Stranded with Stories

Kevin Daniels’ oneman show, El Hablador: the Storyteller keeps butterflies, ending its 3-day run tonight at the Yale Cabaret, involves several conceits that blend together to create a unique theatrical experience. First of all, “el hablador” (the storyteller) features the notion that the main character -- Daniels, a young black man in a suit, barefoot -- is stranded on an island where his need to tell stories is fulfilled by messages in bottles.  These hang from the ceiling, and the storyteller selects one or another, seemingly at random, and offers it with friendly gestures to an audience member who then reads aloud the message inside.  Addressed to the storyteller, the messages present occasions for a story.

Another conceit comes into play through the storyteller’s name: Dante, an illusion to the famous poet who catalogued the inhabitants of hell in its various circles.  Indeed, the stories El Hablador tells dramatize social hells of our contemporary world for four protagonists in interrelated stories.

Yet another conceit could be said to be the form of the stories themselves: delivered in highly rhythmical, allusive, visceral raps, the stories are offered as spoken both by and about the character in question.  The most effective, to my mind, was the tale of an African-American father trying to flee the crisis of Hurricane Katrina with his family; the story provided a convincing sense of other characters in the man’s life, as voices or ghosts pursuing him from the disaster.  The story of a young man trying to articulate his relation to his own sexuality was deft in its use of dramatic, confrontational soliloquy.  The other stories, of an Hispanic drug-dealer victimized by the ‘no exit’ like space of his ghetto upbringing, and of his white former girlfriend who moved to Vegas to become a stripper, while full, like all four monologues, of wonderful verbal riffing and expressive outbursts that were almost show-stopping in their brilliance, seemed to trade more on certain cliches of ‘the life’ than the other two monologues did.

Still another conceit that was perhaps the most striking was that the storyteller -- who was a childlike, ingratiating mime-figure when speaking in his native language -- ‘became’ the character in the monologue as if possessed by the voice, or as if he were a machine into which the ‘track’ had been inserted.  This was signaled by the breakdowns into repetitions and slowing speed as monologues drew to an end.  It was an effective transition device which, because of Daniel’s precise sense of rhythm -- matching physical and verbal contortions in expressive combination -- never seemed forced.  Rather it was unnerving each time, as if watching a puppet with Tourette’s Syndrome crash under the calamitous force of having to articulate such passionate, victimized lives.

Not being someone for whom rap has had much allure, I have to say that Daniels' monologues impressed me with the scale to which the form can be stretched, combining the strengths of spoken word poetry, with allusions and metaphors piling up quickly, of dramatic monologue, in which a true self is revealed by choice of expression, and of oral storytelling, in which choice of incident and detail gives reality to scenes we “see” only in words.

El Hablador provides a commanding performance and gripping theater.  The space of the Cabaret was very effectively used through placement of the action, lighting the space to include the audience readers, and the scenic quality of hanging bottles like stars in the sky, each a story.

Saturday, Jan 16 @ 8 and 11pm:

http://www.yalecabaret.org/home.php

Sweets to the Sweet

Katharine Weber, True Confections, Shaye Areheart Books, 274 pp, $22 Katharine Weber’s True Confections takes the form of an affidavit by Alice Ziplinsky, née Tatnall, aka Arson Girl, a New Haven resident who has become the de facto head of Zip’s Candies, through a series of events -- both mishaps and good fortune -- that make for a sprawling, juicy tale in a relatively small compass.

Weber’s fifth novel is Alice’s first person account, offered for legal reasons, of her employment at Zip’s Candies, of her marriage to Howard “Howdy” Ziplinsky, and of her involvement in the family business, and, like the candies Little Sammies, Tigermelts, and Mumbo Jumbos that are the legacy of founder Eli Czaplinsky, Alice’s narrative creates textures that tantalize, tastes that surprise, and a memorable “mouthfeel.” Alice is intelligent, humorous, informative, but also slightly askew, perhaps even actionably unreliable.

Along the way, Weber furnishes engagingly deft sketches of New Haven and environs -- she has a feel for the city in its town and gown dichotomy, and provides glimpses of the city that used to be through evocation of the fortunes of the fictional, but highly realistic, Zip’s Candies.  In the tale of a little, local company that must compete with the big name, real companies -- like Hershey and Mars -- Weber finds an apt figure for the fortunes of small businesses and small cities in the 21st century.  We often find ourselves in a detailed subculture -- the world of candy manufacture and marketing -- that Weber, in the voice of Alice for whom every aspect of the business fascinates and who has “perfect pitch for the candy business,” delivers with great gusto.

Weber also provides a lot of fun by, as it were, peeking through Alice’s narrative with material that the narrator seems not too comfortable with, or perhaps may even be distorting for her own purposes.  What is the true story of the fire, blamed on Alice, that burned down a schoolmate’s home in 1975?  What exactly were the problems with her marriage to Howdy and why did he run off to Madagascar?  And what of the alleged intrigues against Alice by her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law Irene?  How sympathetic do we find Alice, the gentile in the Jewish family business, who becomes, by her own insistence, the one most concerned with the family legacy and her fond, deceased father-in-law’s wishes?

Loyalty is the key.  The successful candy bar is supported by a consumer belief that he or she is honoring family traditions, so that loyalty is all bound up with nostalgia for childhood experiences either actual or longed-for.  Ideally, too, the consumer has a sense of entitlement to self-indulgence driven by an ambivalence toward guilty pleasure.  I mention all these things because my knowledge and experience in the candy manufacturing business in general, and with Zip’s Candies in particular, should be above question, but they have been questioned . . . The questions Weber raises through Alice aren’t all simply personal either.  Should we, today, consider a candy line founded on characters in Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo racist?  Is Alice painfully naive when she doesn’t think of the ramifications of packaging two chocolate Sammies on either side of a white chocolate Susie?  Or is it the world -- Weber gives a quick glimpse of the blogosphere and its ability to create urban legend at will -- that has gone askew?

The book is at its best when Alice is delineating, with story-within-story spirals, her relations with the Ziplinskys -- particularly revealing are her dealings with Sam, her father-in-law, and the way she brings her and Howdy’s children into the business.  The story of Eli’s brother Julius and the Nazi plan to ship Jews to Madagascar is fascinating but somewhat intrusive into the narrative, as Julius is a character who is never “real” to Alice, since she never meets him, and the story, ostensibly told to explain why the Ziplinskys have holdings in Madagascar where their cacao and other ingredients come from, seems material that could have been worked into a gripping novel in its own right, but which seems a bit outside the range of Alice’s voice, despite her admission that she is largely inventing what she can’t reconcile with those few facts she knows.

It’s largely the voice and direct experience of Alice that are the winning ingredients here, for she is the one who makes of her immersion in the candy business the basis for all there is to know about life, a way to take charge of the past, the family, the business, and, ultimately, the future.  As Weber’s inscription from Anne Sexton would have it: “Even crazy, I’m as nice / as a chocolate bar.”

Katharine Weber will be appearing at Mitchell Public Library in Westville at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, January 13th, and at RJ Julia Booksellers, in Madison, at 7 p.m. on Thursday, January 21st.

Auster-ity

Paul Auster, Invisible, Henry Holt and Co., 308 pp., $25.00 It seems like someone writes in every Paul Auster novel I’ve read.  Writing is often as much a part of the story as the story itself.  And there’s often a doubling of situations: characters recreate each other in some fashion, sometimes finding themselves to be fulfillments of each other’s imagination or even the authors of each other’s existence.

Then there’s the prose itself: Auster writes a prose that is rather austere; he doesn’t fill his novels with the particulars of general experience, nor does he spend much effort on description; he lets brief references to the larger world serve the purpose of instant recognition that other novelists take to great lengths.  Even though his books are set in specific places and times, there’s often a streamlined approach to setting that makes his work seem minimalist.  And there’s almost no one in his novels other than his main characters -- few extras, no crowd scenes.

With this, his fifteenth novel, Auster works his limited palette to great effect: the ‘instability of the narrative’ -- often a much-touted feature of postmodern fiction -- is blended easily with steady evocation of dramatic situations: a triangular relationship between a young poet and an older couple; a self-defence killing or murder; the death of a brother as a child; an incestuous sexual relationship; an elaborate effort at vengeance; a sinister meeting in a remote locale after many years; a writer who is constructing a memoir that might also be fiction and who is dying while writing it.

Part One is a swiftly-moving narrative in which Adam Walker, a student at Columbia in 1967, recounts his encounter with the somewhat unsettling but generous Rudolph Born and enters into an affair with Born’s companion, a Frenchwoman called Margot.  The story ends with an act of violence and a gripping self-examination on Walker’s part.  In Part Two we find that the story was a manuscript sent to a writer named Jim (the “Auster character” -- there is often in Auster’s fiction an authorial presence in the story, who in some ways is “like” Auster himself).  Jim tells us quickly of his friendship with Walker back in their Columbia days.  We learn that Walker, in the present, has leukemia, is dying, and is trying to write a three-part memoir based on his life in 1967.  Part One of Invisible is, in Walker’s ms., called “Spring.”

Soon Jim is reading “Summer,” in which Walker and his slightly older sister Gwyn become lovers.  But Walker, stymied by the rigors of writing, had asked Jim for advice before writing this segment; Jim’s advice was to move from first person to third.  Instead, Walker settles for an in-between: he uses second person for the story of Adam and Gwyn.

What’s in a pronoun?  Does the shift in pronoun make the story more believable or less?  And what about later, when Walker’s illness gets the best of him, so that the final portion of Walker’s narrative, chronicling “Fall,” his time in Paris reconnecting with Born and Margot, is told in the third person because Jim creates the narrative from Walker’s notes and drafts?  This kind of distancing from the narrative through different acts of narration seems almost automatic on Auster’s part, as if simply telling the story would be to fall into the trap of authority, rather than Austerity, of presenting events as simply occurring rather than necessarily narrated.

