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The Critical Flamily: Issue on Motherhood...and Infertility

Proud to be part of the #CriticalFlamily. Since its inception in 2008, The Critical Flame has sought to address the disparities and imbalances of the literary establishment. Editor Daniel Pritchard publishes six issues a year, devoted to long-form essays, critical reviews, and interviews on literary and cultural topics (under 5000 words), written by blazing upstarts, middle-careerists, and old pros. You know the scrappy stand-up comedian who shows up to open-mic night and blows the crowd away with their observational humor, even though they’re truck drivers, AARP, women, queers, LGBT, immigrants, and waiters. The Critical Flame wants to foster the literary equivalent of that community.

The latest issue contains more goodness on last month’s theme: motherhood. Ailbhe Darcy reflects on writing for a year about the atom bomb and her bewilderment at having it both improved and defaced in post-production by her male partner in crime and collaboration; my essay on Monica Youn “Blackacre” (2016 National Book Award Finalist) delves into the opposite of motherhood: infertility. It continues my exploration of writers who explore hope and humor, gender, friendship, and community, beyond the miasma of inadequacy. At Kenyon Review, I reviewed Christopher Salerno’s Sun and Urn, a slow dance between son and grandmother around the toxic masculinity of the father. This time around, I address Monica Youn’s “staring contest with judge, jury, and sonogram” and the poem she’s written for anyone who has ever asked that important question: “how did I ever become friends with this douchebag?”

You can read the whole essay and other fierce pieces at The Critical Flame.

— Court Jeffster, © The Citric District, 2017

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The Great Squall of Chen Chen

I advocate the Great Squall of Chen Chen. My take on his poems and the politics of the cute at Harvard Review Online (May 2017).

— Court Jeffster (@citricdistrict)

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Even in his dazed moods, Salerno writes with more spunk than the dutiful elegist. His poems explore how the playbook of game face destroys the fathers and how going off-script may save the sons. Bittersweet and radiant, Sun & Urn shows how to fall out of a horse race and into the arms of a slow dance. You don’t need a plot to fall in love with this story.

I wrote a cover blurb for Christopher Salerno's Sun and Urn in November 2016, when I was coming terms to the anxiety of being childless for the rest of my life. It only took seven months for the full review to finally go to print. The book, in any case, has done very well for itself, with New York Times and Publisher's Weekly level of recognition. That said, I'm not big on the empty rhetoric of superlatives that passes for criticism today. A critic should be able to seduce a reader without relying on besteses.

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Ocean Vuong writes poems as svelte and sturdy as fire escapes, bridging readers with the most fragile and fraught of situations. After paying his dues as the refugee troubadour of Burnings (2010), he honored the lives of gay suicides in No (2013)...His full-length debut Night Sky with Exit Wounds ..shows us what it means to shatter the oracle of public expectations, recovering the heroism of the helpless and staring the abyss into submission.

Read my full review at The Rumpus.

— Court Jeffster, Citric District ©  2016

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Vodkalicious! David Malloy’s Electropop Opera Kicks Tolstoy’s Can all over the Place.

Review: Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, music and lyrics by David Malloy; directed by Rachel Chavkin; scenic design by Mimi Lien; costumes by Paloma Young; Loeb Drama Center, American Repertory Theatre; Cambridge, MA. New Years Day 2016.

The author during intermission.

What do you want to call this shebang, Mr. Malloy. An electro pop opera. How about the Bois & Grrls Kick Tolstoy’s Can all over the Place Musical. The press will never go for it. What about Vodkalicious, then? I need to start off the Year of the Monkey on the right note, with Zany Pizzazz, as I haven’t posted here in ages. Vodkalicious isn’t in the dictionary. But that’s what poets are for!, darling. How else do you expect me to describe your angsty burlesque tart of a nineteenth-century love story…

We were a little skeptical when the A.R.T. made us tunnel through corridors of butcher paper and oddly-placed coatracks representing what we thought were the ruins of post-Communist Russia. So we flapped with flabbergast to discover ourselves in this chic supper club with 19th century taste arranged by Gertrude Stein on the cycloramic red velvet curtains. Not Stein, you doofus. Mimi Lien. Yes, Mimi Lien. It’s just…it’s just so hard when everyone thinks you’re all wallflowers on wall paper made of rice paper, and someone like Lien comes along with this extraordinary sense for space and spectacle and renews your faith in humanity.

Scenic designer Mimi Lien won a 2015 Genius Grant on the strength of her innovative solutions for various productions on the Off-Broadway circuit. For Natasha, she promoted the lowly pawn of armrests into the burlesque queen of catwalks.“I noticed that when people sit in booths, there’s often this flat area behind them at shoulder level, and I went, ‘Aha!’” At the Loeb Drama Center, home of the American Repertory Theatre, here in Cambridge, Mass, she offset the gap between stage and seating by tiering the stage to mirror the seats at the back.

For Natasha, scenic designer Mimi Lien promoted the lowly pawn of armrests into the burlesque queen of catwalks.

We were lucky to score seats on the stage, which meant they seated us at tables in alcoves (16-20 person occupancy) spaced between instrumental combos that made up the live orchestra. On occasion, the actors would break from the action and play waitstaff serving us Russian Happy Meals of pierogis (potato dumplings), love letters to read, and toy maracas to shake during the infectious choruses (the maracas were in the shape of Ukranian easter eggs or pysanky). And when they returned to the stage, which was a meandering network of catwalks, we would crane our necks like giraffes to catch the actors huff and puff up and down and all around the inverted ziggurat. It was like being an extra in a music video springing forth from a half open Escheresque pop up book.

We were all on the verge of our seats when the conductor/DJ throws the opening downbeat and a jaunty brindisi or drinking song puts at ease by introducing us to all the characters  They point us to the illustrated family tree in the program if we get lost since “it’s a complicated Russian novel, everyone’s got nine different names,” but the catchy song drills the character profiles in our minds, before truncating them to cutesy catchphrases for the sake of economy. Take it away original NY cast:

“Prologue”: “Dolokhov is fierce but not too important” / “Helene is a slut” / “Anatole is hot” / “Natasha is young / [and best of all] “Andrei is not here”!

