Fun With Problems: Stories by Robert Stone, Hougton Mifflin Harcourt, 195 pages, $24

Reviewed by Harvey Blume

Though one of our prose masters, Robert Stone is less acknowledged than he ought to be. That may be because his characters repeatedly court or are caught up in dangerous situations, often pertaining to war, sexual obsession, or drugs, which may lead him to be downgraded as a genre writer.

The more likely reason for his relative obscurity is that in the United States today any but the most obviously Nobel Prize worthy writer—perhaps only Phillip Roth, since John Updike is dead—has a hard time getting full credit. Our taste tends to veer away from real writing toward colostomy bags in literary form penned by the likes of Dan Brown.

But back to Stone. Dog Soldiers (1974)—well served by the film “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” starring Nick Nolte—and Outerbridge Reach (1992) are his best novels. His memoir, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (2006), wouldn’t be a bad place to start getting to know him either since it contains many of his lifelong concerns, including Vietnam, drugs, physical-edge and psychological-edge play, ocean, irony, and varying shades of disappointment.

To give some sense of the pleasures Stone’s prose routinely delivers, I quote a sentence from Prime Green about the Adelie penguins he observed in Antarctica while serving in the U.S. navy: “They come at the persistent intruder, cackling Donald Duck-like, fowl obscenities and churning their flippers faster than the eye can see, like so many tasteful little pinball machine components. A good shot with the flipper, however, can buy them back a little respect, since they’re capable of breaking a human leg with one.”

Stone would never be drawn to the long-suffering birds ennobled by Hollywood penguin operas. It’s only the sort of gangland fowl you’d cross the street to avoid that get his attention. There is no more bird-watching in Prime Green; instead, plenty of Ken Kesey watching. Kesey’s Magic Bus, filled with Merry Pranksters “painted all colors,” came to rest, after its cross-country journey, outside Stone’s Manhattan apartment.

The name Prime Green comes from the dawns beheld in Mexico’s Manzanillo Bay by Stone, Kesey, and their crew. Such dawns, Stone writes, made “nonsense of examined life.” All caught in their “vortex” would “freeze in [their] tracks and stand to, squinting in the pain of the light, swearing, grinning. We called that light Prime Green; it was primal, primary, primo.”

The phrase “you’re on the bus or you’re off the bus” may be next to meaningless today, but those curious about what the ride might have been like will get some good clues from Stone’s prose.

Fun With Problems, Stone’s new collection of short stories— after Bear and his Daughters (1997) and Bay of Souls (2003)—wouldn’t be a bad place to start with him either. Certain things come clear about the roots of his trademark irony in the current volume. Here, for example, is Duffy, the main character of “The Archer”, as he prepares to attack his wife and her lover with, as campus legend has it, a homemade bow and arrow, while screaming: “All right, motherfuckers. Cupid is here.”

Though hell-bent on mayhem, Duffy, an artist and art historian, is not too far gone to mull over his motives. “He might have been defending his home and his wife’s heath and safety,” he reasons, half-sanely. But he “knew better in these weak piping times than to speak of honor.”

Here Stone betrays his own longing for a less weakly “piping” time, a time when honor could be invoked without embarrassment, and irony, therefore, was not such a constant and merciless commentary on our limitations.

Some stories in this collection are meant to date themselves by the prevailing intoxicants—meth, grass, alcohol, acid, freebase, crack. Dope for Stone serves much as tree rings do for a redwood fancier; they track circumstances and environment, always of historical concern to Stone. “High Wire,” for example, begins with the narrator telling us the main event of his story occurred “about midway between the death of Elvis Presley and the rise of Bill Clinton.”

Stone is attuned to the havoc latent in masculine pride and to the hostility likely to break out for no particular reason between males of our species. One timely story records the sort of fierce dementia that can lead one man to fly his plane into an IRS building, and another to shoot up guards at the Pentagon because it is an article of faith for him that 9/11 was a crock cooked up by a malevolent government.

In “The Wine-Dark Sea,” a man named Taylor exclaims rabidly, apropos 9/11: “That was faked, wasn’t it? The planes into buildings . . . “I knew it! . . . No planes whatsoever!” If Taylor read at all, his taste would run toward conspiratorial mish-mash—say Dan Brown, but more murderous.

Robert Stone: his lifelong concerns include Vietnam, drugs, and varying shades of masculine disappointment.

My favorite story in Fun With Problems is the concluding tale already mentioned, “The Archer.” Stone’s prose is unbridled here as it records what appears to be Duffy’s irresistible rush toward implosion. Years after attacking his wife, Duffy is piecing himself together but coming apart anyway, maybe faster. Arriving at Pahoochee State University on the Gulf Coast to give a lecture, he’s sickened by what he perceives as the local blend of sanctimony and ugliness:

Insolent posters were affixed to [the] suffering trunks [of trees] with cruel nails the size of industrial staples, threatening passersby with the judgment of Christ. Artificial palms stood at intervals among the others like Judas goats at a slaughterhouse to encourage and betray the doomed natural ones.

Duffy’s Pahoochee hotel room provides no relief, with water from the faucet tasting “of baitfish and the Confederate dead.” Duffy’s academic host—a Professor Rind, yet—calls to say he’d like to bring his kids up to the room since they’d enjoy the ocean view and the elevator ride. By then, though, Duffy has drunk himself past the line separating “inebriation and riot”. He says: “Maybe they’d like it if I threw them out the fucking window. How many are there?” That appalling addendum—“How many are there?”—strikes me, at least, as priceless.

Duffy, in the dining room, blows up and declares that the crab being served is nothing but “some rotten thing out of a tube. Made by people who hate us and think we’re stupid.” This outburst brings the chef roaring out of the kitchen and mortifies Rind, his family, and a hapless, young waitress. Duffy never gets to deliver his talk on “contemporary American painting, more or less, and how it got that way.” Instead he does something that neither he nor the reader would have thought possible for him, and that might be called redemptive were Stone a more explicitly religious writer.

That Stone makes this unexpected act fully credible and rewarding is one reason Fun With Problems is such a good read.

A review of Prime Green and an interview I conducted with the author for The Boston Globe can be found here.

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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Opera Boston's 'Madame White Snake': Peter Tantsits as Xu Xian and Ying Huang as Madame White Snake Photo: Clive Grainger

It has been many years since a major new opera was mounted here. But Opera Boston has done just that with its recent world premiere of “Madame White Snake” at the Cutler Majestic Theatre. This was the most demanding and expensive undertaking in the company’s history.

The work itself is based on a celebrated ancient Chinese legend that has undergone some changes over the centuries. The libretto—her first—is by Cerise Lim Jacobs, born into a Chinese family in Singapore but educated in the U.S. and now a retired lawyer in the Boston area.

The composer is Zhou Long (like Jacobs, born in 1953), who grew up in Beijing, was forced to give up the piano and drive a tractor for five years under the Cultural Revolution, and eventually came to study at Columbia University, where he earned a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in 1993 and became a U.S. citizen in 1999.

According to the legend, a white snake demon is turned by the gods into a beautiful young woman whose companion (and the opera’s narrator) is a green snake (Xiao Qing). She falls in love with a young mortal man (Xu Xian) and, violating several taboos, somehow becomes pregnant. A Buddhist abbot (Fahai) sees through her disguise, and her lover betrays her with a potion, whereupon she is turned back into a snake.

The libretto has its share of trite lines but is certainly serviceable and exhibits some appealing alliterations (“the thunder of water and war,” “the death of doubt”). A prologue and epilogue (both involving a destructive flood) frame four continuous acts that reflect the four seasons: awakening, passion, decay, and betrayal.

Zhou’s score turns out to be quite strong, moderately dissonant but also infused with the pentatonicism of traditional Chinese music. He writes effectively for the four solo vocalists and the two choruses (16 villagers, 32 spirits of drowned children). The autumn and winter sections are particularly eloquent, the former exhibiting a wonderful duet. Zhou’s 33-person orchestra contains the standard western instrumentarium. But he also includes parts for Chinese percussion, a bamboo and clay flute, and the erh-hu (a two-string, bowed spike fiddle held on the thigh).

Michael Maniaci as Xiao Qing Photo: Clive Grainger

In the title role was soprano Ying Huang, a graduate of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and a specialist in Mozart. She proved to have a lovely lyric voice, and her acting was convincing throughout. As her lover Xu Xian, Peter Tantsits, who holds degrees from Oberlin and Yale, displayed an admirable tenor. Dong-Jian Gong, with experience in both Chinese and western repertory, brought a fine bass to the role of the Abbot.

The role of Xiao Qing was entrusted to male soprano Michael Maniaci, who was trained at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and the Juilliard School, and he has embraced both standard works and premieres. The assignment of this female role to a countertenor harks back to the longstanding Chinese practice of having men play women. The prime example is the half-century career of Mei Lan-Fang (1894–1961), widely considered the 20th-century’s greatest Chinese actor, whose Beijing Opera repertory, as it happens, included the role of Madame White Snake in one of the tale’s incarnations.

The Boston Children’s Chorus (prepared by Anthony Trecek-King) and the adult villagers had quite a lot to do and did it well indeed. Gil Rose conducted the orchestra with his usual precision. Robert Woodruff, former artistic director of the American Repertory Theater, staged the production forcefully with only a modest amount of activity. David Zinn was responsible for the scenic and costume design. Mark Barton bathed the stage in varying light depending on the season, and Peter Nigrini devised the occasional videos projected on a scrim.

This co-commission will travel in October to the Beijing Music Festival, the largest music-producing organization in China, and one dedicated to fostering the works of new composers, both western and Chinese.

Children of Invention: Tze Chun

By Justin Marble

March 2–4, “Children of Invention” at the Brattle: Young filmmaker Tze Chun’s first feature was shot on location in Boston and focuses on a single mother with two small children struggling to make ends meet. When she doesn’t return home one night from her con-artist-esque job, it falls to the older brother Raymond (who fancies himself an inventor) to care for his little sister. The film has received positive buzz for both the realistic depiction of the harsh economic climate and its beautiful depiction of Boston.

March 5: “I Killed My Mother” at the MFA: Another young filmmaker, Xavier Dolan, piloted this personal film to the Cannes Film Festival when he was just 20 years old. With Dolan portraying the main character himself, the film focuses on the love/hate relationship the teenager has with his mother. The Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) presents the film as the showpiece of it’s “New Films from Quebec” festival, which lasts till the 13th.

March 13: “Prodigal Sons” at the Kendall Square Cinema with director Kimberly Reed: Shifting to documentaries but keeping the personal touch, Kimberly Reed directed “Prodigal Sons,” which centers around her relationship as a transgender woman with her younger brother Todd, a gay man, and her older brother Marc, who is found to be the grandson of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. Reed will present the film herself and answer questions on the 13th.

