Which Side Are You On?

For the second feature in the Yale Cabaret’s 2010-11 Season, Artistic Director Andrew Kelsey, project initiator Louisa Proske, director Flordelino Lagundino, and producer Jennifer Newman offer a truly surprising and striking work, Caryl Churchill’s Far Away (2000), a vision of dystopia whose full horror sneaks up on you, a horror perfectly etched with inspired absurdist control. Churchill’s plays typically explore themes of social and political dysfunction, but unlike some of her work, Far Away does not reference any overtly topical themes.  Instead, Far Away maintains a grasp on the political realm by suggesting how “regularized” or “normative” the most appalling circumstances can become.  The totalitarian state functioning beyond the scenes we see portrayed can only be inferred, and that is what makes the play so lethal: the way references to the status quo always presuppose the logic – and an acceptance – of the situation, whatever it may be.  As we gradually get up to speed – in three scenes taking place over an indeterminate span of years – we find that the world of the play has either gone entirely mad, or is literally comprised of endless war efforts, not only international, but interspecies in scope.

The great strength of this play is how good the dialogue is.  In the first scene, a woman named Harper (Alexandra Henrikson) tries to command her niece Joan (Laura Gragtmans) to return to bed, only to uncover gradually that the niece has witnessed her uncle involved in an act of brutality, an act that Harper denies, then reinterprets for Joan’s benefit so that it seems a benign act, all for the best, though one that must be kept secret.  What we don’t know, for a fact, is whether or not this couple is trafficking in abducted children or is actually helping them escape while brutally punishing traitors, but in either case, the slow burn by which the step-by-step discussion takes place establishes a world where normality is a thin veneer over inhuman acts, whether desperate or depraved.

The second scene is a workplace, a hat-making shop.  But the oddities of the headgear being prepared by Joan (now young adult) and her senior co-worker Todd (Chris Henry) add an element of humor to what soon becomes another appalling situation.  In the midst of their amiable workplace flirtation are little dropped facts like watching televised trials late into the night, or arbitrary problems with the workers’ job security.  We learn that the hats are for parades, and shortly after we witness an example, as limping, zombie-like figures cross the stage, drably attired but for fantastical hats.  It was a stunning moment of theater, implying both a complete loss of human dignity as well as gesturing to what we might think of as totalitarian aesthetics, adding a touch of the circus on the way to the gallows (a tip of the hat to Costume Designer Ana Milosevic for the entertaining chapeaus atop figures from a gulag).

In the final scene, the world is at war, as we learn strictly from the dialogue between Harper and Todd, waiting in Harper’s bland living room for Joan to return, and debating which animals and other creatures have joined forces with which nations.  Churchill pushes the idea that “everything is political” to its logical, absurd conclusion: even the animal kingdom is political.

The revelation for me in this production was Henrikson’s performance – in the first scene she was young and maternal, a bit steely perhaps, but we are not sure at once who is the problem: her or her niece.  As the dialogue unfolds we remain uncertain: is Harper completely duplicitous, making up things to explain away Joan’s fears, or uncertainly initiating the girl into the harsh realities of their world?  And it is that uncertainty about Harper’s character that makes her so intriguing.  In the final scene, Henrikson conjures an older Harper, not bitter so much as run ragged by maintaining a grasp of the world that necessitates knowing, for instance, which side the deer are on.  As she berates Todd for his slips in the party line, her hectoring tone – despite the absurdly wild things she is saying – never slips into comic histrionics.  We see a woman who actually lives in the world she describes, thus making it vivid and real to us as well, and unforgettable.

Far Away has two more performances: tonight, Sat. 25th, at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.

Far Away, written by Caryl Churchill; directed by Flordelino Lagundino

Yale Cabaret, 217 Park Street, New Haven; 203.432.1566; www.yalecabaret.org

It’s a Glass Family Affair

High school reading is a curious thing. I'd like to think that the sudden burst of teen-appropriate fiction in the late 1990s was largely driven in by the rise of Scholastic as a business and Harry Potter as a phenomenon. This no doubt explains the many reader guides available on this wealth of writing—Amy Crawford's Great Books for High School Kids, Daniel Hahn's Ultimate Teen Book Guide, Nancy Keane's Big Book of Teen Reading Lists, John Gillespie and Catherine Barr's Best Books for High School Readers, and on and on. In this day and age, the heroes of writing for teens are Sherman Alexie, John Green, Nikki Grimes, Laurie Halse Anderson, and innumerable others—and finding these others is easy in an age of Amazon and "customers who bought this item also bought…"

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, teen reads were not so easy to find. High school reading for non-honors courses comprised Judy Blume, S.E. Hinton, and Paul Zindel. For more smart-alecky students, the diet consisted of traditional classics, ranging from Charles Dickens' seemingly interminable (then!) David Copperfield to John Steinbeck's overlong (then!) Grapes of Wrath. The geek crowd—among which I number myself—floated into Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and the newly arrived Orson Scott Card or William Gibson. But among the authors of slightly straighter fiction that had a special cachet for high school overachievers, none stood higher than J.D. Salinger (with Kurt Vonnegut and Herman Hesse often trailing in his wake).

Salinger was the Seinfeld of his day: ideally suited for the semi-cosmopolitan children of middle-class parents with more smarts than money. While Catcher in the Rye was as inevitable then as it is today—notwithstanding recent claims of its early death in the pages of the New Yorker—the aforementioned overachievers not uncommonly preferred the pleasures of Salinger's Nine Stories and his one other published novel, Franny and Zooey, to his paean to post-pubescent adolescence.

There are some awfully pleasant associations I still have with the Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey, making it impossible for any re-reading of these works not to be colored by feelings of high school smugness. (Look at me! See how smart I was reading these as a high school sophomore rather than the prescribed Catcher!)

But my continued fascination with re-reading as a 40-something books that so impressed me in my 'teens continues unabated, and while Pride and Prejudice, in my humble opinion, continues to ride high, my experience with other works has not withstood the tests of time as well. Salinger may be a case in point. For the Nine Stories, I have to confess that, by and large, these have held up well—certainly much better than many short stories of the same period. Franny and Zooey, however, does not.

It's not that it's a bad novel. It isn't. It's still pretty good. It's just, well, a little overdone, a little contrived, a bit pretentious, the kind of stuff likely to feed the ego of a precocious teen reader. One can't help but suck up the mysteries of the disturbed wunderkind, the elusive Seymour—eldest of the Glass children— whose shadow and genius hang over the novel, and particularly Franny, like a wet blanket woven from the threads of an existential angst born of reading too many Tolstoy novels and Zen maxims. Salinger is not so dumb as to ignore that fact when brother Zooey rails at sister Franny: "We're freaks, that's all. Those two bastards [eldest Seymour and next in line Buddy] got us nice and early and made us into freaks with freakish standards." The freakish standards at issue boil down to Franny's discontent with—how does one put it?—the petty qualities that in some way are exactly what make us human—which is, of course, Zooey's point.

Notwithstanding inevitable triteness of Zooey's moralizing about how to accept people for who they are, warts and all, the novel irresistibly draws us into it, turning us into the very freaks with freakish standards Zooey deplores. In fact, reading the book in high school inspired the same act of freakishness that Franny has taken on of hauling around a copy of the anonymously authored The Way of a Pilgrim, the first-person narration of a wanderer who devoutly recites the "Jesus Prayer" ("Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner"). In Franny's knapsack is The Way of a Pilgrim; and in ours then was Franny and Zooey—at least, until the end of sophomore year when SAT exams became more important.

In the 1970s and 1980s, at least, the greatest irony of Franny and Zooey was an entirely unintentional one: namely the postmodern trick of its transformation into an exemplar of what it condemns. Even as Zooey lectures Franny—and presumably readers—on the pretension of judging too harshly all the non-"whiz kids" out there, we can't help but nod our heads with the all-too-wise Zooey and sympathize with the well-meaning Franny. Hey, smart people like Franny—and ourselves—make these kinds of mistakes all the time, and it's good thing that we're smart enough to read books like this by J.D. Salinger to teach us better.

