Henry V

Continuing my autumnal romp through Shakespeare, I saw Henry V at the Irondale Center in Brooklyn last night (performances continue through Dec. 10, 2011).  Only 10 actors performed over 40 roles (47 according to the playbill).  Perhaps this accounts somewhat for the liveliness that the play afforded, streamlining the otherwise heavy drama into crisp encounters and exchanges.  The most memorable scene, for me, was the bilingual punning conversation in which the French princess Katherine blushes and giggles at the wordplay of “foot” and “coat.”  When even such a potentially leaden scene as that, which I only half understand, is performed with such gusto, it makes for a very enjoyable two hours.   

Richard II

 The Pearl Theater Company’s Richard II at the New York City Center Stage has one thing to recommend it: Sean McNall as Richard II.  Fortunately, he’s the lead and he gets a lot of stage time.  Every line he delivers is powerful, clear and stately and wild at once; his bearing is never overdone, his expressions regal and tearful and amused.  Brilliant work.

Unfortunately, with a play that runs nearly three hours long, Richard II can’t be on stage the entire time, even if it is named for him.  And yes, this is a straight-forward rendition of the play, one which neither skips a line nor feels any need to add much in terms of direction.  The acting was solid throughout, but the blocking was hokey, the set a Hallmark vision of “desolate,” the wardrobes atrocious—aviator jackets and black jeans over the most proppity-prop-prop props on the Middle Ages, I swear the crown was cardboard painted gold. 

Richard II on the left, Bolingbroke on the right, and that's Harry Percy sportin' the aviator look in the background.  Harry's skirt looks like wallpaper, by the way, and that crown looks like an unimaginative ten year old made it.  Image courtesy of the New York Times review, here.

Probably the worst offense was a soundtrack of cheesy ass New Age renaissance music that would play between scenes, rife with the murmuring of the commoners if the scene called for such a thing (murmermurmermur), and played as background music to lend a sense of bathos to Richard’s brilliantly rendered pathos.         

Cymbeline

Cymbeline has got a little of everything.  It’s got War, it’s got True Love, it’s got the Girl Disguised as Guy, the Princes Raised as Woodsmen, it’s got the Wicked Stepmother, it’s got the Apparently Dead Person Who is Really Just Asleep (think Romeo and Juliet).  What sets it apart from a lot of Shakespeare’s work is that it doesn’t have the incessant wit, the wild turn of phrase that at once seems impossibly wrong and indubitably right, that forces us to see the world in new light.  No, the dialogue here is rather prosaic in comparison to most of the comedies, or any of the plays with a fool (even Hamlet-as-Fool, as much as Lear-as-Fool—though Lear has his own fool, of course). 

It’s just this prosaic dialogue that Fiasco’s Theater rendition of Cymbeline, which I saw Sunday night (door tickets are $37.50) at Barrow St. Theater, does so much with.  At those moments of mediocrity that creep up throughout this play, the directors have chosen to make their characters a touch on parodic side—which is to say nerdy/geeky side of things (except in the case when they’re more like idiots).  It works remarkably well.  For example, in Act I, Scene I, when two lovers are forced to part, one gives the other a bracelet and calls it a “manacle of love” and puts it on his “sweetest, fairest.”  If this were Romeo, then the lines would be delivered in all earnestness, and the other version of Cymbeline I’ve heard had them delivered such.  The Fiasco Theater’s version makes the line-deliver something like an over-excited nerd.  Because, you know, calling a bracelet a “manacle of love” sans irony ain’t cool.  And they do it like this throughout, hamming it up, both in delivery of dialogue and silent reception of it.

The performance has a lot to recommend it.  The acting was superb.  Six mummers performed about twice as many parts, with minimal costume change and with maximum clarity.  The music, which was worked in during major moments of transition, was simply excellent—the cast can sing.  The space is small and intimate and I can’t imagine a better version of Cymbeline.

I don’t want it to sound like the play itself doesn’t have something to offer.  Of course, it does (just less, I’d argue, than normal for a Shakespeare play).  One of favorite lines in all of Shakespeare is in Act I, Scene IV.  I like it so much because I find it particularly enigmatic.  I’ll end this review with it, spoken by Iachimo:

What, are men mad? Hath nature given them eyes
To see this vaulted arch, and the rich crop
Of sea and land, which can distinguish 'twixt
The fiery orbs above and the twinn'd stones
Upon the number'd beach? and can we not
Partition make with spectacles so precious
'Twixt fair and foul?

….

It cannot be i' the eye, for apes and monkeys
'Twixt two such shes would chatter this way and
Contemn with mows the other; nor i' the judgment,
For idiots in this case of favour would
Be wisely definite; nor i' the appetite;
Sluttery to such neat excellence opposed
Should make desire vomit emptiness,
Not so allured to feed.

