What We Talk About When We Talk About Carver

Raymond Carver’s short story “Beginners” became his published short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” and therein lies a tale. The published title and story became “Carveresque” in the minds of his admirers, but it turned out that the title, and many other elements in the story, were due to the editorial efforts of Gordon Lish, a writer and editor who nurtured Carver as his mentor and publisher. Was Carver more “Carver” after Lish’s intervention or before? Whose story is it, anyway? This literary question seems to be the matter being dramatized in Phillip Howze’s Beginners by Raymond Carver; or, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love at Yale Cabaret, but, as might be expected, that story-behind-the-story is not so easy to dramatize.

Sitting before the audience are four people around a table, just like in both versions of Carver’s story: Mel/Herb (Aaron Bartz) and Terri (Prema Cruz) are a couple, as are Nick (David E. Bruin) and Laura (Ashley Chang). In the story these four get onto the subject of “love.” In Carver’s “Beginners,” Herb holds forth about his views more than the others, mostly in an effort to offset Terri’s claim that the abusive man, Carl, with whom she had lived before Herb and who eventually took his own life, loved her. “If that’s love, you can have it,” Herb says, more than once. In “What We Talk…” Herb is called Mel, and he says most of the same things. (You can know this by looking up the changed text—The New Yorker printed the original with Lish’s emendations some time after Carver’s death.)

On stage, we get a brief gesture to the name change and maybe the sense that we’re going to be watching an enactment that registers the alterations, so that “the story” will morph according to which version we’re getting. The problem with that approach is the changes are often too subtle to enact. So, Howze and director Andras Viski append to the story happening in front of us voice-overs from Carver’s letters to Lish, read by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, to give a sense of how the story got away from Carver. And yet nothing he says comments on any specific changes. We can only infer what Carver objects to, as he goes from gratefully “taking the changes” to questioning what Lish has done to his story.

As someone who both edits the writing of others and writes, I found this aspect of the play to be the most interesting. I could feel for Carver, and Abdul-Mateen reads the prose in a clear and forceful voice that lets us hear how carefully—and even desperately—Carver was choosing his words, trying to call off the editorial license he had called down upon his tale. But what about the story in front of us and the interplay?

The things Lish struck out of the story float at times behind the players as ghostly text, then as struck-through text. No one reads this text aloud—I suppose because it has been silenced by Lish—so if you read quickly you know what’s happening in “Beginners”; if you don’t you only get “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

The disparity is very important at the story’s close when Mel/Herb, now pretty drunk, starts to flounder around about calling his kids—from whom he is separated by his divorce from his first wife—and then goes off to take a shower before, ostensibly, the two couples go out to eat. In Carver’s original version, there is much more speech from Terri; in the Carver/Lish version, not. Both include the speech by Nick, looking out the window and away from the women—Laura comforting Terri, who is upset—, with which Howze’s play ends. It’s hard to say, at that point, what version of the story we’re getting. Neither Carver’s nor Carver/Lish’s because, most obviously, neither were written as a stage play.

So, what about Howze’s version? The best thing about the play version is Aaron Bartz’s reading of Mel/Herb. While he doesn’t “look” like I imagine a Carver character looking, he is closer to that image than the others and capably delivers the long speeches—particularly the story-within-the-story about the old couple hospitalized after an accident—that describe Mel/Herb’s view of what married love should be. The fact that neither of the couples is enjoying that kind of married love is clear, but, at the same time, we do experience the hopefulness of Laura—Ashley Chang makes the most of the reactions her character is there for—and the neutrality of Nick.

In the story, though, Nick is our narrator, so his neutrality is partly offset by the fact that we get everything through his perspective. Howze doesn’t let us in on that until Nick delivers the final statement of the play, and that has the effect of making his words sort of hang there, even more than they do in the short story.

As Terri, Prema Cruz’s role is crucial because, as the night goes on, we come to realize that much of Mel’s fulmination is directed at her previous love. Mel can forthrightly state that he now hates his former wife, while allowing he must’ve loved her at one time, but Terri’s silence on that point tells us that she won’t say she hates the at-times violent man she previously married. She still feels his love was love because she still loves him (she sat at his side until his death, three days after the self-inflicted gunshot that killed him), and that love makes her current husband increasingly surly. All this is dramatized quite well in Viski’s production, though Cruz seems too detached to be the kind of "open heart" I imagine Carver imagined Terri to be.

What is much more murky is what any of that has to do with the drama between Lish and Carver, and if we’re to read the lines that pass by us too quickly—as the figures at the table turn away from us to read the wall with us—as part of the play or not.

Howze and Viski’s version of the content of “Beginners/What We Talk About…” works because Carver’s story has enough verbal interaction to be stageable. The four-way conversation is interesting and Bartz engaging enough to carry the evening. But what doesn’t get across is the “Carver” element of story-telling: that rather laconic and undemonstrative narrative voice that floats ghostly behind-the-scenes, here, but which is the whole point, in narrative fiction. Instead, we get the drama of those letters, whose reality almost overwhelms the playlet before us. Which may be the point. Or not.

Beginners by Raymond Carver; or, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love Adapted by Phillip Howze Directed by Andras Viski

Dramaturg: Rachel Carpman; Producers: Emika Abe, Libby Peterson; Set Designer: Jean Kim; Costume Designer: Sara Holdren; Lighting Designer: Joey Moro; Sound Designer: Joel Abbott; Projections Consultant: Shawn Boyle; Projections Engineer: Joey Moro; Stage Manager: Kate Pincus; Technical Director: Ted Griffith; Photography: Nick Thigpen

Yale Cabaret October 17-19, 2013

Long Wharf's New Season Launched

Of course, the big news today is that we have a functioning federal government again . . . sorta, and government workers are returning to work. Whether your inclination is to cheer, jeer, or sneer at our political leadership, here’s news of another happy return taking place today: the Long Wharf Theatre is back. The first show of the new season, Steve Martin’s The Underpants, begins previews tonight, and opens next Wednesday. Derived from a German play of the Expressionist era by Carl Sternheim, Martin’s play is a irreverent farce about marriage, fidelity, temptation . . . and undergarments. When a young woman’s knickers drop to her ankles while she’s out in public—to watch the King on parade—she becomes a major provocation to young men on the prowl. Would-be suitors move into a room for rent in the house where Louise lives with her stuffy husband who is squeamish about sex—because children cost money!—and not at all ready to find himself married to “a sensation.” Directed by Gordon Edelstein, the play’s skewering of dull conformity in the name of racier considerations should make for a lively evening, and Martin’s sense of comic timing is legendary. October 16-November 10.

Next up is a Pulitzer-winning play by August Wilson: Fences, a play that won a Tony for its two lead roles both in its original production in 1987 and in its first Broadway revival in 2010, as well as Tony for Best Play (1987) and Best Revival (2010). Set in the 1950s, the story concerns Troy Maxson, a man who drives a garbage truck but who at one time was a baseball sensation in the Negro Leagues. Set in the time when the color barrier was being broached by black athletes, the play is a character study of a working-class black man struggling with his place in life—which includes a brother with a war injury, two sons, one from a previous marriage, the other from his current marriage to Rose, and a pregnant girlfriend. The Long Wharf’s revival will be directed by Phylicia Rashād, famous since the 1980s for her role as Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show, and a Tony-Award-winning Actress in the revival of A Raisin in the Sun in 2004. November 27-December 22

The first play of the new year is the World Premiere of Heidi Schreck’s The Consultant, a workplace comedy set at the firm of Sutton, Feingold and McGrath, a pharmaceutical advertising company, where downsizing and getting ahead fuel anxieties, and office romance plays its part in the complex sense of “work” in our era of constant Bluetooth and Smartphone access. Long Wharf Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein calls the play “irreverent, a little kooky and very humane.” January 8-February 9, 2014

Associate Artistic Director Eric Ting helms celebrated newer playwright Amy Herzog’s touching family drama 4000 Miles, about the rapport between a twenty-one-year-old and his ninety-one-year-old grandmother, living together in Greenwich Village after Leo bikes across the continent from California. It’s an opportunity for the clash and the coming-to-terms of generations in this highly praised play called both “funny” and “moving” by The New York Times.  February 19-March 16

Tony Award-winning South African playwright Athol Fugard has not acted on stage since 1997. It’s exciting news to hear that he will be acting the main role in his new play The Shadow of the Hummingbird in its World Premiere, directed by Gordon Edelstein. Fugard plays a grandfather who unexpectedly plays host to his ten-year-old grandson, truant from school for the day. Following 4000 Miles at Long Wharf, we can say that the interplay between elders and juniors is a big theme in the second half of the 2013-14 Season. In Edelstein’s words, Fugard’s latest is “a great work by a master about living and dying, and how to live one’s life.” Stage II, March 26-April 27.

The final show of the season is the crowd-pleasing musical The Last Five Years, Book, Music, and Lyrics by Jason Robert Brown, directed by Gordon Edelstein. Playing on Broadway just now is Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, about a marriage and an infidelity, told backwards from the end of the affair to the night it began. Brown’s musical does something similar: Cathy, an actress, tells the story of her marriage to Jamie, a writer, from its end to its beginning; Jaimie tells of his relationship to Cathy from its romantic inception to its collapse. In the center of the play there is a shared song on the night they agree to marry. Using a clever device to explore the “his” and “hers” of stories about relationships, the play is poignant and engaging, with songs of wit and romance. May 7-June 1.

It would seem the Long Wharf has put together another winning season of new work, important revivals, and welcome encores of recent crowd-pleasing theater.  Over 30 Long Wharf productions have transferred to Broadway or Off-Broadway, most recently the highly acclaimed My Name is Asher Lev and the fascinating musical February House.

Plays are staged at the Claire Tow Stage in the C. Newton Schenck III Theatre, unless otherwise stated.

The Long Wharf Theatre Gordon Edelstein, Artistic Director; Joshua Bernstein, Managing Director

222 Sargent Drive New Haven, CT

203.787.4282 www.longwharf.org

The Cabaret Continues...

The Yale Cabaret is dark this weekend, but the shows for the rest of the semester—and into early January—have been chosen. The upcoming schedule boasts a daunting mix of plays by challenging playwrights—Sarah Kane, Edward Bond—plays adapted from other sources, such as stories by Raymond Carver, Ray Bradbury, and the popular entertainment Gunsmoke, plays originating with YSD actors leagued with YSD directors, and a movement piece developed by two prominent Cabaret theater managers. Here’s the line-up: Up next week is Cab 4: Beginners by Raymond Carver, or What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, October 17-19. Carver was the preeminent American short story writer of the 1980s, but the play is not simply an enactment of one of his stories; rather, the story “What We Talk About…” is famous as one of the best-known stories by Carver that was in fact heavily edited by Gordon Lish before appearing in print. The play, adapted by 2nd-year YSD playwright Phillip Howze and directed by 2nd-year YSD director Andras Viski, dramatizes the writing process as well as the fraught relationships in the story, with a set design intended to suggest both the reality and unreality of fiction.

