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Woyzeck At The Philly Fringe By Norm Roessler

Filed Under: AnarchoTheater, Philadelphia Theater by ecibs — Leave a comment
September 14, 2011


Woyzeck. Georg Büchner. Adaptation: Gregory Motton. Direction: Zach Trebino. Set Design: Emily Baldasarra & Zach Trebino. Ensemble: Homunculus, Inc. Location: Ice Box Project Space / Crane Arts Building. Philadelphia Live Arts / Fringe Festival. Philadelphia, PA / USA. Reviewed: September 7, 2011.

Theater is a heartbreaker / mindfucker. Just when you are ready to give up on the old girl, muttering to oneself “Theater (God) is Dead” it pulls you back in Godfather III-style. Such was the case on a dreary, rain-soaked evening – four days before the 10th anniversary of 9/11 – where I found myself at the Crane Arts Building in the Northern Liberties section of Philadelphia for a Fringe Festival event. A production of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck in the old Ice Box Warehouse space seemed a perfect place to bury my resignation with the conservative, subscription-friendly, geriatric-oriented, fringe-fried Philly Theater scene and its moribund theater review tradition. Yet, Homunculus, Inc.’s production was so painfully good that I might have to reconsider my discontent and give the old girl of theater another chance.

“Fortune favors the bold” goes the old saying and director Zach Trebino and the Homunculus, Inc. ensemble boldly went where no right-thinking theater artists have gone before: combining the fragmentary, syncretic, existential masterpiece of Woyzeck with the cavernous, post-industrial, existential space of the Ice Box. But it worked. And it worked exquisitely.

Trebino set the prologue in the foyer outside of the Ice Box room, where everyone (actor and spectator) felt just a little bit homeless. The actors (soldiers dressed in vaguely WWI–era, expressionist inspired costumes; others in carnivalesque, post-industrial, impoverished tatters) and audience members aimlessly milled about the empty darkened space, which was broken up by four central concrete pillars (indicating a type of theater-in-the-round stage) and ominous steel doors leading into the Ice Box. When the prologue began, the audience was introduced to poor, abused Woyzeck (Paul Bayley). Woyzeck can’t please anyone: his captain (Eleonore Condo) who continuously browbeats him; his “doctor” (Sara Newman & Samantha Turret) who experiments on him by making him eat only peas and then castigates him when he can’t urinate on the spot; his best friend, Andres (Matt Austin), who doesn’t listen to the voices in Woyzeck’s head telling him to kill his girlfriend; his girlfriend, Marie (Louisa Debutts), who sleeps with a studly drum major, and the drum major (John Wentworth) who beats the shit out of him. So, the standard quotidian existential crises facing the modern human being.

The prologue effectively mediated the text and the interpretative complex that surrounds the text. Written in 1836/37 shortly before his untimely death at age 23, Büchner’s text was never finished and remained a series of fragments until it was first published in 1879. Its publication was a major influence on the Naturalist dramatists of the day, but it would not be produced onstage until 1913, where it would exert a tremendous influence on the Expressionist generation and the Epic Theater of Bertolt Brecht. In 1925, Alban Berg set the material to music in his opera, Wozzeck, which famously mediated the atonal techniques of Schoenberg. Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski would team up in 1979 to serve up a gritty, realistic, New German Cinema version. And in 2002, Robert Wilson and Tom Waits (See Blood Money, 2002 and Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards, 2006 for the full material) would team up for an operatic, natural-time production.

At the close of the opening scene, the actors lead the audience into the Ice Box Project Space in a maneuver that was reminiscent of Weiss’ Marat / Sade or LaMaMa’s 1970s production of The Trojan Women. The spectators were confronted with a similar spatial design as that of the foyer: stage props and seating created a permeable theater-in-the-round space. The stage design was anchored by an elevated stage opposite the Ice Box doors that was surrounded by various pieces of debris: old TV sets (whose screens intermittently are turned on), car tires, and a large aquarium filled with water. Directly opposite the elevated stage was another debris field that included more TV sets as well as some broken chairs. Between these two stage areas was a smaller debris field of tires and an aquarium tank. This stage design proved to be an effective adaptation of the Ice Box space. It allowed the actors to constantly move the visual field of the audience, creating a nice dynamic, but at the same time wherever the scene had been moved onstage, the large white walls of the space effectively framed the scene in a tableau-like moment.

The same cannot be said, however, for the acoustic quality of the production. Some of the dialogue was lost, especially when vocalized at higher, passionate registers. This was most noticeable in scenes with the doctor character. Assayed by two actors (similar to the 2002 Wilson production) the doctor character is a mad scientist constantly spouting out philosophical and scientific babble. The doctor’s dialogue is a chance for a Woyzeck-production to illuminate its humorous and absurd dimension, but the cavernous space that had proven so fruitful for the spatial aesthetics was not as forgiving for the acoustic aesthetics of the production. Another casualty of the acoustics was the translation by Gregory Motton, one of the more interesting guerilla theater artists in Europe and a noble heir to the fragmented, open theater approach pioneered by Büchner.

It was obvious that the ensemble had wrestled with the problem, but had not quite resolved the difficulties therein. Yet, at the same, I wondered whether the failure was on my end (the spectator) and not that of the acting ensemble or the theater space. Even when one reads Woyzeck and can clearly hear, see, feel the text in intimate precision, it still comes across as an opaque experience. The scenes are episodic and the text is aphoristic: it works as bits and pieces but nowhere near a cohesive whole. Perhaps this is why Berg’s atonal opera and Wilson’s use of Tom Waits’ music were so successful in mediating the turgid opacity of Büchner’s text.

The acting was noticeable for its ensemble cohesiveness that equally shared the work and rejected the usual corporate, star-driven, cinematic acting that is found in both Hollywood and University Theater Departments. Some of the more memorable scenes to speak of: 1) The Shaving Scene: Since the captain is played by a woman (Eleonore Condo), Woyzeck (Paul Bayley) has to shave her legs and not her chin. This was choreographed well and acted with excellent timing; and, at the same time, required a rethinking of traditional power dynamics; 2) The Fight Scene: The fight between the drum major (John Wentworth) and Woyzeck was beautifully choreographed and enacted. It had a savage operatic quality to it and was enhanced by the other actors who formed a circle around the battle, barking in ferocious delight; 3) The Peas & Piss Scene. Despite my criticism of the vocal quality of this scene, it is spot on in terms of visual effect. The doctors (Sara Newman & Samantha Turret) are a well-dressed, two-headed monster, alternating between red robes, carnival masks, and dominatrix outfits. Moreover, the climactic moment of the scene in which they disrobe Woyzeck to full frontal nudity and wait for him to provide a urine specimen is a great tableau shot of ritual and medical humiliation; 4) Marie’s Death. This is the iconic scene in the play. Just take a quick gander at internet images of Woyzeck productions (an interesting analysis in itself) and you get a wide variety of approaches to this scene from the close up, realistic Kinski one to the operatic, bathed-in-red, Wilson one. I thought Homunculus, Inc. played this one a little flat. I’m not sure if this was intentional because they wanted to illuminate the final scene, or if they were just running out of gas. The latter third of the production did seem to teeter a bit from fatigue as if all the stunning ideas of the first part of the production were hard to live up to; 5) Grandmother’s Negative Fairytale and Woyzeck’s Death. If they did underplay Marie’s death in order to do this scene right, then they nailed it spot on. Juxtaposing the two scenes of the Grandmother’s (Maren Lord) telling of the depressing fairy tale with Woyzeck’s suicide in the large aquarium tank was a wonderful bit of theater.

Faced with perhaps the most important yet most difficult work of modern theater, Homunculus, Inc. not only survived but flourished. They trusted Büchner’s work and their own skill, but most importantly they trusted the audience: inviting it to embrace the Gilgamesh-like lacunae and the fragments of Büchner’ text and co-author / co-act a dialectic interpretation of it. One can only hope that Homunculus, Inc.’s production will inspire Philly Theater to stir from its slumbers, eat its peas, piss out its middle-class mediocrity, and embrace a bit of avant-garde, Germanic Theater in the future.

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Art, Cash, Sex, Story, Politics: Chester Brown’s “Paying For It” by Jonathan Pappas

Filed Under: Book Monkey / Junkie, Graphic Soul by ecibs — Leave a comment
August 23, 2011

Discussed: Paying For It: A Comic Strip Memoir About Being a John by Chester Brown. Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly. Reviewed by Jonathan Pappas for Ecibs.

Here is a yucky but important book. Exactly how important you find it will be defined by whether you think the book’s author is amoral, immoral, or boldly defining a nontraditional moral/financial/psychological model. It’s told—and drawn—with undeniable skill, its scenes are vivid, and it’s funny. It’s also quite gross, and might leave even the most open-minded and steel-bellied among us feeling a little ill. Though I stack it on the “must-read” shelf without reservation, there’s the lingering suspicion that the intellectual model that Brown presents is hollow and even corrupt. But that conclusion should only be considered after full engagement with this “comic strip memoir.”

