to have and to hold

Illus: Soviet Mayan Playing Cards via bad banana blog

Steppenwolf’s production of Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer was solid and satisfying. Still, I stepped out on to Halsted after last evening’s performance, the night strangely warm after a day in the high 50s, the ice and snow of the brittle days before having melted in the rain, wondering: what is it with guys and their poker games?

It seems to me that there’s something about the game of poker -- games of chance in general, maybe, but games of poker especially -- that men are in the habit of elevating to the realm of rite and ritual.

Am I wrong to pin it on the men? After all a woman, Shirley Jackson, wrote The Lottery, which is all about chance and the communal act. Although it’s true that women play poker, both casually and professionally and have even, I’m sure, run themselves equally to ruin, the game of the mythic West and the tables and back rooms of Vegas seem always in the imagination of writers to be played by men. Women appear in cocktail skirts or wifely attire, porting in sandwiches and refreshments, sometimes shaking their heads through the thick smoke and bad behavior.

There’s something monastic about men gathering to play. Objects are arranged and shared according to rules unspoken but understood. Fortunes are driven by brief decisions and the flick of a wrist. Everything depends on the moment of transubstantiation -- when chance intervenes and three of a kind transforms into a full a house.

As with any religious rite, the cascade of consequences that follow (in the pages of literature; in the lyrics of a Kenny Rogers song) from the way the cards are dealt and played carry that tense, tired, sweaty patina of the struggle between self-determination and chance.

The man at the pew is haunted by the same question as the man at the card table: Do we decide, or are these things decided for us?

And the question was there last night on the Steppenwolf stage, a room full of drunk men playing cards with the devil, one with an earlier score to settle, all of them with a lifetime of missed chances and fuck ups to regret. Only one of them waking painfully to the awareness that he played a role in the unhappy events that spilled around him and were his history.

Like a Midnight spent in Mass by a true believer, the game was played and everything changed for this one awakening fellow.

Only it hadn’t. His departure with the devil was long before determined; the certainty of his cold terrifying eternity was foretold by the nuns.

But then it did.

Because layered on top of the game was Christmas, and with it came a sudden, miraculous boozy intervention that might have looked, if it lay in a manger, all the world like redemption, but because it was near-sighted and smelled like whiskey on an old man’s breath it looked an awful lot like dumb luck.

Which can so easily be mistaken for a miracle, under the right circumstances.

Which these were.

The Seafarer
By Conor McPherson
Directed by Steppenwolf ensemble member Randall Arney
Featuring ensemble members Francis Guinan, Tom Irwin, John Mahoney and Alan Wilder with Randall Newsome

In the Downstairs Theatre
Thu. December 4, 2008 — Sun. February 8, 2009

superior donuts

The trick with a good stage play is to make the stage go away. It’s not an easy thing to do: it’s a hulking artifact, that stage, and even if you blow away the proscenium arch you still have creaking floorboards and awkwardly placed stage props and missed entrances and forgotten lines to remind you that oh yeah: We’re here in this dark room watching a bunch of folks pretend.

Filmmakers have more of a margin to get it right. Long hours in the editing room trimming out the awkward bits give them leeway to make the magic that much more magnificent, lets us ride those few flickering hours in a state of suspended disbelief without the disruptions that real-live pretenders can introduce when they’re really live, and -- when the movie’s really good -- make us want to go back and ride it again.

Steppenwolf’s production of Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts [1] gets remarkably close to absolute crystalline suspension.

I can’t recall a single wrong note in the dialog of the play that we watched unspool yesterday afternoon, and the cast as a whole is so solid, so believable, so enjoyable to watch -- each conveying authentically that something that is born to them through family and place and in aggregate becomes this thin slice of the city that is Chicago -- the whole was so well done that I was sold on the story well-told.

There was only one awkward moment when the stage showed itself -- in a session of clumsily blocked fisticuffs that didn’t deliver the pow and bang and fury of a filmed spectacle (the addition of a few well-placed sound effects could smooth out the rough spots). And too there was the revelation at the beginning of Act II (once I consulted my program during the intermission) that the fellow playing the lead role so appealingly, and who seemed so familiar, was Michael McKean, aka Lenny from Laverne & Shirley and David St. Hubbins of This is Spinal Tap. But that displacement disappeared almost immediately, so completely does McKean occupy his role.

