stumbling virtue

Prep School

 

Commuting isn't for the faint of heart.

I went to graduate school in New York City, but I lived and worked in New Jersey. This meant that for a few years I found myself part of the bridge and tunnel commuter shuffle. My route involved taking a bus to Port Authority and then riding the subway to school (first day of school I got on the wrong subway and happily traveled several blocks in the wrong direction before realizing anything was wrong). I learned that there was an art and science to commuting--what kind of seat to look for on the bus, how to ignore the person next to you, and most importantly, the fastest and best routes from the bus gate to the subway platform. This was of utmost importance to me--most days I had morning classes that got out at 1:00 and I had to be at work at 4:00. If I made it onto the 1:30 bus, I could stop at home first and get a few desperately needed moments of privacy, quiet or sleep. If I missed the 1:30, though, I had to wait until the 2:30 bus and that meant that I would have to go straight to work, and that was just miserable. I remember more than a few times making it to the bus gate one or two minutes too late and bursting into tears on the spot.

So I studied how much time it took me to get from the subway to the bus. I figured out how often the subways came to the stop near school, and I left classes without looking back, even if the teacher was still rambling on. I knew not to carry too much with me at any time in case I had to run the distance from the subway to the bus. I also learned that sometimes no matter how much you planned and tried, things just went wrong. There's a problem with the trains, and you're stuck helplessly at 96th Street with the minutes ticking away; you're in the Lincoln Tunnel and traffic is backed up and you have no hope of getting home in time for anything. And when that happened, I learned to just give in, and think, "I have done all I have done. There is nothing I can do."

What fascinated me about this commuting wisdom is that I was not the only one who had acquired it. Sometimes you walk onto a subway platform and see what looks like thousands of people standing there, the obvious sign that something is wrong with the train. Or in those days when I relied on the bus, there would be times when I'd bound up the last flight of stairs to the the fourth floof of the bus terminal and see lines snaking from my gate all the way back to the escalator. Again, something had gone wrong and we were all left to wait. And the astonishing thing was that I never saw crowds in these situations go mad. You would think there would be people screaming, swarming, pounding on the glassed in booth of the subway workers, grabbing the bus employees and swearing at them. But no, nothing--maybe some more sighing and annoyed voices than usual, but hardly the behavior you would expect from a giant crowd of people who are suddenly finding out that they can't get where they're trying to go. Where's the anger, the chaos? I always marvel at this.

So a few weeks ago, when the US Airways plane crash-landed in the Hudson River and word came out that the evacuation had been fairly orderly (though as it turned out later, not as calm and orderly as first reported), I wasn't surprised. For some reason, crowds often behave better than you would think, and I had no idea why. When I read one of the articles about the crash and rescue, though, I found some quotes from Amanda Ripley, who had just written a book called The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes--and Why, that covered, amongst other things, how crowds behave during disasters. It took me no time to put that one on reserve and then rush down to get it.

 

To Be Or Not To Be

...is not really the question--it should be "Fortinbras or no Fortinbras?"

As recently noted, I am in charge of editing Hamlet down to a length that audiences can stand in a black box, folding metal chairs kind of theatre--really, you don't want the full four and a half hour version in that kind of atmosphere. We'd need to be sponsored by some kind of ergonomic furniture maker in order to pull that off (and also again, I will mention that I am not nearly as interested in editing Hamlet as I am in playing Hamlet, which I know is not going to happen, alas--cross-gender casting will only be taken so far).

But seriously, Fortinbras serves a very important purpose in the play, in that he represents the opposite of Hamlet--Fortinbras acts without hesitation, while Hamlet can never bring himself to take action (though of course he has "cause and will and means to do it"). So if you remove Fortinbras, you remove this nice mirror image that is constantly thrown before Hamlet, the person who is all that he is not, which makes him even more wretched (though notably not more able to act). Practically, though, if you take out the Fortinbras storyline, you easily cut out a lot without the main plot of the play suffering or needing any tweaking to be understood. As anyone who has to edit things down from very large to quite small knows, the first thing you look for is big chunks to take out--cutting individual lines and words is the last resort for when you're getting down to the wire. If you stick with the Fortinbras material, you're (or I should say "I") going to have to do a lot of fine little line-by-line shaving.

