Brief Encounter

This is what the San Francisco Chronicle wrote about the American Conservatory Theater/Kneehigh Theatre production of Noël Coward's Brief Encounter: "Every so often a theater piece comes to town that is so brilliantly conceived and executed, so entertaining on every level, that you want everyone you love or even like just a bit to see it. Brief Encounter ... is that kind of experience."

Couldn't have said it better. It's on until October 17. There is a really cool site including a trailer that doesn't do the piece justice here.

The work is based on Coward's well-known 1939 play Still Life, and there is a better known movie, which of course I haven't seen, called Brief Encounter. The present production melds film, stage, railway, song, movement, and audience into a new, and yet old, retake.

It's about love. There are three love affairs: the central one in which two middle class folks come to the edge of losing their good sense, and two background love affairs among the railroad station cafe staff. The latter are bawdy and humorous; the former is dark and heavy, ultimately unrequited.

All that fun on the stage and I came to want some fulfillment. Coward, of course, would never end the thing in death ... perhaps someone can correct me if I am off-base here ... but there is a little death in the soul-destroying return to the sensible. All the fulfillment is in the bawdy joy of the other two relationships.

The essay in the program pointed out the poignancy of one of the songs ... Room with a View ... because of what it would have represented to the then marginally closeted Coward. He could not have true love because that was denied to homos. He could only have the bawdy slap and tickle stuff, and that only when he kept it quiet enough that it did not "scare the horses." So the contrast between the two bawdy relationships and the furtive and ultimately unfulfilled middle class liaison reverses itself ... the homosexual author lusts after a formal relationship without all the middle class nausea about the sensible.

Enough said. Very enjoyable.

On Heterosexuality

This has ended up being a very long ramble. I take a risk here because I engage in what I like to call "pure speculation" about heterosexuality ... by "pure speculation", I mean speculation unencumbered by fact or reference or proof, and founded upon the ramblings of my own mind. I do not want to offend anyone. But dynamics that we all experience deserve playing out and talking about. I believe in transparency, and I believe in making mistakes, especially of interpretation, in aid of finding your way forward. So here goes.


I spent the afternoon with my excellent friend Roy Ortopan at the American Conservatory Theater's production of Edward Albee's new and not so new At Home at the Zoo. So, spoiler alert, I plan to reveal anything I feel like, so those of you who might want to see this exquisite production should consider bookmarking these scribblings for future reference.

The play is a combination of two acts: the first act is new writing and concerns a discussion about matters of relationship and sex between a long-married couple Peter (Anthony Fusco) and Ann (René Augesen), both long-time regulars at ACT. It has the form of a prequel to the second act which is Albee's iconic first playThe Zoo Story, written in 1958. So a little criticism to start ... the first act exhibited the exquisite writing of a , each line crafted and yet natural. Augesen and Fusco oozed the comfortable relationship whose very smoothness is its own threat. The second act, Pinteresque in writing and in staging, is rougher, even coarser, with a long monologue in which Jerry (Manoel Feliciano) recounts to Peter a murderous story about a dog and works himself from accidental interlocutor to incarnate violence.

The unsettling nature of this production is in its interconnected but stylistically and emotionally distinct one-act plays. The challenge is to find the resistances that flow from the one to the other.

In the first act, set in an exquisite modernistic living room, white and sterile and clean, the exchanges between these comfortably married middle-aged Manhattanites expresses what I would call the inner dynamic of heterosexuality. That is, the dominance of the female irrespective of the power relationship, and therefore the alternating current of resistance and attraction to the female that is the dynamo of male heterosexuality. Let's lead by noting that there's a lot in that that is probably bullshit ... I mean that. But as a lifelong gay guy (notwithstanding an earnest and meaningful heterosexual relationship of 18 months at the end of my teenage years) I observe male heterosexuality as a sort-of alien force in the kitchen of my being. It is there, it is clearly real, and yet it is hard to quantify. It is passing difficult to quantify how the female principle drives straight men even as they alternately dominate it and submit to it.

I never fully accepted the inside game of feminism's more abstruse ideological perambulations. The obvious and ineluctable force of women demanding equality is not feminism ... I call that women's liberation, and I separate it from the ideological prescriptions of the high priestesses of feminism, especially in the 70s and 80s before they slowly faded from relevance in the face of rising female equality. So, a play like this throws light on our present post-feminist era. Women and men may continue to spar as they have done for centuries, but women have a better block from which to jump off than ever before, leastwise in Western society.

Ann presses her complacent husband to be dangerous. It is he who resists, who tells a story of the one time in his youth he was dangerous, and how it was terrifying and almost destroyed his life. This is a flip from stereotypes, because it is the female who is supposed to crave the secure and the predictable. But it is Peter who argues that he thought that they had agreed before marriage that theirs would be a peaceful and predictable journey where excitement was not at issue, but the pleasures of the long and the assured were in the fore.

There is no one heterosexuality, of course, any more than there is only one homosexuality. But one thing that distinguishes heterosexual men from exclusively homosexual men is that one way or another they must encounter the female principle in all its permutations. Gay men ... and this describes me to a T ... love women for the intelligence and wit and, most emphatically, their non-maleness. But the female principle "in all its permutations" we can take or leave. We don't live with it and we don't go home with it. Straight men do. The notion of the traditional chauvinist is that he pedestalizes women in order to wall himself off from those permutations; in other words, chauvinism is a way of isolating and crystalizing femaleness so that it can be used without interfering in the more fundamental and more powerful maleness which the chauvinist prefers.