The story revolves around the inexperienced heroine Natasha who travels to the big city when her betrothed Andrei goes off to war. She’s young and horny and falls in love with the hot hedonist Anatole who’s bad news, but she can’t be blamed, having been cooped up like a country chicken for so long, even slutty Helene says so.

Natasha bares her black arms before a mirror while singing about her fair skin like a Disney princess, but finds herself on the other side of a showdown with the family of the betrothed before the prospective sister-in-law comes to her senses that her rapey father is the evil one. (The most evil thing about him is a grody rastafarian Mozart wig and the shiver-me-timbers acting).

The goody two shoes and the voice of reason, Sonya lets Natasha know that hot people are usually bad news, but of course Natasha won’t be convinced because a hot guy went in for the jugular kiss, and that sometimes is an irresistable turn on if you haven’t yet learned about rapists. But you can’t blame her when even the wooden tables want some of the action: there is some serious eye-fucking between Anatole and Helene (who are sibling!) and Dolokhov (his gonna-drink-tonight bearded hipster bro who’s “fierce, but not too important”!). Of course, Sonya’s hurt, but she just gives Natasha her love space. Can her relationship with either man be repaired, or is there a third way outside of Andre and Anatole.

I love the people at A.R.T. when they pull stunts like this. Lucas Steele is one Hot Comet of 2012, but they gave him the baby-dyke-from-the-back treatment and blocked his beautiful face to emphasize the radiance of Denée Benton. Some marketeer deserves a gift basket for giving us our recommended daily amount of Vitamin C.

Although the romantic leads wear nineteenth century toggery, you can sniff the delicious scent of the Gurlesque all over this production. It was as if Costume Designer Paloma Young had went to some Russian village straight out of Stravinsky and gave the entire town the riot grrl editorial. The chorus of backup dancers were black and white Britney (and Whitney) Spearskayas, in studded chokers, knee high socks, and peasant blouses tied bikini style. Less imagination went in the costuming of their boyfriends punked out as club kids whose hulking arms, newsy caps, and acid wash purple jeans made them look like waifs from an Alexander McQueen show. I kid cause I love.

It was as if Costume Designer Paloma Young had went to some Russian village straight out of Stravinsky and gave the entire town the riot grrl editorial

The burlesque element is distributed across the cast rather than being localized in a single impersonator. There’s no one musical playbook, in other words, by which the actors abide. I imagine the score giving dynamic markings like Salonga up this passage or McLaughlan this solo up. Denée Benton played the role of Natasha to a tee with the honeyed innocence of the animated ingenue. Besties Sonya (Brittain Ashford) and Pierre (Scott Stangland) do proud the stuttering indie songstress and drunken Piano Man. Hot Anatole (Lucas Steele) channels the one interesting member of the boyband who hits the stratospheric C# with a little Bowie. Take away the cigarette holder from Cruella de Ville and you have the gesticulating grande dame of Moscow, Marya. But the character who gave me the most life was slutty cosmopolitan Helene (Lilli Cooper), who steals the show with the kicky and sultry number “Charming”: “(You are such a lovely thing, oh where you have you been. “It’s such a shame to bury pearls in the country // charmante, charmante”).” Take it away Lucille Doll, Amber Gray, from the original Off-Broadway cast.

As you can see, this is no song for amateurs. Ms. Gray is serving the cutesy dangerousness of Eartha Kitt supported by the gravelly growl of Shady Marmalade, Patti Labelle. Lilli Cooper, the actress cast for the A.R.T. production, really sold the voluptuous solidity and conniving that character demands. Cooper dragged her delivery with slinky style, hitting her notes without scooping or straining. She was my favorite performer of the night.

Natasha is a musical that pokes good-natured fun at the conventions of nineteenth century noveland the pastimtes of a prior age when cell phones and email didn’t consume our lives, leading to a score chock with dramatic irony, as in “Letters.”

In nineteenth century Russia we write letters we write letters we put down in writing what is happening in our mind Once it’s on the paper we feel better, we feel better. It’s just like some clarity when the letter’s done and signed.

People in novels drink and write letters compulsively and are ecstatic if they receive a reply in two months time. Compare that to the feisty texter who throws a fit if he or she doesn’t get a reply in less than two minutes.

But as characters in novels, they sing parts that resemble the author, lapsing into third person and achieving in the process ironic distance from their muddle of feelings towards each other. It was a great idea but for the flagging execution at the end. I wanted duets, trios, and choruses interweaving at strange angles with one another and generating the impossible yearning and unresolved tensions, not vocal percussion for an acapella group at 3rds and 6ths, which doesn’t cut it in this context, but that’s a specialist’s gripe.

The Great Comet signals that kind of transfigurative experience that comes once in a blue moon. As the room darkens for the denouement, the chandeliers gleam with their full potential to create a moment. Like the characters, we’ve just watched our own delusions of pride and insignificance play out. The characters of the show feel grateful for the comet as we feel grateful for the theatre for giving us something to talk about on the way home, as the warmth of intimacy intensifies and makes the darkness vanish.

Interview with Mimi Lien and set designs for Ars Nova Production of Natasha, by Jeremy M. Baker, “Mimi Lien creates Art with her Sets,” American Theatre, September 22, 2014.

— Court Jeffster, Citric District © 2016

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Shakespeare’s 400th

Miss Sarah Bernhardt sears Yorick to a cindery crisp for new Houghton Library exhibition on Shakespeare

Public art exhibitions always have to toe a certain line of respectability and undersell their provocations to appeal to the broadest public possible. Here is the official spiel from Harvard University Libraries:

To commemorate the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, this exhibition presents over eighty rare and unique objects—many never before seen—drawn from the Harvard Theatre Collection and other library departments.  On view will be important early editions including the iconic First Folio owned by Harry Elkins Widener; creative respondents to Shakespeare from his eighteenth century editor and critic Samuel Johnson through the modernist poet E. E. Cummings; theatrical memorabilia highlighting the careers of great Shakespearean actors and actresses; in addition to an arresting array of visual material that trace the development of Shakespearean stagecraft over four centuries. Play a part in the worldwide celebration of Shakespeare in 2016 at Houghton Library.

