Good Actors Make Good COMPANY

"Who's high?" Neil Patrick Harris as "Robert," Jon Cryer as "David," and Jennifer Laura Thompson as "Jenny" perform at the 2011 New York Philharmonic Orchestra Spring Gala Benefit Performance Of Stephen Sondheim's "Company" at Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center on April 7, 2011 in New York City.

Photo by Dario Cantatore/Getty Images North America

(This is a further reflection on COMPANY. See previous post.)

There’s a subtle moment in the musical COMPANY, after unmarried Robert has introduced friends Jenny and David to recreational drug use.  It’s uproar, until Jenny worries that they’ll wake the kids.  She leaves for the kitchen.  David refuses another reefer, because “Jenny didn’t like it. “ But Robert observes that Jenny got very high and had a great time.  David corrects him.  “She liked it for me.” He leaves to help in the kitchen.  All Robert has to say is, “Wow.  Oh, wow.”

How does the actor playing Robert perform a line like that?  “Wow.  Oh, wow.”  What does it mean?  I’ve seen productions of COMPANY where the actor said the lines in a tone of generic disbelief.  Those productions fell flat.

But in the recently broadcast film of a concert-staging of COMPANY, actor Neil Patrick Harris made clear that “Wow, oh wow” means a combination of “Wow, you can’t do what you want when you’re married,” and, “Wow, Jenny risked herself to please David, and David just sacrificed his preferences to please Jenny.”   Harris and his costars also gave us a strong sense that there’s something deep going on that Robert can’t even begin to fathom. 

How does a good actor do it?  I can explain, having played “David” in COMPANY back at Duke University in 1978.  I’d thought I was a good actor:  I memorized my lines, figured out where the jokes were, and punched those up the same way in every rehearsal and performance.  

Then my “Jenny,” a wise student actress named Wendi Bukowitz, invited me to her apartment for dinner in character as husband and wife.  This struck me as a silly, pretentious idea.  But then we, as actors, discussed how we, as husband and wife, met each other, how we spend our days, how we know Robert, and even how our apartment is laid out.  Then we had dinner in character, talking about our day.

It still seemed like a useless exercise, until rehearsals.   Suddenly, there were all kinds of communications going on between us behind Robert’s back, but picked up by the audience.  She glanced up to Junior’s room, and I knew what she was silently telling me. I made an innocuous statement, and she picked up the message, “I love you. I’ll do the right thing.”  

In our tiny studio theatre, the audience easily picked up on the subtleties of our performance, and the local critic singled out our scene for the ways we communicated feelings under the dialogue – what actors call “subtext.”

In the concert COMPANY, and also in the DVD of John Doyle’s Broadway revival of the show, the actors all do a great job of communicating the subtext.  

Perhaps COMPANY is too subtle to be appreciated where audiences can’t see those sidelong glances and locked gazes, where a camera doesn’t focus on the actor who says nothing while the others prattle.  That might explain how the conventional wisdom about COMPANY has been so wrong for so long.  Even in recent blog postings, it’s a given that COMPANY is a “cynical” show with weak script, clever but heartless songs by Stephen Sondheim, and “the kinds of characters you avoid at cocktail parties.” Conventional wisdom holds that the creators of the show palliated its anti-marriage message by tacking on Robert’s final prayer, “Somebody hold me too close… Somebody make me aware of being alive.” 

But the conventional wisdom has been wrong for forty years.  “Being Alive” is a breakthrough:  Robert is the last one at the party to “get it.”  Finally, he reads the subtext.

COMPANY on Film: Review

(reflection on the filmed presentation of COMPANY, book by George Furth, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, originally directed by Harold Prince.  Presented at Avery Fischer Hall by the New York Philharmonic, directed by Lonny Price, conducted by Paul Gemignani.)

I'm pleased to announce, after all these years, that my favorite Sondheim show is, hands down, COMPANY.  NIGHT MUSIC has those elegant waltzes, SWEENEY TODD all that glorious heart-pumping music in every scene, FOLLIES those layers of reality, SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE its lovely treatment of the themes of art, family, and mortality.

But today, sitting in a movie theatre to see a broadcast on the big screen of the entire show, I'm ready to commit.   

In an interview with Terry Gross about the concert version of COMPANY, Stephen Colbert divulged that he and the other cast members didn't understand until the first rehearsal that this was going to be more than a staged reading of the show.  They rehearsed two weeks.  So I expected some laughs from George Furth's best zingers, and a glorious sound from the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and a miss-matched bunch of TV actors hamming and missing cues..  Instead, I saw an ensemble committed to making their characters distinct and real.  The care that went into each moment was moving, all by itself, apart from the script and score. 

Director Lonny Price staged this musical with variety and focus, though he had to do the whole show on a narrow horizontal strip between orchestra and front row.  The play features five married couples and their single friend Robert, so the set consisted of five 1970s - modern sofas for two stripped in chromium and rolling easily into configurations to make separate living rooms, or a restaurant, or a parade.

TV stars well known to others have been dinged by some on-line critics for giving merely serviceable performances, and I'm surprised.  I have more to say about their acting, and George Furth's writing for actors, in my article "Good Actors Make Good COMPANY.")

RENT: Quaint

L-R, front row: John Stewart as "Benny," Michael K. Harry as "Collins," Felicia Boswell as "Mimi," Stanley Allyn Owen as "Roger," and Maxim Gukhman as "Mark." Image from Atlanta Lyric Theatre's Facebook page.

I've recently seen both FOLLIES and RENT.   FOLLIES (see my review "Haunting and Haunted"), from 1971, concerns old people haunted by memories of the 1930s and 1940s.  RENT opened in the mid-1990s just after the death of its young creator Jonathan Larson,.  But RENT is the one that feels more dated.

The production by Atlanta Lyric Theatre at the Earl Smith Strand Theatre in Marietta, Georgia, was energetically performed by a cast of strong singers, all of them earnest actors, dressed in a variety of the uniforms worn in the 90s by defiant non-conformists under thirty.    Enunciation was clear, dancing was energetic and virile in that fist-pumping way that we’ve come to expect from modern performers. Scaffolding climbed the stage’s bricked walls to create the urban milieu of the story. The rock band rocked; the lights directed our attention to the right places.


But the rock music had a quaint feel.  It has become the music of men with thinning hair and AARP cards.  (Recently an eighth grader complained to me, “What’s the music going to be? I hope it won't be rock.”) Worse, the high-strung emotional songs, the attitude of the defiant anthems -- complete with middle-finger -- all seemed generalized, just what we'd expect from rock anthems of this or that type. We applauded the performers emotional sounds; we didn’t share them.

One character mentions that he’s on AZT, a drug that I haven’t heard mentioned in so long that I’d forgotten about it. In the time of RENT's composition, it was the only hope for slowing the progress of the AIDs virus.

The transvestite Angel and his lover Collins got more laughs and more tears for their strand of the story than other couples in the show. From initial attraction through deepening affection, their story seemed real. The principal romance between Roger and Mimi, starting over a candle (a device borrowed from the show’s source, La Boheme), seemed much less substantial. So far as I could tell, Roger liked the shape of her rear end, and she liked cocaine. The ups and downs of their relationship just didn’t mean much.

One character made perfect sense, all the way through:  Bad guy "Benny," played with fierce presence and often affable demeanor by John Stewart, was clear in his intentions, his self-justification, and his mixed feelings.

Larson knew his Broadway as well as his rock. The show clarified and perked up whenever the music was driven by character, not the beat. There were those Bernstein / Sondheim places where several groups of characters sang different lyrics and different material in counterpoint. There were pastiches, such as the amusing “Tango: Maureen” and “email” messages from characters’ parents. “I’ll Cover You,” sung by Angel and Collins, was rousing and touching. When Roger and Mimi stopped yelling and whispered, “I should tell you, I should tell you…,” they were at their most interesting.

That’s what they were singing at the inevitable death of Mimi, and I was tearing up. It works in La Boheme, too, as the tenor, realizing that she has died, sings just one word, “Mimi!” and the curtain falls. So, what happened after Roger sang “Mimi” in RENT seemed like a cheap trick from some light comedy.

”Seasons of Love,” which opens the second act, is as good as the show gets, encapsulating the show’s best intentions in one lovely anthem.

Kennedy Center's FOLLIES: Haunting and Haunted

Eliot Elisofson's photo of Gloria Swanson in the wreckage of the Roxy Theatre.  In the
mid-1960s, this image was an inspiration for James Goldman and Stephen Sondheim's FOLLIES.

