Does anyone read Meyer Levin’s “Obsession”?

I am having very good luck with my arbitrary choices of books to read lately.

Levin wrote Obsession in the early 1970s, over twenty years after he first became involved with Otto Frank and “The Diary of Anne Frank”.  I don’t want to give away too much detail about this book, because I want everyone to read it.  It is interesting on so many different levels.

So, find and read a copy if you are interested in: (1) “The Diary of Anne Frank”; (2) How theater is put together; (3) Jewish theater; (4) Holocaust and post-World War II American Jewish psychology; (5) copywright litigation; (6) psychoanalysis; and (7) an admittedly obsessive personality and its effect on one’s life, and one’s family.  Oh, yes, and (8) Leopold and Loeb.

That covers all of the readers of this blog, doesn’t it?

The Metro Smooch Factor (one cent)

9 a.m.    I step onto the Metro train.  Standing room only.  I stand, near the door, in front of the seats that are facing the aisle and are marked “priority seating” for seniors and people with disabilities.  Sitting in the seats are a rather unattractive young couple, twenties or thirties.  He has his eyes closed, his head on her shoulder.  She is faced towards him, her right arm pawing all over his body.  They smooch.  Occasionally he opens his eyes.  Occasionally they talk, but very softly, every few words followed by a kiss or a caress.  It is like they are in the privacy of their own home.  It is like no one else is there. I am embarrassed for them. This goes on my entire train ride; they get off when I do, oblivious to the rest of us, who wondered, “What the hell?”

5 p.m.  I step onto the Metro train.  Standing room only.  I stand, near the door, in front of the seats that are facing the aisle and are marked “priority seating” for seniors and people with disabilities.  Sitting in the seats are a rather unattractive, but different, young couple, twenties or thirties.  His eyes are wide open, they smooch and smooch and smooch.  In between smooches, they both giggle, he giggling very loudly and she a bit more circumspect in her giggling.  It is like they are in the privacy of their own home.  It is like no one else is there.  I am embarrassed for them. This goes on my entire train ride; they continue to smooch, paw and giggle as I step off.

How could this have happened two times in a row like this, when I have never seen it happen before?  Was it coincidence?  I don’t think so, I think I was set up and have not seen the end of this.  But why?  And to what end?

Stay tuned.

So, Now I can be a critic.

Last night, we went to the Forum Theatre to see Carlos Murillo’s Dark Play, or Stories for Boys.  Let me approach it on three levels:  (1) I don’t like the story line at all, (2) Putting aside my distate for the story line, the play is extremely well written, and (3) I thought that the production, and especially the acting, was absolutely first rate.  The audience, on the other hand, was quite small – much too small for a Saturday night.  I am not sure why, except that there is so much competition in town.

The basic story is about two teenagers, one 14 and one 16.  They don’t know each other, although they live in the same city.  The older boy is looking for love in an internet chat room, a beautiful green eyed girl, about 5′4″.  The younger boy is looking for love, too, but the love is he looking for is more like that of a 16 year old boy.  To seduce the boy, he invents a sister, creates an ID for her, and enters into a cyberspace relationship.  Things deteriorate from there.

The surrounding story is that, as this tale is being told, the 14 year old is now about 18 and in college, and at least outwardly heterosexual with a girl friend.  Should he tell her?

And what is a “dark play”?  A dark play sets forth a situation where only some of the players know the rules, and know they are playing a game.  Murillo created the perfect dark play, loosely based on a real situation that occurred several years ago in England.

All of the actors were terrific, and you have to pay special attention to James Flanagan, who played Nick, the 14 year old and college student, and master manipulator.

Dark Play followed an equally strong performance at the Capital Fringe Festival.  This one, called Children of Medea, is a one woman tour-de-force, written and performed by Sue Jin Song, a Tisch graduate of Korean-American background.  Any one person showing lasting 75 minutes is bound to be impressive.  Any show written and directed by that one person is bound to be impressive.  But this play surpasses all expectations.

Song tells the story of a 13 year old girl, with Korean born parents and a 6 year old sister, whose mother abandons the household.  The father, well educated it appears, an intellectual, has a do-nut shop to take care of his family; he is a silent man, tyrannical, hesitant to show positive emotion.  The story goes through five years, until Cynthia, the 13 year old, is ready to go to college.  She has been accepted early at Harvard; she is extremely bright, responsible and hard working.  But she is also pregnant, from the chancest of chance encounters.  This is the story of Cynthia, her younger sister, and her father.  It is also the story of Medea, vengeful woman, abandoned by Jason for whom she has sacrificed everything.  The script moves back and forth.

