The Central Square Theater opens soon

At left is the entrance of the brand new Central Square Theater, home of The Nora Theatre Company and Underground Railway Theater, located at 450 Massachusetts Ave, in the heart of, yes, Central Square. Underground Railway Theater will inaugurate the space on July 24 with QED: An Evening with Richard Feynman, by Peter Parnell, featuring Keith Jochim as the eccentric physicist. In August, the theatre will host the Norton Award-winning Coming Up for Air – an AutoJAZZography, conceived and performed by Stan Strickland, and What the Hell are You Doing in the Waiting Room for Heaven?, a one-woman show from Deborah Henson-Conant, Boston's popular "hip harpist." In September, the Nora will make its first bow in the space with Dario Fo's all-too-timely We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!. For more information, check out the theater's website, here.

Today's poem

Let America be America Again

by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")



Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.



Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.



O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

Anger management

Orfeo's video preview for Look Back in Anger.

All art operates within its social context - on which it depends to a lesser or greater degree. El Greco, for instance, would be ravishing but baffling without our knowledge of Catholic myth, which has remained (fairly) fixed until the present day.

But what happens when the context of a work of art vanishes? One hopes the reputations of the great would somehow soldier on, if in some new form - clearly the whirligig of time is the crucible in which artistic gold is centrifuged from dross; the true masterpiece will eventually find a new context (indeed, at the very top of the artistic food chain - say with Shakespeare - the work generates its own future contexts). But the rest - even those hailed as "revolutionary" in their day, like The Weavers, seen earlier this year - inevitably slip unheeded into the dustbin of history.

And alas, it's hard to pretend the dustbin won't be the final destination for John Osborne's fifty-something Look Back in Anger, now at the Piano Factory through July 6, and for several reasons. The first is that Osborne didn't deal with his context - the suffocating landscape of postwar Britain - directly; he assumed it instead, and so didn't have to build a brand new dramatic model from scratch (as Beckett had a year or two earlier with Godot). Sans any new structure, Osborne treated his supposedly revolutionary subject by subverting the tropes of its stylistic antithesis, the soapy, Terence-Rattigan-like "well-made-play." In short, Osborne attempts to evoke lower-class social drama via middle-class domestic drama. It doesn't sound like a strategy that's going to withstand the test of time, does it - although to be fair, it did suggest the technique Pinter and Albee later deployed far more effectively (by subverting the well-made play not with politics but absurdity).

The second problem with Anger is that not only has its original context vanished, but a new context has arrived which maps well to its materials, but doesn't flatter either author or play. In the year of its premiere, the cruel beratings of his wife by the play's hero, Jimmy Porter, read as deflected fury at the upper classes; today they read as spousal abuse. Is Jimmy raging at the injustice of his society, or is he merely a misogynist and narcissist operating under the cover of raging at society? The play's effect depends on this question, but the productions I've seen, while trying mightily to convince me of the first interpretation, inevitably left me with the second. And the river of piss and vinegar running through Osborne's oeuvre - along with lingering questions about the author's sexuality (the obvious source for "Cliff" always maintained that he and Osborne were lovers, not friends) - does little to wash away that intuition.

It should be said, however, that the current version, an Equity Code production from the new Orfeo Group, does about as good a job with the play as the others I've seen (although it's not nearly in the same league as Orfeo's previous effort, last summer's Marisol). Director Gabriel Kuttner has trimmed the text here and there (he should have trimmed more - Peter Hall's drastically reduced version was reportedly more successful than the original), and has shaped the material intelligently, if not always incisively (it's his first directorial effort, and frankly, Look Back in Anger should be no director's maiden voyage). More problematic is that Kuttner has drawn thoughtful work from his actors, but hasn't dug deep enough to overcome the fundamental miscasting of his leads.

Said leads - Daniel Berger-Jones and Liz Hayes - are two of Boston's best young actors, and of course good actors are always looking to stretch beyond their inevitable "types;" that's only natural, and just what you'd expect from an Equity Code production, which is designed by and for its performers. Still, when both leads are playing against type, and what's more, against each other's type, let's just say crossed signals and missed climaxes tend to be the order of the day, however talented each actor may be. To grossly overgeneralize, the essential conflict in Anger is between the smart but sexily crude Jimmy and his gently refined, yet subconsciously smug, wife, Alison. He's earth; she's air. Yet Liz Hayes is obviously the earthier, more believably working-class of the two, with naturally practical smarts that she tries desperately to suppress in a quiet, passive-aggressive mode. Meanwhile Daniel Berger-Jones is indeed a hunk, but is also a physical thoroughbred; tall and in gym-trim, with a refined physical grace, he's the natural aristocrat of the two. Still, despite the fact that they really should have traded roles, they both have their moments; Berger-Jones is at his best when he drops his occasional histrionics in the third act and simply toys with Helena, his wife's "girlfriend" who replaces her in his bed. And Hayes brings a memorable intensity to her final scene, when she re-lives the horror (the loss of a child) that her husband had wished on her earlier (nice guy, huh).


