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Cruella in a Mantilla?: Bernarda Alba at FPCT Needs Some Rethinking

Margaret Condon, Melissa McGinley, Helenmary Ball, Linae Bullock, Ren Pepitone, Kate Bailey Metkus, and Amy Mulvihill

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com April 21, 2015

Only a brave community theater would take on The House of Bernarda Alba, Federico García Lorca’s last play. Written by a closeted gay playwright at the very outset of the Francisco Franco’s conservative fascist rule and savagely attacking that era’s repression of female freedom, both social and sexual (and by implication other freedoms), it inevitably betrays an air of extreme avant-gardeism. Ibsen and Strindberg and Wedekind may have gone into the same territory, but as of 1936 not too many others. And Lorca drives home his message as if no one had ever conveyed it before – which was more or less true in his time and place.

It’s different now. Today, in much of the world, including this corner of it, be the realities what they may, in the realm of theory and discussion the cause of women’s freedom is not nearly as controversial as it was, and plays about it are likely to be neither as shocking nor as trailblazing. The Vagina Monologues is the new normal. And that means that Bernarda Alba must be presented, to some degree, as a period piece. If you present it without that distance, without indicating that you know that what once needed to be shouted can now be said in a more moderate voice, the performance will grate on the ear and the mind. And that is the central problem with the revival of Lorca’s play at Fells Point Corner Theatre, a company whose productions ordinarily make me forget the community theater label. The necessary distance seems to require professional resources.

The problem begins with the depiction of Bernarda herself. Bernarda (Helenmary Ball, directed by Richard Barber), for all the wrong she perpetrates, should not be portrayed as a villain. In trying to immure her five daughters within a house of mourning for eight years, she is trying to preserve values of respectability and chastity in which she truly believes. Ball and Barber seem bent upon making her out to be a model of malignity. She seems to hate her daughters, and her hatred is presented as her motivation. Her assertions to her maid, La Poncia (Margaret Condon), that she has the whole situation under control sound a lot like the clichéd bwa-ha-ha of the archetypal melodramatic villain who mistakenly thinks the heroine is securely tied to the railroad tracks, instead of the utterances of a soul who, unawares, is completely out of her depth. She would be far more chilling and far more believable played at a softer pitch.

The difficulties go on with La Poncia, probably the second-most important character in the play. And here the problems start with Lorca’s script, which cannot quite work out La Poncia’s attitude toward Bernarda. The senior servitor in the house, she starts out the play claiming to hate her employer, but she spends so much time trying to warn Bernarda of her folly, and so much time acting as a sort of Greek chorus that these professions of hatred ring hollow – or at least would in a part intended to be coherently written. Condon (perhaps prompted by director Barber) tries to bury the contradictions in a devil-may-care, often jocular, above-the-fray delivery that take her out of the atmosphere of the play altogether, and doesn’t work at all when Bernarda is portrayed as such an unregenerate villain. If La Poncia doesn’t really hate this Bernarda, she ought to. She ought to be far more involved in opposing the victimization of the five young women, and far more opposed to Bernarda than she seems.

Then too I cannot see what benefit the change of setting to what the program describes as an 18^th century Caribbean island brings. It does establish some excuse for one or two bits of obeah voodoo ritual, but the significance of that escapes me. Perhaps dramaturg and adapter Kate Bishop was thinking of other stories of female captivity and oppression from that time and/or place, a la Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, but, if that is the notion, very little in the text, the costuming, or the scenery supports it. The exquisite costumes (by Helenmary Ball wearing a different hat, or should I say mantilla) are a treat for the eye, filled with black lace or, near the end, white lace) and the spare but evocative setting (by Trudi D. Ludwig), seem far more Spanish than Caribbean. Bishop’s production notes cite, apparently as precedent, recent performances where the setting has been changed, but those changes seem less fanciful and more legitimate. She mentions one rendering which transposes the setting to modern Iran, for instance (London 2012), and the oppression of women in many contemporary Islamic societies does come across as a parallel to the treatment of women in ultramontane Fascist Spain. But I can see little potentially comparable in this setting, and nothing actually made visible.

The part of the play that seems more successfully rendered is the story of the five daughters, three of whom are involved in a love quadrangle with a man never seen onstage but powerfully felt, Pepe el Romano. Those three, Adela, the youngest and prettiest (Linaé Bullock), whom Pepe actually is sleeping with, Angustias (Melissa McGinley), the oldest and plainest, whom Pepe is courting for her money, and Martirio (Ren Pepitone), whose passion for her sister Adela Pepe is threatening, are all well-portrayed. And their intertwined stories plausibly justify the passion and the histrionics (in the literal, not the derogatory sense of the word) they bring forth. In particular Adela’s outburst of carnal high spirits and passion toward the end is powerful, and its doomed conclusion suitably tragic.

In short, this is a flawed production of a flawed masterpiece. And perhaps, in fairness, the flaws were unfairly heightened by opening-night jitters when I saw it, with lots of blown lines that had to be repeated, and a failure of the air conditioning which left the audience coping with the same kind of sultry heat the characters complain of. I would expect the execution of these details to improve as the run goes on, and perhaps the equilibrium of the piece will assert itself against the directorial errors as well.

In the end, Lorca’s rebellion against an ethos which says no to so much human feeling and sexual passion, which gives such veto power to unthinking conventionality and religious diktat, states a timeless theme. That does not mean that every aspect of Lorca’s articulation of that rebelliousness is equally timeless He may have had one foot in Brechtian agitprop, according to the conventions of which Bernarda could be a two-dimensional villain, Cruella de Vil in a mantilla. That dated kind of oversimplification is the most important thing a modern production must rescue Lorca and the play from. Bernarda too is a victim, whether Lorca fully understood it or not himself, and a production which consistently makes Bernarda’s own victimhood clear, not just in the fadeout at the end of the play but throughout, would be stronger than this one. That said, there is a lot to like in this production, particularly with the younger portion of the dramatis personae and the cast. It is still worth taking the time to see.

Photo credit: Nat Raum

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo

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David: An (Un)Original Sinner

Delivered in slightly different form as part of the Easter Vigil Service 2015 at St. Vincent de Paul Church, Baltimore

(Accompanying readings from 1 Samuel 18 and 27, 2 Samuel 5, 11 and 12)

David is like us, and we are like David. That’s my thesis.

Last year at this service, I talked about Genesis Chapters 2 and 3, the story of Adam and Eve, and about the two Trees in the story, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and what they tell us about mortality and morality. Father Lawrence pointed out with maybe a touch of asperity that I did not mention Original Sin in my discourse. He was right; I didn’t.

Tomayto, Tomahto

And I didn’t for two reasons: nowhere is Original Sin mentioned in Genesis 2 and 3, and it is only through the work of Catholic theologians much later on that we have the concept of Original Sin, let alone a perception that it is at work in those chapters. Personally, I don’t think it fits there. The story doesn’t tell us enough about the inner lives of Adam and Eve to give us any basis for saying they were being sinful as we would use the word. In fact, it strongly suggests the contrary. Remember, they didn’t know good from evil when they ate the apple. It was the apple that gave them that knowledge. I cannot conceive of ignorant sin. And in any case if Original Sin is real and operates in human history and histories, then it can hardly have started with two individuals named Adam and Eve, who are legend, not history. Well, that’s a dispute for another day, in any case.

You say tomayto and I say tomahto. You say Original Sin, I say human cussedness. In terms of results, at least, if not of causes, we’re talking about the same thing. We humans tend to screw up a lot.

I want to talk tonight about another Bible set of stories that I think do illustrate Original Sin far better: the stories about King David. Now there’s a sinner for you, as we have heard. He commits sins both large and small; accounts of two of them been read to you tonight. On the smaller side, he puts Uriah in harm’s way so he can add Uriah’s wife Bathsheba to his harem. And on the larger side, he seems to be involved in constant wars against the Philistines and others, atrocities from which are recounted in the segment we just heard.

Out, Damned Philistines

Let me clear up a preliminary question: Is the war against the Philistines sinful? I vote yes, and here’s why. The Bible doesn’t exactly tell us who started the fight between the Philistines and the Hebrews. By the time we get to the accounts of David, all we know is they’re at war with each other. But it seems clear at a minimum that in Hebrew myth, the Philistines were around Canaan from before the events of the Book of Exodus. And in Exodus God tells the Hebrews they have a right to displace other aboriginal peoples in Canaan. We have to assume the Philistines were implicitly included among those displaceables.

But for me, the notion of a God telling one people they have a right and a mission to displace another people is unacceptable. I refuse to accept the notion of a God who encourages ethnic cleansing. Whether the Bible says it or not, I don’t believe it really happened. The tale of God sanctioning ethnic cleansing is the kind of story guilty people would tell each other to deaden their awareness that they were dispossessing and killing other human beings.

Why the Hell?

And certainly David isn’t engaged in this struggle for any reason that would seem respectable to us. When it works out better for him to go over to the Philistines, that’s just what he does. Then he goes back to the Hebrews to become their king. There is absolutely no moral compass at work here.

And by the way, this is a story of contemporary significance. The modern word Palestinian is just an updating of the word Philistine. So when Israelis and Palestinians fight over the land, it’s the very same struggle as in the 8th Century BC between the Hebrews and the Philistines. And there are still attempts at mass displacement between neighboring peoples that result in continued warfare.

If we can reject the notion that Yahweh or Allah actually gave divine sanction to this endless war, we have to ask: Why the hell are you fighting? And the answer on each side, then as now, would probably be: Because the other guys are fighting against us. Or Just because fighting wars is what humans do. Neither of these is a satisfactory justification, but the fact that there’s no good one is an important clue to the fact that something both sinful and perennially human is at work. I think we are here, much more than in the story of Adam and Eve, in the presence of what official Catholic doctrine calls Original Sin.

Armstrong

In thinking about this subject, I have largely been guided by and acknowledge my debt to the writings of religious scholar and writer Karen Armstrong, and in particular her recent book Fields of Blood.[1] Although she is a former nun, she is not today what most of us would consider a religious believer. But she is a keen student of the perennial problems of human nature that believers are talking about when they use the term Original Sin. It is a problem she believes every religion has confronted.

Her focus in Fields of Blood is not every kind of sinfulness but specifically the human inclination to warfare, which she finds pretty much universal among human civilizations. But I think her observations will also cover what I’ve called the smaller stuff, like the nasty way David did in Uriah to gain Bathsheba. That kind of behavior is also universal.

She thinks explanations begin with evolution and with the demands of civilization.

Three Brains

As to evolution, she has this to say:

Each of us has not one but three brains that coexist uneasily. In the deepest recess of our gray matter we have an “old brain” that we inherited from the reptiles that struggled out of the primal slime 500 million years ago. Intent on their own survival, with absolutely no altruistic pulses, these creatures were solely motivated by mechanisms urging them to feed, fight, flee (when necessary), and reproduce. Those best equipped to compete mercilessly for food, ward off any threat, dominate territory, and seek safety naturally passed along their genes, so these self-centered impulses could only intensify. But sometime after mammals appeared, they evolved what neuroscientists call the limbic system, perhaps about 120 million years ago. Formed over the core brain derived from the reptiles, the limbic system motivated all sorts of new behaviors, including the protection and nurture of young as well as the formation of alliances with other individuals that were invaluable in the struggle to survive. And so, for the first time, sentient beings possessed the capacity to cherish and care for creatures other than themselves….

