Donald Brown
What’s in a Word?
Meyer Levin, a writer best-known for his novel Compulsion, the story of the Leopold-Loeb murder and trial, wanted to be known as the man who wrote a play based on the diary of Anne Frank. He met with Otto Frank to discuss that possibility before Anne’s book had even been published in the U.S.
But the task of writing a play from the diary went to the Hollywood screenwriting team of Hackett/Goodrich, and their play won a Pulitzer Prize. In Levin’s view, their play succeeded by downplaying the overt Jewish elements in Anne Frank’s story, universalizing it into a tale of unjust suffering and a young girl’s moral insight. Levin himself called his effort to present a more authentic theatrical version of Anne Frank an obsession.
Rinne Groff’s new play, Compulsion, opened Thursday in its debut at the Yale Repertory, directed by Oskar Eustis, artistic director of The Public Theater, which, along with Berkeley Repertory, commissioned the play. The play recreates Levin’s struggle — fictionalized in the person of Sid Silver and incarnated on stage by a bristling, touchy, sincere, sarcastic, soulfully suffering, and at one memorable moment, light-heartedly soft-shoeing Mandy Patinkin.
But the title, in opting for Levin’s word “compulsion,” used to characterize what drove Leopold and Loeb to murder, rather than Levin’s word “obsession,” chosen for his autobiographical account of his struggle with the Anne Frank material, indicates the problem the play presents us with. It suggests that Silver is not righteously obsessed — as one might be with an injustice, trying to alter a situation that nags at one — but rather under a compulsion, as one might be when neurotically driven to certain behavior, such as having to repeat the same lesson over and over.
Both things might be true, and it’s up to the audience how far they go along with Silver in his crusade, first, to be the one who makes a play of the diary, and, when that hope must finally be relinquished, to get recognition that the Hackett/Goodrich play stole from his, then to mount a staging of his play (though he had signed away any right to do so) to show that his play is, as a friend says, “the more important play.”
Groff’s play is fast-moving, enough, in these arguments over Silver’s play — though they rely on an interest in show biz that all viewers may not share. Silver’s character is further fleshed out by his life with his French wife (Hannah Cabell), a writer herself, who offers a few erotically charged moments and also provides moral support, until driven to almost suicidal despair by her husband’s obsession. At that point, just before intermission, the drama between the two becomes the greater focus of the play, though the figure of Anne stills presents its fascination.
In what may be the play’s most memorable scene, Anne, rendered as a marionette, appears in bed beside Mrs. Silver to discuss her husband. The scene stages the triangulation among Silver, his wife, and Anne, and further complicates the relation via Silver’s identification with Otto Frank. Anne, voiced in this scene by Patinkin, expresses the pathos of her father, a man Silver excoriated for betraying their beloved Anne after her death.
Compulsion’s use of marionettes — not only for Anne, but also for scenes from the two different plays based on her book — is a brilliant idea that occurred to Groff when she learned that Levin had once worked in puppet theater. The marionette of Anne allows the play to convey Anne’s indeterminate age in the present — is she the age she was when she died, or the age she would be had she lived? The marionette also registers the extent to which Anne Frank has become “a puppet” of her representations, and, thus, no longer a flesh and blood entity.
Ultimately the play’s theme is the question of whether Silver’s cause is important for Jewish identity, as he insists, or whether it is simply a personal matter involving his obsession with Anne and what she suffered. (In real life, Levin was a war correspondent who did see firsthand the horror of the Nazi camps, and it was his review of The Diary of a Young Girl in the New York Times that was pivotal in catapulting it to bestseller status — both attributes are retained for Silver, so we do see him as a man to be taken seriously.)
The script makes Silver more of a wordsmith than he perhaps has a right to be — using coinages such as “cash cow” and “in the loop” in the Fifties, a decade or two before they had become common currency. Though it has more than a few entertaining exchanges, the play offers little in the way of dramatic reversals, recognitions, or romantic complications to add entertainment to what is essentially a hard-luck show biz tale.