It is an intricate script, with each word clearly thought through.  Nothing is out of place.  And Song’s performance is mesmerizing – her varying forms of diction, her running the gamut of emotions, her energy.

My guess is that this is not the last time that Children of Medea will be seen.

We also saw two dance programs yesterday, one based on Poe’s “Annabel Lee”, and one a demonstration of classical Indian dance.  They were both fine, although I would not suggest that you have to run to see them.

Dark Play and Children of Medea, though, should go on your must-see list.  Even if you don’t have one.

What does it take to be a critic? (1 cent)

I wonder sometimes what it takes to be a critic.  I assume that a critic must know how to write well, and how to structure a review to capture the interest of the reader.  The critic should be knowledgeable about the field (theater, music, etc.), and perhaps about the performers, the piece, the writer, and so forth.  Based on these requirements, I am obviously not equipped to criticize.

There are a lot of critics these days, not only those working for print media and the larger websites, but those who create their own websites devoted to criticism of one thing or another.  In D.C., for example, there is www.potomacstages.com; www.dctheatrescene.com; and www.allarts4u.com. They review almost everything.

Today is the last day of the Capital Fringe Festival, with performances of over 100 different shows.  I have seen about 12 of them.  DCtheatrescene is reviewing all 100+; Allarts4u is reviewing a large number of them.  I am not sure about Potomac Stages.  I have looked at the reviews of the shows that I have seen and by and large find them to be totally off point and wrongheaded.

Is it them, or is it me?

What does it take to be a critic?

“The Law of Similars” and The National Archives (14 cents)

I enjoyed Chris Bohjalian’s The Law of Similars immensely.  Northern Vermont.  Homeopathic healer.  One patient dies.  Another patient falls in love.  Was the death caused by criminal action by the healer?  Does it get more confusing because the patient who is in love with the healer is also the local prosecuting attorney?  And that he has become an arsenic addict, and has helped the healer rewrite her notes on her sessions with her dead patient throw the prosecutors (i.e., him and his co-workers) off the track?  An easy read, an engrossing read.  Truly hard to put down.  Although this book is not reviewed as positively as some of Bohjalian’s other works, I recommend it highly.  [Also, note that there is a statue of Samuel Hahnemann, founder of homeopathic medicine at Scott Circle in Washington DC.]

I did put it down long enough to attend a noon program at the National Archives yesterday.  Three archivists gave a talk (designed for tourists more than scholars) on some of the kinds of things you can find at the Archives.  It was, in fact, a series of vignettes, with no overall pattern, and each was fascinating.

For example, Alexander Hamilton, who had never taken his Revolutionary War pension, because he was on the Board that gave out pensions and thought it would be unethical to receive one.  Four days before his fatal duel with Aaron Burr, he filed for a pension and gave a statement of his assets (meager) and debts (enormous).  It took his wife over twenty years before a pension was granted.  Politics played a role, as Congress debated the issues time and time again, and as his widow kept filing petition after petition.

Another example, prohibition.  Prohibition was in the air, of course, before it became the law of the land, and the dries in Congress thought that D.C. should be the first place to ban alcohol, as it was under Federal control.  Laws were proposed and resulted in, if not the abolition of liquor at first, in making it harder to get a license to sell, and eventually, two years before the national ban, a local ban was passed (if not rigorously enforced).

A third example, Pearl Harbor.  We were taken by surprise, yes, but we also had radar that had tracked and plotted the incoming Japanese planes.  Unfortunately, we thought they were American planes on their way to join the squadrons already on Oahu.

Fourth example, early movements for universal suffrage (following the Civil War) for women as well as men, and the Congressional petitions that were filed.

And more.

A relaxing and humorous and informative presentation.  (And, you can skip the long lines if you are going to the Archives for this sort of program.)

A Brief Trip to Philadelphia and a Book (14 cents)

It was a very brief trip.  I arrived at 10:30 a.m., and returned home on the 4:55 p.m. train.  I don’t get to Philadelphia very often, less than once I year, although it is right up the road.  And, because I find it a very stimulating place, I am not sure why I seem to stay away.