[We must also consider] the third part of our brain. About twenty thousand years ago, during the Paleolithic Age, human beings evolved a “new brain,” the neocortex, home of the reasoning powers and self-awareness that enable us to stand back from the instinctive, primitive passions. Humans thus became roughly as they are today, subject to the conflicting impulses of their three distinct brains.[2]

For present purposes, then, evolution has given us minds that have a lot of old stuff going on that will fight against the demands of conscience – as well as new physical structures that for the first time make conscience possible.

Civilization and Its Discontents

And then, turning to what civilization demands, we find that since the dawn of agriculture civilization too demands behavior we should consider sinful. Armstrong focuses first on what we know about ancient Jericho and the violence that an agricultural society invites. She writes:

By the beginning of the ninth millennium BCE, the settlement in the oasis of Jericho in the Jordan valley had a population of three thousand people, which would have been impossible before the advent of agriculture. Jericho was a fortified stronghold protected by a massive wall that must have consumed tens of thousands of hours of manpower to construct. In this arid region, Jericho’s ample food stores would have been a magnet for hungry nomads. Intensified agriculture, therefore, created conditions that could endanger everyone in this wealthy colony and transform arable land into fields of blood…. From the first, it seems, large-scale organized violence was linked … with organized theft.[3]

The progression, then, is that agricultural and later other surpluses begat armed theft and armed resistance. In other words, wealth provokes warfare.

But agriculture also brought worse than fights over food.

Agriculture had also introduced another type of aggression: an institutional or structural violence in which a society compels people to live in wretchedness and subjection that they are unable to better their lot. This systemic oppression, …according to the World Council of Churches, [is] present whenever “resources and powers are unequally distributed, concentrated in the hands of the few, who do not use them to achieve the possible self-realization of all members, but use parts of them for self-satisfaction or for purposes of dominance, oppression, and control of other societies or of the underprivileged in the same society.” Agrarian civilization made this systemic violence a reality for the first time in human history.

Paleolithic communities had probably been egalitarian because hunter-gatherers could not support a privileged class that did not share the hardship and danger of the hunt. Because these small communities lived at near-subsistence level and produced no economic surplus, inequity of wealth was impossible. The tribe could survive only if everybody shared what food they had. Government by coercion was not feasible because all able-bodied males had exactly the same weapons and fighting skills. Anthropologists have noted that modern hunter-gatherer societies are classless, that their economy is “a sort of communism,” and that people are honored for skills and qualities, such as generosity, kindness, and even-temperedness, that benefit the community as a whole. But in societies that produce more than they need, it is possible for a small group to exploit this surplus for its own enrichment, gain a monopoly of violence, and dominate the rest of the population.

As we shall see [says Armstrong] … this systemic violence would prevail in all agrarian civilizations.[4]

The 2% Emerges

And it is not merely that agricultural and later industrial societies create the opportunities for systemic violence. They arguably create the necessity for it. Says Armstrong:

In the empires of the Middle East, China, India, and Europe, which were economically dependent on agriculture, a small elite, comprising not more than 2 percent of the population, with the help of a small band of retainers, systematically robbed the masses of the produce they had grown in order to support their aristocratic lifestyle. Yet, social historians argue, without this iniquitous arrangement, human beings would probably never have advanced beyond subsistence level, because it created a nobility with the leisure to develop the civilized arts and sciences that made progress possible. All premodern civilizations adopted this oppressive system; there seemed to be no alternative.[5]

 Nor is the damage that our social development has done to our nature confined to social inequality; it continues with warfare. Says Armstrong:

Established by force and maintained by military aggression, warfare was essential to the agrarian state. When land and the peasants who farmed it were the chief sources of wealth, territorial conquest was the only way such a kingdom could increase its revenues. Warfare was, therefore, indispensable to any premodern economy. The ruling class had to maintain its control of the peasant villages, defend its arable land against aggressors, conquer more land, and ruthlessly suppress any hint of insubordination…. No state can survive without its soldiers. And once states grew and warfare had become a fact of human life, an even greater force – the military might of empire – often seemed the only way to keep the peace.

So necessary to the rise of states and ultimately empires is military force that historians regard militarism as a mark of civilization. Without disciplined, obedient, and law-abiding armies, human society, it is claimed, would probably have remained at a primitive level or have degenerated into ceaselessly warring hordes.[6]

Moreover these tendencies reinforce each other; the ruling class always benefits from the necessity of warfare. In European history, for instance, medieval protection rackets were the germ of the feudal nobility, who leveraged their power to make war into control of land that had previously been communally-owned and of the citizens who had previously owned it. Historian Daniel Richter has spoken of this feudal innovation as “the bizarre European custom according to which individual warriors were entitled to possess land in perpetuity, pass it on to their lineal descendants in the male line, and force others to do the work of making it productive.”[7]

Sympathy for the David

Of course David comes earlier and elsewhere. But in general principle, it’s the same story. Evolutionary history and the dynamics of every human economy and society show how we get to David, the perpetrator of war crimes and consolidator of privilege in Israel’s first royal house.

Which is not a total condemnation of the man. He lives in a human body with a brain that has been in development for half a billion years and it really, really wants what it wants even if what it wants is a woman married to another man. He is a citizen of a human society where political economy seems to force the development of armies and unjust warfare, and to push members of the ruling class to lead those armies and consolidate riches (including desirable females like Bathsheba) at the top. He is up against the real original sin, real structures in his brain and in society that push him in bad directions.

And we are no more immune to those bad directions than David was. We can’t opt out of our brain or our societies. If we try to escape, like Henry David Thoreau to Walden Pond, or to some kind of commune in the wild, we can be assured we shall take these givens of human nature and society with us. No one stays divorced from the greater society for very long, and no one can shed human nature. If you call the tendencies that society and our brains give us to do the wrong thing Original Sin, then we are all original sinners. Seems that there’s nothing as unoriginal as Original Sin.

There’s more to David’s story, though. Thanks to the newer parts of his brain, he can recognize at least partly the nature of his misdeeds. When Nathan poses the analogy to David that shows he’s just as bad as the man in the story Nathan tells him, David’s neocortex enables him to see the analogy plainly. His conscience then works. He accepts God’s punishment as just, and moves on. Neither he nor Nathan spot the problem with the war-mongering and atrocities. But of course it’s only our gradual development as a race since the 8th Century BC that has really equipped us with the vocabulary to grasp what’s wrong with war.

An Ecumenical Struggle

Armstrong shows we have been working on it as a race, however. It is striking that in every religious tradition, including our own, there are expressions of discomfort with that status quo.

The passage in the Aryan scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita, that those of us from outside that tradition are most likely to know,[8] the conversation between Krishna and Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, shows Arjuna, a warrior, questioning why he should be drawing his bowstring when the opposing army is full of relatives and friends. Krishna gives him an answer meant to silence the question, effectively that Arjuna is a warrior, and it’s not up to him to question his duty. But Arjuna comes from a world where there have already been yogas and Jains who have questioned the entire ethos of warrior-hood. And effectively the epic sidesteps the question; it does not answer it. But the Bhagavad-Gita clearly shows that the conflicting impulses are there.[9]

In Chinese culture, Kong-fu-tse, whom we know as Confucius, espoused what Armstrong calls an “ideal of equality based on a cultivated perception on our shared humanity,” which “was a radical challenge to the systemic violence of agrarian China.” One can almost hear Confucius pleading for the ascendancy of the modern brain over the lizard brain when he says, in Armstrong’s paraphrase, that a gentleman “could … replace the current greed, violence, and vulgarity and restore dignity and grace to human intercourse, transforming the whole of China.” This “practice” was “difficult, because it required the [gentleman] to dethrone himself from the center of his world”[10] – a concept the lizard brain would never grasp. In various ways, Confucius and his followers tried to moderate the brutality of Chinese warfare. But, as Armstrong notes, neither Confucius nor his followers totally disavowed warfare.

When we get to the Hebrew scriptures, there is nearly open warfare between hawks and doves. There are parts of those scripture that recognize the necessity of treating others humanely, and parts that vehemently reject it. I do not have the time tonight to go into this in detail. But we can compare, as Armstrong does, the hospitality Abraham extends towards foreigners with the kind of intolerance that crops up around the time of Josiah, when the blatant forgery the Book of Deuteronomy is introduced, putting in Moses’ mouth commands for bloodshed to protect a new monotheism. This demand for bloodshed against unbelievers was undergirded by the freshly-minted but backdated (by 600 years or so) First Commandment inserted into the Exodus story, designed to put an end to the kind of polytheism Jews had often practiced up to that point.9

And we could go right on with the contrast between the Sermon on the Mount on the one hand and the Crusades and the Inquisition on the other, between the peaceful and tolerant counsels and the violent and intolerant ones in the Muslim scriptures. All of our religious traditions in one way or another reflect this struggle.

If There’s Hope for David, There’s Hope for Us

As humans we are trapped with minds and societies that demand we act in ways that with at least part of our minds we know are wrong. None of us can surmount those demands entirely; we are all implicated. Sometimes, like David when it came to committing war atrocities, we cannot even see that what we’re doing is wrong. Sometimes like David in the official account, when it came to doing in Uriah to obtain Bathsheba’s hand, we do the wrong thing but then we get it and repent. Often, like David in what probably was the real life history with Uriah and Bathsheba (to the extent David was a historical figure), we know we’re doing the wrong thing even as we’re doing it, but we just can’t help it.

David is like us. If so, then there’s hope that we are like David in being the objects of God’s forgiveness, and the implements of God’s plans notwithstanding. It is worthy of note that Solomon, David’s son, the builder of the Temple, is also Bathsheba’s son by David. God uses adultery and murder to produce a king who manifests God’s glory. David wasn’t going to sin – wasn’t capable of sinning – so much that God withdrew from that relationship with David or his people. So there’s hope for us.

And there’s homework as well. Maybe we believe in this doctrine of Original Sin, maybe the label doesn’t work for us. But we know that, what with our evolutionary history and our place in a militarized society which concentrates wealth and power at the top, it’s guaranteed we won’t always grasp when we’re doing wrong, and that even when we understand what we’re doing wrong, we may not be able to refrain from doing it. It’s our nature not to do the right thing all the time. The challenge, I think, is to be on the lookout for the Nathans in our midst, the ones who tell us when we’re on the wrong track. We have to repent; we have to keep trying to do better. And then, like David, mercifully, we can let God sort it out.

________________

[1] Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2015).

[2] Id. at 7.

[3] Id. at 13.

[4] Id. at 13-14.

[5] Id. at 14.

[6] Id. at 14-15.

[7] Daniel K. Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts at Location 476 in Kindle edition (2012). I wrote more about Richter’s ideas in this Big Picture column.

[8] If only because T.S. Eliot referenced it in The Dry Salvages and all we English majors had to learn about it.

[9] Discussed in Armstrong, op.cit., at 71-75.

[10] Id., at 88-90.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Admirable Disloyalty

Published in the Daily Record April 14, 2015

British novelist E.M. Forster famously wrote: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”[1] I was reminded of that line watching Amy Herzog’s 2010 play After the Revolution, now in revival at Center Stage in Baltimore where I live. In it, Herzog explores the question whether disloyalty to one’s homeland and its laws is always a bad thing. Not to give too much away, she doesn’t think so; in the play’s final speech, the widow of the family patriarch who passed some American intelligence secrets to the Soviets during World War II roundly rejects the characterization of that behavior as “dishonorable.”

