Freedom: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 576 pages, $28.

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

In two days, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux will publish Freedom, the new novel by Jonathan Franzen whose last book, The Corrections, made just about every best-of list of 2001. It also earned the National Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and an offer (later rescinded) to be a selection of Oprah’s Book Club. Bret Easton Ellis called it one of the three great books of his generation, and just last year, the literary website The Millions voted it the best novel of the decade.

All of which is to say that something is in the air. It is possible that the rarest of occurrences—one comparable to a visit by Halley’s Comet, or a negative quarter for Apple, or a watchable M. Night Shyamalan film—is imminent. We may be about to witness a national conversation about literature.

When was the last time it happened? Scandals don’t count (sorry James Frey), nor does genre fiction (nobody was allowed to doubt Harry Potter, only to marvel at its stratospheric success). Hipsters may have discussed the finer points of a Dave Eggers or Jonathan Safran Foer novel, but the mainstream couldn’t have cared less. And the majority of the bestseller list is fodder for non-thought—the kind of stuff you read in order to avoid having a conversation.

In truth, one might have to look back to 2001 to The Corrections itself for an equivalent historical-literary moment, meaning there is quite a bit more resting on Franzen’s shoulders than the threat of sophomore slump. He is one of a very small cadre of authors still capable of firing up America’s interest in books. And Franzen seems to be well-aware of this fact, as evidenced not only by his occasional self-aggrandizing interview or unforgiving screed against “difficult” books (see the infamous “Harper’s Essay”), but by his newest novel itself. Freedom seems to take its inevitable cultural importance as its very premise, working backwards from there. So the question isn’t so much “Will people be talking?” but “What will they be talking about?”

Novelist Jonathan Franzen: He knows the way we live now? Photo by David Shankbone

The novel announces its major theme on the title page, and the nearly 600 pages that follow provide the variations. The kernel of the story concerns Walter and Patty Berglund, an average, suburban couple who spend the bulk of the novel struggling with freedoms, psychological, physical, sexual, and romantic.

“One strange thing about Patty, given her strong family orientation, was that she had no discernible connection to her roots,” we are bluntly told in the clever opening chapter of Freedom, which is narrated by a kind of collective suburban dislike of the Berglunds. Soon after, we are made privy to Patty’s autobiography—written at the behest of a nameless therapist. That Patty, a tall, white, college basketball superstar (who isn’t named Harry Angstrom), writes suspiciously like Jonathan Franzen is a fact we’re expected to ignore.

(A side note: While many critics have experienced near-ecstasy at Franzen’s literary stylings, I found the prose fairly unexciting. Though there are certainly moments of Updike-inspired beauty—a washed-up New Yorker actress in her late forties is described as dressing “tarty-teenage”, and she eats a piece of cake by “parceling out each small bite for intensive savoring, as if it were the best thing that was going to happen to her that day”—just as many lines are plain nonsense, such as the description of a character’s rent payments as “so low as to be literally nominal.” And though it may seem odd to have a discussion of an author’s style noted in parentheses, it seems perfectly reasonable to me in this case.)

Patty and Walter meet in college, where Patty is lusting after Walter’s friend and roommate, Richard Katz. Katz soon becomes a rock star, as the front man of The Traumatics, and his success is rekindled decades later (because that happens all the time) with a band called Walnut Surprise. Richard and Patty circle each other lustily for a couple hundred pages but don’t end up getting down and dirty until Patty has given in and married heart-of-gold Walter. Anguish inevitably ensues for all involved.

Richard was my least favorite character in a book full of hateful personalities. I’ve found the majority of recent portrayals of musicians in fiction to be problematic (Juliet, Naked and A Visit from the Goon Squad springing most immediately to mind), but Richard is by far the worst. The problem is Franzen’s penchant to sacrifice his veneer of realism whenever he has a stereotype to inflate and pop. Take this conversation Richard has with a young, earnest fan:

The kid was wearing a hoodie and the sort of low-cut skinny pants that Katz had first observed in London. “What do you think of Tutsi Picnic?” he said. “You into them?”

“Don’t know ‘em,” Katz said.

“No way! I can’t believe that.”

“And yet it’s the truth,” Katz said.

“What about the Flagrants? Aren’t they awesome? That thirty-seven-minute song of theirs?”

“Haven’t had the pleasure.”

It’s at the phrase “thirty-seven-minute song” that Franzen departs from the realm of gentle satire and embraces farce. This boy doesn’t exist in the real world, but wouldn’t he be hilariously annoying if he did?

And Richard himself is no better. His implacably cool demeanor, his claim that his goal in life is to “put [his] penis in the vaginas of as many women as possible,” his anti-corporate rant that goes viral on the internet (one of two rants that end up going viral over the course of the novel; am I the first to coin the phrase “deus ex technologica”?)—all of it reeks of the author’s lampooning pen.

Unfortunately, this looseness extends to other characters. Take Walter and Patty’s “golden-haired and pretty” son Joey, who is said to innately “possess the answers to every test a school could give him, as though multiple-choice sequences of As and Bs and Cs and Ds were encoded in his very DNA.” This is a weirdly illogical description, and its hyperbolic inanity infuses Joey’s character throughout the novel. In high school, he moves out of his parents house and in with his girlfriend, Connie, and her family. For a decade, Connie allows Joey all manner of physical infidelity, desiring only to be with him and fulfill his every desire: “Connie could not be fought with. Insecurity, suspicion, jealousy, possessiveness, paranoia—the unseemly kind of stuff that so annoyed those friends of his who’d had, however briefly, girlfriends—were foreign to her. Whether she genuinely lacked these feelings, or whether some powerful animal intelligence led her to suppress them, [Joey] could never determine.” In college, Joey becomes involved in a plan to sell Paraguayan vehicle parts to the American military operation in Iraq.

Which brings us to what really matters about a post-millennial Franzen novel: the size of the canvas. The verisimilitude of a teenager getting involved in military transactions is immaterial to the author’s greater point, which is that our personal, political, and even environmental freedoms are inextricably intertwined.

Joey’s exercise of his entrepreneurial freedom brings him hefty rewards, but also results in the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq. Patty’s exercise of sexual freedom breaks her husband’s heart. Leading to a short-lived relationship with Richard whose end is described as not unlike that of America leaving Vietnam. Walter exercises his freedom by trying to save a species of bird that isn’t even on the endangered species list, resulting in the ironically-named Cerulean Mountain Trust shearing off the top of a mountain and selling the underlying coal to an energy company. Walter’s enthusiasm for this bizarre plan has been described in various reviews of Freedom as “weird” and “strange”; I’ll go with “inexplicably dumb.”

Walter’s passion for conservation is not, however, inexplicably dumb. His dedication to the cause is what makes him the novel’s only noble character. Before the book’s pat but touching denouement, we find Walter living in a lush, suburban enclave, where he spends his days begging the neighbors to keep their cats indoors to save the local songbirds. Personal questions about freedom (Is the desire for freedom the disease itself, or merely a symptom of the disease? Does marriage have to represent a sacrifice of freedom?) become political questions about freedom (Is the economic freedom of Americans worth more than the freedom of others? Is money a form of freedom, or the opposite?), which then become ecological questions about freedom (Does the freedom of a bird matter more than the freedom of a cat? Does the freedom of the next generation matter more than the freedom of the present generation?). Franzen reveals the ways that even the most insignificant issues are caught up in complex webs of conflicting interests, all of them relating to—say it with me—freedom.

Thankfully, Franzen eschews any simple answers, and his happy ending is a peaceful island in a roiling sea. Before Walter is reunited with Patty, he considers how perhaps he was not “made for a life of freedom and outlaw heroics” and needs “a more dully and enduringly discontented situation to struggle against and fashion an existence within.” It is enough of an answer for him, for Patty, and even for their children. But as for Walter’s dream, to conserve and protect the world that has offered us all so much freedom, Franzen fails to provide any answers.

Maybe this is the conversation we can expect once Freedom hits the stands. And the truth is that the critics are right: it’s a worthy conversation. However, even though Franzen poses all the right questions, it would probably be most encouraging if young people came down against the novel’s eventual endorsement of tending one’s own garden over the anxiety of involvement. Freedom speaks for its author’s generation, a generation that still had the freedom to choose ignorance.

As the cover of last week’s Time says, “Jonathan Franzen shows us the way we live now.” Now that’s a scary thought.

By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages, $25.

Reviewed by Harvey Blume

To my mind Michael Cunningham’s novel By Nightfall has one significant flaw, namely that the New York City he cares and writes so passionately about ends at the borders of Manhattan. He describes Battery Park, for example, where Manhattan abuts New York harbor, as, “the city’s only point of contact with something bigger and more potent than itself.” Has he never heard of or visited Coney Island, that somewhat storied strand along the Atlantic Ocean?

Of course, that point of contact between the city and something bigger involves going to Brooklyn, which, like the other boroughs, is for Cunningham and his characters only vaguely and remotely New York City. Cunningham’s not even sure those places are certifiably American.

When Peter, the Manhattan art gallery owner who is the book’s main character, does set foot in Bushwick, Brooklyn to visit an artist’s studio, he can think of nothing but an “Eastern European city” to compare it to. How odd, since whatever relationship Brooklyn may bear to Warsaw, say, or Budapest, it, and the city’s other boroughs, are precisely aspects and foundations of New York City itself.

That’s one quibble. Now the other caveat. Together the two help map the intellectual/geographical territory the book intensely and intelligently inhabits. Rebecca, Peter’s wife, says of a career path her troubled brother Ethan (nicknamed Mizzy) has proposed: “Computer Graphics. Don’t ask me what that is, exactly. In terms of how it could actually be a job.”

Rebecca and Peter are a married team in the thick of New York culture, she in publishing, a field not exactly exempt from the digital revolution. In a novel published this year and au courant in so many ways, for Rebecca to be clueless about how computer graphics might just imply a career path is even more jarring a false note than for Peter to act as if there were no New York beaches.

That said, within the confines of Manhattan’s art world, its true locus, By Nightfall comes alive in ways that more than compensate for its border problems.

Cunningham knows how to put his readers in front of contemporary art works, affording them opportunity to see, mull over, doubt, and perhaps, in the end, despite all doubts, succumb. Early on in the book Peter and Bette, an older, more established gallery owner, pay a visit to the Metropolitan Museum. Peter notes how quickly they march past the art of Rodin whose works are, “part of history, but new artists don’t revere him, no one makes a pilgrimage, you learn about him in school, you pass his sculptures and maquettes on your way to see the Damien Hirst exhibit.” And it is in fact Damien Hirst’s 13 foot pickled shark they visit.

Michael Cunningham knows the Manhattan art world. Photo: David Shankbone

“And there it is, the shark,” Cunningham writes, “suspended in its pale blue, strangely lovely formaldehyde . . . the lethal perfection of its shape . . . its maw, jagged, big as a barrelhead.” Bette chooses this visit to confide to Peter that she has cancer, perhaps more advanced than she cares to admit. She intends to give up her gallery and would like to bequeath to Peter one of her most promising young artists. This confession, however, much as it affects Peter, does not bring their contemplation of the shark to an end. Bette adds: “You let yourself think, oh, it’s a gesture, it’s just a dead shark, every natural history museum is full of them, but then you stand in a gallery with it, and, well . . . ”

This interchange exemplifies themes that Cunningham deftly summons up and balances throughout the book. Peter is alert to how, when it comes to art, setting is far from neutral: it not only frames but comes disturbingly close to calling art into being. Consider, as Bette does, the difference between seeing a shark as a zoological specimen and coming on it just steps away from acclaimed statues by Rodin. Later, Peter muses:

“Although gallery people don’t like to talk about it, even among themselves, this is one of the problems that can arise—the simple fact that in a hushed white room with polished concrete floors, almost anything looks like art.”

For Peter, the unmerited power of these hushed, white rooms can only be fully neutralized by works of such genius that they defy setting and transcend framing. His hunt for art on that order leads Uta, his gallery assistant, to reflect that Peter too easily forgets that “he is unambiguously in the art business.” Silently she upbraids him: “Do you understand, crazy old Peter Harris, do you understand that genius is rare?”

Some of the fantastically wealthy collectors Peter deals with—some connected to and eager to impress even more wealthy Chinese multi-billionaires—like to test-run artworks out on their estates. If a piece does not burnish this room or that expansive garden, if it does not add to a particular outdoor view of Long Island Sound, it is returned. This is the way business is done, and Peter cannot challenge it. But in his heart, he believes that:

“A real work of art should rule the room, and the clients should call up not to complain about the art but to say that the art has helped them understand how the room is all a horrible mistake.”

Peter’s problems arise when he finds in Mizzy, Rebecca’s brother, who has recently, in his vagabond way, turned up on their doorstep, someone with the power to make him conceive of his life so far—including heterosexuality, marriage, and parenting—as a horrible mistake. Cunningham writes that: “Mizzy is becoming . . . [Peter’s] favorite work of art, a performance piece if you will, and Peter wants to collect him . . . to curate Mizzy.”

Whether Peter does choose wayward and alluring Mizzy with his “sorrowful eyes” and “impossible grandeur” over Rebecca, who suspects nothing of what’s begun to happen between her husband and her brother, must to be left to the reader to discover. I will only note that the book concludes with a surprising force that drives away any preciosity or superficiality left over from hushed, white rooms.

Cunningham’s writes about Manhattan’s art world with canny insight and sympathy. By Nightfall discusses the sorts of shows that have since been mounted, at times amid controversy. Cunningham won’t get you to the beach but he’s splendid to be with in the museums and the galleries. What makes the book more than a finely-tuned, insider’s art guide is that that Cunningham anchors his story not only in beauty, as it is constantly reconceived and imagined, but in considerations of love, sex, morality, and mortality. The novel is an impressive accomplishment and a pleasure to read.

By Steve Elman

I didn’t have to re-listen to “Lost in the Stars,” from her Riverside album Abbey is Blue. I can replay that performance any time I wish, just by thinking about it.

Abbey was 28 at the time. She already had plenty of experience as a singer, but her voice still had freshness and clarity. There were only occasional hints of the rough edges that would later compromise her control, the sandpapery qualities that she ultimately learned to use for dramatic effect.

In those Riverside days and in her one session for Candid, all the distinctions of her young voice are in balance—a firm sense of pitch, dramatic and declamatory phrasing, and a bright, hard, hornlike timbre. Those performances vary in their artistic merit—there are some agreeable swingers, some sensitive ballads, and some potent expressions of uncompromising racial pride and anti-racist anger. Sometimes there’s a little too much drama for the material.

But “Lost in the Stars” is a bold risk, brilliantly realized.

