Solar lily pads on the Charles? Or the Mystic?

Could art and engineering come together in a unique response to our energy crisis? Glasgow is considering the feasibility of "solar lily pads" in its Clyde River (above). Yes, the pads would float, and would be connected directly to the city's power grid. Could MIT and the City of Boston look into the same idea for the Mystic, or parts of Boston Harbor? More here.

Cry of the Reed Revisited

It came to my attention a week or so ago via Art Hennessey's Mirror Up to Nature blog that playwright Sinan Ünel, author of The Cry of the Reed, had begun his own blog to respond to what he saw as the "vicious and personal" reviews the show received.

I was pretty intrigued by this idea - it seemed at the very least like one more small step toward getting a genuine public dialogue going in this town about its theatre. But I'm a bit disappointed in Ünel's blog itself; it seems to be almost entirely praise of the show, emailed or called in by enthusiastic audience members. Not that there's anything wrong with that - and I expected to find a good deal of it on the blog - still, there's precious little analysis to be found in its posts; it operates more as wounded defense than actual response. So I posted the following comment on the blog:

Hi Sinan -

I understand your reaction to the negative reviews you received, and I'm intrigued by your use of a blog to respond. But I'd be even more intrigued if you responded to the points made in the reviews, or described how the reviews have affected your view of the work. Now that the play has closed, will you be pondering any revisions? I'd be very interested to hear about that.

Thanks,

Tom Garvey
The Hub Review

Sinan replied with the following:

Hey Tom - thanks for the question. As in all feedback, if the suggestion is intelligent, insightful, and will potentially improve the play, I will welcome it and use it. If it is hostile, insulting, arrogant, condescending or not particularly smart, it's more of a challenge. It's not terribly useful that much of criticism seems to have lowered itself to the level of the latter.

From you review I was able to extract one possibly legitimate point: Ayla's line "it's in everyone's heart."

Although your tone while addressing this - and other aspects of the play - is mocking, condescending and mystifyingly juvenile, I take your point. I might consider changing it.

Part of the purpose of this blog is to try to comprehend who these reviews serve. Do they serve the audience? Judging from the responses to your review - and the audience response to the play, this is not exactly the case. Does it serve the playwright? Judging from the tone of your review, this is not your intention. What is the purpose then? Simply to serve the critic and his ego?

I then replied:

Well, I suppose I can gather from this that I'm hostile, insulting, arrogant, condescending, and not particularly smart. No doubt all that is true, but surely you can see that you've subtly turned my question on its head - as if I were aspiring somehow to enlighten you, instead of the other way around. In other words, if you're going to value some audience members' responses more than others, you should have a stronger reason than the complaint that the people who didn't like your play are "mocking, condescending and mystifying juvenile." (Just btw, that makes your full characterization of your unflattering reviewers run to a full seven adjectives' worth of invective: "hostile, insulting, arrogant, condescending, not particularly smart, mocking, and mystifyingly juvenile.")

It's true I wrote one mocking line about some of your dialogue ("Wow, that's like so deep"), but the point was that Rumi's philosophical musings can sound like "deep thoughts" unless handled very carefully onstage. And the gist of my review was that the two "tracks" of your play didn't seem to connect - one was a conventional thriller with philosophical overtones, the other a debate that to me never seemed to get beyond the opening round. Did you feel that these two sides of your drama were eventually integrated? And if so, how? None of the praise you've posted has brought up this issue, which to me seems central - I mean, isn't that what the reed is crying about?

You wrap up by writing, "Part of the purpose of this blog is to try to comprehend who these reviews serve. Do they serve the audience? Judging from the responses to your review - and the audience response to the play, this is not exactly the case. Does it serve the playwright? Judging from the tone of your review, this is not your intention. What is the purpose then? Simply to serve the critic and his ego?"

I hate to break this to you, but I've heard several negative comments about Cry of the Reed - not everybody loved it. So maybe I was writing for those people. You also ask if critics write "simply to serve their own ego." Well, we certainly don't write to serve your ego, that's for sure. Honest criticism that could help the play is always hard to hear, I know that. But you seem to think that you can pick and choose just the flattering comments to blog about.

So far, no answer back to that last post, but you can see where this is going. I'm struck (yet again) by the slightly hysterical ad hominem attacks that always seem to be lobbed in the direction of cool (okay, cold) criticism around here. Yes, I know, before you say it: "Tom, you hypocrite, you've got the thinnest skin of all! Look what you said about Terry Byrne!" Yes, well - my point about Byrne was that I felt she delivered a particularly nasty review as payback for my criticisms of her reviewing skills. I still feel that way - although don't get me wrong, I don't think my production was "awesome!" I just never read an accurate description of it in the press (yes, I'd kind of like to write my own review, but that would be rude to my cast, and get entirely too meta even for me!). Byrne's review was nutty, and if you want to argue that it was her incompetence rather than her vengefulness speaking (a case several people have made), that's fine by me.

