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A Stunning WHALE at the REP

Susan Rome and Michael Russotto

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com January 19, 2015

As I had previously noted in these pages, the REP Stage in Columbia recently announced an initiative to produce “stunning new plays by young American playwrights.” Their first show after the announcement didn’t exactly stun me; this time around, with the regional premiere of Samuel D. Hunter‘s 2012 play The Whale, the word “stunning” fits. The play thoughtfully tackles some very large subjects, and the REP has given it a first-rate staging.

The central very large subject, the Whale of the title, is morbidly obese Charlie (Michael Russotto), who teaches college-level expository writing online because he is far too debilitated to leave his ill-kept little apartment. He has one friend, a nurse named Liz (Megan Anderson). The college students he deals with online seem to be, without exception, inarticulate and unengaged, and he in turn appears equally clueless about how to live or even save the life he is rapidly growing too large to hold onto, despite Liz’s best efforts. His path to this lonely and isolated place only comes out gradually. As the story emerges, though, it becomes apparent that he is engaged in a heroic quest of sorts to salvage something of importance from a lifelong struggle.

At one level, that struggle could be characterized as a fight for the dignity of homosexual love (Charlie is, and a deceased lover was, gay) against the moral orthodoxy of Mormonism, a religious persuasion that seems to have a bigger presence in Idaho, where the play is set, than in the more heterodox East. A little deeper, the fight might be characterized as between empathy (Liz and Charlie are full of it) and the lack of it, evinced by Charlie’s estranged daughter Ellie (Jenna Rossman), who seethes with nastiness toward everyone, and in a different way by Elder Thomas (Wood Van Meter), a Mormon missionary, whose stance of universal benevolence masks some complicated reservations. Beyond even that, Charlie seems to be fighting for authenticity of emotion, his touchstone for which is a dismissive essay on Herman Melville‘s Moby Dick written by a naive student. This unlettered essay carries some special resonance for Charlie, not explained until the very end. But the sincerity and passion Charlie sees in the essay largely explain why Charlie is willing to lay down his life to prevail in his quixotic struggle.

Honestly, this multivalent struggle is a little too complicated to jimmy into a two-hour drama. I did not buy the argument with the Moby Dick essay nor did I credit the impact of a retelling of the Book of Jonah upon Charlie’s old love affair. These ancient and epic whale stories had an obvious thematic congruence with a story about an obese man, and one can see why playwright Hunter would have wanted to find a way to put them in, but congruence remains all there is. Their relevance to Hunter’s present-day story is unpersuasive and helps render that story slightly incoherent.

No matter. Trust me: you will become so absorbed with these characters that the cluttered thematic apparatus with the whale stories and the authenticity-of-emotion issue won’t matter. You will care far more about who these people are and what they’re going to do next. In the end the Whale’s heroism matters; the motivations the dramatist tenders for that heroism don’t much. It’s just an interesting story touchingly told, and well-paced by Director Kasi Campbell.

The acting is just spectacular.

Obviously the largest weight (in all senses of the word) falls upon Michael Russotto; I really don’t know how he managed to pull off such a convincing impersonation of a seriously fat man, complete with wheezes and struggles to pull himself sufficiently upright to grasp a walker. No doubt movement coach Jenny Male (whose work I’ve noted before in these pages) had a lot to do with it. And his ability to communicate his character’s unrelenting care even for those who are vilifying him, willingness to cast his pedagogical pearls before Freshman Comp swine, and determination to see his project through unto death, are simply wonderful acting.

I was also much impressed by the relatively brief turn by Susan Rome as Charlie’s ex-wife Mary, who compresses into maybe 20 minutes onstage a sense of much shared history, bitterness, some measure of forgiveness, alcoholism, and resignation to her daughter’s apparent awfulness.

Jenna Rossman takes what is these days a more conventional role, a bitter, sarcastic, Internet-empowered angry child with just a hint of decency held in check by mistrust, and goes to town with it. And Wood Van Meter does all that is necessary in the role of a Mormon missionary, i.e. a man called to radiate certainty at an age so youthful that his certainty must inevitably bespeak nothing but folly and denial of human variability and weakness. You will have seen his character’s like in The Book of Mormon. Megan Anderson, a consummate professional well-known to Baltimore audiences, nails the role of the aggressively competent, loving and concerned friend.

Let me comment in addition that I think I see something interesting going on with the casting. I have written in these pages and elsewhere about the difficulties of creating a local Equity-level stage in the Baltimore area with so few venues that employ Equity actors, and with Center Stage so firmly entrenched in its penchant for casting with Equity actors from New York and anywhere but here. (The new management there talks a good game on this but the casting choices they have usually made talk louder.) The new artistic direction team at the REP, Co-Producing Artistic Directors Suzanne Beal and Joseph W. Ritsch, seems actually to be doing something about the problem. Megan Anderson is primarily a product of Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre; Susan Rome is a veteran of Center Stage and the late lamented Baltimore Shakespeare Festival; Michael Russotto is a member of Washington’s Woolly Mammoth troupe. And I would add that the pedigrees of the offstage talent involved with this production reveal deep roots in the Towson University theater program especially, but also other local programs including Catholic and Stevenson Universities. From all indications, then, the fostering of a regional Equity-level acting (and backstage) corps looks to be part of the REP’s agenda. This is welcome.

The Whale is on a regrettably short run. Act quickly to see it, because it should not be missed.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Photo credit: Katie Simmons-Barth

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A Theology of Escape

Lift the Wings, by Bill Whelan, performed by Áine Uí Cheallaigh (1995), encountered 1997

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

By 1997, I knew I had made good my escapes.

Yes, “escapes” plural: from a marriage and from a workplace, as I’ve described in earlier pieces. And as a result of those extrications and of subsequent developments, I finally knew, with a fair amount of certainty, what my adult life was going to look like: whom I would be married to, who my kids were, and how I would be employed. It might seem strange that at this point, over a decade after the crisis in my first marriage and three years after I’d left the big firm, I should still be turning all this over in my mind. But actually, it’s only after the crisis that you can stop to process it all.

I liked what I saw, no question about that: happy marriage, good family situation, job I was proud of.

Escapes Had Been Necessary

It was striking, though, that to reach this happy plateau, escapes had been necessary. This was the part I was not happy to acknowledge. I had been raised to finish what I’d started. (One of my earliest memories of treasuring praise came when I was about eight and my step-grandmother had remarked to my mother how impressive it was that I’d finished writing a short play; yes, I had thought even then, I finish things.) But now, in my mid-forties, I was finally learning the opposite lesson: that deep happiness can sometimes come from leaving big commitments behind, unfulfilled.

If it had just been a matter of my job, it would have been a lot easier to process. But when it came to leaving behind a marriage, it sat uneasily with my religious convictions, and this was the moment I had to deal with it in detail.

Catholic Discourse Alert

And here I must frankly notify the reader: this is going to be a very Catholic blog post. If the struggles of a Catholic with the doctrine he was raised in aren’t of interest to you, I’ll forgive your skipping this one. But these pieces are about some of the important times in my life (and the music that went with them). And it inevitably happens with Catholics – and of course did with me – that doctrinal issues find their way into some of the important times of their lives. So yes, I have to go there, but it’s up to you whether you choose to come along.

Okay: we’ve cleared the room. At this point I’m assuming that if you’re still here, you’re up for a discussion of what it’s like as a Catholic confronting the religious implications of being happily divorced and remarried.

Absolutely Positively Not (Maybe)

When I was mulling this over in 1997 (and I fear for generations to come), Catholic teaching started out with great clarity regarding divorce: You Can’t Do It. Jesus said you can’t, and also said that remarriage is adulterous.[1] And it was a teaching that made some sense to me in light of at least one rationale; when you marry, you twine other people’s lives with your own, and if you extricate yourself, they stand to be hurt by the disentwinement. Jesus never used this rationale, however.

Moreover, the Church had made exceptions that suggest that the harm-to-others rationale is not uppermost in its thinking. I saw it with my mother, who, two months to the day after her divorce papers were signed, was able to remarry before a priest, by virtue of the “Pauline privilege” which denies that certain marriages contracted between non-Catholics are valid, and gives no consideration to whether there were children.[2] The Church also allowed annulments, and again, the presence or absence of children seems not to have had a bearing.

One What?

The Old Testament formulation that Jesus and the Church appeared to be relying on instead was this: “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.” Genesis 2:24. As with so much else in Genesis, who knows what the original author may have meant by these words? But if I was compelled to put any sense to them at all, I drew a blank. I could see no evidence of any reality which gives “one flesh” meaning. I had always seen marriage as a partnership of two people: two people who may become like each other, but who remain two separate people, each with his or her own physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual “flesh.” To my modern ear, the insistence of “one flesh” is either suspect (yet another way to subjugate women, perchance?) or monstrous (the couple as a two-person Borg). And even though this did come from Jesus’ mouth, I could not and cannot accept it.[3]

In any case, the implications of Pauline privilege and annulment run contrary to the “one flesh” concept. Pauline privilege is supposedly justified because the parties could not have made what the Church regards as a true marriage, since it was unsanctified by the sacrament of matrimony, as being contracted between non-Catholics and not conducted by a priest.[4] Now, the sacrament of matrimony, as every Catholic schoolchild educated with the Baltimore Catechism used to know, was, like every other sacrament, “an outward sign, instituted by Christ, to give grace.”

Do you see the problem? Unless Jesus instituted the sacrament of matrimony before he was born, then the one-flesh doctrine, dating back to Genesis, and obviously fully a part of Jewish teaching by the time Jesus came on the scene, must relate to something other than matrimony. And if the absence of Christ-instituted matrimony makes marriages capable of retrospective non-recognition, then every marriage contracted before Jesus did whatever he did to “institute” matrimony was capable of retrospective non-recognition, notwithstanding the one-flesh doctrine.

More simply put: Jesus can either be the institutor of matrimony, without which marriage may be invalid, or the inheritor of the one-flesh doctrine, in light of which multitudes of marriages contracted before (and since) the institution of sacramental matrimony were and are valid. But He cannot be both.[5] Catholic doctrine has not convincingly reconciled this inconsistency.

So, bottom line, I was confronting a Church whose principal justifications for its hard line on divorce were incoherent.

A CARE Package Full of Menus

But even if one granted, as I found I could not, that there was an intellectually satisfying, scripturally supported, justification for the rule, even if divorce and remarriage were sins, what about forgiveness? Well, the Church says, we’ll forgive you as soon as you acknowledge your transgression and, to the extent possible, undo it: stop living with the woman, break up your child’s home. But until you do, don’t you dare come to Communion.

