Reading Like a Writer…English Major…Critic

The blog Mark Athitakis' American Fiction Notes (which I recommend) has a recent post that reminds me of a formula I've been using lately to talk to my fiction-writing students when advising them on how to learn from the fiction they are reading. I'm not the first to recommend "reading like a writer," of course. (Francine Prose has an interesting book by that title.) But I did get to the idea more or less on my own by applying what I learned over the years teaching freshman composition courses, usually staying one chapter ahead of my students in the textbook.

Books in that discipline often encourage "reading rhetorically"—that is, reading for the rhetorical techniques a writer of expository prose uses to be persuasive. As I worked over the years on my own fiction, I became more and more conscious of how I use that same analytical skill in reading fiction. For example, when I am struggling with a problem of point of view, I tend to pay attention to how the novel I am reading at the moment uses POV, and I even gravitate toward novels that have the same POV. This started out more or less unconsciously, but now I pretty much am always working through a specific home-made course of study to help me with the writing project of the moment.

I now structure the fiction writing classes that I teach around similar courses of study. I tell my students that reading like a writer is based largely on the old saw that good writers imitate while great writers steal. I want them to be skilled thieves. I want them to case the joint properly.

Still, in their analysis of published fiction, my students struggle to talk about technique and tend to focus on matters that I'd sum up as "the search for the hidden meaning." They are "reading like English majors," I then complain, half in jest. God bless us for being English majors to begin with, but when they sign up for the creative writing elective, that might be more handicap than help. Literary analysis, as I learned it and, as I believe, my students have been learning it, has almost nothing to do with analyzing literary technique. (Think of it as collateral damage to Barthes' "death of the author" and related debates over the intentional fallacy.) I don't at all remember learning how to break down an author's use of pastiche, repetition, contrast or similar devices, an approach that now seems to me at least as important to deeply understanding a work of fiction as listening for the radar pings returning from the book's social contexts. To become better at "reading like a writer," we have to suspend our tendency to read like an English major. Or give it up like a bad habit, I've been tempted to say aloud. But even at this late date I still believe there are worse habits my student could have.

Until recently I sometimes put this argument to my students this way: We ask different kinds of questions when we read with different goals. Most people read like readers and will ask: "Is it enjoyable?" English departments train us to ask different questions: "What does it mean?" Reading like a writer means asking about how the literary effects—especially pleasure and a sense of meaningfulness—are achieved. In other words: "How does it work?"

Mark Athitakis' note suggests to me an extension of the formula—reading like a book critic and/or reading like a book reviewer. I know important distinctions are made between the roles of critics and reviewers, but I won't wade into those here. I like to think of them like those cousins in narratives of the English aristocracy who are related by marriage, and possibly by blood, if anyone dare investigate. (Yes, yes, I've been watching Downton Abbey on Masterpiece Theater in great gulps of late.)

Athitakis, and the two other bloggers he is commenting on, are teasing out the kinds of questions that critics and reviewers should ask. The way I see it, reading like a book critic/reviewer, depending on personal inclination or prejudice and the forum in which you are publishing, involves some combination of all three of the questions I outline above. Will anyone like it? What does it mean? And how did the author do that? The reviewer/critic brings together in one place answers to whether or not a book offers pleasure, its social function of meaning something, and the significance of its form in realizing those two other elements. Most reviews and criticism touch on—or even frog-march through—all three concerns. Too many reviewers use a weighted scale, defending a book that offers no pleasure on the grounds it is richly meaningful or giving a pass to a book that offers no weight because of its craft.

It's easy to get snarky with reviewers and critics, but I know from my own few attempts at that kind of writing that it's not an easy job covering the entire waterfront, and rare is the book that succeeds in delivering in all three categories. I only wish reviewers and critics more often operated from a critical perspective that they could articulate to their readers, even if it isn't as rigid a system as the one Athitakis comments on.

Well, I don't only wish that. I suppose I also wish that the balance was weighted more to a discussion of pleasure and how it is achieved in literature. I wish they (myself included) would forget sometimes how to read like old English majors.

Robert McGuire is a freelance writer, writing teacher and aspiring novelist from New Haven. He blogs about his writing at www.workingonanovel.com.

And Everything Is Going Fine

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG9RajVgnaI[/youtube]

A Tribute to Spalding Gray by Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh’s new film does not ask: But who was Spalding Gray, really? That’s a nonstarter, if only because the asking act is best left to Gray himself.

Yes: an act, as in a bit of business -- or a performative personal literature, by which the audacity of sitting alone at a table on a stage and telling stories of self was refined into art. In those cozy dark hours just before the dawn of our era of online oversharing, Gray was the last great confessionalist.

And Everything Is Going Fine takes its title from an ironic leitmotif in one of Gray’s many monologues, whose intimacy and singularity the film has been designed to evoke. It’s a memorial scrapbook of archival Spalding Gray materials, arranged by Soderbergh and editor Susan Littenberg with affectionate attention and good organizational intuition. The images accrue not chronologically but in Graylike narrative zigzags: We see him getting older and younger and older again, moving through fluctuations of flannel and coif and footage formats. But the bigger picture, the story of his life, makes its way from a recognizable beginning toward an expected end. It’s the perfect one-man show: eccentric, hilarious and only boring to those already predisposed against him.

