1959 and Our Culture of the Moment

Jazz musicians really live "in the moment," responding to the immediate environment of sounds to invent new music on the spot.  As an approach to composition, both musical and literary, jazz holds together Fred Kaplan's book on 1959.  The chapters make a daisy chain of call and response.  For example, a chapter about Swiss photographer Robert Frank's off-kilter portrait of The Americans segues into a chapter about "off-Hollywood" film-making, linked by Frank's own foray into the medium.   A chapter on racism's outrages that made household names of Medgar Evers and Malcolm X in 1959, begins with a New York cop's beating Miles Davis, hero of the preceding chapter about how the freedom of jazz made it our best ambassador during the Cold War.  A chapter on "sick" comics is followed by the story of Herman Kahn, who did his own "stand-up" routine in 1959 to promote ways that the USA could survive nuclear holocaust and "win." 

"Living in the moment," like a jazz riff, keeps sounding in other chapters about novels (On the Road), poetry (Howl), art (solemn abstract expressionists inspire fun Rauschenberg, and then Kaprow's faux-spontaneous "happenings"), "sick" comics like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl,  and even about the A- Bomb and Cold War politics. 

Now, living in the moment has its appeal.  Religious writer Blaise Pascal reflected that his 17th century contemporaries failed to live at all because they clung to the way things used to be or they anticipated some future change.  Psalm 90 reads, "Teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom," stating a theme that appears over and over again in scripture, that you can't count on tomorrow, so live each moment to the full.

Then, why should we spend any of our moments reading a book about history, or a novel, or a blog post?  Why write this stuff?  Shouldn't we all be out there doing stuff?   That's what the heroes of 1959 did.  Kerouac went on the road to write On the Road and only reluctantly took time to edit the thing.  Pollack and his contemporaries were "almost heroic" in their spontaneous "attack" of a canvas (Kaplan 166).  Lionel Trilling spoke out against this kind of ill-formed and careless spontaneity at the time, but his journals, published posthumously, reveal that he harbored envy of Hemingway, an earlier "in-the-moment"  artist, writing that Hemingway's life "which is anarchic and 'childish' is a better life than anyone I know could live" (35).

Following up on that striking confession, I found on the web a review by Allan Massie of a  book about Trilling by Adam Kirsch, containing this spot-on comment by Trilling:  the "contemporary American writer [senses] that he has been like the final investor in a Ponzi scheme, having bought into the venerable enterprise of literature only to discover that it is on the verge of default."  Trilling wrote that in 1952, and I tried to express the same idea about the futility of being an English major -- much less effectively -- in this blog a few years ago.  So, if the time spent composing, reading, and reflecting on literature is all wasted today, that's nothing new.

Massie goes on:

In [Trilling's] later years he became aware that “the case against mind is now being litigated in our culture”. The distrust of intellectualism promoted a loss of faith in literature, which is, “as he understood, fundamentally a loss of faith in a certain ideal of selfhood”. Instead, there emerged what Susan Sontag in 1996 called “the triumphant values of consumer capitalism”, in which “cultural consumption is used”, Kirsch writes, “as a basis – or perhaps, a substitute? – for identity”. There was an ever greater alertness to changing fashion, and a weakening of the position that “an actual response to art depends on discourse – not upon any one kind of discourse, but discourse of some kind”.

This is the take-away from Kaplan's book, that 1959 marked a tipping-point when crazy, youthful, spontaneous, and radical began to attract admiration away from responsible, mature and thoughtful. Born in 1959, I certainly have felt the tension between these two approaches to life.  I identify with Lionel Trilling, now that I've seen those journal entries.

And yet.  Massie quotes Margaret Atwood:  “History depends on the written word – electrons are as evanescent as thoughts.”  And a great deal of what Kaplan describes as ground-breaking in 1959 turns out to have been "evanescent," kept on life support by baby boomers in academia whose lives are invested in those ephemeral works that were cutting edge in their youth.  That's nothing new: Kaplan remarks that the "modern" art enshrined at the Guggenheim Museum was already old hat at the museum's opening, eclipsed by Frank Lloyd Wright's design for the museum itself.   It makes sense that what was created "in the moment" might not have a long shelf-life.  I suppose it wasn't intended to, either.

It's ironic that Shakespeare, who wrote 400 years ago, just for the next matinee, manages to go on creating moments for us to live in.   Yesterday, on the occasion of Peter O'Toole's retirement from stage and screen, National Public Radio re-aired an interview in which he casually remarks that he has memorized all the sonnets, and that they are by his bedside wherever he goes, constant companions through life.  He recited "My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun," his voice highlighting contrasts and turns in the composition -- thanks to the time he put into analysis of the verse.   So all of us who heard it were able to catch what Shakespeare put into it, filling just that moment with a rich sense of life experienced vicariously.

Peace, Professor Trilling:  the time spent in reading, writing, and reflecting is what gives the moments of action their meaning.   If a tree falls in the forest with no ear to hear it, then the disturbance in the air makes no sound;  if Jackson Pollack captures his own "action" of hurling paint at a canvas with no mind thinking anything more than "Heck, it's just paint drippings," then his moments were meaningless.  Let us take time to make meaning of our moments, actual and vicarious. 

Doesn't "moment" mean "meaning?" 
Reflections on The Year Everything Changed: 1959, by Fred Kaplan. Published by John Wiley and Sons, 2009.  Also response to a review of Why Trilling Matters, book by Adam Kirsch.  Review by Allan Massie. "Does Lionel Trilling matter?" The Times Literary Supplement online. Published 1 Feb.2012. Accessed 11 July 2012. 

Power Perfected in Weakness: LBJ's Finest Hours

(reflections on THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON: THE PASSAGE OF POWER by Robert A. Caro, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.)

LBJ takes the oath of office aboard Air Force One, on the runway, in Dallas.  He could have waited until the plane had flown to D.C.; he could have done it earlier; but he waited until Jackie arrived from the hospital -- with the body -- to stand beside him;

"Power is perfected in weakness," writes the apostle Paul in II Corinthians, because goodness -- God, Spirit, self-control, magnanimity -- can shine through at times when we feel vulnerable.  How LBJ handled himself and the institutions of federal government in the aftermath of JFK's assassination takes up the second half of Robert Caro's Lyndon Johnson: The Passage to Power.   (My reflections on the first half of the book are here.)   Reading Caro's book during a week of patriotic celebrations, I wondered if true patriotism has more to do with Paul's kind of "weakness" than with competition of nations.  Caro shows how the crisis turned LBJ's personal demons to good for the country.

Caro gives us the events at Dallas from the unfamiliar angle of Johnson's experience.  He and Ladybird heard the shots and saw Jackie's reaction.  Johnson was then dragged to the floor of his open-air limo; his secret service bodyguard lay on top of him as the car accelerated to follow the President's car.   LBJ leans silently against a wall in the hospital until a Kennedy aide enters and sobs, "He's gone!"  We read again and again how LBJ's calm and resolve impressed eyewitnesses who'd always seen him as "Colonel Cornpone." 

In those hours, and in the days that followed, it seemed that the world might be poised to relive mistakes that had turned an assassination at Sarajevo in 1914 into the "Guns of August."   Was Russia or Cuba involved?   Had LBJ's cronies in Texas somehow conspired to make him President?   Ladybird remarked that it would have been better if she, too, had taken a bullet to allay that suspicion, but "thank goodness" [Texas governor] Connaly was shot.  Would Kennedy's ferociously loyal aides balk at accepting the Constitutional accession of LBJ?  Attorney General Robert Kennedy's animosity towards LBJ makes that scenario credible.

I remember those first days, as our home was shrouded in darkness, curtains closed, TV on constantly.  At four years, I knew who Kennedy was, and I understood that he'd been killed.  I don't recall any feeling beyond the solemnity of it all, but reading about it brought tears to my eyes.   Why?    And why did I also read with such pleasure about LBJ's successes?

In those first days, LBJ wooed Kennedy aides to stay on, tip-toed decorously around the Kennedy family during days of public mourning, masterfully dealt with numerous heads of state who arrived for the funeral, and impressed states' governors, even skeptical Pat Brown of California.  LBJ talks Chief Justice Earl Warren into heading a commission to investigate the assassination.  His speech to the nation, written reluctantly by JFK's wordsmith Ted Sorenson, began, "All I have, I would give, not to be standing here tonight."  Caro tells us that, for the first time, LBJ spoke slowly, with dignity and proper emphasis.  Johnson calmed fears and re-directed feeling for JFK towards passing the agenda that JFK had been unable to push through Congress:  cuts to both spending and taxation (to increase wealth and tax revenue -- it's Reaganomics!) and a civil rights bill to open up employment, schools, and public accommodations to Blacks.

So where do these emotions come from, fifty years later, the tears for the assassination and the pleasure at LBJ's behind-the-scenes working of the system?   Is this "patriotism?"  Is patriotism directed at a geograhical area, or at an ethnic group (white English speakers)?   Is it directed at the army and expressed only in terms of US strength?  Is it akin to being a sports fan, and does it hinge on defending our position as "number one?"