But let's be honest, how much would we have listened really if we weren't at the same time all jazzed up by the "beaverboard" nailed up on the back of the door to Seymour and Buddy's childhood room, on which "every inch of visible surface of the board had been decorated with four somewhat gorgeous-looking columns of quotations from a variety of the world's literatures"? And there you are: lengthy quotes from Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Kafka for you Western traditionalists' pearls of wisdom from Issa, the "Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna," and Mu-Mon Kwan for you intellectual mystic types into Alan Watts and Thomas Merton. If this isn't the height of pretentiousness, I'm not sure what is. And yet let's all just admit that it's cool, too. I even remember how during summer camp as a counselor in training I and others had taken to the habit, in clear imitation of this bit of intellectual self-puffery, of tracking down suitable quotes and writing on the walls of our bathroom stalls bits of geinus from Dostoyevsky and I.L. Peretz. It all certainly made for more interesting reading that "Here I sit hear broken-hearted..."

I ought perhaps add at this juncture that in some ways I repeat the criticisms leveled at the novel by Mary McCarthy in her 1962 review of the novel ("J.D. Salinger's Closed Circuit"), a wonderfully smart reading of the novel and no doubt better written and more insightful than this.

But McCarthy's criticism bears repeating, albeit contextualized by two realities: first that Franny and Zooey is a pretentious novel because its appeal is built on precocity, and being precocious is hardly a bad thing in itself. I recommended the novel to my teen daughter, and I have no qualms doing just that when I consider some of the competition, from Stephanie Meyer's teen vampire soap operas to Cecily von Ziegesar teen sleaze (she's author of the just plain awful Gossip Girl novels). Second, McCarthy wrote before she would realize how strongly the novel would tap the need of smart kids to feel smart. This is a reality that cannot be batted away and Salinger's novel, in some sense, grasps that fact. Franny and Zooey is the Jesus Prayer of the smart and sensitive soul (not the nerd, who represents an entirely different type as smartness goes). Smart kids, in their way, need their Franny and Zooey's (today these tend to be Junot Diaz's Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao): books that bespeak their intellectual curiosity and which, in their being carried about, signal to others that their search for other intellectually curious types. And that ain't a bad thing either.

Finding the Words

The Yale Cabaret is back.  And the new season began with a memorial service. At Good Words: A Memorial with Music for Paul Everett Tarsus, audience members found themselves sitting on folding chairs, eating from a catered buffet service, attending a memorial for a man who died in Hamden, a "local theater artist," according to his obituary, who requested that his memorial be held in a theater.  Seems the Cab's black-walled basement digs was the best they could do.

The conceit of the staging meant that for the opening of the play, we were addressed as congregants at a service.  Nehemiah Luckett welcomed us and filled in a bit of backstory, though very minimally.  When he led an onstage chorus (Sunder Ganglani, Taylor Vaughn-Lasley, Christina Anderson) in "Glory, Glory, Hallelujah," and got the audience to join in, the ice was effectively broken and we were ready to hear the story.

The burden of the story was borne by Paul's father, Dr. Paul Caleb Tarsus (Trai Byers), a minister descended from a teacher who abandoned the small school in the south where his father taught to study at the Yale Divinity School.  As that synopsis might suggest, we might expect a tale of  generational tension and disappointed expectations, about how a minister raised a theater artist, but the story of Paul Jr.'s life and death was not the main focus.  Instead, the drama focused on the old man's youth in New Canaan, Georgia, and his eventual flight to the north, where his son was born.

The power of the piece derived from the uplifting vocals of the chorus, and depended upon Byers' capable performance as the old man, doddering through his memories. As Dr. Tarsus told us, memory is like a cabinet with a lot of drawers in it, but lately the contents of his drawers have gotten mixed.  And that meant he sometimes spoke as a son addressing his own father and sometimes as the father of the young man who died, a slippage heightened by the chorus which provoked him with voices that echoed and bedeviled his statements while also adding strikingly rhythmic and poetic effects to his monologue.

The chorus were in fine voice, particularly Ganglani's spirited lead on "Poor, Wayfaring Stranger" and Vaughn-Lasley's angry rendition (in the role of Eula, the girl Dr. Tarsus left behind) of "Pass Me Not O Gentle Savior."  The songs flitted in and out of the narrative, commenting on Dr. Tarsus' memories, and opening his monologues to areas of feeling that his effort to find only "good words" failed to acknowledge.

The most unsatisfying aspect of the play, written by Meg Miroshnik, with music (including two original songs) by Mark A. Miller, directed by Andrew Kelsey (Artistic Director for the Cab this season) was the uncertainty about the ultimate nature of the relation between Paul the father and Paul the son, a relation indicated by the son's choice of theater rather than the ministry, but that story wasn't presented.  In its place was the theme of the overwhelming continuity of past and present, as Byers, recreating his courtship of Eula after she followed him to New Haven, enacted a forceful elliptical segue from his young start in life to an old man's present in which his son was gone.

It was great to be back at the Cab where each week provides a new experience, a new challenge, and, as the motto for the new season reads, "shifting perspectives on performance."  Next up, Sept. 23-25, is Far Away, by British Brechtian playwright Caryl Churchill, directed by Flordelino Lagundino.

Listen Here, Fall 2010 Season

The Arts Council of Greater New Haven, New Haven Review, and New Haven Theater Company are pleased to announce the return of Listen Here, the weekly short story reading series in which actors from the New Haven Theater Collective read short stories chosen by New Haven Review editors. The Fall 2010 season of Listen Here will take place on Thursday evenings, from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m., with reading occurring on a rotating basis at Book Trade Café (1140 Chapel Street), Lulu: A European Coffee House (49 Cottage Street), and Manjares Fine Pastries (838 Whalley Avenue, on the corner of West Rock Avenue). September 23: Hardly Boiled at Book Trader Café, 1140 Chapel Street, off York St. Woody Allen's "The Whore of Mensa," read by Steve Scarpa Ethan Coen's "The Russian," read by Jeremy Funke

September 30: Short Shorts at Lulu, A European Coffeehouse, 49 Cottage Street, off Orange St. Yukio Mishima's "Swaddling Clothes" Katherine Anne Porter's "Magic," read by Shola Cole Leo Tolstoy's "Alyosha the Pot," read by Bennett Lovett-Graff William Carlos Williams' "The Use of Force," read by George Kulp

October 7: Homesick at Manjares Fine Pastries, 838 Whalley Avenue, on West Rock Ave! Ernest Hemingway's "Soldier's Home," read by Peter Chenot Betsy Boyd's "Scarecrow," read by Hilary Brown October 14: Crossroads at Book Trader Café, 1140 Chapel Street, off York St. J.D. Salinger's "For Esme - With Love and Squalor," read by Steve Scarpa

October 21: Fathers, Sons, Mothers, Daughters at Lulu, A European Coffeehouse, 49 Cottage Street, off Orange St. Steve Stern's "The Tale of a Kite," TBD Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing," read by Shola Cole

October 28: Halloween Special at Manjares Fine Pastries, 838 Whalley Avenue, on West Rock Ave! Joyce Carol Oates' "Where is Here?," read by Jeremy Funke Charles Lambert's "The Scent of Cinnamon," read by Erich Greene

November 4: Hello, Goodbye at Book Trader Café, 1140 Chapel Street, off York St. James Joyce's "Eveline," TBD David Schickler's "The Smoker," read by Steve Scarpa

November 11: Strangers in a Strange Land at Lulu, A European Coffeehouse, 49 Cottage Street, off Orange St. Anton Chekhov's "The Bet," read by Ian Alderman Naomi Williams' "Rickshaw Runner," TBD

November 18: Food & Drink at Manjares Fine Pastries, 838 Whalley Avenue, on West Rock Ave! Beena Kamlani's " Zanzibar," TBD Paul Beckman's "Another One of His Punishments," TBD November 25 Thanksgiving — no readings

December 2: Mere Children at Book Trader Café, 1140 Chapel Street, off York St. Sarah Orne Jewett's "A White Heron," read by Shola Cole Amy Hempel's "The Most Girl Part of You," read by Hilary Brown December 9: Close Calls at Lulu, A European Coffeehouse, 49 Cottage Street, off Orange St. Ernest Hemingway's "The Killers," read by Steve Scarpa Roald Dahl's "Man from the South," read by Jeremy Funke

December 16: Tall Tales at Manjares Fine Pastries, 838 Whalley Avenue, on West Rock Ave! Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," read by Peter Chenot Stephen Vincent Benét's "The Devil and Daniel Webster," read by George Kulp

Working (for) the Man!

