Delia Sherman's Blog, page 3

The Moment of Change

Rose Lemberg's wonderful anthology of Feminist Speculative Poetry, The Moment of Change , Has Been Published! [A Tucket sounds!]  It contains poems by most of the best poets in the current crop of extraordinary young poets, including our very own tithenai , sovay , yuki_onna , csecooney , bluejo , shweta_narayan , nisi_la , and nineweaving .  Also Theodora Goss and Vandana Singh.  And me, who amn't strictly speaking a poet, (or young, come to that) but who commits verse now and again.  It is, in fact, a TOC of Goddesses, and you must go out RIGHT THIS MINUTE and order it.

But first, look at the pretty cover, by Terri Windling:

February House

It never rains but it pours.  In this case, plays.  We notice that things are about to close, or friends suggest something they'd like to see, then somebody offers an extra ticket, and what do we say?  "Sorry, we're going out a lot this week, we've got work to do?"  Nooooo.  We say, "Yes, please; we'd love to."  And we do.  That adds up to five this week--counting today.

First up was February House at the Public Theater.  This was a double-date with new friends, who love the theater as much as we do.  I knew it was a musical, and that it was about a boarding house in Brooklyn in 1940 where a bunch of musicians and writers lived, but that's it.  I love the Public and I love not knowing what I'm in for, so all systems were go for a pleasant evening.  And that's what I got--and maybe a little bit more besides. 

February House is a musical in the tradition of late Sondheim and plays like Light in the Piazza rather than Gypsy or Carousel.  There's nothing like a production number, no dancing (except a little light ballroom during a rent party), no chorus, a tiny cast, no lead, ingenue, antagonist, second lead, or clown figure.  There's not even, strictly speaking, a protagonist, since the focus of the play shifts from character to character depending on what's going on in the world and in their intertwined lives.  Insofar as there is a center to the play, it's George Davis (played by Julian Fleisher), who opened the down-at-heels February House in 1940 as a kind of artistic flophouse, and whose "writer's menagerie" included Carson McCullers, W.H. Auden and his lover Chester Kallman, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Erika Mann (Thomas Mann's activist daughter), and Gypsy Rose Lee, who wrote The G-String Murders there.  What he wanted to create was a safe haven for the rum, the gay, the unsure, and the dispossessed, a family that would accept same-sex love and weather artistic tantrums and foster new and wonderful novels, plays, operas, poems, and relationships.  In a limited way, he succeeded--the limitation being the twin realities of WWII and the abject poverty of everybody involved in the project, which often set leaking roofs, broken furnaces, skimpy dinners, cut-off telephones, and bedbugs between the artists and any hope of creating their art.  But before the experiment falls apart, a great deal manages to get said, entertainingly, about growing up different, about love, about the political and the personal, about what makes a family, and about the ways in which artists are and are not just like everybody else.

All this unfolds over two very long acts.  It's worth saying that I noticed how long they were (especially Act I) because my butt got numb rather than because I was bored.  I wasn't.  The dialogue was clever, the speeches and situations moved fast and neatly.   There is no actual plot, although each character has something like a psychological arc, delivered mostly in individual ballads.  The communal life of the boarding house is traced in wonderful ensemble pieces (I've lost the song-list, sadly--it wasn't printed in the program) full of clever lyrics and some very clever staging.  I was particularly impressed by the music, which sounds more modern classical than pop, shading into quotations from Britten (Ellen said--I don't know this music well enough to know) and other mid-century modernist composers without ever going full-on 12-tone (except for comic effect).  Gypsy Rose Lee's burlesque hymn to intelligent men is a total delight, as is Britten and Pear's duet on the subject of bed bugs.  The singing was assured, nuanced, and totally unmiked, which I appreciated, even though it meant I missed a few words of lyric.

OK, I have to leave now, so I can go see two (!) more plays:  Gentlemen Prefer Blonds with Ellen's Uncle Ron and Fabulation of the Re-Education of Undine in Brooklyn.  Don't know when I'll catch up--we're leaving for WisCon on Thursday.  But I'll make notes and do my best, because everything I've seen makes me want to share.