The rest of us are invited to cherish him once more, and to reflect. What a peculiar cultural figure, this doomed, delectably artful digresser. He was like a different make of David Foster Wallace -- the tone of his voice both intellectual and vernacular, the subject both himself and everything, the suicide both impossible and inevitable. The film does not directly acknowledge that Gray took his own life -- that’s the consensus, anyway -- in 2004, at age 62. It seems to presume that anyone who would be watching already knows this, and will not be able to forget it. Thus does hindsight become foreshadowing: We learn, or are reminded, that Gray’s mother’s mental illness was fatal; that after reading Freud he worried his unconscious would compel him to throw himself out a window; that he took a role in Soderbergh’s King of the Hill partly in order to explore a fantasy of self-induced death.

Expository concerns are handled as Gray handled them: forthrightly, yet discursively. There is no narration, except of course his own. The only character witnesses are his occasional interviewers and very occasional interviewees -- whose ranks include strangers gathered up from his audience and his own father. Otherwise, aptly, it is all Spalding all the time.

Gray recounts his experiments with sex, theater, family and fame. He charts the discovery and cultivation of his technique, which he came to describe as both “creative narcissism” and “poetic journalism.”

He says, “I like telling the story of life better than I like living it.”

The Children's Hour

Once upon a time there were three YSD actresses—a third year (the tall one), a first year (the small one), and a second year (the medium-sized one)—and they lived together in a little room with a sink on one side, a toilet on the other, and a bench in between.  There was also a little door to come and go through and some pictures on the wall. These three actresses were really children and never spoke to one another.  Their time was spent in pantomime and songs.  Each had routines and the routine each had in common was tooth-brushing.  At first it made the tall one weep, but later she did it orgiastically, with liberal lather.  It was not unlike her dance routine upon the toilet, waiting for that liberating splash.  For the small one, the toothbrush was a bullhorn, and brought on a kind of oral/aural seizure.  And for the middle one, the toothbrush was a seductive partner at a dance.

And so the three lived and played and did little tasks—peeling a potato, going to confession, folding laundry—and sang nonsense songs and lip-synched and danced, and mimicked love scenes from Gone With The Wind, From Here to Eternity, and It’s a Wonderful Life.

A big box was delivered to each and contained something important, maybe even something each needed.  For the middle one, the box held a little box she could wear, with clouds inside; for the tall one, the box gave her a light that touched her heart and sent her on wings toward heaven; for the small one, the box held a power drill that got stuck in the wall.

All three actresses have considerable comic skills: the tall one recently played Dogberry in a YSD production of Much Ado About Nothing and was very funny; here she was the sister with the most anxiety and the tears of a clown; the small one had fewer routines but she liked phallic things, like a big, thick dildo and that power drill; the middle one was the most endearing, enacting cute sock puppets making love, or giving out a succession of mouth farts.

Everything they did gave them pleasure or recalled pleasures or, like the cackling baby who was really a vacuum-cleaner, created a sense of the pleasure things have in giving pleasure to humans.  And that’s why the play was called pleasureD.

The Yale Cabaret, where these three actresses performed, will be dark now until March 24-26.  And then there will be a new play and it will be a musical, about a mannequin who might be a boy or might be a girl or might be both, called Trannequin.

pleasureD, conceived, created, and performed by a trio of YSD actresses

The Yale Cabaret, Feb. 17-19

McGrath's American Hero

Campbell McGrath, Shannon. Ecco/Harper Collins, 2009. $23.99 This long poem’s opening, spoken in the confiding, companionable first-person voice of a young man eager to stand out on Lewis & Clark’s team in the summer of 1804, rolls through unsettled American land near the Missouri river. Determined to prove himself, this youngest member of the Corps of Discovery rides out, without much food or ammunition, after runaway horses. He finds the horses the first day. Two weeks pass before the Corps finds him, starving, with buffalo all around him (no bullets left). The subsequent sections of the poem mark the days of the young man’s solitary trial.

The historical George Shannon—c. 1785-1836, eventually a Missouri judge known as “Peg-Leg” after an Indian ambush nearly killed him—left no journal or memoir, so the poem’s language is entirely McGrath’s. His Shannon is alert to every sight, sound, smell. He’s working. And wise, right away, to more than the surface: “the fugitives appeared/Not unhappy at sight of me.” He’s curious, excited, humorous, ambitious, self-conscious—all in the first moments of his first day alone.

For Shannon McGrath has found language that opens the mind of this emblematic New (white, Christian, colonizing) American without intruding on the reader’s experience of him. There’s Action: killing one rabbit with hard wood in place of a bullet. Suspense: in the quest for food; more, in the struggle to register every lesson in the landscape. And fantasy sex, reluctant theology, geopolitical prophecy, ant visions, buffalo dreams. It’s a film you want to watch again and again.

Actual journal entries by William Clark record Shannon’s departure before he begins to speak and his rescue after he stops on the fifteenth day. The lines of irregular length feel transparent, at the far end of the poetic scale from the charged, boisterous lines of the work McGrath is best known for. In Shannon it’s the line-breaks that make music:

Small herds Of elk coming out from the arroyo To silver water & shadows Of clouds over the same hills & wind Amongst the grasses grown Ceaseless now.

Shannon enjoys time to think. At first a conqueror, naming the place around him “Shannontown,” he begins to question

. . . our grand purpose Here, that being to keep moving To forge if even blindly Onward.

All the political fury and rhetorical dazzle McGrath packed into “The Bob Hope Poem” in Spring Comes to Chicago (1996); all the fire of his quest for America in road-trip poems from his first book, Capitalism (1990), through his prose-poem book, Road Atlas (1999), to his lumpy, fascinating journal book, Seven Notebooks (2008), take new form in Shannon (2009), his eighth book. All to ask: How do we (Americans) serve—let alone deserve—this glorious land we have lucked into?

