sometimes we simply perform in the woods

They do their pieces in this tiny studio, with no publicity whatsoever, for an audience that is reached through text messages, and that audience never comes directly to the theater. They are met at another location and escorted to the theater by a cast member. When you come, you are advised to bring your passport, because you never know when the police are going to show up and haul everyone off to jail.

Catherine Coray, a theater professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, speaking of the Belarus Free Theater in this morning's New York Times.

The Belarus Free Theater players are currently in New York where they are performing in Being Harold Pinter as part of the Public Theater's Under The Radar Festival.

and go we know not where

Shakespeare is hard. Every time I sit down to see some Shakespeare I dread the possibility of poor execution. Will this director, these players, leave me wondering what they’re saying? Feeling like a kneaded clod for not comprehending the four century old metaphors?

Which is why, when Shakespeare is done right, there is gratitude. A gratefulness that underscores and complements the full emotional range that the Bard unfurls with his brilliant book.

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s production of Measure for Measure made me glad like that.

I have no recollection of Measure for Measure before last night. I know I read it once. I slogged through most of the Riverside Shakespeare as an undergrad; even the history plays. But I can’t recall experiencing the oppressive weight and rage invoked by Antonio’s benightedness or the sweet relief of mercy measured out that flooded me last night. Nor do I recall being filled with grief and apprehension on hearing Claudio explain why death is a fearful thing.

I may have dismissed the play when I read it long ago because of its quaint mores -- the whole of the action hinges on sexual transgressions that are no longer life or death concerns. We do not execute men for impregnating women out of marriage; we file complaints when men in power request sordid sexual favors in exchange for political ones or we wait and call TMZ when they renege on their side of the deal.

The director Scott Williams doesn’t allow these old-world concerns to trip us up; they instead serve the core action of the play and provide just the tension required to keep the volley alive; just the strain needed to peel back the seeming and reveal the being. Nor does the director marry off all our players easily at the end -- his handling of the final scene between the Duke and Isabella is one of the moments of this production that makes it peer to London and New York productions -- Rupert Goold’s Macbeth and Sam Mendes' As You Like It come to mind.

Only the stagecraft was second rate and distracted from the whole; as did the decision to seat several rows of audience on the stage. Better that they lose the snowy soap flakes, give up a few ticket sales, and tuck away whatever that monstrous unused tubing was that floated over the stage like it was waiting for the Blue Man Group to come charging out and toss out the rain capes.

All the better not to distract from the central trinity of players in this production, all of whom answer to the strength that Shakespeare demands: Robert Sicular as the Duke, Chip Persons as Angelo, Lenne Klingaman as Isabella.

Klingaman as Isabella is especially remarkable. It would be easy to play a nun as pious and celestial, cold and untouchable; but the tiny Klingaman is rooted and real with the strength of an oak, a woman who preserves her power without apology and acts through it to make a difference for others without sacrificing herself. Antonio’s transgressions make perfect sense in the magnetic pull of her presence; as does the Duke’s sweet hopes to capture and own her.

That Williams saw an opportunity in the final scene to turn easy assumptions inside out and ensure that Isabella remains true to herself and that same strength that bathes her world with mercy and grace -- here is where the audience is changed and amazed.

And grateful.

full of wise saws and modern instances

When it comes to As You Like It I usually don’t. As a rule, Shakespeare’s comedies leave me cold. I like my Bard with a little Tybalt in it; a Cordelia and her mad daddy at odds and then reconciled; or a couple of star-crossed lovers dead in a heap on the cold stone floor, the whole neighborhood full of regret.

Sam Mendes’ direction of As You Like It at BAM’s Harvey Theater changed my mind -- not in a pure binary way, but in one of those subtle shifts of perception that dissolves intolerance and makes the world richer and more inclusive for it.

Shakespeare’s comedies are now something more subtle and rich and real than they were before.

The set design is richly cinematic, with a luminous quality that one might expect from the director of American Beauty, but most appreciable was the transformation of the story itself from the ways I’ve experienced it in previous productions (in less capable hands).

Mendes has uncovered something true about Shakespeare’s play that I never knew.