Finally, we return to the first person for the novel’s dénouement, a diary written by Cécile Juin and given to Jim. Cécile, in 1967, nearly became Born’s stepdaughter; she was a young student, a would-be translator, and developed a crush on Walker.  Her diary recounts her final meeting with Born, on an island in the Caribbean in 2002.

The novel, like most Auster, is deftly imagined, and told with no wasted motion.  There’s sex, food, interesting conversation, talk about books and writing, and through it all the figure of Born, a mercurial, malevolent character whose actual intentions, occupation, and thoughts are never quite certain.  A provocation to Walker, but also a sort of idée fixe that gets passed on to Jim and to Cécile and to the reader as well.

An extremely subtle novelist, Auster's true intentions often arrive almost indirectly.  Because he’s able to interest us in almost anything he chooses to write about, one reads his novels sometimes a bit frustrated that he doesn’t devote more attention to some of the very interesting situations and ideas that surface.  His novels, at their best, follow an inexorable logic or narrative necessity, but at other times it’s rather like being shown a series of sketches which the reader’s own imagination must flesh out and inhabit, much as Gwyn and Adam do for their dead brother Andy, holding a birthday party for him every year at which they discuss him in the past, present, and future:

For ten years now, he has been living this shadow existence inside you, a phantom being who has grown up in another dimension, invisible yet breathing, breathing and thinking, thinking and feeling, and you have followed him since the age of eight, for more years after death than he ever managed to live . . .

Auster’s characters are like this dead boy: shadow existences that inhabit each other’s minds, often via writing, and who inhabit the reader’s mind, “invisible yet breathing,” haunting and quizzical, never quite exhausted by the stories their author tells of them, a part of Auster’s ongoing shadow existence and ours.

Nowhere Man

Pop!, the new musical now playing in its world premiere at the Yale Rep, could have been a camp classic: staging a song-and-dance extravaganza on the shooting of famed pop artist, provocateur, and blasé icon Andy Warhol at the hands of a disaffected feminist revolutionary, Valerie Solanis, in 1968.  The silver Factory, Warhol’s headquarters at 231 East 47th street in NY, was famed for its stable of hangers-on, including “poor little rich girl” Edie Sedgwick, pre-op transexual Candy Darling, and other would-be geniuses.  From this remove, it would be possible to play these characters for laughs, as a collective disgorging of whatever is stored in the closet marked “NYC Underground c. 1967.”  Along the way, we might be amused (or not) by the fact that one of these “superstars” had the wherewithal to shoot and critically wound The Master.

But Maggie-Kate Coleman, author of the book and lyrics of Pop!, her collaborator, Anna K. Jacobs, composer, and director Mark Brokow are after something else: the play, staged as a kind of dream inquisition into the shooting, occuring in Andy’s mind moments afterwards, eventually becomes an inquisition on Andy himself, as both the shaman and charlatan who created the forces of resentment that would lead to the attempted murder.  Not so much: who shot Andy Warhol, and why?, but rather: who wouldn’t shoot Andy Warhol, and why not?

The humor of the piece is wry and ironic in its treatment of Warhol, a coolness that the artist himself might well have appreciated.  Randy Harrison is dead-on in his Andy-mimicry, recreating the artist as a likeable apotheosis of a dilettante, always ready to give an empty paper bag to anyone who really needs it.  And by giving voice to Andy’s underlings -- most notably in the powerful, engaging, crowd-pleasing performance of Leslie Kritzer as Valerie -- the songs, such as “Up Your Ass” and “Money” and “Big Gun,” chip away at or send up any sympathy we might have for Andy, converting these characters from the ciphers of grime-glam they were in real life, given status by their roles at the Factory and in Andy’s homemade arthouse B movies, into articulate spokespersons for the needs of the uncelebrated, the passed-over, the assistants and groupies, the would-bes of all stripes, and finally, of women as the formerly disenfranchised but now up-and-coming demographic for all things cultural.

Thus, we get the replacement of the Oedipal struggle with artistic "fathers," that the Abstract Expressionists understood, with the anti-partriarchal struggle of the likes of Valerie, whose S.C.U.M. manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men) envisions a world rid of men in which women will finally achieve their greatness.  But as Andy sings at one point “I’m not your father,” and casting him in the role of the evil daddy, or even the fetish-loving gay daddy-substitute, sends out ripples of satire.

The play is entertainingly artful in its mocking of all sides: treating the Ab-Exs Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell as macho cowboys, much as Warhol and his crowd perceived them, but at the same time mocking Andy as the working-class mama’s boy from Pittsburgh who recreated himself as the holy avatar of making art the mirror in which consumerism can read its own features, fascinated and narcissistic (and Warhol would not see those as negative characteristics), but who, it seems, never really gave of himself.  That he attracted a crew of narcissists is another point the play sends up, by never letting us forget that the great talents supposedly possessed by the likes of Viva, Edie, Candy, and Valerie were largely wishful thinking.

It’s also the case that Warhol himself was fallible to just such wishful thinking.  He really wanted his movies to be appreciated by Hollywood, to earn him status and a real budget, so that he could really make stars of his “superstars.”  But it never happened, and the disappointment, as an aspect of Warhol’s own story -- as, eventually, the hanger-on of all hanger-ons, even to his own magazine and art production, and in his flattered attendance on the beautiful people -- is missing here.  Perhaps the play could use a poignant aria by Andy on the pressures of being famous, to offset the sentiments of “15 Minutes” in which the company seems to accept as a mantra Warhol’s observation that “in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.”  He didn’t say it as a promise, but rather as a prediction -- that the search for fame would become the driving feature of life.

The musical, which began life last summer in the Yale Institute for Music Theatre, is still finding its feet.  It’s a lot of fun and could become a hit in New York.  If it gets the Broadway treatment it could use some real dance routines to flesh out the Factory -- the cast of seven are all quite good as singers, but display rhythmic movement more than actual dance numbers.  The stage and cast are small, but if both expand, more could be done with some of the songs as production numbers.

Special mention should be made of Brian Charles Rooney as Candy, who sings at times like a woman, at times like a man, and at times like a man singing like a woman, depending on what is required; as our Mistress of Ceremonies, Candy’s role is pivotal and, it seems to me, could benefit from more play as a glamour queen -- the bridge between Judy Garland and David Bowie, as it were, a new Sally Bowles for a different time.

For me, the weak links are the guys -- Ondine (Doug Kreeger) and Gerard (Danny Binstock), two Factory workers who are given roles as stoned sleuths -- whose songs never quite come alive.  Unlike the girls, each of whom gets a song outlining her particular status.  But even there, Edie’s songs were largely lacking in the bite and wit given to Valerie and Viva (Emily Swallow); Edie (Cristen Paige), in the Factory mythology, was more than simply a victim of wealth or a would-be starlet looking to be cast in a major role -- her own life -- by Andy.  For a time she was a sort of androgynous double for Warhol in those early days when her name opened more doors than his did.

One has the sense that the musical could expand too in its cameo roles -- where’s Billy Name?  Why not a bit for Lou Reed (“I have some resentments that can never be unmade”) as potential assassin?  More, more, more.  As Andy himself said, “always leave them wanting less.”

POP! Book and lyrics by MAGGIE-KATE COLEMAN Music by ANNA K. JACOBS Directed by MARK BROKAW November 27-December 19, 2009 Yale Repertory Theatre

Speak, I Will Listen

Have You Seen Us? at Long Wharf Theatre November 24-December 20

Have You Seen Us? is what one may call an "incident play," a story driven by a singular event. As its protagonist Henry Parsons (Sam Waterston) frames it in his prologue to this one hour-and-twenty minute meditation on racism, displacement, and addiction, sometimes it takes the nudging of one domino in the supposedly well-designed life to bring the rest falling down. The chaos of strewn dominoes that follows in the wake of that crash is Henry's story; the pattern that emerges from what has been tipped over is all playwright Athol Fugard's.

Performed without intermission, Have You Seen Us? tells a seemingly straightforward story. Bookended by Henry's direct address to the audience, the chain of events is simple enough. Our protagonist is an expatriate South African professor of Old English living in his fifteenth year in the United States. The event he recollects from two years earlier is actually a pair of closely linked moments that, he asserts, would change his life. The setting for both is a sandwich shop in a Los Angeles mall run by Adela (Liza Colón-Zayas), a Mexican immigrant of unclear status. Serving as prelude to the second, main event, the first finds Henry exiting the shop after a verbal knockout punch rendered by the store's proprietress in—as Henry sees it—their regular contest of mutual insults.

The blow delivered is her spot-on tagging of him as un borracho perdido, "a hopeless drunk." This precipitates an anti-Semitic outburst outside the shop directed by Henry towards an elderly Jewish couple that had responded to his "Happy Christmas" greeting with a "Thank you, sir, but we're Jewish." What follows in the sandwich shop a month later is a delicate dance of anger, shame, confession, and repentance as the full quartet—South African expat, Mexican store-owner, and Jewish-European couple—come together to make Fugard's portrait of guilt and absolution come alive.