Shannon’s hunger for food NOW becomes his ambition for the future; his awareness that he’s lost in the land becomes the new nation’s uncertain development. McGrath enlarges upon Shannon’s ambitions in this major work that has been under-noticed because Shannon doesn’t sound like “McGrath,” and because readers balked at the subtleties of Seven Notebooks. Concluding his Afterword, McGrath links our hopes to his hero’s: “George Shannon often got lost, but he always got found. May the same hold true for those who continue to follow in his footsteps, the majestic land he wandered, and the nation he was proud to call home.”

It's Not Easy Being Blue

The most recent Yale Cabaret offering was inspired by the art theory of Wassily Kandinsky, the modernist painter and Bauhaus instructor who earlier was a founder of the avant-garde group The Blue Rider.  If you’re wondering how art theory can supply the basis for drama, you have to imagine a series of dialogues between blue and yellow. For Kandinsky, these two primary colors represent the first principles of color in painting—yellow, terrestial warmth; blue, celestial coolness.  In Out of the Blue, written by Kee-Yoon Nahm, a dramaturgy student at YSD, and directed by Elliot B. Quick, the Cab’s Associate Artistic Director this semester, Blue and Yellow become, respectively, an artist (Jack Moran) and his model (Jillian Taylor).  “Art can only begin at the point where love and compassion end,” Kandinsky wrote, and with that statement as the tagline for the play, you can intuit that whatever the desires of the individuals might be, the pursuit of art is going to overwhelm any attempt at intimacy.

In the play, Yellow represents the aggressive nature of human interaction, always trying to make something happen between people, and Blue represents the withdrawal from interaction, the attempt to remain solitary and unprovoked.   If that sounds incredibly abstract, that’s appropriate to Kandinsky’s view of art, but in practice it produced several amusing vignettes in which the artist figure became a French monk, a Russian explorer, and an American Man in the Moon.  In each case Yellow became the figure for human interest, the busy destroyer of solitude, arriving to insist on a relation to other people.

Back at the painting studio, the artist has to explain to his mother why he dropped out of art school, and overcome his model’s aggressive suggestion that he represent her entire body, not just her hands.  Both actors expressed the qualities of their respective colors, with Moran moody and detached, Taylor bright with bonhomie.  The set (Kristen Robinson, designer) and lighting (Yi Zhao, designer) added dimension by providing painted blue shadows to objects—a chair, an easel, a bookshelf—bathed in yellow light.  And there were slide projections (Hannah Wasileski, designer) that seemed derived from a personality test in which the viewer was asked to describe the relation between a yellow triangle and a blue circle.  The fact that the circle seemed at times like an ovum subjected to the triangle’s efforts to penetrate only added to the old notion that the artist is “feminine,” and the imagination a world unto itself.  And yet, the play suggested, looking at art, no matter how detached from the everyday worlds we inhabit, might still bring us together.

Out of the Blue, written by Kee-Yoon Nahm; directed by Elliot B. Quick

The Yale Cabaret, February 10-12, 2011

Unfinished Business

August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson has returned to The Yale Rep where it debuted in 1987.  The play is part of a cycle of ten plays, one for each decade of the twentieth century, that Wilson wrote to depict African American experience.  With that sense of epic reach in mind, one approaches The Piano Lesson a bit awestruck, ready to watch a master work through family history and racial history in telling ways, making his characters “representative” but also fully weighted with individuality.  The play, as written and as presented, stands upon venerable traditions of naturalistic theater, with a grasp of character dynamics that recall Chekhov and O’Neill, playwrights celebrated for their ability to make dramatic points arise out of what seem to be everyday conversations. But that may be a misleading claim, for the plot of The Piano Lesson hinges upon events unusual in themselves, beginning with Boy Willie’s bumptious visit to his sister Berniece, coming all the way from Mississippi to Pittsburgh in 1936 as a man with a mission.  But once he gets there, with his slow-spoken friend Lymon along, the first mission—to sell a truckload of watermelons—doesn’t seem too pressing, and the other mission—to convince Berniece to let him sell the family heirloom piano—becomes the occasion for all sorts of reminiscences, grandstanding, arguing, haranging, and hauntings.  And there the feel of how porous is the difference between the usual and the unusual, the natural and the unnatural, becomes more portentous, investing the Charles family heirloom with a fetishistic quality that partakes of different forms of magic, all tellingly presented in the play.

The house is haunted by the ghost of Sutter, grandson of the slave owner who sold off Boy Willie and Berniece’s great-grandmother and grandfather to buy the piano.  He has died recently, pushed down a well, and that means his land, which the Charles family worked as slaves, is now available for Boy Willie to purchase.  And that’s why he needs to sell the piano.  Though we never see the apparition, it appears to different members of the family, indicating to Berniece that her brother may have been responsible for Sutter’s death, but also seeming to indicate that, even beyond the grave, Sutter is concerned with what becomes of the piano, a piano that was stolen by Boy Charles, father of Boy Willie and Berniece, along with his two brothers, Wining Boy and Doaker, and brought to Pittsburgh.  Carved into the piano are images of the two who were sold as well as images of other notable moments in the Charles family history (all this history comes out in Scene II in a wonderful speech, delivered as collective memory,  by Uncle Doaker).