There is a manifesto element here in favor of decriminalizing prostitution, but this is not only a tract: as the title implies, it’s a personal story. When Brown is left alone after being dumped by his girlfriend, he commits himself–physically and psychologically and ideologically–to paying for sex with prostitutes. He believes he has found the antidote to society’s devotion to the ideal of romantic love, which he calls evil. This is his true subject.

In comics terms, these are some of the best panels you’ll see this year, and Brown honors the form by being able to dispense actual laughs, sometimes as traditional last-panel punchlines. He has adopted a lucid eight-panel grid for his pages that was apparently inspired by the “good duck artist” Carl Barks, and the story moves fast even when not much is happening. That kind of flow takes a master, or at least a technical expert. Brown is both. His characters are visually iconic, consistent, and they look funny. The action and bodies, while “cartoonish” are also “realistic” in that they meet the eye with ingeniously descriptive proportions and gestures.

There are lots of nuts and bolts here about the protocols of calling prostitutes, of paying them, and also stuff about the bodily plumbing and mechanics of the sex. Here, Brown attempts to flee a brothel after the woman looks nothing like what he was led to believe. (It should be noted that the lousy scanned images here do not come close to doing justice to the quality and clarity of Brown’s art as it appears on the page. For instance, his lines are clear and indelible, there’s no static and nothing shaky to his style. A topic for another day is how the pleasure of viewing these images and words in a well-designed book is the factor that will guarantee the survival of paper-book graphic works in general.)



Brown uses the performative act of cartooning to painstakingly describe his forays into this world. All the while, he is building a rhetorical case with his friends in the narrative, and with the readers of the book. He writes that, “Feminists should be consistent on the subject of choice. If a woman has the right to choose to have an abortion, she should also have the right to choose to have sex for money. It’s her body, it’s her right.” His male and female friends, and his fellow cartoonists Joe Matt and Seth, are all characters in the narrative; they are foils, sounding boards, and mouthpieces for the opposing arguments. The case being built is not for the legalization of prostitution, which would involve regulation, but its decriminalization.

The explicit stuff–and surely all of our sex lives are “explicit” if rendered so carefully and with such exacting attention–are compelling, but I’m just as into the pages that move at the speed of life and chronicle Brown’s mental wranglings. One gets the feeling that everything Brown does is carried out methodically and with excruciating attention to detail, but the scenes from his life outside bedrooms are the biggest strength of the book. The only element that might grow old for the reader is the preaching. In the conversations with friends, he outlines his arguments as they develop, and it might be said that this stuff is aggressively didactic. I much prefer pages like these, which come right after Brown is asked to leave the home of his ex-girlfriend and her new guy, where Brown has been living peaceably as a roommate.

As Brown notes in the foreword, “In this book I record every time I paid for sex up to the end of 2003 and every prostitute I’ve had sex with since then.” The fullness of that “every time” lends both a sense of authority and a sense of the cold-blooded to the whole undertaking. But it also lends credence to the philosophy, grounding the episodes in a meticulous, academic sort of procedural. Some of the sex scenes are compelling in the salacious, voyeuristic way you might expect, and you will want to file some of them under “Too Much Information.” But that’s part of Brown’s point, to not shy away from the disgusting bits. In this scene of a return visit to the “incall” prostitute who turns out later, to Brown’s surprise, to be a non-English speaker, there is the loaded detail of the spent tube of lubricant.

The spent tube of lube carries many of the book’s assets and contradictions. Brown’s need for it in the moment encapsulates the gross quandaries he finds himself in, and its depiction in closeup shows Brown’s use of the form as well as his unerring eye for detail. Let’s revisit that tube:

The tube works as a storytelling device, and it works to boost the “this-really-happened” effect. And the nebbishy desperation of the moment is funny. So the art, the sex, and the story are served, but what of the personal politics? Well, that spent tube also speaks to coercion, doesn’t it? Or at least to the emphatic un-arousal of the prostitute. And its emptiness illustrates the constancy of the trade, of the unrelenting parade of johns that must come through that room. The tube raises the specter of prostitution’s exploitative qualities, a charge that Brown vigorously denies. Either way, that tube is funny at first, then comes to embody a mundane tool of the trade, and then on further consideration, reads as increasingly awful. We are fully engaged with the issue at the hand, and Brown has brought us there using the particular tools of his medium.

The friend characters in the story were each granted space in the notes section for rebuttals and clarifications, but only Seth took the author up on his offer. Seth’s contributions are a highlight of Brown’s appendices/notes which, depending on your patience, can veer into the territory of semi-baked diatribe–that is, if you don’t view them as baseline due diligence. In his droll notes, Seth points out that Brown stacks the deck in his own favor, and positions the Chester Brown character as the sane and authoritative “voice of reason” in the scenes’ verbal debates. This is natural but it is not, according to Seth, accurate to the experience of arguing with Brown.

Seth also keys in on a notable quality of Brown’s, which is his zero-affect, eerily even-keeled reactions and ideas. Seth calls Brown “The Robot” and says, “In posing a question to him I might quip, ’Perhaps I might ask a person with actual human emotions instead.’” For his part, Seth finds Brown’s opinions “a bit of a broken record,” and “a little too dogmatic for my tastes, a little too tied to the libertarian party line about the sancticity of property rights.” I’m sure that if one is Brown’s friend, this ethics-of-prostitution line would be tiresome, but it’s rarely expressed in such exacting detail as it is here. Here is a page of the appendix, to give a sense of that section’s style.

The ideology-rich portions of this book are rescued from the whiff of the didactic by their connection to an authentic story, and to the presence of an arc: Brown shifts from attacking the concept of romantic love outright to pointing his venom at the construct “possessive monogamy.” This nuance, along with the obsessive reconsiderations and research, suggests a mind that’s sharp but also pliant, even if the personality attached is bereft of certain interpersonal trappings we may expect to find in our free-thinking writers and artists.

Brown is unmoored from certain common hang-ups like, say, being sexually turned-off by the fact that your partner is not enjoying the act but is merely enduring it. That sentence comes off as sort of square, maybe, and far less radical than Brown, but then Brown is untroubled by situations that would trouble most. He points out that coerced sex is the case in plenty of nonpaid sexual situations as well, but I’m not sure that’s a workable defense of paid sex.

The physical stuff: the vaginal dryness, or the woman who covers her face with her own hair, or the one who repeatedly yells “Ow” (!) or most prostitutes’ general refusal to make eye contact let alone kiss, all rate a mention but are not a deterrent. That is, these loaded conditions are reported but not really dealt with by your narrator.

By the end, Brown has found and agreed to terms with a sort of personal prostitute, a woman who is retired from the business except for him. They are exclusive to each other, and the sex remains paid. This unique arrangement seems to be the perfect one for Brown; one that does not involve strangers, but also does not carry with it unachievable expectations. In a narrative or philosophical sense, it may be seen as a cop-out, since the process of sexual gratification that the book describes and ostensibly promotes is ultimately untenable even for the author. “Paying For It” is not likely to be widely effective as a persuader, but it is serious book about a serious subject. It should be owned and loaned and discussed. It’s a bracing–and in its way even logical–account of how one idiosyncratic man found a unique kind of satisfaction, if not happiness.

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Poetry from Anthony Squiers

Filed Under: Poetry by ecibs — Leave a comment
May 25, 2011

HELSINKI, FINLAND

Helsinki,
local transit,
six a.m.
Buses are
metallic gears
of a clockwork city.
People wait to board,
in straight,
simple,
Alvar Alto lines,
beyond the azure jewel
of a shimmering harbor.

——————-

MODISH AESTHETIC

Modish aesthetic
approximates the sublime
with colors dreamed
in neo-Platonic visions.

Divined from a mysticism
of modern self-made forms,
her body and movements
move like algorithms
move like
material melodies,
curved and precise.

Beyond the laws of physics,
metaphysical attraction.

——————-

MY PRESENT COMPLAINT

Every drink that I mix
and the pills
that accompany them
are a balletic pas de deux
that forms a billowing wave,
which rises and washes through me,
in poisonous little currents
of simplicity
and bliss.

They are tiny, perfect measures
administered with the precision
of experimental science
with them, incrementally,
I find
the place
which is slightly more
than the burden
of my present complaint.

——————-

RIGA, LATVIA

Footsteps echo in the early morning,
as the stone streets meander through
the old town of Riga.

The smokers exhale smoke
that dissipates well before
the gilded clock towers
that tick, to tock
the bells
That tock the pace of
a polished city.

In the late fall,
when crisp air enlivens the lungs,
the Daugava moves with icy ripples
as the golden roosters,
perched high,
on green steeples
overlook the town.