Bringing to bear the full weight of the role's studied South African accent, Sam Waterston’s muscular portrayal of Henry carries much of the show's weight. This is hardly a surprise since the third-person limited narrative suggested by prologue and epilogue makes this story first and foremost Henry's. In the actor talk back that followed the December 8 performance, Waterston admitted that to help him master the accent, Fugard recorded Henry's part, although there is no question that Waterston invests the role with his own distinct interpretation. Henry is, at times, gruff and combative; at others, defensive and plaintive. The overall effect works wonderfully well. In a role that could have tipped into melodrama, Waterston manages to keep the lid on. True, Henry is intemperate and aggressive—hardly unusual for an alcoholic who struggles to stay on the wagon but appears to fall off with an implied regularity—but he is not given to histrionics. It is certainly not what Fugard would have intended, and any such presentation would have been deadly for a play that depends heavily on the relative bathos—yes, bathos—of the climactic event, which amounts mainly to the calling out of an ethnic slur.

At the heart of Have You Seen Us? is its title, which is as these things should be. It refers to the missing persons postcard Henry uses as a bookmark and tries to make light of in his hostile banter with Adela. However, Liza Colón-Zayas' understated Adela will have none of it, humanizing for Henry those who have gone missing, substituting story for stereotype, stopping cold Henry's largely guilt-driven efforts at a type of humor marked—and marred—by contempt. Have You Seen Us? is fundamentally about, if you will, "clothing" the stranger in human garb, no small matter in a play where all of the characters are not only of foreign origin, but have arrived for different reasons. The elderly Jewish couple, Solly (Sol Frieder) and Rachel (Elaine Kussack), are suggested to be Jews who had escaped a war-torn Europe; Henry is an evictee of an apartheid-free South Africa that is no longer familiar to him; Adela is no more—and no less—than a recent arrival looking for work but not trouble. All are displaced persons struggling to bridge the gap of language and attitude: Henry is perturbed by Adela's Spanish and often insists on translations of it; Adela is flabbergasted by Henry's ignorance of Mexican soldaderas (women "soldiers" during the 1910 Mexican Revolution) and continually castigates him as a gringo, a jarring appellation considering how un-Yankee-like Henry really is; Solly is completely befuddled that he can't get a bowl of chicken soup from Adela and equally mystified why she would propose chili as a substitute.

The only link that bridges this chasm is music. Granted Have You Seen Us? is no musical, but music is its language: Henry is enamored with Adela's voice and repeatedly importunes her to sing for him in her native Spanish; to an amused Adela, he eagerly belts out a rugby club "fight song" in Afrikaans; and finally, Solly's soft croon to Rachel and, at Henry's request, to us offers in Yiddish a lost world's insight into matters religious. Solly's song—the last of these—is also the most pointed since only when he sings will the semi-catatonic Rachel eat. As Fugard is at pains to point out, music is, indeed, life, for without it we starve and die.

It is Solly, poignantly played by Sol Frieder—from slightly stiffened walk to painfully hushed tone—who offers absolution to Henry, who wrestles with the guilt of the simple sin we all harbor but dare not speak: prejudice, hard and cold, without mercy or thought. When Henry bends knee to Solly and begins his confession, it is the latter's simple response, "Speak, I will listen," that more than anything drives away this darkness that shadows our better selves. Is there hope in actually being heard? Is there anyone indeed who will listen? It is all, Fugard suggests, we can ask for. And yet, when someone does make that offer and it is accepted—speak, I will listen—a world can change. For me, this production spoke: I have, indeed, seen it, and, yes, I did listen.

Love is a many-creatured thing

Strange Love in Outer Space, the final show by the Yale Cabaret this semester (two shows tonight; three on Sat, including an early show for kids), was written by Janyia Antrum, a twelve-year-old student who participated in the Dwight/Edgewood Project last summer.  The program gives local 6th and 7th graders from Augusta Lewis Troup and Wexler-Grant Community Schools an opportunity to work with Yale School of Drama theater people. Janyia was mentored by Brian Valencia, a dramaturg. The one-act that Janyia wrote in two days at the D/EP’s weekend retreat got a second act after she went home and dreamed about the characters’ further adventures.  The Yale Cab commissioned a third act to find out where the characters were going, and the full trilogy, produced by Jorge Rodriguez and directed by Christopher Mirto, has now had its debut.

What kind of characters?  The main figure is Splontusia (Alex Hendrikson), a four-eyed, one-armed creature who gets transformed into being mean and evil by an injection from the mean and evil Dr. Roswald Tuscanium (Dr. T, for short; Valencia), a worm-like creature with a slit for eyes, truncated arms, and a long trailing body.  By end of act one, however, these two would-be antagonists have admitted that, yes, there’s something charming about that slit and something bewitching about the gleam in that fourth eye...

Romantic complications ensue with the addition, in act two, of Grumis (Mirto), an aquatic creature with a rather dim-witted if likeable delivery who has always loved Splontusia, and, in act three, of the outrageously named Bonegettagettaquisha Star Jones (Dipika Guha), a pirate woman who happens to be part dog, and who has kinda had a crush on Dr T ever since science class back in high school.

And, yes, there are songs.  In fact, be prepared to get on your feet for the rousing “the way love moves in outer space” finale.

I don’t know if Janyia has ever seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but I assume that her cast and mentors have, and they maintain a similiar level of zany engagement and campy silliness that made that film such a hit.  Dr T laughs diabolically and snivels pathetically; Grumis sings like an insecure kid on Sesame Street and then belts out his beloved’s name, “Splon-tuuu-syaaaaa,” like Stanley Kowalski with fins (and how he does those fish-hops I’ll never know).  And once Splontusia starts vacillating (Dr. T did chain her to a toilet, after all), B.S. J. arrives as a possible new match for Dr T; she growls and howls yet still manages to exude the charm of a funky Puss In Boots; and Splontusia herself, all in white, at a regal height, towering above the rest of the cast, veers in a mercurial manner from ditzy to heart-felt to aggressive to, finally, someone ready to be her own person.

See it to support young talent!  See it to meet creatures you won’t find anywhere else!  See it for the toilet bowl song!

Strange Love in Outer Space What does it take to make a relationship work? by Janyia Antrum (2009 Dwight/Edgewood Playwright) Directed by Christopher Mirto December 4 @ 8 and 11PM December 5 @ 4, 8 and 11PM Love just got a whole lot stranger. A trilogy of plays begun in the Dwight/Edgewood Project.

Performance Anxiety

Philip Roth, The Humbling, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 140 pp, $22.00 In The Humbling, Philip Roth has created a three-act tragedy for famed stage actor Simon Axler, now in his mid-sixties.  In act one, “Into Thin Air,” Axler mysteriously loses his ability to act, his wife leaves him to his misery, and he finally checks himself into a psychiatric clinic.  In act two, “The Transformation,” in his seclusion in rural NY, he begins an affair with Pegeen Mike Stapleford, the forty-year-old daughter of old acting friends.  Pegeen has been a lesbian since college, and the affair with Axler, which occurs after her lover had decided, with no input from Pegeen, to undergo an operation to become a man, surprises them both.  Finally, in act three, “The Last Act,” Axler must cope with Pegeen’s termination of the affair, an event he had more or less expected but which he had convinced himself wouldn’t occur.

Laid out thus schematically, it’s easy to see the trajectory of the novel, but it takes a bit more delving to see what’s at stake in such a tale.  Roth brings to the story a serious and powerful grasp of final things that has driven his other recent short, emphatically focused novels Everyman (2006) and Exit Ghost (2007); all evoke the rueful feeling of aging and of no longer being able to take for granted one’s gifts and one’s ability to fulfill one’s desires.  An actor unable to act makes the predicament of age become not only an artistic problem, but allows Roth to push at the basis of social interaction.  For the idea of self that keeps us coherent is a role, or a series of roles, we have learned to play.

The notion that how we play our social and sexual roles is amenable to change, and that we can create all sorts of new frissons by opting for other possibilities, is the theme signaled by Pegeen Mike’s sudden change of sexuality.  In exploring “the transformation,” Roth, whose fiction is firmly planted in the contested realms of sexual politics, has fun with the notion that gender is a role, and that a lesbian, as a phallic woman, creates new sexual possibilities with other women and with men, if she so chooses. The fluidity of desire becomes very heady for Axler, but also, because of his vulnerability in losing his metier, emotionally dangerous.

But Roth is enough of an ironist to avoid the simple reading of Axler as castrated male (loss of acting ability) who finds recovered potency as clinging, aging “sugar daddy” to a woman-loving love object who allows herself briefly to become his “make-over,” from tomboy to Prada-wearing femme fatale, only to abandon him.  It’s not that that reading isn’t present, it’s just that it’s too apparent to the characters themselves.

What is more telling is that the break-up occurs after Axler helps fulfill Pegeen’s fantasy of a threesome with Axler and another girl, Tracy, a drunken pickup.  Axler gets to witness Pegeen wield a strap-on dildo to fuck Tracy, and become “a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal.”  The scene takes place to underscore that Axler, formerly the hero in the world of sexuality, is no longer “the god Pan,” and that that role has been taken, in our time, by the polymorphously perverse women of the world.  As an ironist who sees that the surest way to misery is to let a man get what he wants, Roth makes Pegeen’s sexual virility a blow to Axler rather than a turn-on.

For Axler there is no irony in his situation with Pegeen, even though he knew she was playing against type from the beginning.  But for Roth, who sees that, for men of Axler’s generation, losing the comforting roles constitutes the loss of their magical selfhood, the irony is that Axler ends up where he started.   Pegeen, as the new god Pan, giveth and taketh away -- and who would base his well-being on such fleeting transformations is, as they say, in for a world of pain.

But Axler was already in a world of pain, contemplating suicide, due to the loss of his gift.  The transformation of Pegeen he engineered merely lets him play at being a director, casting her as the object of desire he most needs.  The fact that she involves her parents in her life when she begins her affair with him indicates the extent to which Pegeen really isn’t playing the character Axler has cast her as, but is in fact playing with some oedipal urges of her own.  All of this is plain to him, as Roth’s narrator, wonderfully attuned to Axler’s inner voice, makes clear.  And yet Axler persists.  If only to forestall death with one last manifestation of the pleasure principle.

