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]
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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 21st century language, with a 21st 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.
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, ....