A Victim of Voices

The most recent Yale Cabaret production, Sarah Kane’s Crave, directed by playwright Hansol Jung, is staged as a kind of dark night of the soul of a writer. Sitting at a table with sheaves of paper, M (Helen Jaksch) interacts at first with disembodied voices that seem external but also possibly internal. Soon, the voices take shape as three distinct interlocutors—A (Taylor Barfield), B (David Clauson), and C (Ashley Chang). The trio come at M from all directions, bursting through screens, leaping out from behind curtains, popping up from a big plastic trash can. Their mixture of memory, poetry, confrontation, and exhibition drives the show.

At times there is argument and contestation among the voices, at times there are moments of tenderness or hilarity, and seductive arias and impassioned pleas. It’s a very vocal show but unlike the Cab's recent Radio Hour—another show driven by voices—Crave is anything but static as the four characters move all about the playing space as though the audience just happens to be sitting in their personal playground.

The tech of the show is superlative as lights (Elizabeth Mak) and sounds (Cahyae Ryu) have to create much of the atmosphere—an atmosphere that is nothing if not mercurial. And because the set is a part of our space, and vice versa, the set design (Samantha Lazar and Andrew Freeburg)—like that deconstructable desk or the paper screen of texts or a blanket grabbed up for all four to get behind—counts for a lot. The tale-telling trio are clad in loose white outfits that make them easy to focus on as they dart about amongst the tables like will o’ the wisps.

M, in glasses with sturdy frames and a rather no-nonsense attitude—all things considered—roots the proceedings in a reality not as threatening as it might be. This could be a play of someone losing her mind, coming apart in a schizophrenic meltdown, but as enacted by Jacksch seems rather to be a lengthy, therapeutic exploration. Kane gives us a protracted whine about sex and death and the ineluctable modalities of physical existence and mental distraction—the conditions of inner angst that a writer has only the dwindling resources of imagination and graceful utterance to combat or overcome.

At times we might be in the midst of repressed memories—the kind that come out on the psychiatrist’s couch—at other times we might be in a moment of truth one might reveal to a lover or friend. B is the most petulant, seeming to want something to be resolved, preferably in his favor; A is the most histrionic, at one point mooning us or grabbing a microphone like a game show host looking to entertain with embarrassing factoids; C is generally like some Id-child, storming about, almost hyperventilating, and having “accidents” we associate with childhood. M is often like a patient teacher or older sister, stern but forgiving, until the whirlwind of loose ends begins to take its toll.

Like a kind of verbal Rorschach test, the text of Crave is something that no two audience members will experience the same way, and this staging by a playwright and four dramaturgs brings that text to life in imaginative ways, so whether or not we follow every implied dramatic situation, we still get the kind of visceral pleasures we come to the Cabaret to find. At times moving, at times funny, at times wildly histrionic, Crave is a fascinating “treatment” of a certain kind of modern ailment—the compunction to find words adequate to experience. If only to find the final word we all crave.

Crave By Sarah Kane
Directed by Hansol Jung

Dramaturg: Kee-Yoon Nahm; Producer: Sally Shen; Set Designer: Samantha Lazar; Assistant Set Designer/Tech Consultant: Andrew Freeburg; Costume Designer: Hunter Kaczorowski; Lighting Designer: Elizabeth Mak; Sound Designer: Gahyae Ryu; Projection Designer: Ni Wen; Stage Manager: Emily DeNardo; Assistant Director: Gabrielle Hoyt-Disick; Photographs: Nick Thigpen

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street
November 14-16, 2013

New Haven Maine-stays

The New Haven Theater Company’s production of Almost, Maine makes a virtue of its minimalist set to create a kind of fantasy space where all the action takes place. That’s fitting because Almost, Maine almost takes place in a real place, but John Cariani’s script likes to interject little fabulistic touches that let characters be symptoms as much as people. Which is a way of saying that the point of each of the nine vignettes that comprise the play is that love makes everything different. We might think we’re normal people in normal situations, but when love gets involved, magical or bizarre or at least unusual things happen, and the way we talk about what we’re going through has to make use of metaphors and imagery. So if Glory (Jenny Schuck) is carrying a broken heart, or a man (Erich Greene) has been reduced by the loss of hope, well, Cariani’s play is going to treat such things literally. Which means you may be like Phil (Steve Scarpa) and Marci (Anna Klein), who have come to the end of their relationship—waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The NHTC has the knack of playing things with a straight-forward gusto that lets us in on the joke while also being as forthright as these characters need to be. It’s fun to watch pratfalls of emotion (fall in love, get it?) overtake two beer-drinking buddies, Randy (Peter Chenot) and Lendall (Christian Shaboo) because the guy-ness of these guys is so vivid. It’s fun to watch Steve, a guy who can’t feel pain (Scarpa) get hit with an ironing board by someone else’s wife (Deena Nicol) who has just the right air of annoyed woman doing laundry on a Friday night. Scarpa takes a page from Dustin Hoffman’s autistic fellow in Rain Man to make us feel both sympathy and amusement.

And that’s the key note of the evening. Every one of these characters is suffering in some way—I particularly liked Chenot as Jimmy, the sad sack behind a wall of downed Buds who cheerily confronts Sandrine (Anna Klein) who ditched him months ago and is now on the way back to her bachelorette party (ouch!)—and yet the comedy is always there too. So whether it’s a couple (Mallory Pellegrino and Christian Shaboo) whose bags full of love seem rather wildly disproportionate or two snow-sports friends (Jenny Schuck and Peter Chenot) who suddenly discover there are such things as indoors sports, there is usually an outcome that seems for the best.

Directors Megan Chenot and Margaret Mann should be happy with the pacing of their evening, and the Chenots’ incidental music adds very appropriate touches to backgrounds and transitions—I particularly liked the banjo that adds a jauntiness to the proceedings. Nothing goes on too long, though some scenes are more developed than others—Scarpa and Klein’s scene felt the most real—and not all the scenes end with love triumphant: Greene’s Man gets the most biting lines in the play about how leaving someone with just a little hope can be like stealing their oxygen bit by bit, and Deena Nichol dragging a wheelie suitcase away while saying “yes, yes” stabs as well.

NHTC have found another dialogue-driven entertainment that showcases their grasp of regular folks in irregular circumstances—a strength of their Our Town as well. Added to the regulars of the company are newcomers who add a lot, replacing some who have left our town for other horizons.

Almost, Maine plays again tonight at 8 p.m. and next Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. at the English Building Markets on Chapel Street.

Almost, Maine Written by John Cariani Directed by Megan Chenot and Margaret Mann

Peter Chenot, Erich Greene, Anna Klein, Deena Nicol, Mallory Pellegrino, Steve Scarpa, Christian Shaboo, Jenny Schuck

Original music written and performed by Megan and Peter Chenot Technical production: George Kulp and Drew Gray

New Haven Theater Company at English Building Markets 839 Chapel Street

Almost, Maine is Almost Here

The latest offering from the New Haven Theater Company goes up this Thursday night and plays for the next two weekends. Following on the warm, fuzzy feeling that their production of Our Town inspired in the fall, the folks at NHTC have jumped into a more contemporary play about a fictitious town: Almost, Maine, by John Cariani. Co-directed by Megan Chenot (the Stage Manager in Our Town) and Margaret Mann (Mrs. Soames in Our Town), Almost, Maine finds NHTC returning to the same space—in the back of the English Building Markets on Chapel—where they staged Our Town, to take us to another “almost” town. Mann says the troupe really “bonded like a family” during the Our Town run, and remarks that she’s never been part of a theatrical group where “the entire company gets along” so well, all committed to making “the best production possible.” The group wanted to find a new vehicle quickly while still riding the good vibes from Our Town, both among the company and from the NHTC’s fans and supporters. Megan Chenot knew of the popular winter play Almost, Maine, having staged it with high school students during her time at Cheshire Academy. It’s a family friendly play, language-wise, and Mann calls it “funny and refreshing.” And it’s one of the most staged plays in our nation’s high schools since its first successful run—in Portland, Maine—in 2004. The play was recently staged at TheatreWorks in Hartford.