Giving an object such historical and familial meaning is significant enough, but Wilson goes further, letting us feel the appeal of music—the prison worksongs (another great moment is when Boy Willie, Lyman, Doaker, and Wining Boy all join together on the song “Berta Berta,” beating time on kitchen implements), the boogie-woogie tunes (Wining Boy is an aging former saloon singer and piano player), the hymns and ballads that the piano seems to incarnate.  Berniece’s most persistent suitor, Avery, is an elevator attendant who aspires to be a preacher and his attempt to exorcise Sutter by blessing the house brings into play the strong evangelical magic that speaks to these folks to varying degrees.  Then there is the magic attraction of the loose woman, Grace, that speaks to both Boy Willie and Lymon, to say nothing of the alleged magic of the silk suit and Florsheim shoes Wining Boy convinces Lyman to buy from him, "guaranteed" to get him a woman.

In other words, talismans abound, and cultural reference points, and songs, and fluent rhythms of speech, all coming together to form a vast expressive fabric.

The battle between brother and sister about how best to live up to what the burden of the past means is the heart of the piece, as everywhere there is unfinished business—between Willie Boy and Berniece (she blames him for her husband’s death), between the Charles family and the Sutter family—the slaves and the masters—and between the North and the South, the rural and the urban, as sites of African American identity.

The question of who carries the day and why is what we leave discussing.  If we’re meant to sympathize with Berniece and her intentions to retain the emblematic piano, the performance by Eisa Davis made that difficult.  Her Berniece sounded brittle and strident, only appearing warm and appealing in her touching quasi-courtship scene with Lyman (Charlie Hudson, III) where the latter’s easy-going nature brought her out of a settled irritability.  LeRoy McClain’s Boy Willie, while engaging, energetic and instantly likeable, appeared at times so wrong-headed and insistent we can’t completely sanction his claim nor entirely dismiss his intention to sell off the past to improve the present.

The siblings’ struggle was fleshed out entertainingly by Charles Weldon as Wining Boy, a pivotal figure every time he was on stage because his command of a repertoire of moves and voices made vivid a character of vast experience, and by Keith Randolph Smith’s Doaker, a stolid figure with an air of bedrock solidity.  We might feel at times a taint of cliché hanging about these characters: the plainspoken railroad man, the feckless entertainer, the prim widow, the naïve hayseed, the sexy city-woman, the knockabout with a plan, but that sense of the familiar only proved uninspired in one instance: as Avery, the upright worker turned preacher man, Tyrone Mitchell Henderson was neither comical nor wholly convincing, there being an earnest dullness in the character he couldn’t quite overcome.

At times, there were places where the play could move more quickly, but time seems to be part of the burden Wilson wants to present, and director Liesl Tommy gives us a play we have to settle into and learn how to live with, providing just enough jolts to keep us off-guard, but also giving us a lesson in naturalistic action and ensemble work.  The piano may be all too obvious as an emblem of slavery, song, and family, but the genius of the play is in making the past—like the uneasy revenant Sutter—a real presence.

The Piano Lesson by August Wilson; directed by Liesl Tommy

Original music by Eisa Davis; lyrics by August Wilson

Yale Repertory Theatre, January 28 to February 19, 2011

Lebanon (Film Review)

Lebanon is an Israeli film that played in U.S. theaters for a few weeks last summer.  For those who missed its initial release, it just came out on DVD and is worth catching.  While not the absolute masterpiece that some of my fellow critics have claimed, it is a very good film that boasts the ability to milk unbearable suspense out of war film cliches. Set during the First Lebanon War, it tells the story of an Israeli tank crew.  Shmulik (Yoav Donat) is the gunner and the new member of the crew.  Assi (Itay Tiran) is the ineffectual leader who fails to command the respect of his men.  Hertzel (Oshri Cohen) is the ammunition loader and the closest thing in the film to a live wire—his constant challenging of Assi’s authority quickly becomes a nuisance for everyone in the tank.  The final member of the crew is Yigal (Michael Moshonov), the quiet driver who tries to stay out of everyone’s way.

Accompanying a squad of paratroopers into enemy territory, the tank moves into an urban area where it’s hard to tell the difference between civilians and fighters.  Most of the film is seen through Shmulik’s scope as he scans the area for fighters.  But Shmulik is fresh from training where the only thing he was asked to shoot were barrels.  When he is faced with firing on a truck full of enemy fighters, he freezes, focusing on the panicked face of the driver which, through the scope, looks to be only inches away.  Despite repeated calls to shoot, he cannot do so and this action results in a firefight that finds not only the enemy dead but also one of the Israeli soldiers.  With no way to evacuate the body from the area, Jamil (Zohar Strauss), the major in charge of the operation, orders the body placed in the tank.  This is done as much as a punishment to Shmulik as it is for pragmatic reasons.  Inevitably, the next truck that comes along is not the enemy but still pays the price for Shmulik’s inability to fire on the first truck.

The story is one we’ve seen many times before.  It simply morphs from a film of “men on a mission” to one of “trapped behind enemy lines.”  But for the most part writer/director Samuel Maoz is not interested in plot.  He was a member of a tank crew in the First Lebanon War, and this experience informs every frame of the film as he focuses on the smallest of details.  From the myriad indignities of being stuffed inside a tank (the heat, dehydration, claustrophobia, choking fumes, and being forced to urinate in metal boxes) to the horrors of war (fear of the unknown, confusion of battle, grisly sight of mangled bodies), Maoz keeps the film uncomfortably intimate.  Taking cues from claustrophobic war film classics like Das Boot and Kanal, Lebanon isn’t a film you watch so much as smell and feel.  “Everyone knows war is hell,” Maoz seems to be saying, “but did you know it smells like smoke, blood, and shit?”