There is another kind of chauvinist ... I call them "true heterosexuals." These are the men who are focused exclusively on women, and who hardly notice men at all. There are curiously few of these men. I had a lecturer in college who was a great influence on me and with whom I had many excellent conversations. But if there was a single woman present, I ceased to exist for him. I invited him once to my home for a slide show of a recent trip to Indonesia and we were having a rollicking conversation until a then temporary roommate, female and young and pretty, stopped by. He was gone; I never got him back.


But nowadays, notice how most coupled men ... and the more so the more urban or younger or more middle class they are ... foreground the female. Things as simple as walking a half step behind while girlfriend wife gabs on the cell phone (this drives me nuts), or as complex and laudable as the immersion in childcare or domesticity. It is that new convergence that Albee was expressing in his first act. But he is not afraid, as so many commentators are, to express the discomforts of the new prominence of the female in heterosexuality.

Peter found in his female approach to his marriage the comfort of taking the sting out of his masculinity. He complains at length ... and this gets plenty good laughs from the audience ... that his circumcision is retreating. Not that his foreskin is growing back, but that the glans of his penis is ever so infinitesimally disappearing under what foreskin was left by the surgeon's long-ago snip. Meanwhile, Ann complains that from time to time she wants Peter, whom she describes as a great lover and lousy fuck, to be dangerous, in essence to rape her with consent ... though she does not put it exactly that way.

So here we have the male principle slowly shrinking simultaneously happily and nervously, and the female principle casting around looking for the excitement that its very dominance precludes. Nice dialectics ... I love conundra like these. And as with the real world, there is no denouement, there is resolution. Life goes on, uneasily. You wonder if after this conversation they can return to the sweet satisfying lovemaking that Ann both accepted and rejected and that was all that Peter cared to do.

"Cared to do" ... because in the most violent portion of the conversation, Peter relates the one time when he was dangerous, when he had anally penetrated a woman and injured her, caused her to bleed sufficiently to send her to hospital, during a fraternity-sponsored initiation orgy long beforehand. Just that one brush with danger was enough for him, and the idea of role-playing violence with his gentle-voyage wife was thereby abhorrent.

Remember this ... it was blood and penetration forced upon Peter by the other that haunted him.

So the act wraps up with Peter leaving awkwardly to go for a walk with his book, to take a read in Central Park


Remember that the second act was written in 1958, and the language and staging is coarser. I would argue that this is both by reason of Albee's youth and by reason of the writing occurring before the rise of women's liberation. Jerry, a drifter, strikes up a conversation with Peter. From its inception, this conversation bristles with the implied violence of male-to-male heterosexual relations. That Jerry reveals in the course of the conversation that he has sexually hustled men only adds to that unexpressed violence. While in the first act, the audience is satisfied in a conversation that starts and ends essentially nowhere and travels from one indeterminate to another, in the second act, the audience knows that this cannot end well. Blood will be spilled; someone will die.

When straight men are together, they always bristle a little. It can be nice bristling, it can be humorous, vigorous, laidback. It can be any kind of bristling you want, but there is always at least a tiny charge. Perhaps it is almost as if everyone wants to put out a positive electrical charge to make sure that they all equally repel if they get too close. I think this is what explains the tendency to violence under the influence of alcohol, because the tiny positive electrical charge fades and suddenly, unexpectedly and most unwelcome, two men may find themselves too close.

I think that most men actually prefer the company of men ... notwithstanding my notion that the modern defusing of the male/female relationship leads to greater comfort between men and women. Because when men are together, the female principle no longer threatens or demands; it becomes a kind of icon for waving or saluting or acknowledging or, mostly, ignoring. That is why gay men, and I include myself in this, are always vaguely unnerved by being the lone gay guy with a bunch of straight guys. Again, this is meant to express underlying subcurrents, not some supervening agenda. Keep that in mind. Gay guys are unnerved because we do not output that tiny positive electrical charge. To turn the metaphor on its head, we are more AC with each other than DC ... we play by flipping from positive to negative charge, pushing and pulling, alluring and demanding. So the electrical pressure of all those positive charges we experience around a bunch of straight guys is demanding.

It is in this sense that Albee's depiction of the confrontation between Peter and Jerry is so successful. He plays with what I would describe as the AC/DC thing ... alternately repelling each other and attracting each other. But each submission, each attraction makes the subsequent repulsion the stronger. At one point as the denouement approaches, Jerry starts to tickle Peter who laughs and enjoys himself. That rapidly devolves into a fight over territory that leads quickly to Peter picking up the knife that Jerry threw to him, and Jerry impaling himself on the knife as Peter holds it as warning that Jerry must not approach further. The knife which Jerry provided is like the penis which the sorority girl had demanded in Peter's previous encounter with the dangerous. But where his youthful danger was male/female, and ultimately resolved itself, his adult danger was male/male, and death was the result.

Albee's genius here is in the way he flips back and forth. Remember that the earlier part of Peter's life was written recently, where this terminal encounter was written 50 years ago. I wonder how long Albee has been thinking of the prequel.

So I have rambled on as is my wont. These are irresolvable questions, in constant flux. The names of the principles may be eternal, but the practice of them is always changing. Whenever you hear of an eternal principle, keep that in mind. The name may be eternal, but nothing human is eternal. Nothing is solid.

Photos by Arod from a lengthy series I call "Flat Faces" ... pix of men on billboards or posters out and about.

share this: facebook

American Idol Performance

I guess I will blog this live ... at least a little. I'll take some TV pix and upload them sooner or later.

What the hell is a "guy-liner"? ... says Ryan with reference to Adam.

Adam 1: Mad World ... seemed too cool, no climax. Not sure why he picked that song. I think he has to play all the different chords. This was laid back and not the high vamp thing we have seen too much of lately. Maybe that is the strategy. Very nice, but I didn't think it was a blow-away.

