The Listen Here! Short Story Reading Series rolls into its 11th week with readings at Bru Cafe, 141 Orange, Street, this Tuesday, May 18, 7 p.m.

Our Theme?
 “Brothers”

Our Stories?
Louise Erdrich’s “The Red Convertible” and David Sedaris’s “You Can’t Kill the Rooster”

Why these?

Louis Erdrich is one of our best-known Native American writers (she is part Ojibwa on her mother’s side) and is a prolific novelist. She’s also a helluva a short story writer, and “The Red Convertible” nicely illustrates this aspect of her storytelling talent. This tale addresses the impact of the Vietnam War — and the then emergent understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder — on the American Indian community of the early 1970s. The story originally appeared in Mississippi Valley Review in 1981 and was collected in Love Medicine in 1984. Its blend of pathos and pain are a reminder of the terrible price of war paid by the families who stay behind.

David Sedaris became universally known for his display of caustic wit on This American Life with his reading of the “Santaland Diaries.” But “You Can’t Kill the Rooster” is equally one of the funniest stories he has ever written, with the added blessing of being probably the most vulgar that Listen Here! has presented to date. (In other words, you ain’t gonna ever hear this one on NPR!) We found this in the edited collection Brothers, put together by New Haven Review subscriber Andrew Blauner, a really wonderful collection of stories on just that topic.

The Long Wharf Theatre production of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House managed a surprising feat: it made the play more entertaining without significantly altering it.  If you’re a purist who wants to see Ibsen played straight, it does that; but if you think that a play like ADH, with its winsome wifey who gets into some hot water due to an “innocent” forgery, then gets out of it only to slam the door on her happy-ever-after home, is a bit dated and could use some kind of make-over, well, this show does that too.

And that’s what I found surprising: first, that one could perch Ibsen on the terrain of a sitcom or a soap; second, that I found myself thinking, well, isn’t ADH simply a more revered soap?  After all, the plot of the story is pure soap opera, and there’s nothing in the dialogue that aims beyond the play’s basic premise, which is something like: happiness is only skin deep.  Scratch it, and it bleeds.  So why not give us an A Doll’s House (1879) that resonates in a world of McMansions where — as is only too timely — a bit of financial chicanery might bring the whole cloud castle down on a bank manager’s ears.

Gordon Edelstein, who did the adaptation and directed, deserves great credit for mining the comic potential in the material.  It mainly seemed to be a matter of emphasis.  The dialogue, a bit modernized, was close to any version of the play we might already be familiar with, but this production included laughs that might be in Ibsen’s script but which a less enterprising director might overlook.  There was a breeziness to it that kept it from taking itself too seriously, a breeziness derived from the giddy fun of looking into our neighbors’ glass house.

What’s important, for a modern production, is that we not be laughing at Nora, the little bluebird, squirrel, chipmunk, as though she were simply in over her airhead and deserving of a little domestic contretemps for our amusement.  Ana Reeder made the most of making Nora likeable, cannily dim rather than actually so.  She managed the protean shifts that are necessary — the play makes us see — to be the “perfect wife”: temptress, adoring partner, household manager, confidante to friends both male and female, defender of the threatened nest, even sacrificial victim (the latter a melodramatic touch that can’t help seeming a bit 19th century).  When, in the end, she does what she’s got to do, the shifts from comically desperate to happily saved to proudly determined occur a bit too fast for realism, but Reeder “kept it real,” as they say, helped by the change to casual jeans and sweatshirt after the hiked skirt, hose and low neckline of her belle of the ball costume as a dancing peasant girl.  The “street clothes” underscored that her role in the household had been a command performance all along, and it was time for a curtain call.

In the supporting cast, special mention goes to Tim Hopper as Dr. Peter Rank, the ailing best friend of Nora’s husband Torvald who carries a torch for her himself.  Their scenes had enough heat to make up for the rather lukewarm affections of Torvald, and Hopper’s doomed departure, in cowboy costume with a big cigar going, deserved an ovation.  As Torvald, Adam Trese kept a part that could easily be a caricature sympathetic, even up to his panicked outburst at Nora for exposing him to his enemies.  I liked him best at the end as he babbled about how he forgave her, sitting in his big papa chair, and his attempts to defeat her logic resonate so well, even 21st century males might easily hear Ibsen laughing at us.

