Updike's Witches

(reflections after re-re-reading THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK by John Updike 1984.) John Updike's upcoming novel returns to some old characters for THE WIDOWS OF EASTWICK, so I've pulled out my old paperback of the 1984 novel THE WITCHES.... The main thing that strikes me, so soon after re-reading COUPLES, is how the books' lines run parallel: We meet an insular community within an insular community (the couples' group within the suburb of Tarbox, MA, and the coven within the small town of Eastwick, ME). As we get to know them and their routines and lovers, a newcomer disturbs the equilibrium (Foxy Chapman in COUPLES and Darryl Van Horne in WITCHES). Long story short: the pleasures that ensue contain the seeds of the community's disintegration. In both novels, the dissolution of the community is not the end of the world, and life goes on for the individuals, away from each other. I enjoy, as always, simply being immersed in the lives and sensations of these characters. There's also the tricky way that Updike plays Hawthorne's game of giving us magic that might also be mere rumor, or coincidence, or dream, or metaphor. One witch shriveled her husband to nothing, and she keeps his dust in a jar among the tomatoes; another turned her husband into a doormat. One shares a vision of flight. One casually kills a squirrel with her evil eye when she sees him raiding her bird feeder. Together the three witches wish cancer upon a rival -- but the young woman already said she felt a growth. Written in 1984, the novel looks back with more than a hint of satire on the hippie - feminist - Weatherman currents running through the culture in 1969. Betty Friedan's THE FEMINIST MYSTIQUE referred to men's pretense of protecting women's mysterious closeness to nature, saving them from the rough world of male business and government. Updike catches a whiff of that in later feminists' own extolling of sisterhood. So there's this sisterhood of women who would certainly agree with the once-popular feminist bumper-sticker that "a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle," and yet they're all thrown into a tizzy of excitement and jealousy by meta-male (and Satan) Darryl. I especially enjoy Updike's nearly plausible explanation of a magical thunderstorm. It's willed by the witch Alexandra Spofford to spite the sun-tanned and fit young adults whose frisbee and radios spoil her walk at the beach. Updike observes that the weather certainly has an effect on our moods; Alexandra simply reverses the process. Updike is particularly rough on a Unitarian power couple of liberals, and Felicia, a literally sharp-tongued community activist (she spits up tacks, sticks, and feathers under the spell of her enemies). He usually shows empathy for all of his characters, but not with these. "Felicia had a considerable love for the underprivileged in the abstract but when actual cases got close to her she tended to hold her nose." The pompous Unitarian preacher - turned - terrorist blows himself up; his wife becomes leader of a rival coven and spits up pieces of insects in the pulpit, and Felicia's husband bashes her head in mid-screed. Updike slowly builds that scene of the murder by filling in the husband's reflections on the past and present between lines of spoken dialogue. After the crime of passion, someone (husband Clyde, or Updike's vaguely situated narrator -- who sometimes speaks for Eastwick) reflects, "Marriage is like two people locked up with one lesson to read, over and over, until the words become madness." There's another set piece near the end: the devil's sermon, delivered in the pulpit of the Unitarian church. It's a stick in the eye of all who say that creation is good, pulling out of an encyclopedia the horrible slow deaths caused among wildlife by certain insect poisons and ghastly parasites, with gratuitous (even circuitous) processes that seem way out of range for evolution to explain. (Begins p. 321 in the Fawcett paperback of 1985.) There's no way for me to read the book without flashing back to the movie, which starred Jack Nicholson as Van Horne, Cher as Alexandra, and Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer as the other witches. Cher's performance was particularly memorable in a scene that doesn't occur in the book: Alexandra rebuffs Van Horne's crude seduction with self-assured amusement, ending her list of his faults with, "And you smell." But Van Horne retorts with a description of Alexandra's life, her truncated expectations, her unexpressed dreams, and her self-delusions. He circles, while the camera closes in on Cher's face, and we watch as her smug smile freezes into a grimace and tears form in her eyes. The end of the movie is pretty silly. John Williams' score for the movie is a favorite of mine. His main theme is a pastiche of Lizst's Mephisto waltz, and its recaps grow old; but the long seduction sequence is eerie and fun; and I love especially the piano toccata that Williams uses for a magical tennis game.

Cabinets, Committees, and Me

I recently sat at the table with Senators, President Bush, NATO heads of State, the cabinet of Iraq, the governors of the Federal Reserve, trustees of the school where I teach, and the Vestry of the church to which I belong. We concluded our meeting with a sense of relief that the matter had been decided, but also with a sense of dread that we would face second guessing and people personally hurt by what we decided.

During our meetings, the more we wished aloud for other options and chased other possibilities, the more we saw a wall with no other ways through, and its narrow gate closing. For all that, we also felt like we were taking a gamble.

We've made our decisions, for better and for worse, and consequences are rolling in. "It's socialism for the rich," says one about the Fed's recent decision to assist the buyout of Bear Stearns, while another says, "A failure to act would have been economic disaster for everyone." Al Maliki misjudged the strength of his forces and misjudged the time and has irrevocably weakened his floundering government in Iraq, or else he has finally demonstrated his will to break the stronghold of tribal militias in Iraq. We have hurt church programs and slapped faithful staff in the face, say some; and we have responded sensibly and hopefully to current circumstances, within parameters set up by decisions made years ago say others.

Cabinets and committees have run the world for the last two or three hundred years. I've taught about it, and read about it; now I'm in it.

The feeling recalls Abe Lincoln's fit of temper when accused of ruining his party's chances out of pure personal ambition. "I have tried to do what's best, you know how I have, and now to be accused of doing it for selfish reasons. . . !" His secretary wrote that Lincoln mastered his temper at this point: "Well, things could be better, they could be worse. All I can do is what appears to be right." (Quoted from memory.)

Re-Affirming Faiths

(reflections on Gregory Epstein, humanist, and conservatism as recently considered by David Mamet and David Brooks.)

Listened this morning to Gregory Epstein, chaplain of the Humanists at Harvard, performing there ritual marryings and buryings without God, and promoting a faith in our efforts to live meaningful lives by promoting the best world that we can through individual and group efforts. He reads and respects the scriptures of different traditions (and he studied talmud for a year in Israel), but adds that he gets even more out of modern literature. (All on the radio program SPEAKING OF FAITH).

I have no quarrel with anything I heard from him. Do I have any difference with him at all? Wondering this bothered me through most of our week-after-Easter "lessons and songs" service. I guess I'm also soured by Spring's sudden retreat, and our cold grey skies, and by the fact that I can no longer put off designing a week's History project for the 7th grade.

Somewhere near communion, my mood shifted, thanks to a hymn I'd not sung before (number 109 in the 1982 Episcopal Hymnal), memorable for its mode-ish melody and a blue note. It didn't change anything: In practical terms, Epstein is right that God or no-God makes no difference at all to grown-ups, who should operate beyond the primitive reward-punishment scheme of heaven and hell.

My political beliefs have been refreshed recently by coming back into contact with the root of all political questions: Is man good, or not? I've long believed that man is dangerous in power, that all organizations (government, corporations) are suspect, and our Constitution is brilliant in balancing self-interested parties against each other, making room for courage and goodness.

These beliefs have been enunciated recently by playwright David Mamet and conservative columnist David Brooks. The first one has announced "Why I am no longer a brain-dead liberal" in the liberal newspaper THE VILLAGE VOICE; the other writes in a critique of the Bush administration, quoted in THE ST. CROIX REVIEW (December 2007). Conservatism, in both pieces, is neither a party affiliation nor a preference for policy, but an outlook that says, "Be careful: organizations are corrupt, we need protection from the powerful, society cannot be changed by legislative fiat without dreadful consequences."

Brooks, quoted in the REVIEW, writes

What Burke articulated was not an ideology or a creed, but a disposition, a reverence for tradition. ... A temperamental conservative is suspicious of rapid reform believing that efforts t quickly transform anything will have, as Burke wrote, 'pleasing commencements' but 'lamentable conclusions.'

Mamet asks:

Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations—they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not "Is everything perfect?" but "How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?" Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well.

Mamet goes so far as to endorse Milton Friedman, Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell when he asserts that our nation is "not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace." He writes:

"Aha," you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

An older friend Charles Weeks, when I was in my early twenties, observed that I was not exactly a conservative, but "conservative in temperament." I think so. Burke, more than Bush, more even than Reagan, is my touchstone.

Local News: Tornado in Atlanta

What's so beautiful about distant storms? Is it just the fact that we're not in them? I know that color and shape are part of the answer. Here's a photo of the unprecedented twister through my hometown, passed on to me by email:

Past Modern: Stieglitz, O'Keeffe, and Beckett

(reflection on Samuel Beckett occasioned by some of his poems newly translated from French by Philip Nikolayev in POETRY, Feb. 2008, along with an art exhibit about Stieglitz, O'Keeffe, and their company)

Ah, the good old modern days! Remember them? From this distance, some of those brash, new revolutionary artists look like pathetic attention-seekers, on a par with Madonna. Still, the best of them have something to show us even now.