Speaking for my own patriotism, it's an admiration verging on affection for the good old Constitution and for the men and women -- voters included -- who go along with the rules of the game of living in a federal republic of conflicting interests that we call "politics."

Echoing an idea expounded by George Will in his 1980 book Statecraft as Soul Craft, I love to see how the form of our government actually shaped the behavior of the man at its helm in those critical days when America was down, doubtful, and vulnerable.

Just Songs: Discovering Joni Mitchell 40 Years Later

I drifted back to the 70s this afternoon, listening to songs by Joni Mitchell that I'd heard in the background in "rec rooms," if I'd heard them at all.   Now, 40 years later, I paid attention!  The songs were so rich and acute that I started the whole collection over again as soon as it finished, to pick up on some of what I'd missed.

None of the songs in this collection were hit singles, but were chosen on merit by Graham Nash, Elvis Costello, Seal, k.d. lang, Herbie Hancock, and others.  Robbie Robertson, writing that he knows Joni's music "from the bottom up," observes that bass lines grew more important to her musical compositions as she matured.  Other comments mostly draw our attention to the acuity of the lyrics, which often give us character studies of people Joni (may have) met, including some that critique the artist's own character.. It seems typical of Bob Dylan, whose appeal to others has always baffled me, that he chose "Free Man in Paris" because it reminds him of -- what else? -- his own time in Paris, though he admits that has little to do with the song. 

I would choose "Free Man in Paris" because its distinctive woodwind riff and Joni's overdubbed harmony make sunny fun from a harried man's self-pity.   The man is some kind of music producer "stoking the star-making machinery behind the popular songs," but he could be Everyman nostalgic for the days when he was a "free man in Paris."  Now he deals with "dreamers" and "screamers" on the phone all day.  I've felt like him, and now, hearing Joni's pitiless portrait, I feel found out -- amused, but also ashamed. [Update, 8/7/2017: I've since heard that the song was specifically about producer David Geffen, at that time a closeted gay man, for whom the time in Paris was also a time when he felt free to express his sexuality.  That takes the whiny edge off the song and adds poignance.  I appreciate the song even more.]

"A Strange Boy" depicts another man who won't face reality, but this portrait is much more tender, and the boy/man is nothing like the one from Paris.  The song begins, wonderfully,

A strange boy is weaving
A course of grace and havoc
On a yellow skateboard
Thru midday sidewalk traffic 

and comments how "even the war and the navy / couldn't bring him to maturity," as all his talk is about childhood and school friends.   But when she tells him to grow up, he retorts, "Give me one good reason."  Something in his imagination captures hers,  "He sees the cars as sets of waves / Sequences of mass and space / He sees the damage in my face."  Sheila Weller's book tells us how Joni rode cross-country with a couple of men, and that the younger of the two was this one.   Real or not, he's real to me after hearing this sweetly ambivalent song.  As she sings that "he's a strange boy, a strange, strange boy" the refrain, and her feelings, stay up in the air.

A cheerfully breathless song, "Coyote" is "like a road movie," writes bassist Robbie Robertson.   The scenery did roll right by as I listened the first time, along with waves of emotion.  A cowboy drives "a hitcher" to the next motel, and then, though he has "a woman at home and another one down the hall," he wants her, too.  They dance.  That's explicit as it gets, but it feels much steamier.   She refers to him as "coyote," a metaphor that merges with the singer's childhood memory of a coyote's encounter with a hawk:

And a hawk was playing with him
Coyote was jumping straight up and making passes
He had those same eyes just like yours
Under your dark glasses
Privately probing the public rooms
And peeking thru keyholes in numbered doors

Again, Weller tells us the real-life germ of this song, though the song is good enough on its own.  It's about playwright / actor Sam Shepard on tour with Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and others ca. 1975.

Mitchell draws on another animal metaphor to reflect on a singer's career in "Black Crow."  The "ragged" bird, "black as the highway" that the singer drives on, flies from tree to tree, "diving, diving, diving" for any "shiny object."   Comments by k. d. lang highlight the way that Mitchell's guitar, strummed "in open tuning," creates the feeling of vast space in which the crow / singer keeps flying.

For the two  hours that I listened this afternoon, resting on the carpet with napping dogs beside me, fan going overhead, cicadas buzzing through the hazy green summer heat outside my open windows, I could have been 14 again, daydreaming about writing songs like Carly and Carole someday.  By 15, I was getting into music theatre and opera.  It's been a long time since I thought in terms of just songs.  Joni Mitchell's songs remind me just how rich just songs can be.

[See my reflections on Sheila Weller's biography of Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon. For my appreciation of her album Blue, see Traveling with Joni Mitchell's Blue: Lots of Laughs from 07/2020]

Carole, Joni, and Carly in Context

(Reflections on GIRLS LIKE US: CAROLE KING, JONI MITCHELL, CARLY SIMON, AND THE JOURNEY OF A GENERATION by Sheila Weller, paperback published by Washington Square Press, 2008.)

Discussing the cover of Carly Simon's 1972 album No Secrets, Sheila Weller notes that the photo portrays the singer-songwriter as "the epitome of the 1970s educated woman," shown "in errand-doing, lunch-date-going motion in velour jeans, tote bag swinging."  In eighth grade, I picked up on all that subliminally.   More significantly, I took for granted in 1972 that women would have lives and careers of their own, unmarried. Weller does also note  a couple of details that did grab my conscious attention back then, "discreetly visible" under Simon's "tight jersey."

Weller in GIRLS LIKE US presents parallel biographies of Carly Simon, Carole King and Joni Mitchell.   It's about three parts relationships, one part songwriting, and one part social history. 

About social history, Weller is so right matching her subjects' albums to the zeitgeist of that era that I take her word for the parts of the story that I was too young to understand.   She fits their work into a bigger picture of immense cultural change, and she does so without idealizing that era. For example, she writes that Carole King, a teenager unmarried and pregnant in 1959 had therefore married and boarded "the elevator" (of adulthood) "when young adult life had meant responsibility and sober idealism.  Now [in 1967] it meant playfulness, politics, and sensuality" (189). 

Weller observes that Sixties social movements seemed to happen overnight, but she describes how they had been a long time in preparation.   We can see some of this in the family backgrounds of these three women:  Carole King's working-class parents and their divorce;  Joni Mitchell's escape to Bohemian life, immediately marred by pregnancy and the anguished choice between giving up either the career or the baby (haunted for decades after by her choice to give up the baby);  Carly Simon's wealthy, educated parents' cocktail parties with New York cultural figures and their "no secrets" lives with live-in employees who were also their lovers.  The sexual revolution didn't begin in 1967, it just went public.   Weller doesn't idealize any of this:

In hindsight, the last three years of the 1960s were like some self-wrought mini-Messianic Age plunked in the middle of the twentieth century.  Hubristic prophets spouted melodramatic rhetoric...; believers found revelations in holy texts (Weather Underground manifestoes, acid visions, Dylan or Beatles lyrics); [and Students for Democratic Action espoused] "fraternity and honesty."  But they devolved into tableaux both satirically grandiose and improbable...  (256)

Citing Wolfe, she describes Black Panthers sharing cocktails with Leonard Bernstein.  What she calls "the triumphalist chaos of late 60s rock, the radicals' political opera, the psychedelic madness" all "seemed to have backfired" by 1971:  assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin King, massacre at My Lai, and shootings of protesters at Kent State, not to mention high-profile drug-related deaths of counter-culture icons Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, all seemed to be signalling that 1971 was the time to try living out Bobby Kennedy's statement, "We're here to make gentle the life of this world" (321). We were ready for songs that asked, Ain't it good to know, you've got a friend?

About artistry, Weller confirms what I've divined since my days of squinting at LP inner liners' lyrics and composition credits:  Carly and Carole have the AABA form from Broadway in their blood, and all three women respect craft to an extent that bothered some of their peers and critics, for whom anything unspontaneous smacks of inauthenticity. King's lyricist-husband Gerry Goffin had wanted to write his own West Side Story with Carole, and their song "Up on the Roof," with strings added, was a nod in that direction.  Joni had jazz chords and the sounds of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross in mind long before she got the guitar and the folk label, longer still before her jazz albums of the 70s bombed.    

For this poisonous ideal of "authenticity," Weller credits the faux-vagabond Bob Dylan with spreading the notion that craft reeked of dishonesty.  In his encounters with these women and with the Beatles, his example and charisma gave them license to indulge in allusions to personal experiences that no one could divine.   Weller calls it "deep" songwriting that does more than find ways to say "I love you."  At one point in the mid-sixties, Joni Mitchell realizes, "Oh!  You can write about anything!"

All of that is very interesting, but the stuff about who did what in bed (or the bathroom!) with James Taylor (or Graham Nash, Jackson Browne, Neil Young, or Mama Cass Elliot's brother-in-law Russ Kunkel), about marriages brutal and sad, and about flings with Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Mick Jagger, and others -- just didn't interest me much.  Weller quotes many more women friends than I could keep track of dishing about the artists' relationships. 