While it may be obvious, this intentional demythologizing of warfare is the only overarching message that Maoz seems intent on exploring.  He avoids any political statement about the situation in the Middle East that led to the war and, aside from one extremely heavy-handed shot (the only point that Maoz loses firm control of the tone), there is no reference to the numerous problems the region has seen since the war.  All that matters in the film is that war is a dehumanizing, horrible experience that no one should find entertaining.  This is reinforced by the constant use of seeing the war through Shmulik’s scope.  This perspective gives much of the film the same look as a first person shooter video game.  But unlike a video game, much of what is shown is horrific or mundane, never exciting or fun.

If this doesn’t exactly sound entertaining, that’s because it isn’t.  It’s a film that I find myself reluctantly recommending.  Despite the familiar genre tropes on display, it manages to carve out its own identity through Maoz’s stellar direction and solid work by the cast.  It’s effective at what it wants to do, but that’s also where it becomes difficult to watch.  It’s a film that deserves to be seen, just don’t expect a popcorn flick.

Matt Wedge is a film reviewer, New Haven resident, and co-founder of The Parallax Review, a totally awesome film criticism site.

The Eyes Have It

Bernard Berenson, the famous art connoisseur, made his name and reputation through a seemingly unfailing fidelity to his own cognizance of what constitutes the characteristic style of a master; his attributions made the fortune of the dealers and collectors who sold and owned the works he authenticated, or, likewise, could undermine a buyer or seller who tried to pass off as a masterpiece what was in fact an apprentice work. Simon Gray’s The Old Masters, now playing at the Long Wharf Theater, is set at a time when Berenson’s (Sam Waterston) expertise is not commanding the prices it had formerly; not only that, his beloved Italy, where he and his wife reside, is now being run by “the Duck” (aka Il Duce), and, not only that, the big buyers in the art world are no longer men who aim to acquire taste as well as prestige–such as Mellon or Frick—but rather men whose fortunes are made by, for instance, a string of five and dime stores.  In other words, the old verities are no longer quite so veracious, and perhaps even Berenson’s imprimatur can be had for the right price.

At least that’s what art dealer Joe Duveen (Brian Murray) hopes.  He wants to sell Mellon a Giorgione; unfortunately, Berenson insists the painting is an early Titian, a breakthrough in which the pupil comes close to the master, but not quite getting there.  The sparring between these two old masters, B.B. and Joe—as the latter tries to convince the former to concede that he might be mistaken—is the main dramatic substance of the play, the only scene where Gray’s mastery of his own medium is in evidence.  Early on, the proceedings are much slimmer, consisting of busywork aimed at dramatizing the ménage à trois of the Berenson home.  B.B.’s ailing but forceful and likeable wife Mary (Shirley Knight) suffers her husband’s amours with his private secretary, Nicky Mariano (Heidi Schreck), who must also suffer his amours with his Swedish masseuse, apparently, but all these references to B.B.’s erotic interests seem to be present primarily for the sake of running time and because Gray has obviously based much of this material on Mariano’s memoir.

The scenes between B.B. and the women add, arguably, a grasp of the great man’s character through knowledge of his domestic dealings, but Waterston’s truculence undermines any amorous interest.  And, though Schreck  is gamely graceful and Knight ruefully doting in their attitude to the man in their lives, Waterston’s irritable, blustering B.B. simply shines brightest with a male foil.  And that’s what Murray provides with delightful panache.  With a twinkle in his eye, a leonine head of hair, and an elegant moustache, his Duveen, ailing and driven, uses all his powers of persuasion, and the two men evince all the fascination of old counterparts perilously close to becoming enemies.

The sets are sumptuous, as befits a man of consummate taste, creating a sense of the style beyond means of the Villa I Tatti.  The pacing is too slow in the early going and the final scene seems a largely extraneous afterword.  In between, the best scenes are Waterston and Murray, then Waterston, Murray and Knight—her genuine affection for Joe as well as her sense of their need for his financial benefits add poignancy to the fact that the old friends cannot see eye to eye.

And it’s B.B.’s faith in his eye—not in art per se, nor in love, nor in loyalty—that is the driving force of the play because it’s what makes B. B. who he is, a factor of pride and authority that he can’t surrender without losing, no matter the financial gain.  But what the play ultimately dramatizes is how untenable are claims for art in an absolute sense.  What Gray wants to give us, it seems, is grounds for seeing the status of the art object, the very aspect that makes art Art, as inevitably up for grabs, nothing more than a gentleman’s agreement, quaintly doomed if gentlemen no longer call the shots with their accustomed integrity.

The Old Masters, by Simon Gray; directed by Michael Rudman

Long Wharf Theatre, January 19-February 13, 2011

The Ship of Death

Oh build your ship of death, your little arkand furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine for the dark flight down oblivion.--D. H. Lawrence, “The Ship of Death"

How do they do it?  How does the Yale Cabaret take a story of utter desperation—the doomed expedition of the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, under the command of Sir John Franklin, in search of the Northwest Passage in the Arctic Ocean in 1845—and make an entertaining evening of it?

Maybe it’s because director Devin Brain heads to the dark side the way most kids go to their favorite playground, and because the ensemble cast are clearly having so much fun in this dire tale of dwindling hopes.  And maybe it’s because the many tunes in the show, sea shanties like “What do you do with a drunken sailor?” and jigs like “The Rocky Road to Dublin,” are so irrepressibly infectious.

