A memorial service is being held at Heritage Hall (3102 Main Street), from 12-2 pm on Friday, July 31st.
In the meantime, visit Jerry Wasserman's moving tribute to Gale's life and work at vancouverplays.com.
P.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
RIP Lorena Gale
I just learned that Lorena Gale, local actress and playwright extraordinaire, lost her battle with abdominal cancer at the end of June. This is a devastating loss to Vancouver's theatre and film community and what seems most unfair is how quickly the disease progressed (Lorena was only diagnosed this past February.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Our Edmund White
Last night the American author Edmund White gave a reading, along with local writer Claire Robson, at Little Sister’s. White is in town as part of a research project sponsored by Robson and Professor Dennis Sumara, of the Department of Curriculum Studies at UBC, that is looking at memoir writing and community formation among older lesbians in Vancouver. As part of their research, the group had read White’s classic autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story to parse in part the relationship between sexual content and style in that book.
To make a long story short, mostly by luck and happenstance I was invited to say a few words of introduction about White’s work in advance of his reading. As White is one of my favourite authors, someone whose work I greatly respect and admire, this was a major literary fantasy come true. Even better was the fact that White turned out to be a genial and gracious person, and seemed genuinely taken and touched by my remarks (he’s asked for a copy, at any rate). I reproduce them here for those unable to attend last night’s event:
Taking a page from his 2006 memoir by way of pluralizing the possessive pronoun of its title, I want to talk to you very briefly about “Our Edmund White”—that is what White, as one of our foremost authors, has gifted to our community. To do so means, necessarily, to follow the very model employed by White in My Lives: that is, to speak serially and to eschew chronology; to make connections across time and space, both in terms of the corpus of White’s writing as a whole, and the larger category of gay writing more generally.
However, you’re not here to listen to me, and so in order to waste as little time as possible, I will concentrate my remarks primarily on White’s experiments in autobiographical fiction, which resulted in the acclaimed trilogy of novels comprising A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony. Together these novels chronicle, via their impish and by no means wide-eyed and innocent narrator-protagonist, what it meant to grow up gay in postwar Middle America, while at the same time offering a firsthand account of a community in social and erotic formation post-Stonewall, and threatened with near-total destruction and eclipse post-AIDS. By choosing to make art out of his life (and, concomitantly, life out of his art), White has consciously placed himself within a long tradition of queer writerly self-fashioning, beginning with Oscar Wilde, and extending through Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Proust and Jean Genet (all of whom are the subjects of acclaimed biographies by White), as well as Christopher Isherwood (with whom White has important affinities, not least in terms of autobiographical method) and even more contemporary writers like Augusten Burroughs (whose respective portraits of his divorced parents owe something, in terms of retrospective irony and scabrous wit, to White’s earlier explorations of familial dysfunction and Oedipal desire run amok).
If, on occasion, White has been critiqued for the too-painful honesty of these works, for failing to set limits on what—or who (including the dead)—can and cannot be talked about in fiction and prose memoir (near the end of The Farewell Symphony, for instance, we are told by the narrator that he can’t tell the story of his lover Brice’s passing—and of the “angry hateful” final words uttered by him—only to get a version of this very story, albeit with the names changed, three years later from White in The Married Man, which serves as a kind of coda to the series); if, in other words, White’s resolute refusal to censor himself as a writer sometimes strikes a raw nerve, it needs to be noted that White always reserves his harshest scrutiny for his fictional alter-egos: the betrayal of his music teacher, Mr. Beattie, at the end of A Boy’s Own Story, for example, is clearly shown to emerge from the narrator’s own self-loathing; and for sheer self-exposure nothing quite matches the frank portrait of White’s own unruly desires on offer in the “My Master” section of My Lives. Just as the portraits of the bitchy and narcissistic Baron de Charlus, the flighty Duchesse de Guermentes, the social-climbing Madame Verdurin, the feckless Charlie Morel, and the dissembling Albertine and Robert de Saint-Loup in Proust’s Recherche tell us more about the guileless Marcel than they do about a social set he at once sees himself above and apart from, so do White’s at times barely disguised versions of the more outrageous denizens of a gay Faubourg Saint-Germain scene of 1970s and 1980s New York serve as an indexical accounting of his own place in the world and his responsibilities (including their paradoxes and shortcomings) to others. And just as Marcel discovers in the library of the Princesse de Guermentes at the end of the Recherche that it is only through literature and art that one can stop Time and reorder memory, so too does White suggest at the end of The Farewell Symphony that writing offers a way of completing the work of mourning.