All three women had long spells of self-doubt and critical indifference in the 80s and 90s, and all have come through with some acceptance that their audience will remain those of us whose notions of relationship were shaped by "That's The Way I've Always Heard It Should Be," "You've Got a Friend," and "Both Sides Now."

[Read my re-discovery of Joni Mitchell here. In another blogpost, I pay tribute to the singer of that same generation whose voice I hear in my head every day of my life, Cass Elliot.]

When Plot isn't Enough

(Reflections on THE ROMAN HAT MYSTERY, an early novel by Frederick Dannay and Manfred B. Lee as "Ellery Queen", two novels by Henning Mankell, THE TROUBLED MAN and RETURN OF THE DANCING MASTER, and the Roman Polanski film CHINATOWN.]

Returning after forty years (!!!) to read a novel by a leader in the classic detective fiction of the 20th century's first half, I was disappointed.  It was all plot, with characters who were all "types," and no texture - i.e., no memories, social observations beyond stereotypes, atmosphere, inter-textuality.  Another novel by a modern master, however, was not much more lively, despite the dutiful layering in of mixed feelings, memories, and cultural comments. 

"Ellery Queen" was once a powerful brand name for readers of detective fiction.  It covers stories, novels, and media products featuring detective - writer named Ellery Queen, and it's also the pseudonym for two men who wrote that fiction and edited the eponymous "mystery magazine."   When I was 12, "he" was my favorite, with his knack for decorously macabre murders and his emphasis on logic to solve the puzzles.  I especially recall a novel built on "The Twelve Days of Christmas," the last verse pinned to the back of the victim:  "Your true love gives to you [a] knife / The finishing stroke to end your life."  

So I returned with fond memories to Ellery Queen's THE ROMAN HAT MYSTERY, one of only a few available on Kindle.   Here, the murder occurs in row LL of a Broadway theatre during the performance of a violent play about organized crime.   Inspector Richard Queen, accompanied  by his Ivy League wunderkind Ellery, blocks access and egress from the theatre until it can be ascertained that the murderer must still be in the theatre.

That's as interesting as it gets.   I kept turning pages from loyalty, while the Queens interview witnesses and acquaintances of the deceased, a shyster lawyer.   Clues are repeated:   He must have worn a hat, but none can be found... He owned several books on handwriting analysis...  He (or someone) had doodled the number 50,000 in his program, along with his own signature several times.
Who could have seen the murderer leave that seat?  Where could the hat be?   Why did the murderer take it?  We know that the victim brought a hat into the theatre because he was in evening dress, and, logically, someone would have noticed had he not worn a hat to match the suit.   That, and other leaps of "logic", were pretty debatable.  By the time I learned Whodunnit, I didn't recall much about the culprit, and I didn't care how he did it.  

In the sixty years between Ellery Queen's novel and Henning Mankell's THE TROUBLED MAN, we've come to expect a more textured story.   Plot is overlaid with backstory and sidestory.   For backstory we have Detective Kurt Wallender's tense relationships with his grown daughter and her mother his ex-wife, with parallels to his ambivalent relationship with his father.  The sidestory is related:  Wallender fears that he is showing signs of the Alzheimer's disease that destroyed his father. 

But the texture here felt just as generic as the plot in the Ellery Queen novel.   We get a bit about the plot -- concerning the disappearance of a retired admiral who had something to do with a Soviet submarine's spying on Sweden in the 1980s -- and then a bit about Wallender's fraught family life, and then a bit of worry about his mental capacities.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat.   It's clear by the end that Mankell himself has tired of this character, and he sets up a new focus on the daughter's crime-fighting career.

Mankell gives himself a boost of energy by introducing a different detective for his RETURN OF THE DANCING MASTER.   This one has a bizarre murder that Ellery Queen might have been too fastidious to describe:   the victim's bloody footprints show that the murderer tangoed with him -- or with his corpse.  Mankell varies the point of view, so that we know more than the detective about the one who did it.  When there's a second murder, we know that it's someone else's doing. 

This novel succeeds in ways that the other two do not, creating some images and some encounters of characters that are gripping and haunting.   Even so, the "texturing" again seems routine.  Our detective, for example, has cancer, and the author checks in with the same set of thoughts periodically:  "Oh, I've got cancer, and I may not live much longer, and nothing matters, does it?"  Neo-Nazis are involved in the plot, and we run through a predictable series of thoughts about that every so often.

It may not be fair to compare novels to a movie, but CHINATOWN fits this discussion as an examplar of a detective fiction in which character, plot, and texture are all of one piece.   It's LA around 1940, an apparent paradise of elegant facades, blue pools, and lush green fields.  The characters look good, and their roles in life are well-defined: the efficient detective, the dignified wife, the crusading politician.  The plot is straightforward:  Hired to catch the politician in his affair, the detective discovers that nothing is what it seemed -- not the man, not his wife, not even the blue pool or the green field.  Nothing feels added on, not even Jerry Goldsmith's music (which really was added in later):  it's all integrated.

Sondheim Mini-Festival in Atlanta

Just this past weekend, it was possible to see three Sondheim musicals in the Atlanta area.  Atlanta Lyric Theatre produced GYPSY, his 1959 collaboration with composer Jule Styne and book writer Arthur Laurents.   Georgia State University's music department presented their summer opera workshop production of A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC (1973), with Sondheim's music and lyrics and with book by Hugh Wheeler.  A suburban theatre group called Next Theatre presented ASSASSINS (1990), book by John Weidman.  I haven't seen GYPSY yet, but I saw the other two shows, and I have a couple of reviews.

Night Music:  Better Heard, Not Seen
First, NIGHT MUSIC worked so long as the director trusted the material.  The young performers' voices were strong and supple, blending well on the ensemble numbers.   (See my review of the Broadway revival.)

The standout performer on the night that I saw it was John Tibbetts. In the role of Carl-Magnus, an outsized and cartoonish character, Tibbetts had the outsized voice, but also a presence that made us believe that he believed every outrageously chauvinistic and egocentric thing he voiced.

Members of UGA's opera workshop production of Night Music:
John Tibbetts (Carl-Magnus), Erin McDaniel (Desiree) and Ryan Glover (Henrik)
photo: from facebook

To make the bare recital stage into the world of the story, director Copeland Woodruff started with a great idea.  The stage was dressed to be a backstage dressing room, where we watched the young actors at make-up tables, adding age to their faces and hair.  Scenery was derived from dressing-tables, trunks, folding screen, cloth.  

But then the director strained for laughs that killed the atmosphere that the show's creators tried to create -- "whipped cream with knives" original director Harold Prince called it, with music that aimed to be "perfume."   The Liebeslieder quintet, fine young singers, were made to shuffle and squint as though enacting a singalong at some nursing home.  The idea got some laughs at the start, but became a distraction when the quintet moved scenery at a shuffle's pace.    The high-comedy banter of the dinner party scene was marred by low-comedy mugging, the characters squeezed onto a small picnic blanket like clowns in a tiny car.   At the climax, Henrik's smashing of his wine-glass was turned into a slow-mo special effect with strobe lights. 


Evidently believing that songs need motion to be interesting, the director cued entrances for other characters during solos and duets.  For example, when characters Fredrik and Carl-Magnus confronted each about their lover Desiree, she entered upstage and slunk downstage center between the two men and lay at their feet while they toyed with her body -- detracting from the song, and also detracting from her character.  

The last words of the script are Madame Armfeldt's.  For all her experience with love as "a pleasurable means / to a measurable end," Madame Armfeldt has learned during the course of this evening's events what she has missed in life.  This night, she has seen her daughter fight to recover the one true love of her life, and to begin a new family.  Telling her granddaughter that it's now time for the summer night to "smile" for "the old, who know too much,"  she lets go of life, and Sondheim's lovely "Night Waltz" soars.   It's a delicate, bittersweet moment.

In this production, she collapses dramatically, is unceremoniously shrouded with the picnic blanket, and left in a heap while the actors tip toe away, dabbing at their eyes with handkerchiefs.  So much for delicate and bittersweet!

The voices were glorious, the dialogue well-delivered, the astonishing "perfume" of Sondheim's accompaniment all realized by a single overworked pianist (Christy Lee).  I just wish I'd closed my eyes.

Assassins: On Target
Also operating on a low budget, with a low ceiling on a wide shallow stage, director Rob Roy Hardie used nothing more than bar stools and barrels in the foreground, a seedy carnival shooting gallery upstage.  It was flanked by projection screens where photos of the assassins and their victims appeared at appropriate moments.

This show may be fool-proof.  I've seen it four times, including the Tony-Winning Broadway production in 2004.  Some actors sang better than others, some stages were more impressive, some sound systems were better balanced, but the effect has been the same:  We're drawn into the world of the assassins.  They mingle at the carnival, at the bar, in the park, always cantankerous, always endearingly loopy.  We learn their stories, one by one.  By the time they sing "Another National Anthem," we're on their side, and the fresh-faced "Balladeer" sounds pretty foolish when he tells these angry losers to be patient and "you can make the lies come true."  Even now, the fourth time I've seen it, I felt a pang when suddenly we're in Dallas with Lee Harvey Oswald, and the whole cohort tempt him to pull the trigger.  "Without you, we're just footnotes -- vainglorious actor, disgruntled office-seeker -- but with you, we're a force of history!"  The woman in front of me began to cry as soon as she realized where we were.