As the villain in the piece, Mark Nelson’s Nils Krogstad had a kind of shaky petulance that worked well enough in confronting Nora with her wrongdoings, and in his pleas to be reinstated at the bank, but made it hard to see what her friend Christine Linde (Linda Powell) could see in him.  He seemed more eager to end it all rather than able to blackmail a boss’s wife or rekindle an old romance.

Michael Yeargan’s set was a wonderfully detailed doll’s house, its fakery part of its appeal, with plenty of floorspace for Ibsen’s and Edelstein’s playthings to move about and grope toward some satisfactory vision of the future.

And what of the kids?  It may be much easier for today’s male to accept without much soul-searching Nora’s claim that she needs to educate herself and find a place in the world; but does today’s woman find it any easier to pursue that goal at the sacrifice of her ties to her children than women would in Ibsen’s day?  “You’ve come a long way, baby,” since Ibsen’s Nora first walked out — but, Edelstein’s production seems to ask, “how far would you go?”

LONG WHARF THEATRE, Gordon Edelstein, Artistic Director; Ray Cullom, Managing Director

presents:

A DOLL’S HOUSE by Henrik Ibsen, Adapted and Directed by Gordon Edelstein, Set Design by Michael Yeargan

through May 23, 2010

The Listen Here! Short Story Reading Series rolls into its 9th week with readings at Willoughby’s “Coffee & Tea, 194 York Street, this Tuesday, May 4, 7 p.m.

Our Theme?

“Lovesick”
Our Stories?

Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter” and Lydia Peele’s “Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing”

Why these?

Jhumpa Lahiri is best known for her novel The Namesake (almost inevitable when these things make it to the silver screen.)  Before then, however, she was a highly regarded short story writer. In fact, her collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000. “A Temporary Matter” comes from this 1999 collection and, we will freely admit, upon first reading in the airport as we were scrounging around for stories, this one brought us to tears.  The tale really does manage one of those few amazing feats of a great short story: it delivers an O Henry-like twist ending—the bane of most modern short story writers who take the craft “seriously”—with a deeply moving tale that is rich in ideas and possibilities.  In brief, it is more than its ending, and yet its ending really is everything, begging an entire re-thinking of the story title itself.

Lydia Peele is not so well known.  Translation: there is no Wikipedia article on her.   She is, however, the winner of a 2009 Pushcart Prize, one  of our sources for  stories by lesser-known talents who deserve greater recognition.  “Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing” is a quirky story: it’s about love, it’s about reptiles, it’s about evolution.  It asks questions without necessarily answering them, suggesting almost in its form (as you’ll hear) something textbook-ish about how the world is or could be and notwithstanding that textbook-ishness, meaning inheres in our experience of love and loss, parting and reuniting.

Bernard-Marie Koltès’ Battle of Black and Dogs (Combat de nègre et de chiens), translated by Michaël Attias, and directed by Robert Woodruff, is the second play this season at the Yale Rep to take us to vague environs in Africa to witness a drama among a small group of people cut off from the world at large.  Like Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed, BBD places us in a compound, but this time it’s a “construction site run by a foreign company in a West African country, anywhere from Senegal to Nigeria,” where the main characters, white and French, are confronted by Alboury (Albert Jones), a member of a local Wolof tribe who wants to retrieve the body of a worker at the site who has recently died or been killed.

At the site, the boss, Horn (Andrew Robinson), primarily drinks and gambles with his underling Cal (Tommy Schrider), an engineer who should be higher on the ladder than Horn, but is not exactly what you’d call management material.  In fact, he killed the Wolof worker for almost hitting his shoe with a gob of spit, then insisted it was an accident, then tried to dispose of the body in various ways before finally flinging it in the sewer.