This tale especially resonated for me because I have roots in the world of the play (among other places). Though set in 1999, the story is haunted by the memory of the McCarthy era, that moment in the early 1950s when suspected Communists were summarily dismissed from government service, blacklisted from Hollywood, and subpoenaed to testify before hostile congressional committees. My own (definitely non-Communist) father was dismissed from the State Department without recourse at almost exactly the moment Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for passing nuclear secrets to the Russians, and there were Communists on my family tree who also fit precisely the profile of the clan playwright Herzog presents (secular Jewish, intellectual, New York-based).

The patriarch’s son reminds us how things were at the time his father passed the secrets.

When he first got involved in the spying, we’re barely out of the Depression, that meant thirty percent unemployment, it meant you don’t walk past a garbage can without someone elbow deep in it. This is the landscape of my father’s childhood and young adulthood. Now who are the people speaking up on behalf of the destitute? The American Communist Party. Who is talking about racial equality, twenty-five years before the Civil Rights Movement? Same answer.[2] Who is calling attention to the fact that Russians are dying by the millions fighting fascism so that American hands can stay clean? Same answer… So who is my dad’s allegiance to?… [I]t’s to his party, it’s to the honest working-class Russians who are dying so that he can be free.

Incidentally, it should be emphasized that what that patriarch did was not treason; the Constitution defines that offense as consisting of levying war on the nation or being of aid and comfort to its “enemies,” and the Soviets were our allies, not our enemies. The patriarch was merely violating whatever laws and regulations required secrecy, and being disloyal to his country – in the service of his greater loyalties to the nation’s then-ally.

A little more than a year ago, my father’s Cousin Robbie died. He was one of those former Communists from the same generation as Herzog’s fictional patriarch. Robbie was just a sweet, honorable guy. His daughter, in announcing Robbie’s death, called him “noble,” and I believe the label was apt, not only for the man in his venerable old age but just as much during his years with the Party. Being an artist and art dealer, Robbie had had no secrets to betray, but I think it likely he would have done so, had he been in possession of any. And it would have been just as noble.

In saying that, I do not suggest it is ever a facile choice to make, deciding between one’s ideals and one’s nation. Even when a nation has behaved very badly, as this country has so often done, that nation may still possess such great value as the guarantor of things we cherish that we may find it is worthy of our loyalty notwithstanding. But the causes that the old American Bolsheviks stood for, identified by the son in Herzog’s play (succor for the destitute, redress to racial inequality, the struggle against fascism), might legitimately weigh heavier in the balance of a fair-minded person.

And laws protecting official secrets do not impress me. You do not change what weighs heavier merely by passing laws criminalizing acts that support paramount causes. Leges sine moribus vanae,[3] wrote the poet Horace, which is generally translated “Laws without morals are useless.” But perhaps Horace also meant “Laws contrary to morals should be useless.” In other words, laws should not necessarily be followed if breaking them supports the greater good. Naturally, the risk of moral error is extreme when one disregards the laws in service of the greater good. One is as apt to find oneself a John Wilkes Booth as a Martin Luther King, once one starts down that road. But there are Martin Luther Kings out there, vindicated by history.

And I would argue that American Communists like the Rosenbergs and others who handed over American nuclear secrets to the Russians have, surprisingly, been vindicated by history. After Russia got the bomb, and ever since to this very day, the “balance of terror” (impossible until Russia had the bomb) has kept the entire world from using it in anger. That is a powerful argument that helping Russia acquire the bomb was the correct choice. A fearful one, but apparently correct, so far at least.

Likewise, I would argue that the Rosenbergs’ successor, Edward Snowden, who has done so much to expose the ways our government has undermined personal privacy and covered up so many misdeeds, has contributed immeasurably to public understanding and discourse, even as he thoroughly disregarded and violated our laws. In both cases, the release of government information was just as salutary as it was illegal and disloyal.

In saying these things, I am not idealizing either the Communists or the modern-day information anarchists. U.S. Communists slavishly followed the Party line even when it called for support of some of Stalin’s most inhumane and murderous practices. And a per se approach that government is entitled to no secrets whatever could and perhaps someday will lead to disaster. But there nonetheless is and remains such a thing as admirable and creative disloyalty.

The trick always has been and always will be to distinguish which loyalties should trump loyalty to one’s nation, and which should not. And that will never be an easy trick to pull off.

________________

[1] From What I Believe (1938).

[2] See, e.g., John Hope Franklin and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (9^th ed. 2011), at 437-39 (Communists stepped in to handle the Scottsboro Boys’ appeal when the NAACP hung back). [My comment, not Herzog’s.]

[3] The full phrase, which I understand comes from the Odes, is Quid leges sine moribus vanae proficiunt?, which I guess could be fairly translated “What use are useless laws without morals?” So technically speaking I’m modifying the meaning a little, inserting a verb where Horace did not put one.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Even With Campus Rape Charges, We Still Need A Due Process Culture

To be published in the Daily Record April 1, 2015

Student discipline procedure at our nation’s colleges and universities is a disgrace that the recent controversy over how to handle rape allegations will unfortunately probably deepen.

Why Fairness Matters

When a college charges a student with misbehavior, fairness matters. Even though there is a dearth of law that truly compels the college to be fair,[1] the student and the student’s family are usually making enormous sacrifices for the respondent’s education, and if the student is expelled or suspended, the family’s sacrifice may well be nullified. Worse, the damage to the student’s reputation will likely last a lifetime. A disciplinary expulsion can be as stigmatizing as a criminal conviction. Every professional license application questionnaire, every job application, will reopen the wound. The college owes the respondent student the right result, not just one that desultorily checks off procedural boxes.

Right results are not achievable without high-quality due process. But our colleges and universities are generally satisfied with a barely adequate process that protects a number of other interests far better than it protects those belonging to the student respondent, which should be paramount.

Killing All the Lawyers

The first thing the colleges typically do, they kill all the lawyers. The rules of disciplinary hearings generally bar lawyers from appearing on behalf of anyone, complainant or respondent.[2] Lawyers, however, enforce the procedural norms, they understand the rules of evidence, and they are trained in presenting facts. Notwithstanding, at most institutions, lawyers are allowed in, if at all, merely to counsel respondents about possible waivers of Fifth Amendment rights, and are usually sternly told not to participate in any other way – unless they are there to advise the finders of fact, which when it happens is hardly fair to the participants. If anyone, including the tribunal, brings a lawyer, everyone ought to have that right.

Even without a lawyer, student respondents typically are denied the right to cross-examine. How you can possibly have a fair hearing in cases where the witnesses contradict each other without anyone cross-examining is simply beyond me. Yes, being cross-examined is no fun; so are many of the other burdens of a civilized life. And college-age complainants, like respondents, are supposed to be learning how to bear such burdens.

Various explanations have been given for not allowing lawyer advocates, but it usually comes down to the fact that colleges do not want the expense of hiring administrative prosecutors to counter private defense counsel. Mere cheapness is no good reason, though, to deprive a student of a competent representation when his/her family’s fortunes and his/her own career may hang in the balance.

Unqualified or Unserious

A secondary reason is the fear that slick defense counsel will confuse the amateur adjudicators, students or faculty. And it is undoubtedly true, as I have found repeatedly in advising student respondents, that students and faculty make truly awful adjudicators without any help from lawyers. Students simply lack the maturity, many of them being too young to serve as jurors in real court systems, let alone as judges. And faculty are, as I have found, all too willing to defer to what the college authorities think or want, and (oddly much more than the student adjudicators) inclined not to take their tasks seriously as they should. But even when there is sufficient seriousness and maturity, the analytical skills are usually lacking; it really takes lawyers to act as judges, both in the criminal system and in administrative systems like college tribunals.

This is important to do anyway, because in the end the big questions in these hearings involve applying rules concerning the assessment of burdens of proof, weighing evidence, measuring what is found against standards of proof, and exercising discretion to assess the correct discipline, where discipline turns out to be called for. Lawyers are systematically trained how to do this, and no one else in our society is.

I would add that in most situations, the only person whose interests are directly involved is the student respondent, and in a situation like that, there should be little debate that the respondent should be protected by a clear and convincing evidence standard of proof. The typical accusation, where a student is accused of cheating, may rest on circumstantial evidence that could be read either way. The risk of error should fall on the institution and on society. Preponderance of the evidence can destroy a student’s life on a hair’s weight of difference. That’s not just good enough.

The Department of Education Guidelines: No Meaningful Impartiality

These days there is also a hue and cry led by the U.S. Department of Education to perpetuate some of these worst practices in the administrative prosecution of rape charges. You will get no argument from me that suspicion of rape and other forms of assault is different from, say, suspicion of plagiarism. The complainant certainly deserves special solicitude and protection. But suspicion is just that until it has been confirmed through some credible and fair form of process. And in the meantime the respondent should not be stigmatized by being treated as if he were guilty, even in service of protecting the complainant. Almost every protection that DOE recommends is based on the assumption that the respondent is guilty, for instance removing the respondent, and never the complainant, from classes the two may be in together, and moving the respondent and never the complainant, from shared dorms. In other words, obliterating any semblance of a presumption of innocence from the academic and social environment the two jointly inhabit.

It gets worse when it comes to procedure. DOE has all but ordered colleges to use a preponderance of the evidence standard, and not a clear and convincing standard of evidence. Sorry, but, particularly where, as is likely with rape allegations, the only evidence is “he said/she said” and hence is in close to equipoise, a mere preponderance standard cannot be enough fairly to adjudicate what are close to criminal accusations. The consequences for the respondent are just too serious, however serious the alleged misdeed.

Cross-Examination Is Vital

Similarly, in an environment where DOE is well aware that defense lawyers are generally prohibited from playing a meaningful role, DOE still “strongly discourages schools from allowing the parties personally to question or cross-examine each other during the hearing,” because “allowing an alleged perpetrator to question an alleged victim directly may be traumatic or intimidating.” No mention of the possibility that allowing cross-examination of a lying accuser may be the only way an innocent respondent may be able to get to the truth of the matter.

Rape is horrible; it is also a horrible thing to be wrongly found to have done, and an easy charge to make falsely. When an accusation is made, there must be a fair path to exoneration. DOE has shown itself intent on placing roadblocks in that path.

And DOE means business. It advises: “When the [institution] does not come into compliance voluntarily, [the office of Civil Rights] may initiate proceedings to withdraw Federal funding … or refer the case to the U.S. Department of Justice for litigation.”

“Rape Culture” and Due Process Culture

We need to take a breath. And we need to still the accusations that all concerns for due process are just apologetics for a rape culture. We all, including the many bona fide rape victims, still need a due process culture.

_______________

[1] For private institutions, the only guarantee is whatever is set forth in writing, perhaps in college catalogues. So if the college promises nothing, it owes nothing. And usually what it promises is no better than what is described below. For public institutions, students are supposedly protected by the due process clauses of state and federal institutions. But the courts have been so half-hearted about giving substance to these clauses that they too generally guarantee nothing more substantive than what is described below.