Gone is the madcap screwball tone and laughable gender confusions. Instead:

• The gravity that binds us to those we care for occupied the stage like an unnamed actor, swinging the players into their orbits as gravity influences planets around a single star in unique but concomitant obliques.



• Twinning was everywhere and beautifully explicated in ways far more psychologically revealing than Rosalind could convey by simply donning drag. Power and class are flip flopped; gender is bent. When we move from the court of the usurping Duke to the winter woods of his expulsed brother we see the treacherous Duke (whom we’ve come to know as erratic and violent -- fearful of maintaining his shaky status) step, with his retinue, to the hard wood wall that backs the stage.[1] In the dim light the wall rises to reveal the wild and the wood behind them, and they step out of their court finery into weather ravaged rags. Before our eyes they become the court in exile. Before our eyes we see the wheel of Fortune spin and end on her head.



• We see the play’s hallmark gender confusion played out not as buffoonery but as a part and parcel slice of humanity, where human sexuality is more subtle than a pure pipefitting of parts, and all players are ultimately more nuanced than they seem.

Where the production is weak:

• There’s a lovely strain of melancholy that moves through the play and influences its pacing. This works beautifully until the end, where it’s forced upon the reconciliation scene where parties are wed and the father and daughter are reunited. We need a little more madcap pacing here to make it play right; a few more exuberant reunion embraces, and we need them sooner than they were received.



• Somewhere in the mix, too, we lose sight of why Rosalind remains disguised in the forest. She’s encountered her father, we learn, and yet remains concealed. Why? It supports her charade with Orlando, of course, but the threat is no longer clear or imminent -- we need a sharp reminder of why she conceals her true self once she’s transitioned to the safety of the woods.

But these are small things, and the play as a whole is a lovely retreat and a mind opening three hours. Bonus to the whole is the delicate integration of orchestration. Musicians are placed both above the stage to set the tone and then emerge to make music within it. I’m of the school that believes a well-made play has a little bit of music and dancing in it -- As You Like It accomplishes both, and the choreography of the happily coupled pairs somehow managed make me cry, which I have to count as a success even though it startled me.

Thank you, Mr. Mendes, and Company. As it turns out, I liked it very much indeed.


As You Like It is a Bridge Project production, a collaboration between BAM, the Old Vic and Neal Street. It will run at BAM through March 13th.

Cast:
Ashlie Atkinson, Phoebe
Jenni Barber, Audrey
Michelle Beck, Celia
Edward Bennet, Oliver
Christian Camargo, Orlando
Stephen Dillane, Jaques
Alvin Epstein, Adam & Sir Oliver Martext
Jonathan Lincoln Fried, Le Beau
Richard Hansell, Amiens
Ron Cephas Jones, Charles the Wrestler
Aaron Krohn, Silvius
Anthony O’Donnell, Corin
Juliet Rylance, Rosalind
Thomas Sadoski, Touchstone
Michael Thomas, Dukes Frederick & Senior
Ross Waiton, William
Stephen Bentley-Klein and Shane Shanahan, Musicians

Originally uploaded by beebo wallace

[1] I mentioned to my brother -- my date for the evening -- that the wall in question reminded me of the wall in Mary Stuart, representing her imprisonment in the Tower. Come to find out it wasn’t happenstance -- Neal Street, Sam Mendes production company which is entangled in the Bridge Project, was also involved in bringing Mary Stuart to Broadway.

serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude

I’ve been Ajax. I’ve spoken to Ajax.

Sgt. First Class Tony Gonzalez, an Iraq combat veteran from Brooklyn, speaking during a panel discussion on readings from Sophocles' plays Ajax and Philoctetes, and quoted in this morning's New York Times.

The tragic readings were staged in Manhattan by Theater of War, an independent production company that recently received $3.7 million from the Pentagon to visit 50 military sites "through at least next summer" with the production.

Aristotle is not mentioned in the piece, nor is his theory of how Tragedy, properly executed, effects catharsis, "through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions".

But our soldiers were mentioned -- one out of eight who have returned from Iraq suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder -- as was their sore need for some kind of salve.

a wild song without words

By day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and has a soul.

Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are poured out again back to the streets, prairies and valleys.