The distant, mechanical
squeal of tram breaks,
can break
the tranquility of newspapers
and the day’s first cigarette
while early risers,
waiting for the day to begin
anticipate something
sometime
in late modernity.

——————-

RUDOLF J. SIEBERT

To the witness of monstrosities:
of Dresden and Hiroshima,
napalm and burning flesh;
the witness
who could not forget the simple facts
of Gattungswesen and reason.

Though the wars continued to be waged
for profits and rage;
though we were locked,
in the grips of necessity
he still speaks of freedom.

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O Beautiful – Liberal Politics Hit the Stage by Abby E. Snook

Filed Under: Uncategorized by ecibs — Leave a comment
May 23, 2011

O BEAUTIFUL. THERESA REBECK. DIRECTION: SANFORD ROBBINS. ENSEMBLE: REP / PTTP. STAGE: ROSELLE CENTER FOR THE ARTS. PHOTOS: NADINE K. HOWATT. UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE, DOVER, DE. APRIL 20 – MAY 15. REVIEWED: MAY 15, 2011.

A stage on the campus of the University of Delaware dressed as a high school gymnasium was the setting for Theresa Rebeck’s explosive new play, O Beautiful. It is a controversial piece of contemporary American theatre that covers every subject from bullying to abortion. The topics approached are applicable to our current struggles as United States’ citizens, but the liberal political points shining through from underneath the fabulous acting and character development of the actors is quite strong. While O Beautiful is an intriguing new piece of theatrical work, it is also another demanding piece of American political theatre that pushes political views more than it allows the audience to ponder them.

Rebeck and Director Sanford Robbins deserve a lot of credit for taking on such difficult show. The best item on Rebeck’s agenda for the script was the new idea of “cyber bullying,” and this show successfully made it a tangible issue for the audience to consider. One of the male leads, Lennie Ryan (Ben Charles), messes up the words to the song “O Beautiful” in the high school talent show- an experience and embarrassment many have faced. However, Lennie’s classmates will not let him forget his minor error, and begin to bully him verbally, through text messaging, and eventually physically. Ben Charles does a great job of taking the audience back to their high school days and helping them to relive and relearn the torment and anxiety that occurs from being bullied through Lennie’s character. When Lennie makes a serious decision about how to handle the situation of his bullying, the audience knows what tragedy is coming and wants to warn him against his decision, but can simultaneously feel the pain he is experiencing that fuels his depression. Rebeck does an excellent job of bringing home the seriousness of the bullying problem in today’s schools, which is unfortunate since this point gets overshadowed toward the end of the show by liberal arguments on Second Amendment issues.

It is clear from the opening scene that Rebeck really wanted to write a show about abortion. In the play, she uses the character of Alice Fletcher (Sara J. Griffin), a high school teenager who was a victim of date rape, and ends up pregnant because of the act. Since Alice is from an extremely religious Christian family, she does not feel that she has anyone to turn to for help, except for Jesus. Jesus’ character (Michael Gotch) is somewhat of a mediator between the characters and their minds. Gotch does a spectacular job of providing comic relief to a serious play, while still having an important role in redirecting the dialogue to the ideas of compassion and love for the human race, and providing support to the characters that talk with him, such as Alice. In Alice’s case, she and Jesus discuss why Alice had to get pregnant, that she does not want to keep the baby, and whether Jesus ever actually said that abortions were bad. Alice is clearly Rebeck’s shining character that represents feminism and the right to choose. It would have been great to see Alice take charge of what happened to her, and regardless of her decision about the baby, to file charges against her rapist. However, that kind of law and order approach was not on the liberal agenda that was set out for this script. The left idea of abortion could have easily been countered by one of the characters with an argument for adoption in addition to the idea of Alice filing charges. This would have presented a more balanced, thought-provoking section rather than just feeling drowned by the pro-choice ideal the entire show. Regardless of the content, Sara J. Griffin was brilliant and moving as Alice, and truly brought to life a wholeheartedly honest girl who was frightened by the events that had occurred to her. Her character’s journey is a roller coaster ride that will have you laughing and crying throughout the show.

Another element of the show that could have been toned down was the Glenn Beck spoof character, Simon West (Mic Matarrese). While Matarrese did a pretty good impression of the wild, conservative television host, there was no similar character to balance out the extreme views that were portrayed by the character of Simon West. The Tea Party and other conservatives were obviously the butt of the joke in this case, since Simon West was interviewing the Founding Fathers of America on the show, and telling them what their original constitutional intent was when they wrote it. The scenes involving Simon West and the Founding  Fathers are a direct sneer at conservatives’ views of constitutional interpretation and civil rights. A character that would have been a spoof off of Keith Olbermann or Jack Cafferty would have made for another extremist view that would have balanced out the jeers at the right with some at the left.

Overall, O Beautiful was a panoramic view of the issues facing every American in this day and age, and was portrayed with some deep, and beautiful acting. However, it would have been even more explosive if it were there to make the audience think about the many political views that people have about the issues at hand, instead of berating them with liberal propaganda. A centered piece of American political theatre is yet to be seen, and that will be the show that triggers the true debate that Theresa Rebeck hoped to start with O Beautiful.

 

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Down the Rabbit-Hole With Guthrie and Dylan. An ECIBS Interview with Jonathan Pappas

Filed Under: Book Monkey / Junkie, Dylan, Interviews, Music by ecibs — Leave a comment
May 19, 2011

ECIBS recently talked to the writer Jonathan Pappas about two new books, one on Woody Guthrie and the other on Bob Dylan.  Dylan and Guthrie are often linked together in the popular imagination, and Pappas talked about that connection, and about “authenticity,” the separation of myth and legend, about pop music, politics and aesthetics, and what Guthrie and Dylan ultimately are all about.  It happened that on the morning of the interview, Bob Dylan had issued a blistering statement responding to criticism over the question of censorship and his set list choices regarding his April 2011 concerts in China. 

Discussed in this interview:  Bob Dylan in America by Sean Wilentz Doubleday 2010, Woody Guthrie: American Radical by Will Kaufman, University of Illinois Press 2011, Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan, Simon and Schuster 2004, and Bound for Glory by Woody Guthrie, originally published by E.P. Dutton in 1943.

 

ECIBS:  It’s sort of perfect that Dylan published his statement today, the day we’d planned to sit down and talk about political musicians and the Guthrie book and Bob Dylan in America.

JP:  People are what, unhappy that Dylan didn’t play the “protest songs” that they wanted him to play?  Accusing him of bowing to some shadowy notion of Chinese censorship?  I like that he ends his press announcement with a taunt to all the people trying to write books about him.  I can guarantee you that people who want or wanted to write about Dylan, good and bad alike, were pole-axed when he came out with his own book, which is so lucid and good, because he took something from them.

ECIBS: Which was?

JP: Their reason to exist.  Actually in April, the Bob Dylan In America author Sean Wilentz in the New Yorker had the ultimate rejoinder to the Maureen Dowd column in the New York Times that helped kick off the whole current controversy.  He points out how Dowd made a fool of herself.  Wilentz is my hero in a way for summing it up perfectly.* He also calls Dowd clueless and smug, and I agree.  Dowd and the “Human Rights Watch” were mad that he didn’t strum Blowin’ in the Wind?  Sorry, they can’t dictate what subversion is, whether Dylan should be fomenting dissent or how he should foment it, or with which songs.

ECIBS: Dylan’s own book about Dylan looms larger for you than the others?

JP: I thought that we’d talk about Guthrie first, but yes I think Chronicles will keep echoing because it’s excellent by any measure.   We’ll see its influence and reputation grow.  The first time I read it, I finished it in one night, in a delirium like I had a fever.  It wasn’t because of my Dylan fandom, it was the book itself, the book was lightning.  It has all the history and character and humor of big novels, all the striving and scrabbling of so-called “American tales.”  For our purposes here, it’s also about performance, about self-creation, about songs, and about choosing a path.

ECIBS: So, would you call yourself a Dylan or Guthrie scholar?

JP: Hell yeah!  No way, not really.  I would not claim to be a Dylan scholar, and my lack of audience-recorded pirated bootlegs bars me even from the label “superfan.”  I can say that I’ve heard and listen to all the officially-released songs, that I own it all, that I’ve read the major bios and all the print interviews that he’s done.  I haven’t been to Hibbing or anything.  I haven’t interviewed Suze or Baez.  (Laughs.) But I’ve seen him in concert about twenty-five times, and continue to go to shows.

In the case of Guthrie, I’m a reader of the bios, a big listener of the music, and in the past have been a sucker for the whole train-jumping cowboy-Okie mythos.  But again, I haven’t camped out in the Library of Congress or cozied up to the living Guthries.  But Will Kaufman has.  And now, it turns out, I’m a fan of Kaufman too.