After a dark week, Cab 5 brings us Radio Hour, a chance to peek behind the scenes at a lost art: telling stories on a live radio broadcast. With ten performers, the show, adapted by Tyler Kieffer and Steve Brush of the YSD sound department and directed by Paula Bennett, stresses “slick not schtick” in its authentic radio effects dramatization of 1950s staples of radio programming, John Meston's Western Gunsmoke (which would go on to be one of the longest-running TV shows ever), and “Zero Hour” (not to be confused with the Rod Serling radio program from the Seventies), a tale from the fertile pen of sci-fi/thriller-writer Ray Bradbury.  Radio Hour will be a fitting show for Halloween weekend—come as a cowboy or an alien. October 31-November 2.

After another dark week, a production of Sarah Kane’s Crave is Cab 6. Directed by 3rd year YSD playwright Hansol Jung, this four-person play explores the voices in the mind of a playwright in the midst of creation. Kane is known for the open-ended, interpretive nature of her plays, in which speakers are often unspecified, leaving much to the creative team to devise.  November 14-16.

Cab 7 takes place the week before Thanksgiving—the American holiday that celebrates getting by. Derivatives, conceived by 3rd-year YSD actor Jabari Brisport and directed by 3rd-year YSD director Cole Lewis, is a devised, multimedia theater piece that explores the increasing distance between the Haves and the Have-nots in this land of ours. The disparity in incomes in the U.S. is greater than it’s been since the 1920s. Political, entertaining, with a real sense of problems and the need for solutions, the play is not afraid to ask the big questions. November 21-23.

The week after Thanksgiving, and the last show of the first semester, is Cab 8, a movement piece called Bound to Burn, developed by Rob Chikar and Alyssa Simmons, two Cab regulars who work behind-the-scenes on many shows, as Stage Manager and Theater Manager, respectively, and who share a penchant for dancing. The show investigates the experience of loss, using bodily rather than verbal expression. December 5-7.

The first two shows of the next semester, following the winter holidays, take place in January: Cab 9 features Have I None, a daunting play by British playwright Edward Bond from 2000. Set in 2077, the play darkly imagines a dystopia in which memory, and therefore history, has been erased. Second-year YSD director Jessica Holt will stage the claustrophobic play—in which going out of one’s room is risky business---with a stress on Bond's sense of the absurd. January 16-18.

Cab 10 features 3rd-year YSD actress Elia Monte-Brown’s original play, The Defendant, about the rigors of public school in New York (where Monte-Brown taught before enrolling at Yale); the play aims to recreate some of the anxieties of today’s student, and to question the values of public education in America, using all 1st year actors in the YSD program. January 23-25.

And that’s the line-up, as the Cab continues its mission of exploring the purpose of theater in our community—as entertainment and provocation, as a questioning of and a response to the world we live in. There’s a little something for everyone—the past, the present, the future; the nowhere space of creation; the problems of education and the economy; the bonds of bodily contact; the voices of our inner demons; the voices on the airwaves. See you at the Cab!

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven

For more information about ticketing and menus:

203.432.1566 www.yalecabaret.org

Alice Munro in New Haven Review

Congratulations to Alice Munro, 2013 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.  One of the major living practitioners of the short story, Munro is the 13th woman to win the award for Literature, and the first Canadian, unless you count Saul Bellow, born in Canada but a U.S. citizen when he won. In Issue 9 of the New Haven Review, we published an interview with Munro by Lisa Dickler Awano, as well as Munro's story "Wood," originally published in 1980, then revised for a collection published in 2009, and reprinted here.

New Haven Review publishes original short stories in each issue; on our website, Noah Charney has been discussing short stories in a sort of playlist of classics of the form.

We salute the decision of the Nobel committee to honor a master short story writer, and we feel honored and greatly pleased to number a Nobel Laureate among our contributors.

Be All You Can Be

Who is most affected when a show doesn’t go off as it’s supposed to? The audience? The promoter? The MC? We might suppose that’s one of the questions being posed by Gabe Levey’s The Most Beautiful Thing in the World, at Yale Cabaret. Ostensibly, we’re gathered to “discover the power of the Youniverse” with inspiring motivational speaker Chase Michaels (Dan O’Brien), but what we get is something completely different.

So different that, I suspect, the show will be different for each audience gathered for the event. If mainly literalists of the “see the show” variety are gathered, then that’s what will happen: they’ll see a show of some sort. If more interactive viewers are present, they may well find that they’re helping to make the show they’re seeing. The point of the exercise, then, isn’t simply to entertain but to manifest something inherently precarious about theatrical experience. The “house” has a lot to do with what you get. Which might be a way of saying that, though we each live in our own “youniverse,” we are always also inhabiting other people’s, and, beyond that, the same actual universe. We can’t escape that fact any more than we can escape the fact of “what’s happening in Washington.”

The latter trope—for everything that affects us that we can’t directly control—was present in the version of the show I saw Thursday night. When asked—with searching earnestness by Carol (Kate Tarker), Chase’s John the Baptist supposedly unfit to tie his sandal-strap—“what is your problem?,” members of the audience were willing to volunteer answers such as “Republicans” and “all politicians.” While we might imagine a show in which all the problems mentioned were of the “youniverse” variety (I was thinking of saying “aging,” if asked; someone else told me she would’ve said “uncomfortable shoes”), the fact that part of what might be bringing us down is “the world at large” is instructive, and indicative of the show's implications.

It’s structured like a self-help session that doesn’t quite come off, and yet does. Carol does all she can, and let’s hear it for that plucky presenter, mustering her best “show must go on” gumption and stepping into the breach—nay, the gaping chasm—that occurs when breathless fans of Chase Michaels' every move find themselves confronted with so much less than the answer to everything. Unless the answer to everything is . . . entertaining yourselves? Showmanshipwise, there are spacey projections of the slideshow variety (wielding “the clicker” is a lot like wielding the remote in domestic situations), and a great moment of eerie “out-of-body” vocalizing to ambient sounds that felt like an astral plane version of scream therapy.

As Carol, Tarker is charming. Sporting a vaguely Justin Bieber-like head of hair, wearing a no-nonsense business gal suit, Carol seems as androgynous as she can be. She’s like anyone’s cute younger sister/brother at that guileless age—eight? nine?—before major anxieties set in. As such, she seems equal to the task of mucking through because she has no ego to be destroyed by audience dissatisfaction. She quickly makes herself one of us—let he or she who has never had things go wrong in public cast the first cat-call. When Chase finally does arrive he’s a decided party-pooper. It’s like watching a TV personality intrude on a heart-to-heart between nobodies. He expects the spotlight but his show’s already over.

I suspect that the “plot” element to the show—Carol showing Chase what’s what—may have been a late arrival in the process, if only because the show seems predicated on the idea that drama happens even when nothing happens, when the best-laid plans, as they say, “gang agley.”

Maybe seeing the giftedly glib get their come-uppance is “The Most Beautiful Thing in the World,” or maybe it’s just finding out that your “YOUniverse” includes lots of other “you’s,” enough, even, to be an “us.”

The Most Beautiful Thing in the World Conceived and Directed by Gabe Levey

Scenic Designer: Kurtis Boetcher; Costume Designer: Soule Golden; Sound Designer: Tyler Kieffer; Projection Designer: Gabe Levey; Stage Manager: Anita Shastri; Technical Director: Lee O’Reilly; Producer: Alyssa Simmons; Creative Collaborators: Mickey Theis, Mitchell Winter; Projection Engineer: Nick Hussong; Photography: Nick Thigpen

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street

October 3-5, 2013

Story Playlist 30: Free Fruit for Young Widows

Nathan Englander: “Free Fruit for Young Widows” (2010) Wow. While I can’t necessarily say that this is the “best” of the thirty stories I’ve read in this project, it certainly feels like it. This could be because I read it last, with the weight of all the others behind it, or it could be that this is one hell of an amazing short story.

In “Free Fruit for Young Widows” the narrative voice has some character of its own, with turns of phrase that suggest an elderly Israeli (like the characters in the story) speaking English, and with a nice sense of humor. There are smile-inducing, if not quite laugh aloud, moments in this story about the brutal and the grim which make the tale easier to read. So we have Millhauser’s narration as historical account, and perhaps some of lightness of James Thurber in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”

The story is told as nested stories, like Russian dolls. We begin with a description of our two protagonists, Professor Tendler and Shimmy Gezer, when both were soldiers fighting for Israel against the Egyptians at a time, the narrator tells us casually, when, due to France’s changing sides, both Israeli and Egyptian soldiers wore identical, French-issued uniforms. Shimmy sits at a mess hall, along with four other soldiers. When Tendler arrives, he sets down his tea (“careful not to spill”) and shoots the four other soldiers in the head. Shimmy, thinking he’s gone mad, tackles his friend Tendler. Tendler explains that these soldiers were Egyptians, that he’s just saved Shimmy’s life. Shimmy pauses, then tackles him again, angry that he killed them instead of taking them prisoner. Something snaps in Tendler, and, instead of warding off Shimmy, he beats his friend within an inch of his life.

This is a story Shimmy tells, with increasing amounts of detailed information as the boy grows, to his son Etgar (named, incidentally, after an Israeli writer friend of Englander’s, whose anecdote inspired this short story). Knowing this story, Etgar never understands why his father is so kind to Tendler, now a professor living in neighborhood, giving him free vegetables from the family’s fruit and veg stand—an act of respect usually reserved for war widows—when this same man beat Shimmy so mercilessly long ago. Once Etgar reaches the age of thirteen, Shimmy sits Etgar down and tells him the story of Tendler during the Second World War, the war about which his father has not spoken, and which no one speaks of, the war in which Shimmy lost his entire family. The story about Tendler that Etgar has not yet heard.

Englander gives us three stories in one: the backstory of the Israeli-Egyptian conflict, the framing story of Shimmy and his son Etgar, and the central story told by Shimmy about Professor Tendler during the Second World War. This final story is the most powerful and memorable. In Shimmy’s story, the story-telling voice, which is great for fables and tales of magic, but is not as good at producing tension and thrills, largely due to the subtle filter system of the implied narrator (here, Shimmy) as story-teller interfering (someone telling you about a scary film is less scary than watching the film), miraculously produces the sense of creeping dread, horror, and power that surprised me as a reader, after the light and delicately-handled opening.

At age thirteen, Tendler survived a death camp by hiding beneath the pile of corpses waiting to be incinerated. When the camp was liberated, he emerged from the pile, causing two G.I.s to faint at the sight of a living corpse crawling out of the pile of “balsa wood.” He wound his way back home and found his nanny and her family—husband, two grown sons, infant daughter—there, occupying his family’s home. He is given a royal welcome—a goat is slaughtered rather than a fatted calf—as the returned master of the household. Nature calls and Tendler, while urinating outside the window rather than withdrawing to the outhouse, overhears the nanny and her family plotting to murder him in his sleep, for fear that he will take away the property they now consider their own. Tendler returns to the house, enjoys the feast, and heads up to bed. But he stays awake into the night, until the house is asleep, and then he shoots the entire family, including the infant daughter, so that no one is left to take revenge upon him.

