Perhaps the only colon in the book

A Tennessean named Webster had been watching him and he asked the judge what he aimed to do with those notes and sketches and the judge smiled and said that it was his intention to expunge them from the memory of man. Webster smiled and the judge laughed. Webster regarded him with one eye asquint and he said: Well you’ve been a draftsman somewheres and them pictures is like enough the things themselves. But no man can put all the world in a book. No more than everthing drawed in a book is so.

Well said, Marcus, spoke the judge.

But dont draw me, said Webster. For I dont want in your book.

My book or some other book said the judge. What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it’s writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all.

You’re a formidable riddler and I’ll not match words with ye. Only save my crusted mug from out your ledger there for I’d not have it shown about perhaps to strangers.

The judge smiled. Whether in my book or not, every man is tabernacled in every other and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the uttermost edge of the world.

—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, ch. XI

Methinks Webster is a 19th-century Facebook refusenik.

Known unknowns and unknown knowns

ROY COHN. So send me my pills, with a get-well bouquet, PRONTO, or I’ll ring up CBS and sing Mike Wallace a song: (Sotto voce, with relish) the ballad of adorable Ollie North and his secret contra slush fund. (He holds the phone away from his ear; Martin is excited.) Oh you only think you know all I know. I don’t even know what all I know. Half the time I just make it up, and it still turns out to be true!

—Tony Kushner, Angels in America: Perestroika, Act 1 (“Spooj”) sc. 5

Angels in America

Forum Theatre, recently relocated to Round House Theater’s Silver Spring black box, delivers a commendable production of Tony Kushner’s huge, seven-hour two-part play. Each of the many, many scenes is suggested by only one or two set pieces on wheels—an armchair for Harper and Joe’s home, a counter and a bench for the Mormon visitors center. The dressings are modest, sometimes even a little ratty, in keeping with one of the show’s themes, that of extraordinary things happening to very ordinary people. Directors Jeremy Skidmore and Michael Dove minimize the transitional seams with sound, light, and characters holding in place while the next scene begins. This is a real accomplishment, when you consider the number of scenes that absolutely call for a double bed on stage.

The playing area is configured with audience on three sides and four corner exits. The fourth side is covered a patched-together canvas that suggests a monumental painting by Anselm Kiefer. Lights thrown on this drop, front and back, establish moods and present the burning aleph; and, as you would expect, this cloth parts for the arrival of the Angel (majestic Nanna Ingvarsson) at the end of Millennium Approaches. Rather than put the Angel in a flying harness, this production perches her atop an A-frame ladder on fancy wheels; this design choice works, except for the sequence in which Prior wrestles with the Angel. About all that he can do is climb onto the unit and hang on as it’s wheeled about.

Alexander Strain succeeds at making the problematic character of Louis Ironson likable and sympathetic, because as written, Louis spends so much time being craven, obnoxious, or both, that we wonder why Prior cares for him. Karl Miller gives us a fine, vinegary Prior Walter. The female Pitts in this show, Hannah and Harper, come off as rather subdued. Jennifer Mendenhall does better with her more dialecty roles, like the specter of Ethel Rosenberg. Ingvarsson also has a wonderful short scene as Sister Ella Chapter, an insecure real estate agent with an overcompensating toothy smile. Jim Jorgensen has a gay time as the closeted, hyperintense Roy Cohn—a furioso performance.

  • Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, by Tony Kushner, directed by Jeremy Skidmore and Michael Dove, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Maryland

Disfarmer

A tornado conjured from scraps of paper fanned with a piece of stiff paper, a minature cow twirling on a stick, light projected through old-school photographic negative plates—such are the simple, powerful effects accomplished by Dan Hurlin in his new puppetry piece presented at the Clarice Smith Center. This time his subject is a reclusive, perhaps eccentric small-town portrait photographer: Mike Disfarmer, who worked in the Ozarks burg of Heber Springs, Ark. from the 1930s until his death in obscurity in 1959. Focusing on the obsessive, solitary life of Disfarmer, the piece has only one puppet character, that of the photographer himself. As conceived by Hurlin, Disfarmer begins as a three-foot bespectacled figure (imagine an elongated Bunsen Honeydew); as his days unwind (as well as the mid-century small-town way of life), smaller and smaller puppets take its place, until the touching final tableau in which a twelve-inch Disfarmer clambers under his photographer’s cloth for the last time.