This interracial workplace drama is further complicated by the fact that Horn has recently returned from a trip to Paris and brought back a woman he hopes will become his wife.  Léone was a chambermaid at the hotel he stayed at who, as he puts it, always answers yes — particularly to the offer to come with him to Africa, to see the fireworks display he’s going to set off before leaving the country for good.

Cal will make a pass at her (or rather will paw her in an unsettling fashion while babbling inanities); she’ll fall for Alboury (in an odd courtship in which she speaks German and he speaks Wolof, though he does understand French, her native language; the double estrangement is no doubt meaningful, but rather leaves the audience in the dark about what they are saying to each other — does the fact that she’s reciting the well-known poem “The Erlking” help?).  Things will not end well, though, all things considered, not as badly as they might have.

In such a stylized play, all the emphasis is on performance.  Robinson, resembling the aged Jon Voight and sounding at times like the aged Jack Lemmon, inspires a certain Everyman confidence as Horn, particularly as he’s not that virulent a racist, and speaks for the most part sensibly to Alboury, even addressing him as “sir” initially, and though trying to buy him off may be crass, that too is sensible since the body of Nouofia is unrecoverable.

As Alboury, Jones is given a cipher rather than a character, a representation of elemental difference, perhaps; the “nègre” of the French title is no doubt infused with ideas of “négritude,” which makes the whole feel a bit dated or at least resolutely Francophone.

But even harder, for me, was reading the character of Léone who, in the girlish, lost little lamb voice Middendorf used, might well have fallen from the moon rather than Paris, despite a remark about Saint-Laurent’s Africa boutique.  Her ritual cum guilt cum scarification cum symbolic gesture of blood-letting late in the play was heavy with portent but light on sense or catharsis.

As Cal, Schrider is the live wire in this production and the play’s most dynamic character: unpredictable, seething, at times funny in the way that those who speak in earnest rants can be — at first, a bit of Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now to Boss Kurtz, though way more unstable than Horn.  He also appears in one scene naked and coated in what is — rather believably — meant to be shit, and also showers in full view of the audience before donning his sacrificial whites.  It’s a demanding part, to say the least.  Whether or not the nudity is gratuitous — it’s Woodruff and not Koltès who insists on it — it did rather distract from the dialogue.

While there are problems with the play’s plot and staging, it should be said that, to give Koltès his due, each character does get at least one fascinating monologue, and it’s the talk that mainly sustains our interest.  My favorite speech was Horn’s description of a city that would take up only half of France and could house the entire population of the world in 40-story apartment blocks.

The set, designed by Riccardo Hernandez, is interesting, with a big basement room with a cot and cage visible below — and more naturalistically furnished than — the spare stage above,the latter dominated by a kind of shack of corrugated slats, a table for the drinking/gambling, little spots of dirt, and some bougainvillea hanging in the cylindrical lights above.   It looks like nowhere on earth, and if we were told it was a construction site on a planet somewhere far, far away, that would be easy enough to believe.

BATTLE OF BLACK AND DOGS, Yale Repertory Theatre, April 16 to May 8, 2010, written by Bernard-Marie Koltès, translated by Michaël Attias, directed by Robert Woodruff; photograph, Joan Marcus

The Listen Here! Short Story Reading Series rolls into its 8th week with readings at Manjares Fine Pastries, 838 Whalley Avenue (on West Rock Avenue), this Tuesday, April 27, 7 p.m.

Our Theme?

“For Shame”
Our Stories?

Antonya Nelson’s “Control Group” and Toni Cade Bambara’s “The� Lesson”

Why� these?

We didn’t know so much about Antonya Nelson, but we should have.   Nelson is a short story writer and novelist, and chair of creative writing at the University of Houston. , and has the laurels to prove it.  This story was brought to our attention by one of our assistant editors, who knew it from a classroom assignment while she was attending  Southern Connecticut State University.   “Control Group” nicely renders the confusions of childhood and the striving for acceptance—the ethical compromises we make for that acceptance—every child seeks. Like any tale of shame that involves children, it deftly illustrates the pains to which adults go—and the missteps they may make—in trying to break the young of the habits of a “flexible” morality that in the end only serves to break them in an adult world.