Kris 1: Ain't No Sunshine ... not as good as the first time he sang it. Lacked a bit of edge, and maybe a little overthought. But a sterling performance, with full and rich voice. I love that song, and I love the way he does it.

First round is a tie.

Adam 2: Change Is Gonna Come ... big, over the top. Bluesy and hard rock. This is what he does, and what he blasts out of the park. Wow! Took a classic and made it something utterly new. And, yes, the emotion was raw and gutsy.

Kris 2: What's Going On ... Sweet voice, but it seems like he doesn't know what the song means. Still, rocking performance. I just love the richness of his voice. But, the performance betrayed a lack of depth. Sweet, not deep.

Round two to Adam.

Adam 3: Horrid song, by Kara et al ... not really designed for Adam, but he made what he could out of it. It might seem to be his genre because it is so over the top. But he actually can wrap himself around a good song, and this song had too many elbows for wrapping. Not his choice, but he did as best he could. Impressive, not a home run. Christ, he's wearing a crucifix!

Kris 3: Sam song as Adam ... No Boundaries. Wow, he had trouble with that. Just a crappy song. What a way to pull the air out of the tire. I thought he was pitchy and all over the map. Never quite figured it out. Way to high for his rich lower tones.

Round 3 to Adam.

So I think Adam won the night. But I figure that Kris will win the competition; he is just better designed for the broad middle. NO doubt though that Adam outsang Kris tonight and he deserves the prize.

Kris 3:

Boleros

The play is called Boleros for the Disenchanted but I am not sure that I get it. I'm not sure who is disenchanted in this play by José Rivera, performed before my crying eyes at the American Conservatory Theater. By crying, I mean a little weepy as the thing proceeded.

The play has two acts, the first set in 1953 when the protagonists, not so loosely based upon the playwright's biological parents, met and married in Puerto Rico, and then in 1992 when they are aged and one dying in Alabama where, so it seems, a long road just ran out. The first act was sharply written, and it made the writer's point that love and happenstance and perseverance in the service of ideals can find fruition. The second act was probably a smidge overlong and indulgent, but it too made the writer's point that love and happenstance and perseverance in the service of ideals cannot protect us from pain and decline and death. I should note that, as usual, the ACT set people outdid themselves, especially in the first act where the environment of the village was indicated by a series of hanging models of tiny houses, and the simplicity of life is indicated by the porch of a small house occupied by a bitter anti-American old man and his long-suffering wife.

The play was thankfully free of the butter-not-melting-in-the-mouth ethnic purism that infects so many pieces like this. It was a piece about people struggling to be and succeed in a world pitted against them. Their ethnicity was a fact but not the moral center of the story. I am sensitive to that because there are aspects of my parents' lives that mirror what Rivera portrayed of his parents. My parents are not possessed of the retreat into ethnic identity to which so many so cloyingly cling in this era where the essential readily trumps the substantial. Rivera avoided the trap, and it made his piece more universal, more visceral.

It made me think of my own parents, and it touched me. It does not matter that this was not a play in the tradition of magical realism, because it simple reality and its unaffected dialogue left me unarmed in front of knowing what I know about how life turns out.

The first act was in 1953 ... that's when I was born ...




Not exactly certain when mother and father met, but they lived only a few doors apart during their teenage years, and they married in 1951. Dad was more adventurous than Mom in youth, but he soon founded a business and a family. Notwithstanding all the dross of everyday life, what my parents had in spades was ethics and honesty and a commitment to doing what is right.

So this is not meant to be a long rumination on what my parents went through, or how they sacrificed to bring us up. It is meant only to say that what Rivera wrote in the first act, notwithstanding how far away it was from my parents encountered at roughly the same time, spoke to me about what they experienced when they met and married.

And so cut to the present. Dad has had a stroke, mother cares for him, and all the dross of the past dissolves in the face of their irreducible commitment to each other. I could think it is sad, but life is not a circle but an arc, and eventually the arc comes to ground again. Like Rivera's parents, my parents have lived the arc, and now it approaches ground again. What marks them as honest people is not just that they are together, but that the fullness of the bond between them exhibits in its every moment the fullness of the lives they have lived.

So, Mr. Rivera succeeded. He set out to display the meaning of an old relationship, and he made me think of the best old relationship I have ever witnessed. So, to return to where we started, I am not really sure where we find the disenchanted referenced in his title. Because staring the fullness of reality in the face is not disenchantment ... it is the stuff of living itself.


Photos by Arod of my parents. The two sketches are of mother and father and they have long been on the walls of the various places they have lived; bottom photo taken at a family event about a year ago.

Obama, Adam, and a Bunch of Whores

Obama

When I think of Obama right now, I keep thinking of torture and gays, and he is off course on both. We have high hopes yet, of course. If he does manage to get a health care proposal in front of Congress, and if there is some movement towards financial re-regulation, both within the next few months, well we can consider that movement. But right now Obama seems a little bamboozled.

The torture thing, like the economy and the various wars, are not his fault ... but they are his problems, and problems trump fault. The constant chatter on torture, likewise, is not something he can do anything about. Both the 'publicans and the new aggressive left talking heads can't get their minds off it. And this is a problem for the agenda.

Yes, torture is horrible, and ... surprise, surprise ... the dubyaites lied and fudged and used torture to try to extract "proof" that the tyrant Saddam was in bed with the puritan al-Qaidah. But what does banging that drum get us right now? What it does is to make Dick Cheney relevant. What it does is to keep Bush in the conversation. What it does is give various troglodyte 'publicans a platform to call Obama a traitor. And what it does not do is to reveal the opportunity to break out of the old politics into the new.

