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Interlude: Puppets, Clowns

Too, too often have I said to myself the following, or words to this effect: "Zalman, you subtle and skillful juggler of words, you perfect specimen of the penman's art, you prince—why do you endlessly endure theatre you do not enjoy? You love the arts of puppetry and clown. Why go see a mediocre play at a major arts nonprofit when you can sit in a grungy black box on the third floor of an office building and watch people do some weird nonsense with foam rubber or white face paint?" And you know what, reader? I'm right to say so, and I'm right about everything else, too. So I kept my eye out for events that might include these most ancient crafts. And in June, I did indeed get my clowning and puppetry in. And do you know what? Sturgeon's Law holds.* Still, I had a good time, and there was much worthwhile in my adventures, which I will cover in brief here.

*Sturgeon's Law: An informal formulation by the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. Back in the day, there was an old saw that 90 percent of science fiction was crap. Sturgeon responded "90 percent of everything is crap!" He was correct, and continues to be so.

Theatre Review: Jerome

Listen: I’d love to be able to tell you that the new queer quasi-surrealist play in town does everything right. I quite like queerness, and surrealism, and plays. (Maybe that last item ought to come with a qualifier.) I would love my eyes to glitter when I spoke of Jerome by John J. Caswell, Jr. I would love to deploy a rush of words like “fresh,” “fascinating,” and “gripping.” But if I ignored the plain truth about a show and focused merely on eulogizing it regardless of its real attributes, where would I be? Writing for the New York Times, probably. Nevertheless, I have a critical ethos and a mind of my own, despite the world’s attempts to batter both out of me, and I must say what I think. Does Jerome have good intentions? Undoubtedly. Is Jerome, as a dramatic work, good? Not really. I’m sorry.

The trouble is best described as a sort of snowballing mediocrity. Caswell is careless. Little faults of dramatic logic, of historical scope, of construction, accumulated scene by scene until it became impossible for me to take the play seriously. You may accuse me of hairsplitting. I might even agree, but it’s not willful. I have a kind of dramaturgical gland in the brain, a very active little organ, and it starts flooding my system with inflammatory chemicals whenever a playwright gets loosey-goosey with her craft. Jerome activated the thing for two straight hours. By which I mean two gay hours. But not transgressively gay. Jack Smith this ain’t.

Theatre Review: Dad Don't Read This

The way I learned what Sims were was by learning a method to torture them. You invite one into a swimming pool, it splashes around merrily, and while it's occupied, you remove the ladder that it used to climb into the pool. For good measure, you raise a fence around the perimeter. The Sim is now trapped. It goes to leave. No way out. It panics. It thrashes in the middle of the water, its energy ebbs, and at last it drowns. The Grim Reaper appears poolside and ushers the ghost away.

I should add, for those of you who didn't grow up with it, that I'm describing actions in a computer game. The first edition of The Sims (developed by the game studio Maxis) was released in 2000, and a version of the game is still being played today, frequently updated with new packs. In the game, you control a population of Sims and their built environment. Sims are simulated people—but they speak an incomprehensible tongue called Simlish, and their needs and motivations are rather more crude than those of ourselves. Human beings have the kind of prismatic and illogical emotional needs that lead to sexual kinks; Sims just need to logically progress along various set pathways. The game's still pretty popular, I'm led to understand (who doesn't like ultimate power over life, death, and one's house?). But it seems The Sims exerted unusual cultural power in the early 2010s. I never experienced this firsthand, but I am reliably informed that high-school girls in this era would labor at their Sim-worlds, creating and destroying, shaping and flattening, building up huge residences and neighborhoods. And it does make sense if you consider the constrained life of a teenager, and a teenage girl especially. The kids are miserable out there sometimes. No wonder they want to play God.

Theatre Review: Death of a Salesman

I often write my theatre reviews in rich and zany language. I tried to review Death of a Salesman that way. It didn't work. There was something I couldn't manage to crack. It took a while but I realized the problem. The prose and the show didn't match up. I needed a plain and distant style. So I decided to write with exaggerated plainness. You know the kind. Pretending I'm Hemingway or some other hairy American boozehound of the twentieth century. That relieved the boredom. I was happy. Here you go.