The raw material most likely appealed to her and to Max Roach (drummer and co-musical director for the session) because of its anti-apartheid credentials. Lost in the Stars, the show that introduced the song 10 years earlier, transferred the pathos of Alan Paton’s South African novel Cry, the Beloved Country to the musical stage. It was Kurt Weill’s last stage score, and the title tune has one of Weill’s most noble melodies, untrammeled by any burlesque or irony.

Maxwell Anderson’s lyric is hardly Brecht, and it’s not even great poetry. It’s one of those folky recastings of religious myth into down-home imagery, a vehicle for a heroic, black baritone, something out of the Paul Robeson tradition. The singer is a preacher in a moment of personal despair. He’s expressing a noble suffering, a doubt of God’s goodness in his dark night of the soul, but we listeners know that his faith will ultimately see him through.

Abbey Lincoln singing from her album Abbey is Blue on the Ed Sullivan Show.

In Abbey’s version, the despair overwhelms the sense of optimism. Orrin Keepnews’s production and Jack Higgins’s engineering emphasize the angst of her vocal with a boomy echo, a use of production effects more blatant than in any other of her Riverside recordings. The metallic quality of the primitive reverb is ham-handed and obvious, and one would think that it would undercut the power of the performance. Instead, the rawness rips the song away from rural South Africa and puts it on an American street. Everything comes together in four minutes of pure urban anomie.

Abbey takes us quietly and patiently through the first lines, with the Lord God sifting the stars through his fingers like grains of sand, permitting one little star to be lost and then found again, and finally promising that he’ll take “special care so it wouldn’t get lost again.”

But as she sings “sometimes it seems maybe God’s gone away . . . and we’re lost out here in the stars,” she colors the words with gall. There’s no hint of a restoration of faith at some time in the future, no sense that salvation awaits. She takes us out into a vast, desolate darkness and leaves us there. (Here’s an excerpt.

Few singers of her time had the courage to do something so bold. Few singers ever have that courage.

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Jonathan Epstein (Leontes) embraces Josh Aaron McCabe (Camillo) in Shakespeare & Company's The Winter's Tale

The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare. Directed by Kevin G. Coleman. Staged by Shakespeare & Company at the Founders’ Theatre, Lenox, MA, through September 5.

Reviewed by Susan Miron

The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s late plays, often called a romance (along with The Tempest, Pericles, and Cymbeline). It also qualifies as a family tragedy, a comedy of mistaken identities, and, by the end, a Disney-like, family fairy tale.

I had gone to see this play to see the remarkable actor Jonathan Epstein, back at Shakespeare & Company after a 6 year absence. Director Kevin Coleman insisted on Mr. Epstein for the lead role of Leontes, king of Sicilia, and what moments of theatrical brilliance there were in this production largely belong to Epstein, who finds myriad compelling ways to show both jealous fury and bottomless grief on his face.

Like Othello, The Winter’s Tale begins with a scene of marital harmony, quickly followed by psychopathic jealousy, leading inexorably the death of a beloved spouse. All of this happens in the opening act when Leontes sees his very pregnant wife, Queen Hermione (Elizabeth Aspenlieder) in conversation with his boyhood friend, Polixenes, King of Bohemia (played by the scene-stealing Johnny Lee Davenport).

Struck by a fit of paranoia, Leontes imagines the two are having an affair and that Hermiones’s baby is Polixenes’. The latter understandably flees, aided by Camillo, who had been ordered to poison him. Leontes, still insane with jealousy, has his wife imprisoned on grounds of adultery and treason (yes, treason). The baby, a girl, is born and handed to Leontes, who orders what he considers an illegitimate child banished to a faraway kingdom.

A trial ensues, with Leontes the sole judge. Rejecting the Oracle of Apollo, which had declared his wife guiltless, Leontes idiotically declares his wife guilty. After hearing their son has just died, Hermione collapses—what are her other options?—and we hear from her close friend that she has died. Leontes is horror-stricken by what he has done and he promises to spend the rest of his life in mourning. And who can blame him?

Elizabeth Aspenlieder as Hermione is a quiet-spoken beauty, who radiates sincerity and loyalty. Her only fault, as far as I could tell, is a bad, strawy wig. We don’t see Leontes again until the last scene, when the lovely Hermione is, for all the audience knows, a recently chiseled statue, looking just fabulous in a clinging white satin gown (a new wig would have been nice.)

When the scene changes to the seacoast of Bohemia, the minimalist set of the first half of the play has been replaced by a very colorful mural befitting the bucolic harvest scene, where a festival/bacchanalia is underway. This gives Shakespeare & Company a chance to strut their stuff—there’s plenty of dancing and music both recorded (and very well chosen) and plucked by talented players on stage. In his role as an ebullient, larceny-minded peddler, the terrific Jason Asprey steals the show, singing and charming all onstage and in the audience.

Elizabeth Aspenlieder (Hermione) and Johnny Lee Davenport (Polixenes) in Shakespeare & Company's The Winter's Tale

If you showed up after intermission, you could probably not imagine the fury and wrenching sorrow that colored the first half. For those still traumatized by the first half of this play, all this merriment is quite jarring. What ensues are the obligatory cases of mistaken identity in a comedy—16 years have elapsed since the first act when the Hermiones’s and Leontes’ baby girl, now 16, was banished. In the ensuing years, she has fallen in love with Polixenes’ son Florizel and is about to be married when lots of shenanigans ensue and eventually everyone ends up back at the Sicilian Court, where, of course, all the troubles began.

Here our happy endings begin. Leontes gets his daughter back, and Hermione appears as a statue, looking, he notices, quite a bit older than he remembers her. I always like a statue scene—think Don Giovanni, Don Carlo. Here we witness the radiant (statue of) Hermione coming (”back”?) to life to restore her family. The fairy tale continues.

It’s a bit much, unless you read Mr. Coleman’s explanation in the Berkshire Eagle. Shakespeare’s romances, Mr. Coleman notes, have to do with family ties and forgiveness and redemption and have some sort of fantastic magical scene. “They’re tragedies gone right,” he asserts.

I guess I like a tragedy gone wrong. And I like it undiluted. Mix it with an hour of comedy and I get disoriented. But if you like saccharine endings after horrible beginnings, this might be the play for you, forever after.

Marianna Bassham (Desdemona), Seth Gilliam (Othello) in the CSC production of Othello. © Photo by Andrew Brilliant/Brilliantpictures Inc

Othello by William Shakespeare. Directed by Steven Maler. Staged by the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company at the Boston Common, through August 15.

Reviewed by Bill Marx

Iago a tragic figure? W. H. Auden’s vision of Othello invites that kind of arch speculation, fed by the poet’s claim that Shakespeare began the play by focusing on Othello’s lethal case of jealousy but eventually became more “interested in why people like evil, not for their own advantage but for its own sake. The effect of this shift in interest is that Othello becomes a secondary character and Iago dominates the whole play, which finally raises difficult problems for Shakespeare.”

Dilemmas not so much for the Bard as for productions of Othello, which attempt to match the fascinatingly nihilistic drive (the gleeful emptiness?) of Iago with the fated sexual attraction of Desdemona and the Moor. A successful production has to generate plenty of passion, erotic as well as diabolic. Eros wrestling with Thanatos.

Thus the devilish irony of the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company (CSC) production of Othello on the Boston Common. The night I saw the show the weather was balmy and cool, a slice of sheer comfort after the heat wave of a day, the audience’s sweat and cares evaporating away while listening to the poetry of the Bard echo off the walls of the towering buildings on Tremont Street. It was a pleasant experience, and free exposure to Shakespeare is a mitzvah.

But the CSC staging, serviceable but stolid, could have badly used some of the overwhelming heat of the day. In this Othello Iago goes through his malignant motions as if they were business-as-usual—the emotional temperature of the staging remains disappointingly mild throughout, even with Othello first drowning poor Desdemona and then throttling her to death via a sleeper hold. The only extreme was the shrill volume of the sound system (perhaps because some of the actors shout into their mics?) that left your (or at least my) ears ringing. In the case of the decibel level, more restraint would have been valuable.

Even if you don’t agree with Auden that Iago is at the center of Othello, the vacuum-souled figure is hauntingly contemporary: he should be strangely compelling, crazily enigmatic. Auden thinks that Iago would best be played as “plain and inconspicuous, absolutely ordinary, someone who would be chosen as a Secret Service man . . . yet he must dominate the play by his will.” A difficult paradox to pull off. Why would we go to the theater to see Iago as the guy-next-door?

I must admit that I like my Iagos to connive with subtle style, to be connoisseurs of self-satisfaction. Memorable Iagos for me range from Ian McKellan’s ramrod-repressed military marionette and Christopher Plummer’s wily cogitator-in-chief to David Patrick Kelly’s sex fiend, addicted to sniffing Desdemona’s panties. If nothing else, a performer has to pull us into the villain’s plots—inviting our complicity or at least our admiration as he pulls off his schemes with deadly deftness. I have seen impressive stagings of Othello with problematic Moors, but none without a charismatic Iago.

Alas, James Waterston (pictured at left) provides an Iago who fits Auden’s demand for “plain and inconspicuous” all too well. The actor goes about his character’s nasty business with a loud but dutiful nonchalance, neither monstrous nor momentous. Waterston’s voice, reedy at times, lends some of the lines a comic touch, a kvetchy punch of complaint that undercuts the horror. The audience giggles at lines that should exude some cold fear, a sense of the inhumanly sinister. Director Steven Maler appears to be aware of the lack of the threat in Waterston’s straightforward performance—he brings in some standard uggah-buggah music at times to help make the actor sound diabolical. It doesn’t help much.

Overall, Maler’s staging comes off as distanced to a fault, smoothly moving the action along but kindling few genuinely dramatic sparks. There is a forward march rhythm to the scenes that emphasize the fuzzy mechanics of the plot. For example, the brilliant episodes in which Iago methodically teases and taunts Othello into a jealous frenzy invite a relaxed caricature of caring intimacy—Iago shamelessly moves into (violates?) Othello’s space, his body flitting around around his prey, his eyes studying every reaction for a cue for what damaging innuendo to say next. Here Iago stands well away from Seth Gilliam’s Othello, an aloof puppet master who figures that pulling the strings of Shakespeare’s language is enough to snare his victim.

As Othello, Gilliam brings welcome vocal variety to his delivery, and he explodes into insane rages with convincing fervor, but there’s simply not enough poetic shock in his fall from command or electricity in his romantic fission with Desdemona, played by Marianna Bassham. Like Cordelia, Desdemona is an innocent soul who believes that goodness serves as its own defense in a wicked world—a cardinal sin in Shakespeare. Bassham comes off as knowing (or at least suspecting), a woman wise to the ways of the world. Adrianne Krstansky’s solid Emilia is not pleading about the “wayward” ways of men to clueless ears.

Dan Roach’s Cassio provides a blunt portrait of blind loyalty, while the supporting performers, Fred Sullivan Jr.and Grayson Powell among them, sometimes become strident, perhaps to play up the racist underpinnings of the society, the motive for Othello’s need to marry Desdemona as a means to “fit in.”

Dutiful rather than inventive (except for the waterlogged dispatch of Desdemona), the CSC production of Othello delivers a faint touch of evil.

Breaking Bread: Recipes and Stories from Immigrant Kitchens by Lynn Christy Anderson. University of California Press, 304 pages, $24.95.

By Sally Levitt Steinberg

How do you get clammed up people talking? Ask them what they fix for dinner. That’s what Lynne Christy Anderson did, and before you could say spanakopita, her shy ESL students were spilling out stories of their foods from Cape Verde or Sudan or Russia, cooked in the kitchens of Boston. And bringing in their dishes. In Lynne’s book, Breaking Bread, a Persian woman says, “I think food is a great icebreaker.”

Lynne says, “I started teaching ESL, looking out to the sea of faces from El Salvador and China, and thinking they seem frightened to be here and afraid of me. We needed a common language and that turned out to be food. Before I knew it they were telling me where to get the ingredients.” From this she wrote Breaking Bread, a book of Me and You and Everyone We Know and their foods, from 25 cultures. She has burrowed into the issue of food as signifier, identifier, communicator, unifier. “Food is our common language.”

I am sitting on Lynne’s back porch on a hot July day, overlooking a tumbling garden of flowers and greenery, slightly helter skelter, things growing as nature intended.

Hanging over the porch is a set of reddish cutlery carved from wood and oversized, as if from Alice in Wonderland, with the mushroom that made you grow taller or shorter. Lynne tells me her husband the hydrogeologist is a woodworker by moonlight, and he carved it for her as a birthday present. “He is an environmental scientist. He does a lot of computer programming. He understands ground water systems. His passion is woodworking”—shop class as soulcraft. The house has a lived-in look, part ramshackle, part historic and venerable. It’s an 1840 house, and a work in progress. Inside are beautiful old wooden floors and doors with carved reliefs. Lynne tells me that her husband is restoring it on Fridays.

The mock fork and spoon align with the book, where the world of food, in all its multicultural splendor, is writ large and imbued with dignity, but retains its good humor. They comment on and celebrate the book and Lynne’s passion with a smile, an exclamation point in wood, tangible, visual evidence, a metaphoric blurb. Rustic, rough hewn natural materials are made into utensils that are what they are, but with a gentle wink. They are humorous and appealing in the way of things that are out of proportion to their real size. They are made of that basic material, wood, the material of the table.

Like food, they are of a growing thing, the tree, common to all cultures, whether fir or jacaranda. The tree provides and symbolizes, it figures in folk tales and myths the world over. Like food, it has tales to tell and substances to give, resins and wood, sap and bark. And like the foods of the book, the tongue-in-cheek place setting is basic and at the same time sophisticated, simple material artfully wrought and resonant with associations and meaning.

Hanging over author Lynn Christy Anderson's porch is a set of reddish cutlery carved from wood and oversized, as if from Alice in Wonderland, with the mushroom that made you grow taller or shorter.

Above all the wooden place setting draws attention to the world of food. In this yard, it announces Lynne’s involvement in the world of foods of everywhere in Boston, foods of people who have landed here at the call of opportunity and necessity and family and freedom, in flight from poverty and violence in some cases, and in pursuit of a better chance for their children even if it means sacrifice for themselves and giving up a life that offered more in the way of succor and community. What is Boston made of? Boston is now made of the world—a stewpot beyond Brahmins and Irish and Italians. Ethiopians mingle with Moroccans and Costa Ricans and Chinese.

Through this looking glass, Boston is also made of foods of the world and the customs surrounding them. Cape Verdean Katxupa, pork with corn and beans, and Ghanaian Nkatekwan and Fufu (plantain flour dumplings) and Ethiopian Yebeg Wot, lamb stew for Easter. We get a glimpse of Italy, in the story of an old house by the sea that affords a cool spot in summer for lunch, old-style, not high fashion Italian glitz. These tales that are true stories are from tropics and woodlands, from the fabled minarets and souks of Isfahan, from the high, forested ground of Latvia near the Baltic with mushrooms growing in the brush. This is the world, the world of everywhere on earth.