I saw a piece ... can't seem to locate it now, but will substitute this note for a link if I stumble on it again ... today which noted that Obama seems to have been bamboozled by his generals. I think that is true in regards to his failure to pull any significant units out of Iraq. But Obama has to refuse to release more photos of torture. There is no upside for him, he hardly needs in any real sense a further proof of the immorality and anti-democratic ... indeed anti-American ... nature of the Bush administration. And the release of those photos would only serve to infect his efforts to re-orient American foreign policy with the very poisons he seeks to supersede. I am certainly for transparency, and Obama came to office on a platform of transparency. But this is no win for him. Or for us. Revenge traps us in the past, no matter how well-deserved; I think it serves the 'publicans if only because it feeds their ability to obstruct and delay and get in the way.

Oberman ... Maddow ... move on. Leave dubya behind. What about the agenda for the future?

Now gay rights works the same way, only Obama is here the one who is hanging on to the past to no good effect. If he killed "don't ask, don't tell" today, the news cycle would be two weeks long, and then it would seem like it had never happened. Gibbs, press secretary, had this to say "'To get fundamental reform in this instance requires a legislative vehicle,' Gibbs said. 'The president made a promise to change the policy; he will work with the Joints Chief of Staff, the administration and with Congress to ensure that we have a policy that works for our national interests.'" To use a word, what a pile of horseshit. Have some chutzpah, Obama ... just do it.

But ... and this is getting to be an eerie refrain ... he doesn't just do it. I understand the cool, the need for timing. But the enemy ... I mean the 'publicans ... are on the run. Gay marriage is sweeping the country. We are still spending scarce federal dollars chasing Arabic speaking faggots out of the army.

Have some goddamm balls, Barack ... just end the stupid policy.

But "no" ... because we are still living in the era of dubya ... and the torture and the gay debates prove it.

When do we move on?


American Idol

I am glad that Gokey is gone. He bugged me. I never really liked his voice, and the performances seemed carbon copied to me. But I suppose I did let my bias interfere with my critical faculties to some degree. He's probably better than I think.

He double-bugged me when I got wind of the christian conspiracy to win him. Hardee har, they didn't win ... oops, that is not nice. Regardless, it says something about the curiosities of American Idol voting, but because they do not provide us with any demographic data, we can only speculate ... badly. I hope they re keeping this data somewhere, because some enterprising doctoral student should make a great dissertation out of it some day. The Twittersphere was alive with Christians promising to hang with Kris ... but that stinks a little given that, christian though he may be, they gave him no succor last week.

I thought Adam was predictable on Tuesday. Two hard, hard rock performances. I want the raw, shocking creativity of his "Ring of Fire" performance; I want him again to do something that we have never seen from anyone before. I think if he does that, the sheer velocity of his talent makes him the winner.

That of course relies upon a notion that there is a large portion of the voting audience who vote from the performance rather than the prejudice. And that is good.

I really like Kris Allen too ... although he should stick to a lower register. In the return to Arkansas piece, he sang a folk song and kept the voice down low ... it is so rich and sweet not like candy but like molasses. He will be a luxuriant, velvety balladeer, and I love that schmaltz.

So in a sense, it does not really matter who wins, except that I want the fag to win. When I scratch myself, more often than not, my predilections devolve to this ... if it's good for the fags, then it's good.

So Adam, blow us away. Make it a romp. We'll all groove to the puppy a-croonin', but we will suffer spine chills when you make music no one has imagined before.



Whores redux

So Craigslist caved, and killed their Erotic Services in favor of something called Adult Services. Pretty much the same thing, as far as I can tell, except nobody speaks the nasty words, there are no naked pictures, and ... curiously ... they no longer categorize by m4m or w4m. What's that about?

When will we realize that people have sex? When will we realize that all of the bad that comes with prostitution is made worse by illegality? When will we realize that a service like Craigslist would allow a rational approach to public health to monitor disease, offer services, and protect people. Oh well. More idiot madness in the service of foot-stomping politics. I guess Craigslist had to semi-fold. But what a waste that we spend public resources on trying to prevent people from consenting activities.



Photos by Arod of street art around Florida Street. I took these photos in 2005. The third photo, near Harrison and 15th, has a legend that states that it is "De Frontera a Frontera," by Joel Bergner, June 2003.

American Idol

Top eight ... gonna write as I watch and take some pix off the tube.

Danny Gokey, 1980, sings Mickey Gilly's Stand by Me. He's murdering this thing ... missing notes, and the same earnest rasp. The judges always seemed to like him, but he is a one note orchestra to me. And so earnest. Yeah he's got rhythm, but that was just a routine day in a dumpy bar. There's something about this guy that really annoys me ... but the judges all seemed to like it. Harummph.


Kris Allen, 1985, All She wants to Do is Dance. I thought that was flat and uninteresting, and it just missed the deep tones of his voice that makes him so fascinating. Really boring after the way he blew us away the last couple of weeks. That said, he is the sexiest thing this year by a long shot. Simon hated it. He'll survive, but that was disappointing.

Lil Rounds, 1984, What's Love Got to Do with It. She's showing a little more voice, but this song is so much bigger than her that it puts her in a shadow. I think she underperforms every week, and it is very disappointing. Because you figure that under there somewhere is a breakout performance. This one is not that one. Competent, but not nearly big enough. Even Paula agrees. Simon was meaner but exactly right. We're still waiting, Lil.

Anoop Desai, 1986, True Colors. Those big brown eyes, and a voice you can hardly remember. Not ridiculous or anything, but nothing special. Straining a little at times. I just don't care. Randy says a nice vocal, but still "so what"? Simon seemed to like it, and notes that "we can be horrible to you and you can be horrible back."

Am I just being cranky, but I am underwhelmed tonight. Last week had 3 or 4 knockout performances ... so far, none this week.

