The Big Picture and the Closeup

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Insincere White Invitations, New Black Authenticity: THE ASHES UNDER GAIT CITY at CATF

Shauna Miles

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com July 20, 2014

[Note: The Contemporary American Theater Festival each year produces five new American plays in Shepherdstown, WV (an hour and a half from Baltimore) Wednesdays through Sundays throughout July. This is a review of one of this year’s productions. Each will be separately reviewed in this space.]

In a review I wrote a few years ago, I dispraised August Wilson‘s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and drew a flame from a reader who said, in effect, that effete white reviewers who quoted Shakespeare had no business reviewing Wilson. In effect It’s a black thing; you wouldn’t understand. Although I did not respond in writing, my thought was that the standards of criticism are universal enough so the race of the critic who faithfully adheres to them should not matter.

But last weekend I came across a piece that seems so much of a part of an internal dialogue in the African-American community, so attuned to nuances and experiences in which white people do not generally share, that for once I’m constrained to say I may not be getting important things, and my critical standards may not work well. Nonetheless, I am the designated reviewer for this page, and I shall do what I can.

The play is Christina Anderson‘s The Ashes Under Gait City, experiencing its world premiere at the Contemporary American Theatre Festival in Shepherdstown, WV. It concerns the efforts of a small band of black visionaries to establish a presence and a community in an Oregon town which historically tried to exclude blacks by force, and more recently established a regime of disregard. But to say it in that way suggests some kind of civil rights movement, and that would be an inadequate label.

Perhaps quoting the author’s directions at the outset of the script may give a clearer notion: “The Black people in this play are the kind of Black people who are often accused of ‘not being truly Black’ by other Black people. The Black people in this play are the kind of Black people who, on several different occasions, have had a white person tell them ‘I don’t even think about color when I consider you.’ The Black people in this play redefine Black authenticity.” Which I guess means talking with general American accents and being culturally part of the American middle class.

What seems to motivate these avatars of redefined Black authenticity is anger at white disregard and the subtle racism that is hard to detect and harder to prove. Simone the Believer, the leader of this movement (Daphne Gains), elicits from her follower D (Kaliswa Brewster), an account of a job she lost because of it. “I thought I was safe there. Then meetings were scheduled without me. Presentations edited without my consent. Signatures unverified. But the smiles were still there. The apologies so sincere. And the mix-ups, the slip-ups never felt intentional.”

So far, so good. Any beneficiary of white privilege can examine his or her conscience and think of times he or she has politely but wrongly discounted someone of color. But the Oregon town turns out to do worse than merely disregard its few black citizens. Although the script is far from precise or clear on this, it would appear that at some point in the distant past there had been a fire in this town, and it was rebuilt so as not to have black citizens. The survivors were driven out. But, perhaps owing to an inconsistency in the script, somehow there were black citizens nonetheless, although they were fewer in number. (Historically, as the dramaturg’s notes tell us, Oregon attempted to legislate exclusion of free blacks, and maintained segregationist laws during Jim Crow times.)

What it has apparently come down to in modern times is that a shadowy group called the Re-enactors participate in an annual festival as a part of which a black person is chased out of town. But it is confusing, because at least one local African American has been politely asked to join the Re-enactors. And it has supposedly become more benevolent, by making the black “fox” a paid volunteer. Toward the end of the play, though, we catch a glimpse of this tradition in action, and it seems more like a mixture of a cross-burning and Shirley Knight‘s The Lottery. Real injuries result.

This is where the white reviewer parts company with the black playwright. We all know there remain atavistic pockets of the white community where the racism is violent and terrifying, but the participants do not ask their black neighbors to join their Klavern, even as a hypocritical gesture. So if this is meant as a serious reflection on the state of affairs, if we are meant to agree that the polite disregard that leads to stories like D’s loss of a corporate job is the same thing as the racial terrorism apparently practiced by the Re-enactors, it is a bridge too far.

There’s a lot of what looks like similarly ill-thought-through material in this play. What are we to make of leader Simone, presented to us as a paid “believer,” who somehow has parlayed her talent for believing in people into paid client relationships, although she meets none of these clients face-to-face? What are we to make of a Twin Peaks-y moment at which the members of Simone’s local group see that Gait City is a laid out as a perfect diamond? What do we make of Simone’s imprecise mastery of leadership skills, exemplified, for instance, by her discouraging the sexual relationship forming between two of her disciples, for no apparent good reason, or her questionable judgment in deliberately provoking the Re-enactors? What of the horrific “initiation” ritual Simone’s group establishes at the end that echoes the assaults of the Re-enactors? And finally, what of the apparent conflict between the message of the above-quoted “redefining Black authenticity” discussion, in which the new paradigm seems to be a lack of embarrassment at doing what others might call “acting white,” and the semi-separatism of the community Simone is trying to build?

Make no mistake; the play is fascinating at all times, amusing at many, and it contains much good material, for instance as sophisticated a depiction of the way modern social media work as I’ve seen anywhere (a tip of the hat to the techies who project the images that tell the tale). But either it is a thematic mess or my place on the wrong side of the racial divide obscures a lot of it to me. I’m open to either possibility. At the root of the problem, I think, is that it’s hard to know what to take literally and what to treat as a deliberate exaggeration. The performances are all terrific too, especially Gaines and Shauna Miles (pictured above) as Felicia, the no-nonsense landlady of the movement.

In any case, if you go, whatever you look like, you’ll have plenty to talk about afterwards.

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

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Is There an I in Robot?: UNCANNY VALLEY at CATF

Barbara Kingsley and Alex Podulke

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com July 15, 2014

Mathematician and cryptanalyst Alan Turing famously posited, in the middle of the 20th Century, that if, in conversing with a machine, one cannot tell whether one is dealing with a machine or a human, artificial intelligence (AI) has been achieved. By the second decade of this century, AI is probably more of a party trick than a real presence (we don’t particularly mind having our computers and robots look and act like computers and robots), but Turing’s Test has long been passed, in a variety of ways. We are on to next steps: Thomas Gibbons’ new play Uncanny Valley explores what those steps are, and the philosophical, moral, and existential questions they pose.

When the play starts, sometime 30 or 40 years hence, we see a neck and head mounted on a desktop, the first module of a new, lifelike robot. Its fabricator and trainer, Claire (Barbara Kingsley), a scientist near the end of her career, wakes it up and starts it on its first lessons. The head, named Julian (Alex Podulke), blinks its eyes, and turns. Through a series of short blackouts it begins to acquire a voice, then knowledge, then conversational skills. After that, Julian acquires an arm, and learns to shake hands. And then, raising his hand to his hair, he says something crucial: “I perceive myself touching. I perceive myself being touched.”

Those two sentences exemplify the core of what some modern scientists and philosophers think consciousness is really all about: the integration of various sensations and perceptions at such high speed and such volume that either the illusion or the reality of a single personality perceiving itself is created. Most of us believe ourselves to be “real,” i.e. something more than the interchange of firing neurons. But if we are wrong about that, then, excluding the perhaps irrelevant fact that we are built from biological raw materials, we may all be as much robots as is Julian. Or, on the other hand, if we are right, could it nonetheless be true that at a certain level of mechanical activity and complexity, Julian may be as human as we?

The play is presented without intermission, but nonetheless there are two definite acts. The first comes to a point when Julian, now equipped with a full set of arms and legs, is told something that had been held back before: he was “purpose-built,” created with a certain body and face and certain capacities, for a particular role. And he (and we) learn(s) that once he is further customized, he will be irrevocably changed. By now he and Claire have what can only be called a friendship, so the first act ends on a valedictory note. He won’t be him (whatever that means, exactly) when it’s all over.

I shall not be giving away the role Julian is now called upon to play, except to say that it involves him functioning so that he would pass the Turing Test if he were attempting any deception. As such, he calls to fruition one of the most astonishing acting jobs I’ve ever seen. Alex Podulke, who did an impressive turn at CATF last season as suicidal actor, progresses by tiny gradations over the course of an hour and a half from impersonating a machine in speech and movement to a near-human in those regards, and one finds oneself saying, Of course that’s how a machine trying to imitate a human would look, even though one has never seen it before. Doubtless Tom Dugdale’s direction also has a lot to do with this extraordinary effect.

The coda to the play is fully earned, when Claire, forced to watch her aged husband’s journey in the opposite direction, into dementia, turns, apparently with hopefulness, to discover a gleam in Julian’s eye, “gazing back,” as he puts it, across the valley that separates cyber-life from biology.

Uncanny Valley is the whole package, everything you want a new play to be but seldom see: unique, thought-provoking, designed to evoke extraordinary performances, and filled with the unexpected.

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

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An Overstuffed ONE NIGHT at CATF

Kaliswa Brewster and Brit Whittle

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com July 14, 2014

As I’ve commented before about contemporary drama in general and about the Contemporary American Theatre Festival in Shepherdstown, WV, in particular, it seems that the standard template for a serious play these days is for the central characters all to have secrets, and the action of the play to be largely devoted to disclosing them. This structure lends a certain air of predictability to Pulitzer Prize-winner Charles Fuller‘s One Night, a play about two Iraqi War veterans, drifters, both PTSD victims, though one is in much worse shape, who wash up momentarily in a motel off a busy highway somewhere. They were staying in a shelter but there was a fire there.