First, the pathetic: Atlanta's High Museum of Art has an exhibition of photos, drawings, and paintings by Alfred Stieglitz and the women that he promoted under the banner of "modernism" in the early decades of the 20th century. The draw for the exhibit is the eventual Mrs. Stieglitz, a.k.a. Georgia O'Keeffe. I'm sure the exhibitors didn't intend for us to see these women artists as the harem of a man who was nothing more than a mediocre artist and a prurient promoter. Yet, the photos of the women show them in posing, and being posers. Again and again, we're told that this or that woman fulfilled Stieglitz's notion of a woman's "innocent" and "childlike" vision. He flitted from one to the other, until he got a star in O'Keeffe, so they didn't fill full at all. What business does Alfred Stieglitz have telling us what a woman's vision is? How condescending to equate "woman" with "child." With all the nude models who drape themselves across unlikely prop pieces, their heads back, their faces averted -- it all seems like "childlike" and "innocent" are code words for "erotic" and "submissive" in the way that "wild" and "untamed" telegraphed "sex" in the ads for movies and books that puzzled me in my childhood in the Sixties. O'Keeffe always pretended to be shocked that her big fat close-ups of flower's reproductive parts were said to be erotic, but, by the time we reach those at the end of this depressing exhibit, what else can we conclude? She was the best of the bunch at doing what they all did, and I still like her early pictures of city skylines and her late pictures of American desert, but this exhibit, which intended to set her off as the jewel of the collection, only diminishes her.

One bit of commentary at start of the High's permanent collection of early twentieth century works was a helpful reminder to me, however. We are admonished to remember "modernism" as an attitude, not a style. Since art of the immediate past had told stories, and had romanticized nature, and often had didactic intentions, the modernists focused on the purely personal, and on urban life, and generally on mocking prevalent values as "bourgeois."

In literature, this attitude informed the works of James Joyce and of his disciple Samuel Beckett, and we're all richer for that. Right now, I'm stuck once again around chapter seven of ULYSSES, having reached the point of diminishing returns where my inability to figure out just what's going on in each sentence is weighing me down more than my appreciation of Joyce's choice to write an episode at a newspaper office entirely in the form of little newspaper articles. But my affection for ULYSSES is growing with each new slog through the book, nourished by the fun and distinct feel of the early chapters, with nothing more appealing than the very first page.

Now, reading newly translated poems by Samuel Beckett in February's issue of POETRY, I'm looking in vain for the Beckett I learned to appreciate from his stage works.

In the late Seventies, at a time when I was calling myself an evangelical fundamentalist, Beckett helped me out of that limited perspective by showing me how truth and joy could be expressed by a man in the very act of describing a world where there is no God. I read his novel MURPHY, and enjoyed its word play. But it was seeing a double bill of KRAPP'S LAST TAPE and ENDGAME that won me over. It was a production at London's Old Vic theatre in 1980, performed by (former?) inmates of San Quentin prison, directed by the author. I'll not forget how dim light came up on the old man "Krapp," seated at a desk, his head in his hand -- and how nothing happened for an uncomfortably long period of time, until the actor suddenly sighed, causing the audience to jump and even squeal in surprise. What a great way to adjust our expectations! This stretched the old ideas of what a play should be -- the man acts alone, but he's in a dialogue of sorts with his own past selves, represented by tape recordings.

These poems by Beckett, upon several re-readings, don't give so much. The commentary by translator Philip Nikolayev tells us that these are each responses to very personal events, full of cryptic references to things and people Beckett knew. In short,"you had to be there" to "get" them. Poetry had been a popular form for the unified expression of common ideas and values, and for the sharing of personal experiences and insights. So one prominent modernist T. S. Eliot went another way, trying to objectify his poetry and to make his readers piece together for themselves the fragments of others' experiences -- minus the unifying voice of the poet. Beckett, here, is trying to do less than that.

Still, there's fun in a disorienting little poem on a littler subject, "La Mouche" ("The Housefly"), amusing in playing with perspective. Here's the first half of it:

between the scene and me
the glass
empty except for it

belly down
tieid tight in its black guts
panicked antennas linked wings

And, as always, there's word play, as in a morose poem translated as "all right all right there's a land," which contains this line: "my loneliness I know it oh well I know it badly," and ends with "the calm the love the hate the calm the calm." Beckett often juxtaposes opposites for the effect of jarring us into some kind of truth. In this poem, it's just to call attention to the incongruity of the phrase "I know it well" when the poet means to express the tedium of loneliness. The last words of WAITING FOR GODOT are something like, "Yes, let's go," juxtaposed with the last image of the two waiters sitting still, still waiting. I think often of another juxtaposition in the last words of his last novel THE UNNAMABLE, "I can't go on. I'll go on." That encapsulates much of life, especially for people who live in poverty of means or health.

While I'm dwelling on the February 2008 issue of POETRY, I'd like to point out a "portfolio" of poems by George Szirtes from a larger collection called "In the Face of History." These are short poems printed alongside historical photos that inspired them. For example, a photo of Jewish boys in the Ghetto playing at being goose-stepping soldiers draws a poetic response from Szirtes that doesn't do much more than describe what we see -- but the combination draws attention to something marvelous and horrifying that deserves our attention. The final picture in the collection shows a little naked girl on a barren hill flanked by Soviet-era public housing with commentary that wraps up the period of Soviet domination and Marxist theory with this laconic and neatly rhymed musing:

All that you see is the all-but-naked child
on the all-but-naked hill against a naked sky
as if what you could not see were the question
and she the reply.

More Fun with COUPLES

(reflection upon re-reading John Updike's COUPLES, with some research into JOHN UPDIKE AND RELIGION edited by James Yerkes, and a survey of web blogs and the NYTimes web page about the book.)


Two of John Updike's novels are puzzles to which I keep returning because, following hundreds of pages of incidental pleasures and insights, they leave me unable to sum up what I've read, yet with the strong sense that they do add up to something important. Updike says the same thing about novels by the late philosopher Iris Murdoch, and his COUPLES (1968) shares more characteristics of her novels than this. Like many of hers, this one flits from one love affair to another so frequently that I've had to keep a table of couplings in the back flap of the book. I've dealt with Updike's SEEK MY FACE elsewhere (see Updike's Underappreciated Seek My Face); now I'd like to see what I can nail down in COUPLES.

More than I can remember the details of Updike's book COUPLES (1968), I recall the world it conjures up, and how it felt to explore that world when I read it the first time. That was back in 1987, when I was still young enough to see the 30-something characters as older, middle-aged types. For me then, it was a glimpse into what it was like to be one of the grown-ups when my parents entertained neighbors at our home in Pittsburgh in the year that the novel is set, 1963. I still don't drink a martini without its aroma taking me back to that time. I asked my parents about the book in 1987, and about my vague sense that those neighborhood parties were very much like the wife-swapping flirt-fests that Updike describes. My parents admitted that's exactly what was going on, though they were the newcomers and slow to figure that out.

About that time, I've written elsewhere how it seems in retrospect to have been the last time that there really were grown-ups. (See my blog entry about the Rat Pack.) A recent book called THE DEATH OF THE GROWN UP sees a decline in our national maturity level dating from the end of the 60s, but Updike had it covered at the end of the 50s. "Are we the last generation to be ambitious?" the character Foxy Whitman asks, observing the slightly younger generation's easy-going "peace and love." But earlier, character Piet Hanema describes the USA as one big adolescent: "God doesn't love us any more . . . . We're fat and full of pimples and always whining for more candy. We've fallen from grace" (p. 200 in the original edition).

This time around, I didn't immerse myself in their world, and may have a clearer view for that. I read about the first gin-soaked party when the new couple Ken and Foxy Whitman first meet the others, including Piet and Angela Hanema. Then I skipped to the denoument: the Hanemas' visit to the Whitmans to clarify exactly who had slept with whom, for how long, and who was complicit (around p.416 in the 1985 Fawcett Crest paperback).

What I saw in those few pages was a distillation of the whole book. Ken Whitman, cuckold and host, pours drinks and proceeds to question his guests. We don't have to have read the preceding four hundred pages to appreciate the pain, embarrassment, and calculation that underlie each line of dialogue:

Ken [asked Piet's wife] Angela, "How much did you know of all this?"
"Ah," Piet said, "an oral exam,"
Angela said, "I knew as much as you did. Nothing."
"You must have guessed something."
"I make a lot of guesses about Piet, but he's very slippery."
Piet said, "Agile, I would have said."
Ken did not take his eyes from Angela. "But you're in Tarbox all day; I'm away from seven to seven."
Angela shifted her weight forward, so the leather cushion sighed. "What are you suggesting, Ken? That I'm deficient as a wife?"
Foxy [Whitman] said, "One of the things that makes Angela a good wife to Piet, better than I could ever be, is that she lets herself be blind."

Another sharp exchange a bit later recalls the plot's crisis, when Piet arranged an abortion for Foxy performed by dentist and Tarbox's high priest of parties, Freddy Thorne -- in exchange for a night with Piet's wife.

Ken turned to him. "Among the actions I'm considering is bringing criminal charges against Thorne. You'd be an accessory."
"For God's sake, why?" Piet asked. "That was probably the most Christian thing Freddy Thorne ever did. He didn't have to do it, he did it out of pity. Out of love, even."
"Love of who?
"His friends."

The interconnectedness of the friends, the ten couples of the title, is what makes this book unique. The earliest review of the book that I've seen, by Wilfrid Sheed of the NEW YORK TIMES in 1968 (available on the web) observes that we meet these couples "vaguely," the way we would meet them in life. They come into sharper focus as we discover, with some of the same wicked pleasure of real gossip, how this or that spouse is secretly trysting with another.

But the newness wears off, and so do the erotic attractions, and so does the friendship. Mutual betrayal, disappointment, and natural processes (John Ong's cancer, the Saltzes' moving away, the childrens' growing into teens) all crack the ring apart. By book's end, nothing remains of this too-tightly-knit group except some bad reputations discussed among Tarbox's younger, newer couples.