This last section is a brutal rollercoaster of emotions for the reader. It is told coolly, with the distance of Shimmy’s narration, including several pauses that pull us out of the scene, when Shimmy and Etgar discuss something in the story. But the material is so vivid, with images like the skeletal Tendler emerging from the pile of corpses, and the emotions so raw, that we practically beg the nanny’s family to take change their minds, then beg Tendler to escape into the night rather than murder the family, especially the infant who truly cannot be blamed. These voices in our heads are echoed in the discussion between Shimmy and Etgar about the story being told. Shimmy plays devil’s advocate and seems to excuse Tendler for killing the entire family, convincing Etgar of its reasonableness, and then shaming him for ever thinking that any human should feel permitted to take a life. Shimmy never would, and wishes to teach this lesson to his son. But Tendler’s experience as a survivor of the death camp system, which was meant to allow none to survive, cracked him just enough that he has lost the humanized capability of showing mercy, of knowing when to stop, of recognizing that, in the choice between escaping, subduing, or murdering it is better to choose the first two rather than the third.

The story is written with such a deft hand that not a word is out of place, nor a word used too few or too many. It brings up, and chews over, philosophical ideas, which is a hard thing to do in works of fiction. Fiction might prompt philosophical discussion (as does Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”), and non-fiction about philosophy might draw examples from fiction, but for one text to be a work of fiction that includes philosophical discussion (without sounding pretentious or stepping out of the narrative) is a pretty rare feat. The characters are brightly drawn with few adjectives. There is very little “Writing” here, all of Englander’s skills are massaged into place, without anyone hitting you over the head with the fact that a Writer has Written this story (as is the case with the wonderful but Baroque style of Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain”). The story is as good a psychological profile of those fractured by war and returned to society, having to turn off their emotions or melt down because of them, as I’ve ever read.

The only parallel on this Playlist is Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” interesting to read alongside Englander’s story. The writing styles are similar, employing a light hand to deal with serious issues and creating a surprising amount of tension. In Salinger’s story, our former soldier kills himself, whereas Tendler kills his enemies—but Etgar recognizes how easy it could have been for Tendler to have turned the gun on himself instead. Such material could be heavy and gooey in the wrong hands. Englander makes the tale feel light, airy, sky-etched.

Story Playlist 29: One for the Road

Stephen King: “One for the Road” (1977) Stephen King is my favorite author. I know you’re not supposed to say that, but there is no other author who I have so consistently enjoyed and admired. I like Michael Crichton novels, but I don’t admire them the way I do King. I enjoy Nabokov, but I don’t compulsively devour his work, checking the clock to see when I can return to his novel, my heart beating faster as I read it. There is no other author whose work I was so eager to read my way through, nor so grateful that the catalogue is so long—the hyper-prolific King publishes a book a year, at least.

King’s stories are character-driven, beautifully-written, highly intelligent. They happen to feature monsters of all sorts, from natural to preternatural, but that is secondary to their core as great stories, well-told. As an author King is wonderfully approachable and open, writing about his writing process and what he likes about horror, letting his readers into his head to snoop around, to check behind the drapery. He tips his hat to some of the authors featured in this project: Hawthorne, Poe, and Lovecraft above all.

Among his short stories, there were several favorites from which I might choose. It came down to a choice between the two scariest, both of which appeared in his 1978 collection, Night Shift. “Children of the Corn” is the scarier of the two, but “One for the Road” is easier to write about, as it deals in archetypes that are the heart of good horror fiction.

On a snowy night in southern Maine, two septuagenarians are drinking at Tookey’s Bar, about to close up the joint. Herb “Tookey” Tooklander, the proprietor, and our narrator, Booth, have one more drink before calling it a night, when someone bursts into the bar, half-frozen. A tourist in Maine, Jerry Lumley was en route to visit his sister-in-law when his car broke down several miles away. He left his wife and seven-year-old daughter in the car, and trudged through the snow to get help. When he stumbles into the bar, he’s frost-bitten and about to pass out. The two old men agree to help him, but are concerned about more than just the cold weather when they learn where Lumley’s car broke down—en route to Jerusalem’s Lot.

Tookey and Booth take an SUV into the snow, through barely-passable roads in the blizzard. Before we arrive at the car, King wonderfully winds us up, when Tookey warns that, if the wife and daughter are not in the car, then the group will turn straight back around, and that if they see anyone out on the road, even if they are spoken to, they will not speak back. This is before anyone drops the “v-word” and mentions vampires. In fact, the moment that vampires are invoked, a bit of the mystique is lost. Just a bit, because King is so deft.

But consider: the creepiest parts of really creepy books and films are in the first half, when inexplicable things start to happen (footfalls on the stairs, blood on a doorjamb, rooms filled with flies). The fact of their being inexplicable is what makes them effective. As soon as we have an explanation, it sort of “explains away” the mystery and is less effective. From that point on, scares come down to jump-out frights, chases, mortal peril, that sort of thing. Creepy turns to thrilling. Thrilling is good, but I’m an unabashed fan of creepy. Most authors feel the need to explain things by the end of their stories, even if the explanation is not really an explanation at all (“aliens are behind this”). Vampires, or any other known-entity monsters, are a way of explaining things with something we feel we understand. Your average Joe knows enough about vampires, from Dracula, from films, (dare I say it, from Twilight) and so on, that they’ve lost their mystique. They are a cool, archetypal villain, and much ink has been spilled on the subject of just why we are so fascinated with vampires, but they are also a known commodity. I’d venture to say that Average Joe knows more about fictitious vampires, their characteristics, behaviors, and so on, than they do about real goldfish.

So when the creepiness preceding the action in “One for the Road” is chalked up to vampires, I almost winced—but not quite. Because after the reveal of what is doing the creepy doings, the action part is so well done that I wanted to slather butter on the pages of the story and eat them right then and there.

What makes “One for the Road” particularly effective is the sympathy we feel for Lumley, lost and cold and desperate to get to his family, whereas the locals know that it is already too late. Anyone would react as Lumley did. Shocked to see the car empty, and his daughter’s parka inside, he set off to follow the footprints in the snow, fast-disappearing beneath the blizzard. About to give up, he hears his name being called and, emerging from a “copse” (a wonderful choice of word by King, one letter away from “corpse”), his wife. He rushes to her, as would we. Tookey and Booth know that she is no longer human, however, and try to stop Lumley, but of course he ignores them. He realizes too late that he’s about to become lunch. When Tookey and Booth retreat to their truck, to drive away, there’s a heart-stop moment when the daughter (whom we almost forgot about) suddenly appears beside the truck, asking in the sweet, helpless child’s voice for help. Booth immediately sees that something is wrong—the child is standing upon the snow, her feet not sinking into it—but cannot resist, hypnotized by the vampire child (and if vampires are scary, child vampires are scarier). Only a well-thrown Bible from Tookey saves Booth, and they drive away.

King uses sympathy to his advantage. We side with Lumley—if we were to fear for the lives of our family, dismissing vampires as hooey, and suddenly see our wife or daughter alone in the snow, we would rush to them. It’s an irresistible urge for non-sociopathic humans. And yet that very urge is used by vampires to hunt their prey.

Vampires will always hold an endless fascination for us, because they tap into some powerful Jungian archetypes. They appear human, with slight differences. They are hybrids between carnivore creatures and people. They hunt humans, which we humans find fascinating because, grumpy sharks and a few ornery mammals aside, humans are hunters, not the hunted. They live forever, which sounds good to us, but do so in a way that doesn’t sound so appealing. There is a sexual component to how they prey on us, essentially doling out elaborate hickeys. They drink blood. Unlike humans with refined palates, they are not partial to garlic. There is much to wonder at, but most of all, we are fascinated by how they inhabit the liminal zone between dead and living. Add real character depth and development to a story featuring vampires, and you’ve got yourself one heck of a cocktail. Here’s to you, Mr. King.

Story Playlist 28: Brokeback Mountain

Annie Proulx: “Brokeback Mountain” (1997) This wonderful miniature novel of a story by Annie Proulx will perhaps forever be known as “the one about the gay cowboys,” largely due to the fine film made of it. No doubt the distinction of being the first major story to feature a homosexual relationship within a social group that is considered virile and straight, almost violently so, and showing an openness about homosexuality far from the worlds in which homosexuality is open, won the story, and The New Yorker, where it was first published, the National Magazine Award for Fiction. While the story was much-discussed, even before the 2005 Ang Lee film version of it, it is much more discussed than read. This should certainly be remedied.

In 1963, Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar are thrown together as ranch hands in Wyoming, obliged to graze sheep on the mountain of the title. For weeks they tend the sheep, alone in the wilderness, with only each other for company. Eventually sex takes place between them and for a time they have an erotic idyll. Then the job ends and they go their separate ways.

Ennis is married to perhaps the most interesting character in the story, Alma, who begins to recognize Ennis’ sexual dynamic only when, years after the romance on the mountain, Jack visits her husband and she sees the two kiss in a passionate embrace on the Del Mars’ front porch. The two men had been unable to stop thinking of one another, but the way they speak and think is painted by Proulx as uneducated, laconic, even crass. These are not thinkers, but workers—hired men in ranching and rodeo-riding—which adds complexity to the narrative. Proulx’s narrator finds the words for what they feel; the characters don’t. They don’t think things through too much, or communicate with each other particularly well. They don’t have a grasp on their feelings. Their thoughts, words, and sex are blunt, elemental. As characters, Jack and Ennis feel unidealized, not cleaned up or romanticized, but almost painfully authentic. The disintegration of Ennis and Alma’s marriage, and Jack and Ennis’ belief that they cannot be together openly (they know of examples of murderous, homophobic bigotry), produce a tension that drives the story, propelling the reader through beautiful prose at times a bit mannered.

There is also a bit of a mystery in the tale; it opens twenty years after the idyll on Brokeback Mountain, with Ennis dreaming of Jack, who has died. As their backstory unfolds, with the two finding occasional times to be together, we see that Jack longs for a life together with Ennis, but that Ennis is too afraid. When he hears of Jack’s death, Ennis imagines that Jack met his end through a violent attack, although Jack’s wife tells him Jack’s death was accidental. Ennis embarks on something of an investigation of his late lover’s fate, paying a visit to Jack’s parents, ostensibly to take part of Jack’s ashes back to Brokeback Mountain. He learns that, while Jack was the only man he ever loved physically and sexually, Jack had at least one other male lover with whom he made plans, never fulfilled, similar to those he fantasized about with Ennis; Ennis had already assumed Jack had other casual lovers during the long months when he and Ennis could not see one another. Proulx lets the idea of two men living together as lovers seem a utopian fantasy that neither of Ennis nor Jack can bring about. Ennis remains convinced that Jack was killed for his homosexual relations.

Proulx’s story doesn’t try to label the characters or their longings. The two men are fathers and have lived with women, but what they have together, they both realize, is rare and powerful. By making her characters so basic, Proulx lets us see that labels such as homosexual and bisexual are modern and artificial. Love is love and sex is sex, whomever you are with and wherever you may be. Provided all involved are copis mentis and consenting.

What makes the story so great is that it is a hyper-realistic love story. That the couple in love are two male cowboys, neither of whom considers himself homosexual, is of secondary importance. The story is not sensationalist, though its theme might be so considered by those uncomfortable with male-to-male intimacy. Proulx has added to the popular genre of “impossible love stories,” such as Romeo and Juliet, or stories of racial or class divides that made love difficult and dangerous in other times. That the lovers are otherwise straight, rough-cut men adds a unique spice to the story, which is mainly a powerful tale about loneliness and longing.