Ünel is in a somewhat different position, anyway - as was Ronan Noone, who tangled with me over Brendan here. Both make essentially the same response to their critics - there are people who like the play; it's selling out, etc., and the people who point out its faults are mean, vicious and bad - or rather "hostile, insulting, arrogant, etc." But do I have to spell out how that doesn't count as an "argument"? Rather than debate his case - or even clarify his themes or method - Ünel simply smears his critics (and Noone wasn't much better).

Of course a skeptic might come to a certain conclusion about the situation - that Noone and Unel don't actually counter their critics because they know there's truth in the critiques; they simply can't argue "on the merits." Ergo, the other party must be a snob, "heaping scorn from on high," blah blah fucking blah. And all I can say in response is "Shut up and figure out how you're going to resolve your subplot, Ronan." "Develop the relationship between your mother and her daughter, Sinan." In a word, get to work. And maybe people will like your play even more.

On the other hand, if you want to argue the merits of my review, or put forth your own case, post your comments right here. But try to leave the poison pen in the drawer.

Poem of the Day

Elegy of Fortinbras

by Zbigniew Herbert

for C.M.

Now that we’re alone we can talk prince man to man
though you lie on the stairs and see no more than a dead ant
nothing but black sun with broken rays
I could never think of your hands without smiling
and now that they lie on the stone like fallen nests
they are as defenceless as before The end is exactly this
The hands lie apart The sword lies apart The head apart
and the knight’s feet in soft slippers

You will have a soldier’s funeral without having been a soldier
the only ritual I am acquainted with a little
there will be no candles no singing only cannon-fuses and bursts
crepe dragged on the pavement helmets boots artillery horses drums drums I know nothing exquisite those will be my manoeuvres before I start to rule
one has to take the city by the neck and shake it a bit
Anyhow you had to perish Hamlet you were not for life
you believed in crystal notions not in human clay
always twitching as if asleep you hunted chimeras
wolfishly you crunched the air only to vomit
you knew no human thing you did not know even how to breathe

Now you have peace Hamlet you accomplished what you had to
and you have peace The rest is not silence but belongs to me
you chose the easier part an elegant thrust
but what is heroic death compared with eternal watching
with a cold apple in one’s hand on a narrow chair
with a view of the ant-hill and the clock’s dial

Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project
and a decree on prostitutes and beggars
I must also elaborate a better system of prisons
since as you justly said Denmark is a prison
I go to my affairs This night is born
a star named Hamlet We shall never meet
what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy

It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos
and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince

(translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz)


Zbigniew Herbert was born in 1924 in Lvov, Poland, and died in Warsaw in 1998. He survived both the Nazi and Communist occupations, and drew on both in his poetry. His collection Selected Poems was translated into English by Czeslaw Milosz.

One for the history books?

The boys in the band of The History Boys.

Occasionally a play arrives that unconsciously underlines the way theatre is becoming a kind of private gay preserve. Alan Bennett's The History Boys, for instance (currently at the Roberts Studio Theatre, from SpeakEasy Stage) centers on a gay teacher with a certain peccadillo - he gropes his teen-age charges - that it's hard to imagine as a minor "flaw" in a straight leading man, at least if said leading man hoped to hang onto our sympathy. Yet sympathize with Bennett's hero, the crusty "Hector," who teaches in a lowly private boys' school in Sheffield, we are definitely expected to do. Yes, Hector is duly caught and punished before the final curtain, but we're repeatedly asked to smile indulgently at his transgressions - he compares his furtive feels to "benedictions," for instance (imagine that joke being made about a girl's breasts!), and he's finally dismissed not as a predator, but as "a twerp."

Now I don't mean to paint the objects of Hector's attentions as victims - after all, they're in the final year of British "public" (i.e., private) school, which is famous as a homo-erotic hothouse. So not unbelievably, they by and large laugh off Hector's pathetic pawing ("I'm scarred for life!" one snickers). Still, the whole subplot reeks of a certain kind of gay fantasy - playwright Bennett half-hints that the boys' indulgence of their pedagogue's probings is a part of their affection for him, and never faces up to the balance of power in the situation (although later on he does show an intriguing awareness of how it can pivot). To be blunt, the boys submit to Hector largely because he controls their grades, not out of any feeling for him (although said affection is quite probably real), and it's simply silly to pretend otherwise. Trust me, I know - I was once felt up by a professor myself (hard to believe, yes, but once I was young and skinny). It was hardly a trauma, and I liked the guy quite a bit; still, I've no illusions as to why I let him do it.