Yesterday, I went for a short business lunch (like 12 to 2:30) at the Union League of Philadelphia.  I knew it was a private club, but that is about all.  I did not know that it was in an 1862 building right in the heart of downtown, on South Broad Street, and that it is a very attractive building, inside and out.  I now know a little more about the “Union League” movement, of which Philadelphia had the first branch and one of the only remaining ones.  The Union League was started during the Civil War to support the idea of keeping the union together, of opposing secession. The Union League of New York established the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and built Grant’s Tomb and the base of the Statue of Liberty.  In Philadelphia, the League has always been philanthropic in its activities.

The Philadelphia League also owns an 84 room hotel, open to the public.  The League has  a dress code (particularly for men), where jackets are required in the restaurants (which I do not believe to be open to the general public), although the advertised code seemed to be ignored by at least three tables of men in sport shirts.  There is a lot of art on the walls, and in the main dining room of one of the restaurants (I understand there are two or three separate restaurants), there are large pictures of nude women, which makes me wonder why jackets are required.  But, there you go……

I have found that, as a rule, food in private clubs are not up to par.  The Union League was no exception.  My modest Caesar salad with salmon turned out to be fresh, but uncut, leafs of romaine lettuce sort of stacked in several piles, croutons large enough to require more than one bite, a paltry amount of parmesan cheese, and a nice large piece of salmon on the top.  But the salmon seemed to have been drenched in salt, and the Caesar dressing was on the side, not tossed with the salad.  Not very good, although I ate to be polite (and because I was hungry).

I did a fair amount of walking in a short time – from the 30th Street Station to the used book store behind the main Library on the Ben Franklin Parkway at 20th, to the Union Leage, and then reversing my steps.  The book store was fun, although it is overpriced for what it is, so mostly I looked (and looked hard), coming out with just a few books (such as a signed autobiography by the Duchess of Bedford, and the “unauthorized autobiography” of David Slavitt.)

I am always impressed that, in Philadelphia, virtually every building has something about it that makes you want to spend some time looking and thinking, and that I never have time to do that.  On the other hand, I wonder how a city with so much outdoor public sculpture, can have virtually no sculpture that it worth looking at at all.  I think they need a new way to approve their public art.

Congratulations to Amtrak – comfortable and on time both ways.  I got a chance to finish Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints, an engrossing novel of four generation of women in the Dominican Republic (spanning the 20th century), four quite different women, none of whom could break out of their seriously restricted environments, and to start Chris Bohjalian’s The Law of Similars, a mystery novel about homeopathic medicine.  I hope that the rest of the book is as enjoyable as the first 100 pages.

The Restaurants, the Theater, the Book and the Nats (96 cents)

The Restaurants.  Three to talk about.   1.  We had a rather late dinner Wednesday night at Regent Thai in Adams Morgan.  Sitting outside on a beautiful night was great; the staff was very accommodating.  Everyone there seemed to be enjoying themselves.  The only problem was that the food was not what we hoped it would be.  I don’t want to conclude that Regent Thai is just an ordinary Thai restaurant; the problem may have been that we just did not order the best on the menu.  We started by splitting a papaya salad, something we often do in Thai restaurants, so we are able to compare.  This salad was smaller than most, and I thought the dressing tasted like it had a little too much garlic; no subtlety here.  On the other hand, the vegetable fried rice, which was loaded with fresh vegetables, lacked a degree of taste, and the Penang tofu curry, seemed to be small cubes of soft tofu in an awful lot of sauce.  I thought it needed a little more of something in it to give it more texture. All in all, not bad, but somewhat disappointing  2.  On Saturday at lunch, however, what we thought would be simply passable turned out much more than that.  Again, sitting outside at Asia Spice in Chinatown (a beautiful day, but the main view was that of two funerals at the Baptist church across the street), I decided again to try the fried rice, this time with seafood.  It is on the menu as “spicy” and I asked them to tone it down a bit, which they did, leaving with it just the right amount of bite.  The seafood was plentiful and fresh, and the rice had more taste to it than Regent Thai’s.  Our other dish was a very well designed green salad, with a Thai peanut dressing.  3.  That night, we went to the new Busboys and Poets, on 5th Street.  A simple vegetable pizza with non-dairy cheese, and a wonderful baby spinach salad, with blueberries, pecans, wheat berries, gorgonzola cheese.  I sprung for the extra $2.95 to put chicken on it, and, although the chicken was plentiful and fine, it was not necessary.  (We should also say that we ate at Clyde’s Chevy Chase last night, with relatives.  I had roast chicken with jicama, and black beans and rice.  No complaints.  And it is nice, every once in a while, to go where you seem to be the youngest, and not the oldest, in the restaurant.