Saying what cannot or what is not supposed to be said in fiction is not just part of a self-consciously queer writerly aesthetic; it is also, for White, part of a readerly ethic, a way of speaking to and hailing a community of readers who will recognize in the address a shared connection. As White explains, again near the end of The Farewell Symphony, “I wanted to see if the old ambition of fiction, to say the most private, uncoded, previously unformulated things, might still work, might once again collar a stranger, look him in the eye, might demand sympathy from this unknown person but also give him sympathy in return. These secret meetings—unpredictable, subversive—of reader and writer were all I lived for.” In other words, literature as a form of cruising.
I have been enjoying secret, unpredictable, subversive meetings with the writing of Edmund White for more than two decades now: from his early experiments in allegorical fantasy and baroque style (Nocturnes for the King of Naples, Forgetting Elena, Caracole) to his more recent explorations of historical meta-fiction (Fanny: A Fiction and Hotel de Dream, about the lost gay masterpiece by the tubercular American writer Stephen Crane, and the role a capricious and moralistic Henry James might have played in losing it); from his pioneering contributions in queer ethnography and self-help (States of Desire: Travels Across Gay America and the first edition of The Joy of Gay Sex) to his equally important work in a genre it only seems appropriate to call the city memoir (Our Paris: Sketches from Memory, written with Hubert Sorin, The Flâneur, and the forthcoming City Boy); from the Francophilia that dominates his choices of biographical subject (the aforementioned Genet, Proust, and Rimbaud) to the steadfast and stalwart Americanness that comes out in the biographical portraits of Uncle Ed on offer in nephew Keith Fleming’s The Boy with the Thorn in His Side and Original Youth: The Real Story of Edmund White’s Boyhood. I have thoroughly enjoyed each and every one of these private literary encounters with Edmund White, and it is a pleasure and a thrill to finally be making his public acquaintance here at Little Sister’s—where so much of that work was purchased.
P.
To make a long story short, mostly by luck and happenstance I was invited to say a few words of introduction about White’s work in advance of his reading. As White is one of my favourite authors, someone whose work I greatly respect and admire, this was a major literary fantasy come true. Even better was the fact that White turned out to be a genial and gracious person, and seemed genuinely taken and touched by my remarks (he’s asked for a copy, at any rate). I reproduce them here for those unable to attend last night’s event:
Taking a page from his 2006 memoir by way of pluralizing the possessive pronoun of its title, I want to talk to you very briefly about “Our Edmund White”—that is what White, as one of our foremost authors, has gifted to our community. To do so means, necessarily, to follow the very model employed by White in My Lives: that is, to speak serially and to eschew chronology; to make connections across time and space, both in terms of the corpus of White’s writing as a whole, and the larger category of gay writing more generally.
However, you’re not here to listen to me, and so in order to waste as little time as possible, I will concentrate my remarks primarily on White’s experiments in autobiographical fiction, which resulted in the acclaimed trilogy of novels comprising A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony. Together these novels chronicle, via their impish and by no means wide-eyed and innocent narrator-protagonist, what it meant to grow up gay in postwar Middle America, while at the same time offering a firsthand account of a community in social and erotic formation post-Stonewall, and threatened with near-total destruction and eclipse post-AIDS. By choosing to make art out of his life (and, concomitantly, life out of his art), White has consciously placed himself within a long tradition of queer writerly self-fashioning, beginning with Oscar Wilde, and extending through Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Proust and Jean Genet (all of whom are the subjects of acclaimed biographies by White), as well as Christopher Isherwood (with whom White has important affinities, not least in terms of autobiographical method) and even more contemporary writers like Augusten Burroughs (whose respective portraits of his divorced parents owe something, in terms of retrospective irony and scabrous wit, to White’s earlier explorations of familial dysfunction and Oedipal desire run amok).
