably forever.  I can't find my program, so I don't know who the actor was. 

It's running until October 24, and the theatre wasn't at all full last night.  I bet there are discount tix.  Go see it if you can.  It's not perfect, but it's very, very interesting.

Catching up + Orlando

Argh!  I'm behind.  Again.  Still.  I'm resigned to the fact that I'll probably never get around to writing about Laurie Anderson or La Bete, which we saw BC (Before Colorado).  It will have to suffice to say that my love for Laurie Anderson is deep and strong, even when I can't follow what she's doing.  I love it that she takes chances and plays with technologies and tells stories in strange and wonderful ways.  She's been interstitial since the beginning, and is certainly one of the reasons I'm drawn to weird-ass, unclassifiable art and artists like Rinde Eckert.  That said, Delusions is not my favorite of her pieces, being a little full of odd images projected on too many screens at the same time and screechy/scratchy music for my taste.  But she was fascinating, as always, to watch, and she talked about love, death, the seasons, families, and showed lots of pictures of leaves, which are among my favorite topics.  So that was all right.

La Bete was a bit more problematical.  On the one hand, what's not to like (for someone like me) about a modern play in rhymed couplets, set in 17th C. France, that includes a playwright and a princess and a theatre troupe, a set paved with books, references to Moliere and Voltaire, and Mark Roylance, with whom I've been deeply in love ever since I saw him as Olivia in the Globe Twelfth Night?  On the other, there were poo-poo jokes and flatulence jokes and quite a lot of comedy of humiliation, which (as you know Bob) is far from being my cup of tea.  Yes, I know the 17th Century was big on toilet humor--I've read Gargantua and Pantagruel, and I didn't like them, either.  Call me a prude.  It's a fair cop.

Mark Roylance was brilliant as a crude, egotistical street clown thrust into a company of tragedians by their noble patroness.  David Hyde Pierce, as the company's high-minded playwright, does a beautiful slow burn and delivers an impassioned defense of serious theatre.  And I loved Joanna Lumley, who played the Princess like Patsy on downers.  The play itself is flawed, I think, by a lack of dramatic tension, a lot of repetition, and a certain smug didacticism, which even got to me, who sings in the choir of this particular high-cultural church.  The critics loved it.  I liked it fine.

Which brings me to Orlando, which we saw as a Sunday matinee, at its final performance.

I wanted to love it, I really did.  And I did like it.  The acting was good, the set interesting (a huge mirror suspended over an astroturfy plot), the adaptation faithful.  They'd decided to stick entirely to Woolff's words, so there was as much narrative as dialogue, reporting and description as actual scenes.  Orlando and Sasha were portrayed by women.  Everybody else, male and female alike, was taken up by one of the three men who served as a kind of chorus.  Orlando looked kind of like Tilda Swanton, without, sadly, the intensity.  Sasha was a dish with an uncertain Russian accent and a habit of skating in slow motion at the back of the stage at psychological moments.  The ubiquitous David Greenspan camped Queen Elizabeth into incomprehensibility, and what he did with the Romanian archduchess who is actually a duke was, well, extreme.

I sound like I hated it, don't I?  But I didn't.  Woolff's prose remains Woolff's prose, and her meditations on gender and time and human relationships and poetry and love and death are as beautiful on the tongue as they are on the page.  The scene of Orlando's transformation from man to woman was wonderful, her scenes with the man she ends up marrying touching.  My main problem with it, I think, was the sheer number of layers of artifice the production put between me and the action.  The artifice of the acting, the almost Kabuki-like staging, the great hunks of narration tossed among the actors, the choreographed sequences of dreamy movement that accompanied passages of description or philosophy--all conspired to come between me and emotional engagement with what was going on.  To be fair, I'm tired, and that might have had something to do with my slightly jaundiced view of the play.  Maybe I should just go re-read Orlando and be done with it.

We're seeing Romeo and Juliet tonight, the Globe production.  I'll try to write about it tomorrow, while it's still fresh in my mind.

O Tempora! O Mores!

If Lizzie Bennet lived in the 21st Century.  Gakked from sartorias . 

I particularly liked the first and last items.

Swan Lake

But not the one you're thinking of, unless your mind goes right to Matthew Bourne and those big scary, muscular guys with feather-leggings and the worst of all possible attitudes towards inter-species dating.  We saw it in 1998, when it was new and startling and audience members left the theatre in droves--the straight guys because a pas de deux between two guys is icky and the ballet queens because they missed the tutus and gently waving arms.  I don't know why the woman sitting next to Ellen left in the middle of Act I--maybe she hadn't got the guy-Swan memo.  I suspect the men in front of us left because one of them was too big for the little, teeny seats they have up in the balcony of the Civic Center.  I'm sorry he was uncomfortable, but it was certainly easier to see the stage after he left, since he was also unusually tall. 

Anyway.  The ballet.  Bourne says it's not a ballet at all, but a dance/theate production, and indeed it is very far from a floaty, dreamy White Ballet.  For one thing, Bourne has changed the story to add actual psychological resonance and relevance.  In this version, the Prince is a shy young man going through the paces of public life in the hopes that if he's a good enough boy, his mother the Queen will show him some affection. When finally convinced that this is the vainest of vain hopes, he disguises himself, gets drunk in a cheap dive, gets beaten up by a couple of sailors, and ends up in a city park, where he prepares to kill himself, only to be stopped by a flock of swans.  A Special Swan shows up and wins his heart.  Next night, there's a Palace Ball, which the Swan seems to crash, dressed in black leather and a skirted coat, the Top to Top All Tops.  To the Prince's chagrin, this Stranger is all over every woman in the room, including Queen-Mom (a knock-out in red satin and black petticoats).  There is a struggle with the gun (provided by the Private Secretary, for reasons I could not fathom), and a feckless Girl who has been following the Prince around (possibly at the instigation of the same Private Secretary) gets shot--by the Prince, aiming at the Stranger.  There's a strange and rather pointless scene involving a doctor, seven female nurses, and ECT, after which the Swan and the Prince are nibbled to death by the flock, and the Queen is sorry.

Oh.  The Swan (and his flock) might be imaginary.

Well, the story's not the point in any ballet, is it?  Even though it makes a lot more sense than the original, this one works better as a metaphor for coming out in the mid 20th Century (or even now, although it's easier than it was when I was an adolescent) than as an actual coherent narrative.  In Bourne's hands, it gives plenty of opportunity for broad comedy (any scene involving the Girlfriend, who is a kind of Valley Girl/Chav mixture, with touches of Paris Hilton around the costume) as well as high tragedy, and a lot of really yummy dancing.  No pas de bourre, attitude, grande battement stuff, though there are plenty of lifts and leaps and very interesting things done with the head and arms, particularly by the swan chorus.  One of my favorite parts was a spoof ballet, with a guy in white tights chasing a Butterfly Maiden and her attendants with a collecting net, and three rather groovy Demons, one of which the Butterfly Maiden clocks with an axe when he threatens her True Love.  My other favorite part was the love-duet with the Swan and the Prince, which was a marvel of parallel dancing, with both men supporting and lifting as well as leaping.  It was interesting, though, that the Prince got no solo within the duet--he  only danced when the Swan danced, or chased after him.

We were really too tired to go, one day back from Sirens/Tucson, but I'm glad we did.  I'm glad I wrote this review, too, although it was a bit of a struggle.  It's been too long since I've written anything.