The Theater.  Saturday was devoted to the Capitol Fringe Festival; we saw 5 different shows.  First, a two person sketch, called Riding the Bull, about a rodeo clown and his overweight girlfriend (and her cow), punctuated by a banjo player/folk singer from New York; this was the most professional and strongest show of the bunch.  Then, came Dorks on the Loose, back for their second year.  Friends of my daughter, they are zany, and have put together a bunch of short pieces of the humorous variety.  Third was a piece based on two fierecely rival a capella groups at a college, with a love interest between a member of each.  I can’t say much for the plotline, but the music was very harmonious.  Fourth, a 90 minute comedy called GS-14, based on a government bureaucrat who gets a little too involved in the life of his employees.  Finally, All Good Men, which I don’t know how to describe, except to say that it is a 5 person dance/movement piece with an off-stage dialogue telling the story of a medical school, which has a growing need of cadavers, and the folks that make sure that it gets them, any way possible.  All were enjoyable, the day relaxing, seeing so many people attending so many atypical theatrical events encouraging.

The Book.  The book is called Many and Many a Year Ago, and is written by a Turkish banker/author, Selcuk Altun.  I found it at the Fringe Free Store, amongst the many books donated and not yet taken.  Because it was a mystery set in Istanbul, I thought it would be interesting to read.  Seeing that it also had to do with Edgar Allen Poe was intriguing.  I have read it now, and I found it a worthwhile read, although the plot is a little complicated.  Our hero (actually a hero of the Turkish Air Force, crippled by a jet crash, unable to follow his other passion as a classical music performer) becomes the unwitting tool, perhaps, of an old army buddy, who leads him through all sorts of missing person chaces and chance encounters, across the city, and throughout some of the Turkish countryside, but also to Argentina, and to Boston, New York and (of course) Baltimore and Poe’s burial site.  Do I think this is a must-read?  No, but it kept me going (if scratching my head too often).

But that’s not the point.  The point is that this book, which I have read cover to cover, has not yet been published in English, and won’t be until September.  Now, I am not reading an advanced reading copy, nor an earlier published foreign edition, although my copy was printed in the UK (where also it is to be published on 9/1).  How is this possible, and how could it arrive so quickly at a give-away table?  It seems to me that this is the true myster.

The Washington Nationals.  Oh, my.  They fire their manager (correct decision), elevate their bench coach (who worked under the manager and thinks he did “everything right”), and the team loses four straight to the Cubs.  Oh, my.

J. M. Coetzee (4 cents)

I had never read anything by South African writer, J.M. Coetzee.  Always thought I should.  Never did.

But yesterday, sitting for a couple of hours at a volunteer job, I picked up a copy of his Age of Iron, and finished before the evening was over.  A beautifully written book.

Published in 1990, it tells the story of a retired literature professor in Capetown (white), who learns she has an incurable cancer.  Her husband is long dead; her only daughter living the United States, vowing not to return to South Africa until apartheid it dismantled.

The book is written in the first person, a long narrative written to her daughter far away.  The narrator is eminently likeable, has led an exemplary life, it seems, a liberal academician caught in a brutal society.

Yet she never realized how brutal it was, until a series of adventures, with vagrants (white), her domestic (black) and her domestic’s children and their friends leads her into a South Africa she knew existed intellectually but had never seen first hand.

And now, her life was ebbing before there was change in her country.  She never imagined it that way.  And now it appears that the social system in the country might continue forever, because no one (white) really speaks out, no one (white) really understands what is going on.

She would speak out, in her dying days.  But how?  Is there a way to make a statement, to create an incident that would serve as a statement, without belittling oneself with no advantage to the cause.

Coetzee has written this simple, complex story with grace and beauty.  No wonder he is considered such a world class writer, twice a Booker Prize winner, and the 2003 Nobel Prize winner.

From Wikipedia, “Rian Malan wrote that Coetzee is “a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word.”^[19]

I guess that if you write this well, talking might be superfluous.