At yet the play is more compelling than a tale of someone passed over on the road to fame and glory, and that’s because of the figure of Anne Frank. But we have to be willing to see the meaning of the Holocaust as implicated in her cultural status, and, as Silver insists, in the fate of his play. But again it seems more fitting to highlight Silver’s obsession with Anne and what she represents, rather than his compulsion to insist on that relation.
COMPULSION
By RINNE GROFF
Directed by OSKAR EUSTIS
Featuring HANNAH CABELL, MANDY PATINKIN, STEPHEN BARKER TURNER
January 29 to February 28, 2010
Yale Repertory Theatre
1120 Chapel Street
A co-production with The Public Theater and Berkeley Repertory Theatre
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Listen Here, Spring 2010 Season
The Arts Council of Greater New Haven, New Haven Review, and New Haven Theater Company are pleased to announce the return of Listen Here, the weekly short story reading series in which actors from the New Haven Theater Company read short stories chosen by New Haven Review editors.
The spring Listen Here series will take place on Tuesday evenings, from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m. Stay tuned for venue details, which will be announced shortly.
March 9: What Did She See in Him?
Raymond Carver, “Fat”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Jelly-Bean”
March 16: Short Cuts
I.B. Singer, “Why the Geese Shrieked”
Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl”
John Cheever, “Reunion”
Annie Proulx, “The Blood Bay”
March 23: Breaking Up is Hard to Do
Bobbie Ann Mason, “Shiloh”
Bernard Malamud, “The Jewbird”
March 30: Straight Shooters
Stephen Crane, “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”
Tobias Wolff, “Hunters in the Snow”
April 6: Take Me Out to the Ball Game
James Thurber, “You Could Look it Up”
James Farrell, “My Grandmother Goes to Comiskey Park”
April 13: Something’s Not Right
T.C. Boyle, “Bloodfall”
Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery”
April 20: L’Etranger
Isidoro Blaistein, “Uncle Facundo”
John Cheever, “The Swimmer”
April 27: For Shame
Lorrie Moore, “Control Group”
Toni Cade Bambera, “The Lesson”
May 4: Lovesick
Jhumpa Lahiri, “A Temporary Matter”
Lydia Peele, “Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing”
May 11: Animal Crackers
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat”
Annie Proulx, “The Half-Skinned Steer”
May 18: Brothers
Louise Erdrich, “The Red Convertible”
David Sedaris, “You Can’t Kill the Rooster”
May 25: Romeos & Juliets
Louise Erdrich, “The Plague of Doves”
Wiliam Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily”
The Publisher
New Haven Review
admin
Weasel Coffee Lovers
Followers of this site will have no doubt come across the occasional wonderful article we have had from New Haven journalist and writer Robert McGuire. Every so often Robert heads off with his wife to Vietnam, their sojourn to which he chronicle at www.weaselcoffeelovers.com.
We like Robert, and his blog postings on Vietnam are thoughtful disquisitions on the daily life in this region of far East Asia where so much American treasure and blood was consumed. To that end, we think it more than worthwhile for our readers to take the trip over there and see, from the perspective of a New Haven writer, this remarkable region of the world.
The Publisher
New Haven Review
Bennett Lovett-Graff
Grant On!
This posting is a courtesy notice for local writers.
In brief, a new grant for writers has been established by the Greater Hartford Arts Council, and though Hartford is not New Haven and never shall the twain be mistaken for one another, greater New Haven area writers can apply.
Entitled the 2010 Solo Writers Fellowship (as opposed to the 2010 Dynamic Duo Writers or 2010 Kingston Trio Writers Fellowship?), the Solo Writers Fellowship provides a limited number of awards to writers of various genres who live or work in Connecticut.
Four fellowships of $2,375 each will be awarded based on a panel’s review of writer’s application, work samples and professional work history. The purpose of this grant program is to reinforce the importance and value of writers within our community by supporting activities related to the artistic process, such as, but not limited to, rental fees, travel costs and/or living expenses while creating new work. We envision this grant program to support several weeks’ worth of living and working in a temporary space that fosters imagination, focus and creativity.
Applications are due March 1, 2010. For more information, including Guidelines and Application forms, please click: http://www.letsgoarts.org/writersfellowship.
