The recent Norton Awards only reminded me of the wayward nature of award committees. Not that the IRNEs are any less error-prone - I mean seriously, Man of La Mancha? (I didn't even see it, btw - I hate that fucking show.) What's strangest is when the two awards mysteriously align, as was the case this year with the mediocre No Man's Land at the ART. How did it garner so many awards, from both the IRNEs and the Nortons? "Philistines attempting to look sophisticated" was one analysis, and I'm inclined to agree. To be fair, the Nortons were mostly respectable - all the acting awards went to people who deserved them (aside from ALF's Max Wright), either for the work cited or other roles (award committees tend to play catch-up). The directing awards were a little odder - I'd never have given one to David Wheeler for No Man's, but Paul Daigneault came through with Some Men (less so with Parade and Zanna Don't, but then neither piece is interpretively interesting). The production awards were likewise a mixed bag - Kentucky Cycle was probably the only fringe show everybody saw, Clean House, Sarah Ruhl's recycled Susan Sarandon movie, got the Louise Kennedy vote, and No Child was a bone tossed to the ART (which gets verry pissy when it's not recognized enough!). Not generally as solid a group as last year's awards, I'd say, and the whole thing felt compromised by the fact that the Nortons are now dumping all design work - be it for costumes, sound, lighting, or set - into one category (just so everyone can go home early, I guess).
But could another award committee do any better? It's an interesting question. Is it time for a third local theatre award, a Blogger, or Bloggette, to be decided only by the electronic media critics, who by and large tend to be a smarter bunch than the printies - or at least, write for a smarter audience? Actually, it's probably past time - only somebody else do it, I'm too busy!
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Should there be a Hubbie? Or a Bloggie?
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
And btw, if the Pulitzer committee is looking for a Globe article to honor . . .
. . . it should go to this one.
Laughing Wilde
The stars seemed aligned this season for a fascinating reconsideration of The Importance of Being Earnest - largely because the Publick just closed a rambunctious version of Travesties, Tom Stoppard's clever repurposing of the play as modernist critique. A return trip to the source material could have been brilliant - a kind of cooperative doubling unknown between local theatre companies, with the two productions orbiting each other like opposed artistic twins (rather in the manner of the play's separated-at-birth siblings, Algernon and Jack).
Alas, that didn't happen - even though the productions actually share an actor (Dafydd Rees). This Earnest, however, makes no pretense to exploring the play's philosophical underpinnings; of what Stoppard was talking about, the Lyric has no clue. To director Spiro Veloudos, Oscar Wilde's masterpiece is simply an arch little farce, perfect in its architecture; it earnestly pursues its laughs, and no more. Not that there's anything wrong with that - and to be honest, Veloudos has never shied away from intellectual challenge (indeed, in between Man of La Mancha and This Wonderful Life he's programmed more genuinely avant theatre than the ART). Still, even if it nails its laughs, the production feels like an opportunity lost; it could have been so much more.
And, truth be told, even as a traditional retelling of Oscar Wilde's masterpiece, it's not all that memorable or subtle. Veloudos is smart, but tends to paint with a broad brush, while Earnest is etched with show-queen precision. And his young cast sends off exactly the "vibrations" (to quote the play) one might expect: they're to this manner neither born nor bred, and are doing their best to simulate it after two weeks' rehearsal. That they manage it at all is to be applauded; their accents are mostly in place, their poise carefully maintained; they're all talented and will go far. But no one who's seen a truly polished Importance of Being Earnest would ever be convinced by them.
On the other hand, if you've never seen Earnest, this will probably strike you as a revelation - in the same way that Vanya on 42nd Street stunned so many film reviewers with its depth. The atmosphere may not be there, but the jokes all are, and the production moves like clockwork (sometimes in a mode unconsciously like the mechanically-played scene between Gwendolyn and Cecily in Travesties). There's only one piece of problematic casting - as the Wilde factotum Algernon Moncrieff, Lewis Wheeler does his flat-out best, but he's still a little flat because he's simply not, at bottom, a bemused bon vivant, no matter how hard he tries. And as solid-citizen, straight-arrow Jack Worthing, Ed Hoopman deploys a sonorous speaking voice, but not much more until the last act, when he finally loosens up and has a little fun. The women fare slightly better - as Gwendolyn, Hannah Barth has the right romantic, daffily alienated sexual presence, but sometimes seems unsteady in her attack; meanwhile the more-assured Jessica Grant makes an appealingly straightfoward Cecily, but could use an ounce more inner mischief.