[2] This means that college students are generally stripped of counsel rights that elementary and secondary students generally receive. I have never seen an attempt to explain why this is fair, so I cannot paraphrase the explanation. If I were to hazard a guess, I would theorize that the apologists for this system think college students are mature enough to defend themselves. Having seen firsthand the Kafkaesque tribunals college students often find themselves in front of, I can only say that if that is indeed the justification, it is lacking. That’s putting it politely.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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In the Darkest Place

In the Darkest Place, by Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello, sung by Elvis Costello (1998), encountered 1998

Buy it here | Available on Spotify | See it here | Lyrics here | Sheet music here

The call interrupted a happy moment. On a Veterans’ Day evening, I had just come out of an enjoyable dinner meeting of the county bar association. My cellphone rang. I don’t even remember who  was on the other end – maybe Mother, maybe one of her friends. My stepfather had fallen and was in the hospital. This time he was in serious danger.

Dug In, Shut In

No great surprise there. He’d been in awful health for years, especially since a fall he’d had in 1977. He had the classic health threats of his generation, too, alcoholism and tobacco addiction. Still, he had beaten a lot in his 76 years, and even, recently, tolerated an amputated foot (lost to diabetes he didn’t acknowledge at the time but I’d suspected). He had remained grimly optimistic, notwithstanding. “I expect to die an old, old man,” he’d told me. “Never in good health, but old.”

I’d always been skeptical. When the foot had come off, his emphysema had been so bad, he couldn’t draw the air into his lungs necessary for the exertion of getting around on a prosthesis. He lived in a house with stairs to get into and out of, and stairs to get to the bedroom to the living room, so it was a catastrophe for his mobility. And it was a catastrophe in the delicate synergy by which he and my mother managed to stay independent. Her cognitive powers and hearing were fading, and even with his physical strength being none the best, he had still been able to do various things for the two of them. Now he was essentially an invalid, and had had to move downstairs to the study, putting additional strain on my mother, who really wasn’t up to bearing it; her friends had had to become far more involved, bless them. A man whose great love was world travel and who in his youth had been noted for his grace as a dancer was now basically a crippled shut-in.

I had done what the adult kids always do in such situations: begged them to move to a senior living facility where they would have support and company and no stairs, preferably somewhere near me, their only child. I had been stonewalled by both of them. It wasn’t a matter of money; they could have afforded it. I never received a satisfactory explanation, but I suspect the root cause was a realization by both of them that my mother lacked the mental and my stepdad the physical ability to pack and do the logistics of a move. But probably there was also just some codger cussedness at work.

That Vertiginous Feeling

In any case, coming off the call, I promised I’d make my way to Michigan the next day or possibly the day after (my calendar and my memory both fail me on this point).[1] And then I let myself feel it a little: that vertiginous “this is really happening” feeling that comes when you realize that things are going very badly, very badly in a life-changing way.

Whichever morning it was when Mary dropped me off at the airport, I was oppressed by that feeling. By now, as I’ve written elsewhere in these pages, I had had some experience in shooting life’s rapids, but that training wasn’t entirely helpful in maintaining my composure here. What I’d learned from experience was to tell myself things like nobody’s dying as I confronted whatever lesser crisis I encountered. The trouble was, on this occasion, I was pretty sure somebody I did not want to lose was dying.

First Aid

My instinctive mode of first aid for myself in these situations throughout life had been to get myself some kind of treat, to cut life’s bitter taste. I did that here; there were a few minutes before the flight, which I took advantage of to stop by the music store on the concourse and buy myself the CD – in those days one traveled with a tiny portable CD player – of Painted from Memory, the recent if unlikely album collaboration of Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello. (I’d seen the movie Grace of My Heart, a song from which, God Give Me Strength, was the germ of the album, and I’d loved it.) The album proved to be an excellent choice for what I was about to face, though not in the way I’d been expecting. Instead of making an effort to cheer, the songs almost unremittingly take you to a dark place where relationships end.

And that was indeed exactly where I was about to go in my life: where relationships end. Admittedly, this was to be an ending of a different sort from the kind Bacharach and Costello were making music about. Nobody had cheated on anybody, which seemed to be a frequent theme in these songs. My stepdad, Ernie Gohn, had been extraordinarily faithful to me, as best he could be with his addictions and other issues, in the forty-four years we had been family. It had not my choice to lose my much loved birth father’s last name, but I could never be ashamed of bearing my equally loved stepfather’s. When I used the word “Father” as a name in conversation, Ernest Gohn was the person I was referring to. I shall do so now.

I was extraordinarily fortunate that one of the friends who had rallied around my parents so kindly during my parents’ last years together was Kathleen, a nurse. I knew I could not count on Mother to give me a useful accounting of Father’s medical status. But when I got to Ann Arbor, I met not only with Mother but with Kathleen. Briefly, what had happened was that, while trying to shift himself from his bed to his wheelchair, Father had fallen and was unconscious on the floor. As near as anyone could tell, the fall was the result of his unconsciousness, not its cause. Apparently his brain had largely shut down. He had awoken briefly in the hospital to which he had been taken, to observe to my mother: “They do things very well.” (Probably meaning the staff at the hospital; if so, as a veteran of so many medical interventions there, he could speak with authority.) Then he lapsed into unconsciousness again.

Kathleen warned me that Father was being kept alive by machines and artificially fed. I was going to have to help Mother make a decision. And I knew immediately what kind of decision I was going to have to help her make.

Seeing for Myself

Shortly thereafter, I drove Mother to the hospital to see for myself. When they ushered me into Father’s room, I found him lying in bed with ugly tubes covering his face, looking fatigued even through his unconsciousness. Monitors were relaying information about respiration and heartbeat. I believe Mother said something about our needing to pray really hard, and my immediate reaction was that we were well beyond prayer already. I also had a visceral reaction against the tubes covering his face. Although I thought it extremely unlikely that he was sentient enough to mind them at all, I minded them. They struck me as an affront to his dignity; I know it makes no sense, but that’s what I felt.

My recollection is also a bit hazy about whether we met with the doctor that day or the next day or even the day after that, but if I had to bet I’d say it was that day. Whenever it happened, the meeting with the doctor was one of the things that stands out most vividly. He was wearing a brown suit and a bowtie, and was tall enough so that he loomed over Mother and me. He was struggling to describe Father’s situation in layman’s terms. Cirrhosis, kidney failure, diabetes, emphysema, and brain damage were the principal things I grasped. Father was not going to emerge from his coma.

Mother, who could be thick, if pardonably so on this occasion, and who also very literally believed in miracles, seemed not to be taking in what the doctor was obviously telling us. At last she blurted out: “Is there no hope?”

“No hope at all,” the doctor said, with maybe a hint of irritation in his voice. Mother had been making it hard for him to get the message across, and he may have been taking the slightest bit of pleasure in twisting the knife in the wound.

That silenced Mother. I asked what our options were. As I figured, they were to keep Father going in a vegetative state or to pull the plug. And having taken that in, we left, agreeing that we would talk it over and come back on the morrow.

Losses

I remember going back to the house and cleaning up the blood from where Father fell in the study-turned-bedroom. Unfortunately, this was not my first task of this nature connected with the care of Father. I’d been back on another occasion (before he’d been stuck on the ground floor) when something in his gut had ruptured, and on that occasion there had been blood all over the upstairs bathroom. My mother, in her not-quite-there way, had not been able to undertake the cleanup, and it had fallen to me. But now I was thinking this was enough.

Was I thinking about myself? Partly, of course. I didn’t want this repulsive work anymore. But mostly I was thinking of Father. Even if it could have been possible to bring him back, this was no life for a world traveler and great dancer. Whether it was God or oblivion that awaited him, either alternative beat what he could expect here.

The one for whom Father’s death would be an unmitigated disaster would be Mother. Their relationship was a peculiar one in many ways, but no one could doubt her devotion to Father, or his to her. What she would lose when she lost him would be profound and incalculable.

Again, there are holes in my memory, but I’m sure that when I left Mother that night to return to my hotel, I left a woman who was heartbroken but holding that heartbreak at arm’s length for one more night. We agreed, I recall, that we would put off any decisions until the next day.

I left for a hotel rather than staying at the house for two reasons. First, unless I wanted to bunk down with Mother or in the alternative sleep in Father’s bed, there was no bed for me. Second, I had for some years avoided sleeping there when I visited. Mother’s degeneration had left her hostessing skills in tatters. She could not reliably provide sheets and towels, and breakfast preparation would predictably take an hour. Nor was this a matter of me lazily demanding service when I could do it myself. Where all the sheets and towels had gone was a mystery I could never solve, and Mother would not hear of me going into the kitchen to fix breakfast. In pity for my children and Mary – and myself – I had decided everyone’s sanity would be served by my staying at a hotel I liked. And that always had continued to seem like a wise choice.

Nor Did He

I know I played the Bacharach and Costello disc later that night in my hotel room. The mournfulness of the music felt like a relief. I might pray as my mother was praying, but I knew what I had to do the next day, and I knew that God was not going to spare me from doing it.

Nor did He.

The next day, back at the hospital, I found myself in a conference room with Mother and others whom I cannot recall. Even with the doctor’s advice, Mother couldn’t wrap her mind around the dilemma facing us, the dilemma that really wasn’t a dilemma, since there was no hope of reviving him.

I can’t think of many things more wretched than to tell someone that yes, they really do have to pull the plug on the person they love best. And tell them and tell them, because they are mentally challenged, in denial, possessed of religious beliefs that question worldly science and logic in such matters, and desperately frightened. But sometimes you have to keep at it, even so. Was I persisting because I needed my own relief from this dilemma-that-wasn’t? Oh, yes, I know I was. But I trust Mother’s welfare was uppermost in my mind. And Father’s too. He needed to get on with the business of dying; I knew he did, though he could neither feel nor know that need. It was time for his poor tired body to shut down.

I cannot tell you the words any of us used. But Mother eventually relented. I think she asked for one more night, but the fight had gone out of her.

Saying Goodbye

I believe it was the following day we came back, just Mother and I and Kathleen, to finish it. I think they’d already taken the feeding tube out, and we could see Father’s face properly. Then Mother, sitting across the bed from me, launched into one of the most amazing goodbyes I have ever heard. Talking directly to Father, in the conviction he could still in some fashion hear and understand, she told him all the things about their marriage that had been wonderful to her. I would give a great deal to have had a recording of that speech. I remember her mentioning the parties they had given and the trips they had taken together, and the friends they had shared. It went on for a long time, a very detailed list, unique to Mother’s and Father’s experiences, almost a history of their lives together. At the end, it was evident that in saying goodbye to all of that, Mother was saying goodbye to her own life in most ways. With her dementia, she wasn’t that clear about much, but she obviously grasped that nothing much good was ever going to happen to her again, and she would never have anyone to share it with as she had had with Father.

Then the nurse undid some other connection, and very soon the monitors made it clear Father was sinking. I think it went on for about an hour and a half. Eventually he flatlined.

I burst out in tears, embraced Kathleen and my mother, and went out into the hall to call Mary. I know I spent some time crying on the phone to her.