I was apprehensive going in. I was expecting a cranky play. The New York Times ran a piece on Letts last weekend in which he remarked on being angry when receiving his Tony -- a tangled mix of emotions that rolled out of a difficult year in which he lost his father, a member of the August cast, to lung cancer. This confirmed the read that I took last month when I asked Letts a question from the audience during his appearance at the Printers Row Book Fair -- asked him why he chose to write for the stage and not for film, when the attention that film receives, and the dollars that follow, are so much greater.

I had hoped to frame the question in a way that gave him a chance to speak to the strengths of theater -- what he thought set it apart as an experience from other dramatic arts -- but a storm was kicking up outside the tent and only part of my question made it to the podium. His reply was petulant and defensive and not at all illuminating, as if he assumed that I thought he was an idiot to write for the stage when he could be making it big in the movies -- and that he thought I was an idiot for asking it. I sat down chastened, unsatisfied, and not liking Tracy Letts all that much.

Superior Donuts, written in part before August: Osage County ever hit the stage, turned my heart in his direction again. I expect Mr. Letts is riding the tide of grief, something we all get to do, something that can make one decidedly cranky. Reasonably so.

If August and Donuts are any indication of how he will make his despair sing for us then, Mr. Letts, please take your time.

And godspeed.



p.s. Got a kick out of the fact that a line from the play has appeared here before at detritus. Consider the donut »

[1] as I post this the link to Steppenwolf is broken -- apologies -- hopefully they’ll get it fixed soon

I apologize

Video: Oscar Brown Jr., I Apologize

If you free the music the music will free you.

—Maggie Brown, quoting her father, Oscar Brown Jr., over a week ago at a Steppenwolf Traffic production in his honor.

Saw Maggie Brown and her sister Africa the Monday before last, in a tribute show for their daddy, Oscar Brown Jr., but the week got to moving so fast that I didn’t have a chance to sit down and write about it.

In a nutshell: great show. Peopled by extraordinary artists -- musicians and poets -- some of whom had a hand in the Afro-Centro movement (Kwame Steve Cobb was there, playing percussion and reading -- sweet merciful lord -- reading I Apologize. See the video clip above for Mr. Brown reading it his own dear self.).

Others --- Keith M. Kelley and Jeff Baraka -- who are writing new stories, giving new wings to the ancestors’ work. The sisters even brought out the kids -- nieces and nephews and sons and daughters culled from all the siblings, eight in total -- and the littlest of them all brought the house down with his dance moves.

Left me with that solid feeling that comes only rarely when you’re a white girl living in America: the knowledge that there’s a whole chapter of American history that we simply don’t talk about enough. And the awareness that there are daily slights committed against our fellow Americans whose skins are dark. Slights that I only feel if I’m with a friend who’s black and the air turns chill as we’re shopping or dining or just walking down the goddamn street. It’s not omnipresent, but it rears up like a fog, and me unfamiliar with it it always takes me a brief WTF? moment before I realize: Oh Sh*t. Here we go again.

And then I get to leave it behind. Because my skin’s white.

Ignorance is my inheritance as a white girl, because no one forces this knowledge on you when you’re the same color as the men in charge. I first felt it for real the day the verdict (or lack thereof) came down against the policemen who battered Rodney King, Jr. I was working as a freelance researcher and graphic artist for an office in downtown L.A. and drove in late, without a radio, so I didn’t hear the news.

After I parked the car I stopped in the Post Office that I was used to frequenting, and there was a chill in the air. All the women who worked there were African-American, and what was usually a warm and receptive place full of laughter and jokes was stone cold and mostly silent. From there I walked to the office, where two men -- the security guard who I greeted everyday and another fellow who worked in the building -- were speaking in hushed tones at the front desk.

I held the elevator and the gentleman got in, with a small nod of thanks, his body turned from me. I asked him what was going on, and he told me about the verdict. Quietly, dispassionately. My response was immediate and violent: One loud “WHAT?!”

In that moment I made a friend, and he turned to me and we talked about the injustice. A warmth grew between us. Neither of us knew that the city would burn that night, but both of us could feel that something had to break loose. Something had to set this right.

It wouldn't of course -- set things right, I mean. But if you were there when it happened it all made sense somehow. Terrible, sad, sense.

It was after he stepped out and I did too that I realized what I had felt in those few feet -- from the P.O. to the front desk -- I carried my white with me. Unshakable. Branded. With judgment on my head.


p.s. Here's another story about those days in L.A. »