ECIBS: But not the old legend of the rail-riding dust-bowl Okie?

JP: Well, it has to do with Kaufman’s book.  If anything I am more of a fan now of Guthrie in both a musical and a pop sense, and I’m much more of an admirer in the political sense.  Kaufman’s book will deepen your understanding of the guy.  The cornpone-folkie-troubadour image is limiting, inaccurate.  The most important thing to Guthrie was the politics, or, more accurately, human rights.  Rights for workers.  Union organization.  And later, additional issues like race.  People know that, but they may not know the extent to which it is true. They will, after reading American Radical. Guthrie’s main reason for existing–for singing and writing–was the differential in the power structure, it was about evening the score between the haves and the have-nots.  Kaufman says he lived “his productive life on the warpath–against poverty, political oppression, censorship, capitalism, fascism, racism, and, ultimately, war itself.”  That’s why the book is called American Radical.

ECIBS: That’s Kaufman’s angle?  Is it what sets this apart from the other Guthrie books?

JP: It’s a political biography.  You won’t see much about riding the rails like a hobo here, or about the succession of wives and mistresses.  All of the dirt Kaufman deals here is through the frame of Guthrie’s ideological commitment to causes.  The attitudes and allegiances were prone to shifting and swaying, but the level of involvement and the commitment to causes were permanent conditions.

Guthrie could self-mythologize with the best of them–look at his Bound for Glory, it’s a novel, full of fabrications and exaggerations–but at his core Guthrie was a tireless advocate for groups he felt were getting the shaft. A socialist. At Dylan’s core, on the other hand, Dylan is an artist.  They both seem to be true to themselves and to their nature.

ECIBS: Guthrie was authentically a radical?

JP: There’s that word, authentic, which is an unwieldy word.  He was a radical to his bones.  That’s the case that Kaufman makes.  In the intro to Kaufman’s book alone, Guthrie has all these epithets applied to him, some from Guthrie’s contemporaries, and many brought up sardonically by Kaufman to point out their failure to meet the mark of who Guthrie was.  Phrases like “America’s balladeer,” “officially sanctified national treasure,” “Saint Woody”  “The Okie bard,” “America’s favorite hobo.”  But throughout the book you get these phrases that Kaufman feels are more accurate.  Like “radical activist,” and the chapter title “lonesome radical soul,” about the post-WWII years when he describes Guthrie in a “blaze of proletarian glory.”

ECIBS: From what I’ve seen just in the intro, and to Kaufman’s credit, Kaufman is also thorough and straight-up about Guthrie’s disappointing qualities, like not tipping in restaurants, or his alleged youthful racism, or the fact that he bizarrely loved Stalin his whole life.  I mean, Guthrie died in 1967.  There was plenty of time to denounce any early affection for Uncle Joe.So Guthrie was a radical, whereas Dylan was what?  A “prophet”?

JP: Well, I said artist.  You’re saying “prophet” as a joke, but the hysterical press was writing that for a while, forty years ago.  I don’t think that idea survives to this day, that he was a prognosticator or the spokesman for his generation.  Dylan’s language is songs.  It’s too bad that Wilentz doesn’t quote from Dylan’s songs at greater length, as Kaufman does expertly and thoroughly with Guthrie’s.  Maybe that’s a rights thing, I don’t know.  But Dylan speaks very frankly about this interviews.  In his biography, in Scorsese’s film (No Direction Home.)  He talks about it.  He goes out of his way to not be an enigma, but people call him one.

 

THE RIGHT MAN FOR THE JOB

Guthrie and Pete Seeger

ECIBS: Why?

JP: I don’t know.  Because he doesn’t sit on the couch on late-night talk shows? He wrote his autobiography.  He did a 60 Minutes interview, how much more mainstream and open can he get?

ECIBS: They chopped that interview, didn’t they?   They aired, like, two minutes.

JP: Because he talked about songs!  He wants to talk about songs.  For an example check out his 1997 Newsweek interview with the novelist David Gates, who’s also a musician.  The current album was Time Out of Mind, which Wilentz writes about.  But I have to say, Wilentz writes about, or tries to write about, almost every single Bob Dylan album.  It’s  a long book.  Anyway I remember being impressed by that, that they hired a fiction writer who knew music to interview Dylan, they put it on the cover, they let the two people talk about songs.  Everybody quotes that interview, Wilentz included, though he buries Gates’ name in the notes.  And Dylan tells Gates, “I believe in the songs,” and in about five other ways, tells Gates that he finds “religiosity in the songs.”

ECIBS: Maybe you should interview Dylan for ECIBS.

JP: Gates and Scorsese and others already interviewed him, it’s all there.  I met Gates when I was in grad school, and asked him about that interview.  He said, “We agreed on what the saddest song in the world was.”

ECIBS: What was it?

JP: I can’t remember, I didn’t write it down.

ECIBS: I retract the offer.  You’re the wrong guy to go interview people.

JP: I know, it’s awful of me.  But that’s funny, yeah I used to think that would be a dream to interview him, but the truth is I probably don’t know enough about music to interview Dylan.  He’s a musicologist, he wants to talk about the structure of songs in a way that is beyond my verse-chorus-verse pop-music knowledge of songs.  Read his book.  Always hire a songwriter to interview Dylan, or at least a musician.

ECIBS: Not a poet?

JP: You could hire a poet.  The right poet would do fine.  But my impression is that Dylan would rather talk to the songwriter, that it would be a meatier interview.

ECIBS: Does Wilentz talk to Dylan?

JP: If he did he doesn’t mention it.  He treats Dylan with both realism and reverence.  He’s a historian and a stickler for details.  He’s interested in the music, which ultimately is what Dylan is all about.  But he tries to do it all, to mixed effect.  Some of the most compelling writing occurs in “you-are-there”-type accounts of recording sessions, like the chapter about Blonde on Blonde. Wilentz writes really well about artistic inspiration, the writing process, the recording process.  He’s done his homework.  Topically the book’s a bit of a mess but it’s littered with great stuff.  I think that, I don’t think I’m being unfair to Wilentz, he admits in his own intro that Bob Dylan in America is kind of a dog’s breakfast.

ECIBS: A what?

JP: A hodgepodge, a catch-all. It’s a little all-over-the-place.  A collection of pieces on various subjects, under the umbrella of a designed-to-sell title.  There are lots of Dylans, and Wilentz takes you through a bunch of them, in a process-oriented way, which I like.

ECIBS: It’s always been my impression that Dylan follows his own path, trusts himself.  So what about this issue of “fandom,” what about the thing of “loving” an artist?  Is there a Dylan to love or is it just a series of intellectually constructed personae and idioms?

JP: There are many Dylans to quote “love”—people usually pick just one, and become fiercely protective of that persona that they perceive.  He brings that out in people, I think.  But then we’re talking about pop music, not art or the context of the songs, which is fine, to talk about pop music.  Most Dylan fans have one Dylan that they adhere to most fiercely.  Blonde on Blonde Dylan is a good one, or Highway 61 Revisited.  Mine is a specific ‘70’s Dylan, like a lot of people, but not just Blood On The Tracks, more specifically the Dylan of Desire. 1975-76.  The Rolling Thunder Revue Dylan.  Did you ever read The Rolling Thunder Logbook by Sam Shepard? Or hear that official bootleg?

ECIBS: I’ve heard the live stuff. (The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue –ed.)

 

POLITICS, PERFORMANCE, AND THE PENCIL-THIN MOUSTACHE

JP: Well, then you know.  I wish I was on that tour. Wait–what’s your own personal Dylan?

ECIBS: The era of Don’t Look Back through Nashville Skyline. Everything up til Self-Portrait and New Morning.

JP: Yours is a very ’60′s Dylan.

ECIBS: And yours is a creature of the ’70′s.

JP: We all fetishize certain eras, in terms of American music, I’ve always been pissed that I missed the late ’50′s and the ’70′s.  Rolling Thunder was right when I was born.  I don’t wish that I was at Newport, for instance, but I wish I was on that weird tour, the first leg; New England with T-Bone Burnett and Ginsberg and Baez and Mick Ronson.  When Dylan’s voice was in super-fine form, and he was giving the best live shows that he ever would give.  A mature artist in his prime without the crap of the ‘60’s hanging over everything.

ECIBS: Which crap, exactly?

JP: The knee-jerk politicization of music.  Dylan is a content guy, not a context guy.  The official bootleg of that tour, like the live Buddokan album, is my own specific Dylan.  I know people who can only hack the 1961-63 ragamuffin-poet or some who favor only the pointy-shoed rocker of 1966.

ECIBS: Who is Sean Wilentz’s personal Dylan?

JP: He’s cagey about it.  Young Greenwich Village Dylan, definitely, but also I think– weirdly–the mature Dylan, the Dylan of ten years ago until today.  The riverboat gambler outfit, the country and western suit with the hat and tuxedo stripes.