It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and out all day that give the building a soul of dreams and thoughts and memories.

(Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert, who would care for the building or speak its name or ask a policeman the way to it?)


Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters and parcels and iron pipes carry gas and water in and sewage out.

Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words, and tell terrors and profits and loves--curses of men grappling plans of business and questions of women in plots of love.


Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the earth and hold the building to a turning planet.

Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and hold together the stone walls and floors.


Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the mortar clinch the pieces and parts to the shape an architect voted.

Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust, and the press of time running into centuries, play on the building inside and out and use it.


Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid in graves where the wind whistles a wild song without words.

And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor.

Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging at back doors hundreds of miles away and the brick-layer who went to state's prison for shooting another man while drunk.

(One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the end of a straight plunge--he is here--his soul has gone into the stones of the building.)


On the office doors from tier to tier--hundreds of names and each name standing for a face written across with a dead child, a passionate lover, a driving ambition for a million dollar business or a lobster's ease of life.


Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls tell nothing from room to room.

Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from corporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers, and tons of letters go bundled from the building to all ends of the earth.

Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul of the building just the same as the master-men who rule the building.


Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor empties its men and women who go away and eat and come back to work.

Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on them.

One by one the floors are emptied. . . The uniformed elevator men are gone. Pails clang. . . Scrubbers work, talking in foreign tongues. Broom and water and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit, and machine grime of the day.

Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for money. The sign speaks till midnight.


Darkness on the hallways. Voices echo. Silence holds. . . Watchmen walk slow from floor to floor and try the doors. Revolvers bulge from their hip pockets. . . Steel safes stand in corners. Money is stacked in them.

A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights of barges butting their way across a harbor, nets of red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span of glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs of crosses and clusters over the sleeping city.

By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.

Skyscraper by Carl Sandburg


I heard this piece last night, along with thirty-some others, in a "wordshop" of bread and salt at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park. It was the inaugural performance of a new series of works in progress that will be staged at the Pritzker Pavilion during our cold months, behind the windowed curtain shut against the night, looking out from under Gehry's curling steel across the broad lawn.

It was an astonishing setting, and the words of Carl Sandburg, heard against the night skyline of Michigan Avenue to the right and the dark distance of Lake Michigan to the left, had a rich resonant power.

Unfortunately, that power was exploited by the pointing (too much) and the literal gestures (too many) that accompanied the poetry. The city was all around us -- it wasn't necessary to point it out like a teacher at a lectern, and this convention managed to shatter credibility when the actor looked toward Green Bay while conjuring boats returning from Saugatuck.

The playwright, Charles Gerace, who has done us the great service of showcasing Sandburg's works and was also a player on the stage, has perhaps intervened too aggressively in this early stage of development, cutting and pasting Sandburg's works into a pastiche. Resonant sounds and syllables seemed dislocated from their mother stanzas and orphaned by the lost proximity. Repetitious phrases were transformed into dull bores by the distance, as if they had entered the conversation too late. Lost was the resounding drum-like town crier quality the phrases convey when left intact and integral in the original pieces. To be fair this is a work in progress, and we can hope that with time it will progress into a piece that does better service to the strength and the power of Sandburg's words and insights.

Because each of these are extraordinary, and worth lingering in.

All that is required is for the playwright to meddle less and let the work remain intact to "reach down to the rock of the earth". Sandburg's poetry is all steel girder and tender compassion, and it can be trusted to hold.

Seat A1

Seat A1
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Mary Stuart at the
Broadhurst Theatre

Posting by cameraphone
from 44th between
Broadway and 8th Ave
just before curtain

had Eisenstein replied

Video: Opening clip from Sergei Eisenstein's first full length feature Стачка (1925)

How I would like to go to Moscow and work under Eisenstein for a year. ... What I would learn under a person like Pudovkin is how to handle a camera, the higher trucs of the editing bench, & so on, of which I know as little as of quantity surveying.

Samuel Beckett in a series of letters to his friend Thomas McGreevy, cited in The Making of Samuel Beckett in the 30 April issue of the New York Review of Books.

Beckett wrote to Eisenstein and requested admission to the Moscow State School of Cinematography. He didn't hear back.