It's in the older generation that the production sparkles a bit. Beth Gotha makes an amusingly ditzy Miss Prism, and Bobbie Steinbach (above, with Wheeler and Grant) works her usual magic with Lady Bracknell. Steinbach isn't physically imposing enough, perhaps, to command the stage (Bracknell should be a real dragon, or maybe even a dragoon), but her command of the lines - many of which by now are dauntingly iconic - is witty and confidently low-key; she knows the way to land Wilde's insane circumlocutions is with impeccable dignity.
Alas, Steinbach's delivery sometimes reminds one of what might have been, if Veloudos had risked something a bit more surreal, rather than the Lyric's usual suburban naturalism. Earnest endures, of course, not just because of its witticisms but also because of its strange sense of size and weird hints at philosophical depth. Veloudos may understand that Wilde's homosexuality, and "double life," is reflected in the play (let's not parse "bunburying" too closely), but he doesn't seem to understand how it's reflected. To Wilde, as to any gay man, of course, the heterosexual norms of society seem utterly arbitrary - it was his brilliant intuition to take this insight and run with it (in earnest, as it were) in Earnest. Everyone's logic in the play is impeccable; but their premises are absurd. Indeed, Wilde pushes this far past any gay perspective - which is why turning Earnest into a drag show doesn't feel quite right, either. After all, Wilde skewers Eros, too, and utterly: Gwendolyn can only hit her G-spot with the name "Ernest," for instance, which seems ridiculous until you consider how the rest of us do it - with blonde hair, or big boobs, or extremities cut or uncut: all ridiculous conditions, and no more absurd than the desire for a certain Christian name. This utterly free perspective, of course, is why Earnest, which perhaps begins modernism in the drama, could also be turned inside out by Stoppard to critique modernism, and why, in a way, the play supersedes the mode it engendered. I suppose it's a bit much to ask a small company like the Lyric to capture all that onstage; still, I can dream, can't I?
Solar lily pads on the Charles? Or the Mystic?
Could art and engineering come together in a unique response to our energy crisis? Glasgow is considering the feasibility of "solar lily pads" in its Clyde River (above). Yes, the pads would float, and would be connected directly to the city's power grid. Could MIT and the City of Boston look into the same idea for the Mystic, or parts of Boston Harbor? More here.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Cry of the Reed Revisited
It came to my attention a week or so ago via Art Hennessey's Mirror Up to Nature blog that playwright Sinan Ünel, author of The Cry of the Reed, had begun his own blog to respond to what he saw as the "vicious and personal" reviews the show received.
I was pretty intrigued by this idea - it seemed at the very least like one more small step toward getting a genuine public dialogue going in this town about its theatre. But I'm a bit disappointed in Ünel's blog itself; it seems to be almost entirely praise of the show, emailed or called in by enthusiastic audience members. Not that there's anything wrong with that - and I expected to find a good deal of it on the blog - still, there's precious little analysis to be found in its posts; it operates more as wounded defense than actual response. So I posted the following comment on the blog:
Hi Sinan -
I understand your reaction to the negative reviews you received, and I'm intrigued by your use of a blog to respond. But I'd be even more intrigued if you responded to the points made in the reviews, or described how the reviews have affected your view of the work. Now that the play has closed, will you be pondering any revisions? I'd be very interested to hear about that.
Thanks,
Tom Garvey
The Hub Review
Sinan replied with the following:
Hey Tom - thanks for the question. As in all feedback, if the suggestion is intelligent, insightful, and will potentially improve the play, I will welcome it and use it. If it is hostile, insulting, arrogant, condescending or not particularly smart, it's more of a challenge. It's not terribly useful that much of criticism seems to have lowered itself to the level of the latter.
From you review I was able to extract one possibly legitimate point: Ayla's line "it's in everyone's heart."
Although your tone while addressing this - and other aspects of the play - is mocking, condescending and mystifyingly juvenile, I take your point. I might consider changing it.
Part of the purpose of this blog is to try to comprehend who these reviews serve. Do they serve the audience? Judging from the responses to your review - and the audience response to the play, this is not exactly the case. Does it serve the playwright? Judging from the tone of your review, this is not your intention. What is the purpose then? Simply to serve the critic and his ego?