Scott MacIntyre, 1985, The Search is Over. The vocals are a little more up, but there are all the flat notes. This may be the end of the line for him. Sometimes, there are notes that hurt, but there is a quality to his voice that makes him good enough for wedding singing, and that sort of thing. He's behind a guitar this week, and he does not seem comfortable with it. Probably a mess, but you keep hoping for the guy. Will they finally call things by their real names. The judges ... commend, give credit ... hmmm.

Allison Iraheta, 1992, I Can't Make You Love Me. Out of the park. Wow. This girl is a star ... Bonnie Raitt is cheering ... what a handle. Man. That is what we watch for. 16 years old, and just the most amazing singer. She is a star right now. "One note and you know it is Allison" says Paula. Yes.

Matt Giraud, 1985, Part Time Lovers. Theatrical and jazzy and sexy. I thought he topped that song. It was fascinating and enthralling. And he finally got everything out of his voice. Whoddathunkit. The guy has soul ... he needs a coach and an agent, and he could be a very successful niche singer.



Adam Lambert, Mad World. He's on another planet. That is so far away from anything anyone else could do. Simon gives a standing ovation. This guy could be as big as Bowie. I am blown away.

Photos by Arod from the tube.

Stoppard's Rock 'n Roll

Saw Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n Roll at American Conservatory Theater today. So a few quick notes while it is fresh in my mind. I'd love to get my hands on the script and go over some of the dialog again, but we shall see if my "vast leisure" permits such a luxuriant excursion.

The play concerns the life of one Jan (Manoel Felciano), a young Czech Jew who had left his homeland before the Nazis invaded and then spent his youth in England before returning. He was in England as a student in 1968 but chose to return just after the Soviets invaded. His Cambridge professor, Max (the incomparable Jack Willis) is an unrepentant Stalinist prone to rage and in-your-face rage at the lily-livered who have abandoned the party line. Jan, by contrast, clings to the notion that ignoring the power makes it go away or at least disempowers it. He hangs on to rock 'n roll and, as it turns out, even provides some info to the authorities in order to preserve his precious record collection.

The dialog was a little stilted for Stoppard, but I thought that it accurately represented the sort of intense political rhetoric that saturated the lives of politicos in the era ... I certainly recognized it from personal experience. I found the whole thing intensely nostalgic in that sense. I was both a hippie and a lefty at the time, which made for uncomfortable moments in both camps. Eventually my hippiedom devolved into the free love dynamic of the early "heroic" gay movement even as my politics tended to get a little more sectarian and strident than I would prefer to remember at this rather later stage of my life.

So I was impressed by the depiction of the conflict between the explosion of creativity in music and its social effect as against the explosion of the left and its social effect. And the inconclusiveness of the conclusion (everybody gets older, communism lost out, and the two key characters end up in love in a liberated Prague ... but the ideological conflict was unresolved) mirrors the fogginess of how stuff happens in real life. Perhaps those looking for a pleasant afternoon in the theater were satisfied by the love conclusion, but I kept thinking about how empty must be the soul of a man who had been so defeated and stripped of dignity as Jan was.

The rock and roll theme has to touch anyone who lived through the era. I especially grooved to the Pink Floyd stuff (although the references to Syd Barrett would be lost on anyone who had not read the program). We are so cynical now that it is hard to remember what an era of cheeky optimism was the 70s. On the other hand, it would be hard to underestimate what a body blow to lefties was the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia ... I was 15, but I wept when my father told me. The conflicted feelings of liberationists ... if I can use that as a broad term ... was not a dark conflict of the soul, but a bright confidence that no matter the problem, no matter the forces at work, there had to be, there would be, a great historic solution and it would be soon.

Didn't turn out that way, but life went on anyway. Perhaps that is why Jan ends up with his interrupted childhood love interest, but this time in Prague, this time middle-aged, this time listening to the Rolling Stones in the same venue where his previous Communist overlords had vainly celebrated their supremacy.

'Tis Pity She's a Whore

Roy and I attended the American Conservatory Theater production of John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore on Saturday. So a couple of quick notes ...

'Tis Pity She's a Whore is a 1630-something revenge play, a sort of combination of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet with an incest theme. I enjoyed the fast interweaving of scenes and subplots, the comic relief, the skulduggery and dark corners. Not to put to fine a point on it, but classic drama incorporates techniques of oral performance because its audiences were schooled in the oral text. The audience wants to be told when someone is hiding, when someone is thinking something other than what he says; they expect it.

The performance at ACT was sublime, notwithstanding the rather pissy review in the Chron. Two points, external to the action. "Walt Spangler's industrial-baroque cathedral set" served both to invoke the period by reason of how its barren complexity motivates the complexity of action and interplay of choreography. They made plays with fewer gee-gaws back then, and audiences were better trained in suspension of disbelief. The set invoked that history. But the most striking aspect of the set was composer, cellist and vocalist Bonfire Madigan Shive situated like an angel amidst a riot of seeming organ pipes. Her haunting, electrifying music, both instrumental and vocal, punctuated the fear and the dread and ultimately the horror. The audience rewarded her with the most heartfelt of the ovations. Hers is a striking talent that must have greater play as life winds on.

This is a gruesome play, too gruesome, frankly, to have been written in our more squeamish century. Perloff, the director, led at least me to believe in the climactic moment that it was the fetus that was slaughtered, but all the references are to the murdered sister and lover having her heart ripped out bodily. The notion of the slaughter of the unborn seems a nod to modern sensibilities ... the Aztec-ish heart extraction seems blunt to us.

The audience laughed at a few things out of key ... several references to the inferior position of women, and pointedly to a line where Vazquez trumpets that a Spaniard out-revenged his dead Italian master. As an audience, I prefer to pretend that I am somewhere else ... more's the pity that the yappy old bags behind couldn't shut up long enough to pretend anything that their tiny, perfume-addled minds might imagine. Ooops, too cranky.