One secret is revealed almost immediately: the female drifter, identified as Alicia G (Kaliswa Brewster) was raped by four other soldiers back in Iraq (aka the Sandbox), and she only knows the identity of three of them. Care to lay any bets as to who the unknown fourth assailant was, given that the other drifter, Horace Lloyd (Jason Babinsky) is male? The other secret, somehow tied up with the first, is who set the fire at the shelter: it had to be one of the two of them. And, to my way of thinking, that second secret is just too much material for the audience to process successfully. The show is overstuffed.

When I say that, I fully acknowledge that rape in the military is a huge and important subject (one I’ve written about in a non-reviewer mode), and we need dramas about it. I likewise acknowledge that one of the many reasons it’s an important subject is that it often brings lifelong consequences in its train, what physicians would call sequelae. Yet it must also be acknowledged that rape and those sequelae, including PTSD, are inherently melodramatic subjects, and if one puts them in the same dramatic frame with another melodramatic subject, like a fire of unknown origin, it risks provoking rolling eyes in the audience. It’s a little too Perils of Pauline-y for the average sensibility. Throw in that Alicia G has a broken marriage and a lost son to mourn, and a show will begin to run a small risk of audience risibility. (One is reminded of Oscar Wilde‘s remark about hyper-travailed Little Nell: one who could read of her death without laughing must have a heart of stone.)

In fairness, I will not say that there is much actual risk of laughter; the audience with which I saw the show was suitably grave throughout. But the overstuffing does not help the mental digestion. Quite the contrary; there are the bones here of a perfectly respectable play about rape and what comes after in the U.S. military and veterans’ system. The play does a fine job of showing how command will undercharge the perpetrators if they are charged at all, and will penalize victims for raising a stink; how urgent requests for veterans’ benefits will become lost in the system or denied for lack of documentation that the delay in benefits has itself made likely; and how the supposed advocates for the victims will be so deadened by the way the system has made them ineffective that they come across as cold and unsympathetic. These are familiar tropes to anyone who follows the news, but good ones to bring out in dramatic form.

Perhaps more originally, there is a real exploration of the dynamics of military rape itself, of the question why rape is so prevalent in that environment. Frankly, I did not understand why playwright Fuller felt the need to revert to the revelation-of-dark-secrets template at all. A straightforward telling of the tale would have sufficed nicely.

If Fuller felt the need to bury at least one secret, it should have been the identity of the fourth rapist. But even there, once the not very surprising identification leaks, what Fuller does with it is so good, so articulate, that the framing device seems superfluous. Horace says why it happens. Morally speaking, it may be no excuse, but it at least renders it comprehensible: “We had to come down from killing people everyday – break the frickin’ monotony of it – every hour – every minute! – You have to FUCK SOMETHING – just to get the shit out of you.” And there was also the resentment of the “grunts” who did the killing but received no decorations against colleagues who did get decorations but were noncombatants by virtue of being women in a military that still keeps women from that kind of fighting. And these revelations are topped off by a spectacular plea for forgiveness that totally sold me on its anguish and sincerity. Her choice in that regard is dramatically credible and heartbreaking.

That is not to say that the play comes down one way or the other on whether Alicia should forgive any of her assailants; that is part of its strength. We can see why she might be better off to err on the side of forgiveness. But that option is neither dramatically nor morally compelled. It’s her choice, and we come to care a great deal about what she decides. Rape is about as close to an unforgiveable wrong as exists anywhere.

Shepherdstown is first and foremost about works in progress, plays that are being brought through the development process. Over the past three seasons of attending, I have come to distinguish the ones that are well along and ready for prime time from those that need to be broken down and retooled. One Night fits in the second category. In addition to over-reliance on the hackeyed template of secrets spilling out, it is far too busy and too long.

As to the busyness, one of the good things about the play is a series of flashbacks (to which Alicia, as a PTSD victim, is prone anyway) in which the interactions with the system, from the rape to the attempt to report it, to the disposition of the rape complaint, to the utterly frustrating interactions with the utterly incompetent Veterans’ Administration, are replayed. These are uniformly well done, with Brit Whittle and Shauna Miles filling ably the various roles of the other characters in these vignettes. (I particularly liked Miles as the military prosecutor, talking in deadpan fashion about how she personally dealt with her own rapist.) But the staging of these vignettes sometimes plays right over the material from the dramatic present, so one cannot hear what is being said in both frames. Likewise, the constant intrusions of the hotel proprietor Meny (Willie C. Carpenter), a state trooper and a fire marshal (both Brit Whittle) often seem to lack any clear purpose in moving the play forward. There is also some confusing and barely audible or outright inaudible dialogue coming through the wall with what sounds like a porno movie being made in the adjacent motel room. It could go, and no one the worse.

So I think Mr. Fuller needs to go back to the drawing board. A story told in more straightforward and shorter fashion might go down much better.

Of course, what Shepherdstown audiences are being offered is not the play as Fuller might rewrite it in the future. In my own estimation, and in that of numerous other members of the audience with whom I talked, this in its current form was the weakest of the five plays the CATF is putting on in this year’s festival.

That said, the most important parts of the drama are worthwhile, and I would say on balance it still repays an audience’s attention. Brewster is outstanding as a woman fragmented by PTSD (owing not just to the rape, but to everything she had gone through, including watching colleages blown to bits), and Babinsky (who showed impressive range in alternating between this and a totally different role in another play) was simply outstanding as a man playing all the angles to achieve an unacknowledged agenda.

One final comment, and again in saying this I am echoing what a number of Festival-goers said to me: The incidence of foul language in this play and three others was simply wearying and unnecessary. Soldiers curse; we get it. But it’s not necessary to reproduce all the blue talk all the time in order to impart that sense of authenticity. The obscenity becomes so offputting in the end that, to use military jargon, it imperils the mission. CATF should think about this. To paraphrase a famous military exhortation during World War Two, CATF should ask itself, when considering scripts: Is this cussword really necessary?

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

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Death By Tranny?: DEAD AND BREATHING at CATF

Lizan Mitchell and N.L. Graham

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com July 14, 2014

The question is posed in the first few minutes of Chisa Hutchinson‘s Dead and Breathing: Can Carolyn, a wealthy black widow dying by inches of cancer, persuade Veronika, her at-home hospice nurse, to kill her? It won’t be easy, as this funny, insightful play establishes. Veronika is seriously Christian. Carolyn’s reasons for wanting to shuffle off this mortal coil are complex and not such as to make her a strong candidate in Veronika’s mind for the big favor of euthanasia. And besides, Carolyn (Lizan Mitchell) is repulsed by transsexuals, which Veronika (N.L. Graham) happens to be (to Carolyn’s surprise, if not that of the audience). It appears that, if Carolyn has to go, she faces what she disgustedly calls “death by tranny.”

In the play’s hour and a half, Carolyn’s bitter, God-free vision of reality and her place in it is placed in strong opposition to Veronika’s sense of a personal relationship with the Deity, as they wrestle earthily and wittily with Caroline’s pursuit of extinction and the incentive Caroline dangles in front of Veronika to buy (or is it extort?) her cooperation in bringing that pursuit to a successful conclusion. In the end, it seems possible God actually has answered Veronika’s prayer and sent a signal of the divine intent for resolving the conflict.

Hutchinson is a writer of telling wisecracks, e.g. “You now return me to my regularly scheduled program of disdainful silence” or “Honk if you love bumper stickers about Jesus.” And I’m not sure she has any serious purpose in this play. But unlike some of the other entrants in this year’s Festival, this play is so well-finished it seems ready for a trip to New York.

This is not just a duel of characters, but of actors. Lizan Mitchell, a face most viewers are probably familiar with from quality television like The Wire, is powerful and dignified, even with no clothes on – and delivers sharp-tongued zingers with scornful abandon. And N.L. Graham, a sassier sister of Laverne Cox of Orange Is The New Black (another great exponent of the art of making femininity issue from an originally male frame), mines every delicious wisecrack for all it might possibly be worth. (Kristin Horton’s direction doubtless has something to do with it as well.)

I was going to end with the caution that this is not exactly a feel-good show, but the number of theatergoers I saw walking out, obviously feeling good, has made me reconsider. I guess it is, despite the darkness of the subject.

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

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Edgy

Published in The Hopkins Review, Summer 2014, New Series 7.3

The heart wants what the heart wants, as Woody Allen trenchantly puts it. To the marriage of true minds we do not admit impediments, if only because the barriers against such a marriage generally do not hold. Unfortunately, the loins also have wants. They want what they want, and little will change that either. At some level, this is a problem for nearly everyone, because our hearts and our loins so often want different things.

