Listening to the Moment: Eliza Lay (Sam) and Dave Sanfacon (Andy) in Apple. Photo: Greg Maraio

Apple by Vern Thiessen. Directed by Greg Maraio. Presented by Phoenix Theatre Artists and Company One, at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, through April 3

Reviewed by Alyssa Machado

In Apple, Andy, a middle-aged man in a failing marriage, meets Samantha on a park bench on the day he is laid-off from the government job he loves. Sam, an attractive medical student, coaxes him to close his eyes and really “listen to the moment” in the park, to appreciate the beauty of right now and forget the disappointments of the past. Intrigued and a little overwhelmed by her awkward flirtations, Andy lets “things change” as she suggests. They kiss, and their affair begins.

Although Apple’s plot is rooted in cliché—a 40-something guy in a failing marriage has an affair with a beautiful, young student and becomes conflicted when his estranged wife discovers she has cancer—the play doesn’t wallow in the potential melodrama posed by disease and the affair.

Instead, the script explores, poetically and refreshingly, a series of emotional moments, the kind of tiny but revelatory turning points that accumulate “when things change” in romantic relationships. These interludes grow into an intimate and touching picture of the natural seasons of love and loss, the “sweet spring,” “dying fall,” and “clean winter.”

Playwright Vern Thiessen’s nuanced approach is particularly impressive given the obvious opportunity for soap opera, the juicy invitation to indulge in big dramatic revelations and overwrought explosions of anger. He wisely keeps much of the action internalized and grounded in guarded emotions.

For example, when Andy’s wife, Lyn, discovers the affair, she comes to the realization gradually, never saying a word. We sense her discovery through the changes of expression on her face, aided by the adroit placing of pauses. Also, Thiessen, to his credit, doesn’t spend much time dredging up his characters’ past; the play, like the utterly spontaneous Sam, focuses on the emotions of “right now,” particularly Lyn’s dignified acceptance of her cancer as well as her rediscovery of her relationship.

Thiessen adeptly uses monologues and repetition of lines to connect the play’s series of moments together to create a fluid sense of time. These techniques imaginatively invite the audience to see the events and relationships through Sam’s eyes: “No future. No past. No time. Just this day. This moment.” Yet Andy’s monologues are in the past tense, implying that his experience is the inevitable result of what has already occurred. Apple makes artful use of this paradox because the scenes of love and loss are dramatized in front of us, creating a tension between past and present.

Thiessen’s reinforces this fluidity of time by repeating dialogue like the start of the conversation Sam and Andy have each time they meet at the park bench.

SAM: Beautiful day.
Pause.
ANDY: Yes.
SAM: The lake.
ANDY: Yes.
SAM: The trees.
ANDY: Yes.
SAM: The park.
ANDY: Mm.

These lines are echoed many times—when the couple meet as strangers, when they are first caught up in the excitement and hope of their affair, when Lyn’s cancer interferes, and when Andy makes his final decision about his future. The repeated phrases generate a sense of history so that the changes in the delivery of the lines make the developments in their relationship strikingly evident.

Apple isn’t unblemished, however. While the characters emotions are realistic, the storyline tends to be highly coincidental and frequently implausible. For example, Sam hires Lyn, out of all the realtors in their town, to sell her apartment. At one point Lyn’s doctor can’t make an appointment and, of course, Sam, a medical student, is assigned to be the wronged wife’s nurse. One fortuitous meeting is acceptable; two heads into fantasy territory.

Speaking of suspending disbelief, do beautiful, mysterious, young women frequently approach depressed, average-looking middle-aged guys in the park, seduce them in a few minutes, proceed to have amazing sex with them, and then declare that they aren’t looking for any type of commitment? Andy’s quick agreement makes sense, but Thiessen never adequately demonstrates why Sam, who is the least-developed character, is so intrigued by the bland Andy.

Thankfully, the New England premiere production of Apple, presented by the Phoenix Theatre Artists and Company One, overcomes these relatively minor distractions. Director Greg Maraio, who also came up with the costumes, designed a simple but appropriate set. It consists of a green park bench in the center of the stage, two matching smaller black benches on stage right and stage left, and the black silhouette of a tree downstage, split in half to allow entrances in the middle. Sunset colored leaves litter the stage of the small black box theater.

On a practical level, the benches allow the three actors to remain onstage during the entire play and avoid distracting exits. Having the women remain in the background also emphasizes that they remain in Andy’s thoughts even when he isn’t with them. The fallen leaves set the park scene nicely, but also serve as symbols of letting go, falling in love, and falling apart.

A play like Apple, with a fairly passive main character and more internal, emotional action than external, physical action, requires a talented cast of actors to mine the vulnerability of the characters and prevent them from becoming caricatures. Dave Sanfacon (Andy), Eliza Lay (Sam), and Barbara Douglass (Lyn) are up to the task.

Sanfacon’s Andy is endearingly earnest and vulnerable as he searches, often haplessly, for something missing from his life. His eventual rediscovery of his wife, Lyn, is convincingly natural and so gradual that the audience barely realizes it is happening.

An average guy who just got laid-off while dealing with an unhappy marriage compels empathy, but Sanfacon also makes the character likable enough to make his marital transgressions forgivable. Portrayed as a bewildered man tentatively searching for elusive happiness and love, Andy doesn’t set out to cause pain to others.

Dave Sanfacon (Andy) and Barbara Douglass (Lyn) in Apple. Photo: Greg Maraio

Eliza Lay faces the hardest challenge, portraying Sam as the representation of the “sweet spring” stage of love, a time when everything is suddenly blooming with possibilities, excitement, and lust. She has to convince us of Sam’s sudden fall for Andy even though the script’s reasoning—Sam was left with a “hole in her heart” when her mother died—is wafer thin.

Lay uses stammering and awkward pauses in her monologues, which take the form of medical lectures, to effectively emphasize Sam’s vulnerability. However, because she didn’t stammer or pause as much in her scenes with Andy and Lyn, it was difficult to determine early on whether the performer’s choice was deliberate or if Lay was struggling with her lines. Increasing Sam’s awkwardness in her group scenes would help dispel doubts that Sam is a little too confident to desperately need someone like Andy.

Lay is at her best in the later scenes, the “dying fall,” of her relationship with Andy, her progression from painfully awkward to quietly desperate to bravely resigned. At those moments, Lay’s acting transcends the script; Sam’s love becomes convincing.

Barbara Douglass, who plays the self-absorbed, driven, and to-the-point real estate agent Lyn, begins the play with a swear-laden rant about a co-worker and follows that up by mercilessly nagging and scolding Andy, who has just been laid off. Douglass succeeds in making Lyn a thoroughly unlikeable if strong personality, though the actress seems too self-aware during the rant, speaking quickly and occasionally not enunciating.

Douglass steals the show, however, with her transition to a more restrained, approachable, and almost noble Lyn once she is diagnosed with cancer. She keeps the character’s inner core of steel (“cancer is not a gift!”) while revealing layers of fear and vulnerability. In addition, Sanfacon and Douglass have an easy chemistry in their later scenes, whether they are joking about their day or having about a poignant discussion about the practical details of disease.

Thiessen’s works are frequently produced in Canada and have won many prestigious prizes, including the Governor General’s Literary Award, Canada’s highest honor for playwriting (for Einstein’s Gift in 2003). Apple (winner of the 2002 Elizabeth Sterling Haynes Award for Outstanding New Play) suggests that he deserves the accolades.

The play may be a little implausible at times, but its insightful and often lyric exploration of relationships lifts it above its minor flaws, while the Phoenix Stage Artists and Company One’s straightforward, well-acted presentation elevates this moving script even higher.

Chinese writer Liao Yiwu

On his way to the Cologne literature festival earlier this week, dissident Chinese writer Liao Yiwu was escorted off the plane by the Chinese authorities and handed over to the police for interrogation. He has sent an open letter to the world, available in English, asking for help.