             

The Stranger's Child

2 ½  Polychromatic Galaxy Skulls                             

Along with the perfectly crafted sentences, lines of beauty, what I have appreciated most in Alan Hollinghurst’s previous novels has been the unification of penetrating moments of clarity into something abysmal and poetic in the human soul, on the one hand, and the complete banality of the lives he describes on the other hand.  He can describe rigidified social mores, unbridled lustful obsession, and a sense of deep sorrowfulness with equal grace and clarity.  At times his prose is refined to the point that it becomes poetically prosaic, which also becomes a thematic in works like The Folding Star (my personal favorite) and Line of Beauty.  He does it all with a sense of aloof detachment that is actually tender.  For these reasons, Hollinghurst was one of my favorite authors, for a spell.

After reading The Stranger’s Child, Hollinghurst is no longer in my pantheon of living writers.  He’s still an amazing stylist, certainly, but for me the last 150-odd pages of his newest novel rattled on in what seemed to be a parody of plot hooks.  Obliquely following the reception of a fictional poet who died in WWI, the novel spans nearly a century.  In the last sections of the novel, the only thing besides carefully crafted sentences that is designed to engage a reader is whether or not the world will discover that said poet slept with men as well as women.  This seems to matter a lot to his biographer, but no one outside of his family even seems to care, much less this reader.  I found myself nodding along with the librarian who, when confronted with the possibility of the poet having been gay, says, “They all were, weren’t they?” (420). 

The Swimming Pool Library covered very similar thematic ground, excavating the repressed homosexual histories of Britain’s aristocratic elite throughout the 20^th century.  That debut novel was less tightly written, but in a sense it was also more ambitious, taking on a variety of voices and genres in a way that makes The Stranger’s Child seem monotone.  (And even The Swimming Pool Library seems monotone next to Byatt’s 1990 novel, Possession, which works on a similar structural and heteroglossic conceit.)   Furthermore, The Swimming Pool Library was published in 1988.  If The Stranger’s Child had been published over 20 years ago, its investigations into repressed biographical histories might have seemed like an intriguing, even liberating, challenge to popular opinion.  But in the second decade of the 20^th century it’s strikingly banal.

Book Review in the Zoo

My first requested book review can be found here, at A cappella Zoo.  It's an awesome journal, run by an awesome staff of zoo animals.  The review is of Theodore Carter's forthcoming The Life Story of a Chilean Sea Blob and Other Matters of Importance.  Check it out.

Ready Player One

Ready Player One

Ernest Cline

Random House

3 ½ Polychromatic Galaxy Skulls

The pleasure one gets from this book is pretty much the same as the pleasure one gets from watching your brother rack up the high score on Galaga or coming across a copy of your favorite D&D module, some 20 years used, at a random bookstore.  It’s part nostalgia for the childlike life you once led and part recognition for the child that’s still in you.  I think most of us can get the same enjoyment from a good blog about the 80s, but that’s more a testament on blogs than Cline’s novel.  The writing is fine—you’re not going to swoon over the sentences, but you won’t gag either.

If you are child of the 80s, or even almost one, then the novel will probably mean a little more to you than otherwise.  When Knight Rider’s KITT is mentioned, for example, you might recall your brother’s first goldfish, also named KITT.  Your brother was a big fan.  And when characters star slow dancing to “Time after Time,” you might remember that the first cassette tape you ever remember holding was Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual—owned by your brother. 

And you might recall going to Pinocchio’s for pizza with your mom.  After your brother and you had your pizza, your mom would give you quarters and you’d go down to the arcade in the same building and your brother would play Galaga for hours on just one quarter and you’d own Centipede or Ms. Pacman.  And you might remember the Snow Day when you and Jeffrey Hille walked to the arcade with $20 in quarters in order to finally, finally, finally beat Commando (at least you think it was Commando, maybe it was Gauntlet?).  It makes you remember when New Coke came out, and Weird Al Yankovic at the start of his career, Casey Kasem, the first time you rolled a D&D character, crying when Flint died, Fizban, He Man, She-ra, Jem, G. I. Joe, Gummi Bears, M.A.S.K., and all of those Saturday Morning Cartoons.  It’ll make you think about a lot, for better or worse.

Also, for me, one cool thing about the novel is that the protagonist is from Oklahoma City, with his home on Portland Ave. for the first part of the novel, very near where my father’s house is (though according to the novel, it’s unlikely his house will be around in 2044).  There aren’t enough novels set in Oklahoma.

Love's Labour's Lost

I saw this play performed for the third time last night.  It was one of the best all around performances of any Shakespeare that I've ever seen.  It was here, on the Public Lab stage of at the Public Theater. 

Everything was well done: good acting, strong characters, strongly delivered lines, great physical deliveries, variety and simplicity in wardrobes and stage design.  One thing that set this performance off for me, though, was the physical, silent acting that was going on while other characters were delivering their lines.  That's hard to describe.  Suffice it to say that despite, what, only 10 short lines or so of dialogue, Stephanie DiMaggio's wench Jaquenetta is larger than Sam Waterson's Lear.