The Harvard Gazette article “In His Own Works” that just came out is just as jejune and spineless. Jejune and spineless, however, do not meet our higher style guidelines. Here at the Citric District, we like to advance arguments after seeing the exhibition for ourselves. Ahem…

This world class exhibition puts the Folger and the British Library in the Stone Age. With Paul Robeson and his righteous chorus upstaging the blackfaced Othello; Sarah Bernhardt crisping Yorick, and e.e. cummings swatting the t.s.e.t.s.e fly, this is the Bard seen through the Top Acts, Hep Cats and Brass Belles, Mechanical Bottoms and Cushman Women, designers and couturiers, classic balletomanes and cutting edge directors. If the Bard has to be viewed behind glass, this is the way to do it, not through the eyes of the stiffs who defend him through unthinking superlatives, but through the dark horses who transformed the Bard’s love of clowns, strong women, and moping minorities into the radiant dignity of the gutter.

Tsssssss. You can fry an egg on that.

— Court Jeffster, at the Citric District © 2016

Tuesday, Feburary 9, is supposed to be the big opening reception. The illustrious Stephen Greenblatt will give the Winship lecture on Bibliography, “Editing Shakespeare in the Digital Age,“ and the room will explode from all the tweed blazers and pencil skirts and pant suits and skinny jeans and thick glasses trying to fit in the Thompson Room of the Barker Center. Keep an eye out for his two Asian understudies Misha Teramura and David Nee who will probably replace Greenblatt Julius Caesar style. It’s going to be epic and not in that tired gamer way.

Houghton Library is the brick building on the Yard that looks like a poor man’s Monticello. It faces Quincy St. between Widener and Lamont Libraries.

I might have gotten a little excited….

I submitted a zippy review flaunting my theater savvy to a magazine in advance of the rush-jobbers this week and hope someone will like it well enough. Crossed fingers.

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I repeat the #Eaglemobile has landed! Shot from shotgun (around Castroville, CA. Artichoke Capital of the World!). Don't do this from the driver seat folks!  Not worth it!

— Court Jeffster, The Citric District © 2015

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It takes a certain degree of daring and charisma to transform the raw material of wretchedness into the choreography of one’s fierce convictions, and Jenny Zhang has it. No one was going to put her in the straightjacket of a mute whore or bumbling doormat if she could help it. Much like stand-up comedian Margaret Cho, she has had to learn (with the help of friends) how to parlay the role of the squeaky wheel into the buoyant wit and devastating realness of the self-proclaimed hag, wooing the coffee-and-bathhouse crowd when the gatekeepers of the establishment told her she was un-relatable and irrelevant. They’ve since had to eat their words. 

Through her online contributions and social media presence, Three Penny Jenny has managed to lure a younger generation of teens and quarters to the candy cottages of the prose and poetry presses. “How it Feels,” her ode to performance artist Tracey Enim, is a blessed reminder of the transformative potential of the arts for a broad cross-section of misfits who continue to confront the indignities of second-class citizenship. In addition to the chapbooks Hags (Guillotine Press, 2014) and the full-length collection Dear Jenny, We are All Find (Octopus Books, 2012), The Selected Jenny Zhang (2015) is now available as an epub though Emily Books. My sassy profile on Zhang, the first of its kind, places her poems in a larger avant-garde tradition of women who have adapted the lessons of their queer collaborators to their feminist battles, when the brutes and the housewives prove unhelpful. (May it serve as a corrective to Kenneth Goldsmiths and Marjorie Pearloffs’ white-washed vision of the avant-garde as a post-identity bleach vacation). J-Zhang purrs with the poodles and rides the Yankee Doodles. Cheers and maraschinos to our Chatty Cathay! 

— Court Jeffster, The Citric District © 2015

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Did you have Halloween in China?

From “Halloween,” by Chen Chen

Did you have Halloween in China? the son asked, stationed at the living room table, categorizing (& gobbling up) his loot. No, the mother replied, explaining how no one in China would just hand out candy for nothing. The son pointed at his zombie face, explained it wasn’t for nothing, it was for dressing scary. You don’t scare me, the mother said, & picked up a wrapper from the high heap of the already devoured. So wasteful, she sighed, smoothing out the slip of silvery plastic, holding it in her palm. We used to

save these, she said. Save them? The son paused his sorting & gorging. Of course, the mother said. She & the other village kids wouldn’t ever crumple up & toss out a wrapper...

— Chen Chen

Read the rest in his chapbook Set the Garden on Fire (2015), available through the Porkbelly Press storefront. My review after the jump.

Photo of Chen Chen by David Tomás Martinez

Cast out of paradise, the boy hero of Set the Garden on Fire, aches towards the community garden of love and forgiveness. Darkly magical and effervescent, Chen’s first chapbook is a collection of kitchen nightmares, sweet-toothed wonder, wolf-mouth tantrums, bean sprout rhapsodies, and ankle-twisted romps. Putting the “Howl” back into the Chinaman’s son, they swagger with the zany metaphysics (or endearing cliches) of the boy who blazes awake and in his sleep to dispel the pangs of rejection. Through the exemplary darkness haunting the gay child, Chen shows how all children create the terms of their earthly esteem in the divinity of their dreams and forgive with their purple hearts the Old World parents and institutions who invalidate their marvelously lived reality. In so doing, Chen brings us out of the age of shame and into the future of the child’s fierceness. 

Chen Chen has appeared in Poetry, Narrative, Crab Orchard Review, and The Best American Poetry 2015, among other places. (In addition to the prestige circuit, he has written some snort-worthy poems for us queer folk in PANK). You can learn more about Chen Chen on his website chenchenwrites.com.

— Court Jeffster, The Citric District © 2015

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The Throes Parade: Elektra at the BSO

The ladies of Elektra slayed as the Throes Parade Pageant of trepidation and vengeance.