I then replied:
Well, I suppose I can gather from this that I'm hostile, insulting, arrogant, condescending, and not particularly smart. No doubt all that is true, but surely you can see that you've subtly turned my question on its head - as if I were aspiring somehow to enlighten you, instead of the other way around. In other words, if you're going to value some audience members' responses more than others, you should have a stronger reason than the complaint that the people who didn't like your play are "mocking, condescending and mystifying juvenile." (Just btw, that makes your full characterization of your unflattering reviewers run to a full seven adjectives' worth of invective: "hostile, insulting, arrogant, condescending, not particularly smart, mocking, and mystifyingly juvenile.")
It's true I wrote one mocking line about some of your dialogue ("Wow, that's like so deep"), but the point was that Rumi's philosophical musings can sound like "deep thoughts" unless handled very carefully onstage. And the gist of my review was that the two "tracks" of your play didn't seem to connect - one was a conventional thriller with philosophical overtones, the other a debate that to me never seemed to get beyond the opening round. Did you feel that these two sides of your drama were eventually integrated? And if so, how? None of the praise you've posted has brought up this issue, which to me seems central - I mean, isn't that what the reed is crying about?
You wrap up by writing, "Part of the purpose of this blog is to try to comprehend who these reviews serve. Do they serve the audience? Judging from the responses to your review - and the audience response to the play, this is not exactly the case. Does it serve the playwright? Judging from the tone of your review, this is not your intention. What is the purpose then? Simply to serve the critic and his ego?"
I hate to break this to you, but I've heard several negative comments about Cry of the Reed - not everybody loved it. So maybe I was writing for those people. You also ask if critics write "simply to serve their own ego." Well, we certainly don't write to serve your ego, that's for sure. Honest criticism that could help the play is always hard to hear, I know that. But you seem to think that you can pick and choose just the flattering comments to blog about.
So far, no answer back to that last post, but you can see where this is going. I'm struck (yet again) by the slightly hysterical ad hominem attacks that always seem to be lobbed in the direction of cool (okay, cold) criticism around here. Yes, I know, before you say it: "Tom, you hypocrite, you've got the thinnest skin of all! Look what you said about Terry Byrne!" Yes, well - my point about Byrne was that I felt she delivered a particularly nasty review as payback for my criticisms of her reviewing skills. I still feel that way - although don't get me wrong, I don't think my production was "awesome!" I just never read an accurate description of it in the press (yes, I'd kind of like to write my own review, but that would be rude to my cast, and get entirely too meta even for me!). Byrne's review was nutty, and if you want to argue that it was her incompetence rather than her vengefulness speaking (a case several people have made), that's fine by me.
Ünel is in a somewhat different position, anyway - as was Ronan Noone, who tangled with me over Brendan here. Both make essentially the same response to their critics - there are people who like the play; it's selling out, etc., and the people who point out its faults are mean, vicious and bad - or rather "hostile, insulting, arrogant, condescending, not particularly smart, mocking, and mystifyingly juvenile." But do I have to spell out how that doesn't count as an "argument"? Rather than debate his case - or even clarify his themes or method - Ünel simply smears his critics (and Noone wasn't much better).
Of course a skeptic might come to a certain conclusion about the situation - that Noone and Unel don't actually counter their critics because they know there's truth in the critiques; they simply can't argue "on the merits." Ergo, the other party must be a snob, "heaping scorn from on high," blah blah fucking blah. And all I can say in response is "Shut up and figure out how you're going to resolve your subplot, Ronan." "Develop the relationship between your mother and her daughter, Sinan." In a word, get to work. And maybe people will like your play even more.
On the other hand, if you want to argue the merits of my review, or put forth your own case, post your comments right here. But try to leave the poison pen in the drawer.
Friday, May 9, 2008
Poem of the Day
Elegy of Fortinbras
by Zbigniew Herbert
for C.M.