If, on occasion, White has been critiqued for the too-painful honesty of these works, for failing to set limits on what—or who (including the dead)—can and cannot be talked about in fiction and prose memoir (near the end of The Farewell Symphony, for instance, we are told by the narrator that he can’t tell the story of his lover Brice’s passing—and of the “angry hateful” final words uttered by him—only to get a version of this very story, albeit with the names changed, three years later from White in The Married Man, which serves as a kind of coda to the series); if, in other words, White’s resolute refusal to censor himself as a writer sometimes strikes a raw nerve, it needs to be noted that White always reserves his harshest scrutiny for his fictional alter-egos: the betrayal of his music teacher, Mr. Beattie, at the end of A Boy’s Own Story, for example, is clearly shown to emerge from the narrator’s own self-loathing; and for sheer self-exposure nothing quite matches the frank portrait of White’s own unruly desires on offer in the “My Master” section of My Lives. Just as the portraits of the bitchy and narcissistic Baron de Charlus, the flighty Duchesse de Guermentes, the social-climbing Madame Verdurin, the feckless Charlie Morel, and the dissembling Albertine and Robert de Saint-Loup in Proust’s Recherche tell us more about the guileless Marcel than they do about a social set he at once sees himself above and apart from, so do White’s at times barely disguised versions of the more outrageous denizens of a gay Faubourg Saint-Germain scene of 1970s and 1980s New York serve as an indexical accounting of his own place in the world and his responsibilities (including their paradoxes and shortcomings) to others. And just as Marcel discovers in the library of the Princesse de Guermentes at the end of the Recherche that it is only through literature and art that one can stop Time and reorder memory, so too does White suggest at the end of The Farewell Symphony that writing offers a way of completing the work of mourning.
Saying what cannot or what is not supposed to be said in fiction is not just part of a self-consciously queer writerly aesthetic; it is also, for White, part of a readerly ethic, a way of speaking to and hailing a community of readers who will recognize in the address a shared connection. As White explains, again near the end of The Farewell Symphony, “I wanted to see if the old ambition of fiction, to say the most private, uncoded, previously unformulated things, might still work, might once again collar a stranger, look him in the eye, might demand sympathy from this unknown person but also give him sympathy in return. These secret meetings—unpredictable, subversive—of reader and writer were all I lived for.” In other words, literature as a form of cruising.
I have been enjoying secret, unpredictable, subversive meetings with the writing of Edmund White for more than two decades now: from his early experiments in allegorical fantasy and baroque style (Nocturnes for the King of Naples, Forgetting Elena, Caracole) to his more recent explorations of historical meta-fiction (Fanny: A Fiction and Hotel de Dream, about the lost gay masterpiece by the tubercular American writer Stephen Crane, and the role a capricious and moralistic Henry James might have played in losing it); from his pioneering contributions in queer ethnography and self-help (States of Desire: Travels Across Gay America and the first edition of The Joy of Gay Sex) to his equally important work in a genre it only seems appropriate to call the city memoir (Our Paris: Sketches from Memory, written with Hubert Sorin, The Flâneur, and the forthcoming City Boy); from the Francophilia that dominates his choices of biographical subject (the aforementioned Genet, Proust, and Rimbaud) to the steadfast and stalwart Americanness that comes out in the biographical portraits of Uncle Ed on offer in nephew Keith Fleming’s The Boy with the Thorn in His Side and Original Youth: The Real Story of Edmund White’s Boyhood. I have thoroughly enjoyed each and every one of these private literary encounters with Edmund White, and it is a pleasure and a thrill to finally be making his public acquaintance here at Little Sister’s—where so much of that work was purchased.
P.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Free Speech Ain't Cheap
As if Vancouverites needed any further evidence of the how far we have collectively sold our souls to VANOC and the IOC with respect to the Olympics. Kudos to Mark Hasiuk at the Vancouver Courier for exposing UBC and making this an issue.
P
Dancing on the Edge of Library Square
It looks like I'm not going to get to very much of the Dancing on the Edge Festival this year. Performances wrap up this weekend, and I've got too many other commitments right now. Still, I did manage to catch Paul-André Fortier's performance of Solo 30X30 yesterday evening at Library Sqaure. Fortier has performed the piece around the world, and as part of his current residency at the Scotiabank Dance Centre (where he performed Cabane last month) he is collaborating with Dancing on the Edge to stage it here in Vancouver. The work's conceit is simple: every day for 30 days Fortier performs a rehearsed dance solo of 30 minutes at the same time in the same outdoor urban location. In Vancouver's case, it's the Robson Street plaza/concourse outside the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library at 5:15 pm.