This conflict was fascinatingly illuminated by two brave and iconoclastic works about sex I saw a day apart in the same place, Theatre Row on 42^nd Street. One was Intimacy, by Thomas Bradshaw, put on by the New Group; the other was Toni Bentley’s adaptation of her own erotic memoir, The Surrender, a one-woman show with Laura Campbell standing in for Bentley.

The shows are brave for the forthrightness with which they deal with their subject. Sex and sexuality may be ubiquitous in the theater, but extreme honesty about these things is a lot rarer. Even today, for instance, there are usually limits to the depiction of sex onstage. These shows, particularly Intimacy, simply brush almost all limits aside. (Actual erections as part of the performance are, to pick an example, a new one on me – at least on that block of 42^nd Street and in this century.)

Feudal Positions

The shows are iconoclastic for the potentially unpopular things they say. One potentially unpopular thing said in The Surrender would be that a (mostly) straight woman loves anal sex. The iconography of the act (male superior, woman not) sorts awkwardly with the feminist ideals most of us like to think we share. Yet if Bentley has one theme, it is that her greatest release occurs precisely when she is most objectified, most, to use her own word, slutty. (“Anal sex is about cooperation. Cooperation in an endeavor of aristocratic politics, involving rigid hierarchies, feudal positions, and monarchist attitudes.”) One could take issue with this analysis by contending Bentley is “topping from the bottom” (in all senses of the word), but this facile formula really fails to do justice to Bentley’s feelings and views.

No, if Bentley is saying anything at all about this contradiction, she is saying that the “sluttiness” (anal and otherwise) she practiced with the lover she called A-Man and with others may not have contradicted so much as ignored all elevated notions of human dignity, and that orgasm trumps theory.

In so postulating, she is not falling into the opposite fallacy, the one championed by deSade and The Story of O, for instance, that there is a mystical significance to the male-superior position. It’s simply that the loins want what the loins want. Bentley may be looking for what she calls “the joy that lies on the other side of convention,” but it is not the unconventionality per se that she craves. Just the joy.

She has another leg up on those Frenchmen, de Sade and Réage, as well. Justine and O have to take place in neverlands, fantasized chateaux where perversity can flourish. Bentley, by contrast, makes her argument out of what she claims is actual experience. It is believable, told with a thousand piquant details conveying the ring of truth, like the gym-rat environment where she meets A-Man (and a redheaded woman who serves for a time as their mutual lover), or the way she encounters a born-again Christian (whose backsliding she prompts) while cutting dowel at a Home Depot.

Universally Availed-Of

The Surrender, then, seems dedicated throughout to honesty about sexual reality. Intimacy at least starts out the same way. This seven-character play, built around the ubiquity of masturbation, pornography, and the sexual fantasies that fuel them, is like Schnitzler’s La Ronde, depicting a circle of tangentially-associated individuals whose sexual secrets end up linking them together in unacknowledged ways. The play takes for granted, as did Kinsey, that masturbation is pretty much a universal behavior, at least for men, and that pornography, the ultimate masturbatory aid, being universally available to all on the Internet, is therefore pretty much universally availed-of. Further, playwright Thomas Bradshaw assumes that the fantasies catered to by pornography are those its consumers resort to because what they crave is not available to them in real life.

Act One is largely devoted to exploring this phenomenon: the disconnect between what we want and what we get. For instance, the (mostly) straight Hispanic contractor Fred (David Anzuelo) has a thing for boys and has the thong underwear to prove it; both widowed father Jerry (Keith Randolph Smith) and teenaged son Matthew (Austin Cauldwell) spend time and energy lusting after the 18-year-old sexpot Janet next door (Ella Dershowitz). The difference between what these men want and what they can get (or at least what they think they can get) is papered over with vast amounts of hypocrisy. And Act One is largely devoted to stripping away the hypocrisy, depicting copious acts of porn-watching and masturbation.

Act Two is something else. Act Two might be subtitled “But if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you want after all.” The conceit is that Matthew, on the cusp of high school graduation, is given a high-end movie camera and the money to make a movie, and decides to become an auteur of porn, casting all of the members of this daisy-chain of secret suppressed desires, who are all persuaded to abandon shame and do for the camera what they so badly wish to do in their personal sex lives.

Casting Off Pudor

And this is where the two plays part company. Bentley is at least presenting her anal exploits as autobiography. She really did get to do what so overwhelmingly appealed to her. (If it didn’t happen, it is presented with so much emotional verisimilitude that you coulda fooled me — and probably everyone else in the audience.) But it’s one thing for a single person to overcome her inhibitions, her hang-ups, her what-the-ancient-Romans-summed-up-with-the-word-pudor (from which we get “pudenda” among other words) meaning, non-judgmentally, a sense that some things are appropriately covered up and private. It’s another for a whole diverse circle, as in Bradshaw’s play, to cast pudor aside.

Bradshaw unrolls this casting aside process starting with Janet, the 18-year-old, who turns out to be an actual porn star featured in Barely Legal, unashamedly catering to the very sort of fantasy her neighbors had been entertaining about her. From her perspective, nothing could be better than triggering such desire and occasioning such happiness. I wonder whether many porn stars feel like this, but I have even less confidence that the shedding of inhibitions on the part of the other characters would go as smoothly. The conclusion of the play is meant to carry somewhat the same emotional resonance as the conclusion of a Shakespeare comedy that ends with a brace of weddings, only here (with one completely unbelievable exception) the couplings are literally that only, not actual marriages. Instead we get two instances of ephebophilia, one of analingus with overtones of incest, and a great deal of frottage. After the frequently savage comedy of the first act, this all seems a bit discordant, as if someone had waved a magic wand or rolled out a deus ex machina. And in fact that’s almost precisely what this mass-deliverance from shame is.

For the fact is, most of us don’t lose our pudor. It’s hard-wired into us, and whether this hard-wiring is a good thing or a bad one is a serious question deserving a more thoughtful answer, not a cheaply feel-good ending. What would really happen if people lived out in real life the scenarios that roll through their heads while their hands are busy with those pudenda? A lot would have to be rearranged in their lives, that much is certain. It’s quite arguable that without pudor our lives would be unlivable. But even if that were not true, there are questions about morality. Arguably there are things people want which it would be wrong for them to have (and maybe even to want). Where that line gets drawn would be a matter of near-total disagreement in almost any demographic, but the notion that we should all be trying to live the dream, whatever the dream might be, is clearly wrong, and almost everyone would agree it’s wrong. Some dreams are dangerous and should stay firmly ensconced in fantasy. Maybe most of them.

Not Blinking

No such easy resolution in The Surrender. Granted, the anal penetration Bentley so prizes at the hands or more accurately the penis of the lover she calls A-Man does her no medical or emotional harm. Not the act itself. But it both restricts and frees her in unsustainable ways. It will hardly be surprising that the relationship consists exclusively of sex: no dating. As she puts it: “We’ve never been to a movie and don’t plan on going to one, ever. Why would we? We are the movie…” So the profound sex paradoxically makes the relationship shallow and hence vulnerable. Nor will it be surprising that the “butt-fucking,” to use her own repeatedly applied term for it, is part and parcel of a boundary-free association with A-Man in which both of them have liaisons with others as well, a life of libertinage in the technical sense. (“If a man can possess a woman sexually – really possess – he won’t need to control her … other lovers.”)

To maintain equilibrium in a relationship like that requires a studied inattention to one’s lover’s other attachments. That can be costly enough from an emotional standpoint when one is as thoroughly in love with one’s partner as Bentley obviously was with A-Man. But even if it is a cost one is personally willing to pay, it is impossible to find a ready supply of counterparties, other lovers of the same man who will also be willing to share. And the play, to its credit, does not blink when the story reaches that point.

A-Man is a gym rat, brought into Bentley’s life as part of a threesome with another woman who frequents the gym. But though that other woman drops out of the picture, A-Man takes another lover from the same gym, a “mousy blonde” (in the show, though a brunette in the book). When the two women become aware of each other, it cannot and does not end well. I quote the climactic scene from the book, which is liberally quoted in the script: “I asked her if she loved A-Man. I hadn’t planned on asking, but I guess I wanted to know… Her big … eyes filled with tears and she murmured, ‘I try not to.’” And after that, the only course open to Bentley is renunciation. And in the script, she claims to have cried every day for months.

No Support for the Local Libertine

The cost of Bentley’s unspeakably thrilling erotic freedom, then, is a thoroughly broken heart, actually two of them (the mousy blonde/brunette being similarly afflicted). Even had there not been the operatic break, the thrill would have diminished. Even Bentley acknowledges that constant sexual encounters with the same person are apt to diminish in power, as the parties become desensitized to each other; as she puts it in the book: “With time, cracks appear in the walls of the Garden—and reality, insipid reality, slithers in with its insidious poison.” That is the way of it; desensitization will affect most sexual and most emotional relationships over time. The prevalence of long-term marriages, still, even in this day and age of divorce and late marriage, strongly suggests how acceptable this desensitization is to a wide variety of us. The thrill always fades to a great extent, and most of us can deal. But, one suspects, never Bentley nor A-Man.