We're always happy at New Haven Review when one of our own takes to the printed page and places his or her authorial stamp upon something that a publisher has enough confidence in to put some financial muscle behind it. Such is the case for business writer and management consultant Bruce Tulgan, who has served as a trustee and guiding spirit to the New Haven Review since its founding. Bruce is the author of Managing Generation X (2000), Winning the Talent Wars (2002), It's Okay to Be the Boss (2007), and Not Everyone Gets a Trophy (2009). If it was okay to be the boss and not everyone got a trophy, apparently it is also okay to manage your boss: the argument Bruce makes in his latest work It's Okay to Manage Your Boss: The Step-by-Step Program for Making the Best of Your Most Important Relationship at Work (Jossey-Bass, 2010). The subtitle says it all, but just in case that wasn't enough, let's let the publicists in and do their share:

If you are like most employees, you answer to multiple bosses -- some directly, and others indirectly. You are often pulled in different directions by these competing authority figures with competing interests and agendas. All of them have the ability to improve or worsen your daily work conditions, your chances of getting rewards, and your long term career prospects. And all of them are different.

Under these circumstances, you are the only one you can control. You can control your role and conduct in each of these relationships. You can control how you manage and how you get what you need from these relationships. You have no choice: If you want to survive, succeed, and prosper, you have to get really good at managing your bosses.

Why? The boss—at every level—is the most important person in the workplace today. On this there is widespread consensus: Study after study show that the relationship employees have with their bosses is the number one factor in the ability of employees to produce high quality work consistently, to feel good about work, to earn credit and flexible work conditions and greater rewards.

If you are looking for guidance on how to manage your boss, there are zillions of so-called experts out there who will be happy to provide it. The problem is that so much of the advice about "managing up" or "managing your boss" out there doesn't tell the whole story. This book is written for people who want to be high-performers. In order to be a high performer in today's workplace, you need to create high-engaged relationships with every boss - whether that boss is great, awful, or somewhere in between.

I've read several of Bruce's books and they're always good fun if solid business advice is what you're looking for. Since I've worked for nearly two decades in publishing—many of those years in fact in the corporate business settings Bruce describes—the advice is well placed, based as it is on hundreds (if not thousands) of interviews Bruce has held with corporate employers and employees trying to manage those seemingly indefinable human elements in the business relationship. Congratulations, Bruce!

—Bennett Lovett-Graff, Publisher, New Haven Review

A Play of One's Own

Last Friday and Saturday nights The Wicked Wolf in New Haven hosted the inaugural Second Sex Play Fest ("second sex" as in the title of Simone de Beauvoir's famous classic, NOT the second "sex play fest").  Under the auspices of the New Haven Theater Company, the project was conceived to address the lack of significant parts for actresses in the dramatic literature. According to Producing Director Kaia Monroe, of Southern Connecticut State University, in the last three Broadway seasons thirty-two plays were produced; of the two hundred fifty-nine characters in those plays, only seventy-one were female.  The Second Sex Fest seeks to address the disparity by producing a new works festival in which all the characters in the all the plays are female, and by publishing an anthology of the winning works so that the parts can be made available to acting classes and theater groups hungry for female-based drama.

So, what were the five plays produced, out of the forty submitted, like?  Well, for starters, it was a bit odd, perhaps, that all the chosen plays were written by men.  I say "perhaps" because, while I don't believe characters of a certain gender can only be convincingly written by authors of that gender, it may seem a bit one-sided to give only male playwrights the limelight.  Be that as it may, one must accept the judgment of the choosing committee that these were the best of the bunch.

As roles for women, the plays seemed mainly to offer caricatures: Erik Christian Hanson's Jean Awareness gave us two women who had been busted for protesting the Oscars on behalf of Jean Arthur, an Oscar-less actress famous for screwball comedies and regular gal roles; the actresses, Kerry Tattar and Bethany Fitzgerald, were quite engaging in parts that called for broadly conceived coarseness to bring out comically the women's emotional engagement with their heroine; D. Richard Tucker's A Very Lovely Dress, the only play that wasn't a comedy, in which a very maternal tailor (Elizabeth Reynolds) converses with a young girl (Susannah Resnick) selected to represent her people at a public ceremony -- the drama of the piece centered on the anxiety of a woman having to present herself as emblematic at such occasions; Jack Rushen's Jane in Hell in which Amanda Ratti played the appealing and promiscuous Jane who, in hell, has to periodically enact disco moves (because she said she hated disco) and who welcomes a former male sex partner Ira (Adrienne Brown) who has been condemned to endure eternity as a female while spied upon by his Jewish mother (Judy Lenzi-Magoveny) no less; John C. Davenport's Tough Love in which two manly biker girls, Tanya (Kaia Monroe) and Patty (Hallie Martinson) assert their heteroness the way manly male bikers might and Tanya shocks herself and Patty by deciding to become a wife; and Michael Ragozzino's Everything You Own in a Box to the Right, a political satire in which a Republican candidate Martha Margaret (Margaret Mann) finds herself catapulted into the big time where ambition dictates she align herself with the ultra-right wing aspects of the party as comically enacted by a trio of ideologues (Kelly Boucher, Patricia McCarthy, Barbara Hensel) sent to counsel her, over the protests of her more moderate assistant (Sandra Rodriguez).

For the most part the plays moved briskly, as dialogue-driven situations that could be quickly grasped.  Rather than full-scale productions, these were more like workshop presentations, script-in-hand.  Most of the appeal came from exchanges in which the actresses could bounce off one another verbally -- as for instance the great comic timing in Tough Love -- or from moments of physical comedy, as for instance Adrienne Brown having to disco while enacting a man in a tearful woman's body, or the priceless moment when Kelly Boucher, as a faux Southerner, coached Margaret Mann and Sandra Rodriguez in how to grab their balls.

Everything You Own, directed by T. Paul Lowry (who kept the comedy crackling in NHTC's production of the all-male play Glengarry Glen Ross last spring), was the most ambitious play presented.  Its portrayal of political machinations voiced and enacted entirely by women was a telling choice in the age of Hillary and Sarah, but the script could have used some trimming as it rambled a bit and the transformation of Martha into a spit-perfect mouther of Tea Party truisms, while sustained by an undercurrent of anger, only offered skewering of the GOP with no real surprises -- unlike, for instance, Jane in Hell 's introduction of a stereotypical Jewish mother into hell, which included her shock at Jesus' "I told you so" smile when she faced his judgment.

All in all, the offerings demonstrated a few points: male characters aren't necessay for successful plays, and plays with all female characters needn't be Soaps full of Oprahesque uplift.  If the plays still fell short of giving us complex female characters, well, there's always next year.

A New Bookstore, A Different Approach

On Friday night, your correspondent went to the opening night of Detritus, a new bookstore at 71 Orange Street supported through the city of New Haven's Project Storefronts program and curated by Alexis Zanghi of The Dirty Pond. Detritus aims to be a bookstore that reflects both the local literary scene and the eclectic taste of its curator; it also aims to be a place where literary events of many, many kinds can occur, making the bookstore as much a performance space as a bookstore, a place where New Haven's writers and readers can go to not only read each other, but see each other, hear each other, meet each other. And if the energy of its first evening is any indication, it will succeed. For the opening was crowded, the wine flowing, people standing around the sidewalk outside laughing and smoking cigarettes, as if it were a club (hooray!). And inside, your correspondent, who is not a talkative man by nature, could not stop talking to people—writers, readers, critics. Zanghi declared that the opening would last from 6 pm to 8 pm and had to shoo people out the door. We should make sure she has to keep doing that, for Detritus appears both to be filling a niche that New Haven needs and offering a different, and highly intriguing, model of what a bookstore can be.

Blame Yale: A Brief Todd Solondz Q&A

You’ll be glad to know that writer-director Todd Solondz is not finished rummaging through the inner lives of depressive perverts. That puts it more cruelly than Solondz would, which is part of his charm. With Life During Wartime, a quasi-sequel, as he has called it, to his 1998 film Happiness (i.e. “the one about the pedophile”), Solondz revisits the variously troubled characters from that earlier film, and even recasts them. Instead of Philip Seymour Hoffman, we get Michael Kenneth Williams (who played Omar on The Wire). Instead of Jon Lovitz, we get Paul Reubens. And so on.

What remains is an arresting affinity for suburban dysfunction. You might call it the Solondz touch. You might call it an inappropriate touch. Here’s what the filmmaker has to say for himself.