The Unforgiveable Thing

Without doubt, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire is a great play. While some might choose The Glass Menagerie as the quintessential Williams play, I’ve always preferred the goings-on in Elysian Fields, giving us that fascinating threesome plus one of Stanley, Stella, Blanche, and Mitch. The play is so good in giving these characters interesting things to say and do that, we imagine, all a director and cast need do is get out of the way and let the thing work. Directed by Mark Rucker, the Yale Rep’s Streetcar aims for and mostly achieves the kind of definitive version admirers of the play would hope for.

Start with that set (Reid Thompson, Scenic Design): the size of the University Theater stage is put to good effect—particularly its height, with an upstairs we can see just below the overhanging curtain, so that there is a real feel for a two-room apartment below another one. It’s the classic proscenium with missing fourth wall, and it’s satisfying to see it used so well, with very fluid movements from one room to another and from outside to inside. The action is all blocked with an animated naturalism that moves at just the right pace. The play is long—with two intermissions that are required for dramatic curtains along the way—but never tiring. If you already know the play well, it’s still a great opportunity to study Williams’ ability to structure scenes and dialogue. Theater, film, television—rarely are scripts this good.

All the buzz in the media has focused on Joe Manganiello as Stanley. While I can’t claim any knowledge of Manganiello’s work as a werewolf, I feel certain his fans will get what they came for. In his very first scene he strips off his shirt to expose his ultra-buff bod—he’s so built, it’s almost a special effect—and in general he struts his stuff so as to give us a Stanley who is a bit more muscle-bound than might be common. The physical threat of Stanley is therefore palpably present, and so I found myself struck by how reserved this Stanley can be. I mean, he could really cause some damage, but is generally an easy-going guy. To a certain extent, Stanley—as written—received a disservice in the widespread view of Marlon Brando as the definitive performance of the role. Brando’s Stanley is far too fascinating, full of an intensity that goes well beyond the kind of guy Stanley is meant to be. Manganiello’s Stanley, to my mind, is closer to the “average Joe” qualities we should find in the master of 632 Elysian Fields.

In the demerits column, Manganiello’s performance at times left a bit to be desired in terms of elocution—the effort to give Stanley a certain tone and voice is appreciated, but at times the lines get a little swallowed, and there wasn’t quite as much comedy as there might be—as with the Napoleonic Code and the contents of Blanche’s trunk. But then comedy is hard, as they say.

The main emphasis in any production of Streetcar must fall on the role of Blanche. René Augesen takes on this exhausting role with amazing energy and a full sense of its many nuances. There aren’t any surprises in her performance, but there is a great feel for Blanche’s wit, and for the comic aspects of the play. Even knowing the outcome, we can watch the play with a sense that nothing that happens is a foregone conclusion. Even when the revelations about her past begin to surface, Blanche has the presence of mind to face them with style. Sure, she’s on a downward spiral after her last scene with Mitch, but it’s still the assault from Stanley that tips her over the edge. What I enjoyed most in Augesen’s performance is a sense of just how resilient and adaptable Blanche is. It’s a role full of the tragedy of indignity and Augesen gets it all across. And her costumes (Hunter Kaczorowski) are amazing—particularly the robe of Della Robbia blue in which she departs her sister’s home.

There’s fine support all along the way: April Matthis and Marc Damon Johnson, as Eunice and Steve Hubbell, the upstairs neighbors, have a proprietary sense of belonging that underscores the uniqueness of the DuBois sisters, and Adam O’Byrne’s Mitch meets the challenge of playing awkwardness gracefully. As the most “sensitive” of Stanley’s friends, Mitch might be just what Blanche needs—and Streetcar is perhaps at its best in showing that illusion can only go so far in masking the hard line of reality. The interplay of illusion and realism—as dramaturg Helen Jaksch’s playbill points out—is crucial to Williams’ sense of theater, and to see fond illusions crumple is both sad, inevitable, and dramatically satisfying, even if that means deliberate cruelty is the victor.

In the end, the female roles are what make this production—particularly the many nice comic touches in the sisterly rapport between Blanche and Sarah Sokolovic’s Stella. Sokolovic plays Stella as a realist who accepts the world she lives in without expecting more from it than it can provide; she’s a constant contrast to Blanche’s genteel volubility and fanciful conceptions, and Sokolovic lets her facial expressions in silent reactions say a lot. We have the sense of a woman who has been found wanting in Blanche’s view of things all their lives, and her solicitude for her sister is matched by her sense of Blanche’s pretensions. Some of the best scenes are the ones when the sisters are alone together.

One cavil: the moment when Stella, after her make-up session with Stanley, climbs out of bed nude in her sister’s presence. Nudity on stage is fine, but when it’s not specified in the text, we can wonder what purpose it serves. While it might be in character for Stella to be nude in front of her sister—which I doubt, given her sense of Blanche’s dignity—it seems to me completely out of character for Blanche not to say something. But she can’t say anything because Williams didn’t intend for her to be reacting to nudity.

It’s the one ill-chosen contemporary touch in this otherwise faithful, entertaining, and fascinating revival.

A Streetcar Named Desire By Tennessee Williams Directed by Mark Rucker

Scenic Designer: Reid Thompson; Costume Designer: Hunter Kaczorowski; Lighting Designer: Stephen Strawbridge; Composer and Sound Designer: Steven Brush; Production Dramaturg: Helen C. Jaksch; Dialect Coach: Jane Guyer Fujita; Fight Director: Rick Sordelet; Casting Director: Tara Rubin; Stage Manager: James Mountcastle; Photographs: Carol Rosegg, courtesy of Yale Repertory Theatre

Yale Repertory Theatre September 20-October 12, 2013

Story Playlist 27: The Whore of Mensa

Woody Allen: “The Whore of Mensa” (1974) Woody Allen is probably the funniest man on the planet. He has been consistently funny, smartly funny, from the 1960s to today (although his best material is from the fertile first 25 years). “The Whore of Mensa” is not his funniest story, but it is perhaps the best-known of his short works of fiction, and it offers a good launch pad to examine what makes for funny writing.

There is essentially one joke in “The Whore of Mensa.” A prostitution ring traffics in women who engage their johns in intellectual conversation, rather than sexual activity. The style of the story is mock-noir, a take-off on hard-boiled detective fiction, aping the tone and format of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Our hero is the wonderfully-named Kaiser Lupowitz, one of Allen’s many characters whose names are part WASP, part Jewish (my favorite is Fielding Melish, from Bananas). He is a detective hired to look into this prostitution ring, wherein johns order up blondes or brunettes to discuss Wallace Stevens, Melville or, for extra cash, a comparative study of Melville and Hawthorne. All of the tropes of prostitution are used, with intellectual discussion in the place of sexual favors. One prostitute is one credit away from her Master’s in Comparative Literature, trying to earn money to cover tuition.

A desperate client (the also-wonderfully-named Word Babcock) is being blackmailed, and walks into Kaiser’s detective agency for help. This launches Kaiser’s investigation, and the story. The story is lacking in jokes per se, but jokes are just one type of humor. There is hardly a line that makes you laugh out loud (although the idea that the Hunter College Bookstore is a front for this prostitution ring is pretty good), but the humor is, instead, situational.

There is, believe it or not, a field of study known as “humor research.” Just knowing that may well suck the fun out of anything you find funny, because to explain why something is funny is to destroy what was funny about it. But from a writer’s perspective, peeling away the façade of a story to look at how it stands up is a useful exercise, even if a few temples to hilarity are torn down in the process.

Experts break down the funny into three categories of humor: situational, physical, and satirical. Physical humor is just what it sounds like—something physically happens to a character that is awkward, surprising, or incongruous. It often involves someone being injured, but there is a fine line between funny injury and serious injury. Slipping on a banana peel is funny. Getting hit by a train? Not so funny. Situational humor employs an absurd situation—one that we might even recognize as having comic potential before we read any further. Mistaken identity is a popular tool of situational humor, as is cross-dressing. Mrs. Doubtfire, in which Robin Williams pretends to be an old woman in order to win back his love, focuses on situational humor—a man pretending to be an old woman is a funny, absurd circumstance. Misunderstandings, mistaken identity, improbable situations are all part and parcel of situational humor. Satire, and its cousin parody, are about mocking specific things, people, events, and trends. Parody is more direct, for instance a Saturday Night Live sketch making fun of the film Titanic by mimicking certain aspects of the film. But parody is only really funny if the audience is familiar with at least the basic outlines of the target of the parody. If you know nothing of Titanic, then you probably won’t enjoy a parody of it. Satire is the broader umbrella category, describing humor that mocks human actions and shortcomings in general, without aping a specific source, but rather making jokes out of a situation that the audience will recognize as contemporary. The Daily Show or The Colbert Report are good examples of today’s best satirists.

None of these categories are about jokes. Sigmund Freud wrote a book about humor, and considered that we find funny what the unconscious lets slip out, an expression of what society normally forbids or encourages us to suppress. This might define a joke, which lets out thoughts or feelings that we usually think we must keep shut away. Jokes either surprise us by their endings, and therefore we smile from surprise, or they make fun of other people in ways that we would not permit ourselves to do in regular conversation, where there can be hurtful consequences. Jokes are the bricks and mortar of satire and parody, and they also may be used in situational humor, to point out the oddities of the situation. Jokes are not normally involved in physical humor, unless they comment on the humorous physical action after it has taken place. A program like Blackadder employs all three types of humor. The situations are funny (in one episode Blackadder must impersonate a prisoner he has never seen, and he learns as he goes that the prisoner has weird traits, including a very high voice and only one leg). Physical humor plays a role (Blackadder jumping on one leg to try to impersonate the prisoner, and often whomping his sidekick, Baldrick, with various implements). And there are jokes, often made by Blackadder at Baldrick’s expense, making fun of how he smells, how dumb he is, and how inept.

I was recently hired to write the script for a new Croatian comedy series. I’ve never before written a sitcom or written for television. My stock in trade is art history books and dark thriller novels. I also know next to nothing about Croatia, but I’m certainly game for the challenge. This new commission has prompted me to examine how humor works, from a writer’s perspective, and I’ve found some interesting things. Woody Allen’s work is as good a place as any to begin our study.

If we turn back to “The Whore of Mensa,” we can say almost all the humor is situational. The key is replacing sexual favors with intellectual conversation in this story of cerebral prostitution. There is a parody element, as well, that is amusing as Allen’s narrator approximates the persona of the hard-boiled detective—letting him delight in the loaded similes of the genre: “he was shaking like the lead singer in a rhumba band.” There is no physical humor (it is harder to use successful physical humor in a written story, because the reader has to imagine the action after reading it, as opposed to reacting immediately to seeing it), and there are few jokes; mostly, the laughs come from Allen knowing his audience (readers of the New Yorker) who will smirk at his name-dropping: a prostitute offers a photograph of Dwight MacDonald reading; the “big cheese,” Flossie, has had surgery to look like Lionel Trilling. The whole is clever and humorous, but unlike other pieces by Allen, it is not particularly funny. Not as funny as other stories of his, not as funny as his early films, and not as funny as his stand-up comedy, which is utterly brilliant.