Set in a small town in Maine, the play brings together 8 different vignettes, 4 in each act, framed by a prologue, interlogue, and epilogue. Each of the segments presents a couple finding love, losing love or grappling with love in some way, and all are happening more or less simultaneously on a winter’s night around 9 p.m. Mann characterizes the dialogue as “charming and real,” and Chenot—who is also a member of the musical duo Mission O—has written incidental music to help with the transitions.

Mann volunteered to work with Chenot when the latter proposed the play but didn’t want to direct it solo. Mann has found that the process of working with her NHTC colleagues in this capacity has let her “direct the way I would like to be directed.” Which is a way of saying that she doesn’t see this as a production she controls but rather one where collaboration is the method. It’s all about “encouragement, and trying things.” Chenot praises her co-director for being “patient, kind, and so observant of every important nuance.”

NHTC has developed a great feel for ensemble work as the same dedicated players appear again and again in their productions. Almost, Maine will feature 8 actors playing 17 characters, which means everyone gets at least two roles. That element of the staging—seeing actors change roles before your eyes—adds to the entertainment in such an intimate space as the English Building Markets. The scenic design is fairly minimal—with some of the props for sale in the Market itself—but there will be a scrim for an important special effect: the Aurora Borealis.  And, of course, snow.

According to Mann, the play is very definitely set in Maine—way up in Maine. Maybe to the point where our sense of “north” becomes somewhat mythic. In any case, it’s a play that seems to strike a chord with contemporary Americans, especially—perhaps—those who know what cold is. And those are the people who might enjoy a warm night of theater with the friendly faces of the New Haven Theater Company.

To add to the warmth: NHTC invites its audience to bring new or gently used winter clothing, to be donated to a local charity, as well as unopened cat food and clean blankets and towels, to be donated to the Purr Project of New Haven.

Almost, Maine by John Cariani Directed by Megan Chenot and Margaret Mann

The English Building Markets 839 Chapel Street, New Haven

November 14-16 and 21-23 at 8pm Tickets are $20 For more information, visit www.newhaventheatercompany.com

Owning Up

Caryl Churchill’s Owners, the second show of the Yale Repertory Theatre season, directed by Evan Yionoulis, is an insidious play. It’s so much fun to watch—with the fabulous scenic design by Carmen Martinez that shifts magically before our eyes—that we might be lulled into forgetting how barbed it is. In Yionoulis’ take on the show, the characters don’t seem to be really appalling—well, except for Marion—and so there is much entertainment value in watching how they cope with straitened circumstances and windfall offers, with marital melt-downs, new babies, and old flames, with skullduggery and borderline thuggery. Everyone keeps the comic timing skimming along, making us chuckle . . . until the ending brings home how lethal it all it is. How callous and shallow the world these characters inhabit . . . and perpetuate.

It’s Britain in the early seventies and the “owners” are taking over, a situation that we might say “resonates” with our times, though the more perceptive attitude, I think, is to see that Churchill is showing us how things began to change for the worse—all the way back then. Marion (Brenda Meaney) is the live-wire here, the rapacious woman Churchill shows us to remind us that, once in power, a woman can be as unreasoning, as blood-thirsty, as fascist as a man. It’s the other side of that great Equality demand the times were fraught with, and, in “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” fashion, indicates that the real problems lie elsewhere.

Marion wears the pants, we might say, except that her husband, Clegg (Anthony Cochrane), a butcher going out of business—and chatting to her employee Worsely (Joby Earle) about how he might do Marion in—when we first meet him, considers himself quite manly. He delivers spot on comments, common enough in those days when the ERA was being bandied about in the States, about how a man controls a woman. His idea of revenge on Alec, Marion’s old flame who he believes is back on the job, is to have sex with Alec’s wife Lisa. It’s all about ownership, you see. “She’s mine; she’s yours,” and so on.

That other couple—Alec (Tommy Schrider) and Lisa (Sarah Manton)—have kids and another on the way. They also are living, with Alec’s mum, in a flat in a building that Marion is taking over. So that precipitates a visit from Worsely to buy them out. It’s the standard practice of taking over a property, ditching the undesired (with rent-controlled leases), and soliciting the interest of the upwardly mobile—like the Arlingtons who eventually move in below. The stakes of this game are pretty clear, but it gets more complicated when Marion and Clegg take on ownership of the other couple’s new baby. It’s not quite clear why Lisa gives her child up except that she’s very distraught and a bit dim. Further complications circle around whether or not Marion can somehow take on ownership of Alec as well. And a running gag is Worsely’s attempts to kill himself, to give up ownership of what he stands up in, as he puts it.

As Clegg, Anthony Cochrane is more or less “the main character” in the sense that his rapport with Marion, from his point of view, is the only business really to be decided—that, and whether or not there will be an heir for “Clegg and Son.” In the end he still loves Marion because of a decision she makes about doing-in Alec. Peachy. Cochrane reminds me a little of Bob Hoskins combined with Jack Warden, which is a way of saying he’s a very likeable guy, in his manner, and if he’s a bully, he’s also a man trying to make do in a Man-and-woman’s World. He was in the army too, so, there you have it. He’s adaptable. And maybe even a little sentimental toward Lisa and her new baby.

As Marion, Brenda Meaney has the toughest role of the play. It’s easy to dislike her and to read all kinds of Iron Lady associations into her, but, on the other hand, she seems really to have feelings about Alec. It’s just that, as she says at the close, “I might be capable of anything. I’m just beginning to find out what is possible.” Why should Lady Macbeth have to stand behind that conscience-stricken fool she married? So then you ask yourself: what would the tragedy of such a woman be? Meaney has the perfect stature and statuesque qualities for this role. She’s commanding and powerful and, chomping chocolate bars or offering to buy Clegg a stripper, she has the same off-hand grace that says, “yes, this is my world. I’ve accepted it, what’s your problem?”

Alec, her problem, is the part that requires the most work. If his lines aren’t spoken with the right kind of Brit diction, Alec could turn into a caricature. Tommy Schrider nails it. His Alec is someone who has opted out, quasi-Bartleby-like. Not only would he rather not, he doesn’t see much point in doing or not doing. If Marion wants him to go to bed with her, he will, but there’s not much behind it. “I don’t keep,” he says. He dispatches his mum, when she’s in a coma, and the play lets you decide if that’s mercy or not. In the second part of the play, he seems to begin to accept that his wife and kids are actually a part of his life. Better late than never, we might say. And then he does something extraordinary, in the end.

Sarah Manton’s Lisa has heart and a grasp of realities, eventually. No caricature either, she could be contemptible in her useableness, but. She comes across as “woman, old school.” She’s nice and gracious to Worsely even when he barges in on her and Alec after their home has been robbed; she’s pregnant, at first, then a mother who has to abandon her baby. She’s confused and apt to cry until Marion gives her one across the face. Lisa is blonde and lithe, willing to have sex with Clegg to further her cause. Women’s wiles, you see.

Joby Earle’s Worsely is as likeable as Eric Idle always is, with that kind of self-effacing sociability that seems passively winning, but then such social graces mask that there’s something deeply wrong with Worsely. He keeps telling us this, and we see the evidence as more and more bandages bedeck his person, but it’s just a macabre gag, isn’t it? That is until we see Churchill’s point that, for every grasping villain like Marion, there are those walking dead, those moral nullities, that will do any bidding, for lack of anything better to do.