Sondheim and playwright Weidman added a number for the 1992 London production, and for me it's the linchpin of the piece.  After Oswald pulls the trigger, and we see a montage of video images from that event, the ensemble enters to sing in roles of ordinary men and women remembering the moment they heard the news, "The President's been shot!"   Their characters span 100 years of history, social groups and geography, but the clutching sense that "Something Just Broke" hits all of them -- and us, too.  The agony expressed so directly in this song restores us to balance.  When those assassins reprise their toe-tapping number "Everybody's Got the Right," they're goofy as ever, but not endearing any more.

While the director interrupted a couple of climactic moments with odd silent gun play between characters that I didn't get, this production was no less effective than others.   Danielle Girardeau stood out as "Squeaky Fromme," a foul-mouthed flower child, Paul Gourdeau commanded our attention in his two long tirades as Samuel Byck, and Zip Rampy managed to play Charles Guiteau as if all his cheerful bravado were just a blink away from abject despair.  The small band overpowered the singers, but not after the first couple of numbers. 

All My Sons: Actors as Acrobats

(reflection on a performance of Arthur Miller's play ALL MY SONS at The Walker School, Marietta, GA, on October 27, 2011)

The day after the performance of ALL MY SONS by high school students at the independent school where I teach, I heard a fellow teacher tell a cast member, "I don't 'enjoy' an Arthur Miller play, but I can appreciate it."   I know what he means, but I take issue with it.

Written in 1947, the play shows us men and women in the aftermath of the war, dealing with loss, and guilt.  There's Kate Keller (Rachel Novak), grieving over her son Larry, grasping at hopes that he might still be alive.  There's Chris (Justin Kasian), the young officer who lived to see most of his men sacrifice their own lives in their efforts to save each other, who now finds routine life to be a betrayal of that kind of generosity.  His father Joe (Kyle Rehl) owned a business that manufactured crucial equipment for fighting planes.  Now retired, he was tainted by a scandal when defective parts resulted in US planes crashing; his partner went to jail for knowingly approving the shipment.  That partner's son is George (Patrick McPherson), ashamed of his father's fall. 

The catalyst for the action is a visit to the Keller home by Ann (Olivia Breton), George's sister and the late brother's fiancee.   Why is she visiting?   Does Chris love his older brother's fiancee?   The mother, clinging to the idea that her son still lives, will not tolerate that thought. Can she be made to see reality?  

The enjoyment of the evening comes from watching actors tip-toe on a fragile bridge of light dialogue over dangerous water.  Undercurrents are close to the surface of polite conversation, and tension grows with our awareness of what's concealed in the depths.    My favorite moment this way may have been the split-second when the mother steps out onto the porch, interrupting a confrontation among the other characters.   George has been on the verge of attack, revealing a fact that will change everything; but, face still flushed with anger, he turns a polite smile to the mother and to answer small talk with small talk, while the other characters watch with trepidation, and follow his lead.

When the actors are so focused on character as these young actors were, it's not depressing; it's exhilarating, like watching acrobats at Cirque du Soleil!


This was my second time with ALL MY SONS, and I came away feeling about the script as I had the first time (a production at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival over a decade ago):  It's one of the best plays I've ever seen, until the last thirty minutes, when the characters become mouthpieces for a bitter Marxist critique of America.   
 
Still, the good will generated by the actors in Miller's dialogue for the first couple hours carries the day.


The Cast:  Kyle Rehl (Joe), Rachel Novak (Kate), Justin Kasian (Chris), Olivia Breton (Ann), Patrick McPherson (George), Myles Haslam (Jim), Casey Schreiner (Sue), Coleman Hedden (Frank), Liane Houde (Lydia), Sam Lowry (Bert).  Directed by Katie Arjona.  See a student-produced trailer.

Half Way with LBJ

(reflections on THE PASSAGE TO POWER by Robert A. Caro, fifth in his multi-volume work THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON, Knopf 2012.)

Half way through this volume, I feel oddly reassured to know that the leaders who loomed large in my early childhood were no more grown up, thoughtful, talented or courageous than anyone I meet or read about today.   Sensitive to criticism, paralyzed by the fear of failure, prone to miscommunication, careless of facts that don't go with our preconceptions: that's all of us, even Presidents, Vice-Presidents, and Cabinet officials.   This is good to remember when we're tempted to apply superlatives to the current crop of leaders, whether best, worst, most or least.

Caro starts when Lyndon Johnson was close to 50 years old, Senate leader, second most powerful man in America, and, for once, indecisive.  As Caro tells it, Johnson's life was governed by his determination to rise above the locally famous story of his father's precipitous fall from prosperous leader to pauper and town joke.  We read how Johnson begged, wormed, and bullied his way into ever more influential positions.  As Senate leader, he belittled staffers and physically intimidated legislators, kicking future speaker Jim Wright in the shin, for example, and pulling other men's faces close to his.   With all that background, we appreciate the frustration of his supporters and hangers-on when Johnson inexplicably turns down their help to start organizing for the presidential race coming up in 1960. while the Kennedy clan was promoting JFK throughout the country.   When he finally made up his mind to run, it was too late.  His campaign staffers had to redesign buttons "All the Way with LBJ" because democrats in the western states didn't know what LBJ meant.

Caro reminds us how vice-presidents have been the butts of jokes from Adams on, but it's still hard to believe how pathetic LBJ appears in the office.   The offer to be Vice-President is a matter of debate, and Caro devotes a dozen pages to answering the questions, "Did JFK offer the VP job only as a pro-forma courtesy?" When Bobby Kennedy ran down to LBJ's suite from the Kennedy suite two, three, or four times to talk LBJ out of accepting the position, was he representing Jack, or conniving against a man whom he had hated viscerally for years, or was he misreading his brother through the filter of his hatred?

LBJ serves his one purpose by getting JFK the electoral votes of three southern states.   LBJ's home state of Texas went nearly 50% Republican, and at one event, Republicans jostled LBJ and Lady Bird, carrying signs that accused him of selling out to the "communists."  The vote was close in Texas, and Caro goes into great detail about the ways that Democrats (probably) cheated.  They used elaborate specifications for "proper" paper ballots to disqualify paper ballots in largely Republican districts outside of the big cities, and custom allowed ranchers to herd their Spanish-speaking workers into polling places to vote as a bloc.

Approaching the Vice-Presidency, LBJ boasts how "power is where power goes," how he'll turn this office into one of influence.  Then he is politely but decisively rebuffed on all sides: Mike Mansfield and LBJ's former flock in the Senate do not allow him to chair their caucus meetings (LBJ quips that a cactus differs from a caucus because "the pricks are on the outside"), and JFK ignores a letter (compared to Seward's co-presidency memo to Lincoln) except to write that he expects Johnson to "review" policies.   Used to 56 staffers and an office dubbed "the Taj Mahal" in the Senate, LBJ was allowed 18 in a corner of the Executive Office Building, and a visitor remarked that, during his hour there, the phone didn't ring once.   No one needed LBJ for anything.  By 1963, even the staffer charged with "keeping Lyndon happy" had forgotten about him.  LBJ and Lady Bird were left off party lists.  Yet LBJ went through a pathetic routine to appear relevant, having his limo park beside the White House, entering a side door through secretary Evelyn Lincoln's office past the Oval Office and out through the Rose Garden, so that it would appear to anyone watching that he was "checking up" on things in the White House before he resumed his lonely perch in the building across the street.

Caro's book has focused so far on personal politics, saying next to nothing about the principles and policies of the national kind.   It's more about personalities and "manners," along the lines of who sits near the President at the conference table, and who gets to barge into the President's office (Bobby, not LBJ, in both cases).   LBJ appears manipulative, extremely insecure, self-deluded and crude.  So far, Bobby comes across as morose, rude, "ruthless," unprincipled, and petulant. 

JFK seems to sit above the rest.  Caro gives us the background for LBJ's disdain for Senator Kennedy, whom he addressed as "Sonny Boy" or "Johnny" when patronizing him in the Senate.  JFK's lifelong struggles with undiagnosed abdominal pains and back trouble are detailed.  His physical courage to save men when a Japanese ship splintered his PT boat are detailed.  His playboy image is supported, not least by a couple of parenthetical tidbits that this or that woman was a mistress.  His lack of interest in Senate work and absenteeism are detailed.  But he was charming because he was confident in his ability to win anybody over to his side, with persuasion and a smile.  We see it happen when he sways a pro-LBJ delegation of Texans with a combination of gracious praise for their favorite son and a little twist on LBJ's rhetoric.   We see how he seems to be clear and calm about choosing LBJ while Bobby and two suites full of aides are hand-wringing, sobbing, and threatening to come to blows.   We see it when he quickly and definitively takes full responsibility for the mistake of approving the poorly-planned Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.  He takes the hit and moves on.