Yet even then, to be honest, I was holding some realization away from myself, using my misery to hold off even greater misery. I had had to do that, to begin with, in arguing with Mother that we had to let Father go. And I had to go on doing it now, in all sorts of ways. The Bacharach and Costello CD was a lifesaver in that regard. The music beguiled the ears: spectacularly lush, vintage Bacharach orchestration with lots of the signature staccato flugelhorn licks. Costello’s voice and lyrics perfectly combined to chart various courses of romantic misery. I could focus on them, suck out the pleasure, and feel subtly, not overwhelmingly miserable.

Fighting Misery With Misery

In the Darkest Place was an excellent example:

In the darkest place

I’m lost

I have abandoned every hope

Maybe you’ll understand

I must

Shut out the light

Your eyes adjust

They’ll never be the same

You know I love you so

Let’s start again

I was starting to see that I would never be the same, but that I could never start again, having been exposed here to some kind of loss I was not going to recover from entirely, although there was still a large part of my mind that was youthful enough to reject the notion of my own vulnerability. And paradoxically, this music, by embracing misery but not too much, helped on both sides of the dialectic.

I got through the next two weeks that way: the arranging a mausoleum-site, putting together a funeral mass service, helping to hold Mother together. I could not have done it without my family, without my parents’ friends and my own, and without this music.[2]

___________

[1] I think that by coincidence I had already purchased a ticket to visit the next weekend but one, for his 76^th birthday. However, I believe that the tickets I purchased to get to Michigan at this juncture were separate. I think I used the birthday tickets to get back there for the funeral.

[2] This is not the place to write a tribute to my stepfather. I have written about him in pieces I hope to post on this site after my Theme Songs are covered.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for cover art

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Playing Marital and Mortal Odds: 13 Dead Husbands at Cohesion

Cassandra Dutt and Matt Payne, with Sean James and Nick Delaney

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com March 14, 2015

If charming and silly are your thing, you’ll have fun at Thirteen Dead Husbands by Tom Horan, making its appearance in Baltimore courtesy of Cohesion Theatre Company, a new fringe or (as the program seems to call it) a new DIY group in Baltimore. The play, which premiered in Chicago in 2008, is set in “a Paris of the Imagination” that seems more like the French countryside, centers around Dee-Dee (Cassandra Dutt) the “most beautiful girl in the world,” whose stunning looks come with a serious drawback. The drawback: You marry her, you die promptly of some kind of unpredictable catastrophe (collapsing buildings, shipwreck, being torn apart by wild animals). When the action starts, she has already been widowed twelve times, and has a trunk-full of wedding dresses to prove it.

The question then becomes what kind of man would now seek Dee-Dee’s hand, and what are his chances (of matrimony, and if so, of survival) if he does? Three candidates appear: Hubert Q. Hubble (Thom Sinn), a Rupert Murdoch-like press magnate with a fondness for cigars and an ego like Donald Trump’s; Marcel C’est La Vie (Matt Payne), a student of Sartre whose imperturbable but unearned attitude of superiority and godawful French accent put one greatly in mind of Inspector Clouseau; and Jean-Pierre (Bobby Henneberg), a schlubby balloon-vendor who is the only regular guy in the bunch. I will not give away more of the plot except to say that true love triumphs at the end – and that in the meantime the audience will be subjected to more whimsy than they have seen since their last time sitting through The Fantasticks or almost anything by Jean Giraudoux.

Among the whimsical accouterments of the show are a series of portraits of some of Dee-Dee’s deceased dozen that come to life behind their frames, argue amongst each other and with Dee-Dee, as they try to determine how she should navigate the matrimonial rapids ahead. There is also a great deal of incidental music presented by a duo calling themself The Napoleon Complex wearing sailor-ish striped blouses like refugees from a picnic painted by Manet, and berets (lest anyone possibly miss the joke). The Napoleon Complex seem to be alter egos of Music Director Nick Delaney and company co-founder Alicia Stanley, but I leave that issue to be ascertained by the audience.

Despite the charming, agreeable script, and game, enthusiastic actors, there are some aspects of the show that audience members may find rough sledding. After being suddenly displaced from the venue in which they had anticipated putting on their show, Cohesion has taken up quarters, at least temporarily, in The Church on the Square, on O’Donnell Square, and from an acoustic point of view, that is not good news. Churches by design have completely different sound profiles from theaters. (I point to the late lamented Baltimore Shakespeare Festival’s church-bound efforts to declaim the Bard’s language, or for that matter that of the Baltimore Shakespeare Factory at Old St. Paul’s, as cautionary tales in point.) An acting troupe trying to put a show on in a church and not making major adjustments to make sure each word is heard distinctly may have its lines lost in the sonic backwash; that happened a lot here, and it was even more pronounced with the music.

Another auditory challenge came from the two male principals, Bobby Henneberg and Matt Payne. They lay on the Clouseau accents thick. This is not at odds with the artistic conception; I saw a YouTube video preview of the original production, and there was the Clouseau-speak back then in 2008. But Peter Sellers knew how to keep the weird-sounding speech comprehensible. Henneberg and Payne frequently lose our ears by trying too hard. That said, I’d hate to lose Payne’s portrayal of the slightly insane Marcel. He is a natural comedian, and the fractured language, coupled with his only-half-sane glares, his mugging, and his wild gesticulation are all of a piece.

Dutt is the other standout. Recently seen as an ingenue-ish writing student not above making mercenary use of her looks in Theresa Rebeck’s Seminar at nearby Fells Point Corner Theatre, she serves up a delightful variation on the theme here, alternately wheedling presents and affection out of suitors, and then trying to rise above the rote repetition of somewhat meaningless and heartless courtship. The point seems to be that all courtships are at heart as dead as hers have ended up being until there is something that takes one out of one’s narcissistic self. Dutt puts the point across well.

Company co-founder Brad Norris’s direction is lively, and keeps the fun going; I would only caution against taking up too much time with the musical interludes.

As for Cohesion itself, they seem totally undiscouraged by the forced move, which is a good thing. To succeed in Baltimore, a theater company must be prepared for the peripatetic life. Even Center Stage, the tentpole of the local theater scene, has had to move twice unexpectedly en route to becoming the state theater of Maryland; Chesapeake Shakespeare Company spent years in the wilderness; Single Carrot Theatre, probably Cohesion’s closest spiritual relative, got bounced a couple of years back from the space it had been calling home. Setting down roots while moving around can be done. If Cohesion can make it through the shakedown cruise, it may end up as permanent as the companies I have mentioned. One certainly hopes it will.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo by Shaelyn Jae Photography

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She’s Not There: ZERO HOUR: TOKYO ROSE’S LAST TAPE Alights at Towson

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com February 16, 2015

Zero Hour: Tokyo Rose’s Last Tape, a full-length theater piece created by artist Miwa Yanagi, now touring after a brief stand at the Asia Society in New York, and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, alit at Stephens Hall at Towson University on Friday night. It is well known that “Tokyo Rose,” the monicker given to a collective of young women who broadcast music and commentary on the NHK network aimed at American military men in the Pacific during World War Two, was never a single person. The single identity covering multiple women is Yanagi’s starting point, and she does various things with it.

First, though, what she does not do: tell the story straight. She adapts the names of the characters (Iva Ikuko Toguri d’Aquino becomes Annie Yukuko Oguri Moreno), or changes them completely (two European American reporters named Brundidge and Lee become a single Asian American named Daniel Yamada). She reduces the number of participants in the Tokyo Rose collective. She gives another male character a role in the Toguri/Oguri trial when he was in real life barred from testifying, and so on. This is not journalism; this is not even fictionalization like Inherit the Wind. As an experience it is more akin to the endless, mysterious film loops one can sometimes see at the Museum of Modern Art.

Yanagi’s central conceit is that the “real” Tokyo Rose, the one the xenophobic revenge-seekers in America wanted to put on trial for more treasonous comments than were voiced by the others, was someone other than Toguri/Oguri – and indeed someone different from anyone identified as having been part of the collective. As we hear the voice of the “real” Tokyo Rose, it does seems that her sometimes guttural, sometimes screechy, sometimes seductive tone emanates from the Japanese national spirit and no mere individual. Yanagi is almost certainly right that the authorities convicted the wrong Tokyo Rose, but the main point isn’t that, but rather that the spirit of Tokyo Rose was ethereal, ephemeral, and not subject to being captured, either by soldiers or even by memory. Except for recordings of her voice, she is absent.

The entire complicated, mysterious theater piece is built around her absence. The “real” announcers that were located after Japan’s fall are represented here by five identically- (and delightfully) dressed young women – and we were told there were actually six broadcasters, so we know someone has vanished from the picture. The five, who are partly choreographed (very skillfully, by Megumi Matsumoto) to engage in shuffling like cards in a three-card monte hustle, to emphasize their very interchangeability, are different from the missing one, it seems, even after they take off their hats that shade their eyes and make their faces seem indistinguishable, and even after we learn a bit about their individual stories.

The trial of Oguri works a little bit as a sermon on the wrong-headedness of the war’s victors and their sham of due process, but mainly it is employed to, in a paraphrase of Bob Dylan’s words, “just make it all too concise and too clear that [Rose is] not here.”

Rose’s absence is also evident in the parallel plot of two men, Yamada, a Navy translator who, haunted by Rose’s voice, comes looking for her after the war, and stays to try to defend Oguri, and Shiomi, a recording engineer at NHK who, if he ever really knew the identity of the real Rose, buries that knowledge in perjurious testimony later on.

This summary makes the whole enterprise seem more plot-driven than it is. I say again, it is like one of those provocative yet langorous old black-and-white experimental movies you see looped at the Museum of Modern Art. And the Yamada/Shiomi relationship mirrors this. They have agreed to play 100 games of chess, which they do by correspondence over the yeas. Their final game, in person, is played without a board, as they announce moves to each other in chess notation, in the midst of a conversation about Rose, in langorous old men’s voices. It is painfully tedious to watch, and that may well be the point. The hunt for Rose is pointless, because she is nowhere and everywhere, and those who seek to pin her down, even in memory, become pointless themselves.

This is not an easy show to watch, demanding both sonically and visually, without giving too much back. Sonically, it is hard because it is largely in Japanese, sometimes but not always with surtitles, and the English is often spoken with a Japanese accent. But that is only the beginning of the problem for the ears. Yanagi’s technique with sound includes much deliberate layering, where two or even many characters are talking at the same time, or they are competing with simultaneously-played recorded tracks, and many of the recorded tracks are, or at least purport to be, archival, with all of the frying-pan hiss associated with primitive recordings. And even when there are surtitles, they are sometimes projected over other surtitles. In short, the intent is to make it hard for the listener to stay oriented, and impossible for the listener to hear everything. He or she must instead grab onto one voice in a cacophony and hope to get enough out of it.

Visually, the show is stunning and seems clear, but it rapidly becomes plain that the clarity is deceptive. The five Roses look provocative and splendid in their identical black skirts, white blouses, and black hats (ignore the blue blouses and white hats pictures in the photo above); a tip of the hat to Yukari Asukura, the costume designer. And the modular illuminated-from-within white desks that double as chairs and other objects (courtesy of Torafu Architects) are attractive and further the action well. But all that clarity and attractiveness of line only emphasizes how little we know or understand about the action

Summarizing, then, this is a largely unknowable piece about a largely unknowable subject, and it is quite a long one. Hence the viewer may well suffer the kind of fatigue that attends movies with intentional longeurs like Last Year at Marienbad or Andy Warhol experiments. Or it may be your kind of thing. For me, it worked at some times, and did not work so well at others.