Conceived by Alexandra Henrikson, who is luminous as Franklin’s indefatigable wife back home, resolutely refusing to consider herself his widow, Erebus and Terror is credited to the cast, and that could be why the parts seem so perfect for each actor: Max Gordon Moore, clipped and distinguished as Officer Downing; Ben Horner, swarthy and bawdy as Ferry (his eager pursuit of Lady Death is a high-point, to say nothing of dining upon the deceased Downing); Andrew Kelsey as Oxford, a sympathetic bloke who gives an effective delivery of the seductive speech of Titania to “translated” Bottom in the crew’s impromptu enactment of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Stéphanie Hayes, skittish and fearful as Paddy, a young Irish lad (her shrieks of joy from the crow’s nest have a “top of the world, ma” feel); Dipika Guha, wide-eyed and mesmerized as Fin, a mate going “off his tit,” and Irene Sofia Lucio, as Timmy, or Kid, the youngest and most comical of the swabbies.  Add Pierre Bourgeois’s songs, richly evocative of the world of these seamen, all bound—in a string of distinctive endings—for Davey Jones’ Locker, and you’ve got the main elements for a successfully gripping show, supported by Ken Goodwin’s watery sound effects, by Lighting Designer Alan C. Edwards’ dramatic variations of light and dark that, playing on Aaron P. Mastin’s authentic costumes, put me in mind of Rockwell Kent’s nautical drawings, and, through the exit door that was opened a few times as part of Julia C. Lee’s set, by mounds of snow provided by Nature, making the effort to imagine the frozen wastes surrounding the ship that much easier.

Have you built your ship of death, O have you? O build your ship of death, for you will need it.

Erebus and Terror, Songs of Ghosts and Dreams Conceived by Alexandra Henrikson; Written and Created by the Ensemble January 13-15, 2011; Thurs, 8 p.m.; Fri. & Sat., 8 p.m. & 11 p.m. The Yale Cabaret

Our Friends in the New Haven Theater Company

New Haven Theater Company is hosting its first annual benefit Saturday, Feb. 5 at 8 p.m. the High Lane Club, located at 40 High Lane, North Haven. The event, called “Fall in Love with NHTC” will features songs and sketches with your favorite NHTC actors, comedy performed by the The Funny Stages, the group’s improv troupe, decadent desserts, and the musical stylings of the Keith and Mazer Trio. Tickets are $25. To purchase tickets, go to www.newhaventheatercompany.com.

The company is entering an exciting period of transition. T. Paul Lowry had set the NHTC’s direction for several years, creating children’s theatre, improv comedy and culturally relevant plays since 2005. However, Lowry moved out of state to pursue a job opportunity in the entertainment industry and the remaining company members were forced to make a decision: should the company fold or should it reconstitute and think of a slightly different way to move forward?

United by friendship, mutual respect and a common artistic ethos, a group of NHTC actors decided to soldier on. To fill Lowry’s role, the group voted to form a board comprised of Megan Keith Chenot (president), Hilary Brown (vice-president), Hallie Martenson (secretary) and Erich Greene (treasurer) to provide guidance and leadership. “It's thrilling to be working with people who all feel such joy at the prospect of creating theater together. We all share a love of storytelling as well as a love for the city of New Haven. There's a palpable sense that we are building something together that we can be proud to share with our city,” Megan Chenot said.

In addition to the board, the company is comprised of Ian Alderman, Rachel Shapiro Alderman, Peter Chenot, Jeremy Funke, George Kulp, Steve Scarpa, Jenny Schuck, Christian Shaboo, J. Kevin Smith, and Mike Smith. All of the company members have significant experience in a variety of capacities with NHTC, primarily in the company’s critically acclaimed productions of Glengarry Glen Ross, A Civil War Christmas and Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me.

New Haven Theater Company’s current mission is to celebrate the power of storytelling by providing New Haven with awesome theater experiences that are relevant and accessible to all members of our community. “We're excited to be working together to bring the city a fresh take on community theater,” Megan Chenot said.

The group is committed to continuing many of Lowry’s initiatives, including the Funny Stages improv comedy, the Listen Here short story reading series and Reel New Haven, the company’s yearly film festival. In addition, the company is currently in the midst of selecting its first play of 2011. An announcement will be made soon.

For more information about New Haven Theater Company, contact Megan Chenot via e-mail at NHTCpress@gmail.com.

Have a Happy New (Haven Review) Year

And here's what we're cookin' up for this year... New Haven Review is back for another year of merry. Our book publishing venture has so far garnered all sorts of fab publicity, like this here, and there have been successful parties in New Haven and New York. We have upcoming appearances at the New Haven Public Library (all of our authors, 6pm, Jan. 26), the Faith Middleton Show (Feb. 18, 3pm, Charles Douthat and Mark Oppenheimer), and Labyrinth Books (same crew, the next day, Feb. 19, at 4pm).

And our radio show, Paper Trails, featuring Mark Oppenheimer, Brian Slattery, Gregory Feeley, Binnie Klein, and others talking about books, debuts Feb. 13 on WNPR. Stay tuned for more on that.

Issue #7 is on the web here. (Have you subscribed? Are you a library or someone else with an expense account? Are you somebody who likes to support the arts? And likes to read good stuff? Will you please subscribe?)

Meanwhile, Susan Holahan's poems in issue #5 got honorable mention for the Pushcart Prize volume.