I've reached the part of the story where the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 has just ended.  Here, LBJ at least gets to sit at the table, though transcripts show that he contributed little while military and civilian councilors advised JFK to strike Cuba's missile silos and Cuba, too.  Bobby shifts the discussion by comparing the event to Pearl Harbor, with the USA as the bad guy bombing another country out of the blue.   When JFK and Bobby are absent from the room, LBJ speaks up on the tape recording of the council, objecting that the US looked "weak" because of the President's approach of "quarantine" and waiting to strike back at challenges to the quarantine (and the shooting down of a U2 spy plane).   JFK finds his own way, disregarding the pressure from the rest of the room, and it works in both the short and long term.

Now Caro has to rehabilitate Bobby, who has looked so bad through the rest of the book.   Now, at least, we find that he has a tearful, fearless, life-long identification with the underdogs in society, and a warm regard for children.

(I completed the book.  Read my reflection, "Power Perfected in Weakness: LBJ's Finest Hours")

Eternal Zappiness: Screwtape and Safety Not Guaranteed

(reflections on C. S. Lewis's THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS, adapted and directed for the stage by Jeffrey Fiske and Max Mclean, starring Max McLean; presented by The Fellowship for the Perofrming Arts at Woodruff Arts Center in Saturday June 16; and SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED, a movie directed by Colin Trevorrow, starring Aubrey Plaza and Mark Duplass.)


Zap! In a flash of white light, a soul is saved, leaving behind strife, inner conflict, and ordinary existence. Two times this past weekend, I saw disparate works with this same effect: a staging of C. S. Lewis's SCREWTAPE LETTERS and a new movie SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED. The first is explicitly Christian; the other is geared to the "ironic post-college twentysomethings" who mock Christianity  (self-description of a reviewer of this Screwtape from NYTheatre.com) . In one, the soul escapes to heaven; in the other, the characters hope that time travel will take away the regrets and losses in their lives. This is very satisfying to watch. Don't we all wish that we could seriously believe that the day we quit this ordinary life is the day when we'll cross over to a new, eternally better one? But neither of these works wants us to take "happily ever after the zap" seriously.

SCREWTAPE is a satire. The title character is a mid-level martinet in the ranks of Hell, a military-industrical bureaucracy where the "intelligence department" has been working on the question "What is God really up to?" (since it's inconceivable that He really loves His creatures) and the Research Division has failed to develop even one pleasure -- so all the devils can do is to turn pleasure to sin through selfish obsession.

Other laughs come from the devils' insights. So, their "patient" has adopted Christianity, and has had an unselfish thought. "Have you made him aware of that fact?" Screwtape asks the novice tempter. "Make him proud of his humility." That got the biggest laugh of the evening, except for an exposition of what has constituted "sexy" in different eras, from regal reserve to silly fawning, to "girls who look like boys" and Screwtape's imitation of Madonna's strutting.

The premise of the entire novel / play is one great joke, variations of one overstatement. War, we're told, is of minor importance for the devil, and a wise devil won't enjoy it too much. But battles of cosmic consequence are over little things: a piece of toast, a little chuckle at someone else's expense, the distaste one may feel for the church usher with the oily smile.

For all of the witty little lessons along the way, and the dramatic apotheosis at the end, Lewis's great gift to us in this work is the insight that salvation is a transformation of ordinary things. Little may change in the routines of work and living, but everything changes in the seeing, as Charles Wesley's hymn says, "We walk by faith and not by sight." The danger to our salvation is in letting those daily failures, discomforts, and resentments transform us. Naturally, Lewis had to zap his man at the end, or the story would have dragged on, like real life, through middle age and the nursing home -- where Screwtape tells us the devils have the best chance of winning the battle!

SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED delights, first, because of the actors who embody the characters. Aubrey Plaza plays Darius, a twentysomething intern whose face expresses "whatever" by default. Mark Duplass plays Stephen, a twentysomething loner who advertises for a companion to travel in time, "safety not guaranteed." Jake Johnson plays Jeff, a reporter at Seattle Magazine who sells his editor on the idea of investigating the whacko who placed that ad. Jeff takes a couple of interns, "the lesbian" (Darius) and "the geek" Arnau, played by Karan Soni.

That's the set up. What follows, really, is as old as As You Like It and Midsummer Night's Dream. Our band of mismatched reporters arrive in the boonies, and each finds love (at varying depths) and himself or herself.

When Stephen and Darius share their reasons for wanting to go back in time, we hit on a religious theme. Both carry the burden of deep regrets and guilt. For sci-fi buffs, it's obvious what to do about that: Go back in time to prevent the bad thing from happening. Each character is endearingly guarded and needy, and we root for them to get together, and to succeed in their quest.

Jeff, the sleazy reporter, has an ulterior motive for this trip. While the interns do the investigation, he is looking up a high school girlfriend. An online critic pointed out that this, too, is a form of time travel. Jeff is disappointed in her at first (time has put "s--- all over her face" he says, one of many crass statements), but it's not long before he's sharing dinner with her, and chores, too -- out feeding her chickens. After a setback, he turns his attention to Arnau, coaching him through a night of "seizing the day" with some local girls.

It's not in the time travel, not in the chorus of angels, not in the zap of light, but in those everyday things -- buttering the toast, feeding the chickens, seeing the beauty and honoring the dignity in others -- that salvation begins and grows. It's a message in both SCREWTAPE and SAFETY, not loud, but clear.

The Invention of Stoppard

Reflections on Tom Stoppard's play THE INVENTION OF LOVE (Grove Press 1998).

A.E.Housman advises his younger self in THE INVENTION OF LOVE on Broadway, 2001. Photo from Playbill.com

The moment of greatest emotional impact in Tom Stoppard's play THE INVENTION OF LOVE  occurs four-fifths of the way through the script.   It follows debate concerning the value of knowledge for knowledge's sake, art for art's sake, choices for editing ancient Latin texts, and the ambivalence of Victorian English gentlemen to the Greek vice (referred to in this script as "spooniness," if not "beastliness").  Settings change from rivers (Styx, Charwell) to games (croquet, billiards, track and field), but never stem the flow of words.   So it is ironic that the most important line is left unspoken.  It comes in the brief silence between two monosyllables: "Why?  Oh!"

The immediate context is a question from the speaker's roommate and longtime best friend, A. E. Housman, best known today as author of the poems collected in A Shropshire Lad.  Housman has just asked his roommate, Moses Jackson, "Will you mind if I go to live somewhere but close by?"

Jackson asks "Why?" as in, "Why would you go to live somewhere else?  Why should I mind if you live close by?"    Then Jackson makes the leap:  Housman has been evading a direct response to the suggestion, made by Jackson's fiancee, that he's "sweet on" Jackson.  Housman has skipped past confession straight to sentencing, exile.  In a flash, Jackson understands why Housman sacrificed a promising career in academia to take a clerical job in Jackson's office; why Housman, uninterested in sports, cheered Jackson at track competitions for years; and why Housman, a classics scholar, made so much of Theseus and his friend who "loved each other, as men loved each other in the heroic age, in virtue."  All of that goes into the syllable, "Oh!"

After Jackson recovers somewhat from the shock, he behaves decently.  "It's terrible, but it's not your fault. ... We'll be just like before."  Jackson offers his hand and says, "All right?  Shake on it?"  But here the playwright inserts a blackout on the scene, leaving a spotlight on the actor playing Housman, who recites verse that summarizes the scene, and the rest of the poet's own life:

He would not stay for me; and who can wonder?
He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand and tore my heart in sunder
And went with half my life about my ways. 

This scene, the emotional core of Stoppard's play, was not enough to save THE INVENTION OF LOVE for me when I saw it on Broadway in the spring of 2001. All I recall from the production is the stage itself, black and reflective as patent leather, suggesting the surface of water for many episodes on rivers.

Nonetheless, since I studied Stoppard at Duke, I've wanted to write at least one play in his manner. That means, as Stoppard once explained to critic Kenneth Tynan (in Tynan's book Show People), thinking of a play as a shattered ashtray. Stoppard finds a central image or idea, and rummages around for fragments to fit with it. The pieces often relate, not to the characters or story, but to a tangent suggested by a word or allusion. The scenes (some, mere blackout sketches) run a course of seemingly free association, zig-zagging from present to past, from serious to silly, from serious disputation to gags. Like discourse among clever friends, a Stoppard play may not lead to a clear destination, but it covers a lot of ground in convivial company.

Arcadia is the exceptional Stoppard play: delightful,  thought-provoking, but also moving and memorable.  It is no less discursive than Invention, skipping around through topics of British gardening, chaos theory, fractiles, contemporary academic writing, and the life of Shelley.  When I first saw it at Atlanta's Alliance Theatre, I was amused but unmoved.  I saw it again in a more intimate theatre at the Alabama's Shakespeare Festival, and was moved and elated.  (So moved was I that I cast thrift to the wind and booked a second vacation that year, to catch Arcadia's final performance.)

Other plays of Stoppard that I've seen -- Invention, Rosencrantz..., The Real Thing, Travesties, and Jumpers -- did not delight so much in the theatre as when I was reading and marking the scripts.  Were the productions at fault?  Was I expecting too much?  Or do Stoppard's worst critics have it right, that his cleverness overlays the script and smothers the drama?  Tynan wrote, more gently, that, in Stoppard, "simplicity of idea often underlies complexity of style."   A favorable reviewer of Invention on Broadway advised viewers to enjoy the story and to ignore all the intellectual stuff that Stoppard threw in just to meet critics' expectations.
 