I went to the theatre. It was the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway. The Winter Garden has a huge billboard out front. It sits above the entrance like a bald man’s forehead above his face. I went down beneath the billboard and under the marquee to see Death of a Salesman. I think I mentioned that before. It was billed as Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Maybe that was to prevent it from being mixed up with Tennessee Williams' Death of a Salesman. (I stole that joke from Stephen Sondheim. He wrote it about The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess back in 2012. It was as stupid a mannerism then as it is now.) The auditorium was full of rich people drinking bad wine. The play was full of poor people. In the end one of the poor people (the salesman) kills himself. In the end the rich people get a cool photo for Instagram.

Interlude: Matzah, and an Heir of the Marquis de Sade

Sometimes, the brain simply will not get up to operational speed. I’ve lately felt like the sad and Sisyphean suburban dad in an ‘80s movie tugging at the ripcord of a gas-powered lawnmower. Come on, I say to my mind, work, dammit. The thing putters and growls without actually starting up, and my intellectual landscape grows crabgrass. Maybe it’s the diet of matzah and matzah byproducts that’s done it. For the non-Jews, Passover started on April Fool’s Day this year, and a cruel prank it was. During Passover, instead of leavened bread, we are obliged to purchase and consume a an arid, unleavened cracker called matzah for just over a week. This is in remembrance of our ancestors in Egypt, who found naught but matzah in the cruel supermarkets of Rameses. No, the story we actually tell is that the ancient Jews had to escape the land of their servitude before the dough they’d made had time to rise, so they baked the unleavened dough on hot rocks in the desert. This was the first matzah, the “bread of affliction.” Of course, the tribes led out of Egypt were later compensated for this with the miraculous (and reportedly delicious) manna; all one can anticipate during the modern Passover is the ability to eat bagels again someday.

IN THE THEATER TONIGHT...

Accents and accentuation are in the theater. Apocalypse is in the theater. Black people are in the theater. Blindness is in the theater. Christian martyrs are in the theater. Collective trauma is in the theater. Computers are in the theater. Death is in the theater.

Deception is in the theater. Dictatorship is in the theater. Disabilities are in the theater. Diseases are in the theater.

Domestic space is in the theater. Doors are in the theater.

Education is in the theater. Firearms are in the theater. Ghosts are in the theater. Heroines are in the theater.

Horror is in the theater.

Idolatry is in the theater. Illusion is in the theater. Immigrants are in the theater. Intimacy is in the theater. Masculinity is in the theater. Monsters are in the theater.

Music is in the theater. Mysticism is in the theater. Mythology, Greek, is in the theater. Nuclear weapons are in the theater. Pain is in the theater. Pictures are in the theater. Pregnant women are in the theater.

Psychic trauma is in the theater. Race is in the theater. Ritual is in the theater. Scandals are in the theater. Senses and sensation are in the theater. Social media is in the theater. Social problems are in the theater. Sports are in the theater. Symbolism is in the theater.

Ugliness is in the theater. Violence is in the theater.

Women are in the theater. Work is in the theater.

(Quasi-)Theatre Review: The Importance of Being Earnest via National Theatre Live

Sometimes, skilled theatre artists mount a comedy in a state of unmistakable desperation. The designers dye everything yellow, the actors gambol, the audience laughs because broad silliness always gets laughs, and one can almost feel the director’s panic-sweat pattering down on the back of one’s neck. Meanwhile the playtext, whatever characteristics may be said to inhere in it, is whipped round like a windsock. You often see Shakespeare comedies done this way; the director fears that the Elizabethan jokes will rebound off the audience’s impenetrable skulls, and so she equips the production with every device she can think of to prod out the laughs. Alas, this was the impression I got from the National Theatre’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a recorded version of which was recently available on YouTube. Here was all the frantic stage business and mugging that one expects from a director who approaches his play with fear and trembling. And yet I can’t be certain that the director fretted. I am certain of the production’s other problem.

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EVERYTHING'S FINE :) By W.B. Yeats

Tracing a neat straight line, adept and sure, The falcon heeds the calling falconer; Things hang together, and the center holds; Mere symmetry is ordering the world, The sea-bright tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence proceeds; The best have strong convictions, while the worst Are full of resignation and are sad.