And from this everywhere emerge foods that behave like Proust’s madeleine, calling up moments from the past in places long ago, or more recent, but certainly far away. The first is from Lynne herself, from her grandmother. “My grandmother would roll pastry dough for lemon meringue pie. It’s sort of a forgotten dessert, no one talks about it anymore, but I love it.” A recognizable American food we take for granted, but that could be seen as “typical,” indigenous.

Lynne conjures up her childhood, the shining peaks of meringue, her grandmother mulling over whether there was enough lemon, or whether the crust turned out right, and choosing a crystal plate for Lynne with a slightly larger piece. Lynne says that when she worked as a chef, “a piece of the past is what we really wanted to eat.” She says that Barry from Ireland is always in quest of the “perfect potato, he’s very serious, he wants to find that flavor from home.”

Beatriz makes Guatemalan tortillas with Juan Antonio, left, and Alejandro. Photo: Robin Radin

Then we are plunged into another world, a hunt for grape leaves in Arnold Arboretum, with a Lebanese mother and child, and a grandmother poking the underbrush with her cane, and speculation about whether a goat has just passed by. We hear the refrain repeated by many from many cultures, about time—people here just don’t have time to prepare dishes like stuffed grape leaves, to prepare them the right way or the traditional way.

In this book about the food of immigrants you have the sense that the way of food is the way of nature and of human culture as it grew naturally. Foraging with her family for mushrooms on Cape Cod, a Russian woman says, “When you forage, it’s a contemplative state of mind. You’re outside with nature.” She talks about getting her kids to pay attention to the ground and its topography, and to the play of light. She says it’s not the result but the process of foraging that is the reward. “You can think about life and talk to each other.”

We watch Zady, a human force of nature, a strong man from Ivory Coast, an “iron chef” cooking at home, saying that in his country cooking is like playing drums. “You just do it. You can’t learn it…If you tell them you’re going to school to become a chef, they will laugh.” He is full of village wisdom, saying that the woman who cooks will attract men. “Your man will always stay where the good meal is.”

Genevieve waits for the groundnut stew, a specialty from Ghana, to simmer. Photo: Robin Radin

But there is another side to him. The women do the cooking in his home country. They would not believe that he cooks, especially for his girlfriend. Zady defies the tradition of women’s hegemony in the kitchen, presiding over a realm ruled by matriarchy where he comes from. He expounds on the freedom he has here–to cook, and not to use his education in his work as a contractor. Wait…what? You heard right. According to custom in his country, he would have had to take a fancier job, perhaps drive a Mercedes, otherwise it would be considered a waste of education. He feels lucky to be able to put his “diploma in the drawer” and go into the street in dirty clothes, to have the privilege of reverse mobility so that he can survive and “help the country.” Shop class as soulcraft again, in the life of a contractor from Ivory Coast.

Lynne, a New England local, has a folksy natural way, not pretentious or self-consciously literary. The fork and spoon go with this style. She is spontaneous, warm, a storyteller. She has a degree in Applied Linguistics. “I knew I wanted to teach ESL. It’s a well kept secret they are the most rewarding. They are thankful to be here.” She has also cooked at high end Rialto. “I loved working with the amazing ingredients and learning culinary techniques. Eventually, I concluded that I didn’t want to spend my time cooking for people I couldn’t sit down at the table with. It started to bother me that some of the dishwashers could never afford to eat there. I became friendly with one of the prep cooks, a woman from El Salvador. We started talking about Salvadoran recipes, and the simplicity in preparation interested me at a time when so much effort and time was spent on dishes at the restaurant.”

Then, without recipes to work with, since most of these cultures don’t use them, she embarked on writing a cookbook. In these cultures, people cook by smell. There is no reverence for the authority of print—if you can read it you can do it is not their way. Lynne watched and reconstructed the dishes that come from centuries of tradition in places where kids stand next to their mothers and watch and smell. Maybe we’d all be better off if we stopped to smell the aromas from the kitchen. It’s about sensory immediacy–the senses are in full use and trusted.

If you want to know what’s for dinner in the Middle East or Africa, look no further than Breaking Bread. Here a Persian dish of eggplant with saffron and yogurt, there a Ghanaian soup of chicken and ground nuts scooped up with a dumpling called fufu, there a Lebanese stuffed grape leaf from Arnold Arboretum. Kedjenou—have you heard of it? Now you can cook this chicken and okra dish from Ivory Coast. Each chapter views a culture through one person or family. Lynne sets the scene in a written sketch in a kitchen or the woods or a market. Then an oral history of food and culture and personal experience follows in the voice of the person profiled. Recipes appear at the end of the chapters.

Fausta and her mother adjust the seasoning for fettuccini. Photo: Robin Radin

Lynne says, “It’s not just my book, it’s their book. It’s more than a cookbook. The stories are a big part of it. They are proud of it. They say they came here with nothing and now there’s a book. ‘People are interested in my story, and they are cooking my food.’” Food was “a way to connect with students. They love to talk about their food.”

In the book you read about local traditions, the foods that people miss not just because of taste but because of the communal place they hold and the rituals surrounding them, their links to the past. The Ethiopian woman talks about the “coffee ceremony.” She says, “No matter what, coffee is the one thing that I will always keep.” In Ethiopia it takes place “outside in the grass with incense. They serve it with popped millet, which is kind of like popcorn.” Sehin says that “back home, people can get together to have coffee.” Here when she has a guest she serves it, but she laments the lack of time (the leitmotif again).

Food is a conduit to human contact. The Filipino woman says, “It’s more than just the food; it’s the connection.” One thread running through the book is that here neighbors don’t drop in for a meal unless it’s arranged. In Italy, there’s a song, Aggiungi un posto a tavola, add a place at the table, for the guest. Fausta says, “Italian women always expect that someone will come,” and she bemoans the fact that Americans don’t. Now she invites people. “There is power in eating together, in sharing,” Dmitra, the Lebanese woman, says.

A Moroccan woman talks about seeing her father kill a sheep in Morocco to celebrate a holiday, and grilling it on the fire. Trying it here with an electric grill, she says—“It’s electric! It’s not so delicious….” She says that even when she cooks Moroccan food here, she can’t enjoy it because they are alone, without family around.

Najia from Pakistan slices onions for biriyani rice. Photo: Robin Radin

Food is one of the few things carried when cultural groups migrate, along with music. Languages give way, with dress and other customs, but food and music, immediate sensory phenomena, survive in new terrain. We leave the homeland, but taste and sound accompany us to new places. Lynne says, “For people who have left so much behind, food is one thing they can hold on to, to give their kids a taste of home. They are immigrants. They are proud of their food. Food is about identity, a place to preserve and show off their culture.”

People from everywhere have sought freedom in the New World, but with loss of community goes a shakiness of identity—most of the people in the book have questions about who they are, with a foot in each world. The Filipino woman says, “And now, I think I’m in between two cultures.” We hear Italian Fausta say that here she is “missing something, like I’m not a whole person.” Old and new cultures tug against each other. There are discontinuities, expressed at the dining table. We listen to a Tre-speaking mother from Ghana, with one child who loves McDonald’s and another who prefers African kenke, a cornmeal cake.

Food, not just for eating, is a cultural marker, a carrier of memory and human ties, and of history. It is a purveyor of meaning. It links us to the past and to each other. Fausta’s cotechino, Italian sausage, has lentils in it. The saying is that the more lentils you eat the more money you will have. Folk wisdom is given its due here, not dismissed as superstition.

“People use food in different ways. Some want their kids to know about cooking. The Guatemalan used her food as a legacy. Why not teach them to cook? She cooks every day with the kids, to bring Guatemala into her house. Johanne from Haiti–her thing was about escape. She watched them set her friends on fire, and she wanted to go back and think about the food of her childhood. She saw food as a way for people to get to know Haitian culture. People use food to remember or to forget. Liz from Brazil uses food as a gift. ‘When you bring food to people you bring a smile to their face and you have the world in your hand.’ For her it’s a gesture of love.”

All of which goes to show that there’s more to food than just food. “I am a big fan of MFK Fisher. She always talks about how food gestures beyond the table.” The book is about what food means in life, as connection, as a spark for memory, as something of value to spend time on, as a way of giving to others. A Lebanese mother says, “That’s how we communicate back home—with food.” It’s not just a dish or a meal, it’s a primal, elemental human experience.

Lynne says, Food is Love. The book shows where the heart lies, and how the dignity of human endeavor finds natural and passionate expression at stove and table, with foods of the homeland, of the family group, binding family with flavors of home, of Russian mushroom patch or Vietnamese banana grove. Zady says, “Whatever my mother made, it was always the best thing of the day.” The Lebanese woman says of her mother, “She cooked from the heart.” There is no stronger adhesive in human life.

Herein lies the tale. Food is us. We are the world.

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Sally Levitt Steinberg is a writer, journalist, and oral/personal historian. She has written several books, including The Donut Book, the world’s definitive book of everything-you-need-to-know about donuts. It was chosen twice as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection; it has been featured in all the media, including NPR, the Martha Stewart radio shows, and the film Donut Crazy for the Travel Channel, and its materials form The National Donut Collection at the Smithsonian Museum.

She has written a biography, The Book of Joy, as well as several personal histories and a book on interior design. Her essay, “Coffin Couture,” was cited as the best piece in the recent anthology of personal history, My Words Are Gonna Linger. She has written articles for many publications, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The New Yorker. She lives in Boston.

Order The Donut Book through the link below to Amazon and The Arts Fuse receives a (small) percentage of the sale.

Genevieve waits for the groundnut stew, a specialty from Ghana, to simmer.

Fausta and her mother adjust the seasoning for fettuccini.

Najia from Pakistan slices onions for biriyani rice.

At Papercut -- A Zine on Glass

By Dylan Rose

I’m new at this reporting bit and, in an early conversation with my editor about the particular goals and restrictions of the genre, I blundered: I happened to refer to Arts Fuse as a “ zine.” I was at this time made to understand that the term “zine”—a small, self-published magazine about a particular subject—is now somewhat passe. “A zine,?” he asked, “Who’s making zines anymore?”

Ordinarily I would have simply apologized for the blunder—to peeve an editor is, as I understand it, a journalistic high crime—but I could not in this case have made the apology sincerely. Although I believe his question was intended to be rhetorical and instructional, it does have a definite answer. The answer is that the zine is in fact still a vital form and, as I have been recently made to understand, it shares a great deal in common with projects like The Arts Fuse.

The Zine

Self-publishing is a practice that extends as far back as the original printing press, but true modern zines are generally held to have first emerged in the middle of the last century, when the increasing success of magazines like Popular Mechanics created a demand for DIY and kit-based home-improvement projects for interested amateurs. The development of the zine as a distinct publishing form quickly accelerated, growing to encompass a wider range of artistic, religious, and technical topics.

Adopted first by the hippies of the middle ‘60s and later by the punk and grunge music cultures of the 70s, 80s and early 90s, the zines’ comparatively low publishing cost and relative ease of distribution supported the counter-cultural and frequently anti-consumerist creeds of these groups. DIY instructions for sewing one’s own clothing, tips and techniques for recording and marketing one’s music, and spiritual advice for interested seekers could in this form be quickly and easily distributed without recourse to commercial publishing houses. Zines also became a tool for exposing interested communities to one’s creative work: many modern, privately printed literary magazines still operate on the production and distribution template set down by earlier literary zines.

Although many individuals continue to edit and publish zines, like television and the podcast quickly eclipsed radio, so too has the internet and the blog brought the axe to many zine enterprises. The simple fact of the matter is that a zine, no matter how cheap, does cost some money to produce.

Even if one hires professionals to design and maintain a personal blog, this expense—even over time—in no way compares with that of the necessary costs for sending out requests for content, paying for editing or layout software, and printing and binding one’s zine. Many zine creators see the expense of their production as a sign of their love and dedication to their fields or as a form of opposition to oppressive consumer economics, but the intersection of the large required time-commitment and their low (read: zero) rate of return means that only the most popular zines could hope to break even.

Papercut

That said, the Papercut Zine Library (once a Harvard institution, now relocated to Somerville, MA) is proof that zine creators will find a way to keep their tradition alive. Occupying a single crowded room on the third floor of an renovated art-space (no elevator, either), Papercut’s mission is to collect, catalog, and make available to the public the widest possible collection of contemporary zines.

Operating largely through donations of both cash and material, Papercut is still a lively enterprise. New material is brought in regularly enough that the old and decaying is soon relegated to the library’s archives. In spite of the occasional purges, the library’s shelves are nearly always stuffed to capacity; zines spill out of their place and are reshelved crazily, quickly lost or forgotten. This gives the place the same kind of home-built, quirky character that the zines themselves possess.

Zines for all ages

Although this vibe is mostly charming, it can’t be denied that some of the zines that end up here embody this aesthetic a little too thoroughly. After grabbing a random handful from the shelves, I soon discover the great flaw and weakness of the zine “production by photocopy” method: a print item, too often reproduced, soon becomes illegible. The images on the covers of these misfires are muddles of black ink; whatever their titles were once intended to convey has been lost to history.

Often enough these works become the victims of other distortions: poor grammar and spelling, editorial laxity, or an apparent taste for Dada renders others frankly unintelligible. In pulling one from the shelves, I discover that cost-saving measures in binding and paper selection remain, at the last, only corners cut: poorly inserted staples come loose, pages flutter, and I am left holding the emptied and not fixable shell of someone’s creative labors.

This was certainly not the case for most of what I saw at Papercut, however. Some of the zines I found there were crafted lovingly, even beautifully. One zine I was directed to had been printed directly onto glass by some obscure photographic technique. Another came in a small, intricate, origami-like package with a mini-cd of music and a folio of photographic prints. Others were bound with ribbon or lace on paper that was smooth and cool and shone in your hand like gold-leaf.

Most marvelous of all was the tiny, aluminum pill tin I discovered on one of the shelves, which contained a tiny scroll of paper on which a list of 30 or 40 items that “could fit into this tin.” The zine here also lived up to its reputation as catering to the tiniest of niche interests: pamphlets on cybernetic theory jockeyed for space on the shelves next to raw-food, diet instruction manuals and tracts on magical theory and practice. I laughed aloud at the small, absurdist comic strips and one-liners, which were crammed into the margins of others.

Binding it Together

Reeling from the shock of discovering so many artful and interesting publications stuffed into so little space, I turned to face a newly chimeric assignment: by what conceivable standard could all of the paper and glass and lace and tin in this room be bound together by a single name? Certainly it was not a single theme or subject of content. And it is true that not just anything qualifies as a zine: a small percentage of the total material that ends up at Papercut every month is turned away or filed as “miscellaneous.” So where is the line? What separates the zine from the non-zine, the zine from (drum-roll please) a blog like The Arts-Fuse? Is there something that these publishing forms share, and can they be placed in fruitful dialogue?