This grant is made possible through the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, and administered by the Greater Hartford Arts Council.
For more information, contact:
Greater Hartford Arts Council
45 Pratt Street
P.O. Box 231436
Hartford, CT 06123-1436
860-525-8629
info@LetsGoArts.org
Eva Geertz
The Yale Murder. Not that one. The other one.
I noticed in the New York Times an obituary for Jack Litman, an attorney who defended a lot of people who weren’t such nice people. He handled a few notorious murder trials, and the Times named two in particular: one, the Robert Chambers/Jennifer Levin trial, “the Preppy Murder,” which I actually remember, dimly (I was a teenager when it happened), and also a murder trial that was called “the Yale Murder.”
It was interesting to me that the Times made a point of referring to the Yale Murder, because, what with the latest big Yale murder, the Annie Le case, in all the coverage of that case I kept looking in the media for a reference to the earlier murder, and never saw it. I would have thought that someone would have brought it up, but, no, it never happened.
The only reason I know about the Yale Murder is that someone once asked me to locate a copy of the true crime book that it inspired. I located a copy for the customer, and then, because I like reading true crime, I got another copy for myself (finding it by chance at a junk shop, ironically, after putting actual effort into finding the customer his copy). I still have it. It’s a bright magenta mass market paperback. Presumably for legal reasons the publisher was prevented from using Yale blue…
Now out of print, the book tells the story of the people involved in the case — Richard Herrin and Bonnie Garland, two Yale undergrads who were involved in a relationship that had a bad ending (when Herrin killed Garland in her parents’ Westchester house). This happened in the 1970s, and while I was here at the time, I was too young to have been aware of it.
I find it sort of weird that the “original” Yale Murder has become such an obscure historical fact, even here in New Haven, where I feel like we all have such long memories for things like this. People talk about Penny Serra like it happened yesterday. But the “Yale Murder”? Nope.
Maybe it’s because Bonnie Garland wasn’t actually murdered in New Haven. But even so. Even so. It’s a Yale crime. Where did it go in our collective memories? Bonnie Garland is now, it seems, just a little note in Jack Litman’s obituary.
Donald Brown
Futures Past
Terry Gilliam’s latest film, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, is currently playing at the Criterion Cinema in New Haven, but I haven’t seen it yet. However, two unique films directed by Gilliam (which I consider his best, or are at least the ones I remember best), Brazil (1985) and 12 Monkeys (1995), are showing tonight and tomorrow night, respectively, at the Whitney Humanities Center on Wall Street, at 7 p.m., courtesy of The Yale Film Society and Films at the Whitney.
Not wanting to give anything away, if you haven’t seen these films, I’d say they’re well worth your attention if you like fables of the future with a quirky relation to the present. Do I mean the present when the films appeared or the current present? Both, I think.
Brazil is set in a kind of Orwellian future that knows itself to be Orwellian — the way that Orwell’s 1984, ostensibly set in 1984 but written in 1948, has a relentless feel of the immediate post-WWII world. Brazil is like that too: it looks like a future that dates back to Orwell’s 1984 as homage (the film appeared in 1985, note) and as comment on the datedness of the kind of dystopia it re-imagines for us. A Ministry of Information “sometime in the 21st century” that uses pneumatic tubes for interoffice communication? Computer consoles that look like ham-radios with screens? Warrens of nameless workers who are only male and wearing suits that look like the ‘40s?
But there are elements that make it feel ‘80ish too: fashion statements such as a stunning hat that actually appears to be a ladies’ leopard-print high heel inverted on the wearer’s head; increasingly disastrous cosmetic surgery interventions; a female heroine with short spiky hair who is more butch than the willowy male hero (a twitchy, sadsack Jonathan Pryce); add to this the vast sets that recall, deliberately, Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and you have something like a retro-chic version of how the police state might morph before the millenium.