Surely no revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming's far away. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When an indifference borne of stable comfort Leaves my sight clear: somewhere in sands of the desert A lion with lion body and the head of a lion, A gaze calm and leonine, as is usual, Is moving its slow thighs, while all around it Reel shadows of the normal desert birds. What a nice lion, right? And now I know That twenty centuries have gone along And things were bad sometimes, and things were good, And if a lion slouches toward Bethlehem, That's 'cause it's native to the Levant.

17steps

JUST AN INANIMATE STATUE! Rainer Maria Rilke

We can glean much about his mortal head with eyes like two glass orbs. Such as: his torso is now dull and totally dark, like a lamp that’s been switched off,

just like his eyes, tightly shut. And that’s why his flat chest is unimpressive, and somehow you can tell his downstairs would be too.

And that’s why this stone seems a little mottled under the opaque shelf of the shoulders and it looks pretty matte; after all, it’s a rock:

and it seems pretty self-contained and static: for you are just looking at a statue alone. Your life is just fine as it is.

#EXCELLENTLY DONE #‘his downstairs’ is masterful

A T.S. ELIOT POEM

Abhorrent, every other human being, And I despise myself. "London is ugly—America is uglier," I said, and laughed to hear my voice. Procne inclines above her warp; A track of silent words she weaves In miserable boustrophedon, Battening thread whereon she grieves. And, might I add—oh, might I? Yes, I might— I'll add that women are grotesque, And I was never over-fond of Jews. Well, Ezra, what do you think?

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Seminal Works: Shakespeare’s “Procreation Sonnets”

For a poet and a lover of poetry, I have an odd relationship with Shakespeare’s sonnets. They unnerve me. I seldom read them; I tread softly around them, trying not to wake them up. There they sleep, on my shelf, deceptively impassive in their compact volume. But they’re little bastards. When I open the book and try to examine one, it bolts up into my face. Some sonnets do not resist my touch but are as opaque and inert as chunks of slag; others writhe in the hand like eels, or have tough toothy shark-hides, and some are nasty piranha-like things that gnaw at my fingertips. They simply aren’t tame. I can at least comprehend Donne’s religious agonies or Edna St. Vincent Millay’s urbane ones, but with Shakespeare, it’s always a wrestling match. I come away bested more often than not.

the-domestic-mammoth

Seminal Works: Shakespeare’s “Procreation Sonnets”

For a poet and a lover of poetry, I have an odd relationship with Shakespeare’s sonnets. They unnerve me. I seldom read them; I tread softly around them, trying not to wake them up. There they sleep, on my shelf, deceptively impassive in their compact volume. But they’re little bastards. When I open the book and try to examine one, it bolts up into my face. Some sonnets do not resist my touch but are as opaque and inert as chunks of slag; others writhe in the hand like eels, or have tough toothy shark-hides, and some are nasty piranha-like things that gnaw at my fingertips. They simply aren’t tame. I can at least comprehend Donne’s religious agonies or Edna St. Vincent Millay’s urbane ones, but with Shakespeare, it’s always a wrestling match. I come away bested more often than not.

Seminal Works: Shakespeare’s “Procreation Sonnets”

For a poet and a lover of poetry, I have an odd relationship with Shakespeare’s sonnets. They unnerve me. I seldom read them; I tread softly around them, trying not to wake them up. There they sleep, on my shelf, deceptively impassive in their compact volume. But they’re little bastards. When I open the book and try to examine one, it bolts up into my face. Some sonnets do not resist my touch but are as opaque and inert as chunks of slag; others writhe in the hand like eels, or have tough toothy shark-hides, and some are nasty piranha-like things that gnaw at my fingertips. They simply aren’t tame. I can at least comprehend Donne’s religious agonies or Edna St. Vincent Millay’s urbane ones, but with Shakespeare, it’s always a wrestling match. I come away bested more often than not.