Well, I’ll tell you one thing: that doesn’t a bit resemble forgiveness the way I have practiced or experienced it.[6] Most serious forgiveness is of ongoing sins, or of wrongs that either cannot or under the changed circumstances at the time of forgiveness should not be undone. Serious forgiveness gives the sinner a pass. Forgiveness the way the Church offers it plays a lot more like revenge.[7]

And it lets God off the hook too easily as well, at least the God of conventional Catholic moral teaching. So many things in the realm of sex and marriage are officially forbidden. And so many of those things are things we need want and need desperately (as I had needed to be divorced and remarried). In the realm of sex and marriage, I am confident, most of us, if our stories were fully told, would be deep in mortal sin most of the time. The Catholic Church, then, asks us to believe in a God who made us what and how we are, and then made hanging offenses out of a vast number of things necessary to our happiness. True, Jesus died for the forgiveness of all sins, but under Catholic doctrine, that forgiveness is like the proverbial CARE package full of menus; the hangings will go on anyway unless we cooperate with that so-called forgiveness by repudiating our desires and our affections, effectively our very God-given natures.

Doesn’t sound much like a loving God to me. More to the point, it doesn’t sound like Jesus to me. Yes, he told people to go and sin no more. But – at least in dealing with people face-to-face – He never made those statements sound as if the forgiveness would be lost if they did sin again.

What About David? What About Jacob?

But it went further than that. It was inescapable that Biblical heroes (David, for example, or Jacob) engaged in transgressions that actually seemed to be the vehicles for God’s plans, and they were never excluded from the Jewish community. God’s design seemed to depend upon Jacob deceiving Isaac and cheating his brother, or David engaging in horrific slaughters of peoples whose only offense was that they were in the way of Israel’s expansionism. God seemed to bless sinners, making not just what they did, but their getting away with it as well, parts of their heroism. Maybe what they did was wrong, but they stayed part of the community, and what they did was not only what they had to do, but what the community needed them to do.

This spoke directly to me. From the outset of my escape, I had never quit attending Church and never quit going to Communion. I was not going to be party to the Church’s effort to exile me.[8] If they tracked me down and showed me the door, fine. But I was not going to show myself the door.[9]

I was not going to do it because I didn’t agree it should be done. In a modest and untrained way, I was evolving a theology of escape and renewal, if you will. I still believed in building lasting things – sometimes. But sometimes, I thought, you needed to leave off, and leave. It wasn’t contrary to God’s plan; it was God’s plan. And I wanted to share my point of view.

Where to Say It

Given the resources available to me then, I had only one conceivable place to do that: Easter Vigil.

My congregation has a tradition that echoes the way some congregations in the early Church celebrated Easter, by praying and reading Scripture through the night before the Easter morning service. Individual parishioners or groups of them present hours of it, each built around a particular passage from the Old Testament, often presented dramatically, with media like slide shows or songs, sometimes popular ones. I got myself appointed to present an hour, as I’ve done at other times (some of which you can see here).

I got together with another member of the parish who had ended a marriage, and we put on the program together. My text was Moses’ departure from Egypt, and my music included Lift the Wings from the phenomenal then-new Irish revue Riverdance. Why each of them? Well, let me quote a little.

What I Said

First, a bit of my homily that night:

We humans are meant to set down roots. Setting down roots is of course much approved by churches and governments, which thrive in rooted places, and tend to treat the roots as sacred.  But more importantly, the work of rooting is close to the human heart. We need to make families and communities and workplaces and countries and churches. We need to nurture our young and our old, and intertwine our lives with those of others.  We need to collaborate in building bulwarks against disaster of all kinds. We intertwine our roots with those of others, we become connected.  You cannot pull on one of us without pulling on us all.

However, we humans are also meant to tear up roots. Churches and governments don’t like that as much. But it is just as central to who we are as putting down the roots. There come times in many of our lives when our roots strangle us, when we can no longer stay with the parents who raised us, with the spouse we had built half a life with, with the jobs that have failed us for one reason or another, with the careers that we had thought would see us through, with countries that had bred us and protected us, and — yes — with the very churches that are the wellsprings of our spirituality.  Nations, in fact, have to tear themselves from the guts of other nations — just as the Hebrews did with Egypt and our country did with England.

But wait, you may say, how could God be operating at cross-purposes? Is God crazy, asking us to plant ourselves and sprout roots, and then later sometimes asking us to tear up the very connections He asked us to grow in the first place? Could God be the kind of God who wants that?  I at least believe He is. God has left us no guarantees that the roots we try to grow will always work and go on working.

And gardeners know that sometimes a plant just outgrows the pot and has to be pulled out and planted elsewhere, or it will die. If you accept the official Bible story that the Hebrews were all descendants of Jacob and his family, you must also acknowledge that the experiment of the Jacob clan coming to live in Egypt worked for a while, and then stopped working.

This is the way of human rooting.

Whatever we were once told, there are no indelible marks placed on our souls by baptisms, marriage oaths, citizenship oaths, employment contracts, ordination, or anything else. There are only efforts we flawed humans make to establish relationships with each other and with our God. The efforts do not always succeed, and if they succeed, they may not succeed for all time.

God Himself made us that way. I submit that insisting that God could not want contradictory things for us at different times is insisting that God be rational by human lights, tearing God down to our scale.

This is hardly an original perception on my part.  We all know the words of the Book of Ecclesiastes, that to every thing there is a season: “a time to sow and a time to reap, a time to build up, a time to break down, a time when you may embrace, a time to refrain from embracing.” God’s plan for us at one time may in that sense contradict His plan for us at an earlier time. Still, you may say: Uprooting? Doesn’t it hurt when you do that, and not only yourself, but the people with whose roots yours are intertwined? You bet. Pharaoh and his people took it on the chin — they lost all those first-born. And even if you don’t feel for Pharaoh, how can you possibly not feel for all the first-born themselves…? …. God has never laid down any unconditional prohibition against causing suffering. God cares about suffering and means us to care about causing it, but also cares about putting us where He wants us. Exodus is very clear testimony that sometimes we are intended to choose freedom …. Sometimes the captain is meant to go down with the ship, and the soldier to stay by his post even when it’s being overrun. We are not always meant to pursue our own happiness, growth and survival. But sometimes we are. And there are no fixed rules to guide us. We have to listen for that voice.

What Whelan Said

And then songwriter Bill Whelan’s voice (please follow at least one of the links above that give you a chance to hear the music too):

How can a tree stand tall

If a rain won’t fall

To wash its branches down?

How can the heart survive?

Can it stay alive

If its love’s denied for long?

Lift the wings that carry me away from here and

Fill the sail that breaks the line to home

When I’m miles and miles apart from you

I’m beside you when I think of you, a Stóirín

In the show, the song was sung upon the separation of lovers, as one of them is about to cross the sea; though the first production did not make it entirely clear, in later productions the separation was evidently part of the Irish migration to America[10] (largely prompted by the Potato Famine). Whelan is a stunning composer, but not quite of that caliber as a lyricist; you could not quite fit the first quoted stanza together with the context or with the second stanza.[11] However, both stanzas formed a pretty decent match to what I was talking about: longing that will not permit you to survive in a situation and must be remedied by turning one’s back on people or circumstances one may still have an attachment for.[12]

Then and now, hearing the solemn, almost funereal drumbeat, the tambourine, the harp, and the keening low whistle that begin that song, I am transported back to moments when I was transfixed by the need for a wholeness I could not achieve where I was, and then, equally, to later moments of looking back not only in relief, but also in understanding that what had been left behind was nonetheless precious. That ambivalence is real, as I can attest, but inseparable from many lives fully lived – and I would submit, lived in as close to a Godly way as our inconstant natures will permit.

That was what I was trying to share that night. I hope I succeeded.

________________

[1]. See, e.g. Luke 16:18, Mark 10:2-12.

[2]. The privilege, as Wikipedia tells us, “allow[s] the dissolution of a marriage between two non-baptized persons in the case that one (but not both) of the partners seeks baptism and converts to Christianity and the other partner leaves the marriage. According to the Catholic Church’s canon law, the Pauline Privilege does not apply when either of the partners was a Christian at the time of marriage. It differs from annulment because it dissolves a valid natural (but not sacramental) marriage whereas an annulment declares that a marriage was invalid from the beginning.” Now, I have no reason to believe that my Irish Catholic grandmother had failed to have my mother baptized (though she was married to a Methodist). So my mom did not technically conform to the “non-baptized” criterion. However, Mother had become an apostate in college, going so far as to become president of the Radcliffe Unitarian society. So she was, if not unbaptized, at least unchurched, when she married my father, who was definitely not baptized. And I guess that in getting permission to marry my stepfather in the Church, she was able to characterize the events that had led to her divorce from my father as being in some sense a “conversion” that had led to my father leaving. (I question whether a reversion to the faith of one’s youth is properly called a conversion, but that is probably only a semantic quibble.) There may have been some truth to this account of events, but it left out a lot of salient information.

[3]. I believe Jesus when he talks about his Father; it just sounds right. When he simply spouts Old Testament piety, on the other hand, I do not feel compelled to go along with him, any more than I would feel compelled to follow Jesus’ dietary observances. He’s echoing a work too discredited for anything in it to stand without an independent gut check.

[4]. The explanation for annulment is similar: no true sacrament because one or both of the parties was incapable of making the commitment.

[5]. And while we’re on the subject, just when did Jesus institute matrimony, anyway? Or could it be that the Baltimore Catechism was just wrong about this? And if so, about what else? Incidentally, the logic doesn’t change if you concede that Jesus didn’t actually institute matrimony. If every marriage contracted before Jesus’ time were deemed a product of the sacrament notwithstanding that someone other than Jesus had instituted it, it would seem to follow that every marriage contracted after Jesus’ earthly time was similarly a product of the sacrament. Unless one contends that all the new marriages entered into outside the Church after Jesus turned up suddenly left off being binding. Rejecting that assumption, but assuming that all marriages entered into outside the Church from the beginning of marriage were sacramental, what room is there for Pauline privilege? I can see none.

[6]. As a child of divorce, I had truly and immediately forgiven both parents, and I never saw anything to suggest that they had not truly forgiven each other. The predictable upshot was that they had each made better marriages the second time around. I was the beneficiary of that. Did the Church get to not forgive what I had forgiven? That notion is simply laughable.

[7]. I’m not pooh-poohing the concern that if “sinners” who have not repented are accepted at the Communion rail, it appears to reflect acceptance of their sins. However, I can think of dozens of less cruel ways for the Church to make clear where it stands than by barring sinners from full fellowship in a community whose Founder openly consorted with prostitutes and tax collectors.