I thought I might get a toe-hold on these problems by talking with a friend of mine, Ms. Mary Lechner of Olympia, Washington, whose own zine,This is Madness, This is Sense, has just released its second issue. She suggested that the appeal of both blogs and zines is that they “both give people the freedom to create and express, without the limitations of more formal publishing frameworks.” This was a pretty common thread in most of what I read and talked about with people at Papercut: self-publishing is basically hassle-free. Where the two publishing forms divide, ultimately, is in the choice of medium.

Zine as a small, intricate, origami-like package with a mini-cd of music and a folio of photographic prints.

Ms. Lechner expressed a preference for the zine over the blog “because I really believe there’s something powerful about holding the work in your own hands—it creates a more visceral, holistic experience.” There really is something special to be said for the experience of holding these works in your hands. Reaching into a random stack of zines feels a little bit like putting one’s hand into a candy jar: the sight, the feel, and anticipated taste of what is therein contained produces a sensually rich experience.

That said, the blog is often more cost effective and has a broader potential range and depth of coverage. Blog creators also have a much more powerful set of tools at their disposal for dispersing their work: social-networking has enabled instant cross-referencing of information with a nearly limitless “blogosphere.” While Papercut relies on heavily on word-of-mouth and an active arts presence within the community—they host regular acoustic shows and art-openings—it seems hard to argue with the fact that content that is posted directly to a person’s blog can be shared in similar communities around the globe. If I wish to browse Papercut’s library, I have to trek out to Somerville; one need travel only as far as one’s laptop to see what has been posted to The Arts Fuse today.

It would be cheesy to conclude by suggesting that these differences are ultimately superficial, and that both forms of publishing are “special and unique in their own way.” I’ll therefore side-step the cliche and say only that differences between what a blog like The Arts Fuse does and what the creators of zines do really are two entirely separate things. The one raises a standard in favor of ease of distribution and technological relevance; the other a battle-cry for “process over results!” What these two enterprises do share, something which delights me in both cases, is that they both play marvelously with the scale of our attention.

To spend an afternoon at Papercut is to stumble upon endless, miniature marvels of art; it is a feast for the senses that, unlike many other such feasts, requires our careful and minute attention. The same could be said of what The Arts Fuse does. “Support local authors!”, it exclaims, “Put down your remote-control and spend an evening at a local theater!” These are the facets of modern, urban life, which, if we are not carefully and minutely attentive of them, are easily lost to louder and flashier diversions.

After the Revolution by Amy Herzog. Directed by Carolyn Cantor. Staged by the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Williamstown, MA, July 21 through August 1 (closed).

Katherine Powell (Emma) and David Margulies (Morty) raise their glasses in After the Revolution at the WTF. Photo: T. Charles Erickson

Long before the invention of psychotherapy, long before writer William Faulkner wrote “The past is never dead. It is not even past,” the Greeks mined family history for its dramatic possibilities. The consequences of an event or choice made by one generation that steers the course of lives long after is a staple of dramatic literature, all the more potent when the event is politically or personally traumatic.

Amy Herzog’s intelligent, incisive, and multi-layered After the Revolution, which had its world premiere at The Williamstown Theatre Festival last month, left me thinking not only about the extraordinary family of contemporary characters she brings to life but about how many groups and generations have confronted a history of massive trauma.

In many cases a period of self-imposed silence—if not an outright secretiveness—follows victimization, as in many survivor families from the Armenian and Cambodian genocides and the Holocaust. Sometimes, political repression enforces this silence, as for the families of dissidents in the parts of Europe formerly controlled by the Soviets.

In the United States, there is a large sub-culture of families of American Communists black-listed during the McCarthy years. I’ve long wondered when some Red Diaper baby or a member of the third-generation will produce a significant work about this. Now Amy Herzog has.

Her two-act family drama is set in 1999. Bill Clinton is still President as Emma, a grand-daughter of the beloved and black-listed Joe Joseph, graduates from law school and arrives at her parents’ home to celebrate the occasion with her family. Grandpa Joe is dead, but grandmother Vera Joseph is a sometimes befuddled, still feisty, no-nonsense matriarch with thick gray hair, clunky Birkenstocks, and a commanding presence. She refuses to budge from her Marxist principles or give in to the indignity of wearing a hearing aid. She also keeps abreast of her grand-daughter’s (Latino) boyfriends and complains, “I never understood your prejudice against Jewish men.”

Emma’s father, Ben Joseph, is a familiar figure: an idealistic, overworked high school teacher, passionate about educating his “under-privileged” students and driven by left-wing politics. His ideology imbues his being and spills over into his relationships with his two daughters, whom he was left to raise alone after his first wife left him.

Emma has responded by identifying with her father and internalizing his beliefs; her sister Jess has rebelled and spent her adolescent and young adult life in and out of rehab. Ben’s second wife, Mel, provides a cool, competent, Midwestern balance to the family, but at a crucial moment confides in Emma her own struggles as an outsider in a left-wing family. Like Ben’s college-professor brother Leo and his sports-loving kids, she tries to keep her life separate from ideology.

There is also Miguel, Emma’s boyfriend and law school classmate, a refreshingly smart and irreverent son of Latin American immigrants and Morty, an old friend of Emma’s grandparents, who identifies himself as a former “fellow traveler” and holds a torch for Grandma Vera.

Mare Winningham (Mel) comforts Peter Friedman (Ben) in After the Revolution. Photo: Sam Hough

Emma and Miguel work together (much to Vera and Ben’s satisfaction) on the Joseph Fund, a foundation Emma has established in memory of her grandfather that is currently engaged in the long fight to appeal a death sentence for Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mumia is the real-life former Philadelphia radio personality and activist convicted of murder, now on death row. Things would be perfect on Emma’s graduation day, aside from the news that a new book has come out based on newly-opened, Soviet-era archives that irrefutably names Grandpa Joe as a Russian spy.

The brothers Ben and Leo at first keep the news to themselves, but soon are compelled to share it with an angry and confused Emma, who wonders how it will impact both the meaning and the financial underpinnings of her foundation. The ripple effect broadens out to include Morty, Miguel, her parents, uncle, sister, and grandmother.

Emma refuses to speak to her father, whom she views as having kept a crucial secret from her; Miguel wants her to drop the family psychodrama and focus on Mumia; sister Jess is relieved that, for a change, the spotlight is off her; Grandma asks “Which side are you on?” The kindly, world-weary Morty concludes: “You’re disappointed in your family but that’s not an uncommon predicament.”

Playwright Amy Herzog: An insider familiar with the complications generated by a progressive American family.

This is clearly a play written by an insider, familiar with the lingo, dynamics, and endless complications of politics in a progressive, American family. Playwright Herzog, a graduate of Yale as well as the Yale School of Drama, has said, “My extended family is largely Marxist,” and “One of the things that spurred me directly to write the play was Morton Sobell’s confession in 2008 that he, along with Julius Rosenberg, had spied.”

She has bolstered her personal memories with extensive research as a Williamstown Theatre Fellow: the breadth and depth of her reading has paid off in spades.

The production and cast of After the Revolution have been well-reviewed elsewhere, and the play ended its too-brief Wiliamstown run last weekend. Still, while it is too late to see this play in the Berkshires, here’s a valuable heads-up for the fall in New York, where the play will be presented at Playwrights Horizons. Herzog is an emerging dramatist of unusual gifts; this is a play that will last.

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Helen Epstein has written a biography of Joe Papp. Her translation of Heda Kovaly’s memoir of Stalinism, Under A Cruel Star, is also available on amazon.com. Order though the link below and The Arts Fuse receives a small percentage of the sale.

In my other life, as editor of World Books for The World, BBC/PRI’s national radio program dedicated to international news, I write and edit book reviews as well commentaries and interviews. I also host a monthly podcast dedicated to global literature, which is available through ITunes.

The most recent pieces posted on World Books include Helen Epstein’s pointed review of Jessica Stern’s Denial: A Memoir of Terror, a first-hand, detailed account by a Harvard expert on international terrorism of her rape by a stranger when she was 15 years old.

Other reviews include an evaluation of a new translation of the prophetic prose pieces of the late 18th-century, Teutonic bad boy Heinrich von Kleist. Harvey Blume (Mr. Short Fuse) reviews a collection of novellas, The King of Trees, by the Chinese writer Ah Cheng, the best of the trio a brilliant examination of chess. Roberta Silman is underwhelmed by the Dutch novel The Storm, Margriet de Moor’s yarn based on a real life, natural catastrophe, a 1953 winter hurricane that killed nearly 2,000 people.

Nigerian writer Sefi Atta

My latest podcast features a conversation with Sefi Atta, an impressive Nigerian writer whose novel Everything Good Will Come won the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature. Her recently published collection of short stories, News From Home, garnered the 2009 NOMA Award for Publishing. Both are well worth reading; her next novel, Swallow, will be out in September.

Finally, Tommy Wallach dissects two books that attempt to turn examinations of cruelty into an art. One of the short volumes is the controversial French bestseller Beside the Sea, the story of a mother who kills her young children.

At Wordfest: Poet and Translator Peter Filkins

By Roberta Silman

Although all the statistical material about the demography of Wordfest has yet to be compiled, the word is out that this newest event at The Mount was an amazing success. About 500 people attended events at the grounds of The Mount and nearby at Seven Hills (the fundraising dinner) over the weekend of July 23–25; they were of all ages, though probably “about 10 years younger than our usual population of visitors here at The Mount,” said Susan Wissler, the director. “And there were about 60% women and 40% men, which is also a bit different from our usual population,” added Audrey Manring, a freelance writer and publicist who was brought in to help launch this new event in the Berkshires.

What was absolutely wonderful was the way the writers themselves “stayed on after their individual gigs—on panels, giving interviews, signing books—exchanging ideas with each other as well as the guests,” according to both women. Such generosity of spirit creates an atmosphere that is hard to convey in any report, but that was palpable and encouraging to those who came not only to meet these fine writers but to learn from them. It is also very hard to predict. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t. But the stars were in their right places in Lenox, MA last weekend. And the biggest surprise was the large audience on the Terrace for the poetry readings, mostly by Berkshire poets of varying ages.

All of the writers have called or emailed to report their pleasure, and “they all seemed to feel honored that they were here for this first Wordfest,” Susan said with delight. Although I could not attend because of pressing family obligations that weekend, I know I will clear my calendar for the next Wordfest, which is already being scheduled for September 2011. And when I stopped in to see the two women last week, I had the feeling that Edith Wharton herself was looking down, saying to herself: This is what I dreamed when I created this beautiful estate (which looks absolutely gorgeous, by the way, especially Edith’s garden), and this is exactly how the marvelous legacy of American writing should be disseminated to interested readers and a new generation of writers.

Bravo to all those who participated—you can look them up on The Mount’s website—bravo to the organizers, and a special bravo to those private contributors and businesses who made this unique event possible.

Roberta Silman is the author of Blood Relations, Boundaries, The Dream Dredger, and Beginning The World Again, as well as the children’s book, Somebody Else’s Child. She can be reached at rsilman@verizon.net.

The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Steven Canny and John Nicholson. Directed by Thomas Derrah. Presented by Central Square Theater, at Central Square Theater, Cambridge, MA, through August 22.

Trent Mills (Sir Henry Baskerville), Remo Airaldi (Sherlock Holmes), and Bill Mootos (Dr. Watson) are on the case in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Photo: Elizabeth Stewart

Reviewed By Alyssa Machado

Steven Canny and John Nicholson’s spoof of Hound of the Baskervilles, the classic Sherlock Holmes novel by Arthur Conan Doyle, distills the characters and plot to their most basic humorous qualities, exaggerates those qualities tenfold, and tasks three actors to tackle 16 roles at breakneck speed to tell the tale of the murderous hellhound of the great Grimpen Mire. The methods are familiar comedy and farce standards (crossdressing, physical gags, gay innuendo), but the execution, timing, and silly self-awareness of Central Square Theater’s production make the Devonshire moor an amusing place to visit for the evening . . . if you dare.

Canny and Nicholson pack this version with physical humor and visual gags while retaining the basic storyline of the complex original version. The action proceeds so pell-mell that those who aren’t familiar with the tale might find the plot confusing at times, but events serve mostly as opportunities for antics anyway. Those antics are ably and energetically executed by the three-person cast, Remo Airaldi (Sherlock Holmes), Bill Mootos (Dr. Watson), and Trent Mills (Sir Henry Baskerville).

Dr. Watson features more prominently in the story than Sherlock Holmes. As a result, Bill Mootos, an endearing, earnest, and eager puppy of a Watson, plays the least amount of other characters and anchors the action. Much as as Watson serves as Holmes’s “torch,” inspiring his brilliant deductions, Mootos partners the other two actors adeptly, inspiring hilarity as their comic foil as well as with his own well-timed, exaggerated facial expressions.

Remo Airaldi, a member of the American Repertory Theatre’s Resident Acting Company, handles quick costume changes with ease, but occasionally he doesn’t enunciate. His Sherlock Holmes, although appropriately calm and deadpan, leaves less of an impression than the more exaggerated minor characters he plays, especially Miss Stapleton, the Peruvian woman who falls for Baskerville. In a dress and braided pigtails, Airaldi remains straight-faced and fully committed to everything from babbling gibberish language to a hilarious romantic tango dream sequence, wisely allowing the full effect of the visual incongruity to undulate for itself.

The third member of the trio, Trent Mills, portrays Baskerville and most of the incidental characters. Few differences exist between his minor characters except for costumes and accents, but he isn’t afraid to be silly, which makes him fun to watch. His charming and frequently oblivious, “gee whiz,” Yankee-boy version of Henry matches well with Mootos’s similarly unaware Watson.

The silly self-awareness of the show adds to its appeal, and it includes the audience in the joke by delighting in its deliberately low-tech staging. During scenes, actors frequently break the fourth wall to jest about fake-looking props (plastic food glued to a plate) or their set changing responsibilities (“as soon as I’ve taken down the bed”).

The designers also embrace the self-aware, light-hearted mood while keeping everything functional. Carlos Aguilar, the scenic designer, created an adaptable set with only a few set pieces, two-dimensional rocks and a moveable, framed (with a mini proscenium arch), room-sized platform with rotating, vertical scenic panels on each side. These pieces make transitions as easily and quickly as the actors do and transform into everything from the spooky moor to Baskerville’s estate.

Aguilar facilitates the fast pace of the show by enabling the actors to make changes as the action proceeds by flipping the side panels, hiding behind and moving the rocks, and adding creative set pieces like curved shower rod with bedsheets that hangs on a panel to make a vertical bed. Similarly, Nathan Leigh, the sound designer, chose a wonderful mix of ominous, creepy effects and music (such as the chilling hound howl) to set the mood and more cartoony noises (like the sucking and popping sound when characters are pulled out of mud) to amplify the comedy.