Clearly the character Piet Hanema comes closest to being protagonist, though he disappears from the book for dozens of pages at a time. Of all the promiscuous people in the novel, he's most promiscuous. He's also the most prominent character whose thoughts and words about God are given consideration, often in contrast to his nemeses Freddy Thorne and atheist scientist Ken Whitman. He's also, let's not be too blunt, a despicable man. Updike allows us to see him in all his evasive, rationalizing, back-stabbing, woman-abusing boorishness, and he affords this moment when Piet sees himself as others do (p. 431 in the paperback):

"All I can do is let things happen, and pray," [Piet said to his business partner Matt Galagher].
"That's all you ever do." Matt spoke without hesitation, as a reflex; it was one of those glimpses, as bizarre as the sight in a three-way clothing-store mirror of your own profile, into how you appear to other people.

What are we to make of Piet, his name so close to Piety, his last name close to "hand made," and his one virtue of caring about the integrity of his carpenty work?

These last pages of the book could have ended with the lightning bolt that levels the town's church also striking Piet down with it -- he's there watching. Maybe the Puritans' old all-seeing weathercock could have toppled and skewered Piet right there in the storm. Instead, Piet and the others muddle through, life goes on (or not: John Ong dies shortly after Piet's uncomfortable visit through an oxygen tent), and it's as if none of this mattered.

But in those sharp lines of dialogue, the pain is acute and real.

A survey of comments about John Updike's novel COUPLES (1968) turns up a lot of references to sex, religion, sex as a substitute for religion, sex and religion as two responses to death, and to explicitness of the religious purpose (especially God's own bolt of lightning that ignites the congregational church) almost as often as to the explicitness of the -- umm, physical functions, not excluding those that are more digestive than erotic. 

Critics have always called for more judgement of the characters in the book. I'd say, what they do to themselves carries its own judgement, and what they do to redeem themselves after could be seen as grace, at least provisionally, until the next time they screw up. I'd have to say, COUPLES cannot be pinned down in terms of good and bad, final judgements, clear meanings, clear narrative lines -- and in this, reading it is much like living real life, only blessed with Updike's acute vision of detail and his wide frame of reference.

A Little "Light" Music: Guettel and Sondheim

(reflections on re-playing the original cast CD of THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA, music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, book by Craig Lucas, based on Elizabeth Spencer's novella of 1954.)

I never listen to my favorite music anymore. Some I can replay in my head note for note; the rest, I want to keep fresh. Let public radio broadcast the usual Tchaikovsky and Schubert while I do chores and read e-mail. When I play a recording of Debussy's Sonatas, Sondheim's A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC, Glass's SATYAGRAHA or Holst's HYMN OF JESUS, I have to carve out some hours to listen in peace and concentration.

Thus, I've let a couple years pass since I last listened to the original cast recording of the musical THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA. I liked composer-lyricist Adam Guettel's score the first time I heard it, but I was also puzzled, until I saw the original cast at Lincoln Center. At intermission, I felt I was riding a wave of audience enthusiasm, but then I overheard a knot of people in the lobby deciding to skip the second act. A survey of blogs and articles about LIGHT last night uncovered stories of others who were similarly puzzled or just bored. Even those who like the show seem to miss some of what makes it wonderful. And nearly everyone compares Guettel to Sondheim in a superficial way that undervalues both artists. Allow me to share with the blogosphere some of the things I admire in LIGHT's music and lyrics that others may have missed.

While every commentator finds a succinct way to summarize the plot, I haven't run across one that comments on the structure. As they all say, it's the story of middle-aged American Margaret Johnson who tries to stop the budding romance between her daughter Clara and the young Italian Fabrizio Naccarelli when the Americans meet him on vacation in Florence in 1953. Their story follows a straight line to marriage, from miraculous meeting (he happens to stand at exactly the right spot to catch her hat, flying in the wind) through getting to know each other ("Now is I am happiness with you / Walk with me in the place that I live from a child" he ardently sings), to erotic romance without language ("Why don't you trace it on my hand / Or make a song / Do anything / Say it somehow / I will understand").

But the progress of young love is attacked from all sides by three married couples who observe the romance from their vantage points of experience, with disappointment and cynicism. This isn't Sondheim's COMPANY: the couples aren't just commentary, they're half the story. Fabrizio's older brother takes romance and his marriage vows lightly (as he demonstrates in a dancing lesson, the instrumental "American Dancing"), and his wife Franca sings a bitter aria that makes Clara cry ("You're the envy of so many girls," she sings to Clara, "And you are the most beautiful / So far"). A song that seemed strident to me on first hearing, "Aiutumi ("Aid Me")" is actually very funny in context, as old Mrs. Naccarelli translates for us the histrionics of the men in her family, concluding that she encourages it, because, without suspicion, without drama, there would be no feeling left in her household. Most important, there's Margaret Johnson's marriage to Roy, a character not even mentioned in the CD and lyrics who has a strong presence on stage. He speaks to his wife by trans-Atlantic phone from South Carolina. After their conversation, long-distance in more than one way, Margaret wonders about the "dividing day" when their love settled into their business-like relationship. Did it happen recently, or did it start at their wedding? The story's as much about the young lovers' effect on these other couples as it is about the innocents. The more hope that's invested in the couple, the more difficult it is for Margaret to tell the Naccarellis that her daughter suffered a blow to the head at twelve, never to develop intellectually or emotionally beyond that age.

About the music, even Guettel's admirers seem to be saying, "It may not sound like it, but it's really beautiful." Rex Reed wrote, "Not strong on conventional melodies, [Guettel] dares you to take a journey with him that is musically challenging. You can't sing or hum or even remember his songs, but you are enthralled and awed while you're hearing them." (The New York Observer, www.observer.com. May 23, 1999). NY Times critic Stephen Holden wrote with admiration, 'The unifying element of Mr. Guettel's music is a transcendent overarching melodic gift," which sounds good, but he goes on to explain how that "gives order to the often clashing inner voices of his songs." (quoted in Pogrebin, Robin. "Songwriter's Independence Isn't Easy to Hum" New York Times. 12 May 1999). In the same article, Sondheim pooh-poohs the idea that Guettel's music is rebarbative: ''People have lazy ears,'' Mr. Sondheim said. ''With so much stuff in the theater, before the song is over you know where it's going. That's not true of Adam. He is full of surprise. The surprise is seldom arbitrary. It's usually inevitable.''

In composing his music, Guettel intends to suit his music to the character and the moment, and he has the musical vocabulary to create the effects that fit his intentions. ''Unlike some composers, who will map out where the songs are going to be and then start writing individual pieces, Adam will spend months, years, whatever it takes on finding the right vernacular for the piece as a whole,'' says Tina Landau, Guettel's collaborator on the wonderful show FLOYD COLLINS.'' ''He won't move ahead unless he feels he has reinvented some landscape'' (Pogrebin). FLOYD COLLINS is notated with lots of sixteenth-note syncopations, very demanding for a pianist and natural to any bluegrass banjo strummer. The sound for LIGHT is totally different. From the overture onward, Guettel's music tells the story of the young lovers with music of an overtly romantic sound -- many strings, guitar, harp, and what might be Rachmaninoff's piano rhapsodizing in the background.

Many of the songs take the characters through some kind of conflict to a new resolve or recognition, and so the easy way out of merely repeating the chorus isn't good enough for Guettel. The music isn't just a medium for the words; it says something in itself. The bouncy tune that brings us into Florence with the mother and daughter tourists, takes an odd turn when Clara suddenly bursts out gleefully, "We're on vacation!" and runs off with any suggestion of romance in her mother's guidebook patter. It's an early indication that she's younger in mind and heart than she appears to be. It may be just coincidence, but the same four - note phrase (beginning from the leading tone, "on vacation") becomes the chorus of the next song, Clara's expression of "wanting something" that she can't put in words. Another jaunty little song turns gradually into a nightmare through polyrhythms, overlapping lines and augmented instrumentation, expressing what happens when Clara gets lost in the streets of Florence at night. That same music turns up again, only layers of chanted church Latin are superimposed on it, as Clara gets lost again, this time in foreign rites and mores rather than foreign streets.

Mr. Sondheim shares this same musical integrity. SWEENEY TODD's music broods and churns, while the music of his fairy-tale musical INTO THE WOODS stays bright light-textured, and neither of those sound like the patriotic pastiche of ASSASSINS. Like Guettel, Sondheim wants his songs to go somewhere, and they both allow digressions to re-direct their songs. I speak from experience, as one who is trying to master the piano parts for INTO THE WOODS. It would be so much easier if Sondheim would find a neat little pattern and stick to it, preferably in one key, at least until the last verse. But, no, there are sudden shifts of key to mark sudden elevations in tension, and little hiccups of rhythm to set up punchlines, and little developments in the pattern as the song develops. Like Guettel, Sondheim works out interconnected musical bits, such as the five-note motif (matching five "magic beans") that appear in the melody or the accompaniment of all the songs that "sprout" plot-wise from those beans.

So, Guettel and Sondheim share ambition to make their music expressive, and they share some techniques -- which they share with "classical" composers from Bach to Bartok. This means that their music demands concentration from the musicians, and it fails to conform to prefabricated pop and show tune outlines. But it's silly to say that they share a particular style.

It's in writing lyrics that Guettel has something to teach his mentor. Sondheim leads the English-speaking world at finding the precise words to express the logic of a character's thoughts, and his miraculous craftsmanship with rhyme give his rhetoric a sharpness and a feeling of inevitability. He is careful to fit the imagery, the vocabulary, and the rhetoric to the character.

Guettel's lyrics and music allow for non-logical leaps that puzzle the listener to the CD, but make perfect sense on stage. Often, his characters lapse out of language into vocalese, something Sondheim never does. (I've thought for sixty seconds, now, and haven't come up with a single example). While he writes wordless music, he's confident in the expressiveness of his songs to write in Italian, too -- something that one blogger (www.rationalmagic.com) calls pretentious, and it's probably what put off a percentage of those audience deserters.