ECIBS: The pencil-thin moustache.

JP: Right.

ECIBS: Is that a contrivance?  Is that look “inauthentic”?

JP: It’s authentic to the songs, and to the act of playing the songs.  It’s a stage costume, appropriate to  show business.  It’s a calculated decision in order to help him be a popular show business performer, just like naming yourself Bob Dylan is a decision, or coming up with cool names for albums.  He says himself that he doesn’t live in a vacuum, he’s writing songs for actual people, and he’s honoring this extreme bargain where he goes out on most nights of any given year and plays the songs for those people.

ECIBS: He’s just a song and dance man.

JP: Well, he says that to a reporter in the ‘60’s and it’s a famous ironic quote but I’d say it’s as accurate as anything he ever said about himself.  He tells Gates he’s a “burlesque” performer.  Dylan was an Elvis kid, a Little Richard fan, a Buddy Holly kid.  To me, and, I think, to Wilentz, the most important thing about Dylan is not his folk music period, but the fact that he moved past that and had so many periods.  Visual artists are allowed to do that, but most pop performers are resented for it. And the country-gentleman outfit is better than the electric blue sleeveless T-shirt and eyeliner he wore to the Grammies that time.

ECIBS: Seriously?

JP: The ‘80’s were tough fashion times.

ECIBS: I’ll Google-image that.  So how does Wilentz dispense with the born-again period?

JP: He doesn’t dispense with it, he writes a lot about it, very seriously.  Before this book I’d have said that Dylan “went Christian” just for the songs, simply because gospel music is such a huge part of the American songbook.  Sort of like the way he did a Christmas album in 2009, because performers have always done Christmas albums.  But according to Wilentz, Dylan was a seeker, he was on a journey, and in that period ( Slow Train Coming, Saved, Shot of Love) he was a genuine believer in that doctrine.

ECIBS: Until he wasn’t anymore.

JP: Right.  Wilentz seems to love those songs.  And those are not bad albums, I feel like I have to defend those albums to people.  Still, Wilentz writes a lot about the Christian Dylan, and it’s hard for me to believe that those three albums–which I do like–could fuel anybodys’ favorite period.

ECIBS: Maybe he sees it as untrod turf, critically.

JP: I think you’re right.  It could be he’s trying to colonize, in a critical way, two of the most overlooked periods, the born-again albums and the most recent albums. Also the under-appreciated tweener albums like World Gone Wrong and Good as I Been To You. But I like him for giving time to Infidels, though he’s obsessed with the exclusion of the song Blind Willie McTell from that album.  I like him for that obsession, very fanboy of him.  His book is exhausting, sort of like this interview.  (Laughs.)  And don’t forget that Wilentz is a sort of in-house historian for Dylan’s official website, so everything he says is colored by that.

ECIBS: Is it?

JP: It has to be.  How could it not be?  Not that Wilentz is hiding that fact.  He mentions it in his book, he writes very frankly about his own writing and his fandom, though a lot of the book is historicity and postulation.

 

LABELS, EPITHETS, AND LEG-WORK

ECIBS: About what?

JP: His central thesis, if there is one, seems to be that Dylan is a “minstrel,” a “songster.”  He also has his own string of epithets he uses for Dylan, some familiar, like “sponge,” “magpie,” and “alchemist.” But minstrel and songster are his terms. He seems to be passionate about 1963-Dylan, mainly because he attended the 1963 Philharmonic Hall concert in New York as a thirteen-year-old.  A live recording of that concert has recently been released and the topic gets a chapter.  Though he also has a chapter on the Rolling Thunder/Desire tour.  He seems to like it all.

ECIBS: What does Wilentz tell us about Dylan and performance?

JP: He does write that the Rolling Thunder sets were dynamic in a way that Dylan never had been before and never would be again.  But there’s a huge Brecht connection with Dylan that Wilentz is sort of breezy about it.  He flubs it, ignores it.  He quotes Dylan that Dylan’s exposure to Brecht was “a revelation” but he mostly distances Dylan from what he (Wilentz) calls Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “Marxist apocalypse.”  But Wilentz does point out that “Pirate Jenny” begat Dylan’s When the Ship Comes In, and he even claims that the Brecht material led Dylan into the songs of Blonde on Blonde, particularly Visions of Johanna. But the Gates interview from 1997 is more revealing and succinct about Dylan’s stagewise rejuvenation in 1987.

ECIBS: What does Wilentz miss in terms of the Brecht connection?

JP: I know that (ECIBS editor) Norm Roessler has written about the Brecht thing, and has something more in the works, an article or something, about the Dylan-Brecht connection.  Part of it is literally in Dylan’s autobiography, but Roessler is taking it somewhere very interesting.  Wilentz, for his part, spins a long early chapter connecting Dylan not to Brecht but to the composer Aaron Copland, and this connection is a stretch, it comes off as contrived.

ECIBS: Have you heard the theory that Dylan meant “Johanna” as code for the ancient Hebrew word Gehenna, meaning hell?  That it’s concerned with visions of Hell?

JP: Visions of hell?  Wilentz says that Dylan “disdained ideology” and I agree with that, mostly.

ECIBS: But surely you wouldn’t say that he wasn’t above trafficking in religious constructs for his songs?

JP: Not at all, I just like Visions of Johanna as a song about, well, awful loss and being stranded, or about being discarded maybe, but not necessarily about an ancient concept of the underworld.  But that’s me.  I have my own image of Dylan-the-poet which is Dylan-the-Romantic poet.  Descriptive in a poetic way, but also in a way that is non-literal.  That song (Visions of Johanna) has a country music station in it, that song has hookers and the subway, the all-night girls on the D train.  I know the term “visions” is strong and resonant, and the sound of the song is end-of-times and aching, I’m scared of that song just like everybody else, but to me it’s about a girl, or losing a girl, or being with one girl while you think of another.  That’s scary enough.

ECIBS: Fair enough.  Dylan hasn’t said either way, I don’t think.  He did say that Blonde on Blonde was the closest he came to finding his perfect sound.

JP: Yeah, and Bringing it All Back Home.  I know he says that in a Playboy interview from the ‘70’s.  Another one of my favorite interviews Dylan ever did.  And he name-checks Highway 61, too, as a time where he captured the sound that’s in his head.  Those three records.  What he called that “thin, wild mercury sound” or something.

ECIBS: Apparently Visions of Johanna took a long time to get right.

JP: It’s covered in the Wilentz book.  He goes on in great detail about the recording of it, when it was called Seems Like a Freeze Out. (Keyboardist) Al Kooper is interviewed.  Wilentz is a sort of musico-archaeologist and discovers, for instance, that Rick Danko of The Band played bass on those sessions, that it’s his bass on a lot of the album’s finished songs, though he was never named on any liner notes or credits.

ECIBS: Leg-work.

JP: Wilentz does a whole lot of excellent rock-critic leg-work.  He is a dogged music-critic detective.  Not to compare the two books too much, but Kaufman is the scholar here, in the traditional sense, and Wilentz seems caught somewhere between Greil Marcus and, well, actual liner notes for a box set or something.  And Wilentz does write those in real life; liner notes.  He was nominated for a Grammy for that, as he also points out.

ECIBS: And Will Kaufman?

JP: Well, you know, he plays.  He performs Guthrie’s songs.  He’s an American academic who works in England at the University of Central Lancashire and plays Guthrie music to European audiences to keep it alive, to keep it in the air.  Did you read the Kaufman book?

ECIBS: If this goes well I won’t have to, you’ll tell me everything.

JP: No, buy the Kaufman book.  It’s got many small moments like, a typical scenario is when Guthrie lands a Decca recording contract in ‘52.  And he says to a friend, apparently tongue-in-cheek but not really tongue-in-cheek, “Just don’t think that the Decca Recording Company has got me wrapped up around any of their little finger; I was born to be a reddical and and the life and death of a reddical is the only kind of a life and death I’d sign up with.”  And Kaufman tells us how immediately after that, because of HUAC and McCarthy, Decca dropped him anyway.

ECIBS: And the Wilentz book?

JP: Read it.  Whether to buy it as opposed to get it from the library, depends on your level of Dylan fandom.  It’s significant in Dylanology for the scholarship of some of the chapters.  Others are padded-out reviews and musings.  Take it out of the library, maybe, unless you are trying to build a complete Dylan critical library.  I borrowed my review copy but I’ll be buying a copy of my own when I have to give it back.  The Kaufman book is a must-buy.  A story of Woody Guthrie told with a kind of sidewise affection and accuracy that only adds up to reverence if you-the-reader personally revere Guthrie.  It’s cold-blooded and clear-eyed.  Just, deadly accuracy.

