stumbling virtue

Dinner with Friends

 

Delmonico's, the place to see and be seen during the Gilded Age.

Once upon a time, I had to write a short piece about the history of bagpipes for a reading textbook--a reading comp passage for test prep. I tried to find out where bagpipes came from, but couldn't find one definitive place; it seems bagpipe type instruments began to appear in numerous places around the world at roughly the same time. It seems like sometimes it's just the right moment for an idea.

Numerous people had been working their way towards the idea of evolution for years before Charles Darwin published his "Origin of the Species"-- including Darwin's own grandfather. While many people considered and tried to put together a theory about how species might be related to each other and previous versions that were no longer here, Darwin was the one who slogged through the actual experimentation and study to come up with a scientific grounding for evolution. Henry Russel Wallace, who did his own study in the field rather than the lab, was the one who probably came closest to earning the credit for the theory, but that didn't stop others from claiming the prize.

One of the most notable claimants was Herbert Spencer; in fact, thanks to the tireless promotion of his friend, editor Edward Youmans, Spencer was for a time more famous in the United States than Darwin for discovering evolution. Today, Spencer is better remembered--when he is remembered at all--as a founder of the study of sociology, and one of the proponents of "social Darwinism."

While Spencer was the one who coined the term "survival of the fittest" (Darwin preferred natural selection), to lump him in with those who advocated leaving the weak and the poor by the wayside is a bit much, or at least that's how it seems in Bruce Werth's Banquet at Delmonico's. Spencer believed that society was capable of improving, or evolving, but in those pre-genetics days he believed that this progress would occur because acquired knowledge or characteristics would be passed on, rather than through the elimination of those not seen fit; near the end of his life, when the study of genes proved that acquired characteristics could not be passed on--that humans did not biologically learn from their mistakes--Spencer was crushed and tried to find a way to work around it. However, a number of Spencer's American acolytes did take it to mean that the weak got what they deserved--Yale professor William Sumner once commented that a drunkard in the gutter was where he should be, and protested the town of New Haven's suggestion around Christmas during a financial depression that the town try to find jobs for unemployed men.

Makeovers

 

Lucille Ball in Lured. She's working undercover as a housemaid, while really trying to find a serial killer. No, it's not Fred Mertz. 

I just wanted to mention two movies I've recently seen that I liked quite a bit.

Lured (1947) is a Douglas Sirk movie, set in London and starring Lucille Ball, of all people. She had been a longtime bit player and had rarely had any starring roles, so she may have seemed like an odd choice. But take a closer look and you can see why she was ideal. Lucy plays an American showgirl stranded in London, who's brought in by the police to help track down a serial killer (one of her friends has disappeared and is a probably victim). To trap the killer, who they know lures women through the classifieds, the police have her respond to every ad looking for a single woman--which means she gets to pretend she's a model for a very eccentric Boris Karloff, a housemaid, and a classical music fan for a man who's looking for a date to a concert. Lucy's strong in the parts where she's playing the world-weary showgirl, and the undercover cop whose main job is to play let's pretend. She's weaker in the dramatic romance department, where she ends up with the always unflappable George Sanders, who himself is falsely accused of being the murderer (he manages to raise some mild indignation at the prospect of being hanged for a crime he did not commit, but mostly looks like he thinks it wouldn't be that bad provided he could be sent off after having some fine cognac). It's a fun little movie that isn't particularly well-known, but has a great post-war, lowdown atmosphere to it. The title could just as easily be "Lurid."

Pygmalion (1938) is the Shaw play that's much better known in its musical incarnation, "My Fair Lady," but this film adaptation, starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller is great, and in fact, much preferable to the unwieldy 1964 film of "My Fair Lady." It's bright and fast. Howard often was bored by his movie roles, but here seems to be having an enormously good time. Hiller is perfect (a much better Eliza than Audrey Hepburn was)--she speaks the line, "Them that lived with her would have killed her for a hatpin, let alone a hat," with such perfect, schooled diction which is yet so inappropriate for the content, that I can't stop myself from repeating it now. I'd watch this again any time it's on.

More Matter Less Art

I just thought I'd take a moment to write something about how I approached cutting Hamlet down to a manageable size, just in case any of you kids out there are planning to spend a fun night working on your own abridgement. There were some obvious cuts that I knew about, mostly whole scenes in Act IV (goodbye, audition monologue in scene iv!). Then I looked around and found some sites where people had posted common cuts, so I looked at those and tried to decide which made sense. I loved the person who cut the whole opening down from a big conversation about the Ghost's appearances to just having the Ghost make a cross before going into the next scene; all the information about the death of the king and Fortinbras that's in that first scene is given again in the next few anyway. There's a whole scene between Polonius and a character named Reynaldo who never shows up again, that was an easy cut. All the stuff between the clowns before Hamlet arrives at the graveyard? Not as funny as they probably thought it was in 1601, so gone.