(reflections on the musical FOLLIES at Kennedy Center June 4.  Book by James Goldman, Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, originally directed in 1971 by Harold Prince, co-directed by Michael Bennett.)

FOLLIES is a ghost story.  I found the Kennedy Center's production to be haunted by images of earlier productions.

To be fair, a show about aging performers of the Thirties and Forties confronting death and lost ideals may never again be quite so poignant as it was in 1971, when it starred aging performers of the Thirties and Forties. My three companions, who had no such preconceptions, laughed, shuddered, and teared up at all the right moments. 

The audience enters KC’s Eisenhower Theatre to find the walls and proscenium shrouded with loose-hanging safety curtains.  The jagged wreck of the stage’s apron overhangs the orchestra pit.   We are in the fictional “Weissman Theatre,” once glamorous and soon to be demolished for a parking lot. 

Doom-filled chords begin the “Prologue” and the shroud lifts to reveal a statuesque chorine in glittery gray.  As the music hushes to an eerie waltz (one of Sondheim’s most evocative pieces), more ghostly chorines appear and join in a delicate ballet.

The ghosts never leave the stage, even during intermission, and aged characters are shadowed by ghosts of their youthful selves. These ghosts re-enact songs and scenes of the past, and play important roles in the drama of two couples who come to a “first and last reunion” at the theatre.

The story is simple: Sally married Buddy, and Phyllis married Ben, but now Sally has come to the reunion to recapture “the time [she] was happy” by recapturing Ben. In this crisis, each character has to confront the realization that, at mid-life, their lives have been “time wasted, merely passing through.”

Reviews of the original 1971 Broadway production often disparaged James Goldman’s book and the “book” songs in Sondheim’s score, saving the most positive comments for Sondheim’s “pastiche” songs, those written in the style of earlier Broadway composers. Viewing this production, my companions and I had the reverse reaction.

James Goldman’s script gives us a dozen characters’ back stories in brief bits of dialogue, peppered with zingers.   Scene by scene, Sally reveals the depth of her delusions.     Ben’s veneer of accomplishment wears away until he reveals that he feels like a phony, and so he has never experienced love (as opposed to affairs and flings).   Only the reconciliations at the end seemed too quick, too neat; two of my friends came to Goldman’s defense, feeling that the characters were returning home with their eyes opened: not a happy ending, but a chastened beginning of the rest of their lives.

In Sondheim’s “book” songs, the characters reveal what they think – or like to think – of themselves.   “The road you didn’t take never comes to mind, does it?” asks Ben.   “In Buddy’s eyes, I’m young, I’m beautiful,” sings Sally.  “It was always real, and I’ve always loved you this much,” promises Ben to Sally.  Buddy sings about how good life is “when you’ve got the right girl,” but then can’t finish the refrain, “And I’ve got….” After kicking chairs in frustration, performer Danny Burstein ended the song in tears.

By the time Phyllis sings to Ben, “Could I leave you? Yes!” the drama has reached an impasse.   A curtain falls, the characters and their ghosts intermingle, all yelling recriminations at each other, and suddenly, that curtain is ripped down to reveal arches of giant red-pink roses spanning the stage. 

This production’s principals, choreographer and dancers really nailed those “Follies” numbers that bring the show to a climax.  The chorus sang “Loveland” while the two couples wandered, dazed, about the stage.  The young couples sang clearly, charmingly, in the double-duet “You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow / Love Will See Us Through.”  Bernadette Peters sang “Losing My Mind” with quiet intensity, not moving from her spot stage center;  Ron Raines as “Ben” sang and danced “Live, Laugh, Love” with requisite confidence – before the dance falls apart.  Standouts of the evening were Danny Burstein in “Buddy’s Blues,” whose clarity, enthusiasm, and inspired athletic antics with two girl dancers made me laugh at this number as if it were new to me.  Jan Maxwell, as the femme fatale surrounded by fawning, leaping boys, made “Lucy and Jessie” the showstopper of the evening.

Between episodes in the slow-motion collision of the two couples, FOLLIES gives us old girls singing and dancing their old songs, always shadowed by their younger selves.   These numbers were high-points of the original production; here, they came close to dispelling all the ghostly atmosphere and dramatic tension that director Eric Schaeffer and his cast had been at pains to create.

A few times, the numbers worked as the creators intended.   A delightful pair of elderly performers, “The Whitmans” (played by Susan Watson and Terrence Currier)  sang a cute “specialty” tap song – “Listen to the rain on the roof go pit-pitty-pat” -- as if happy to be remembering their days of modest success.  Upstage, their youthful “ghosts” performed the dance with grace that the older pair no longer could match. 

“One More Kiss” reaches its musical climax on the phrase, “All things beautiful must die,” and the truth of that line is proven in the music, the image, and even in the casting. In the role of "Heidi Schiller," soprano Rosalind Elias, her voice strong but husky, takes the low note in harmony while Young Heidi's more supple and clear voice reaches much higher.   Throughout her number, even as she sang the words, “Never look back,” Miss Elias as "Heidi" was looking back with longing at her younger self.  At the end of the song, during the applause, she seemed to be lost in a painful memory, and she wandered off stage, looking a bit lost.  (In the Broadway revival of 2001, a young man touched the elderly soprano on the arm, and tugged her gently towards the exit, while she peered back plaintively into the darkness of the house – the most memorable moment of that production.)

The “mirror song” (“Who’s That Woman?”) brings a chorus line of flabby, stiff or haggard women into step with their younger selves.  One of my friends teared up to see this;  I was struck by the image of spry “Mrs. Whitman” stumbling mid-spin, disoriented, while her younger self twirled behind her.

But other stars of the show punched holes right through the fourth wall, as if they were trying to impress the audience at a benefit concert.  Regine, unsteady on her feet, anchored herself to a spot stage left and delivered "Ah, Paris!" sans enthusiasm (or consonants), and then paused to receive her expected allotment of applause.  Linda Lavin, swathed in a tight, shiny gold dress, belted "Broadway Baby" and even raised the pitch an octave for a grand smash.  But the song loses a lot of its interest if the aged singer who swears to "stick it till I'm on a bill all over Times Square" appears to be a confident, healthy, glamorous star.  The woman for whom it was written, Ethel Shutte, had lived those lines.  At seventy-five, she had once been a performer of the real Ziegfeld follies, a has – been, or a never-quite-was.  To see that old lady up there in her matronly skirt, finally getting her (last) chance to be in a "great, big, Broadway show" was wonderful, funny, and heart-breaking at the same time. 

Diva Elaine Paige's version of “I’m Still Here” likewise suffered in comparison to earlier versions.   In the original, Yvonne De Carlo had lived much of what she was singing about, no one more the “sloe eyed vamp” than she in her 1950s film roles, and no role more “camp” than “Lily Munster” in the then-recent TV sitcom. In the 2001 production, Polly Bergen and her director got it just right:  For the first half of the song, the character was regaling laughing guests at the party.  She left them laughing with, “I got through Shirley Temple, and I’m here,” and retreated to a spotlight downstage left, close to the audience. There, she sang to us the more rueful verses that begin, “I’ve been through Reno, I’ve been through Beverly Hills….”  Paige didn’t seem to get that concept. Worse, to achieve the illusion of spontaneity, she stretched the end phrase every time, an annoying affectation.  The introspective part was just a generalized belt-fest, not an expression of character.

Perhaps no production of FOLLIES can be what that first one was. This one probably came as close as possible.

Heads You Lose: The Detective Novel from the Sidelines

(Reflections on HEADS YOU LOSE by Lisa Lutz and David Heyward)

What happens when you have to suspend your suspension of disbelief?

This novel follows a sister and brother, both twenty-somethings, as they deal with an inconvenient headless corpse that shows up on their property one night, and again after they think they've disposed of it.

At each chapter's end, we cut away from the story to read snarky comments from one collaborator to the other. Lutz has published detective fiction before;  Heyward, her ex, has published at least one poem before in 1996, in Harper's, on page 32, as he reminds her.  According to her, he loses plot lines in his efforts at character development;  according to him, she kills off all the best characters.

The result is all the fun of a detective novel, with some of the fun of creating one.   I've plotted one mystery myself, once, in collaboration with seventeen eighth-graders.  I know the frustration of characters and plot that don't seem to be going the way you want them to go, and the exhilaration of finding a thread that connects all the random pieces anyway.