To Alex Trow falls two small but important roles: as Mrs. Arlington, she’s the well-heeled and well-meaning forces that stand above Marion. Marion worked hard in a man’s world to get something. Mrs. Arlington’s already got it. And a baby she lets the neighbors look after as she rushes to the theater. Heh. Trow is sweet in the mannered way of betters to lessers. But as Alec’s Mum, she’s a surprise. At first, given the use of mannequins, you might thing she’s one too, sitting in a chair like a piece of furniture. Then she speaks from the depths of her dementia. Then, later, she gets up, gets the kettle, attempts to make tea, all in a tour de force of muscular memory continuing beyond conscious thought. It stays with you.

About Marion and those pants—fortunately she doesn’t really wear them. We might arrive in fear of pants suits, but Seth Bodie’s costumes go for the patterned midis of the times, back when working women wanted to look like women, not business-women, which meant seeming to be on a date with life, in bold colors and big hair. Lisa, meanwhile, looks pretty much like the hippy turned hausfrau that was the outcome of the sexual revolution by the time its style trickled down. The men’s attire is flared where necessary and printed, matching or not, and Worsely, in particular, has the requisite not-quite-placeable seediness that speaks tomes.

The scene changing, on spinning sets, is fun to watch, especially as it is led-up to by “freeze frames” that work with Benjamin Ehrenreich’s lighting to create tableaux, which adds to the fun. Martinez’s sets include a nondescript butcher shop and an upscale one with blazing neon. The difference between the two says it all, as we go from post-war to posh.

See Owners if you can. This one’s really something, I’ll own.

Owners By Caryl Churchill Directed by Evan Yiounoulis

Scenic Designer: Carmen Martinez; Costume Designer: Seth Bodie; Lighting Designer: Benjamin Ehrenreich; Sound Designer: Joel Abbott; Production Dramaturg: Hugh Farrell; Vocal and Dialect Coach: Beth McGuire; Fight Director: Rick Sordelet; Casting Director: Tara Rubin; Stage Manager: Sonja Thorson

Yale Repertory Theatre October 25-November 16, 2013

The Art of the Airwaves

Radio Hour, the latest Yale Cabaret offering, was a good choice for Halloween weekend, featuring “Zero Hour,” an eerie sci-fi tale by Ray Bradbury, adapted for radio, and an episode of John Meston’s Gunsmoke. The show, a live “broadcast” in the style of late fifties radio, offers not only the entertainment of experiencing the variety of voices an actor is capable of, but also the opportunity to see the making of all the special sound effects, called Foley.

Conceived by Tyler Kieffer—who gets to do the unmistakeable voice of Sheriff Matt Dillon’s sidekick, Chester, in Gunsmoke—and Steve Brush, who, like Kieffer, performs some of the many sound effects, and directed by Paula Bennett, the show is a straight-forward homage to an era of entertainment that predates most of us in the audience. The best thing about the show is its grasp of the showbiz conventions that made radio programs so indelible for their listeners, and its wonderful evocation, via Hunter Kaczorowski's costumes and the props of Reid Thompson's scenic design, of radio as it was two generations ago.

And yet it's no disservice to say that, while it’s hard not to look at actors and Foley artists performing before one, the entire show might be best enjoyed with one’s eyes closed, letting it all take place in one’s mind, as it did for listeners in the time of classic radio. The show includes genuine commercial breaks, a part of the whole that becomes one of the more entertaining aspects of Radio Hour as nothing says nostalgia like the ads of yesteryear. (I saw the show late Saturday night with my daughter and we were greatly amused to see and hear a rendition of the Choo-Choo Charlie commercial for Good’n’Plenty that, in an animated version on TV, was a part of my childhood that I verbalized for her childhood.)

Anyone watching Radio Hour is bound to have his or her favorite voice moment—Prema Cruz’s laconic Shilo is a voice that immediately creates an image, and her little kid voice is entertainingly vivid, as is Ariana Venturi’s Mink, a bratty kid who turns against her parents in favor of a mysterious playmate called “Dril”; Brendan Pelsue creates a bizarre over-the-top pastiche of accents for the Announcer that amuses and surprises, while Aaron Luis Profumo performs the toffee-voiced tones of a patient dad, as well as the masculine composure of Sheriff Dillon, matched by the coy affection of Ashton Heyl’s Big Kate. Seconding all the vocal talent—and creating footsteps, slamming doors, fist fights, gunshots, dramatic music and jingles—the one for Mr. Clean is bound to stay in your head—are Foley artist/musicians Kieffer, Brush, Jing (Annie) Yin, and David Perry.

The stories selected are easy to follow, and also somewhat didactic: parents learn the price of their condescension to their children’s imaginations in Zero Hour, and a would-be husband learns that even in the patriarchal Old West taking a woman for granted can lead to humiliation, especially with Matt Dillon around to set things right. The cast played well to the audience’s sense of old-time charm, so that the entire evening was a bit like time travel.

It’s interesting that shows which, whether on radio or TV, would strike us as corny or simplistic, can inspire a respect when played with a sense of history and irony for audiences otherwise too sophisticated for such genre fare. Which leads me to wonder if, with shows like Mad Men trading on the “romance” of advertising, it’s not time for a TV show set on an old-time radio program where the interface between what happens on and off the air is where the comedy or drama lies.

For Radio Hour, the entertainment is in the staging even more than in what is staged.

Radio Hour Featuring Ray Bradbury’s Zero Hour and John Meston’s Gunsmoke Conceived by Tyler Kieffer and Steve Brush Directed by Paula Bennett

Dramaturg: Helen Jaksch; Scenic Designer: Reid Thompson; Costume Designer: Hunter Kaczorowski; Lighting Designer: Joey Moro; Sound Designer: Tyler Kieffer; Sound Designer/Composer: Steve Brush; Stage Manager: Kate Pincus; Technical Director: Rose Bochansky; Producer: Melissa Zimmerman; Photographs by Nick Thigpen

Yale Cabaret October 31-November 2, 2013

This week the Cab is dark, then returns November 14-16, with Sarah Kane’s Crave, directed by Hansol Jung, a play that investigates the psychic costs of the creative act with a quartet of actors enacting voices all alive in a writer’s mind.

A Town Without Pity

The Visit, the first YSD thesis show of the year, directed by Cole Lewis, is a play by Friedrich Dürrenmatt dating from the 1950s. We might say it’s a play about “justice, greed, and the American way” but for the fact that the play is set in a German town called Güllen and, thus, was initially intended as a comment on the bad consciences of post-war Germans, where virtually any town had its distressing history of fascism and scapegoating. The YSD production doesn’t update the setting, much—which allows for fun with certain period aspects of German costuming—but makes the play abundantly relevant to our country and our times, where many townships that can’t boast major industry or global investment companies are falling into the dire penury we find among the good folks of Güllen. What will they do to pull themselves out of the economic quagmire? Why, find a patron, a donor, or maybe even an investor. The potential “good angel” is Claire Zachanassian, a native of Güllen who has been abroad for forty years—long enough to have had seven marriages and to have amassed a fortune of at least $3 billion. Her return has all the townsfolk a-tizzy as the play opens, including her girlhood flame Alfred Ill, who the city fathers hope can sweet-talk Claire into generosity. Despite a lyrical, two-on-a-swing interlude between the former lovebirds, we find out that something rather bad befell Claire thanks to Alfred, and that she’ll pay up to the town’s coffers only if she gets payback. She wants Alfred dead.

Of course, the mayor and all the townsfolk reject this proposal—even if Alfred did in fact do her wrong in the remote past, it’s not justice to put a billion dollar price on his head, making the town’s salvation dependent on his execution. And so, as many “good Germans” would immediately recognize, the horrible and hidden past can hold the present hostage. What’s more, one finds that one’s fellow citizens are apt to join together against whoever stands between them and prosperity. And that person—here only an individual (a shopkeeper) but elsewhere an entire race—can become a scapegoat for the will of the people.