Do people stop you in the street and say, “What’s wrong with you?”

I mean, people have been nice...to my face. I don’t quiz people. I don’t interrogate them. When people say nice things I say thank you. So no. I have to say it says something good about human nature that many people do stop and say nice things to me, actually. On the street, in the subway, what have you. But I know there are just as many people who hate everything I do. And they have the good discretion and good tact never to assault me.

I mean this as a compliment to you both: If Paul Reubens deserves to be in anyone’s films, it’s yours.

I’ve always loved him. He read for me years ago. So I had a sense of what he could do, and we both took a leap of faith in each other here. With Paul of course there’s an extra layer of pathos or poignancy because of the whole history that the audience is aware of with him. And also, no one has any idea that he’s even capable of such a performance. And that’s all very exciting. And I’m very playful; in my head the character probably even has his own Pee Wee Herman doll.

That’s something to think about. How did you first discover cinema?

I went to Yale, and they didn’t have a film major. But that’s where I first thought of the idea. I think because I was socially shy or awkward and felt intimidated. When I went, we had VHS tapes, they had film societies. It could be a Howard Hawks double-bill, followed by Maya Deren, followed by Bergman, Garbo. Every night, many options. And I went out all the time. In part to escape the pressures, the social pressures, and in the process I fell in love with movies in a way that I hadn’t taken seriously as a child. I mean, I can remember I was 16 and my mom came home, and she said, “I saw a movie, Todd. What a movie. It was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” I said, “Oh, I want to see that.” And she said, “No, no, you’re too young.” So I was very protected, in what I saw growing up. It had to be rated G. And then things changed in college. I didn’t have to understand a movie. I just let it all wash over me.

So at what age would the younger you be old enough to see the movies you now make?

I have a different viewpoint from my mom. I think children have built-in censors. I think parents are always worried about, “Oh my god, the sex, the violence.” But I can remember, as a kid, anytime they started kissing, I went for the Jujubes at the concession. I took a break. No interest. And I think usually the more anxious the parents are about that stuff, probably they don’t realize they themselves are the main source of whatever nightmares these kids are having.

What will be your next movie?

The title is Dark Horse. And I can tell you there’s no child molestation, rape or masturbation in it. But I’m afraid those are the only details I can share at this point.

Those are useful details.

It’s an abstraction, really, until it’s made. You have all sorts of plans; nothing ever turns out the way you plan it. If I were maybe smarter, wiser, I would maybe have a real career. But I’m not interested in that. I just make movies that interest me in my own way. I don’t pay attention -- I can’t -- to what I maybe should do. A lot of times I think, “Oh this could make a lot of money, I have a very marketable idea.” But then I end up writing something unmarketable. I listen to whatever compels me to put pen to paper. I don’t have a strategy. I’m very fortunate. When I look back, I say, “Oh my god, someone gave me money to make these movies.” It’s amazing. But I never presume that I will get money again. I have to be zen about all of this. I mean, you can just get depressed and jump out the window. But I have a sense of humor about it all.

So we beat on . . .

muse, the final show of the Yale Summer Cabaret 2010 season, is an original dance-theater piece, a two-character drama that presents the story of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald from the point of view of the afterlife. Brenna Palughi conceived the idea, scripted it in collaboration with her production team, Danny Binstock, Walter Chon, and Adina Verson, directs and choreographed the show, and stars as Zelda.  She finds in the story of these literary icons the kind of vivid fascination that, these days, attaches to the likes of Brangelina.  Scott and Zelda lived lives that were not only passionate and artistic, but were also emblems of their era, the Roaring Twenties, forever associated with them, both because of Scott's works, such as The Great Gatsby (1925), and the couple's lifestyle.

To present the reality of the couple, Palughi's script uses only the duo's actual words -- mainly from their considerably articulate correspondence.  But rather than try to recreate the events of the couple's life, Palughi cannily creates a retrospective fantasy, a kind of Satrean "no exit" space where the couple have to face eternity by trying to make sense of what they were to each other and why it went so wrong.

One of the most unforgettable moments, as a glimpse into the abyss the public couple tried to skirt, derives from a transcript of a session at the Fitzgeralds' home with a  psychologist (voice of Joby Earle) in attendance to act as arbitrator.  Zelda, who had wanted to be a dancer, published a novel, thus treading on her husband's territory.  Worse, she was now working on a novel based on events Scott was trying for years to draft as material for what would eventually become Tender is the Night (1934).  To hear Scott baldly declare the conditions under which his wife must live, in order to continue being his wife, is rather appalling to anyone who expects something closer to mutuality in marriage.  On the other hand, the position Scott speaks from is not really one of bullying strength, no matter how his words sound.  He is in need of Zelda, hence the title of the piece: muse.  Without Zelda's participation in his life, Scott seems to fear a loss of his bearings, but at the same time, any act she might take in her own interest would be considered a complete betrayal.

As Scott, Binstock enacts vividly Scott's nature via dance and dialogue.  He displays graceful self-control in a lengthy dance piece with Palughi that narrates the couple's entire story with considerable economy and aplomb, but we see the pressures he faces take actual physical toll on his movements.  And in his spoken protests and pleas Binstock shows us a Scott verging on a loss of control that, if it were to occur, might have been a saving grace.  Instead, we always feel Scott's grasp of himself, so thoroughly buttoned up in his lovely suits, no less tenacious for being tentative and vulnerable.  Only when he dances do we see some of the "light fantastic" that makes the prose so golden, so self-assured.

In a segment where word and movement are particularly well matched and powerful, Zelda kneels on the stage reading a letter from Scott comprised of nothing but hurtful, insistent, resentful, relentless questions while behind her Scott performs a marionette's series of jerks, slaps, and contortions.  Here we see the perfect visual realization of something almost inhumanly mechanical -- the way his concept of himself as a writer controlled Scott just as fiercely as his need to control Zelda.

As Zelda, Palughi's dancing is able to express an openness and abandon that seems, from all accounts, to have been part of Zelda's fascination.  But it's also fascinating to hear how lucid she could be, even when threatened with an asylum.  Palughi's voice at times gets strident but never veers into the kind of hysteria we might expect.  Her Zelda is verbally in control, even if her expression at times becomes a doll-like fixity, the mournful gaze of a spirit trapped forever in her husband's vision of her.

For all the tensions and darkness of this marriage, Palughi's sense of the material highlights its romantic potential.  Elizabeth Groth's costumes are lovely; her set is a world literally papered with words; the music -- Gershwin for instance -- breathes with rapture and jaunty melancholy; Sarah Lasley's newsreel-like projections add the necessary touch of the mediated reality that encroached on these lives, making them famous and a part of our nation's permanent record.

In the afterlife, "hell is other people," but if the people were truly a couple -- overriding even "til death do us part" -- it may be possible to see that the feeling "to be young then was very heaven" might also override all-too-human failings with the heady thrill of being "beautiful and damned" for all time.

muse;  conceived and directed by Brenna Palughi

July 29-August 14, 8 p.m.; August 7, 2 p.m.

Yale Summer Cabaret: 203.432.1567; SummerCabaret.org

Strange Love in NYC

When it debuted in Yale Cabaret's 2009/10 Season, Janyia Antrum's campy sci-fi musical Strange Love in Outer Space was the success story of The Dwight/Edgewood Project (see my review here).  Now its success continues with the play's debut in New York in the eclectic and exciting New York Fringe Festival, Aug. 14, 17, 19, 21, and 23, including a mention in the New York Times. The Dwight/Edgewood Project is held every July under the auspices of Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theater.  It's a four week program that introduces New Haven area kids to the elements of theater, from playwrighting and design to acting and directing, with classes staffed by Yale School of Drama students.  For the last two years, August Lewis Troup Middle School and Wexler-Grant Community School have been partners in the project.

Janyia wrote the first part of Strange Love in summer 2009, at the age of twelve.  When she got home after the project ended, she felt the urge to continue the story and wrote a second part.  The Yale Cabaret commissioned a third act and then produced the play.  Jorge Rodriguez, who has worked with Janyia as a producer from the beginning, comments: Janyia "wrote a play that was incredibly well structured, with outstanding character development and incredibly funny."  The play impressed her fellow students at D/EP and the staff "was stunned by her sense of comedic timing.  The zany, campy humor that distinguishes this play were of her own creation and a result, as she often joked about, of years of watching TV sitcoms like The Nanny."