I became acquainted with the writings of Liao Yiwu with the publication of the English translation of The Corpse Walker in 2008, an expansive volume of oral history, banned by the Chinese authorities in 2002, that offers a view of five decades of China’s history from the colorful perspective of the marginal and forgotten, the derided and the outmoded. Yiwu’s collection of 60 interviews was trimmed down to 27 in Wen Huang’s translation. I spoke to Wen about the translation and Liao Yiuw.

I followed up in 2008 when Liao Yiuw provided me a section of a diary he was writing about living through the earthquake in Sichuan province.

Liao Yiwu provided me an update on the aftermath of the earthquake a year later and then, on the 20th anniversary of the brutal suppression of the Tiananmen student movement, he provided me excerpts from “Massacre,” an epic poem about the violence that landed the writer in jail.

He is a fine writer and a brave man.

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Abdo Khal—winner of the Arab Booker

By Bill Marx

Saudi Arabian author Abdo Khal won the $60,000 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the Arab Booker) for his novel Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles, which is also known as She Throws Sparks.

Taleb Alrefai, who served as chair for this year’s panel of judges, said, “The winning novel is a brilliant exploration of the relationship between the individual and the state. Through the eyes of its two dimensional protagonist, the book gives the reader a taste of the horrifying reality of the excessive world of the palace.”

In 2008, I spoke with journalist and novelist Jonathan Levi, who co-founded the literary magazine Granta, serving as its U.S. editor until 1987. The writer has just visited Saudi Arabia, and he spoke to dissident novelist and journalist Adbo Khal and other authors about the state of Saudi writing. Levi talks to me about Khal’s challenges and what else he learned about literary life in the country. Along with a podcast of the conversation, there’s an excerpt from a Levi essay on the trip that deals with his encounter with Abdo Khal.

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Below is an excerpt from an essay Jonathan Levi wrote after his visit to Saudi Arabia. In this section, he recalls his meeting with Abdo Khal.

At four o’clock on my last full day in Saudi Arabia, Ebtihal Mubarak [a reporter for the Arab News] and I finally sit down in the coffee shop of the Jeddah Hilton with Abdo Khal. I’ve only read Ebtihal’s quick translation of the first chapter of his novel Immorality. But looking across at him, with his high, mahogany cheekbones and Yemeni brush mustache standing out against his white thobe and ghutra, he looks a little bit like a thug who’s gone respectable. Abdo is the first writer Ebtihal has brought me who isn’t solidly middle-class.

“I was born in the south,” he tells me through Ebtihal’s translation, “a very poor farming family. “My father died. We moved to Jeddah and all I wanted to do was read romantic stories so I could get on with the girls in the neighborhood. My mother thought I was going bad, so she sent me to Riyadh. Riyadh was like Siberia—if you wanted to punish someone, you sent them to Riyadh.” Luckily, Abdo was rooming in the house of a man with a big library—Dickens, Hugo in Arabic, Mahfouz, and Darwish. Somehow, in 1976, at the age of fourteen, Abdo found Allah and became an imam. He really was a southern boy, I thought, images of child preachers out of Sinclair Lewis and Eudora Welty turning the Hijazi Mountains into the Ozarks.

“I was out in the streets preaching, ‘you’ve got to believe in jihad or you’re going to hell.’ I really believed it. I even went home and tore up all the pictures and smashed the TV.” But Abdo’s spiritual leader was someone slightly more frightening than Elmer Gantry or Jerry Falwell. Juhaiman Al Otaibi was a militant fundamentalist who, at the end of 1979, in the company of 200 followers, attacked the Grand Mosque in Mecca and took hundreds of hostages, protesting the corruption of the royal family. It took two weeks for the government to retake the holy places. 250 people died, 600 were wounded. 68 terrorists were beheaded in the aftermath. Juhaiman was one. Abdo could have been another.

“Except in 1977,” Abdo says, “some friends from the south found me. They told me, ‘we’ve got something to show you.’”

Our club sandwiches and Pepsi’s arrive. Abdo takes a mouthful of fries and waits for the waiter to move off.

“It was in Old Jeddah, an old house that had been turned into a cinema. We sat down. My friends were giggling. Then the movie came on. It was called ‘The Cow,’ and it was pure porn!”

I eat half my sandwich waiting for Ebtihal to stop laughing, uncover her face and translate.

“The next day, they took me to the U.S. Consulate and we climbed a tree outside the wall. Inside was the swimming pool and a bunch of ladies in bikinis.” One boy fell off the tree into the Consulate garden and broke his leg. All the American women gathered around him. “He got to see the Cow for free,” Abdo laughs and takes a sip of his Pepsi. “So I stopped preaching and started writing.”

“Society is suffocating,” Abdo says, as we talk about Immorality and Saudi Arabia. “People aren’t human. They walk in fear, not from the government but from everyone around them who is telling them how to live.” Life means being afraid of everyone. There is more life inside the grave than out. All tender human feelings are buried. Ebtihal nods even as she translates for me. “We all become victims,” Abdo says. “And victims are deformed, amoral characters.”

I say goodbye to Abdo. I think, maybe this guy from the south, this sometime fundamentalist, this potential pornographer, while he may lack the epic sweep of Tolstoy, has the makings of a Saudi Simenon, or at least a Jeddah James Ellroy. I promise to try to get him to the States or England to meet western writers. He says something in Arabic to Ebtihal and laughs.

“What was that?” I ask as we walk out of the lobby into the light.

“Next time,” my Bedouin Virgil says, tucking her hair securely into her hijab, “he promises to take us to see ‘The Cow.’”

Brecht At Night by Mati Unt, translated from the Estonian by Eric Dickens, Dalkey Archive Press (Baltic Literature Series), 209 pages, $13.95

Reviewed By Bill Marx

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
There will also be singing
About the dark times.

Bertolt Brecht, Svendborg Poems

But can an artist who has absorbed some of “the dark times” sing of them? Questions of political opportunism, as well as the twisted prerogatives of creative egotism, drive Estonian writer Mati Unt’s postmodern, historical novel Brecht at Night. Unt isn’t concerned about how playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht sang about the rise of Hitler and Stalin or the outbreak of World War II in Europe.

Instead, Unt examines, via an arch vaudevillesque irony, the narcissistic machinations of Brecht in the year 1940 when, fleeing Nazi Germany, he and his entourage of wife, mistresses, and children end up in Finland, the guests of playwright Hella Wuolijoki, a rich Communist sympathizer with Estonian roots. It is the portrait of the artist as a determinedly abstracted man, aside from his paranoid fear that Hitler has sent out assassins to kill him.

Unt’s Brecht is primarily concerned with making it to America, not attempting to make sense of the gathering forces of the night, which would touch on his uneasy relationship with the Soviet Union, Stalin, and Communism. The general impression left by the book is that it isn’t fear of censorship so much as a pervasive, inner decay that holds Brecht back from dealing with reality: “The worse thing for a writer is not, Brecht thinks, having to keep your mouth shut. It’s a lot worse when you have nothing to say via that mouth.”

Sadistically, Unt, a narrative kibitzer in the book, surrounds Brecht with realities that should have given the writer plenty to talk about. He provides excerpts from non-fiction accounts (newspaper articles, academic studies) of the horrendous happening in Europe, with a grim emphasis on the Soviet Union’s thuggish highjacking of Estonia. He also provides potted biographies of Brecht’s friends and lovers, showing how they were used and abused by Brecht and by history, camp followers betrayed or left on their own to survive.

All of this could have been heavy-handed—Brecht the selfish artist slapped around, over and over, in a circumscribed barrel. At his best, however, Unt brings sardonic humor to the dark proceedings, perhaps tapping on his own feelings about being an artist (playwright, novelist, director) bottled up by the Soviet Union. Unt’s Brecht chooses to see the world through Marxian rules, Hegelian hocus-pocus: “The covert theme of the book is, of course, dialectics, Brecht’s greatest love.” That streamlined notion of Brecht’s vision isn’t entirely fair, at least to his poetry, which at the time made use of ambiguity and skepticism, a satire made of mockery.

