An editorial in the Atlanta Constitution in the fall of 1880 remarked that “Jews seemed to enjoy Rosh Hashana as much as the Gentiles did Christmas” but then added, “none of them [Jews] have been seen reeling with intoxication on Atlanta streets.”
-David Geffen in the Jerusalem Post, on the US cultural history of Rosh Hashanah.
The chorus does everything in Greek theater except become a main character – kill or be killed, love or fall in love. Zack’s friend and mine, Sumana, sent me this Socrates quote a couple weeks ago and I only just looked at it:
“Do you regret that we have not become important, like the kings we see in tragedy, men like Atreus, Thyestes, Agamemnon, and Aegisthus? They are always portrayed as victims of murder, as figures to be lamented, as preparing and eating evil banquets. No tragic poet has had the audacity or lack of decency to introduce into his play the slaughter of the chorus.”
My friend Sari writes here about an Orthodox congregation in San Antonio:
“For many years, Rodfei Sholom was the only Orthodox synagogue in the southwest part of the state. Now that Orthodox congregations have formed in Austin and South Padre Island, Scheinberg said, he wants his congregation’s role to change.”
my sunglasses are turned up on a table here at The Grind in Lincoln Square, where Ee and I are working, and a ceiling fan is being reflected spinning around in their eyes, which makes them look like they’ve just seen a topless woman, in an old cartoon. I’m certain that this is exactly the kind of uncomputerized technical effect we need more of in theater. It’s surprising, and it works, and if you think about it you can figure out how.
Last night, after watching the Senators for an hour and a half, (“That’s just not true.” “That’s not true.” “That’s Senate inside baseball”…) and drinking Smirnoff mixed with something that contained 15% cranberry juice, I crawled into bed and dreamt a fully staged version of a scene which doesn’t exist.
I was in the lobby of the auditorium of Q School, where I taught LYSISTRATA workshops two weeks ago, hanging out with my friend and co-teacher JF and some of our high school classmates. The next scene to be presented was the pierced mask scene from King Lear (there is no such scene) and the director was our former teacher and mentor, Ted W. I was bantering with friends, other teachers, and laughing – and suddenly I decided I couldn’t miss Ted’s staging of this famous scene.
Distracted and drunk in the dream as I was in sleep, I rushed into the auditorium (proscenium with raked seating) late, almost disrupting the scene, and to the extreme disapproval of the students’ parents sitting around me. I slid down in my seat.
Two seated narrator birds in white beak masks spoke in a synchronized unison whisper, one from the back center of house right, one from the stage. Their lips were amplified visually somehow – I could see nothing else. The whisper, like feathers or snakeskin, was present in every corner of the auditorium, which had house lights up and the stage dimmed. They spoke in verse, which I cannot remember.
I was annoyed that they already knew how to do choral speaking – why had we bothered with the workshops? They were so good.
A diagonal chorus of four, one man and three women, in gold half-masks ran down the house right aisle, all facing the house right wall, all with the skin of their torsos gleaming under red cloth. They announced the arrival of the king, I think, also in verse and in unison. Their spacing was beautiful. Mechanical. Each head was a foot lower than the next.
The young king appeared from the same aisle entrance I had used. He was being played by a student I taught last year. He was elaborately made up, but unmasked. He was cloaked.
He called, in verse, for the appearance of the pastries (I am not making this up!) and a conveyor belt carrying syrup-oozing golden stacks of hexagonal sponge cakes, topped with raspberries, ran behind the chorus, through the center seating block of the audience. The cakes kept moving, and the chorus speaking.
Suddenly there was a lighting shift. House lights went dark, and there was abrupt movement and sound on stage. (In the dream, I remember not understanding how the actors got from the aisles onto stage, but in my reconstruction it’s clear that there must have been a second, identical group of actors on stage, and the instant darkness created the illusion of their transport.)
A terrifying pattern of light which looked like an enormous staple, or a 3-sided rectangular gate, moved through the darkness from upstage left to downstage center/right, with a sound like a screech.
The gate stopped and revealed the young king, immobilized, bolted to a chair like that Bacon painting, and screaming. In the dim light all you could see was that he wearing a grotesque mask, grey-white, bulbous, and with eye-slits. The mask was like half of a white pumpkin turned on its side.
It was as if the moving gate had been his chair being pushed out.
Above his head and stage right of him, on a pole, or midair, was a fool/Dionysos/trickster character, an actor combined from a friend of mine in LA and another former student, shrieking and laughing at him.
Dionysos began his monologue, which I knew was to tell the king that the pierced mask would never come off his face again, and I woke up.
This dream certainly owes a lot to Richard Foreman’s WHAT TO WEAR, which I saw with Chris Danowski in Los Angeles at REDCAT, and I think the “pierced mask” as a group of words is somehow taken from the “pierced chair” that the Popes were supposed to have to sit on to have their gender checked. But otherwise, I think I may have finally had an original idea. If by original, you mean Dionysian.
“…if I were moderating tonight’s TV debate, I’d start with one question and a follow-up, and I’d wait for the flop-sweat: Senator, name one great civilization in world history whose government was not a major arts patron.
Now, what can we learn from this?”
– header & quote from Christopher Knight on the debates and (lack of) coverage of cultural policy, in the LA Times.
Eileen and I will be hosting a small debate-watching party tonight in the Thomas St. apartment. Everyone I’ve spoken to this morning is waiting with bitten fingernails. We want so badly for Obama to do really, really well. The air is still with the anticipation, especially here in Chicago, where Obama buttons are on everyone’s backpacks and lapels.
I feel lucky to have lived to see a time of profound political engagement around a Democratic candidate. I was younger with Clinton, and I remember we were excited then, too – but this feels much more serious.
So now I’m going back again,
I got to get to her somehow.
All the people we used to know,
They’re an illusion to me now.
Some are mathematicians,
Some are carpenters’ wives –
Don’t know how it all got started,
I don’t know what they’re doing with their lives.
But me, I’m still on the road
Heading for another joint –
We always did feel the same,
We just saw it from a different point
of view,
Tangled up in blue…
– Dylan, Bob.
I’m blogging from the beloved Star Lounge on Chicago Avenue, which has installed an organ since I was last here – and waiting for a phone call to begin writing another grant. It’s very exciting. Feels like being an agent or something, waiting for my operating instructions. Since I began freelancing as a grantwriter in June I’ve done three. This will be my fourth, a complete proposal for an institution for which I wrote the original letter of inquiry.
Grantwriting appeases my sampling instincts, since you have this huge body of shared text to draw on in the form of past grants, and it’s understood that you can and should take at will. It’s collage writing, or in the word I like using the best for what I do with those pesky Greek texts, “cross-adapting.” It relieves me that we do recognize instances of authorship where copy(wrong) is not primary. Every time I find one, there’s more hope.
I also have new gadgetry – a wireless mouse, which makes me so 007 right now. (If by 007 you mean 2003 – Krist3l had one then…)
Back from the week-long workshop at Q School on all the choruses in Lysistrata. As I did when I was directing the play myself, in 1998, I forgot to include the final Spartan celebration-chorus until the end. Something about it just keeps slipping my mind.
The students of Q were very eager, and up to the hardest passages in the play – those two instances where the Chorus of Men and Women unite to address the audience. They were able to improvise both vocally and physically within choruses by the end of the week. Really, they were doing it after the first couple of hours, but they were rock stars by Friday. Made me so proud.
It was very nice to be a guest teacher, and also to have the luxury of exploring choruses through the lens of one text. We had almost fifteen hours of workshop time.
Dara Weinberg 