They had different philosophies.  Back in the 70’s Dylan said that he never renounced a role in politics, because he never played one in the first place.  He told Playboy that.   His thing is songs, not proselytising, though he did proselytise when it seemed that everybody else was doing it.

 

LINKS AND ORIGINS

ECIBS: Dylan’s religion is songs.  And Guthrie’s was–

JP: That Brechtian “Marxist apocalypse” that Wilentz writes about. The working man.  All the things that sound cliched now, but were life-and-death for Guthrie, literally.

ECIBS: What is the real link between these two figures?

JP: I can say that in the popular imagination, there’s no doubt that the link is the story of a baby Dylan showing up at Guthrie’s hospital in New Jersey when Guthrie was ill with Huntington’s.

ECIBS: But that’s not the true connection?

Bob Dylan and Ramblin' Jack Elliott

JP: What do you mean true?  Musical?  The musical connection is the 200 or so songs of Guthrie’s that Dylan knew how to play by the time he showed up at that hospital.  And all the old songs they both knew.  Or the 2,000 songs Guthrie wrote.  Or, I don’t know, maybe in some ways the link between the two of them is not them with each other, but Pete Seeger between them. Or Jack Elliot.  Woody Guthrie was the center of Bob Dylan’s universe at one time, to hear Dylan tell it.  Some cranks will say that Dylan betrayed or subverted what Guthrie was about.  But Dylan loved those songs, and he was a folkie because he wanted to be a folkie, until he followed his interest elsewhere.  Back to rock and roll, actually.  It was a return.  He is not form Oklahoma in the twenties.

ECIBS:  Neither was Jack Elliot.

JP: Yeah, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. His daughter made a documentary of him, you know.

ECIBS: Born Elliot Adnopoz or something.  From Brooklyn.

JP: But I would call him authentic in every way.

ECIBS: Why?

JP: Because that’s the way I feel about him.  He’s a traveling bard.  A busker.  He explains it in his own movie.  He’s self-aware. And Kaufman quotes Elliot as saying he was always more into the singing-cowboy thing than he was interested Guthrie’s politics.  Not everybody can be into the politics like Guthrie was, and there very few of his peers that he didn’t badmouth as sell-outs.

ECIBS: Is that what authentic means, being self-aware?

JP: That’s your word, authentic.  It reminds me of a jeans ad or something.  Is it authentic to write and re-write Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands in one night at a sound-studio piano while your musicians wait for you and play ping pong?  Kris Kristofferson was a janitor in the studio in Nashville that night.  He and another guy tell the story in Wilentz’s book.  Dylan drank Cokes all night, never took his shades off, never went to the bathroom, and by morning had written Sad-Eyed Lady.

ECIBS: I guess that word authentic isn’t very useful.

JP: No.  It’s a context word.  I prefer the content, both of the songs and of the individual life stories. These books can be read both ways, depending on which one you’re looking for.  And one of Dylan’s most memorable, personal lines, in Sara off of Blood on the Tracks, is about staying up all night in the Chelsea Hotel, “writing Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands for you.”  Which apparently didn’t happen.  But that could be one reason why we read these books, it doesn’t matter which.

ECIBS: Which what?

JP: Which reason.  The content or the context.  In Guthries’ case, as a defining moment, I think of him cracking wise, bravely, on the bus in Peekskill when he and the other Paul Robeson supporters were being murderously attacked by the police and the residents up there, attacked with rocks and clubs.  Some people will look to place these guys in a larger framework, in a political or poetical tradition, and those people will read into the songs and the behaviors.  Some other people just want some good background on the songs they love.

ECIBS: Which is the right way to go?

JP: Just down I guess.  Dylan, Guthrie. These are rabbit holes you can fall into, we know that.  You could get lost in the albums, in the scholarship, in the bootlegs, in Youtube, or in the history around it all.  With Guthrie, maybe even more so.  Kaufman and Wilentz are both reporting from somewhere deep down the rabbit hole.  It makes you want to stop talking about it and just listen to the records.

END

 

 

 

 

*Wilentz: “Apparently, unless Dylan performs according to a politically-correct line, he is corrupt, even immoral. He is not allowed to be an artist, he must be an agitator. And he can only be an agitator if he sings particular songs.”)

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EgoPo_Hell by Rebekah Zhuraw

Filed Under: Performance, Philadelphia Theater by ecibs — Leave a comment
May 9, 2011

Author:  based on the novel by Henri Barbusse (1908).  Adaption: Ross Beschler and Lane Savadove.  Costumes:  Janus Stefanowicz.  Set:  Anthony Hostetter.   Sound & Lighting:  Matt Sharp. Video:  Ren Manley.  Direction: Lane Savadove.  Company:  EgoPo.  Location:  The German Society.  Schedule:  April 27-May 15, 2011.  Reviewed:  May 4, 2011.  Photos:  Steven DeMarinis.

 

Barbusse’s voyeurisitic tale of sexpionage fairly begs to be theatricalized, and Ross Beschler and Lane Savadove’s adaption is the answer to that prayer.  Using the motif of the eye prominent in the erotics of the French avante-garde, made famous 20 years later by Bataille, Hell explores the cultivated loneliness born of the twinned desires to both know and escape the social compact that obscures and exacerbates the savagery of living.   Through the course of the play the questions of the nameless main character (played by Beschler)—through whose eye we see and whose words we then translate these images—mount:  How do I live with such contradictory desires?  What is this love I feel for everything at once and no one at all?  How to I face with bravery my own cowardice?

Thankfully, there are no answers to these questions.  EgoPo’s production makes instead this viscerally hungry questioning itself palpable by pushing our gaze further and further, through walls that open to reveal three depths of field, up skirts, and over surfaces that eventually all blend together, saturated with video of ordinary people and places, longed for and long gone.  Set Designer Anthony Hostetter, Lighting and Sound Designer Matt Sharp, Costume Designer Janus Stefanowicz, and Video Designer Ren Manley work together to create a sensory feast for the roving eye.  Color and lights switched on and off or dimmed to candles are used to guide us, distinguishing and ultimately connecting the lives of the disparate women and men who live and die and fuck and give birth and sometimes even briefly love. The occasional fiery red hue that erupts amidst the dominant white, brown and slate tones signals the giving in to temptation, and when phalanxes of blue and green and yellow umbrellas cascade from tier to tier, the boundaries finally rupture, until in the final scene, the girl, Anna (played by Cindy Spitko), whom our main character left in the rickety bed at our feet in the opening scene, steps through the wall, collapsing the narrative frame.

You can hear the nine-month process Beschler and Savadove went through of reading aloud the novel together in the heady balance of monologue and dialogue that furthers the simultaneous sense of distance and intimacy that a chink in a wall affords.  Often the cast narrates an internal dialogue alongside any actual dialogue or pantomimed events.  Voices and distances overlap.  Even the voice of a single character can seem to overlap itself as if Hamlet’s soliloquies were spliced right into his action scenes, creating a dimensional rupture of perception.  Out of this setting of thick narration, sex scenes burst into live action, still thickly mediated by dialogue, then collapse back to voyeuristic, internal narration before we can get out of the sexual encounter.  The character Aimee (played by Mary Lee Bednarek) who has the most sex of anybody on stage admits she has only once ever had an orgasm.  Dying Phillipe feverishly examines his own wife’s body that he will never possess, while Aimee’s husband (both played by Ed Swidey) prefers and attempts to rape the dour, dirty-fingernailed maid (Sarah Schol).

While for Sartre hell is other people, for Barbusse hell is clearly oneself.  By taking on Barbusse’s Ur-realism with terse precision, this production serves as a period study in the predecessors to the French literary avant-garde, Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, and as such is a comment on theater itself.  As voyeurs, we theater goers are fairly toppling out of our chairs into the first bedroom from which our anonymous main character presses his eye to ours.   As he witnesses Anna remove all of her clothes down to her lace-up boots in a moment of pure display for another man—to which he responds with shame and pity—we shamelessly devour her (though some of us would have liked to have similarly devoured some of the male cast, as well, we bow to the male vision of the text), and when she comes back clothed, as one of us, for the cast’s final bows, we look the actress (Spitko) in the eye knowing we, too, in fact know nothing more than this shadow-play of flesh.

Located in a large townhouse at the corner of 7th on a quiet stretch of Spring Garden, the open space of the German Society’s Horner Library and Reading Room has been cobbled out by Rob Klimoski and a crew of eleven other carpenters to accommodate the large, tri-tier set.  Antique galleried book cases herd us down the aisle into the base level of the set itself where, to our left, a set of risers for our seating are shoved under the west end chandelier, in spitting distance of a large bust which rises on its pedestal just outside our box beside the exposed top rows of books, extending one depth further the limits of our gaze beyond the immediate constructed space.