None of the not-working-so-well was the fault of the actors, who were all splendid. Standouts were Hinako Arao as Oguri, Ami Kobayashi as Jane Sugawa, the only professional announcer, who has a startlingly plummy British accent, and Yohei Matsukado as Yamada, Oguri’s staunchest supporter. The movements of the corps of five young women were stunningly well-done.

What was decidedly not well done was the house management at Stephens Hall. The performance was scheduled for 7:30, and the doors opened after that. The performance actually started twenty minutes late, with no apologies and no explanations, a new record in my experience. This kind of lack of consideration for the audience is growing more common, and I have decided to begin calling attention to it in these reviews. Theaters rightly ask for respect from their patrons; seldom do we see a play without first being asked to silence cellphones and refrain from photography. Promptness in starting and accountability about unavoidable delays are the least respect theater management can provide in return.

It is a shame the show was a one-night stand. Were it not, I would (with some reservations) be recommending that readers make time to see it.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Credit: Sansae Kimura

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This Is (Not) Going to Go on Your Permanent Record

Published in the Daily Record February 23, 2015

I experienced a flash of indignation when I read that the European Union is planning to inflict its “right to be forgotten” rules on U.S. search engine providers.

Censorship From Afar

What an attack on the First Amendment! Still decisional rather than codified,[1] and hence quite unclear in its outlines, the new European law gives people the right to tell search engines like Google and Yahoo! not to provide search results linked to their names – even if the servers and the companies that own them are here in the U.S. Search engine results are certainly speech, and here are governments trying to restrict that speech. Of course, the First Amendment only protects directly against the U.S. government and state governments restricting speech, not European ones. But still, this new European law tells us what not to say in our own country.

Worse yet, U.S. companies seem to be knuckling under. On the first day after the decision, for instance, Google received 12,000 requests to take down links, and it appears most were complied with.

Juvenilia, Disgrace and Slander

Oh sure, privacy seems like a good idea. Few of us get through much of life these days without leaving such a huge trace of ourselves on the Web that friends and enemies alike can learn more about us than we may wish. And for many of us, especially those who grew up in the Internet era, those traces are apt to reflect juvenile thinking, behavior, and appearance we would fain have the world forget. The Web degrades second chances and self-reinvention by making it hard to outrun or silence juvenilia, disgrace, or slander.

On the other hand, the ability to make the Web forget us would also facilitate a lot of misbehavior. The unforgetting quality of the Internet enforces accountability to spouses, investors, voters, and consumers. It may not be such a great idea to allow the Net to forget, and the very people who would clamor the loudest to exercise this “right” are probably exactly the people who would most abuse anonymity.

Relevant to What? Excessive to Whom?

How do we reconcile these policies? The European decision says that links may be disabled if they lead to “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive” information. But abstractly, these terms tell us very little. Relevant to what purpose? Excessive in whose eyes?

The answer is strange. The subject of the link is the person with the legal right to demand the removal of the link – if the information linked to fits those strange, amorphous criteria. But the search engine operator receiving the request is supposed to be the one to determine whether the criteria are met. That arrangement weirdly delegates to the search engine operator, a non-governmental actor, the authority to determine the scope of the requester’s legal rights.

It is safe to say that such a rule would never have originated in a First Amendment culture like that of the United States. And yet we are already beginning to live under it. European regulators claim the right to disable links that may be accessed in the EU, even if the search engines that carry them are U.S. companies whose servers sit in the U.S., so long as the owners of those servers have European subsidiaries. In other words, Google and Yahoo!, which obviously cannot abandon the European market.

No Banking for Yankees

When you think about it, though, we have little standing to object here. We have been regulating commercial activities in other countries for the longest time. For instance, ever hear of FATCA (the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act to its friends, if any)? This law makes foreign banks report and disclose information on U.S. taxpayers to the IRS; one little not-so-incidental problem is that FATCA is rapidly making it impossible for Americans living abroad to obtain any banking services at all, because the U.S. requirements on foreign banks are so onerous that they will not take or retain holders of U.S. passports as customers. Or consider the international reach of ICANN, the supplier of internet domains to the entire world, a corporation whose lawyers recently opined that the organization’s governing law, not even that of the United States as a whole, but specifically that of California, would not permit accountability that international users have been demanding, and even the U.S. government is demanding.

And in any event we have our own regime of frustrating the ability of the public to access information – and again, this is not always a bad thing. We don’t typically kill links (at least so far as we know, given the uncertain profile of NSA interference with the Internet), but we do kill what the links link to: for instance when convictions are expunged.

The Bad Guy Gets Away

I recently encountered this phenomenon in my practice; a newspaper story (linked to online) said my client’s adversary had been convicted of misbehavior relevant to our case. But the conviction was gone from the online state court records, very likely owing to expungement. The record had presumably been erased by government action, and the erasure covers up its own traces. We knew what the bad guy had done, but we’d been deprived of the opportunity to prove it, since the bad guy had exercised his right to be forgotten – a right that exists under U.S. law.

So we erase too. The difference lies in the ways and means, not in the principle.

Privacy, Not Relevance

And I think most Americans would not be opposed to any and all kinds of link takedowns. When you get down to it, the real problem with the EU law is that the criterion for takedowns seems utterly meritless. Almost no information concerning any of us is absolutely and at all times and for all purposes “excessive, irrelevant, or no longer relevant.” What may seem excessive to the man-on-the-street with no interest in us may be welcome to our biographer. For instance, if William Shakespeare had undergone a personal bankruptcy (like the man in the Spanish case that gave rise to the EU ruling), and a scholar could find a link to the court records that proved it, that information would be the subject of scholarly dissertations. And what might seem irrelevant to one person might be quite relevant to someone else. Take the scenes of youngsters carousing, alcoholic beverages in hand, ubiquitous in the social media. Perhaps, in later, maturer years, the kids pictured might think those photos irrelevant; it is a safe bet, however, that their potential employers might not. The legal question whether links to the photos should be taken down should be determined by considerations of privacy, not considerations of “relevance.”

And Even So …

Whatever the criteria, link-killing poses a terrible danger. We don’t know and can’t know what search engine links may be good for. But they may be our only way to find important data. Access to information important to purposes we may not even be able to imagine yet may be lost if people can demand that links about them be taken down.

The EU is expected to codify this ruling one of these days. Let’s hope that when the time comes, cooler and smarter heads will prevail in Brussels.

[1]. I’m no expert on this, but it appears that the outline of the EU’s plan for a codified version of these rights is authoritatively proposed here.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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What It Takes To Build A Theater Town

Published in The Hopkins Review, New Series 8.2 (Spring 2015)

For a brief spell, back in the days when the Baltimore Business Journal had an arts-and-leisure page, I was the theater critic. In 1993 the BBJ killed that page, arts and leisure being viewed, I guess, as unbusinesslike. Having lost my own business reason to keep an eye on the Baltimore theater scene, I turned my attention to other matters the next 17 years. Then, in 2010, through my journalist wife’s good graces, I was offered the chance to take up reviewing again, now for the Baltimore “page” of BroadwayWorld.com. My resulting rediscovery of Baltimore theater at that point was like Rip Van Winkle’s awakening: the place was the same but almost everything in it had changed.

Clocking Out, Clocking In

As it happened, the moment I clocked out was close to the moment Vince Lancisi clocked in. Coming out of Catholic University in Washington with a master’s degree in directing, Lancisi in 1990 envisioned bringing a repertory professional theater company to a town that didn’t have one. Baltimore, he judged, filled the bill.

As he tells the story, when he looked at Baltimore he saw one top-notch regional theater, Center Stage, plus a thriving community theater scene, and very little else that was locally produced. There were, then as now, two large houses, at that time the Morris Mechanic Theatre and the Lyric Opera House, where national touring companies of Broadway shows could alight for a week or two, but of course those shows were anything but local. And, though Lancisi does not mention it, there was one house, the Theatre Project, where avant garde productions, local, national, and international, staged brief runs. Even adding that detail, however, Lancisi was right that this state of affairs left a need the new company he had in mind could help supply. All he had to do was convince Baltimore audiences to agree that the need existed, and that the dozen or so community theaters, whatever their virtues, were no substitute for what a small professional company could offer. Lancisi dubbed his company Everyman, partly as a reference to the medieval morality play, partly to proclaim for the troupe’s aspiration to universality.

When Lancisi and I compared notes, we agreed that in the interim between the early 90s and 2010, while I was playing Rip Van Winkle and he was building Everyman, Baltimore became a theater town.

No Magic Formula, But …

Definitions first: what does one mean by the phrase “a theater town”? Clearly, there’s no easy synonym, no bright line demarcating theater towns from others, much less a magic formula for making one emerge. Nonetheless, it’s very easy to take Baltimore as a test case, and look at what’s been added over the last two decades. Without some of these additions, the label wouldn’t have fit. The additions are what make the difference, and they are worth considering.

Surely the single most striking difference between 1990 and now is that where there was once only one company staging original professional productions in its own house, there are now four, spanning an impressive spectrum.

First and foremost is the same pillar that sustained Baltimore at the beginning, Center Stage, now in its 52nd season, a typical age for a product of the regional theater movement. I have been around to witness most of Center Stage’s trajectory. At the beginning, Center Stage bore some resemblances to Everyman today: a focus on mainstream, non-musical dramas and comedies, with a good helping of classics. And there was at Center Stage, if not a regular company, a solid core of actors who regularly appeared there, some of whom stayed principally in the region for most of their careers. A couple escaped into the larger world and became national names, like Terry O’Quinn and Christine Baranski. But audiences could look to see many of the same faces from production to production, and watch pronouncedly local talent grow and become more assured.

The Equity Trap

That local flavor to Center Stage was just ending around the time Lancisi’s company arrived, with the appointment of Irene Lewis as Center Stage’s artistic director. There were two notable changes when Lewis took over from Stan Wojewodski, Jr. One change was salutary: the repertoire was altered to take into account that Baltimore is a majority-minority town. Plays by African American playwrights began to appear, and casts became more diverse. The other change looked good but wasn’t: local actors became close to unwelcome, as Center Stage’s casting took on a decidedly New York look. It became rare for programs to reflect any, or at least any recent, Center Stage experience among the on-stage talent. Basically, Center Stage became a home-away-from-home for Off-Broadway casts, a source of gigs for actors who had never been to Charm City before and most likely never would again.

Of course the fits between actors and roles became amazingly precise; when you have all the wealth of unemployed New York talent to choose from, you can make some astonishingly on-point casting decisions. But who were all these people (other than being members of Equity)? No one knew, and no one ever found out. Nor did it help that the Lewis regime coincided with the last gasp of most of the few remaining corporate headquarters in Baltimore; in the consolidation of the world’s most influential corporations, Baltimore had become a branch town. And in the Lewis era, Center Stage became a branch town too.

New Impressario in Town

The company, and the world of Baltimore theater, deserved better leadership, and received it when in 2011 the board announced an electrifying and unexpected choice: charismatic Guyanan-and-British playwright and impressario Kwame Kwei-Armah. (He will say he “stands on [Lewis’] shoulders,” and this may be more than mere politeness; still, things are different now.) Center Stage audiences knew him from his play Elmina’s Kitchen, produced there in 2005, a bitter slice-of-life from the London suburb of Hackney, turf ruled by black gangsters. He may have been an exotic addition to the scene, but he quickly signaled a serious commitment to Baltimore, networking quickly with everyone: managers of the other companies, academia, even (impressive to me for obvious reasons) the local corps of reviewers, whom he lunched and staged an open-ended dialogue with.