Now that we’re alone we can talk prince man to man
though you lie on the stairs and see no more than a dead ant
nothing but black sun with broken rays
I could never think of your hands without smiling
and now that they lie on the stone like fallen nests
they are as defenceless as before The end is exactly this
The hands lie apart The sword lies apart The head apart
and the knight’s feet in soft slippers
You will have a soldier’s funeral without having been a soldier
the only ritual I am acquainted with a little
there will be no candles no singing only cannon-fuses and bursts
crepe dragged on the pavement helmets boots artillery horses drums drums I know nothing exquisite those will be my manoeuvres before I start to rule
one has to take the city by the neck and shake it a bit
Anyhow you had to perish Hamlet you were not for life
you believed in crystal notions not in human clay
always twitching as if asleep you hunted chimeras
wolfishly you crunched the air only to vomit
you knew no human thing you did not know even how to breathe
Now you have peace Hamlet you accomplished what you had to
and you have peace The rest is not silence but belongs to me
you chose the easier part an elegant thrust
but what is heroic death compared with eternal watching
with a cold apple in one’s hand on a narrow chair
with a view of the ant-hill and the clock’s dial
Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project
and a decree on prostitutes and beggars
I must also elaborate a better system of prisons
since as you justly said Denmark is a prison
I go to my affairs This night is born
a star named Hamlet We shall never meet
what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy
It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos
and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince
(translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz)
Zbigniew Herbert was born in 1924 in Lvov, Poland, and died in Warsaw in 1998. He survived both the Nazi and Communist occupations, and drew on both in his poetry. His collection Selected Poems was translated into English by Czeslaw Milosz.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
One for the history books?
The boys in the band of The History Boys.
Occasionally a play arrives that unconsciously underlines the way theatre is becoming a kind of private gay preserve. Alan Bennett's The History Boys, for instance (currently at the Roberts Studio Theatre, from SpeakEasy Stage) centers on a gay teacher with a certain peccadillo - he gropes his teen-age charges - that it's hard to imagine as a minor "flaw" in a straight leading man, at least if said leading man hoped to hang onto our sympathy. Yet sympathize with Bennett's hero, the crusty "Hector," who teaches in a lowly private boys' school in Sheffield, we are definitely expected to do. Yes, Hector is duly caught and punished before the final curtain, but we're repeatedly asked to smile indulgently at his transgressions - he compares his furtive feels to "benedictions," for instance (imagine that joke being made about a girl's breasts!), and he's finally dismissed not as a predator, but as "a twerp."
Now I don't mean to paint the objects of Hector's attentions as victims - after all, they're in the final year of British "public" (i.e., private) school, which is famous as a homo-erotic hothouse. So not unbelievably, they by and large laugh off Hector's pathetic pawing ("I'm scarred for life!" one snickers). Still, the whole subplot reeks of a certain kind of gay fantasy - playwright Bennett half-hints that the boys' indulgence of their pedagogue's probings is a part of their affection for him, and never faces up to the balance of power in the situation (although later on he does show an intriguing awareness of how it can pivot). To be blunt, the boys submit to Hector largely because he controls their grades, not out of any feeling for him (although said affection is quite probably real), and it's simply silly to pretend otherwise. Trust me, I know - I was once felt up by a professor myself (hard to believe, yes, but once I was young and skinny). It was hardly a trauma, and I liked the guy quite a bit; still, I've no illusions as to why I let him do it.
But of course any such realism would complicate the rest of Bennett's play, in which Hector (Bob Colonna, at left) does battle for the right and good against the creeping, careerist relativism of the modern academy. "Hector" - that's a nickname, of course, because his noble cause is lost, and his victories pyrrhic (literally) - believes in education for its own sake; his study hall is devoted to the useless knowledge that you can't make a widget out of but which we cherish as making us human (including everything from Auden and Hardy to Brief Encounter and "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered"). But the headmaster wants his boys to cut the mustard at "Oxbridge" (as we say nowadays), and so brings in a glib new history teacher, Irwin, who is all about postmodern flash and spin over substance. "History nowadays is not a matter of conviction," he whispers in his students' ears. "It's a performance." So soon the "history boys" are arguing the opposite of what they actually believe (or know to be true) simply because that's what makes a good show - and the play becomes yet another erstwhile battle for young hearts and minds. Of course we know who won this particular war (if you don't, just read Andrew Sullivan or Christopher Hitchens to find out), but the funny thing is, it does make a good show - and Bennett conjures some fresh, witty fireworks from his classroom campaigns.