My student Alana will likely have much more insightful things to say about 30X30 in relation to site-specificity, public performance, urban space, and place as pause (which I will duly report), so I won't bore readers with my own analysis here. Instead, I'll just leave you with some pictures instead:
P
Theatre Down Under
Just back from Australia, where the marathoning was disappointing and painful (2 minutes off my target time and a throbbing right leg throughout due to a calf injury sustained two days before), but the scuba diving fantastic and awe-inspiring (nothing like making the Great Barrier Reef the site of one's first dive).
As for the theatre in Sydney, it was hit and miss. A preview performance of Martin Crimp's latest one-act play, The City, at the Sydney Theatre Company's Wharf 2 stage was underwhelming. A cross between Pinter (the fact that Chris becomes a butcher after losing his job is a dead giveaway) and the more metatheatrical Pirandello, the play situates family dysfunction within a surreal and symbolical framework of literary invention. Opening with translator Claire's story of a foreign author's abandonment of his child, the play ends by suggesting that Claire has appropriated both the story and the child (who makes an appearance at one point, playing the piano and reciting dirty limericks) as her own. A not terribly original linking of biological and literary procreation made all the more confusing by the seemingly pointless introduction of the Jenny character, a nurse/neighbour who totters precariously around a stage made up of a series of steep risers on high heels. The adult performers were all very sharp, but the child actor could not project, and she seemed unsure of how to negotiate the obstacle-course-of-a-stage. My exhaustion at trying to follow the plot was compounded by jet lag and an overheated auditorium, and not surprisingly I found myself nodding off towards the end of what was only an 80-minute performance.
Much better was Company B's production of Ruben Guthrie at the Belvoir Street Theatre the next evening (Company B and BST originated the revival of Ionesco's Exit the King with Geoffrey Rush that recently played on Broadway). Brendan Cowell's corrosive exploration of youthful success and excess, the play focuses on the eponymous Ruben, a whiz-kid advertising executive whose over-indulgent penchant for booze and pills leads to him thinking he can fly one particular evening. A chastened Ruben, having lost his Czech model girlfriend as a result of this latest antic, agrees to join a recovery program. As Ruben gradually internalizes, with help from his sponsor (who eventually becomes his new girlfriend), the lessons of AA, he starts to alienate friends and family: his father, himself an alcoholic, who thinks it's un-Australian to refuse a drink; his mother, who after encouraging him to join AA in the first place now thinks the program has turned him into a zombie; his boss, who claims Ruben has lost his creative spark now that he's sober; and his best friend, newly returned from New York and wondering what pod person has suddenly replaced his former drinking mate. Sharply paced and bitingly funny, the production features a career-making performance by Toby Schmitz as Ruben. I now understand why people say Company B is Australia's leading theatre company.
I had booked to see another play, The Elling, at STC my last night in Sydney, but then I injured my calf, so I opted to rest in my hotel room instead. A fat lot of good that did me two days later on the Gold Coast.
Oh well, at least the coral and fish were pretty.
P
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Phantom Phèdre
Dominic Cooper and Helen Mirren in the National Theatre production of Jean Racine's Phèdre
The Met’s idea was as simple as it was brilliant: hire an experienced camera crew to film successive Saturday afternoon matinees of its current seasonal repertoire, and beam the images live to audiences across North America, who will have gathered in their local multiplexes (here on the west coast before breakfast, which only adds to the novelty) to experience, for example, the thrill of Marcello Giordani and Susan Graham in Robert Lepage’s visually stunning production of Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust for a fraction of the cost (tickets for Phèdre were a mere $20.95 CDN), and in stereo surround sound and high definition video.
The Met broadcasts happen at the Scotiabank Movie Theatre in downtown Vancouver, the newest and most luxurious of the raked ampitheatre-style cinemas in the city. While I have yet to attend one of those events (I’m not, I admit, the biggest opera fan), when I heard that the same venue would be participating in the Phèdre broadcast, I immediately jumped at the chance to buy tickets. I had seen advertisements for the production when we were in London this past May, and regretted that the show was scheduled to open only after we left. I regretted this even more when I began hearing, via various other blogs and RSS feeds I follow, that the production was receiving uniformly excellent reviews. Having now seen the play, I concur with these assessments, albeit with one minor qualification. On the whole, I likewise enjoyed immensely the experience of watching Mirren and company battle futilely against their own desires and the even more inexorable will of the gods in glorious technicolour on a giant movie screen, although here I have some more significant quibbles.