That is the ingenious plot that Lewis’ cast enacts in this impressive ensemble affair. Few are the actors here who play only one role, and the movement and activity in the Iseman's varied playing space keeps this longish show lively. Most of the fun is in the early going, as things get increasingly sinister and appalling as the play goes on, and it does go on. Be prepared to be exhausted by the time it’s over.

The principals in the cast carry their roles with aplomb: as Claire, Mariko Nakasone is an extremely sexy sexagenarian, combining a steely sturdiness with feline graces—and she gets some great costumes too; she’s too odd to command our sympathies, though she does have grounds for claiming herself wronged. Chris Bannow’s Alfred seems more appropriately aged and we sense that, whatever his faults in the past, he has tried to overcome them in good bürgerlich fashion. His role grows in stature when we begin to sense, as he does, that the whole town is against him—a chilling moment when he tries to leave town plays like something out of the Twilight Zone. As the Mayor, Matthew McCollum is affable and unctuous and keeps us—we sometimes double as the citizens of Güllen, waving flags at appropriate moments—in the palm of his hand.

Among the rest of the cast, there are many fine moments as well, particularly Mamoudou Athie as the Schoolmaster, the one figure here who mounts an effective plea—on television, no less—against what is happening. It’s good to see Athie given a role not predominantly comic, though he does also get hit over the head with a painting. Other fun comes from Celeste Arias, as a moustache-sporting film star (two different versions) married to Claire, and as the frowsy wife of Alfred, and from Iris O’Neill, a child actress who gets to do things like pull a wagon across stage and vamp on a toy accordion, and pretty much steal her every scene.

Elsewhere, Ceci Fernandez and Mickey Theis cavort enthusiastically as roly poly eunuchs, creepy and unsettling—and they also lend great effect as the TV team who come to cover Alfred’s great “sacrifice.” In fact, dressing up Theis in a variety of outfits is almost endlessly entertaining—he plays three other roles, including a teenager. Montana Levi-Blanco’s costumes are inspired: the outfit for the Butler, besides making Elia Monte-Brown almost unrecognizable, seems a surreal, androgynous take-off on something out of Monopoly. And then there are the cast's tell-tale yellow shoes…

The scenic design by Chika Shimizu is wide open in the first half, with different spaces provided by small-scale buildings to represent the brick and mortar sturdiness of the town. Later, we get a shop, and a cardboard cut-out car that works quite effectively. There are also plenty of entrances, exits, use of the catwalk, and special effects. Kristen Ferguson’s collage projections in the slideshow segment are wonderful in evoking a hint of Georg Grösz by way of early Cubism. Brian Hickey’s sound design, I suspect, will yield new things on every viewing. I was keen enough the first night to pick up the sound of a gramophone stylus spinning in the endless groove at the end of a record as things began to close in on Alfred. Caitlin Smith Rapoport’s lighting design met the challenge of so much action in so many places, creating outdoors, indoors, and, in one great sequence when the Doctor (Merlin Huff, winningly and ineffectually conscience-stricken) attempts to appeal to Claire's good nature, raking autumnal light flowing through a fence over scattered leaves.

Cole Lewis aims her version of The Visit at the human ability to rationalize any barbarity or indulgence in the name of our capacity to please ourselves and avoid considering the consequences. If you don’t find yourself stabbed at some point in this production, then you just aren’t paying attention.

The Visit By Friedrich Dürrenmatt Translated by Maurice Valency Directed by Cole Lewis

Scenic Designer: Chika Shimzu; Costume Designer: Montana Levi Blanco; Lighting Designer: Caitlin Smith Rapoport; Sound Designer: Brian Hickey; Projection Designer: Kristen Ferguson; Production Dramaturg: Lauren Dubowski; Stage Manager: Emily DeNardo

Cast: Celeste Arias; Mamoudou Athie; Chris Bannow; Jabari Brisport; Cornelius Davidson; Ceci Fernandez; Christopher Geary; Merlin Huff; Sarah Krasnow; Matthew McCollum; Elia Monte-Brown; Mariko Nakasone; Iris O’Neill; Jennifer Schmidt; Mickey Theis

Yale School of Drama October 29-November 2, 2013

From an Editor’s Desk: It’s Not Who You Know…Really It Isn’t

As music editor for Rowman and Littlefield, I receive any number of proposals for memoirs from musicians that tell not so much their story as that of the musical luminaries with whom they worked. Unfortunately, the aura of fame often extends only as far as the actual celebrity. As I wrote one agent regarding a possible book by a temporary drummer for a once famous act:

I know the uphill battle you will be facing when pitching a book of this sort, which I commonly refer to as the “memoir of the greatest sideman you've never heard of.” It’s tough to place books about the near famous rather than the famous. As Mel Brooks once quipped: “There are two types of people in this world: the famous and the near famous. The famous are just what you’d expect—president, popes, Hollywood stars. The near famous are those who want to be near the famous.”

Not long before this proposal, I had received another from a prospective author that was to be brazenly titled Confessions of a Shameless Name-dropper. Unlike other memoirists who try to sneak this stuff by, this author was refreshingly open about the matter, and even though I had to credit him with his bravado, I had to school him in the realities of the market (which he took with remarkable grace). Here’s what I wrote:

Since I handle lots of music titles—and of all sorts, including memoirs of the type you’re proposing—I wanted to follow up. I tend toward the brutally honest, so, as I warn some of my authors, put on your elephant skin. Here we go…

You are not the first and not by any means the last author who has proposed a book about his adventures in the music business and the many great names with whom he may have worked. The problem is a simple one: names of note in a book do not translate into sales when the book itself is not written by one of those noted names. Even forewords and endorsements by “big” names are no substitute for the real deal. A book about one’s working relationship with Renee Fleming or Mick Jagger is simply not the same as a book by either one of them.

The net result is that these titles don’t ever do nearly as well as their authors predict. Sometimes they don’t even do as well as we predict—and we at least have access to good sales data about this kind of thing.

The bad news is that star-power-by-association is a bit of a myth, and unless you are one of those rare behind-the-scenes individuals who made those stars into stars rather than just someone who worked alongside them—think Russell Simmons of Def Jam Records or Motown producer Berry Gordy—a book documenting one’s musical career through the great artists whose paths crossed yours is a tough sell.

I should note that this isn’t to say there aren’t exceptions. But those exceptions are few and far between. If the story told is so compelling or uniquely wrought that the work shines almost in spite of the name-dropping, a book editor might sign on. But in that case the sign-on is not to the dropped names but the literary quality of the work itself.

Of course, another possible approach is if the book editor not only thinks the story compelling enough to publish but also believes that real marketing muscle (and real editorial attention) will overcome possible lack of interest. In this scenario the book is, you might say, forced upon the public by being oversold or sensationalized. A case in point is Chicago Review Press’s publication in 2005 of I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie. Following in the wake of this sexual tell-all, which CRP managed to get behind well enough, author Pamela des Barres was able to write a follow-up and even publish an anthology of confessions from other groupies.

But, my, my, how quickly this kind of self-pumping confessional—groupies as muses…really?—ages when you look at how autobiographies of this ilk now clutter the world of the self-published. After Warren Zevon’s wife, Crystal, published her tell-all—since we now swim in a sea of spousal memoirs that are hardly better than shoulder-rubbing memoirs (or more than shoulders, if you opt to work from des Barres’ playbook)—it is not surprising that there should follow a self-published confessional, too, about Zevon’s illegitimate child with Rae Murphy or Anita Gevinson’s self-published expose of rock stars she bedded (most prominently…Warren Zevon).