Unfortunately, the playwrights take the self-awareness too far by inserting an awkward subplot where the actors stop the show and portray themselves as the actors, threatened by mysterious events in the theater. This jarring interruption at the end of the first act throttles the building momentum, doesn’t add anything to the main tale, and isn’t particularly funny. Thankfully, although inexplicably for anyone wanting a resolution to the subplot, the play sticks to the much funnier Holmes story for the rest of the performance.

Hound of the Baskervilles appears deceptively simple at first glance, a typical spoof with standard theater gags. But the demands of this kind of buffoonery are stringent — without actor chemistry, perfectly timed and blocked hectic scenes, and inventive costume changes the proceedings could easily degenerate into an unfunny mess. Luckily for fans of broad comedy, the talented team at Central Square Theater make the difficult task of pulling off this frenetic farce look, as Sherlock Holmes would say, elementary.

GRIMM: The Brothers’ Tales Remixed & Re-imagined . . . Written by Gregory Maguire, Kristen Greenidge, Melinda Lopez, Marcus Gardley, Lydia R. Diamond, John Kuntz, and John ADEkoje. Directed by Summer L. Williams and Shawn LaCount. Staged by Company One at the Calderwood Pavilion, Boston, MA, through August 14.

Becca A. Lewis (Red) and Raymond J. Ramirez (Victor) in Company One's Grimm

Reviewed By Bill Marx

The nineteenth-century fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm go far beyond the forlorn, though you wouldn’t know it from the bowdlerized, sanitized, and moralized versions offered by the likes of Walt Disney and others, who think bedtime stories should offer lessons in good citizenship.

Violent, dark, and at times downright absurd, the Teutonic magic realism of the Brothers Grimm is peculiarly modern in its embrace of anarchistic violence, random manipulation of the fantastic for the sake of revenge and sexual conquest, and use of fantastical effects for shock and/or inspirational value. The fairy tales are also inherently dramatic—their archetypal conflicts between good and evil compressed into short spells for rapt listening audiences of all ages.

Company One had the enterprising idea of asking seven accomplished, local playwrights to take up the challenge of remixing or re-imagining a selection of the stories. The resulting world premiere production suffers from the inevitable unevenness of multiple author exercises (though only one of the Grimm reboots really overstays its welcome), but the varied round-up of playlets and sketches offer plenty of vaudevillesque humor and imagination.

The writers approach the material in a spirit of mischievous fun, which is understandable, but that generally leaves the nastier, more unruly elements in the stories untouched—the overall impression left by GRIMM is of artists playfully teasing an old friend. A more radical deconstruction of the standard and/or obscure fables would have been fascinating, but the Company One show succeeds as light and enjoyable summer entertainment.

Keith Mascoll (Cry Baby Jones)

GRIMM also has the merit of spotlighting Company One’s commitment to new plays and local dramatists— serving as a convenient “sampler” of the work of John Kuntz, Melinda Lopez, Lydia R. Diamond, and others. The personal touch of having the playwrights, via taped comments, introduce his or her play underlines the company’s intent to connect directly with the audience. Directors Summer L. Williams and Shawn LaCount emphasize the point-blank in their staging, which focuses on keeping the proceedings direct and efficient—not much subtlety here, but the job gets done.

The hardworking Company One cast of 12 race though their GRIMM tasks with skill and enthusiasm, though more modulation would be helpful; At times the comic turns wallow in SNL overkill, threatening to slather the same clownish patina over all the pieces.

The seven playlets break down into four essential tones:

Sentimental: The Seven Stage a Comeback by Gregory Maguire proffers an intriguing premise: the Seven Dwarfs awaken from their slumber and decide for various reasons—unrequited love, abandonment issues, envy, homicidal anger—to track down the rescued Snow White. The glass coffin is brought along as some sort of creepy ritual offering. Maguire generates some wry amusement out of the dwarfs’ chatter and internal debates about their quest to the bright side but not enough to do justice to the idea, which is dunked into mush at the end.

Cry Baby Jones, based on “The Frog King,” comes off as an urban “fractured fairy tale” that chronicles the coming-of-age of a literal big baby who sells healing talcum power out of his home, a dumpster in Plastic City. Dramatist John ADEoje garners some laughs as he fires off at a melange of targets (ham acting, TV news, the Peter Pan syndrome), but the piece nosedives into the silly and juvenile well before its predictably cuddly end.

Victoria Marsh as Hazel, the take-no-prisoners museum guide

Satiric: Half Handsome & Regrettable is an ultra-broad, comic update of “Hansel and Gretel” set in a German museum that has the fabled Gingerbread House on display. Two rich American brats challenge the imperious German guide and all Hell breaks loose. Playwright Marcus Gardley has lots of fun sending up horror films, snooty cell phone wielding kids, and the cult of innocence. Victoria Marsh’s dictatorial guide threatens her adolescent charges with hilarious panache.

Dramatist Lydia R. Diamond’s giggly The White Bride and the Black Bride features three actresses reading the off-the-beaten-track Grimm tale “The White Bride & The Black One.” Along the way they toss pop culture references and deflating sarcastic barbs at the yarn’s hideous racial politics, surreal narrative, and over-the-top violence. It is a one-joke sketch, but handled with sweet and sardonic aplomb.

Earnest: Thankgiving, Kristen Greenidge’s soap opera-ish response to the Brothers Grimm tale “Clever Else,” is a vivid talkathon featuring three New England housewives, schoolmates and friends, waiting to pick up their kids. Nothing new here—the usual regrets for taking the sedate domestic way out, with the downward mobility of one of the wives (her janitor husband was caught stealing and is out of a job) serving as the panicked focal point—the vision of living in a lighthouse stands as a dreamy rebuke to suburban servitude.

Playwright Melinda Lopez supplies the most serious, least gag-filled play of the evening, taking three different looks at “Stories about Snakes” in Stories About Snakes.The spiritual significance of the serpent, played with insinuating cunning by Lonnie McAdoo, morphs through each of the stories: He’s an innocent seducer in one, a victimized dupe aiding female liberation in another, and finally takes on the traditional role of purveyor of evil. It’s a provocative view of fairy tales as invitations for multiple-choice reinvention.

Diabolical: Red by John Kuntz is the kinkiest of the plays making it, ironically, the closest to the sordid spirit of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. “Little Red Cap” inspires a sadomasochistic game played between girl and hunter, with both superb performers, Raymond J. Ramirez and Becca A. Lewis, reveling in the theatrical salaciousness of it all. The topsy-turvy role changing feels a bit by the numbers, but the play adds the necessary note of sick, illicit pleasure to the evening.

CTC performers Allison McLemore and Joel Ripka ride the Last Train to Nibroc. Photo: Rick Teller

Last Train to Nibroc by Arlene Hutton. Staged by the Chester Theater Company, Chester, MA, through July 25.

I drove back to Chester Theater Company(CTC) last night expecting another engrossing evening and got it. I love making the trip to the village (pop. 1000) and the makeshift theater in its small Town Hall with its inexpensive but ingenious and effective sets, costumes, and light and sound design. I’m always interested in the work selected by Artistic Director Byam Stevens, who makes plain his commitment to a writer’s theater.

“There are companies that celebrate the magic of the actor’s craft,” he writes, “that propound the primacy of the director, that espouse particular artistic or ethnic identities. These are all fine things . . . But if there has been a craft that has left its imprint on my seasons here, it is the craft of the writer . . . deep insight into the human condition, rich characterizations, first rate dialogue, and a deep and abiding faith in the essential poetry of common people.”

Words to warm any writer’s heart.

I had never heard of Last Train to Nibroc or playwright Arlene Hutton, author of more than a dozen plays and self-described “daughter of hillbillies,” whose work draws on her Appalachian family background. In fact, Last Train To Nibroc received a 2000 NY Drama League nomination for Best Play and more than 50 regional productions. CTC is producing it this summer as part of a trilogy as well as a marathon.

All performances are followed by a Talkback, which in the CTC’s case means the director gets to talk as much or even more than the audience. Given the subject, we preceded it with a visit to Chester’s Railway Station, a place staffed by railway buffs and local historians who seem to know everything there is to know about railroads in the U.S.

But, back to the play. Set in the early 1940s, Last Train to Nibroc is a romance between May, a young woman planning on becoming a missionary and Raleigh, a young man planning to become a writer. Relaxed and lanky, Raleigh takes the empty seat beside May on an eastbound train from California bearing the coffins of Nathaniel West and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He has been discharged from the Air Force for medical reasons; she has gone to California to visit her fiance and is returning home to Kentucky disappointed. In a first scene that sparkles with humor and charm, the two get acquainted, sparring in the tradition of the finest plays and movies of the 1940s.

The stop-and-start relationship that evolves over the next two scenes (separated by two brief pauses in which a soundtrack of contemporary radio broadcasts and music of the time sustains the historic mood) is both engaging on its own terms and evocative of theater history. I thought of characters from plays as different as Major Barbara and Same Time Next Year, to name just two. The characters are fun to watch, their relational misunderstandings both familiar and specific to their time and place.

As I’ve come to expect at CTC, the actors are very good, as is the direction. Joel Ripka makes a convincing and sympathetic suitor and Allison McLemore a tart and intelligent May. But thinking about the director’s credo, I found some of Hutton’s dialogue (or perhaps it was his direction of her “poetry of common people”) a tad labored. Our culture has made “the Journey” into a cliche. Heavy declamatory emphasis on images such as “The tree” or “The train” undermines their metaphoric power. We get it.

With that small caveat, I’m recommending that you go to Chester very soon.

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Helen Epstein is the author of the biography Joe Papp and a profile of art historian Meyer Schapiro available on Kindle/Amazon.

Garrison Keillor, winner of The Mount's 2010 Henry James Award, is one of the authors coming to Wordfest. Photo: Andrew Harrer, Bloomberg News

By Roberta Silman

When we first built our home in the Berkshires in the early 70s, I remember going with my husband and our children and my parents to Edith Wharton’s home, The Mount, which had become the quarters of a newly established theater company called Shakespeare & Company and the setting for all their plays. And what a setting it was! Rooms representative of the Gilded Age where actors dramatized Wharton’s witty stories and a wonderful sloping lawn where we would bring lawn chairs and be drawn into the most magical performances of Shakespeare’s plays.

The company, founded by two extraordinary women, Kristin Linklater and Tina Packer, had built a wooden stage where lawn and forest met, and, as the plays unfolded, sometimes using the terrace of the beautifully sited house, we were utterly enchanted by the comedies and tragedies and history plays.

Wharton had lived in Lenox for only a short time, but in that time she had created an elegant home and gorgeous gardens, as well as Ethan Frome, her great novella set in a fictional town based on Stockbridge. She entertained lavishly, and her most famous guest was her fellow writer, Henry James. After her death and over time, the gardens had virtually disappeared, and the place had a lived-in shabbiness that no one really noticed considering all the wonderful things that were happening there.

As the years passed, Linklater went her own way and is now a professor of drama at Columbia University, and Packer became the director of the company. Several years ago the Board of the Mount decided it was time to try to make The Mount its own Edith Wharton headquarters, and Shakespeare & Company departed for a new campus on Kemble Street in Lenox. That was when, in the words of a friend, it risked becoming another “dead house.”

The place was spruced up, refurbished by various interior decorators (some rooms are more successful than others), the gardens restored magnificently to the specifications that Wharton left behind, and the tours of the house, which had gone on even when Shakespeare & Company was there, became more detailed and, probably, more accurate. But for the first year or so it felt empty, which it was considering the energetic activity that had gone there for so long, and in danger of becoming the dead house my friend had predicted.

Fortunately, though, it did not. A terrace café was soon installed, “Selected Shorts” performed there at least once a summer, and a lecture series was established—all by its earlier director, Stephanie Copeland, who also insured that Wharton’s own library find its way back to The Mount, intact. Unluckily for Copeland, she made that huge purchase just before the economic meltdown and thus left Wharton’s home in a precarious position; for a short time its very existence was threatened. But after a vigorous fund-raising campaign that continues and under the direction of Susan Wissler, who worked with Copeland and succeeded her, The Mount seems to be coming into its own in ways that make it more alive than ever before.

On July 23–25 it will be host to its first Wordfest, a celebration of writing in America with talks, interviews, panels, and book signings. Among the writers who will attend are Elinor Lipman, Jim Shepard, Judith Thurman, Dani Shapiro, John Hockenbery, Martha McPhee, and several others—exactly the legacy that Edith might have dreamed of for her beautiful house and grounds, playing host to working writers who will surely offer the Berkshires a lively and interesting weekend.

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Roberta Silman is the author of Blood Relations, a story collection, three novels, Boundaries, The Dream Dredger, and Beginning the World Again, and a children’s book, Somebody Else’s Child. She has recently completed a new novel, Secrets and Shadows. She can be reached at rsilman@verizon.net

In English, Polish novelist, playwright, short story writer, and brazen, metaphysical gadfly Witold Gombrowicz remains under appreciated, a modernist who was never pulled into the highbrow bandwagon. Part of that neglect is thanks to bad translations that, in some cases, bowdlerized the Polish text or were translated from a French version of the original. One of the neglected issues regarding translation is how much harm mediocre translations do—on occasion they sabotage literary genius, imprisoning the writer’s prose in a false image that hardens over the years. By the time a new, juster translation comes along it is too late. Let’s hope that doesn’t hold true for Gombrowicz.

Danuta Borchardt has been working to turn Gombrowicz’s fortunes in English around, re-translating three of his novels, including his masterpiece Ferdydurke, for which she won a National Translation Award. (My personal favorites are the novel Cosmos and his speculative Diaries.) Her latest Gombrowicz translation is of his 1966 novel Pornografia, which has now won a 2010 Found in Translation Award. Set in 1939 in the Polish countryside, the black comedy revolves around two aging “thinkers” who play mind games with a pair of teens, an attempt at vampirish exploitation that eventually turns obsessive and ugly. The paperback edition of Pornografia will be released this coming October.

Gombrowicz translator Danuta Borchardt

In a World Books podcast, I spoke to Borchardt about the challenges of putting Gombrowciz into English, the politics of translation (Susan Sontag had veto power over issues raised by the Ferdydurke translation), and why Gombrowicz should be read today. Unfortunately, Borchardt has no plans to translate Gombrowicz’s plays, which are amusingly anarchistic parodies of authority. I saw a sharp production of The Marriage in Montreal years ago.

Chad Hoeppner, Rebecca Brooksher, and Kevin Hogan In the CTC production of Molly Sweeney Photo: Rick Teller

Reviewed By Helen Epstein

Molly Sweeney by Brian Friel. Directed by Michael Dowling. Staged by the Chester Theatre Company, Chester, MA, through July 11.