I threw all this over to the director who responded with an unhelpful "Let me think." Think? Who has time to think? Who does he think he is, Hamlet? My personal opinion is that as much as I love having Fortinbras around, I think the smartest, most efficient thing to do is to just let him go. I feel we must let the man drift offstage in Scandinavia on his own. Sigh.

Second Draft

The one-act fest did open last week, and so far, so good. Well, not that good--let's just say that single digit temperatures and snowstorms are not exactly helping us in terms of audiences. I'm not talking about walk-up business, I mean everyone's friends and family have been saying, "Uhh, yeah...I hear it's going to be in the 40s next week, maybe I'll come then..."

The play I'm in has been going well enough--fantastic in comparison to our disastrous dress rehearsal, but that was a pretty low bar to rise above (seriously, that may have been the second worst dress rehearsal I've ever been part of in my entire life). I've been getting decent laughs, but the glasses I wear broke on Sunday. I love my glasses! They make the entire character, so I hope they've been fixed. I've always wanted to wear glasses...sigh...

As for the play I wrote--considering they only had about four hours of rehearsal, it's been going well. You know, when you write something you have no idea how it's going to sound onstage. The first time I watched it I wanted to just die because I could hear sections that needed desperately to be cut. If only I had been able to sit in on one reading, I would have asked to have the script back and slashed it mercilessly (imagine my joy when the director cheerfully explained about all the sound effects and bits he added to the opening, the part I think needs the most cutting. I just smiled and thanked him for his enthusiasm). It still works, though, mostly because two of the three actors really get it and have good onstage rapport. If I ever think of submitting it anywhere else, though, I'll do some serious work on it first.

Meanwhile, I have been given the task of editing Hamlet down to a reasonable length for one of our spring shows. I am grimly trying to remind the powers that be that as much as I don't mind doing extra things offstage, I prefer to be on.

Separation Anxiety

 

People signed Descartes' skull like a high school yearbook.

You know, sometimes you read a book, and you know there's really nothing wrong with it, and you don't hate it, but you don't love it either, you just...read it.

In Descartes' Bones, Russell Shorto follows the journey of the skeleton of Rene Descartes, the author of the groundbreaking "Discourse on Reason." Descartes died in 1650 in Stockholm and did not exactly rest in peace. Over the next two hundred years, his bones would be reburied in France, misplaced, found, and wondered about by generations of philosophers and scientists. His skull was disconnected from the rest of his remains, and the journey of that piece of the man, and the struggle to identify it absolutely when it supposedly turned up, was a story in itself.

Time Enough

 

FDR handled radio like a pro.

I suppose it is timely that I find myself writing today about Franklin Roosevelt and the first one hundred days of his administration (again) on a day when another president jumps into the fray. This wasn't planned--I finished the book about five days ago, but my computer was out being repaired and I'm just getting to it now (as for the inauguration, I must confess how cruelly disappointed I was to hear an error of singular-plural agreement in the speech--"than see a friend lose their job." I had so hoped that at last we would have a president who would make this country safe for grammar fans. Sigh). That means that I must apologize in advance for some vagueness of the details...

Now Franklin D. Roosevelt might have made the same mistake if left on his own to write a speech--he wasn't much of a writer, though he fancied himself one at times. He usually took various drafts of a speech from several writers, then patched them together (occasionally disastrously--he contradicted himself in a campaign speech put together too hastily from two writers' versions). He added a few tweaks of his own, but that was it. When it came to speeches, FDR's talent was not in writing, but in his delivery; he excelled at making listeners feel like he was their friend, like he was talking to them alone. He was able to sound confident and calm in a crisis, which was something his audience desperately needed to hear, and something he understood they needed; before his term began, Roosevelt told James Farley that he measures he adopted were less important than restoring confidence to the American people. It's unclear whether Oliver Wendell Holmes was speaking of Franklin Roosevelt or Theodore Roosevelt when he said, "A second-class intellect but a first-clss temperament." The first part of the description might have been a little harsh, though I haven't read enough to judge that; the second part, though, seems to be a fine description of FDR and in the time in which he served, a first-class temperament was perhaps more important than a first-class intellect.