[8]. And to be fair, my pastor was not party to that effort either. Knowing my story, and those of many other parishioners like me, perfectly well, he included us in every way. Well, every way but one; he could not marry Mary and me. (My thanks to David Brown, the Methodist minister who could and did!) But he did run us through premarital instruction. I served on the parish council. I have been visibly involved in many parish matters. The larger Church may have one position on people like me; my pastor clearly has another. This issue is not his fault.

[9]. Technically speaking, the metaphor of being shown the door may be doctrinally inapposite. I think divorced and remarried Catholics are still supposed to go to church on Sundays; they just aren’t supposed to receive Communion. But to me that is a distinction without a difference. Communion is the ritual which (as the name suggests) reinforces our membership in the community. The converse is also true: the absence of Communion cannot help but diminish our membership in the community. The denial of Communion would not technically amount to excommunication, then, but it would feel amazingly like it. So I believe my phrasing is correct.

[10]. We know this because the departure is followed by an arrival in America, where African American and Irish tap dance styles are compared.

[11]. The first stanza is about being forced to do something by longing for missing emotional nourishment, the second about missing someone (addressed as “Stóirín,” which I’m told means something like “dear”) though being determined to journey away from that person. If the missing beloved of the second stanza were the object of the unsatisfied desire limned in the first, then the singer ought to be resolving on taking a journey toward that person, not away, which is clearly the situation of the song. So no, it’s not consistent, though it surely is evocative.

[12]. Oh, I’ll agree that the “Stóirín” discussed in the preceding note suggests a greater remaining fondness for the person or situation left behind than I was talking about. But again, if not spot on, the lyrics are surely evocative, as I discuss above.

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

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Disrespect: Real and Unreal

Published in the Maryland Daily Record January 29, 2015

The hostility shown by some members of the New York Police Department toward Mayor Bill de Blasio seems to be a feeling in search of a socially acceptable articulation. It is sometimes expressed as a demand for “respect.” Approximately 850 officers, for instance, have signed petitions that the Mayor not attend their funerals (should they fall in the line of duty) “due to” de Blasio’s “consistent refusal to show police officers the support and respect they deserve.” A policeman who turned his back on the Mayor during the recent funeral of Officer Wenjian Liu was quoted as saying: “I turned my back last week on [de Blasio] … because he disrespected me, Officer Ramos and Officer Liu when he said he warned his son, Dante, to be wary of cops.” To me, though, this sounds like a mischaracterization; the wariness the Mayor counseled was distrust and fear, not exactly disrespect.[1]

It Was Earned

But call it disrespect if you want to. That does not solve the problem. Does that policeman really think that de Blasio’s words to his son were without foundation? In 2013, the Department’s overwhelmingly imbalanced use of stop-and-frisk against people of color had been found after an exhaustive trial in the Southern District of New York to be a simple and undeniable fact, based on the most objective of evidence: the forms the police had to fill out every time these encounters occurred. Only 10% of all stops over a decade were of white people. The only conclusion was that nonwhite people were being repeatedly harassed by New York’s finest. Any young man of color, like the Mayor’s son, would stand a very appreciable chance of being subject of one of the 4.4 million stops that had occurred over that decade. And, as the Supreme Court noted two generations back: “It is simply fantastic to urge that [a frisk] performed in public by a policeman while the citizen stands helpless, perhaps facing a wall with his hands raised, is a ‘petty indignity.’” In New York, this non-petty indignity was reserved almost exclusively for nonwhites. Talk about disrespect: this is the real thing.

As to the “disrespect” the cops were complaining about, if it were indeed disrespect for the Mayor to give that advice to his son, at least it would have been earned disrespect.

Limited Utility

Perhaps the police who so passionately defended the widespread and racially-biased stop-and-frisk regime nevertheless really believed it had law-enforcement utility. But if they truly believed that, they were ignoring the statistics they themselves were developing. Stops were a very ineffective way to catch lawbreakers; only 12% of stops resulted in further law enforcement action.

And the racial disparities in the stops were not merely of questionable utility. Searches of whites actually turned up weapons a higher percentage of the time than did searches of nonwhites (1.0% of the stops of blacks, 1.1% of the stops of Hispanics, and 1.4% of the stops of whites). Likewise with other contraband (1.8% of the stops of blacks, 1.7% of the stops of Hispanics, and 2.3% of the stops of whites).[2] These numbers suggest one of two hypotheses: a) whites were more likely to possess guns and contraband than nonwhites (in which case whites should have been stopped more and nonwhites less); or b) police were using more reasonable criteria in determining which white people to stop than they used determining which nonwhites to stop (in which case they were employing criteria which were simultaneously more racist and less effective with nonwhites).

More than that, when you consider that 83% of all criminal convictions in New York happen to nonwhites,[3] when, at least from the evidence of the stops, blacks and Hispanics are more likely per capita to be law-abiding than whites, and you consider that 45% of New York City is white, it is evident that far too few whites or far too many nonwhites are being convicted for the disparities to be accidental. New York justice – and New York policing – are anything but color-blind.

Scheindlin’s Ruling Stands

I suppose this is the place to acknowledge that Judge Scheindlin was later removed from the case by the Second Circuit for supposed bias. Whatever one thinks of that, the figures stand on their own merits. And the Second Circuit did not overturn Scheindlin’s analysis of those figures.

Perhaps the cops also felt disrespected when de Blasio withdrew New York’s appeal of Scheindlin’s ruling, although in so doing, de Blasio was arguably protecting them from a rising tide of anger and litigation.

The other thing that has some NYPD members riled, of course, is the Mayor’s remarks about the Eric Garner killing, followed closely by the shooting of Officers Liu and Ramos by Ismaaiyl Brinsley, an obviously unhinged person, who claimed that his actions were partly in revenge for Garner’s death.

What the Mayor Actually Said

From the videotape of the Garner incident and the findings of the Medical Examiner, it would be reasonable to conclude that Garner (grabbed, incidentally, in the very act of protesting stop-and-frisks) was brought to the ground by a chokehold, and that the chokehold as well as an enforced prone position for several minutes was a critical factor in Garner’s death. Opinions differ as to whether the hold was technically a chokehold, which is against NYPD regulations, and as to whether the hold contributed to Garner’s death. If the Mayor thought these things, however, that wasn’t what he said. Rather, he only commented “We all have a responsibility to work together to heal the wounds from decades of mistrust and create a culture where the police department and the communities they protect respect each other…”

Apparently this tepid suggestion that all might not be well between the police and minority communities was regarded in some quarters as somehow responsible for Brinsley’s violence.

At least that is what Patrick Lynch of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association seemed to be saying, when he proclaimed “That blood on the hands starts at the steps of City Hall in the office of the mayor.” Lynch then led officers who turned their backs on the Mayor at the Ramos funeral.

Non Sequitur Is a Restrained Way of Saying It

So, apparently, according to Lynch, you have blood on your hands if you so much as suggest that the police might ameliorate the disrespect they show in minority communities and then someone commits violence in claimed vindication of the dignity of those communities. The technical term for discourse like this is “non sequitur.” There are more common terms, but they’re not for a family paper.

You can see, though, why demagogues like Lynch have to resort to non sequitur; the facts, presented straightforwardly, as Judge Scheindlin did, do not support them. They cannot say publicly what a policeman I had the misfortune to spend an evening with recently told me privately: that minorities are mostly criminals who have to be controlled if cities are to remain governable. But that’s what they’re really thinking. Stop-and-frisk is all too often not about detecting or preventing crime; it’s about putting certain people in their supposed place.

So let’s start being honest about who’s really disrespecting whom.

A note to my readers: I had promised another column on secession this time. I’ll get back to it. But some events just push their way to the front.

__________________

[1] The quoted policeman tried to put a gloss on his remarks, saying that because the Mayor and his family had a police protection detail, a suggestion that the son should be wary of cops was a counsel to beware of his own protectors, and implicitly a belittlement of their power to protect him. But this is a wilful misreading of the Mayor’s advice, which was explicitly about what would happen if and when the son was “stopped” by the cops on the street. Manifestly, that was not going to happen while the protection detail was on duty; this was advice about other circumstances altogether. And the quoted cop knew this perfectly well. His outrage may have been real, but the reasoning behind it was clearly feigned.

[2] Owing to the space requirements of a column, I could not adequately distinguish a stop from a stop-and-frisk. The distinction accounts for the apparent anomaly in the figures I quote. We can assume that all frisks which turn up guns and contraband are likely to have resulted in further law enforcement action, but of course that percentage is far lower than the already-low 12% of all stops that did so. We must assume that the difference between the under-2% of stops which turned up contraband and guns and the 12% which warranted further law-enforcement action was that the remaining 10% or so that triggered further law enforcement action were not accompanied by the degrading frisks. However even a hostile stop is inherently disrespectful. It may be necessary from a law-enforcement perspective – sometimes – but it will always necessarily be disrespectful when it occurs, and breed resentment among its subjects, regardless of their criminality or lack thereof.

[3] I wish I could re-locate my authority for the 83% statistic. I know I had a source when I wrote this. But I have a misgiving that the source may have been an article by Bill Quigley, law professor at Loyola University New Orleans, in which he said that 83% of the people with life sentences from New York City are nonwhite. This is not insignificant, but obviously the class of those convicted of all kinds of crimes is much larger and potentially different in racial composition from the class of those sentenced to life. Based on the other statistics that Quigley cites,  however, I would be astonished if the percentage of nonwhites receiving life sentences differs much from the percentage of nonwhites simply being convicted. But figures which pinpoint this very issue seem to be hard to find, and I am proceeding in the faith that I had a source that spoke to this precise issue, without now being able to confirm it.

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The Best Revenge

You Oughta Know, by Alanis Morissette and Glen Ballard, performed by Alanis Morissette (1995), encountered 1995

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

Living well is the best revenge, goes the saying. By the time Alanis Morissette’s volcanically angry signature song You Oughta Know came to my attention, I’d already chosen the living well revenge for myself, over a year before. The anger that had driven me to choose that revenge was still fresh, though, and my anger was as persistent as Alanis’, too good to let go of even if one could have. And that mattered more than the obvious fact that whatever had provoked her anger was way different from what had provoked mine.[1] That’s why I would drive along with the cassette of her album Jagged Little Pill in my car radio, singing along at the top of my voice —

And every time you speak her name
Does she know how you told me you’d hold me
Until you died, till you died
But you’re still alive

— over and over again.

Paradoxically, I’m not sure I could have enjoyed my anger so much if I hadn’t reached a point in my life when, overall, I was calming down. I had been one to indulge my rages over the years, not only against the bad guys life sends one’s way but against the good guys, my family members especially. By now, though, I was coming to realize the moral imperative of holding my temper better. But temper and rage are one thing; this was different: productive, liberating anger.