A great deal more could be written about the sociocultural pressures to take advantage of celebrity. After all, there are any number of so-called celebrities whose only real talent is their ability to celebritize (yeah, I made that word up), from Paris Hilton to the Kardashians to the reality TV personalities who will then reappear on Dancing with the Stars. Because celebrity is now so cheaply bought on cable and online, it had created the illusion that there is, in fact, an audience of readers who want to know about the people who knew famous people. And there might be: for free. But a paying audience?  That’s a different matter, and it’s where I, as a book editor, often draw the line.

I Read Poetry to My Daughter

My daughter is a very talented poet.  She is also a first-year college student struggling--as, I think, many students must--to articulate a fully formed criticism of a poem that she had taken on for a term paper.  In her last year of high school, she and I sometimes sat together to iron out our thoughts on poems about which she had to write.   Recently she asked for my thoughts on a poem she had selected to explore.  "Fire Is Not a Nice Guest," written by the prose poet Russell Edson, was not an easy work.   (You can read it here for yourself.)  Since she is in college over 1,000 miles away, and I'm here in New Haven and her request came between classes, I decided to write my response.   After writing it, I realized it might, in turn, be worth sharing with those who wonder: "So how does one read a poem?"  Of course, there is no one way.  But what I offer here is one of the more common approaches--particularly if you are trying to gather ideas for writing about a poem.  So here it goes...  

Hey, kid,

Let me write for you something not only about the poem “Fire Is Not a Nice Thing,” but also about the toolbox needed in order to write poetry criticism.

A poem is a carefully shaped textual object. It emphasizes two things, in particular: form and economy. By form, I mean everything from the sound of the words to their order and rhythm to the line breaks; by economy I mean a certain dependence on concision—the saying of a lot in fewer words than might be said in a story or an essay.

When reading a poem, the first step in the process is to read it several times through and just let it soak in. As you read, and re-read, again and again, you should begin to pay attention not so much to the poem itself (that is, the poem on its own) as to the kinds of associations that light up in your head and the dark spots that show up by contrast and require more attention—with more re-reading or thinking about or even background research.

In analyzing a poem, you can first split it apart by its form and its content. This is never a neat split. For good poems, it’s not supposed to be. But it is a good starting point. By “content,” we refer to what the poem is “about”—most commonly the topic(s) discussed or suggested, the story being told (the narrative), and the images that are being used. By form, we refer to the literary devices employed that give the poem its distinctive shape.

The formal elements come in several major categories…

• Phonemic: This refers to the sounds of the words, either alone or in relation to one another. The devices commonly associated with this category are things like assonance, alliteration, sibilance, rhyme, onomatopoeia, etc.
• Rhythmic: In poetry this typically refers to the pattern of word stresses and line meter(s), the use of punctuation and line breaks (for creating longer and shorter pauses).
• Syntactic: This refers to word order and thus to devices like chiasmus, ellipsis, palindrome, and numerous others.
• Semantic: This refers to the meanings of words or phrases expressed or more often stretched or distorted through such devices as metaphors, similes, slang, and idioms, as well as portmanteau words and unusual word choices.

There are other types of formal aspects to poems—dramatic (apostrophe), poetic (couplets, Petrarchan sonnets, villanelles, haiku, free verse), and so on. But you get the idea about separating form from content.  With respect to form, it doesn’t hurt to think of devices through these categories. I should also note that many of these devices are not exclusive to any one category.  Ononmatopoeia—words that sound like the sound to which they refer, such “pow” or “woof”—is both a phonemic and semantic device.

But let’s move on. The point here is not to learn how to use these devices. That’s for the writing of poetry. What we want to learn here is how to recognize these devices when they’re being used, figure out why they are being used, and, even when we can’t figure out the why, then at least explain their effect on the reader--which brings us back to those associations that I mentioned earlier.

You know all of this already to a certain extent as a poet. But what we need now is to figure out how to use this knowledge as a reader and critic.

This is the view from 20,000 feet in the air. So let’s get down to earth.

A good way to write any analysis of a poem for a term paper is to first free associate and then record in bullet points your impressions.  This is essentially data gathering.  You may not be ready to make an argument until you’ve written a whole set of notes on the things you noticed first—your responses, your guesses, the links you see or think are being made.

Let’s take the title: “Fire Is Not a Nice Guest.”  Here are some of my associational bullet points.

• The sentence is very simple.  It uses the simple equational verb “is.” The construction is basic: subject (“fire”) verb (“is”) object (“guest”).
• This is a negative sentence.  That suggests to me negativity could become an element of the poem.
• Guest is used as a metaphor.  Guest suggests an invitation, friendliness.  Fire could be friendly, a “guest,” if it warms one.  But generally guest suggests a house visitor, and fires and houses don’t mix well at all.
• Nice is the adjective used to describe fire.  It’s a very simple word—too simple—almost  as if a child had named the poem, and that points to the dramatic aspect of the poem of who the poem’s speaker is supposed to be.  (As you and I have discussed, every poem has an implied speaker who is sometimes the same as the poet herself--but just as often not.)
• This title is also, in a funny way, kind of stupid—that is, it reveals the stupidity of who named it because it states the obvious.  Fire is, metaphorically speaking, no guest!  (If the poem were called “Fire Is a Nice Guest,” that would really have me wondering what the poem would have been about: I imagine it then in a hearth warming my feet and thus a rather mawkish poem to follow suit.)

Important note here: I haven’t made an argument yet.  I’m just recording impressions—ideas suggested by the arrangement of the words, the implied tone (and perhaps intelligence or lack thereof) of the persona, the image I thus draw of the persona (is this a child? Someone mentally challenged? A not-too-bright adult?  An arsonist telling a story from prison?).  Actually, the type of notes that I’m recording here are examples of "reader response criticism" in action: I’m making a series of assumptions about the poem without having read the poem all the way through—many of which may be right or wrong, but whose validity as impressions are personally valid, even if mistaken.  Eventually, after one reads a poem (preferably many times), these impressions may come together as an argument or undergo heavy revision or more than likely both!

Again, I’m giving you a process—a way of reading poems—that hopefully can help in your getting to the point of writing about them in the form we call “criticism.”

OK, now into the poem a little.  I won’t do a line-by-line analysis.  I’ll just pick out parts that got my attention.

“I had charge of an insane asylum, as I was insane.”

• For a first line, this is pretty bold.  Is it to be believed?  Is it just a metaphor? Is the speaker  really insane, or is he or she just exaggerating?    For now let’s take the assertion at face value.
• The line begins with a clear contradiction. Inmates generally don’t run the asylums in which they are placed.  However, this sentence implies that because he(?) is insane, he’s in charge.  That assertion is, in itself, insane because it is a paradox (semantic device alert!).  He runs the asylum because he’s insane?  That’s just nuts!  It makes no sense—and thus perhaps serves the poem’s purpose.
• Also the order of the phrases is interesting.  The first half is a reasonable assertion, until one gets to the second half. Suggestion: someone seemingly normal who, upon a second look, is clearly not?
• Why “as I was insane” instead of “because I was insane”?  Since this is a prose poem, it doesn’t appear to be a question of meter.  The comma is suggestive—a pause, an afterthought, a bit of information being added to the main clause.  The narrator holding back on us (and maybe a little on himself, too).  The “as I was” would support that comma.  “Because I was” would not have.

I could go on then, line after line, noting, for example, the use of personification (a subset of metaphor): the fire eats logs, curtains, beds, etc.  It is hungry and has no restraint. It has a family. It really isn’t a very nice guest.

Now the poem begins to assume shape at the level of a poem (rather than line by line). It could be read as the tale told by a madman (woman?) of the fire that consumes his (her?) house.   The mad narrator reconstructs the event (assuming there even was one) with fire as a guest who has overstepped polite bounds, taking over altogether the home.

But let’s say the poem’s not about an actual fire. Instead let’s treat the fire itself as a metaphor.  But of what then?  Perhaps of the house that is his mind.  Notice that there’s implied safety upstairs.  If we work from the idea that what’s being housed is the narrator’s mind, then upstairs would suggest physically the brain, the seat of the mind or soul or whatever that lives in the upstairs of our bodies.  This kind of reading is certainly viable.