Incisive critic John Simon, writing in New York magazine about the production of Invention that I saw, wishes that he had read the play first:  

[The Invention of Love] is remarkable but not really a play, if by play we mean something that can be followed by an audience with a standard education and average intelligence. By followed, I do not mean getting the general drift, but catching at least a good part of the allusions, quotations, parodistic references, wordplay, and other fine points, for fine points are Stoppard's stock-in-trade. Plot and characterization are not completely lacking but are minimal in importance.  ("Stoppard Un-stoppered")

Yet Stoppard does not fail to tell his story with feeling.  Not five pages into the script, we have a foreshadowing of the emotional climax:  the shade of old Housman, in a boat with Charon crossing the Styx, encounters his younger self during a boat ride with Oxford friends Pollard and Moses "Mo" Jackson, with a dog.  Dumbstruck, the elder Housman utters just one syllable: "Mo!"  The young men's banter explicitly recalls Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog).  As they glide off,  Housman speaks words that could be his epitaph, "I had only to stretch out my hand! -- ripae ulterioris amore!  (cries out) Oh, Mo! Mo! I would have died for you but never had the luck!"  Later, after several variations on this same scene, we understand that it was in that boat on that afternoon that young Housman made his pivotal choice to abandon the academic course laid out for him, to devote himself -- platonically -- to Jackson.   
 
In between that early scene and that handshake, we get scenes that develop the drama in a more or less conventional way, making clear how difficult and ruinous it would have been for Housman to "stretch out his hand" to Jackson.   Much is made of Housman's contemporary Oscar Wilde who displayed what Jackson repressed, and of the new law that would ruin Wilde -- imprisoned "for the color of his hair," Housman's coded reference to an inborn trait.   More than once, Jackson blithely expresses disdain for Wilde and his ilk, while Housman keeps uncomfortably silent.   
 
But Stoppard steps on the story with long speeches, lectures even, about the value of "useless" knowledge.   Perhaps it could be made more clear what connection there is between Housman's vigorous lifelong devotion to recovering the exact original phrasing (down to the commas!) of ancient authors, and his other lifelong devotion.   Is it that both passions were "futile," and thus heroic, like the 150 soldier-couples alluded to a few times, who died in futile defense of their homeland?  

And what do we do with the one topic that Stoppard's characters barely mention, A Shropshire Lad?  In the fifth part of the script, Oscar Wilde joins Housman in Charon's boat, and says, just before his exit, "You didn't mention your poems.  How can you be unhappy when you know you wrote them?  They are all that will still matter."   Moments later, Old Housman teaches his younger self about Gallus, the first to write love elegies, though only one line of his remains of all his poems.  His younger self is struck by the sadness of it: "Only one line for his monument."  The older Housman replies, after Virgil, "How much immortality does a man need? -- his own poetry, all but a line, as if he had never been, but his memory alive in a garden in the northernmost province of an empire that disappeared fifteen hundred years ago.  To do as much for a friend would be no small thing."

These topics are interesting.  I underlined my script and wrote "Ha!" and "Ah!" many times in the margins.  Yet the fact remains, as a student once said to me about a New Yorker cartoon, "I understand it, but I don't get it."

Blasphemy Against the Holy Spirit: Sermon by Fr. Kirk Lee

I was not the only parishioner at St. James' this morning struck by Father Kirk Lee's sermon.   Responding to Mark 3:20 ff., he first gave us parallel texts from the synoptic gospels all telling us that "blasphemy against the Holy Spirit" cannot be forgiven.  But, what constitutes blasphemy against the Holy Spirit?

He provides context from Mark.  At the point of this statement, authorities and family both have asked if Jesus is not demon-possessed,  as he has broken taboos, regulations, and laws of Scripture and laws of nature.  

In other words, they were attributing to Satan the work of the Holy Spirit through Jesus.  That, he concluded, is blasphemy against the spirit. 

That makes sense to me in a way that other glosses on the passage never have done.

Staging Philip Glass: Kepler at Spoleto

No story, no dialogue, no characters -- no problem.  For Philip Glass's opera Kepler, director Sam Helfrich found dramatic shape in snippets of Kepler's writings and poetry of Kepler's era.  He told the story by working with just a few staging ideas.

In this, he mirrored the composer, whose musical vocabulary consists of certain musical gestures so familiar by now as to be fairly trademarked.  Glass fans can listen to Kepler and say, "Ah! There's the chug-chugging bass line under rapidly ascending four-note scales; there's the castinet rhythm he's used since the mid-90s; there are the whirling flutes from Satyagraha ;  there's his signature sound, deedle-deedle played under deedledy-deedledy...."  New pieces by Glass are thus instantly recognizable as his, but that doesn't take away the inherent pleasure raised by the perpetual motion, the ominous undercurrents, and the scintillating sounds from the upper registers.  The pleasures are at least doubled by the element of virtuosity when an orchestra plays the music live.   After hearing the orchestra sustain concentration for two hours of roiling patterns and sudden stops,  the enthusiastic audience last Thursday saved its standing ovation for them and their conductor John Kennedy.

Director Helfrich's staging was compatible with Glass's approach, mixing and matching just a few visual and dramatic elements.   Over the fast-paced pulsing of the music, the drama moved very slowly three times through a simple cycle:   Kepler presents an idea about planetary motions;  the idea is resisted, questioned, and ultimately accepted by a cohort of scholars (an ensemble of six soloists, three men and three women); a chorus receives the idea and responds.   Twice, the response is prayer and heartfelt praise of God;  in the climax to Act One, the response is violent repression.

None of this is more than suggested in the text.   One time Kepler mentions how horrible the times are with their martial drums and "terrible trombones," at which point Glass indulged a little musical joke, giving the trombones a little slide to play.  Soldiers' chanting "Vanity of vanities" is all the explanation we get for their shoving Kepler and the cohort below stage to a dungeon.  The responses of the scholars are made clear simply by the fine acting of the performers, each one distinguishing his or her character through body language and occasional solos.  As Kepler, baritone John Hancock conveyed dignity, self-doubt, courage to put his own ideas to the test, courage to face opposition.  In one humorous aria, Kepler names his many enemies, and Hancock seemed to have a nuanced feeling about each name.

Two non-singing, non-speaking actors are present throughout the drama, a little boy and a woman.  Are they Kepler in his childhood, with his mother?  Are they Kepler's wife and child?  The only time that a child is mentioned, it's Kepler's figuring the minute of his conception and retro-testing the validity of his horoscope (e.g., that the child conceived at that moment would be a boy, curious and bothersome "like a dog").   First seen looking through a telescope, and often revealed watching Kepler from the sidelines, they could be either, or merely a representation of nascent curiosity and its nurturing. 

Helfrich's design team kept the scenery simple: a floor-to-ceiling wall, curved to suggest the elliptical shape of planetary orbits, Kepler's great discovery. On a screen embedded in that wall, we saw only animated abstract shapes, such as the horizontal beam of light that rose slowly throughout the opening number.  Three times, the wall stage left separates into four segments to suggest a giant crucifix, at times when the chorus sings praise to the deity.  Kepler sings that his discoveries clarify God's creation, complementing the Bible which, he says, should be read "not as a scientific text."

Mom seemed bemused when I described the opera Kepler.  "Kepler was an astronomer in the 1620s.  There's no dialogue in the show."  So, what happens?  "He begins with certain ideas about the orbits of the planets, and then he changes his mind."  Mom looked doubtful.  "One time, soldiers come in and there's a fight."  Mom just shook her head.

Well, now that I've seen it, I can testify that it was good.

[Note:  The director Sam Helfrich saw this post and added this helpful note: 

I wanted to share one thing: when Kepler was 8 years old, his mother took him to the top of a mountain to watch Halley's Comet. This fact inspired me a great deal: the idea of a curious young boy watching the night sky and later becoming one of the world's great astrophysicists! I didn't feel the audience needed the back story, as long as they understood that the child's love of the sky could inspire greatness in the adult, but I knew I wanted to include the image.

My friend Susan and I "got it!"]

(Reflections on KEPLER, an opera by composer Philip Glass, libretto by Martina Winkel.  Produced at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, SC.  Directed by Sam Helfrich. Performance May 30.)

Remembering Bo

When I first saw Bo in his cage in the Humane Society kennel on Howell Mill Rd., he was the only dog not to caper and call to me for attention. He lay at the back of his cage, his front paws elegantly crossed.  He looked up as I passed, inquisitively knitting his brows.  When I doubled back to see the calm dog, he didn't move, but thumped his tail.  When I knelt, he came forward to lick my hand, and I'd made my choice.

Back then he was called BJ, and the card said he was "hyper but lovable."  Within minutes of adopting him, I was sure that I'd made a mistake.  He tugged on his leash, ignored my calls and reassuring pats.  In the back of my car, he paced and fretted the whole way from Atlanta to Kennesaw.  Then when I let him out of the car, he unloaded his bowels on the garage floor.  Suddenly I knew what he'd been fretting about during that hour, and I was grateful to him then, and ever after.