Cock

Hoo boy.  Here come the sexbots.  But, really, that's the name of the play.  And there's a big old rooster on the Playbill to underscore its central (if unexpressed) conceit:  that love relationships are as much like cock fights as they are like anything else, and that, in the end, even the winning cock is nearly as bloody and damaged as the loser he's vanquished.

I went into this play knowing less than usual about what I was going to see.  Ellen said she'd like to see it, I said "Sure, why not?" and went back to finishing the latest draft of my WIP.  I think she said there were gay men involved (which didn't actually astonish me), and that it had been at the Royal Court Theater in London, where we saw The Libertine many years ago.  I didn't expect to like it; I didn't expect not to.  I don't know anything about Mike Bartlett, the playwright.  I was, in fact, a tabula rasa.

The set told me something.  The Duke has set up the whole theater as a 19th C. cock pit:  steep banks of backless benches around a really very small central circle.  Below is a green oilcloth.  Above is an octagonal flourescent light fixture of unforgiving and unvarying brightness.  On one side sits a stocky woman in an oxford-cloth shirt and a vest with a prompt book and a buzzer, which she sounds at the end of each scene, or round.

Two men enter from opposite sides of the ring.  One is dark, built, 30ish, with one of those faces that can skip from scorn to anxiety to frozen rage in a heartbeat.  The other is fairer, slighter, looks 20-something but is probably older, possessed of remarkable cheekbones, puppy eyes, and an air of slightly vague sweetness that, frighteningly, doesn't vary even when he's saying something neither vague nor sweet.  It is immediately apparent that these two have been living together for some time, that the dark one (M) is happy with the relationship, and that the fair one (John, the only named character) is sorta, kinda, well, not exactly not happy, but maybe a little restless?  Dissatisfied?  Uncomfortable?  He doesn't really know.  But whatever it is, it makes him leave M by the second buzzer--for a couple of weeks, anyway.  During which he meets, and arguably falls in love with, a young woman (W), with whom he has surprisingly glorious sex, who treats him like an adult (as M does not), who offers him a future of marriage and vine-covered cottages and children and Christmas dinners (which M most certainly does not).  Who, in turn, he leaves for M, who he still loves.  And quarrels with.  And can't stop telling about W and how much he loves her.

Just when I was starting to think M was going to kill John just to get him to shut up, he surprised me by inviting her to dinner.  And his father, so he'd have someone there on his side in case (!) things got weird.  And then things got weird.  But not in any of the ways I thought they would.

It was certainly an interesting play.  A great deal of it is about the ways people talk to each other, what they listen to and what they ignore, how they try and fail (or succeed) in manipulating each other.  M has a great line in clever-boots sarcasm, which is simultaneously hilarious and slightly cringe-worthy.  W is nice to an almost supernatural degree, with just enough no-nonsense frankness to keep her from floating off the stage on a pink, fluffy cloud.  She suffers from being slightly more of a polemical position than a real character, though Amanda Quaid works hard to give her true humanity. Similarly, M's father (F), is not altogether convincing.  He's a useful fourth in the complex dance that is the closing bout of the cock fight, but that's pretty much all he is.

M and John, on the other hand, are very real indeed.  And Jason Butler Harner and Cory Michael Smith do them proud.  I've heard fights like theirs.  I've participated in fights like theirs (not in the last 20 years, I hasten to say).  Even though the putative subject of their quarrels--as of the play--is John's sexual identity and, more fundamentally, whether homosexuality is a choice or a destiny, finally, what I was most touched by was its more generally human concerns.  What is love, and how do you know you're in it?  What is normal, and who gets to define it?  How on earth can you choose between two loved, but mutually exclusive objects?

In the end, Mike Bartlett leaves the answer to that last question pretty much up in the air.  I can see how he got to where he did--he just followed the pattern he'd set up to its strictly logical conclusion.  It was absolutely satisfying intellectually.  But it wasn't particularly satisfying emotionally.  Which was his point, and on one level just as it should be.  But the effect was finally a little itch-you-can't-quite-reachish.  And I really wish he'd given W a little more real depth and complexity.  But these are personal quibbles.  It's a fine play.  It makes you laugh and it makes you think--always a good combination.  I recommend it highly.