In mid-1995, I still had a raging hangover of that anger.

Life as a Square Peg

Over what? You have to go back to what I call the Round Hole Law Firm where I found myself nominally a partner, in 1993. And let me be fair. I owe that firm my gratitude for rescuing my practice group and hence me from the collapse of the law firm that in these pages I have called Funhouse. And they were eventually kind enough to call me a partner. But I was a square peg at Round Hole, a lawyer whose work didn’t really fit any of the practice groups, and wasn’t plentiful enough so that I could constitute myself a practice group of my own. My square peg-ness became more apparent as my designated practice group’s principal client began withdrawing work for various reasons.

Now when you as a firm have a square peg, you can try to make a square hole by finding the person work he or she can grow. And heaven knows, I was doing everything within my power to be a good service partner and justify receiving that kind of help, should they choose to offer it.

They didn’t. Basically, they went to the other extreme.

There were two events.

Despicable

When you are hurting for a “book of business,” the one thing you most want is to develop one. But in a large law firm, the chances are that almost everything that might otherwise come your way falls into one of two forbidden categories: a) already spoken for or b) conflicted out. That is, either one of the people senior to you has already located that piece of business and laid claim to it, or the reason no one in the firm has it is that no one can touch it because of some kind of conflict of interest. It can make trying to market yourself very, very hard. I kept coming up against that problem.

Then, late in 1993, to my delight, something was offered to me that could have been profitable: a contractor’s claim for unpaid work building out some mall storefronts. Since the store chain involved hadn’t paid, my client had a claim against the chain’s surety. As it happened, Round Hole often represented sureties, but not this particular surety. So there was no direct conflict. Recognizing there was still a possibility of an “issues conflict” (where the firm might be required to make contrary arguments on the same legal issue for different clients), I carefully sought the blessing of the lawyers who did the surety work. Again, to my delight, I received that blessing. So I signed up the client.

And then I had to go into the hospital. I appear not to have written in these pages about my back problems. I have them, that’s all you really need to know. And at that point, I had them badly enough so that I needed to undergo surgery, be hospitalized, and take a week or so off from work as well. While I was in the hospital, however, some of the partners who had previously cleared my taking on the construction firm client in the first place fired the client without consulting me. When I got back, no one apologized, or even explained. My assumption is that the same partners who had originally discounted the possibility of an issues conflict had rethought the matter. Still, firing my client behind my back when I was sick in a hospital, a client everyone involved must have known I really needed, was simply despicable.

The Ritual

This was followed closely in time by the division of the profits at the end of 1993. All law firms, except those that are strictly “eat what you kill,” have to find some discretionary way of dividing up the profits. When you need an exercise of discretion, someone has to exercise it, and in most firms, the partners vested with the discretion are the partners with the clients. Not being one of them, I knew no one was going to invite me into that circle. Fine; but I wanted to think that the guys in that committee (I think they were all guys) would use their power fairly.  They were the folks mostly entrusted with the firm’s governance, after all, and I was (mostly willingly) trusting them with that as well (even though I had no choice).

The ritual at Round Hole was that each partner would sit down with the committee and justify his or her claim for a share of the firm’s profits. This was an exercise I am sure I would have found humiliating even if I had possessed a large “book of business.” But I tried to keep up my dignity. I was truly proud of my record as a service partner.

It will come as less of a shock to the reader than it did to me that I was not treated fairly. In fact, when the numbers came out, I could see that the members of the Committee had (in my view) paid themselves and their friends remarkably well at the expense of people like me. I had been screwed.

So there I was, screwed because I didn’t have a book of business, and screwed in trying to develop one. Just generally screwed all around.

I realized then that I faced a fundamental choice. No one had said a word to me, but I had been told remarkably clearly where I stood. I could see how the firm’s command structure felt privileged to treat me. There was no reason, given these cold realities, that I should expect anything better, if I stuck around.

Tim and Lou

It may seem incredible that sticking around even appeared an option. And it may not actually have been an option. In light of things that happened at Round Hole later on, I doubt I could have hung on forever. But the option seemed real to me then

Real and horrible. I had seen what that looked like.

One case was a partner I’ll call Tim. At one time, he must have had some self-regard. But he just didn’t have the business, and got by on handouts from others. By now, however, he was treated as a joke by his partners, even by his wife. And then he died. He died without having experienced dignity anywhere in his life for quite some time.

Then there was an “of counsel” I’ll call Lou. The firm had taken his one big case, his dowry, milked it, and then given him nothing back. Consequently he was coming into work each day and doing nothing. And as he told me confidentially, “There is no harder work than doing nothing.” Unlike Tim, he was rescued when an old colleague from before Round Hole invited him into a practice in another town. The last time I saw Lou, he had a spring in his step and a smile I had not seen in years.

So was I going to resign myself to being a Tim (a man without hope) or a Lou (whose hope consisted of waiting for someone to pull him out)? The answer might seem obvious. But actually choosing anything different was a hard decision. True, I had been flirting with variations on the theme of escape for a few years. I had quietly interviewed with other firms (always coming up against the same barrier of no book, despite my credentials). I had tried to do a business plan for going out on my own (but always running up against that same barrier). I might be willing to make a bet on myself, even though I had practically no “portables.” But I had three kids for whose education I was paying at least a share. Making a bet on myself would be forcing a lot of other people to make a bet on me as well.

I could very well have stood poised on the edge of the diving board forever, or, like Tim, walked sadly back to poolside. What decided me to jump? The anger, of course.

No Business Plan for Moses

I was coldly furious at many of the people I was constrained to be polite to as I met them in the office, day after day. They did not deserve my cheery greetings, which were sticking in my throat. I had to take these two incidents as a sign from God; I reflected that Moses could never have had a business plan when he left Egypt either. You had to be crazy enough to count on some parted seas and columns of fire and manna and burning bushes and water flowing out of rocks.

As a wiser Jiminy Cricket might have said, Always let your anger be your guide.

So, at the beginning of January, 1994, I announced that I would be resigning effective the last day of February, and starting my own practice the following day.

Having done one bold and risky thing, I then spent the next two months trying as hard as I could to be careful and provident. I rented space, had stationery designed and printed, bought malpractice insurance, acquired a computer and staged it with carefully selected software, borrowed some starting capital from my stepdad and my father-in-law, ordered office furniture, etc.

As the day approached, it got scarier and scarier. But the anger kept me going. I was damned if I was going to stay subjected to people who had treated me that way. And the way the upcoming  division of my work was being handled didn’t do anything to cool me down. It was made very clear that, even though I was the one who had been in nearly sole charge of the railroad asbestos business described in an earlier piece, I could have that over their dead bodies. And mine. (Nothing like someone else’s greed to keep the blood boiling.)

Jailbreak

Of course I got no work done on my last day, Monday, February the 28^th. Much of my stuff had already been moved to my new quarters. At the end of the day, a colleague helped me haul the last couple of loads to my car. It all came to a very quiet conclusion.

The next day, in my new office, with the new furniture not yet delivered and the new computer somewhat balky, it was not until my landlord, whom I want to thank by name for his many kindnesses towards me – Nevett Steele –  called me into the library of his suite where I was subletting space and presented me with a sheet cake, copied here, the decoration of which bears close inspection (click on it), that I suddenly began to have a conviction, not merely a hope, that somehow things were going to be all right.

And then the phone started to ring. Former colleagues at the big firm referred cases. Old clients turned up with new business. Friends sent friends. People I’d never heard of referred other people I’d never heard of.  People I’d applied to for a job sent cases. One lawyer who had formerly been my adversary in a number of matters asked me to represent him personally. To my delight I was making ends meet, and doing better work, too, simply because I was happier than I had been in a long time. I had not budgeted to turn a profit at all in the first year, but I was into the black in only fourteen weeks. I started repaying the parental loans. I and my family never missed a meal. The State Bar Association started responding to my oft-expressed wishes to be involved. Friends from big firms were asking me about my break for freedom, and I could hear a wistful note in their voices.

March 1, 1994, the date I inaugurated my practice, turned out to have been the beginning of the three happiest years of my professional life, when I was entirely on my own. (No aspersions on anything that happened later, mind you.) It was the best revenge.

_______________

[1]  There is what they call a cottage industry of speculation over the identity of the original of the unnamed man to whom the song is addressed, which Morissette has been encouraging in a teasing way. But while the song clearly concerns a romantic and sexual breakup, the Wikipedia article on the album tells a different story that may better explain the song’s truly obsessive quality: “Morissette later revealed that, during her stay in Los Angeles, she was robbed on a deserted street by a man with a gun. After the robbery, Morissette developed an intense and general angst and suffered daily panic attacks. She was hospitalized and attended psychotherapy sessions, but it didn’t improve her emotional status. As Morissette later revealed in interviews, she focused all her inner problems on the soul-baring lyrics of the album, for her own health.” The story is told without citation, and I am no Morissette scholar. But it feels right. In either case, whether Morissette was the victim of PTSD from having been threatened at gunpoint or had merely suffered a particularly pronounced case of broken heart, her emotional state was only like mine, not the same. This doesn’t mean her song shouldn’t have spoken to my own situation.

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

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Rebeck Loses Some Edge but the Cast Does Not in SEMINAR at FPCT

Michael Zemarel, Anne Shoemaker, Alex Smith, Cassandra Dutt, Eric C. Stein

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com November 16, 2014

Theresa Rebeck‘s 2011 play Seminar, now being revived at Baltimore’s Fells Point Corner Theatre, is a little less hard-boiled than Mauritius (performed in 2011 at FPCT) or The Understudy, recently staged at the Everyman across town. And that lack of edge is the play’s loss. Seminar starts out strong, ripping into the fabric of the business of teaching fiction writing with knife-edged one-liners and characters you love to despise; then, as the plot, the characterizations, and the theme take a hairpin turn, it emerges that, no, the teaching is not a scam after all, the students’ fiction has possibilities, and the characters are not what we thought them. All Rebeck’s hilarious savagery dissipates. Like Rebeck’s writing and show-running for the first season of TV’s Smash, it is a little too affectionate toward the business and the people in it to stay as scathing as Rebeck could and should keep it.

None of this is the fault of Steve Goldklang’s direction or the acting of the small ensemble, all of which was top-notch. Director and actors jointly make what can be made of the material – and a lot can be made of it. Rebeck always writes generously for her actors, giving them plenty of great lines, plenty of room to emote and back story to explain the emotion. With all this going for it, the show is entertaining enough so that when the final 20 minutes or so comes, the audience is apt to forgive the way Rebeck blows up her own work and the spotty exposition that leaves certain key facts unintentionally ambiguous.