It's strange to speculate what kind of films the author of Play and Endgame and the just now running on Broadway Waiting for Godot might have made, had Eisenstein replied.

made it.

made it.
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Made it somehow, against all reason, even though my plane squatted on the tarmac for 55 minutes more than it should have before dropping me into LaGuardia one brief hour before the Tuesday 7PM curtain time (which has thwarted me before: see Equus).

Made it, somehow, which I'm sure is what William H. Macy was thinking after the first night of his run in Mamet's Speed-the-Plow in a role that Jeremy Piven bailed out of as the result of mercury poisoning from too much sushi. (Or so his doctor says. Mamet was unforgiving and wisecracked that Piven was off to pursue a career as a thermometer).

Macy is Mamet's man and he pulled it off with only a few recovered flubs and one duped line and two big hugs from his co-stars -- Raul Esparza and Elisabeth Moss -- which he received shyly (does William H. Macy do anything any other way?) in the twilight space where the curtain drops on the other world of the play before it rises again to the hot footlights of the curtain call and whatever the audience has to dish.

K says Macy's no Piven and I believe her, but I loved him all the same.

Posting by cameraphone from Times Square.

p.s. More on Mamet »

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

a crucial obligation

Charlie Rose spends an hour with Harold Pinter »

It breathes in the air. It cannot be seen, but it enters the room every time the door is opened.

Though you go to the uttermost parts of the earth, and hide yourself in the most obscure lodgings in the least popular of towns, one day there is a possibility that two men will appear. They will be looking for you, and you cannot get away. And someone will be looking for them too. There is terror everywhere.

Mr. Pinter, on the evidence of this work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London.

Sunday Times theater critic Harold Hobson writing of Pinter's first play, The Birthday Party, in 1958, shortly after the play closed following a brief run in London's West End. Hobson was cited in this morning's New York Times obituary for the playwright who passed away on Wednesday.

equus

equus
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

For the record: Theatre in Manhattan starts at 7pm on Tuesday nights. So even if you hassle your waiter to get back to you fast with the check and you arrive with 25 minutes to spare (presuming the curtain's at 8 like every other night of the week except Monday of course) you're still going to miss the first 35 minutes and wonder why the whole place is so quiet when you arrive at will call only to be hushed and ushered in (generously, I thought) where you can stand at the back and watch the first half of Equus unfold.

And good thing too if your seats are like ours -- just four rows from the stage but all catywompus (sic?) and off to the side where you have to perform a gestalt and fill in the faces and bits of stage that you can no longer see.

But you will manage to squeeze in all the naked bits quite nicely, and it won't be nearly as creepy to see Daniel Radcliffe, aka Harry Potter, work his way through that difficult chapter of adolescence where one feels compelled to commit strange and unexpected acts with and against horses, as you thought it might be.

And it will certainly give you plenty to talk about over that second glass of wine after the show, when you aren't talking about binary oppositions and whether or not the thing they were wrestling over was worth the wrestle.

Equus tonight in previews with Daniel Radcliffe, Richard Griffiths, and the inimitable @karigeltemeyer.

Posting by cameraphone from Midtown when I should really probably be sleeping instead.

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

slam BAM thank you ma'am

slam BAM thank you ma'am
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Met up with Rahul last night for some Beckett at BAM -- his first, which is all kinds of risky for me, because Beckett productions skew to the very very good or the very very bad with very very little middle ground.

Mitigating my risk was knowing that John Turturro and Elaine Stritch were in the Endgame cast, and we were soon to learn of two others (whose names I'm having trouble ferreting out from the BAMbill) who nearly outshone the two knowns.

Just nearly. The performances were pitch perfect across the board (nearly: Elaine disappointed just a smidge, playing the part a little too hard, but I think maybe my expectations are too high for my favorite dame.) and R generously guffawed where expected, giggled on cue, and had periodic extended laughing fits, all good signs that I hadn't led him too far astray with the suggestion.

But it was a safe bet really: R and I met in a hostile office environment where we quickly and almost subversively discovered that we found the same crazy absurd realities funny.

And that we were the only ones laughing.