playwrongs

Goose Shit by Evil Mary Oliver Who Lives in Your Head

You do have to be good. In fact, you have to be perfect. Having even one perturbation will disqualify you from going to the grocery store. You are obligated to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting, backwards, in underwear made of red-hot puff adders. You can't let that soft, fallible animal of your body love what it loves. Are you kidding? Tell me about despair, yours, and keep telling me, and don't stop, or you'll completely explode and go to jail, and then hell. Meanwhile the world goes on without you. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of hailstones are beating down on your head, pouring into the buildings and deep gutters, the corpse-laden mountains and the rivers-- did you read that article about the one that turned bright yellow from pollution? Meanwhile the wild geese, hissing and shitting everywhere will not leave your yard. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, you can always get lonelier! And I can help. I call to you like the wild geese, harsh and intimidating, over and over announcing your place-- oop, sorry, never mind, someone else took it.

the-domestic-mammoth

I appreciate those in the notes of "Everything's Fine" who have drawn an intertexual link to this poem, which also happens to be one of mine!

EVERYTHING'S FINE :) By W.B. Yeats

Tracing a neat straight line, adept and sure, The falcon heeds the calling falconer; Things hang together, and the center holds; Mere symmetry is ordering the world, The sea-bright tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence proceeds; The best have strong convictions, while the worst Are full of resignation and are sad.

Surely no revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming's far away. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When an indifference borne of stable comfort Leaves my sight clear: somewhere in sands of the desert A lion with lion body and the head of a lion, A gaze calm and leonine, as is usual, Is moving its slow thighs, while all around it Reel shadows of the normal desert birds. What a nice lion, right? And now I know That twenty centuries have gone along And things were bad sometimes, and things were good, And if a lion slouches toward Bethlehem, That's 'cause it's native to the Levant.

#tumblr exclusive

the-domestic-mammoth

Theatre Review: What We Did Before Our Moth Days

In the form of a dialogue between the author and the worse angel of his nature

I have a constant companion when I go to the theatre. I say “companion”—he’s really a sort of imp. He has a permanent house seat on my left shoulder, and he’s a talker. Where I evaluate shows justly and serenely, always considerate of the cast’s efforts and the playwright’s intentions, the imp loves nothing more than to rail at every choice; to him, the playwright’s a dolt, the director’s a twit, and the set designer must have suffered some kind of Bristol Board accident and lost her frontal lobe. We both have sympathy for actors, though, I because I used to aspire to the craft, and he because actors have a number of traits in common with demons.

Anyway, the imp and I recently got home very late from a performance of the new Wallace Shawn play What We Did in Our Moth Days, directed by Andre Gregory. The imp had been snickering the whole journey, and I knew I was in for a really rowdy session with him. Indeed, just as we got through the door, he opened combat:

IMP: That. Was. Dreadful.

ZALMAN: We’re doing this already? I’ve only gotten one shoe off.

IMP: Why do you insist on dragging me to these sloppy last plays? This was the fourth or fifth one we’ve seen…

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In case anyone (or @fraise-impossible in particular) missed it!

Theatre Review: What We Did Before Our Moth Days

In the form of a dialogue between the author and the worse angel of his nature

I have a constant companion when I go to the theatre. I say “companion”—he’s really a sort of imp. He has a permanent house seat on my left shoulder, and he’s a talker. Where I evaluate shows justly and serenely, always considerate of the cast’s efforts and the playwright’s intentions, the imp loves nothing more than to rail at every choice; to him, the playwright’s a dolt, the director’s a twit, and the set designer must have suffered some kind of Bristol Board accident and lost her frontal lobe. We both have sympathy for actors, though, I because I used to aspire to the craft, and he because actors have a number of traits in common with demons.

Anyway, the imp and I recently got home very late from a performance of the new Wallace Shawn play What We Did in Our Moth Days, directed by Andre Gregory. The imp had been snickering the whole journey, and I knew I was in for a really rowdy session with him. Indeed, just as we got through the door, he opened combat:

IMP: That. Was. Dreadful.

ZALMAN: We’re doing this already? I’ve only gotten one shoe off.

IMP: Why do you insist on dragging me to these sloppy last plays? This was the fourth or fifth one we’ve seen…

Have you noticed that most people who write about literature and poetics on the internet seem merely to be jerking off? Not me, though; I’m perfect.

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