March 19–21: Big Top Cinema at the Brattle: The Brattle Theatre dedicates a weekend to “circus cinema,” films centered around life under the big top. Highlights include the disturbing cult classic “Freaks” on Friday, family-friendly “Pee-Wee’s Big Top” on Saturday, and Tim Burton’s underrated “Big Fish” on Sunday. As always, the theater offers discounts for the purchase of multiple tickets at once.

French-Tunisian filmmaker Abdellatif Kechiche receives an retrospective at the HFA.

March 19 Onward: Akira Kurosawa’s Centennial at the Coolidge, Brattle, and HFA: In honor of what would have been Kurosawa’s 100th birthday on March 23rd, several local theaters are reviving Kurosawa’s classics. The Coolidge will start playing “Ran” regularly on the 19th, with” Rashomon” to follow next month (if you can’t wait, the Harvard Film Archive (HFA) has a free screening of “Rashomon” on the 31st). The Brattle, meanwhile, offers the biggest tribute: starting on the 24th, it’s Kurosawa every day well into April—this month includes “Stray Dog,” “Seven Samurai,” “Ikiru,” and “Drunken Angel.”

March 26–28: Abdellatif Kechiche retrospective with appearance at the HFA: French-Tunisian filmmaker Abdellatif Kechiche accepts the McMillan-Stewart fellowship for distinguished filmmaking, and the HFA celebrates by showing three of his films along with an appearance by the filmmaker himself. Kechiche is gaining notice for his nuanced study of Arabs living in France; this is a great opportunity to catch a glimpse of a fresh face in international cinema.

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.’”

March is the month for Elder Statesmen—and drummers.

Bassist Buster Williams has played and recorded with, well, damn near everyone, and currently leads his own Something More Quartet; they’ll be coming to Scullers on March 2 at 8 p.m.

Drummer Cindy Blackman pays tribute to Tony Williams

Photo by Mandy Hall, available under a
Creative Commons Attribution license.

Drummer Cindy Blackman, who’s made several recordings over the years with Buster Williams, studied with Boston jazz legend Alan Dawson; fittingly, her latest project pays tribute to another of Dawson’s students, the late Tony Williams. Blackman brings her Another Lifetime quartet (guitarist Aurelien Budynek, keyboardist Marc Cary, and Felix Pastorius—yes, he’s Jaco’s son—on bass) to Scullers on March 4 at 8 p.m.

Over at the Lily Pad on the same night at 7:30 p.m., Peruvian drummer/percussionist Jorge Perez-Albela leads his Dream Band (with special guests including vocalist Sofia Rei Koutsovitis and guitarist Julian Lage) in a program of new compositions and arrangements.

To kick off the first Boston Jewish Music Festival, Klezmer Conservatory Band founder Hankus Netsky welcomes back original members reedman/composer/polymath Don Byron and vocalist Judy Bressler for a 30th anniversary reunion at the Berklee Performance Center on March 6 at 7:30 p.m.

The following evening, reedman and educator Paul Combs, whose long-awaited book on composer/arranger Tadd Dameron will be published later this year, brings his Dameron-inspired Pocket Big Band to the Amazing Things Arts Center in Framingham, MA, at 3 p.m.

Maybe it isn’t strictly speaking a jazz event, but when the 95-year-old bluesman (and boyhood friend of Robert Johnson) Dave “Honeyboy” Edwards comes to town, toss out the dictionary and just savor this living link to the deepest roots of jazz. He’ll share a bill with guitarist Marc Benno at the Regattabar in Cambridge, MA, on March 10 at 7:30 p.m.

Harmonica master Jean “Toots” Thielemans is joined by frequent collaborators Oscar Castro Neves, guitar, and Kenny Werner, piano, on March 12 at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. at Scullers. Expect some inspired forays into the Great Brazilian Songbook.

Meanwhile, the Acton Jazz Cafe welcomes pianist Harvey Diamond and his band (including daughter Hannah Rose) on March 12 at 9:30 p.m.

On the heels of his gospel-funk project, Piety Street, guitarist John Scofield shifts toward the acoustic side with his New Jazz Quartet (Mulgrew Miller, piano, Ben Street, bass, and Kendrick Scott, drums); they’ll be at the Regattabar on March 19–20 at 7:30 p.m.

Pianist Rebecca Cline is usually found in the thick of Latin Jazz projects like Obbini Tumbao, Enclave and Mango Blue; you can catch her in a rare trio appearance (with bassist Will Slater and drummer/percussionist Karina Colis) on March 22 at 7:30 p.m. at the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown, MA.

Sun Ra meets Stockhausen:The Respect Sextet

Photo by Ryan Gould

Anyone who puts out a CD (Sirius Respect) mingling the music of Sun Ra and Karlheinz Stockhausen is definitely onto something different; the Respect Sextet brings this inspired mash-up and more to the Lily Pad in Cambridge, MA, on March 24 at 10 p.m.

Around the corner at Ryles the same evening, World Wednesdays hosts a double CD-release party at 9 p.m for drummer Steve Langone and saxophonist/flutist Jim Repa (who play in one another’s bands).

Ageless drum master Roy Haynes

The career of Roxbury’s own Roy Haynes spans a recording debut with Luis Russell in 1945 and a guest voice-over on Grand Theft Auto IV (!) in 2008. The restless and eternally youthful drum master, whose in-the-pocket/outside-the-box propulsion has fueled the bands of Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Thelonious Monk, Eric Dolphy, Stan Getz, John Coltrane, Gary Burton, Chick Corea and Pat Metheny, will challenge his Fountain of Youth Band (Jaleel Shaw on sax, Martin Bejerano on piano, David Wong on bass) to keep up with him during a two-day stand (March 26–27 at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m) at Scullers.

Finally, on March 28, veteran drummer Joe Hunt (who played and recorded with George Russell and mentored the young John Scofield) brings the current incarnation of his Trio to the Lily Pad at 9:30 p.m.

Jean Sibelius: His Finlandia is not an outstanding achievement; but its main tune has become the virtual Finnish national anthem and is his most famous music.

The Student Symphony Orchestra of Trondheim, Norway, concluded its U.S. tour at Massachusetts Institute of Technololgy’s (MIT’s) Kresge Auditorium on February 26. Celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, the 70-member orchestra was under the leadership of Gavin David Lee, who has been in his post since 1992. The group’s repertory on this occasion came from six Norwegian, Finnish, and Russian composers—three well-known and three little-known.

The concert opened with the “Hjalarljod Overture” by Eivind Groven (1901–77). This was written in 1950 to honor the 900th anniversary of the city of Oslo and started off appropriately with loud brass and timpani. Groven was a largely self-taught musician, and this showed in the occasional awkwardness in his harmony.

Piotr Ilych Tchaikovsky (1840–93) wrote an oft-played work for cello and orchestra, the “Rococo Variations.” But his other work for cello is almost unknown, the “Pezzo Capriccioso” (Op. 62), written in one week in 1887. For this, Tabita Berglund stepped forth from the cello section with her instrument and showed herself fully capable of the work’s demands. Its title is a bit strange, since the piece is in B-minor and offers rather slow lyricism for a while, though it does become somewhat more active later on.

Norwegian composer Harald Saeverud: He wrote an intense and forceful Ballad of Revolt to protest Germany's occupation of his homeland.

The Norwegian composer Harald Saeverud (1897–1992) was solidly trained in music from his early years. His most popular piece—though unfamiliar to Westerners—is “Kjempeviseslåtten” (“Ballad of Revolt”), written in 1943 to reflect Germany’s occupation of Norway. It is an intense and forceful statement.

The most popular piece by Johan Halvorsen (1864–1935) is his short “Bojarenes Inntogsmarsj” (“Entry March of the Boyars”), written in 1895. This piece alternates between minor and major modes and contains considerable solo passages for the first clarinetist.

After intermission came the famous “Finlandia” (1900) by Jean Sibelius (1865–1957). This was the last of seven historical scenes protesting censorship from the Russian Empire, though it is almost always heard as an isolated piece. Sibelius never thought of it as an important composition, and, indeed, it is not an outstanding achievement; but its main tune has become the virtual Finnish national anthem and is his most famous music.

Composer Eivind Groven: He was a largely self-taught musician, and this showed in the occasional awkwardness in his harmony.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–75) wrote an enormous amount of music, but few realize that his output contains scores for three dozen films. The Trondheim orchestra ended its concert with seven excerpts from Shostakovich’s music for the 1955 movie “Ovod” (“The Gadfly”), based on a British historical novel by Ethel Voynich. The composer was clearly having fun here—notably in “People’s Holiday,” “Barrel Organ Waltz,” and “Galop.”

Throughout the evening, the student musicians played with obvious skill, though—as often happens with student groups—they rarely achieved a soft level of dynamics. The printed program contained highly informative notes by Claudia Bätke concerning the history of musical life and composition in the three relevant countries. Since there was an empty back page, it would have been nice to have a list of the names of the musicians.

One would have liked to see a larger audience for this event, but it unfortunately received very little publicity.

The world’s greatest living cellist makes his home here, though he tours the world most of the time. Yo-Yo Ma makes a local appearance thanks to the Celebrity Series.

March 2: The Contemporary Music Ensemble in residence at Boston University, Alea III, under the direction of Theodore Antoniou, offers a free concert in celebration of the late eminent composer/teacher/conductor Lukas Foss (1922–2009). Works by Foss to be performed are “Echoi,” “For Toru,” “Elegy for Anne Frank,” “For Aaron,” “The Prairie,” and “Behold! I Build an House.” The concert also will include “Nineteen Epigrams,” new music written by 19 of Foss’s students. At the B.U. Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA, 7:30 p.m.

March 6: The Boston Modern Orchestra Project, conducted by Gil Rose, presents a program entitled “Strings Attached,” which will feature Scott Wheeler’s “Wakefield Doubles,” Stephen Hartke’s “Alvorada,” Milton Babbitt’s “Correspondences,” Betty Olivero’s “Neharót Neharót” (with Kim Kashkashian as viola soloist), Nathan Ball’s “Stained Glass” (New England Conservatory winner), and Bartók’s “Divertimento.” At New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street, Boston, MA, 8 p.m.

March 7: The Boston Conservatory Orchestra, led by Bruce Hangen, puts a welcome spotlight on Scandinavia: Carl Nielsen’s rarely performed “Helios Overture” (1903), Einojuhani Rautavaara’s “Cantus Arcticus” (1972, concerto for bird & orchestra), Hilding Rosenberg’s “Sinfonia Concertante” (1935), and Jean Sibelius’s glorious Symphony No. 5 (1919), Sanders Theatre, at Harvard University, 45 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA, 2 p.m. (with a pre-concert lecture at 1 p.m.)

March 8: The New Center for Arts and Culture presents Osvaldo Golijov’s “Passion” along with his chamber piece “Tenebrae,” the latter played by the Borromeo String Quartet. The evening also includes a chat between the composer and “Boston Globe” music critic Jeremy Eichler. At Temple Israel, 477 Longwood Avenue, Boston, MA, 7:30 p.m.