Tears for months or not, she continues to have lovers. But it’s clear her heart isn’t in it. More importantly (in the play at least), her ass is not in it; she does not engage in her favored activity with any lover after A-Man. No wonder; in the real world there are too many of “mousy blondes” and too few libertines.

A libertine might draw from the scarcity of peers the moral that the world is just not full enough of men and women brave enough to follow their loins, whereas if there were more brave people ready to ignore their pudor, we’d all be happier. This perspective may even be correct. But most of us don’t aspire to a level of erotic fulfillment that commandeers our lives, as Bentley’s commitment has apparently done. Bentley’s example suggests it would be more likely to imperil our happiness than to enhance it.

Mickey, Judy and Gerard

Most people have the opposite problem, the problem confronted in Intimacy. The loins may want what the loins may want, but there are a lot of other parts of the body and the spirit going a different way. We want company, we want children and families, and communities – communities that we would threaten if we pursued our sexual hearts’ desires too vigorously.

It is surely in the uneasy clash between these competing pulls that pornography is born. Pornography is an attempt to square the circle, to reconcile the unreconcilable. Of course it leads to the conflicts and the hypocrisy so clearly limned by Act One of Intimacy. Desire and pudor are locked in a battle neither can win.

In Act Two, when the youngsters involve their elders in their Mickey Rooney-and-Judy Garland let’s-make-a-movie moment, it rapidly becomes an indigestible Gerard Damiano moment. Young auteur Matthew praises old auteur Damiano (who created the unspeakably bad Deep Throat) as featuring real scripts and real acting. If a character admires Damiano for that, something is clearly amiss with that character’s sensibilities, and, however charming we may find his desire to film an hommage, we are not going to drink the same Kool-Aid ourselves. The direction by Scott Elliott neatly distinguishes the characters who know they don’t know how to act – and hence approach their roles using their own voices if not their own words – from the characters who ostensibly know how to act and so put on different voices. But it’s wasted, because the most convincing of these supposedly on-camera performances still sounds stilted and unnatural – as did those of Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems, whose example is actually played for us on a video monitor during the proceedings (lest we forget). If acting in a porno movie is actually going to liberate you, it should not first make you inane. Or so one would think.

Yes, one can say, apparently along with the playwright and the director, that this is all meant to be lighthearted, and that the notion of everyone getting over their hang-ups while getting it on in a daffy, unwatchable hommage to something that needs no tributes is charming. And I guess it is, but the savagery that made Act One so delightfully edgy is leaking out of the play like air from a damaged balloon.

A Sliver of Epic in a Tent

Of course one doesn’t have to talk about sex to be edgy, even in seen-it-all New York. There has been a lot of comment about Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, being presented in a space on West 54^th Street called Kazino. In fact, it might well be that much of the buzz results from it being presented in that space, a tent. It is set up like a cabaret, with actual bar service at the tables, and the action taking place all around the audience: at both ends of the tent, along all the walls, and in the corridor separating the tables. Even the band is dispersed a bit around the space. And David Abeles, the actor who sings Pierre, also participates with the band. Naturally such things, or things quite like them, have each been done before, but perhaps not together in the very purlieus of Broadway. (The show moved to Kazino from a venue in the Meatpacking District.) Still, this staging has a bracing novelty to it.

The tale, as the title suggests, is drawn from some incidents at the end of Book Two of War and Peace. It quite fills up the two hours with only a sliver of the huge novel. In my estimation, it should be categorized as an opera rather than a musical, though I would be the first to acknowledge that there is no bright line separating the genres. But the traits that drive my categorization of the show are: a near-complete consignment of oral communication to song, a complete disdain for rhyme in the lyrics, and what one might call an operatic attitude (fervent emotion largely expressed through the music) for want of a better word. That said, opera is usually presented with orchestras rather than bands, even bands which, with the exception of some synthesizers, are all classical instruments (cellos, drums, viola, clarinet, bass, piano and oboe). As in Spring Awakening of a few seasons back, a classical musical palette is placed at the service of modern rhythms and melodies, although fittingly there is a strong influence of Russian music here. But where Spring Awakening’s music was often infused with rock influences and had been parceled out into discrete songs, here composer/lyricist Dave Malloy’s score is all contemporary classical music, and while it is presented in definite units, the word songs does not come readily to mind. The program speaks of “musical numbers,” but few members of the audience will go out humming them. Whatever one calls the music, fortunately, it is propulsive, powerful, and creates the feeling of a fevered dream.

A Conventional New Life

It is subtly surprising that all this innovation or near-innovation is placed at the service of a conventional tale. Tolstoy’s initial critics may have seen the huge, ungainly book as scandalously ungenred, and certainly there are things in the book like bastardy and abortion, philosophizing about the genesis of historical events, and battle reconstruction, few of which have seldom been the stuff of conventional romance. But the sliver of the story under consideration has more of what one might call the usual stuff, structured around a threat to a beautiful young woman’s premarital chastity and to her affections, set against a background of high society in a time of war. There is a ball and a duel and a visit to the opera. We are in a completely different universe from that occupied by the two plays discussed earlier; here it is meaningful to speak of a woman being “ruined.” And the catharsis at the end is symbolized by the appearance of a comet. (I am not sure why Malloy changed its year; it actually appeared in 1811.) But – in a fashion similar to the “purple summer” phenomena evoked at the conclusion of Spring Awakening – it is transmuted into a cause for hope. Here Pierre describes it:

This is conventional; Pierre’s “new life” may be a number of things, but primarily it is the first moment of his love for Natasha, which will culminate in their marriage many hundreds of pages hence, long after the action of this show. (As far as the show goes, the comet is the conclusion.) There is edginess here, but it resides in the overall presentation – and in what follows immediately upon these words: a spine-tingling discordant but beautiful upward chromatic slide of screeching synthesizer notes (not unlike that of the strings at the end of A Day in the Life) combined with a lighting effect that conveys the sense of a comet passing directly overhead.

Seriously Gilt

And there’s one place you can always look for edginess: the subgenre known as the theater piece. The exact boundaries of this subgenre are open to debate, but certainly such things as unconventional or absent plotting, audience participation, performer abdication of role-playing, and severe generic mashups are hallmarks. To one degree or another, all were to be seen in the Rude Mechs’ production Stop Hitting Yourself, recently on display at the Claire Tow Theater at Lincoln Center. The Rude Mechs (their name a tip of the hat to Midsummer Night’s Dream), are a theater troupe out of Austin, Texas, from whence they send emissaries on the road with shows they have created as a collective.

Theater pieces may have a fringe-y and hence low-rent reputation, but there was nothing low-rent about this performance, starting with the set, a large collection of objects, all gilt, including (but not limited to) 17 chandeliers, a mirrored set of steps that doubled as a queso fountain, a huge illuminated dollar sign, a large-than-life male nude statue, a suit of armor, a grand piano, and heaps of treasure, including gilded athletic shoes. Clearly we are in the realm of some kind of abstract fantasy of wealth, a place where, as Bob Dylan once put it, “Money doesn’t talk, it swears.” Lying in the foreground as the audience files in is a half-nude bearded man with matted hair, his body smeared with a yellow substance we will later discover to be congealed queso. Asleep? Dead? We learn by the end of the action, all of which turns out to be a flashback leading to this point.

Obviously, a character who looks this way is the one of those things that is not like all the others. What is Wildman (Thomas Graves), a rude creature of the forest, doing in this environment of epicurean wealth and splendor, one that looks as if Margaret Dumont could emerge at any moment to preside over it? And how will he fare within it? Those questions are answered, sort of, in the proceedings that follow.

More Brecht Than Rand

The program notes say the company was meditating on the ideas of Ayn Rand while creating the piece, and perhaps so, but what I saw was more a parable about the divide between the 1% and the 99%, a current and perennial issue in our wealth-dominated polity and culture. Rand at least theoretically believed in a form of individualism which, while liberated from notions of altruism, also was not actively hostile to the have-nots. This piece seems to be largely about just such hostility. In consequence, I at least saw more Brecht here than Rand.

Wildman arrives at this place, which turns out to be the palace of the Queen (Paul Soileau), in the run-up to an annual charity ball at which characters compete for a royal favor. Wildman is willing to put on rich people’s clothes and try to try to learn some plutocratic manners, in order to compete for a favor which would benefit the threatened natural environment, the wild from which he comes. But in so doing, he is running directly contrary to the ethos of thoughtless consumption and aggressive self-seeking by which the denizens of the palace live. That resistance is personified in the Unknown Prince (Joey Hood), a shady character who just wants to be made rich enough to become accustomed to the style of the people who regularly feature on the palace’s guest list.

Along the way to the charity ball, the audience will see various things that do not usually appear in plays: a weird kind of ballroom dancing somewhere in between clog dancing and tap, breaks in which the audience is requested to close its eyes for a seven-count in order for the cast to move from one absurd tableau to an unexpected different one, a kind of quiz show in which members of the audience are invited to compete for $20 bills by doing silly or embarrassing things, and moments in which members of the cast apparently tell snippets of their personal history (a la the dancers in A Chorus Line). The thematic and didactic thread seems to break at certain points in the performance, as one might expect. But it is fun.