But best of all? Thanks to a generous donation, we can now pay our authors. So agents, publishers, authors--get the word out. Issue #8 is nearly full, but we are now accepting submissions for issue #9 and beyond. For more information, write to editor@newhavenreview.com

Winter Alert

Yeah, I know, everyone’s having a collective snowgasm in the snowpocalypse, but, should you decide to put your head outside your cave, there are some theatrical events happening this weekend that should make the snowjob of digging out worth your while. First of all, Thursday night, Jan. 13th, the Yale Cabaret, led by Andrew Kelsey and Tara Kayton, resumes its 2010-11 season with a play entitled Erebus and Terror, directed by Devin Brain, last year’s co-artistic director of the Cab.  Brain’s anticipated return to the Cab also marks a return to a work, conceived by Yale School of Drama acting major Alexandra Henrikson and written and created by the cast, that was originally scheduled to end the Cab’s 2009-10 season.  The wait was worth it, we suspect, especially as the play dramatizes events in the Arctic.  The current conditions in New Haven couldn’t be more propitious.  The title refers to the names of the steamships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, commanded by Sir John Franklin on his doomed search for the Northwest Passage in 1845.  Among the 2,3999 books aboard ship was a copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare—a fact that may be significant for how the play dramatizes the snowbound experience of the 128 men on the expedition.  The play, the Cab website tells us, “is a journey north in search of songs and stories frozen in ice”—but you need only journey through the wintery wastes to 217 Park Street in New Haven to hear them.  Shows at 8 p.m, Thurs., Fri., Sat., late shows Fri. and Sat. at 11 p.m. Call: 203-432-1566; www.yalecabaret.org

And on Sunday, Jan. 16th, a special event takes place at the Long Wharf Stage II.  A dramatic reading of an adaptation of Torture Team by Philippe Sands, directed by Gordon Edelstein, and featuring the star power of Vanessa Redgrave, Lili Taylor, Jeff McCarthy, Jay O. Sanders, and Harris Yulin.  Taking attorney Sands’ book Torture Team, described as “an All the President’s Men for the 21st century,” as its starting point, the play investigates the degree of complicity on the part of the Bush administration in the tortures of Guantámo Bay, using a variety of media—clips of Judgment at Nuremberg, presidential statements, interviews, Murat Kumaz’s memoir of his incarceration at the U.S. detention facility—to dramatize the events and their context.  Sands’ book has been praised as a formidable work of investigative journalism that lays the basis for a charge of war crimes against the Bush administration.  Redgrave, known almost as well for her activism as for her acting, and Sands will both participate in discussion of the controversial claims of the work after the performance. 7 p.m. For information: www.longwharf.org

My Caitlin Flanagan Problem: or, Shouldn't I Be Reading Something Else, Really?

My daughter was napping, so the house was quiet, and I was eating lunch and staring at my computer. On a whim, I went to the website for The Atlantic, which I always forget about and then remember with a huge sense of relief -- there I know I'll find something I'll want to read. I scrolled through the list of current articles and noticed a piece by Caitlin Flanagan, and clicked on it eagerly. As I settled in to read it, fork in hand, I shook my head and asked "Why am I doing this to myself? It's just going to make me crazy." But I had to read it.

Caitlin Flanagan is on a mental list I have of writers who I read whenever I can, even though they make me crazy. I've got a little list of such writers. Half the time -- more than half the time -- what they write turns me into a raving loony, pissed about their lack of critical thinking, their shitty writing skills, or some other massive flaw in their work; and yet I read every word I can find by these people. Why is this? Why is this? Why do I do this to myself? It's a form of masochism, right? But why?

And am I the only person who does this?

Flanagan is a writer who seems to inspire this reaction in lots of people, so I can't be alone. I mean, she makes people crazy, but she's still earning a living as a writer. I don't think anyone disputes that she's entertaining; she's got lots of clever sentences, and she seldom sounds simply moronic. But nuanced thinking may not be her strong suit, shall we say. I read her and while I'm laughing at some zinger she's come up with, I often think, "Well, no, that's not really true." And I wind up frustrated with the piece as a whole, even as I agree with several points, or even the thrust of the article overall. Even if I think she's got a good idea, I inevitably feel it's not well argued (which is comical, coming from me, because I am probably the least lucid or organized thinker in my zip code). When someone like me thinks a piece isn't well thought out, you've got problems.

But this phenomenon of "I hate you/I love you/When's your next book coming out" happens to me with fiction writers as well. Over the years, based on my affection for one writer, I've been led to the works of other authors who I've been told, or who I suspect, will quench my never-to-be satisfied thirst for another book by my beloved (ok, it's Laurie Colwin, I admit it). So over time I have read numerous novels that I opened hopefully, but have left me just angry that I wasted my time. Books by Maemeve Medwed -- who are the people who really think these are great? Because I just can't get into them; novels by Cathleen Schine, who I ought to love, but who I just.... don't; Meghan Daum. Oh, Meghan Daum. Her first book of essays made me insane: it was so good, so good, and she was so likeable in so many ways, but I just wanted to smack her on the head and tell her to shape up. I approached her novel The Quality of Life Report with apprehension, knowing on the one hand that it would almost certainly suck, but positive that I would devour it in maybe one and a half sittings. I was right on the money. Why did I do this to myself? I could have been reading something I actually enjoyed; instead, I forced myself to read this novel that held no surprises, no phrase that stuck in my head forever after (not true with My Misspent Youth, a collection of pieces that rings in my head all the time). I received her book about house hunting for my birthday last year and was so excited to read it, even as I knew it would disappoint -- and my suspicions were fulfilled. I opened it immediately and couldn't stop reading but in the end I was left feeling like I hadn't read anything at all.

It's very frustrating.

There's a test I have, though, which is, Do you keep your copies of the books by these people, or do you get rid of them (or never even buy them in the first place, but just borrow them from the library).

Cathleen Schine, I've kept one novel (last year's The Three Weissmans of Westport). There are no Medwed books on my shelves.

I'm keeping all my Meghan Daum.