I thought Salome making love to the unhinged head of a southern Baptist on a silver platter was harrowing, but the Boston Symphony Orchestra's sold out performance of Richard Strauss’ Elektra was, pardon the pun, electrifying. The Throes Parade Pageant of trepidation and vengeance made mincemeat of the three boys.

When the opera opens, we hear one of the most effective oracles in all of the repertory. Strauss has transformed the four syllables of Daddy A-ga-memmmmmm-non into a terrifying theme that will recur throughout the evening in various guises. He arrived at a vocabulary for vengeance by finding harmonic correlative for goodness crossing over to the dark side, organizing his score around key areas that share only a few pitches in common. So that when these relations—often displaced by the interval of a minor second or by tritone—are superimposed in the same clashing polytonal sonority, they provide the musician’s symbolic code for the cavernous wrath of Tartarus.

Elektra is the classic heroine of tragic opera. Something has turned her world upside down—mommy has murdered daddy Aggy in the bath—and she grieves and works herself up into a frenzy of there’s no turning back. Christine Goerke was everything you could ask for in the title role, pacing about as though she could make the heavens fall with every thrash of her vermillion gown and wrench of her face. Her high notes, spun and honed to a ferocious urgency, hit you like an invisible axe. The Terry Castle lesbians will go wild, when Elektra psychs up her timid sister, promising to be her handmaiden and slave if only little sis would grow a spine and help her murder Mama Clytemnestra and her floozy boy toy Aegisthus.

Gun-Brit Barkmin (who sang Salome with the BSO last season) was just as captivating as the goody two shoes, in the role of sister Chrysothemis. Wearing a long slinky coat with furry landing strips for shoulder pads, and flaring out with fin-de-siecle filigree, she could have walked out of an Ernst Kirchner. I would have gone with different hair though, because her severe bob did not say happy-housewife-to-be at all. It was giving me Cyd Charisse in Singing in the Rain realness. Perhaps Ms. Barkmin was trying to pull focus with her long-sleeves and her Mariah Carey arm-waving, but wouldn’t you if you kept being referred to in the opera as “Daughter of Clytemnaestra.” She’s like the middle child whose name no one can remember.

And Mama Clytemnestra (sung by formidable grande dame, Jane Henschel) could have walked out of a Klimt painting with her glittering floor length robe. She punctuated her lines with a crackling cackle that made the Witches of Macbeth seethe with envy. We loved the scene when she moseys up to daughter Elektra for a remedy to her guilt-induced nightmares, and Elektra tells her mother her brother will wipe her carcass all over the halls of the castle with the sacred family axe, if she could only remember where she buried it.

For playing the savior Orestes, James Rutherford’s performance was remarkably stiff. He looked as though he were holding a giant keg all night, pulling his pants up every now and then. More animated was the conductor, Andris Nelsons who bobbed and weaved like a game fighting cock or preying mantis in a cage. Mr. Nelsons has restored to the BSO a sense of exhilaration that was sorely missing during the conduct-from-a-chair reign of his predecessor. 

Piddling high Cs are child’s play for wannabe pop stars. We go to hear the sonic doom of D#s. Long live the robust fat ladies and our favorite rhythmic baton twirler! 

— The Citric District, © 2015

P.S. A feminist musicologist like Carolyn Abbate will have us know us that expressionist operas like Elektra trade in the artistic conventions for morbid psychology and hysterical femininity during the Freudian nineteenth century. That said, she would also assure us that Elektra put a lot of dignified matrons in employment on the stage. Opera is probably not the most American of genres, but you can’t help how you were socialized into culture, and like Edward Said, I choose to own my artistic expertise regardless and embody my appreciation in a different manner than the dominant culture to whom it is addressed and whose interests they serve. I’ve always fantasized about all the good I could probably do as a queer and visionary director who would exploit the amenability of theater (as opposed to film) to flexible casting arrangements.

This is something that the tired old queens still haven’t figured out. If it were me, I’d activist cast Asian and Latino and Black mezzo soprano maids just so they could have the stage for five minutes to themselves singing about the white mistress’s lofty contempt for them in her self-willed bestial funk and failure to grasp intersectional oppression. And I’d cast the Fifth Maid (usually a role reserved to test upstart sopranos) as the female equivalent of the Uncle Tom who defends the racist and classist white mistress for her nobility. Once the audience could see the power dynamics inherent in the character relations of the script, intensified by the cross-racial casting, they could then swallow the happy ending with a little more self-consciousness about the way the world works. 

I am not a fan of what Hollywood calls colorblind casting for the sake of colorblind casting (at least when it comes to re-staging the classics). It is more instructive to show the distribution of power as is, to find the scripts that let the little people get their edgewise punch at the people who have pushed them around for centuries. That said, with a ratio of a dozen women to three men, a feminist production of the opera could be made to yield the subtext of an intersectional and inter-sexual sisterhood getting past its bitchy rivalries to dispatch the patriarchal stranger and the traitorous Clytemnestra who murdered her doddering sugar daddy for the estate, and whose gold-digging, smiley virus ways continues to be an obstruction to the queer sorority of fourth-wave feminism. Orestes can be the gay fellow traveler.

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Samuel Beckett in Yellowface

This is a late entry, but I thought I’d post it anyway, as I’ve been inactive lately. 

I’ve always been fond of the plays of Samuel Beckett, and I’m not going to blame the Ham Sammie or the Waitressing-Actresses who serve him four nights a week for the yellow-faced smiley bag below.

If you’ve been following me, you know that I get around the arts and theatre scene across the technicolor spectrum. But I decided to boycott this production on account of the poster, read the short plays by Beckett in print, and delay my irritation until the run had ended. In the process, I learned that a Chinese company had beaten the Cambridge Poets Theatre to the visual and dramatic punchline by 30 years or so, undercutting the unctuous claims to originality and favoritism by the director whose teaching contract as a professor, sources tell me, Harvard University has chosen not to renew. (This is ever so delicately alluded to in a preview article that appeared in WBUR’s The Artery)[1].