Still, the character’s intellectual triangulation amusingly seems to free him from looking too deeply at the demands of the here-and-now, aside from the sexual and secretarial demands he makes on the women in his life. (Unt draws on John Fuegi’s biography The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht, which details the author’s swinish treatment of women.) Occasionally the author tries to wake Brecht up via an impish surrealism, such as having a very un-dialectical frog pop up in his room to give him a scare.

Unt includes a memorably funny chapter about a real-life Estonian government official who served as a stooge for the Soviets named M Unt (no relation to the author). The guy counts down his acts of repression before his bosses murder him: “Lithuania has been accepted as part of the Soviet Union (3rd August). There’s still time to go before my death.”

Still, it is difficult to keep the inventive black humor coming, and by mid-point Brecht at Night increasingly shoves the title artist aside to chronicle the lethal facts of Soviet domination. The book’s imagination gives way to presentation; it suggests that Unt lost interest in drawing (and re-drawing) ironic attention to Brecht’s disinterest in reality, his obsession with bourgeois comfort during a time of chaos. If Unt had included more of the undialectical consciousness that informs the (anti)lyrics in Svendborg Poems, the book’s exploration of the amoral writer-in-exile would have been richer and more compelling. Unt has a considerable reputation as a stage artist—but there is surprisingly little dramatic conflict in the book. His Brecht devolves into a didactic puppet.

Unt’s other novels available in English, Things in the Night and Diary of a Blood Donor, tap on rich veins of fantasy (apocalyptic meltdown, vampirism) to evoke the brutal truths about the somnambulism of life under (or after) the domination of the Soviet Union. In Brecht at Night the author speaks openly and powerfully about the crimes of authoritarian barbarity, the degradation of creativity and morality, and the slippery slope of self-involvement. But one misses his customary wildness, his imaginative gusto, as he goes about it.

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The Ninth by Ferenc Barnás, translated from the Hungarian by Paul Olchváry, Northwestern University Press (Writings from an Unbound Europe), 159 pages, $16.95

Reviewed By Bill Marx

A brilliantly unconventional look at life in a small village outside of Budapest in the late 1960s, Ferenc Barnás’s marvelous novel The Ninth comes off as an inventively dour, sardonically humorous version of Huckleberry Finn, except that the book’s nine-year-old narrator can’t light out for the territories once he begins to understand the duplicities of home, society, and morality. His indigence is too overwhelming, his family situation too absurd (he has nine siblings), and the soft authoritarianism of the government too robustly restrictive.

What’s more, Barnás gives his observant child hero an additional handicap—a disability that makes it difficult for him to speak and to read. Thus, the book’s central metaphor works itself out with grim logic: in surroundings this resolutely repressive, everything of value—creativity, morality, truth, and humanity—is bottled up inside, pressurized. What sort of steam could escape the Communist stopper? The answer suggests why Barnás’s third novel, which he admits is autobiographical, takes the form it does—a child’s frank, fanciful, and anarchistic view of moral survival amid repression.

Yet Barnás doesn’t revel in the gloom, an admirable artistry of refusal that turns away from predictable opportunities for extremism to nurture an indirection and subtlety that only deepens the factual surrealism of the situation and the time. The ninth child lives in a poverty-stricken, secretive, Catholic family that scrapes along by selling rosaries and religious gewgaws condemned by the Communist government. The boy’s domestic and school life is marked by starvation, overcrowding (the ten children sleep in three beds), overwork, and abuse. His father is tyrannical and short-tempered; his mother is kind but passive. In the course of the book, the family’s exhausting focus, under the father’s stern command, is to earn enough money to move into a larger house.

Barnás conveys the environment’s barbarism through ironic humor (“One afternoon, when for some reason I wasn’t in the mood to mutilate frogs out in the yard with the others . . .”) and memories of violence that are kept offstage (“the other day our father gave us twenty lashes on our soles for being late, he used the iron’s chord but it was better than watching klaro get it . . .”). Catholicism serves as a rich satiric source of meager solace, wry hypocrisy, and amusingly secular observations, such as the peculiar but understandable satisfactions the inarticulate kid finds in serving as an altar boy: “It’s so good to see people shut their eyes while sticking their tongues above the tray! Nowhere else could I see so many different sorts of tongues; lots of them are quivering, and some are colored stranger than I ever would have thought.”

Ferenc Barnás

It is this agile emphasis on homey detail rather than trauma and despair that has led the book’s too few reviewers to dwell on Barnás’s admirable modesty and nuance. For me, The Ninth is all the more provocative because it depicts, through a nimble exploration of a child’s stream-of-consciousness, the vicissitudes of his imagination and the tee-tottering state of his soul amid the village’s sickening perfidy, corruption, and stupidity. When the kid steals money from his teacher and spends his ill-gotten gains on cakes and candies for his classmates, the idea is not to stage a pint-sized crime and punishment.

Barnás wants us to watch his narrator shape the parameters of the self he will become, dramatizing whether the child will absorb the guilt and spiritual poverty around him or become an individual by embracing the possibility of change, by speaking the self-incriminating truth. Memorably, his confession seems to burst out of him, against his will: “Everything becomes even hotter inside me as something begins surging up into my chest, something sure to gush into my mouth in no time: the saliva is already sour in my throat, as at other times. ‘It was me,’ I say.” What looks like a modest tale of growing up becomes a far more ambitious examination of the formation of an ethical consciousness, almost out of thin air, in an authoritarian state built on lies and coercion.

Barnás’s nine-year-old narrator is a brave construct, an unconsciously sophisticated consciousness that filters life’s hardships and decisions through a startling innocence, an amoral earnestness. The character’s emotional life is weirdly attenuated, his thoughts often taking on a gnomic vagueness redolent of post-modern philosophy: “It must count a lot, what we assume on account of what, and what we imagine we hear in what; at least that’s what the last month taught me.” Translator Paul Olchváry skillfully captures the novel’s fascinating blend of arch artificiality, sharp-eyed realism, and antic fantasy, all at the service of depicting the inner life of the marginal among us.

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By Gary Schwartz

Rembrandt, An elephant Inscribed Rembrandt ft. 1637 Vienna, Albertina References: Benesch 457. Bisanz-Prakken 2005, nr. 54

In June 2009 a grand conclave of Rembrandt specialists took place at a castle in Sussex. Herstmonceux was bought in 1993 by the amazing Alfred and Isabel Bader, who donated it that same year to Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario as a study center abroad. The Baders have endowed Queen’s with choice Dutch paintings from their collection and with top experts to curate them and to teach Dutch art. They have turned Queen’s into the most important academic center for the study of Dutch art in North America.

Alfred and Isabel Bader were in the front row of the two long days of the Rembrandt conclave, which they sponsored. Given the circumstances – notably that none of the more than 50 scholars in the room had at one time or other not been pilloried in print or pointedly ignored by one or more of the other participants – the atmosphere was friendly if somewhat strained. Personally, I found it difficult to join meaningfully in discussions of points about which I had written extensively and which were batted about the room in opinionizing sound bites.

One point about which I have not published until now I did try to put into play, without success. It concerns the number of drawings that are so firmly given to Rembrandt that they can serve as a basis of reference for other attributions. The concept was sensibly introduced into the literature by Peter Schatborn, the retired chief curator of prints and drawings of the Rijksmuseum. In the introduction to the exhibition catalogue Rembrandt: the master and his workshop: drawings and etchings (p. 10), held in Berlin, Amsterdam and London in 1991-92, writing of the need to separate the corn from the chaff in the attribution of drawings to Rembrandt, Schatborn wrote:

In order to accomplish this distinction, the first thing that has to be done is to establish which drawings can be regarded with some measure of certainty as the work of Rembrandt. These form the core of his oeuvre. Except for a small number of borderline cases, specialists are in broad agreement concerning this group. The autograph status of the drawings in the core group is determined by signatures and inscriptions in Rembrandt’s hand and beside that by the function of drawings as preparatory studies for autograph paintings and etchings. It is rather surprising that the group of “certain” drawings that can be formed in this way is small, in any case not much larger than about seventy drawings.