As the young dog, he submitted to queenly Cleo [reclining in the lower right hand corner of the photo collage].  She and I were both in mourning for my first lab, Churchill, and we had both just moved to Atlanta.   She had grown suddenly old; but Bo made her young again.  He was playful, and maybe too playful.  At first, I was alarmed at his tearing around the back yard and his determined lunging at me for the stick or tennis ball that I held. 

When Cleo died, I adopted our neighbor dog Luis, who had sometimes cavorted with Bo in my backyard.  My neighbor had tied Luis to a stake for more than two years, pegging him to the carport in all weather, hot, cold or stormy.  Bo solemnly assumed the role of Alpha, biting Luis to keep him out of our bed, putting the younger dog in his place.  Bo maintained his status with long-suffering dignity.

Dignity may be a word hard to associate with a dog who, just last week, thrust his snout up and out from behind the thighs of a woman visiting my home.  He licked the bowl of cashews at last week's choir party.  Whichever side of the road I walked, he always wanted to tug to the opposite side. 

Yet he had a sense of dignity.  In these last months, he looked at me with helpless dismay when his legs gave out midway across the road, or when he woke to discover that he had fouled his bed, or when he needed my help to stand and greet me when I came home.  Deaf and perhaps forgetful, he wandered around the house looking for me. 

He still could get a kick from a walk or a snack, but his enjoyment was declining fast.  I'd promised myself years ago not to let him lose that enjoyment.  So the time had come.

On Maundy Thursday, he had his last supper.  For the first time in weeks, I let him sleep in the bed with me (incontinence notwithstanding).  On the morning of Good Friday, I took him out for a walk with me in our battlefield park.  We used to walk four or five miles, but he was tripping after only a hundred yards.  Still, we made it one last time to the clearing where he stood, chest out, nose raised and quivering at the spring breeze, looking at the sun's rising under a carpet of grey clouds. 

My friend Suzanne sent me the photos of him from these past few months, along with these words from a hymn that we sang on Maundy Thursday:

God is love, and where true love is, God Himself is there.

I've been blessed by Bo, and he by me.  Thanks be to God, and to friends who helped me to care for him.

[I wrote about Bo and Luis in two other reflections:  "Dogs are Poetry"  and "Dog in Winter"]

"How Did you Get to be Here?": Merrily We Roll Along



Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park cast of MERRILY / photo Sandy Underwood

Never having heard any of Stephen Sondheim's score for MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG, and knowing little about the story, my friend Suzanne confirmed my judgement that this production, directed by John Doyle, hits home.  Suzanne grew tearful talking about the experience this morning.  The lyrics accurately spoke what she has thought as she has rolled along her own way in life, also wondering, "How did I get to be here?" 

She went on to cite "Not a Day Goes By," and how it turns from a rapturous song of youthful love and hope, to a statement of bitter regret; yet very little changes in the song itself.  It's an image of the way relationships really do alter over time without losing their original shape.

Both of us were strongly affected by a simple gesture in the final anthem "Our Time," when central character Franklin Shepherd laid his hands on the shoulders of the young man billed in the program as "Franklin Jr."   This college-age man, in a Juilliard tee shirt, started the show poring over a score from the archives of sheet music that comprise the set (reams of manuscript paper the backdrop; boxes and stacks of manuscript paper the furniture).   From the first chords that the middle-aged Franklin Shepherd plays at the piano, he seems to direct the entire show at the younger man -- trying to justify himself to the younger man.  Other members of the cast, seeing the young man, ask him "How did you get to be here?"  Suzanne was confused, but I was no more certain of who exactly "Franklin Jr." was:  Franklin at a younger age?   Franklin's son?  At times, he was clearly portraying the son at age 3 or 6 or 10.  He could be Franklin's grown and estranged son trying to understand his father.  

Suzanne and I decided that a definitive answer isn't necessary.   What matters is that gesture, hands on the shoulders, a sign of investiture and benediction.  By that time, the middle-aged Franklin has worked backwards through some bitter memories to memories of youthful struggles and hopes with friends Mary and Charley.  This "Franklin Jr." has been witness, often anguished and accusing.  At the end of the show, the "beginning" of its characters' friendship on a rooftop in 1957, he also seems to have come out onto the roof to see Sputnik -- not the Russians' triumph alone, but for all of us, they say -- and Franklin Sr. lays those hands on him.

In John Doyle's production, there's no doubt.  We're to leave the theatre energized to go forward ready to get started:  "There's so much stuff to sing."

Poet Todd Boss's Pitch: Family's Value

(Reflections on PITCH by Todd Boss, Norton Co., 2012.)

A piano pitches out of the bed of the family truck when the father misjudges a turn on an icy road.  For poet Todd Boss, the anecdote crystallizes some truths about his own parents, beginning with "the broken cords, the empty bed".   He examines its facets in four poems under the cute title "Overture on an Overturned Piano," and he plays musical puns throughout.  These glints of wordplay are incidental pleasures in Boss's work, burnishing his reflections on family in poems about his father, his own children, and even beloved dogs.

For one poem in the suite, "Fine," (another musical pun), Boss begins, "I wonder what it was like to have to call his dad on the phone the morning after and answer the question: So, piano make it home all right?"  The humiliation of his father is a trope throughout the collection.  Behind many of Boss's poems is the story of a family moved to a farm that fails.  "Your Dad Never Did, in the End," is one such poem.  "The God of our Farm Had Blades," describes the rust-encrusted windmill overlooking the fields.  Another poem, "Broke," accumulates dozens of connotations of that word, a crushing summation of the family's experience.  

Yet, in "Apple Slices," the poem that introduced Todd Boss to public radio listeners world wide when he read it to the gourmet host of The Splendid Table, he tells us that he has "never labored harder, nor eaten better" than a time when he and his dad took a break from farm work.  "And Then One Day in a Department Store" seems, even from its title, to be an afterthought about the father in a later section of the book, a bit of Muzak recalling the classical piano pieces "your father used to fumble over all those years before," and "you'll feel what he felt -- or feel again that familiar longing to learn...." 

There's an undercurrent of self-dissatisfaction, mirroring the father's.   Boss's persona is a mere "paper-pusher," and "a pitch-man for the rich man."  Boss writes about a family reunion of three generations in a ghost town of "Luckenbach," (pun on "lookin' back"?), admitting 

Only recently have I begun

to let my small-town

farm roots show.

                             I've been a fool.

In a pair of poems "Amidwives," Boss finds sardonic fun in the fraught relationship among mother, wife, and the man they have in common.

But it's mostly delight that shows in Boss's work.   In a favorite poem of mine, "This Morning in a Morning Voice," which I called a "secular psalm" in a comment on its appearance in Poetry years ago, Boss lies in bed marveling while his son sings a kindergarten ditty on his way to the bathroom.   Other poems are playfully erotic ("Feast," "My Love for You Is So Embarrasingly"), and many are those "secular psalms" I described that pay such close attention to the wonders of creation that they come close to expressing gratitude to a creator.  He comes close to saying just that in "The World Is in Pencil," speculating that sketching the world "had to be a labor of love." 

A couple of poems stand out for what they say about specific occasions.  One tells of sitting through "A Stock Homily" for Aunt Emily, which, in its "anonymity" feels "like sin / to those / whose pages / her life was / written in."  Been there; felt that.     Another poem "My Dog Has No Nose" finds rueful fun in an incident when a dog offers up an unwelcome gift.

I've blogged about Todd Boss's first collection Yellowrocket.  Before that, he showed up in two articles that I wrote about "secular psalms."  Here are the links:

http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2009/06/poet-todd-boss-story-and-rhyme.html
http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2008/12/more-secular-psalms-in-poetry.html
http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2007/08/summer-poetry-time-to-catch-up-on.html

Church and Theatre: Laughing Matters?

When I mentioned to my 7th grade writing workshop that I've been at work on a comedy - murder - mystery - dinner - theatre piece for my home church, some were aghast.  A play, in a church?  About  murder?  And it's a comedy?

The Cast of DESPERATE CHURCH LADIES
rehearses the "interrogation scene."

I understand their reaction.  When I was an acting student who viewed the world through fundamentalist lenses, my conscience used to bother me, because plays seemed always to be about misbehavior and unhappiness.  Then I discovered Flannery O'Connor's observation that "Christian novels" about good people doing good things depict a world of false innocence.  "That strongly suggests its opposite," she drily added.  O'Connor and others asserted that any art that shows the world as it truly is will also show God.  

Years later, I heard confirmation of this view from an unlikely source.  I attended a dinner party where my mentor Frank Boggs interviewed an actor / director from London who runs an evangelical retreat for actors there.  This evangelical actor surprised his Christian audience by saying that his favorite play was WAITING FOR GODOT.  Yes, its creator Samuel Beckett was a confirmed atheist, but his humanity, humor, and despair take us to the heart of the world as we experience it, as do Ecclesiastes, Job, and Psalms.