The unspoken problem with the plot, however, is that it unintentionally demonstrates that slimy Irwin actually does make his students think more, and with greater insight, than Hector does; maybe glib contrarianism isn't as bad as it seems. But The History Boys can't really pursue its arguments to such an equivocally fresh conclusion, because it's distracted by its awkward sex-crime subplot - particularly when the "hot" boy in class, Dakin, having learned a thing or two about school teachers, sets about seducing Irwin. This bizarre twist is hard to parse (particularly in this production); Bennett seems to almost be pursuing some kind of vengeance on his villain, with a cool irony that's simply at odds with everything that has come before - and then, to top off the whole structural car crash, he throws in a motorcycle crash as his dénouement. I've never seen a play so carefully crafted within its scenes utterly jump the rails in its overall arc; but that's what happens to History Boys.
And that's what happens to Scott Edmiston's smart, but superficial (and sentimental) production. Edmiston, as usual, is brilliant with scenes with "heart," but doesn't quite know what to make of the characters' cooler calculations, and tends (again as usual) to punch things up with musical interludes. It doesn't help that some key roles are ever so slightly miscast. Bob Colonna is all roaring, bright-eyed eccentricity as Hector, but he never taps into the anxious, pathetic longing that hides in his persona's shadow - so his fall conjures little pathos. Meanwhile Chris Thorn essays Irwin with an accomplished sense of understatement - but shouldn't this bright, false new star be a bit more charismatic and attractive? How else to explain the way he arouses the interest of Dakin (played here by Dan Whelton with the requisite hots, but with not quite enough smarts, or dawning sense of competitive power)?
Luckily, there's more precisely-gauged work elsewhere in the production. The reliable Paula Plum (at right) makes short, deft work of the school's single, wryly defeated female teacher, while Karl Baker Olson twists with transparent pain as the gay boy who's in love with Dakin, too. The rest of the "boys" nail their sketched-in characters with appropriate energy. The design work is at SpeakEasy's usual high level - although Gail Astrid Buckley does little with the costuming to conjure the 80's, the play's putative setting (it's really set in the 50's, anyhow). Meanwhile Janie E. Howland once again triumphs over the wide, boxy feel of the Roberts with a wittily expert and lovingly detailed set. This superficial sheen isn't really enough to disguise the flaws in the play, but if you squint a bit, it may fool you into thinking it's at the head of its class.
Photobombers unite!
They hack into your Facebook page, photoshop the pictures you've posted, and voilà! Your special moment is ruined!
All photos from actual Facebook pages.
More hilarity ensues here.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
The Foer of us
Bhavesh Patel is half of rather an odd couple in The Four of Us.
It's hardly a secret that The Four of Us (now at the Merrimack Rep) is a scénario à clef with the famously young, famously rich Jonathan Safran Foer at its center. In fact, said connection has become the slim, cynical comedy's chief marketing ploy; after all, the pitch is right there in the title. Sure, author Itamar Moses half-heartedly disguises "Jonathan" as "Benjamin," but the parallels between his script and his friendship with the Gen-Y novelist/Dave Eggers replacement are simply impossible to ignore. And even if the Merrimack muddies the waters a bit by making "Benjamin" Indian (which helps us forget that these two were basically smart Jewish kids who met at band camp), Moses eventually goes so meta (by the finale, the characters are watching the play, too) that we feel almost pinned to the postmodern wall: Admit it, Moses seems to be crying, you know who I'm talking about!
Yes, yes, Itamar, we do. And we admit we find him as irritating as you do. Foer skeptics (I count myself among them) who think of Everything Is Illuminated as brilliant-but-recycled will find a lot to back up their doubts in The Four of Us: "Benjamin" is a self-possessed prig with his nose to the keyboard/grindstone (Foer - at left - began writing to Susan Sontag at age nine) but with little in the way of original passion or vision. Indeed, a key problem with the clef of this play is that both "David" and "Benjamin" are self-aware but slightly dull; their late-night confessions are so dude-alicious (girls, beer, bands, and of course whether or not they're gay), that we simply have to take their being artists on faith. And as for being friends - why, exactly, do these likable young narcissists like each other? Shared ambition? Sense of humor? We never get a clue.
Although "David's" jealousy needs no explanation once a $2 million advance sends "Benjamin" into the lit-celeb stratosphere. Admittedly, Moses has a keen ear for (his own) envious psychological strategies - David is concerned that the payday may prove "totally spiritually corrupting" - and expertly punctures the ego of the unseen star who options Ben's novel (Liev Schreiber, who ineptly directed the movie of Illuminated, is the one with a real bone to pick with Moses). The playwright also conjures a smart, distracting series of formal tricks - flashbacks soon rub shoulders with flash-forwards, with the characters even commenting on them; it all plays rather like one of those puzzles you solve to stave off Alzheimer's.