At the exhibitions, it was being said that Schatborn had drafted his list in collaboration with his colleague Martin Royalton-Kisch of the British Museum. In subsequent discussions with them, they confirmed this. From the start, I found it impossible to believe that the number of such drawings was as small as 70, and my skepticism has only grown throughout the years. Part of the research I did for my book on Rembrandt in 2006 was to keep track of drawings that I came across that matched Schatborn’s criteria. It had 125 items.

I have been waiting impatiently all this time for one of two developments to take place. Either for Schatborn and Royalton-Kisch to publish the list and let the rest of us judge it, or for one or more colleagues of theirs in the field of Rembrandt drawings to subject their statement to critical scrutiny. Since neither of these things has happened, I seized on the Herstmonceux gathering to force the issue. The following exchange took place:

Schwartz: Peter, do you still think that the core list of Rembrandt drawings is no larger than 70?

Schatborn: Yes. It may be a bit larger, say 75.

Schwartz: Have you ever published the list?

Schatborn: No.

Schwartz: Why not? Shouldn’t you and Martin back up your claims with argued information? In preparation for my book of 2006 I began assembling a list of the drawings that answer to your criteria, and there were 125 items on it.

Schatborn: If you show me your list I will cut it down to 75.

If anyone else in the hall shared my impression that this was a trifle arrogant, they kept it to themselves. As I sat down, Holm Bevers of the Berlin print room, the third member of the troika of main Rembrandt drawings specialists, leaned over and said to me helpfully, “Anyone can make that list. Just go through Benesch [that is, Otto Benesch’s six-volume catalogue of the drawings of Rembrandt] and you can make it by yourself.”

Well, I have now done so, with consultation of more authorities than Benesch alone. And I am showing it not only to Peter Schatborn, but to all interested parties.

The upshot is this. There are 20 drawings that are signed by Rembrandt and another 24 with inscriptions by him. No doubt is possible concerning five drawings that were indented for transfer to the etching plate. That makes 49. For the one painting and one etching for which we have the largest number of related drawings, St. John the Baptist preaching and The hundred-guilder print, 18 sheets are known. That leaves room for three (or eight, if you are being expansive) more drawings on the Schatborn-Royalton-Kisch core list.

Rembrandt, Seated old man, ca. 1630

On my list there are however not three or eight above those 67 but 101 more drawings that are related so closely to autograph paintings and drawings by Rembrandt that they serve the purposes of a core list. In order to submit them to your judgment, I have taken the trouble to make scans of all the drawings, paintings and etchings concerned and to add them as adjuncts to the Schwartzlist.

Not all the relations are visible in this form. However, each and every one of these relations has been broached by respected specialists and nearly all have been confirmed by others. To my knowledge, the authenticity of not one of the 168 sheets has ever been doubted in print by Schatborn, Royalton-Kisch or Bevers.

There is only one explanation I can imagine for the small number of drawings on the Schatborn list. That is, that he takes the notion “preparatory drawing” excessively literally, limiting it to drawings that are exactly equivalent to a composition or detail in an autograph painting or etching and that can be dated before the painting or etching. I have employed a more general criterion for about half of the 101 sheets referred to above. That is, any drawing whose attribution is generally accepted that is undeniably related to an autograph painting or etching. On the nature of such drawings we have the testimony of Arnold Houbraken (vol. 1, 1718, p. 257), who wrote:

With regard to art he was rich with ideas, so that you frequently see him making a great number of different sketches of one and the same object, full also of changes in the figures and poses as well as the arrangement of the clothing; for which he is to be praised above all others – especially above those who employ such figures and clothing in their work as if they were twins.

This picture is reflected perfectly in the examples on my core list. It is a rich compendium of drawings, covering the full range of Rembrandt’s work from early to late, from the most informal to the most elaborate modes, from renditions that show variants of the finally chosen solution to some that correspond like twins, in all the kinds of subjects that Rembrandt created. The list offers wide opportunity for the responsible attribution to Rembrandt of comparable drawings that are not directly related to known paintings and etchings. I fail to see why, given the possibility to construct a list of this kind, one should prefer to work with a far more restricted list of core drawings that offers so many fewer possibilities for comparison with other drawings. A list of the kind of which Houbraken so rightly disapproves.

For the sake of clarity and to keep the website pages within bounds, I have divided the list into nine sections, to which I provide links below:

1. Signed drawings: 20
2.With inscriptions in Rembrandt’s hand other than a signature: 24 drawings
3. Indented for transfer to the plate: 5 drawings, used for 5 etchings
4. Related to the compositions of history paintings: 20 drawings related to 16 extant paintings and 2 that are lost but known through prints
5. Related to details of history paintings: 22 drawings related to 10 paintings
6. Related to painted portraits or figures: 10 drawings related to 8 paintings
7. Related to etched compositions: 32 drawings related to 20 etchings
8. Related to portrait, figure and genre etchings: 22 drawings related to 19 etchings
9. Related to landscapes: 13 drawings related to 1 painting and 8 etchings

In all, the nine sections contain 168 drawings, a list that can surely be added to. The 119 drawings that are included because of their relation to a painting or etching (other than the five indented ones) are connected to 37 paintings and 47 etchings.

For each drawing, I provide an abbreviated reference to Otto Benesch’s catalogue and with few exceptions to a standard authority later than Benesch. The references are given in full below.

The issue involved is more important than merely a question of numbers. It has far-going consequences for our reconstruction of Rembrandt’s working method and our understanding of his art. These consequences will be addressed in Schwartzlist 302. It will appear in time for the next get-together of Rembrandt specialists, at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles on February 2nd, at which the opening talk is: Peter Schatborn, “The core group of Rembrandt drawings.” There I hope to spark a more satisfying discussion of this matter than that at Herstmonceux. Unless, of course, Peter Schatborn succeeds to the contentment of the field to slash my list back down to 75.

Please address reactions to Gary.Schwartz@xs4all.nl

References in sections 1-9 of the Core list of Rembrandt drawings

Ackley et al. 1989
Clifford Ackley et al., exhib. cat. From Michelangelo to Rembrandt: master drawings from the Teyler Museum, New York (Pierpont Morgan Library) 1989

Ackley 2003
Clifford S. Ackley, exhib. cat. Rembrandt’s journey: painter, draughtsman, etcher, Boston (Museum of Fine Arts) 2003

Bomford et al. 2006
David Bomford et al., Art in the making: Rembrandt, London (National Gallery Company) 2006

Bakker 1998
Boudewijn Bakker et al., Landscapes of Rembrandt: his favourite walks, Bussum (Thoth Publishers), Amsterdam (Gemeentearchief Amsterdam) and Paris (Fondation Custodia) 1998

Benesch
Otto Benesch, edited by Eva Benesch, The drawings of Rembrandt, 6 vols., London (Phaidon) 1973

Bevers et al. 1991
Holm Bevers et al., exhib. cat. Rembrandt: the master & his workshop: drawings & etchings, Berlin (Altes Museum), Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) and London (National Gallery) 1991

Bevers 2006
Holm Bevers, Rembrandt: die Zeichnungen im Berliner Kupferstichkabinett: kritischer Katalog, Berlin (Kupferstichkabinett Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) 2006

Bisanz-Prakken 2004
Klaus Albrecht Schröder and Marian Bisanz-Prakken, exhib. cat. Rembrandt, Vienna (Albertina) 2004

Blankert 1997
Albert Blankert, exhib. cat. Rembrandt: a genius and his impact, Melbourne (National Gallery of Victoria), Sydney (Art Exhibitions Australia) and Zwolle (Waanders Publishers) 1997

A corpus of Rembrandt paintings
J. Bruyn et al., A corpus of Rembrandt paintings, 4 vols. to date, first three vols. published by Kluwer under imprint Martinus Nijhoff, Dordrecht 1982, 1986 and 1989; vol. 4, by Ernst van de Wetering, was published by Springer Verlag, Berlin 2005

Giltaij 1988
Jeroen Giltaij, De tekeningen van Rembrandt en zijn zijn school in het Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam (Museum Boymans-van Beuningen) 1988