In this, his thirtieth book, Roth, whose first book was published fifty years ago this year, demonstrates again his astonishing ability to delineate the prickly realities of desire.  Few authors come close to his ability to chart evenly, with comic touches and gripping pathos, the ups and downs of women’s effect upon men.  If that means his women are primarily occasions for male reflection, and that his fiction is generally a one-sided dissection of libido, it’s still true that nobody does it better.

The tale of Roland Emmerich’s “2012,” as told in 10 lines of its own dialogue

“Nutrinos have mutated into a new kind of nuclear particle. They’re heating up the earth’s core.”

“It’s the biggest solar climax in recorded history.”

“Don’t you see the signs?”

“California’s going down!”

“All our scientific advances, our fancy machines! The Mayans saw this coming thousands of years ago.”

“Daddy!”

“We’re gonna need a bigger plane.”

“It’s a brave new world you’re heading for, and the young scientists are gonna be worth 200 old politicians.”

“The director of the Louvre was an enemy of humanity?!”

“Everybody out there has died in vain if we start our future with an act of cruelty.”

Trial and Error

The Yale School of Drama has just completed its presentation of Phedre, penned by French master playwright Jean Racine in 1677. In this production, dramaturg Brian Valencia and director Christopher Mirto opted for the 1998 translation by Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath's widower, but in the end, there is no knowing if any other translation—such as those by John Cairncross or R.C. Knight or Robert Lowell—would have helped much in the mighty struggle that ensued to bring this tragedy to life. Back story is critical to grasping what's going on, and the playbill aids mightily in this regard. The tragic figure of this tale of lust and betrayal is not Phaedra (I'll be sticking to the anglicized spelling for this review), but her husband Theseus, famed slayer of the Cretan Minotaur. At this late stage in his career, his reputation lies largely in his womanizing, and by the time of the play's action, his reputation for selfish indulgence has begun to overtake that for heroics. Minotaur slaying notwithstanding, the play's cast of characters is already more than familiar with his abandonment of former lover and one-time savior, Ariadne, on the Greek isle of Naxos; his wooing and fathering of Hippolytus on the Amazon Antiope before his desertion of her; and finally his return to Crete, where, adding insult to injury, he takes Ariadne's sister, Phaedra, to wife. But poor Phaedra! In the noble tradition of ancient Greek bedroom drama, her heart belongs not to Theseus, but his son, Hippolytus, whom she persuades Theseus to banish, figuring out of sight, out of mind. Such reasoning works well enough until Theseus, Phaedra, and their two children are exiled in turn by Theseus' father, Aegeus, to Troezen, Hippolytus' current home. Poetic justice indeed!

Now Phaedra must confront the tabooed passion for her stepson, while, Hippolytus, frustrated by his years of exile, has fallen hard for another prisoner of Troezen, Aricia, descendant of Pallas and his line, the sworn enemies of Theseus, who originally placed her there. Who knew Troezen was such a hothouse of intemperate decisions and mad passions! Telenovelas clearly have nothing on Greek mythology, which renders all the more difficult the performative challenges of this particular play.

To put it bluntly, the drama school students simply bit off more than they could chew. This production illuminated only too well the hurdles presented to any modern theatre company by a play featuring an overwrought story of ancient Greece told by a 17^th-century French playwright translated by a 20^th-century literary patrician for a 21^st-century audience. The connective tissue of problems in this production stems from variety of sources: set design, body language, line delivery, plotting. Untangling the web is no small matter, but it is, without doubt, educative.

Let's start with set design. It is notably at variance with the fairly traditional presentation. This version of Phaedra is not some gussied up modernization—although Racine's script could easily support, in artful hands, a campy soap opera. No, this is a straight shot, through and through, so why the set design effect of doors that open in all parts of the stage (lower story and, upper story doors, ceiling hatches and trap doors)? Perhaps the arrangement is intended to convey a certain lack of privacy—everybody seems to know everybody's business, or will eventually, which is the nature of tragedy. Perhaps it is to bring to the fore a certain dynamism that the play lacks because of its Racinian stiffness. One can't be sure, however, the net effect hurts the entire production for one very critical reason: the upper doors require stairways—in this case metal rail versions—that take up stage space, specifically back stage right and front stage left (the latter of which has the equally deleterious effect of "screening" off back stage left), and end up forcing the actors to crowd the corner of front stage right or work the stairs themselves, considerably limiting their ability to move about and gesture freely.

Consequently, too many characters stand block still during their recitations or when ostensibly listening, no doubt to avoid falling off the stairs. One notable exception stands out: Shannon Sullivan's Ismene, who quite literally writhes like a pole dancer during an exchange over her mistress Aricia's yearnings for the seemingly disdainful Hippolytus. Overplayed perhaps, it is still one of the few instances that the stairs as props aid instead of hinder the play's emotional dynamic. Otherwise, this "stairway" effect of tableau-like posing not only impedes much of the play's potential dynamism, but comes to infect the floor action as well. Too often body language is so minimal that there is sometimes none at all. In other instances, it's just too modern. Andrew Kelsey's Hippolytus' line work is not bad, but the military swagger is just a little too New York City. The military stiffness we expect of ancient Greek military bearing—even if that expectation is itself a modern fiction—was just not there.

The stiffening character of this stairway effect also enters too much of the dialogue itself. A great deal of this can be directly attributed to the difficulties of performing "high drama" of this sort. Our modern sensibilities, heavily shaped by dialogue as rapid-fire exchange and not as declamation or soliloquy, present one of the greatest challenges to the modern actor. How the hell does anyone today deliver Shakespeare or Racine, Corneille or Ben Jonson, and actually connect with their audiences instead of putting them to sleep or evoking laughter? I don't envy the actors who face this challenge. But as audience members, we know when actors pull it off, and we know when they don't. Indeed, when it works, we admire that much more the thespians who seem to make it seem so artless. So, yes, I have more respect for Emma Thompson than Julia Roberts because Thompson can do Shakespeare and do it well. Roberts? Your guess is as good as mine.

In this production, they don't pull it off. Far more attention and training needed to be given to line work, to beats and pauses, slow downs and speed ups, to muttered asides and changes in pitch and volume. Christina Maria Acosta's Aricia gives a rather good show at this level, but there was too much stillness of body for a character so potentially riven by passion. On the other hand, there is absolutely no doubt that the show belonged entirely to Austin Durant's Theseus. He growls and howls; speaks low only to erupt in shouted imprecations; he holds his arms up high to rain down curses upon his falsely accused son; he kneels, head in hands, to bemoan his foolish actions. Durant's Theseus moves, both verbally and physically, literally bestriding the stage like a giant. Cannily, Durant stays off the ladders, using what space is available liberally, letting gesture of body match, and then magnify, inflections of speech. It was easily a professional performance and ought be studied by fellow actors, dramaturg, and director alike for how period plays of this sort must be performed if they are to work at all in a day and age as jaded as our own.

Without a Hurt the Heart is Hollow

The FantasticksLong Wharf Theatre, October 7 to November 1

I was first introduced to The Fantasticks, of all places, by the Guinness Book of World Records.  Even then, some thirty years ago, it held the record as the longest continuously performing play amid the less effulgent lights of New York's off-Broadway Sullivan Street Theatre.  A few years later, my father did me the courtesy of taking me to see this old standby and, what is perhaps strangest of all in the microhistory that exists between The Fantasticks and myself is my not having had the pleasure of seeing it again since then.

This is no small matter when considering a play with this kind of pedigree.  Any proper New Yorker knows that up until The Fantasticks' closing on January 13, 2002, some 17,000 performances later, a trip down to the Sullivan Theatre, adolescent in hand, was a rite of passage for parents seeking to bestow upon their kinder the kind of cosmopolitanism that Broadway show attendance bequeaths.  Unlike today's overproduced albeit entertaining extravaganzas for children and teens—from The Lion King to Wicked—The Fantasticks recalls a quieter time, a more intimate encounter, and, yes, a far, far more sophisticated experience than any childhood viewing can properly take in.

Long Wharf's current production of The Fantasticks' recognizes this all-too-literary quality of the play.  This production features a distinct set of innovations in the dramatic interpretation: the play's narrator El Gallo is recast as an illusionist; the environ is Rocky Point, an actual amusement park in Warwick, Rhode Island, that has been closed for over a decade; the thematic thrust is the carny atmosphere  (recalling weirdly enough Carousel, of all things!).  But all seems almost superfluous for a play that is so obviously about theatre and its illusions.  This is not a criticism of director Amanda Dehnart's decision to relocate the play's traditional pair of homes with gardens separated by a wall through which the separated lovers whisper their sweet nothings to one another.  The conceit of moving the action into Rocky Point is a sound one, , despite the strange geographic dynamic of the self-same wall and gardens  sitting somewhere within or nearby the lonely amusement park. Indeed, one feels the abandonment of the park in the play's set design.

But it is a strange location for other reasons because the very weirdness of the arrangement underscores what is so fascinating about The Fantasticks as a play.  When it first opened on May 3, 1960, reviews were mixed at best and despite poor initial attendance, the production stayed on eventually building itself up into—what exactly?  This is the question that couldn't help but nag as I compared my middle-aged experience of the more than solid performance delivered by cast and musicians, director and set designer, with that of my dimly remembered early teen years.  In watching, I recalled the frankly disturbing character of the play, its illusion-shattering comparison between the happy ending of the first act and the far more hardened sentiments of its second act, musically expressed with alliterative harshness: "Without a hurt the heart is hollow."