Of course not everything in the poem fits neatly into this reading of it.  But then again, that, too, makes its own kind of sense: the narrator is not altogether coherent anyway. He’s crazy! Still, we would want to be careful with this idea: it can sound like an excuse for not explaining the difficult sections of the poem (I consider the line “Hey, that’s where the dusts have built their cities” one of those more challenging parts.)

There are strong suggestions that the narrator is the subject of his own discourse—he is insane, he is one of the lunatics, he is the maniac.  My attention was especially caught by the line the 2^nd line’s end: “…but do not go upstairs and eat a dementia praecox” Dementia praecox was an old psychiatric diagnosis for what we call today schizophrenia (easy enough to read up on in Wikipedia.)  What’s particularly strange about this line is that dementia praecox fell out of use as a formal term by the 1920s and Edson’s poem was written in the 1960s.  (Edson himself was born in 1935—thanks Wikipedia!).

Is the narrator an older individual?  Or did Edson use this older term mistakenly?  This is unclear.  But it is a most interesting word choice—medical and yet also, technically speaking, out of date, even for the time period of the poem (semantic device alert!).

Where does this leave us?  I won’t spell out what your reading/interpretation of the poem should be. I’m offering a series of ideas to rev the engine so you can construct your own reading of the poem, bringing together here what Edson is doing: mixing “crazy talk” with a broad array of poetic devices.  In fact, this type of poem—crazy man talks and it sounds like poetry!—resonates with some standard ideas about poetry:

• It taps into the traditional link between madness and poetry (poetry as an inspired kind of madness).  The idea itself originates with the Greek philosopher Plato and the dialog he wrote called Ion.
• Who says madness can’t create art?  Artists mad and great at the same time abound.  Could Edson be illustrating that in madness can be found art or that madness can be reshaped as art?
• It’s probably here worth discussing the fact that this is a prose poem, which was Edson’s métier, his specialty.  In some ways, the prose poem makes the most sense for a mad persona’s speechifying.  A more traditional poem—with rhyme schemes and well-defined meters—would come off as, well, pretty weak.  We know that people who are mad aren’t that coherent.  Such a poem—the words of a madman cast in iambic pentameter—might work for Shakespeare, but for a modern poet it would look highly contrived (artificial) and probably fall flat.

I’ll stop here.  I wrote a lot, but I wanted to give you something to work with, to absorb and most important of all, a way of reading.

Dad

Story Playlist 32: Signs and Symbols

Vladimir Nabokov: “Signs and Symbols” (1948) It’s a little depressing when arguably the best modern prose writer in the English language is a Russian. Perhaps there’s something to be said for writing in a foreign language, for the language feels fresh and new to the writer, a series of signs and symbols to be deployed without the weight of over-familiarity dragging the words down or making them feel recycled? Whatever you think about Nabokov, the dude can write.

“Signs and Symbols” is as good an example of his mastery as any, not only of prose, turning ordinary words into inky butterflies, but also of his ability to sketch character with a few strokes of his typewriter/brush, and his injection of dread into normal-seeming situations. I’ve already written of how much I enjoy the feeling of dread—the way it propels stories, no matter their genre. A tale needn’t be a thriller to use a sense of foreboding to the writer’s advantage. Nabokov does not write thrillers, but his literary character studies thrill with a certain general menace.

This story, first published in The New Yorker in 1948, follows an elderly immigrant couple in New York who plan to visit their son on his birthday. The son has been confined in a sanitarium for years, as he suffers from a mental disorder in which he thinks that all of the natural world is speaking to him, and about him, in a coded language that he must decipher. It’s a lot like paranoid schizophrenia, as described, but it also seems a great literary disease because it immediately prompts the reader to understand that everything happening in the story, the grace notes of details that we might easily pass over, may have a hidden symbolic meaning for us to discover: that everything in the story might be “signs and symbols.”

Nabokov stories regularly feature ex-pat characters, exiles much as Nabokov was himself. An elderly Belarussian couple, who were important back home, must now rely on the largesse of a more-established uncle. Without extensive details, Nabokov is able to paint the back story of his characters, the little rituals of their life together, a life that has passed through astonishing changes. We feel just how worn down the couple is, not sure how to deal with their beloved son, whose condition was indulged as artistic up to a point it passed long ago. When they arrive at the sanitarium, carrying a basket of fruit jams as a gift, they learn that the son has, again, tried to kill himself, and that it might be better if they did not visit him that day.

The couple returns home, but the father cannot sleep. That night he bursts into the living room in his bathrobe and announces to the mother that their son must not remain at the sanitarium, that they should bring him home. The mother acquiesces, and they make plans to bring him home the next morning. But then the phone rings, though the hour is late. When the mother picks up, though her English is not strong, she understands that the caller is asking for Charlie, and must therefore have the wrong number. There is a kick of dread in the late-night phone call, for such calls are rarely the bearers of good news. We are relieved when it was a wrong number. But then the phone rings again. It is the same woman, asking for Charlie. Again, she is told that it is the wrong number. Then the phone rings a third time…

By that time we fear that it is the right number, that perhaps the mother has misunderstood, and that news has come that their son has killed himself—just before he would have come home. But none of this is made explicit, and it is the stronger for it. If an author can plant just what he wants to plant in the minds of his reader, essentially trick them into thinking what he wants them to think, without having to write it out explicitly, then he wields a powerful tool. Like the best teachers, who do not tell students the answer and expect them to memorize it, but help lead students to the answer themselves, the best writers likewise set up the situation and allow the reader to complete it for them. Of course, with an author as slippery as Nabokov, the actual intention might be quite different, for if he wanted us to understand only one possible interpretation, he would have written it that way. We are told what the caller says, seemingly without distortion.  Do we assume the unanswered third call is the same caller? Why?

The point of the story could be said to be the recreation in the reader of something like the “referential mania” the unnamed son suffers from. Then again, knowing Nabokov, there is likely a story behind the story that only someone who knows the code can read. Nabokov told New Yorker editor Katharine White, in a letter: “a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one.” In that second story, the phone call might simply be the random wrong number it seems to be, and some other detail in the story, easily overlooked, is more essential to the story's meaning.

When reading Nabokov, one feels in the hands of a great master, much like listening to a virtuoso violinist in concert. Knowing that we are in skillful hands, all we need do is remain attentive. All the “signs and symbols” are there in the beautiful riddle Nabokov has painted for us are there. It’s up to us to finish the puzzle.

Panting for Something

Whether or not Louise Maske is hot to trot, her unpremeditated exposure of her underpants—sometimes called, rather anachronistically here, “panties”—while out to view the King on parade sets off the comic shenanigans in The Underpants, famed comic Steve Martin’s adaptation of a 1911 play by Carl Sternheim. Louise, a fetching young woman married to Theo, doesn’t even know she’s repressed, but, due to a loose tie, her knickers drop to her ankles in public, exposing her to a certain kind of male attention lacking in her life before. She stoops—to take off the underpants—and conquers, sparking the riveted attention of a pair of bachelors: one, Frank Versati, a proudly unpublished poet ready to rhapsodize her into bed; the other, Benjamin Cohen, a nebbishy barber who wants to worship her underthings.

With the well-timed intrusions of Gertrude Deuter, the nosy upstairs neighbor playing the part of eager duenna, we’re given a farce where cuckolding the self-possessed and rather clueless bourgeois husband is a comic given. Or, almost. In the end, the play is about the elasticity of marriage rather than the elation of adultery: the men who show up, beckoned by a glimpse of bloomers, are no better than the callous father-figure husband who, after all, has set Louise up as a perfectly respectable middle-class Hausfrau.

