James reports from the park:

Gang, we are definitely the wood duck and hooded merganser nest box group now. We have 2 merganser hens setting (box 68 and 6) and 2 laying eggs (box 67 & 77). Also, 1 woodie has started laying eggs in box 13.

posted: 11:10:26 PM  

Book of Days, by Lanford Wilson, directed by Wendy C. Goldberg, Arena Stage Fichandler Theater, Washington

A solid, polished production of a marvelous script by one of the premier companies in town, anchored by salty Susan Lynskey as Ginger, earnestly naive Brian Keane as Len, and (newly endowed?) Jennifer Mudge as Ruth.

The events of the play concern a community theater production of Saint Joan in small-town Dublin, Missouri; the town is rocked by the sensational murder of one of its leading businessmen. The narrative style is fractured, with scenelets played out of chronological order, and even one scene repeated but with somewhat different dialogue spoken. As the murder is covered up, Ruth becomes identified with the character she is playing, the single-minded Joan.

The scene where Sharon, the victim's repressed wife, is informed of the death contains the most brilliantly theatrical moment that I've witnessed in ten years: Sharon's character refuses to feel her own grief, so the Saint Joan director asks another character (Ginger) to step in and play the scene for her. Goldberg's crew gets nearly everything to be got out of that scene.

In a case of making a virtue of necessity: getting characters on and offstage in the Fichandler's generous proportions for quick scenes can easily drag a show down. So Goldberg stations various characters on the shadowy edges of the scene, observing what they could not observe but almost certainly can learn (this is a small town, remember) and ready to go on with the next scene. A nice touch.

Oh, and Earl's baptism at the top of Act 2 gives the Arena technicians a shot at one of their signature water effects!

A wee quibble: Goldberg flashes a bit of ironic hope (a burst of music) at the play's end. Better to just shut off the lights and leave us in the dark.

posted: 8:44:40 PM  

How to be Alone, essays by Jonathan Franzen

The book is an chance for Franzen to revise and to publish in book form what has become known as "the Harper's essay," a lengthly exploration of the state of novel writing these days—along with various other pieces, mostly from the mid-nineties. In a preface, Franzen admits that

... I used to be a very angry and theory-minded person. I used to consider it apocalyptically worrisome that Americans watch a lot of TV and don't read much Henry James.

Given the essays here, I'd say he could still take the opportunity to lighten up. "The Reader in Exile" is a curmudgeonly attack from 1995 on the excesses of Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital, which leads off with a story about the author giving away his television set. "Scavenging" similarly turns on Franzen's reluctance to adopt 1996 entertainment technology. Jeez, in "Books in Bed," he confesses that he is "one of the few heterosexual men in American who's not turned on by elaborate lingerie."

I'm still puzzled by his use of the word "preterite" on p. 168.

posted: 8:32:31 PM