The two pleasures dovetail in this novel's denouement, along with the added pleasure of discovering that the title is apt in more ways than one.

Wendell Berry's Detective Novel

(Reflections on A WORLD LOST by Wendell Berry, (2008))

Image from Counterpoint Press edition

The framework for Wendell Berry's A WORLD LOST is that of a detective novel. 

Andy Catlett, fictional chronicler of many of Wendell Berry's fictions of Port William, Kentucky, remembers fondly the uncle Andrew for whom he was named, and the afternoon when he learned that Uncle Andrew had been shot to death.  Very young at the time, he accepted the family's line about a disagreement over a job. As an older man, he searches scraps of memory and artifacts to piece together what really happened.

The book hardly proceeds in a linear fashion.  Andy admits that his childhood memories are like the "illuminated capital letters" at the starts of chapters in a children's book -- recalled apart from each other, without supporting detail. 

Now, I read the book a few months ago, and enjoyed it, but I don't remember the answers to Andy's questions.   Who killed Uncle Andrew?  Had he propositioned a man's underage daughter -- or was that just an excuse, or a rumor?  I don't recall.   But then, I rarely do recall the solutions to mystery novels. 

What I do recall is the character of the uncle, and it's clear that he was trouble waiting to happen.  Isn't it Hercule Poirot who says that you find out more about the killing by finding out more about the victim?

Uncle Andrew "overflows" attempts by his well-meaning parents and brother to inhibit him.  Andy recalls with a mixture of shock and pleasure how this uncle "infused with glandular intensity" the seven-year-old boy's shy daydream about a girl.  The boy is bewildered, and yet "pleased to be carried away on the big stream of his laughter."

His uncle "carries uproar with him wherever he goes." Flirtatious, given to excesses of drink, wildly impulsive, he's dangerous.  Once some cocky teenage boys step into the road to force him to stop and offer them a ride, but he simply accelerates, chasing them off the road and then up the bank.

Naturally, a novel that probes death and memory turns into a rumination on mortality.  Like mystery novelist Walter Mozley, Berry tells us through Andy that "life does not begin with itself," and it carries on after life ends: Home is not a place, but "also that company of immortals with whom I have lived here day by day...."

Not Who You Are, But What You Serve: Two Novels by Wendell Berry

(Reflections on NATHAN COULTER (2008) and MEMORY OF OLD JACK (1974 and 1999) by Wendell Berry.)

Just when I was thinking that the people of Wendell Berry's community of Port William were too noble to be true, along comes this fictional memoir by "Nathan"  (son of Jarrad, nephew of my favorite character Burley).  It's full of people behaving badly, irascibly, cruelly, even dirtily.

The novel begins in a boy's dream of a lion with his Grampa's blue eyes, crouched and roaring outside their family home.  By the end of the novel, the boy is in his teens.  The story in between contains sordid episodes including a long sequence at an ugly carnival side show.  But the action is the way that Uncle Burley and others step up to take care of Nathan when his mother dies and the grief-stricken and angry father Jarrad fall away. The older brother, called "Brother" early on, also withdraws.  This is the Tom Coulter who will perish in the Second World War.   Nathan, we know, will go on to marry Hannah, and thereby hangs another novel.

In fact, I understand that NATHAN COULTER was Berry's first novel, and that the rest of the Port William world formed around it.

MEMORY OF OLD JACK is more complicated.  Like Updike's SEEK MY FACE, and also like a couple of wonderful stories by Berry, this novel moves forward on two tracks.  We follow old Jack Beecham in present time, from his waking in a chair at a window, before sunrise, to his return to that chair at darkness.  As he walks haltingly from the store to the barber shop and through the town that day, his mind wanders from turning point to turning point in his memory, from early memories of men going off to the Civil War onward to the day that his closest family members convince him to retire at a "hotel" in town.  We sometimes see Old Jack through the eyes of  characters who love him: Mat Feltner (second oldest man in the community) and Wheeler Catlett. 

Among Berry's characters, Jack is oldest and far from wisest.  But he comes to learn, by marrying the wrong woman and by mistakes that put him in deep debt, that distinction in life comes "not by what he was or anything that he might become but by what he served."  Berry means, the land, but also the community of those who serve the land.

Berry often links Jack's inner world to the natural one.  As a young man, Jack reins in a powerful horse...

And Jack feels that same checked and conserved abundance in himself, his shoulders pressing againstthe good broadcloth of his suit.  The whole country around him, in fact, is full of it, the abounding of energy and desire...

At church, in the company of girls and young women.

His consciousness hovers and moves now over the congregation, like a bee over a patch of flowers, in search of nectar, alert to what is bright and sweet and open. 

Much later, his fury reflects that of a stream in flash flood, and he recklessly drives his team of mules into the raging water -- a scene that one reads breathlessly.

In his marriage to a woman who shares the beliefs of the prevailing culture that all of civilization should be about acquiring the means to rise above hard work, Jack comes to embody the plight of Port William as a last stand against the engulfing commercial world.

We Loves You, Porgy

(reflections on the March 4 performance of PORGY and BESS by George Gershwin, with libretto by DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin, produced by the Altanta Opera Company. Also reflection on Pierre Ruhes' review and comments at Arts Critic Atlanta.)

photo from ArtsCriticAtlanta.org

Atlanta Opera Company's recent PORGY AND BESS dispelled the doubts I'd had about the work going into it. I'd always felt that Gershwin and his collaborators overstuffed its two acts with melodies and incidents and lost their focus. This was the line recently taken by Atlanta Critic Pierre Ruhe.


But this production made clear the opera's sharp focus on opposites in the world of Catfish Row, richly underscored by contrasts in Gershwin's music: upright religion versus underworld sensuality, gospel versus jazz, "Doctor Jesus" versus Sportin' Life, women versus men, town versus country, work versus release. In two amusing episodes, there'a also white versus black: whites cynical, bullying, speaking their terse lines; blacks wary, submissive, singing their responses.


Gershwin's music establishes a chiaroscuro design. In just the first couple of minutes, Gershwin opposes the pounding piano of the dance hall against the fond yearnings of hope and religious faith in "Summertime." The mother's dreamy lullabye contrasts minutes later to the father's mocking one. Men roll dice to a quirky, percussive music that pervades the act, and Gershwin eventually layers the strains of "Summertime" over the gambling music as the first scene reaches its climax.


Porgy is the fulcrum of the structure. His music sets him apart. Calls of "here comes Porgy" and a swelling of good feeling with lively music mark the crippled man's entrance on his little pallet with wheels. The stage is crowded with the men who are gambling, and the women who are disapproving, and the merchants selling their wares. Porgy is asking about Bess, consort of the thug Crown, and someone asks if he's "soft on Bess." Porgy replies, "No, no, brudder, Porgy ain't sof' on no woman," and then all action on stage is suspended as Porgy begins this odd and wonderful little piece:

They pass by singin', they pass by cryin', always lookin'.

They look in my do' an' they keep on movin'.
When Gawd make cripple, He mean him to be lonely.

Night time, day time, He got to trabble dat lonesome road.

Night time, day time, He got to trabble dat lonesome road.

It's not a full-fledged song, and it's not recitative. Up to the word "movin'," it's a series of short phrases that rise and fall, interrupted by harsh orchestral echoes of the two-syallable words "singin'" and "cryin'." They sound like alarm bells. Then the line soars from "God" to "lonely," before falling back to the mournful repeated lines.


Then action resumes, a story of how Porgy comes to be Bess's protector, and he grows into full life at last.

Bess teeters between the opposites of this world, rejected by the righteous women, abused by the criminal men. Caring for Porgy and for the orphaned child of Clara, she gains some measure of self-respect and sympathy from the audience. Then a snort of "happy dust" is all it takes for her to abandon all to follow Sportin' Life to New York, where she'll likely be merchandise for Sportin' Life's new line of work.


If we try to see the opera as a love story between Porgy and Bess, we'll be disappointed. Porgy's caring for Bess is just the expression of a faith (not a religion) that matters to the opera's creators.


Porgy -- with Jake and Clara -- marks the sweet spot between the cruel self-righteous religion of the women and the cruel self-absorbed hedonism of Crown and Sportin' Life. His faith is naive in its beliefs, but it is also a source for true courage and goodness.