I guess what I want to say is this ... I do not think that there is any specific that is eternal in this play. We shouldn't force this kind of thing into a tyranny of relevance. Incest may be more prevalent than we prefer to imagine, and it is probably less fraught with slaughter than this play imagines. But the joy in a performance like this is to cast oneself back and imagine sitting in a crowded odoriferous and noisy throng in 1630 watching all the action ... to imagine being in a world where any entertainment is always available, but rather a world in which entertainment is rare and scarce and treasured. To imagine the vicarious thrill of bloody revenge performed, and the thrill of clerics represented as cheats and scum.

In that sense, this performance was sublime. It proffered the antique in the performance, and the modern in the set and the music. Two and half hours plussed passed as a mere moment, and I wanted more notwithstanding the littering of bodies as curtain dropped.

One note to Carey Perloff, ACT's superlative Artistic Director ... your web site should not be so stingy with photos. All these magnificent sets should be memorialized. And many would be the happy to see DVDs of production made available for purchase after the show has closed. I am for the transparency that the Internet era promises, and places like ACT should be in the lead making their fabulous entertainments available broadly.

A few photos from the web tomorrow if I get a moment. Tonight's cocktail, by the way, a Sazerac ... sublime.

Curse of the Starving Class

Nice day. Breakfast with friends. Car in the shop for a thousand dollar clutch and fly wheel job ... a thousand dollars for something I will never see. Went to the American Conservatory Theater's production of Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class. And as I write this, the Giants are leading the Phillies in Philly 3-2 in the bottom of the 10th, Brian Wilson pitching, one on, one out. I'll keep you posted.

Now as to the play, first off, ACT again did itself proud with a spectacular set that evoked grinding rural poverty and desperation. They always amaze. I wish that they were a lot less stingy with images of their work on their web site ... it is general complaint with the web ... we are all aching to consume images, so let us see. Don't be stingy ... let us look.

As to the play ... I told RO, who is my theater muse and with whom I attend every ACT production, that it was like we started with a David Mamet and ended with a Harold Pinter. The play concerns a poor farmer family with a violent drunken father (Weston, Jack Willis), an aloof mother (Ella, Pamela Reed), an angry and confused son (Wesley, Judd Williford), and a wild 12-year old daughter (Emma, Nicole Lowrance). The first act is a lot of setup .... you certainly know, not merely because it is a Shepard play, that these folks are losers. But in the second act, it all gets kooky. Characters start switching roles ... the drunken dad dries out, and the son turns into Dad. So does the Mom.

Shepard does not have the facility with genuine dialog that Mamet has or Tom Stoppard. There are a lot of truly peculiar lines, including using the word "authenticity" at one point. So there is a bit of the theater of the absurd in the thing all along. You know these poor sods are about to be swindled out of their parched patrimony. If this were just tragedy, then, the deed would be done at long last and they would stand there bereft and abandoned of hope.

But even by the end of the play, the deed is not done. The father has fled, the daughter leaving as well, pre-teenaged to pursue a life of crime. I thought she was blown up in the off-stage car explosion that was near coincident with her exit. No mention was made. The explosion and the two toughs who entered to prance and threaten ... well it seemed too much.

But there is a method, one must assume, in this madness. Part of it is to underwrite the dark comedy that courses through this work. It is also that reflexive comedy of writing for the cognoscenti who want to think themselves versed in the ways of the ignorant and unwashed, presumably with a certain pride in the breadth of their wisdom ... or who want to experience again the vicarious emotions of having descended from the descents of society. In other words, using my own example, I am two generations away from a blacksmith, so Manhattan-fueled though I may be, I know my proletarian bitterness, "goldernit". In that sense, I figure that a couple of Okies spitting "authenticity" back and forth is Sam Shepard's little spit in the eye of the audience which he presumably loathes.

To be a playwright of bitterness is to spit in the eye of your audience, knowing that your audience gets the joke and doesn't think itself all wet thereby.

The Saturday matinée crowd is, shall we say, a tad more senior than the average crowd, notwithstanding that live theater these days is generally the province of audiences getting more elderly all the time. When the studly Wesley faced the audience to take a long labored piss on the shrill Emma's 4H project which shows how to cut up a chicken, one of those tall, built, upper class ladies who favor unfashionable and bulky heavy tweed knits decided she had had enough, and she up and left her seat in the front row. We habitually inhabit the back row orchestra by the door, and so were able to hear her mutter loudly to the usher as she passed, "I am too old for a display like that." Another large lady of upper class demeanor chose another tense moment to disturb a long row of people so she could walk out. Sam Shepard is not every bourgeoise's coupe de thé.

The other moment that might have occasioned faint-headed yet headstrong dudgeon was when Wesley appeared completely nude, picked up the live lamb in the crate, and exited stage right. He displayed, among other assets, an unusually round and muscular tush, if a fevered fag may be allowed to pass his professional judgment.

Such titillations aside, it was a creditable performance of a difficult work where pain and bad fate lurk in every moment. Shepard is a round caricature of himself, and he gets the joke. So the themes he treats strike home even when his realism is off the mark. Indeed, being off the mark becomes part of the mark. I think the actors got it, and that is why they succeeded.

Then again, I am usually wont to enjoy live theater. Perhaps my dear friend LP will finally start her theater blog and pass judgment with a little more sharpness and theatrical insight ... wink, wink.