Beschler and Savadove have scoured much of the overt religious language from Barbusse’s text, while maintaining a sense of Promethian sacred theft, including their own recasting of the external voyeur as Anna’s lost love, Michel, in order to break down the final frame of the stage.  Yet in the end, it’s not quite sentimentality we witness when Anna and Michel reunite.  Rather there is the harrowing awareness that somehow we need each other, though we would rather not.  For while being alone brings the intellectual clarity we crave dearly, coming together is another shocking exercise in humility, and to hold such desire fleetingly in common is, in the end, a far greater place from which to mourn.

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Theatre Exile_Saturn Returns by Rebekah Zhuraw

Filed Under: Performance, Philadelphia Theater by ecibs — Leave a comment
May 7, 2011

Saturn Returns. Author:  Noah Haidle. Direction: Brenna Geffers.  Company:  Theatre Exile.  Location:  Christ Church Neighborhood House.  Schedule:  May 4-22, 2011.  Reviewed:  May 4, 2011.

The set at Christ Church Neighborhood House is driftwood white, in the midst of which a drab arm chair on a worn, brown rug create a focal point, like a pupil, from whose center an old man (Harry Philibosian playing 88 year old Gustin Novack) stares in silence.  Thus begins the Theater Exile production of Saturn Returns directed by Brenna Geffers, the national debut of the revamped Noah Haidle memory play that saw it’s American premiere at Lincoln Center in 2008.

Saturn Returns is touted for it’s symmetry in which one day fans out into an overlay of three fateful intervals in the life of Gustin Novak, a regular guy in pursuit of happiness (wife, child, job).   Into this trinity of hours are placed the familiar dyad of a man and a woman, whose story unravels backwards.  In the linear story behind the play, the man (Novak) transforms in time:  he ages—for which role three actors play the same man (at 88 Philibosian, at 58 Theater Exile’s Producing Artistic Director Joe Caruso, at 28 David Raphaely).  The woman, however, follows a Frankenstein model, with one actress (Amanda Schoonover) portraying three different women—his wife, his daughter, and his nurse—who collapse to occupy the same psychological space:  Novak’s loss.  However, in the final confessional moment, they reveal—or Gustin Novak potentially reveals—beneath the mask of loss, the deeper primordial lonliness of the 50’s housewife in us all.

Time and timing are thus the necessary focus of Saturn Returns as a production.   That the syncopated intervals catch not so much on revelation as the clicking towards completion of an ultimately closed set is the hump in the script that is difficult to surmount onstage.  Modulation of space is one thing this production uses to play out this conundrum.  Downstage left a low door serves as the ostensible locus the actors throw their gaze to like a garland at the sound of knocking or a cab’s horn, the site of entrances and exits in the traditional sense, while to the right the dissembling pale rail of a rising stair is used to deconstruct such apparent distinctions as beginnings and endings, expectation by expectation.  Similarly, the strobe affect of recurring thematic phrases (and somewhat perfunctory cursing), the man’s composite incarnations and the female’s shapeshifting is concretized by the motif of a lighthouse which punctuates scene changes with an actual all-seeing-eye strobe set high up in the backstage darkness that painfully blinds the audience into metaphoric submission to the tropes of memory and time.

While this production casts a nod towards existential angst, the overall flavor is more of a disjointed homage to Tennessee Williams.  The real melancholy in this story is that we don’t enjoy what we have when we have it.  We have no idea how.  We are caught up in the math.  Thus there is a foreshadowing of loss before the loss: the ghosts of our lonliness are our youngest selves.

To counter the inherent romanticism of this shattered dream, the part of Novak is played flat by all three actors in this production.  Thus 88 year old Novak is surprisingly accessible.  He just wants company and manipulates openly to get it.  It is all there on the surface, and Philobosian’s untutored style lends authenticity to the superficial if unwitting tenderness in this final prostituting role.  58 year old Novak is bitterly unpleasant, anxious, a liar, unable to love, but still wanting sex, and frankly easier to like for it.   When Canuso plays the emotional middle-aged Novak who strikes his daughter in mid-scene, then wants her to forgive him, and she does, he is our cheapest, most human self.  (And Schoonover bore a perhaps unintentional pink mark on her cheek to prove it.)  28 year old Novak is naively caught in the bourgeois machine, suited and striving, yet unable to really understand his wife’s misery as a caged pet beyond being shackled to the fulfillment of her mission of motherhood.  If there is love, we can’t feel it, taste it, smell it.  Love is an idea of a formally arranged nuclear family.  Love is a bomb of desperation waiting to go off called a baby.   We from the generation of divorce know that babies are not the balm for lonliness.  They provide, if anything, an expedient transfer of the virus, at best a deferment.  Raphealy’s training is evident in the carry of his voice, appropriate for the young and earnest Novak with whom thus begins the clock’s ticking towards total collapse and all blame.

Amanda Schoonover starts out as flat as the Novak character as the aged Novak’s young nurse, but as the scenes develop builds some grit and vulnerability into her range, and ends, as the young wife calling her husband to bed, with something close to admirable camp.  She’s strongest in these later scenes as the young wife in search of meaning and the young nurse rejected by her lover.  These are the scenes with the most dynamic tension, the 3 Gustin Novaks all taking the stage at once, each pawing lightly at her before turning her over to the next.

Thus in the end, the Theater Exile production of Saturn Returns is true to the script.  Still, I couldn’t help but want to see something more done to squelch the inherent, empty sentimentality.  Perhaps a recasting of the script as a dark comedy that in its final scene has Gustin Novak in drag, the soap flakes sticking to clownish paint, as he strikes the final Judy Garland pose himself, the heroine, face uplifted to the spotlight, clicking her heals, wanting to go home.

 

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Let Me Down Easy. Reviewed by Sarah Jagiela

Filed Under: Performance, Philadelphia Theater by ecibs — Leave a comment
May 7, 2011

Let Me Down Easy. Written and Performed: Anna Deavere Smith. Direction: Leonard Foglia. Location: Susan Roberts Theatre, Philadelphia, PA / USA. Schedule: March 18-April 10, 2011. Reviewed: March 25, 2011.

***

Choosing to avoid discussion of a thing such as death does not make it disappear. Anna Deavere Smith brings the concept of mortality to the forefront of her latest production of Let Me Down Easy, being performed at the Susan Roberts Theatre through April 10th. Smith delivers twenty different, powerful commentaries, each derived from interviews she conduced, on death, dying, and mortality; concepts that everyone must deal with eventually. Each of the commentaries beautifully illuminates a new aspect of mortality and death, while giving life to each character. One person portraying twenty different roles is quite a sight to behold. Though some of the characters Smith portrays are nearing death, she infuses passionate life into each and everyone. Human mortality and the stage go hand-in-hand, and Smith couples them perfectly in this latest rendition of Let Me Down Easy.

 

Though the set never changes throughout the entire play, each character is perfectly at home in their space on the stage. The set consisted of a couch, a coffee table, and a dinning room table with three chairs, all in a matching light beech color. What was most interesting about the set, was the backdrop of 5 or 6 large mirrors. These mirrors allowed for the audience a 360 view of Smith throughout the entirety of the play. Located above the stage was a display announcing the character’s name and occupation or brief description. The transitions between characters were virtually seamless. Accompanied by a quick musical, usually jazzy, phrase and a subtle lighting change, Smith flowed from one character to the next, picking up a new prop, be it a suit jacket, plate of food, hospital gown, or lab coat, and discarding the old prop along the way. By the final character, the stage was littered with remnants of each previous character, creating a sort of character mosaic. It was amazing to watch a single person flow so easily through twenty different portrayals and for each character have as much personality as they did.

 

The characters themselves ranged from supermodels, to athletes, to reverends, to patients and doctors, those who are well known, to the unknown. I feel that the assortment of characters was very diverse, but I would have preferred more lesser known individuals as opposed to some of the superstar athletes and models. While these superstar characters offer the extreme opposite view of the unknowns, I felt for some reason they overpowered the unknown’s voices in the play. A remarkable note about the production is the way that Smith develops each character’s quirks and accent. Smith is able to embody her interviewees with only the use of her voice and minimal props. Each character had a different accent or drawl, adding depth and personality to each new persona. I am still baffled by Smith’s ability to distinguish between characters so simply and successfully.

 

While some of the character play was comical, the overarching theme of mortality is anything but light. Many of the characters spoke of cancers, health risks and dangers, and doctors. Though depressing and largely focused on death, the interviews also addressed life and how imperative it is appreciate what each and every one of us is given. One of the characters explains how many of us see death as defeat. Death is not defeat; it happens to everyone, no matter one’s status in life. Everyone has an expiration date. Lance Armstrong describes how “being present” is the best was to live life. Living in the moment and being there, he says, are keys to enjoying life and not letting it slip by. Smith weaves between stories of near death experiences and rejuvenation of life. I feel that this medium is very appropriate for such topics since theater basically is of the moment. Movies and recordings can be played over and over again and remain the same, but performance and theater are only once. Like a moment, they are fleeting; like a life, they cannot last forever. You can only experience that moment or performance once and it can really only be shared with those who were there for it. You cannot return to a moment without a recording, just like you cannot return to the exact same performance without a recording, at which point it has changed mediums and is no longer truly a performance. Smith couples this concept of performance with the content of mortality to create a piece that can only truly be appreciated in the moment.