This summer Chester Theatre Company (CTC) Artistic Director Byam Stevens is exhorting theatergoers to “free the inner audience” within them. Theatergoers, he says, have become like critics, losing a sense of honest engagement with drama. The critic, he argues, is a character invented by modern journalism, a charlatan uneducated in theater history and practice, rating cultural productions like a Consumer Reports evaluator, making judgments from a (superior) distance rather than partaking of the theatrical experience.

Audiences, he argued, in an introduction to the company’s first production of the season, Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney, should become theater colleagues rather than “voyeurs”; they should join actors, designers, and directors in engaging directly with the playwright’s work, “eschewing the soul deadening thumbs up/thumbs down shortcut,” experiencing, actively trying to understand, rather than just looking.

Just looking is the subject of Molly Sweeney, which is the opening production of the season at Stevens’s wonderful theater in the Town Hall of Chester, Massachusetts, a tiny valley town in western Massachusetts so isolated that it’s a wonder he can fill the auditorium’s 128 seats. Chester is located on Route 20, a few miles east of the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, a half hour’s drive from the Berkshire hub of Lenox-Stockbridge and an hour from Northampton. Nevertheless, theater cognoscenti regularly make the drive, and some precede the show with dinner at the Pioneer Grill and Pizzeria, an unassuming, little restaurant where the fruits and vegetables come right out of the garden.

A similar freshness imbues the productions of the CTC, this week Molly Sweeney by accomplished Irish playwright Brian Friel. This is a play about engagement at its most basic level: through what senses do each of us perceive the world we live in? What happens when we try to improve on that arrangement?

Rebecca Brooksher in CTC's Molly Sweeney Photo: Rick Teller

Friel based the play on an early New Yorker article by neurologist Oliver Sacks. In October of 1991, Sacks received a telephone call about a 50-year-old man he called Virgil, who had been virtually blind since childhood. Virgil had been offered a miracle cure, a chance to see the world. “There was nothing to lose,” Sacks wrote, “and there might be much to gain.” But, in fact, it was a miracle that misfired and wound up with Virgil losing his job, his house, his health, and independence, “leaving him a gravely sick man, unable to fend for himself.”

Friel transforms 50-year-old American Virgil into 34-year-old Irish Molly Sweeney, creates a ne’er-do-well husband named Frank, and an opthomologist identified as Mr. Rice. The play is performed as a set of intertwined monologues that the three actors deliver directly to the audience from three chairs: a stool for the callow, impulsive, but loving husband; a comfortable easy chair for the physician whose professional and personal life has been arrested by his wife’s desertion to one of his medical colleagues; a plain hospital chair for the spunky and sensual Molly, first blind, then sighted, then blind again.

The directness of their speeches to the audience are reminiscent of a psychotherapeutic encounter; their isolation from and misunderstanding of one another is pronounced. The emotional intensity is sometimes broken by the distraction of Lara Dubin’s lighting design, which is meant to evoke Molly Sweeney’s changing visual field but, like some of the ultra-high-tech lighting I’ve seen lately, ends up being distracting.

Michael Dowling cast and directed the play well. All three actors—Rebecca Brooksher as Molly, Kevin Hogan as Mr. Rice, and Chad Hoeppner as Frank Sweeney—are accomplished and almost always interesting to watch and hear. They convincingly bring to life Friel’s meditation on this extraordinary true story, which combines fairy tale and Faustian bargain. “Beware of strangers bearing gifts” and “Be careful what you wish for” are only two phrases of folk wisdom that resonate through this deeply intriguing play. Like many such adaptations from real life, however, Friel had to choose and simplify in order to create a satisfying drama.

Afterwards, I looked up Sacks’s Anthropologist on Mars (where the New Yorker piece has been collected), to reread and reflect on the many complex issues the production brings to theatrical life.

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Helen Epstein is the author of the biography Joe Papp and a profile of art historian Meyer Schapiro available on Kindle/Amazon. She will be speaking about memoir on July 8 at Cary Library in Lexington, MA.

I resist the idea that books for the beach have to go down as easy as piña coladas. My eccentric and eclectic list of fiction and non-fiction in translation is made up of volumes that demand and repay close attention. They also meet Durs Grünbein’s requirements for poetry: they contain a zest for life and plenty of intellectual curiosity.

By Bill Marx

In addition, I feel that the intrepid group of small presses that publish books in translation should be rewarded for their courage and perseverance in hard times. Thus while I have included some of the first-rate books from major publishers, I highlight offerings from less mainstream presses as well. Note that many of the books covered by PRI/BBC’s World Books (which I edit) over the past few months, particularly Homesick and The Origin of the Species, are worth considering as well.

Feel free to send in other suggestions of worthwhile international fiction, especially those from the smaller publishers.

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugresic (Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac, Celia Hawkesworth, and Mark Thompson, Canongate) Ugresic’s surreal fable presents, in three sections, imaginative elaborations on the archetypal figure of Baba Yaga, an ancient crone who kidnaps small children. The volume deals with women, witchcraft, and old age on a number of levels: it is an affecting report on the indignities and blessings of aging, a (somewhat broad) satiric send up of capitalism in Eastern Europe, and an acerbic investigation into shifting social and mythic perceptions of women and power.

The Bars of Atlantis by Durs Grünbein (Translated by John Crutchfield, Michael Hofmann, and Andrew Shields, Farrar Straus, and Giroux) A simulating gathering of wide-ranging essays from Grünbein, who is considered by many critics to be one of Germany’s greatest living poets. He is certainly no slouch as a prose writer, writing with inspired clarity and deft learning about his childhood in Dresden, love of deep sea diving, and belief that poetry serves as a “memento suspended over the abyss of existence.” Along his serious but never solemn way, the writer castigates the ugliness of contemporary architecture, extols the relevance of the literature of antiquity (it stands for “the nontrivial, the nonbanal in linguistic reflection”), and provides smart elucidations of a number of intellectual heavyweights, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Gottfried Benn, and Georg Büchner.

Blooms of Darkness by Aharon Appelfeld. (Translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green, Schocken Books) Another compelling Holocaust narrative, one of his finest, from Appelfeld, who this time around grounds a tale of Jewish survival in an inspiring if grotesque love story. His previous novel in translation, Laish, was magnificent but grim-to-the-bone. Here Appelfeld provides much more emotional complexity, the story’s horror and suspense leavened by tenderness, even moments of humor. Hugo, an eleven-year-old Jew, hides from the Nazis in the apartment of a prostitute who serves German soldiers. Told from Hugo’s bewildered point-of-view (he spends most of his time in the woman’s closet), the novel methodically details the child’s sexual awakening and eventual romance with his savior, their passion coming to its inevitable end.

Case Closed by Patrik Ouředník (Translated by Alex Zucker, Dalkey Archive) This shaggy-dog send-up of TV detective yarns doesn’t really pay much attention to its manifold crimes (sneaky goings on in a retirement home, decade old murders, a rape), let alone punishments. Ouředník openly disdains plot; instead, he serves up a zany cultural critique of contemporary Czech society, its endemic incompetence and corruption unfazed by any of the political changes, authoritarian subservience comfortably giving way to capitalist phoniness. The sort-of main character, a prickly retiree named Viktor Dyk, sports a misanthropic sense of humor that made me laugh out loud, particularly his penchant for making up quotations from the Bible: “The eyes of the dead lend their sparkle to the stars.” “Proverbs 8:125.”

Death With Interruptions by José Saramago. (Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, Harcourt) The Nobel Prize-winning writer passed away at the age of 87 on June 18, his funeral attended by over 20,000 people. His books, playful fables combining savage political satire with philosophical antics, have made him a popular writer in Europe. His novels, with their long paragraphs and sparse punctuation, never found that kind of acceptance here, though Blindness was made into a film. This 2008 effort isn’t one of his masterpieces (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis), but in light of his recent death this poignant and magnificently macabre meditation on death taking a holiday (“The following day, no one died.”) stands as a celebration of his ironic moral vision, a commitment to life’s underdogs that even embraces the Grim Reaper.

Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa. (Translated by Stephen Synder, Picador) Those looking for something kinky but classy this summer should turn to Ogawa’s strangely hypnotic tale of sadomasochism in a seaside resort on the coast of Japan. A bored seventeen-year-old, working at a beach resort, falls for an aging customer, a translator, who is all soft-spoken demurral in public but turns into a commanding sexual taskmaster in private. The tale is told from the innocent perspective of the girl, who never questions that submission brings pleasure. Critics who liked her earlier book in translation, The Housekeeper and the Professor, have been put off by the creepy eroticism, but Ogawa’s subtle exploration of the subterranean connections between pleasure and control elaborates on the psychological probing of Tanizaki Jun’ ichiro (The Key).

Oliver VII by Antal Szerb (Translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix, Pushkin Press) A Central European country is so deep in debt it has to sell itself to the highest bidder. A disgruntled king organizes a revolution so he needn’t take responsibility for the sale. Those are the surprisingly relevant quandaries tossed about in Szerb’s blithe but pointed entertainment, the last novel the writer, whose parents were assimilated Jews, completed before he disappeared in a labor camp in 1945 at the age of 43. Over the past few years, Len Rix and Pushkin Press have presented superb translations of Szerb’s impish fiction; Journey By Moonlight stands as his highest artistic achievement, but this book is a delight, a thoughtful romp that fits knotty issues of authority, nationalism, illusion, and identity into a stage farce structure. The king, hiding away in Venice, is forced by con men to act as the head of state in order to steal from . . . himself. Szerb proffers an amusing variation on the message of Max Beerbohm’s “The Happy Hypocrite: A Fairy Tale for Tired Men”—act a role long enough and you become what you impersonate.

The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zambra (Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, Open Letter) A gentle tale of longing narrated by a professor of literature who, while waiting for his wife to return home, muses on his past and what his step-daughter will think of him and the novel he is working on. A graceful testament to the ambiguities of memory and communication, the novel wisely never lets tired strains of angst or regret overwhelm “a love of this world.” Zambra’s first book, Bonsai, won Chile’s Literary Critics’ Award for Best Novel; it was translated into English and published by Melville House.

A Splendid Conspiracy by Albert Cossery (Translated by Alyson Waters, New Directions) The novel’s worship of indolence is tailor made for vacation reading. In fact, if Cossery (1913–2008) had his way you would never go back to work. The writer left Egypt as a young man for Paris, where he hung out with Albert Camus and other French intellectuals while leading a life of hedonism (he estimated he had slept with over 2,000 women). Cossery’s fiction financed his bohemian lifestyle and promulgates his anarchistic perspective. This 1975 novel features a police inspector in a small Egyptian town who suspects “terrorists” are kidnapping and/or killing some of its most notable citizens. Cossery’s gang of gleeful indigents, who mock everything but leisure and sex, are suspected to be the culprits. In one striking passage, the ringleader of the laid back crew expresses sympathy for those dedicated to destruction: “The tiniest bomb that explodes somewhere should delight us, for behind the noise it makes when it explodes, even if barely audible, lies the laughter of a distant friend.” A fascinating read in the age of terrorism . . .

A Time for Everything by Karl O. Knausgaard (Translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson, Archipelago Books) Angels are definitely not to be fooled with in Knausgaard’s powerful recasting of God’s celestial pecking order. In the sixteenth century an eleven-year-old boy glimpses what he believes are a pair of angels in the woods. Thus begins a psychologically crippling, life-long obsession with all things angelic, a search that uncovers fascinating suggestions that angels may be the tortured offspring of man and the divine trapped between two realms, the earthly and the transcendent. Knausgaard provides memorably concrete reinventions of Bible stories as well, from a topsy-turvy telling of Cain and Abel to a shocking version of Noah’s ark, told from the point of view of those who are left to drown as the big boat floats by.

Order these books through the Amazon link on the page and The Arts Fuse receives a (small) percentage of the sale.

Chuck Close: Life, by Christopher Finch. Prestel, 352 pages, $34.95.

Reviewed by Peter Walsh

In these media-saturated, image-obsessed times, every public figure is surrounded by a cloud of buzz. Inside, like so many motes of dusk, float supporters and detractors, mentors and hangers on, friends and rivals, family and lovers, the grateful and the betrayed, news stories, documents, secrets, hype, rumor, lies, and hints at the truth.

When the time comes, if it does come, for a serious biography, the writer’s first job is to filter through all this: to make judgments about what really matters, ignore the fluff, and put everything in some kind of order.

This, unfortunately, is not what happens in Chuck Close: Life. Author Christopher Finch is a painter, a prolific art writer, and former curator at the Walker Art Center. His previous books, among them an early study of Pop Art, a biography of Judy Garland, and a companion monograph, Chuck Close: Work, range from serious to frankly commercial. Chuck Close: Life falls somewhere, awkwardly, in between.

Finch has been a devoted friend of his subject matter for some 40 years. The book, Finch explains in his preface, was not only the artist’s own idea but “the result of a huge act of generosity on the part of Chuck Close.” Finch’s account does, in fact, rely very heavily on interviews with his subject, his family, and an inner circle of long-time friends and admirers.

Finch seems to have little impulse to fact-check or even take a second, skeptical look at his voluminous but entirely subjective sources. Chuck Close: Life has just 24 footnotes, taking up a page and a half of a 350-page volume. It has no bibliography at all. A well-researched biography or work of non-fiction typically has hundreds of entries in both, together covering as much as a third of the whole.

Can such a book, in any way, be objective? For sure, there seems little in it that might ripple its subject’s own self-image.

It’s not entirely surprising, then, when Finch’s narrative turns out to have the blandly cheerful tone and slightly stilted prose of an official biography: the sort of thing with the CEO’s picture on the cover, given out at stockholders meetings or that appears in bookstores a few months before a presidential primary.

You know the plot already. The start is humble, but family, friends, and teachers all recall early signs of brilliant talent, great promise, and true generosity; detractors have hidden agendas; challenges are overcome; tragedy hurts deeply but strengthens. There are some years of struggle but success, when it comes, is triumphant and richly deserved.

Such books are intended to polish an image, not illuminate a life. Most are quickly forgotten.

Close deserves better. He is an important artist with an interesting and possibly instructive life. Born to a modestly middle class family in Monroe, Washington, Close is one of those American originals to come from extremely ordinary backgrounds in out of the way places (think Rauschenberg in Port Arthur, Texas; Hartley in Lewiston, Maine; Pollock in the scrappy small-towns of the American West; Warhol in working-class Pittsburgh), who nevertheless went on to set American art on a daring new path.

Coming as Pop Art and ‘60s counter culture both seemed to sputter to a halt, Close’s gigantic portraits, vivid and photographic yet clearly meticulously handmade, made an indelible impression.