Remembering Diana Wynne Jones

This is the tribute I wrote for Sharyn November's Celebrate Diana Wynne Jones Tumblr page.  It went up today, and you can read it here with the pretty picture of the cover of The Pinhoe Egg (and a link to SBP so you can buy The Freedom Maze, if you should be so moved).  But I thought I'd just reproduce it here, because otherwise I'll lose it, and I'm fond of it, even if I couldn't find The Pinhoe Egg on the shelf (somebody must have moved it), and was forced (!) to read The Magicians of Caprona instead.

Following in Diana’s Footsteps

I can’t remember the first Diana Wynne Jones book I read.  I suspect, from the age of the book and its well-thumbed aspect, that it was Cart and Cwidder.  But The Magicians of Caprona is almost as decrepit.  As for Fire and Hemlock, the words have been practically read off the page, but then I taught it, and that’s always hard on a book.

In any event, it was a clear case of Love At First Read.  Diana’s prose is deceptively simple, like a mill pond whose clear, brown water hides depths teeming with fish and lily-roots and water witches and things with far too many teeth.  Her characters are instantly memorable, and her invention never flags as she explores plot twists like Christopher Chant exploring parallel realities.

I wished I could write like that.

Then, some time in the mid-80’s I met her, and decided that I wanted to BE like that.  Which is to say, wry, warm, generous, and attentive to everything that was going on around her, because (properly viewed) it was Bound To Be Useful.

Both wishes, of course, are functionally impossible.  We are who we are, and cannot be otherwise.  But we can certainly choose our influences, and Diana is definitely one of mine (along with C.S. Lewis, George Eliot, Georgette Heyer, and Kenneth Grahame).  I spent many happy hours studying the underlying structure of Fire and Hemlock, the characterization of the Chrestomanci books, the complex card-tricks that are Howl’s Moving Castle and The Time of the Ghost.  No matter how many times I read one of her books, I am always, always astonished anew at her way with a sentence, her wit, and the generosity of heart that allowed her to clearly love even the most evil and limited of her characters.  Her stamp is on Changeling and The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen, but is even more strongly on my current WIP, The Evil Wizard’s Apprentice which (like many of her most beloved books) is about a boy learning about magic and its responsibilities.

And now I think I’ll go re-read The Pinhoe Egg.

How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

We have a friend in town from Paris.  She's a medievalist, specializing in the prose Alexander and the way Alexander the Great was depicted in illustrations of the same.  We went to her thesis defense in Paris a few years ago, which was a whole lot more scary than mine was, I'm here to tell you.  Lasted almost all day, open to the public, and the hall was PACKED--must have been more than a hundred people there.  She knows all there is to know about Medieval art, and going to Ste Chapelle or Notre Dame or Cluny with her is an education all in itself.  She's also an enthusiastic dancer and a not-so-secret Lover of Musicals.

Which is why we've been to two in two days, er, nights.

For some reason, LJ lost the second half of my review of "Anything Goes."  I can't recapture it, but I do want to say that I loved Joel Grey, who played Moonface Martin as Mark Rylance in Boeing-Boeing:  wry, slightly bewildered, clear-eyed (even when drunk), and oddly, primally innocent.  In many ways, it's a very innocent play, despite the hymn of praise to Public Enemy #1, another to sleeping around ("Buddy Beware"), a nightclub singer who used to be an evangelist, some very sexy angels, an (almost) forced marriage, an implied dog-drowning, and assorted sketchy priests, captains (of industry and ocean liners) and concupiscent sailors.  Everybody's a con man of one kind or another, hiding a secret past, passion, or dream.  And yet, they are cheerful, forward-looking, (except for the ingenue, the incongruously-named Hope, who despairs at the drop of a hat), and damned fine dancers.

I think it must be the music.  Porter is at his wry, cheerfully cynical best in songs like "You're the Top" (one of my favorite songs in the world) and "Friendship" and "I Get A Kick Out Of You."  And "Blow, Gabriel, Blow" made me cry, solely and entirely because of how it was used in the wonderful Porter bio-pic "De-Lovely," which you should all rent IMMEDIATELY if not sooner, because So Very Good.