The play’s situation is primarily an excuse for arch innuendo, for comic turns by a sparkling cast, for jibes at Germans and their notorious attitude toward Jews, and for the kind of situations that, in a Frenchman’s hands, would’ve resulted in spicier bedroom schtick. Martin throws in the occasional racy bit—mostly coming from Gertrude, an eager onlooker panting to live vicariously through her very beddable neighbor—and we do get to see lacy underpants that are less revealing than a pair of boxers. To the extent that there’s an idea behind it all, it seems to be that our objects of desire—those random occasions for our libidinal spikes and fetishistic fervor, some even quite famous—can be remarkably short-lived, whereas baby-making, when all’s done, is what the fuss is inevitably about. Family values—“a man’s got to take care of someone”—and all that. Martin, as the playbill points out, realized in writing his adaptation that the bourgeoisie are us—regardless of politics.

As Louise, Jenny Leona is perfect. She’s cute, lively, demure but not dumb, not easily cozened, but willing to stray. It’s a performance so natural you have to stop to think about how badly it might be done. What director Gordon Edelstein gets across is that this blonde bombshell can be both the “angel in the house” that stands behind her man, as well as the object of those looking for a “geile Hausfrau.” The men are another matter. All clearly no match for her, or for Gertrude’s sense of possibility, we get to laugh at all of them, and each for a different reason.

Jeff McCarthy as Theo Maske is overbearing in that oblivious manner of the manly male. His wife is one of the things in his possession, not really a partner. As played here, he’s not really despicable, nor really hopeless. He’s the man of the house and the man Louise married, for better or worse, as the saying goes, and she (and we) might be forgiven for thinking he might get better. To Frank, played with pompous self-regard by Burke Moses, Louise is a source of inspiration—his best scene is when he lights her fire only to rush off to pen some lines, inspired by a conquest he never consummates. Much of the really funny stuff falls to Steve Routman as “Cohen with a K,” who gets to present us with the caricature that might be nearest Martin’s heart, or maybe it’s just a tribute to the kind of schlemiel and ambivalent Jew—humming Wagner and wondering aloud how anyone who cites Herder or Schiller could ever be less than humane—that Woody Allen established himself playing early in his career.

Routman’s rubber-legged departure after swallowing a sleeping draught is great fun, as is his slide across stage on a pillow while clutching a mirror to see up his hostess’s dress. The other comic standout is Didi Conn’s Gertrude, playing up moments like fanning her pelvis with the refrigerator door—after Theo turns her on—or miming a husband “doing his job.” It’s a role that requires charm to avoid crudity, and Conn certainly charms the audience.

Indeed, charm is a large part of what makes the Long Wharf production work. Start with Lee Savage’s set, with the Old World charm of its kitchenette, its double-door perfect for well-timed entrances and exits, its stairs and settees begging for the kind of physical comedy Edelstein’s production showcases. Jess Goldstein’s costuming—including Louise’s stripped-for-fun period underclothing, a pair of German flag underpants, and Kaiser regalia—is bright and eye-catching, and the play’s timing mostly on point.

A bit understated, perhaps, The Underpants is a brisk and benign evening of fun. “That’s where the danger lies. Under,” opines Theo early in the play, certainly a worthy thought in the play’s Freudian era, but, despite gestures to Nietzsche and Einstein, The Underpants, though willing to catch its characters with their pants down, and even off, doesn’t give any character the wherewithal to get down to it.

The Underpants By Steve Martin Adapted from Carl Sternheim Directed by Gordon Edelstein

Set Design: Lee Savage; Costume Design: Jess Goldstein; Lighting Design: Robert Wierzel; Wig and Hair Design: Charles LaPointe; Fight Consultant: Tim Acito; Production Stage Manager: Melissa M. Spengler; Assistant Stage Manager: Amy Patricia Stern; Assistant Stage Manager: Kelly Hardy; Casting: Calleri Casting; Photographs: T. Charles Erickson

The Long Wharf Theatre October 16-November 10, 2013

Story Playlist 31: Sredni Vashtar

Saki (H. H. Munro): “Sredni Vashtar” (1914) There is no more badass short story in this project, or perhaps in existence, than Saki’s “Sredni Vashtar.” Badass may not sound like the proper terminology, but the English language wants for a more formal term to replace it. With glee, I could write a short book on the genius of “Sredni Vashtar,” so rich is it in its plot and precepts.

Conradin, a ten-year-old orphan not expected to live more than five more years, is under the care of his unpleasant cousin and guardian, Mrs. De Ropp, and the two dislike each other. Mrs. De Ropp takes a certain pleasure in thwarting Conradin’s happiness, while Conradin, whose perspective we share, nurtures fantasies of escape from, and revenge on, the person who controls him and denies him the few joys in his life.

These joys include two creatures who Conradin keeps in his hide-out, a shed in the back garden: a hen who he adores like a pet, and a darker creature kept in an iron cage in the shadows of the shed, a creature that Conradin both admires and fears. Saki calls this creature a “polecat-ferret,” a hybrid. The boy had it brought to him by an older child in exchange for coins, and he keeps it (how and what he feeds it is not clear) as a sort of totemic demi-god, one who he almost worships, to the extent that a 10-year-old can develop a spiritual admiration for a creature. Even the name he gives the creature, Sredni Vashtar, is not explicated by the narrator or the child. It was likely chosen by onomatopoeia, with Sredni implying “shred,” and Vashtar sounding like some Indian god. It is always tempting to read more into such exotic names than may be present (“sredni,” in Slavic languages, means “middle” but I’m not sure that adds anything), but suffice it to say that we have a dangerous bestial god on our hands.

The antagonistic cousin abruptly sells off the pet hen, seemingly just to do something mean to Conradin, but the child refuses to give her the pleasure of appearing upset. He simply does not indulge his love of toast, his favorite snack, when his cousin offers it, surprised that he does not tuck in. From that point on he makes a nightly wish for Sredni Vashtar to do something for him, careful never to articulate what he would like, perhaps for fear of crossing a line that thinking does not cross.

Wondering why Conradin continues to spend time in the shed, despite having disposed of his pet hen, Mrs. De Ropp sets out to investigate. She suspects that he might be keeping a kitten in there, which she would quickly make off with. Conradin watches the shed from his bedroom window as Mrs. De Ropp goes inside and doesn’t come out—for a very long time. With cinematic poise, the narrator lets us see the images of defeat that fill Conradin’s mind as he stares out the window, eyes fixed on the shed in the distance. Eventually Sredni Vashtar emerges from the shed, his maw bloody, and disappears into the forest. Conradin accepts a tray from the maid and coolly toasts a slice of bread for himself as the discovery is made and the house is filled with screams and commotion.

The idea of a ten-year-old developing a cultic worship of a creature, framed as an exotic beast-god, resonates with the rich fantasy world that adolescent boys can develop, and which can get out of hand, if left unchecked. A “polecat-ferret,” which we can sort of imagine, is a clever choice of creature. A ferret would hardly be able to do away with a grown Mrs. De Ropp (nor, one imagines, would a polecat), but perhaps this is some larger, more fierce variety. The dynamic between an unwilling guardian and her charge, neither of whom like each other but who are stuck together, is familiar. Anyone who has ever wished that a sibling would suffer a minor injury will know a mild version of the fantasy that Conradin develops. It is a question whether we are meant to think that Conradin willed the attack into being, or simply got lucky, a rare child whose prayers are answered. There is no moral here, no “beware what you wish for,” because Conradin is free from the clutches of his nemesis. We do not need to know what happened next, if he will be sent to some even less pleasant guardian, because our camera cuts away just as he prepares himself another slice of buttered toast.