Followed the performance with an astonishingly comforting Italian/Spanish/Portuguese meal in a Brooklyn basement that felt like a Spanish cava (is that a wine cellar? maybe it's a wine... anyway: we were in a wine cellar.) sharing astonishing, comforting stories about misadventures with one-eyed grandmothers and other excavated memories.

And then the subterranean ride home in which R demonstrated his unnerving knowledge of the NY public transit system's coming and goings, listening like a Pawnee guide to the incoming rail cars from a central spot and dashing to the appropriate platform when the train came rushing in, to take us back across the river to my swank corporate crib, already chasing into the next early morning hours but still, done too soon.

the scottish play

the scottish play
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

A few brief thoughts about the Scottish Play headlined by Patrick Stewart (oh hell: Macbeth. We saw Macbeth. This isn't a theatre. I can say it.) which I caught last night at the Lyceum with @karigee, because there isn't time enough to write up something thorough and thoughtful -– it was too big, and any approach I might make is heavily saddled with former English Major baggage, and I have to be at a meeting in half an hour.

So here it is:

• The sitcom Friends gets a lot of credit for introducing brief episodic scenes into the dramatic narrative. Shakespeare did it first.



• I thought this was a play about ambition. The director Rupert Goold wants me to know that it's about tyranny and tyrants and, maybe?, George W. Bush. And he's right. And I'm ready to rally against it.



• The thing of a play is: it must be inhabited. The life that is brought to this play through the blocking, through the body language, through the acting -– always and again I'm astonished by how powerful dramatic action can be. When it's well done.



• There's such a huge and clear difference between a mediocre Shakespearean actor and an accomplished Shakespearean actor. When a player can deliver that language with all the naturalism of breathing -- like Stewart did last night -- there's nothing better. It's potable poetry.



• Devastated by the scene where Macduff learns of his family's fate. Reminds me of the Henry production in Chicago -- the scene with Hotspur and his wife. How often did Shakespeare do this with the antagonist -– infuse them with a humanity that brings the big themes into startling focus? Making it all manageable. Evoking such compassion.



• Lady Macbeth: I wasn't your fan in the first Act, but now that you're washing out those spots I'm all yours. Such pure, believable madness.



• And, right: How old is Patrick Stewart again? Damn he's hot in those boots.

Posting by cameraphone from Union Square in NYC.

speaking of effigies

speaking of effigies
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Divorce is most of all lonely.

Mine was compounded by the fact that my family adored my ex- and, for whatever reason -- maybe because the realization that the happy shining life that I loved so much was, in part, a sham -- I didn’t share a lot of details with them about why we were getting divorced. Protecting him and myself, I guess. But the event largely proceeded in silence. My silence. They didn’t ask much, and I didn’t tell them much.

Which made for a very lonely time in which I settled into the understanding that everything I wished for was gone.

It all exploded (many years ago, now) around Thanksgiving and had settled some by Christmas, but I was feeling so raw that I declined invitations from family and friends and opted to spend my Christmas at home alone by myself.

I don’t recommend it. But it gave me plenty of room to cry. And feel lost and alone and as if my world had ended.

Right. Like I said. Don’t recommend it.

A few days after Christmas I received a package from my little brother. I felt I had disappointed my brothers most of all. I gave them the news indirectly, cc’ing them on an email that I sent to my father as a last minute impulse. They had a great relationship with my ex- -- he was like a brother, he fit my family so well -- and it was the wrong wrong wrong way to do it. But hurt skews your best rational impulses, and regret doesn’t mean you can take it back.

So I received a late Christmas package from my little brother. The late part made sense: as a clan we seem to share a collective phobia of post offices and things always get mailed later than they should. What’s unusual is receiving a gift on time from my family. Late is expected.

I received a slip to pick up the package at the P.O. and so I did, taking it with me next door to the sublime Espresso Vivace to have a shot of coffee before I headed back up the hill for home. My empty home.

I decided to open his package right there at Vivace, and this little porcelain figurine -- the very first and the very last porcelain figurine that I have ever received from any member of my family -- was in the package. (We are not, as a habit, givers of porcelain figurines. Plastic, maybe. Under certain circumstances.) Along with a note from my brother.

I saw the figure, read the note and immediately started to cry. Carefully, silently, my chest heaving and my trying to hide it as I sat in that cafe.

