Silverlake Blvd.

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)

 

 

 

 

“Ninety-nine glimpses of Princess Margaret”, a.k.a “Ma’am, Darling” by Craig Brown

 

 

I never knew Princess Margaret’s birth was the cause of the modern revival of astrology.

 

Brown lays the story out in all its delicious idiocy. But that's just the start. The stories unfold in the specified number of ultra-short chapters. 

 

But it’s a meta-mythography rather than a biography: it toys with and mocks the very idea of biography. It’s not Her Highness but the various royal diarists, memoirists, biographers, gossips, journalists who Davis really goes after. He subjects their catty anecdotes to an unrelenting cross-examination, illuminating whoopers in logic, language, probability, and motive.

 

But he relays the stories all the same, demonstrating a very Margaretian insistence on having ones cake and eating it too. One chapter consists, in its entirety of

1 December 1992 Princess Margaret attends a preview of Carousel at the National Theatre. After meeting the cast, she is escorted to the front door by Richard Eyre, who makes a note of their brief conversation. ME: I’m glad you enjoyed the show. SHE: I didn’t. I can’t bear the piece.

 

Then there’s the chapter that reviews HRH’s appearances in indexes of other books – she seems to appear with alarming frequency just after Charles Manson and Imelda Marcos. And the transcript of HRH’s Desert Island Disc appearance, in which Davis transliterates her “Yes” phonetically as “Ears”. Even the footnotes are brilliant: a one-paragraph list of all of PM’s alleged lovers, in alphabetical order.

Dianne Wiest in Happy Days @ the Mark Taper

 

Wiest’s performance was like what people told me about Yo Yo Ma playing Bach solo at the Bowl: two hours of utter exposure, utter nakedness, reckless risk for a “star”. But she illuminated the text, getting laughs from the running gag of the toothbrush, and demonstrating how all of Beckett’s intricate stage instructions can not only be realized, but are significant, moving, and important. And the thrill of hearing and seeing such a skilled craftsperson shift from whining to nagging to needling to exclaiming in exasperation to reaching out in tenderness. And the refrains: sudden realization of hopelessness, followed by determination to cheer herself up.

 

The text is music in which Winnie returns again and again to favorite motifs: “… in the old style …”, “… I always say …”, “… that’s what I find so wonderful …”, ….

 

Yes it’s a joke, a stunt. Beckett is having a laugh. But it also serves a purpose. Setting Winnie in a mound of dirt instead of a naturalistic rendered rest home keeps attention focused on the heart of the matter. In a presentation playing the realism game, the audience could resist Winnie’s account of herself by disputing her situation. “She could have avoided this all if she had exercised, saved more money, had children to take care of her, etc.” Those are all dodges, ways the audience could avoid the real situation: Winnie’s boredom, helplessness, and hopelessness.

 

Also to maintain focus, Beckett doesn’t permit Winnie to live entirely in memories, in nostalgia. We are given a few hints, bare phrases, but they are not dwelt on. Any other playwright would have made all of Winnie’s speeches vivid recollections of the good old days. Not here. The old times are merely noted. The memories are frayed to single threads.

 

There seems to be a competition going on up at Bunker Hill. The Taper audience managed to misbehave even worse than Disney’s: cell phones ringing, manaical program-rattling, the old ladies next to me chattering away during the performance (Wiest was three yards away), people leaving their seats and arriving during the performance, etc.

Nudity & Costume @ the Getty

 

I ran into an old friend at “The Renaissance Nude”. It was by Raphael until it was attributed to Raphael’s teacher, Perugino. The pipe-player was Marsyas until experts started to i.d. him as Daphnis. Moreover, the Getty hung it in a LGBT corner, implying that Apollo and the piper are a couple. Does it make a difference?

 

If they’re a couple they don't seem to be having a good time. Apollo looks down – in both senses – on his companion. The piper is so absorbed in his music-making that he isn’t paying attention – despite the fact that Apollo is making an exhibition of his physical splendor. The piper is bald and not at all a Greek god, but Perugino (or whomever) has given him the beauty of someone wholeheartedly engaged in an absorbing task. He's the one you focus on.

 

Here’s where the name becomes significant. If he’s Daphnis, he’s going to be caught up in love triangle with some local nymphs which ends so badly for him that he devotes the rest of his life to sad songs. If he’s Marsyas, Apollo will take offense at his presumption in being a musician, and skin him alive. A lot going on in a 524-year-old, 15” x 11” rectangle.

 

 

The exhibition was such that it is possible to mention “the other Peruginos” on display, i.e. the big decoration with scenes from the Metamorphoses in the background and a “Combat between Love and Chastity” in the foreground; and an electrically charged “Baptism of Christ,” with Christ’s feet seen through the pale blue water of the Jordan.

 

 

But before the naked people from the Renaissance, we experienced how Rococo ladies got dressed at Maxwell Barr’s brilliant lecture/demonstration. He took us through the mechanics and logistics of how aristocratic Frenchwomen dressed throughout the day. I will never look at eighteenth century lace again without thinking about the extraordinary quantities of labor they embody, and their consequent function as a signifier of wealth.

 

Not to mention the labor of the women who put on and took off these signifiers! Barr encouraged our patient model to give frequent updates on how she felt at different stages - under the corset, the layers of heavily embroidered fabric, balancing on un-sensible shoes, ....

 

Zulema Cusseaux on Soul Train, 1975

... who I know from Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance

 

 

The Numinous Has Many Shapes and Ways: On SITI and Aaron Poochigian’s "Bacchae"

 

See my review of the Getty Villa's production of Bacchae, published today in the L.A. Review of Books.