March 11–13: It is not often that opera productions are offered to the public free of charge, but that is what OperaHub is doing with Alexander Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg (The Dwarf), completed in 1921 and based on Oscar Wilde’s story “The Birthday of the Infanta.” It will be sung in German with a projected English translation. At the Plaza Black Box Theatre, Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont Street, Boston, MA, Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. For advance reservations, e-mail tickets@operahub.org.

March 12–18: The New England Conservatory will present a six-day festival celebrating the avant-garde composer (and sometime literature professor) Christian Wolff (b. 1934). He has composed more than 175 works, and the festival’s free concerts will include 21 of his works from 1950 to the present. Among the pieces are the U.S. premieres of “Quodlibet” (2007) and “Rhapsody” (2009), and the world premiere of “Songs From Brecht: The Exception and the Rule.” For exact dates, times, and pieces, visit here.

Alea III, under the direction of Theodore Antoniou, offers a free concert in celebration of the late, eminent composer/teacher/conductor Lukas Foss (1922–2009).

March 12–23: The Boston Lyric Opera presents the Welsh National Opera’s production of the comedy Ariadne auf Naxos (1916) by Richard Strauss. The 29-year-old American soprano Marjorie Owens will undertake the title role, with Brandon Jovanovich as Bacchus and Boston University alumna Rachele Gilmore as Zerbinetta. Erik Nielsen conducts. Sung in German with English surtitles. At the Shubert Theatre, 265 Tremont Street, Boston, MA, March 12, 17, 19, and 23 at 7:30 p.m.; March 14 and 21 at 3 p.m.

March 13: Wellesley College professor and pianist Charles Fisk salutes the bicentennial of Chopin’s birth with a free all-Chopin concert: Nocturne in C-minor, Ballade in A-flat (Op. 47), Fantasy in F-minor (Op. 49), Polonaise-Fantasy in A-flat (Op. 61), and Polonaise in A-flat (Op. 53. Also on the program is the Sonata in G-minor for cello and piano (Op. 65), with cellist David Russell. Jewett Auditorium, Wellesley campus, 106 Central Street, Wellesley Hills, MA, 8 p.m.

March 14: The first Boston Jewish Music Festival presents Ernest Bloch’s esteemed “Avodath Hakodesh” (“Sacred Service,” 1930-33). Participating will be the Chorus Pro Musica, the Zamir Chorale, and the New England Philharmonic. The event also includes the premiere of a new commission by Andrew Rindfliesch. At John Hancock Hall, 180 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA, 3 p.m.

March 19: The Boston Early Music Festival continues its twentieth anniversary season by presenting the French chamber ensemble Les Folies Françoises, directed by Patrick Cohën-Akenine. The program, entitled “Great Parisian Masters Under Louis XV,” features music by Jean-Marie Leclair, Jean Barrière, and Joseph Royer. At the First Church of Cambridge, Congregational, 11 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA (just off Harvard Square), at 8 p.m. (a free pre-concert talk with the artists takes place at 7 p.m.)

Composer Peter Lieberson

March 25–30: A Boston Symphony Orchestra commission, the eagerly awaited world premiere of Peter Lieberson’s “Farewell Songs” for baritone and orchestra takes place with Gerald Finley as the vocal soloist. James Levine conducts this along with Debussy’s wonderful “Jeux” and Schubert’s Symphony in C-major (“The Great,” D. 944). At Symphony Hall, 301 Massachusetts Avenue, Boston, MA, March 25, 27, and 30 at 8 p.m.; March 26 at 1:30 p.m.

March 26: The world’s greatest living cellist makes his home here, though he tours the world most of the time. Yo-Yo Ma makes a local appearance thanks to the Celebrity Series, partnered by pianist Kathryn Stott. They will play Schubert’s “Arpeggione” Sonata (D. 821), Shostakovich’s Sonata in D-minor (Op. 40), Piazzolla’s “Le Grand Tango,” the Gismonti/Carneiro “Bodas de Prata & Cuatro Cantos,” and a cello transcription of Franck’s A-major violin sonata (M. 8). At Symphony Hall, 301 Massachusetts Avenue, Boston, MA, 8 p.m.

March 27: The celebrated Tallis Scholars, founded in 1973 and led by Peter Phillips, return to town in a vocal program entitled “Franco-Flemish Masters of the Renaissance.” The featured composers are Josquin Des Prez, Loyset Compère, Jean Mouton, and Nicholas Gombert. At St. Paul Church, 29 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA (corner of Bow and Arrow Streets off Harvard Square), at 8 p.m. (Phillips will give a pre-concert talk at 7 p.m.)

March 28: The Harvard University Choir and Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra, led by choirmaster Edward E. Jones, present J.S. Bach’s monumental “St. John Passion” (BWV 245), with tenor Frank Kelley as the Evangelist. At the Memorial Church, One Harvard Yard, Cambridge, MA, 8 p.m. (the world’s leading Bach scholar, Christoph Wolff, will give a pre-concert talk)

Brendan McNab as Mr. Zero in a scene from the SpeakEasy Stage Company production of Adding Machine: A Musical. Photo: Mark L. Saperstein.

By Bill Marx

1: Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company (HTC) at the Boston University Theatre, Boston, MA, March 5 through April 4. Another comic update in the perennial battle between the sexes, this one a Pulitzer Prize finalist whose plot revolves around a blind date gone awry. HTC Artistic Director Peter DuBois directs the off-Broadway hit.

2: The Dinosaur Musical Music by Robert Reale. Book and Lyrics by Willie Reale. Directed by Caitlin Lowans. At the Stoneham Theatre, Stoneham, MA, March 5–21. The New England premiere of a tunefest from some of the creators of the musical Johnny Baseball, which is receiving its world premiere via the American Repertory Theatre this May. This show deals with the education of a 14-year-old Tyrannosaurus, who finds out that the only way to ward off extinction is to team up with a Parasaurolophus. Why can’t a Brontosaurus sing a torch song? Note: The Dinosaur Musical is appropriate for all ages, though it is pitched toward children in the 3rd through 6th grade. (Comparable content to “Finding Nemo” or “The Lion King.”)

3: Othello by William Shakespeare. Presented by the Actors’ Shakespeare Project at the Villa Victoria Center for the Arts, 85 West Newton Street, Boston, MA, March 10 through April 4. Another battle of the sexes, though this tale of the “green-eyed monster” is not played for laughs. Veteran Boston director Judy Braha directs a cast of sturdy local performers, including Bobbie Steinbach, Paula Langton, and Ken Cheesesman.

4: Entertaining Mr. Sloane by Joe Orton. Staged by the Publick Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA, March 11 through April 3. It will be interesting to see if this once oft-produced play about sexual manipulation still contains any risque zip. Certainly the seamy plotting and counter-plotting is in talented hands, from director Eric Engel to an impressive cast that includes Sandra Shipley and Nigel Gore.

Jason Bowen as Othello and Ken Cheeseman as Iago in the Actors' Shakespeare Project's staging of Othello. Photo Stratton McCrady

5: The Adding Machine: A Musical Original music by Joshua Schmidt. Libretto by Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt. Staged by SpeakEasy Stage Company at the Boston Center for the Arts, March 12 through April 10. Based on the play The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice. Directed by Paul Melone. The New England premiere of a musical version of Elmer Rice’s expressionistic 1923 allegory about how the business of American business is homogenization. The play isn’t revived often—this song-filled version won a 2008 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Musical. Brendan McNab stars as Mr. Zero.

6: Melancholy Play by Sarah Ruhl. Directed by M. Bevin O’Gara. Staged by Holland Productions at the Factory Theater, Boston, MA, March 12–21. Ruhl is a very fashionable playwright at the moment—here is another of her whimsical scripts, this one about “a melancholy young stranger who makes her sorrow so sexy that everyone in her life falls maddeningly in love with her.”

7: Apple by Vern Thiessen. Directed by Greg Maraio. Presented by Phoenix Theatre Artists and Company One at the Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA, March 12 through April 3. The New England premiere of a script by an award-winning Canadian playwright: according to The Globe and Mail stage critic, this play is “a fascinating tale of alienation, fear and the need for love.”

8: Opus by Michael Hollinger. Directed by Jim Petosa. Staged by the New Repertory Theatre at the Arsenal Center for the Arts, Mosesian Theater, Watertown, MA, March 28 through April 17. The New England premiere of a drama that revolves around “a celebrated and world-renowned string quartet that is struggling to prepare for their highest-profile performance when their gifted but volatile violist mysteriously disappears.” The cast features stalwart local performers Benjamin Evett and Bates Wilder.

9: From Orchids to Octopi by Melinda Lopez. Directed by Diego Arciniegas. Presented by the Underground Railway Theater and the Catalyst Collaborative@MIT at the Central Square Theatre, Cambridge, MA, March 31 through May 2. Charles Darwin has his say in this world premiere production of Melinda Lopez’s playful meditation—commissioned by the National Institutes of Health to celebrate the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species—on how we understand evolution.

Dan (Michael Steven Costello) tries to drink the pain away in In Private Fears in Public Places. Photo by Richard Hall/Silverline Images

Private Fears in Public Places by Alan Ayckbourn. Directed by David J. Miller. Set design by Miller. Staged by the Zeitgeist Stage Company at the Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA, through March 6.

Reviewed by Bill Marx

Alan Ayckbourn is a playwright who has grown on me by growing out of himself. At least his most recent plays, such as 2004’s Private Fears in Public Places, represent a refreshingly haikuesque departure from the intricately constructed, large scale semi-farces he is most identified with, such as The Norman Conquests and House & Garden.

Popular as these shows have been here and aboard, they have always struck me, despite their ambition, as thin comic gruel, partly because they fall somewhere in-between farce and sit-com. Private Fears suggests Ayckbourn has left that unsatisfying comic netherworld (perhaps after 70 scripts he has finally exhausted it) and is writing plays that, to their credit, fit neither category.

(Granted, Ayckbourn has stretched his imagination in various ways throughout his long career, from the dank brew of blackmail, murder, and drugs in A Small Family Business to the feminist schizophrenia at the center of Woman in Mind and the futuristic sci-fi of Henceforward . . .)

Judging by Private Fears, Ayckbourn has developed into a mature observer of human disconnection, a comic diagnostician of boredom. I say boredom because a line in the play got me thinking about what makes Ayckbourn’s characters come together and then draw apart. One of the women in the play observes with conviction that she bores herself as well as others. That struck me as a particularly revealing confession about what Ayckbourn is up to now—he lets his figures curdle in the world they create for themselves rather than surrounding them with whiz-bang formal contrivances.

