Silverlake Blvd.

Monday Evening Concerts presents Morton Feldman’s “For Philip Guston” @ Hauser & Wirth

 

The tempo was the main thing. “Slow”, sure, but it wasn’t languorous. Some moments were animated, other nearly came to a complete stop. Christine Tavolacci (flutes), Brendan Nguyen (piano and celesta), and Jonathan Hepfer (percussion) registered micro-scale nuances of speed as well as attack, volume, and everything else. It never stalled, for the five hours it unfolded.

 

Five hours!? Five hours is nothing: an afternoon at work, a flight to New York, a drive to Las Vegas. But in terms of music, it’s longer than Götterdämmerung; it’s longer than a double feature of Don Giovanni and Rigoletto. What could possibly be the point? It disrupts the concert-going routine; it demarcates an event that’s unique. The point being the preparation of an opportunity to really hear.

 

I did not sit straight through. I had to take a break. I don’t know when – I didn’t allow myself to check the time. After maybe two hours. My mistake was failing to bring water. I made my own 30-minute intermission and came back and stayed to the end.

 

Why? It was the pleasure of sitting in dark stillness, catching now and then bird calls and traffic sounds coming from far away.

 

But landscapes are just one way of describing it.

 

It was also immersion in a tempo in which it is impossible to be willful, violent or sly. No racing, no jolts. Instead of statements there is a sounding-out. Not only no rhetoric but no syntax. Poignant without schmaltz. Not ascetic, either: discrete, voluptuous, urgent.

 

Image: Dial (Philip Guston, 1956)

“In Circles” @ The Odyssey Theater

 

 

A bit over 100 years ago, Gertrude Stein started writing plays. At first, they didn’t seem plays at all, but demonstrations of how liberated Stein was from syntax.

 

Later, Stein started composing them out of fairly colloquial bits of chatter. The phrases are conventional, but put on display without context or referents, they become strange and comic. “A Circular Play” from 1920 is an example of this genre. It’s a romp, hinting at comic goings-on between unspecified characters, and also making cheeky pronouncements about how to write a play.

 

Stein expected her plays to be produced. Since outrageously anti-theatrical things like Raymond Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique were actually getting staged in Paris a century ago the idea wasn’t absurd. But in fact it took Virgil Thompson’s Four Saints in Three Acts and Mother of Us All to get Stein on stage. Their success has led others to try and see what can be done.

 

In 1967, Al Carmines, adapted “A Circular Play” into a off-Broadway chamber-musical. The music and production is human scale – there’s just the one piano for accompaniment – aiming at intimacy rather than razzle-dazzle.

Carmines uses Stein’s words to create distinct episodes with distinct moods, from grave to larky. The overall impression is of a gathering of friends – one of the senses of “circle” – who, in the course of 80 minutes, flirt, fight, amuse each other, annoy each other, drift off into solitary meditations and re-combine in different combinations. They spin off into individual riffs, but always regroup, reaffirm their solidarity.

 

Carmines employs most of Stein’s text, but plays with it, so we have games on games. He selects sentences and phrases, and works them into opening lines of songs, or refrains. Since he has a good ear, they are usually arresting or amusing. Once he has found a good line – or set of lines – to set to music, his song consists of the lines repeated over and over. Repetition is feature of Stein’s work, but this way of using her words is different from the actual texture of Stein’s text. It’s an explication of Stein’s play rather than a performance of it.

 

The result is mostly delightful. But sometimes it seems like a docent “revealing” the people and objects “hidden” in an picture by the zany artist.

 

David Schweizer’s production was handsome and clever. The cast was enthusiastic, with especially admirable clowning by Aaron Jung and P.T. Mahoney and singing by Ashlee Dutson.

Michael Kiwanuka’s latest

 

 

Philip Guston @ Hauser & Wirth, L.A.

 

 

The Guston retrospective of 15 years ago omitted work from 1971 – the year all the work currently at Hauser & Wirth was done. It was worth the wait. It was like getting a tour of his studio. Or, rather studios plural, since the work was produced in Italy and in U.S. The homeland of antiquity and the homeland of Richard Nixon are reflected, distilled, caricatured, restored, and quarantined. As George Seferis put it, “I woke with this marble head in my hands; / it exhausts my elbows and I don’t know where to put it down.”

L.A. Phil diary in the L.A. Review of Books

 

Check out my “Open Bar: A Diary of The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 2018-2019 Centennial Season,” just published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Two dozen events in a bit over 3000 words.

 

[Image: Paul Klee, New Harmony, 1936]

Earnest @ the Clark

 

The end of August, Chalk Repertory Theatre presented “A Wilde Picnic: a reading of The Importance of Being Earnest” in the garden of the Clark Library.

 

What could be the Importance of The Importance?

 

One thing this performance revealed to me was how the famous aphorisms feel like logical propositions. Proposition that are statements of identity and non-identity, that are contradicted by other propositions in the play.

 

Functions:

“Babies go into handbags; manuscripts go into prams”

 

Names without Persons:

“Fictitious persons (Bunbury, Earnest) have real consequences, lives independent of their creators.”

 

Names and Persons:

Both “Names are significant” and “Names are not significant”

Both “Names are given” and “Names are chosen” (Corollary: “Ones age is chosen”)

Both “Christening is a physical ordeal” and “Christening is vaccination” – Altogether “grotesque and irreligious” as Lady Bracknell puts it.