Jonathan Alter's The Defining Moment tells about the much-heralded period during which FDR launched the first programs that made up the New Deal. However, Alter doesn't actually get to those hundred days until two hundred pages into the book, which is only about 330 pages long (in the edition I had). "The Defining Moment" for FDR, then, comes through less as the early active days that defined Roosevelt's presidency than the moments in his life that made him into the man who became that president.

Let's Put On a Show

The one-act fest opens tomorrow. I have no idea how it will go. The play I'm in was an absolute train wreck during dress rehearsal, but the run through we did afterwards went much better. We figure there's nowhere to go but up after that disaster yesterday. I didn't get a chance to see the one I wrote, but the actors who are in it (who finally got to rehearse...twice) said it's going okay, and the questions the director sent me that made me worry he didn't understand the play were resolved in the way I suggested when I wrote back (the play, btw, doesn't include anything as unwieldy and bad as that last sentence). I'm just hoping people will laugh.  

Meanwhile, we finally have heat and hot water back in our apartment, the super is coming tomorrow to tear apart our shower because there are leaks from our pipes into the apartment below us, and my computer is sick and has to get sent out for repair. Sigh. Everything happens at once. Happy opening night indeed.

 

Theatre for the Masses

 

Power, a slapstick satire that advocated public ownership of utilities was a huge hit with audiences; with power companies, not so much.

Last week I got an email that's circulating around to theater people asking for signatures on a petition to the new presidential administration to create a Secretary of the Arts position, similar to the ministers of culture or the arts that are found in other nations' governments. The idea, presumably, is that it would be a government entity that would support and provide money to arts organizations. When I read this, my first thought was, ah yes, because that has worked so well in the past.

[Cue traveling back in time music and a slow swirly fadeout. Lights come up in a shabby, half-dark theater where a group of ragtag actors are trying to rehearse a play while stage hands hammer and saw in the background. Oh wait, this isn't a movie, it's a book review! Scrap all that.]

Susan Quinn's Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times tells the story of the most fabled government foray into the arts, the Federal Theatre Project. Much has already been written about this venture (and it even got a movie, too, but I'll get to that in a bit), but often as part of another book about the WPA or the Depression or a biography of one of the major players. Quinn, though, has a whole book and that gives her time to get beyond some of the more well-known stories.

(Just to be clear--my search of the NYPL system shows that, yes, there have been a few other books solely devoted to the Federal Theatre Project, but about a third of these are memoirs of some of those involved in the project, some others look like dissertations, and none of them were published more recently than 1978. Quinn's book is from 2008, so it's been a long time since anyone has really delved into this.)

Enter Laughing/Exit Crying

“I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again, night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don't we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.” - Richard Brinsley Sheridan

"Wait, people get paid to do this?" - KA

The one-act festival opens next week, and to be honest, I'm terrified. I'm in one play, and while I only have a small part, and I'm not wild about the play itself, there's no reason why it shouldn't come off well. We have a great director, a fun cast, and the world's always a better place when I get to play an incompetent comic doctor.

The real problem, though, is that I also have a play that I wrote in the festival. Now of course I'm more than grateful that the producers chose mine as one of the lucky ten. But the production itself seems like a disaster. The director is very nice, someone I like, who has done quite a lot for me. But he's also someone who tends to take on a lot of things at once, and then not everything gets much attention. So I found out that eight days before opening, the cast hadn't met once, and they hadn't had one rehearsal yet. Okay, one-acts, especially of the fifteen minute variety don't really need much rehearsal. However, this has a lot of fast-paced dialogue in it and the only way you can get that down is to just drill it. Worse, the play has a sound cue, several props and oh by the way, someone from one of the other casts to do a silent walk-on at the end. Yet no sign of any of that being taken care of (dangling preposition, I know). 