Perhaps it’s simply that the targets—crime fiction and pseudo-intellectuals—are too easy, and yet one wonders: would it be possible to write something this clever with one of the stories on the playlist as the basic situation to parody?

Mystery Train

Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman—playing for two more shows at Yale Cabaret—was first written and produced when Baraka was still writing under the name LeRoi Jones, his given name, at a time when the Civil Rights movement in America was finally catching fire. Times have certainly changed since then—a fact that “New Black Math,” a poem performed before the play, apprizes us of with its rapid fire listing of traits we might suppose a “Black Play” to have, or not. The point, I think, is to keep us from seeing Dutchman as stuck in its moment, while at the same time letting us know that—whether we feel progress has been made since the Sixties or not—the very notions of “white” and “black” remain very much with us.

And that’s where the play begins: a subway car in NYC, a black man sits reading—poetry, we learn—and a rather provocative white girl gets on. Something might happen between them, or nothing. The girl, who calls herself Lula, wants something to happen; the man, called Clay, could go either way. Lula acts the part of a vamping temptress only too aware of what she’s doing. Gradually she provokes Clay into moving past his guardedness and his politeness, eventually he has to assert himself—with violence. This, we might say, is what Lula has been aiming for; taunting him, teasing him, treating aspects of his life as stereotypical, using outrageous body language to arouse him.

In a wonderfully self-possessed performance by Carly Zien, Lula comes across as extremely manipulative and aggressive—rather than, say, pathetic or scary. Cornelius Davidson gives us Clay’s patience and diffidence, his coolness with regard to what we call today “racial profiling”—Lula’s belittling of his New Jersey origins and “Uncle Tom” aspects. Dutchman dates from a time when the worse insult you could hurl at a self-respecting black man was that he was, essentially, white.

The poetry of Baraka’s play resounds in the back and forth of these two protagonists. It should be said that not all of Lula’s moves are over-the-top; at times, she seems to want to find a common ground, a way for the two to meet free of the racial past and gender divides. As directed by Katherine McGerr, the play cannily keeps before us not simply the appeal and rejection that occur when strangers try to “hook up,” but also the degree to which these characters are “emblematic,” freighted with their social roles as “white woman” and “black man.”

Jones himself was married to a Jewish woman at the time of Dutchman, and there is much in Clay, the would-be “black Baudelaire,” that feels aimed at the author himself. In part, that means a rejection of the expectations of white audiences for the artistic expression of black consciousness through the Black Arts Movement. In that light, Dutchman is almost a manifesto for rejecting the “temptations”—expressed and voiced by Lula, complete with proffered apple—that the white liberal mainstream would saddle black artists with, while “accepting” their work. Dutchman was once very much a play working toward clarity about its own situation.

A strength of the Cab production is that it doesn’t try to recreate any particular time—Clay has earbuds in, so we know it’s our time, more or less—nor does it go overboard in making the situation archetypal. What it maintains is a certain sense of fluidity, that what takes place between the two could go differently, and that what does happen is because of a flaw in the social fabric. In other words, one won’t get too far trying to treat these characters only as realistic subway riders alive in a specific time. Baraka, more famous as a poet than a playwright, knows how to make language act, and is less concerned with character per se.

For those who want backstory and “what happens next,” there is the question of whether Lula actually knows of Clay or if this is a first encounter, and, even more, what happens at the end. The Cab production, which has no bystanders (other than the audience), seems to make the repetition at the end conceivable as a “re-set” that could lead to a different conclusion, with Lula already on the train when “Clay,” or a different black man much like him, enters. The play as written gives one a stronger sense of Lula as more predatory, in a serial search for either a victim or a date. I liked the Cab’s version because it seems to me that the play aims to gesture to an “eternal” situation, rather than a series of discrete encounters.

For me, the main point of the play today—which makes it extremely timely and a great show to revive—is the speech Clay gives to explain his attempt to get along with white society, after Lula provokes him by trying to affront his “manhood” and then his blackness. What Clay gestures to is the possibility of a world where the black man can rise by playing the white man’s game—and thus come to power over his one-time “masters.” What Baraka gives voice to is the perceived threat that many in our allegedly “post-racial” society find in Barack Obama as president. In other words, the racism Dutchman sees is still very much with us and has taken on a new wrinkle in our time.

A play that once seemed rife with the “threat” of interracial sexual relations—still a hot topic in 1964—now seems to play out as a meditation on cultural strategies. In that view, Lula’s temptress moves smack of the “sex card” played by every pop diva, while her own act of violence becomes more ambiguous: a blow against the oppressive male alive in every man? A gesture toward white supremacy (which sees every black man as a threat)? A turning of the tables, where women cease to be victims? However we take it, it’s clear that the nerve Dutchman touches is still a live one.

Dutchman By Amiri Baraka Directed by Katherine McGerr

Producers: Caitie Hannon, Charles J. Felix; Scenic Designer: Adrian Martinez Frausto; Costume Designer: KJ Kim; Lighting Designer: Joey Moro; Sound Designer: Joel Abbott; Dramaturgs: Jennifer Schmidt, Sarah Krasnow; Technical Director: Emily Erdman; Stage Manager: Rob Chikar; Creative Consultant: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II; Photographs: Nick Thigpen; courtesy of Yale Cabaret

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street

September 26-28, 2013

Story Playlist 26: Eisenheim the Illusionist

Stephen Millhauser: “Eisenheim the Illusionist” (1998) In creative writing courses, you’re inevitably told a golden rule of good fiction-writing: show, don’t tell. Don’t tell us that a character is greedy. Instead, show him acting in a greedy way, and allow the audience to understand this characteristic. But rules are meant to be broken, and a whole subsection of stories are written in the oral, story-telling tradition. We’ve already encountered a few of them over the course of this short story playlist: Mark Twain’s “Jumping Frog” story comes to mind, in which Twain employs a first-person narrator to retell the story told to him by a character in the story—a layer cake of narration. Other authors employ a manner that is meant to be read as an historical account. Stephen Millhauser’s “Eisenheim” story is one of the latter: a fantastic tale told with a sense of both objective reporting and the hearsay of legend. Where the staid creative writing professor might urge Millhauser to involve us in Eisenheim’s life and thoughts and actions, the story as told gives an external, reportorial view of the events.

In contemporary times, we have grown accustomed, perhaps, to stories that aim for the immediacy of film: a little scene-setting, then tell what happens, with as much neutrality as possible. Millhauser adopts a more antiquated style to mimic the time—late nineteenth-century Vienna, mostly—where the story takes place. The best contemporary stories carry their audience away to another world, with the reader forgetting the teller as they follow the action. Older stories tended to be more narrated, creating an implied author that stands for the veracity of the tale. Millhauser exploits this device to recreate as much as possible the outlook of the times his characters live in.

Eisenheim is ostensibly the greatest stage magician of his time. His tricks are so amazing and inexplicable that he is thought to have real magical powers. The narrator tells us that he has pieced together as much as he could of the life and strange end of Eisenheim, based on newspaper reports, interviews with witnesses, and whatever tidbits he could find. Because of this hybrid story-teller/pseudo-journalistic style, nothing in Eisenheim’s story is directly dramatized. There is no dialogue, direct or indirect, and no effort to inhabit the minds of the characters. There is enough detail to carry us away to a foreign place and time, as Millhauser effectively suggests a parallel between the disintegration of the Hapsburg Empire and the rising interest in stage magic, séances, and the paranormal within it.

Millhauser made a choice. He could have dramatized the story of the rise of Eisenheim, the leading illusionist of fin-de-siècle Vienna and beyond. Instead he uses the report format, which takes some of the dramatic kick out of what he tells. We are given a play-by-play explanation of some of Eisenheim’s magic tricks, including the mechanism of how some (but not all) of them worked. This sucks the magic right out of the magic tricks. It is more clinical, and less wizardly, to be told that Eisenheim did this, that, and the other thing, and that the crowd was amazed. Would it not have been better to show the trick, in detail, as if we were viewing it, and then we could share the crowd’s awe?

Perhaps, but since the theoretical backdrop to the story explores the fascination with the supernatural within the hyper-bureaucratic, pragmatic, and crumbling Hapsburg Empire, the intention is to separate us from Eisenheim’s contemporaries, not to make us a part of their world. While this trick may “work”—like one of Eisenheim’s illusions—to create an engaging story, the narration seems a bit dryer than I might have liked, a bit too detached and clinical. It wasn’t quite a tale told by a bard before a blazing fire, nor a piece of twentieth-century sharpened prose, but rather a somewhat dated, if interesting, report on a pseudo-historical personage. I guess I liked the story, the character of Eisenheim, and the striking way he engineered his end, foiling Walter Uhl, the intriguing policeman and amateur magician who tries to arrest him when his mix of reality and illusion is deemed too subversive, better than the way the story was told. I actually found myself wishing that the Pulitzer-prize-winning Millhauser had written a novel about Eisenheim, to fully inhabit the world he only suggests here, especially with regard to the possibly fascinating figure of Uhl, about whom we learn too little.

There is a wonderful core to Millhauser’s story, but more could be done with it. Neil Berger must have felt the same way. His film The Illusionist (2006) is based on Millhauser’s story but adds much more plot. The film is not better, but the character of Uhl (a great performance by Paul Giamatti) is satisfyingly fleshed-out, and a love interest for Eisenheim takes a passing detail in Millhauser’s story and makes it into an exciting subplot involving the Crown Prince. It is worth reading the story first, and then seeing the film on the same evening, to consider whether what the film-maker did to expand the story was a) beneficial, b) matched what you might choose to do, if you were tasked with expanding the story, c) even necessary, for I’m sure many will find the story quite sufficient. I liked it very much, but, like a creative writing teacher, I wanted more showing, less telling.

Story Playlist 25: Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Joyce Carol Oates: “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (1966) Joyce Carol Oates begins her most famous story with the self-absorbed personality of Connie, a 15-year-old girl in a small town in 1960s America. Over the last two decades, authors (encouraged by publishers) have felt the need to start stories and novels and even history books in medias res, right at the center of the action, to hook the reader, before stepping back to fill out the back story and develop character. Gone are the days of Balzac’s Pere Goriot, which opens with some thirty pages that simply describe the exterior of a country inn. Balzac would never find a publisher these days. Perhaps today’s attention-deficit readers are too impatient to wait through a slow burn? If they aren’t engrossed by page two—paragraph two?—they are unlikely to buy the book.

But to understand Connie, it’s crucial to see Connie’s discontentment with her family, her teenaged sullenness, and the kind of life she leads, where the highlight of her week is a burger and Coke at a drive-thru where the older kids hang out. While there with another boy, she is spotted by an odd-looking loner with wild dark hair in a gold-painted convertible, who leers at her and says, “I’m gonna get you.”