He also announced a policy of trying to develop local talent in a way Center Stage had not done for a while. Kwei-Armah and managing director Steve Richard launched a wide variety of new initiatives, chose a more daring selection of plays, and created a sense of excitement around the now-venerable institution that had been missing for a while. And the numbers reflected the turnaround: attendance, subscriptions, and revenues all rose.

Picking Up the Discards

Meanwhile, Everyman has been developing local talent right along. Lancisi was committed from the start to building a repertory troupe of Equity actors. In fact, his company had picked up some of the largely or totally discarded Center Stage “regulars” from before the Lewis regime, including Tana Hicken, Wil Love, and Vivienne Shub. And together Lancisi’s crew forged a somewhat lonely path to something like parity with the Center Stage colossus. In the 2013-14 season, after years of careful and provident planning, Everyman moved into new quarters in a beautifully refurbished former vaudeville house and movie theater in the heart of the old Baltimore downtown. This space was a step up in the most literal sense. I had seen, in Everyman’s old space in what is now known as the Station North Arts District, balcony scenes that had to be rendered only a few steps up from the characters “below,” because there was no way to achieve any more significant grade separation. In the opening production at the new downtown theater Everyman at last had a stage with sufficient vertical clearance to perform August Osage County (where a set’s three different floors are de rigeur).

When Everyman largely picked up Center Stage’s “discards” and added new actors to the mix, it was a small step to creating a pool of local Equity talent who were associated with more than one stage, but the traffic was flowing mostly from Center Stage to Everyman, not the other way around. There has of late been at least one instance of talent moving in the other direction, Bruce Nelson, an actor who was nurtured at Everyman and then got picked up to perform some important roles at Center Stage, including Groucho’s persona Captain Spaulding in a dramatized Animal Crackers and Vanya in Christopher Durang’s instant classic Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. But basically that effort has stalled. Most of the Center Stage casts are still unknowns in Baltimore, probably because it is hard to develop a pool of local Equity talent without a larger number of places for the members of such a pool to play. Stephen Richard, Center Stage’s Managing Director, tells me that there is now – as opposed to perhaps as recently as five years ago – “a strong Baltimore, and certainly Baltimore-Washington corps of actors.” And he says that there is at least talk at Center Stage of consciously training local actors to work at Center Stage’s level. The jury is still out on Center Stage’s seriousness about this, but it is at least the right aspiration.

Having It All

Lancisi expects change, too, but in a different way, not so much by local actors moving back and forth among local venues as by local actors “having it all,” jumping from Everyman to national stage and screen, and back again, an incubator for national talent. He cites the example of company member Eric Berryman, whose dance card was so filled up with commitments in New York and elsewhere he had to take a pass on this season altogether, but is fully expected back. Megan Anderson and Dawn Ursula, two other members of the company, had recurring roles on The Wire and continue fully engaged at Everyman. Danny Gavigan will be doing three plays with Everyman next season – and living in Los Angeles the rest of the time pursuing film work.

The forces inhibiting the local sharing of talent do not operate so powerfully out of the acting sphere, in crafts unconstricted by Equity. The local career of Joseph Ritsch is a prime instance. In addition to serving as Co-Producing Artistic Director for the REP Stage, an Equity troupe in nearby Columbia, Maryland, Ritsch has directed at Everyman and teaches and has directed at Towson University. Nor is he remotely alone. Lancisi teaches at University of Maryland Baltimore County. Center Stage and Everyman share personnel with every academic theater program and many community theaters, and Everyman provides internship opportunities for students at the Baltimore School for the Arts (and an institution that counts Jada Pinkett Smith and Tupac Shakur among its graduates is indeed a likely source of talent).

Everyone Got Fed

There are more things to share than talent. When Everyman moved downtown, as Elliott Rauh told me, everyone else in the small-theater Baltimore world “got fed.” Rauh is one of the founders and the Managing Director of the collective known as the Single Carrot Theatre (after Paul Cezanne’s comment that “[t]he day is coming when a single carrot freshly observed, will set off a revolution.”). Every other theater company in town got something from the surplus materials that Everyman was leaving behind, said Rauh. In Single Carrot’s case, the physical loot was some of Everyman’s chairs and filing cabinets. For Rauh, this was just a small example of Everyman’s generosity. Over half the Single Carrot company “has gone through Everyman’s doors and received a paycheck” for some kind of work there. More than that, as Rauh commented to me. “Vinnie is such a strong mentor for everyone.”

Weird Shit

Single Carrot’s founding legend is well-known in the Baltimore theater world, and Lancisi played a role in it. The Carrots started as a group of drama students at the University of Colorado, looking around in 2006 for a town in which to continue working together. They hit upon Baltimore in large part because they spoke to Lancisi, who was generous with his connections, and with his advice, which, succinctly, was to come to Baltimore. Acceding to that recommendation, Single Carrot immediately made a splash with small quirky productions that Rauh happily recalls “may not be what you would find at a community theater or the major institutions here,” staged in bohemian spaces that may have been cold and may have required audience members to ascend many flights of stairs, but were in areas of emerging nightlife, productions that were either from young playwrights new to the Baltimore scene or were collaborative compositions of the collective. These unusual productions quickly created what Rauh calls “a patron base,” or, more pointedly, “a population of people that loved weird shit in this city.”

In a review prompted by my first encounter with them in 2010, a play about theme parks where the planet’s ecological crisis was held at bay, and about Native Americans brought in as “local color,” I mentioned that the Carrots’ youthful energy reminded me a lot of the first crop of Not Ready for Prime Time Players on Saturday Night Live in the 1970s. Like the SNL ensemble, the Single Carrot troupe were very good, very different, and no one (least of all themselves) had any idea what the limits of their talent were. But they have been figuring it out.

Turning Point in the Founding Legend

The Carrots are professionals, in that they are each paid a stipend, and many of them live on it. But a remarkable thing about their achievement is the speed with which they have been transcending the “starving artist” stereotype, against the backdrop of some notable challenges.

Most notable of these was the abrupt closure of Load of Fun, the artistically-graffitoed performance space within a disused auto dealership that Single Carrot had been using from 2007 to August 2012. When City inspectors found Load of Fun not up to code, and pulled its use and occupancy permit, everything happening in the building, including not only Single Carrot but at least one other theater company and an art gallery space, was potentially out of business. In the six years that the Carrots had been plying their trade in Baltimore, however, they had made good and powerful friends. Fred Lazarus, the president of the Maryland Institute College of Art, called Rauh and assured him the Institute would find a temporary space for the planned season to proceed. And then, Rauh and his colleagues leveraged other connections and friends to raise the funds to do in an auto repair shop what Lancisi and company had done in the disused vaudeville house: create a theater that was not a mere make-do but a gleaming trophy space. And today, when you enter the Single Carrot facility, you see beside the door a placard announcing an affiliation even more powerful in Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University. It’s an instance of what Rauh calls “cultural capital.”

Single Carrot’s new season, its eighth, is announced on its website, and the shows it promises continue to be things most of the audience has never heard of. But that lack of familiarity is not (as might be the case if Kwei-Armah tried to make Center Stage too breathtakingly original) the kiss of death. Rather it is the biggest reason why we can be pretty certain there will be a sixteenth season eventually.

Which is not to say that Center Stage is not part of the story of Single Carrot’s success. Center Stage receives hundreds of scripts a year, many of them promising but not right for the company that is formally designated “The State Theater of Maryland.” Gavin Witt, Center Stage’s Associate Artistic Director, who knows what the Carrots do, forwards many promising scripts to the Carrots.

Growing a Fringe

Ian Gallanar, Founding Director of the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, which has moved to Baltimore this year after eleven years performing in the exurbs of Howard County, speaks admiringly of the Single Carrot troupe: “Single Carrot came in and they went: ‘This is how you do it,’” he says. “And because of that,” there were suddenly a lot of fringe troupes out there.

Some shy away from the “fringe” label, but it is useful. It refers to organizations that from bylaws or tax returns might look like community theaters, but somehow aren’t. Their actors and staffs are generally unpaid like the actors and staffs of community theaters. But fringe companies are informed by a kind of vision that makes the “community theater” label seem inadequate, even inaccurate. Typically they serve a particular vision or speak for a particular slice of the community only. Thus there is the Strand Theater Company (specializing in works by and about women), Iron Crow Theatre (“a queer theatre celebrating the renegade and the unorthodox, in all of us”), Glass Mind Theatre (“exploring the boundaries of the theatrical experience through interactive concepts”), and the Baltimore Rock Opera Society (“LET’S PARTY!!!!”) Center Stage’s Stephen Richard observes that he does not know of any city with a vibrant theater scene of which this kind of presence is not an element. Baltimore now has it.

The Bard’s New Home

Chesapeake Shakespeare’s Gallanar immediately follows up on his “this is how you do it” observation with the caution that it is exceedingly hard for fringe companies to summon the business savvy that made Single Carrot’s transformation into an institution possible. When he talks about the business savvy it takes to institutionalize a theater company, he speaks with authority attested to by the setting in which we’re talking: the first balcony of the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company’s new home in a former bank in downtown Baltimore.

Below us the set for the house’s third production is in rudimentary construction. We can look almost directly down because this space is deliberately configured to be highly reminiscent of the Bard’s “wooden O, with the stage thrust forward into the middle of the circle, so that it is three-quarters in-the-round, and nearly as close to the balcony and second balcony as it is to the groundlings. Above the Corinthian columns that hold up the high ceiling are highly ornate and brightly-colored squares of plasterwork. The theater is simply a knockout.

Gallanar agrees that the new theater not only permits but indeed requires a significant expansion of the repertoire. Once you have a facility that can do shows year round, you cannot just have it empty. More shows in that space is a “consummation devoutly to be wished.” Two months earlier, I had attended press night for the very first show there, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a production so good I went back and saw it again on my own nickel.

Apart from the fact that Single Carrot and Chesapeake Shakespeare have spanking new digs, they might appear to be artistic antitheses. The Single Carrot troupe look like and prize the mystique of artistic insurrectionists from the far west; Chesapeake Shakespeare, under the guidance of Managing Director Lesley Malin (whom I credit for the best Beatrice I ever saw) is heavily classically-trained. The Single Carrots’ most conventional production may have been a Vaclav Havel work in which they switched around the gender roles to make it more subversive. William Shakespeare, for all his “infinite variety,” generally remains the ultimate safe choice for theatrical programming. True, Chesapeake Shakespeare’s version of anything by Shakespeare, replete with musicians, warm-up acts, encouragement to take drinks to seats, may be what Malin calls “Shakespeare for Baltimore,” and a bit distinct from what one might experience in Washington’s two Shakespeare venues. But at the end of the day, it is still Shakespeare (and assorted other mostly classical playwrights, e.g. Wilde and Chekov this season).

Similarities

And yet the differences may be more superficial than one would expect.