But watching The Fantasticks this time around opened up an entirely new vista for me, one leavened not only by personal experiences of pain and disillusionment, but a much expanded knowledge of arts traditions.  The Fantasticks is notable for how much it turns to classical Western literature for its moorings: there are references to Greek and Roman mythology and history, Dante Alighieri, Washington Irving, and James Barrie.  But the stage belongs to Shakespeare, and not just any stage.  No, notwithstanding references to Othello, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, the play that really stands behind The Fantasticks—but receives nary a mention--is The Tempest, which delivered the now hackneyed but in the case of The Fantasticks all-too-applicable revelation "that all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

Tom Jones' libretto, as a consequence, is really part of another strand of Western culture.  While it makes pretense, perhaps a little too presumptuously, to be a part of the tradition of great playwriting—The Fantasticks is, in fact, far more than another Kiss Me Kate—there is no arguing that, as musicals go, the philosophical sights it sets are enormously high.  By stripping down as musical from the Broadway marquee hits it was trying in some ways to emulate—the Long Wharf production features eight actors, one piano, and one harp, and a simple set design, making it one of the easiest plays to stage regionally –Jones' libretto can focus on the very theatricality of theatre.  The experience is distinctly of a piece with Brecht's alienation effects, from the narrator's proleptic announcements to the highly stylized acting ("See, see, we're acting!" this production, like every other version of it, screams).

As a result of this minimalism, The Fantasticks can't help but be a distinctly postmodern play, a label I assign in the most intense and complimentary of senses.  Behind El Gallo's sleights of hand and the washed-up Arthur's comic manglings of Shakespeare, young Matt's sunny effusions and even younger Louisa's starry-eyed exclamations, and their fathers' soft-shoe, shuffling duets (excellently rendered in this production), the worm of literary deconstruction eats away at the play's philosophical foundations.  The easy reading is that the pretend happy ending of the first half is an illusion of moonlight and our penchant for story-telling, an illusion that the harsh glare of the sun and life itself dissolves.  But this thesis is so theatrically presented, and The Fantasticks is, if anything, utterly self-conscious of it play-ness, that it is impossible to see how life can be anything other than actors strutting the stage.  It is in that sense a remarkable play, a Worm Ouroboros, that eats its own tail endlessly  The Fantasticks strives to escape its own theatricalism through philosophy—that there is such a thing as "real life," which delivers real hurts from which we gain an "true" education and deeper understanding of love—but never really can, offering us either empty slogans about real life or, dare I suggest, a more "Matrix"-like understanding of the epistemological nut that Kant and his phenomenological successors have still failed to crack.  Namely, what we perceive is life and it may all be an illusion, but swim on we must.  And that reason alone is enough to see The Fantasticks.

Strength in What Remains

By Tracy Kidder (Random House, 2009)

I almost didn’t read the new book by the great journalist Tracy Kidder, and I’m not proud of either of the reasons why.

First, I didn’t like the title. Tracy Kidder has had some memorably evocative titles (Among Schoolchildren, an allusion to a Yeats poem, whether he knew it or not; Home Town; and one of the best titles ever, The Soul of a New Machine, which among other virtues always reminds me of the Police album Ghost in the Machine). But he now has two terrible titles to his name. First, there was Mountains Beyond Mountains, a portrait of the saint on earth Paul Farmer. And now comes Strength in What Remains, about Farmer's also quite saintly Burundian colleague Deogratias Niyizonkiza. There's something about good people that, for Kidder, makes for bad, treacly titles.

I also didn’t want to read a book about genocide. Having skipped Philip Gourevitch’s book about the Rwandan genocide, avoided David Rieff’s writings on genocide and intervention, and missed every book about death and destruction in Iraq (except Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s, which I correctly suspected would be fun to read because it’s all about what incompetent boobs the Bush administration were), I thought I might as well keep up my streak: no books that threaten to convince me that mankind is irredeemably evil and God, if he exists, doesn’t care.

But I read a review of Kidder’s new book on the day in August that my annual birthday gift from my in-laws, an Amazon gift certificate, arrived in my e-mail inbox. So I bought it. And in the last week I have finally read it.

And it’s warm, and humane, and at times funny. There’s no shortage of intense misery, described all too well. Of the frequent flashback scenes that take us from Deogratias’s more comfortable life in the United States back to the hell he endured less than ten years ago in his native Burundi, where as a Tutsi he was hunted by Hutu génocidaires, the most haunting involves an orphaned infant whom Deogratias could not save. I won’t tell you any more than that—partly because I don’t want to give away too much, partly because I just don’t want to re-live it in the typing.

For me, the book’s most unusual achievement is to show us a big American city, New York, through the eyes of a penniless refugee. Before Deogratias was taken in by generous Americans, before he enrolled at Columbia, before his graduate work at Harvard and then Dartmouth, he was delivering groceries for below minimum wage and sleeping in Central Park, hoping to one day figure out that subway system. No matter how impressive the accomplishments that bracket this period—surviving, on foot, and evading his would-be killers; becoming an educated American and building a hospital back in Burundi, a hospital which opened in 2007—it’s Deogratias’s early days as a nameless, faceless, dark black man in a city where he knew nobody that I will always remember best.

'How can we know the dancer from the dance?'

Yeats’ famous rhetorical question at the end of his poem, ‘Among School Children’ suggests that the dancer and the dance are fused into one, as an actor should be in his role, as a musician might be in the music she plays or sings.  The power of that symbiosis is always striking when it occurs, making the audience also lose a part of themselves in what is transpiring before their eyes and ears. Such, we are told, was the effect of seeing Vaslav Nijinsky dance.  Here was a being who seemed to live to dance, for whom performing was the only life.  The fact that the great, innovative, legendary dancer and choreographer succumbed to schizophrenia, a condition that ended his career, means that he has become not only a figure for greatness in performance, but also for madness in the arts.

Norman Allen’s play, Nijinsky’s Last Dance, which is ending its three night run tonight at the Yale Cabaret (shows at 8 and 11 p.m.), seizes on both aspects of Nijinsky -- the inspired genius, the struggling schizophrenic -- to present a monologue in which the dancer regales the audience with his view of his life and accomplishments.

It is a life that is now all in the past, except to the extent that every moment is still intensely alive in the character’s telling: his loss of his father in childhood; his meeting with and affair with the infamous impresario Sergei Pavlovitch Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes; modelling nude for Rodin; the scandalous shows -- Le Sacre du printemps and L’après midi d’un faune; his marriage, the birth of his daughter; his sojourn in popular music hall entertainment in London; his tour of America; his final dance at the St. Moritz in Switzerland during World War I.

It’s a role that requires amazing physical stamina, notable comic and dramatic gifts, a dancer’s body, and a grab-you-by-the-lapels urgency.  Danny Binstock, in the Yale Cab production, has all that.  His Nijinsky is simply rivetting from first to last.  Taking us into his confidence from within his cell in an asylum, Binstock delivers Nijinsky’s lines with a feverish sense of need -- he must try to make his world intelligible because -- as he shouts, sighs, pleads, again and again -- ‘I am Nijinsky!’

Few sights can offer more gripping pathos than a major innovator, past his glory, having to insist upon his triumphs -- which only exist, now, as memories in the minds of those who saw them or participated in them.

And so we are presented with the mind of Nijinsky, the only place we can turn to try to grasp what this extraordinary life was like.  We hear at times the voices of people from Nijinsky’s life, to which Nijinsky reacts in various ways, sometimes mouthing their lines, sometimes seeming to argue back in distracted muttering, sometimes taking refuge in movement.  Director Charlotte Braithwaite departs from the script in these voice-overs, since they are written to be spoken by the actor playing Nijinsky, but the innovation works well.  Rather than watching Nijinksy become Diaghilev or his own wife, sister, or mother, we see instead the effect these voices in his head has upon the dancer.

Further, the play calls for quite a bit of physical movement.  Not abounding in space, the Yale Cab is a risky place to put on such a show -- if the actor goes a little off his mark, he could find himself in a spectator’s lap or amid the remnants of someone’s dinner.  So one can only marvel at how precisely Binstock uses the space available to him, while suggesting a whirlwind of movement.  Brathwaite, Binstock, and producer/choreographer Jennifer Harrison Newman very inventively mime the ballet routines that were part of Nijinsky’s repertoire.

When at one point Binstock sits upon a chair to eye his audience in a pause prolonged to become uncomfortable, we see how the director has adapted the play to its space with great bravura.  That moment, and the final segment in which Nijinsky upbraids the audience for allowing the war to happen, brings the play suddenly from the past, c. World War I, and the mind of a long-dead dancer, into our time-frame, where the voice of a genius -- who hears God say ‘enough!’ at the end of his last dance -- speaks to us fully in the moment.

The most intense and spirited production at Yale Cab so far this season.

Smoke & Mirrors

SmokeBy Chuck Richardson 236 pp. BlazeVOX $16.00

Truisms are called truisms for a reason. They’re not exactly the same as truthiness, as promulgated by right-wing demagogues. Truisms, by their nature, are hackneyed. But they contain more than just the traditional “element of truth.” They do not sin by omission. Rather they bespeak the obvious and are often useful by bringing our attention back to what is obvious.