How often does one sees Asian women as poster children for anything in this country, and what are they made to signify for the public when they do appear at all?

None of the four plays on the program have anything remotely to do with Asia. But the image of four Japanese women takes after the vaguely Asian title “Ceremonies of Departure.” From the exotic fashion of their kimonos, the color scheme of pink and green on black is derived. The static bands striking out the sensory organs of eyes, a nose, a mouth recall the static signifying bad reception on a television screen. When you put it all together, the neon treatment of silence, the clashing typography a Victorian playbill, one gets a bold and graphic visual representation of an Asian sisterhood joined by the enigmatic silences of their bodies.

The Poets Theater, of course, has no intention of putting Asian women on stage, which would have pushed the poster from the realm of orientalism to activism. Rather, it pays lip service to that storied legacy of modernism that desires the Other’s strangeness while rendering the Other mute in the process. The Poets Theatre wants the strangeness of those kimonos and those colors, that style, to give an all white production an insurrectionary edge that the cast of white women can’t do alone, unable to communicate suffering as white women. But rather than being forthright about its whiteness, the production exploits the visual stock value of the Other whose voice it denies.

Mr. Scanlan’s own program originates itself in an irony of refusal. In the eighties, a feminist troupe in his home country of Ireland turned to Scanlan to ask Beckett for his blessing to direct an all-woman’s production of Waiting for Godot. Beckett nixed the idea and suggested that Scanlan do instead an evening of short plays that the playwright wrote expressly for women [1]. Twenty four years later, that project has come to fruition with the program last week.

That Beckett didn’t take kindly to a feminist burlesque of Godot does not invalidate the impulse to transform a play’s parts through the operations like drag or racial masquerade, or through the operations of revisionist casting. Such decisions have been vital to theater since the nineteenth century (when women’s suffrage and the anti-slavery movement put into question the centuries-long tradition of white men playing all the races and all the genders to better control the behavior of everyone). Needless to say, such flexible casting arrangements serve to differentiate the genre from the relative absolutism of film.

The intent behind revisionist casting has been to make the drama of human interaction responsive to the shifting demographics of the audience, shining a light on social dynamics relevant to the present. An Asiatic or Asian American production of Beckett’s plays is not out of line and had in fact been done prior to the Poets Theater production. Director and Beckett specialist Sidney Homan describes page after page of a superlative production of “Come and Go” (among other plays) by the Changchun Modern Drama company in 1989, charged by the circumstances of censorship in Maoist China:

The actress [Huang Suri who played Flo] looked out at the audience, her face full of tension, hands twisting nervously in her lap, as if she dreaded what was coming…[When Ru let out her “Oh”], Flo …let out a silent “O” of her own as if she were playing both parts…It took the challenge of doing this little play in a different culture to show me what…Beckett’s play for women could mean. And an actress who could meet the challenge of performing this enigmatic work [using] a painful memory of her father [slain in her presence by Mao’s guards] for the sake of her character.” [2; 313-318].

Homan says he sent his article to Mr. Beckett himself who was so heartened by the reminiscence that he waived for Homan the royalties for producing Beckett’s plays for television. His remarks, however, raise the question of why the revisionist production is only valuable when it does not take place at home? The answer of course is the nativist logic that underlies most marketing strategies in which white racism is masked as a taste and nostalgia for tradition at the same time that diversity is offered as a palliative for inequality.

As the only group number, ”Come and Go” probably inspired the demurely scandalous playbill design (the other three plays are one-woman monologues more or less). When the play opens, three former schoolmates (Vi, Ru, and Flo) have each suffered some unspeakable horror that is left to the audience’s imagination. The action unfolds as a dance of reunion and departure:

Vi: When did we three last meet? Ru: Let us not speak [Silence. Exit Vi right. Silence] Flo: Ru. Ru: Yes. Flo: What do you think of Vi? Ru: I see little change [Flo moves to centre seat, whispers in Ru’s Ear. Appalled] Oh! [They look at each other. Flo puts her finger to her lips]…Does she not realize. Flo: God grant not. [3]

When one woman leaves the stage, the other two feel at ease to talk behind her back. Flo prods Ru as if to confirm what she already knows about Vi and when Ru doesn’t catch on, Flo moves closer to share some secret concerning the third. The audience never hears the secret which is inaudible and unknowable, it can only perceive the look of shock on Ru’s face. Twice more, this charade is repeated with a different lady exiting while the other two gossip. The silences, where and how the ladies should sit, on whose side, with their arms held or apart, and how their arms should interlink, are plotted in Beckett’s notes as precisely as choreography and eat up more space in the script than the actual dialogue which takes no more than a couple of minutes to perform.

“Come and Go” is a tactile drama of sisterhood across unspeakable grief and silence. The game of “three” and “two” enacts the difference between camaraderie (where propriety must be observed) and friendship (where gossip and personal tragedy is appropriate topics of conversation). The poster is a hipster joke at the expense of Asians: “Beckett’s plays are terse, tight-lipped, and enigmatic, just like Asian women.” One could however imagine a situation in which the same poster promoted an activist production of Beckett that addresses the under-representation of Asian Americans in the theater, and interrogates the cosmopolitan tradition of modernism that exploits the scandal or our otherness while making Asian American subjects mute in the process. 

I end then with a quote from Timothy Yu’s ongoing project, 100 Chinese Silences, a burlesque of Yankee Doodle Dandies (like Billy Collins and the above production team) who continue to Asianize the virtue of silence:

Today, I hear your tinny voice blaring from the rooftops in praise of my reticence, and my thoughts turn to my honorable ancestors:

Fuk Yu, who gnashed Pacific rails between his eloquent teeth, and his great-grandson, glaring out from the Middle West, Yu No-Hu. [4]

— The Citric District, © 2015

Notes

[1] Lloyd Schwartz, “Poets’ Theatre Opens Its 2015-’16 Season With ‘Beckett Women’,” The Artery (11 September 2015).