The overall excellence of the production owes much, I think, to the success of Hughes’ translation, which adapts Racine’s notoriously difficult Alexandrine verse into a contemporary English idiom that is especially visceral in its animal imagery, particularly when describing human sexual appetite and the thrall into which those appetites often place us. Hytner and his production team have matched the contemporariness of Hughes’ prose with a simple, spare set carved out of the white limestone of the play’s Troezen setting, and modern-dress costuming in mostly Armani-like monochromes (with the notable exception of Queen Pèhdre) and modern tailoring that nevertheless succinctly alludes to more ancient themes of martial masculinity and quiescent femininity. Against this “blank” backdrop, Hytner allows his cast to give full vent to their deeply hued and intricately embroidered passions. Most of the cast is up to this task, especially Mirren, who gives a master class in tragic acting (which, even in Racine’s “updated” 17th-century neo-classical baroque style, can look impossibly antiquated and alienating to a contemporary audience raised—via movies, no less—on the North American “method”).
It is particularly transfixing to watch how Mirren’s body physically recoils from the unspeakability of the words that she is yet powerless to prevent herself from uttering to her nurse Oenone early on in the play, and that consequently set the tragic plot in motion—namely, that she is in love with her stepson, Hippolytus. Again, those who primarily know Mirren from her buttoned-down Oscar-winning movie role as Queen Elizabeth II in Stephen Frears’ The Queen will have forgotten what a sensuous, embodied, and physically present actress she has always been (from the increasingly frazzled and blousy Jane Tennison in the Prime Suspect series to her sexually magnetic turns in movies ranging from Michael Powell’s The Age of Consent to Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover and Paul Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers). Here, as an older woman abandoned by her self-important and womanizing husband, Theseus (those who remember their Greek mythology will know he had similarly abandoned her sister, Ariadne), and all too aware, moreover, of the curse that hangs over her family when it comes to love (her other sister is Medea, after all), Mirren registers her character’s forbidden, incestuous desire as a series of wounds sustained upon her body. She enters the stage crippled over by the weight of her secret, and on or near the floor of the stage is where she lingers for most of the play, literally bent double by the quicksilver rush of uncontrollable emotions engulfing her. Watch, for example, how she supplicates herself abjectly at the feet of Hippolytus after confessing to him her love, and then in a flash grabs his sword and places it upon her breast when it is clear he has only contempt and disgust for her. And, near the end of the play, when she discovers that Hippolytus is secretly in love with Aricia, the princess imprisoned by his father Theseus because of her rival claim to the throne of Athens, the new emotion that suddenly overtakes her—jealously—first registers as a pain beneath her ribs, with Mirren using her fingers to crawl down the left side of her body to indicate the exact spot where she has been ensnared by the poisonous flipside of Cupid’s arrow. Mirren conveys with such gestures how vainly and futilely characters like Phèdre strain against the inevitability of the narrative as it has been written for them (by the gods, as by a Sophocles or a Racine), and it is a marvel to watch such a fine actress slowly succumb, limb by limb, vertebra by vertebra, to the destiny that will literally consume her.
As Hippolytus, Dominic Cooper (whom the three of us had all seen, albeit on different sides of the Atlantic, in the National’s excellent production of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys of a few years ago) matches Mirren’s outsized passion with his controlled performance of a man who has spent a lifetime keeping his own emotions in check: his contempt for his father, who sired him through rape (ironically, the very charge that will be brought against him by Phèdre when she realizes, belatedly, that her husband is still alive); his disdain for his stepmother; and his own secret and forbidden passion for Aricia. Cooper is an intensely charismatic performer and, here, clad in army fatigues and a black wifebeater, with bulging biceps and a sexy growth of beard, it is easy to understand how both Phèdre and Aricia fall under his spell. When, falsely accused by his father, he finally lets loose with the full fury of his emotion, the effect is electrifying. And the love scenes with Aricia (a very fine Ruth Negga) are equally affecting in their tenderness. John Shrapnel and Margaret Tyzack offer strong support in the key roles of Théramène, confidante to Hippolytus, and Oenone, nurse to Phèdre. Both are properly solicitous of the confidence of their respective charges, though the counsel Oenone gives in return (she is the one who, upon false news that Theseus is dead, convinces Phèdre, to confess her love to Hippolytus, and then, when it turns out Theseus is in fact still alive, to accuse her stepson of rape) is perhaps not so wise as that of Théramène. These supporting roles also indicate something of Racine’s innovation regarding the classic Greek chorus, with Oenone and Théramène separately taking on aspects of this dramatic function, but in so doing also turning the chorus into a fallible individual conscience/unconscious (a check on Hippolytus’ ego in the case of Théramène, not enough of a check on Phèdre’s id in the case of Oenone) rather than an abstract collective consciousness with which the audience is meant to identify.