In his earlier plays, Ayckbourn drops his characters into a whirligig comic plot even though his men and women lack the fierce desires for sex and respectability that propel the best examples of slammed-door farce. The hyper-combustibility of free-wheeling desire and the need to maintain an untarnished reputation fuels this kind of extreme comedy: a genius like Ben Jonson takes that conflict further, exploring our fetish for desire itself, the addictive pleasures of wanting to want.

But Ayckbourn’s characters don’t seem very interested in sexuality or power; they are closer to cartoonish sit-com characters, whose mild appetites and vapid dreams are meant to be aroused and satisfied in 30 minutes. In his most popular plays, Ayckbourn plunks his soft-headed, bumbling creatures into the manic machinery of farce—and it amusingly chews them up.

In Private Fears the playwright forgoes the customary armor of ingenuity he builds around his characters, letting us look more closely at the poignant comedy created by people whose isolation appears to be mostly self-generated—they are bored with themselves and thus bore others. At least a self-damning acedia is a plausible (and intriguing) explanation for the play’s touching roundelay of relationship misfires.

Christine Power and Michael Steven Costello in Zeitgeist Stage Company’s production of Private Fears in Public Places. Photo by Richard Hall/Silverline Images

Written in 54 cinematic scenes (the script was made into a fine 2006 film by French director Alan Resnais), the play’s ostensible center is the crumbling relationship of Nicola (Christine Power), a young woman looking for a three bedroom apartment for herself and her husband-to-be, Dan (Michael Steven Costello), an ex-army officer who is determined to remain unemployed. Nicole deals with an inadequate real estate agent Stewart (Robert Bonotto), who finds, to his surprise, that the hardcore Christianity professed by his attractive, young co-worker, Charlotte (Becca A. Lewis), may only be skin deep.

Meanwhile, Charlotte is temporarily looking after the randy and foul-mouthed father (the character remains offstage) of Ambrose (Bill Salem), Dan’s favorite bartender, the friendly but ineffective ear for his customer’s soused self-justifications and trivial complaints. Stewart’s middle-aged sister, Imogen (Shelley Brown), lies to her bro about cruising the bars, fruitlessly, for love.

The Zeitgeist Stage Company production is sensitively directed by David Miller, who generally pulls sturdy performances from his cast. As Dan, Michael Steven Costello could do more to show the flickers of panic behind Dan’s bluster. While compelling, the performer sometimes leans too hard into the character’s faux-bravado.

Becca A. Lewis is impishly amusing as Charlotte, the fundamentalist tease; Robert Bonotto provides nimble deadpan as Stewart, particularly through the weird twists and turns of Charlotte’s temptations. Power and Salem get at the anguished power of their humane characters, the only figures in the play who directly convey a sense of loss.

Charlotte is the play’s duplicitous Eve, a game player who amuses and/or punishes herself by inviting lonely men to contemplate their null state. At one point Ambrose, after taking a gander at the Charlotte’s Bible, gently complains about how harsh the Old Testament is. The script’s satiric treatment of religion—how in Charlotte’s hands it doesn’t give comfort but aids and abets despair—suggests that Ayckbourn is taking aim at more than romantic disconnection, but poking at something closer to the spiritual bone.

Pascal defines boredom as “nullity without realizing it.” Ayckbourn has come up with a mordant comedy rooted in his ironic strengths as a playwright—Private Fears depends on the surfeit, rather than the excess, of desire.

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A Profile of a Beautiful Vegetable. A Food Musing.

By Sally Levitt Steinberg

I know cardoons and cardamom and carpaccio. I’ve eaten adobo and stracchino. I’ve never had an ortolan, but I did eat eye of trout in Japan. The eye was staring out of a hole in the middle of a table in a kaiseki dinner in a ryokan. I had fried beetles in Bali—yes, they were meant to be eaten. I was served but declined a monkey brain in Asia. But the other night I saw a green thing I’d never seen, in the mushrooms, a strange apparition. A green flash.

Here’s how it happened. At Craigie On Main in Cambridge, MA, in a dish of flora and fauna from barnyard and forest floor, mushrooms along with cockscombs and Hakurei turnips, there was an unexpected, never-before-seen, brilliantly green miniature tree, with pleasing foliage radiating in a spiral pattern on its cone shape, looking as if it had jumped from a fairy tale in a glade on to the plate and also looking vaguely geometric or mathematical or even architectural.

Later I would learn that it was profoundly mathematical—the pattern of its component florets repeats itself in a predictable, formulaic rhythm, each one a microcosm of the entire head, and each tiny floret shoot a microcosm of the larger floret. What a piece of work is creation! What a miracle of science in a cruciferous vegetable.

We said, “What’s that green thing in the mushroom ragout?”
Someone said, “Kohlrabi.”
I looked it up. It wasn’t kohlrabi. But what was it?

The menu listed all this stuff, cockscombs included, in the mushrooms. It didn’t seem to be named. . . . Oh wait. There’s a name I didn’t recognize. Could that be it? Could Romanesco be a name for broccoli? And more amazing, it’s fascinating and delicious. Take that, first President Bush.

It tastes subtle, velvety, green, and vegetal, with an elusive savor, vaporous, the way avocado vanishes into thin air with its smoothness.

This bit of cutting-edge gastronomy is eye-catching and mouthwatering, a vegetable as old as the Roman hills. It’s bosky. It tastes subtle, velvety, green, and vegetal, with an elusive savor, vaporous, the way avocado vanishes into thin air with its smoothness. It looks seductive too, glowing with an unearthly, phosphorescent beauty. Vegetable pulchritude.

Romanesco, named for its place of origin in ancient times where it was grown exclusively, is cropping up on menus, the newest new thing and one of the oldest. It is sneaking up out of the Lazio hills of the Roman countryside, out of the mists of Italian history. Some say it harks back to the times of Julius Caesar. Something old, something new.

Chef Jody Adams of Rialto in the Charles Hotel says, “It’s very old. I feel like I’ve always known it.”

Sometimes called Romanesco cauliflower or broccoflower (it is technically an edible flower) or cabbage or even asparagus (an early mistaken identification based on not knowing what to make of this vegetable mystery), it is close to all these, a clone of none, hard to classify accurately. Cauliflower or broccoli, mathematical formula or vegetable? Ce n’est pas une pipe! Mostly it is itself, and as one expert said, “deserves its own listing.”

And that self led me to a hitherto undiscovered trove of lore and information about a bit of nature, a piece of conical greenery that holds within not only a history dating back to Julius Caesar, not only a place in the pantheon of crucifers, but a mathematics and a personality. Food as cultural artifact.

And the color—an impossible color between green and yellow, with white highlights—beams out. Saturated color, brighter than bright, like Caribbean birds or carnival costumes. Someone called it “fluorescent broccoli.” It’s a glowing yellow-green, chartreuse, otherworldly, neon, as if lit from within. A special effect vegetable created by nature.

What does it remind you of? Romanesco makes poets of us all. Or mathematicians or Leonardos, observers and theoreticians of the natural world. It’s a Rorschach test. It reminds everyone of something else, not just itself. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure thing.

There’s the math and science aspect. Romanesco is fractal, symmetrical, formulaic, pyramidal or conical, harmonious, spiraling, rhythmic, and logarithmic. A restaurant host said, “I’m a science guy. Romanesco is like fractals. You know when you look at rivers from above they curve around and around? That’s what it looks like.”

In fact, Romanesco is “self-similar,” or “fractal,” which is a mathematical principle described by Leibniz in the 17th century in which each small part, although different in size, is identical to the others and also an exact replica of the larger whole. This pattern appears all over the natural world, in clouds and snowflakes, for example.

All the florets are arranged in a spiral called a logarithmic spiral.

As if that were not enough, there’s more math. All the florets are arranged in a spiral, called a logarithmic spiral, in a rhythm called the Fibonacci series, which is said to be based on “the famous golden number, origin of all aesthetic harmony according to the Renaissance artists.” Romanesco, a vegetable with an equation. The logarithmic spiral was identified by Descartes, and it also appears frequently in nature. Does Romanesco remind you of a mollusk? The shell of the cephalopod Nautilus is another example of a logarithmic spiral. So is a cyclone.

This journey into the mathematical properties of a vegetable was for me its own unending spiral, a descent not into the maelstrom but into the byzantine ramifications of the mathematically-based patterns of the natural world, leading to further exploration I had to put an end to when the natural end was not in sight. Who knew such wonders lay inside of a little, edible, green cornet?

Then there’s the poetic and artistic aspect, the emphasis on beauty, art, creature comparisons, architecture, and enchantments. Romanesco could be a miniature hiding place for elves, like a toadstool. Out of Alice in Wonderland. Or a pagoda, a parasol. It belongs in the forested world, the forest populated by fantastical growths we take for granted but that appear magical. Who could have thought up big umbrella funghi stuck on a tree trunk? The enchanted forest, you know the one.

It also has a leprechaun look—the light green dancing color, Limerick green, Shamrock green. But not Irish. With a name like that of an opera singer, how could it be?

Chefs using Romanesco have a lot to say about all of its aspects, not just the gastronomic.

Charles Draghi of Erbaluce in Boston says, “Crazy look, doesn’t it? It kinda looks like a Horny Toad. In Italy as a kid I would look at it; it was so cool looking. What is that and can you eat it? It looked as if it might sting you.”

And also, “Nature loves symmetry in a radiating pattern. I do a lot of scungilli, and I use the smaller tiger whelks. The whelks will sometimes gather in a cluster around a single food item; if there’s a piece of fish, they gather round it. Romanesco looks like a cluster of whelks.”

Jody Adams of Rialto says, “I saw it in Rome at the Campo dei Fiore market. It looks like a wild and crazy cross between broccoli and cauliflower. It’s dramatic, Madonna-esque, like something Madonna would wear. Like a bra. Very spiky and evocative of the female anatomy. I really like that. Also it’s all about the flower, which is great.”

Shape matters. Romanesco florets are glowing green turrets that could adorn a castle but are edible blooms. Its architecture is decidedly one of nature’s wonders. More circular than a bunch of broccoli or cauliflower, it appeals to us. Many of the resonant natural phenomena that astonish hew to the spherical. Spheres are everywhere—on earth in fairy rings and the raccoon’s stripes and in the heavens, hot as in sun, cold as in moon. We like them. They pervade heavenly bodies and our bodies, cosmos and culture. Rings of Saturn. Circles of friends, dress circles at the opera. Jade pi and wedding ring. The Romanesco is its own green galaxy, whorls upon whorls. It’s a fugue of a vegetable, repeating, circling back on itself.

And there’s the gastronomy aspect, where how it tastes is the thing. Adams says, “I think it looks like a very aggressive vegetable, and that’s kind of nice. The thing I like about those vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, and Romanesco, is that they hold up well to roasting, which draws out the sugars and they caramelize.”