There’s plenty of Gilliam’s characteristic wide-angle and fish-eye camera work, lots of visual distortion, evocative uses of lighting and scale and, as usual with the former Monty Python animator, endless visual fun, including a Battleship Potemkin reference (in “the director’s cut,” at least) to give filmbuffs a laugh. And the story — with threats of sabotage and terrorism against the state fleetingly evoked, and the Orwellian catchphrases posted in the background: “Truth is Information”; “Trust in Security” — stills holds up and maybe resonates as much now, post-W., as it did shortly after Reagan’s re-election.
12 Monkeys is set in the future, but not so distantly. James Cole (Bruce Willis) was about 8 in 1997, the year when a viral plague wiped out most of the human race. Now he’s about 40, sent back to 1996 to try to gather information that will help scientists in the present day (when everyone is living underground) find an antidote to the plague. The basic situation of the film – time travel to the past to counteract the post-apocalyptic present, and the dramatic detail of the killing in the airport — derives from Chris Marker’s film La Jetée (1962). But Gilliam brings to the material lots of fun, whacked-out stuff.
And keeps it interesting and mysterious. A first viewing really plays with your head, much as the various “endings” of Brazil do. And the visual palette is ramped up with chatter and crosstalk from TV sets (broadcasting the Marx Bros.’ Monkey Business, for instance), films (hiding out in a cinema while Vertigo is onscreen), music (one of my favorite moments is the look on Willis’ face when he hears, on his first trip back to‘96, Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” on the radio), and the kind of beat futurisitic clutter held over from Brazil.
Other pleasures include a desolate, post-apocalyptic Philadelphia (and a not-so pleasurable version of that city, c. mid ‘90s, that looks truly distressed); also, Brad Pitt, as a psychotic scion of a rich magnate of biochemical products, is all quirks, trippy chuckles and frenetic hand gestures and mismatched eyes, heading the political group 12 Monkeys, dedicated to animal and environmental rights, but which might be moving toward terrorist or guerilla acts — again, a timeliness all-too-apparent for today’s viewers.
The apocalypse in Marker’s film was nuclear-based; in Gilliam’s it’s viral, but there’s enough environmental sentiment present, together with dismay at the human race — and stunning shots of an array of African animals loose in the streets of Center City — to fuel whatever global-warming apocalypse scenarios might be circulating in the brain of the 21st-century viewer.
Chuck Richardson
Federman’s Last Laugh
Raymond Federman’s last novel, Shhh: A Story of Childhood, forthcoming from Starcherone Books, is excerpted here with a piece called “List of Scenes of My Childhood To Be Written.”
Federman died last October, shortly after BlazeVox published his novella, The Carcasses, which, for this reader, brought to mind The Tibetan Book of the Dead (or my personal preference, Book of Natural Salvation) and Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes as well as some of his other short work.
In The Carcasses, Federman’s narrator has the “FNACS” (the afterlife’s revolutionary forces) taking up what has traditionally been Satan’s rebellious role in Heaven by calling for a democratic transmutation of the dead—politicizing metamorphosis, the apparent essence of nature itself.
The Carcasses is not a human-centered fable. It’s not even biocentric, since there’s just as great a likelihood that at some point in one’s eternity those who’ve passed on will come back to this dimension as a piss pot. The novella’s flexible topology, its permeability of self, the apparent possibility of its imaginary carcass narrator’s future enlightenment (or is it escape?) from karma, its wheel of life, make Federman’s novel a pleasure to read. And in the end, when facing transmutation, these feelings about civil rights among the dead seem irrelevant. Too much freedom and freedom becomes meaningless, an emptiness that seems a death itself. A carcass with too much freedom is, perhaps, too much a carcass. One who’s free of one’s self is without self.
We laugh at all this death because we’re dying ourselves, which means we’re alive. It’s seems grief can tickle our funny bone. Why? What does it say about us that we can laugh at death?