The overall effect, therefore, is a bit like the one Rachel Maddow produces when she recounts horrifying, angering events in her patented droll, chipper manner. One is amused by the comic delivery at the same time as one is suitably appalled by that which is delivered. But an entertaining manner of explication risks being too far out of keeping with the subject, even distracting. Bread and circuses are fun, of course, but they are offered to us to keep us from thinking of other things. When the performance is itself a circus of a sort, quite literally a variety show with audience participation, we may be in danger of missing the emotional point. Even when we take in, intellectually, that wealth breeds misrule of society and of the environment, we may be having so much fun we do not take the point in emotionally. And that would be too bad. Of course, that itself might be the real point. Hard to tell with a show like this.

Here’s to Edgy

There is pleasure in seeing old classics done well, and pleasure in big, comfortable shows, and pleasure too in seeing well-known stars. But the shows discussed here remind us how vital it is that the theater keep on giving us things we haven’t seen before, might not be comfortable watching, things that stun us and surprise us. I would go so far as to say that if theater ever stops giving us edgy work, it will cease to be theater. Here’s to edgy.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Missing from the Awlaki Memo: Almost everything that really matters

Published in the Maryland Daily Record July 17, 2014

In a development that surprised many, the Second Circuit recently overturned the ruling of Judge Colleen McMahon of the Southern District of New York blocking the release of the July 16, 2010 Office of Legal Counsel memo that blessed the 2011 CIA drone operation that cost Anwar al Awlaki his life. I commented in these pages a year ago February on Judge McMahon’s rejection of the efforts of the ACLU to obtain the memo under the Freedom of Information Act, even though various members of the Obama Administration had been playing peekaboo with publicity about the drone attack and its rationale. In reversing Judge McMahon, the Second Circuit concluded that most of secrets in the memo had in fact been revealed by members of the Administration, and that some of the exceptions to the government’s obligations under FOIA had therefore been waived. Attached to the ruling was the redacted memo itself.

After the Redactions

The redactions left what appeared to be the bulk of the document. But critically, what the Second Circuit found had not been waived, and what was consequently redacted, was any mention of the intelligence which led to the conclusion that Awlaki was where he was (Yemen, as we all know) and what made him an appropriate target. Basically, the discussion of Awlaki’s activities that supposedly made him an appropriate target, and the elimination of other methods of other methods of dealing with him, are missing. We can see redaction spaces that probably contain such material, but, even assuming that they are devoted to nothing else, it’s obvious that that part of the discussion is cursory.

In short, although 90% of the memo is probably there, what’s missing is what we really want to see. What’s there is mostly trivial. Much ink is spilled over whether killing Awlaki constitutes the “foreign murder of United States nationals” under a section of the U.S. Code permitting prosecutions for that offense. Obviously, as the memo laboriously demonstrates, it isn’t murder when done on “public authority.” When the hangman does his work, that’s not murder.[1] Nor is it murder when a U.S. soldier attacks anyone as part of combat with another army.

The closest we come to a discussion of the real issues involved is the part that discusses whether the Authorization of the Use of Military Force (“AUMF”) passed after 9/11[2] covers the contemplated killing. If you focus only on the words of the AUMF, the answer is potentially yes. Awlaki was part of an offshoot of Al Quaeda, and Al Quaeda was the “organization” that “planned” 9/11. A Hellfire missile launched from a drone is “force.” The U.S. may use “force” against members of “organizations” that “planned” 9/11. The big question is whether the “force” is “necessary and appropriate.” The most important part of the memo addresses that question.

A Shadow of Its Former Self

Wholly missing from the text as we have it is any discussion of the facts establishing whether it was “necessary” or “appropriate” to target Awlaki. Surely it cannot be enough to say that a latter-day member of an offshoot of an organization that nine years earlier (when Awlaki was only a graduate student at George Washington University and part-time imam – albeit one who knew three of the 9/11 hijackers)[3] was much different is by merest definition of the word “organization” an appropriate target. A lot had changed. As Fawaz Gerges, a professor at the London School of Economics and author of a book on Al Quaeda, told PRI, “the Al Quaeda of Osama bin Laden no longer exist[s] as an effective organization. It’s gone. It’s dead. It’s a shadow of its former self.”[4]

If that’s true, how does the AUMF legitimate killing someone for his roundabout connection to this “shadow of its former self” organization? Moreover, someone who continues to be protected under Fourteenth Amendment due process, as the memo concedes? Right at this juncture in the discourse, the redactions become thick. Whether the killing is “appropriate” within the meaning of the AUMF must surely hinge on Awlaki’s own activities. But of those, we are told only that “a decision-maker could reasonably decide that the threat posed by [Awlaki’s] activities to United States persons is ‘continued’ and ‘imminent.’”

Sorry, not good enough. There are threats and there are threats. If Awlaki were planning an armed invasion of the United States or was coordinating a military attack on U.S. forces (and no one has ever suggested this had been true), that would make him an enemy combatant. By contrast, if he were planning to blow up civilian airliners (and we know he knew some people who were making such plans), that would make him only a terrorist, and hence only a criminal. (And it should be emphasized, there was no public proof of Awlaki’s own involvement in terror planning, though there were many accusations.) If he were merely glorifying terrorism on the Internet, which is mostly what we know he was doing, that might leave him somewhere in the troubled territory between mere exercise of First Amendment rights and treason. (And we didn’t execute Tokyo Rose, even when we convicted her of treason for somewhat similar behavior.)

In any event, there is absolutely no proof in the released part of the memo that Awlaki was part of a military effort against U.S. citizens, let alone any activities that clearly warranted the criminal death penalty. And absent such proof, it could never, consistent with the law of nations, be appropriate to use military means to kill him, and, therefore, I would submit, would never be an “appropriate” use of “force” within the meaning of the AUMF.

The Dilemma

I appreciate the dilemma that the prohibition causes. The memo says, in effect, that we’d rather arrest him and try him than kill him without trial, but we don’t have the means to arrest him. You know what? That doesn’t make criminal due process requirements go away or justify using military means and hardware to solve a police problem.[5] Tellingly, in trying to leap the barrier due process places in the path of this probably illegitimate solution, the memo references the Mathews v. Eldridge balancing test employed by the Supreme Court in addressing the claim of Yaser Hamdi, a U.S.-born detainee (initially at Guantanamo, then at a naval brig in South Carolina), that he should receive some sort of hearing on his claim not to have been an enemy combatant. Mathews says that due process is flexible, in light of the circumstances. But in the Hamdi case, the Supreme Court agreed, applying Mathews, that Hamdi was entitled to a hearing, albeit one that occurred after he had already been interned.

But what kind of meaningful trial could Awlaki have received if the government were allowed to kill him first, and try him afterwards? Once you concede Awlaki had a due process interest in his life – and one always has a due process interest in one’s life – then a post-deprivation trial must by definition have failed the Mathews test. Mathews never yields a result where the amount of due process owed to the private citizen is zero, both before and after deprivation of the due process interest. That’s why death penalty appeals are so long and tortuous: if you don’t get it right before you execute the defendant, there is no opportunity to correct it.

Yes, adhering to due process requirements in this difficult situation might well have meant the death of innocents, though it is interesting how little public proof there was that Awlaki was anything more than a Tokyo Rose for the era of the Internet and jihad. But there are much larger risks to our entire political order when we wipe away the distinction between law enforcement and warmaking, and when we accept a reading of Mathews that yields a zero due process result. Plenty of innocents would die in such a world as well.

[1].          An abomination, but not murder.

[2]. “… [T]he President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001…” AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF MILITARY FORCE, PL 107-40, September 18, 2001, 115 Stat 224.

[3]. All facts about Awlaki in this piece are taken from the Wikipedia entry on him, as accessed July 11, 2014.

[4]. For a somewhat different perspective, see this article by Joshua Frost in The Atlantic in 2012. But Frost seems to concede that central Al Quaeda does not directly control most of its offshoots. As the OLC memo acknowledges, Awlaki was closely affiliated with Al Quaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Apparently AQAP was not under the direct control of central Al Quaeda.

[5]. I have not discussed here (because the memo devotes no attention to the question) the rules regarding police use of force in apprehending suspected felons. But assuming (contrary to fact) that an arrest of Awlaki had been attempted, deadly force would only have been appropriate, if at all, had he attempted to flee. 6A C.J.S. Arrest § 53. It appears that military forces have been occasionally used to effect arrests, e.g. most recently in the capture of Ahmed abu Khattala, suspected in the Benghazi killings, by naval personnel. I would presume that, under those circumstances, the same deadly force rules would apply.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Visiting the Ilyrian Casbah: Center Stage Does TWELFTH NIGHT Proud

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com March 14, 2014

William Shakespeare‘s Twelfth Night is a confection, a treat full of wonderful things: music, romance, mistaken identities, gender confusion, practical joking, and love. It is in fact one of Shakespeare’s two or three most delightful plays.