But said tactics also stave off the need for development. Moses has an "out," of course, in that the yin/yang of this pairing is neediness vs. self-sufficiency (with the thematic sidebar of "needy" drama vs. "self-sufficient" fiction). Hence Ben's inscrutability, and David's pathetic attempts to penetrate it. Indeed, the final coup occurs when the "real" Benjamin asks the "real" David, "How could you write about me?" only to receive the reply "How could you not write about me?" There's something neat in this conceptual bow - but it's not really enough to tie up a play; if jealousy is eating away at something we have to understand what that something is. And at any rate, since when did complacent self-sufficiency ever put up with needy neurosis for long?
Still, the skilled cast and crew up at Merrimack manage, for the most part, to stave off these doubts, and keep us focused on Moses's jokes and structure. Bhavesh Patel makes of Benjamin an annoyingly confident, low-key buddy who's also a bit of a bully, while Jed Orlemann channels a sweet, slightly-damaged charm as David. And director Kyle Fabel never lets them stop for breath as they dash back and forth in time, as well as across Bill Clarke's witty set, which has apparently taken a tip from Liev Schreiber (whose apartment, according to Moses, is a shrine to his own image) in its wall-to-wall photo tribute to Ben and David. If only Moses's dramatic snapshots really got behind all those smiles.
Monday, May 5, 2008
There at The Creation
You don't find much more ambition in composers than in Franz Joseph Haydn, who tackled nothing less than the beginning of everything in his oratorio The Creation. But you also rarely find more humility; The Creation resounds not with the drama of its own creation, but instead echoes with a note unheard in music of late - the sound of gratitude. As the great composer, like a tiny god himself, re-conjures the world musically, he does so with a palpable sense of affectionate embrace (even "hosts of insects" and the lowly worm are greeted with warm bemusement). And since he only ponders the world before the Fall (we leave Adam and Eve before they touch that apple), the piece is suffused with a poignant optimism. The hosannas and thanks-be-to-Gods may get a little relentless, but they're still radiant, and heartfelt. 
A performance of The Creation should, therefore, give off its own glow, while not taking itself too seriously - a poise that Boston Baroque managed admirably last weekend. Conductor Martin Pearlman (at left) clearly understood both the uplift and the implied regret of the piece, and he kept things moving at a brisk clip (as the text is pure exposition, it can get a little static). Alas, said clip was sometimes slightly unsteady - Pearlman keeps a lilting, eccentric beat, and as a result (I think), entrances and exits can be a bit ragged; many of the same musicians play more cleanly over at Handel and Haydn. The upside of said lilt, however, is a rhythmic freedom that brought real verve to Haydn's tone painting: the whales swayed before with us with lugubrious grace, and the "ponderous beasts" of the earth were greeted with a hilariously flatulent blast from a 9-foot contrabassoon. (You could almost hear Haydn chuckle at that one.)
The soloists were likewise in solid form. Tenor Brian Stucki had just the right timbre (even if he thinned out alarmingly at the top of his range), and struck an appropriately fond, cantorian tone. He was perhaps outshone, however, by soprano Sari Gruber and bass-baritone Kevin Deas. Gruber's tone was warm yet pure, while Deas almost reveled in the richness of his low notes - but both were at their best together, as Adam and Eve in the oratorio's final section. Rarely do singers have chemistry the same way actors do, but Gruber and Deas had exactly that in the teasing exchanges between the world's first couple, which exude a sense of surprisingly wise romance (despite their all-too-traditional sex roles). Of course we know what's going to happen, even if they don't - Haydn and his librettist, Gottfried van Swieten, offer only the faintest of foreshadowings (A&E both love the "taste of rich and ripened fruit"). But that knowledge only made this evocation of what might have been all the sweeter.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Who was Rachel Corrie? (Part III)
I suppose all plays are political, but to paraphrase Orwell, some are more political than others. Take, for example, My Name is Rachel Corrie (Ms. Corrie, at left) which repeatedly has threatened to unravel the liberal consensus that supports our current theatre - by alienating a substantial number of the Jewish members of said consensus. The show has been delayed and canceled in places like New York and Toronto due to protests, and when the New Repertory Theatre announced its production dates, the theatre packaged it with To Pay the Price, a patriotic meditation on the Entebbe raid drawn from the letters of Jonathan "Yoni" Netanyahu, older brother of the former Israeli prime minister, and the lone Israeli killed in that famous rescue. Only ironically enough, this time it was the pro-Israel play that got canceled - the Netanyahu family pulled the rights, with youngest brother Iddo Netanyahu stating that "there is an inherent incompatibility in the joining together, in one evening, of a play based on my brother Yoni's letters with the play 'My Name Is Rachel Corrie.' "
So the consensus remained unraveled. The New Rep, however, quickly announced a replacement production: Pieces, by Zohar Tirosh, which, due to its length, would be presented on alternating nights with Corrie - a small separation which may have ameliorated tensions around the project. But when both shows opened, the critics were none too pleased with the "balance" achieved. "It's a pity that New Rep found it necessary to create this kind of balance," sighed the Globe's Louise Kennedy. " . . . no two plays in the world can exactly balance each other . . . They're individual works of art, not position papers, and they must each be judged on their own merits - not just on how they connect to the real political issues they engage, but also on how they succeed as works of art."