 

But the propositions are just one element, a means to an end. The play presents children running around a garden. But children who hold themselves with grave dignity, and who speak with unreal clarity and decisiveness. It links Wilde with a stream of subtly worked out nonsense that runs from Edward Lear to Carroll, Wodehouse, Firbank, through Monty Python and beyond.

Twelfth Night @ the Old Zoo

 

ISC’s summer season is already done. I’m sorry about missing Pericles, but did catch their Twelfth Night.

 

Is this the best comedy of all? It seems to combine everything good in all the others: it’s fun, but not silly; the laughs all come with a sting. The humor is about people not being themselves. But who are they, really?

 

ISC’s performance stressed the physical over the verbal.

 

At one moment a conversation between Duke Orsino and Cesario (the heroine who he thinks is a man) ended with them joining hands and tracing out a few steps of a dance. Something Fred and Ginger would call a “romantic adagio.” Just a few steps, partly a goof, but it radiated a heightened intimacy that left both uncomfortable.

 

Later, in full-out slapstick mode, Cesario and Sir Andrew were so terrified of engaging in a swordfight that the parties egging them on picked them both up and battled with them like toy weapons.

 

Xavi Moreno’s Sir Andrew was the highlight of the show. Three hours of non-stop, physical comedy. His every move was hilarious.

 

Plus he nailed his big moment in Act 2, when he steps out of a rowdy drunken conversation to assert, “I was adored once, too.” A sigh left unexplained and unnoticed by the others.

The Heal, inspired by Sophocles’s Philoctetes @ the Getty Villa

Aaron Posner and Round House pulled it off.

 

I couldn’t believe it when the Getty announced they were doing Sophocles’s Philoctetes. It’s impossible to stage. The main character is a loathsome freak, with repeated references to his bad smell. A victim no one likes. The action consists of men lying, whining and arguing. No romance, no humor, and not even the relief of nature poetry. It works up to an impasse that is resolved only by last-minute divine intervention, that leaves you disquieted and suspicious.

 

The Heal was an imitation rather than a translation. Was there a single line that could be traced back to Sophocles? No matter. It took the themes and issues and expressed them in 21^st century language, with a 21^st century sensibility. The play Sophocles wrote about a man with a wound that won’t heal expanded into a confrontation with lying politicians, homelessness, refugees, neglected veterans, PTSD, ….

 

The radical updating meant the evening was free of sententious tragic posing. There were no invocations to gods that nobody believes in. Phil’s agonies were cartoony – eliciting some laughs – rather than sombre Theater of Cruelty rites.

 

The chorus had nothing to do with the chorus of Sophocles and was the hit of the show. Instead of a gravely attitudinizing pseudo-classical approximation, three seen-it-all Bob Fosse chorus girls danced and declaimed backstory and commentary with delicious acidic wit. E.g. summarizing the Trojan War with hand slapping “Fight, fight, fight! Death, death, death!” And a bump and grind inventory of the bad husbands of Greek mythology.

 

On the other hand, the update shifted the play from the Tragic to the Theraputic. Injustice and suffering were treated as something to overcome. Instead of divine intervention, The Heal offered honest talking and listening as the way out of an impasse. It affirmed that there are no conflicts without solutions – which is the opposite of the Greek view.

 

Still, The Heal concluded with everything to be resolved for the characters. They go off together, but to what?

Maxim Osipov's Rock, Paper Scissors and other stories

 

It makes other books seem idle and irrelevant.

 

The stories are beautifully designed traps that snap shut with a satisfying slam. Neither slices of life nor experiments. 

 

Osipov seems to be engaged in a capacious, easy-going realism. The title story starts off as an episode of “Midsomer Murders” translated to contemporary Russia. It doesn’t neglect to have mild fun with the provincial backwater and the imperious Boss Lady. But then ugliness takes over. It’s clear, but not an exposé.

 

Osipov tends to be reticent. But the information he provides is so pertinent and complete - though presented as if casually without melodrama or emphasis - that the end doesn’t require spelling out.

 

A list of the things Osipov omits would be very long: no melodrama, outrage or righteousness. No romance, no patriotism, no devotion to ones work, no religious belief, no philosophy, no heroism, no love of nature, pets, or literature, …. No community, no hope.

 

The tone is dire but not hysterical: Osipov keeps his head.

 

There is also humor. But a kind of humor that waxes and wanes over the course of a story, and afterwards. “On the Banks of the Spree” is – in one sense – a succession of increasingly hilarious episodes in the style of O. Henry. The daughter of dying KGB agent travels to Berlin to meet, for the first time, her German half-sister. But the woman refuses to believe Betty’s story. For one thing, here are photos of the grave of her mother and father. Betty tries to explain that father's "grave" was just a part of a deception that no longer matters. Her half-sister will have none of it. For Osipov, it’s light comedy; comic relief from John LeCarré. But the sting it leaves is overpowering. The stench it evokes. A vision of the future.

Leon Kossoff / João Gilberto

The 4^th of July weekend brought earthquakes to L.A. and the exits of two artists of two different worlds, Leon Kossoff and João Gilberto. ““… to know oneself is to know one’s region, it is also to know the world, and it is also, paradoxically, a form of exile from that world, to know oneself is above all to know what one lacks …” (Flannery O'Connor)