And yet, like all of Shakespeare’s comedies, the more confectionary ones and the “problem comedies” alike, it has a dark undertone to it, an almost constant subliminal note of loss and insecurity. The events that set it off are a traumatic shipwreck from which brother and sister Sebastian and Viola are rescued, each believing the other dead, and the deeply troubling death of a brother of the Countess Olivia which has plunged her into exaggerated mourning. Moreover, there is a sense of continued and somewhat unsettling disorientation that surrounds virtually everyone. Both the genders and the sexual orientations of the Sebastian and Viola, and hence those of the two older nobles who will end up marrying them, Countess Olivia and Duke Orsino, are open to question. Olivia’s steward Malvolio is a jerk and a both upper- and lower-case Puritan, but hardly deserves the nasty trick that the rest of Olivia’s household play on him, so we know this is a world in which really bad things can happen to only moderately bad people. And sea captain Antonio, Sebastian’s rescuer and apparently would-be lover, takes unreasonable risks because of his love for Sebastian, and is apparently still in jeopardy because of those risks while the happy couples ignore him and dance through the closing. It is no wonder that Feste the clown, one of only two totally unconfused characters in the play, bases much of his schtick upon how deluded and foolish everyone is, including himself. He may be poking fun, but with a stick that is frequently too pointed for comfort.

A really good production of the play, such as the one now gracing the boards of Center Stage in Baltimore, will give us all of this. The inspired choice at the heart of this beautiful realization of Shakespeare’s vision is the creation of Illyria, the neverland in which Shakespeare set the play. There was no Illyria in Shakespeare’s time, and really had been no such nation since Roman times. Whatever Shakespeare was going for, it was not constricted by any realities contemporary to him. This meant that director Gavin Witt was free in turn to fashion something that in 21st-Century terms would correspond to Shakespeare’s fantasy. And what he presents is a kind of amalgam of the Marx Brothers’ Freedonia and the Warner Brothers‘ Casablanca. There are slinky evening gowns you might see at Rick’s Café Americain. There is a hat that echoes a fez. There is an outfit like a Greek soldier’s. Sebastian and Viola wear plus-fours and Norfolk jackets, topped with newsboy hats. The costumes, by designer David Burdick, all fit together and, together with the set by Josh Epstein which suggests a colonnaded white town overlooking the Adriatic (locus of the ancient Illyria), convey a world between the two World Wars. It is at once idyllic and dangerous, as we know Europe’s Balkan neighborhoods have always been and especially were then. Characters may be eavesdropping from behind beach umbrellas rather than bushes, but there’s still some not-totally-innocent eavesdropping going on.

Witt has turned a fine cast loose in this setting.

Carolyn Hewitt and Buddy Haardt, as Viola and Sebastian, look alike enough not to overstrain the implausibility of them being mistaken for each other physically, though there is no effort to make them sound the same (despite the Duke’s claim that they have “one voice”). Each makes the most of his part, especially Hewitt, who is given some of Shakespeare’s most wonderful lines to say. Orsino and Olivia may go for the extravagant swoony stuff that is meant to be poetic and musical though also fatuous, but Viola’s reproaches of Olivia are sharp and well-taken, and an actress like Hewitt can have a lot of fun with them, particularly when there’s double-entendre material referring to Viola’s own love for the oblivious Duke. Give a Shakespeare heroine the kind of agency that comes with an assumed masculine identity, and you get a striking truth-teller (think Portia in Merchant of Venice or Rosalind in As You Like It).

Sir Toby Belch, Olivia’s uncle, is a likeable figure of fun and a not-so-likeable figure of greed, and the trick of the part is to figure out where to strike the balance. Brian Reddy nudges Toby more into the greed category, as he gulls his buddy/victim, Andrew Aguecheek (Richard Hollis), to spend and spend in a suit for Olivia’s hand that is foredoomed by Aguecheek’s inconsequentiality and dissipation. Reddy’s Toby is delightfully sinister. You definitely would not want to buy a used niece from this man.

I can also report good things about William Connell’s Orsino, slightly epicene, dangling cigarettes while listening to love songs (Edith Piaf to be precise) on the record player, Allen McCullough as a sturdy and well-thought-out (if slightly under-malevolent) Malvolio, and Vanessa Wasche, who manages, in her portrayal of Olivia, to look simultaneously slinky and farcical in any kind of dress while envisaging one of Shakespeare’s most amusing portraits of the follies of love.

But for my money the prize performance is turned in by Julie-Ann Elliott as Maria, the servant who comes up with the scheme that trips up Malvolio. In my experience, Maria usually gets the kind of accent sported by the downstairs characters at Downton Abbey. This Maria seems almost regal, and definitely lives upstairs and talks the upstairs talk. And this rendering was a revelation to me. No longer a shrewd observer of her betters, she now possesses an aristocrat’s breadth of view. When Toby Belch marries her in most productions, he’s raising her status as a reward for that shrewdness. Here it seems as if the favor may be being done to Toby. Elliott makes maturity and clear-sightedness seem much sexier than the ingénue qualities of Olivia and the (to say the least) still somewhat unformed femininity of Viola.

The one real mistake in casting was Linda Kimbrough as Feste. Granted, the whole concept of conventional casting is a somewhat artificial construct when one is speaking of Shakespeare, whose original casts were all male. But that was not by Shakespeare’s choice; unconventional casting was all he had. And I would posit that in a mixed-gender cast in a comedy where gender identity and gender roles are at the root of the fun, conventional casting is a must. (The more cacophonous the piece, the greater the importance of the orchestra tuning to the concertmaster’s A to start with.) Moreover, this Feste does not seem to be presented as male, despite the male pronoun that Shakespeare at least once uses for the character (and the closing song mentioning the singer as having once been “a little tiny boy” and now having come “to man’s estate”). Kimbrough’s Feste seems to be presented as a woman – except maybe when Feste pretends to be a curate sent to determine Malvolio’s sanity. And apart from perhaps unintentional gender confusion, I had no idea what Kimbrough brought to the role. She didn’t make Feste seem all that witty or all that insightful. Her singing (and this character is the singer who matters in this very musical play) was adequate but not exciting. (To be fair, Palmer Heffernan’s original music isn’t very exciting either.) My sense was Kimbrough was a fine actress in the wrong role.

Fortunately, there is so much going on right in this wonderful performance of a wonderful play that an uninspiring note or two matters little. Somehow the vulnerability of Witt’s recreated Illyria underlying the farce makes the joy in the show shine all the brighter. There will never be a definitive production of any Shakespeare play, but this is one of the truly special ones.

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

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CSC’s AS YOU LIKE IT: You’ll Like It Like That

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com June 21, 2014

It’s often been observed of Shakespeare that his plays don’t tell you what he thinks about most subjects. But it is hard to doubt that he believed in romantic love, that mad, intoxicating, all-encompassing feeling that inspires courtship and marriage. Many of his comedies are essentially love delivery vehicles, giddy confections that give the audience an extraordinarily broad license just to roll in the bliss of it. I think especially of Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But the most love-mad of all is surely As You Like It. And thankfully, that love-mad champagne feeling is served up nearly full-force in the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company’s latest rendering of the play.

As most theatergoers know, the plot is set in motion by an evil, usurping duke (Gregory Burgess) who has banished the rightful duke, his brother (Gregory Burgess again), and by a churlish young nobleman named Oliver (Matthew Armstrong) who has tried to kill his younger brother Orlando (Vince Eisenson). Their respective misdeeds have already driven the rightful duke to flee to sanctuary at play’s beginning, and drive Orlando after three short scenes to do the same. Deposed duke and fugitive young man hide out in a mystic neverland called the Forest of Arden, from whence the play never afterwards departs. Arden is a very different and much safer place. In Arden, as scholar Albert Gilman accurately states, “the chief dangers … are falling in love or being worsted in a discussion.” Many modern writers think that Shakespeare had in mind the British forest of Arden in Warwickshire, near his home in Stratford, but even Shakespeare’s frequent carelessness about locations would have bridled at trying to make his audience forget that there’s an English Channel between France, where the play begins, and Warwickshire. My own theory is that this was an Anglicization of Ardennes, the densely-wooded part of Northern France that saw much fighting in both World Wars.

Regardless, in Arden’s green and pleasant land, there seems to be sheepherding going on (yes, you can graze sheep in forests), but it’s all offstage, and doesn’t seem to be very demanding of anyone’s time, freeing up not only the toffs who philosophize about this or that or play at love, but also the commoners who are supposedly tending those sheep, so they can all get into the love action. Thus, when Orlando arrives, and, separately, his love Rosalind, the rightful duke’s heir (Blythe Coons), her cousin Celia, the evil duke’s daughter (Lizzi Albert), and their companion, the fool Touchstone (Keegan Cassady), all the elements are in place for an extended romp, involving most of the principal characters. By the end of the play there will be four pairings, but the impediments to things falling in place quickly are that Rosalind is disguised as a man, and that she and her cousin are incognito. (Don’t ask silly questions like why she continues with the disguise once she gets to Arden, or why Orlando doesn’t see through the disguise, or why the good duke doesn’t recognize his daughter, even in drag. Well, actually on that one, there are lines that make it sound as if the good duke only left France recently, but also lines which make it sound as if he’s been in Arden for years, which might make the non-recognition slightly less implausible. Shakespeare inconsistent? Who knew? Who cares?)