Then there are lyrics that don't make sense, because the connections aren't logical or rhetorical. For example, Clara's first solo seemed to be just generic poetry -- "This is wanting something" -- until I saw the show, and saw what "this" means in context. She's in a museum ("the land of naked marble boys") when she sees an image of a saint reaching out towards another figure. Imitating the pose, she sings, "This is wanting something, this is reaching for it," thinking of the cute boy she just met on the square. Her mother sings the same music in the second act to a very different effect, as she recalls the horrible moment of her daughter's childhood accident. The mother had turned away for a moment, and turned back to see her daughter falling unconscious. Re-enacting how she reached out, too late, she, too, sings, "So much wanting something / . . . So much wishing just to have one moment back . . ./ So much blind acceptance / I know / No, I don't know."

The title song sounds on the record like a sweet soliloquy from Clara about what love is like, "light in the piazza" that dawned when she met Fabrizio there. Pretty prosaic for poetry, and, as RationalMagic.com points out, it's a lot more poetic than we'd expect from a mentally impaired young woman. But this lovely song is a turning point. Margaret has pulled rank, removed Clara from Florence, has ordered Clara to obey, and, as we watch, she is trying to carry on a tour of Rome, just as at the beginning of the play, only it's not working. Clara isn't minding, Clara is sulking. In frustration, Margaret slaps Clara. Now, cue the lovely music:

I don't see a miracle
Shining from the sky
I'm no good at statues and stories
I try
That's not what I think about
That's not what I see
I know what the sunlight can be
The light, the light in the piazza . . .

It may sound poetic, but it's a direct expression of what she saw when she met him. Once again, there's a leap. Nothing logical has happened, no new information has come out, but everything changes. Margaret relents.

Of many moments in the show that I love, I think the ones that affect me most strongly, even just thinking about them now, are the ones that deal head-on with the inability to put in words what one feels is right. In act two, after Signior Naccarelli angrily forbids his son to marry, Margaret cannot find words to convince the father to change his mind. She does convince, him, however, to simply sit with her at a cafe. Their music is wistful, and they say little, except how they each remember how, "at a certain age, / We almost fall on purpose." There's a hint of a metaphor -- the "way" and the "road to be taken for happiness." Beyond those few words, the song consists of one phrase, repeated over an affable little promenade - "Let's walk. Let's walk." Words cannot explain what happens, but, by the end of the song, they have reached an understanding, and we have, too: the marriage will go forward, and let's hope for the best.

The next song is painful to think about: tears just came to my eyes typing this. But, when Clara is confronted suddenly with her own limitations, she herself calls off the wedding. Without language to answer her, Fabrizio sings simply what he has seen in her from the beginning:

I notice how you hunger for surprise
And do not think that you are tall enough
Like you're standing on a mountainside alone
This is what I see,
Oh,
Oh, you're not alone.

None of that exactly makes sense. But by the end of the song, they are reconciled. And I'm a basket-case.

As the show is as much about the effect of this couple's love on everyone else, that is expressed obliquely in lyrics that struck www.rationalmagic.com as poor attempts at poetry, totally unsuitable to the moments. In the church, during the Latin lesson, the ensemble sings of "The shock of winter, the coming on of spring . . . I am suddenly alive." They're telling us of the passage of time, and relating it to how the other two couples in the Naccarelli household have been chastened and are visibly more affectionate to each other. Margaret's solo, "A Fable," seemed to me incomprehensible, until I saw her perform it. She sings it from an isolated area of the church while she watches her daughter's wedding. It's the story of her life, the disappointment of her fairy tale marriage that's turned out to be "a fake, a fable." But midway, her rhetorical progress stalls: "Still you have to look / and look and look and look and look and look . . ." (repeat several more times) " . . .for the eyes on a bridge in a pouring rain," and,

If you find in the world
In the wide wide world
That someone sees
That someone knows you
Love!
Love!
Love, if you can, oh my Clara,
Love if you can and be loved
May it last forever . . .

In the middle of her bitterness, seeing the wedding, she suddenly makes the irrational leap to hope, ending in prayer, a benediction.

As with so much other music that I love, my introduction to the work of Adam Guettel came through Stephen Sondheim. In a recital of songs that Sondheim says he wishes he'd written, the "Riddle Song" from FLOYD COLLINS was the only one by a composer young enough to be Sondheim's grandson. In fact, Guettel is his godson, child of Sondheim's own childhood friend composer Mary Rodgers, and grandson of Broadway pioneer Richard Rodgers (who said of Sondheim, only half jokingly, "I've watched him grow up from a precocious little child to a monster").

That "Riddle Song" shows all the characteristics I've described from LIGHT, including this quality that would not have occurred to Sondheim: the riddles are a way for Floyd's brother Homer to distract Floyd from his predicament. As each riddle calls to mind a memory of their growing up together, the music grows exuberant, until remembering a deep, dark watering hole brings Floyd back to the deep, dark hole he's buried alive in. One more riddle, and Homer brings Floyd back to hope. What the song really means is, "I love you," but it never says so.

Sondheim once lauded a single line from PORGY AND BESS: "Summertime, and the livin' is easy." Sondheim says that he would have written , "summertime, when the living is easy," and he admits that, though it would make more sense, it wouldn't have been so right. I'm sure, in a similar way, Sondheim admires the feelings that Guettel expresses obliquely.

In Sondheim's own words (from PACIFIC OVERTURES), "Let the pupil show the master, Next!"

Gerald and Sara Murphy: Muses of the Roaring Twenties

Gerald Murphy, Ginny Carpenter, Cole Porter, and Sarah Murphy

(reflections on EVERYBODY WAS SO YOUNG, a biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy by Amanda Vaill)

Before I knew that Gerald and Sara Murphy ever existed, I wrote the scenario for a musical play about them. It was to be called "Cafe Americain," set in Paris, mid-20s, and the story would include a pair of arch-wits modeled on Noel Coward and Cole Porter, and a monstrously egotistical American adventure-writer modeled on Ernest Hemingway, and a romantic affair. These characters, like wayward children, would all meet at a fictional cabaret called Cafe Americain, and there would be a maternal figure modeled anachronistically on singer Mabel Mercer. (She was indeed in Paris, 1920s, but was a girlish young woman, decades away from the maternal cabaret singer she would become.) Anyway, my play was to be an evocation of a place and a time when the characters' only concerns would be self-expression -- while they searched for something of substance to express. Of course, at 19, I was in that boat, myself, and the project came to nothing.

I'm reminded of this long-abandoned project because it turns out that all the real-life versions of those artists, and more, really did gather at one place, and it was called Villa Americain. The Great War had ended wars forever, the American dollar was strong, Americans and their culture were idolized, the avant - gardists in music and the other arts were having fun and occasionally producing works of lasting value. Their hosts really did fulfill the roles of the grown-ups among the bunch.

I've now read about them in Amanda Vaill's bittersweet biography, EVERYBODY WAS SO YOUNG, the biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy. Checking up on them in Google, I find a consensus that this is the couple everyone means when they talk about making one's life a work of art. The first biography of them, in 1971, was called LIVING WELL IS THE BEST REVENGE.

Gerald had been a socializing bon-vivant at boarding school and at Yale, always a couple of percentage points away from failing. He rejected outright the life that was expected of him, to follow into the family business, a fashionable retail outfit called the Mark Cross Company. His later letters suggest that he was also homosexual, but he wouldn't admit this to anyone in clear terms, not even to himself. Despite that, his marriage to childhood friend Sara seems to have been happy on many levels: they adored their three children, they were partners in important decisions, they enjoyed each other, they developed their tastes at a time when "anything went," and they enjoyed what they could do for others with their money.

Gerald took time out to enroll in the army for the Great War, though he saw no combat. He emerged with a stronger sense of himself, and he applied himself (for the first time) when he began to study drafting and architecture. One of his art teachers discouraged any kind of representational art, focused entirely on abstract shape and design.

During the 20s, Murphy made a splash as an American painter (or "Amurrican" as Picasso called him, approvingly). Vaill has interesting things to say about Murphy's paintings, and how they apply his draftsmanship and penchant for abstraction to objects that had personal significance for him: his father's watch, his martini mixing paraphernalia (he reportedly mixed drinks "like a priest saying Mass"), and objects in his library that represented his father's regimented world and disapproval. Here's what Ken Johnson of the Boston Globe wrote in a review of Williams College Museum of Art's (WCMA.org) retrospective of the Murphy's memorabilia and artwork (summer 2007):

Gerald's seven surviving paintings are the heart and soul of the exhibition. "Razor" (1924), a still-life picture of a safety razor and a fountain pen crossed before a box of safety matches, is like a Jazz Age coat of arms, as coolly controlled and explosively lively as a Fred Astaire dance number. "Watch" (1925) is a dazzlingly complicated, 6-by-6-foot enlargement of the inner works of a pocket watch rendered in an exacting, Precisionist style in 14 shades of gray plus two shades of mustard yellow.

Another critic points out that Murphy's works anticipate Pop Art by forty years.

Johnson comments on another painting, in light of what Murphy called his heart's "defects":

In this light, "Wasp and Pear" might be revealing. The pear's generous bottom is easily read as a human behind, a luscious, ambiguously gendered object of sexual desire. Yet the desiring subject is a hideous monster - a reflection, maybe, of Murphy's anxiety over the nature of his own passion.

Perhaps Murphy realized more or less unconsciously that he was approaching a fateful juncture: to continue painting would be to reveal more openly the truth of his secret urges and shame. (He considered "Wasp and Pear" his best work, by the way.) Yet to cover up the truth - by means, say, of an emptied-out formalism - would constitute a kind of creative suicide. Perhaps it was better, all things considered, to just stop painting.