Only Stanley Townsend as Theseus truly disappoints. He is a commanding physical presence, and has a booming voice, but his performance is noticeably wooden alongside the others, and he does not seem able to invest Hughes’ prose with the same emotional depth or poetic rhythm as the other actors. The return of Theseus (absent for the first half of the play, but a powerful looming presence nonetheless) is the key moment of the play, what sends everyone hurtling towards their denouement, and unfortunately Townsend just doesn’t convince as a man equal to Hercules in heroic labours but tragically blind to his own domestic dysfunction.
It was pleasing to see such a strong turnout on a warm summer night for all of this high tragedy, though one wonders why audiences don’t seem to exist in the same numbers for live local theatre? As it turns out, the event was somewhat misadvertised. It was not actually a live simulcast (which, as it started at 7 pm local time, would have meant the London performance was taking place at 3 or 4 am), but rather involved filming a live performance to tape for subsequent rebroadcast around the world. Which makes it all the harder to explain why the people in charge at the Scotiabank felt compelled to start rolling the tape before all of us forced to queue outside the cinema entrance had found some seats. Richard and I came in just as Hippolytus and Théramène were engaged in their opening expository conversation at the top of the play. Joanna arrived just a few minutes later, and had to take a neck cramp-inducing seat near the front.
Then, too, as much as I enjoyed seeing Mirren and Cooper et al emote in extreme close-up, and as much as I admired the skill with which the director of the film crew cut between actors, I did chafe against the cinematic apparatus’ imperative of where to look. One of the pleasures of going to the theatre is, by and large, having an unobstructed view of the entire stage and the full range of action played out upon it. In the theatre, we can choose where to look; in the cinema, the camera makes that decision for us, and in this context I deeply regretted on more than one occasion not being able to see and assess various reactions of the non-speaking actors on stage.
There was also something missing in terms of atmosphere, and not just because of the strange disjunction of seeing people carrying big bags of popcorn and jumbo softdrinks to their seats. Notwithstanding the ongoing debates in performance studies regarding liveness and mediation, I admit to being a sucker for the “eventness” and sense of intimacy created by live theatre. I do think the audience feels differently (which is to say, in a way that is potentially more collective) in the theatre than in the cinema. And I think this has something to do with the difference between seeing live bodies on stage versus virtual bodies on screen. A case in point: while there were the odd scattered laughs and gasps throughout the course of the broadcast of Phèdre on Thursday night, it was telling that the one time the audience came together in a noticeable way to express a felt reaction was one that was expressly mediated by technology, that is, when the broadcast signal appeared to wobble and the screen images momentarily started to break up.
A final note to readers: the blog is going on hiatus for a few weeks, as I will be traveling (to Australia, where, before running a marathon on the Gold Coast and traveling with my sister and brother and his family to the Great Barrier Reef, I plan to catch some theatre in Sydney). I’ll be back in mid-July to report on the Dancing on the Edge Festival and much else.
P.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Intelligent Homosexuals
An article in the Arts section of the New York Times yesterday referencing the premiere of a new Tony Kushner play at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis that I remember hearing was in the offing some time ago. The premiere is part of a larger Kushner festival being mounted by the Guthrie which also features revivals of both parts of Angels in America, Homebody/Kabul, and Caroline, or, Change. The new play—given, like Angels’ subtitle, a suitably Shavian moniker (by way of Mary Baker Eddy)—is called The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures.
Pretty much sums up Kushner’s main concerns, I’d say. All wrapped up in the requisite Kushnerian family psychodrama, in which, as reporter Andrea Stevens astutely points out, history is likewise a main character. Except that the family is Italian-American this time, which is a twist. Throw Kushner acting veterans Kathleen Chalfant, Linda Emond, and Stephen Spinella into the mix in prominent roles, and it adds up to what sounds like yet another trenchant theatrical socio-diagnosis of these strange times in which we labour—times which have already in fact announced the end of labour. No doubt this is something dear Tony picks apart in the play. Would that I could jet to Minneapolis tomorrow to see it. The article does mention that a Broadway transfer down the road is a distinct possibility (preceded, of course, by Kushner’s equally requisite rewriting process and a likely workshop at the Public), so hopefully it will remain within my sightlines.