But of course any such realism would complicate the rest of Bennett's play, in which Hector (Bob Colonna, at left) does battle for the right and good against the creeping, careerist relativism of the modern academy. "Hector" - that's a nickname, of course, because his noble cause is lost, and his victories pyrrhic (literally) - believes in education for its own sake; his study hall is devoted to the useless knowledge that you can't make a widget out of but which we cherish as making us human (including everything from Auden and Hardy to Brief Encounter and "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered"). But the headmaster wants his boys to cut the mustard at "Oxbridge" (as we say nowadays), and so brings in a glib new history teacher, Irwin, who is all about postmodern spin over substance. "History nowadays is not a matter of conviction," he whispers in his students' ears. "It's a performance." So soon the "history boys" are arguing the opposite of what they actually believe (or know to be true) simply because that's what makes a good show - and the play becomes yet another erstwhile battle for young hearts and minds. Of course we know who won this particular war (if you don't, just read Andrew Sullivan or Christopher Hitchens to find out), but the funny thing is, it does make a good show - and Bennett conjures some fresh, witty fireworks from his classroom campaigns.

The unspoken problem with the plot, however, is that it unintentionally demonstrates that slimy Irwin actually does make his students think more, and with greater insight, than Hector does; maybe glib contrarianism isn't as bad as it seems. But The History Boys can't really pursue its arguments to such an equivocally fresh conclusion, because it's distracted by its awkward sex-crime subplot - particularly when the "hot" boy in class, Dakin, having learned a thing or two about school teachers, sets about seducing Irwin. This bizarre twist is hard to parse (particularly in this production); Bennett seems to almost be pursuing some kind of vengeance on his villain, with a cool irony that's simply at odds with everything that has come before - and then, to top off the whole structural car crash, he throws in a motorcycle crash as his dénouement. I've never seen a play so carefully crafted within its scenes utterly jump the rails in its overall arc; but that's what happens to History Boys.

And that's what happens to Scott Edmiston's smart, but superficial (and sentimental) production. Edmiston, as usual, is brilliant with scenes with "heart," but doesn't quite know what to make of the characters' cooler calculations, and tends (again as usual) to punch things up with musical interludes. It doesn't help that some key roles are ever so slightly miscast. Bob Colonna is all roaring, bright-eyed eccentricity as Hector, but he never taps into the anxious, pathetic longing that hides in his persona's shadow - so his fall conjures little pathos. Meanwhile Chris Thorn essays Irwin with an accomplished sense of understatement - but shouldn't this bright, false new star be a bit more charismatic and attractive? How else to explain the way he arouses the interest of Dakin (played here by Dan Whelton with the requisite hots, but with not quite enough smarts, or dawning sense of competitive power)?

Luckily, there's more precisely-gauged work elsewhere in the production. The reliable Paula Plum (at right) makes short, deft work of the school's single, wryly defeated female teacher, while Karl Baker Olson twists with transparent pain as the gay boy who's in love with Dakin, too. The rest of the "boys" nail their sketched-in characters with appropriate energy. The design work is at SpeakEasy's usual high level - although Gail Astrid Buckley does little with the costuming to conjure the 80's, the play's putative setting (it's really set in the 50's, anyhow). Meanwhile Janie E. Howland once again triumphs over the wide, boxy feel of the Roberts with a wittily expert and lovingly detailed set. This superficial sheen isn't really enough to disguise the flaws in the play, but if you squint a bit, it may fool you into thinking it's at the head of its class.

Photobombers unite!

They hack into your Facebook page, photoshop the pictures you've posted, and voilà! Your special moment is ruined!



All photos from actual Facebook pages.



More hilarity ensues here.

The Foer of us

Bhavesh Patel is half of rather an odd couple in The Four of Us.

It's hardly a secret that The Four of Us (now at the Merrimack Rep) is a scénario à clef with the famously young, famously rich Jonathan Safran Foer at its center. In fact, said connection has become the slim, cynical comedy's chief marketing ploy; after all, the pitch is right there in the title. Sure, author Itamar Moses half-heartedly disguises "Jonathan" as "Benjamin," but the parallels between his script and his friendship with the Gen-Y novelist/Dave Eggers replacement are simply impossible to ignore. And even if the Merrimack muddies the waters a bit by making "Benjamin" Indian (which helps us forget that these two were basically smart Jewish kids who met at band camp), Moses eventually goes so meta (by the finale, the characters are watching the play, too) that we feel almost pinned to the postmodern wall: Admit it, Moses seems to be crying, you know who I'm talking about!