Then yesterday I got an email from the director asking me all kinds of questions about the play, and can we change this and that because it doesn't make sense, etc. From the questions, I got the bad feeling that not only had he probably not read the play before, but that he had even now only just given it a quick skim. Not only that, he just didn't seem to get the point of it at all. Not that there's a huge point to it--this isn't Deep Meaning Theater, it's comedy!--but there are reasons people have certain types of names and things like that. I know the play does work--I had people read it before I submitted it and I talked to two of the cast members a few weeks ago and they didn't seem to have a problem with it (they were telling me how much they liked it!!). So I think this looks like it's going to be a mess and I'm absolutely crushed. I've never had a play I wrote produced before (I actually don't write plays very often) and I hate to be represented so poorly. And I was so fond of the little play. I don't love everything I write, but I do love this one. I can't stand the idea that it may be performed in a way that other people won't love. I feel horrible about this. I'm trying to just trust in the actors and hope they'll find the right way. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

Hundred Yard Dash

 

Hoover and Roosevelt try to pretend they're not in the same car as they ride to FDR's 1933 inauguration.

1932 was a fantastic year for movies. It was, however, a pretty rotten year for just about everyone else. By the time the presidential election rolled around in November, the American people, desperate for a change, would probably have gladly voted for Johnny Weissmuller, Hollywood's new minted Tarzan, rather than Herbert Hoover. Instead, though, they had Franklin Roosevelt as a choice and he won handily. By the time he took office in March, 1933, expectations were high.

Roosevelt realized something needed to be done and done quickly. In his first one hundred days in office, he took a series of actions meant to stabilize and then boost the American economy. Some worked, some didn't. Nevertheless, those one hundred days are now perceived as the cornerstones of what became known as the New Deal and the debate about whether that was a good thing or not has never stopped. The one hundred days has also since become a benchmark for other presidents, a period where they feel they have to define their presidency in a similar way.

In FDR: The First Hundred Days, Anthony Badger goes through the major events of that "defining moment," and brings together the various arguments for and against each one. The book has many virtues. Badger takes the time to explain why conservatives hated this program, why liberals thought it didn't go far enough, and why farmers were against it. Then he tries to pull away some of the mythology and clarify what really happened, such as whether Roosevelt was really anti-business (no, he says), whether he was power mad (again, no), whether his actions helped or hurt (yes...and no). It's a calm, clear, point by point approach that should be a good opener for anyone looking to investigate this period. A timeline listing important steps during the one hundred days is very helpful.

Virtues, though, while very nice, are rarely fun and I found this book incredibly boring. It was only about 175 pages, but I felt like I was hauling myself through mud as I read. The best sign in a book is when you wish it won't end, but with this one I actually went out of my way to find extra time to read just so I could finish more quickly and get on to something else.

(Keep reading to find out why I was bored...)

Believe It or Not

Blood rain, showers of frogs, ice blocks the size of an elephant that fall from the sky, spiderwebs that float down and stretch for miles over the land, unexplained lights dancing across the sky--to most people these are the things of tabloid newspaper covers, the sort of tall tales that begin with the insistence of one person who can't back it up with any proof, or a group of true believers whose belief ends in shamed silence when a scientific explanation emerges that turns their fantastic into our everyday mundane. To Charles Fort, though, these events weren't oddball phenomena, but rather proof that the extraordinary is ordinary, that everything we think we know is wrong, and that what we call science is just as likely a fairy tale as any story that involves giants and elves.*

You may not know the name Charles Fort. I didn't either, until one day, as I was walking through the library, a book on one of the shelving carts caught my eye, not because of the title--Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural--but the author, Jim Steinmeyer. I had read Hiding the Elephant, one of Steinmeyer's other books a few years ago and found his story of the history of magicians and the secrets behind their tricks so fascinating, that I actually bought my own copy to have around for reference purposes (I don't often get to buy books, so when I make the leap, it's a pretty big event). As is easily apparent from my previous reading choices, if I like one book by an author, I'm probably going to read several other of that writer's books (or wistfully await another, in some cases). So I trusted Steinmeyer and set off to learn about Charles Fort.

(Keep reading if you dare--one of my sort of New Year's resolutions was to stop clogging up this front page with long posts.)

(Another was to not write excessively long posts. Oh well. Tomorrow's another day.

(And no, I absolutely did NOT resolve to cut down on my use of parentheses.)