I have a truism in mind: where there is smoke there is fire. This expression exercises and belies David Hume’s deconstruction of causation. As Hume noted, how do we know that particular effects follow from certain causes? How do we infer specific causes from quantifiable effects? Hume’s radically pedestrian assertion was instead of nature, God, or the Devil, we hold to causation from force of habit. We associate causes and effects within our minds through repetition and imaginative thinking that is predicated on experience. We believe the sun will rise the next day not merely from an abstract understanding of earthly rotation (which we never really feel) but from having seen it occur day after day. How do we know the wine glass I’m about to drop will fall to the ground and not float upwards, will shatter and not merely bounce? Of course either of these less likely outcomes is possible. But no, it will fall and it will shatter. This I know from my experience of other falling objects and the witnessing of bursting light bulbs and beer bottles on kitchen floors and street corners. True, there is an extension of imagination within this assumption, but it is imagination grounded in experience, expectation, some trauma (I’m always shocked by shattering glass), and the brute force of a lifetime of habit-formed association between actions and reactions.

So where there’s smoke, surely there’s fire? The beauty of literature done well is when truisms fail miserably. And in Chuck Richardson’s Smoke there is smoke, but it’s not clear there is any fire. Mind you, this is not intended as some sort of backhanded figuratively-cast literary criticism. (All smoke no fire signifying some failing of literary imagination.) Quite literally, there is no fire in Smoke because smoke is what it’s all about.

Smoke is a classic example of what troubles genre of literary fiction as a business proposition—troubled, that is, not by any lack of quality but lack of market. Personally, I thought Smoke a great read and thus deserving of a hell-of-a-larger audience. First it appealed directly to my penchant for science fiction and background as an erstwhile scholar of dystopian fiction. (If Margaret Atwood can get away with it, why can't Chuck Richardson?) Second, it is, like any work of dystopian fiction done right, told through the fish-eye lens of multiple characters, not all of whom fully understand what is happening or why, who struggle to assay the truth of their situation but only see parts of it, as if wading through smoke themselves. After all, isn't what makes fiction fiction its smokiness, its insubstantiality, the penumbra it offers only of reality, of life seen through a glass darkly?

I’ll be blunt and a little lazy and not even dig into the details of the story’s plot line—which is fuzzy anyway. Enough to say that the setting is a future America where there is an “Agency” that takes in individuals for questionings that amount to all-orifice, sodium pentathol-like, half-pain, half-ecstasy torture sessions. It is also an America where your loyalty is to the never properly defined “Tribe” and where the aforementioned entire Agency is after the mysterious and much too earnest Zbigniew “Ziggy” Fumar and his rebel supporters—who may not even know that they are supporters.

Although Ziggy is not necessarily the protagonist—whatever that may mean in this particular work—he is the voice of the author, authority, and perhaps the ultimate lack of it, which all authors experience once their work graduates into the hands of readers. As Ziggy offers in the letter? manifesto? confession? that the Agency's agents, the novel’s “authorities,” study for clues as to what Ziggy's movement is about:

So let me start by saying that I don’t get you. It’s easy when a writer writes something and he knows his reader; because it makes it easy to leave out things the two of you already know. But I don’t know what you know, and don’t know what I know, and nobody knows what they don’t know. And that’s the truth. Honest. The truth always wraps itself in a dynamic paradox. In this case, it’s the writer’s paradox: All writers are liars; I am a writer. Or, all writing is lying; I am writing. Or, all reading is sucking; I am reading, and so on, etc….You’re not against fiction; you’re against my fiction. You oppose my make-believe. And you believe your make-believe is real. I’m sure it is, but so is mine. You dream up your stuff and I’ll dream up mine. This is fiction, and that you are reading anything and believe it’s not fiction, well that’s a fiction, albeit a non-literate one. It’s me who should be torturing you…

We are Smoke’s readers and Mr. Richardson, like any author, cannot know what we do or don’t know in fine detail. As such the novel has and takes the liberties of literary expressionism, steeped in equal parts George Orwell and Robert Coover, compelling its readers to find their way through the haze: What is this world? What is the Agency really after? What is the Tribe? Why do some characters seem little more than the ghosts of Pirandello’s players in search of an author? Why do they change form or divine the future or see their stories merge, split and merge again in some macabre waltz of unsettled identities, an unsettled future, and an unsettled literature.

If this review itself seems hazy, don’t let that obscure the fact that Smoke is actually a pleasure to read. OK, so every question is not answered; so truisms and false-isms are liberally mixed producing a powerful concoction of literary speculation on our modern politics, authorial deceit, and epistemological yearning, but I’d be more than happy to order another round. Smoke is more than “speculative” fiction in the traditional senses as applied to highbrow literature and science fiction respectively. It’s a fine read that compels even as it disturbs, compels because it disturbs, which, in a sense, is how life is, if not ought be, ultimately lived.

An Arresting "Orestes"

The Yale Cabaret states its mission to be “a gauntlet thrown in the face of our future, a scar in the memory of our audience, a ballerina dancing with a stick of dynamite.”  If this sounds a bit in your face, can that be a bad thing?  Theater can’t cuddle its audience, that’s what TV is for.  And unlike an audience watching a film in a moviehouse, a theater-going audience shouldn’t be allowed to hide in their darkened seats, secure in the fact that whatever they’re watching is already in the past. At Yale Cabaret, the audience sits at tables at the same level as the performers.  There’s nowhere to hide.  And for the first show of the 2009-10 Season, the audience had to sit or stand outside along two of the four sides of a courtyard in the middle of which Euripedes’ blood-thirsty and manic Orestes was enacted by a small ensemble cast of seven players.  In fact, we were gestured to a few times as an ugly mob, and Elektra even demanded we keep alert and pay attention.

The play is a good choice for the Cab’s stated goal.  For if any classical author lives up to that mission statement, it’s Euripedes.  Brechtian “alienation effect,” Artaudian “theater of cruelty,” Beckettian “theater of the absurd” -- none of them have anything on Euripedes.  Reading his plays, one is never sure whose side we’re supposed to be on.  It’s not that everyone is equally bad, it’s just that no one is really good, or noble, or virtuous, or even tragically misunderstood.  It’s as if his characters suffer from the hubris of believing the gods give a shit; worse, they sometimes think they understand what the gods want and try to act accordingly.

Orestes, in Devin Brain’s production, was even more than usual denuded of the voice of reason.  By cutting the figure of Tyndareos, who counsels his young grandson to give into what the polis decides, and by removing a speech which describes the arguments in the agora, this Orestes knocked away the prop supporting the contention that the play is about the need to replace blood-vengeance with civil proceeding -- which should have been used against Orestes’ husband-murdering mother and her paramour in the first place.

Instead of such city-state thematics, we have a tale of two siblings, Orestes and Elektra, wrapped together in a rather sensual folie à deux: they plotted the killing of their mother and now are pariahs who have only each other.  The pair becomes a trio with the introduction of Pylades, a stalwart friend of Orestes to whom Elektra is promised, should they live.  But one can’t help feeling, after the trio exchange full kisses with one another, that, if they live, they should all live together happily ever after in a ménage à trois.  Does that make us less sympathetic to them or more?

Hard to say, but when they try to murder Helen (whom they hate and whom Euripedes seems really to enjoy pillorying), and grab her unsuspecting daughter Hermione as hostage, running up a fire escape above the courtyard  to hurl taunts at Menelaos while insisting on negotiating a way out of their death sentence, they become gleeful would-be killers, a kind of mini Baader Meinhof cell, asserting their rights, but more than anything their detestation of the likes of Menelaos and Helen, the bourgeois beginners of battles that others must die to fight (Elektra -- played with suitable heart-wrenched woe by Emily Trask -- even gives a very affecting speech to that effect, mourning all those fallen Greek heroes at Troy).

Indeed, with Elektra so distraught, and Orestes, as played by Babak Gharaei-Tafti as somewhat of a maunderer, so clearly in need of her (and so happy he can call her a man in a woman’s body), and Helen so vain, and Menelaus so bureaucratic, it’s hard not taking the side of the kids, blood-lust, sex-lust, and all.

Then Apollo steps in.  As played by Kevin Daniels -- hairless bare chest, hairless bare head, black, in white flannel -- he steps in like the guy from upper management who has to put the peons in their place.  He’s scathing, indifferent, and incontestable.  Hermione and Orestes will marry!  We can imagine the wonderful get-togethers they’ll have at Menelaos’ place, or maybe Hermione will one day complain that her hubby never holds a knife to her throat any more like when they first met.  It matters not to Apollo -- or to Euripedes either.  We get the gods we deserve, and seeing the imperious shrug of the Sun god as he doled out just deserts put a big smile on my face.

It’s hard to say who Euripedes has more contempt for: these mythic figures whose messy lives have to be rehearsed again and again, or the audience that expects theater somehow to make sense of what makes no sense.  For a modern audience, that level of absurdity is always to some extent comforting, for it shows us that someone else has noted, and determined how to enact, mirth in passion, doubt in belief, randomness in justice, death in sex.

A great start to the season!

In Griot Time: An American Guitarist in Mali

By Banning Eyre (Temple University Press, 2000)

Journalist Banning Eyre is one of Connecticut's great unsung musical treasures; he and Sean Barlow are the driving forces behind Afropop.org, one of the best sources I've come across to learn more about Africa's various styles of music, as diverse as they are infectious. But Eyre is also a stellar guitarist in his own right. He has recorded with Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited, perhaps the biggest band to ever come out of Zimbabwe and certainly one of its coolest (and Zimbabwe has a lot of cool bands). And he has performed with the Super Rail Band, one of Mali's greatest acts. The latter, however, is for a more direct reason: Several years ago, Eyre effectively apprenticed himself to Djelimady Tounkara, the lead guitarist in the Super Rail Band. He spent the better part of a year in Bamako, learning as much as he could from Djelimady about Mali's musical traditions, and venturing out to meet—and hopefully play with—as many other musicians as he could find.