Eric C. Stein, in a role originated by Alan Rickman and taken over by Jeff Goldblum (hard shoes to think of filling), is novelist-turned-guru Leonard, alternating imperious putdowns of the cowering covey of insecure egos who are his postulants with Hemingway-like chest-thumping earned by spending time in tough places like Somalia. Stein can sneer and thump with the best of them. Anne Shoemaker is a pleasure to watch as Kate (who develops from Austen wannabe to ghostwriter for tough guys); her subtle reactions (quiet embarrassment at a fellow-student’s humiliation, blood draining from face at her own, glow of sexual satisfaction at a third place) are simply terrific acting. I enjoyed watching Alex Smith as Douglas, a sort of dim cousin of Charles Van Doren of Quiz Show fame, who is deliriously funny as he waffles on and on using meaningless jargon and trying to cover up that he didn’t know there was no “d” in Inigo Jones while describing the site of a prestigious writers’ conference his fortunate connections got him invited to (and the others did not). It can take talent to portray talentlessness. Michael Zemarel and Cassandra Dutt, whose characters round out the circle of nervous and sex-obsessed scribblers, are also very good.

I also enjoyed the incidental music that played during the blackouts for scene changes, though the program doesn’t tell us where it came from. It sounds a bit like David Carbonara’s Mad Men scores, though a bit trombone-ier. It does not sound like at least those parts of John Gromada‘s Broadway score for the show that can be heard on Spotify.

Fells Point Corner Theater continues to exemplify the best of the non-fringe community theater in Baltimore, providing solid productions of mostly contemporary drama, with acting and direction so good you usually can’t tell it apart from what you see at the city’s professional companies. Seminar is right in line with that.

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

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Look, Matthew, It’s You!

The Rainbow Connection, by Paul Williams and Kenny Ascher, performed by Kermit the Frog (Jim Henson), 1979 (encountered ca. 1991)

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

In 1990, after about two years of marriage, Mary and I became parents. For me it was a second go at fatherhood, a chance to do it better.

I was not disappointed and, I hope, did not disappoint.

Almost immediately it was clear that our son Matthew’ life was lived mostly in the sunshine. Lots of laughter, lots of enthusiasm. I have a wonderful video of Matt right after he’d learned to walk, just following me around the house, giggling with excitement. It sums up our one-year-old. Of course no child is always happy, and Matthew, our tiny son, could start that little lower lip trembling with incipient tears at the drop of a hat; any frustration would do. Still, there were a lot more laughs than tears.

His older brother accurately said of Matt a little later that his tail was always wagging. And while I know that every child brings something uniquely his or her own to the relationship with parents, I am certain that coming up in an atmosphere of palpable stability and love improves the odds of happiness. I couldn’t sufficiently provide these the first time around; this time I could.

You could see this dynamic in Matthew’s efforts to learn to speak. It was a joyous thing for him. He had a “language tape,” a VHS video transcription of the first three Muppet movies that I had made in the previous decade for his older brother and sister during a Muppet marathon on old Channel 45. It was complete with commercials and station breaks and really, really bad video, but it was perfect for Matt.

For instance, there’s a moment when the Kermit and Fozzie are behind the wheel of a Studebaker en route to Hollywood, and they come upon a billboard on which the evil Doc Hopper (Charles Durning) has appropriated Kermit’s likeness to sell his would-be fast food Doc Hopper’s Frog Legs. “Kermit, it’s you!” exclaims Fozzie in astonishment. Matt, who watched the tape a lot, and whose command of his own name was still a little wobbly, would go around saying things like: “Look, Mytoo, it’s you!” He mined the three movies for all sorts of things like that.

Of course, it was more than the lexical vocabulary of the movies; Matt inhaled the sunny, madcap spirit of them, and the music. And now the music makes me think of him at that age.

Midway through The Muppet Movie, Dr. Teeth and his band crowd around a copy of the script of The Muppet Movie, reading the movie’s own first scene: “Exterior. Swamp. Day. In a long helicopter shot we discover Kermit the Frog playing his banjo and singing.”[1] Dr. Teeth doesn’t get around to telling us what Kermit was singing, but the audience members are not likely to forget; once having heard The Rainbow Connection, Kermit’s wistful but hopeful little tear-jerker, one will never be free of it.

It is a song with two sides: the as-yet unsatisfied pursuit of wonder and the faith (naive or not, you choose) that we will attain it one day. It is not a religious song, because the wonder the frog aspires to find is probably earthly (though I have heard the song sung in church), but it is close to a secular equivalent.

When we get older, we know that in this life at least we will never quite find that rainbow connection that Kermit aspires to with such touching confidence. But we grownups tend not to tell our children about that letdown. Childhood should be touched by magic.

Matt’s was.

[1]. Per the Wikipedia entry (accessed 11/16/2014): “To perform Kermit static on a log, Jim Henson squeezed into a specially designed metal container complete with an air hose (to breathe), a rubber sleeve which came out of the top to perform Kermit and a monitor to see his performance, and placed himself under the water, log, and the Kermit puppet. He was also assisted in this operation by Kathryn Mullen and Steve Whitmire. This scene took five days to film.”

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

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Secession’s Dueling Rules: Self-Determination vs. Uti Possidetis

Published in the Maryland Daily Record December 10, 2014

Blame (or credit) Woodrow Wilson. And the Russians. It was reportedly Wilson in 1918 who first spoke of “the right of self-determination of peoples” as something international law should recognize. A convenient thing, perhaps, for an American president to support when American had no empire to speak of[1] and its rivals for international influence did, but a laudable ideal. The concept did not truly catch on until 1945, however. In that year, the Soviets, who doubtless recognized decolonialization as a likely way to increase the world’s stock of socialist and autocratic governments, had their own reasons for insisting, successfully, that the self-determination principle be recognized in Articles 1 and 55 of the United Nations Charter.[2]

Self-Determination Includes Secession

So, as a matter of international law, “peoples” were pronounced to have that right to “self-determination.” But it couldn’t just be about colonies. Inevitably, “peoples” would sometimes seek to exercise that right by “self-determining” to secede from countries where they lived. And they too could claim the sanction of international law.

Sometimes the resulting divorces were cataclysmic: the 1947 partition of Pakistan and India, resulting in an incomplete separation of Hindu and Muslim “peoples,” uprooted 10 to 20 million people and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.  By contrast, the 1992 splitting of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic, commonly called the “Velvet Divorce,” only required a Slovakian declaration of independence and some negotiation, and came off without any loss of life.

Most secessions and would-be secessions fall somewhere in between India’s horror and Czechoslovakia’s mundaneness. But almost all are problematical. The biggest problem often is that “peoples” are theoretically guaranteed the right to divorce, but territory isn’t. Yet necessarily and thus inevitably, separating “peoples” wants to break off chunks of territory with them. And the United Nations Charter which guarantees the right to secede says nothing about how maps are redrawn. In the real world, though, there may be competing claims to land. “Peoples” may occupy multiple lands, and multiple “peoples” may occupy a single land. So what becomes of the map when one “people” decides to withdraw?

Uti Possidetis and the Map

There is only one legal principle I know of that addresses this problem, but it isn’t much help. Known at uti possidetis, it has its origins in Roman law. In its original incarnation, the principle ordained that the boundaries of the territory held by the victor at the end of a war would continue in force thereafter (until the next war, presumably). As the Spanish empire crumbled in the 19^th Century, uti possidetis came to mean that Latin American countries chipped out of that empire’s rubble would retain colonial borders.[3] And in the last century and a half, it has effectively meant that in national divorces, customary boundaries persist. This sounds benign until you realize how it works in a secessionist context.

We have seen some alarming impacts from attempts to apply it. Take one example from the breakup of Yugoslavia: the case of Kosovo. Before the death of Yugoslavia’s dictator Tito in 1980, the boundaries of Kosovo were fixed: it was a recognized province. But it was sacred both to the ethnic Albanians and to the Serbs who were a minority within the province. After Tito’s death, the country of Serbia-Montenegro was formed from part of the Yugoslavian territory, and included Kosovo. The boundaries of Serbia were specifically fixed by reference to uti possidetis.[4] When the Albanian Kosovars, surely a “people” with the meaning of the Charter, began fighting for Kosovo’s independence, the Serbs, aided by the central government, engaged in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against them that was only stopped by Western bombing. Kosovo became independent, and eventually a nation. The Serbian Kosovars (and the Roma) then largely left the province. Only at that point and by that process did the boundaries of the nation correspond to the boundaries of a people. And that result was only reached when uti possidetis was in effect overruled by Western arms.

Blood and the Map

Say what you will about Radko Mladic, the Serbian general responsible for some of the worst atrocities; he summed it up neatly with the phrase “borders are always written in blood” – rather than by applying neutral principles. And he was right; in a situation where self-determination and uti possidetis could not both be honored, NATO shed Serbian blood to affirm the Kosovars’ self-determination.

Of course, the story does not end there.

The lesson that the West preferred self-determination and borders written in blood to uti possidetis was not lost on Serbia’s ally Russia, which, in the name of self-determination, has absorbed South Osetia from Georgia, and then the Crimea from Ukraine, and is on course to absorb more of Eastern Ukraine as well. Putin claims to be doing what the West did in Kosovo. And he might be – if Crimea and Eastern Ukraine really had been “yearning to breath free of Ukraine. (According to polling conducted this year, though, the “peoples” of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, if honestly consulted, would probably have expressed a preference to stay with Ukraine or at least not join Russia.)[5] But Russia has nonetheless called the West on its inconsistency: supporting self-determination and borders written in blood in Kosovo and uti possidetis in Ukraine.

Iraq and Kurdistan: Uti Possidetis at its Worst

Another bad theoretical mess and worse human tragedy arising from the interplay of self-determination and uti possidetis can be seen in two related errors left by the withdrawal of the British mandate in the Middle East in the 1920s. First, as the British exited, they tried to cobble together one country (Iraq), by conjoining three vilayets (provinces of the Ottoman empire), one predominantly Shiite, one predominantly Sunni, and one predominantly Kurdish. In keeping with uti possidetis, the administrative boundaries were observed; the “peoples,” however, were locked in a national cage together. Worse, the Kurds were parceled out among five countries (Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Armenia).

We all know how well all that’s worked. Up until ISIS, no one had been able to break out of the cage of Iraq; and even now, the Kurds have nothing like a homeland. And, oh, yes, hundreds of thousands have died.

So How Is It Done?