Those were probably the biggest chunks--after that it got harder. I went through and looked for places where people give out information that they've already revealed in other places, for example, a section where Claudius and Polonius go over their plans again for setting up Ophelia to have a conversation with Hamlet so they can eavesdrop on them. There's a lot of that kind of thing, actually--audiences weren't trusted to remember much at that time. I then started going through scenes, and especially monologues to find language that was just pretty poetry or that dealt in references or symbolism that don't mean as much now. Personally, I've never been a fan of monologues--I think they bring a scene to a dead halt and what they do with words can usually be accomplished with action. So I started to try to find even one or two lines here and there that could go. The hard part, of course, with Hamlet is that just when you think you've found something to cut, you think, "Oh, wait, that's really famous...better not." My reverence got the best of me, more than I would have liked, to be honest. Obvious characters who were candidates for trims were Claudius, some of whose monologues go on and repeat information; the First Player (his monologue to show his acting skill to Hamlet and Polonius is really, really, REALLY long); Gertrude--her big scene with Hamlet survived intact, but that's pretty much it; Laertes and Horatio lost a lot of little small lines and scenes. Osric, another not as funny as he thinks he is type, lost some and Fortinbras at the end had his monologue cut a great deal (after all the debate of Fortinbras or not, we decided to keep just enough info at the beginning to bring him in to tie things up at the end; I don't know if I love that, but in the end, I'm the assistant director, not the director). The tough one was Polonius--most of his speeches or scenes are just rambling and nattering, so you'd think they'd be able to be cut. But if you do that, then you essentially change his character, which is that of a rambling, nattering ninny. The best I could do was try to take a few lines off the end of several of his monologues and turn them into interruptions from the next speaker, as if everyone is saying, "Okay, we know you go on and on."

I actually considered cutting Rosencrantz and Guildenstern altogether, as did the director. I decided not to because (this was before auditions) I thought there was a good chance they'd be the only parts I would be considered for (oh well), and also, the "too famous to cut" problem again. Again, director's choice, but you know what? I'd love to try putting together a version without them. Once you start editing, sometimes you don't know when to stop. It becomes an obsession. Or a disease. Or both. Anyway, maybe someday when we have a final script, I'll post it for others to use. Because I'm that kind of generous girl. Or ridiculously vain girl.

Meanwhile, I have to learn my lines.

Constant Companion

 

A young man could get in all sorts of trouble in 18th c. London.

When I was very young, I fell in love with movies and spent all my time reading about old Hollywood--books about the studio system, biographies of people in the industry, histories of the period from about 1930-1960. I read lots of stories about the making of many movies that I had never seen. Reading about what went on--who was cast and why, who got along and who didn't, how many drafts there were of the screenplay, why was this director fired, why there is something peculiar in that famous scene--of course made me desperate to see these movies. But when I found them, I almost always was disappointed. The story behind the movie was so much more interesting than the finished product.

I guess I have always liked the how and the why of any given thing more than the thing itself, which is why a book like Adam Sisman's "Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson" appealed to me. I just recently started reading "The Life of Dr. Johnson"--yes, just now; I have enormous gaps in my education and I am always trying to catch up--and remembered that Sisman, whose book on Coleridge and Wordsworth I had read, had written a book about Boswell's book (book! book! book!). I knew that this was considered one of the key books in the history of English literature, so I became curious about how it was written--the story behind the story.

Cast Thy Nighted Color Off

So we had our Hamlet auditions. I didn't feel like my initial audition went well, but I got a callback anyway and thought that went better. But when the director told me what part he was giving me, well, I burst into tears on the spot, which took him a little bit by surprise, as he seemed to think it was something that would please me. He was giving me the Gravedigger (you know, in the churchyard for "Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him"), which seems to make sense to everyone--after all, it's a comic part, and I'm the company resident funny girl. There's some singing, and the director knows that it takes me about one word of an invite to burst into song. So why was I upset? Well, first of all, I knew he was casting a girl for Horatio and I had been dumb enough to think it might be me. The girl he cast is fine, but I had a really specific idea of what to do with that part, and I think it would have really added something to the play (no, my idea wouldn't work for her). I'm so disappointed about that. More to the point, though, the Gravedigger, well, I usually associate that part with grizzled old men, and good lord, I am not that. We're not putting the traditionally male parts that were cast with women into drag, so it's not like I have to dress up like a man, but nevertheless, it is the grubby, ugly, dingy part. I have been cast as a young boy a lot, because I'm small, and sometimes I just feel like screaming, "I'm a girl! I'm a girl!" But no one seems to pay attention to that. Okay, I know I'm not beautry queen, but I don't like having it pointed out to me all the time. The theater is where you're supposed to be able to not be yourself, yet it seems like I always am cast as the equivalent of a dustbin. Okay, a comic dustbin. I'm never going to be the romantic lead in any show and to be honest, those often aren't the best parts anyway. But I can't help but secretly hope that someday I can play someone who, well, wears a dress. And is a character who gets a real name.