She says, “Broccoli is a crowd pleaser. If you were to poll kids in elementary school, I bet 99 percent would say their favorite vegetable is broccoli. I prefer broccoli rabe. Cauliflower has an earthy specific flavor, and Romanesco bridges those two flavors beautifully. We invented the preparation. What’s not to like about pork? Right? Romanesco is a very Italian vegetable; the Italians braise vegetables with garlic and hot pepper, anchovies, and pork fat. It came out of my head but the flavor combinations are pretty true to an Italian dish.”

Draghi says, “The aunts over there were always cooking. There are three categories of chefs—technical, visual, or a flavor chef. For me, once the fork goes through the presentation, it’s over. I like dishes to haunt people so they come back. What I love about this vegetable is that it has the best qualities of broccoli, that green chlorophyll quality, but also the creamy sweetness of cauliflower. Without those heavy-handed sulfur compounds that are healthy but can put off the taste.”

Draghi’s idea for it is lemon sabayon. “When I was a kid there were a lot of broccoli-type vegetables where I spent summers in Piedmont and Lombardy. We had the rapini, the wild one, thinner, with intense licorishy flavor. With Romanesco you put it in a hot pan and you lid it and the green comes out. I make a savory sabayon sauce, with egg yolks, a splash of Marsala, and lots of lemon, nutmeg, no sugar, and whip it nice and frothy so it has a light, airy, lemony, eggy flavor.”

He also uses an ancient condiment called garum with it. “The Romans had garum they carried in bottles around their necks, the universal condiment of the Romans and the Greeks—it’s anchovies in salt water that you ferment, a fish sauce. They buried the fish bones in salt in jars to ferment. They brought it with them into battle to Transalpine Gaul.”

Romanesco Broccoli: Vegetable as Eyeful

Tony Maws of Craigie On Main puts it with cockscombs in mushroom ragout. “The Romanesco would have been glaceed ahead of time (glaceed meaning braised, with butter and stock) and folded into the ragout. Romanesco is a great vegetable. We plan on using it for years to come.” He adds the cockscombs, the red floppy adornments on the head of a rooster. They are part of Old World cookery. “I come from an Old World family. Cockscombs are a traditional French countryside dish. We don’t put them there for shock value; we put them there because they taste good. I first started cooking them at Clio. We made sure we had fun stuff on the plate. We did a pot pie with cockscombs and truffles,” Maws says. A chicken pot pie with a difference.

Even on the gastronomic side of things, Romanesco is true to its choose-your-own-adventure nature—with garum or sabayon, cockscombs or pork, it serves as a lightning rod for flavors pronounced or subtle or as a foil for living things from land and sea. It’s versatile but not unassuming. It maintains its identity in a gastronomic field.

Adams says, “People are curious about it. When we couldn’t get it, we served different color cauliflower and people complained.”

Most people have not heard of Romanesco, and they don’t quite know what you’re talking about. They say “What?” And you have to name it again. People mistake it for the sauce Romesco, a Catalan concoction with nuts and garlic and peppers and tomatoes. But awareness of it is dawning.

Romanesco tastes delicate, not cabbagey. But it’s a crucifer, so we know it’s good for us—cruciferous vegetables are loaded with beneficial, cancer-fighting nutrients. Crucifers are plants with four petals in the form of a cross—radish, turnip, mustard. Among the archetypes enriching this apparently simple plant then is also the cross, an echo of a powerful symbolic presence.

This one’s a crucifer with a twist, gastronomic, historical, aesthetic, mathematical, and perhaps symbolic. When we look at and into Romanesco, so much arises from its depths and shadows, the labyrinth of unending, unfolding reference points and resonances from unexpected realms of discourse that lie behind it. This variegated vegetable is nutritious as well as delicious; visually fabulous as well as fabulistic. Who knew what could be in a vegetable?

Those Italians are sneaky. They know vegetables that have been around since Roman times, but they follow a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. So no, we don’t know their cardoons or their heirloom Romanesco, that is, we didn’t until this gorgeous Calypso of the vegetable world started singing its siren song to us. But now we know better.

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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.

Bars of Color within Squares, a permanent installation in MIT’s Green Center, Cambridge, MA.

Finding Bars of Color within Squares. Photo: George Bouret

Reviewed by Yumi Araki

Hidden between three buildings surrounding Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT’s) Green Center, Sol LeWitt’s u-shaped 5,500 square-foot terrazzo floor installation, Bars of Color within Squares, is truly a spectacle not only to behold, but also to be experienced.

The experience begins with the search to find the door leading to the atrium, which is tucked away along the aptly named Infinite Corridor of MIT’s Physics Department. Even for the intrepid wanderer, finding the enchanted door with the hanging chalkboard bearing mystic symbols and complex equations is quite the feat. Luckily, the vibrant colors from the terrazzo floor peek through the door’s window, and suddenly the corridor doesn’t seem so infinite.

While deceivingly simplistic, the vibrant geometric squares that color the floors stimulate illusionary senses. They are representative manifestations of LeWitt’s style, which emphasizes concept over aesthetic. In his seminal 1967 essay, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” LeWitt champions what he calls “conceptual art,” which emphasizes the concept or idea rather than the aesthetic or presentation of the work. He also strives to make art “mentally interesting to the spectator.” Thus much of LeWitt’s work treats art as not only something to behold, but also something to be experienced.

Bars of Color from another angle Photo: George Bouret

Completed in 2007, the floor consists of 15 different arrangements of vibrant squares. The surface is made with epoxy (a fiber-reinforced plastic) and glass beads; this material differs from the make-up of traditional terrazzo floors, which are constructed with gravel, cement, and marble chips. Never an artist complacent with convention, LeWitt was among a prominent group of artists who, in the early and mid-1960s broke away from traditional art. He tossed away the canvas and used different materials, such as wood, cinder blocks, and metal. Gray and white lines encompass each square, giving each the distinctive definition of steppingstones arranged with linear precision like rocks in a colorful Zen garden.

At first glance, LeWitt’s terrazzo floor looks starkly elementary, even unimpressive, compared to the atrium that surrounds it. At ground level, the terrazzo arrangement looks like a floor of a kindergarten classroom. In fact, the floor appears to be no more than what the installation promises: bars of color within randomly arranged geometric figures. The simple, primary color choices strike you as kid’s stuff. But it takes more than an initial look at the floor to experience and understand LeWitt’s conceptual presentation.

Encompassing the terrazzo floor is the aforementioned atrium space, which is evocative of some high-tech, aerial metropolis. Electric cables and lab equipment peek through the skeletal, glass-windowed building at the center of the floor, and the central structure resembles an energy source with networks of passageways leading in and out of the structure. At any moment it seems like a hovercraft could shoot from the center on to a passageway leading to the terrace on the other side. The passageways are also open-air and walled with glass, which adds to the sci-fi “Metropolis” appeal.

Built in a way that expands the campus from within, the architectural strategy designed by Payette Associates of Boston takes advantage of the nooks and spaces among the three buildings within MIT’s Physics Department complex. The approach effectively creates a building within a building. The metaphysical space is calm and serene, and the glass windows that span the back wall draw in soft rays of light, creating an escape from the cognitive hubbub outside.

The contrast between the vibrant squares and the ultra-chic space around them seems to clash at first. But at the end of the ground floor where the u-shape plateaus, a door opens to a staircase leading upward to the glass-windowed central structure. Cubicles and professors’ offices occupy the second floor, and the third and fourth floors adhere to the same design. At the end of each hallway, a lounge and study area (evident from the ubiquitous equations scribbled across chalkboards by the tables) jut away from the offices to form a terrace that overlooks the terrazzo floor.

Looking down on Bars of Color: a view that taunts the eye. Photo: George Bouret

Peering down at LeWitt’s installation from above drastically transforms the flat terrazzo into three-dimensional-looking spaces that taunt the eye. Just one climb to the second floor transforms what were mere squares into colorful depth fields, which change according to the angle of view. The shapes and illusionary effects are most vivid from the third floor as the shapes begin to take the form of rooms. Some color blocks resemble bird’s-eye views of empty hallways while others look like they offer aerial snapshots of a maze. Slowly the linear shapes and the perceptions that the colored squares conjure begin to adapt to the surrounding high-tech space.

LeWitt also argued in his seminal 1967 essay that successful conceptual art usually relies little on an artist’s skill or craftsmanship and more on the notion that “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” Indeed, many of LeWitt’s works appear geometric and incredibly simplistic. Even his public installation at the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Washington, D.C. is titled just the way it looks (Within a Circle, Lines in Four Directions). But upon changing the environment or perspective, the lines seem to move, creating an optical illusion.

The same effect is evident for Bars of Color. But without proper architectural consultation and collaboration to translate idea into art, LeWitt’s art would arguably resonate differently. Would the bars of color effectively morph into illusionary 3-D spaces without MIT’s facilities or Payette Associates’ creative direction?

The artistic space continues on the third and fourth floors, where LeWitt’s earlier paintings and pieces by other contemporary artists including Conlon Williams and Kes Zapkins are displayed in a space behind the offices. The theme of vibrant colors against intricate geometric shapes ties the collection together, creating a small gallery within the central building. Come to think of it, MIT revels in this architectural aesthetic as it continues on the walls of the institution’s Visual Arts Center and the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.

Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt

Bars of Color within Squares both defies and adheres to the definition of conceptual art. LeWitt’s revolutionary aesthetic resonates because it appears to be simplistic yet uses that apparent directness to camouflage an impressive complexity. Still, without the artistry of those who can convert the conceptual into the physical and the surrounding atmosphere that augments the ideas and energy of the art, the approach would remain one-dimensional. LeWitt’s imagination needs the right space to grow in.

Sophie Treadwell (Anne Gottlieb) and Mac (Craig Mathers) in Not Enough Air (Photo credit: Elizabeth Stewart)

Not Enough Air by Masha Obolensky. Directed by Melia Bensussen. Set designed by Eric Levenson. Staged by the Nora Theatre Company at the Central Square Theater, Cambridge, MA, through March 14.

Reviewed by Bill Marx

Unsurprisingly, Not Enough Air teems with interrogatives, many of its scenes punctuated with performers proffering staccato Whos, Hows, and Whys. Masha Obolensky’s compelling play explores the evolution of Machinal, the celebrated 1928 expressionist drama by journalist/playwright Sophie Treadwell, which was inspired by questions raised by the notorious Ruth Snyder/Judd Gray murder trial—why did this woman kill? And why the pitiless and sensational media stalking of Snyder, the first woman sentenced to death by electrocution?

Obolensky’s script takes the questions back a few notches: what was the creative and personal challenge for a woman of that day trying to write, with empathy and imagination, about a woman who snapped? What happens when the oxygen of rationality thins in the pursuit of the truth? The response is a rare dramatic specimen—the story of a woman artist heroically grappling with social pressures, inner doubts, health issues, and patriarchal strong-arming to give birth to a feminist answer to an essential question.