The written result of his exploits is In Griot Time, a book that's part travelogue, part character study (of Djelimady and the many other musicians Eyre meets), and part love letter to the music that Eyre went to Mali to learn how to play. In the course of the book, Eyre freely acknowledges his debt to John Miller Chernoff's African Rhythms and African Sensibilities, perhaps one of the best books ever written about African music for a Western audience. The parallels between Eyre's experiences and Chernoff's are many. Both went to Africa—Eyre to Mali and Chernoff to Ghana—to learn to play music. Both knew that playing the music well required them to understand something about the culture and history that created the style in the first place, and both strove hard to immerse themselves as much as they could. Chernoff's immersion was perhaps more successful: He emerged from his experience with a book that reads in parts like a Rosetta Stone to understanding Ghanian drumming in particular and African music generally. As a musician myself, I am still learning from Chernoff's book, and it's been ten years since I read it.

Eyre's book, by design, doesn't have that kind of insight. Unlike Chernoff, he doesn't dwell on how the music is put together so much as what it was like for him to learn how to play it. While it seems clear that he played music for at least a couple hours a day, most of the book is about what happens to him when he's not playing music—the conversations he has with people, the things he sees and does, the other musicians he hears—all written with a clear eye, an astonishing sensitivity, and a willingness to wrestle with some difficult questions about cultural frictions and the legacy of colonialism. The result, I believe, is a much more accessible book than Chernoff's. Where Chernoff's book is perfect for people who already love African music—particularly other musicians who are trying to figure out how to play it—Eyre's book is just the thing to make people who don't know much about African music want to learn more about it. Its own effect on me has already been profound. Chernoff's book in some ways scared me away from trying to play African music even as it made me want to all the more. But it was Eyre's book (and Eyre himself, who I finally took a lesson from) that finally made me pick up a guitar and try to play. I know that I'll never play like either Chernoff or Eyre—let alone the African musicians they have played with—but In Griot Time gave me the courage to play with the required humility, and evident joy.

Romanticism

By April Bernard (Norton)

To last as a Romantic, April Bernard says in a recent interview, “You have to be wise and passionate.” In her fourth book of poems passion and wisdom contend for the soul of Art.

Her Romantic suffers, feeling more, about more:

. . . it was the tree that caused an uproar, it was the tree that shook and shed, aureate as a shaken soul, I remembered I was supposed to have one—for convenience

I placed it in my chest, the heart being away, and now it seems the soul has lodged there, shaking, golden-orange, half spent. . . . [from “Beagle or Something”]

Her Romantic pretends what s/he’s asking for doesn’t add up to all that much:

. . . Hands with mine in the sink, washing dishes, the smell of wool, feet tangling mine in bed. [in “Romance”]

Ha! returns The Voice, the Force the Romantic was trying to bargain with: “What lies you tell, and call them love” (the end of “Unloved”). You think you’re the only one who’s ever gone through what you’re going through?

In Romanticism, the untrammeled Romantic in us struggles for expression in Art. The winner—no question—is the reader. April Bernard can do what she chooses in a poem, and what she chooses, here, is to remind us how Romanticism—which, she says, involves “the primacy of feeling; an embrace of the irrational”—enters our lives as it sneaks into our reading and listening and thinking, with glory and agony.

Romanticism has three sections. In the first you encounter Romantic states of being and feeling; in the second, among other wonders, a whole Romantic novel created in five short poems. The third breaks into song, lyrics with no music, including arias from operas that exist only in these pages.

Bernard doesn’t hesitate to say she wants to encourage a reader "to be an individual and be in society, . . . to have strong feelings."

This extraordinarily artful book uses intense pain as one of its colors. We luxuriate in sumptuous surfaces that mask pain:

That trinket of bulbous Baja pearl, hanging from a coin-purse latch, a gift from her dear Mama. The letters sheaved in a lavender ribbon (the ribbon edged with tiny loops of silk). . . . . . . no harm she has done comes close to what has stabbed at her, what now stabs— these cheap losses. [from “Last Glimpse”]

Here we can delight in invented forms, imported forms (a ghazal, “Paler Hands,” in memory of a famous ghazal-maker), and familiar forms reworked to dazzling new purposes (the unrhymed sonnet, “Heart or Head Canard”), all shifting the pain around, finding joys within it, offering pleasures liberally. Grief for a poet-friend who loved old movies turns into a sinuous dance of words circling Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in “Notorious” (“To the Knife”). We’re surprised by humor and tickled by connections that draw each poem into a larger body of feeling.

“I am a hopeless romantic,“ Bernard wrote last fall (in an essay in Lapham’s Quarterly)—the kind of “hopeless” that means “wholehearted” rather than “without hope”—the kind of hopeless that wrestles with hope in poem after poem throughout this marvelous book, which is so good it may change your mind, and then your life.

Susan Holahan is a writer and an editor of New Haven Review.

Fred Astaire

By Joseph Epstein (Yale University Press, 2008)

One doesn’t read Joseph Epstein’s most recent book, Fred Astaire, to learn new things about Fred Astaire. One reads it to see what the former editor of The American Scholar and author of Snobbery: The American Version, the wittiest essayist alive according to William F. Buckley, might do with a self-described “slender disquisition” on this question: “Whence derived Fred Astaire’s sublimity, his magic?”

One reads for sport, in other words, and at one’s leisure. Published almost a year ago with no apparent occasion other than the luxury of intellectual indulgence, Fred Astaire today remains as fresh as a book that puts on such airs possibly can be. It is timelessly unhip.

That’s not to say the book lacks charm. In fact, it has an entire excellent chapter on charm. And it has eleven other chapters, or “acts,” as Epstein calls them, all of which just breeze right along. With mature appreciation and lucid verve, Epstein stays mostly on the surface, studying the face, the clothes, the moves, and the cultural context in which the dancer became iconic.

He makes short work of establishing Astaire and Gene Kelly as the Apollo (“classic and understatedly calm”) and Dionysus (“romantic with high-banked fires”) of movie dancers, although Kelly’s own comparison—he called them the Cary Grant and Marlon Brando—made even shorter work of it. Epstein also supplies a nimble cross-referencing of Astaire’s and Ginger Rogers’ respective autobiographies, and a rather reproving survey of the other literature on his subject. “The amount of penetrating writing about Fred Astaire is less than overwhelming,” he writes. Too bad that line might also be used against him, to describe the contents of his own book.

The emerging answer to Epstein’s operating question has a lot to do with discipline, and one starts to wonder if removing all instances of the word “perfectionist” would render Fred Astaire only a few paragraphs long. But the point is well taken: Astaire, in Epstein’s estimation, was not a genius, necessarily, but rather a hardworking “unconscious artist” of exacting high standards, who brought transcendent joy to popular entertainment.

To prove it, one could do worse than spend an afternoon with a comfy chair, a stack of DVDs and a couple hundred pages of slender disquisition.

Stranded

When I heard Mark Strand read at Yale the end of spring semester from his New Selected Poems (NY: Knopf, 2009), I resolved to get a copy and read through it. The impression I’d had that Strand’s work inhabits a certain constant place is sustained by this reading, and it’s fitting that the New Selected should appear after Man and Camel (2006). There is a wryness in the latter volume that, I realize now, inhabits much of Strand’s verse from the earliest, but which wasn’t quite so forcefully apparent before, to me, at least. His reading was so affable, jocose even, that the sense of the poems as austere imaginative landscapes into which one peers with metaphysical intent collapsed somewhat, leaving a stronger sense of playfulness. Strand’s poems have always been inflected by a sense of words as symbolic more than descriptive. He’s about as far from being a nature poet, who yet describes a natural world, as one could be. He’s also rather far removed from confessional verse, even though he does at times clearly write about himself, or as himself. Such poems are not meant to create a scene to contemplate, or to reveal the dramatic movement of events, but are aimed to make a statement. For Strand, to create a poem is to offer a kind of précis that renders the state of consciousness, that articulates a grasp of lyric presence, or rather articulates the lyric presence that we might spend our whole lives trying to grasp.

Sometimes, as with 'Man and Camel,' the sense of parabolic meaning is so deliberate its effect becomes quite funny. For Strand has a very dry sense of humor and he knows how to use it. He’s able to make us feel in on a joke that may very well be played on us nevertheless. The poems often seem quite solemn, and they are indeed ‘austere’ in the sense that they don’t seek out fun and music and sensuous detail, very little in the way of sound effects or vivid impressions.

'I walk / into what light / there is.' This, we can say, is so pared down as to be minimalist. To be so toneless is not easy, and the goal seems to be for the poem to be read as if the page itself speaks. There are a lot of imperative sentences, words that simply surface and command our hearing. And the actions are generally simple too: walking, looking, speaking, writing, sitting, thinking; sometimes there are dreams. Nothing very much happens, but everything is poised to happen because each poem is running a course, moving to an end that will clarify its intention, its statement. As with this poem, from Darker, way back in 1970, that in some ways defines Strand’s project:

The Remains

I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets. I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road. At night I turn back the clocks; I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.

What good does it do? The hours have done their job. I say my own name. I say goodbye. The words follow each other downwind. I love my wife but send her away.

My parents rise out of their thrones into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing? Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same. I empty myself of my life and my life remains.

The nouns are so precise and yet so generic; we could almost say Strand seeks a poetry of the generic. If that were all he were doing, it might be interesting enough for a volume or two, but there is always more at stake because the generic can become the allegorical: 'The words follow each other downwind'; and the metaphysical: 'Time tells me what I am.' But there are other typical registers here too: the familial thread is alive in each stanza, from ‘family album’ to ‘my wife’ to ‘my parents,’ so that affective relations, the human community, is always ready to burst into Strand’s meditation. And the gesture toward nature or to metaphor, ‘the milky rooms of clouds,’ can bring a clear, unforced lyricism to bear at any moment.