This production was noted nation-wide for its use of luminous photographic projections on two vast frames. These allowed action to shift in an instant from Catfish Row in the shadows of Charleston's fine old homes, to the shuttered interior of the church, to the lush green Kittiwa Island. Video footage of a hurricane illustrated Gershwin's evocative storm music.


It may have been the uncluttered stage that helped make clear Gershwin's intentions in this production in a way that other productions I've seen have failed to do.

Imagine All the People: Good Art is Bad Politics

(reflections on Stephen L. Carter's book THE VIOLENCE OF PEACE: AMERICA'S WARS IN THE AGE OF OBAMA excerpted in NEWSWEEK, Wendell Berry's fiction, and a review by James Seaton in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Dec. 20, 2010, of THE SOUTHERN CRITICS: AN ANTHOLOGY edited by Glenn C. Arbery.)

Imagine, John Lennon sings, no possessions, all the people living as one, in peace.  Or, with the essayists of the 1930s known as the Southern Agrarians, imagine...

...such things as attachment to place from generation to generation, the traditions and communities that sprang up around such attachments, attunement to the rhythms of nature and its contingencies, strong bonds of kinship, a sense of the sacred, and indifference to an abstract idea of wealth understood in terms of monetary values (Seaton 33).

That entire list of themes is detectable in Wendell Berry's wonderful fictions. Even in a single episode of A PLACE ON EARTH, kinfolk come to help a young mother rebuild after a violent rush of flood water has swept her little daughter away and after the father, having failed to protect her, has left in shame.  The mother continues to care for the animals alone while a cousin repairs the flood damage, and the town's lawyer frees her from the clutches of an absentee landlord who cared more about money than about his land or the people on it.

But, realistic as a fiction writer's style may be, attentive to minute details, evoking the most appealing ideals, it's still not reality.  We artists are gods to our characters, and we set the parameters for the choices they can make.  Our own preferences will shape their worlds.

That's why artists -- including essayists and those performance artists that we call "commentators" -- would be scary in political office.  In a book explaining how little difference there is between Obama and Bush on war and security issues, Stephen Carter writes...

The need to pick from among several unappealing ways to defend the nation is what separates presidents from pundits.  I believe that much of the virulent hatred directed at president Obama's predecessor, and at Obama himself, arises from a rejection of this proposition.  To the hater, the world is simple, not complex.  The answers are obvious.  "If the president were only as clear-eyed and wise as I am," the protester thinks, "he would see the world as it truly is, and make better decisions." (Carter 35).

The same principle applies to such political questions of the proper balance between individual responsibility and communal responsibility.  It's utopian to "imagine no possessions" and sharing among us all; but it's equally utopian to imagine that everyone who works hard can get ahead, or that, by denying help we are somehow preserving American virtues of hard work. Remember how Theodore Roosevelt modified his doctrinaire belief in laissez-faire policies when Jacob Riis took him on a tour through the squalid homes of immigrant families, who labored as hard as anyone and who yet could not catch up, much less get ahead. 

Besides, someone else's virtue isn't our business.  See how ridiculous it was for the Southern Agrarian Andrew Lytle to exhort all Southerners to give up "motor-cars, picture shows, chain-store dresses... [and] Sears-Roebuck catalogues" (33).    A modern day progressive wrote a book asking in the title, What's wrong with Kansas?  The perception of such a condescending attitude in Mr. Obama and more in his supporters, more than any policy, is what rankles conservatives. 

Seaton, regarding the Southern Agrarians, concludes that

it would be a mistake to take the guidance of literary intellectuals urging either a leap into an (imagined) utopia of the future or a return to a (largely mythical) past.... [They] are often wise when they write about literature and about family and personal relationships, but not so wise when they address large political and social questions (33).

 Ironically, just four pages after those words in this conservative news magazine,  we find another reviewer, Nathan Harden, approving author Charles Hill's idea that "blindness to literary insight is the Achilles' heel of pure political science" (37).  I suppose any kind of blindness is bad in political discourse.  Let the political leaders read literature, including the Bible, but let's not take the writers and priests for political leaders.

Grief and Belief: Three Pages from Wendell Berry

http://forums.catholic.com

(reflections on A PLACE ON EARTH by Wendell Berry, published by Counterpoint.)


Today I was surprised by grief, a sudden tipping from contentedness to tears. Wendell Berry's compassionate but measured writing was a catalyst that unleashed feelings I've held in since Dad died.  [See my personal guide to Berry's Port William fiction.]


This cold Saturday morning, I opened A PLACE ON EARTH to a dogeared page where I'd left off last weekend, midway through the book. Though it has no plot, this book does have a story: the young men of the town are away at World War II, and Virgil Feltner is missing in action. Now, in a section called "A Comforter," the town's preacher calls on the home of Mat and Margaret Feltner, Bible in hand, to speak the expected words of comfort for a family in mourning. Virgil's wife Hannah is there, too, living with her husband's parents.


It's almost a comedy of manners, because the comforter is the one who needs to be put at ease. We see how his arrival interrupts the family's daily work, as Margaret puts aside the dishes, and Mat has to shed muddy boots and to wash up before he can come join the family. Until all of the family can sit down, talk is of the weather, of the day, of anything but Virgil.


Berry doesn't play it for laughs, though. We see from the preacher's point of view. "The preacher feels himself drawn again, helplessly, into the stream of pastime conversation, which moves by no force of its own but by a determination in all of them against silence." With every new turn of the conversation, he feels his own failure. But when he does announce why he has come, talk stops, and Margaret "touches the tips of her fingers lightly to the side of her face." He speaks at them...

...like a man walking before a strong wind, moved no longer by his intention but by the force of what he is saying. ...But beneath the building edifice of his meaning, he is aware of something failing between them. ...He feels that the force of his voice is turning back toward himself, that he is fleeing into the safe coherence of his own words....(98)

Then focus shifts to the father, Mat. He has kept at bay the knowledge that his son is lost, and the preacher has let it loose. The preacher speaks of heaven, a hope beyond their lives, and that's where the preacher's mind is as he speaks.

But in this hope--this last simplifying rest-giving movement of the mind-- Mat realizes that he is not free, and never has been. He is doomed to hope in the world, in the bonds of his own love. ...His hope of Heaven must be the hope of a man bound to the world that his life is not ultimately futile or ultimately meaningless, a hope more burdening than despair. (99)

That hope can be more burdensome than despair -- that strikes me as true, a theme that ennobles Berry's works.


When this ordeal of social awkwardness is over and the preacher leaves, Mat touches Hannah's shoulder and asks, "All right?" She smiles and says she's all right.


Then she cries, "No! I'm not all right! I'm not!"


That's where I lost it. The dogs were there, comforting and funny in their concern. I've recently been in that same kind of room with the same kind of chit-chat, with the same cast of characters.

I've written about Berry many other times: See my personal guide to Berry's Port William fiction.

Unbroken: Bad Boy Makes Good

(reflections on UNBROKEN by Laura Hillenbrand (Random House, 2010).)

"Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food and oxygen" writes Laura Hillenbrand in Unbroken (183).  At that point in the book, her subject Louie Zamperini has fought his way from being the scorned Italian kid with a face "designed by committee" (8), to running the mile for the USA at the Berlin Olympics, to surviving the crash of his B-24 bomber with two crew members followed by forty-seven excruciating days in a raft without provisions, fighting off sharks.  He is just beginning two and a half years of deprivation and physical degradation in a series of Japanese prison camps -- each one worse than the one before.

He maintains his dignity with fellow captives by small acts of rebellion.  They steal cigarettes and sugar, they teach obscenities to an obtuse guard who thinks that he's learning conversational English, and they try not to stagger and fall when beaten by fists, baseball bats, and the heavy buckle of a belt.  Once they even perform a musical version of Cinderella, calling the ugly stepsisters Dia Rere and Gonna Rere (269).  POWs sink barges, communicate in silence by codes, and even knock a train off its tracks (242-243).  Near the end of their captivity, they plot to assassinate their most furious tormentor Mutsuhiro Watanabe, a.k.a. "the Bird" (231).