[2] Sidney Homan, “Come and Go: Samuel Beckett's Play for Women,” Women's Studies 39:4 (2010), 304-318.

[3] Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove, 1984).

[4] Timothy Yu, 15 Chinese Silences (Tinfish Press, 2012). The latest silence, a travesty of a letter from Ezra Pound to T.S. Eliot, was recently published in  Poetry (June 2015).

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Midsummer Night’s Snack: Shakespeare Beneath the Stars

Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Commonwealth Shakespeare Company and Boston Landmarks Orchestra, Director Steven Maler, the Hatch Shell, on the Charles River Esplanade; FREE! (August 26, 2015). Warning: slightly snarky.

Spunky exuberance and gender hijinks reigned at the Hatch Shell with a  collaborative production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Top: Dance of the Fairies with Puck; Bottom (from left to right): ASL Team; Bottom, Lion, Conductor, Players.

The Hatch looks more glorious as a burnished apple barrel than as the frying pan of stars and stripes, I reflected upon watching the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company and the Boston Landmarks Orchestra’s stage a production of Shakespeare and Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Perhaps the show fell short of a dream, with picnickers swatting at gnats and fanning the fumes of sardine feet in the humid heat, but let’s agree to call it a midsummer night’s snack.

Max Reinhardt and William Diertele gave Shakespeare his first “bowl cut” with their iconic 1935 production of Midsummer Night’s Dream. They had scooped out the Hollywood Bowl amphitheater from the ground to make room for a lavish arboreal diorama for fairies and lovers to traipse and cavort. The glittery cast featured the likes of the young Mickey Rooney (Puck), James Cagney (Bottom), Anita Louise (Titania), and Victor Jory (Oberon), among others.

Scene from Max Reinhardt’s Midsummer Nights Dream, filmed at the disemboweled Hollywood Bowl (1935)

Director Steven Maler tried to work the same magic on the Charles River Esplanade with apple-green apprentices and a shoe-string budget, and the results looked more like a birthday party on public television. The art direction tended towards adorable floral sundresses, suspenders and vests, random polka dots in red and blue a la Blues Clues. What the production lacked in high glamour, it made up for in the spunky exuberance of its young cast of actors and dancers.

If Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play that celebrates royal weddings, it seems to yawn at the nobility who rest on power or pretty. We don’t care one whit about the ensuing marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta who sanction the night’s festivities but do not possess any of the moral qualms that make their counterparts in the tragedies compelling. Nor are we invested so much in the virginal Hermia, fairest in all the land, who doesn’t have to fight as hard for the boys as her less comelier and spurned playmate Helena who plays it sassy and kinky to have a better shot on the meet market. (“The more you beat me I will fawn on you. / Use me but as your spaniel”). The theatrical spotlight belongs really to the wenches, the wags, and the workhorses. From this vantage point, the purpose of the play within the play—the love story of Pyramus and Thisbe—is not to intensify the surrounding dramatic action, as in Hamlet, but to give the plebeian characters a pretext for strutting their comedic chops and achieve their rare moment of dignity, as in the case of Bottom the Ham, mugging to play all the roles or stretching out his minutes of fame as the gallant Pyramus over multiple fake deaths.

I warmed up to Georgia Lyman’s committed Titanatrix…Paul Melendy’s Thisbe had the delicious ribbon of Extra Whore Olive Oyl running throughout his performance…Paul Rodriguez infused his impish role of assistant shit-stirrer with the manic whimsy of a video game hero.

Steven Maler scored a triumph casting actors and actresses who could channel each other’s tessitura and body language. Georgia Lyman lacked the chirpiness expected of a Queen of the Fairies, but sold her bone-chilling alto range so well, I quickly warmed up to the idea of a committed Titanatrix rather than a hippie-dippy Titillatania flirting with an Ass. Conversely, Paul Melendy was an absolute riot as Flute, who commits to delivering his lines for the part of a damsel in a high pitched squeak (”Nay, faith, let not me play a woman. I have a beard coming.”). Indeed, Flute may have inadvertently topped Bottom (Robert Pemberton) with his Thisbe, who had the delicious ribbon of Extra Whore Olive Oyl running through his jiggly arms, hiked-up nightie, falsetto ease, and lace front weave, paying homage to old school drag with his intentional flashes of boy body beneath the performance of womanliness. 

The star of the evening, though, was Juan C. Rodriguez, perfectly cast as Puck. I predict a bright future for this star in the making. His feeling for the cadence of Elizabethan verse was astounding and made me forget about the obnoxiousness that was Mickey Rooney playing the same role. Veering in and out of martial arts buffoonery, balletic delicacy, and emcee self-possession, Mr. Rodriguez infused his impish role of assistant shit-stirrer with the whimsical energy of a video game character, unlike his peers afflicted by Broberon syndrome, unable to elevate their performances beyond poor posture, slurred diction, and bad rhythm. 

I have always wondered whether Midsummer Night’s Dream was Shakespeare’s meditation on the relationship between marriage and promiscuity. “You must say ‘paragon.’ A ‘paramour’ is (God bless us) a thing of naught,” Flute reminds us just before staging a play about illicit love (IV.2.13–14). Perhaps the magic fairy dust Puck sprinkles on the couples is merely a device for putting paramour love past the censors. Hermia and Helena must after all get mixed up with the wrong men before they settle on the supposedly right men. If so, the future awaits a Midsummer Night’s Dream that reflects on “paragons” and “paramours” as interchangeable phases in the life cycle:

One might point out that what might seem to be two irrevocably opposed ways of life (sexual freedom on the one hand, marriage on the other) can sometimes simply be different stages in the life of the same individuals. Those who participate in the former during a more or less lengthy period may as the years pass move toward the latter…Or alternatively, persons who had set up as couples at a young age, may after a breakup, discover the pleasures of multiple partners. [1]

Let us imagine then a Midsummer Night’s Dream where if a bearded man can play a woman on stage, a dry-witted Thelma and Hippolyta may be cast to sanction the festivities, and the fag hag dynamic duo of Hermes and Helena can tangle with Lybeltsander and Demetrius, before leaving us with the new status quo of gay and straight nuptials. A mid-autumn festival queen can dream, can’t he?