But there were two more clear reasons to stop painting in 1929. Young son Patrick fell ill with TB, and lingered for years before it killed him. In the meantime, his healthy older brother Baoth contracted measles at boarding school, and the treatment led to an infection that became meningitis, and he died suddenly, all in a matter of days. "Lightning striking twice,"said Gerald in forlorn retreat from the life he and Sara had known. Beginning with these deaths, he finally went into the family business, the Mark Cross store in Boston, which he had avoided so long.

The story becomes more and more sad, tainted by the Depression, the rise of Fascism, and the repeated personal betrayals by ungrateful artists who had accepted Gerald and Sara's hospitality, patronage, and huge personal loans. Foremost among these are the obnoxious F. Scott Fitzgerald and back-stabbing Ernest Hemingway. Tender is the Night and A Moveable Feast make clear and unflattering portraits of the Murphys.

The one person I was most interested in before beginning to read this was Cole Porter. I was surprised to discover that Gerald and Sara Murphy appeared prominently as supporting characters in the Porter bio-pic DE-LOVELY that I saw a couple of years ago. Here, I learned about Porter's one orchestral score, WITHIN THE QUOTA, a ballet about immigrants in the US, for which Gerald Murphy conceived and executed a backdrop consisting of a fanciful mock-newspaper ("UNKNOWN MILLIONAIRE BUYS ATLANTIC OCEAN" reads the headline).

In the 1950s, New York became the center of the avant-garde, and they watched "from the sidelines," writes Amanda Vaill. Gerald became anti-communist, though this lost him the company of old friends -- Dorothy Parker took anti-communist to be "anti-Dottie," Murphy said. Gerald died of cancer; Sara began to show signs of alzheimer's in the mid-60s, and lived until 1975.

Second Thoughts on SWEENEY, Seconded

So, I'm posting about SWEENEY TODD for the third time in five days. Why not? I've waited twenty-eight years for the movie.

I've seen the movie three times, now, and I've checked web sites that compile reviews from published critics as well as from casual movie fans. So far, the only people who seem to have disliked it are the ones who've been sitting with me. The third time, I went alone, and the audience behind me laughed and audibly gasped at the surprising twists - very gratifying.

Speaking to a friend who asked me today how I liked it, I had to admit to a harsh ambivalence: the movie is everything I ever dreamed it would be, and yet I cannot recommend it to anyone I care about.

This week's WEEKLY STANDARD includes a review of SWEENEY TODD that touches on the revulsion one feels watching the movie, which I experienced as shame at myself for enjoying it. Critic John Podhoretz begins his reflection with reference to Brooks Atkinson's comment in 1940 about PAL JOEY, a musical now recognized as a masterpiece: Despite the merits of the music (Richard Rodgers), lyrics (Lorenz Hart), and performance (Gene Kelly as Joey), Atkinson asked rhetorically, "Can anything sweet come from a foul well?" Podhoretz says, "this remarkable movie [SWEENEY TODD] isn't merely a foul well, but an open sewer."

Yet Podhoretz calls himself a "devotee" of Sondheim's show, having seen it five times and claiming that he can sing the show from start to finish by memory (something I've done on long trips for many years now) and he is "lost in admiration" for this movie, a "brilliant truncation of Sondheim's sweeping three-hour tragedy into a brisk and intimate two-hour musical thriller." Still he, too, uses caution recommending it. He says that people "will be justified in walking out and demanding a refund at the box office."

He offers this bit of justification for the "Vital Gore" (as he cleverly calls it -- two weeks after the magazine's obituary for that crank Gore Vidal):

Burton's decision to be brutal and graphic was a necessary one. If he had held back, Sweeney Todd [and Mrs. Lovett] might come across as lovable. . . and the whole project would have descended into camp.

Podhoretz is one of the critics who praise Helena Bonham Carter. Even the raves have been snarky about her. I appreciate her performance more each time I see it. I'm put off by the doll-like immobility of her face in this film, but that seems to have been a purposeful choice, to strike a fashionable stance called "Goth" in contemporary culture. But her eyes tell a wide range of stories -- notably, when she whispers in Todd's ear, "Silver's good enough for me . . . Mr. T.," and when she's justifying her repulsive plan: "Such a nice plump frame wot's-his-name has . . . had? . . . has!" One critic observed that she's not so much Sweeney's lover as his manager -- and that helped to put her performance in perspective for me. Near the end, as events spin out of her control, her eyes tell that story, too: narrowing with defensive hatred when she orders Toby to "throw the old woman out!" and widening with involuntary panic when the Beadle startles her, and welling with tears when she realizes that the boy Toby knows too much to live.

Even my friends who disliked the movie have singled out young Edward Sanders for his performance as actor and boy soprano in the role of Toby. When the movie seems to have hardened into pure gore and heartlessness, he softens it. He's the one truly human being in the whole movie.

Another critic pointed out a line added for the movie that makes a stronger connection between Sweeney Todd and his nemesis Judge Turpin. There's always been that line about their "fellow spirit" and their "fellow tastes in women," but screenwriter - producer John Logan adds an offhanded comment for the judge moments after we've seen him sentence a little boy to hang:

JUDGE TURPIN: Was he guilty?
BEADLE BAMFORD: If he wasn't, he certainly had done something to justify the punishment.
JUDGE TURPIN: As which man has not?

That is, of course, the same thought that Sweeney sings in "Epiphany": "We all deserve to die."

There's more to say about musical technique. Intrigued by a blog posting ("The Obtuse Melodies of Sweeney Todd" at a blog called "The Playlist"), I read Johnny Depp's comment that Sondheim's melodies are "obtuse." The blog posted my comment about the melodies, as follows:

I wonder if Depp (quoted in ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY) was thinking of some other word when he said "obtuse?" That word usually connotes stupidity of the stubborn sort ("ob-" meaning, "in the way of," like an obstruction). "Obtuse" angles are wide and fat, and yet Depp seems to be commenting on the "acute" intervals in the music: literally "sharp"-edged.

I've tried to pick some of the melodies and accompaniment out on the piano, and discover that, playing the melody to one, I'm also playing the accompaniment to the other. Sondheim, a puzzle-lover and a trained composer, likes to cross-reference bits of songs this way.

For instance:

- the main theme played so loudly in the opening credits is hundreds of years old, going to the words "Dies Irae, Dies Illae" ("Day of wrath, day of mourning") of the ancient Catholic requiem.

- The same pattern of notes, played rapidly and softly (in musical terms, an "ostinato" because it's stubborn or "obstinate!") then altered a bit, show up often in the score (associated with the phrase, "There's a hole in the world like a great black pit," and with Mrs. Lovett's song "Wait").

- While that same pattern plays in the low strings during the opening title, we hear some wind instruments play a counter melody above -- and that becomes the second phrase that Sweeney sings in the movie: "Life has been kind to you," and appears all the way through the movie. The melody that fits over those becomes, "There was a barber and his wife. . ."

- and the notes for the words "There was a barber and his wife" also begin each phrase of Sweeney's lovely melody where the movie is most gross, a song called "Johanna," when he sings, "And are you beautiful and pale . . . Johanna?" though the melody turns in another direction.

So maybe Depp meant "angular?" "Obscure" (in the sense of dark)? "Ostinato?" Maybe "abstruse" -- pushed to the limit, difficult to comprehend? All of these: but not obtuse!

SWEENEY: Second Opinions

So far, I and my friends are the only ones who've expressed anything negative about Tim Burton's film of Stephen Sondheim's SWEENEY TODD. I'd be happy to change my mind; after all, I've been looking forward to this movie since 1979. Maybe my outlook was influenced by my friend's reaction to the gore, coupled with the fact that I had excited my seventh grade students about seeing this show. How could I respond if a parent were to ask me angrily, "What made you think that slasher film was appropriate for my child?" For the stage show, that was never problematic.

Here's some writing I've found relating to my qualms, including some comments by Stephen Sondheim himself.

Writing in the Washington Post (12/21/2007), columnist Peter Marks writes, "By excising choral numbers and highlighting the sorrow inside the sordidness of Sondheim's wit-strewn score, Burton invites us into a more intimate communion with horrible yet hummable aspects of human nature." While I worry that the gleefulness in gallows humor is missing, Marks notes the same thing as a strength:
"Helena Bonham Carter [makes] Mrs. Lovett — Sweeney's cannibalistic comrade-in-harms — a woman less comical than, but just as poignant as, the Broadway character Angela Lansbury created 28 years ago." As for the sadness and goreyness, which to me seemed unredeemed by "joy in the telling" (as a religious man, that's important to me), Marks observes that, in "the slightly distorted consistency and color of what oozes out of everyone's necks . . . we are not in the domain here of chainsaw massacres, but art."

Sondheim himself responds directly to my concern about the way that a film musical cannot generate the same rapport between audience and singer as a stage musical can do. He is interviewed on the subject of his movie by David Benedict in an article in the London Observer ("The Singalong-a-Slasher," Sunday December 23, 2007). Sondheim says:

'On stage, generally speaking, the story is stopped or held back by songs, because that's the convention. Audiences enjoy the song and the singer, that's the point. Static action - if that's not an oxymoron - is accepted. It's what writer Burt Shevelove used to call "savouring the moment". That's a very tricky business on film. It's fine if the songs are presentational, as in a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers-style movie where you watch them for the fun of it, but not with storytelling songs. When the song is part of the action and working as dialogue, even two minutes is way too long.' The interviewer continues: "He's considerably cheered, however, to learn of a test screening in California after which college-age audiences besieged Logan with positive comments along the lines of: 'I forgot they were singing.' [Sondheim exclaims], 'That's exactly what I wanted!'"