OK, that's mostly what I said (except for something exceptionally clever about Joel Grey's silly duet in the second act with a blue follow-spot playing a bluebird singing "tweet-tweet", which is lost in the mists of whatever, and a tolerably lyrical description of the Act I finale tapstravaganza "Anything Goes."  Ah, well.  Sic Transit Verbum LJ.)

Wednesday night was more of a mixed bag, at least in terms of the actual play.  How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is a leaner, meaner, more sexist machine than Anything Goes.  Its cynicism is narrow-eyed, its humor is not particularly good-natured, and its assumption that girls just work until they land a rich husband with a house in New Rochelle is more uncomfortable for a woman who is aware of just how close we are to that world to be funny.  That said, it's a very tightly-written, smart book, the good songs are catchy, if not particularly witty or melodically interesting, and the so-so ones are so very WTF they almost achieve a kind of greatness.  I'm looking at you, "Cinderella Darling," in which the secretaries encourage Rosemary not to dump the trickster-hero (who says he adores her, but completely and totally ignores her in favor of his career) to stick by him because her engagement gives them hope they'll land neglectful workoholics someday themselves. 
In short, this is no play for a feminist.  It is, apparently, a play for fans of Nick Jonas, who has replaced Harry Potter Daniel Radcliff as J. Pierrepont Finch (call me Ponty).  The audience was full of 20-somethings in very short dresses and very high heels, who practically fainted en masse when he came on.  He is actually great in the part--perky, energetic, arrogant, an extremely flexible dancer, and a fine, strong singer with excellent elocution.  Of the rest of the cast, I loved Beau Bridges as J.B. Biggley, the philandering, old-school-tie-obsessed, knitting president of the World Wide Wicket corporation.  And Stephanie Rothenberg (who comes to Broadway from a career as a Disney voice actress), who gives the model secretary/love-interest/doormat character a certain Giselle (from Disney's Enchanted) wide-eyed charm.  The chorus was dynamite, the choreography a lot wittier than the lyrics, the costumes pitch-perfect early 60's.  My favorite part of the set was the backdrop of the early 60's Midtown skyline, including the Pan Am Building (where my father worked) and the Chrysler Building (where he worked before the Pan Am Building was built), and a building that looked like a honeycomb I recognize, but don't know the name of. 

And that's it, really.  Except for a short irritation break over the fact that the preceding two paragraphs are in Italics, despite my best efforts to make them Roman.

Anything Goes

"In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking.  Now, god knows:  Anything Goes!"

Well, almost.  Even the heavily re-written book we saw last night revolves about a marriage plot, (or two, or three) and the booty calls are all by Moonface Martin's hot redheaded sidekick, Erma (or Oima, in Joel Grey's on-again-off-again Bronxese).  Not a four-letter word in sight, either.  Plenty of ankles, though.  And calves and knees and thighs of inordinate length, and twitching backsides, male and female.  The keynotes of the evening were innuendo, double-entendre, and a double helping of joy de vivre, all ending up in multiple marriage bells and a grand tap-dancing finale.

My scholar's heart would love to do a comparative reading of the original play and this reboot (with, I doubt not, new songs swiped from other, more forgettable Cole Porter musicals).  But since I don't know the original, I can't do that.  I can tell you that I was pleasantly surprised by Act I, which makes sense (for some alternate value of "sense") once you accept the utterly unlikely plot premises.  Act II (featuring a dream sequence in the brig with a blue follow-spot playing a bluebird and a completely unlikely tent revival/revue number involving an entire ship-load of idiots passengers randomly confessing their sins to a bunch of hootchie-cootchie dancers, fell apart entirely.  But by that time, nobody cared.  We'd seen the astonishing tour-de-force of stagecraft and dancing that was the Act I closer, and we were ready to swallow anything, as long as it had plenty of sequins in it.