And so we get mistaken identities, and mock courtships, and parodies of bad love lyrics, and – oh, yes – the discussions Albert Gilman mentioned, mainly courtesy of a melancholy courtier named Jacques. In this production, Jacques is unconventionally cast, played by a woman, Jenny Leopold. The character is made female. I confess to having been nervous about this, having recently seen a woman badly miscast as Feste, the clown in Twelfth Night, who was apparently still a male character though the actress made no effort to act or appear so. Leopold is another matter entirely; I was in love with her rendering almost immediately. Jacques is absolutely critical to the emotional structure of the play; his/her famous “Seven Ages of Man” speech reminds us that all the ecstasy, all the joy and playfulness, that envelop the other characters and the audience too, are transitory, that there is darkness outside, that oblivion (Jacques’ word) awaits. Shakespeare has Jacques walking out of the wedding feast at the end because there must be one character who prevents the giddiness from getting out of hand, keeps the emotional engine from overheating. And hearing the thoughtful naysaying come from a self-possessed female speaker, not bitter male one like some Jacqueses I’ve seen, just the viewpoint of an experienced woman who knows what she knows, somehow gave it a depth I had not heard before.

That is not to say that the production stints on the giddiness. You know, early on, that they’re going to do the giddy part right, when Orlando and Rosalind first meet, and Orlando spends perhaps two minutes just comically trying to speak, he’s so dumbstruck. The lines hint at this, but it is certainly not compelled by them. You keep waiting through the silence for the bit to be overplayed, but it isn’t. Eisenson knows how to gasp without repeating himself. And there is a running gag throughout the production that when love at first sight befalls, a little band pops out from a hidey-hole and plays the recent hit Stuck on You by indie singer Meiko, with the telling lyric “You are the one I could see having fun with,/ Not just for tonight but for the rest of my life.” They get to play it a lot, and not just for the couples that actually end up together for the rest of their lives – the miscues leading to some amusing business for the musicians.

Speaking of the music, it seems to be an integral part of the experience of the CSC’s outdoor shows at the ruins of the Patuxent Female Institute in Ellicott City. The night I saw the show, there was an Irish folk band playing on the grounds to greet the arriving audience, and before the production, various ensembles from the cast showed off their musical chops (the songwriters were Barry Louis Polisar, Ingrid Michaelson, and Hall & Oates, so you know there was some range), and Shakespeare’s own songs were also prominently featured, with new settings by Daniel O’Brien or Sean Chambers. Actors mugging and doing precision finger-snapping routines are a treat. There was also, as a warmup act, if you will, a swordplay demonstration by fight captains Teresa Spencer and James Jager, in character as Phebe and Silvius, one of the eventual couples in the play.

And it’s not just the music or the bonus swordplay. There are lots of little gimmicks to add fun to the already lively proceedings, including a snowball fight (you read that right), a direct parody of WWF-style “wrestling,” and lots of direct audience interaction which went over great with my 11-year-old companion. (Did I mention that kids under 19 are admitted free?)

If I had a criticism, it would be not with the principals, but with the way that the smaller parts were handled. Granted the exiled duke’s court is some kind of Arcadian fantasy, as Shakespeare conceived it. But it gained some heft as a fantasy by displaying the manners and the talk of real courtiers, albeit courtiers who have moved to a different setting. This youngish ensemble frequently seemed more reminiscent of the flock of clownish disciples in Godspell than a group of nobles in pleasantly reduced circumstances. I’d also mike the singers. It only takes one loudmouth conversing with his family during the pre-show entertainment (and I had one in front of me) to render the lyrics almost inaudible. With proper amplification, that problem would have gone away. And even during the play, when the loudmouths were not up and running, the singers’ voices were not always totally intelligible (unlike those of the actors, who were fine). I don’t know why that was the case, but it was.

For the most part, though, this is a solid and ultimately respectful rendering of one of Shakespeare’s most pleasing plays, the romantic equivalent of a hit of pure oxygen. It is impossible to dislike the play, or to come away from this production of it without a grin.

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

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Bumpy Landing

Innuendo, by Michael Franks (1987)

Hear it on on Spotify | Buy it here | See it here | Lyrics here

Life’s major transitions are often messy. When (halfway between two marriages) I finally gave up playing the field, that was a major transition. And majorly messy.

Moments of Clarity

Neat would have been if I’d come to a clear-cut realization that carrying on multiple relationships was straining my integrity and imperiling my chances with Mary, the one I most cared for. Neat would have been a calm decision that therefore my wandering ways needed to stop.

Now, I did have such moments of clarity, lots of them, aided by predictable flashes of jealousy on both sides between Mary, my main girlfriend, and me. But I also had plenty of moments of the opposite sort of clarity: a clarity about the sexual freedom I’d be giving up and about my still-unsettled state (not yet being legally divorced, nor out of therapy, and certainly without a way of figuring out my long-term finances). A bit like Saint Augustine, I had always wanted an exclusive relationship; I just was having trouble deciding to have it quite yet.[1]

So the process was messy. Let us say bumpy. Surely the biggest bump came in the fall of 1985 when I tried swearing off the other relationships – and then panicked, and begged off the new arrangement for a while. Mary, who had by then moved to Charlottesville, forgave me, but it didn’t help matters between us.

Go to the Calendar

So things went on until the spring of 1986. I wish I could articulate more clearly how it was different this time from the way it had been a few months before, but I have no explanations. I can only tell the story, prompted by my calendar.

As the calendar reflects, in late April I went on my last real date with someone else. By my own choice I was already down to just one someone else, and she was the friend with benefits I’d described last time; we had no serious relationship. I guess I was no longer looking for anyone who could compete with what I was building with Mary – just someone who could delay it.

Two days later, I was in Bellaire, Florida, at a national training session for new state humanities council members (I’d just joined Maryland’s). Mostly I was alone; that much I recall. I don’t remember much about the conference. Well, let’s be honest; I don’t remember anything about the conference. No doubt it was well-run and inspiring, and no doubt the company was pleasant. But nearly thirty years later, all of that is lost to my memory. What stands out – and stands out vividly – is the hotel itself, the Belleview Biltmore. Even in my contemporaneous snapshots, it is the hotel that matters, not the guests.

When we, the conferees arrived, being humanities people, we were briefed by someone about the history of the place. It had started out at the turn of the previous century as a place where rich folks could come down by train, park their private cars on a private siding, and golf amongst their peers. The grandee market having dried up considerably after the Great Crash, the hotel had had to cope, partly, as I learned, by becoming a defense asset during World War II.

By sheerest coincidence, when I got there, I happened to be reading James Gould Cozzens’Guard of Honor (1948),[2]  a tale of the races and the sexes behind the lines in 1943, as the Army Air Corps geared up for combat. Much of the action there took place in a grand hotel called the Oleander Towers where officers attached to a nearby airfield and official visitors were billeted. The Biltmore’s guests, I learned, had been attached to nearby MacDill Airfield. And much of the description of the Oleander Towers fit the Biltmore: Cozzens’ wrote of “[t]he vast corridors, the old-fashioned lofty rooms with ceiling fans and slatted doors [that] were fairly cool. The high, screened balconies got some breeze … most nights.”)[3] And then I realized that the Cozzens’ hotel was on the Central Florida Gulf Coast as was the Biltmore. And you don’t have two places on that scale in proximity to each other. So I concluded the Biltmore had to be the model for the Oleander Towers! Suddenly, I could, in my mind’s eye, see men in uniform striding down the hallways “down on conferences, inspections, and junkets” – in Cozzens’ words, and maybe finding moments for romance, as one of his heroes sort of did.[4]

Hence it was, I felt, a hotel that had seen everything,[5] and if I could only be attentive in the presence of that mute historical omniscience, somehow I would receive some sort of wisdom.

A Sunset to Share

What I came away with was more a feeling than a thought: a dissatisfaction with aloneness. I suspect from some scanty evidence, and again I’m revealing how messy it all was, that on the Monday night, I had a flirtatious dinner that led nowhere with someone whom I know now merely by recorded initials (the name is gone from memory). I know that after that inconclusive dinner I caught a shuttle out to Clearwater Beach, to catch the celebrated sight of the sun setting over the Gulf of Mexico from the fishing pier there. Seeing it made me wish I could share that prospect with Mary, but I had forgotten my camera. (Fortunately, fate brought me back to the area almost exactly a year later, and that time I captured images of the sunset that had eluded me the preceding year.)

I am certain I came away leaning toward the view that it was time to bring this stage of my life to a close. But I wasn’t quite there even then. Perhaps my mind was really made up two weeks later, at a group therapy session. The other members of the group did not think highly of my inconstancy, to put it mildly. One of the female members told me, in a voice that one uses to explain the obvious to a thick child, that ordinarily you put in some time being monogamous with anyone you’re thinking about marrying.