Yet, in Finch’s book, all this disappears behind a barrage of anecdotes and shop talk. The stories of youthful antics and eccentricities are charming at first. But after a hundred pages or so, you feel you are trapped in a hotel bar after a funeral or a testimonial dinner with a couple dozen half-drunk guys laughing over old tales about some poor sod you don’t even know.

Artist biographies are tough. You have a life, a career, and a body of work. The three must somehow be related, but you can never mix them up. A great artist can have a miserable life and a messed-up career. On the other hand, a brilliant, successful career and an exciting, rewarding life can leave nothing behind but wasted canvas.

Self Portrait, Chuck Close

Case in point: Finch’s decision to pivot the book on Close’s sudden illness in 1988, a near-death experience that left him mostly paralyzed. The plot device, as Finch uses it, combines a dramatic personal tragedy with an inspirational story of inner strength overcoming physical adversity.

Finch may have been deliberately echoing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous bout with polio in 1921, which robbed him of the use of his lower body. The struggles Roosevelt endured as a paraplegic, his biographers claim, helped transform a pleasant, if over-privileged and somewhat spoiled amateur politician into a great and empathetic president.

By 1988, though, Close had been a prominent artist for 20 years. His most iconic work already hung on the walls of museums. So his paralysis was a great personal tragedy and yet not a disaster for his work. Or even, in Finch’s account, more than a temporary interruption of his career. The illness tested the man. But it didn’t make the artist.

Finch’s book is hardly a waste. It is mostly an easy, jargon-free read. The author’s long-standing personal relationship with the artist means that there are some intimate and revealing glimpses of the artist at work. There is much here to interest and entertain even a casual interest in late 20th century American art.

If Close’s work lasts (and I think it will), there will be plenty in Chuck Close: Life for future biographers to mull over. Still, Finch leaves the Big Questions about this particular life to them.

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Peter Walsh studied art, design, and art history at Oberlin College and Harvard University. A former Director of Publications for the Harvard University Art Museums, he has served on the staff of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Harvard Museums of Natural History, and the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College and has been a consultant to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, and the Art Museum Image Consortium, among many other organizations. He contributed to scholarly books on museum studies and new media, has lectured widely in the United States and Europe, and has published over two hundred articles and reviews in The Arts Fuse and elsewhere.

Reviewed by Caldwell Titcomb

A strong case can be made that the late Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) was the all-round greatest musician our country has produced—virtuoso pianist, composer of both classical and popular music, the most charismatic conductor of his century, acclaimed educator and lecturer, author, and public intellectual.

It is also probable that his career is the most fully documented in musical history. He has been the subject of numerous biographies. The print media have gone to town over the years (including the cover of Time magazine). Television cameras have amassed a huge body of visual coverage. His recordings total more than those of anyone else in the world. His countless attendances and speeches at leftish political events caused the Federal Bureau of Investigation to compile a dossier on him that ran to at least 666 pages.

You might think that there is nothing fresh to be said about him, but you would be wrong.

There has just appeared an important book entitled Working with Bernstein: A Memoir, which is crammed full of information unavailable anywhere else. It is written by Jack Gottlieb, who is a prolific composer himself. Gottlieb enrolled in a graduate course taught by Bernstein in 1954. Bernstein then hired him as an assistant to undertake all manner of tasks, extending from 1958 to 1970. After several years as music director of a temple in St. Louis, Gottlieb returned to New York and resumed his employment by Bernstein for the rest of the latter’s life, and since then has been the senior member on the staff of what is now called the Leonard Bernstein Office.

Gottlieb divides his book into two main parts. The first he calls “A Grab Bag of My Life With LB,” which contains “reminiscences, anecdotes, observations, testimonies, little known facts.” He keeps track of the frequent change of New York apartments along with the business staff (notably Helen Coates, Bernstein’s one-time piano teacher who became his secretary). “On the Road” describes Bernstein as “a notoriously reckless driver,” and provides an account of the awful time that everyone, including movie star Bette Davis, tried to cope with a Washington snowstorm at the time of the inaugural gala for President Kennedy.

Gottlieb was advised to keep a diary during foreign tours with the New York Philharmonic and the Israel Philharmonic, so he was able to supply detailed entries about the places visited in an “On Tour” section. “In the Workroom” is especially informative about recycling: “Bernstein was never one to let a good tune go to waste.” Gottlieb lists a host of musical ideas that began in one place and ended in another—something that nobody else could have supplied. Discussed too are Bernstein’s jottings in his orchestral scores, and his special commitment to Gustav Mahler. Bernstein did more than anyone else to implant Mahler’s music firmly in the core repertory (he recorded the cycle of all nine Mahler symphonies three times, although he unfortunately refused to perform Deryck Cooke’s wonderful completion of the nearly finished Tenth).

Author and composer Jack Gottlieb

In “Keeping Faith,” Gottlieb devotes a substantial number of pages to the Jewish content in Bernstein’s output, including Mass, an ostensibly Catholic (and still controversial) work written for the 1971 opening of the Kennedy Center in Washington. “Spinning Platters” deals with Bernstein’s discography. Gottlieb says that not even Herbert von Karajan or Sir Neville Marriner comes close to Bernstein’s total of 826 recordings. Asked once to name his own favorite recordings, he gives us his Top Ten lists for Bernstein as a conductor and for Bernstein as a composer.

“Teaching and Television” gives us an account of the Bernstein course that Gottlieb took, the televised Omnibus programs (from 1955) directed at adults, and then, especially, the 53 televised Young People’s Concerts that Bernstein—as explicator, pianist, and conductor—presented with the New York Philharmonic from 1958 to 1972. (In 1992 Gottlieb edited a volume of 15 of these scripts with musical examples and appended a list of all 53 programs and the music performed in each.) Gottlieb ends Part One with a moving account of Bernstein’s last days and funeral.

Part Two is devoted to Bernstein’s compositions—what Gottlieb calls “My Notes on LB’s Notes.” Gottlieb knows Bernstein’s oeuvre more intimately than anyone else alive. And this half of the book is a godsend since it pulls together conveniently in one place a host of Gottlieb’s writings scattered here and there among concert programs, record jackets, essays, and forewords to scores.

Gottlieb provides many musical examples as he proceeds through the compositions by genre: chamber music, choral works, dance and theater works, Jewish works, commentaries, overtures and entertainments, and songs. My one tiny complaint concerns the failed 1972 musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (only seven performances, one of which I attended), which centered on our country’s presidents and first ladies along with their black servants. Gottlieb names the pair of actors who played the “upstairs” personages (Ken Howard and Patricia Routledge), but he failed to name the equally important black “downstairs” performers (Gilbert Price and Emily Yancy)—an unfortunate omission since the late Price (1942-91) was as great a baritone as we’ve ever had and garnered three Tony nominations during his career. (Incidentally, Price triumphed in the central role of the Celebrant in a California production of Bernstein’s Mass.)

Leonard Bernstein: One of the most remarkable titans in musical history.

I spotted only a handful of errors in the book. Gottlieb began his graduate studies in 1953, not 1954 (p. 20). Bernstein’s tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic is stated to have ended in 1966 (p. 24) and 1968 (p. 327), when it actually lasted through the spring of 1969. There is a reference to Justice Learned Hand of the Supreme Court (p. 40); although many wish he had served there, he actually sat on the U. S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, from 1924 to 1961. Bernstein studied orchestration at Harvard not with Edward Burlingame III (p. 328 and 349) but with Edward Burlingame Hill.

Gottlieb does not delve into Bernstein’s unswervingly liberal political activities. For this, one can turn to the recent book Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician by Barry Seldes (University of California Press, 2009). Seldes spends a lot of time on Bernstein as a “man who brooded over what he considered his failure to compose a masterwork of lasting importance.” While Bernstein may, in Seldes’s view, not have found a subject that spurred him to write a great classical opera, there are other ways to achieve “lasting importance.”

Gottlieb considers the ballet Dybbuk to be Bernstein’s “shining masterpiece,” displaying “the skill and imagination of a composer at the peak of his powers” (pp. 162, 241). As for me, I would posit at least the following as masterly achievements: the ballet Facsimile, “The Age of Anxiety” (Symphony No. 2), the violin “Serenade,” the operetta Candide, the musical West Side Story, and the choral Chichester Psalms. In addition, I consider his music for the movie On the Waterfront (1954) one of the two greatest film scores ever written—the other being Sergei Prokofieff’s score for Alexander Nevsky (1938).

Gottlieb’s publisher is to be commended for allowing a total of more than 75 photographs to appear in this tome. They add enormously to a text that substantially increases what we have heretofore known about one of the most remarkable titans in musical history.

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The American Stage: Writings on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner, edited by Laurence Senelick, Library of America, 867 pages, $40.

By Bill Marx

“There is no place of public amusement of which I am so fond as the theatre,” states Washington Irving, posing as Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent, in the first entry in The American Stage, adding the deadpan kicker that “to enjoy this with greater relish I go but seldom.” In this rich anthology, editor Laurence Senelick contends that writing about the agonies and ecstasies of American theater has, over 200 years, generated its own form of entertainment, lively prose that proffers, in his words, “insight, wit, or strong feeling.”

Thus the collection isn’t an earnest round-up of critical notices of important plays or a by-the-numbers documentary history but a hearty, decidedly eccentric hodgepodge of written responses to the theater —on- and off-stage, experimental and conventional—including reviews, interviews, poems, parodies, manifestos, propaganda, and remembrances.

One of the yardsticks for an anthology is how much first rate unfamiliar material the editor turns up. Even those who know the turf should be surprised and delighted at some of what they find. Yes, The American Stage contains the predictable suspects, including pieces by Henry James, Tennessee Williams, Thornton Wilder, and Arthur Miller. But there are some meaty meditations from such keen critical minds as James G. Huneker, George Jean Nathan, Stark Young, S. J. Perelman, and Eric Bentley. Even more satisfying are brilliant pieces of writing that Senelick pulls out of thin air, including Langston Hughes’s hilariously cutting satire of The Green Pastures, Willa Cather’s acidic dissection of a production of Anthony and Cleopatra, Gore Vidal’s evaluations of Eugene O’Neill and George Bernard Shaw, and Thomas Disch’s satisfying version of the perennial “Death of Broadway” notice.

Of course, part of the fun of reading an anthology is wondering why some made the cut and others didn’t. Regarding the missing, I was curious that William Dean Howells, as well as the critics Richard Gilman and Gordon Rogoff, were left out in the cold. Also, some of the winning entries are puzzling, such as Mary McCarthy’s gratuitously nasty demolition of A Streetcar Named Desire. And do we need one of Dorothy Parker’s few positive reviews?

I spoke to Senelick about the selection process, the ways that Americans write about the theater, the decay of theater criticism, and his favorite pieces in the anthology. Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University and a recipient of the George Jean Nathan prize for dramatic criticism. His books include The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre and The Chekhov Play: A Century of the Plays in Performance. He is also “a professional actor, director, and translator who has staged a number of American premieres.”

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Bill Marx: How did The American Stage come about?

Laurence Senelick: I was struck that the Library of America, which had been founded as a version of the Pléiade series in France and was dedicated to preserving American literature in convenient, inexpensive, and definitive editions, was issuing volumes on given subjects. It had volumes on true crime, baseball, food, sailing, New York, and movie critics. But it didn’t have one on theater. So I spoke to my friend Lloyd Schwartz, who had edited a Library of America edition of the poems of Elizabeth Bishop. He gave me the names of the editors, and I wrote to them with a proposal and sample contents. It was accepted straight away. I have to say it is one of the most efficient books I have ever written in my life because the idea came up two years ago in the summer. The book came out within two years of that. Once we had determined what was going to be in the book, it was rushed into publication. I had a very good time writing the headnotes and the introduction.

Marx: You mention that the Library of America has a volume of film critics. But in the introduction to The American Stage you say that you were not interested in compiling a compendium of critical writing about the theater. Why did you decide to go in that direction?

Senelick: Phillip Lopate, who edited the volume on American movie critics, stated quite straightforwardly that he wanted to create a kind of canon of American film criticism. He felt that film criticism has been overlooked as a school of writing, and he hoped to bring to the fore writers who had been forgotten or whose ideas on film had helped create an aesthetic for American film.

I, on the other hand, was aware of earlier attempts at theater anthologies that focused on critics. One, published in the 1930s, was called The American Theater as seen by its Critics. It is basically made up of snippets, rarely entire reviews, by daily and weekly reviewers of important American plays from the 18th century on. It is a very useful book from a documentary history perspective, but it is tedious reading because the approach of daily and weekly reviewers tends to be consumer reporting to a large extent. There is an obsession with finding the snappy phrase.

I wanted to go back to the notion that the Library of America is about preserving great writing, or if not great writing, at least very interesting and entertaining writing. I also wanted to encapsulate, as much as possible, the various aspects of the American theater through various kinds of American writing. I wanted to find writing that gives a sense of how the audience, the viewer, the observer responds to what is going on the stage.

So, rather than sticking to criticism or reviewing, which an awful lot of criticism boils down to, I include essays, think pieces, memoirs, parodies, all kinds of writing that reflects—mainly from the audience’s standpoint—the experience of the theater. There are not a lot of pieces by actors or directors or designers in this book: the few included were penned by theater artists who also distinguished themselves as writers. Director Elia Kazan, for instance, who was a very successful novelist, and actor William Gillette, who was a very successful playwright.

Marx: How would you compare American responses to the stage with how writers looked at the theater in other countries? Is there a distinctive American vision of the stage?

Senelick: American theater is more demotic, if you like. It is a popular theater—that is to say whenever our theater was a lively and well attended art form it appealed to a large portion of the population. Whereas historically, in Russia for example, the theater had a very tiny audience. One of the hard things about creating theater in Russia was finding enough literate people to go to it. In America, almost from the beginning, the populace went, and this egalitarian appeal bothered a lot of European commentators like Alexis de Tocqueville or Fanny Trollope, who were disturbed by the fact that what went on in the theater was determined not by the best minds in the society but, to some degree, by the rabble.

Editor Laurence Senelick: Nobody really wants to sit down and write a really considered essay on the theater.

This is why you get, over time, a need on the part of the American intelligentsia to cultivate playwrights who might somehow make the theater amount to more, make it more adult, such as the attempt in the late 19th century to establish James Herne as the American Ibsen. Or when Eugene O’Neill begins to establish himself, suddenly the thinkers rush in to exclaim, “Oh! We have a playwright of European appeal. Somebody who is actually experimenting in a way that Europeans experiment.” There is a kind of inferiority complex involved. It is as if it is not enough that the theater is a place of diversion and entertainment; it also has to be high art. You get an interesting tension throughout American writing about the theater, a conflict between the people who are delighted to celebrate it as a demotic form (Edmund Wilson on burlesque, for example, or Fred Allen and George Jean Nathan on vaudeville) and the people who are really trying to put it in long pants, so to speak, to make it classy.