Kennedy continued: "Neither is a perfect play, but "Rachel Corrie" is more expertly crafted, more movingly written, and, at least in these productions, more essentially theatrical than "Pieces." Let me emphasize that that's an aesthetic judgment, not a political one . . . "Corrie" is ultimately more persuasive because it starts by allowing us to see its protagonist as a naive, self-absorbed flibbertigibbet . . . the experience of actually watching the play leaves us less interested in [political] questions, and more interested in the development of a specific, flawed, but fascinating human being. The almost giddy young girl we met at the outset has, by the end, grown into a far sadder, more complicated, and yet still resiliently optimistic woman."
Meanwhile over at the Phoenix, Carolyn Clay subtly struck a pro-Israel stance: "There is no doubt that Rachel Corrie . . . offers pro-Palestinian propaganda," she sniffed, but still quickly fell in line with Kennedy: "What makes each [play] compelling is its piquant personal journey, not its political agenda." Meanwhile, over at the Herald, Boston's youngest theatre lady, Jenna Scherer, declared "Art shouldn’t require even-handedness . . . Issues don’t get more hot-button than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a subject on which you’d be hard-pressed to find an objective account. But shouldn’t that be all the more reason to allow an individual voice to ring clear without apology? Isn’t theater supposed to incite people to think and react?"
Of course calls like these from people safely protected from their consequences always ring a bit hollow - "Uh, react how?" one might legitimately ask Jenna Scherer. In comparison to these critics, I was more sympathetic to the New Rep's efforts at "balance," if only because I knew a bit about the threatening edge of Zionist sentiment firsthand: years ago, I directed a production of Sophocles's Antigone which I set on the West Bank, with Antigone burying a fallen brother who had joined the Intifada. I received, of course, threatening phone calls and letters, warning that if I "knew what was good for me," I'd never open the show. Of course, I never do what's good for me - I opened it anyway, and nothing came of the threats. Still, said threats gave me (and the actors!) pause, as something tells me they would Louise Kennedy, Carolyn Clay, and Jenna Scherer.
So "balance" has a certain practical argument on its side - and after all, unlike Toronto, we got to see My Name is Rachel Corrie. But there's a more slippery problem slithering through the critics' declarations about "balance" - as well as what they clearly thought of as an escape hatch from the whole imbroglio, the idea that these plays were compelling not as political statements, but as "piquant personal journeys."
This, of course, is the kind of diversity boilerplate that Kennedy, and to a lesser extent Clay, are always deploying - I'm still waiting for the Kennedy review that concludes "the tragedy of Hamlet is that the prince dies before he has the chance to become the warm, wise woman he has the potential to be." The trouble with boomer boilerplate, of course, is that this time, decoupling the "personal journey" from its politics is trickier than it seems - for both Rachel Corrie and Zohar Tirosh. 