But forgiveness -- of others, and of oneself -- is also essential to the feeling of self-worth, and that's a truth that underlies Louie Zamperini's life-long struggle.  We see this early in Louie's life when he gives up his "one-boy insurrection" that pains his family so, to devote himself single-mindedly to running the mile.  We see it in the shame and physical decline of Louie's fellow survivor on a raft who devoured his companions' rations while they slept in their first night at sea. Ultimately, we see how impotent hatred of his former captors eats at Louie from the inside during his first years back from the war.  When his wife Cynthia, who has already filed for divorce, drags him to see a gaunt young evangelist named Billy Graham, Louie feels "indignant rage" at the evangelist's assertion that it's false for anyone to imagine himself to be good:

I am a good man, he thought.  I am a good man.

Even as he had this thought, he felt the lie in it.  He knew what he had become.  Somehwere under his anger, there was a lurking, nameless uneasiness, the shudder of sharks rasping their backs along the bottom of the raft.  There was a thought he must not think, a memory he must not see.  With the urgency of a bolting animal, he wanted to run. (373)

By sustaining this narrative of Louie's spiritual growth, Hillenbrand  pulls us through the book, even through stretches where the accumulation of descriptions of physical degradations makes the reading painful.

Pleasures abound in the book, just in her writing.  Even knowing how the race will turn out, I was breathless turning the page to read the conclusion of Louie's mile race on a fatally hot afternoon in New York (25).  An air battle becomes vivid in her retelling of it (95-96).  She implies a metaphor in her description of the last, eeriest, worst prison camp when Louie first sees it on a cold day: two hundred "whisper-thin men" are "gathered in drifts" up against buildings, "silent as snow" (192).

Hillenbrand also searches for the good.  Sympathetic Japanese guards show courage when they shield men from abuse (185, 196, 245).  Caring for an injured duck named Gaga enlivens the prisoners (203).  A Japanese pilot salutes his target Louie rather than fire, and they later become friends (348). In the last months of the war, Louie and his fellow prisoners are struck with sympathy for the Japanese civilians who live near the prison camp, who are also starving, broken, burned, and sick.

There is also a dark side to dignity.  Hillenbrand shares an insight from a book of an earlier century, Frederick Douglass's autobiography, where he shows how a good woman, unable to think good of herself so long as she dominates an innocent human being, learns to despise the slave, and she becomes a "demon" of racial hatred (196), angered especially by any signs of the boy's intelligence and spirit.  Watanabe, "The Bird," reveals his inner struggle in his actions, and, decades later, in a televised interview.

Along the way in her narrative, Hillenbrand divulges details about that time in American history that we might prefer to forget.  The pseudo-science of eugenics that shaped policy in Nazi Germany and Tojo's Japan also shaped policy in the California of Louie's childhood, and he had good reason to fear being sterilized along with other "bad boys" of Italian descent (10).   We learn how the tens of thousands of airmen lost in combat over the Pacific is dwarfed six-to-one by the numbers of those lost to mechanical failures and human error (80). We get a tour of the "flying brick" called the B-24 with all its design flaws, and we get a strong sense of how awesome the new B-29 is in its superior speed, altitude, size, and its moral effect on the Japanese: the Japanese phrase for B - 29 "B Niju Ku" contains a double meaning, as "ku" means both "nine" and "pain" (248).  A survivor of the Bataan death march reflects on the landscape approaching Hiroshima by train, post A-bomb, a progression from trees to trees without leaves, then without branches, then without trunks, then nothing: "Nothing! It was beautiful.  ...I know it's not right to say it was beautiful, because it really wasn't.  But I believed the end [to cruel captivity] probably justified the means" (320).

The acknowledgments are worth reading closely, because Hillenbrand describes with gratitude all the eyewitnesses and family members who helped her to write the book, including many who didn't live to see its publication.  Louie Zamperini himself lives on, "apparently immortal" (399).

Remembering Dad

(Remarks for a Celebration of the Life of Thomas W. Smoot at First Presbyterian of Church, Valdosta, GA, November 13, 2010)

For me, Tom Smoot was father.

For him, that meant, first of all, to be a provider.   To support his family, he did work that took him away for long periods of time, to uncharted Canada, to Nevada, to Brazil during a military coup, a couple times to Japan.  During those years, his family wanted for nothing, except for him.

When he became his own boss, he could settle down – though he drove himself long hours to grow his business.

More than material things, a father provides guidance.  Dad left schooling mostly to the teachers – thankfully, because he was way ahead of our textbooks – and he left discipline to Mom.  But he taught us in the way he approached the world.

One lesson begins, “You can be suspicious of everyone.”  He told me how a client was probably ripping him off. He said, “You can be suspicious of everyone, but you don’t want to live that way.”

Another time, Dad said, “When someone accuses you, you've got to respond – or you’ll lose respect for yourself.”

There were other lessons I picked up from observation:

Sing.   Sing in the kitchen, in the car, in your factory working with your son very late on a hot summer night.  Sing at the top of your voice; with or without a ukulele, guitar, or Simon and Garfunkel.  When he joined the choir of this church, he said he wished he hadn’t waited fifty years.

Another lesson: When you get an idea, go with it.  For instance, he got the notion that a surprise birthday party with a couple hundred guests at the top of a skyscraper might ease Mom’s transition to her sixties.  He sent out invitations right away – even though, at the time, she was only fifty-five.

Another lesson is a phrase that he learned from his close friend and mentor Alfredo Berato, “Bon appetito.”  For Dad, it meant that eating nutritiously is good for your body, but sharing food and drink with friends is good for your soul. 

Another lesson: When the going gets tough, take along a dog.  No one could stay mad when Dad brought Frosty or KC to a meeting.  Dad told me once, if there’s such a thing as reincarnation, then he wanted to come back as a Smoot dog.

Stay young by seeking out new places, new ideas, new challenges.  And if you’ve already run enough miles to go around the world once, try it again – but go the other way.

His most important lesson was so much a part of his being a father that I never appreciated it until I was grown up and long gone.  That’s when Mom told me how she married before she understood what love really means.  Dad taught her how to love, and I can see now that what a loving father provides, along with material support and moral encouragement, is room to grow.

Mom didn’t have room to grow when three little children were crowding her life, so Dad made sure to be home on Saturdays, giving Mom time away to do whatever she wanted.  He encouraged her to renew her teaching career, and then to get advanced degrees to become an administrator – even though it meant staying up late to write Mom's research papers.

He took interest in anything his children did.  Whatever struck our fancies at the moment, he took us to museums or shops or theatres or playing fields to learn more, bought us books about it, and then stepped back to see what happened.  He delighted even more in lavishing the same kind of attention on his grandchildren.

So his children have grown to be totally different people.  What we do have in common are the shared memories of meals, games and trips – and Dad's driving sense of responsibility for others.

Speaking here, just for myself, I am grateful that he gave me room to grow through my stage of adolescent insolence – which, in my case, outlasted three Presidential administrations.

When I would come back to see how his company had grown, I came to appreciate how Dad saw himself as a provider for the families of the men and women who worked for him.  For them, too, it wasn’t just a job that he provided, but career guidance, education, and opportunities to build their careers.  Sometimes, he provided bail -- and a second chance in life.

There was one lesson that Dad got from me.  Just last Spring, he called with a theological question.  Between the Sunday school of his boyhood and his joining this church, he hadn’t thought much about religion.  He wanted to know, What exactly is meant by the word “grace?”  Is it forgiveness?   Is it Heaven?    To him, it seemed to mean different things in different contexts.

With some theological training behind me, I told him how Scripture implies that the Holy Spirit works in us and through us, long before we believe.  It's through the working of the Spirit that we come to know God, and that’s what we call “grace.”   Grace helps us to see how God the Father has provided us care and guidance throughout our lives. Looking back, we can give proper thanks to our Father.

Dad liked that idea.

Other posts relating to Thomas W. Smoot
• Thomas W. Smoot, obituary
  
  
• Homily on names, containing Dad's reason for my name

Sondheim's Book, Finishing the Hat: First Reading

Photo by T. Charles Erickson

Having sung Stephen Sondheim's songs at the top of my lungs in theatres, showers, kitchens, cars, and parlors for forty years now, I could pass over the meat of this book, his collected lyrics: I've memorized nearly every syllable.  Instead, I devoured the side dishes sweet and biting:  comments about lyrics, his craft, and what he learned from other practitioners.  

My first impression is that Sondheim's heart is in this book, expressed precisely (as usual) by a mind that simply cannot abide dishonesty or inaccuracy.  Years ago, when Meryl Secrest published her biography of him, he commented that, of course, he gave her full access to everything about him, and he held nothing back.  He wondered, what would be the point of a biography otherwise?