Partly there is the history each company shares of wandering “in the wilderness” that preceded the triumphant entry into these two new facilities. Single Carrot’s hegira has already been described. In a similar vein, Chesapeake Shakespeare offered summer performances outdoors under the isolated ruins (reachable mainly by shuttle bus) of a 19th-century young ladies’ finishing school high above the Patapsco River, and in other seasons (when there were other seasons) peripatetically. (I once saw them do Merchant of Venice in the upper loft of a barn. While the summer shows in the ruins will continue, the barnstorming is over.)

Then too the companies share audiences that skew younger than most. This is predictable with a fringe company made up of young people, but somewhat surprising with a troupe that mainly does plays in an archaic form of our language written over four hundred years ago. It is reported, however, that Shakespeare companies everywhere do well with younger audiences, perhaps because rightly or wrongly Shakespeare is often viewed as “safe” to take young people to. As Gallanar and Malin each pointed out to me, the result of Shakespeare’s universal popularity is that most cities have at least one Shakespeare company, and there is a league of Shakespeare theaters.

And like Single Carrot, Chesapeake Shakespeare has been forced to go the non-Equity route (for the most part: there may be one or two Equity “guest contracts” now and again). In his comments to me, Vince Lancisi regretted that all the professional companies in town could not be Equity, and he hopes that someday they all will be. And there are subtle quality differences one can sense when the company is comprised exclusively of actors who have gone through the career screening that an Equity membership bespeaks. That should not obscure Baltimore’s good fortune, however, to have four professional companies, three of them repertory, each with its own impressive house. It is also Baltimore’s good fortune to have them synergizing so well (whether it be through sharing chairs or scripts or filing cabinets or simply turning up at each other’s opening nights, which to my observation is becoming something of a custom in Baltimore of late).

Amateurs in Name Only

But wait, as a commercial might say, there’s more! I would not want to suggest that the only reason Baltimore has transformed itself into a theater town is these four professional companies, nor these plus the three new theaters, nor even all of that plus the emergence of a more pronounced fringe. It is these things plus everything else, much of which is happening in the world around.

You can actually see this more clearly below the professional level. Go back and read the cast blurbs in a Baltimore community theater program from the 1980s, and then look at the blurbs in a program from the same company today or better yet one of the fringe companies. Odds are you will observe in progress the professionalization of the nominally amateur sphere. Once, the actors’ and directors’ credentials consisted mainly of other community theater roles. Today, the brief resumes are apt to reflect those roles still but also some academic training or significant professional experience. The increasing frequency of BFAs and formal training may well be the consequence of the academic programs turning out more trainees and graduates than the market can bear. (A universal lament among the theater managers I spoke to was the supreme difficulty of making a living as a theater professional.)

And in the Baltimore area, there are some academic significant players, including in Washington the programs at Catholic, George Washington, Georgetown, and American Universities, and more locally University of Maryland Baltimore County (which has its own gleaming new theater), Towson University, and Goucher College (seedbed of the previously mentioned Baltimore Rock Opera Society), not to mention Notre Dame University of Maryland and historically black Morgan State University. And at least at the musical end of the spectrum, it also reflects the new professional venues which have emerged into greater prominence in recent years: theme parks and cruise lines among them. Everyone is just getting better at the game. (And even at the professional level, Malin observed that the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company “require[s] a different kind of actor now.”)

A Golden Age of Playwriting, a Bumper Crop of Critics

And the game is getting better too. By common consensus among the people I talked with, the country is in the midst of what Lancisi call “the golden age of playwrights.” In a world that is giving us people like Lynn Nottage, Lee Blessing, Theresa Rebeck, Naomi Wallace, Kate Moira Ryan, Michael Weller, Lisa D’Amour, Bruce Norris, Doug Wright, Jason Robert Brown, Christopher Durang, Sarah Ruhl, Donald Margulies, Tracy Letts and Colman Domingo, just to name a few new playwrights recently produced in Baltimore or its immediate environs, and Amy Herzog, who will see two plays produced by Center Stage in 2015, there is so much exciting material that it is just hard to go wrong using it, and there is a vast pool of playwriting talent out there that has not even been tapped in Baltimore yet (see my reviews of the nearby Contemporary American Theater Festival in 2012 and 2014 in these pages for numerous cases in point). The juggernaut is still picking up steam.

Nor should the impact of the somewhat expanding local theatrical commentariat be ignored. Theater is a dialogue between performers and audience, as we well know, but it is also a dialogue between performers and reviewers. The Internet, though deeply implicated in the decline of the press, has in this particular probably given back more than it took away. Between my previous stint as local critic and my new one, there have emerged five on-line publications that regularly review theater locally: not only my own home, BroadwayWorld.com, but also Maryland Theatre Guide, the Baltimore Post Examiner, and two DC-based sites: DC Metro Theatre Arts, and DC Theatre Scene. The fact that these are not paper publications has facilitated broader coverage. BroadwayWorld alone, for instance, has five or six reviewers working in Baltimore at any given time, and we still do not cover everything that is happening. No physical newspaper could ever give space to so many reviewers or provide such deep coverage. Add to the online commentary the remainders of the conventional press (the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore City Paper, and one or two paper publications plus a broadcaster or two), and there is more than a sufficiency, if not yet a plethora, of reviewing voices, some quite sophisticated, poking and prodding the artistic directors and actors and directors and keeping them grounded. (Or at least so I, as one of the reviewers, would like to think.)

Growth at the Edges

Even at the extreme edges, expansion goes on. For instance, the expanding art burlesque scene, with roots in the theatrical tradition of revue as well as striptease, shares facilities, performers, and audiences with the theater fringe and the community theater. Or, at the other extreme, the Baltimore Symphony orchestra now has its own playwright-in-residence, Didi Balle. (I recently witnessed her short play about Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, presented in conjunction with a performance of the symphony itself.)

The future promises more and better. For example, plans, perhaps over-ambitious, perhaps not, have been announced for a theater incubator project on Howard street that would provide a home for five fringe-y companies: Annex Theater, EMP Collective, Effervescent Collective, Stillpointe Theatre, Acme Corporation, and Psychic Readings.

Three Generations

As Elliott Rauh summed it up, Baltimore has “great arts funding, a welcoming arts community, a big city with a small city feel, and a place where we as artists can afford to live and be artists and make the work we want to.” Baltimore has benefitted now from a generation of what Lancisi called “blood, sweat, tears, and development,” development that included the contributions of people Lancisi calls “cultural philanthropists” like the late Tana Hicken, who donated performances of The Belle of Amherst to raise money for the new theater, and held bake sales to boot.

As the joke goes, after a while you’re talking about real money. You’re talking about a foundation so broad a great many things can rest on it. And that, I think, is the not terribly secret, not terribly original explanation of Baltimore’s new “overnight” status as a theater town: it was the work of three generations at least: one to build the community theaters, one to build Center Stage, and one to build almost everything else upon that foundation. And if you were sleeping like Rip Van Winkle, you might have missed it.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Women’s Fate in War: RUINED at Everyman

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com February 9, 2015

The moral imperatives of life in a war zone are different. That was the message Bertolt Brecht taught in Mother Courage, and the message Lynn Nottage reiterates with Ruined, her 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning play inspired by Brecht’s. In each play, a woman determined to survive a war confronts the need to be as nihilistic as the war itself. Nottage’s heroine, Mama Nadi, portrayed in the current Everyman Theatre revival byDawn Ursula, is less willing than Brecht’s heroine to let the imperative of survival trump all the others all the time, but she is far too disciplined to let her more humane impulses show except in small flashes.

As far as her public persona is concerned, Mama Nadi, proprietress of a bar in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is all about business, impartially selling drink and the companionship of her stable of prostitutes to government soldiers and rebel fighters alike. The war, largely over an ore called coltan (vital to cellphones, perhaps 10% of the world’s supply coming from the Congo) and conflict diamonds, is a brutal business led by brutal men. The men, when they erupt into the bar, are dangerous as wild animals. They stomp around with AK-47s slung from their shoulders, fire pistols at the ceiling, and regard rape as an entitlement.

Nor are the non-military Congolese much more reliable. As we learn through the tales of two of Mama Nadi’s girls, Salima (Monique Ingram) and Sophie (Zurin Villanueva), being raped and abused, a universal experience of women in modern war, cuts you off from the communities and families from whence you came, the very people that should be supporting you when horrible things happen. In such a world, empathy can amount to fatal weakness, and so Mama Nadi is quite sparing with it.

Instead, Nadi weaves a virtuoso performance, wheeling, dealing, commanding, and charming all around her most of the time, in order to keep herself and her girls as safe as she can, which is not always very much. It is a virtuoso part, and Dawn Ursula, a regular member of the Everyman troupe, does marvels with it, waving, gesticulating, stuttering with the overwhelming flow of her thoughts, capable of cutting coldness, flirtatiousness on demand, and of both wheedling venality and generosity.

But there is much more to the play than Mama’s turn as a sort of Auntie Mame-of-the-Ituri-rainforest. It is also the unflinching story of how, in the words of Salima, men wage war “on [women’s] bodies.” Rape is not simply “what soldiers do,” to quote scholar Mary Louise Roberts’ recent book on the sexual behavior of World War II GIs in Normandy; particularly in contemporary warfare it is a form of combat, aimed at destroying societies. The scene in Act Two where Salima describes what happened to her is not only uncomfortable, it is a display of raw theatrical power and a tutorial about the mechanics of social destruction in the wake of rape.

Then, too, there is some careful attention paid to the men, including the ironically-named Fortune (Bueka Uwemedimo), a man destroyed by the rape of his wife, though he does not fully know it yet, and two mercantile survivors, a salesman named Christian (Jason B. McIntosh), who, despite the fact that he is among other things a procurer for Mama, is probably the most decent, if weak, individual in the play, and the more amoral dealer in war-wares, Harari (Bruce Randolph Nelson). Finally, and powerfully, there are an ensemble of strutting, violent soldiers. Nottage does not try as hard to anatomize them or understand them, and perhaps has less to say about them than about her other characters, but they dominate the action whenever they come onstage. And perhaps we have seen their like so often in other dramas and films (the casually homicidal General Butt-Fucking-Naked in The Book of Mormon is a perfect recent example), we need less introduction.

If my description has you thinking that this is one overstuffed play, I may have misled you. Nottage has much to say and much to show, but she keeps it under control. Despite the play’s length and its large cast, it does not sprawl. It holds the attention as a single narrative from beginning to end.

This production would hold the attention a bit more, though, if the company’s English were not so heavily-accented, a frequently impenetrable mix of Sub-Saharan lilt and French accent. If Congolese actually spoke this way, it might be more understandable, but the official language and the lingua franca of the Congo (among over a hundred tongues) is French. Absent presenting the play in French, however, it would seem a more justified choice to have everyone talking English normally, or perhaps with a slight African lilt. This would have kept the experience of watching the production from becoming an incessant struggle to make sense of what one was hearing. (Basically, I just gave up on the songs sung by Sophie, of which I could distinguish perhaps one word in ten.) And this isn’t just the experience of one guy with old ears; others around me confirmed they couldn’t understand either. It’s a tribute to Nottage’s power as a dramatist that we all kept paying attention anyway.

Basically, this was the play of the year in 2009. In addition to the aforementioned Pulitzer, it won the Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, Outer Circle, and Obie Awards. It deserved all that hardware. And, diction issues aside, this staging is a beautiful job. Go see it.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Photo credit: Stan Barouh.

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