In “The Lesson,” by Toni Cade Bambara, one of our favorite writers, that breaking is vividly rendered in the protagonist’s tale of a visit to a toy store.  This story is told in the voice of a child whose own selfishness and cruelty have been clearly shaped by poverty and racism.  And, yet, Bambara is utterly merciless in her refusal to permit these twin demons to justify her protagonist’s unexamined insolence.  The narrator’s creeping realization that there are possibilities of liberation beyond her “acting out” the stereotypes that circumstance has foisted upon her is what makes “The Lesson” a classic tale of the African-American experience.

The Listen Here! Short Story Reading Series rolls into its 7th week with readings at Bru Cafe, 141 Orange, Street, this Tuesday, April 20, at 7 p.m.

Our Theme?
 “L’Etranger”

Our Stories?
Isidoro Blaisten’s “Uncle Facundo” and John Cheever’s “The Swimmer”

Why these?
Let’s start with a more important question.  Who the hell is Isidoro Blaisten?!  According to Wikipedia, not much.  Just look at the article on him. He was from Argentina.  He wrote stories, essays, novels, and poetry. We discovered him in a lovely little book by editor extraordinaire Alberto Manguel, who included Blaisten’s “Uncle Facundo” in his edited collection Dark Arrows: Chronicles of Revenge.  Strangely enough, most of the stories collected ended up weak candidates for Listen Here (although there is a whopper of a tale in William Trevor’s “Torridge”), but Blaisten’s stood out not only for its darkly comic sensibility but for its thematic depth (most revenge tales tend to be slim pickings in the deep statement department) and originality in literary style and narrative mode (think magic realism). If his other tales are as good as this, Blaisten deserves better in the United States.

John Cheever always speaks for himself.  Perhaps one of the best short story writers in American letters—his prose is crystalline, his pacing is excellent, his diction is aptly nuanced, and his tales are often refreshingly original and insightful.  “The Swimmer” is perhaps best known for the movie that came of it, with Burt Lancaster in the starring role and cameos by Kim Hunter and Joan Rivers!  Like “The Enormous Radio,” it stays well within in Cheever’s comfort zone as criticism of America classism and serves as a fitting nod to the encroachment of literary surrealism in American writing.

A note from New Haven poet, Don Barkin:

This is to let you know I will be reading from my book of poems, That Dark Lake, at the Woodbridge Town Library on Wednesday, April 21, at 7 p.m. Many of you came to my reading at the Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville last November, which I appreciated. This reading and book-signing is sponsored by the library in honor of National Poetry Month. I’ll be glad to see you there.

Two upcoming conferences in the Nutmeg State drew our attention recently.

The first is the Unicorn Writer’s Conference in Stratford, Connecticut. If you don’t know writing, you should. It’s a bit of a writing Mecca, and the Unicorn Writer’s Conference, now in its second season, takes full advantage of that fact.

The conference is organized by Jan Kardys, a literary agent with a long, long career in publishing.  The conference is a fascinating peek into the ins and outs of getting on board the writing train, with workshops on everything from Writing Character-Based Fiction to Down & Dirty Self-Promotion, an art as old as Walt Whitman’s ebullient and anonymous review of his own poetry.

This conference runs from 8:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. at the Oronoque Country Club, 385 Oronoque Lane, Stratford, CT 06614 (203-375-4293, Fax: 203-375-1443).  You can register here.  The cost is $165.

The list of presenters is long and impressive.  It includes Gene Wilder as a keynoter and presentations by author Jodee Blanco, filmmaker Anthony Artis, Hearst Books publisher Jacqueline Deval, literary agent Gina Maccoby.  It is an ideal venue to meet those in the business and schmooze, one hopes, your way to new deals and success.