Well, he could try to ensure a flattering story.  But not Sondheim.  He wants to take precisely the credit he feels he deserves. 

His honesty and accuracy show in a remarkable passage cited by reviewer Jeremy Gerard on line.  It's about the way commentators have portrayed him as "Repressed Intellectual" since he once sang his song "Anyone Can Whistle" (written for a character who was a repressed intellectual) at a tribute in 1973.  Of this, he writes:

Perhaps being tagged with a cliché shouldn’t bother me, but it does, and to my chagrin I realize it means that I care more about how I’m perceived than I wish I did. I’d like to think this concern hasn’t affected my work, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it has.

I'm sure I'll write  more, later.  But here are links to two of the four reviews I've seen:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/oct/10/finishing-hat-stephen-sondheim-review

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/29/stephen-sondheim-collected-lyrics-review


The second, by Simon Callow, comes closest to saying what I think.  Another in the NY Times, by songwriter Paul Simon, shows a great appreciation of Sondheim dating back to Paul Simon's teenage years. 

www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/books/review/Simon-t.html

Theologians and Artists: Resident Aliens v. The Unicorn

(reflection upon two books contained in my Amazon kindle: Resident Aliens by Hauerwas and Willimon, and The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch.)

I was shocked once in my early days in the Episcopal Church, still fresh from being a fundamentalist in college.  A gentleman in the choir had laughingly said that he didn't really believe all that theological stuff -- "God is in the music," he said. This was heresy to me then;  I've grown to appreciate what he meant.

Case in point:  I spent some time recently wading through a book by a pair of theologians.  The basic idea is congenial to me, that the Church is, at its best, a sort of colony of "resident aliens" in our culture.  That said, the reading turned tedious and even annoying, as the writers reiterated that the Church and its pastors should be telling "the truth" instead of just being polite and helping people.  This strikes me as, first, a false choice, and second, as banal.  The "truth" turns out to be, so far as I can tell, warmed over Paolo Friere: don't be materialistic, don't support regimes that fight wars. 

I moved on with some relief to read an early work of the astoundingly prolific novelist-philosopher Iris Murdoch, an agnostic sort of Christian who delighted in pitting political and religious people against each other in her fictions and confounding all their beliefs.  Just in the first few pages of The Unicorn, she gets closer to "the truth" than those theologians in their entire book.

In those first pages, she's setting up a plot that seems to owe more than a little to Henry James's Turn of the Screw:  nervous, tightly wound governess reporting for duty to a remote estate peopled by people either morbid and secretive or outwardly charming and unapproachable.

But she is also depicting a starkly beautiful world -- she uses the words "beautiful" and "appalling" almost interchangeably here -- of violent waves, treeless landscape, vast sky.  All of the protagonist Marian's previous materialistic concerns  fall away from her as she loses herself in this landscape, where she is now the resident alien.

I sense that much of what the theologians have to say is already implied in this novel, and much more besides.  In just the last chapter, Marian and her pupil Hannah (first surprise:  her pupil is the woman who employs her, not some child), seated as if on a stage illuminated by golden light of the setting sun reflected on the sea, have a sudden dramatic moment.  Hannah grasps Marian's hand and asks for forgiveness, for needing so much for someone to love her.  She goes on to reflect that even God is said to have created us because He needed love.  Hannah believes in God because she loves God, and "you can't love something that isn't there, can you?"

About my Dad: In Memoriam

Dr. Thomas W. Smoot, 77, of Valdosta, died October 6 of traumatic aorta rupture. 

He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, May 11, 1933.  He graduated from Walnut Hills High School, a nationally recognized public college preparatory school.  He received his undergraduate degrees from Miami University, and his PhD in clay mineralogy from the University of Illinois.  He married Frances Lee Maier June 6, 1955.

A scientist and inventor, Tom is named on ten US patents from 1963 to 2010, most recently for a fire-retardant material.  For Canada’s Geological Survey, Tom explored unmapped territory in 1957.   He was a pioneer in developing ceramics to withstand extreme temperatures in nuclear propulsion engines.  His expertise made him a valuable representative for corporations Harbison-Walker in Pittsburgh, Nalco in Chicago, and Glasrock in Atlanta.

 

An entrepreneur, Tom purchased a chemical manufacturing business in Atlanta in 1972 with no full-time employees.  Through hard times and a catastrophic fire in 1982, Tom grew the business, re-naming it Kor-Chem.  By 2001, when he sold the company, it employed dozens of workers and had international partners.

In retirement, Tom stayed active. He started a new business relating to his latest patent.  He served on boards for his neighborhood in Atlanta and for his high school’s Alumni Foundation, and he ran for Valdosta’s school board.  Tom and Frances joined First Presbyterian Church of Valdosta in 2009, and he became deeply involved as Deacon, treasurer of the Men’s Bible Study, member of the Church’s Vestry, and tenor in the choir.

His work with his son Todd’s company Get Active gave him the opportunity to combine his talent for sales with his passion for running.   Tom and Frances competed in road races as recently as 2009, and walked daily.   From 1973 onward, Tom counted the miles he ran, logging over 38,000 miles by 2010, in cities from Atlanta to Cairo, literally “running around the world” one-and-a-half times. 

He is survived by his wife Frances of Valdosta; Kim Ann Carter of Hampton, GA; W. Scott Smoot of Marietta, GA; and Todd Lee Smoot of Valdosta. He is also survived by two grandchildren. 

The 4th "R" for Unmotivated Youth: Relationship

(Reflections on RESIDENT ALIENS by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, "Why School 'Reform' Fails" by Robert J. Samuelson in NEWSWEEK of Sept. 13, 2010)

Educational reforms since 1970 have produced no rise in scores and an increased percentage of college freshmen who need remedial work in the three r's, and efforts to halt the flow of young adults away from the churches of their youth have failed. Is there a common thread?

Economist Robert J. Samuelson tells how efforts have failed to improve schools.  Lower student-teacher ratios, higher teacher pay, and locally successful reforms haven't made a difference across the nation.  He blames "shrunken student motivation."  He does not automatically blame teachers, pointing out that unmotivated students used to have another option: 40% of 17 year olds dropped out of school in 1950.  He adds that "adolescent culture" has eroded the authority of teachers and schools.  He has no solution, ridiculing the aim of having "a great teacher in every classroom" as akin to having every football team comprised only of All-Americans.

Hauerwas and Willimon argue that American churches are failing because "we Christians have given atheists less and less in which to disbelieve." I'm only part way through this book, interested because I saw Hauerwas in early August.  So far, this statement, and some anecdotes from chapter five are the only things that have struck me.  The rest, so far, is stuff familiar to me but presented as if it were some kind of revolutionary revelation emerging from the ashes of everyone else's theology.  I reserve judgment.

But H and W do present an anecdote in the most interesting chapter that I've read so far in my jumping around, chapter five.  The two tell how one of them belonged to a church that challenged itself to reform its routine for confirming youth.  Classroom learning "about" Jesus and "joining the church" were discarded in favor of trying Jesus' own method of discipleship, or, in more modern terms, mentoring.  Adults identified by fellow members in confidential surveys were each paired with a teen, expected to meet once every couple of weeks to compare notes on reading a gospel, attending a church funeral, experiencing the same worship, performing some community service. 

This idea of mentoring is something I've been trying to achieve with my seventy-odd seventh graders this year.  I have in mind the tutoring I did for a stammering, non-writing, test-failing repeat eighth grader named Mike back around 1984.  He'd already failed my course; I soon felt it was futile to keep beating the dead horses of the curriculum.  We began to make progress the day that I stopped talking at all, and instead took out paper and wrote across the top, "Tell me in writing about your family."  He wrote, as usual, a one-line answer about having a mother, father, and grandmother. He handed the paper back.  I asked a follow-up: "Tell me more about your grandmother."  He wrote that she lived next door.  "Anything else?" She had red hair.  "When was she born?"  He had no idea. "Go home and talk to her."  He came back the next day, grabbed the paper, and wrote two pages of closely spaced text. 

I don't recall much of what happened after that, except that it was a major break through, my own Helen Keller at the water pump. He went on, not only to succeed at the high school, but to become a self-confident track star and scholar, who went on to gather more than one advanced degree.