Probably because secession can lead to such intractable problems with national borders, various statements of principle, treaties, and law review articles have discovered qualifications on the right of secession: it is described as only available, for instance where a minority is gravely oppressed, or only available to indigenous peoples to a limited degree, like Indian reservations. None of these qualifications are found in the UN Charter, though. And many of those qualifications would in practice lock minorities into countries where they are oppressed and don’t fit.

If we’re going to be serious about the right to secede, then, we have to figure out better how it’s done, and not in places like Scotland that take an orderly vote, but in places like Kosovo, where large groups hate and distrust each other. I’ll talk about that next time.

_________________

[1]. The lands seized from Spain in the Spanish-American War (principally Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines) plus Hawaii and Alaska (later to become parts of the U.S.), were America’s approximation of an empire at the time. These were dwarfed in land, population, and resources by the contemporaneous British and French empires. (See Wikipedia article here and summary here.)

[2]. Frederic L. Kirgis, Jr., The Degrees of Self-Determination in the United Nations Era, 88 Am. J. Int’l L. 304, 304 (1994).

[3]. The map of South America had been drawn in such a way that none of it lay outside the boundaries of one or another province of one European empire or another (mostly the empire of Spain). But maps were one thing and actual dominion another. There was a fear that if countries split off from the empire laying claim only to the lands their governments actually controlled, this could lead to terrae nullius, territory that belonged to no one and might give rise to conflicts later. In order to forestall the development of such problems, international law insisted that the dominion of the new countries extended to the old, exhaustive colonial boundaries.

[4]. Yugoslav Arbitration Comm’n Opinion No. 2, 92 ILR 168, cited in Malcolm Shaw, Peoples, Territorialism and Boundaries, 3 European Journal of International Law 478, 495-96 (1997).

[5]. On Crimea, see the reporting on a poll conducted in January. And a poll conducted in East Ukraine shortly before the unacknowledged Russian invasion said the same.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Strange Places

Published in The Hopkins Review, New Series 7.4 (Fall 2014)

Some plays are born strange, some achieve strangeness, and some have strangeness thrust upon them (or upon their characters, at least). We consider one of each type herein.

All with the Surname Jones

Born strange is certainly a fair characterization of Will Eno’s play The Realistic Joneses, recently at the Lyceum. The New York Times’ Charles Isherwood was up in arms that the play, which he called “the most stimulating, adventurous and flat-out good play to be produced on Broadway this year,” received no Tony nominations, but it’s pretty clear why that didn’t happen: to borrow a phrase from Frank Zappa, it just “looked too weird.” The surface is all the blandest-sounding conversation, studded with a few jokes, among four white middle-aged, middle-class denizens of some exurban-to-rural residential lane, all with the surname Jones. This bland surface challenges the audience to be on the lookout for minuscule conversational ripples possibly hinting of some kind of drama going on unseen, down beneath. But the little ripples might just as likely be meaningless, and Eno is nearly mum as to the real depth of any ripple. A sample from the early going, where new neighbors Pony (Marisa Tomei) and John (Michael C. Hall) are paying a first visit to residents Bob (Tracy Letts) and Jennifer (Toni Collette):

PONY

Hi. We’re Pony and John. You must be the Joneses. It’s on your mailbox. We’re Joneses, too. We’re renting the house at the end of the road with the blue shutters and the–

JOHN

(Interrupting.) It’s like two-hundred feet from here. It’s right over there.

BOB

Sure, we know that house. Someone else used to live there.

JOHN

Wow. Who knew the place had such an interesting history.

PONY

Look at these salt and pepper shakers. Cute.

BOB

(Picking one up:) These were made at a factory.

JENNIFER

Bob is filled with fun facts like that. (To PONY and JOHN:) Can you sit down?

JOHN

I practically invented sitting down. Actually, that’s not true.

There could be all kinds of aggression going on in this exchange. John might be poking fun at Bob for his vagueness about the previous residents of Pony and John’s house. Bob might be putting down Pony for purporting to find anything interesting in the mass-produced salt- and pepper-shakers. Jennifer might be chastising Bob that cheap shot at Pony (if it was one). John might be engaging in self-criticism for recumbent inertia or in self-pity for whatever drives him to sit. Or he might be acknowledging that his remark about sitting down was simply idle conversation reflective neither of the truth nor of any deeper meaning. Or there might indeed be deeper meaning and truth that John is trying to walk back because he is not ready to share.

Not Telling Us Much

Eno is not going to tell us much for sure. He is going to force the audience to turn its analytical gears endlessly but to little definite end. There is only one untold secret that will definitely be revealed concerning these two couples: both husbands are suffering from the same (fictive) rare degenerative disease, and both couples seem to have moved to this unnamed purlieu to be close to one of the few specialists who has any idea how to monitor and perhaps treat it. This of course places similar strains on their wives and marriages. Each husband seems to flirt with the wife of the other couple, but maybe not. Each husband seems to be in some kind of denial, but maybe not. Nothing changes much in their lives because of any of these things as the play progresses.

At the end, the four of them are sitting outside staring at the night sky in a state of relative contentment, very little having changed since the beginning of the first act. Each of the men tries to put into words how he feels about living with the disease. First Bob: “I have my days. Sometimes, I feel like the luckiest man on the face of the Earth. Except for the late Lou Gehrig.” We know on one level what the wisecrack means, a reference to the signature remark of the most famous man ever to suffer from a degenerative disease. But Gehrig’s sense of luckiness is quite debatable in view of the end the disease took him to. And Gehrig’s life up to that point had been brilliant, unlike Bob’s, and hence arguably lucky overall, notwithstanding the worse luck rapidly approaching. Even if Lou Gehrig’s remark made sense coming from Gehrig, then, it makes a lot less sense coming from Bob Jones. Bob’s remark, moreover, is prefaced with the qualifier “sometimes.” How does Bob sum it up when summing up for all times? We aren’t told.

Then John tries.

JOHN

Okay. If you took the night, if you somehow took all the darkness of the night, and then, like, if you have the ocean, or, if you took all the people… wow, this is a hard one.

PONY

You’re tired. You can finish it later. (Very brief pause. JOHN is shivering.) Are you cold?

JOHN

I’m all right. (PONY rubs his arms or shoulder.) That feels good.

JENNIFER

I do love the sky. The night sky.

JOHN

Yeah. That’s my whole contribution. Yeah.

The inarticulacy of this summation, almost the last speech in the play, would not do at all in a conventional well-made play, but it may be close to the point in this work. We don’t know much, there is no objective order or meaning in what we can see, and there are no big statements to be made about it, seems to be what Eno is driving at. That is the realism of The Realistic Joneses. But art, dramatic art not least, typically aspires to present both order and meaning, even if it courts less realism in the process.

As Frank Zappa Put It

This combination of indeterminate action, dramatic formlessness and thematic drift can only be called strange. If it belongs to any tradition, it is surely the Theater of the Absurd, yet it feels more uncanny than, say, the archetypal Absurd work Waiting for Godot, which combines many of the same elements and outlook in the same apparently inconsequential way. But even in Godot there are things happening; there are quarrels and a reversible master-slave relationship, and a mystery about footwear. There is provocative symbolism. And even the point about maintaining some kind of positive attitude in the face of objective pointlessness seems more poignantly realized.

The all-star casting contributed to the sense of disappointment I felt (also expressed by many members of the online community). Four versatile actors, each capable of expressing the largest range of emotions, called upon to exploit so little of that potential for so long (ninety whole minutes)! Of course they could deliver the occasional wisecrack expertly. But it hardly seemed enough. Apart from the aforementioned Charles Isherwood, there were those who were more impressed than I. The play and the ensemble received 2014 Drama Desk Special Awards. That said, it “looks too weird” to be produced much.

Headed for the Dinner Theaters

Heathers, by contrast, is headed for every dinner theater in the country (at least those that allow blue language and simulated sex), after its off-Broadway run at New World Stages. It is a tuneful and canny reworking of a challenging ur-work, the 1988 movie of the same name that starred Winona Ryder and Christian Slater. And one might say that it is an exercise in strangeness achieved. There is a tradition of “horror musicals” (Little Shop of Horrors, Carrie, Sweeney Todd among them), and they all tend to earn their strangeness as they proceed.

The uncomfortably familiar subject here is school bullying, specifically the kind of bullying carried out by those universal fixtures of high school life Tina Fey memorably labeled simply Mean Girls, young women with the looks, the clothing, the money, the social capital and the casual malevolence to make other young women feel unpopular and second-rate. Unfortunately there is nothing strange or unfamiliar about Mean Girls, or in the wish of those the Mean Girls bully to see their tormentors dead.

That is not to say it should not be strange, this hegemony of the hated. As Veronica, the heroine (Barrett Wilbert Weed), observes: “I don’t know anyone who actually likes Heather, but we still allow her rule over us. Heather is our reality and reality sucks.” But it is so universal an experience, it amounts to business as usual.

Moral Equivalence?

What’s unusual is the bloodlust of the underdogs, topped by the willingness of the show at least to entertain the notion that there is a moral equivalence between desiring that kind of revenge and being the tormentors against whom revenge is taken. Of course the common-sense correct answer is that there is no proportionality between the sin of being a Mean Girl (bad as it is) and the crime of murder. But the working-out of this answer in the dialectic of the show does not feel much like the accession of common sense; it is more grand guignol than happy resolution.

I don’t mean to suggest that these are serious ruminations; though dark in tone, this is still light entertainment. Yet exploring lethal revenge, however comically, is going to a dark place, the more so since the real-life rise of suicides and school shootings that the perpetrators seem to view as a response to just such garden-variety high school and college provocations. (These words are being written three days after sorority girls were among those targeted by a young killer who explained his actions by saying he felt sexually rejected.)

The plot, for those unfamiliar with the movie, follows Veronica, the heroine, as she apprentices herself to the Mean Girls (each named Heather) and joins in their gratuitous cruelties, and then graduates to being the sidekick of rebel J.D. (Ryan McCartan), becoming an accomplice after the fact as he does away with one of the Heathers as well as two dim rapist-jock boys with whom they associate – and helps prompt two suicide attempts.

“The Weirdest Fucking Thing”

It is not that Veronica fails to notice she’s left everyday existence. When she witnesses an encounter between J.D. and his dad in which each says the other’s lines, the stage directions advise: “This is the weirdest fucking thing she’s ever experienced in her young life.” But even stranger than what she witnesses is what she becomes. We see her change from a reasonably well-grounded girl who loyally hangs with her unfashionable grade-school friend to someone who participates in a scheme to humiliate that friend to someone who sings with J.D., as the campaign against the jocks heats up: “We’re what killed the dinosaurs. / We’re the asteroid that’s overdue.” In momentarily sharing J.D.’s zest for nihilistic destruction, she has worsted the Heathers’ worst. She is herself the nightmare.

