THEOLOGY
No, the serpent did not
seduce Eve to the apple.
All that’s simply
Corruption of the facts.
Adam ate the apple.
Eve ate Adam.
The serpent ate Eve.
This is the dark intestine.
The serpent, meanwhile,
Sleeps his meal off in Paradise-
Smiling to hear
God’s querulous calling.
-Ted Hughes
This Saturday, Poetry magazine is presenting a theatrical staging of some Dana Levin poems at Links Hall. If this isn’t what I came here for, I don’t know what is. Life is real! Life is earnest!
“What use had I for hands,” a theatrical interpretation of five poems by Dana Levin. Conceived and directed by Valerie Jean Johnson. Devised and performed by the ensemble: Jennifer Crissey, Aaron DeYoung, Katie Eberhardy, Jennifer Guglielmi, and Kate Olsen. THREE PERFORMANCES: Friday, December 12, 8 PM, Saturday, December 13, 8 PM (followed by a discussion with poet Dana Levin), and Sunday, December 14, 7 PM. Admission is free; call 773.281.0824 or visit linkshall.org for reservations.
Oh, to be able to tag every post with both “poetry” and “theater.” To have the twin sisters always be able to have play dates in the same park. But maybe I wouldn’t appreciate it so much if it happened all the time. Maybe they are like twins, and what they really need – despite my desire to have them dressed in the same matching pinafores (pinafores?) – is time apart.
Rob Kendt and Isaac Butler have a new site, CRITIC-O-METER – it’s like Rotten Tomatoes for New York theater – it compiles all critics’ reviews to award plays a letter grade.
If you look at their listing for HAIRSPRAY, for example, you can see that the site also excerpts portions of all the reviews from which they determined the grade. It’s a good way to get a sense of what lots of different writers think of a show.
From their explanation of the whys and wherefores:
Critic-O-Meter is an idea borne of the blogosphere. Critic and editor Rob Weinert-Kendt and myself (director and writer Isaac Butler) were having matzoh ball soup at the Polish Tea Room when Rob mentioned that he had read on a blog that someone said “You know, they really should have a Rotten Tomatoes for theatre reviews”. In true slowest-moving-art-form fashion, we then puttered about talking about it for a few months before finally building the site you see before you today.
We approve!
There was no cure for the human condition, he thought, not least his own. He [Samuel Johnson] was a prisoner of compulsions. A monster of a man, with a huge and powerful frame, and a blunt bulldog head set above it, he could pick up warring street dogs and toss them aside like kittens, and once beat an insolent publisher senseless with a folio volume. Yet since his youth he had suffered from a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or even Tourette’s syndrome, which became aggravated with the years. Walking down a London alley, he had to touch every post with his cane, and, if he missed one, would go back and start over; he constantly spoke to himself, repeating half-audible incantations under his breath, and would sit in a reverie for hours, muttering and whistling; when he peeled an orange, he always had to keep the peel in his pocket.
Still, the pill of life could be sweetened – above all, with friendship. Johnson made a religion of social life: he ate with friends every night, adored his small circle of intimates […] “My life is one long escape from myself,” he said, and he ran to the table to get away.
– Critic Adam Gopnik, from “Man of Fetters: Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale,” an article on Samuel Johnson and the new biographies of him, in the 12/8/08 New Yorker.
I can’t get over the fact that I can go into many places in New York, and people know who I am. I never really know who I am myself.
– playwright Horton Foote, in the LA Times
the back of the police station is out.
– Nathan Detroit, “The Oldest Established,” GUYS AND DOLLS
I am very surprised to have to report that Bartlett Sher, artistic director of the Intiman Theatre in Seattle, will be the first white director to ever direct a Broadway production of one of August Wilson’s plays – JOE TURNER’S COME AND GONE at Lincoln Center next spring.
All previous Broadway productions of Wilson’s work have been directed by black directors. The NYT and Playbill reports of this news failed to note this fact, focusing instead on Sher’s recent Tony for South Pacific. I got this news from ArtsJournal, who got it from the Pioneer Press, out of Minneapolis.
Some responses:
This is another way of saying that the dominant culture knows more about us than we know about ourselves.
– Actor James Williams
I’m still a little troubled by the decision. Racial representation in theater (at least in New York) has not improved much since the Wilson-Brustein debates. Other than LaMaMa’s Ellen Stewart, there is not a single artistic director of color at a major New York theater, 80 percent of plays produced in New York are by white men despite the fact that white men account for roughly 15 percent of New York City’s population, casts remain segregated, and black directors rarely get tapped to direct plays by white writers.