Christopher Mirto, who directed the D/EP production and the Yale Cab production, is at the helm again for the Fringe production.  He also plays the memorable role of Mr. Grumis, a fish-like alien who courts the statuesque Splontusia.  For Mirto, the play works for a lot of reasons:

"Janyia's story is actually really moving and has a strong leading female character. It's campy fun but very serious and imaginative and comes from such a genuine place. It's surprisingly smart, has great comic timing, [and] the songs move the plot forward; the characters are crazy, but have very clear desires. The Fringe is a good fit because it's an unusual show in style, form, characters, design. It doesn't have a big or complicated design, so it's easy to transfer. Kind of like Pixar films, it appeals to adults and children."

The Fringe version features some of the same cast as the Cabaret version -- Mirto, and his longtime associate Brian Valencia, who also mentored Janyia in D/EP, as the dastardly Dr. Tuscanunin -- but also presents some changes, with Caitlin Clouthier, from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, in the central role of multi-eyed Splontusia, and recent YSD graduate Aja Naomi King as B'Quisha Star Jones, the dog/pirate queen.  The new production also boasts a new song.

The Fringe is a huge, sprawling drama festival that Mirto calls "a total crapshoot."  The sublime and the ridiculous rub shoulders and you go in not quite knowing what you're going to get.  Strange Love has already proven itself capable of mixing it up with the challenging and off-the-wall offerings of the Cab, and now it will run side-by-side with the off-off-Broadway shows of the West Village.

Mirto's excited by the challenge and comments, "There is this really nice non-jaded aspect of Janyia that is refreshing for me: she reminds me that it should be fun, it should entertain, and it should be simple; and that imagination goes a long way!"

It's an imagination that has created a play that's out of this world, a play that has already gone a long way from an afterschool project to a New York city debut.

Strange Love in Outer Space, A Musical Traumedy

Book and Lyrics by Janyia Antrum; Music by Nick Morgan; Directed by Christopher Mirto

The Cherry Pit (venue #14), 155 Bank Street, New York, NY (West & Washington Street)

Sat. Aug. 14, 2:15 p.m.; Tues. Aug. 17, 10:30 p.m.; Thurs. Aug. 19, 8 p.m.; Sat. Aug. 21, 5:30 p.m.; Mon. Aug. 23, 4 p.m; Tickets $15-$18; for tickets: www.FringeNYC.org

Presented by The New York International Fringe Festival; A Production of The Present Company

Jeff VanderMeer's "The Goat Variations" and "Three Days in a Border Town"

One of the abiding pleasures of writing books, and being lucky enough to have them published, is the way in which they have led me to discover parts of the literary world I may not have discovered otherwise. Among them is a brand of science fiction and fantasy that's been given all kinds of labels—my favorite is the New Weird—but basically boils down to books in which many strange and interesting things happen, and in which the writing is really, really good. My running favorite author in this group, which makes him one of my favorite living authors, period, is Jeff VanderMeer, a prolific and vastly talented writer perhaps best known for his books about a fantastical, decaying, and distinctly postcolonial city called Ambergris. In these books, VanderMeer displays not only an astonishingly rich imagination, but also a pretty ridiculous command of numerous fiction styles, from quasi-Borgesian to hard-boiled noir. His books are social, political, personal: everything I want in fiction. If I were the competitive type, I'd say he's the man to beat. Which is why when Matthew Cheney—an NHR contributor, among many, many other things—asked me if I'd contribute to a series of reviews on VanderMeer's new short-story collection, The Third Bear, I was all over it.

I said before that one of the things I like so much about VanderMeer's writing is his deft mixture of the social, political, and personal. "The Goat Variations," which Kevin Brockmeier singled out for praise in his blurb of The Third Bear, accomplishes this to great effect, as the leaders of a nation falling apart at the seams catch wind that a calamity is coming, but don't know how to stop it. Oh, right—this story also involves alternate realities and time travel, which makes for a really heady mixture. Conceptually, VanderMeer sets up a very difficult task, that of writing directly about George W. Bush without hitting us over the head, and yet still giving the story teeth. He might not quite get away with it; there's still a sense that VanderMeer's too close, that there hasn't been quite enough time to digest it all. I say this with humility, though: I would have been a bit frightened to even attempt to write a short story like this, and certainly wouldn't have done as well. And the story still has plenty of teeth, as I find myself returning in my mind to VanderMeer's vivid image of George W. at the beginning of his administration, bludgeoned by catastrophe, the world as he knows it ending all around him, and him just not knowing what to do.

And then there's "Three Days in a Border Town," which is one of the best pieces of short fiction I've read in years; it's no wonder it showed up on awards and best-of lists when it was published in 2004. In it, a sharpshooter moves through a dusty border town in the middle of a desert, looking for her husband, but it's about so much more than that. It's about devastating loss, hovering just beyond the horizon; it's about figuring out how to move on. Matthew Cheney has said why this story is amazing as well as anyone, and he's right. It's Beckett, it's the better end of Dennis Lehane (particularly the short story "Until Gwen," with which it shares a narration written, with wild success, in the second person), and it's VanderMeer at his best, precise and luminous, transporting and transfiguring. "Three Days in a Border Town" is the kind of story that seems to take in the whole world, to be about everything at once, and it shows that when VanderMeer's writing at the top of his game—which is pretty much all the time—it's foolish to talk about beating him, because you can't.

Enjoying New Haven: A Guide to the Area by Betsy Sledge and Eugenia Fayen

The closing of Clark's Dairy, and the news that Rudy's will be relocating to a location that bears absolutely no resemblance to the place it's been since it opened in 1934, have bummed me out significantly, but I think I can handle it. What made me realize I had to snap out of it (particularly in regard to Clark's) was the act of stumbling on a copy of Enjoying New Haven: A Guide to the Area, by Betsy Sledge and Eugenia Fayen. This is a little paperback that I remember my parents having a copy of in the late 1980s. I don't think I ever looked at it then but I do remember throwing it out when they moved out of their apartment downtown. The edition I remember -- and which is now sitting on the desk next to me -- is from 1989 and was published by Sledge and Fayen as East Rock Press, Ltd., and it is a fine little guide to the city with some really lovely prints. I found a copy of it a couple of Saturdays ago. I had spent the day at the Institute Library, a wonderful quiet place to go when you need a place that's wonderful and quiet, and on leaving, I went into the English Building Market, which is a couple of doors down. I cruise the place fairly regularly but hardly ever do I look at the books; however, this book caught my eye: I thought, "Oh, what the hell," and bought it.

So let me tell you: reading a guide to New Haven from 1989 is a trip. It's really a strange experience. I found myself remembering shops that I had really and truly forgotten about, though they were once landmarks of downtown New Haven. Scribbles, a shop on Chapel Street, beneath the Yale Center for British Art: you went there for stupid doodads, stickers, obscene greeting cards, and other things no sane person would spend money on. I'd forgotten all about that place. And what makes that awful is, I actually worked there briefly. For about two days. The job was so deplorable that, at the age of 16, I phoned them and said, "Yeah, hi, I won't be coming in. No, I don't need to pick up the paycheck. Keep it." I never wanted to set foot in there again.

How could I have forgotten about Scribbles? And yet I did.

The guide mentions Gentree's, a fairly dignified restaurant that used to be on York Street, in a building that no longer exists because Yale tore it down. It was on York near Chapel, a site now housing the new part of the Art and Architecture school. Gentree's was originally a men's clothing store; I own an overcoat from there, which I acquired at a tag sale on Orange Street simply because I wanted an article of clothing with the Gentree's label. The men's shop closed, and somehow Gentree's was re-conceived as a restaurant, the kind of place where you could get decent burgers and serious drinks. Plants; dark wood; 80s yuppie heaven. Gentree's closed, and I was sad; it wasn't that it was such a great restaurant, but it was reliable. Fitzwilly's, which was on the corner of Park and Elm Streets, was a similar establishment, but much larger, and I was very sorry when they closed, too.

And the Old Heidelberg! Which is now a Thai restaurant! How can it be that the Old Heidelberg is a Thai restaurant? Well, it is the case, my friends. Been that way since 1991. Which means that the Old Heidelberg has been gone for almost twenty years. Which means that there's at least one generation of people to whom that space has "always" been a Thai restaurant.

A sobering thought.