Eventually, Veronica rebels against J.D. as well, foiling a Columbine-scale act of carnage he had planned, except that J.D. does fulfill his own obvious death wish for himself. But the world she returns to after this denouement remains savage because the adults who should be in charge are all distracted by their own preoccupations. If anything objective has improved because of Veronica’s journey to the moral underworld, that is not made clear. High school is about over for her and her class, so there would be little scope for any enlightenment she had acquire to enjoy any practical effect, and it is not even clear that Veronica, even with her newfound insight, intends to do anything other than rule the roost herself. She sings:

This sounds good, but just before she sings it, she has seized the red “scrunchie” that was the badge of the alpha female from one of the surviving Heathers’ hair. That accessory, as we have seen, could be as dangerous to the wearer’s moral constitution as Tolkien’s One Ring. Thus, for all the peppy music at the end, the audience does not feel as if a safer or more familiar world has necessarily been established. There could be worse than the Heathers yet to come.

Almost Good Enough to Eat

This would be a little too unsettling tonally to make a conventional hit musical, especially one with the “legs” to get played in all the dinner theaters. Changes were required, and they have been made. The biggest are simply a matter of the standard craft of musicals: music, lyrics, dance, lighting and costume. While in the original there was also a deliberate primary color scheme for the three Heathers and for Veronica, as well as basic juvenile delinquent black for J.D., here the whole color scheme is amped up, and everyone looks almost good enough to eat, as echoed by the second number in which the Heathers exult in their controlling lives, CANDY STORE.

The casting helps too, particularly Barrett Wilbert Weed as Veronica, the role Winona Ryder played in the original. Although Ryder’s face has grown more expressive with age, Ryder was only 17 when the movie came out, and her features seemed unformed, which worked well for a sort of female Candide let loose in the worst of all possible worlds. Weed, perhaps five years older now than Ryder was then, has a more adult face, with a seemingly permanent ironic half-smile; in some sense her Veronica is always in on the joke, which gives the audience permission to be in on it too.

Time has also been on the side of one of the principal jokes. The two rapist jocks, before their demise, were given to voicing homophobic putdowns, and ironically, in both movie and musical, J.D.’s murder of them is covered up by making their deaths look like a homosexual suicide pact. But a consensus has formed in the years between movie and musical that homophobia is not only contemptible but probably hypocritical (often affected by closet cases) and in any event certainly comical on some level. So homophobia is now as conventional a target for mirth as homosexuality used to be, a development the musical fully exploits, with the two bereaved fathers singing the song MY DEAD GAY SON and revealing their own past relationship.

You Can Still Travel Back

Finally, J.D.’s motivations have been slightly reworked. In the movie and the musical, there is a bit of an explanatory backstory (traumatic loss of a mother), but Slater’s J.D. is always simply using Veronica. In the musical (book, music and lyrics by Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe), it seems that J.D.’s love for Veronica, however twisted in conception or execution, is sincere. (“Our love is God,” J.D. explains, as he hatches mayhem, including a faked suicide for Veronica.) The manipulation of Veronica and the Columbine plot at the end are in service of his vision, demented though it be, of dying as one with her, and he may actually believe it would leave a better world. (“Just wait till you see the good that comes of this.”) So the stage Veronica hasn’t traveled quite as far into the world of strangeness as the cinematic one, and the way back, necessary to create the right tone at the end, isn’t quite so much of a stretch for her, nor, by extension, for the audience.

In any event, one goes to a horror musical, as one goes to a horror movie, to be wrenched out of a sense of comfort. The restoration of comfort may not come entirely or even partly from within the work, but simply from the fact that one can and must get up and leave the auditorium at the end. After two hours of frisson, normality is there whether we like it or not.

The Old Normal

To shift one’s gaze from Heathers to The City of Conversation is to move from a fictional and exaggerated strangeness to one that was historical, and tremendously unsettling to those it affected. Anthony Giardina’s play, recently at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre in Lincoln Center, recounts a sea change in the nation’s political atmosphere that caught the inhabitants of the old order unawares. The old normality – or at least its upholders seem to have felt it so – was the civilized life of Georgetown, the social hub of Washington from the 1930s to the dawn of the Reagan era. It was normal in that time and place for powerful men to lock horns in the glare of the day on Capitol Hill and then to retire in the shade of evening to certain select salons, ruled by certain select hostesses, to drink and dine and make decisions and deals. A discreet flag of truce flew over these evening gatherings so that the business could be done.  The system was based on sometimes unacknowledged friendships and mutual respect across the aisle which enabled compromises. It was normal for the nation’s business to be transacted in this way, so that the business could be transacted and for today’s new norm, gridlock, to be avoided.

As chronicled in City of Conversation, however, the Nixon presidency, the Reagan revolution and (though it isn’t named because the action ends before the name for it emerged) the Tea Party insurgency have progressively anathematized compromise and substituted mutual contempt for the old friendships and respect. The play recreates the arrival of this savage new world by following its impact upon the life of a Kennedy-era hostess named Hester Ferris (Jan Maxwell) and her family. Hester initially struggles to believe, against growing evidence, that the change is only temporary. But it is not.

The New Normal Begins

We come upon Hester after the first of these three shocks, the Nixon presidency, has already occurred. Although the play does not reference it, obviously the Watergate burglary and coverup were sterling examples of the kind of demonizing of the opposition diametrically opposite to the mutual respect under which the old Georgetown had functioned. Nixon’s approach to Georgetown’s tradition of government-by-dinner-party is discussed.

HESTER

Nixon did away with all that.

COLIN [her son]

Vietnam did away with all that.

HESTER

Fair enough. But Nixon killed it by deciding to be afraid of us …

Nor is the Carter administration is viewed as what the situation requires: “[T]his band of mugwumps in the White House, this southern cabal,” Hester calls them. But Hester is scheming to help engineer a Kennedy restoration under Teddy. “We’re an arm of the government, you might say. Georgetown. Dinners in Georgetown. Or we were. And will be again.”

So what was it about the Kennedy and Johnson years for Hester? For such a dyed-in-the-wool royalist, she is not given lines that explain it fully. Her most direct remark is: “Say what you will about the Kennedys. They know how to use us to move a social agenda forward.” Elsewhere, though, playwright Giardina has made it explicit that that agenda was both liberal and assumed to be permanent, even if subject to temporary interruptions. He speaks of “the great sixties assumption that there was a permanent Washington, that liberalism would always triumph, that all those unpleasant Republican attempts to undo the great progressive agenda were only brushfires, to be put out as soon as Democrats were in the majority again.”[1] A further implication of this outlook would be the expectation that when conservatives broke bread with liberals, the outcome would generally be the cooptation of the conservatives.

Guile or Maybe Contempt?

Of course, to a conservative who was aware of these assumptions the lesson would be to beware of attempts by liberals to forge personal ties or even to break bread. At best, the liberal sociability would mask guile, at worst contempt. And many of the people who came to power with Nixon and Reagan were convinced that guile and contempt were all that did lie behind the Georgetown conviviality. Partly it was a matter of Georgetown’s elitist roots.

Hester seems initially oblivious to either the wariness or the resentment this causes outside the charmed circle. Anna (Kristen Bush), Hester’s brilliant young Minneapolis-born Reaganite daughter-in-law-to-be (in the first act), daughter-in-law (in the beginning of the second), and former daughter-in-law (in latter half of the second), explains her rejection of this world:

Oh yes, the Georgetown rules. I think that would be a lot easier for me if I didn’t find your side so repulsive. The tortoise shell glasses. The grooming of the liberal intelligentsia. The pinhead look. I like a sexy man. I like rough Republicans. I like drinking with them and I like their fuck you attitude and the fact that they come from places like I come from and played sandlot baseball and worked after school. I understand them, and when they pour me a drink it’s filled to the brim and they look at my ass and don’t apologize-

Much the same comes from the wife of a Kentucky senator explaining why Hester is not invited to join a Congressional wives’ book club:

We started it, Congressional ladies from places like Kentucky and Iowa and Nebraska, to defend ourselves from people like you, Mrs. Ferris, who might think that because we come from backwater places, that we are backwater people.

Although the revenge of the Reaganites has surely brought to Washington the ascendancy of money the likes of which was not seen since the Gilded Age, and hence of an elitism, albeit one of a different stripe, it seems that part of Reaganism’s original power was the resentment of people ostentatiously omitted from the elite, people that Hester and her colleagues deemed of no account.

Not Taking Responsibility

Nor have Hester and her ilk truly taken responsibility for their signature act of arrogance: Vietnam. As Anna says: “Look where [President Johnson] took us. Deeper into a war he refused to win. Into an enormous defeat that left us devastated as a country in terms of purpose. No one respects us in the world anymore.”

In Act One, Hester does not get it. Reagan she dismisses as “that washed up movie star governor,” even as Anna and then Colin try to tell her how her world has run up quite a tab of resentment with a major portion of the electorate, a resentment for which Reagan has become spokesman. The balance of the play is devoted to the exposition of how the Hester’s part of that initially unrecognized tab is paid.

Act Two concerns a Hester who no longer regards her era as an interregnum; she now understand herself and her friends to be waging a long twilight struggle with the forces of reaction. In 1987 these forces are personified by Robert Bork, whose Supreme Court nomination she is lobbying against (an effort which will succeed, as the audience knows). Both she and Anna comment on how many fights the liberals have lost in the intervening years. The two women are trying to keep their personal relationship from being derailed by their political antagonism, as there is now a grandson for whom Hester sits.

Unfortunately for them both, and perhaps inevitably, Anna stumbles upon hidden evidence of Hester’s carefully-targeted activism against the Bork nomination, a nomination which Anna, from within the Department of Justice, is trying to see through. Anna being the uncompromising soul she is, she insists that if Hester does not stop, Anna will cut off access to the beloved grandson. Hester, being the principled soul she is, will not relent, be the cost what it may. But she hopes the cost will not be what Anna stipulates. “[A]fterwards, we will forgive,” Hester says, harking back to the old ways. Anna responds: “Hester, the stakes have changed. We are in this because we want fiercely to protect people…, [p]eople you believe do not need protection, and we will not stop- or temper the fight just to get along. Colin will not forgive you and neither will I.” The family irretrievably fractures over this dispute.

Moral Equivalence? — Again

One question the play poses is whether these choices are morally equivalent acts. Certainly in each case, the woman is placing political rivalries above human and family ties. It seems to be Playwrighting 101 doctrine that in a play about ideas, both sides will have equally good talking points and, if possible, equal moral plausibility. As already illustrated, Giardina is willing to give Anna some of the good talking points, but he is not willing to stoop to what President Obama recently called false equivalence, as to either national or familial politics. We know that, for all of her side’s failings, when the catastrophe that Hester did not see coming struck, her actions were justified politically and personally, and Anna’s were not.