– from critic Isaac Butler’s comments in the Time Out New York blog.
The issue, of course, is access — if Lincoln Center won’t hire a black director to direct an August Wilson play, what will they hire a black director to do? I get that Sher is the resident director, he’s on staff, he’s done big things for them before, and I get (and kind of think it’s great) that he’d want to direct a Great American Play to follow up his Great American Musical (South Pacific) — and it’s wonderful that Wilson’s work is considered to fill that role. But if the door doesn’t open for directors here, where does it open?
– playwright & blogger Kristoffer Diaz
Do it now! Do it now or forever wish you had!
– Wilbur Turnblad
Today, snow, and lots of it.
I was standing this evening, freezing in my knitted garments, at the bus stop on Division. Three intellectual boys with bright-colored sneakers were clowning in the cold, blowing breath onto the glass of the shelter and drawing hearts in the frost of their breath, smoking and blowing smoke into the air. They were talking about some ridiculously dressed woman they had seen earlier today. They said, “She looked like the Renaissance.” They were so smartsy and college about it, I had to laugh, we all laughed. I told them they were high on the temperature. They just moved here, too. We all just moved here.
Something is happening here. I don’t get on the Division bus without meeting another young person, another artist, who’s just relocated to Chicago, snow and all. The word is out that the scene here is as hot as the weather is cold, and the housing prices are half of what they are in LA, NYC, or SF. Everybody is moving here. And everybody who isn’t, should be.
I don’t ride the Chicago street bus without hearing people talking about vintage amplifiers. I don’t buy an EggMcMuffin at Adams and Wabash without hearing women talking about Stratford Shakes and the Goodman and ChiShakes and going back every year. There is a real audience here. For all the arts. I don’t even have to think about it. It’s all around me.
And now that Chicago is the city of Barack Obama, too, it’s the place to be for the politics as well. And the pride. I think the Grant Park energy is still ebullient in everyone’s faces. I saw a woman today wearing a T-shirt with the date of Obama’s first day in office on it.
This is the place to be, and I feel that even more strongly now that I’ve spilled myself on the ice for the first time, walking home on Rockwell.
It’s like, Welcome to Chicago. – SMACK! –
I can’t wonder, and I don’t, if my life would have been different if I had come here sooner. I only know I’m here now.
…when my second quartet was played here at Harvard, my old teacher Walter Piston said to me, “you know, if I knew what it sounded like, I would have put the four players in separate rooms and shut the doors.”
-composer Elliott Carter, still avant-garde at 100 years old, interviewed by the Boston Herald. Via ArtsJournal. There’s also a great anecdote about my favorite composer, Charles Ives:
I [Carter] remember vividly this Sunday afternoon. I was taken to his [Ives’s] house by some friends, and we sat down and talked about music. I told him I liked Stravinsky. He sat at the piano, and I don’t think he had ever seen the score, he started playing the “Firebird.” And he said you can not repeat the way Stravinsky does. He was very angry about it, he said that’s just wrong. He thought repetition was a danger.
He didn’t really teach me anything, because I didn’t know much about music and I was just writing lousy little pieces. But I knew I had to study and I did at Harvard and such. But I admired his music. He had given up composing before I knew him. There were all these copies of his scores in the American Music Center which I went through and they were messy, and I tried to do something that I couldn’t follow up, tried to clean them up, they were awful. Like I think it was the fourth symphony, for two measures there would be six trombones playing and that’s all. I though maybe it’s all right, but it bothered me. I wanted to clean them up while he was alive, but it was too much and I couldn’t finish it. Finally Lou Harrison and Henry Cowell took over.
And Ives was against my going to Paris and studying with Boulanger. He thought I should stay home and be American. I one time went to visit him in Redding, and he played the “Concord Sonata” for me. He had a big vein in his neck and he held it like that, and his wife said, “Charlie you better quit now.” And she gave him a glass of milk. He was not well for years when he stopped composing.
I was involved with a music festival at Columbia, and I proposed that they do “The Unanswered Question” and “Central Park After Dark,” and I wrote to Mrs. Ives asking if they had been performed before. She said yes, some men in a New Haven vaudeville show had done it, and it would be unfair to call it a first performance.
I got this in a letter I got from her, and she said he was too sick to write back. But then I found out that he had written it, and she had copied it and added stuff. I have a whole article about things that she changed.
That last bit there relates quite pointedly to the previous post about who gets to relate whose experience. Yep.
Dara Weinberg 