New Haven is, I suspect, no different from any other small city, or even town, in this regard: any business establishment that opens and then lasts longer than three to five years becomes, simply out of its survival, an institution. Some institutions are more entrenched than others: Rudy's may thrive in its new spot, but it won't be Rudy's, really; it'll be something else -- but even so, you know that for the next ten years, there will be people sitting around bars around town going, "Man, remember Rudy's, that night when...." I know that's how it is with the Grotto, a club on lower Crown Street that closed in I think 1988 or maybe it was 1989. New Haven is filled with sentimental chumps like me who remember every club, every restaurant they ever ate at, every store where they ever bought shoes, and lament their closings. If you don't believe me, there is proof on Facebook, even about the shoe store: Cheryl Andresen's shop Solemate, which started on State Street and moved to York Street, is much missed by many. I still wear shoes I bought from Cheryl and her shop closed in 2000. Are people more sentimental in New Haven than in other places? I have no idea. But when I meet someone who has been here a long time, inevitably our first conversation includes a litany of "do you remembers": the Daily Caffe; the Willoughby's on Chapel Street; The Moon on Whalley; the Third World International Cafe... it's always sort of romantic, actually, these conversations. We woo each other with our memory banks of the Nine Squares and the streets that radiate from it. Tight friendships are born out of these shared memories of places long gone.

Mamoun's is still here. Mysteriously, Clarie's Corner Copia is still here. Ashley's is here. All true.

But I miss Thomas Sweet. I miss the pancake restaurant that used to be on York Street. (Not the crepe place; I mean the pancake place; it was where Bangkok Gardens is.) And don't even get me started on the bookstores.

I Used to Be Smarter

…or at least, that is the net effect of what aging, children, pets, mortgage payments have me sometimes believing.

When I was a child I thought myself bright. Many of us at one time probably thought the same of ourselves. It was the euphoria of youth, the deeply felt conviction that with a little application, one's quick-to-understand-anything mental prowess could master any subject placed before it.

So when did the realization arrive that being some sort of prodigy was not my destiny? Indeed, when one reads about prodigies, would such a destiny even have been desirable?

Oh, but the power! That sense of infinite capacity powered by youth and hormones. It is something I sorely miss.

Like many who write for or read this site, I was a reader, too, and a precocious one at that. (But weren't we all?) The transition for me from the Mighty Thor to the Mighty Shakespeare was sudden, taking my father as much by surprise as me. He was kind enough to make the switch from bringing home issues of Iron Man to leaving Signet editions of Dickens on my rolltop desk. He was a good father, and he unwittingly encouraged me in my adolescent hubris.

I read voraciously (didn't we all?) and performed reasonably well in school—except for those classes that I had consciously decided not to succeed in. The world seemed my oyster, easily pried with the knife of my intellect.  In short, I felt really, really smart. I was sharper, I was funnier, I was livelier, I was wittier.

Or was I? Sometimes I think I was these things because now there are so many days as a mid-40s, mid-career, midlife so-and-so that I just feel plain exhausted. Tired. Weak. Pooped. I should exercise, but it bores me. I should eat well, but I get hungry. I should read more and watch less television, but my eyes hurt and besides, my attention wanders: I think I hear my children calling…or is that my wife? And don't let me forget that I need to: bring the car in for a repair, pay the Visa bill, renew my license, send a Bar Mitzvah card (with check, of course)...

In Arthur Conan Doyle's Study in Scarlet, when Dr. John Watson first meets the great Sherlock Holmes, he is utterly flabbergasted to learn:

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

Ignorant of Copernican theory?  This is detective fiction as farce. But even more interesting is the explanation:

"You see," Holmes explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

Yeah, the italics are mine.  Honestly, I have no idea if Doyle is toying with readers or metaphorically treating late Victorian views of memory and forgetfulness. It doesn't really matter. Holmes purposely unloads any accumulation of "useless facts." For me, the act of disposal is thrust upon me, willy-nilly. The space I once reserved for the minutiae that made me a living room whiz during Jeopardy or reasonably competitive in a game of Trivial Pursuit is now taken up with doctors' appointments and trips to the supermarket, worries about my 401k (or what's left of it) and making sure the gas tank is full.

I used to be smarter, or so I would like to think. And yet, I know this is not entirely true. Separate from the reams of data that literally wrinkle my face like pen strokes gone awry, signs of knowledge dearly bought by experience, I do know more about some things than I once did, I am more capable at some mental tasks than I once was.

For example, I know more about the history of literature than I ever did upon my graduation from college. I'm also far better at crossword puzzles. I suspect I may even be a better chess player, which isn't saying much since I always sucked at the game. (Remember, youth had inspired me with the belief that with enough application I could be great at chess, not that I was.) I definitely know more about politics and how it works—daily blog reading has trained me well in that regard. I am definitely a better writer.

But has my writing all this made me feel any better? Not necessarily. In some ways, it has suggested how wrong-headed the sentiment is. I used to be smarter doesn't seem like much nowadays when the smartest guys in the room so successfully melted down the economy of the United States. Suddenly I'm not so inclined to take stock in this type of nostalgia. Already it has begun to pale. Maybe I used to be smarter. But I think I was also more callow, more selfish, more spoiled, and hard knocks have made me smarter in the ways that count.

Or so I'd like to think.

True, too True

Dino Buzzati once began a story: “A strange thing has just happened to me – an extraordinary thing – I haven’t decided whether or not to tell my editor.” That’s a chilling but accurate glimpse into the soul of the freelance writer. For the better part of the last twenty years, whenever anything strange or extraordinary has happened to me, I’ve immediately wondered whether to tell it to Alison True, the editor of the Chicago Reader. I got lost on the way to the airport – a perfect little anecdote for the Reader. I contracted a rare eye disease – during the treatment, I was taking notes for the eventual feature story in the Reader. A man sitting next to me on the subway dropped dead of a heart attack – and I began musing, “Write this up for Alison, collect a couple of hundred bucks … hey, this is turning out to be a pretty good day.” The Reader is one of the most successful and longest-lived alt-weeklies in America. Alison started there in 1984, just out of college – her first job was in the mail room – and she was named editor in 1995. She’s spent her entire career staying out of the limelight. If you Google her – or anyway if you did up until a couple of weeks ago – the only hits are in generic articles called things like “Fifty Women in Chicago Publishing.” No controversial interviews, no grand pronouncements on the future of journalism. Her byline has rarely appeared in the Reader itself; in most issues, the only place her name turns up is on the masthead. But the paper has been, week after week, a continual demonstration of her skill and taste as an editor. Many people who’ve worked there over the years have thought of it as Alison’s high-pressure boot camp in old-school journalism.

Mostly the Reader has specialized in local affairs – which given that the locality is Chicago has meant a certain preoccupation with the corrupt and the bizarrely violent, the sorts of hot-button issues that the local mainstream papers are too complacent to touch (there were two decades of stories about police torturing confessions from suspects – the ringleader was recently convicted in a federal court). But Alison has also encouraged writers to wander and experiment. I spent many years, with Alison’s encouragement, pushing at the boundaries of long-form journalism. 30,000 words about American memories of World War 2. 35,000 words about my father-in-law, a Russian émigré who grew up in China. 45,000 words about the history of my family house in small-town Illinois. Each time I’d tell Alison that I’d finally come up with an idea for a story she’d never be able to use. “Try it anyway,” she’d say. “I love a challenge.”

Alison has also put her pervasive but unobtrusive stamp on the Reader’s internal culture. Its original crew of editors practiced a management style I’d call “hippie machismo.” They weren’t a touchy-feely crowd, those guys (and they were all guys). I told one of them that I’d been writing for the Reader for years and still had no idea whether they even liked my work, because they’d never said a word to me about it. “We publish you,” he answered. “That ought to be praise enough.” Alison changed all that. She’s regularly complimented people on good work (the first time she did it with me, I thought she was being sarcastic). The Reader’s copy editors became unfailingly nice, even when they were persecuting your first draft with mosquito-swarms of nitpicks. Alison got to be an adept at the dark art of coaxing writers into revisions. One time when I was dawdling over a story, she called me near midnight and said she couldn’t go home until I turned in the revised copy. I parried by suggesting that we both get some sleep and I’d send it to her first thing in the morning. She sighed. “That’s okay, I understand,” she said. “You get some sleep. I’ll just stay here and catch up on my paperwork.”