Sometime later, Connie’s parents and sister head out to a barbeque, and Connie insists on staying home. Oates prepares the scene in such a way that, although it is a bright, sunny Sunday and nothing bad has happened yet, we will Connie to go with her parents, not to remain home alone. This is due to tone and non-explicit foreshadowing, with Oates’ prose underscoring Connie’s vulnerability. And so that sound of a car coming up the gravel drive is chilling to us though only a curiosity to Connie. Until she sees it’s the gold convertible. Inside sits the boy from the drive-thru acting as if she should be expecting him. He introduces himself as Arnold Friend, and he’s politely aggressive; he knows her, and knew she’d be alone and knows where her family are. At first, perhaps, Connie finds this intriguing, but Oates lets us feel her unease as well. She’s clearly been accosted by strange men before and is not a wide-eyed innocent; she knows what Friend wants.

Still playing the friendly small-town boy—though Connie insists he’s “not from around here”—Friend introduces Ellie, his silent partner in the car who sits with his transistor tuned to the same hip radio station Connie has on in the house. Friend, outside his car and moving around it, points out the inscriptions on it: his name, and some cryptic numbers—33, 19, and 17—and a few slangy phrases. He doesn’t explain the numbers, but the curious reader can decipher their meaning, with a little work: they refer to a Biblical passage, Judges 19:17, in which a stranger is asked the questions that provide the story’s title.

As they converse, Friend is clearly not taking no for an answer, and we see how trapped Connie is. Our fears for her increase when she realizes that Friend is not a boy at all but nearer thirty and his friend is even older, perhaps forty. Friend moves oddly and tends to lean on things and Connie notices that his boots seem not to be filled by his feet, which creates a sense of freakishness that Oates doesn’t overplay. We imagine his feet are perched, satyr-like, in stuffed cowboy boots that lend him an illusion of height.

When Friend flatly refuses to leave, Connie retreats, threatening to call the police. Friend warns her that he will not enter the house unless she picks up the phone, and insists that she will come out to him voluntarily. We might find an element of the supernatural in this—by some accounts, vampires cannot cross a threshold unless they are invited, so Friend’s comment echoes the kind of hypnotic power vampires commonly exercise in legend and horror films. Friend finally threatens to wait outside and kill Connie’s family if she does not come out. After a freak-out moment in which she picks up the phone and simply screams without dialing, Connie becomes numb to what is happening. She continues to hear Friend’s efforts to be reassuringly seductive—telling her he understands her better than her family does and that the purpose of a sweet girl like her is “to give in,” but in a disembodied way, as though it were happening to someone else. She crosses the threshold into a fate left to our imagination.

The tension in the dialogue between Connie and Friend is huge and masterful, provoking that wonderful internal “Don’t do it!” reaction on the part of the reader. My grandmother literally shouts “Don’t go in there!” at the TV screen during moments of tension in films, and to feel that sensation in a short story is to struggle not to skip ahead, to remain in the sickening state of fear Oates creates. As Friend plays cat-and-mouse with Connie, we can also see Oates toying with the reader: “Arnold Friend” sounds suspiciously like “are no friend”; the stuffed boots and the hypnotic patter turn Friend into some sort of hybrid monster, part vampire, part satyr, part incubus (a sort of vampirical demon who hunts for sex rather than blood); the cryptic use of the Biblical quotation might suggest an allegorical dimension, or at least a twisted sense of the Bible’s commonality, as when the Misfit discusses Jesus with the grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” And, for those who like to look beyond a story to its sources, there is a true crime element as well, since some of the story’s details come from the case of Charles Schmid.

In 1961, Schmid (Smitty to his friends, lovers, and victims) murdered a number of young women in Tucson, Arizona. Schmid was socially adept, murdering women who he knew, in some cases girlfriends, rather than prostitutes or abducted strangers, as is often the case with serial killers. By all accounts he was charming and knew how to appeal to the natural insecurities of girls to draw them out, making them feel appreciated, before his sociopathic streak kicked in and he killed them. Oates read about Schmid, including his custom-made cowboy boots that he stuffed with paper to make himself taller, in a Life magazine article about the Tucson killings. What intrigued her was the victim’s point of view, which is what she recreates brilliantly in her story, giving us a wondrous layer cake: part horror, part true crime, part allegory, part character study—and all ingenious.

Story Playlist 24: A Perfect Day for Bananafish

J. D. Salinger: “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (1948) “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is just about perfect. It is a story that is easy to misread, because the treasures are in the details, a Christmas tree hung with baubles that are barely visible among the pine needles and tinsel. In fact, I had to read it three times to feel that I “got it,” and I’m still not sure if I got all there is to get.

At first glance, the story seems to begin in a banal manner, then becomes awkward, cute, creepy, before an explosive last paragraph that makes you flip quickly back to the beginning, to see if you might find foreshadowing that would have clued you in to the conclusion. It is there, of course, as it must be in all good stories—none of your deus ex machina business, but an honest surprise ending.

The story is divided into two sections, plus that whammy of a coda. The first section features Muriel Glass on a long-distance call with her mother. Muriel is on holiday in Florida with her husband, Seymour, who was a soldier in the recently-ended Second World War. Muriel is a dismissive, unconcerned, and rather oblivious socialite who stuck with Seymour throughout the war, and doesn’t seem to realize that he returned a changed man, damaged goods, as so many poor, shell-shocked soldiers did (Salinger himself was one, and it is easy to project his biography onto Seymour Glass).

It took me a few reads of this opening sequence to catch what was actually going on, because Salinger ingeniously presents it to us as a straight dialogue, with almost no authorial interference, and a lot of interrupted sentences, as when two people are talking over each other or cutting each other off. Muriel’s mother is quite frantic with concern for her daughter, and refers to a number of incidents involving Seymour’s instability, and in each case we can only infer what happened. “The trees. That business with the window. Those horrible things he said to Granny about her plans for passing away.” After a second read, I conjectured that Seymour had been involved in an accident with his father-in-law’s car, perhaps involving trees, that may have been intentional. He may be suicidal (“business with the window” and “plans for passing away”).

We also learn, obliquely, that he was recently released from a psychiatric hospital—too soon, according to one doctor. In the hotel, Seymour’s appearance prompts a psychiatrist on holiday to approach Muriel about him, but she treats the conversation dismissively. Salinger creates tension through the mannered dialogue between a concerned mother and her strong-willed daughter, who seems to want to ignore her husband’s issues since his return from combat. She also accepts that he mocks her, thinking it’s cute that he called her “Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948,” and seems most concerned that she knows nothing about the book by “the only great poet of the century” that he sent her from Germany, and which was in German. From the mother’s insistent questions, despite casual comments on fashion and gossip, we sense Muriel’s husband is a ticking time-bomb.

The second section is where it gets odder—more playful but also creepier. A little child, Sybil Carpenter, is sent off to play while her mother goes for a martini (promising to bring Sybil the olive). Sybil heads straight over to Seymour, who is lying on the beach in his bathrobe. Seymour is charming with the young girl, but we may think it odd that a grown man is playing with a little girl unrelated to him, with no other adults around. Their interaction is friendly but their relationship clear. Seymour speaks familiarly to the child, but in a bantering way. When the girl mentions her father’s imminent arrival, Seymour says he has been waiting for him, but we can’t tell he is teasing her or if he actually knows her father. Sybil seems comfortable with Seymour—who she refers to as “see more”—and that’s reassuring. But when he kisses her foot while she’s on a raft in the ocean with him, she is startled. It’s then that he says they must go. There seems to be a sexual undertone that is disturbing, highlighted by the weird idea of “bananafish,” an imaginary fish that Seymour suggests he and Sybil look for in the water. It’s when she says she saw one that he kisser her foot, suggesting a spontaneous gesture of tenderness toward her. If we like we can consider the sexual overtones of the bananafish, certainly a phallic image as described by Seymour: “I’ve known bananafish to swim into a banana hole and eat as many as seventy-eight bananas…after they eat so many bananas they can’t get out of the banana hole…they die.”

Why is Seymour on the beach in his bathrobe? His reticence to disrobe is dismissed by Muriel as shyness at being pale, but we sense that’s just an excuse for her mother, who thinks there must be something more to it. Muriel offers another explanation: “[Seymour] says he doesn’t want a lot of fools looking at his tattoo,” to which her mother replies, “He doesn’t have any tattoo! Did he get one in the Army?” Now, that detail seemed to be often ignored by other readers of the story—at least I could find no mention of the tattoo in a Google search—but, after several reads, it occurred to me that the sort of tattoo one would get during World War Two that one wouldn’t want “a lot of fools” staring at, is a numerical tattoo from a concentration camp. An identification with Nazi prisoners—according to his daughter, Salinger was among U.S. soldiers who entered a liberated concentration cam—would further underscore the sort of post-traumatic stress disorder that Seymour suffers from. And yet the reference is subtle, and seems to elude most readers.

In the final part of the story Seymour returns to his hotel-room, where Muriel sleeps on a twin bed. In a master-class showing how to build tension and shock in one sentence, Salinger first leads us to believe that, as per the fears of Muriel’s mother, Muriel is going to be the victim of Seymour’s violence.

He glanced at the girl lying asleep on one of the twin beds. Then he went over to one of the pieces of luggage, opened it, and from under a pile of shorts and undershirts he took out an Ortgies caliber 7.65 automatic. He released the magazine, looked at it, then reinserted it. He cocked the piece. Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple.

That last sentence is a demonstration of skillful misdirection. By telling us Seymour looks at the girl, we assume that Muriel is the one “aimed” at, an assumption that Salinger cultivates until the final three words.

In “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” Salinger’s readers must work, like detectives, to first recognize clues that might not seem to be clues, then use them to decode the enigmatic story, piecing together what the clues mean. A writing professor of mine once said that about 2/3 of your readers should “get” a great story the first or second time through. That means that 1/3 will need assistance in order to “get it” all, or they might not get it all—and that’s okay. “Getting it” is not requisite to enjoying the story as a whole, but each hidden attribute that you “get” feels like a miniature conquest, and enriches the overall experience.

Salinger is notoriously hard to “get,” in the sense that he lets quizzical actions and statements remain so, prodding the reader to get on his wavelength but explaining very little. My favorite novels and, particularly, short stories are those that offer up riddles that close reading will solve, opening like flowers to reveal the beauty of the story and the author’s ingenuity. And yet some writers are so good you admire their work even when you can’t determine exactly what they’re getting at with every detail.

The Changing Same

Like more than a few of us, I suspect, I had never seen a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. It’s one of those classic texts that it’s easy to be pretty sure we know all about without bothering to see it. I do recall reading it aloud, round-robin style, in English class in 11th grade. A budding literary sophisticate, I scorned much of it, and I can still remember my main objections: its normative assumptions about what makes for “regular folks” in the good ol’ U.S. of A. seemed to me not only dated but insufferably corny. If you went to school any time after 1964, it was simply too hard to accept a town that’s all-white, and where the “other” is signified by Polish Catholics across the train tracks. Sure, the actual setting of the play is the end of the 19th century to the eve of World War I (and it was first produced in the era of fascist sympathies pre-WWII), and Wilder is quite aware that the world he is depicting was already history. Still, for any child of the Sixties, the play was simply too retrograde, its fond evocation of how parents repeat themselves in offspring just, y’know, Squaresville, man. And that’s one of the things about Our Town—it tends to, and is intended to, inspire thoughts about how time passes and about the changes and the sames of ye olde status quo. There’s a priceless moment where the elderly presider over the local soda fountain reminisces about how it was once possible for a dog to take a nap in the middle of Main Street in the middle of the afternoon, undisturbed. Ah, the good old days—now there’s horses and carriages everywhere and even those encroaching horseless carriages! While no one in a contemporary audience would remember anything like that, we all have similar recollections that date us. Who still remembers milk delivered to the door? Newspapers routes? Wilder wrote the play not to preserve the past, conservatively, but to show that whatever we know as “normal” is going to go the way of all flesh right into the graveyard, eventually.