Sophie Treadwell (Anne Gottlieb) takes a call. (Photo credit: Elizabeth Stewart)

Before the journey through Treadwell’s unconscious, Obolensky supplies the background to Snyder’s life and trial via short scenes featuring an expressionist parade of characters, from Snyder herself (affectingly played by Ruby Rose Fox as a hard-boiled lost soul) to Treadwell’s fellow reporters, cynical radio announcers, tough police detectives, and her sympathetic spouse Mac. The approach is archly cinematic—the scenes skitter along in a jumpy manner meant to reflect the mounting pressure on the exasperated Treadwell, who covers the trial on her own because her newspaper has sent an opportunistic male colleague in her stead.

Instead of prurient curiosity, Treadwell feels sympathy for Snyder, a secret kinship. The empathy doesn’t only spring from her feeling, despite the pat arguments of others, that Snyder is not getting a fair trial. Both women suffer from neurasthenia, a serious nervous condition (crippling lassitude, anxiety, fatigue) that, as explored in plays such as Susan Sontag’s Alice in Bed, takes female desperation to the point of parody and hallucination—it is the total embrace of dependence in a society that denies women the freedom to live and create.

Thus the urge to rebel, not to “submit,” springs from bottled up anger and frustration, a striking back that takes the nihilistic form of murder in the case of Synder and a constructive grappling with the enemies of female dissent, internal and external, in the case of Treadwell. Like Machinal, Obelensky’s play turns on the modernist metaphor of creation as a form of murder, an order that takes place after destruction.

As dreamed up by Obolensky, Treadwell’s spur to create is an anarchistic demon—a fusion of Treadwell and Snyder, a devilish dynamo necessary to fuel her art. The spirit commands Treadwell to write the play to the point of exhaustion, to embrace isolation, a turn from rationality and domesticity that puts strains on her healthy relationship with her spouse, Mac. Thankfully, Mac is not treated by Obolensky as the stereotypical male enemy, but as a sympathetic lover who may be limited in his understanding of his mate but respectful of her need to create.

The interaction between the demon and Treadwell supplies some of the most memorable scenes in the play (I love the sprite’s primal scream) though inevitably attempts to dramatize the creative process fall short. For me, less historical background and more elaboration on Treadwell’s internal duels, her conflicts with the husband, would have been welcome, but what the dramatist supplies is provocative.

The movie rhythms of the play are apt, given that the famous photo of Snyder’s execution, taken surreptitiously by a Chicago photographer and published on the front page of the New York Daily News, was an important step in the tabloidization of the media. The controversial photo skyrocketed the paper’s circulation, accelerating our embrace of the visual over the textual that continues, with pernicious efficiency, to this day. Ironically, the hysteria whipped up by the Snyder trail contributed to the popular success of Machinal.

James Cagney as the rascally Picture Snatcher

(Those interested in the mass culture sentiments of the period should check out “Picture Snatcher” a 1933 Jimmy Cagney film that Turner Classic Movies shows from time to time. Cagney plays an ambitious photographer based on the guy who snapped the Snyder photo. In the movie the ploy to get the “money” shot is treated as a high stakes adventure, with the police chasing Cagney through the streets of the city, guns drawn, to confiscate the negative and stop the publication of the picture. The curio is the popularist reverse negative of Not Enough Air.)

In an illuminating interview given during the Chicago premiere of the play, Obolensky says that she “tried to create a pressurized environment—one that, like in Machinal, is driven by men, the men are the machine.” The Nora Theatre Company production could use some of the grinding snap, crackle, and pop of the Warner Brothers treatment, the sprightly ra-ta-tat-tat of the old Hollywood newsreels. When Anne Gottlieb, as Treadwell, is not on stage, the action feels a bit slack, the male machine gone soft, cartoonish.

But director Melia Benussen wields a sure hand with her talented leads: Gottlieb supplies an engagingly strong-willed Treadwell, a woman who unites intelligence and compassion. The actress expertly conveys panic at the mounting demands of her imagination—a genuine fear of being sucked under. Marianna Bassham’s sprite of the unconscious gives off frightening vibes, and Craig Mathers, as Mac, pulls off the neat trick of defending sanity without descending into whining or self-righteousness. Not Enough Air draws an impressive portrait of the woman artist as psychological warrior.

Mud, Sweat, and Gears: A Rowdy Family Bike Adventure Across Canada on Seven Wheels by Joe Kurmaskie, Breakaway Books, 304 pages, $23.95

Reviewed By Tom Samph

The Kurmaskies (Joe, his wife Beth, and three sons, Quinn, Enzo, and Matteo) left home in Portland, Oregon at the beginning of the summer with their panniers packed to the brim, headed East for Nova Scotia.

The men of the family are all aboard one bike. Joe takes the helm of a tandem bike with his eldest son, Quinn, behind. Next in line are Matteo and Enzo, who ride a trail-a-bike and trailer, respectively, attached to the back of the tandem. The bike is 16 feet long and 500 pounds—a monster of a bike that made it all the way across North America. In an equally impressive feat, Joe’s wife Beth makes the entire trip solo alongside the boys.

The setup makes for witty banter, tense arguments at times, and in the end, a stronger bond between the family members. Along the way, Joe tells of frequent, ravenous eating escapades after long days of pushing pedals, like Joe and Beth devouring the Trucker’s Dream—a three-tiered mountain of meat, gravy, potatoes, and veggies with a hamburger plopped in the middle—at a roadside diner. Stopping only to re-order macaroni and cheese for the kids, they finish the massive meal and the waitress presents them with mud flaps as their prize.

They meet quirky and sentimental characters on and off the bike like “Canada’s Robin Hood of rocking chairs,” an old man who rescues old rockers, repairs them, and donates them to libraries, schools, and anyone in need. And a singing, semi-nude, Irish cyclist they meet on the road who entices them to play a game of “I believe” while pedaling full speed.

Through their encounters with elk, bear, and rowdy Canadian hicks, the family bonds around their incredible feat of traversing a continent by bike. The book is a portrait of an energetic, adventurous family who uncover a new love for life and for each other over a 3,000-mile bike trip. Disconnected, no phones, it’s just the family, the road, and the people they meet along the way.

The mud and sweat collected on the road draw the family closer. The gears keep turning, and the intrepid family cruises across Canada. The trip itself shows the family’s spirit, and Joe shows his endless enthusiasm and passion for living, his family, and cycling, through his writing.

Joe lives and writes with incredible energy. The loves of his life—family, cycling, and writing—were present at every turn, and his retelling of the 3,000-mile family bike ride mirrors his vitality in life.

At times the story is laugh-out-loud funny. But while the humor is punchy and matter-of-fact, Joe also reflects on his past, weaving memories of his mother and the story of how he met his wife Beth with chapters of cycling, making the book both attentive and amusing.

Beth voices her opinion on Joe’s retelling of the adventure in brief footnotes at the bottom of each page as well. At first, the footnotes are a bit jolting, but once the reader is accustomed to the footnotes, they are a clever dialogue between the husband, wife, and reader. Plus, Joe didn’t take the trip by himself. The footnotes are just another part of the family’s honesty and passion. We were made to take risks and adventures, and the Kurmaskie family shows us it is possible.

Joe is an experienced cyclist, having ridden across the United States multiple times, taken tours across Africa, and braved the Australian outback. Beth, however, hadn’t ridden a bicycle since her teenage years, after she suffered a gruesome accident. Even with Joe’s formidable cycling experience, his family came to the rescue countless times throughout the book. Sometimes they disagree, sometimes there is tension, but through the mud and sweat, the relationship gears keep turning and the family is as close as ever.

The family is typical in many ways. Sons who think something is easy despite their father’s struggles to understand (“Can’t you just reboot your brain, Dad?” – Quinn). Sometimes skeptical, always protective, and loving mothers who keep their husbands from over exaggerating (“That’s a load o’ crap. I saw him power across the highway like he owned the roads.” – Beth). And gung-ho fathers who eventually give in to a lesson learned.

Reading the book is like sitting down with the Kurmaskies for a conversation over dinner after just having returned from their trip across Canada. They tell the story as a team, with bits of input here and there from each. Their story is enviable. As Joe tells it, even from the beginning of his relationship with Beth there was a sense of humor in both of them. Joe has an infectious energy and humor that is apparent in his writing.

While Mud, Sweat, and Gears tells the epic story of a family’s journey by bike across Canada, it really is a thoughtful collection of lessons and anecdotes about the Kurmaskies. This is not your ordinary (if anyone could ever call it ordinary) jaunt across Canada by bike with a description of the sights along the way. It’s the Mud, Sweat, and Gears of a relationship and a family told through a bike trip across Canada.

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Pianist Victor Rosenbaum

Among the top pianists who live in our area is Victor Rosenbaum (b. 1941). A faculty member of the New England Conservatory since 1967 (and a former chair of its Piano and Chamber Music Departments), he was also president of the Longy School of Music for 16 years (1985-2001). He teaches at the Mannes College of Music in New York, and concertizes and gives master classes throughout the world. His February 11 recital in Jordan Hall was widely anticipated and drew a large audience.

He began with Haydn’s Variations in F-Minor (Hob. XVII:6), a remarkable work new to me. Written in 1793, this is a lengthy piece, lasting 18 minutes. It keeps oscillating between the minor and major mode, ending in the major. Containing striking Neapolitan-sixth harmony, it features toward the end unexpected ascending chromaticism. In keeping with the period, Rosenbaum never exceeded a dynamic level above mezzoforte.

Proceeding to Haydn’s sometime student Beethoven, Rosenbaum brought a long familiarity with the composer. In recent decades he has made something of a specialty of the last three piano sonatas (Op. 109, 110, 111), recording them on a masterly CD in 2004 (he already played Op. 109 superbly as a college undergraduate). This time he backed up to Beethoven’s early period with a performance of the Sonata in C-Major, Op. 2, No. 3 (1794-95), composed not long after Haydn (who was the work’s dedicatee) wrote the previous piece.

This year marks the bicentennial of Chopin's birth.

The sonata-form first movement wanders afield in the exposition’s second group. Toward the end there are rhetorical pauses—a device that would become a hallmark of Beethoven’s style. The slow movement is in the rather unexpected key of E-major. The C-major scherzo has a trio in A-minor. The finale is a lively rondo with its own surprises. Rosenbaum caught all its moods whether serious or humorous.

This being the bicentennial of Chopin’s birth (1810-49), Rosenbaum devoted the entire second half of his program to this master of piano composition. Of the four wondrous Ballades, he chose the third in A-flat major, Op. 47 (1841). This starts off simply enough but becomes technically demanding as it proceeds. Of Chopin’s fifty-odd mazurkas, Rosenbaum gave us two: Op. 50, Nos. 2 & 3 (1842), both relatively long.