Speaking of intelligent homosexuals, Richard and I attended the memorial service of renowned Canadian architect Arthur Erickson yesterday, appropriately held at SFU, one of Erickson’s first important commissions (with his then design partner Geoffrey Massey), and my own place of employment since 2002. It was a gorgeous sunny day, and the campus (which, as much as I admire it, can look depressingly foreboding in bad weather) showed itself off to stunning effect, emblematically reflecting Erickson’s prime architectural credo of integrating buildings with their natural and environmental settings. It was indeed an elegant and eclectic service, as the write-up in today’s Globe and Mail described it, not to mention perfectly structured, clocking in at exactly one and a half hours.
Needless to say, there wasn’t a lot of reference to Erickson’s queerness and how this might have contributed to his architectural worldview, although Abe Rogatnick, in a wonderful eulogy, did hint at the type of bacchanals that were wont to take place around Erickson’s fabled garden oasis in Point Grey. Rogatnick also movingly mentioned the deaths of loved ones that had preceded Erickson’s—a reference I took to apply in particular to those of Erickson’s two long-term lovers (for more on Erickson’s “gay life,” see the reminiscence published by Hugh Brewster in a recent issue of Xtra! West). But surely how Erickson saw the world and built space—which is to say, decidely aslant—owes much to his sexual identity. How else to explain taking what was originally proposed for the Law Courts of British Columbia—an office highrise—and literally turning it on its side, laying it horizontally across two full city blocks? (Or, for that matter, that SFU gets used so frequently in sci-fi television series?)
We owe the miracle that is Robson Square—and the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, and the Canadian Chancery in Washington, DC, and my own quirkily “alien” academic institution—in large measure to the queer eye of Arthur Erickson.
P.
Pretty much sums up Kushner’s main concerns, I’d say. All wrapped up in the requisite Kushnerian family psychodrama, in which, as reporter Andrea Stevens astutely points out, history is likewise a main character. Except that the family is Italian-American this time, which is a twist. Throw Kushner acting veterans Kathleen Chalfant, Linda Emond, and Stephen Spinella into the mix in prominent roles, and it adds up to what sounds like yet another trenchant theatrical socio-diagnosis of these strange times in which we labour—times which have already in fact announced the end of labour. No doubt this is something dear Tony picks apart in the play. Would that I could jet to Minneapolis tomorrow to see it. The article does mention that a Broadway transfer down the road is a distinct possibility (preceded, of course, by Kushner’s equally requisite rewriting process and a likely workshop at the Public), so hopefully it will remain within my sightlines.
Speaking of intelligent homosexuals, Richard and I attended the memorial service of renowned Canadian architect Arthur Erickson yesterday, appropriately held at SFU, one of Erickson’s first important commissions (with his then design partner Geoffrey Massey), and my own place of employment since 2002. It was a gorgeous sunny day, and the campus (which, as much as I admire it, can look depressingly foreboding in bad weather) showed itself off to stunning effect, emblematically reflecting Erickson’s prime architectural credo of integrating buildings with their natural and environmental settings. It was indeed an elegant and eclectic service, as the write-up in today’s Globe and Mail described it, not to mention perfectly structured, clocking in at exactly one and a half hours.
Needless to say, there wasn’t a lot of reference to Erickson’s queerness and how this might have contributed to his architectural worldview, although Abe Rogatnick, in a wonderful eulogy, did hint at the type of bacchanals that were wont to take place around Erickson’s fabled garden oasis in Point Grey. Rogatnick also movingly mentioned the deaths of loved ones that had preceded Erickson’s—a reference I took to apply in particular to those of Erickson’s two long-term lovers (for more on Erickson’s “gay life,” see the reminiscence published by Hugh Brewster in a recent issue of Xtra! West). But surely how Erickson saw the world and built space—which is to say, decidely aslant—owes much to his sexual identity. How else to explain taking what was originally proposed for the Law Courts of British Columbia—an office highrise—and literally turning it on its side, laying it horizontally across two full city blocks? (Or, for that matter, that SFU gets used so frequently in sci-fi television series?)
We owe the miracle that is Robson Square—and the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, and the Canadian Chancery in Washington, DC, and my own quirkily “alien” academic institution—in large measure to the queer eye of Arthur Erickson.
P.
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