Uncle Vanya and a couple of other things (one cent)

Just returned from a staged reading of “Uncle Vanya”, which means we have seen/heard the four classic Chekhov plays over the past month.  Because the plays are so similar to each other, you can easily get the “if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen all” feeling, and you would not be wrong.  But because the four plays are each so great, it makes no difference, and seeing all four over a short period of time allows you to appreciate his theatrical talent all the more.  Now, of course we did not see them in Stanislavsky’s Russian productions.  They were in English, three in the David Mamet adaptations, and one in the Carol Rocamora/Ari Roth translation/adaptation.  The dialogue in each was snappy, and funny, and of course serious and dark.  Tonight’s production was another Theatre Lab production, with all but one of the actors being adult students.  The quality of the production was very high and (and I am not being sexist in this remark) the male actors shone.

A couple of other things:

All French movies, chosen by the covers on the DVD, are not good, I have discovered.  We watched a movie called, in English, “The Witnesses” last night or, to put it more accurately, we watched half of it.  I would suggest you avoid it if you ever are confronted with the chance to see it (which you probably won’t be).

On the other hand, I picked up a thin paperback novel, Castle Freeman, Jr.’s “All That I Have”, and enjoyed it a lot.  I bought it at a library for 50 cents to read on the Metro.  I had never heard of it, or of Freeman.  It was published by a small press.  It didn’t increase my knowledge any, but it did provide diversion.  A small time Vermont sheriff, who believes it letting things play out on their own,  who doesn’t want to arrest the local kid whom everybody thinks belongs behind bars, and who winds up having to figure out what to do about the mysterious Russians who rented the house out in the country.

And, unexpectedly, we were back at Zaytinya, and my three choices, shish taouk (chicken on skewers), Adana kebab (moderately spiced lamb sausage), and zucchini/cheese patties, turned out to be unbeatable.

The Films of the Weekend (31 cents)

I have kept up my new hobby of going to the video store and bringing home foreign movies that I have never heard of.  How long that will last, I don’t know, but the results have so far been interesting.

I was able to watch two last weekend.

The better of the two was a French Canadian movie entitled (in English) “The Widow of Saint-Pierre”, filmed about ten years ago, and starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil.  It was nominated for a Golden Globe, and won a number of awards in festivals around the world.  Based on a true story, it is set in the (still) French island of St. Pierre (off the coast of Newfoundland) in the mid-19th century, where two obviously coarse and intoxicated young men got into an argument about a third, older man.  The question was whether he was “fat” or simply “big”, and the only way they could decide who was right was to kill him, so that they could undress him and see.

They were tried and found guilty.  One of the men died, and the other was sentenced to death on the guillotine.  Sadly, there was neither a guillotine, nor an executioner, on the island, but there was an extra one on the Caribbean island of Martinique and it was sent for.  In the meantime, the prisoner was put under the control of the army captain, who was the chief disciplinary representative of the French government.  He and his wife (with his wife the stronger personality) thought that it was not right to keep this man in the damp, dark prison, because he could be useful, and she took charge of him, turning him into a gardener, having him build a greenhouse, having him help villagers (and particularly fishing widows) with major household repairs, and so forth.  He became quite the man about town, he impregnated and married a young woman, he saved another woman when a rope broke and the vehicle she was on started charging down a hill, and he even helped bring the guillotine from the ship to the shore.  Every night, he went back to the prison, and he did not try to escape.  He was planning on turning the money he was making over to his wife for the benefit of his new child.

Things did not work out well, and he was executed.  Not only that, but the captain was relieved of his post, sent back to France, court martialed, and made victim to a firing squad.

It’s a historical movie, but it’s also about the good in bad people, about the role of the law, about personal relations, and about the death penalty.

It’s not a must-see movie, but certainly a good-to-see movie.

I don’t know if I can really say the same thing about “The Wall”, a Belgian movie filmed in 1998 and set primarily in late December 1999, just before and at the turn of the millenium.  Linguistic friction is tearing Belgian apart, and the Flemish and French speakers have been negotiating a solution, which turns out to be the surprise construction of a wall on the linguistic divide, separating the two cultures.  The hero of our film is a young, not so smart, much too heavy, but pleasant and agreeable fellow, who runs the “chips cart” (think Belgian fries and sauce), started by his grandfather.  Unfortunately, the chips business is affected by the wall, which runs right through it, and Albert, who is a Walloon, finds himself on the Flemish side of the divide, without the necessary papers either to stay or to go home.

Political satire, of course.  Picking up on a very real problem in Belgium, of course.  But a little far fetched, and none too good.