From an Editor's Desk: The Crooked Path from Academia to Publishing

Here is a presentation I recently made to my alma mater, which—nearly two decades after my graduation—finally decided to take an active step forward in engaging speakers to help graduate students actually explore paths to employment beyond academia instead of letting them shift for themselves as I had to do upon my long-ago graduation, doctorate in hand. In 1988, I enrolled in the CUNY Graduate Center’s Ph.D. program in English one year after my graduation from the University of Chicago, where I had earned a BA in English.  Seven years later, in 1995, I received my doctorate.  My area of concentration was in 19^th-century American literature; my goal was to land a full-time, preferably tenure-track position.  During my time at the Graduate Center, I had spent three years as an adjunct instructor of courses in composition, introduction to literature, and even world literature at Baruch College. The year after that, I did the same in Connecticut at both a community college and at the University of Hartford.  My last year and half was spent completing my dissertation while I worked at Yale University, where I served as an assistant editor on the papers of the great 18^th-century Scottish biographer and diarist James Boswell.

Then, like now, the job market in academia was plagued by the presence of more qualified doctoral and post-doctoral applicants than there were job vacancies.  Then, like now, it was a buyer’s market.  Then, like now, budgetary constraints on schools and individual departments; shifts in monetary priorities at the federal, state, and institutional levels; changing trends in scholarship; and the contortions of academic politics affected the give and take of presenting papers, publishing your work, applying for jobs, landing interviews, and either getting offers or moving on.  What I saw then continues to be what I see now.  Pursuing an academic career to the exclusion of all else is not for the faint of heart.

During my undergraduate years at the University of Chicago, I worked as “reader” for its literary journal, The Chicago Review. When I started my graduate studies, in addition to the classes I took and the classes I taught, I also worked as an editor at various small publications on a part-time basis, sometimes for free, sometimes for pay.  My duties then included work as a copy editor on a few poorly funded progressive Jewish magazines, as a part-time publisher of a struggling literary journal, and as a “page trafficker” at a textbook packager.   Editing was apparently in the blood and it was emerging as a career plan B to academic career plan A.

Two questions arise at this point.  When did plan B become plan A?  And why?  The answer to both is a combination of circumstance with self-realization.  Plan B, in brief, became plan A when three things happened.

First, in my last year as a doctoral student, my wife and I had a daughter, at which point I decided that if I were to take any academic position, it would not be as “visiting” faculty, which necessitated moving—and in all likelihood moving more than once.   On my own or childless, not so great a burden.  But with a child, a line had to be drawn.  This decision dramatically reduced the number of jobs to which I applied.

Second, when I moved from New York to Connecticut, I switched my adjunct duties accordingly.  What seemed no problem at first—insurance coverage extended by my wife’s employer –suddenly became one when that job ended and I learned that the state of Connecticut provided no insurance support for its adjunct instructors.  Of necessity, I did the only thing I could do.  I became a full-time editor at Yale University while I struggled to complete my dissertation.

Third and last, there was no evading the grim reality that if and when my alternative career had reached or surpassed the salary range of a starting assistant professor, I’d have to give serious thought to cutting the cord of academia altogether.  That happened three years later when, after jumping from one job to another, I landed a position as a new media editor at a large reference publisher.

Those three factors comprise the circumstances.

Self-realization entered the picture when it became clear to me that not only did I enjoy working in publishing as an acquisitions editor, a job where I conceptualized, evaluated, reshaped, and brought into being all sorts of projects—from individual books and book series to large databases—but I was good at it, too.  In short, I had found my métier—my calling.  Moreover, while my graduate education had not directly contributed to this eventual career direction, it had not proven as grave a misstep as I had first thought.  The skills I honed as a researcher (particularly in archival work), as a critical thinker, as a teacher, and as a writer were certainly transferable. Even the knowledge base I had amassed as an Americanist, literary theorist, and expert in composition offered an unforeseen return on the investment whenever I worked on projects that asked me to draw on that background.

But did any of this give me an edge in landing a job in publishing?  Not really.  A fair amount of my formal training as a proofreader and copy editor had occurred outside of the classroom.  My education in typesetting and printing came from my part-time editing work. For example, does anyone here know the intricacies of the printing process?  Or the formal mark-up protocols for copy editing manuscripts or proofreading galleys?  Or the order of the front matter parts in a book manuscript?  How to index a book? Know anything about electronic publishing? To learn much of this, I remember during the last years of graduate school sitting down with the 14^th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style and actually reading large swaths of it—where much of this information was covered in gory but necessary detail as Plan B started becoming a more critical part of my life.

In the end, circumstance and self-realization caught up with one another.  Putting food on the table and enjoying my work as an editor had become one and the same and, yes, there was a point when I realized that walking away from academia was no longer to be treated as a regret, but as something I would not go back to if I could help it.  For some of you this may seem unthinkable.   I once thought that, too.  But the dictum know thyself was never more real for me than the day I looked at the education classifieds in The New York Times’ Week in Review section and realized: Now why would I apply for that?

There is life after graduate school—and it need not be lived as a professor on a campus.  The challenge during graduate school is recognizing, accepting, and—without regret—acting on that realization.

—Bennett Graff, Publisher, New Haven Review

A choice tidbit that was recently brought to my attention, or: Where is my cocktail hat when I need it?

About three years ago, I learned something new about myself: I cannot hold my liquor at all anymore. The story isn’t a pretty one, but it was a moment in my personal history that I will never forget, and one which leaves me an odd choice to review the book at hand: Under the Table: A Dorothy Parker Cocktail Guide. And yet: I cannot resist. Compiled by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick (who’s The Man to Talk To if you need an expert on Parker these days), with some help from Allen Katz, this book is a charmingly assembled, lovely little package that many people will find an essential addition to their shelves. Now, I own more than a few bartender’s guides. I have logged serious quality time with The Savoy Cocktail Book and in my younger days I often assembled drinks while checking a Mr. Boston guide -- is that still the standard beginner’s guide to booze? Under the Table is not the kind of encyclopedic book that belongs in every household with a bottle of gin. It’s a specialty item. But it’s both informative and useful: it gives nice little histories of each drink, and is well organized, and very handsomely designed. Even so, it will leave many people shrugging. If you’re not enchanted by the world of the Algonquin Round Table, or by early 20th century American history more broadly, then you’d best leave this one on the shelf of the bookstore. It’s not for you. If your idea of a drink is, say, a Long Island Iced Tea, a wine spritzer, or shooters with names like Cement Mixer, this is not for you. In researching current trends in bartending, for the purpose of writing this review in an informed manner, I discovered that there is something called a Chocolate Martini. If you are someone who gets that, either conceptually or in actual life, when out in a bar: this book is not for you.

But if you’re someone who takes your booze at all seriously -- not in the sense of being a snob, necessarily, but in the sense of, When you want a drink, you want it to be a good, solid, season-appropriate drink; if you are someone who believes (as I do) that a gin and tonic cannot be respectably consumed in the wintertime, and that bourbon is a year-round item, as long as the accessories are seasonal -- then this is a book you will enjoy tremendously.  This is a book for people who don’t need their booze hidden under frills or umbrellas or tricks to make it so you don’t know you’re drinking alcohol. And if you’re a sucker for John Held drawings, so much the better. Yes: the book contains the requisite Yale reference (Yale Cocktail, p. 121), but even if it didn’t, I would be fond of this book, and happy with Kevin Fitzpatrick’s  work. Here is the highest praise I can offer to Under the Table: from it, I learned of a drink called the Jean Harlow, and now I want one very, very badly. How had I never been aware of this before? I intend to acquire a bottle of white rum immediately (I’ve already got the Cinzano) to make this at home; and when I am next out at night, a renegade matron on the loose -- 116 Crown, are you ready for me? -- I expect to order a Jean Harlow and enjoy it all the more, because I will not have mixed it myself.

Under the Table: A Dorothy Parker Cocktail Guide will be published in November by Lyons Press, an imprint of Globe Pequot.

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.