Kevin Marks comments on Clay Shirky's power law article.

posted: 10:04:01 PM  

The Pavilion, by Craig Wright, directed by Jerry Whiddon, Round House Theatre Company, Bethesda, Maryland

I became enraptured with this dreamy play when I saw it at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in 2001. Lee Sellars' Narrator has the first words: "This is the way the universe begins," and in that monologue, backed by a moody piano, Sellars did indeed conjure the universe.

I had my doubts that the intimate play would make the trip from CATF's black box to Round House's more commodious accommodations. Physically, it does: RHT's proscenium is narrowed by built-up flats, and the acting area is further confined to a living-room-sized platform.

But Marty Lodge barrels through the opening Narrator's monologue like he's late for a bus. He's too matter of fact about it. Sorry, but this isn't Our Town. His multiple characters aren't as sharply defined as Sellars'. Aaron Shields seems a bit miscast as Peter, a little too much Jason Alexander and too little Jerry Lundegaard.

Jane Beard as Kari does best. Her emotional lows in Act II are spot on. but she doesn't hit the Act I peak that's called for: when the Narrator says, "We'll take a short break," she has to be so spun up that we're desperate for a cup of coffee in the lobby.

posted: 8:57:41 PM  

Romeo and Juliet, American Ballet Theatre, choreography by Sir Kenneth MacMillan, music by Sergei Prokofiev, Kennedy Center Concert Hall, Washington

How odd to see story ballet without a grand drape! The Opera House is under renovation (I was in the audience last year when sound engineers recorded pink noise to baseline the theater's acoustics), so ABT gamely moved its production into the Concert Hall. Perhaps the result is a bit noisier (no sound-deadening curtains) and distracting (dancers filing in slowly from cramped entrances left and right) than usual.

But the full orchestra sounded great, with passages for organ, tenor saxophone, what sounded like a balalaika, and maybe I heard a bass clarinet. And we heard even more of that wonderful score in the form of incidental vamping to cover backstage scrambling.

The acting is very good, which is important in such a plot-heavy show. Alessandra Ferri's Juliet in the balcony scene deserves mention in this regard.

Act III has most of the plot burden, but also the most interesting dancing. Juliet, consenting to marry Paris, dances a painfully slow, halting adagio with him. And then in the crypt, Romeo reprises the balcony scene pas de deux with Juliet's limp, lifeless body. It's touching, just short of grotesque.

posted: 8:30:57 PM  

For a seminar I'm attending at the Smithsonian, I read a sampling of two dozen stories from The Stories of John Cheever, including the best-known "The Swimmer" and "The Enormous Radio." Cheever's career spans the forties through the seventies, and his subjects are the disappointed, repressed Eastern middle class (those called the "frozen chosen" by A. R. Gurney). Sometimes the disappointment can be rinsed away for a time with a splash of gin. Most of my fellow attendees found the stories "depressing."

A point that wasn't developed in seminar was Cheever's experiments in structure and point of view. "The Brigadier and the Golf Widow" is told by an omniscient narrator, but closes with a coda told from the point of view of an acquaintance. (This story, by the way, concerns a neighborhood fallout shelter, and should be required reading for anyone shopping for duct tape and plastic sheeting.) The hyperrealism and distancing of "A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear" suggests a nouveau roman.

posted: 8:08:45 PM  

A Box of Matches, a novel by Nicholson Baker

This tiny little novel suggests a book of Zen meditations. What I like most about the book is Baker's poemlets of phrasing: he describes worn-out socks with "toe holes" and "rear-tears;" he writes of kindling a fire with the "ripped strips" of a discarded pizza box; he calls corrosion deposits on a car battery "electrical lichen." There is something also of Stanley Crawford's Some Instructions to My Wife... in the book's way of telling a narrative by indirection, in particular the story of the narrator's grandmother. And maybe something of the lowercase sound movement that finds music in everyday sounds and near-silence.

Squeamish readers may regret the narrator's fixation on bodily functions; fussy readers may note Baker's misapplication of "plectrum" to refer to the strummed, not the strummer.

A passage from one the closing chapters captures the novel's message:

A succession of days is like a box of new envelopes. Each envelope is flimsy and can be treated as two-dimensional. But when you pull out all of the envelopes from the box at once, there is a hard place in the middle—a thick lump—that you wouldn't expect envelopes to have.

If Baker sells the metaphor just a bit too hard in subsequent sentences, he stays safely away from Gumpian triviality.

posted: 7:46:30 PM