Which is pretty much what we got.  Yes, we missed Sutton Foster as Reno Sweeney, but Stephanie J. Block was energetic, sexy, and a helluva good dancer and singer.  She did the tough-girl nightclub singer schitk a treat.

Queen Victoria's Book of Spells

If any of you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, and have happened to open your browsers when I was posting, over the past month or so, you'll have heard me whinging mightily about a certain story that refused to Come Right.  Well, it did, finally, and I handed it in, and it was bought, and will appear in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's anthology Queen Victoria's Book of Spells.

Here is the TOC.  As you can see, it's a star-studded cast.  Kathe Koja!  Dora Goss!  John Ford!  Cat Valente!  Elizabeth Wein!  Genevieve Valentine!  Veronica Schanoes!  Greg Maguire!  Oh, just EVERYBODY!

Tor hasn't announced a pub date as yet.  But believe me, I'll let you know as soon as I do.  I SOOOOO can't wait to read this. 

Preface Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling
Introduction Terri Windling
The Fairy Enterprise by Jeffrey Ford
From the Catalogue of the Pavilion of the Uncanny and Marvelous, Scheduled for Premiere at the Great Exhibition (Before the Fire) by Genevieve Valentine
The Memory Book by Maureen McHugh
Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells by Delia Sherman
La Reine D’Enfer by Kathe Koja
For the Briar Rose by Elizabeth Wein
The Governess by Elizabeth Bear
Smithfield by James P. Blaylock
The Unwanted Women of Surrey by Kaaron Warren
Charged by Leanna Renee Hieber
Mr. Splitfoot by Dale Bailey
Phosphorus by Veronica Schanoes
We Without Us Were Shadows by Catherynne M. Valente
The Vital Importance of the Superficial by Ellen Kushner and Caroline Stevermer
The Jewel in the Toad Queen’s Crown by Jane Yolen
A Few Twigs He Left Behind by Gregory Maguire
Their Monstrous Minds by Tanith Lee
Estella Saves the Village by Theodora Goss

Retreat + The Broken Heart

I'm back from Mexico, where I drafted the new last half of my WIP (all except the last scene, owing to the plane landing before I quite finished writing it, and exhaustion and Real Life taking up all my time since) and talked Writing, Business, and Cowboy Boots pretty much around the clock.  San Miguel de Allende is very beautiful, the Spanish colonial buildings all turning their rust and deep rose and ochre and cream backs on the street to gaze into the bright, blooming, tiled courtyards in their centers.  Ours had a stone table and a small, shallow pool (made, I suspect for sipping margaritas in, because you sure couldn't swim in it.  It was very good for plotting meetings, though) and a gas fireplace for the cool of the evening.  Every night, hot water would pour into the pool from a spout under a bas-relief of the Virgin of Guadaloupe, and we would put on our bathing suits and float around what was essentially the biggest hot tub in the world, talking about books and putting off the evil moment when we had to brave the chilly night air to get to our rooms and our beds. 

The past tense is just for me, alas.  The core group is still there, and will be until the middle of March, turning out almost unbelievable numbers of words every day.  As I was, too, for me.  It's amazing what you can get done when Real Life is a morning walk to the Gardine to get a chai latte at Starbucks and pick up icecream and mango juice for the household.  Two weeks was plenty long enough to be away from home, though.  I missed ellen_kushner quite keenly.

Also, going to the theater.  (See how I did that there?  That's a segue, that is.)

Last night, we went to see John Ford's The Broken Heart, produced by Theater for a New Audience, which did the Jew of Malta/Merchant of Venice double-header with F. Murray Abraham a couple of years ago.  Like Red Bull, it's a company that isn't afraid of difficult language and vanishingly obscure plays with high body counts, complicated plot lines, and characters whose world and motivations are foreign and bewildering to a modern audience.  All of which describes The Broken Heart to a T.

The plot is driven by a brother (Ithocles) forcing his sister (Penthea) to marry a wealthy, powerful, older man instead of the younger, less powerful man her late father had betrothed her to.  Her husband (Bassanes) is insanely jealous, even to the point of accusing her of incest when she meets her brother alone. Her lover (Orgilius) pretends to leave Sparta so he can disguise himself as a poor scholar and hang around the edges of the action, pretending to be mad while soliliquising about the faithlessness of women and how much he hates Ithocles and Bassanes and, well, everybody.  Except Penthea, even though she has banished him from her sight and made him cry.