Risher Reddick, Daniel Berger-Jones and Georgia Lyman get past their Anger.

The supporting players manage better, perhaps because, unlike their costars, they're nestled comfortably in their respective types. Georgia Lyman is the standout, I'd say, playing yet another "other woman" - she looks smashing in her dark hair and prim blouse, and her accent is spot-on; my only feeling is that her hatred of Jimmy (which morphs "unexpectedly" into lust!) should be played with more energetic attack beneath her upper-crust poise. As flatmate Cliff (the role that gave Alan Bates his start), Risher Reddick is likewise mostly on-target with a tricky mix of conflicting emotion, and his fisticuffs with Jimmy prove robust and believable. Still, his accent seems to hop the pond from Wales to Tara with surprising rapidity, and he sometimes seems to lose focus along with his character. He, like Berger-Jones and Hayes, flourished far more in Marisol - which, if anything, is a weaker play than Anger. One wonders if there's something about these actors that makes them seek out challenging roles in weak plays - if so, I'd say they're better off with the wacky fireworks of Rivera than the bitter Method of Osborne.

Mephistopheles stonewalls

John Yoo, one of the key architects of the Bush/Cheney torture policy, at House Judiciary Committee hearings yesterday. I think there's no comment necessary.

Why does New York get all the cool stuff?

Olafur Eliasson’s “New York City Waterfalls.” (Photo: Vincent Laforet)

A $15.5 million piece of public art - Olafur Eliasson's "New York City Waterfalls" has just opened, and it's obviously a stunner. Powerful yet whimsical, inspirational yet gloriously pointless, the four-site installation is just about everything (temporary) public art should be - plus no fish were harmed!

Which leads one to view Boston's pathetic new "Greenway" with more dyspepsia than ever. How did that disaster happen? How come Chicago can get "Cloud Gate" (left) and New York can get "Waterfalls," and yet after a zillion-dollar - and literally killer - public boondoggle like the Big Dig, we get precisely nothing? I mean neither of these two pieces is actually all that interesting intellectually or artistically - they're just big and graspable and charming. Can't the Athens of America at least manage that? Doesn't somebody have Anish Kapoor's or Olafur Eliasson’s phone number?

The moon is down

Minneapolis's Theatre de la Jeune Lune is officially out of business. Those of us who suffered through their last productions at the A.R.T. are hardly surprised, since without an academic clique like the one at Harvard, there's just not a large enough audience to support their kind of boringly dated "avant" work. It turns out that for years the company had been quietly accumulating a seven-figure debt; last year they produced no new work, but filled out their season (and the ART's) with repeats of earlier productions. There were also the usual purges and internal feuds usually found in these kinds of troupes. The bad news is that Dominique Serrand and Steven Epp are still exploring "ways to reinvent an agile, nomadic, entrepreneurial theatre with a new name that will create essential and innovative art for today’s changing audience.” Yikes.

You read it here first, cont'd.

The Globe finally notices the upheaval in the local gallery scene. Startlingly, the article was on the front page. Of course Hub Review wrote about this months ago - still, the piece is worth reading for an interesting new point regarding the international "art fairs" (like Art Basel Miami Beach) that have sprung up around the country. The fairs offer galleries a chance to snag international collectors, but at a high price - and those entry costs put pressures on the bottom line here at home. Sound familiar? Our cultural life is slowly being shackled to the power of an international elite - and don't imagine that elite is in any way American, or really of any genuine country or culture; it is simply the international manifestation of capital flows, and we'll wind up with the kind of "hot," superficial art that capital can understand and enjoy. Another surprise in the article (by Cate McQuaid, at whose opinions I usually snort, but who has done some good reporting here) is the role of the Internet in gallery sales - several local galleries note that 20-30% of their sales come over the Web. This strikes me as bizarre - one wonders if the purchasers have even seen the work "live," as it were. I worry more and more about the effect of the Internet on high culture - will it do to us what it's already done to pop, that is, produce a culture of globalized mediocrity? I think high culture will be harder for the Net to kill than pop culture was, but I'm still worried. More to follow . . .