Which is a way of saying: Don’t judge a play by its first Act. Sure, Our Town starts homey enough to fit squarely in some kind of Will Rogers-type recollection about what life was like when everyone in town knew everyone else’s ancestors, but by the end it has let in the space of the beyond. Back before outer space was the answer to our striving beyond the quotidian earth, it was possible to let “eternity” be the common Unknown looming over us all, and Wilder does a good job of bringing the time beyond time into the play—by making it just as homely and familiar, but with a key difference. The dead know what we don’t know, and what they know reveals at last what has been implicit all along: the perspective of the Stage Manager is “from beyond the grave”—like poets and saints, seeing the length of an individual human life as the speck in the span of the ages that it is.

The New Haven Theater Company’s production, directed by Steven Scarpa, in a spare playing space in a big, high-ceiling room at the English Building Market, its set consisting of two groups of three chairs and a quartet of black monoliths that look like pillars holding up the sky and like monuments to the dead, gives us a straight-forward rendering of Wilder’s script that lets us appreciate how much specificity there is in the play’s seemingly generic approach. Grover’s Mill is a town with an identity, and it's great the way the NHTC production lets us imagine the town the way the play wants us to.

Helping greatly with that task is our Stage Manager (Megan Chenot). Rather than the usual benign old codger who is supposed to keep us apprized of the whos and whats of the town, Chenot has the fresh forthrightness of those tour guides you might see leading a bunch of prospectives, their families, and random shutterbugs around Yale’s campus. She’s got the skinny on everything and delivers it all with the kind of amused forbearance we expect from grade school teachers. It’s like the whole town is her “class” (us too) and she wants to lead them along the path to greater knowledge, no matter how painful it may be. Chenot creates a very warming, reassuring effect, and that helps, particularly as there’s likely to be much sniffling and wiping of eyes by the time Act Three ends.

Other reflection on this well-cast show—special mention of the perfect match of Mallory Pellegrino for the role of Emily Webb. The heart of the play comes in Act Two when Emily and George Gibbs, the boy next-door, finally realize what their lives have been leading to. Pellegrino shows just the right mix of bashfulness and smart-girl knowingness not only to win over George—the town’s top athlete, bound for agricultural college—but everyone else as well. It’s a moment that seems so sincere and intimate it justifies everything the Stage Manager is trying to show us.

Other fine touches from this familiar ensemble: Margaret Mann’s comic turns as a professor eager to take us back to the Pleistocene in explaining the town’s interest, and as everyone’s maiden aunt in the wedding scene, gushing with the kind of fulsomeness that makes cliché both comical and real; Christian Shaboo, as George, seems young enough to be as unselfconscious as George is; George Kulp and Susan Kulp play the Webbs with a familiarity that seems as if we’re actually in their home, and the awkward, prenuptial visit of George to his future father-in-law is comic, and almost lets in lots of things best left unsaid; as Doc Gibbs and his wife, J. Kevin Smith and Deena Nicol have a more weary hominess than the Webbs—with the Doctor having to make housecalls (who remembers that ancient custom?), and his wife fantasizing about a trip to Paris as though it were on the other side of the earth; the families’ breakdown at the graveyard feels genuine rather than stagey, a big plus; Peter Chenot, as deliveryman-about-town Howie Newsome, is as real as the imaginary (to us) carthorse he leads around.

Perhaps the most forward-looking aspect of Wilder’s play is when George and Emily, in their respective bedrooms in their respective parents’ next-door houses, try to set up a means of surreptitious communication, if only to study together. Do we need look any further for an early version of the urge to text and share files? And when the Stage Manager comments on the fact that most people end their lives married, it’s a rather obvious reflection that—in these parts, anyway—more people than ever, even those who eschew heterosexual coupling, have that opportunity.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, I reckon.

Our Town By Thornton Wilder Directed by Steven Scarpa Produced by George Kulp Production Design by Drew Gray Stage Management by Mary Tedford

Cast (in order of appearance): Megan Chenot; J. Kevin Smith; Sam Taubl; Peter Chenot; Deena Nicol; Susan Kulp; Christian Shaboo; Josie Kulp; Spenser Long; Mallory Pellegrino: Margaret Mann; George Kulp; Donna E. Glen; Erich Greene; Jim Lones; Rick Beebe; Jesse Jo Toth

English Building Market 839 Chapel Street

2013, September 19, 20, 21; 26, 27, 28 8 p.m.

Queen for a Day

The curtain has gone up on the new Yale Cabaret season—Cab 46—and the debut show is We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun, written by YSD students Helen Jaksch, Kelly Kerwin, and Emily Zemba, and directed by Kerwin. The show has a lot of what makes Cab shows work—a sense of the audience’s proximity, a showy self-consciousness, and a lot of moxy. The play is not so much a whodunit as a howwasit, involving a late, beloved drag queen, Edie (played with show-stopping flair by Seth Bodie), a mummified, gunshot body in her apartment, and a gun. What the hell happened?

Well, of course, the entire subculture of which Edie was a reigning queen has its conjectures, so we meet a variety of possibilities—some plausible, some comically outrageous (my favorite was Edie in full Mae West drag getting the drop on a bandanna-ed bandit)—with all the enacted scenes employing the genre markings of any drama queen’s inner cinema; the bottom line: “he done her wrong.”

The real fire of the show is in the musical performances (original songs, and accompaniment as Charlie the Piano Guy, by Joel Abbott). Bodie/Edie could’ve sung more, for my money, and bravo to Ato Blankson-Wood, looking like a Grace Jones impersonator, for taking the passed baton from Lena Horne’s “The Man I Love” and scoring. Then there are the big, uplift moments, some with lip-synching, that have the audience clapping and cheering. Yes, despite murder and death, this show is a celebration of what Iggy calls “Lust for Life.”

Christopher Ash’s stage set is Warholian with its projections of Edie and it’s glitzy “everybody’s a star” aura; the other queens seem to recall tropes from the 70s and 80s as well—my favorite is the über-slinky Cabaret-like Mistress of Ceremonies played by Tom Pecinka, with her tale of carnations—and there’s a trio of comic turns by James Cusati-Moyer as a blonde ditz, complete with New Yawk squawk, in Daisy Dukes, a leather-skirted conchita hot for fun, and a hilarious Pacino take-off as one of Edie’s more aggressive paramours. Kristen Ferguson works best as the tersely barking flatfoot stumped by this cold case. And Christopher Geary rounds out the cast as a speculative intimate with a place in his bitchy heart for some of the loveable oddities of Edie in her prime.

Apart from all the comedy and song and dance, Bodie really shines in an intimate boudoir moment where Edie takes the entire audience into her confidence—we’ve all been given envelopes containing little icons that she lovingly identifies by the names of the queens they stand for. It’s perhaps the most Warholian moment of all—the idea that, without a historical sense, a scene, a subculture, an art-form, a performance, an identity will be forgotten as if it never was. Well might the other queens rehearse the stories of Edie’s alleged act of violence—she not only had a gun, but a heart and a memory. Viva La Minx!

We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun Written by Helen Jaksch, Kelly Kerwin, Emily Zemba Directed by Kelly Kerwin

Dramaturg: Helen Jaksch; Producer: Emika Abe; Sets, Lights, & Projections: Christopher Ash; Costumes: Grier Coleman; Sound, Original Music: Joel Abbott; Stage Manager: Anita Shastri; Set/Technical Assistant: Samantha Lazar; Tango Consultant: Joel Abbott; Photographs by Nick Thigpen courtesy of Yale Cabaret

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street

September 19-21, 2013

Story Playlist 23: The Man from the South

Roald Dahl: “The Man from the South” (1948) Most folks know Roald Dahl for his wonderful children’s books, like The BFG (Big Friendly Giant), James and the Giant Peach, or Matilda (now a Broadway musical), but Dahl led a number of lives. He was a spy during World War Two, and an older generation knows him for his razor-sharp, creepy short stories for adults, the most famous of which is “The Man from the South.”

The story is simple. Our narrator, an Englishman on holiday in Jamaica, is joined poolside by a man dressed in a white suit and cream-colored hat, who speaks with a Spanish accent (“the” is both written and pronounced “de”). This Man from the South (i.e., South America) engages in a bet with a young American sailor, who is trying to show off to an English girl he has just met. The sailor offers to bet a dollar that he can light the Man’s cigar outdoors on the first try with his Zippo-style lighter. The Man makes a counter-bet, offering his new Cadillac if the boy can successfully light his lighter ten times in a row. The sailor is intrigued and asks what he would have to forfeit, if he fails. The Man replies that it is something small that he would not miss—the pinky finger of his left hand.

As soon as the counter-prize is stated, the general tension brewed by Dahl in the slightly-awkward back-and-forth of the Man and the sailor leaps up to a higher level of dread that prompts the reader’s heart to leap with it. What seemed playful becomes sinister.

Our nervousness at the situation is contrasted by the bright and playful environment in which it takes place—poolside at a sunny Jamaican resort. The narrator expresses his dismay at this bet, as does the English girl, who thinks it is foolish. But the young sailor takes the bet anyway. Why is not clear, though he rationalizes that he’s never needed his pinky and would certainly like a Cadillac. Why the Man would want a pinky finger is not asked.

The narrator is roped into refereeing, and they adjourn to the Man’s hotel room. There the Man asks a maid to bring him nails, a hammer, and a meat cleaver. He hammers the nails into the hotel desk so that he can tie the sailor’s hand down to it. The sailor offers his hand, clenched but with the pinky extended, so the Man can lop it off before the sailor has second thoughts, should he lose the bet. The Man hands the car keys to the narrator, and the sailor begins flicking his lighter.

Dahl produces a wonderfully-tense countdown of successful lightings of the lighter, until we reach the ninth. Just then a woman bursts into the room, sees what is happening, and berates the Man in a flurry of Spanish. The bet is cancelled. The woman explains that this Man is her husband, and he is mentally unstable. He has taken 47 fingers and lost 11 Cadillacs—and all the Cadillacs were hers, and not his to bet. She then adds that everything that was once his is now hers, that she won it after hard work. Dahl then provides a marvelous kicker of a last line, when we see that the woman has only two fingers on one of her hands.

The story works beautifully, providing natural tension, and it is no surprise that it has been made into short films on several occasions, including by Alfred Hitchcock (starring Steve McQueen and Peter Lorre). What we are to make of the bizarre scene and the dynamic between the woman and her mad husband is another question, one which, happily, Dahl does not answer for us. To answer it would be to remove the mystery, and the sustenance of an enduring mystery based on a haunting situation is far more powerful than a mystery that is “explained away.”