Hinterding 2008
Eric Hinterding, Rembrandt etchings from the Frits Lugt Collection, 2 vols., Bussum (Thoth Publishers) and Paris (Fondation Custodia ) 2008

Lammertse and van der Veen 2006, pp. 52-53
Friso Lammertse and Jaap van der Veen, Uylenburgh & son: art and commerce from Rembrandt to De Lairesse, 1625-1675, Zwolle (Waanders) and Amsterdam (Rembrandt House Museum) 2006

Logan 1995
Carolyn Logan, entries on drawings in exhib. cat. Rembrandt/ not Rembrandt in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: aspects of connoisseurship, vol. 2: Paintings, drawings and prints: art-historical perspectives, New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 1995

Magnusson 1992
Börje Magnusson, “Rembrandts teckningar / Rembrandt’s drawings,” in exhib. cat. Rembrandt och hans tid: människan i centrum / Rembrandt and his age: focus on man, Stockholm (Nationalmuseum) 1992

Peck 2003
Sheldon Peck, Rembrandt drawings: twenty-five years in the Peck collection, Boston 2003

Röver-Kann 2000
Anne Röver-Kann, exhib. cat. Rembrandt, oder nicht? Zeichnungen von Rembrandt und seinem Kreis aus den Hamburger und Bremer Kupferstichkabinetten, Bremen (Kunsthalle Bremen) 2000

Royalton-Kisch 1992
Martin Royalton-Kisch, Drawings by Rembrandt and his circle in the British Museum, London (British Museum Press) 1992

Schwartz 2006
Gary Schwartz, The Rembrandt book, Brussels (Mercatorfonds) 2006

Schwartz 2007
Gary Schwartz, “Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, Simeon with the Christ child in his arms, with Mary and Joseph,” in: In arte venustas: studies on drawings in honour of Teréz Gerszi, presented on her eightieth birthday, Budapest (Szépmüvészeti Múzeum) 2007, pp. 170-72

Scrase 1996
David Scrase, Rembrandt and the nude: prints by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), online catalogue of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Starcky 1988
Emanuel Starcky, exhib. cat. Rembrandt et son école, dessins du Musée du Louvre, Paris (Réunion des musées nationaux) 1988

Tümpel 2003
Christian Tümpel, “Jesus und die Ehebrecherin und Rembrandts Notizen auf Zeichnungen mit Historien,” in Thea Vignau-Wilberg, ed., Rembrandt-Zeichnungen in München / The Munich Rembrandt drawings: Beiträge zur Ausstellung Rembrandt auf Papier…, Munich (Graphische Sammlung München) 2003, pp. 161-75

Vignau-Wilberg 2001
Thea Vignau-Wilberg, exhib. cat. Rembrandt auf Papier: Werk und Wirkung, Munich (Hirmer) 2001

Van de Wetering and Schnackenburg 2001
Ernst van de Wetering and Bernhard Schnackenburg, exhib. cat. The mystery of the young Rembrandt, Kassel (Staatliche Museen Kassel) and Amsterdam (Museum het Rembrandthuis) 2001

De Winkel 2006
Marieke de Winkel, Fashion and fancy: dress and meaning in Rembrandt’s paintings, Amsterdam (Amsterdam University Press) 2006

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Gary Schwartz was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1940. In 1965 he came to the Netherlands with a graduate fellowship in art history and stayed. He has been active as a translator, editor and publisher; teacher, lecturer and writer; and as the founder of CODART, an international network organization for curators of Dutch and Flemish art.

As an art historian, he is best known for his books on Rembrandt: Rembrandt: all the etchings in true size (1977), Rembrandt, his life, his paintings: a new biography (1984) and The Rembrandt Book (2006). His Internet column, now called the Schwartzlist, appeared every other week from September 1996 to April 2007 and has been appearing since then irregularly. His most recent book on Rembrandt is one of the six titles nominated for the Banister Fletcher Award for the most deserving book on art or architecture of that year.

In November 2009 Schwartz was awarded the coveted tri-annual Prize for the Humanities by the Prince Bernhard Cultural Foundation of Amsterdam.

© Gary Schwartz 2009.
Reactions to Gary.Schwartz@xs4all.nl.

For those interested interested in the work and lives of classical musicians, or if you teach feature writing, magazine writing, cultural reporting or non-fiction narrative, the profiles in “Music Talks” make a perfect holiday gift or useful addition to the classroom.

It is a volume of 4000 word-and-under profiles of celebrated artists by resident Culture Vulture Helen Epstein. The line-up includes such stars as Vladimir Horowitz, Leonard Bernstein, violin teacher Dorothy DeLay, James Galway, and Yo-Yo Ma. Many of these interviews appeared in the “Sunday New York Times” or other national publications.

Jonathan Baldo of the Eastman Music School has been using these pieces for 20 years and persuaded Helen to get the book back in print. Luckily the Authors Guild Back-in-Print program made that possible. David Hajdu at Columbia and Megan Marshall at Emerson are among the professors who find them helpful to students.

The new edition is available online and at music outlets like the shop at Symphony Hall in Boston. Order through the link below to Amazon and theartsfuse receives a (small) percentage of the sale.

By Bill Marx

The time has come for a brilliant collection of stories, written in the 1920s, about the Soviet future.

Some of my favorite books from around the world this year raise the thorny issue of the relationship between literature new and the old. The critical and commercial reception of a translation in English often depends on the quality of the translation. Thus the reputation of many works of international literature has been hampered by ham-fisted or inexpert debuts into English, an issue compounded by the corruption of texts because of political or social censorship.

Ironically, when superior, unexcised translations appear later they make surprisingly little impact, as if art was simply a matter of timing. American publishing puts a discouraging spin on Ezra Pound’s much-quoted adage: here literature turns out to be yesterday’s news that stays yesterday.

For example, how should we evaluate Robert Chandler’s compelling rendition of an unbowdlerized edition of Andrei Platonov’s masterpiece about Soviet authoritarianism “The Foundation Pit”? Is this a new book? Or, after two earlier versions, is this volume mainly of interest to scholars?

Is this translation necessary?

The flip side of the translation question touches on the influence of economics. How many versions of Franz Kafka in English we need? Oxford University Press has just released new versions of “The Castle” (translated by Anthea Bell) and “The Metamorphosis and Other Stories” (translated by Joyce Crick). Both read well, but are they really necessary? Shrinking column inches for book reviews in newspapers and magazines means that there will be few (if any) meaningful critical comparisons among competing versions.

This preamble explains the presence of “old” new volumes on my holiday list.

Please keep in mind that these are rough times for publishers, especially small presses specializing in challenging books in translation, which is why I have done my best to choose volumes from presses located some distance from the mainstream.

At this point, placing books on your gift-giving list becomes an act of cultural investment, along with the considerable readerly playbacks of stuffing your stockings with international fiction and non-fiction. Each year the paradox grows increasingly absurd: cultural pressures mount on American publishing to shed its provincialism, yet the number of books translated into English remains relatively small.

Fiction:

1) Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Translated by Joanne Turnbull. (NYRB Classics) A Russian writer whose morbidly satiric imagination forms the wild (missing) link between the futuristic dream tales of Edgar Allan Poe and the postwar scientific nightmares of Stanislaw Lem. Little of Krzhizhanovsky’s work was published during his lifetime because it was simply too bizarre (and politically incorrect) for the Russia of the 1920s. I think we are more than ready for him now – an impish master of the fatalistically fantastic.

2) Your Face Tomorrow Volume Three: Poison, Shadow and Farewell by Javier Marías. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. (New Directions) The final installment in Marías’s super spy novel extraordinaire, a final playing out, to the point of demonic exhaustion, of the last century’s obsession with double agents, secret codes, voyeurism, and betrayal. An epic dramatization of backstabbing on all levels – from the psychological to the metaphysical – comes to a fascinating if complicated end.

3) The End of Everything by David Bergelson. Translated by Joseph Sherman. (Yale University Press) First published in 1913, Bergelson’s prophetic novel makes use of a surprisingly nervy minimalism to tell the tale of a beautiful woman from a privileged background whose life is shattered by a marriage of convenience – a searching diagnosis of the anxious hollowness at the center of Jewish life during the turn-of-the-century.

4) Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto. Translated by David Slavitt. (Harvard University Press) An at times intentionally zany new version of one of the literary high points of the Italian Renaissance, an epic crowded with jousting men and monsters that influenced Spencer’s “Faerie Queen,” that Shakespeare lifted a plot from, and that Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges admired. Slavitt’s spiffy translation entertainingly reinvigorates the melodramatic, satiric, battle-heavy antics of Ariosto’s prolix fantasy. Orlando’s impossible passion for the pagan princess Angelica is conveyed through playful iambic pentameter and rhyme:

A wonderful horse, but a horse is a horse and it’s not
a hippogryph. Still, in a joust or fight
his courage and strength could never be forgot.

I await Terry Gilliam’s movie version.

5) The Salt Smugglers by Gerard de Nerval. Translated by Richard Sieburth. (Archipelago Books) This volume is the rib-tickling oddity of the year: the first translation into English of an experimental novel that, back in 1850, appeared in a French newspaper masquerading as reportage. The powers-that-be had passed a law essentially banning serial novels; Nerval engagingly took up the challenge and concocted this deliciously subversive piece of “journalism,” a humdinger of humbug that scrambles fact and imagination amid a swashbuckling quest for an elusive book. Of course, Nerval deftly lampoons notions of authority, fiction, and censorship along the way.

6) The Golden Calf by Ilya Ilf & Evgeny Petrov. Translated by Konstantin Gurevich and Helen Anderson. (Open Letter) A satire of political and economic corruption in 1920s Russia whose delicious blend of the daffy and the acidic resonates today. A larger-than-life con man, Ostrap Bender, leads a crew of scallywags on a surreal rampage of chicanery. This is the first complete version in English of a 1931 novel whose charmingly jaundiced view of avariciousness is worthy of David Mamet and Ben Jonson.

Non-Fiction:

1) Dostoevsky: A Writer in his Time by Joseph Frank. Edited by Mary Petrusewicz. (Princeton University Press) Not a translation but so what? Frank’s monumental five-volume study of Dostoevsky deserves to be read, if only as an inspiring lesson about how much more thrilling a focus on ideas can be than the standard biography’s obsession with the connections between creativity and the subject’s personal life. The series has been condensed with incisive care and respect, giving those with limited time (and budget) a chance to engage with a revelatory vision of the Russian writer’s enduring greatness.

2) Knut Hamsun: Dreamer and Dissenter by Ingar Sletten Kolloen. Translated by Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik. (Yale University Press) This biography doesn’t have the intellectual heft of Frank’s but its tortured subject, Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, offers a life of Dostoevskian complexity, a manic mix of genius and moral blindness. A celebrated writer (his fans included Isaac Bashevis Singer and Ernest Hemingway) who won the1920 Nobel Prize for Literature, Hamsun collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation of Norway. He never renounced his wartime actions, including a much-publicized visit with Adolf Hitler. “If there is one thing I have learned in this work,” writes Kolloen in the book’s Preface, “it is the following: each of us contains more fateful contradictions than we can ever fathom.”

3) Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings by Natsume Sōseki. Translated by Michael K. Bourdaghs, Atsuko Ueda, and Joseph A. Murphy. (Columbia University Press) The nerdiest pick on my list, but for fans of one of Japan’s greatest novelists (“Kokoro,” “Kusamakura”) this volume of his literary criticism offers insights into his fiction as well as some prescient ideas about realism and multiculturalism. Much of the volume is made up of excerpts from Sōseki’s science-minded “Theory of Literature” – some of which are dated and dense. I suggest reading the informative introduction and skipping around until you hit pay dirt. For example, this interesting passage on the value of individuality from Sōseki’s essay “Philosophical Foundations of the Literary Arts”:

It is only when one has an ideal that is new, profound, or broad, only when one tries to realize that ideal in the world but finds the world foolishly prevents this – only then does technique become truly useful to the person in question. When the world prevents us from developing our ideal in real life, then the only avenue remaining is to use technique to realize that ideal in the form of a literary work.

4) Woman from Shanghai by Xianhui Yang. Translated by Wen Huang. (Pantheon) An oddly titled but fascinating book whose fables of humanity shed gruesome light on the horror of the Chinese gulags. Author Xianhui Yang spent three years talking to survivors of a prison camp that had been set up in Jiabiangou (China’s northwestern desert region) during the late 1950’s. Over three thousand Chinese citizens, condemned as “rightists” by the Communist Party, were sent for “reeducation” in the compound, which still cannot be spoken about without fear in the author’s homeland. To escape censorship, the interviews were published as works of fiction in China, though they are based on fact.

5) On the Life and Death of Languages by Claude Hagège. Translated by Jody Gladding. (Yale University Press) A polemic by a noted French linguist alarmed at the accelerating death rate for languages around the world – he claims that at the current pace half of the world’s five thousand languages will fade away within the next century. The book proffers a passionate and often eloquent argument against efforts to establish English as a single world language: “To defend our languages and their diversity, especially against the domination of a single language, is to do more than just defend our cultures. It is to defend our life.”

6) Towers of Stone: The Battle of Wills in Chechnya by Wojciech Jagielski. Translated by Soren A. Gauger. (Seven Stories Press) This riveting work of reportage by an award-winning Polish journalist supplies an overview – flinty, empathetic, and complex – of decades of warfare in Chechnya. In 2008 the volume’s memorable vision of violence as Sisyphean absurdity won the international Literatura Frontera Award in Italy.

Much new material since the October update for those with an interest in international literature.

Justine Hardy: Kashmir has been her beat for 20 years.

My latest podcast features an interview with journalist and author Justine Hardy, whose latest book (published by the Free Press), “In the Valley of Mist: One Family in a Changing World,” continues her exploration of life in Kashmir, a perspective that makes a determined effort to look beyond the stereotypes of crisis. I was particularly curious about what Hardy has learned covering the volatile region as a journalist and novelist. What does fiction do that non-fiction can’t?

Also in World Books: a thoughtful piece by translator and critic Tess Lewis that goes beyond the whiffs of information whipped up at a moment’s notice by the American media about the books of Herta Müller, who recently won the Nobel Prize for literature.

And I posted an interview with a leading Cuban writer about one of my favorite books in translation this year. I questioned, via email, writer José Manuel Prieto about the English translation of the late Guillermo Rosales’s “The Halfway House,” a powerful novel about exile, revolution, and mental illness.

Coming up on World Books: An extensive piece by Helen Epstein that examines the recent publication and translation (ninety years after it was begun) of C. G. Jung’s confessional meditation “The Red Book.” According to the volume’s editor and co-translator Sonu Shamdasani, “The Red Book” stands in a select company of books that exerted an enormous influence on social and intellectual history even while it was unpublished.

What is a Judicial Review? It is a fresh approach to creating a conversational, critical space about the arts. The aim is to combine editorial integrity with the community-making power of interactivity. This is our first session.

• Review by Ian Thal
• Review by Timothy Longman
• Review by Peter Cohen
• Artist response by Shawn LaCount
• Summary by Bill Marx

As coverage of the arts in the conventional, mainstream media wanes, critical discussion of the arts online has settled into two extremes: there’s the corporate dream of an omnipotent “Google” reviewer for all and the chaos of opinions fired off in individual blogs of varying quality and intellectual integrity.

My aim with the Judicial Review, of which there will be one a month in the coming year, is to fashion a mid-way between these two unsatisfying polarities — to create a flexible place where professionals and nonprofessionals, artists and amateurs can exchange views and judgments about the arts. This will serve as a model for a civil conversational setting that will invite independent discussion as well as encourage participation in the arts.

First on the docket for Judicial Review: John ADEkoje (Samuel Mizinga), and the cast of The Overwhelming

The inspiration for the Judicial Review is the U.S. Supreme Court. Arts events will be evaluated by local panels of “judges” who will post majority and dissenting opinions in the form of written reviews or via video- or podcasts. The panel will be made up of a combination of professional critics and non-professional observers.