It soon becomes clear that he's not just pretending to be mad.  In fact, sanity (as Ellen remarked during intermission) is clearly in short supply in Sparta.  Penthea spends a certain portion of what must be Act IV raving (I give her a 7 out of 10 possible Ophelias), Bassanes' character is basically one big scene-chew--until he is reduced to tears in Act III--again, by Penthea--and becomes abruptly calm, reasonable, and self-controlled.  And let's not forget Calantha, Princess and then Queen of Sparta, who laughs and dances as she hears of the deaths of her good friend, her father, and her lover, orders the execution of her lover's murderer, crowns herself, doles out her large and complicated kingdom to the men around her, kisses her lover's dead lips, then dies of a broken heart, smiling stoically at grief.

As you can probably tell, this was all great fun for the actors.  There wasn't much scenery, but what there was, was chewed to ribbons.  Ford's language is nothing to write home about--neither particularly poetic nor particularly dense.  But it is good and melodramatic, with some very nice ironic moments, which Jacob Fishel as the vengeful Orgilius milked for all they were worth, before expiring in a fountain of jet-black blood on a plastic sheet in the final act.  Everybody up there was a pro, veterans of The Red Bull, TFANA, various Shakespeare festivals, and the London and Irish stages.  And it showed.  Annika Boras (who we saw in Orlando a while back) played Penthea as a strong woman, whose strength, like the Spartan boy's fox, had nothing to gnaw but her own vitals.  In a nice bit of gender-reversal, she shed not a single tear, but reduced every important man in her life to grovel in tears before her stony and unyielding sense of honor.  And when she lost it, she raved up a storm.  Not the most sympathetic character in the world, but oddly real.  As was Bianca Amato (who we saw in Arcadia) as Calantha, Princess of Sparta, devoted daughter, consummate politician, reluctant lover.  Like Hamlet, she was likely, had she been put on, to have proved most royally.  I also loved Olwen Fouere as Penthea's chaperone Grausis, who Bassanes addresses as "Nightmare," and gives excellent glower.

I loved it.  So did Ellen.  Unfortunately, a 1633 play about honor and duty and the Apollonian virtues of chastity and fidelity and keeping your vows in spirit as well as deed and self-control and self-denial is going to be a hard sell on Broadway in 2012.  It's also about the essential powerlessness of women.  And suffering without remedy or end except in death. Which is probably why the theater was only half-full last night, and certainly why the elderly couple behind us left after the first act.  "Don't you want to see the bodies?" the husband asked, rather ghoulishly.  "No," his wife answered.  "They're not nice people."

And so they aren't.  Which is what makes them so delicious.

Con or Bust Auction

I've got my knitting needles and my red pen out.  I'm offering a 6 cup tea cosy (because why break a winning streak?) and a critique of 10,000 of your fictional words.   con_or_bust   helps fans of color to attend more cons.  The bidding starts tomorrow, and the offerings look scrumptious, so please bid what you can.

Seven Miles of Steel Thistles

I feel a little sheepish puffing off a blog post I wrote for someone else, when I've been so remiss here.  In extenuation, I wrote it last year, and this is a re-run.  Katherine Langrish asked me for a post about a fairytale I particularly loved for her blog "Seven Miles of Steel Thistles," and ran it last fall.  She's running the series again, and my post is up today.

Katherine Langrish is a wonderful British YA writer, whose books have not had the distribution in the states that they deserve.  She really, really knows her folklore, and creates characters and settings that really live.  Her landscapes are characters, and active ones at that.  The Shadow Hunt, Troll Fell, Troll Mill, and Troll Blood are the ones I've read, but there are more.  And they're available from Powell's.

And my post?  It's about "The Snow Child," a Russian fairytale about adoption and dying young, which made a strong impression on me as an asthmatic child.  She's decorated the post with lovely illustrations I'd never seen before.