I'm also Assistant Director, and apparently my script editing duties turned me into the dramaturge, whatever else that means. So I'm committed to helping make this production the best we can. I know we're not going to do a traditional version, but we're probably not going to do as radical as I'd like to do. If I had my way, I'd probably cast multiple people as Hamlet throughout the show and rearrange the order of the script or set it in a robot factory or something like that. I'd also cut the script down to the bone. If I had my way, that very famous speech would end after "That is the question." Think about it--I always think that when it comes to playwriting, there's more power in what is not said then what there is. You know, we sent out a copy of the edited script to the cast and one of the actors sent it back with a bunch of suggestions for restoring things that I had cut. If I had known where he lived, I would have found him and decked him. I got a 147 page script down to 85 pages and that's still going to run probably around 2 1/2 hours, if we're lucky. There is so little chance that I am letting anyone add anything back in (especially not the sixteen or so lines he put back into one of his own monologues). I wouldn't let Shakespeare add a line at this point.

Anyway, I suppose I may continue to update here. I know, just what the world needs, another production diary.

Drawing the Line

 

The Malay Archipelago, Alfred Russel Wallace's old hangout.

When is it time to give up? And when are you in so deep that it's too late to quit?

Those questions could be applied to almost anything (I could put them to many things in my life right now. Sigh. Disaster reigns.), but in this case I'm talking about books. I admit it, there are books that I have started but haven't finished, but I usually made those decisions immediately--maybe one or two chapters in. I actually have a book from the library right now that I had had on reserve for a while, but when I got it, I looked at the index and decided it didn't have what I wanted after all, and quit without even starting.

But what do you do when you've been plugging away for a while and all of a sudden feel like you've just had it? I was about 206 pages into The Heretic in Darwin's Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace when I suddenly felt like I couldn't go on any longer. I checked to see how many pages I had left--well, there were 490 altogether, so I was a little under halfway there. I had read through those two hundred or so already...surely I couldn't quit now. After all, I hadn't even reached the part of the book that had attracted my attention in the first place. So I steeled myself and dove back into the grey depths of biographical boredom. I made it to around page 408 when I was seized again with the overwhelming urge to quit, even though I was so close to the end. I did decide to keep going (this, of course, is where my marathon experience kicked in), but I probably couldn't tell you anything about what I read in those last eighty pages. Something had gone dreadfully wrong for me with this book.

Go Team

 

I've posted enough Lincoln photos.

At the end of last year, after a lifetime of avoiding the Civil War, due to nothing but a perverse desire to be the black sheep in a family of War Between the States aficionados, I found myself reading several books about Lincoln, both because the books themselves sounded interesting (one turned out to be, the other not as much as hoped) and because I finally had to admit that this hole in my education had grown to be too embarrassing. Anyway, one day at the library, after failing to find some other books I was looking for (and still waiting for...), I ended up with a copy of Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals.  I only knew two people who had read this book and while one loved it, the other--whose opinion I trusted more--had been more ambivalent ("It's okay, but..."). That hesitance was enough to make me pass on it when it was first released, plus I often stubbornly refuse to read books that are popular, well-reviewed, and seen being read by everyone everywhere; the demon of perversity wins too many battles with me. Of course, though, when given the choice between a popular, well-reviewed, seen everywhere book and having nothing to read on the train that week, well, I gave in to the available book.

When We Were Young

 

The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 was just one big party.

Age is relative. To a ten year old, a twenty-five year old is impossibly aged; to a seventy-five year old, that twenty-five year old is impossibly young. And while 233 may seem like many years when so many of the things we see and own have been around a few decades at most, it is an incredibly small amount of time for a nation to have been around. When you go to Europe, and find yourself standing next to eight hundred year old buildings, you realize how little time we have had.

In Waking Giant, David S. Reynolds writes about the United States from 1815 to 1848, the "Age of Jackson," if you like. Reynolds's point, it seems, is that this was a particularly important time period in American history (though as I note above, when you've been around as little time as we have, you can make a case for any year or decade's importance; every year counts for a four year old). For at least part of this era, you could talk to people who had been born when the US was just a group of colonies, yet at the same time life was changing rapidly, and America was moving closer to the place we recognize now, with qualities that became known as "American," while the world of the 18th century and England was receding rapidly (did that sentence make sense? I'm tired; the show just closed last night. I have a point, I promise).