Our goal is to introduce a supervised space for educational, passionate, and incisive conversation about the arts that draws on the strengths of various levels of expertise. By doing so, it is hoped that the judges will learn from each other as well as offer a variety of perspectives that will invite responses that will deepen readers understanding of the arts and the craft of criticism.

In any trial there is a place for a “Friend of the Court” brief. The Judicial Review will include a space for the artists themselves to have their say, to contribute to the respectful exchange. The arts organization under review will be invited to file opinions.

This idea is my response to the considerable challenges and opportunities that the web poses for criticism of the arts, reflecting my belief, after 30 years of writing and reading arts criticism, that a review’s verdict, while essential, is not its most important value. Criticism is at its most vital when it fosters spirited dialogue, when critics help us take the arts seriously by connecting creativity with our thinking and feeling selves.

For that kind of connection to thrive on the web the emphasis must be placed on the value of the collective give-and-take, on generating information and curiosity, on stimulating the slip and slide of reasons and evaluations. We have much to learn from each other. I invite those who would like to take part in this experiment as “judges” to email theartsfuse (staff@theartsfuse.com). I would also like reactions to the idea, suggestions for improvement, directions to take, etc.

Below I summarize the majority opinion of the three judges. Company One director Shawn LaCount then contributes a “Friend of the Court” brief.

— Bill Marx, Editor

==================================================================

The Overwhelming by J. T. Rogers. Directed by Shawn LaCount. Presented by Company One at the Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, through November 21, 2009.

Cedric Lilly (Joseph Gasana),
Doug Bowen-Flynn (Jack Exley) in The Overwhelming

Majority Opinion:

The bottom line decisions of the three judges are pretty much the same: each felt that the production was worth seeing. Company One was praised for staging a script that deals with an international issue of moral and political importance.

Because it leans heavily on the tired notion of Americans as myopic innocents in a strange land (Rwanda in 1994), J. T. Rogers’s play ended up disappointing performer Ian Thal and playwright Peter Cohen. The dramatic set-up didn’t bother Timothy Longman, the Director of the New African Studies Center at Boston University, who was more disturbed that the script reinforces, rather than undercuts, clichés about Rwanda.

Dissenting Opinion: None really, though Peter Cohen strikes the harshest note regarding the Company One performers. He believes they are pitched at too high a decibel level.

Judge # 1

Ian Thal

Any contemporary play that depicts Westerners abroad in the midst of what is euphemistically called a “human rights catastrophe” draws comparisons to Tony Kushner’s “Homebody/Kabul.” Whether or not the latter served as a model, J.T. Rogers’ “The Overwhelming” explores the weeks leading up to the 1994 genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsis through the eyes of visitors from America. In this case, the innocents abroad are the family of Jack Exley (Doug Bowen-Flynn), an academic attempting to track down a Tutsi Doctor and former college roommate played by Cedric Lilly.

To Rogers’s credit, the protagonists encounter a supporting cast of Rwandans, expatriates, and diplomatic workers who pursue their own agendas and seize their own opportunities in a morally bewildering setting. These characters attempt to determine what the Exleys know, what they want the Exleys to know, what the Exleys believe, and what they want to Exleys to believe. These insiders act at cross-purposes to one another to enlist, distract, or shape the perceptions of the outsiders.

Rogers, however, fails to meet Kushner’s challenge: the play is undermined by the author’s reliance on the cliché of naive Americans bumbling far from home. Where Kushner’s Ceiling family is made up of memorable characters, Rogers’ Exley family are barely even stock: back in 1994 the script’s protagonist, a political scientist specializing in international relations and grassroots activism, would not be so foolish as to believe that UN peacekeepers would take action against human rights abuses. For two years running UN troops had already been passively witnessing ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. That Jack studies grass-roots activism yet praises his activist friend to a government official of a rival ethnic group is a ludicrous plot device: Rogers telegraphs to the audience not just the identity of killer and victim, but how the killer will be led to his victim.

Rogers wants it both ways: Jack’s supposed to be a nondescript everyman who serves as an audience surrogate yet also have the intellectual chops to turn up in the wrong place at the wrong time for the sake of a research project. (Rogers could have worked harder to make Jack sound more like a professor who was making a last ditch effort to land tenure.) Actor Bowen-Flynn is unfairly left in the position of having to pump life into a hero who is little more than a container for lazy plot devices.

The other members of the family fare slightly better because their naiveté comes by virtue of being along for the ride. Jack’s wife, Linda (Lyndsay Allyn Cox), is written as a narcissistic writer of creative-nonfiction, a stereotypical self-absorbed idealist blind to the genocidal rhetoric of anyone who promises her a look at The Truth. Ironically, the fact that she clings to her African-American identity blinds her to the encroaching menace. Jack’s teenage son, Geoffrey (Gabe Goodman) at least makes no pretense of understanding Rwanda and is thus the first to grasp what is happening.

Richer opportunities for the actors are found in the supporting cast: the nimble Tory Bullock, who plays Gerard, the porter whom Geofrey befriends, makes good use of the role’s possibilities for physical comedy. Cedric Lilly’s portrayal of the missing activist-doctor embraces both comedic subterfuge and the tragedy of the difficult decisions that have to be made in wartime. Mason Sand and Peter Brown (each in two roles) play a range of foreigners who see the precedents or harbingers of the oncoming genocide but because of world weariness, lack of actionable intelligence, or realpolitik savvy are unable to avert history. Because of Jack and Linda’s ignorance, these telling signs of the time and place are left addressing no one but the audience.

Director Shawn LaCount and stage manager Jillian Levine do an admirable job of keeping “The Overwhelming” running along at a fast pace and, despite the play’s considerable flaws, focused on the important themes that Rogers seeks to explore.

Ian Thal is a mime, commedia dell’arte actor, puppeteer, poet, playwright and teacher in Somerville, MA. His play, “Total War,” holds the dubious distinction of attracting protests despite never having a production.

Judge # 2

Timothy Longman

When I first traveled to Rwanda in 1992, the country was largely unknown in the United States. “Rwanda,” several people asked me before I left for a year of research in the country, “Isn’t that a woman’s name?” Even in the immediate aftermath of the 1994 genocide, the country’s main claim to fame remained Dian Fossey and the movie “Gorillas in the Mist.” For the first several years, when I gave a public lecture about what happened in Rwanda, I was inevitably asked, “What about the gorillas?”

The terrible violence that swept Rwanda in 1994, killing as many as 800,000 people, ultimately caught the attention of the international community. While Burundi’s civil war was longer and Congo’s wars have killed more people, Rwanda has become the rare African tragedy that has garnered widespread notice in the West. A morbid fascination with the intimate nature of Rwanda’s violence has inspired a series of best-selling books, movies, and plays that have elevated the Rwandan genocide to iconic status. The name “Rwanda” has become shorthand for brutal, incomprehensible slaughter.

“The Overwhelming,” currently in a gripping and well-acted production by Company One, represents the most successful play to date about the Rwandan genocide, having been staged at the National Theater in London, the Roundabout in New York, and the Next Theatre in Chicago. The story centers on a naïve and idealistic academic, Jack Exley, who travels to Rwanda with his family in early 1994 to research a book on grassroots activism. Having organized the trip at the last minute at the invitation of an old Rwandan friend, Jack is ill informed and ill prepared for life in a country in the midst of civil war and political transition. Jack, his wife, Linda, and son, Geoffrey, develop friendships with several Rwandans. But none of their new friends are fully truthful, and they all seem to be involving the Exley family in secretive plans.

While “The Overwhelming” takes place in a context of spreading violence, the play itself is a mystery and psychological thriller. Set in the months just prior to the genocide, the play focuses on the mounting tensions in the country and the confusion of outsiders seeking to understand a complex and deteriorating situation. The play poses a series of moral questions. How would you react if confronted with violence? What would you sacrifice to save the life of a friend? Would you have the courage to do what is right when confronted with a life and death situation? How would you even know which choices are right?