I’ve misplaced the note, so I’ll have to paraphrase it here, but first: a backstory.

The whole tribe of us are hams, and as kids we excelled at mounting theatrical productions. My older sister was the ring leader, and I can still mime for you her choreography to Fantasia -- with roles for all four of us -- that grew and took shape over several years of working it. The story line had nothing to do with the real Fantasia -- Fantasia was convenient because we had the LP and a record player -- it was our score.

I’ll spare you the ELO Electric Bump story. But put it on and I’ll bump it for you, without missing a beat.

So. To the fairy godmother.

One of our most spectacular productions took shape over a weekend at my grandparent’s home in Seattle. I think I’ve mentioned before the levels and layers of that home -- it was made for theater. We had just moved back to the Northwest from Denver, and were staying there with my grandparents who were also putting up some family friends who had a daughter about the same age as my sister and me. We seized the moment to mount a full-scale production of Cinderella, using my grandmother’s spectacular ball gown collection for costuming (my grandfather was grand potentate of the Nile Temple in the 1960s -- which meant she had an amazing ball gown collection).

We dressed Cinderella in blue taffeta -- A, the family friend, played the princess-to-be. My sister reprised her role of wicked witch (which she played to perfection almost every single Halloween of our childhood) in the role of wicked stepmother. I think my youngest brother A was the prince, and G played miscellaneous roles, including the priest who would ultimately marry the prince and his princess (the bride’s train, btw, was an extended roll of toilet paper that unspooled as she walked down the aisle).

I was the fairy godmother and I chose for my costume a killer sunshine yellow fringed flapper gown. Sleeveless with straight lines and long satiny fringe running in tiers over the whole of that dress. I asked my grandmother about it not too long ago and unfortunately it’s long gone. Although I’m sure it wouldn’t fit me now (we were unusually tall kids and she was diminutive, so we got away with it then), but if I could score it today I’d find myself a ball to go to. That was a gorgeous gown.

If I may say, I played the part of fairy godmother to perfection. It was my best role ever, wholly improvised, and played to uproarious laughter to a house of completely sloshed adults. They loved it. They particularly loved my crowning moment when, having dressed the ragged Cinderella in a flurry of magical accoutrements (G rushed the goods in when I waved my wand -- it was all very well done) the princess asked: “But I have no shoes. What will I wear for shoes?”

I pondered the problem, studied it, and then resolved it in a flourish -- by pulling a pair of stilettos -- our stand-in glass slippers -- out of the top of my dress where I had propped them in anticipation, heels pointing out, like a stuffed bullet bra, against my then quite flat chest. (This was the summer of what would be my 5th grade year.)


The crowd fell apart.

It was my greatest triumph.

It took some time to mop up the mess, but we finally got the audience to settle down and we took the show to its logical conclusion. Flawlessly executed by all. And of course, after it was done, we talked and talked and talked about it. Told the story over and over.

Because that’s what you do when you put on a show with the best players you’ll ever perform with; when you’re perfectly in synch in a way that only folks who love each other unthinkingly can be.

And that’s why I cried when I read my brother’s note; my brother who felt so far from me just then, who I thought I had lost by making a hugely difficult decision. My brother said in effect: “Merry Christmas to my sister, the best fairy godmother ever.” And some more stuff about being the best sister ever.

Reminding me all at once that I was loved.

And reminding me of something every girl needs to know: that I was my own fairy godmother. That I held the power to make all my wishes come true.





Update: I asked my brothers to verify whether I got their roles right in our world famous production of Cinderella. A couldn't remember for sure (he was so young) but G had no doubt that I mistakenly swapped them -- he was the prince for sure, because he got to dance with the princess. So please consider this amendment.

A also reminded me that he was on the phone with my brother when my infamous cc' came across the wires, and G said: "Oh: I just got an email from D." To which A said: "Hey: me too." Thinking it was Thanksgiving greetings they opened it together and both went: "ohhhhhhhhh noooo." The best part is that they laugh about the timing of it today -- these are the kinds of things we laugh about in our family. 'Cause baby, if you lose your lose your laugh you lose your footing. (Ken Kesey said that first.)