In The Carcasses, one sees mind, matter and energy seeking to sustain their interrelated disequilibria for as long as possible, creating an unsentimental journey with a dash of Calvino’s “lightness,” a bit of Laurence Sterne the Psychonaut resisting his uncarcassization…forever digressing because the novella’s ending is the carcass’s ending…
Unlike The Carcasses,Federman’s last story, Shhh: A Story of Childhood, seems from the brief yet tantalizing excerpt as posted an ever-playful, ever-youthful spirit looking back, planning ahead despite the fact…despite the unspeakable…laughing…
I was one of Raymond’s students at SUNY Buffalo in the mid-1990s and was quite surprised when, in one of our last email exchanges before he died, he offered that Proust had influenced him more than Beckett. He’d barely mentioned Proust in the fifteen years we’d known each other. He said I should read Proust if I wanted to know what he meant. I recently began following that advice, and one of the first things I came across, while doing some preliminary reading, was Proust’s alleged statement that “An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.”
The excerpt of Shhh is a list of things to do, an imperative litany fleshing out memory before it slips forever into the past tense, beginning with his Uncle Leon’s planting a tree, his digging in the yard, a metaphor for Federman’s digging through memory, planting and dispersing seeds in the mind evolving into word-beings that populate a living text…a family tree…and in less than an hour Federman makes a universe of memories that never were, memories of senses left un-sensed…in a vase, or urn.
Federman’s list of things to do is a list of things never done, the outline of some unspeakable undone, knowing that if not for the Holocaust, these word-beings would have been people who would have, like us, had sex with themselves and others, congregated for various reasons, become excited over political ideas and whatnot, etc. & so forth. They would have lived messy lives, like us…no better, no worse…mois…nous.
This list of 33 imperatives perhaps signifies “Solomon’s Seal” or the “Star of David,” a mature family tree that never bloomed except in these stories, and in Federman’s mind where his imagination lived for them and words became beings. The ninth item is, perhaps, the most poignant if the reader’s aware of Federman’s actual biography and the myth Federman created through fifty years of critifiction, surfiction, and laughtrature. It’s here where his family leaves Paris, rather than staying as they actually did, when the Nazis invaded.
Then, three points later: “Scene demonstrating how verisimilitude often becomes improbable when one tells a story.”
Feel the fiction of the fiction to your bones.
I have a feeling that Shhh: A Story of Childhood might be my favorite of all Federman’s books, but I’ll have to wait and see like everyone else.
And that’s hard.
Brianna Marron
Seeing in the Dark
Reading Charlotte Garrett Currier’s Shadow and Light: A Retrospective left me conflicted: Had Ijust finished a book of poetry or listened to a Charles Auguste De Beriot movement? Currier incontestably has a vigilant ear for the metrical line unit, creating impeccable rhythms, balancing the traditional formalities of meter and rhyme scheme. Her work is a unique, eye-pleasing integration of extant linguistic idiosyncrasies with avant-garde typography. Perhaps it is fortuitous that I do not have to answer my question of whether Currier writes poetry or composes music. As Dylan Thomas once offered, “Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing.” At heart, the intent of poetry is to make the audience feel, and feel deeply, and Currier, through this highly metrical almost-memoir, certainly reminds us what it is to wholly feel—whether we wish to be so reminded or not.
Shadow and Light is divided into four sections (although an argument could be made that its “New York City Suite” qualifies as a fifth). Each section—more emotionally brazen and yet more private than its last—captures the shadow and light of wending through those most basic realities of life: contingency, stability, stagnancy. Even so, Currier concludes the book with a lightheartedness that supplies a welcome break from occasionally opaque verse, paying homage to former students, converging both the obscurity and the lucidity of memory. With each section, the audience is bound to poetic persona ever more tightly—sometimes, too tightly.
Shadow and Light is also visually poetic. The New York City Suite pages shift in layout to white print on black paper with short lyrical, witty poems staggered about the page and framed by reverse-image photo brackets. Pages come to resemble a personal photo board, adding an extra emotive power that forces the audience to engage at an altogether graphic level with the the ravages of memory. The black-and-white formatting throughout offers a tangible reflection of the title, immersing readers within remnants of “occasions forgotten or indistinguishable.” Solidifying the connections among memory, verbal artifacts (the poems), and relational reality, Currier shows no shame supplying personal dedications to several of the pieces. Both the layout and the poems offer each page a transparent physicality.