The pianist ended with the beautiful C-sharp minor Nocturne, Op. 27, No. 1 (1835) and the equally beautiful F-sharp major Barcarolle, Op. 60 (1846). He was enticed to play two encores—another pair of Chopin mazurkas: Op. 24, No. 2 and the curious Op. 17, No. 4, with its harmonically ambiguous conclusion. No other composer has explored more deeply the expressive and technical possibilities of the piano, and Rosenbaum demonstrated this with sovereign mastery. No harshness, no banging.

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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An hour and a half before curtain, operagoers are lining up at the AMC 10 cineplex in Burlington, Massachusetts across the road from the mall. Forty-five minutes later, the only available seats in Theater 3 are in the first two neck-craning rows. It’s 12:15 p.m., a sunny Saturday in February when most New Englanders are outside, but like several million people in over 40 countries around the world they have assembled for The Met: Live in HD.

Unlike the audience actually at the Metropolitan Opera (the Met), they’re dressed for comfort not display, in sweaters, parkas, insulated boots, and layers of fleece. Instead of crossing Lincoln Center plaza, they’ve crossed an enormous parking lot. Instead of a grand staircase and glittering chandeliers, there’s an industrially carpeted lobby lined with posters and neon signs. The smell of popcorn rather than perfume wafts through the air, and inside the dim theater there are no ushers, no plush boxes or loge of the kind that Flaubert and Wharton described and that the Impressionists painted—not even reserved seats.

It’s too dimly lit to see much of anything and some of the early birds have brought small flashlights with which to read their newspapers or clipped tiny bed lamps to their books. Others are eating a smuggled-in lunch—whole-grain bread, fresh fruit, nuts and cheese—out of Tupperware. Some are examining the program—no thick, glossy brochure but a poorly-designed handout printed on two sides that lists the conductor’s name, approximate time and duration of the performance, main characters and performers, and a synopsis of the opera.

More upscale locales, such as the Mahaiwe Theater in Great Barrington, MA, hire a lecturer to introduce the opera, which extends the time frame of a typical performance from three and a half to four and a half hours.

The Metropolitian Opera in New York: It is easier and cheaper to see the productions in your local mall.

It’s light enough to see that, at 62, I’m on the younger side of this very straight, suburban crowd. They appreciate the schedule: live Saturday telecasts at 1 p.m.; Encores at 6 p.m. on Wednesdays, though driving on the edge of rush hour can sometimes be a problem. They like the intimacy of the space (250 seats instead of the Met’s 3,800) and the ticket price ($20, as compared to the $30-$300 plus hotel room, meals, and parking they’d have to spend if they drove to New York). Yet the price alone doesn’t explain the enormous popularity of The Met: Live in HD.

Last week’s “Simon Boccanegra” was packed, people were saying, because the sympathetic and internationally famous 69-year-old tenor Placido Domingo was making his debut as a baritone, and local idol, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s artistic director James Levine, was conducting. The week before, “Carmen” was packed because, well, it’s one of the most accessible operas in the canon and had the young, beautiful, vocally perfect, Latvian mezzo Elina Garanca to sing the title role.

Next month’s “Hamlet” (by the little known, French composer Ambroise Thomas) is already sold out, they say, because everybody knows the story and Ophelia will be Nathalie Dessay, who’s as gifted an actress as a singer. But the bottom line is that Met: Live in HD is a huge hit at movie houses all over the United States and is transforming the art form as it succeeds.

“This is NOT opera,” say the purists, echoing Walter Benjamin’s famous 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and in one sense they are right. No amount of Dolby Surround Sound can replicate the experience of hearing an orchestra and singers live. Nothing can replicate viewing the operatic spectacle in its entirety—audience, orchestra, curtain, stage, performers—as well as the architecture of the house, its location in the city, and its place within cultural tradition and the social hierarchy.”

“Mechanical reproduction separates art from its basis in cult,” wrote Benjamin. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”

My musician friend Susan Miron used to drive from Newton to Framingham to see The Met: Live in HD but stopped because she missed what Benjamin called the “aura” of the authentic.

Placido Domingo as Simon Boccanegra

“I’m a huge opera snob,” she says. “I love driving down to New York, the anticipation, getting dressed, standing in line, the smells of perfume. You look at what other people are wearing. The fabrics, the gowns. There’s a sense of occasion. That evening may turn out to be one of the highlights of your life, something you’ll remember until you die. It’s like going to a palace. You drink from the Ezio Pinza fountain. You get to have your own subtitles on your own little screen. There are people from all over the world: India, Oklahoma, the old ladies, the gay guys in velvet. Even the seats are beautiful. It’s a rite; a grand experience. I can’t stand the smell of popcorn at the movies. I feel like I’m slumming.”

Not me. I’ve become a fan of the Met at the mall. Like some of my Lexington neighbors, I’m an unreconstructed New Yorker who went to the Met and listened to its Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts as I grew up. Although I liked using my mother’s opera glasses, I never found looking through them a pleasurable way of following the action —miles away, it seemed—onstage.

When subtitles were introduced, I was glad to have a translation but uncomfortable shifting my gaze between text and the stage. The Met’s hi-tech telecasts put text and image onscreen in a way that’s easy on the eye; in their integration of literature, music, dance, and the visual arts, they provide a more cohesive form of gesamtkunstwerk (the total work of art) than what Wagner imagined and a different but in some ways superior experience of opera than I’ve experienced (even up close) in person.

The Met has been broadcasting for 77 years over the radio. Cinematographers have been filming operas for about as long, both in Europe and in the United States. Joseph Losey’s “Don Giovanni” (1979, shot in the palaces and on the canals of Venice) and Zefferelli’s lavish “La Traviata” (1983) are two of my favorites. The practice of broadcasting operas and plays live began with the birth of television and PBS has accustomed us to telecasts from around the world. Digital technology, bolstered by the money and power of the Met, dwarfs them all in creating what is, in effect, a new form that draws on the techniques of narrative film, documentary, and TV journalism.

Some of Benjamin’s arguments have become obsolete. No longer is it impossible “to assign to a spectator a viewpoint which would exclude from the actual scene such extraneous accessories as camera equipment, lighting machinery, staff assistants, etc.—unless his eye were on a line parallel with the lens . . . (rendering) superficial and insignificant any possible similarity between a scene in the studio and one on the stage.”

The Met: Live in HD utilizes 10 cameras, many cameramen behind many different lenses, and the visual gains for the operagoer are huge. Not only are we drawn intimately into the action onstage, but we can see what the Met audience cannot: we see the conductor as the singers and musicians see him; we see individual musicians and their instruments when their solos occur; the action onstage seems to be happening at a distance of a few feet, and we can follow the protagonists into the wings and backstage.

This is most obvious as the cameras zoom in for close-ups. “Fifty years ago,” Benjamin wrote in 1936, “a slip of the tongue passed more or less unnoticed. Only exceptionally may such a slip have revealed dimensions of depth in a conversation which had seemed to be taking its course on the surface. Since the Psychopathology of Everyday Life things have changed. This book isolated and made analyzable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception.” Similarly, he argues, photographic processes make available aspects of the original “that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens.”

Operagoers who have used opera glasses for years tend to focus on the facial expressions of performers and their small gestures that get lost beyond the first few rows of the orchestra. But The Met: Live in HD broadcasts reveal so much more than that: we can appreciate the intricate patterns of costumes as though we were standing before an oil portrait in a museum; we can see the details of significant operatic props such as daggers and vials of poison as though we were in a small room; we can almost feel the dankness of a dungeon wall or the freshness of a leafy garden.

“The camera that presents the performance,” Benjamin wrote, “need not respect the performance as an integral whole.” True, but here the cameras enhance a form that’s often visually boring and, at other times, hopelessly muddled. Even the convoluted story of Simon Boccanegra made sense in the movie. “He knows where the bodies are buried,” I overheard someone whispering in the dark, “Get it?”

The telecasts reward the photogenic performers who can act and sing, such as Latvian mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca

The new telecasts privilege the visual and will affect opera performance accordingly. They are unkind to old-fashioned directors, set designers, and performers. Stock stances, gestures, and choreography look obsolete. Singers who are too old for their roles or too fat or short or unattractive are out of luck. The camera is unforgiving of wobbly double chins and flabby bellies.

The Hollywood ceiling on age for star women performers looms ahead —maybe for men too. Younger, more versatile singers who can act as well as dance like Elina Garanca and Nathalie Dessay stand to benefit the most in this new operatic world. So do singers and directors who are witty and whose accents don’t preclude making themselves understood when interviewed between the acts.

Renee Fleming does well as an articulate, elegant, and photogenic interview as well as interviewer; Placido Domingo is always nice to look at but at times barely intelligible. It’s unfair to singers with great voices who don’t meet the new standards, but it seems to be the future.

“In New York, there’s electricity,” said the woman sitting next to me, “but here I’m more involved. I know it’s not the real thing, but it’s a more intimate alternative.”

Will these telecasts create a new, younger audience that doesn’t already love opera? The Met: Live in HD has a program for distribution to schools, but the jury’s still out on that and a host of other questions. Does a Met broadcast affect a live, local production of the same opera? Will the opera movies spur attendance for local opera companies? Have the Met’s own appeals for donations during the broadcasts had results? Will the current movie audiences grow?

Next month, it’s Ambroise Thomas’ “Hamlet” at the mall. You probably haven’t seen or heard it. I’m planning to go.

The new edition of Helen Epstein’s Music Talks is available online and at music outlets like the shop at Symphony Hall in Boston. She is also the author of Joe Papp. Order these books through the link below to Amazon and The Arts Fuse receives a (small) percentage of the sale.

Pianist Richard Goode

Solo piano recitals occur all the time, but concerts by duo-pianists are not common these days. The Celebrity Series filled the gap on February 7 when Richard Goode and Jonathan Biss teamed up for a Jordan Hall program of music for piano duet and for two pianos.

In the last century there were three main pairs of duo-pianists who enjoyed successful careers. The husband-and-wife pair of Bartlett and Robinson (Ethel and Rae) began wide touring in the 1920s. Then came another married couple, Vronsky and Babin (Vitya and Victor), followed by Gold and Fizdale (Arthur and Robert), who until the early eighties commissioned and premiered quite a few new works (by Barber, Milhaud, Poulenc, and others). In recent years perhaps the outstanding pair has been Noël Lee (b. 1924) and Christian Ivaldi (b. 1938)—centered in Paris—who have played and recorded a large amount of the repertory for four hands.

Goode (b. 1943) and his protégé Biss (b. 1980), both of whom have solo careers, decided to join forces in 2008 for occasional concerts in London and the United States; and the program they played here was the same they have offered elsewhere.

The two present quite a contrast visually. Goode is short, chubby, white-haired, and sits still at the keyboard; Biss is tall, thin, black-haired, and indulges in a lot of bobbing and weaving. But the sounds they make are generally precise and well-matched.