Yes, yes, Itamar, we do. And we admit we find him as irritating as you do. Foer skeptics (I count myself among them) who think of Everything Is Illuminated as brilliant-but-recycled will find a lot to back up their doubts in The Four of Us: "Benjamin" is a self-possessed prig with his nose to the keyboard/grindstone (Foer - at left - began writing to Susan Sontag at age nine) but with little in the way of original passion or vision. Indeed, a key problem with the clef of this play is that both "David" and "Benjamin" are self-aware but slightly dull; their late-night confessions are so dude-alicious (girls, beer, bands, and of course whether or not they're gay), that we simply have to take their being artists on faith. And as for being friends - why, exactly, do these likable young narcissists like each other? Shared ambition? Sense of humor? We never get a clue.

Although "David's" jealousy needs no explanation once a $2 million advance sends "Benjamin" into the lit-celeb stratosphere. Admittedly, Moses has a keen ear for (his own) envious psychological strategies - David is concerned that the payday may prove "totally spiritually corrupting" - and expertly punctures the ego of the unseen star who options Ben's novel (Liev Schreiber, who ineptly directed the movie of Illuminated, is the one with a real bone to pick with Moses). The playwright also conjures a smart, distracting series of formal tricks - flashbacks soon rub shoulders with flash-forwards, with the characters even commenting on them; it all plays rather like one of those puzzles you solve to stave off Alzheimer's.

But said tactics also stave off the need for development. Moses has an "out," of course, in that the yin/yang of this pairing is neediness vs. self-sufficiency (with the thematic sidebar of "needy" drama vs. "self-sufficient" fiction). Hence Ben's inscrutability, and David's pathetic attempts to penetrate it. Indeed, the final coup occurs when the "real" Benjamin asks the "real" David, "How could you write about me?" only to receive the reply "How could you not write about me?" There's something neat in this conceptual bow - but it's not really enough to tie up a play; if jealousy is eating away at something we have to understand what that something is. And at any rate, since when did complacent self-sufficiency ever put up with needy neurosis for long?

Still, the skilled cast and crew up at Merrimack manage, for the most part, to stave off these doubts, and keep us focused on Moses's jokes and structure. Bhavesh Patel makes of Benjamin an annoyingly confident, low-key buddy who's also a bit of a bully, while Jed Orlemann channels a sweet, slightly-damaged charm as David. And director Kyle Fabel never lets them stop for breath as they dash back and forth in time, as well as across Bill Clarke's witty set, which has apparently taken a tip from Liev Schreiber (whose apartment, according to Moses, is a shrine to his own image) in its wall-to-wall photo tribute to Ben and David. If only Moses's dramatic snapshots really got behind all those smiles.

There at The Creation

You don't find much more ambition in composers than in Franz Joseph Haydn, who tackled nothing less than the beginning of everything in his oratorio The Creation. But you also rarely find more humility; The Creation resounds not with the drama of its own creation, but instead echoes with a note unheard in music of late - the sound of gratitude. As the great composer, like a tiny god himself, re-conjures the world musically, he does so with a palpable sense of affectionate embrace (even "hosts of insects" and the lowly worm are greeted with warm bemusement). And since he only ponders the world before the Fall (we leave Adam and Eve before they touch that apple), the piece is suffused with a poignant optimism. The hosannas and thanks-be-to-Gods may get a little relentless, but they're still radiant, and heartfelt.

A performance of The Creation should, therefore, give off its own glow, while not taking itself too seriously - a poise that Boston Baroque managed admirably last weekend. Conductor Martin Pearlman (at left) clearly understood both the uplift and the implied regret of the piece, and he kept things moving at a brisk clip (as the text is pure exposition, it can get a little static). Alas, said clip was sometimes slightly unsteady - Pearlman keeps a lilting, eccentric beat, and as a result (I think), entrances and exits can be a bit ragged; many of the same musicians play more cleanly over at Handel and Haydn. The upside of said lilt, however, is a rhythmic freedom that brought real verve to Haydn's tone painting: the whales swayed before with us with lugubrious grace, and the "ponderous beasts" of the earth were greeted with a hilariously flatulent blast from a 9-foot contrabassoon. (You could almost hear Haydn chuckle at that one.)

The soloists were likewise in solid form. Tenor Brian Stucki had just the right timbre (even if he thinned out alarmingly at the top of his range), and struck an appropriately fond, cantorian tone. He was perhaps outshone, however, by soprano Sari Gruber and bass-baritone Kevin Deas. Gruber's tone was warm yet pure, while Deas almost reveled in the richness of his low notes - but both were at their best together, as Adam and Eve in the oratorio's final section. Rarely do singers have chemistry the same way actors do, but Gruber and Deas had exactly that in the teasing exchanges between the world's first couple, which exude a sense of surprisingly wise romance (despite their all-too-traditional sex roles). Of course we know what's going to happen, even if they don't - Haydn and his librettist, Gottfried van Swieten, offer only the faintest of foreshadowings (A&E both love the "taste of rich and ripened fruit"). But that knowledge only made this evocation of what might have been all the sweeter.