I'm thinking that in-class writing for my kids could easily take that form.  Could I start class with a question, "What did you learn yesterday in class and in reading that you want to discuss more?"  Then, I keep pressing them with follow up questions until they do tell more.  I've done this in drama class, letting other students write the follow up questions for me.  Some write one sentence and answer a dozen follow up questions; others develop their thoughts fully, the first time.  The aim, of course, is to teach the questions that a critical thinker asks himself when reading or developing an idea.  It's worth the time, if I can do it.

So, let's keep thinking about a fourth "r," relationship.

Arts in Education: Boxes (2007)

(Having just recently posted a meditation on Arts in Education, I was reminded of this from a speech I gave about the arts to an audience of students and parents in 2007.)

Students may experience their days as a never-ending series of interruptions to real life.  They sit in a box to learn something called a "subject" until a bell signals them to move to another box for another subject, and so on.   Maybe they have a scheduled activity after school.  Then they may have some time to kill sitting in front of a box that tells them everything they know about our world today while it entertains them.   On weekends, some students' families gather in large boxes to think about God for a couple of hours.  Then it's back to the routine.    Does anything connect all those boxes to each other?  Can all these boxes connect to the students' "real life," not only at some future graduation ceremony, but now?  

That connection is what Andy Linn (Walker 2006) found in his various arts classes at Walker.   Now in a prestigious arts program at Cornell, he had excelled at Walker as both writer and actor in my drama class, and he had built a distinctive portfolio for AP art as a senior.  I asked him what I might say to middle schoolers about the importance of the arts in their schedule. He thought only a moment before he said, "Connections."  Preparing more than a dozen works of art in different media and styles for his AP credit, he was thinking about his art all day long. Suddenly he found that he enjoyed his classes more, concentrated more, because he was suddenly seeing connections between one subject and another. He said that they all went into his designs.

Now, he didn't have time to explain that part. Did he mean that he drew pictures of Presidents after he studied history? Was he putting equations onto canvasses? I really can't say.

But he reminded me of my senior year, when everything seemed to be coming together. That's when a poem by a soldier brought the First World War home to me in a way that the history book did not. As I was compressing vast amounts of data into a simpler equation, I realized that this was the same thing I was doing writing a poem, simplifying all my thoughts into the shortest possible statement of metaphor, "all this" equals "all that."

And he made me consider how all thinking is a matter of finding a connection between two things that don't appear to be related. And the arts are the one part of our lives where you use words, or designs made out of sound or color, to connect a feeling or a vision to an audience or viewer. It takes awareness of the world outside our little boxes, and skill to use a vocabulary of words, or a vocabulary of musical notation, or a vocabulary of colors and shapes that do more than just "express your feelings." You can do that with text messaging. Good art or music or drama or poetry is never about the self alone, but about enlarging the self to include others. The successful artist doesn't just express a feeling, but gets other people to feel it, too.

So, art isn't one box among others. It is a way of looking at life that sees through the imaginary walls that keep everything in its own little place. 
 

Arts in Education: Got a Moment?

(Written for the Walker School's 2010-2011 fine arts brochure, to be handed out for performances all year long, by yours truly, as Middle School Fine Arts Chair,)

Before the performance, please take a moment to wonder at the time our students took to prepare for it.  

For you, it’ll be over in the next hour or two.  For the young artists, each minute took nearly an hour of practice.     Ten minutes or so was enough to memorize a minute of dialogue, more than enough to learn a tune; so what did they do with the remainder of each hour?  

For instrumentalists and singers, the notes are just raw material to be shaped.   Learning how to color the tone, to connect notes as a phrase, to move a phrase towards the next turning point in the piece – learning how music does make turns and climaxes –  that all takes time, first for discovery, then for practice.   When every musician has done that much, it remains for their teacher to blend their tones and phrasing with everyone else’s.     Thank you, Sonya Peebles, Erik Kofoed, Todd Motter, Samantha Walker, and Chris Johnson!

A play is, to a script, what a visit to the Grand Canyon is to the map of Arizona.   The script prints what characters say, but actors have to make us know what characters think.  We drama teachers – Regena Simpson, Patty Mozley, Katie Arjona, and I – won’t settle for imitations and stereotypes.  We keep our actors digging into the script and their own life experience until characters look, sound, and respond as real people.  Besides all that, there are dozens more hours of work done backstage to create the looks and sounds of an imaginary world, thanks to Bill Schreiner, Matt Eisenman, and Richard Gibson, and the students who help with design and production.    

Coming here today, you passed by students’ art work, pieces that took hours to make.   An artist who tries to depict an object, or to use a certain medium in a certain way, has so many questions to answer.  Where will I focus the viewer’s gaze?  How?  What color, shade, texture, position, or angle will convey the feeling I choose?  All of our art teachers from Pre-K to A.P.  – Kimberly Nasca, Sherry Walker-Taylor, Philippa Anderson, and Laura Stewart -- use their time to help each student discover a distinctive personal approach.

Finally, as I finish this note, I know that it will fit into an elegant publication produced at great expense of time by a group of parents who support young artists and their teachers in all the work I’ve described.    These Patrons of the Arts know that hours deeply engaged in the arts can lead to a moment of clarity and discovery, remembered for a lifetime. 

Enjoy such moments of your next hour, and come back again for more!

Summer Reading: Less Than the Sum of its Parts

(reflections on nonfiction by Malcolm Gladwell, THE TIPPING POINT (2001), and WORLD OF WONDERS (1972), the third novel in the Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies.)

Even at 6 a.m., the heat and humidity are still oppressive.  But, I'm up early fretting about homework schedules, so that means summer's long over.   Time only to give due consideration to the last two books of the season.

Our faculty read THE TIPPING POINT looking for possible applications to our middle school.  Can we engineer a positive trend by appealing to a few charismatic trend-setters, or by paying attention to small details, or by having a memorable message?  Yes.  Can each of those methods fail?  Yes. 

THE TIPPING POINT contributed its title to our vocabulary, so that I've heard the phrase countless times in analyses of politics, the economy, and popular trends in the years since it was published.  Beyond the cover, Gladwell tells a dozen or so good stories in which a seemingly small adjustment to some behavior spreads like a virus through a whole community.    The agents of the virus are "Mavens" who collect knowledge about consumer goods or whatever; "Connectors" who retain names and interests of hundreds of acquaintances; and "Salesmen" who use persuasion and personal charisma to draw others to a product.

From these, he tries to tease out some general rules.  These are, one by one, interesting and useful.  One salesman, for example, operates by having a ready reply for the would-be customer's every doubt (You can't afford it right now, but can you afford to wait?).  The "Broken Windows" change in policemen's policies in New York seems to have worked wonders, turning the city from crime-ridden and sleazy to its present Disney-fied squeaky clean feel.

But each of his general rules works only when some other general rule doesn't apply.  A virus won't work if the context isn't right, for instance.  That's true for a sexually-transmitted virus that stops spreading when cold weather inhibits bar-hopping.   Theology students preparing a sermon on the importance of caring for strangers literally stepped over needy strangers planted in their route to the lecture hall, so long as the context was that the audience was already there waiting for the sermon.  It's a good illustration of something we all know from experience.  Nothing works, he tells us, if the trend (object, concept) isn't "sticky," and it's "sticky" if it's useful, repetitive, appealing, chemically addictive ... whatever.

Think of it as a manual, and the book is a failure.  Think of it as a collection of loosely - related anecdotes that sometimes give ideas to a teacher or any other social engineer, and it's just fine.

Excited to re-read the FIFTH BUSINESS (see an earlier posting, here), I eagerly dusted off my old 1980 paperback editions of the other two novels in the trilogy.  In brief, the three novels follow out the lives of the boy who threw a snowball containing a heavy stone at another boy who ducked, and a third boy who popped out of his mother prematurely when that rock hit her in the back of the head.  Diminishing returns.  THE MANTICORE, I wrote previously, was a fascinating essay to illustrate Jungian ideas of universal myths that have personal meaning to each of us.   The evolving relationship between patient and analyst gave that novel a forward drive to carry through its discursive narrative.  WORLD OF WONDERS begins as a kind of creepy Huckleberry Finn story of a little boy who escapes home and is set adrift in a nasty carnival side-show called "World of Wonders."  The boy, now a master magician and film actor, tells his story to the film crew.  Once that story is over, it moves to the young man's apprenticeship with the last of the Romantic actor-managers in England.

We appreciate the details of life in the carnival, life in the old-fashioned theatre, life in the provinces of Canada.  But however much Davies strains to create dramatic tension between the tale-teller and his audience, the way he did pretty successfully in THE MANTICORE,  he doesn't achieve it, here.  Reading it became a chore, and the final chapters seemed redundant.