Missing Applause for SWEENEY TODD

(reflections on the film SWEENEY TODD, THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET by Tim Burton, script by John Logan, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. For the record: I saw the original Broadway cast on the day after they wrapped up the recording, 1979; the original London cast, Drury Lane Theatre, 1980; a wonderful small-scale production on a basement stage by Atlanta's Theatre Gael, 2000; the Kennedy Center's "Sondheim Celebration" production, 2002; and a passable production at a local college, around 2004.)

I've always recommended SWEENEY TODD to my students without a qualm. The tale of bloody revenge was redeemed by the excellence -- and fun -- in its telling. Now I've seen the movie, and I have a qualm.

Ecstatic reviews led me to hope that this film would do for composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim what the film of WEST SIDE STORY did for his friend Leonard Bernstein. People would crowd the theatres to see Johnny Depp and come away elated as I've always felt after seeing SWEENEY TODD on stage. At last, the world would understand what I (and a few hundred thousand other people) have treasured for decades.

But, while the stage version ends with a gruesomely funny chorus, warm applause, deep breaths and smiles, the film ends with a very grim, very gorey, very sad final image. Where I saw it in a packed theatre, the audience just shrugged and silently emptied the seats. If the movie is going to be your introduction to SWEENEY TODD, please, don't see it. Wait for the next stage version to come to town.

What's missing? The movie's creative team preserved as much of the original material as any Sondheim fan could hope, and the performers inhabit their roles with conviction, and they hit all the right notes. The roiling dark skies over 1840s London match Sondheim's ominous music with a breathtaking macabre beauty. It's a pleasure to see the stage picture realized, at least, at first. All the jokes are intact, though only scattered chuckles greeted moments that have caused uproarious laughter when I've seen it in theatres.

Here's the main difference, and it's nobody's fault: musicals, even this one, are built to generate goodwill between audience and performers, and that can't happen when the actors aren't there.

For example, on stage, when an actress playing "Mrs. Lovett" sings "The Worst Pies in London," it's a virtuosic and comic turn. She kneads dough, pounds it and rolls it, swats bugs, attends to her customer, all the while singing rhythms and tongue-twisting lyrics that reflect her scatter-brained character. She has high notes, low notes, laugh lines, and, during her final long note, there's a flurry of activity to wrap up one complete pie on the last downbeat. For her efforts, and for the live orchestra that keeps up with her, the audience always breaks into warm applause.

When Helena Bonham-Carter does the same thing, it's all finely timed and flawlessly sung -- but she's doing it for a camera, not for us. It's more cinematography than choreography. The song was pre-recorded; the bugs appear on cue thanks to editing; her hands could be stunt doubles for all we know! Imagine seeing a juggler, not live, but an animated cartoon, and you'll understand what's lacking.

Something else is missing that happens when we applaud for a live cast musical. We tell the performers how they've pleased us, and they acknowledge us by waiting for the applause to fade. So, at the end of every scene, there's this moment when the story and characters are suspended and we all tell each other: this is a play, you're doing this for us, we're grateful. Then we resume the story.

Without the rapport that applause generates in live productions of SWEENEY TODD, its highpoints fall flat. Twenty-eight years after seeing the original cast, I remember chills when Len Cariou as "Sweeney" turned to my section of the audience and pointed his razor at us: "Who sir? You sir? No one's in the chair, c'mon, c'mon!" We laughed because we were startled, and Len Cariou as "Sweeney" seemed to enjoy the effect he was having, while he prowled up and down levels of the stage and exerted his voice to its highest pitch. In the movie, this same moment is performed as a kind of fantasy sequence, and Johnny Depp's voice and expressions and body language are appropriate, and the staging is very good, but his invitation to us is deflected to third persons, men on screen. The medium blunts the impact, kills the laughs, and fails to connect us to the character.

Most disappointing of all in the movie is SWEENEY's most lauded musical number. On stage, it's the end of Act One, and the two main characters mug for the audience in a blackly comic song, "A Little Priest." They perform for us like music hall singers of old, and the song even includes a straight-up vaudeville comedy routine with puns and a rhyming contest. At that point in the show, the audience and the actors are sharing laughter, and it's all in fun. An amazing thing happens: we become complicit with the main characters, being in on their joke, eager as Sweeney for revenge. Every house I've been in has applauded wildly at the end as the couple strike their iconic pose -- knife and rolling pin raised. In the movie, their pose is just an odd image at the end of a mildly amusing song.

More intimate songs, such as "My Friends" and "Wait" fare better. One song actually lands in the movie with even more impact than it does on stage, thanks to a wise casting choice. The song "No One's Going to Harm You" was a relief from all the blood and thunder of the original, a lullabye from "Toby," the childlike adult simpleton, to Mrs. Lovett. In the movie, the character Toby is a tousled boy soprano, and Mrs. Lovett is touched and amused. As he sings more earnestly about how he will protect her, we watch Helena Bonham-Carter's growing awareness that the boy knows too much.

Isolated moments are wonderful; the music is rich and layered as ever; the plot clicks into place like the blood-lubricated gears in the opening credits. Yet, if this movie had been my introduction to SWEENEY TODD, I would never have loved the show. Sondheim has always written his music and lyrics for live audiences, and his work seems out of place on film.


( It so happens that I've seen High Definition live broadcasts of Metropolitan Opera productions in this very movie theatre, and, tellingly, much of the audience does applaud, and the producers cannily draw us into the performance via backstage shots and interviews at intermission. The effect is very close to that of being in a live production.)

Rumi at 800: Muslim Poet for us all

(ruminations on the poet Rumi, in translation by Coleman Barks, set to music by Christopher Theofanidas, and as discussed on the Radio Program SPEAKING OF FAITH by Fatemeh Keshavarz, professor of Persian & Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis)

Across the eight centuries since his birth, and across the oceans separating his homeland Afghanistan from us, the personal voice of the poet Rumi came through a chorus and three soloists with full orchestra, in dozens of colors and textures during a memorable concert a couple years ago, at the premiere of "the Music of our Final Meeting" by Christopher Theofinidas. What I heard was tenderness, playfulness, generosity, sensuality, and a saintly focus on eternity. Theofinidas's music responded in kind, with clarity and inventive variety.

After hearing that concert, I bought selected poems of Rumi, in their popular translation from Persian by Coleman Barks, the book that had inspired the composer. Reading it, I bogged down, not least because I'm put off by Barks's choice of re-grouping Rumi's two- and four-line fragments into longer poems with made-up titles. While I often liked what I read under such titles as "At the Tavern," I wondered if this contemporary of mine was putting a spin on Rumi. I lost trust in the translator.

Yesterday, hearing the discussion of Rumi by professor Fatemeh Keshavarz, I heard some confirmation of my suspicion. She was unflaggingly upbeat in praising Barks and others for their work, while also observing that Barks has systematically downplayed the worshipful nature of the poetry. I was struck by the fact that Keshavarz never once mentioned the relationship that Barks emphasizes above all themes in Rumi's work, a friendship (teacher - mentor?) with a travelling mystic named Shams.

I'm re-reading Barks, more carefully, and finding much to enjoy. I particularly liked an image of one's shadow, which follows behind, but sometimes rushes ahead -- as a metaphor for language. Yes, words lag behind the reality, and sometimes words get ahead and shape our perceptions.

Religiously speaking, I'd say Rumi's whole theology / philosophy comports well with my favorite letter of St. Paul, that to the Philippians: "I press on towards the goal of the upward call of perfection in Jesus Christ." Again and again, Rumi is telling us that we will ALWAYS feel incomplete, and that's GOOD -- if you think you've arrived, you're dead. Our dissatisfactions are good for us: we are separated from God, and dissatisfaction is a sign of our longing for completeness in God.

Other desires are good, too, stopping-points on the way to completeness in God. One poem includes the lines, "If anyone asks how did Jesus raise the dead / Kiss me on the lips and say, "like this."

Keshavarz explains that Muslims don't have the Christian concept of original sin. Rather, we are separated from God because we "forget." Thus the first words of the Koran are about "remembering."

Finally, the conversation turned to that monkey in Hindu iconography, the one that represents our restless minds, endlessly grasping at branches and vines. (see earlier blog entry, "Gyrovagueness.") Rumi evidently writes of this a lot, and advises centeredness on a goal to counteract the enervating effect of that "onrush" of concerns.

He also breaks down compartments in our lives, always juxtaposing opposites.

I know good when I see it: Rumi is good. I shall seek an alternative translation, perhaps via this Keshavarz.

Those Who Stood at Nanking

(reflection to interview heard on Bob Edwards's radio program today.)

Like the producer of the documentary NANKING, I must admit that it's news to me that twenty-two westerners working in China, men and women, chose not to escape the Japanese onslaught in 1937. Their home governments sent ships to rescue them, and the Chinese officials of Nanking escaped, but the Westerners stood together to create a "safety zone."

I visited the website and reprint these bits of information:

Ted Leonsis, Vice-Chairman of AOL, read Iris Chang’s book THE RAPE OF NANKING . Leonsis was shocked that he knew nothing about an event that had been such a terrible injustice and he felt that telling its story would have real meaning for today’s world. ...[He was] moved by the courage of the handful of Westerners who stayed behind in Nanking at the beginning of World War II to create a Safety Zone, protecting over two hundred thousand Chinese from rampaging Japanese troops. Their story shows that the actions of ordinary individuals in extraordinary circumstances can make a difference.

The events now known as ‘the rape of Nanking’ lasted approximately six weeks. The city was looted and burned, and marauding Japanese soldiers unleashed a staggering wave of violence on Nanking’s population. According to the summary judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East – also known as the Tokyo Trials, “estimates indicate that the total number of civilians and prisoners of war murdered in Nanking and its vicinity during the first six weeks of the Japanese occupation was over 200,000. Approximately 20,000 cases of rape occurred in the city during the first month of the occupation.”

