Words on a Typewriter

The Chosen

See The Chosen at TheatreWorks, Mountain View.

I’m not religious at all, so the idea of going to see a play heavy with the subtleties of Jewish teachings wasn’t appealing.  But past the references to God (which in my atheistic vocabulary just means whatever someone has made up a few thousand – and sometimes not so many – years ago), The Chosen had a lot to say about fatherhood and the passing of knowledge and skill from one generation to the next.  Strangely devoid of any female input, the play (and I assume the novel on which it is based) focuses on the differences between two grown boys, and the relationship with their fathers.  I just remembered that in my family, one would talk to my mother to discuss an issue and possibly escalate it to my father, who was the silent one.  In the play, the chosen one is an unlikely friend through whom the father and son will communicate, and who will act as a catalyst in their relationship.  Finally, each son will be able to confront his father with who he really wants to become.

I also appreciated that what was being passed from one generation to another was the ability to inquire and discuss, a quality that’s often lost in our world of absolutist trends.  If it was at all possible to debate the TV pundits and preachers that pollute the airwaves, they would soon find nothing to say, and the fanatics would calm down.  And I would also welcome the challenges of discussion by finally admitting that the other person is just discussing the subject without trying to hurt me.  That’s always a difficult issue to deal with.

I, Too, Wanna Be Punk

Broadway shows put me to sleep. But once in a while, they’ll put together a show that won’t let me go to sleep, like American Idiot. And it’s not only because I keep tapping feet and hands at the rapid beat of most of the songs that the musicians play really well (get the CD to compare). Personally, I don’t really care for the voices in the show, and find it more satisfying to have the original Green Day voices in my head.
So this, too, would put me to sleep if not for the visual explosion in front of me that resembles what I saw with my eyes closed the first time I heard this CD (it was something akin to those laser shows we had back in the days). Not that there are any laser shows here. The set is massive, with TV screens all over a two- or three-story high wall complete with stairs at the top of which one can observe a lone violinist is playing. The cellist travels under the stairs that the actors move around (and gets off while they transform it into a bus). The dancers execute moves I wouldn’t even dream of trying at home, and the whole choreography is fun to watch. And I really like the projections on the wall.
What I find puzzling, since I’m a wannabe punk, is that the end is anticlimactic. I didn’t want to be an American Idiot, in full agreement with the first song, didn’t want to be part of this alienation, but that’s where the show leads you. Calm down, you too tried to rebel, but look, this is Broadway after all.

Which leads me to another play I saw at NCTC, called The Little Dog Laughed, which is about actors in Hollywood who stay in their closet for fear of breaking their career, and the alienating forces that dictate a good story has to be heterosexual. My friend expressed his surprise, as it appeared anachronistic to him, but read the program notes and you’ll discover that Hollywood loves to conform, whatever the right wingers say. I thought a play like that belonged in mainstream theatres as an “issue play,” but then NCTC’s Decker theater is nice enough and located near the big mainstream opera and concert halls.

Unless you live in Potrero Hill, chances are you won’t know that there’s a small theatre on 18th Street that’s currently hosting the Asian American Theatre Company’s world premiere of a play by Philip Kan Gotanda called #5 Angry Red Drum. The title, a play on the reversed word “redrum” made famous in the movie The Shining, is more cryptic than Waiting for Godot, which you are inevitably reminded of. The play is filled with references to the well-known absurdist play, and the comical scenes (starting with Pick’s coming out of a hole in the dirt) are brutally overshadowed with scenes of conflict between two men who may or may not want to coexist. When the warmonger appears in their midst, he coaches Pick to murder Gorum. They finally kill the drummer boy, apparently because he’s different.
To many in the audience, the play illustrates the state of affairs in the twenty-first century, with wars going on that we’re trying to forget, and politically angry people who believe whatever Fox News feeds them. But beyond its meaning, the play was very well put together, and at the forefront of new theatre.

Moved Again!

I got all excited by wordpress, so the blog is now moved to guytiphane.wordpress.com

Puzzle

There he is, dead, alone
You cannot disturb him any more
And you think that’s how he wanted it
And you think your puzzle is incomplete.