I knew she was bluffing. But I capitulated anyway – because I also knew (and she knew I knew) that she was eight and a half months pregnant.

Alison cajoled, and nagged, and bribed, and badgered; she put up with all kinds of tantrums (my wife says she once passed by my study and heard me yelling into the phone, “I am speechless with rage!”); I ultimately wrote around a quarter of a million words for her – and I wasn’t even one of the Reader’s most prolific contributors. Some of it is among the best writing I ever expect to do. But the highest compliment I can pay to Alison as an editor is that I think the Reader got better after I stopped writing for it.

The Reader was a comfortably profitable business for three decades, and then almost overnight began hemorrhaging money (the advent of Craig's List wiped out its gigantic weekly section of classified ads). Since then, there’s been wave after wave of budget cuts, staff firings and layoffs, and the inexorable shrinking of editorial space down to almost nothing. My long-form stories were among the first casualties. There were no hard feelings (I’ve gone on to an even longer form known as “books”) and Alison has still tried to get in a couple of little pieces of mine into the paper every year or so. But meanwhile, with a ghost-town office and a skeleton staff, she’s rallied and been printing some of the finest journalism in the Reader’s history. The Reader has been running stories about Chicago’s hidden world of financial chicanery that in a just world would have earned a Pulitzer. But then, if there really was any justice, people would be talking about Alison’s run at the Reader as the alt-weekly equivalent of William Shawn’s glory days at The New Yorker.

In the last few weeks, as the news spread that Alison was suddenly gone from the Reader, I’ve been getting emails from some of the old crew asking me how she’s doing and what the real story of her departure is. I love gossip as much as anybody, but the answers are disappointing. She’s not bad, considering; and there isn’t much of a real story. The Reader’s newest owners have a new business plan (it involves “pushing at” the firewall between editorial and advertising) and Alison doesn’t fit in. Nothing personal. There’s just for a lot of us around town the soundless gut-punch awareness of her absence. It’s a strange, even extraordinary feeling. I keep thinking I should write it up for her. It’ll take me a while to get used to the idea that I can’t.

Lee Sandlin is the author of Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild, to be published in October by Pantheon.

Writers Artists Collaborative

Whenever a writing contest comes along that we believe in, we feel happy to post about. We reproduce the announcement from the Westport Arts Center below.

……..

The Westport Arts Center, in partnership with Ina Chadwick's MouseMuse Productions, is seeking well-crafted memoirs of up to 1500 words for its upcoming writing competition.

As a multi-disciplinary arts organization, WAC is committed to integrating the literary and visual arts within its regular programming. Building on the success of our two previous writing initiatives, the Writers Artists Collaborative will rely on the Arts Center's visual arts exhibitions as a starting point for literary exploration.

This writing contest will culminate with professional actors reading the winning works at a festive reception and award ceremony in the WAC gallery on Sunday, October 17, 2010.

Top winners will also receive:

1. $175 from the WAC Writer's Endowment

2. Online publication on the WAC web literary archive

3. Memoir read live on radio

4. Publication in Weston Magazine and its affiliate magazines

Entries are due September 7, 2010. Download the entry form here.

Literary Regrets

Lisa Dickler Awano is a scholar of Alice Munro and an alumna of the University of Chicago, which I attended as well. She is also a subscriber to New Haven Review and a forthcoming contributor.

When we saw each other at the most recent New Haven Review gala, we talked briefly, as we have before, of the ol' "U of C." She had recently visited the campus, where Amy Kass was being honored. Our conversation turned, as per usual, to the topic of faculty we had known.

For me, Amy Kass, and her equally eminent husband and fellow faculty member, Leon, were not among those with whom I had the honor of taking a class (notwithstanding their conservative credentials). But Lisa and I were able to share fond remembrances of David Bevington, the U of C's premiere Shakespeare scholar. (Bevington's edition of the Shakespeare's complete works remarks for me a touchstone of quality in editing and exposition of the Bard's work.)

Our conversation then took a curious turn. She knew that the greatest influence on my early development as a reader and critic had been literary scholar William Veeder. But that influence, as I've written elsewhere, affected less the shape or quality of my criticism than the confidence—sometimes reckless—that underwrites it. In brief, Veeder trained me in the attitude a literary critic must take to the object of his attention rather than in the actual tools of analysis that should be brought to bear. For a critic to do his work well, one simply cannot tread a path of undue reverence to authors or their work.

And while this was a necessary first step to the art of reading well, the tools he offered at the time did not, as I suspected then but know now, deliver much substance in the way of interpretation or criticism. This is seemingly harsh, but it is without doubt the case that Veeder's passion then for psychoanalytic criticism offered readings that, in my humble view, were seemingly complex but terribly hollow. While the article on him in Wikipedia conveys the strengths of his basic positions as a literary pragmatist (that meaning is engendered by the intersection of text and reader in a given context), his in-class instruction often dwelled to absurd lengths on intricate variants to the Oedipus complex and other Freudian and post-Freudian phenomena.

Veeder supplied the starting blocks. But my "literary regret," small and speculative though it may be, was the opportunity I missed to have a baton passed to me by U of C's best-known literary critic then: Wayne Booth.

Part of the reason for the missed opportunity was simple timing. Somehow I managed to graduate from U of C in three years (an achievement not to be mistaken for any act of genius or even above average intelligence on my part: I sweated seven years on a doctorate that wasn't all that great when I finished.) My junior year was thus also my senior year, which gave me the privilege of shouldering my way into any class I wished but did not bestow the magical property of compelling professors to return to the classroom early from sabbaticals. The academic year after, I bridled with jealousy when a peer and friend regaled me with tales of Booth's erudition and kindness during classes he took the year after my graduation.

At the time, there was no doubt in my mind that the star who shined brightest in U of C's English department then was Booth. True, by the mid-1980s, my undergraduate years, his star had begun to fade under the glare of deconstruction and a cadre of poststructural reworkings of feminist, psychoanalytic, and Marxist literary theory. Booth's theories seem quaint by comparison, but with the receding of the Continental tide of theory, the artfulness and articulateness of his struggle with issues subsequently advanced by narratology and reader response criticism seem to have worn well, or at least, better than some other theories.

This, of course, is just one reader's opinion, and Booth was not necessarily my favorite or even the most convincing critical theorist. But I do think he was, at the time, the best U of C had to offer. But I'll never really know. It is always possible that he as an instructor and I as a student would have been less than compatible. But such is the nature of regrets, even literary ones, which exist in some other universe with its own history.

Do You Believe in Magic?

Director Devin Brain and the cast of the current Yale Summer Cabaret show, The Phoenix, have given themselves quite a task: to render a situation that could be either fantasy or reality, when either is potentially alienating.  Based on a haunting story by best-selling Australian author Isobelle Carmody, the play has been derived by the cast via an improvisational process of discovery, which means that the presentation is not scripted so much as agreed upon through trial and error during a long period of gestation.

If that sounds daunting, it should.  But it also may be the best way to approach a story like this which relies so much on shared fantasy among its characters.  The logic seems to be: if the actors are making things up together to make the play exist in the first place, they'll be all the more convincing as the fantasizing characters they portray.

William (Ben Horner), we're told, is the "local feral child" -- an amusing appellation, but one that means his character will be hard to read.  He addresses Ragnar (Shannon Sullivan) as a princess -- and not figuratively.  He actually seems to believe they are foundlings from another world, left to wander a beach deserted but for a wounded gull Ragnar names Greedy.  In addition to using a bird puppet, the play fleshes out the bird via William Demeritt, complete with feathers at his temples, a brace, and a crutch, appearing at times like a guardian spirit fallen on hard times as he manipulates dolls that emulate the scenes the actors play out.

Though the dark backstories of Ragnar and William are a bit sketchily thrown at us before we have much idea of what's going on, Horner and Sullivan fascinate us with the strange mix of desperation, denial, and happy inspirations that unite the duo.  One device I particularly liked was Sullivan showing us, mutely, a series of photographs while looking at us with facial expressions that telegraphed exactly how Ragnar felt about each image and how we should read them.  That didn't mean we necessarily grasped the narrative, but the effort to communicate it was palpable.

But when Torvald (Joby Earle), a charismatic boy from a different class and school, enters the scene, things really begin to click.  Before that we're just trying to follow the logic of a folie à deux that seems harmless if unsettling; once the third character is introduced we have a conflict.  Will he enter -- as he seems to -- the rather grand, Dungeons and Dragons-like world the other two mentally inhabit, or repudiate it?  And if he does enter it, is he sincere or after something?

