By Caldwell Titcomb

Attention has shifted from the very old to the very new: the Boston Early Music Festival ended on June 14, and June 13 saw the start of the eight-day 2009 Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice at the New England Conservatory (NEC).

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Let us hob-and-nob with Death — Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The Duck Variations by David Mamet. Directed by Marcus Stern. Sexual Perversity in Chicago by David Mamet. Directed by Paul Stacey. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at Zero Arrow Street, Cambridge, MA, through June 28.

Reviewed by Bill Marx

Death be not mentioned in David Mamet’s early short play, “The Duck Variations,” which was first produced in 1972. Of course, it is the playwright’s deft handling of linguistic indirection that makes the script, which deals with two old men trying to ignore oblivion, so genially comic.

Ironically, the aged treading warily around The End holds up better than Mamet’s once-shocking look at twenty-something erotic mores in “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” first produced in 1974. The decades have not been kind to this play and its critique of fowl-mouthed macho puerility. What with the arrival of AIDS, texting, cell phones, and ‘hooking up,’ the piece creaks much more loudly than the squabbling geezers in “The Duck Variations,” who are brought to compelling life in fine performances by Thomas Derrah and Will LeBow. More…

By Harvey Blume

To play Xiangqi (Chinese chess) as earnestly as I have been lately is to revisit a familiar situation, one in which I am at the gateway of another culture, hungry for the experience, but positioned as a junior. That was the case with African drumming and with neurological difference, for example, especially Asperger’s Syndrome. I studied and wrote about both (a book pertaining to the former, many pieces about the latter) but could never be full-fledged.

Is it absurd to stake out such positions? Is it a sign of open-mindedness, or of failure and flight from one’s own cultural possibilities?

(But wait, I forgot! This peculiar sort of intervention, of sympathetic nosiness, has another name — anthropology!) More…

By Caldwell Titcomb

If you know a bit about opera, you will have heard of Verdi – but perhaps not of Monteverdi. Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was the first major composer in the history of opera, and the biennial Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF) is presenting his last opera, “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” (“The Coronation of Poppaea”) as the central event in its many offerings from June 6 to 14. More…

By Caldwell Titcomb

Starting in 1769 serious questions have been raised as to whether William Shakespeare (1564-1616) of Stratford-upon-Avon actually wrote the plays and poems attributed to him. For some years the true author was claimed to be Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626). So far, at least sixty persons have been put forward as the rightful writer. Notable among them are Christopher Marlowe (1564-93); Edward de Vere (1550-1604), 17th Earl of Oxford; William Stanley (1561-1642), 6th Earl of Derby; and Roger Manners (1576-1612), 5th Earl of Rutland. The roster has not been restricted to men: it includes Queen Elizabeth I herself (1533-1603), and – a recent addition – the Jewish poet Aemelia Bassano Lanier (1569-1645).

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A novel about sexual obsession, inspired by “Lolita,” stretches the limits of credulity.

Rupert: A Confession
By Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, Translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison, Open Letter, $12.95, 131 pages

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

I consider myself something of an expert in the seldom studied theme of impotence in film and literature. Most men don’t like to think about the topic, in much the same way they don’t like to think about death. In fact, impotence is worse than death. Thinking about death probably won’t kill you, unless you’re feeling particularly karmic. But thinking about impotence can actually lead to impotence. Best not to dwell.
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June 3rd marks the 20th anniversary of the brutal suppression of the Tiananmen student movement. To mark the occasion, excerpts from “Massacre,” an epic poem about the violence that landed the writer in jail.

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Long-time readers of The Arts Fuse may already have noticed a few changes in the site. The most obvious is that http://www.theartsfuse.com now takes you to a new (albeit simple) home page for The Arts Fuse website, with links to The Arts Fuse blog, podcasts and image galleries.

We have plans to expand The Arts Fuse offerings — this bare bones home page will serve as a launching pad for future developments. Also, note that The Arts Fuse is now on Twitter. And keep in mind that a percentage of the purchases made through the Amazon.com icon on the upper right hand side of the Arts Fuse pages benefit the Fusers.

If you want to get to the blog directly, you can do so via http://blog.theartsfuse.com. (You may wish to update your bookmarks accordingly.) Similarly, our RSS feeds now flow through http://blog.theartsfuse.com/feed/. (For category feeds, use http://blog.theartsfuse.com/category/<category name>/feed/, e.g., http://blog.theartsfuse.com/category/world-books/feed/.)

Behind the scenes, we’ve done a major upgrade to our WordPress blog software and plugins, but this will only be visible to readers in a few instances:

• We’ve added a “Share/Save” button to the end of each blog post, making it easy to share a link to a post you’ve enjoyed on various social media sites, send the link to a friend via email, or bookmark the link in your browser.
• The tag cloud looks a bit different, as we’re now using the widget that WordPress itself distributes.

In the coming months, we’ll be enhancing The Arts Fuse in various ways– watch this space!

By Bill Marx

Sigmund Freud sets out a weirdly Brobdingnagian survival scenario for kids. Young children rely on their parents, dependent on the intimidating bounty and emotional whims of “adult” giants who could easily dish out too much smothering love or unconscious hostility.

Novelist Peter Stephan Jungk weaves a playfully tragicomic variation on this primal generational dilemma in his fantastical “road trip” novel “Crossing the Hudson” (translated from the German by David Dollenmeyer, Other Press, 232 pages).

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