Or perhaps the final turning point came the following weekend when I flew back to my hometown of Ann Arbor for a party honoring my stepdad on his retirement. I spent more time alone there, walking around, photographing my old haunts, thinking, for some reason, about being honest with my kids. Although it was no doubt a trifle optimistic to think they would be interested in their father’s early years, I wanted there to be a record, an honest record, a clear and admirable one. And I knew (if only from the Group’s commentary) that there wasn’t much admiration for my extant way of life from those who knew the most about it.

Making a Break

And so I came to Friday, May 16. Early that evening, I got together again with my friend with benefits, and over drinks, looking across the room at a second-floor window revealing the fading light in an Inner Harbor neighborhood, I told her I’d decided I only wanted to see one woman now. Don’t even worry about it, my friend said. I still want to be friends, I said, and she agreed. (An agreement we kept.) We talked for an hour, we hugged goodbye, and I went home.

Not much later, Mary arrived from Virginia, and I told her I was through with everyone else. She asked me if I was serious this time, and I told her I was. I had a hollow feeling, still, though. I’d had warm feelings for the friend I’d just broken up with. But I kept it to myself.

The following evening, the two of us went to a “hat party” given by a friend – everyone had to wear a lid, don’t ask me why. Two of the guests there were women I had been with. There might have been a day, and not long before either, that I would have exulted in that secret evidence of my prowess and attractiveness. Now I felt bad because the two other women had information Mary didn’t (and, consistent with the rules Mary and I had laid down to avoid jealousy, I had not told her). I found I had stopped wanting the thrill of secret information. I was now ready for a regime of straightforward disclosure. And I felt a strong sense of relief that I would not be adding anything more to that pile of secrets. It could well be that that moment, not the isolation at the grand hotel nor the critique from the therapy group nor the introspection in my hometown nor the goodbye to the friend nor the announcement to Mary, was the real point of decision. There’s no way of really saying.

Wherever it had exactly happened, though, I felt as if the train of my life had gone over a switch somewhere. I might still be running parallel to most of my old ways, but I was headed for a different destination.

The Dialogue More Real

The song that I hear when I think about that part of my life is actually from the following year, 1987, Michael Franks’ Innuendo. The story the song tells bears some resemblance to the transition I was making. It concerns two former lovers coming back together, going on a date after a year off in which he’s had “a few stolen kisses and several near misses” – presumably with others. He’s nervous adjusting his tie in the mirror, before going out to re-encounter The One.

But as they talk, as “their salads are dressing,” along comes Cupid with his arrow, and though they each dissimulate a bit by resorting to innuendo rather than direct talk, eventually they finish the meal and go home together.

So this song is about a second try at a relationship, the success of which is marked by the “dialogue” becoming “more real.” That’s the big similarity. The musical setting might seem distinctly less of a fit. It is lovely and placid, built around the smooth jazz guitar of Earl Klugh, who could noodle as smoothly as any guitarist in that era. And if I’ve made anything clear above, it’s that there was nothing smooth about the process of getting to this point. But as I say, this record actually came out in 1987, a year after the bumpy landing, a happy year, as it turned out. No buyer’s regrets this time. The smoothness of the year somehow worked backwards to make the bumpiness less bumpy in retrospect. So to me the song was a perfect fit.

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Vital and Inevitable: The Decay of Client Confidentiality

Published in the Maryland Daily Record June 30, 2014

Despite the old rhyme about Lizzie Borden (of Fall River, Massachusetts) taking an axe and giving her father forty whacks, Ms. Borden was acquitted of her parents’ murders. Her lead lawyer, George Dexter Robinson, former governor of Massachusetts, began his representation, on October 4, 1892, by conducting a three-hour one-on-one interview with Ms. Borden in the Taunton jail. To this day, his notes of that interview remain locked up in a safe in his law firm, Robinson, Donovan, Madden & Barry, in Springfield.

Andrew Jackson Jennings, the Borden family lawyer, was also on the defense team. His notes, by contrast, passed into his grandson’s estate and thence, recently, into the hands of the Fall River Historical Society, where they have been eagerly inspected by history buffs trying to find out what really happened in those long-controversial murders.

A recent and intriguing piece in Litigation magazine[1] by Anne Klinefelter and Marc C. Laredo poses the question which outcome was the right one.

Reportedly, the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers takes the position that “[t]he duty to protect confidential information survives death in Massachusetts.” Given that Lizzie Borden died in 1927, that asserted duty has survived nearly nine decades in her case.

Massachusetts seems to represent the standard outlook. Attorney-client communications have been explicitly held to remain privileged after the client’s death in Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and in the Supreme Court.[2] I am unaware of cases to the contrary.

The claims of history have been entirely overlooked in the formation of this consensus position, however, and the meaning of confidentiality cannot possibly be as absolute, nor confidentiality’s claims so pressing, in a digital era.

Let’s talk about history first. The importance of knowing the real story of what happened in the development of our species, our societies, and our families, is both practical and existential. The old saw that those who are ignorant of history are destined to repeat it establishes perhaps the most urgent facet of its practical importance. And there is no useless information. Victor Hugo said it well: if you call details small, you are wrong because “il n’y a ni petits faits dans l’humanité.” (There aren’t any small facts in humanity.)[3] And the facts a lawyer hears – particularly those made known in confidence – would likely loom large in anyone’s estimation, were they but known. Lawyers hear the unvarnished accounts, the testimony that gets ruled out on motions to suppress, the contradictions that are ironed out as witnesses are prepared, the secret histories underlying bequests, the angry comments the lawyer assures are never made because to do so would injure the deponent’s credibility, the employment history silenced by non-disparagement clauses and confidentiality agreements, and maybe most important the deliberations government lawyers keep hidden by pleading executive privilege. We lawyers are probably responsible for burying more important history than any other group.

And some of us are actually proud of this.

I’m not suggesting there is no social utility to the attorney-client privilege. The client certainly has a need to consult counsel in confidence. But what about when there is no client anymore? There is no one then to embarrass, no one to prosecute, potentially no one left whose ox could be gored. This will not always be the case; even after a generation or two, certain disclosures about parentage might seriously disrupt inheritances, open disputes about title to land – that sort of thing. But realistically, how could anyone now be hurt by us knowing what Lizzie Borden and George Dexter Robinson said to each other on October 4, 1892?

The no-ox-to-be-gored principle is why you can’t defame the dead – at least not civilly (though there are in many jurisdictions unenforced laws that make it criminal to do so).[4] You also can’t prosecute the dead, which deprives the shield of the privilege of much of its urgency once the potential defendants slip through the ultimate loophole.[5] Basically, when they’re gone, they’re gone for legal purposes – at least those unrelated to their property. (Their estates have to be distributed, and their rights of publicity live on. But claims personal to them vanish.)

This means that the dead exert a peculiar kind of mortmain (dead hand, literally and figuratively) on the speech of the living – and of their survivors. I would contend that this mortmain frustrates the demands of history, and needs to be rethought. Old government secret files are declassified after a certain period. Time capsules are opened. Archaeologists excavate old tombs. Yet our profession clings to the notion that the secrets we sit upon are so sacred they can never be disclosed. What makes us think we or our clients should be excepted from posthumous revelation? (If the law has a right to every man’s testimony, as the old saying went, does not history have a right to each generation’s knowledge and information?)

What makes us even think, in this day and age, that we are capable of keeping secrets? Surely we know by now that every e-mail and telephone communication with our clients is likely seized by some government agency. Surely we know that if our cellphones fall into the wrong hands, client confidences go with them (perhaps encrypted, perhaps locked, but probably not effectively so against a determined search). Surely we know that every call we make to the computer help desk ends up with the technician being given remote access to privileged data. Perhaps Mr. Robinson, in 1892, could commit his notes of Lizzie Borden’s client confidences to a few pages, discrete actual pieces of paper physically capable of being confined in a safe. Today’s lawyer’s documents start life as electronic entities capable of being everywhere and nowhere. Today’s lawyers regard it as malpractice not to back up their documents remotely, likely in a server farm owned and operated by some contractor out in the cloud whose name they do not know, and whose locations are closely-guarded secrets. What becomes of long-term confidentiality in an environment like that?

I write these words at home directly after having composed a confidential draft of a letter I shall share with a client tomorrow. The correspondence has been stored in a commercial cloud drive which I shall access from work to forward to the client – a cloud drive which, let me add, I first heard about in a recommendation from a bar association. Will I realistically be able to clean up all traces of these privileged communications when I retire? I’m quite certain I won’t. Some of those traces will be available to unauthorized parties in the future. But that is the way law is now practiced.

It is an extremely safe bet, then, that client confidences will be harder to preserve as we progress. And it is, I think, a safe bet as well that at some point the profession will come to a more nuanced notion of the lifespan of a client confidence, and embrace some kind of declassification protocol, if only to keep some kind of control on the ravages that technology has wrought on secrecy altogether. It can counteract the ravages that attorney-client confidentiality has wrought on history.