I recall feeling that way in the 1980s, and I also recall feeling that his next trilogy, beginning with REBEL ANGELS, was better, and his earliest trilogy, beginning with LEAVEN OF MALICE, was best of all.

Names and James: Homily for St. James' Church

(Homily delivered July 31 at St. James' Episcopal Church, Marietta, at a celebration of St. James' Day.)

Good evening, and happy St. James’ Day!  This is the day when we celebrate the saint who is our namesake.

And my name is Scott Smoot.  That’s how I’ve always been introduced to you through the years, whenever I’m your guest pianist, or whenever I’ve brought news from the Vestry or the Rector Search Committee. 

But my driver’s license calls me William.  So do my insurance card, and my registration with this church.  And when I sign my name, it’s W. Scott Smoot.

My dad is to blame for this confusion.  Dad chose my first name, and he also chose not to use it.   I’ve always had to explain this to teachers and officials.  But the name has had the advantage of tipping me off to telemarketers:  If they ask for William Smut, I can hang up.

When I was in my twenties,  I finally asked my dad why he gave me a name that he never intended for me to use.   He got a gleam in his eye.  “I wanted you to have that initial W.,” he said  “like W. Somerset Maugham.”   That was a literary lion in the mid-twentieth century, a playwright, essayist, story – writer and novelist, my Dad’s favorite. 

But Dad never had told me that W. Somerset Maugham was my namesake.   Dad never said, “Son, I want you to be a writer.”   So how come I was the ten year old who stayed inside to type stories while the other boys were out playing ball?  How come, to this very day, my first thoughts each morning are about a story or a play that I could be writing, or a homily that I should be writing?   Somehow I grew to fit the name.

Living Up to Our Names
I won’t embarrass anyone by making you raise your hand.  But nod your head if you feel that your parents in some way influenced the course of your life by the names they gave you. 

I’m guessing that some of us have had names to measure up to. I went to high school with a guy named Manley, and you couldn’t help but measure him against his name.  Children of celebrities have had trouble living up to their famous family names.

Some of us have had names to live down.   The classic example is in Johnny Cash’s song about the absentee dad who made sure that his boy would grow up able to stand up and fight, by naming him “Sue.”   I once knew an atheist who named her son Darwin.  She explained that she was protecting him from what she called “cute little Southern Baptist cheerleaders.”  Last time I saw the boy, guess who he was dating?

In the Bible, names are signs of destiny. “I have called you by my name and you are mine,” says the Lord.  The angel tells Mary what to call Jesus before she has even conceived him.  Then there are the names in the Bible that change to mark a new relation with the Lord:  Abram becomes Abraham, Sarai becomes Sarah, Jacob becomes Israel, Saul becomes Paul. 

In our culture, it’s not easy to choose to change your own name, except for entertainers, and for  women who take the husband’s name in marriage. 

Our Church's Name
Now, we never chose the name of our church.  Our name was chosen for us in 1842 by our founding father, William Root. He led Bible studies for railroad workers in Marietta, but he had attended St. James’ Church in Philadelphia. 

This makes me think that we could easily choose a new name for our church.  After all, we didn’t choose the name, and we’re not really named for a saint, but for another church.  This might be a good time to think of a new name, since we’re in a time of transition, looking for a new rector. 

What other saint might be more appropriate?  In a homily a couple weeks ago, Tim Raasch pointed out how Saints Mary and Martha represent the contemplative spirituality of one sister, and the active hospitality of the other.   That certainly seems to describe two strengths of our congregation.   But the Episcopal Church of Sts. Mary and Martha in Buford GA could probably sue for brand infringement.

So what other saints might fit the way we are?  I’m amazed at the skills of people here who are good at building and making things – so we could adopt the name of Joseph, patron saint of carpenters.    Or we could go with Sir Thomas More, patron saint of lawyers?

We could buck tradition and go for a new-style corporate name, something catchy that would look good on a web site.   I was thinking, maybe, in big friendly letters, Prayers R Us?  Or maybe, something with an exclamation –point after it, like, Spiritco!  At the risk of rubbing a sore spot, here, I think we might streamline our current name, the way BP streamlined “British Petroleum.”  What could be more twenty-first century than SJx!

You all don’t look very excited.  Maybe, like me, you have a feeling deep down that St. James fits us somehow.  Perhaps, before we take such a radical step, we should look at what we know about St. James and see what it is we’re living up to.

Our Namesake
In today’s gospel (MT 20:20-28), James tags along with his brother behind his family name, “Zebedee.” We’re told in a note that the name means, “Thunder.”  When your dad’s name is Thunder, you probably get a lot of teasing from the other kids on the block.  The men in the neighborhood always tell you, “Your father was a really great man, very tough.”  Then they have to add, “So, when are you going to be more like him?”   Their mom certainly storms in to make sure they get the attention due such a name.    I imagine James is blushing, and saying under his breath, “Aww, Mom, you’re embarrassing me.”  But I don’t see that he steps up to stop her, either.   No wonder the rest of the apostles get mad.  

But Jesus stays calm.  He has a test for James and his brother.  “Are you able to drink from the cup that I am about to drink?”  The brothers aren’t sure what they’re agreeing to, but they are Sons of Thunder, and they’ve got to live up to that name.  They say, “We are able.”   Jesus is referring to that cup mentioned later at the garden of Gethsemane, the one that he wishes could pass from his lips, the bitter cup of martyrdom.   He sees in James a young man who will indeed make a stand and suffer the consequences.  

We’ve seen that quality in James before, when he was a fisherman, working all night without catching anything.  Jesus called out to him to cast his net on the other side, and the haul was great enough to tip the boat; but when James reached shore, he left the catch behind, and followed Jesus.  Son of thunder indeed, he’s impetuous and determined. 

But with his mother there, asking for special treatment, the other guys get mad, and Jesus rebukes them, saying those wonderful words at the core of Christian life, about how the greatest must be the servant of all, how the first must be the last. 

Tonight’s reading from Acts (11:27-12:3) tells how James, our namesake, lived out those words, drinking the cup that Jesus drank:  serving the Lord, he was the first of the apostles to die for Jesus. 

Now, there are other traditions and stories about James.  We know that he was a missionary who established the church in what we now call Spain, earning the love and gratitude of the natives there.   There’s a story that he resurrected a boy who had been hanged for a crime that he did not commit.  It was five weeks after the event, and people rushed to tell the boy’s father the good news.  The father, who was eating dinner at the time, bitterly said, “My boy is no more alive than this roasted bird.”  According to the story, the bird stood up on the plate, spread its wings, and flew away. 

After King Herod put James to death by the sword in 44 AD, legend has it that the saint’s body was airlifted from Jerusalem by angels, and deposited in a rudderless boat off the coast of Spain at Compastela.   Ever since then, Christian pilgrims have made their way to Compastela, to the church of St. James, or, in Spanish, Santiago.  They carried with them the symbols of our church: a traveler’s bag to carry necessities and a scallop shell to lift water from streams along the pilgrim’s way. 

Is our name a good fit?   Right now, this very month, is a good time to ask that.  The Rector Search Committee has put out a survey, and we are looking for your answers to questions about our church as it is now, and as we hope it will be.  

James answered the call of Jesus, no questions asked, without regard to cost or risk.  I know people at this church who’ve made open-ended commitments of time and resources.  Could this be true of us all?

James learned a lesson about becoming great through service to others.  Are we servants of the Lord?  Do we take turns serving each other?  I see on our survey a long list of committees and guilds.  Could more of us be involved?

James established a church among the needy in Spain;  I see our well-established ministries of Wonderful Days, and Reach Out Mental Health.  I know that we sponsor a church in (Ma – JEL – i- ko).  Is there more we could do?  Could more of us be involved?  

James is the patron saint of pilgrims, who leave their fishing, their business, their day to day lives, to worship.
Is worship central to our church in that way?  Is it central to our own lives?  We have a group here called the Pilgrimage who make their spiritual journeys without leaving the confines of this building – are we all aware of this group?  Could more of us join them?

This is a good time for us to ask these questions.   If a name is something that we grow into – well, let’s keep growing into ours.   Happy St. James’ Day!

[See my page Those Crazy Episcopalians! for other reflections on the church, scripture, and the writings of others who deal with these topics.]