If anything were needed to make this clear, it occurs in the second half of the second act, set on the night of the first Obama inauguration. Ethan, the boy from whom Hester was separated in 1987, is now a young man revisiting his grandmother for the first time since the split, in the company of his gay black lover. They (like Hester) worked for Obama’s victory through MoveOn. Clearly Anna’s indoctrination of Ethan has “taken” no better than did Hester’s of Colin. The existence of this couple stands as a living affirmation of Hester and her politics, though with a slight edge, in that Donald, the lover, is writing a dissertation at Columbia on “American Liberalism in the late Vietnam years under Nixon-Ford: The decline of a class.” Hester’s prickly response (“Did we decline? I wasn’t aware.”) is clearly untrue; Donald is correct about the decline.

Sufficient at Last

As the young men warm up to Hester and her sister, and encourage them to join the couple at an Obama inaugural ball, it is clear that Hester’s vindication is in the air. But before Giardina rewards the audience with that fadeout tableau, Ethan asks Hester point blank what caused the rift. Her explanation starts off sounding contrite, but does not end that way.

A very small argument. One we never should have had. But we did. And it led to a larger one we could never find our way out of. Sacrifices had to be made in those days. It’s hard to see how every small thing mattered in order to come to this moment, but it did.

Ethan demurs that it was knocking on doors and ordinary electoral politics that led to Obama’s election; this time he is the one who is wrong. Clearly the old battles that the Hesters of this world waged with the Annas had something important to do with it too. Hester also points out that if Ethan and Donald choose to marry, they will be doing one of the things that the liberals had to fight so hard for. That, she says, is a result significant enough to justify her surrender of her former relationship with Ethan. And with his final gesture, he seems to signal that he finds the explanation sufficient.

Hester’s long voyage into this strange political and familial landscape has been chastening, in that she no longer looks for a permanent liberal ascendancy. (“If you think having elected a black President, all our battles are over, think again.”) But she has stuck by her guns, and with the reestablishment of ties with her grandson, has fundamentally prevailed. Moral order has in large measure been restored.

This is hands-down the most satisfying theatrical experience of the three mentioned here, and largely because it dares to follow a somewhat conventional dramatic arc, dares to return the audience at least part way back to a place of familiarity and equilibrium, dares (unlike The Realistic Joneses) to be about real and intelligible issues in which real emotional stakes are likely to be recognized.

As theatergoers, we want to be taken places we have not seen before, places that make us shiver, perhaps. As I have written before in these pages, edgy is good. It is good for audiences, good for the characters with whom audiences might identify. But there are reasons why the conventional became conventional; the uncanny, the frightening, the unintelligible, the esoteric, had all better justify themselves, emphatically. If we’re being taken strange places, it had better be worth the ride.

__________________

[1]. A. Giardina, Putting the Personal Aside, Lincoln Center Theater Review (Spring 2014 Issue No. 63).

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Sarah Kane’s Dazzling Apologia Pro Morte Sua, 4.48 PSYCHOSIS, at Iron Crow

Nick Horan, Che Lyons, Katie Keddell

Posted October 10, 2014, on BroadwayWorld.com

“How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note?” asked critic Michael Billington after seeing the original 2000 London production of Sarah Kane‘s 4.48 Psychosis, her final theater piece, staged 16 months after Kane’s self-inflicted death (by hanging in a psychiatric ward). The answer to Billington’s question is, you award aesthetic points to a suicide note the same way you award aesthetic points to anything else: Is it well-written, does it show you something new, does it move you? The answers to these follow-up questions, with this piece (which is admittedly impossible not to view as a suicide note) are yes, yes, and yes. And Iron Crow Theatre has given it simply an outstanding production.

Kane’s writing reminds me repeatedly of Dylan Thomas‘ poetry, with the telling repetitions and the evocative ambiguities of syntax. She can and does make excerpts from patient medical charts sing. So yes, it’s well-written.

Based on this and the one other Kane play I’m familiar with, Blasted, given a powerful staging at Towson University a couple of years ago, I’m convinced Kane could never be anything other than original and shocking in the way she rips all comfort away, and forces audiences to confront tragedy and fear and strangeness. Here, she depicts in full force the utter aloneness of the suicidally depressed, because the revoltingness of life which is their omnipresent reality seems invisible to those who treat them, and the suicidal person’s responses to this revoltingness, like anomie and self-cutting and suicide attempts, feel like such relief but are so discouraged. Kane manages to make us understand that perspective. So yes it shows us something most of us will find new.

4.48 Psychosis is involving from one end to the other, a ritual of speech, movement, and gesture that picks you up and does not put you down, even when it repeats itself somewhat (e.g. the voices of therapists telling the sufferers that they are not to blame for their condition, or that the therapists like the sufferers). With this piece, you cannot not look into the void. So yes, it moves you.

And I have nothing but praise for this staging. Director Ryan Clark and Movement Director Nick Horan make so much out of so little: basically three chairs, a length of white rope, and three performers (Horan, Katie Keddell and Ché Lyons) dressed in white and usually framed against darkness, with an assist from visual projections above and to the sides of the performers. Much can be made with these simple elements. For instance, Horan demonstrates the power of the self-destructiveness he drags into interactions with an uncomprehending world by tying the rope around two of the chairs which have been knocked on their side, and pulling them screeching around the stage as he goes to meet a therapist. At another point the rope becomes a noose. At another time, during the medical charts sequence, the side projections reflect a succession of stylized prescription vials, a little bit of gallows humor (if that word may be permitted in this context).

A peculiarity of this piece is that Kane did not specify the number of performers to participate. There are voices but no consistent characters. The original production featured three performers, the number here. Horan, Keddell and Lyons manage to switch rapidly among the voices, principally the despairing and their therapists, and to find depth and characterization even in the sketchiest of temporary roles.

This show does not have a long run (it ends October 18), and I was delayed in getting a chance to review it. So I must counsel you to waste no time, tear yourself away from the comfortable and familiar, and see it before it’s gone. Stare into the void for awhile.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Credit: Zachary Z. Handler.

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Kinks Above The Waistline: VENUS IN FUR at the REP

Kathryn Tkel and Elan Zafir

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com October 6,m 2014

There’s a throwaway line everyone knows from the song One Night in Bangkok from the musical Chess: “I get my kicks above the waistline, sunshine.” Against all odds, Venus in Fur, David Ives‘ recent Broadway hit, now enjoying what I think is its premiere in this region at the REP Stage in Columbia, manages to be drenched with fetishistic imagery, clothing, and behavior and yet to rely for its appeal almost exclusively on cerebral stimulation. I’ve seen a production of Much Ado About Nothing that was sexier. It is neither “porn [n]or pornish,” to use a phrase from the play. It’s all “above the waistline.”

It set me to racking my brain to explain this. Vanda (Kathryn Tkel) is certainly easy on the eyes, and you don’t have to be deep into S&M to appreciate how she looks in a black teddy, garters, black stockings, and (in the later going, at least) shiny black thigh-high dominatrix boots. Nor are most of us totally erotically immune to the sight of a man being tied up by someone in that kind of getup. What seems to be missing from these rituals – and what seems to be necessary to give them any frisson – is the participation of actual characters.

I mean that quite literally. This play is deep in the territory of Theater of the Absurd. The actors are enacting a ritual in which the old Absurdist trick of removing consistency of personality, even of identity, and swapping places, goes on and on and on. The man is supposedly Thomas (Elan Zafir), a playwright who is trying to cast a play he has adapted from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s erotic classic Venus in Furs, and Vanda supposedly an actress trying out for the part of Wanda, the heroine of the story. The erotic fixation nominally in play is masochism, the compulsion of the man to submit to the woman, but since Thomas is the one doing the casting and Vanda the one reading for the part, the “real life” power relationship is the converse of what is depicted by the words and actions of the play-within-the-play. But if Thomas is really in this exercise for the kinky kicks of it, then she is back being the one with the power, even trying out for a role. And then she begins to add her own creativity and directorial initiative to the tryout, intensifying her apparent domination of the situation. At some point, moreover, Thomas plays a woman and Vanda a man – which puts him back on top if the woman is in charge. But whenever we start to feel tempted to say well, that’s it, they’ve switched roles, they seem to revert to their original personae and their original alignment in the power equation. So it’s impossible to say who’s in charge or to know what really drives either of them. It’s impossible to know how much research Vanda has done on Thomas, although it seems possible that her degree of knowledge gives her a mastery of the situation that also amounts to a reversal of roles. And especially it’s impossible to know what to make of her apparent apotheosis before the final blackout into the actual goddess Venus. In short, there are no consistent characters, and most importantly perhaps, no one necessarily acting out of any erotic compulsion at all; hence the lack of steam. The whole thing may have been a dream, and no telling whose.

Otherwise put, it’s all head games; the loins don’t come into it much. Joseph Ritsch‘s direction may have something to do with this. I was not fortunate enough to see either the Off-Broadway or the Broadway incarnations of this show, but I have seen a clip of the Broadway version, and there was far more touching between the actors in the moments depicted there, touching which seemed to reflect some heat between the characters, whatever was going on. I think it’s possible Ritsch may have dialed back on that deliberately, to emphasize the head games.

Be that as it may, how well one likes this production depends very much upon how appealing one finds the constant morphing and switching place of characters. If shifting psychodynamics are your thing, this version caters to your taste. Tkel is excellent as she repeatedly changes voice and accent and affect, a Noo Yoouhk-accented noodginess and klutziness as Vanda, a Judy-Holliday-in-Born-Yesterday sprightliness as a slightly more empowered Vanda making suggestions during the reading, and a cultivated Masterpiece Theatre voice and regally bitchy style as Wanda and as maybe-Venus. Zafir isn’t called upon for quite the vocal range (as the protagonist of the play-within-the-play, he does move to some indefinable kind of mittel-Europäische accent), but he too has to shift gears all the time among the somewhat-sexist-man-in-charge personality, the woman-worshiper personality, and the variation on that theme, the topper-from-the-bottom. So these actors are all about gear-shifting. With a comic touch, which they also excel at.

Co-Producing Artistic Directors Ritsch and his colleague Suzanne Beal are beginning their first season in charge of the repertoire at the REP, Howard County’s Equity company, and according to the program, they are aiming to produce “stunning new plays by young American playrights.” A worthy goal, in view of the immense wealth of new material in what seems to be a new Golden Age of the American theater, and Venus in Fur is a worthy first step toward that goal.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Credit: Katie Simmons-Barth

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