And the requisite reviews ... Jack Willis was perfect, as he usually is, especially in roles demanding a characteristic American accent. Pamela Reed was creditable, but I think she tried to give her character more character than it deserved. This is a desperate empty women, stuck in her lot, and ready to screw anybody to get out of it. Judd Williford did well given the difficulty of the mix of confusion, innocence, anger, and bitterness demanded. He did innocent best; when he pissed on his sister oevre, it was hard to imagine the motivation. Nicole Lawrence was the least believable ... she just didn't seem 12, even considering the precociousness that a life of desperation visits upon the young. She was best when she was screaming and wailing. The other parts were all fine, although the bar owner was a little over the top.

Still, see it. Makes you think which is what it is all about.

Here's another take on this production.

Let me note, Manhattan (Evan Williams bourbon, Punt e Mes vermouth, and Fees Brothers bitters) in hand, that the Giants won on a great play at short by Burriss ... and as for the thousand dollar clutch job, well, it might seem harsh. But it's an 86 Honda Civic, and a thousand a year, which is what repairs normally amount to, turns out to be a lot better than four or five hundred a month for something new. And at 34 mpg highway, and not very much driving, I feel I am okay if not completely pure. And, notwithstanding my forefathers, neither the thousand nor the beat up auto makes me a member of the starving class ... or so I hope.

Photo of Sam Shepard from his site.

Heath again

Don't the Oscars ring awfully hollow every time you hear "the Oscar-nominated Heath Ledger." He was robbed by homophobia. Who remembers the film that won? Brokeback Mountain was a love story, certainly, but at bottom it was about the closet and how it destroys lives and tortured souls. The Oscars understood, and embraced the closet rather than this now gone, fabulous actor and his film.

Nice appreciation in the New York Times by A.O. Scott here. My earlier post on his death here. A Salon piece here, and my friend Jim Gaither's correspondence with Roger Ebert on Brokeback Mountain and the Oscar's here.

Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Just a quick note to say that the new American Conservatory Theater production of the Sondheim classic is a mind blow. As I have noted before, my critical abilities in music pretty much stop and start with what I like. So, I like it. I like it a lot.

What do I like about it? Well, the music is just transfixing. Ya gotta wonder if this Sondheim guy ever did anything else ... hmmm. It was jarring and seductive. It had me on the edge of my seat and recoiling at the same time. And how can you not thrill to a performance where the players sing and play instruments and move like cats on a crowded stage, and act to boot. Every time the fetching Tobias put his 17th-century violin down on the stage, I was terrified that someone would step on it. But like a bunch of pixies, this spectacular cast sashayed around the obstacles and came to attention on a dime, ready for the next number. Cellos flew from hand to hand, clarinets appeared from nowhere, trumpets exploded, and the violin became a fiddle and then a violin again all within a phrase. The one loose horsehair in the violinist's bow dazzled in the pointilist lighting.

That horsehair was attached to the puckishly pranching and froggily leaping Edmund Bagnell as Tobias who plays a sly and uncomprehending narrator to perfection. The superbly professional and riotously funny Judy Kaye as Mrs. Lovett dominated the set and sutured the actions into one breathing bloody bossy bold protoplasm of a play. I thrilled to the classic tones of Lauren Molina as Johanna and the eery Diana DiMarzio as the Beggar Woman ... you want to ignore her, you want her to go away, but she insists and insists, and turns the play on its head just when you least expect it. David Hess as Sweeney Todd was dark and demonic and obsessive ... sort of like a Hummer owner turned loose on an innocent planet.

But the most overwhelming part remained the dizzying choreography. For a sports fan, it was like a protracted bootleg where misdirection creates waves of action all over the field. I'd see the thing again just to watch the movement. Of course, the music enchants ... it drowns you in its creepiness and its sinister drubbing. So how could even the practiced fan stop his mind long enough just to watch the motion.

So that is lavish praise. And I really liked it.

The Imaginary Invalid redux

My notes on farce last night were a little bland, frankly. I do think that the identity/mocking dialectic provdes a lot of the charge in farce, but the notion of farce as antidote is a little flat. So I want to play with another idea by starting with the simultaneity of identifying with the farcical character and mocking him ... in other words, participating in mocking oneself as one is reflected in the character with whom we ironically cannot help but identify.

I think that the root of this simultaneity is in a rhetoric of deception. So a little terminological set-up:

Rhetoric is the art of manipulation of the relationship between author and audience. In that art, neither author nor audience are fixed or singular concepts. Both shift both in terms of their biological or real being and more so in terms of their representation and play in the text. Manipulation, then, in rhetoric is never singular ... it always involves simultaneous manipulation of both sides of the pairing, each of which is at least multiple and ... being coy ... multifarious.

Multiple, in this sense, points to the author being a real person when he wrote the text, and a real person after he wrote the text, and an implied or represented person in the text, and a reflected or perceived person when the text is experienced by its audience. And, multiple points to an audience that walks into a theater and watches a performance, or reads a book, and that is also implied or represented in the text, and that is often recreated or predicted or defined in the text through the vehicle of an internal audience who witnesses the action.

Multifarious is multiple but more so; it points to the possibility that each of these authors and audiences can change within a performance or a reading or the length of a novel or story. Perhaps I use multifarious in too coy a manner, so I found a couple of definitions (skip to the next paragraph if you want the short version): "uniting usually in an improper way distinct and independent matters, subjects, or cause" [Dictionary.com. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law. Merriam-Webster, Inc. (accessed: June 29, 2007)] and "1593, from L. multifarius 'manifold,' from multifariam 'in many places or parts,' perhaps originally 'that which can be expressed in many ways,' from multi- 'many' + -fariam 'parts,' perhaps from fas 'utterance, expression, manifestation,' related to fari 'to speak' (see fame)" [Dictionary.com. Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper, Historian. (accessed: June 29, 2007)].