 

I honestly was not sure what to expect from the performance, but I was quite pleasantly surprised by it. Though dialogue is really the only action within the play, I stayed quite intrigued throughout the entire performance. The simple set design and use of props made it easy to follow the progression through the characters. Though the subject matter was not the lightest possible topic, I was not left with a sense of dread or depression. I felt the topics were handled very tactfully and overall, it was a great experience.

 

 

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The Kashu-juku Noh Theater Company. Reviewed by Abby E. Snook

Filed Under: Performance, Philadelphia Theater by ecibs — Leave a comment
May 7, 2011

Yashima, Zeami Motokiyo; Boshibari, Traditional; Aoi No Ue, Yukio Mishima. Translation: Japan Society. Direction: Katayama Shingo. Ensemble: Kashu-juku Noh Theatre Company. Location: Kimmel Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania /USA. Reviewed: March 21, 2011.

***

From East to West: Bringing Ancient Art Across Cultural Lines

A new, yet ancient, cultural phenomenon in theater came over from the far East to share the art with Western audiences. The Kashu-juku Noh Theater Company performed three types of scenes from the traditional Noh play: mai-bayashi, kyōgen, and noh. Each of these scenes illustrated the beauty and moral stories that can be depicted with the bare minimum of sets and props, and the extravagance of the body and costumes. The performances were enchanting, even when crossing the boundaries of culture and time.

Yashima, the mai-bayashi, was a short, serious scene that used a significant amount of music and singing to illustrate the story. Mai-bayashi literally means “dance and music,” which was an appropriate description of the solo dance performance of the climax of a famous Noh play. Yashima is the story of a famous 12th century battle between the Taira and Minamoto clans. The Shite, Yoshitsune’s Spirit, describes his post-death experience in asura after dying from diving into the ocean to rescue his prized bow before it could reach enemy hands. The mai-bayashi was characterized by the two drummers, flautist, and the four choral members, who used their voices as additional instruments. They aided the Shite in telling the story with no props other than the Shite’s fan, black and gray costumes, and only the body and voice to draw a picture for the audience. The seriousness and intensity of the song and dance brought the battle back to life.

The second selection, Boshibari, was the kyōgen, the comedic portion of the collection, and is the tale of a master who has two servants who tend to steal and drink his sake when he leaves the house. In this scene, the master tricks the servants and ties them up before leaving the house to prevent them from getting into his sake. While he is gone, the servants humorously find a way to get into, and drink, the sake, despite their “handicaps.” The kyōgen was full of colorful costumes, a few props, and an abundance of comedy. The humor not only poured from the jokes in the script, but also from the miming, actions, and expressions of the actors. It was enlightening to know that laughter is a universal element after experiencing this piece of the compilation.

The finale was Aoi No Ue, an adaptation of the character “Lady Aoi” in the Japanese novel, Tale of Genji. One of the most famous Noh plays, it is heavily based on the music that is played and sung by the onstage musicians and chorus. Aoi No Ue is about the dying Lady Aoi, the wife of Prince Genji, who is being plagued by the evil, out-of-body spirit of Lady Rokujo, a former mistress of Prince Genji. Lady Rokujo sent a spirit to posses Lady Aoi that is discovered by a sorceress, but it is eventually driven away by a Buddhist monk who saves Lady Aoi’s soul. This noh has elements of color, music, singing, ritual, and theatrical intensity all in one scene. The bright, elaborate costumes and masks enhanced the differentiation in characters and emotions, while the music and singing told the bulk of the story. The beautiful orange, gold, and red in the costumes illustrated the fire and passion enveloped in Lady Rokujo’s spirit. The music has a sense of lyrical dissonance; the calming chanting and mild melodies coupled with the intense vocal accents and other instrumental noises gave the scene an intensity and passion that was unmatched by any previous scene. Even though there were English subtitles on the screen above, everyone in the audience could feel and follow the story without watching because the connection to the actors was emotional, not lingual. Even as the actors were exiting the stage after the completion of the scene, you could have heard a pin drop in the audience. The aftershock of the performance rendered them speechless.

While there are many arts that do not translate well between cultures, the art of Noh theater is a complete success. Even though it was presented in Japanese with English subtitles, the original, creative elements of each selection were well represented and accessible to every audience member. This performance was a successful collaboration of ancient Eastern art and a modern Western audience.

 

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“John Sayles and the Art of Reading Aloud” by Jonathan Pappas

Filed Under: Uncategorized by ecibs — Leave a comment
May 3, 2011

 

On the way in to the John Sayles reading at the Free Library of Philadelphia Monday night, I overheard a guy ask a sincere question of his girlfriend: “Who is this guy, some kind of legend?”  I didn’t get her answer but she should have said yes. Sayles, the independent filmmaker (Return of the Secaucus Seven, Silver City, Honeydripper) and longtime Hollywood scriptwritng hired gun, is also an accomplished fiction writer, and he has a 968-page novel out from McSweeney’s called A Moment in the Sun.

This lousy camera phone pic shows Sayles holding my copy of his 1991 novel Los Gusanos. Author is handsomer than this picture would suggest.

After a breathless introduction (“Two-time Oscar nominee!”) Sayles took the stage and read an excerpt from Sun.  I recognized the passage, because it’s included in the four-chapter teaser that his publisher McSweeney’s just sent out to subscribers of its literary quarterly. (McSweeney’s publisher Dave Eggers, who was also the book’s editor, truly has his hands everywhere.)  Knowing the passage allowed me to think about both the story itself, and the job Sayles was doing as a reader.

 

 

 

But reading isn’t always storytelling, and some writers are awful at reading to an audience.  So: how many things can go right with a reading?  Why was this reading so good, when most literary readings are performed so poorly that my distracted notes often read like a mental patient’s dream-journal?  For one thing, Sayles is a performer himself, an experienced actor in his own films, and those of others.  For another, was savvy enough to read an action sequence with an ending that was both resolution and cliff-hanger, and to read for a neat twenty minutes.  But most of all, the new book sounds like it’s written with tremendous skill and grace.

Sun is a politically-conscious historical epic with a multitude of characters, set around 1900 in the US, Cuba, and the Philippines. On Monday night, Sayles’ gold-rush excerpt featured a harrowing ordeal up a mountainside, featuring the many trips endured  by the chapter’s main character Hod.   Loaded each time with another packful of his goods, Hod warily befriends a fellow traveler for relentless runs up and down the icy “Golden Staircase” that reaches to the Canadian border.

Sayles acted three or four different characters, each with distinct intonations and accents.  His accent for Hod sounded unselfconsciously small-w western, and authentically old-timey, if such a thing can be said.  His one-eyed Indian sounded uncannily like the native American movie actor Wes Studi, who shares a distinctly resonant soft-basso voice and gentle accent with some other Native American actors.  (This was the point that the performance became a thing unto itself, and all potential corniness or inauthenticity of the voices were set aside in the mind, in favor of the story’s elements–it all sounded authentic to me.)

I wasn’t really close enough to know if Sayles was radiating any movie-biz charisma, I only know that the voice on the PA sounded great.  He didn’t just read the piece, he did it.    It will be hard to go to another reading any time soon, when someone of lesser stage talents gives it a go.

In 1998 Sayles told an interviewer, “What’s interesting is that before I made movies, my books got called cinematic. I think some of why the movies get called novelistic is that they’re ambitious in terms of the depths you go into the characters, and the number of people whose points of view are being examined…But I think that if you read my novels, they’re much more complex than the movies. They are very mosaic.”

The beautiful cover of Sayles' hefty new novel.

 

Sayles is known for being uncompromising in the content and style of his independently financed films, and it’s not a stretch to say that they are some of the only socially and politically conscious films made by an American over the last twenty-five years.  (Enviable:  If you had to scramble for money in your early days to finance the artistic dramas you want to direct, is there a cooler way to earn it than to write genre schlock like Pirhana and Alligator for Roger Corman?  Sayles also directed Springsteen videos and wrote for hire on everything from Apollo 13 to Jurassic Park IV.)

But as Sayles pointed out during his avuncular Q and A, he was a fiction writer before a filmmaker (and an actor before either.)  Some projects require a large canvas, he said, and for some stories, the writer needs to play god without worrying about the budget constraints of a feature film.   A resignation settled over me as he read and talked; the inevitability of a new 1,000-pager on my nightstand, along with the compulsion to go buy his other books of novels and short stories.

 

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