Marx: Some of the early selections in The American Stage reflect that conflict vividly. Edgar Allan Poe, Willa Cather, and Walt Whitman want the theater to grow up. Were there any serious writers at the time who liked what they saw?

Senelick: The anthology illustrates a very interesting dichotomy. Young writers in the early 19th century think very differently about the theater once they grow older. That is one of the reasons I included several pieces by some of our classic authors. Whitman, Mark Twain, even Henry James look at the theater of their time, and they are highly critical. James considers it to be contemptible, Twain is amused by it, and, believe it or not, Whitman thinks it needs to be civilized.

Then you get them in their elder days, looking back with nostalgia on that same theater, and suddenly they are praising the very things that had bothered them earlier. They are much more willing to accept the popular side of it or what we might call the amusement side of it. So you get somebody like James waxing absolutely rhapsodic over an acrobatic troupe or Twain chuckling over the old glory days of the minstrel shows, and Whitman praising the performances at the Bowery Theatre. The notion that intellectuals could feel comfortable praising the popular side of the theater came later after the writers felt themselves and society sufficiently sophisticated to accept the rougher aspects of things.

Langston Hughes: A brilliant essay on racism in the theater that combines satire and propaganda.

A wonderful example of this is George Jean Nathan. As a young critic, Nathan is eager to advance American theatrical civilization by praising foreign writers and championing Eugene O’Neill. But the older Nathan gets the more he sits back in his chair and says, “Ah, burlesque is great fun, and the clowns are wonderful to watch.” So with time comes an ability to balance one side and the other.

Marx: Does the critical balance between sophistication and entertainment hold for writing about the American stage in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s? Doesn’t the notion of theater as an instrument for social change undercut this kind of modulated judgment?

Senelick: In the early part of the 20th century, writers approach ethnic theater, immigrant theater, and fringe theater as outsiders. They treat readers as if they are taking them on a safari, telling them that this is valuable theater because it reflects the customs and attitudes of people who are becoming part of our melting pot civilization.

By the 1930s, you are getting the children of those immigrants, now finding their place in the theater and wanting to use it for social protest, wanting to use it to change society. One of the most important aspects of this transformation is the Federal Theatre Project, and that is why in the anthology I include a very moving piece from Hallie Flanagan about how Congress quite deliberately destroyed the Federal Theatre Project. At the end of the anthology, I have an excerpt from John Houseman’s memoir (Run-Through: A Memoir) that deals with the production of the musical The Cradle Will Rock. Houseman’s piece not only dramatizes artistic triumph in the face of political oppression, but it also shows how you can create an exuberant art that is also a social statement that brings the audience along with you.

Marx: But doesn’t the rise of political energies in the theater change how it is written about? As the anthology progresses, the writing becomes more earnest and less descriptive.

Senelick: As long as your audience is limited, it is the job of the writer to create a graphic image of what happens on stage for the people who haven’t had a chance to see it. It is not just about selling tickets, but conveying, as best as you can, an experience. Even as late as the 1950s, when I was growing up, every single city had lots of newspapers, and there were a large number of magazines, some of which still exist such as The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, as well as some that are defunct like The Saturday Review. These publications devoted a lot of space to the theater. If you read a number of these publications, you would be exposed to vast amounts of different attitudes and viewpoints about the same performance. And that was very invigorating. Besides a brief notice you would get in the daily paper, you could wait a couple of months and there would be a considered commentary that would show up in the Partisan Review by somebody like Eric Bentley. And there were magazines such as Theater Arts Monthly.

The interesting thing about so many of these publications was that they were intended for a middlebrow audience. They were aimed at an audience that wasn’t specifically focused on the theater, but went to the theater on a regular basis because it was part of its cultural diet. What’s more, it was an audience that liked to read.

Marx: But we have lost that now?

Senelick: By the time I got to the last quarter of the book, I was hard pressed to find that kind of compelling writing. For one thing, our public intellectuals do not choose to write about the theater very much, not even the way Elizabeth Hardwick did in the 1960s and ’70s. One of the few is Henry Louis Gates, and I include a 1997 New Yorker essay of of his. Daniel Mendelson is another exception, but he tends to write about film and opera as much as he writes about live theater.

Alexander Woolcott: Master of the theatrical interview

What’s replaced it? The interview. I have two examples in the book. I have a piece by Alan Dale, one of the earliest purveyors of the form, writing about the aging star Clara Morris. But he has worked an interview into an entertaining essay. It is not just “he said/she said.” His own critical comments and his attitude, which is rather snarky, are nimbly embedded in the piece. The same thing is true of Alexander Woollcott’s coverage of Mrs. Fiske’s opinions of Ibsen. It is not just an article; it is a kind of conversation piece he has invented around their session together.

When I was working on this book, I realized that the American Theatre Magazine, which is an organ of the Theater Communications Group, had just issued its own anthology of 25 years of things that had appeared in the magazine. I had been through American Theatre’s files and hadn’t found anything I particularly wanted for my book. But I was curious to see what they had chosen. And half the book is interviews. And the other half, some of the best pieces, are from before the magazine was invented, things such as Harold Clurman’s Russian Diaries of the 1930s.

So, to get back to choosing representative pieces of our theater for the anthology, I was very hard pressed. Nobody really wants to sit down and write a really considered essay on the theater. And partly that is because the theater is not taken as seriously anymore as an expression of what is going on in our society. And also it is because readers don’t want extended commentary—they would rather get the sound byte.

Marx: Yet some would argue that you have overlooked valuable writings about the contemporary theater. There are few post-war critics represented—for example, there’s nothing by Richard Gilman, Robert Brustein, Gordon Rogoff, or Michael Feingold. And the off-Broadway revolution of the 1950s and 1960s is somewhat neglected.

Senelick: One of the problems has to do with length. The Library of America has an editorial policy that every piece included must be included in its entirety. It cannot be cut or excised or excerpted. I had a book originally twice the length of this. Rogoff, Brustein, Gilman, Theodore Hoffman, Richard Schechter, Don Shewey, and others appeared in it. But many of the pieces were too long. And when they weren’t the right size, my editor, Geoffrey O’Brien, didn’t care for them. He found that they were, when compared to the other things in the anthology, a little too uninteresting, even dull. Or too scattered in their approach, too journalistic in some ways. So we had fights over what to put in. Thus what appears is a good selection, but it may not be the most representative selection, particularly of the modern period.

But I don’t just want to put the blame on the Library of America or on Geoffrey because some of it is my own decision. One of the most curious aspects of the development of the American Theater in the 20th century, now even more in the 21st, is what might be called the academization of the theater. Virtually everybody in the theater in the 19th century and even into the early 20th century learned what he or she was doing on the spot, in the theater. At the beginning of the 20th century, you get the famous 47 Workshop at Harvard University in playwriting. Suddenly you begin to get people going to college to learn about theater. The people who go into the theater are people with college educations, and so they understand academics writing about the theater. Sometimes these writers can be brilliant, but much of the time they write at a distance from the genuine article.

William Winter: A moralistic but analytic critic

There’s a kind of disconnect, though that disconnect occurs less when the people who are staging the theater are also college graduates who are performing for college graduates. But sometimes the American inferiority complex comes into play again. You must (this is a buzzword in the theater, you hear all the time) “problematize” it. We must raise it to a higher level—Brustein is very big on that. Somehow we must make the audience more sophisticated. Since I grew up in the theater, I have always distrusted this attitude. And, obviously, I have a foot in both camps because I was in the professional theater for a very long time but I am also an academic. But I do believe that you have to trust your audiences to some extent. Not cater to them or pander to them, but the minute you want to say, ‘You have got to eat this because it is good for you, not because it tastes good,’ then there is something strange going on that is not organic to the way theater develops.

Marx: So academic and political concerns have elbowed aside exciting writing about the theater?

Senelick: One of the favorite pieces I have in the latter part of the book is Gates’ “The Chitlin Circuit.” He writes about the huge gap between the Chitlin Circuit and someone like the playwright August Wilson, who not only is arguing for separatism of the African-American theater from the rest of the American theater, but also claiming that what he is doing is glorifying aspects of African-American culture; The Chitlin Circuit is made up of very loud, funny, cliché-ridden, moralistic plays African-American audiences flock to see but that nobody reviews. The scripts don’t get published, yet in some ways they answer the needs of that portion of the public hungering for a live theater experience.

I do, at the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, have to ask what is one of the biggest phenomenons at the moment? High school theater—high school musicals, along with musical theater camps. Now you may not consider musical theater to be the highest form, and I don’t necessarily, though I love various aspects of it. I am writing a book about Jacques Offenbach right now.

But being prescriptive is always very dangerous. My point is that American audiences want the live theater experience, but they want it on their terms; they want something that will give them what they used to get in the live, popular theater. This doesn’t mean that we stop staging experimental theater, stop having fringe theater; I am reluctant to use the term avant-garde because it means in the forefront, and theater tends to be derivative. But those kinds of theater appeal to a coterie of loyalists. The theater is popular by definition.

Marx: What first-rate pieces have you found for the anthology that will surprise readers?

Senelick: I pat myself on the back for having rescued from obscurity a number of what I think are particularly wonderful pieces. Langston Hughes wrote a terrific commentary for a leftist journal called New Theatre. It has never been reprinted and doesn’t appear online—you have to sit down and go through the issues. The musical The Green Pastures was something of a theatrical phenomenon in its time. It had an all-black cast based on a book by a white man about how the Bible might be seen through the eyes of a backwoods, Southern preacher. It is a cartoon version, mainly of the Old Testament, with the Lawd God and the angels having fish fries in heaven and so on. Audiences adored it; it ran on tour for years and was made into a Hollywood movie.

Elizabeth Hardwick: One of the few American public intellectuals to evaluate the theater.

A couple of black intellectuals approved of it, but not the very left-wing Langston Hughes. In his essay on The Green Pastures, he describes what happens when the show was scheduled to play in Washington D. C. in a theater that did not admit blacks. Other theaters in the South had what they called “Nigger Heavens,” but not Washington DC. A young man who plays one of the angels tries to organize a strike over the issue, and it works for a little while. But once the company gets to Washington the protest is quashed. He is carried off in handcuffs, and the actor playing the Lawd God, who was on the side of the whites all the time, goes on for his entrance.

My friend Lloyd said after he read it—“My blood is boiling.” It is a satiric piece, yes, but it is also a propaganda piece. It is one most vivid statements of the level of racism going on in America in the 1930s, the period of the Scottsboro Boys, the Klan is still around . . . In this essay Hughes takes on an American hit play and skewers it with aplomb.

Marx: Other pieces you are proud to have rescued?

We have three reviews by Gore Vidal. In these pieces we do not just see the waspish, vitriolic, and aristocratic side of the critic, but we see somebody who can really appreciate. What’s more, when Vidal likes something he says why he likes it, and he explains in some detail. One of the reviews is of a production of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House, and it states in a memorably elegant and succinct way what works in Shaw and what doesn’t.

Marx: Do you have any favorites in the anthology?

Senelick: The old trouper— I have always been a big fan of Don Marquis’s Archy and Mehitabel poems, the cockroach who is banging these things out lowercase on a typewriter in a press room after midnight and his alley cat friend. It is a wonderful poem about a vanishing breed of tragedian, “an old theatre cat/ he has given his life/ to the theatre.” In one production the cat played the owl in the Scottish play; he was the beard in King Lear in another. He stood in for a bloodhound in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is done in an absolutely charming poker face way.

Marx: Where do you see writing about the stage going in the future? Are its best days behind it?

Senelick: There are a number of reasons that writing about the theater has become etiolated. One of the reasons is that you don’t have to describe an actor if that actor can be seen on tape or video or film. There is the common assumption that it is not the job of the writer to describe what was seen because that would either be redundant or it might take away from the experience for the person who is about to see it. Critic John Mason Brown said that “writing about acting has become a last paragraph exercise.” Then I have a think piece by Susan Sontag about the Peter Brook production of the Marat/Sade. She wrote about theater in detail about three times in her entire career because she considered theater reviewing to be consumer reporting, which is what a lot of it is, it is just a question if it is for the high end or low end of the market.

But the main reason why you aren’t getting as much entertaining and brilliant writing about the theater is because people do not feel free to be effervescent about a form that is vibrant and alive and thriving. You can feel free to write snide reviews and snipe at something because you know it isn’t going to change anyway. You can parody it, have fun the way that some of the pieces in the anthology do, because you know that material will survive—you can punch it, knead it, and mold it anyway you like. And it will still bounce back.

Archy and Mehitabel in action

That’s why George Jean Nathan has no qualms in his review of O’Neill’s oeuvre saying that sometimes the dramatist blew it, he wasn’t so good that time out, but he was great on that one. And think about a career like O’Neill’s, where you have several decades of him creating experimental theater, striking out in different directions. Today, playwrights can’t get their plays on anymore.

I was shocked to read the other day that the Pulitzer-Prize-winning drama August: Osage County didn’t play out its two weeks in Boston. It closed because it couldn’t get an audience. I don’t think it is a great play; in fact, I think it is the kind of play that could be done better on television, that there are better written domestic dramas on television now. I am of the school that believes that the things that work best on stage can only go on stage and wouldn’t work as well in another medium.

Nonetheless, what does the fact that an essentially old style, conventional play can’t play two weeks in a major city tell you? The theater no longer speaks to what made a mass audience, what made a general public. Do we use the term general public anymore? We have coterie publics, so that the kinds of theater that some of the academics are writing about and that the academics are promoting may be fascinating work, but it is only going to appeal to a specific kind of audience. We are so fragmented now that even writing is fashioned to appeal to a particular readership.

Marx: In what ways does the web, which can reach a worldwide readership, shape writing about the theater?

Senelick: What we call criticism is rapidly being replaced by opinion. If, on the Internet, every kibitzer can post an opinion, who is to say that one opinion isn’t as valid as anybody else’s opinion. Who is to say that one opinion is more substantial than another? But where does that leave informed criticism? William Winter was a critic for 50 years, so he was able to see many performances over and over again. Sure, he is overly moralistic, but he is also highly analytic. Or you get somebody as elegant in his writing as Stark Young, who can see John Barrymore in Hamlet and compare his performance to all the other Hamlets he has seen. And he saw a lot of them. Young points out how a particular passage worked really well, talk about how Barrymore did this there, which nobody had really seen before, and it makes sense.

Marx: So critics are turning their backs on writing with depth about the theater?

Senelick: It is invidious to name names and I won’t, but you have a colleague who has written dramatic criticism for 40 years, 30 certainly, and yet at no point has this writer ever written an extended piece to say “these are my principles, this is my artistic stand, my aesthetic ideas, this is what I believe theater constitutes.” It is all immediate response couched in fortune cookie cleverness. That is one of the reasons so much of this kind of criticism isn’t collected into books and therefore isn’t really available or eligible to appear in an anthology.

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