Having credentialed, let me paraphrase: uniting in an improper way distinct matters through manifold utterances. Well that, it turns out, is the essence of farce. I am certainly not saying that all rhetoric is farce, because there are many rhetorics dedicated to other purposes. But all rhetorics involve selection from multiple possibilities, and that selection always has the possibility of deception through elimination as well as deception through copious or overlaid saying. In the case of farce, the eliminated choices are obvious and open, even stated, and they are replaced in statement or utterance by additional overlaid and contradictory utterances. So what the farcical character does is to obscure the obvious and state the obscure. He does it baldly. Soon enough, he will be hung by his own petard, as it were, and we will laugh at him. But in the end, the farcical fool ends up with the last laugh if only because he carries on, or because the obscure becomes the obvious. Argon starts as patient, and ends as doctor to himself as patient.

In the Imaginary Invalid, the scene opens with a man obsessed with his medicines and his pains and his fears, and yet his actions belie his words and fear. He pines for his doctor, threatens to marry off his daughter to the doctor's fool son solely to have a doctor in the house, and then ends up by becoming a doctor himself. As I said yesterday, I think that the American Conservatory Theater performance pulled it off. I should add that Anthony Fusco's performance as the scheming notary, Monsieur de Bonnefoi, and as the truly twisted apothecary, Monsieur Fleurant, was exceptionally pleasurable. The notary, attached to the gold-digging evil wife, schemes and manipulates; but he is a bad guy and is eventually chased off and humiliated. The apothecary, however, embodies our fears and our vicarious hopes ... he is the mean man with the enema, yet we can openly hope that the enema is delivered and we can take pleasure in the discomfiture of poor ... well not so poor ... Argon. Fusco made a fabulous evil enema-dealing apothecary.

But every step on the way in this farce is a peculiar representation of deception ... whether Argon deceiving himself, or his wife is deceiving him, or his daughter is deceiving herself, and so on. And meanwhile, the author is deceiving us because he constructs characters again and again who are not who they seem to be, but they are, and we know it, but we pretend we don't so we can laugh.

Farce is a rhetoric of deception that is unusually open about its purposes and its methods. Part of its allure is that the author's toolkit is on full display. I am intrigued by the idea of a rhetoric of deception in every text, and I hope to return to it frequently. But starting with farce, I think, allows us to look at the elements of deception with exceptional clarity.

So those elements include an author with multiple purposes, an audience hoping to be deceived but reserving its savoir faire and savvy, characters who are not what they seem, and devices in the author's toolkit such as that juxtaposition and reversal to which I allude in this blog from time to time.

I plan to return to this theme in thinking about the movie C.R.A.Z.Y. when I get around to watching it again.

Click here for my previous post on the Imaginary Invalid.

Photo by Arod, down by Fisherman's Wharf

The Imaginary Invalid

Didn't think I had the mojo to blog tonight ... it's MRU course catalog time and I am buried in the avalanche of minutiae that constitute the life of a catalog editor ... each tiny fact essential to someone and hence to the integrity of my publication, so there is no slacking on even the most minor little thing. Every jot and dot is life and death.

In that context, thinking about the American Conservatory Theater production of an adaptation of Molière's Imaginary Invalid. Now, I am given to enjoy theater, and hence to like productions unless there is some glaring fault, and this production had the advantage of having its audience in stitches through much of our time together. There was a little lag mid second act, and I thought that the maid Toinette's turn as a fake male doctor was a little weak, but these are quibbles. I laughed at a play 334 years old, and that alone is a recommendation.

The play got me thinking of farce. It is a send-up of a hypochondriac, and of the machinations of an evil gold-digging wife, an excessively innocent and by implication stupid daughter, a money grubbing doctor and his fool son anxious for an easy catch of a pretty wife, and a by turns fumbling and frothing suitor. In other words, all the characters are stock elements of comedy, not so much people or personages as they are caricatures from the moment they appear on stage.

In the A.C.T. production, John Apicella portrays Argan, the “imaginary invalid", and his tour de force in the opening scene where he fudges and fusses over obviously useless remedies and potions establishes both him and the play as farce. We empathize with this fool and we ridicule him at the same moment. That is something that farce both indulges and enforces ... to be both with the character and mocking him simultaneously. In other words, farce requires both intimacy and distance, both empathy and knowing superior disdain. With only empathy, you would have only pathos; with only disdain, glum self-satisfaction. You cannot enjoy farce if you are convinced only of your own superiority, but if you cannot luxuriate even briefly in superiority, you are equally immune to farce.

I am the invalid and I ridicule him.

As an aside, this is another example of juxtaposition and reversal, and I am going again to defer an examination of this feature of performance and text ... but I want to note it for future reference.

Farce tends to end happily because tragedy would break the bubble created by the unacknowledged tension between interiorizing the fool and mocking him at the same moment. This farce ends in a betrothal between beautiful but simple daughter and handsome but simple lover, and it ends in the invalid becoming his own doctor. In other words there are two conflations here: the expected conflation of destined lovers, and the unexpected conflation of patient and healer. In this case, the patient is not a patient, and the healer is not a healer, so perhaps the lovers are not so much lovers as they are children in a sandbox, another set of fools to whom we may feel ourselves superior even as we acknowledge ourselves in them.

So the farce is an antidote to the seriousness of an everyday life in which every jot and dot is life and death, because jot and dot in farce leads only to ridicule both of self and the other. There is no greater relaxation both because it encompasses all the elements of living even as it lets us out of our cage for a while. Laugh and be merry because tomorrow it's back to work; laugh and be merry because I am the fool I mock, and still tomorrow it is back to work.

I have absolutely got to crash ... I am exhausted. Perhaps tomorrow I will try the farce technique I have outlined above on myself, and perhaps I will be laughing a little more than grousing when I get home.

Click here for my next post on the Imaginary Invalid.

Drawing by Honoré Daumier, ca. 1857, Le Malade imaginaire.