Now on to our next event: did you know that there is a Connecticut Chapter of the Romance Writers Association (CTRWA)?  Who knew we had so many writers in the genre? 

But the CTRWA does more than just handle romance writing.  To find out what that more is, you’d need to check out its Connecticut Fiction Fest, which will be held on April 24 at the Four Points Sheraton in Meriden, Connecticut. Registration is a relatively modest at $95 ($75 for CTRWA members) for a program that will run from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. 

The focus of this conference seems to be on “pitching.”  Since literary agents will be in attendance, it’s an opportunity both to learn the trade and, hopefully, make a connection.  Workshops here include “Length Really Does Matter: Tips for a One-Page Pitch/Synopsis” and “How to Sell Your Book Fast,” with presenters including fantasy romance novelist Jessica Anderson to Emily Beth Rappaport of Berkly Books. 

So if the itch you need to scratch is a book looking for a publisher, this might be the conference for you.

On March 23rd, Terry Castle gave a talk in the Yale English department about academic writing and read from her new book The Professor and Other Writings; on March 25th, David Shields spoke at a Master’s Tea in Pierson College about his new book Reality Hunger; and on April 1st, James Longenbach gave a talk in the Yale English department on “the art of writing badly.”

What linked these events for me, other than the fact that they occurred in less than a week and a half, was the attention to the question of writing — who it’s for, what it’s for, and what we make of it.

Castle’s talk, in the end, seemed to be little more than a complaint about jargon in the academic profession.  Her handout, originally designed for a graduate course, gave students pointers on things to avoid in writing, the kinds of things editors will eventually take them to task for, but there was a bit of a polemical edge to it as well — in picking on the use of terms such as “hegemony” and “interpellation,” she was targeting not so much the specific meaning of those words (as derived from Althusser), but rather their far too ubiquitous use (and possibly misuse) in the many theses that cross her desk.

Fine.  But there was another aspect to her talk that bothered me: the “this is the end of days” tone that one finds in many of the Baby Boomer generation coming up to retirement while recognizing that much of what constituted their glory days may not in fact stand the test of time.  Jargon has destroyed the profession, we learn.  Maybe so, but if so, it happened on their watch.

The sourness of this point, for me, was dramatized by Castle reading from a memoir in which, as a young would-be graduate student in the early ‘70s, she came into contact with a dope-smoking professor who may have intended to seduce her before learning she was a lesbian.  In recreating the hip jargon of that era — not only in her reminiscence but also in far too many verbatim transcriptions of her journal of that time — Castle made a point she didn’t seem to want to acknowledge: every generation has its way of speaking to others in that generation, but how seriously should we take such efforts to “talk the talk” of the time?  Current grad students may outgrow their jargon too, but might they not, when also silver-haired and fêted, choose to amuse the youngsters with the Althusserian, Derridean lingo of their day?  In Castle’s memoir, the old guard, all-male previous generation of academics seemed barely worth more than a dismissive glance.  But what will be the fate of the stoned, free love-seeking, in touch with their feelings generation Castle revisited?  Too early to say, but I was not encouraged by the prospect of “tell-all” memoirs rubbing our noses in Reichian drivel for the sake of verisimilitude.

David Shields is a critic and was a novelist, but the argument he presented to the audience in Pierson College was that the novel is not equipped to address the times we live in, for that a new form is needed: the lyric essay.  What that might require could perhaps be found in the direction Castle was taking: in her case, giving up stilted, depersonalized, overly abstract (supposedly “objective”) academic writing for something more personal, subjective, revealing.  In Shields case, giving up the deliberate creation of a fictional world for a first person rendering of one’s intellectual state in the world one actually inhabits.  My first thought was: if the novel is not adequate to these times we need better novelists — the novel itself is whatever we make of it.   That said, I’m quite sympathetic to Shields’ idea of dropping the “traditional” novel in favor of something more experimental — but then that was always the frisson of reading Beckett, Proust, Miller, and others who don’t really write “novels.”