As I've pointed out in earlier posts, My Name is Rachel Corrie goes heavy on the young Rachel's quirky, appealing idealism - we see her bouncing around in tank top and boxers (Stacy Fischer, at right), yearning for some purpose beyond corporate materialism - but then omits her most extreme statements and actions once she gets to Gaza: we never see Rachel burn a mock American flag, for instance, as she was photographed doing, nor does she ever actually thrill to the killing of Israeli soldiers, as she did in her journal. Likewise, the organization she joined to get to Gaza - the controversial International Solidarity Movement, which many Israelis claim (with some evidence) has ties to Palestinian terrorism - is barely mentioned, much less analyzed. And the possibility that the homes Rachel was defending might have been camouflage for a network of terrorist tunnels (again, there's some evidence, which provides a neat explanation for that bulldozer) is likewise never cited.
So what kind of a "piquant personal journey" is this - toward empowerment, or pawndom? We can't really tell, because it occurs in an echo chamber - and not merely the one within Rachel's head, but the political echo chamber constructed by Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner, who generated the piece. Let me say right here that I'm probably in sympathy with Rickman's and Viner's political aims - while I don't deny Israel's right to exist, I also support a Palestinian state, and view Israeli settlements in the occupied territories with skepticism (one very welcome aspect of My Name is Rachel Corrie is that it decouples opposition to Israeli policy from anti-Semitism). So I suppose I should love Rickman and Viner's play. But the actual artistic questions posed by Rachel's life, which might be illuminated by her writing, must include ones like, "Why didn't the idealistic young Rachel end up fighting hunger in Darfur rather than dodging bulldozers in Gaza? Why didn't this candid, talented kid, whose journals crackle with insight into her cozy, crunchy home, ever ponder what exactly she was getting into?"
There are a few poignant hints that Rachel knew she was in over her head - "I'm really new to talking about Israel/Palestine," she admits, after she arrives in Gaza - which, as one wag put it, is a bit like stepping off the plane and announcing, "Me llamo Rachel!" Yet at the same time Corrie can state, without irony or qualification, that “the vast majority of Palestinians right now, as far as I can tell, are engaging in Gandhian non-violent resistance." Ah, but what a difference a single suicide bomber makes! Essentially, Corrie never wonders whether the Palestinians are perhaps contributing to their own oppression; she only knows what she sees, and what she sees is admittedly terrible, and rarely contemplated by American audiences. But this gap in her awareness - which the authors refuse to illuminate - makes her death terribly sad, but not tragic, as she never reaches self-knowledge, or sees the possible flaws in her stance.
And thus, with apologies to Louise, Carolyn and Jenna, it's hard to applaud My Name is Rachel Corrie as a "piquant personal journey" - unless said journey is into the Stockholm Syndrome. On the other hand, it's also impossible for me to agree that Corrie and Pieces "are simply not balanced at all," because they are balanced in their respective blind spots. In Pieces, Zohar Tirosh as studiously avoids the political flip side of her actions as Rickman and Viner do Corrie's; Pieces does indeed "balance" My Name is Rachel Corrie; it just doesn't engage with it. 
Pieces (with author/actress Zohar Tirosh, above) is a more gently pitched "personal journey" - in fact, it's the time-honored one through military service, here thoughtfully and gracefully enacted by Tirosh herself. The story sports the usual décor - the oppressive superior officers, the boyfriend who proves unfaithful, the brush with danger, etc., but the Palestinians, of course, are once again the elephant in the room. They're "over there," Tirosh often says, but she never goes there - so exactly what she's defending, and from whom, is never addressed. Of course her stint in the army occurred under Rabin, when rapprochement with Palestine still seemed possible, and her piece ends with his assassination (by an Israeli extremist sympathetic to the West Bank settlers). So in the talkback, the question inevitably arose - would Tirosh serve in the Israeli army today? Today, after the Second Intifada, and the advent of the suicide bomber, and the Wall? Today, when even as Israelis cry foul at the term "apartheid," they must face the fact that if current trends continue, they will soon be a Jewish minority governing a territory by force?
Would she serve? Would she want her daughter to? The actress, visibly distressed, slowly, sadly, shook her head "no." And several members of the audience immediately bristled.
The consensus, apparently, remains unraveled.
Friday, May 2, 2008
Poem of the Day
Incantation
by Czeslaw Milosz
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.
Czeslaw Milosz (at left) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, at a time when his work was banned in his native Poland. "Incantation" was written in 1968, in Berkeley, California, where he was a Professor of Polish Literature. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mr. Milosz returned to his native country to live part-time in Kraków, where he died in 2004.
Above, a young climber ponders Poland's Tatras Mountains.