As with his other pieces, Hurlin puts his own spin on the Japanese bunraku tradition of puppetry. His five performers (along with Hurlin as narrator and voice for Disfarmer’s unspoken thoughts) both manipulate and interact with the puppet. The mix of scales works out because most of the scenes take place on waist-high wagons. Designers and builders for human performance would envy Hurlin’s freedom to position set pieces without the need for chocks, since his artificial actor isn’t in danger of skidding away or breaking through the set. Hurlin compares puppetry to dance, and indeed his performers often contribute to the story by the simple stillness of a standing pose.

Other technical theater elements contribute to this rewarding piece. Music by Dan Moses Schreier accompanies a projected montage of Disfarmer’s portraits. As the images corrode and fade away (as all emulsion-based photos must), the music becomes a demented, polyphonic bluegrass, to be eventually overwhelmed by sirens blasting from speakers scattered throughout the auditorium. The effect is an uncanny echo of Hurlin’s Hiroshima Maiden, which takes place in an overlapping time period. In a stately passage, lights designed by Tyler Micoleau evoke an evening’s twilight that takes 30 years to fall into night.

This bittersweet production is not without lightness: there’s a good running gag of Disfarmer bopping his head on his own studio safe light. Some of the names of Heber Springs’ denizens are too good to be made up (Carthel?).

  • Disfarmer, conceived, directed, and designed by Dan Hurlin, Smith Center Kay Theatre, College Park, Maryland

On deck: 3

on deck: 3George Plimpton’s hockey book is back in print; an old Dickens from the basement shelves that I never got around to reading; an Angela Carter that I didn’t know about; and this seems to be the year of Edna Ferber around here.

Fitzgerald decoded

I’m a little disappointed with the notes to the LOA edition of The Beautiful and Damned. We get no help with “a seidel of beer” (p. 516) (nothing more complicated than a drinking glass, but still); most of the song lyrics are glossed, but not “Out in—the shimmee sanitarium…” (p. 784). And, most significantly, nothing on Bilphist and Bilphism (pp. 475 and passim), apparently a brand of spiritualism of Fitzgerald’s own invention.

However, a trip to the dictionary was worth it for this sentence. The Patches have come down in the world:

Anthony lay upon the lounge looking up One Hundred and Twenty-Seventh Street toward the river, near which he could just see a single patch of vivid green trees that guaranteed the brummagem umbrageousness of Riverside Drive. (“No Matter!”, p. 760)

Brummagem, a Menckenesque “cheap and showy; meretricious.” Umbrageousness here doesn’t mean what you think, but rather the property of “affording shade”. Coleridge has “A chestnut spread its umbrage wide.”

O.F.

Via The Morning News, John Adams gives tips on getting through the first rehearsal:

Be flexible and take every opportunity to talk to the players. Sometimes you can make an on-the-spot change that will make an instrumentalist’s day. Other times, although you realize that what you’ve written is in fact awkward and unreasonable, the player will be affronted if you offer to simplify or revise a phrase or a passage. They assume that if something isn’t working it’s their fault. Composers are geniuses, right? For them it’s their burden to somehow make it work, and they do not realize that it’s the composer who needs to get it right.

Many actors I know aren’t quite so accommodating toward playwrights.

I also must quote this bit, relating to the many, many details of the composition process:

[Is] it mezzo forte or mezzo piano? (Or maybe pianissimo, because they’ll play it loud in any event?) Why aren’t there more gradients available? (Stockhausen tried: zero to ten.) Is pianissimo in the brass still going to cover the clarinets? And you always forget about mutes. It says “mutes on,” but you’ve declined to say when to remove them. Is it true that Schoenberg thought “mezzo” forte and “mezzo” piano were for sissies who couldn’t make up their minds? Maybe he was right.

Meat pollution

Elizabeth Kirkwood on the very public decision by Britain’s top climate adviser, Nicholas Stern, to stop eating meat as a means of mitigating global warming. Strong stuff:

Why are we not outraged by what the meat industry and those who support it, which is, let’s face it, most of us, is doing to our planet? Why is meat consumption not stigmatised in the way that driving 4×4 gas guzzlers is?

There’s no “I” in “theater”

We are heading to the wire!! Make those reservations, see those shows, do those ballots! And be thankful that there’s no chance of WATCH being sold to Dan Snyder, because y’all are a great team!

—Weekly report to WATCH adjudicators for 28 October 2009

Although the adjudication coordinator is dangerously close to exhausting her quota of exclamation marks.