Fedna Jacquet (Emiritha),
Gabe Goodman (Geoffery Exley) in The Overwhelming

As a moral parable about the naiveté of foreigners and the ambiguous line between right and wrong, the play’s setting in Rwanda is almost incidental to the story. Yet the fact that the end of the story is known, that the viewers know in advance that one group represented in the play is going to commit genocide against the other, undermines the plays intended mystery. Since we are already predisposed to believe that the Hutu in the play are evil and the Tutsi are victims, the audience is not drawn directly into the moral ambiguity but instead watches from a distance to see if and when the American characters will clue into the truth of the situation.

The final revelation that the Tutsi characters may not be entirely blameless serves as more of a distraction than a complication, since it cannot justify the attempt to annihilate all Tutsi from the face of the earth, as the Hutu Power militias ultimately sought to do.

The danger with fictionalized accounts of this sort is that the audience often focuses less on their artistic truths than on the window that they supposedly provide to an unfamiliar culture. While most have now heard of the Rwandan genocide, many people know only the vaguest details. As an audience talk-back following a recent Company One production demonstrated, many audience members turn to the play not only for inspiration but also for information. The idea that the play has a documentary authenticity is promoted by liner notes and press coverage touting the playwright J.T. Rogers’s research on the topic and travels to Rwanda and the real-life moral crisis he encountered in his own dealings with Rwandan consultants.

Unfortunately, the portrayal of Rwanda in “The Overwhelming” is inaccurate on a number of points. The play nicely captures the reticence of Rwandans, who are generally parsimonious with the truth in order to protect themselves. But Rwandans are also notoriously self possessed, keeping their feelings and true thoughts tightly bottled up. The displays of sharp temper and overt emotion at various points in the play do not ring true.

The factual details about events are also mistaken on several key points. The period in which the play is set was a time of sharply rising ethnic tensions, but there was very little violence, outside a few high-profile assassinations. The idea portrayed in the play that ethnic massacres were gradually spreading seems to suggest a much more random form of violence than the well-planned genocide a few months later actually represented.

Certain decisions in this production tend to emphasize the degree to which Rwanda is more of a symbol than an actual setting for the play. The decision to dress Rwandan actors in distinctly West African garb (a Nigerian Agbada and Ghanian Kente cloth) is jarring to anyone familiar with East Africa, as is the comical North African servant outfit worn by the Exley’s household worker.

These criticisms aside, I quite enjoyed Company One’s production. The story is compelling and the acting quite strong. As an evening of provocative and entertaining theater, I would highly recommend “The Overwhelming.” As a window into understanding Rwanda and its genocide, however, other more accurate sources are available. This play unfortunately does not push beyond the iconic status of Rwanda’s tragedy.

Timothy Longman is director of the African Studies Center at Boston University. He has traveled and researched extensively in Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa. He lived in Rwanda in 1992-93, conducting research for his dissertation, and he returned to Rwanda in 1995 to direct the Human Rights Watch field office. His book, “Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda,” was recently published by Cambridge University Press. He is currently completing the book “Memory, Justice, and Power in Post-Genocide Rwanda,” based on field research he conducted there from 2001 to 2006.

Judge # 3

Peter Cohen

I found “The Overwhelming” a difficult evening of theater that often disappoints but ends quite compellingly.

Most certainly, “The Overwhelming” is not an easy play to produce. And for that alone Company One has my respect. They could have gone for the safe bet, fare that is easy to digest; instead, the troupe chose a story about genocide, set in the African country of Rwanda in 1994.

Given the shape the world is in, at present, this play is not an unreasonable choice - just think of Darfur or Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Technically, Zimbabwe’s disintegration is not a case of genocide, but the violence that Mugabe and his clique have visited on it comes close.

Obehi Janice (Elise Kayitesi)
and Lyndsay Allyn Cox (Linda White-Keeler) in The Overwhelming

But while I understand the reason for presenting such a play, I have a problem with this particular one. The story is quite contrived; instead of vibrant, engaging dialogue you get speeches and little lectures; and instead of confrontations that reveal who the characters are, and what they struggle for, you get shouting matches. The director could have done more to stage the play in a manner to offset its shortcomings.

And yet the last scenes make up for much of that. All of a sudden you do have conflict - and a truly tragic one at that. And much of the effort that went into the play pays off. I will not reveal the play’s climax, except to say that in those final scenes we get a real sense of what happened at the time in Rwanda - how shockingly easy men (and women) lose their humanity, almost as if they had lost nothing more than an umbrella or a hat. And that what we hold to be enduring and reliable - our institutions, our values, our art - turns out to be of little more protection than a soap bubble’s skin.

The play has a quite large cast and the director, Shawn LaCount, does not always seem to know what to do with them all. But the troupe includes talented actors of African origin (and accent). In particular John Oluwole Adekoje, Tory Bullock, Chima Chikazunga and Obehi Janice - they all have cameo moments that breathe life into the play. But the flat dialogue makes it hard for everyone to shine for too long.

Finally, I wish the set-designer Sean Cote, had given more thought to the fact that the play is set in Central Africa - I missed the colors, the visual chaos of a developing country. Obviously such effects - for a small theater like Company One - are also a question of money. But not just; more could have been done, not with money, but with imagination.

So, again - if you are one of those people for whom the pleasure of going to the theater includes being challenged - go see this show. You will be rewarded with a powerful finish.

Peter Cohen studied at Princeton and Harvard. It was at Harvard, at age thirty-one, that he broke through with the non-fiction novel “The Gospel According to the Harvard Business School,” which became a bestseller. Cohen’s play with music, “A Ship to Zion,” was produced by a Kingston, Jamaica, company. It won its lead actor the Jamaican Oscar for best male actor; the original production was subsequently invited to Zurich, and to the Caracas International Theater Festival.

Some of Cohen’s plays have been produced by prominent European theaters such as: Schauspielhaus Zurich (in cooperation with Swiss National Radio); Kulturfabrik Kampnagel, Hamburg; Hackesches Hof Theater, Berlin; Theaterhaus Gessnerallee, Zurich and Theater Freiburg, Freiburg i.B., Germany.
In May 2009 a new play, “To Pay the Price,” got a full production Off Broadway; Bob Kalfin, a veteran of Broadway, directed.

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Friend of the Court brief:

Director Shawn LaCount

First, I’d like to thank all of you for your thoughtful critiques. It’s great to be part of an ongoing dialogue on theatre, and I hope we’ll have more opportunities to engage like this in the future. I will say that as a founding member of the company dedicated to “changing the face of Boston theatre,” I would love to see some of the diverse faces in the Boston theatre community participating in the discussion.

It’s no surprise that three critics with different areas of expertise found different strengths and weaknesses in Company One’s production of “The Overwhelming,” and all of you have certainly given us a lot to think about. What I found most interesting, though, are the questions of cultural sensitivity and veracity raised by all three, so I think that’s where I’ll focus for this response.

With a play like this, I think we all – cast, crew, director, audience member – have an inclination to try to provide answers: what makes a genocide or a holocaust happen? But I don’t think we’re capable of that. They continue to happen all over the world, time and time again, even though we say we’ll never let them happen again. So at some point in the rehearsal process, we decided to move away from the idea of putting an academic or historical stamp on the events. It felt condescending, in a way – as if we were taking a superior national, cultural, or racial view.

That’s not to say the show doesn’t provide answers, but I think the answers are not political. I think the answers are individual, paralleling the country’s conflict with this family’s conflict, and speaking to how we make our decisions, specifically in the face of our deepest fears. I always think the concept of “fear” makes for good drama.

Like Professor Longman, I was troubled by the idea that the audience is seeking an historical record in this production, and if I can speak for the playwright, J.T. Rogers, I don’t think his recounting of his research is intended to give the piece a documentary authority. Our approach was not to educate, but to illuminate major questions – to put the audience in the shoes of many different characters, all asking, “What would I do?” If anything, “The Overwhelming” emphasizes that the very idea of truth is always subjective, and there is no neutrality when it comes to issues of life and death. I think that’s what makes it such a good story, and one that I wanted to take part in telling.