You look above for signs of an angel
Taking away his soul
As in the image in catechism.
As in the image in catechism
You remember the angel busy cleaning your soul
But yours had cracks in it
Caused by a fall
Caused by you
Causing eternal pain
Causing unmanly tears retained

Your head bounces on an aluminum locker
Your head spins about unsaid words and questions
Locked in for eternity
Another mystery, as they had many
You had to take for granted

Your finger ventures its back
On a one-day beard
Your lips prohibited long ago
On the freshly shaven cheek
Reserved for a good housewife
Now watching your gesture

And you withdraw deeper
Into a mound of puzzle pieces
That will never come together.

The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer

I live on the other side of the bay from San Francisco, so I listen to KALW radio. That's how I heard his name, and his voice I think. So when I stood in front of his book at Moe's one Sunday afternoon, an autographed copy, I thought I might be missing something if I stopped at the suggestion of the title: it would be a boring story of some successful marriage by perfect people.

I read the first page, and thought this might be good.

"We think we know the ones we love."

Okay, whatever, it's still a happy marriage story.

"Our husbands, our wives. We know them -- we are them, sometimes; when separated at a party we find ourselves voicing their opinions their taste in food or books, telling an anecdote that never happened to us but happened to them."

I was ready to put it back on the shelf. I think I did. I took a walk to the literary remainders, you know, the $6 Everyman Library classic that you'll get to replace the paperback version you have. "Give it one more chance," I thought.

"We think we know them. We think we love them. But what we love turns out to be a poor translation, a translation we ourselves have made, from a language we barely know."

Take a chance. Those are beautiful sentences. Get that ATM unit out and pay the nice guy at the register who will even put the penny you don't want into the donation pot for books in prisons.

I started reading, and didn't stop until my eyes could no longer stay open. This doesn't occur that often with me. The thought of going to see a movie will get me back on my feet if one sentence speaks less than enchanting words. It didn't happen. The days after that I couldn't wait to have time to read more. At the end, when I read the last word, I needed to share this incredible experience of spending a few hours with Pearlie, the narrator of this story, the more than just a wife person I would like to have here, now.

You'll find the story elsewhere, on other web sites. After a few pages, I thought, "I bet the husband is gay," and he was. But that was in the 1950's when that was hardly an option. And then they're black, and the beautiful man is white, almost stereotypically German and successful. There's Ethel Rosenberg being killed by the state because she was a good wife. There's the hysteria that makes everyone be a good citizen and follow orders (a bit like now). And there's Love, especially the one nobody talks about, with secret encounters with someone you know will never be your lover. It's amazing how the transposed heart metaphor resonates over and over in this novel.

"Perhaps you cannot see a marriage." I'm still on page one. "Like those giant heavenly bodies invisible to the human eye, it can only be charted by its gravity, its pull on everything around it." I don't know, this book is full of sentences like that. I want to reproach it that the last page doesn't have them, as if the author had decided that since you were going to close the book right then, he'd no longer talk to you. He gave you that moment when you wanted to cry for whom? A fictitious character? Ha! I wanted to. I was in Pearlie's head all the time. For nearly two hundred pages I wanted to be Pearlie, because she was a beautiful lady.

I thought, maybe I could contact that author and he'd come to my writers group, maybe even for free. Fat chance: he'll be at City Arts and Lectures with Michael Chabon. That's how good he is.

On Chesil Beach

On Chesil Beach: A Novel by Ian McEwan

I love it, first because I could read it in two seatings (big novels are, how can I put it, intimidating, and lose me in the middle). OK, seriously: this is the second McEwan that I read (the other was Saturday), and every time I am enchanted by his craft, i.e. the way he forms sentences that flow and go back deep in the train of thought of his characters to tell you how they ever got where they are now. So, would anyone say, how can he keep you reading this story about the failure to have sex on the night of one's honeymoon?

For one, it talks about a huge myth, the one that makes people hang soiled sheets at the honeymooners' window in Sicily. While reading it, I thought, "shouldn't they just relax about it and talk, maybe see a counselor?" And that is what people don't do. People assume they're deficient. They build tension on trifles just because Love was suddenly distilled to intercourse and everyone has a degree of discomfort with that.

But at the end of the day, this novel is about intense love, the one that is trivialized now but that is the foundation of oneself. At the end of the day, it isn't how much sex you've had, it's about how you connected, and how you experience this abstraction called Love. When you reach the last pages of the book, that is where the author has taken you, and nothing else. There's no moral, no lesson learned, just the hint that you too, could have been so close to that ideal. I just love books like that.