— The Citric District, © 2015

Notes.

[1] Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self (Durham: Duke UP, 2004), 39.

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Dinner Theatre

Photo: Star Anise. Macro, by Adam Wita © 2011-15

You sit there eating up  electricity. Taking in your master’s eloquence makes you steam quietly through a tiny hole. It’s time to wind up your tail and put you to sleep beneath the sink.

I made a new friend ol’ boy. We shook hands  at a flea market. She drags  up wedding showers, crackles onstage. A little grease, a fire beneath her ass gets her going: Maddening Ire’ You have hurt me into theatre.

The recipe for perfect rice she says is fluffy propaganda. I agree. Burning it just a smidge makes things crispy, lets you pluck the new prickly talent of Starr Anise rising like a goddess from a sea of steaming towels.

— The Citric District, © 2015

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The Commons on Shakespeare

Review: King Lear, Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, at the Parkman Bandstand on the Boston Common, July 24  –  August 9, 2015. FREE OUTDOOR THEATRE! Last show, this Sunday. Don’t miss it!

The C.S.C. takes a calculated risk in making the ducal intrigues of Shakespeare’s finest tragedy summon forth the racial traumas of America’s past and present.

Act I.4: Goneril’s court. Goneril (Deb Martin) has just about had it with her sweat-pantsed father Lear and his boisterous knights and is ready to kick them out. Goneril’s steward, Oswald (Brandon Green) stands far right.

There has always been a camp of theatergoers who scoff at the idea of a person of color playing a production that was originally conceived with white actors in mind. It’s just that I prefer the classics done the classic way, they wax politely, before dismissing such infelicities as a postmodern affectation. Such civilized and cultured people often forget that men had played on stage the people they deemed secondary citizens in transvestite or racial masquerade for centuries, largely out of the anxiety that they would go off the favored script of the obedient doormat who knew his or her place in society. The classic way, strictly speaking, provided for white men to play all the sexes and all the races to keep everyone in line and parody or punish the ones who didn’t conform. [1]

The gradual incorporation of women and racial minorities onto the main stage in Europe and America didn’t gather momentum until the nineteenth century when the nexus of women’s suffrage and the abolitionist movement, blackface theatre and exoticism whetted the appetite for unconventional casting on both sides of the Black Atlantic [2]. To name an outstanding case, the Black Shakespearean, Ira Aldridge, would jump through the hoops of racist adversity in the 1850s to demonstrate his acting chops in leading roles like Hamlet, Shylock, and Macbeth on the European stage, after dazzling crowds as Othello. Despite the token nature of the admissions, casting against the grain has long been one of the distinguishing virtues of the theatre. Unlike film, theatre doesn’t freeze the relation between actor and role as a foregone conclusion. The remakes come faster and furious-er, and because the fantastical nature of theatre creates greater opportunities to cast racial minorities, it often beats film to the punchline at addressing the shifting demographics of its contemporary audience, at least when it wants to do so. The CSC’s activist production of King Lear makes that admirable leap, showing what the ducal intrigues of Shakespeare might have to say about racial inequality in our flawed democracy.

Shakespeare’s finest tragedy is one where all the romance takes a backseat to the backstabbing. The spectacle of violence, conniving, and vengeance unfolds through the interwoven stories of power-hungry and power-flaunting nobles who secure their gains through the code of vengeance and self-aggrandizement. In so lawless a space, even a royal such as the title king begins to feel some of the heat, making the dumb mistake of awarding the nasty people who ratify his power through their phony rhetoric and humiliating the genuine ones (like his daughter Cordelia and his best friend, the Earl of Kent) who don’t. But beyond the excesses of the rivalrous nobility is a struggle between the knaves and the nobles, suggests the latest production by the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company. Director Steven Maler takes a calculated risk polarizing characters of varying sexes and stations along the color line. So even though the three black actors of the production figure in minor roles, their presence and impact is felt through the intensification of the play’s power relations. It’s a good illustration of the possibilities of the activist production as opposed to the colorblind production, which only makes a space for tokens, without giving them much to do. [3]

The confrontation between Kent and Oswald, the respective stewards of Lear and Goneril, is a case in point. By Act II, Kent has defended Cordelia’s refusal to embellish her love and pays for it with banishment from the kingdom. Convinced, however, of Lear’s goodness, he disguises himself as the brown-nosing Caius so he can serve his master incognito as his bodyguard. Jeremiah Kissel plays Caius like a scrappy white boxer bouncing with trash-talk, poking and prodding black Oswald as the latter is groping for the door out. “[Thou art] ...a lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue; one-truck inheriting slave...beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining.” (Act II.2).

We marvel at the cussing invective when addressed to a white actor, but when the same words are directed towards a black actor, this ham-fisted eloquence takes on the sinister character of hate speech and racial discrimination, intensified by the disparities between the actors and the disproportion of words coming out of their mouths (“I’ll teach thee differences,” warns Kent earlier in I.4). Caius’s motor-mouthed trash-talk catches Oswald’s dignified alexandrines (six-beat lines) by surprise: “Why, what a monstrous fellow art thou, thus to rail / on one that is neither known of thee nor knows thee!” (II.2). Brandon Green approaches Oswald with sang-froid rather than the expected exasperation, knowing better than to provoke the blowhard redneck even after he suffers the indignity of being tripped thrice on stage, and the interaction comes close to the embittered dynamics of working class whites who direct their bile towards racial minorities instead of the doddering white Old Boys responsible for their dispossession.

Act III, Scene 7: Regan (Mimi Bilinski) sicks her black husband, the Duke of Cornwall (Maurice Emmanuel Parent) on a black servant for insubordination. The latter attempts to dissuade his master against carrying out the cruel and unusual punishment awaiting the Duke of Gloucester, framed by that bastard Edmund.