Following the arrangement by section, the poetry—like life itself—in Shadow and Light follows a series of phases, all organized under the unitary motif of relationship and memory. Embodied in poetic form, Currier pairs loss with humor, darkness with lightness, embracing memory within the corporeality of emotion. Her collection offers euphoric poems expressive of empathy and reflective in their proclivity to quip. In the end, her dexterous and sometime even volatile use of meter, held together with her voracious (at times wry) voice, provides readers with a look back at a life lived with the kind of honesty that oftentimes only poetry can deliver, or as Currier suggests: “These poems, like a long train journey, end at a place not yet home, yet not unknown.”
Jonathan Kiefer
A Single Man
Directed by Tom Ford, from a script by Ford and David Scearce and based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood
It’s hard not to notice that A Single Man’s timing seems a little awkward. For starters, there’s that inevitable confusion with the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, and the fact of both movies having to do with horn-rimmed sad sacks who feel trapped in the peculiar quicksand of 1960s Americana.
What’s more, maybe it’s just too late now to get a great film from Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel of one day in a closeted man’s suddenly lonely life. Certainly director Tom Ford and co-writer David Scearce seem to take that seminal gay-lib text for granted. An established fashion designer who made his name peddling erotically flamboyant luxury, Ford sees A Single Man as sedulous diversion: just one long and lovely and carefully struck pose.
In 1962, as Soviet missiles are piling up in Cuba and college kids are giving up in Los Angeles, Colin Firth is George Falconer, quite clearly the best dressed professor of English ever to have walked the Earth (although in that regard he is not without competition). Having just learned of his lover’s death, George has taken to radiating sartorially magnificent grief, thinking suicidal thoughts and trudging around in his splendid home. He has a support system of sorts, cobbled together from a fetchingly boozy best friend (Julianne Moore), a flirty student in a fuzzy sweater (Nicholas Hoult), and a full-on come-hither hustler (Jon Kortajarena), but nothing quite lights George up like the memory of his soulmate, who’s played in flashbacks by Matthew Goode.
In fact, Ford and cinematographer Eduard Grau take that lighting up very literally, setting it off as a periodic efflorescence from their meticulously pallid status quo. As if Firth’s face, here a marvel of emotive subtlety and control, somehow weren’t enough to get the point across. That’s really the best and most confounding thing going on in here: an extraordinary central performance without which the whole movie, flan-like confection that it is, might completely collapse. It’s astonishing to see how nimbly Firth navigates the simultaneous numbness and volatility that mourning can bring. And it’s frustrating to see him, along with every other shrewdly self-possessed performer in his supporting cast, not so much directed as tastefully arranged within the frame.
Given the milieu of a hazy, uneasy neverland somewhere between conservative cultural nostalgia and foundational progressive mythology, it’s no surprise that Ford should want to reduce all of A Single Man’s feeling to a languid fashion-mag swoon. (Is that moment set in front of a billboard for Hitchcock’s Psycho actually meaningful, or just something the filmmaker saw in another movie once?) But his characterization of the dapper, depressive George risks reinforcing a mopey and preening stereotype — the core of queer vanity behind a veil of hollow flair — that Isherwood sought preemptively to peel away. Funny, and sad, how times have changed.
Brian Slattery
White Readers Meet Black Authors
I was delighted to come across the utterly appropriately titled blog White Readers Meet Black Authors, “your official invitation into the African American section of the bookstore,” maintained by novelist Carleen Brice. There is little I can say about this blog that Brice hasn’t said already, from the video she has on the blog itself to the piece she wrote in December 2008 for the Washington Post. When she started the blog, New York Magazine viewed it as a publicity stunt, and it is that. But Brice is also getting at something very real about the book market; just read the blog and see if you don’t agree with her. But more importantly, read the blog for the books she champions.
Thanks to White Readers Meet Black Authors, I’ve been devouring Victor LaValle’s The Ecstatic, and his latest book, the very well-reviewed Big Machine, just might be next. I bought both at the same time at McNally Jackson, and the woman behind the cash register smiled.
“Going on a LaValle bender?” she said.
“It looks that way,” I said.
She nodded. “You won’t be disappointed.” I believe her.
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