They opened with Schubert, who wrote a great deal of music for piano duet since cultured households back then had a piano that the inhabitants were expected to learn to play. This time, with Biss playing treble, we heard a late piece from 1828, the Allegro in A-Minor, D. 947—which after the composer’s death a publisher labeled “Lebensstürme” (“Storms of Life”). This is a big, sonata-form work, which surprised one with a number of startling changes of key.

Pianist Jonathan Biss

Next came Schumann’s Six Studies for Pedal Piano in Canon Form, Op. 56, written in 1845. The pedal piano was an ordinary instrument to which was attached a keyboard to be played by the feet—like a pipe organ. These date from a time when Schumann was exploring contrapuntal technique, and the final B-major piece even has some fugal writing. Goode and Biss performed these etudes in an arrangement for two pianos made in 1891 by Claude Debussy—the only way one is likely to hear them today.

The first half ended with Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” Op. 134. This began as the 1826 finale to the late, B-flat string quartet, Op. 130. Beethoven then detached it as a separate work for quartet, Op. 133. When another musician arranged it for piano, Beethoven was unhappy with the result and penned his own version for piano duet with its own opus number. To facilitate playing the intricate writing, Goode (treble) and Biss (bass) chose to sit at two pianos. This monster of a piece still astonishes as an avant-garde work. A piano performance cannot match the original medium. The work needs the sense of four stringed instruments effortfully straining to cope with music almost beyond the boundary of playability. On the piano it strikes one as too easy.

After intermission came Stravinsky’s ballet “Agon” (1953-57) for 12 dancers, premiered by the New York City Ballet with choreography by George Balanchine. The ballet (whose title is Greek for “contest”) has no story but consists of 16 abstract numbers. This is a transitional work in which portions of it adopt the Schoenbergian 12-tone system. For purposes of rehearsal, Stravinsky made a two-piano reduction of the orchestral score, which is what we heard here in an adept performance. In the Bransle Gay movement, Biss turned from the piano to a pair of castanets. One was glad to hear this major work, though one missed the harp, mandolin, tom-tom, timpani, and xylophone in the full version.

The players ended the concert with Debussy’s wonderful “En Blanc et Noir” (1915) for two pianos, which came across splendidly. The first movement (dedicated to the conductor, Serge Koussevitzky) bustles with activity and is marked “passionately.” The composer, deeply affected by World War I, dedicated the second movement to the memory of his friend Lt. Jacques Charlot, who was killed on March 3; marked “slow, sombre,” Debussy wove into the texture phrases from the Lutheran chorale “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott” (“A mighty fortress is our God”). The finale contains bits redolent of Stravinsky, who was the movement’s dedicatee.

As an encore, the pair appropriately played “Abendlied” (“Evening Song”), the final number from Schumann’s “Twelve Piano-Duet Pieces for Small and Big Children,” Op. 85 (1849). This has an incredibly beautiful melody (played by Biss), simply but gorgeously harmonized. Often played by organists, it was in 1852 set again by Schumann as the last of a set of six songs, Op. 107. It was nice to have these sounds in mind while exiting into the evening air.

Mass Effect 2: The video game is infinitely better and more complex than any space opera out of Hollywood since George Lucas went bonkers

By Justin Marble

Over the centuries the relationship between popularity and artistic merit has been fascinatingly out-of-kilter. James Cameron’s sci-fi epic “Avatar” has smashed every box-office record out there though it’s devoid of any kind of aesthetic or narrative complexity whatsoever. The movie is pretty to look at and even fun to sit through, much like a roller coaster ride. But the story, characters, and themes of the movie leave little for the mind to chew on; for a film that purports to be about a completely new world, everything is familiar, generic, safe, and obvious.

Perhaps this wouldn’t be so troubling if Cameron’s Golden Globe acceptance speech for Best Director didn’t include him reciting the Na’vi aliens’ catchphrase (“I see you”) as if it were some type of philosophical breakthrough.

The truth is that the first space opera since “Star Wars” isn’t in theaters. It’s in Xbox 360s. The game is called “Mass Effect 2,” and it is infinitely better and more complex than any extraterrestrial epic out of Hollywood since George Lucas went bonkers. Am I actually recommending we search for art not on celluloid but in a video game? Yes, yes I am.

Perhaps that’s unfair. Unlike toy-commercial blockbusters like “Transformers” or “GI Joe,” “Avatar” at least attempts to have a theme, even if it was, well, dumb.

The humans in the story, led by a corporate bigwig and a military general (who—brace yourselves—are jerks), want to mine a valuable resource called “unobtanium” (really?) out from under the entrenched, indigenous Na’vi. Our hero, the Generic Soldier, uses new technology that allows him to inhabit a Na’vi body in an attempt to convince them to move. Eventually the heartless general and greedy profit monger grow tired of this and decide they are going to move in with their mechs and destroy the poor Indians—sorry, Na’vi.

A political allegory! Fascinating. Obviously, the humans here are stand-ins for 18th century imperialists, or maybe Manifest Destiny Americans, or, if you’re feeling current and dramatic, Bush. If you’ve seen “Dances With Wolves,” “Pocahontas,” or “Dune,” or have a functioning brain, you can guess what happens next. Generic Soldier falls in love with a native and decides to use his new avatar body to save the Na’vi from destruction. Well, at this point the allegory gets shucked off in favor of some battle scenes.

I don’t want to be the art-house critic who despises anything with a hint of fun or anything that has gained a fair amount of popularity. I can appreciate a good space opera. “Star Wars” was the first time I really began to think about film in a serious way. And I enjoyed the hell out of this summer’s “Star Trek” reboot.

But I must question if we are asking too little from the film experience and, specifically, from the space opera. Some people view movies as a form of escapism, and the space story is the ultimate form of escapism: we literally leave our world behind and see technology and planets that we have yet to discover except in our minds. There’s an innocent beauty to it.

The significance of “Avatar” lies in the technology Cameron invented to help tell the story. It will allow movies to be bigger, shinier, and in three dimensions. But what if that technology is the wrong direction, a dead end? What if we shouldn’t be thinking bigger, but smaller?

For years video games had no stories. There were levels, and at the end you had to save a princess or stop an evil robot, but that was it. They were entertainment, not art. As games began selling more, budgets increased. Game companies began investing in people who knew how to tell stories. Yet these games, appealing to a popular audience, took their cues from Hollywood’s big-budget blockbusters. Today the vast majority of games still do.

But “Mass Effect 2″ takes the storytelling control away from Hollywood, away from the James Camerons of the world. Bioware (the developers of the game) have created an experience that is unique to the individual player. And the implications of this control are far more fascinating than the passive experience of sitting in a dark theater.

The original “Mass Effect” was much like a Hollywood epic. Bioware created a universe set in the 22nd century (like Cameron’s “Avatar”) where the discovery of something called a mass relay (a big teleporter floating in space) allows instant travel to other galaxies. Humanity made contact with aliens, but we were technologically outmatched. Other races had discovered mass relays before us, and we were marginalized in intergalactic politics. Yet when the player’s character discovers an evil alien’s plot to wipe out the galaxy, he saves the day and humanity becomes the dominant race.

It’s pretty silly, like a blockbuster tends to be. But “Mass Effect” was also a role-playing game (known as an RPG to gamers). You chose how your character would respond to certain situations. You could play him as a xenophobic murderer who wanted humans to take over or as an intergalactic peacekeeper who wanted to foster mutual survival and benefit. You could develop relationships with your crew, and your choices could also lead to some of their deaths.

“Mass Effect 2″ carries your unique story into the second game (which is to be the middle entry in a trilogy). The choices you made years ago affect the universe you see in this game. Humanity may have one voice among many on an inter-species ruling council. Or it may be the sole voice. People you helped may return the favor. Or they may be dead. These choices come up again and again, but Bioware introduces a moral and philosophical complexity that goes far beyond “Avatar”’s childish good guys and bad guys.

The ending offers an opportunity to take over an alien base with advanced technology. Yet the post is fueled by human lives—people that have been boiled down to paste. Does the end justify the means? You’ll see your choice, and the consequences, play out. These choices continue to affect the game, crafting a unique story that culminates in a “suicide mission” in which you and your squadmates may not make it out alive.

Avatar: The same old unimaginative story gussied up in 3-D

Everyone knows the scene in the war movie where a wounded soldier sacrifices themselves for the cause. It happens a few times in “Avatar.” Michelle Rodriguez, playing a rogue, human, helicopter pilot, gives her life while fighting the evil general. Yet her character is so very boring, dull, and one-dimensional that we don’t really care. We’ve become desensitized to these types of things because of overuse and poor writing.

Let’s contrast this with Garrus Vakarian, an alien security officer you meet way back in “Mass Effect.” You can talk to him, learn his back story, even shape the way he views the world. He can become bitter and jaded at the bureaucracy and red tape surrounding his job or a force for justice. Over hours and hours of gameplay, he can be by your side, fighting your enemies with you. In my game, during our final mission, he was shot while attempting to do his duty. He was shot because I decided to place him in that situation.

In a beautifully rendered scene, with lighting and camera movement, this artificial, computer-generated model gasped its last breath. Like all great moments in the “Mass Effect” games, my character was allowed to respond how I chose (via a conversation system that allows you to select responses). I was emotionally affected in a way I didn’t think was possible while playing a video game. He doesn’t always have to die. But the choices I made up to that point meant he was a goner.

I regretted those choices. I wished he hadn’t died. It was a stupid game, something I was playing for fun. But I felt a real connection to something completely fake—something animated. Bioware achieved something Cameron didn’t. Games achieved something film didn’t. It was because the story had become my story. I wasn’t being lectured to from on high about the trappings of imperialism, shown things by an all-powerful director, manipulated to feel emotion for a silly-looking, blue alien. Or maybe I was, but because I implicitly participated in it, it resonated more. I’m still not sure.

The end of “Empire Strikes Back” is pretty depressing when you’re 10 years old. Lando betrays his friend. Han Solo is frozen in carbonite. Luke gets his hand cut off, and finds out Vader is his father. The film ends with the main characters looking out into space, a black abyss. It’s art. It takes risks. “Mass Effect 2″ is similar. Your victory is Pyrrhic and small considering the large scope Bioware gives the series. Your friends may have died. The main evil you have faced off against is still out there, still threatening.

“Avatar” takes no risks. Evil is soundly defeated and punished. There’s no moral complexity, nothing to think about it when it’s over. Sure, minor characters die, but their sacrifice is not treated as being significant, and we are unaffected because they are nothing more than devices used to further the all-important plot. At one time (pre-prequels), Lucas understood character. Bioware does too. Cameron does not.

For me, the metaphor for the artistic imagination is space. There is no greater natural blank canvas than the night sky. We don’t know what lies beyond our planet, beyond our system, beyond our galaxy. It is the unknown. A good chunk of the genre of science fiction is based on this premise. Yet we have become passive participants in the death of the imagination, the death of space. A story that has been told many times before, gussied up in 3-D, is the greatest box-office earner of all time. It is only going to change if we create the next stories ourselves.