Why do I read writers whose works I know I won't like? It's not like I'm getting paid to read these things (usually). I keep hoping for the next Veronica Geng, Laurie Colwin, James Thurber, or Patrick Dennis. I'm not looking for cosmic enlightenment, folks; just some solid light entertainment. I guess I'll just have to let you know when I find it, and in the meantime, re-read some Betty MacDonald. She's good on a cold winter day.

The End of the Line: Literary TV and Showtime's 'Brotherhood'

As popular wisdom would have it, the end of TV’s Golden Age of Drama may already be upon us.  But while its possible deathblow is up for debate (the end of Lost? The rise of Glee?), bloggers and critics of all stripes agree on its birth. It is no coincidence that the form-defining triumph of The Sopranos marked a retraction from the over-hyped New York that we sipped in a trendy coffee shop through the 90s, to offer in its wake a macabre kind of success story from across the bridge. Wall Street and high fashion gave way, for the most part, to McMansions and the hot-pink thongs of a Jersey strip club, while Manhattan became just a place to take your wife out to dinner or to hawk a movie script. HBO’s crown jewel ushered in an era of self-consciously literary television, capitalizing on the shifting, ambivalent viewer involvement that long-form narrative demands. David Simon of The Wire compares his magnum opus to Greek tragedy and Shakespeare; hip college professors are inclined to agree. “David Chase is Dostoevsky for television,” Blake Masters once said of The Sopranos’ creator. This was a high bar for Masters’ own show to live up to.  But though Brotherhood—a little-known Showtime series that fuses elements of mob drama with the best of urban dejection—ran for only three seasons from 2006-2008, it is an indispensable stop on the line from the metropolis to a smaller, post-industrial enclave just an Amtrak ride away.

Brotherhood takes place in Providence, Rhode Island, a city more like our own New Haven than perhaps any of the other TV-drama settings. Its neighborhood of focus is a fictional, but insistently particular, place called The Hill, a working-class Irish Catholic stronghold struggling with lay-offs, new immigrants and gentrification. In terms of literary comparison, the show conjures up nothing so epic as The Brothers Karamazov or King Lear: the larger-than-life gangsters of The Wire’s “Bodymore, Murdaland” are replaced by the day-to-day headaches of low-level ambition. In its unrelenting interrogation of what it means to be from somewhere, Brotherhood is more like Saul Bellow’s Chicago novels: to be from a place means to “stick to your guns”—to know it before and against signification.

Brotherhood’s creator is from New England, and it is evident in the way he treats both the show’s financially beleaguered city—which he likened in an interview to the world’s biggest high school—and his two main characters. Michael and Tommy Caffee are at the top of their game, on opposing teams: one is a local mob boss, and one is a rising star in state politics. They both do some bad things and wind up in good places, and they both do some good things that don’t lead to much. It’s a narrative constructed as all means, no end, and major events seem to happen at random. Even Michael’s return from years of exile to kick off the series is oddly humdrum—he simply shows up one night for Sunday dinner and pulls up a chair around his mother’s dining room table.

The characters in Brotherhood develop, but the plot refuses to arc: when mobster Michael kills an FBI agent in one of the show’s most brutal scenes, he does it because he’s pissed off. He is not the victim of grand social injustice that we are privy to while he is not, and we shake our heads in dismay rather than bristle with indignation. There’s no symmetrical interweaving of anti-heroes on either side of a blurred ethical or institutional line, like in The Wire’s finely wrought structure. This leads to a show that is grim but convincing, and which commands admiration for its refusal to mythologize the condition it brings to life.

It may be this hermetic quality that kept Brotherhood from catching on, in spite of its strong acting and a soundtrack that had me rewinding just to sit and soak it up (one episode closes with a suicide and the Martin Sexton lyrics, “I’m tired, scared and wide open…to the rest of my life”). And while Meadow Soprano lands at Columbia to begin her climb into Manhattan’s good graces, the Ivy League university of Providence is as far off the Caffee family radar as the tri-state glitz of Mad Men. We know this city’s problems link it with others like it, but we don’t quite know how. It is a testament to the nuance of Masters’ writing that the stakes we do experience keep us focused on what he shows us.

For better or worse, then, Brotherhood is a peephole into life as it is, not life as it aspires to be. It’s about a city whose troubles define it from inside, because the people there aren’t trying to get out. It’s neither galvanizing, nor glamorized, nor likely all that eye-opening to the viewers it would probably appeal to most. But the show does satisfy, showing that small places have big stories to tell.  And even if that’s the whole point, right there, getting that story right makes Brotherhood worth a look.

A native of Meriden newly transplanted to Boston, Jeanne-Marie Jackson is a doctoral candidate at Yale, working in Russian and Afrikaans fiction.

Snu? What's new with you?

What's new with us? First, our next issue is out.  Subscribe and check it out.  We have essays on being a ski bum, on being mistaken for a celebrity, on being the new New Haven librarian, on being married happily... or not, on crossing the border, on loving our unloveable hometowns, on being sick and healthy again.

Then there's the poetry and the fiction--all good stuff.

By why stop there?  Our publicity machine has been going strong as well!  The Boston Globe recently had an article about The New Haven Review and its book publishing venture.

And then there are our authors and their books.  Rudy Delson, author of NHR Books' How to Win Her Love, was interviewed on WFMU (the interview can be heard here) and our own local WPKN (listen here).

Poet Charles Douthat recently read from his Blue for Oceans at the Poetry Institute at the Institute Library!

And as for Gregory Feeley's own recent Kentauros, we are looking forward to our first radio programs, courtesy of Connecticut NPR, where he sits down with New Haven Review editors to talk books and whatever else his fervid imagination has cooked up--but more on that later!