At this point in the story, the three principals act out their interactions via the dolls, and suddenly a feeling of truly being transported to those fabled lands of childhood playtime comes to life.  And once Brain and company has us entertaining how wonderfully trusting and expressive and vulnerable that world of shared make believe can be, they've got us primed for where they want to take us.  It becomes an uncompromising and tragic play about the unwritten laws we intuit and then either respect or betray when entering into private, personal bonds with one another.

As ever at the Cabaret, it's the unexpected touches that impress us as theater: the song William makes up, seemingly on the spot; Ragnar's bike helmet; Torvald's inspired use of an overhead projector; moody musical tones, particularly an expressive acoustic guitar part, that surrounds the action, provided by musical director Nathan Roberts; and, finally, that frail craft -- a boat upon a boat -- that gives us poetry as closure.

The Phoenix, from the story by Isobelle Carmody; adapted by Devin Brain and the cast; directed by Devin Brain

July 1-17, 8 p.m.; additional 2 p.m. show on the 10th; Yale Summer Cabaret, 203.432.1567

BBC Blues

I have been watching a lot of BBC Television lately. This surge of anglophilia was occasioned by my wife's return from Walmart with two collections of "BBC Video Classics" tucked into a plastic shopping bag. The first, "The Charles Dickens Collection," contained dramatizations of Our Mutual Friend, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Bleak House, Mrtin Chuzzelwit, and Oliver Twist; the second, "The Jane Austen Collection," featured—naturally enough—adaptations of her six complete novels.

Working my way through the latter, while folding laundry or stuffing envelopes, proved both illuminating and disappointing. The first thing you need to know is that both collections comprise BBC's first round of Masterpiece Theatre-like forays into high literature. All of the productions appeared in the 1970s and 1980s and were shot, to their detriment, as video.

Now let me be clear: I'm an unapologetically avid admirer of Austen. But no amount of avidity can forgive the woodenness of these productions. The stilted deliveries, passive blocking and not infrequent lack of dramatic subtext are fittingly complemented by the flaccid camera work, wan indoor lighting, and general absence of sound engineering. (Everybody speaks with a faint hallway echo).

While hardly distraught, I was, well, dismayed. Did Austen translate that badly? BBC productions clearly have the luxury of length, the lack of which in Hollywood productions was a continual source of frustration for me. In Emma Thompson's rendering of Sense and Senibility (1995), there is no midnight visit by the faithless but regretful John Willoughby, seeking forgiveness for his caddish behavior; in Keira Knightly's Pride and Prejudice (2005), scenes in Rosings Park and Pemberley are painfully abridged, while several characters were altogether eliminated.

Perhaps the faults I perceived lay in the dramatizations (the British term then for adaptation). I had started with Pride and Prejudice, a personal favorite. This BBC version had the distinct honor of being adapted for video by British writer Fay Weldon. Yet despite the seeming coup in selection of dramaturg, the execution was pale at best. It certainly did not compare favorably to BBC's 6-part reworking in 1995 with Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet and Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. And yet somehow, I did receive some modicum of pleasure, so I turned to my next favorite novel, which I had recently read: Persuasion.

Ack! It was unwatchable. The blind were surely leading the blind when someone cast 38-year-old Ann Firbank as the 27-year-old Anne Elliot. Even worse, that someone then set her against the much younger looking Valerie Gearon (who was 34 but looked 25!), who played Anne's elder sister, Elizabeth Elliot. The overall effect was creepy, with the younger sister, the romantic object of the novel, looking like the older sister's mother!

The real test ultimately proved to be Sense and Sensibility because here I could compare BBC and Hollywood productions and directly. (I owned the 1995 movie version.) Now I could assess more intelligently what worked and what did not. The differences were palpable. Despite the inevitable contractions that movies impose on their novelistic sources, both adaptations shared a number of identical lines, demonstrating by contrast what real talent can deliver. Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Hugh Grant, and Kate Winslet earn their reputations for subtlety and expressiveness when compared to the weirdly vapid and at times uninspired verbiage of the BBC production, which no doubt explains Masterpiece Theatre's reputation among some Americans in the '70s and '80s as a waste of cathode rays.

And yet…and yet, I can't seem to give up my commitment to Austen, even when done badly. To be blunt, as dramatizations of literary classics go, these BBC "video classics" suck—but not so much as not to be worth the watching. So is this what makes a "classic" a classic? Somehow the stories still compel even as the productions repel. There is a mystery here that I can't explain.

But forgive me. I see I have a load of laundry on the bed and Mansfield Park is in the DVD drive, so I best get back to work…

Strange Bedfellows

David Rabe, Girl By The Road At Night, NY: Simon and Schuster, 228 pgs. One could say that David Rabe is obsessed with the Vietnam War.  Best known for a trio of award-winning plays in the '70s that deal with that conflict and its effect on those who fought in it, Rabe has more recently turned from theater and taken up fiction-writing and now, with his latest novel, returns to the war that made him famous.  We could say that he does so because he knows he can write about it well -- Rabe served in Vietnam in the mid-'60s -- and because, perhaps, it's a part of our history that never goes away.

I found myself questioning that last supposition in the early going of this poetically spare, episodic novel.  Is Vietnam a national obsession still, or is it Rabe's more than ours?  Perhaps more to the point -- regardless of what you think of the war and its era -- is the question: is there anything more to be done with it?

It may be an unfair question, but when you see the novel's rather taciturn and self-involved protagonist Joseph Whitaker, on the eve of his depature into the army, hanging around in DC hoping to get laid by a war-protesting flowerchild, you might be excused for thinking it all a bit too familiar.  But when Whitaker drops in on his former girlfriend, now involved with a new guy, he begins to come alive a bit more, taking on dimension due to a feeling of unfinished emotional business that could lead him to more interesting experiences.

Rabe alternates the chapters depicting Pfc. Whitaker's misgivings about service in the war and his general lot in life with chapters that introduce us to Quach Ngoc Lan, a Vietnamese prostitute plying her trade at Madame Lieu's, where GIs can get their jeeps washed and their junk moved simultaneously.  Rabe is very effective at rendering how the GIs view these locals, but there aren't many surprises here amidst the general racism and, occasionally, grudging appreciation of what would've been thought of as "oriental mystery."  But gradually the interiority of Lan, attenuated as it may be by lack of education and a rather elemental sense of life, becomes louder and louder for the reader as her pidgin English -- where Rabe gets to show his command of dialogue -- comes to seem not a limitation so much as a unique form of communication.  Her motives and her actions are often glimpsed through the viewpoint of others, but Rabe's greatest achievement is making us feel not that we know Lan but that we would very much like to.

Is Lan the all-too-familiar whore with a heart of gold, and Whitaker the GI who tries to save her from a world they never made?  Frankly, Rabe's tale is not as far from that soapy terrain as some readers might like, or, alternately, doesn't wallow in it to the degree that others might wish.  There is a connection between the two and it might mean something, but Rabe keeps us furnished with enough sense of the grim realities of the setting to prevent us from expecting any improvement for either of them.

But what the interest of Girl hinges on is not its depiction of prostitution and the war -- as forms of exploitation that put both Whitaker and Lan in something of the same position as expendable vassals -- but in its willingness to look unsentimentally at the power that even a minimum of communication and connection can provide between people who are strangers to one another and, to some extent, the situation in which they find themselves and each other.

"Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows" Shakespeare said, and the journalist Charles Dudley Warner famously stated that "politics makes strange bedfellows"  Rabe's novel takes for granted that the politics of the war and the misery it gives rise to create a condition that might throw together unlikely bedfellows, and the novel's best effect is making us believe they might have something to offer each other.

David Rabe reads at RJ Julia Booksellers, Wed. June 23, 7 p.m., $5, which may be used toward purchase of the book; 768 Boston Post Road, Madison, CT; www.rjjulia.com

Listen Here! on the Radio

If you were curious about how the Listen Here! Short Story Reading series evolved and how it's been going, then you'll want to hear this interview.

Our interviewer was Binnie Klein, author (Blows to the Head, check it out here) and subscriber!

The interviewees were New Haven Review publisher, Bennett Lovett-Graff, who picks the stories for the series, and actor and casting director Brooks Appelbaum.