So what is the poem’s statement? Much depends on whether you view the final verse as illustrating futility (‘What good does it do?’) or whether it has managed to slyly change the terms while we were looking. ‘How can I sing? / Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.’ We are bordering on ‘I am that I am’; could God sing a song of praise? Or, what would God praise other than himself? The parents off their thrones and in their clouds is a joke image; the wife is sent away from this paradise of self-knowing, self-perpetuating Godhead. All the other names are vacated. Only the one remains. The poem is stuck constantly in the groove of its own making, like a needle stuck on a record. Empty/remain; empty/remain, ad infinitum.

And that is Strand’s characteristic jest, to start singing just when about to be cut-off, to point the way out as he leads us back to the start. In 'The Monument,' a long poem, written in prose as responses to quotations primarily from other poets, Strand says: 'my voice is sufficient to make The Monument out of this moment.' To make a monument of any moment, one need only write a poem, but it will be a poem which conceives of each moment, any moment, as monumental.

Reading through the 267 pages of poetry in this volume, covering forty-two years of publication, one is struck again and again by Strand’s fidelity to that task. His ability to bring it off is based upon that keen sense of emptying and grasping what remains, but it’s also based on what I take to be the jest of originary utterance. God, the Hebrew scriptures tell us, spoke first and created everything. After that, there can be no originary utterance. The poet, in enunciating his poem, speaks in an ancillary manner that purports to begin things again, to empty, or to praise, but there is always the remainder of that pre-existing world. Strand is far too canny to take that as a point of despair or of futility if only because the mind allows words to happen to it, and when they do, there is no telling what possibilities for speech might also remain.

The Cultural Dictionary of Punk

You wouldn't say that I was a punk rocker, but my record collection (yes, record collection) seems to have an awful lot of Ramones albums in it. For decades I wore a locket every day with a picture of Joey Ramone in it. I seem to have a weakness for some of the old CBGB's bands. When I need a little pick me up, I play "Atomic" (Blondie, I probably should explain). Really loudly. I feel it is good for my so-called soul. My close friends, and even some casual associates, know this about me, which is why I was surprised -- and then not surprised at all -- when a bookseller friend of mine, Kate H., appeared at my house recently with a book for me. "We got this in," she said, "and -- well -- Here!" Then she stood, waiting, waiting to see the expression on my face when I unwrapped the book (which she had, in excellent style, wrapped in old newsprint).

When I saw The Cultural Dictionary of Punk (recently published by Continuum, the folks who did those completely awesome 33 1/3 books), I think I smiled so big and so hard my cheeks hurt. Kate is a doll. I immediately began flipping through it and knew right away that this was gonna be one FUN book to read.

I read it from cover to cover. Every chance I had, I was sitting down with it: with my morning coffee; with a drink at the end of the day. I had my quibbles with it -- this is a highly subjective little book -- but in general I had to admire Rombes' book, which is passionate and filled with interesting details I didn't know.

I had two real issues with Rombes' work, both of which I had the opportunity to discuss in emails with the author. One is that several entries are really these personal discourses on some obviously serious problems that have arisen in Rombes' life. His family suffered horribly from a traumatic event beyond their control, and I wouldn't dream of trying to dismiss them or anything like that. But the sections relating to them did read sort of weirdly next to entries on the glories of the Ramones first three albums. The juxtaposition was jarring, and it detracted from the force of the book as a whole. I often thought, as I read, that Rombes should have just written The Cultural Dictionary of Punk and then done a shorter, tighter memoir about his family's tragedy, which Rombes admitted to me was probably true. So we'll see what his next project is like.

My second issue (which Rombes is trying to address as I type this) is that the book does not come with a CD (or a list of links to recordings online) of many of the songs Rombes discusses. Over and over again he has long discussions of songs that he describes as, you know, bloodcurdlingly perfect examples of this, that, or the other, and I said, "OH MAN I GOTTA HEAR THAT NOW!" and ran to the computer, only to discover that there was pretty much no way I was gonna hear those songs; they're not available on iTunes, and frankly, with stuff like this, it'd be easy to spend waaay too much time and money hunting down obscure 45s. When I expressed my wish for a CD (impossible) or streaming audio or something like that (more possible, though a lot of work), Rombes took it to heart (others had made the same remark to him), and at his website he has begun to post links to key songs. This is really useful, but it's also, just, you know, really fun.

I want to explain that I don't believe that every song he mentions should be included in this compilation; I mean, anyone can find the first Ramones album, or Marquee Moon (that's Television, people: Television). The average reader of this book doesn't need someone to provide a link to "Sheena is a Punk Rocker" or "Chinese Rocks" or "Venus de Milo"; we've got those internalized pretty well by now, thanks. But there must have been at least a dozen really out there songs by, you know, punk bands from Cleveland or Tulsa -- bands that existed for about three minutes -- that Rombes talked about so tantalizingly that I basically wanted to shoot myself when I wasn't able to listen to them RIGHT THEN.

Well, listen: don't let my griping deter you. If you've got any interest whatsoever in punk rock, punk culture, punk whatever, then this book deserves a half inch of space on your shelf. http://culturaldictionaryofpunk.blogspot.com/

Death Bird Spotting

In an earlier post I had mentioned Neil Gaiman’s presence at a conference I had attended, where he was putting in time signing books (at that moment his young adult fantasy The Graveyard Book). I first encountered Gaiman’s work when I selected American Gods for a local book club I was running at the Mitchell branch of the New Haven Public Library. It was, and still is, his best novel, even though I have enjoyed some of his other ventures (particularly his early novel Neverwhere). But American Gods differed from the rest by virtue of its bold topic, drawing on ideas first broached in his Sandman series. In brief, American Gods is an adventure yarn and con game of, quite literally, mythological proportions, as well as a meditation on the Voltairean dictum “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him." And, yet, as thematically bold as the novel is, its topic is not by any means original. As literary renderings of this philosophical conundrum go, it stands on the shoulders of giants. I note this because the clash it depicted between the older gods of ethnic legend—from the Norse Odin to Africa’s Ananzi—and the modern deities of the Almighty Dollar and All-Consuming Computer, came back to me with renewed vigor after re-reading Harlan Ellison’s remarkable Deathbird Stories.

Devoted to the gods of modern urban life, each tale in Ellison's story cycle was an experiment in writing and consequently a literary effort to knock the stiffness out of science fiction itself. Bound too long by the traditions of pure pulp and space opera, American science fiction found in Ellison the American answer to the New Wave of British SF flowing from the pens of Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock, and John Brunner. His editorship of Dangerous Visions broke new ground by giving a distinctively literary turn to this much put-upon genre. His follow-up eight years later in The Deathbird Stories did no less.

Like American Gods, Deathbird Stories is a full-frontal assault on our many species of worship and obsession—the distance between the two never that great to begin with. Each tale is an act of literary transgression blessed by modernist rage. They experiment with time, place, voice, language, symbol, pattern, and even when they fail, the failure strikes us as epic as short stories go.

Yet amid the dark brilliance seams have begun to show, breaks that have grown more prominent with the passing of years, a matter that becomes ever more interesting for me in my study of the reading experience over time. When I first read the Deathbird Stories, I was “blown away,” which, notwithstanding the overblown-ness of that hackneyed, was quite apropos then. My experience was in keeping with Ellison’s tongue in/not-in cheek warning:

CAVEAT LECTOR It is suggested that the reader not attempt to read this book at one sitting. The emotional content of these stories, taken without break, may be extremely upsetting. This note is intended most sincerely, and not as hyperbole. H.E.

Now as I read these tales, despite the vibrancy, their 1970s-ness shines through, dampening that potential to upset. The unhappiness of this decade in America—white flight, urban crime, oil embargoes, cocaine trafficking, Christmas bombings, failed presidencies—is deeply felt throughout. “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” is a literary reworking of the Kitty Genovese tragedy (immortalized as well in the first verse of Phil Ochs’ “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends”). “Neon” is an ode in prose—quite literally—to that flashing light that infuriatingly blinks outside our windows at night but which we love to no end on darkened streets when thinning crowds deprive us of that nocturnal protection in numbers. “Basilisk” places the horrors of war on a collision course with the hypocritical inanities of American chest-thumping patriotism (a story that weirdly resonates in today's climate with current debates on torture and its consequences). And on it goes, with dark-tinted paeans to drugs and free love, the automobile, business and religion.

Among my favorites is “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes,” an encomium to the selfishness and loserdom that typify gamblers on the downhill side. I especially enjoyed Ellison’s mind-bending depiction of Maggie’s dissolution into a slot machine:

A moment out of time | lights whirling and spinning in a cotton candy universe | down a bottomless funnel roundly sectioned like a goat’s horn | a cornucopia that rose up cuculiform smooth and slick as a worm belly | endless nights that pealed ebony funeral bells | out of fog | out of weightlessness | suddenly total cellular knowledge | memory running backward…

The classic of the collection, however, remains “Along the Scenic Route,” which upon rereading holds up surprisingly well only because it is one of the few stories that does not situate itself within the 1970s. Where most of the tales read like magic realism gone awry, this literary gem is a true work of “science fiction.” It is also his least experimental: the telling is straight, the weirdness stripped away. But there is an O Henry-like twist ending that will forever make this story a dark pleasure, which is my superfluously literary way of saying that I had as much fun reading it this time as when I first encountered it.

As life experiences go, I was never one for bird watching, preferring to run my eyes across bookshelves than search the branches of unidentifiable trees in strange parks. So let's just say this time I was glad to spot this rara avis once more and, taking it down from its perch, worship at its altar. For before there were American Gods, there were The Deathbird Stories.