Prior to the fall of the city, many Chinese fled the approaching troops and all foreign citizens were ordered to evacuate. A group of 22 European and American expatriates, however, refused to leave. Despite devastating air strikes and the threat of an oncoming army, these Westerners – including John Rabe, a Nazi businessman; Bob Wilson, an American surgeon; and Minni Vautrin, the American headmistress of a missionary college – remained behind in order to set up a Safety Zone to protect civilians. Some two hundred thousand refugees crowded into the Zone, which spanned two square miles. During the brutal occupation, Safety Zone committee members vehemently protested the army’s actions to the Japanese authorities, but the carnage continued. Every day John Rabe, Minnie Vautrin, and the others fought to keep the Safety Zone’s boundaries intact and the refugees safe. (from Nanking the Film, official web site http://nankingthefilm.com)

According to Leonsis in the interview, the headmistress of a girls' college slapped a Japanese officer and stood alone against the marauding soldiers each night to protect several thousand girls on her campus. A German businessman, member of the Nazi party, personally intervened to prevent rape. An American doctor wrote to his wife how the situation could not get worse -- there were so few people left for the Japanese to kill -- and that he could not leave China for comforts of home, because he would always carry with him the regret that he didn't do what he could to help the helpless, and that would make him less of a husband, less of a father.

Opening Windows: Impressionists and Joyce

(Reflections on the exhibit "Inspiring Impressionists" at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, following which I attempted another foray into Ulysses by James Joyce.)

My brand loyalty to Impressionism is very strong. At art museums, I save the Impressionists' displays for dessert. I sigh when I hear music associated with the "impressionists," and I'm liable to weep for Debussy's last three sonatas. So Atlanta's High Museum special exhibit Inspiring Impressionists was a special treat.

Most of the big names were gathered there. There were Cassatt, Degas, Sisley, and my favorite impressionist dark-horse, Pisarro. Here, Pisarro is represented by a close view of a young female servant carrying an empty drink glass on a tray. Just as I was noting how often an unfamiliar impressionist painting that I like turns out to be Pisarro's, I noticed the first impressionist painting in the exhibit that I didn't like, and it was his: desultory depiction of a servant sweeping a floor around a carelessly drawn table.

The big stars are Monet and Manet, and now I will be able to remember which is which. Monet is the bad boy, and Manet is the team player. Manet's modest words, writ large in the first chamber, tell us, "No one's work is less spontaneous than mine: I learned it all from studying the old masters" (quoted badly, from memory). This is the thesis statement of the exhibit. At the other end of the exhibit, Monet strikes the opposite tone, claiming total spontaneity and nothing owed to tradition. The exhibitors juxtapose his works with others that he would have known by Dutch and French artists of the century previous to his to show that his work owes something to them.

The outstanding pieces, though, were interesting precisely because they were not typical and not necessarily even likeable. It was a bit startling to see, for example, that a big canvas re-telling of the Biblical story of Jephtha and his daughter, done in the grand old style - only more stiff, more drab - was by Manet. Early work, it falls flat between the two stools of illustration and impressionism. Nearby, we see Manet's smudgy version of a Renaissance scene of the Crucifixion, beside a photo of the original. His blurring of the original's crystal-sharp images adds nothing good to the scene, but his comment about his version helped me to understand what he was after, and what he and the other impressionists do achieve in their most characteristic work. He remarks that, while he admired and copied Italian and Spanish Renaissance painters, "one cannot breathe the air" in their works.

Manet is so right! Run-of-the-mill Renaissance works are so neatly realized, so purposefully arranged, so rich in detail, that the viewer can only appreciate them, as if admiring a display through a frame, behind glass.

Impressionists seem to have opened the window to let the viewer breathe the same air as their subjects. I've always felt this about my favorite Monets, and it's true of the ones, here, too. We see some windmills under grey-white sky; we see a Dutch church at the end of an avenue bisected by a canal; we see a distant town from a curve of the Seine. We do get the impression of water's lapping, of the haze in the air, of motion, of our just happening by a scene. We feel the temperature, we hear the rustling of the tall grass. I suppose, if I were a Martian or a Saharan, I might not understand that those blurred green waves in the corner there are thick tall grasses; but, having been in fields and streams before, I feel strongly the power of these works to evoke sense - memory. Their practices of cropping the frame, of hurrying and broadening the brush strokes, of choosing subjects that are ordinary, of blurring the distinctions between objects and backgrounds, also blur the distinction between observer and observed. We feel like the artist has opened a window onto real life at some moment, somewhat carelessly, instead of feeling like the artist has staged a tableau.

To use a slightly different analogy from my own experience, it's the difference between watching a play and being in it. The blurring, the odd cropping, the lack of apparent story-telling, all leave room for the viewer (the actor, in my analogy) to imagine the environment and the feel for himself.

The impressionists are not the only ones to get this effect. For example, the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century, Vermeer especially, have that same quality of opening a window onto real life, and it's no accident that windows so often figure in their works, as the source of light for interiors, and as a source of interest as we get glimpses through them in depictions of Dutch streets. A few of those are here in this exhibit, too, including a portrait by Hals, whose work always impresses me with this quality and something else, too: good humored affection for whoever appears in his work. Another artist I didn't know, Fragonard, b. 1730, uses those same broad brush strokes in a painting of a young woman reading that achieves the same effect.

Curiously, while the Impressionists were ridiculed for their triviality and carelessness in a time when artists were expected to portray the great and to teach religious ideals, it is the impressionists' work that speaks religion as I understand it. It revels in the beauty of creation and perception itself, dignifying the homely people and objects with their close attention. It's a prominent theme of the Bible, that God is present in the smallest, the weakest, the most overlooked (cf. Joseph, the Jews, the suffering servant, the widow's mite, the Good Samaritan, and the cornerstone which the builders rejected).

All of this came to mind as I struggled once more through chapter 6 of ULYSSES. I know that Joyce struggled mightily to write it, and it's a struggle for me to read it; but when I do "get" what I'm reading, there's that same feeling that the mediator Joyce has stepped aside, and I'm really there with Dedalus and Bloom and whoever else. Again, I'm having to read like an actor, learning to make the mental connections between one line and another, with no director there to lead me through it.

I wonder if anyone has ever tried to re-write ULYSSES in a conventional narrator's voice, stage - managed and careful to distinguish thought from spoken word, past from present, main action and side-show? It wouldn't be very interesting in itself, but it might help someone (the writer, perhaps) to appreciate Joyce even more.

Updike on Beauty: Refocusing the Eye of the Beholder

(reflection on a couple of readings in DUE CONSIDERATIONS, a collection of prose by John Updike, published this past month.)

An earlier article in this blog takes up the age-old question, "Is beauty merely a matter of opinion?" (see March 27, 2007

Skirting a definitive answer, John Updike provides a succinct partial answer. "The beautiful is, from one perspective, simply what we need -- a meal to the hungry, a bed to the weary. . . ." But "appreciation of beauty is empathy with a creator." Updike, whose aspiration to be an artist was sidetracked by writing, describes the way a painting by Vermeer draws the viewer into "an ordinary world re-created by a human hand and eye, and our sense of the beautiful becomes a kind of awed applause at another human being's extreme and tender skill" (Due Considerations 663-4).

In the context of an article on "the future of faith," Updike describes the negative of his Vermeer experience. On a vacation in Italy, feeling the ubiquitous images from the life of Christ becoming "a repetition like that of certain maddening television commercials," Updike took in a contemporary art exhibition, he writes,

"I made my way from one pavilion to another, exposing myself to artificial fog and upside-down dandelions... unintelligible whispers and showers of magenta dust... a room of electronic numbers.... Everywhere, abrasive irony and nihilism. ... The desire to shock the hardened art connoisseur into some kind of response had become veritably frantic; there was hardly an inch of the void, of disgust, of scorn left to expose, in this age of post-faith. Only the vegetation and the other spectators... belonged to a world I wanted to be in, a world I could recognize to be continuous with the world of my childhood" (32).

The two passages meet in "religion" in its broad original sense of "connection" (as in ligament). The glass of water, the youthful museum-goers, the painting by Vermeer, and a stand-out painting of the Annunciation connect to the beholder's physical need or remembered experiences. The works of art connect the viewer to the creators' minds. The ugly works deny connection, except in the way they divide their audience into camps of those who look for beauty and those who deny that beauty has any reality beyond the eye of the beholder.

Gyrovagueness

(reflections on an article in the November 2007 issue of WEAVINGS by Mark S. Burrows, and a poem in POETRY by Dean Young from the same month.)

"Gyrovague," I learned today, is St. Benedict's term for the kind of monk who never settled into one monastery. Compounded from gyro "to spin" and vague, the foam on a wave, it's a perfect word for those who "drift . . . slaves to their own will and gross appetites." And who, today, doesn't?

Restless on this day of rest, I flipped idly through one journal, then another, happening on two articles germane to this topic.

First, a poem by Dean Young struck me as a kind of secular psalm celebrating the world's constant movements, its tectonic churning and the "sluggish seeth[ing]" of ice bergs and tides. Young's own lines demonstrate how the mind flits from one things to another, associating sounds (mouse, house, moon, mood, "sadness heaving" and "gladness somersaulting... like a kid's drawing of a snowflake"). Even when the poem seems to be settling down into a love lyric, it flies off again with a fantasia on terminology shared between cars and guns:

...No matter
how stalled I seem, some crank in me
tightens the whirly-spring each time I see
your face so thank you for aiming it
my way, all this flashing like polished
brass, lightning, powder, step on the gas,
whoosh we're halfway throught our lives . . . .
- "Easy as Falling Down Stairs" by Dean Young

A few lines after that, watching the sleeping loved one's face as she has a "galloping dream," the poet muses, "Maybe even death will be a replenishment."