It might be objected that white-black conflict is inevitable with any mixed-race cast, so how does one tell the difference between coincidence and activism? The CSC takes advantage of the audience assumption that it is in bad taste to represent a black man striking another black man on stage unless there is good reason for doing so. And in the case that he is coerced or persuaded, we expect the person issuing the hit will be a man rather than a woman. With the gruesome blinding of Gloucester, the production seizes on the juxtaposition of a noble and a servant caught in the crossfire of a woman’s vengeance:

(KL, Act III, Sc. 7) [4]

Shakespeare has already shaken up the "quarrel” through disparities of gender and class: it would be unchivalrous for a man to strike the beardless dame, but the dame has no problem striking dead the man who’s only a peasant. By racializing the conflict, the production reminds us that a noble peasant who stands for everything just and right also goes down in the melee, especially since the audience is likely to forget him in favor of the white gentry. The noble knave (in the visage of a black man) serves here as a foil for the unjust noble (in the visage of a white woman), and both claims must be adjudicated by the duke (in the visage of a black man). 

Maurice Emmanuel Parent plays the Duke of Cornwall with a question mark rather than with blind haste, weighing his kinsman’s history of loyalty against the charge of insubordination (”My villain?” vs. “My villain!” as other versions of the play have it). Yet while his performance shows a willed resistance to kill his fellow black kinsman, he gleefully rips into the white Earl’s sockets. By the same token, Regan (played by Mimi Bilinski in knee-high boots and with unflinching domineering) has no problem skewering the black servant with her black husband’s sword. The triangular dynamics channel the racist trauma of the white slave master who massages the ego of the House Slave (or the assimilated person of color) to keep the Field Slaves in line and finishes the job of domination herself. The complimentary trajectories of Regan and Cornwall underscore how easy it is to succumb to egregious violence against the racial other when one has no prior history of intimacy with them.

A racialized version of King Lear, of course, is no substitute for the dramatic visions of minority playwrights of the statistical majority who command the gift and language and experience for capturing a broad spectrum of American Life with nuance, fierceness, and pathos (I recommend for this reason Suzan-Lori Parks’ tour de force, Father Comes Home From the Wars, recipient of the 2015 Kennedy Prize for Drama, which blueses up the epic scale of Shakespearean tragedy. Here the graying portrait of white privilege in the visage of a Confederate Lear takes a backseat to a resourceful rabble of plantation slaves who avoid the compulsion to turn on one another in their relative state of powerlessness). Still, the CSC’s production of King Lear brings to light the way one can make theatre more contemporary by leveraging the accent of racial difference to recover the latent significance of minor story arcs whose characters are closer to some of us in their desires, frustrations, and honor than the 1% perhaps more deserving of the fate that befalls a Gloucester.

— Court Jeffster, The Citric District, © 2015

Notes:

Is this the most perverse review or what? The exercise I set for myself was to keep the spotlight trained on women, working class, and racial minorities, making you forget about the privileged white male leads, but not about the author’s grasp of theatre and Shakespeare. I would have posted more pictures but my phone camera was foiled by the night lights.

[1] Transvestism here designates the practice of men who play women’s roles in theatre or who get their jollies in clothes designed with women in mind. Not to be confused with the modern sense of drag, which involves parlaying the  stigma of effeminacy or masculinity (in gay, lesbian, and trans subjects) into a more liminal gender choreography of fierceness in the face of adversity. It should be said that the patriarchal practice of transvestism obtained not just in Greek and Elizabethan theatre of the West but in Kabuki and Noh theatre of the East, where male actors masked up as female spirits and crones. Even in blackface minstrelsy which had its heyday in the nineteenth century, the stock character of the “blackface wench” was played by black or white men.

[2] On the early history of Africans and African Americans in theatre, see Errol G. Hill, and James V. Hatch, A History of African American Theatre (Cambridge UP, 2006); and Bernth Lindfors voluminous biography, Ira Aldridge, 3 vol. Rochester Studies in African History and Diaspora (University of Rochester, 2013).

[3] The Actors Equity Association prefers the term “non-traditional casting” over “colorblind casting.” Both obscure the tokenization of racial minorities on stage. As one representative puts it, “Non-traditional casting is defined as the casting of ethnic minority and female actors in roles where race, ethnicity, or sex is not germane.” Objections to this practice usually “sidestep the dismal reality of employment prospects for most black and other minority performers.” Alan Eisenberg, “Nontraditional Casting: When Race and Sex Don’t Matter,” NYT (October 23, 1988). 

[4] William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Lear, ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, Folger Shakespeare Library, http://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org.

The Citric District descends on the Boston Common for Picnic and a Play (August 1, 2015): Court Jeffster (left) with Bloomsbury Waffle and his friends Hà-Cha-Cha and Amino Acid (right). Jockie Chan (not shown) left to get a Subway sub, while we feasted on a potluck spread of thyme bread, fresh fruit, cherries, cheese, chips, and Thai chile guacamole, every bit as spicy as we are.

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Pinko Chip

Last week was my birthday :) I’m usually a Humpty Grumpty, but this hand-personalized card tickled me pink. Pink Pantser must have snuck into my office and deactivated all my booby traps before gathering the necessary intel guaranteed to make me flap like a salmon. Some of my favorite Dreamboats, Queen Observers, Vanessa Belles, Hunchquacks, and Champion Racewhorses, all Pretty in Pink! That penmanship is as sexy as lip gloss. I give all my marshmallow peeps cutesy nicknames, and you are now my Pinko Chip. 

Smooches, Ham and Legs

— The Citric District, © 2015

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The Skinny

I.

Your weight against mine is all that matters, when you stick your tongue out like a baseball cap, channeling the spunk of a freckled boy gritting his teeth, ricocheting off the counters, dinging against a stove a ribboned jar whose tight lid finally pops open, the lemon curd splotching all over the linens.

II.

No forbidding mount of muscle disrupts the sealed oracle of skins clinging together as gluey strips of newsprint weather unwanted guests wiping their shoes. In such moments you absolve me of embarrassment from a voice that’s hoarse with candy and remind me there’s no tragedy in trials trusting to irritate and cuddle into being this wider universe.

— The Citric District, © 2015