Still, to make light of murder at a church for a fund-raiser also raises eyebrows and questions for people who don't know what acting entails. 

To them, I say two things.

First:  Not only is play-acting a legitimate activity for church members, it is essential activity for church members.  

In an article at Belief Net,  "Acting is a Form of Prayer,"  actor Liam Neeson explains how the spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola prefigure by centuries Stanislavski's "method" that all trained actors know today.   Jesuits are enjoined to "study scripture by taking the part of a character in a Bible story, such as a shepherd in the stable and Bethlem, and employing all the senses to imaginatively enter into the scene."

To my own middle school drama students, I add that we actors practice radical empathy, working from externals (spoken words, actions, stances, costume) to comprehend the spirits of characters.    

So, when a group of novice (and nervous!) actors first met with me at the church to begin the process of creating our play, I began with Neeson's observations about acting. 

Creating characters led us to another theological lesson:  Artistic creation is a form of discovery.  Failing to appreciate this point, some believers scoff at the arts as mere entertainment or, worse, as inflated lies.   But the same point was made just yesterday by a physicist on Krista Tippett's radio program "On Being."  This scientist lives by Einstein's saying, "Imagination is more important than knowledge."  After years of puzzlement, the physicist realized that imagination is our route to new knowledge.

So our little group experienced creation in a way that non-artists don't "get":  The Creator may begin with a notion of an endpoint, but the characters and events can go off in unintended directions.   Nonetheless, when our creation hits a wall, we can redeem it. 

That happened at a meeting in my living room a few weeks ago when the actors and I got tangled in our own plotlines.   It began to look as if there was no "who" in our "whodunnit."  Then one of our actors, Laura, pointed out a simple connection that we'd all missed, and we had found the truth, built into our work as if it had been planned!

Now, to address that other issue, making light of murder, I cite C. S. Lewis's brief discussion of dirty jokes.  The fun in them isn't in the subject matter, but in the incongruous images they conjure for us.  Like a joke, the murder - mystery - dinner comedy is a form that generates delight from the ingenious and incongruous mixing and matching of familiar tropes -- jealousy, venality, cupidity, and fatality.  There's also the simple pleasure of seeing grown - ups behaving like cartoon versions of ourselves.

So, here's to DESPERATE CHURCH LADIES.  The script is in the hands of the director and the actors who created from scratch the characters that they will portray.   I'm eager to see this creation living and breathing, April 20 and 21.

Letter to Walker School's Cast of Xanadu

(response to a performance of the stage musical XANADU, a pastiche of songs recorded by ELO and Olivia-Newton John.  Book by Doulas Carter Beane, music and lyrics by Jeff Lynne and John Farrar, based on the Universal Pictures film.  Director and Choreographer Katie Arjona.)

Dear XANADU,

You made my face hurt from smiling so long!  I admit I came to the show a skeptic, remembering the blandness of those early 80s songs.   I feared that seeing the lights rise on that fabulous set might be a high point of the evening.

Then Justin's warmth and energy and strong voice generated good feeling right away; the Muses' unison jokes and choreography loosened me up;  Georgie's fresh voice and persona (somehow combining winking irony with naivety) won me over.

All of that happened before I laughed myself silly at Eleni and Olivia in "Evil Woman," only to be left breathless by the dance in "Whenever You're Away From Me," and touched by our musicians' big band sounds and McLain's suave crooning.  The melding of Andrews' Sisters – I saw them live, by the way – and the metal boys  was unexpected and a great musical / staging coup! 

Overall, I felt a spirit of teamwork and friendship from you all that washed over the audience, and I left refreshed.  Today I awoke singing "I'm Alive!"

I was a skeptic; now I'm a believer.  Thank you!

V is for Vengeance: The Musical?

Over thirty years ago, author Sue Grafton set some parameters for a series of mysteries.  Learning on the job, her variations within those parameters grow in complexity until her form seems about to break apart.  Each novel follows in an alphabetical pattern;  each features detective Kinsey Millhone, each moves forward just a few months past the one before, so that, thirty years later, we're still in the 1980s.   Now, with V is for Vengeance we have a master playing with her form, this time creating something close to musical comedy.

The "opening number" draws us into the story of a cocky college graduate desperate to climb out of his debt to a gangster by gambling.  The shocking end of that chapter is followed by a high-contrast piece set in a department store where Millhone alerts store personnel to a pair of high-volume shoplifters. 

Many chapters pass before we understand the connection of chapter one to chapter two, and the novel has nearly reached its conclusion before we understand the title.  Along the way, we have chapters that involve us in the lives of characters interesting in their own right -- a suburban housewife with a philandering husband, the gangster with the code of honor, and Kinsey herself investigating the apparent suicide of the shoplifter.  Add to the mix a small time crook, friend of Kinsey, named Pinky, and a corrupt cop named Len Priddy.

Grafton takes her time tying all of these together, choreographing some coincidences and connections in the manner of a farceur, slamming doors and all. 

All the characters join in the grand finale.

I have one beef with Grafton, and it's in the Millhone chapters.  Must we be told every detail about what she ate, when she washed, how she drove? 

Otherwise, I appreciate the craftsmanship and humane feelings behind the events and characters of the series.

Met Opera's Enchanted Island: Distance and Intimacy

(reflection on a live performance of THE ENCHANTED ISLAND, seen in HD broadcast two days ago. )

"Devised" by Jeremy Sams, THE ENCHANTED ISLAND is what Sams calls a "mash - up" of Shakespeare plays, Baroque composers' music, 18th century stage conventions and the latest stage gadgetry.   Every scene brought a smile of appreciation for the canny ways in which Sams and director Phelim McDermott mixed and matched their resources.   This was created frankly to be a vehicle for the Met's best Baroque talents.

So, being all about showcasing technique and technology, borrowing its characters from well-known sources, how could we be drawn in to the story?  Two of the characters are played by counter-tenors (David Daniels as "Prospero" and Anthony Roth Costanzo as "Ferdinand"), their every entrance a shock at the strong high voices emerging from these grown men.  How could it be real to us with so much blatant artifice?

Unlikely as it seems, the production arouses a great tide of affection.  The stars' voices astounded as great athletes' most amazing feats would do.   Danielle DeNiese's voice skipped skyward and laterally as her character "Ariel" would do, while she got laughs for adolescent petulance and energy.  Joyce DiDonato as the witch "Sycorax" swelled a single pitch from pianissimo to painfully loud on the word "Maybe" in one aria, and projected character as well as the notes -- especially in a scene where she laments "a mother's pain" at being unable to mitigate her son's agony at rejection.  With great dignity, bass Luca Pisaroni plays the son "Caliban" in white face makeup and a lugubrious body suit, part turtle, part gorilla.   The moment when a magic potion wears off and his only girl friend suddenly runs away from him is the only moment that resonates as real world emotion;  all the rest is cued by magic and music, and makes us smile.

The real love story here wasn't to be found in the plot, but in the love of the Baroque music evinced by all concerned.   Conductor William Christie is a Baroque specialist, an expert at revealing this music to audiences.  The music was certainly a revelation: the instrumental lines rose and fell in sympathy with the vocal lines, the orchestra rocked and keened, belying the notion that Baroque music is staid and polite.   The novel twisting of the familiar stories, the spectacle, and the clear English lyrics all served to close the distance between us and that music of a distant time. 

Father Roger and Water

The Baptism of Christ was the theme of yesterday's readings in the Episcopal church, and our new rector Father Roger D Allen meditated on "water."  From water that cleanses in John's Baptism to water that makes a new creation in the Holy Spirit, which parallels the water over which the Spirit of God moves in Genesis I, Father Roger led us to see church itself as a source of that kind of water.

"What are we doing here?" he asked a full house of parishioners.   He ticked off a list of things that church does not do, or does not do primarily:  produce anything that could be measured by people on the street, solve problems, connect people to a club of like-minded people, or administer aid the way Red Cross and United Way do. 

It reminded me of a core chapter in Ronald Rolheiser's book The Holy Longing, which parishioners of St. James' Marietta discussed in a book group some ten years ago.  Glancing again through notes I made in that book, I see some startling corollaries to Father Roger's list of what church is not. It's not a self-help center where individual spiritual growth is the aim, but a merging with God in community (Rolheiser 137).  Rolheiser relates the oil applied to the forehead in baptism to oil used in Hebrew burial rites and observes that "we go to church to help ready each other for death" (134).  Rolheiser takes literally the idea that the church is the body of Christ in the world, the Holy Spirit "with skin on."  He also observes, incidentally, that our desire to "distinguish ourselves" is a sign of immaturity, holding on to the early stage of "individuation" (136).  His emphasis throughout is on commitment, of which Paul is his prime example, when Paul stands up, goes forward, eyes open, seeing nothing (125).

Father Kirk and Father Roger went on to baptize an adult, whose children watched from the front row, and an infant who charmingly went to sleep between the dribbling of water and the consecration by oil.  Children of the congregation came up into the choir area to watch, so that all parishioners could watch the children watching the ceremony.  It was sweet, and, thanks to the preparation, it was an outward and visible sign of something we had been provoked to think about.