Is Shields’ new book something along those lines?  Well, at least his talk made me want to read it.  The less interesting, to me, aspect of his presentation centered on the issue of appropriation. His book is a “mash up”: a tissue of quotations borrowed, edited, re-used as he sees fit.  Far from the work of academic citation, this method wants to treat the printed world as writers in the time of Montaigne could: whatever they read was grist for the mill and could be put to what service they liked — of course, those texts were mostly in Latin and not protected by copyright.  So that part of Shields “defense” of his method became an argument, not about fiction vs. non-fiction, but about how writers should treat the writing of others, which might lead to the kind of “if it’s online its yours” cut-and-paste methods that too many students already use in the writing of their papers.

I’m willing to believe Shields may be enough of a stylist to get away with it, but I’ll have to read the book to see.

Finally, Longenbach, a critic of poetry and a poet, wanted to draw our attention to how often “bad writing” appears in the work of good writers.  What he meant by this was actually the art of what he called “dilation”: those passages that seem simply to pile up words, sometimes abstract terms, sometimes cursory details, in such a way that risks the reader’s boredom.  It’s always gutsy to talk about bad writing when reading to people from one’s own prose, as the tendency of any audience members to drift off might signal that one is reading an example of the problem one is addressing.  But the overall point of the presentation was to alert us to how often, in poems, one can’t address the quality of a given line or passage without taking into account its context.  A memorable line may be that, but a limping line may limp for a reason.

Castle’s writing may well have been an example of what Longenbach meant by “bad”: plenty of longeurs meant to recall a by-gone idiom that bored the crap out of me.  Longenbach’s prose escaped the faults Castle pilloried — no jargony terms were used — but the essay didn’t offer the kind of engaged and personal address to the work that Castle called for and, for some, evinced, and seemed not to satisfy Shields’ call for the lyric essay, what’s more Longenbach dutifully provided a handout with his many quotations from poems duly noted.  Shields didn’t read to us, but one suspects that it’s easy to write well if one steals only from the best.

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., with reading occurring on a rotating basis at Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea (194 York Street), Lulu: A European Coffee House (49 Cottage Street), Bru Cafe (141 Orange Street), and Manjares Fine Pastries (838 Whalley Avenue, on the corner of West Rock Avenue).

Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea
March 9: What Did She See in Him?
Raymond Carver, “Fat”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Jelly-Bean”

Lulu: A European Coffee House
March 16: Short Cuts
I.B. Singer, “Why the Geese Shrieked”
Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl”
John Cheever, “Reunion”
Annie Proulx, “The Blood Bay”

Bru Cafe
March 23: Breaking Up is Hard to Do
Bobbie Ann Mason, “Shiloh”
Bernard Malamud, “The Jewbird”

Manjares Fine Pastries
March 30: Straight Shooters
Stephen Crane, “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”
Tobias Wolff, “Hunters in the Snow”

Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea
April 6: Take Me Out to the Ball Game
James Thurber, “You Could Look it Up”
James Farrell, “My Grandmother Goes to Comiskey Park”

Lulu: A European Coffee House
April 13: Something’s Not Right
T.C. Boyle, “Bloodfall”
Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery”

Bru Cafe
April 20: L’Etranger
Isidoro Blaistein, “Uncle Facundo”
John Cheever, “The Swimmer”

Manjares Fine Pastries
April 27: For Shame
Lorrie Moore, “Control Group”
Toni Cade Bambera, “The Lesson”

Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea
May 4: Lovesick
Jhumpa Lahiri, “A Temporary Matter”
Lydia Peele, “Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing”

Lulu: A European Coffee House
May 11: Animal Crackers
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat”
Annie Proulx, “The Half-Skinned Steer”

Bru Cafe
May 18: Brothers
Louise Erdrich, “The Red Convertible”
David Sedaris, “You Can’t Kill the Rooster”

Manjares Fine Pastries
May 25: Romeos & Juliets
Louise Erdrich, “The Plague of Doves”
Wiliam Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily”

The Publisher
New Haven Review