That dovetailed with the next article I picked up in the journal WEAVINGS. Through time, in both life and death, the author writes, a "stream" flows "like a winter river buried beneath layers of ice." That thought, expressed by church history professor Mark S. Burrows, takes off from lines by Rilke about "the eternal flow" of time -- identified as an aspect of God -- that connects past and present, living and dead, in one continuum or community.

Burrows writes in the context of an article, "Vigils and the Rest," about life in the slow lane, a monastery he visits. He writes of "stability of place" experienced by monks who don't "gyrovague" around. In opposition to the life of constant motion that Dean Young seems to celebrate, Benedict's discipline offers a life of cyclical regularity in prayer and song, chores and simple meals, a stability of life that allows one to be attentive.

Just writing that, the in-born Protestant side of me shouts, "Attentive? If that's all you're doing with your life, there's nothing to be attentive to!"

So one source says, life's in constant flux, and just enjoy that. The other one says, all this motion is keeping us from ever being "present" in our own lives, and keeping us from ever knowing God's presence.

I guess both sources would agree that whooshing through our lives isn't a good thing, and they agree that something important is moving in us, "replenishing" us even in repose. The essential thing, if we can do it, is to pay attention, so that something other than drift and appetite directs us.

Of course, "paying attention" is what poetry, the arts, prayers, and this blog, are for - to hold our fleeting moments up to scrutiny, for appreciation.

The Last Five Years: Self-Expression isn't Enough

(Reflections after seeing THE LAST FIVE YEARS, written and composed by Jason Roberts Brown, at Actor's Express Theatre, Atlanta, and JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS at the Alliance Theatre, Atlanta one month earlier.)

For the last ninety minutes, a pair of appealing singing actors and an ensemble of instrumentalists took me and an audience through THE LAST FIVE YEARS, a frankly autobiographical work in which the freshly divorced Jewish composer-playwright wrote about a freshly-divorced Jewish novelist . It required a great deal of stamina from all concerned, in a way that a three hour performance of KING LEAR does not. Now I'm trying to figure out why. My thought -- which began to detach from the action around one-third of the way through the show -- is that KING LEAR somehow is about us and our world as much as it is about an ancient king. But THE LAST FIVE YEARS never gets beyond the artist's self-expression. It's never our story, and it feels a little distasteful to be watching this artful dissection of the affair, however brilliantly it's done.

Here's what's right about this production: The two stars Natasha Drena and Jonathan MacQueen were likable and pitch-perfect in songs that stretched their ranges and their breath control to the limits. The playwright-composer begins the play with Natasha as "Cathy," singing to her 28-year-old ex-husband how his leaving "still hurts." The composer follows that immediately with the husband "Jamie" at 23 singing about the "Shiksa Goddess" named Cathy whom he has just met. Beginning at opposite ends of the five year relationship, the arc of their story reaches both backwards and forwards on parallel tracks. The evening alternates between Cathy and Jamie, each singing to a telephone, or to an invisible partner, except for a magical sequence mid-way, when they marry, and another song at the end, when one is saying "Good-bye" for the night, and one is saying "Good-bye" forever. We appreciate their attraction to each other, and we sympathize with their frustrations. For awhile, we feel like participants in the affair.

Also right are the songs themselves. There's a pop-Broadway pastiche, and a classic Broadway pastiche, and a lilting waltz that could have been composed any time in the last century, but most of these songs are extended AABA songs with folk-rock sounds and pop vocal techniques. The rhymes fall into place neatly, always making a point. The lyrics seem natural, like speech. The music is composed in multiple meters to make it supple and expressive, swinging and rocking one minute, pensive the next.

Here's where I begin to find my dissatisfaction, though. The lyrics sometimes tell a specific story, as Cathy tells of her odd roommates in summer stock in Ohio, and as Jamie tells about his agent and John Updike's review of his new novel. More often, though, the lyrics are scrubbed free of specifics, and are generalized iterations of the well-worn grooves of relationship-speak: I love you, I miss you, I need to be free to pursue my dreams, I believe in you, I can do better than this, or -- old, old story -- I'm tired of my wife, so let's be lovers. I noticed that the lyrics occasionally resorted to images that had nothing to do with the milieu of the story -- something about flight here, something about water there. Only those trite images reached beyond the stereotyped concerns of the two stereotyped principles. The knowledge that this is essentially the story of the author and his ex-wife doesn't make this any more bearable. In fact, considering what a self-centered jerk the once - endearing young man turns out to be, I wondered if the whole play isn't a personal apology to his ex?

This is essentially drama as imagined by adolescents: The girls whom I teach are endlessly fascinated with who's going with whom, and who's jealous, and who's flirting -- but the interest is all in their insulated circle, nothing of interest to the rest of us.

At the end, my hosts turned to each other and said, "Okay, who's the one you hate more, him or her?" We all agreed, 'him," but that's not much of a reason to drive to Atlanta and sit through ninety minutes.

Looking back over the whole play, I can say that I'm glad I went once. I feel like I've been through the affair. That's an artistic achievement. I also appreciated the craftsmanship of the music, lyrics, and the overall structure of the play, with its backwards-forwards movement ( reflected in the song - fable about a man for whom time moves backwards). But I'd have preferred melodrama, artifice, or some kind of question to be considered besides, "Why doesn't their relationship outlive their sexual attraction?"

For contrast, there's another all-sung revue JACQUES BREL, its eponymous composer-lyricist evidently self-indulgent and self-important. Songs toyed with the same two techniques: strophic repetition, so that verse after verse travelled the same melodic ground, building to a faster or louder climax. Then there was irony: incongruously vivacious music setting grotesque and bitter lyrics, sweet little melodies for pathetic stories. Unlike FIVE YEARS, these songs are usually political, sung from a vantage point far above the personal: whether they're about "timid Frieda" or about the toredadors' bulls as a metaphor for soldiers, they're about types and groups, people who are alienated or hypocritical. The songs all have their effects, and they give the performers chances to sing softly, or growl, or sing stridently, or to dance like Vaudevillians. The end result is, rather like LAST FIVE YEARS, to think, "Gee, that composer sure is skilled, and, gee, I wouldn't want to invite him over for dinner."

Play Rabbit Hole: No Easy Answers

(reflections on RABBIT HOLE by David Lindsay-Abaire, produced by Theatre in the Square, Marietta, GA, directed by Susan Reid)

Before the play RABBIT HOLE begins, the audience at Theatre in the Square in Marietta, GA, can admire a perfect recreation of a handsome contemporary living room and kitchen, the fourth wall cut away. Once the play begins, we see maternal Becca (Antonia Fairchild), her punk sister Izzy (Kate Donadio), her affable husband Howie (Charles Horton), her ebullient mother Nat (Marianne Fraulo). For the duration of the play, they talk intelligently and naturally about the kid sister's latest boy friend, and about work, the gym, grocery shopping, real estate marketing, the dog, the Kennedys, sex, birthday gifts, and recipes. No matter where they turn for conversation, each one turns to "it" -- the couple's grief over the loss of their five year old boy Danny. By the end of Act One, this maze of conversational dead ends has the audience feeling trapped on that handsome set with the characters. When Howie tells Becca, "Something's got to change," we're there, too.

The change we hope for may come via Jason Willett, the teenager whose car struck the boy. In a letter, he asks to be allowed to meet with the parents. He says that he didn't know Danny, but the obituary mentioned Danny's toy robots, and Jason is into science fiction. Is the playwright positioning the older boy to be somehow adopted by the couple? As played by actor Matthew Judd, we hope so: he's an appealing kid, well-spoken, a little awkward, honest and earnest. We guess that he will show up at the house in Act Two, there'll be cathartic recriminations and tearful forgiveness, and in some way, he will become a part of their family. We're wise to all of this: we saw it in movies about psychotherapy (from SPELLBOUND to ORDINARY PEOPLE and beyond) and we see it enacted daily on talk shows. We know the language: "We've got to talk about this . . . It's never going to be the way it was . . . I'm in a different place from you . . . No one is to blame. . . You should talk to someone."

But these characters are too aware of popular psychology, as we are, to accept any such easy answers. That's how it is that the characters articulate their feelings clearly and honestly, yet still can't communicate. Every attempt to reach out is thwarted by their second-guessing ulterior motives. For example, when the husband gets amorous, the wife accuses him of wanting to conceive a child to replace Danny. In that scene, and nearly every scene that follows, someone protests, "That's not what I'm saying... that's not what this is about."

Usually, I find some technical aspect of the script to hold on to when the emotions are getting to me. (See my blog entry last month about THE YELLOW BOAT, another play concerning the death of a child). Here it wasn't until late in the second act that the playwright knocks a little hole to let in light from the world beyond those "four walls." It's the teenager's sci-fi story concerning a son's search for his late father through eponymous "rabbit holes" to alternate dimensions. Becca immediately draws a parallel to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, how Orpheus can't accept the death of his loved one, and he goes to the Underworld to bring her back, but, Becca says simply, "It doesn't work out."

That idea of infinite potential endings seems to me to be a key to the playwright's method in this play, as each scene is built around one or two alternate solutions to the problem of their grief, none of which quite pan out.

The characters all mean well, and they all speak well, and we like them. We laugh at their foibles and, sometimes, at their lame attempts to cover up social discomfort. We hear reflections on loss and grief that strike us as true (such as, it never goes away, but you learn to cherish it as your last link to the loved one). By the time the end of the play had arrived, I was hoping it wasn't over -- still hoping for a final resolution. What we get is less than final, but more real, and more satisfactory.