Magritte is my favorite painter, because his paintings, with evocative titles, draw the viewer into a sense of a mystery to be solved—but then he does not solve it. David Lynch is the nearest approximation on-screen, with Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive two famous examples of engrossing mysteries that Lynch, arguably, never bothered to conceive solutions to. The goal is to draw us into the mystery, encourage us to seek its solution, but never to give us the satisfaction of feeling that we have solved it. To solve it would be to dismiss it, to move on. By never offering a solution, we remain haunted by the mystery. And after all, all great artists hope to haunt us.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

Ever have that experience where you feel almost taken hostage by your host? Sorta like a “guestage?” That’s the situation facing Tom (James Leaf) and Diane (Mariah Sage), two teachers—a prof, she earns twice his salary, he’s only a poet and high school teacher—who have car troubles on a road-trip. When we meet them they’ve been brought to the home of Ivan (Daniel White) and Ruth (Irina Kaplan), husband and wife—he, big, burly, effusively and physically friendly; she, kittenish and confiding—after an afternoon of drinks at a roadhouse.

Ivan is the sort of host who thrives on some hopped-up idea of copacetic encounters, looking for openings and outpourings. Ruth just seems ecstatic at having some longed-for company even if she’s shy about playing the hostess (it means having to cook and clean, y’know). We can tell that days on the road seem to be exposing the faultlines in Tom and Diane’s relationship, while Ivan’s status as a member of a Special Operations Unit—a military mercenary, in other words—and Ruth’s as an ex-stripper make them, one would imagine, interesting interlocutors for two teachers at large.

If the idea of two couples downing vast amounts of liquor and talking, squabbling, confessing, and flirting far into the night makes you recall George and Martha hosting Nick and Honey, that’s fitting enough, since this kind of theatrical evening probably dates—in its sense of unspecified unease—from Albee’s play of the early Sixties, but Steven Bellwood’s play, directed by James Leaf, is far less arcane in the kinds of “games” going on, though one is never quite sure, with Ivan, if or when his sense of grievance might turn into something ugly. Nor, for that matter, Diane’s, who seems to play with the idea of, Martha-like, exposing her partner’s frailties.

Tom, the less developed character here, has a tendency to crib lines from Eliot or Shakespeare, and even taking a psilocybin mushroom doesn’t make him more loquacious, or interesting, for that matter. He’s sort of the witness more than anything, though Leaf gives him some fire when he tries to argue for Ivan's trustworthiness against Diane’s fears for Ruth’s safety. Kaplan’s Ruth is at times clueless but—as a former professional stripper—she also knows how to be tough and how to flaunt her sexiness. Ruth is given two pathetic moments, and that’s perhaps one too many—the first, in the first act, might recall “the bit about the kid” in Virgina Woolf, in an oddly literal way; the other precipitates the climax and comes a bit out of nowhere.

Bellwood seems to want to play on the educated classes’ discomfort with the less educated, a discomfort that can be protective, projective, and quite misguided. Ruth’s role in her marriage is stronger than Diane assumes it is, blinded by her own intimidation when faced with preachy Ivan, his domestic arsenal, his jokey Obama mask, and his “what you need is a real man” innuendo. Played by Daniel White with large-as-life gusto, Ivan is the live-wire here and our time in his home may make us uncomfortable, but he’s really just trying to have a good time. In the end, the others just aren’t up for it, particularly Diane who, as played by Sage, maintains a brittle sense of timid intelligence and a belief that others just aren’t as smart as she is. More could be done to express what we’re to make of her attachment to Ruth, but as it is, Diane is the character who stands to be changed most profoundly by what takes place.

The staging—all on one level in the first half, and with a provocative split between levels in the second—is surprisingly intimate given the large, multipurpose room at the Whitney Arts Center—and the cast swiftly establishes a naturalistic rhythm that gets us from awkward-but-well-meaning strangers meeting to exposures, both purposeful and unthinking, that make us worry where it’s all going.

The Specials is entertaining, suspenseful, and full of the kind of unease common not only to being strangers in a strange home, but also to being strangers in our own land.

“Who’s afraid of guns and drugs and the Big Bad Wolf, Martha?” “I am, George, I am.”

Three more shows: Friday and Saturday, Sept. 20 & 21, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, Sept. 22, at 3 p.m.

The Whitney Arts Center, 591 Whitney Avenue, New Haven

The Specials by Steve Bellwood Directed by James Leaf Produced and Assistant Directed by David Pilot

Cast: Mariah Sage, James Leaf, Irina Kaplan, Daniel White

Co-producers: Margaret Carl, Annia Bu, James Leaf, Steve Bellwood; Stage Manager: Beatrix Roller; Assistant Stage Manager, Set and Costume Designer: Lisette Lux; House Managers: Baileigh Rae Massey, John Roeller, Claire Gabriele; Publicity: Jane Mills

Story Playlist 22: Little Lost Robot

Isaac Asimov: “Little Lost Robot” (1947) In general, I’m no fan of sci-fi, although I don’t avoid it. It just never did it for me. I was more in the fantasy realm after an childhood engaged in avid bouts of Dungeons & Dragons (and for some reason it seems that sci-fi and fantasy fans are never one and the same). But I had always heard of two great sci-fi short story authors who were considered great exemplars of the genre in which they wrote: Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov. So I was eager to sample a work by each.

From the start of Asimov’s “Little Lost Robot” I knew that I would like it, and that the fact of it involving the future and robots was largely incidental and not requisite to the enjoyment of the story. It was sauce on a great piece of meat, not sauce used to hide the poor quality of the meat it dressed. Asimov writes in an assured, if old-fashioned, manner and immediately draws the reader in by starting in medias res. As so many great detective stories do, this begins with experts being called in to solve a problem. In this case, the experts are a pair of mutually-antagonistic robopsychologists, including ornery Susan Calvin (a recurring Asimov character), who are tasked with finding a lost robot.

“Little Lost Robot” introduces Asimov’s now-famous “three laws of robotics,” established by scientists to protect humans against their own creations. The First Law is that a robot cannot harm a human, and must intervene if a human is in danger. The plot hinges upon the fact that a mining corporation has tinkered with a small group of robots and trimmed the first law, cutting out the second clause, because robots were interfering with the human miners, who needed to be exposed to blasts of radiation, too brief to be harmful, in order to conduct the mining. One of the robots who was tinkered with has suddenly disappeared, and now seems to be hiding among the 62 other physically identical robots who work for the corporation. Calvin fears that the robot could possibly endanger a human, while still following the first half of the First Law, by not deliberately harming a human but also not intervening to prevent harm. The robopsychologists must develop a test to determine which of the 63 robots is the outlier, without having to destroy them all and cost the corporation millions.

It’s a great setup, and I should pause for a moment to express just how influential Asimov was as a writer. He invented the term “robotics,” as the study of robots. He didn’t invent robots, of course, but so many of the ideas we have about robots, particularly in fiction, emerged from his pen. Just like George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead which established “rules” about how zombies are depicted in fiction, Asimov established, back in the 1940s and 50s, some by-now familiar tropes about robots—specifically, he foresaw just how much we would rely on them, and what could logically go wrong with our over-reliance on them in the future.

After interviewing the miners, Calvin finds one who, in a fit of anger, told the robot in question to “get lost,” which was meant metaphorically but was taken literally by the robot as an instruction. So the robot hid among the other robots. Asimov adds psychology to the robots, so that Calvin begins to believe the robot’s sense of superiority to humans keeps it in hiding, priding itself on outwitting them. She arranges for a human to be put into what appears to be a dangerous situation, in which a weight is falling upon them. Each robot with the second law programmed in place will be compelled to rush to save the human, even at risk to themselves. While Calvin is on the right track, the renegade robot is ahead of her. He has spoken with the other robots, rationalizing with them that they would be unable to save the human and thus die for nothing.

The situation is multifaceted, with an engaging mystery that has profound implications. Eventually Calvin manages to outsmart the robot, but not before Asimov’s main theme has been sounded: if robots become too intelligent, and if we rely on them too much, a) they might become too independent, and b) they might take over. It’s the theme of countless films, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Terminator, but Asimov was the first to employ it, decades before it was a cliché. The implications of robots becoming too human is still present for today’s scientists, and our over-reliance is well-documented. We no longer bother trying to remember things, as our computers remember for us. If our computers one day were to become hostile to their “masters,” or were to suddenly forget everything we’ve saved in them—well, a phrase about a creek without a paddle comes to mind.

Story Playlist 21: The Gift of the Magi

O. Henry: “The Gift of the Magi” (1905) Whether or not you’ve read this story, you’re probably familiar with its broad strokes. A husband and wife with very little money struggle to come up with Christmas gifts for one another. They each possess a single item of great value that they treasure and admire. She has gorgeous long hair, and he has inherited an elegant pocket watch. Without other options that feel satisfactory, the woman’s love prompts her to sell her hair, in order to buy a handsome platinum chain for her husband’s watch, to replace the leather strap he has been using. She gives him the gift on Christmas Eve, when he returns home from work and sees her shortened hair, and his reaction puzzles and concerns her. He then asks her to open his gift: a set of jeweled combs for her long hair, combs that she had long admired from afar. He sold his watch in order to buy her the combs. Thus the husband and wife each sold the object that they most prized, in order to give each other something appropriate as a compliment to what the other most prized. But each wound up selling the treasure that the gifts were meant for, resulting in a pair of elegant, but at the moment useless, Christmas gifts. Their love for one another has been proven, and the story is a happy one, but the key component that it demonstrates is situational irony.

I had heard this story told in a slightly butchered fashion long before I read it. It is often used as the exemplar of an ironic situation, irony being a word that few can define but many can give examples of. This precise plot was the example I was taught in school, in lieu of a dictionary definition of “irony. One definition of irony is “humor based on opposites; something humorous based on contradiction; incongruity.” The humor component, however, is not strictly necessary, or at least is in the eye of the beholder—it would be easy for the couple in the story not to see the humor in their situation. O. Henry, we suppose, wants his readers to see it, perhaps at his characters’ expense.

Thankfully, the tone of O. Henry’s story is remarkably easy-going, even Brechtian in its refusal to tug at the heartstrings until they snap. When I had heard the story spoken aloud, I thought it was about a homeless couple who have nothing in the world but their inherited treasures—this adds a layer of saccharin that is not accurate. Our couple is low-income, but functional, making the whole a bit lighter.

What is most remarkable is how O. Henry has crafted a story that has entered popular mythology. That people know of the plot without having read it is truly noteworthy, and I believe it is the first story on my list that exists outside of the context of the story itself. The theme of live burial in Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” is riffed off of and quoted in film and fiction. The evil cobra and good mongoose in “Rikki Tikki Tavi” are known largely via the animated film of the story. O. Henry’s “Gift of the Magi” exists in the cultural oxygen for folks who have never seen a film version of it, never read it, and think that O. Henry is just a candy bar. That is a remarkable feat, and it’s hard to imagine an author who would not relish creating something that has, in its way, become an example for a rhetorical effect, demonstrating how we understand, or at least explain, situational irony. How many writers can claim to have given dramatic form to a definition?