Poem of the Week 2024/7

The Bean Eaters

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.

Dinner is a casual affair.

Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,

Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.

Two who have lived their day,

But keep on putting on their clothes

And putting things away.

And remembering . . .

Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,

As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that

    is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,

    tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

– Gwendolyn Brooks

Today is Saint Valentine's Day, so here is an exquisite love poem, but it's also Ash Wednesday, so here's a reflective & even melancholy poem.

Brooks defines her old Black couple – "this old yellow pair"; yellow in this context means a light-skinned Black person of mixed race descent – as bean eaters. Why? Beans are wholesome, filling, & inexpensive fare; inexpensive is the key word here. Nothing is fancy about their meals; plain is repeated twice in the third line to describe the plates & furniture they use for eating. These two are clearly marginal, socially & economically: they are mixed race but visibly Black in a racist country, they are old in a country that has always valued youth. The beans are just one of the elements that let us know they make do with what they have: their plates are chipped, their table (not even dignified by being referred to as such) is bare wood, & it is both plain & creaking; they have no silverware, but only flatware made of cheap tin. Beans are ordinary food for ordinary people. Beans suggest food eaten by country folk, who struggle to make a living from the land (there's a possible hint here of the couple's past; perhaps, like Brooks & her family, they were Southerners who moved north to Chicago during the Great Migration). Like the beans they subsist on, this couple isn't fancy or flashy – more solid, salt-of-the-earth types, & as those terms suggest, not really noticeable or memorable. But beans power a lot of the world's people. And it's suggestive that we see our couple in the context of their daily dinner: a casual affair it may be, but it is still a social occasion, bringing these two together as part of a daily & sustaining ritual.

The second stanza reinforces the idea that these two are fairly ordinary (or ordinary-seeming) people; neither brilliant nor terribly bad, they are . . . Mostly Good. The initial caps on the phrase are slightly comic, as if the pair were being rated on some scale, celestial or bureaucratic or both. No greatness in either the good or bad directions! The caps also help lend an air of finality to the judgment; these are lives that are, in all but a technical sense, over, & this is the official assessment. This theme takes over the rest of the stanza. They have lived their day. & yet, here they are still, going through the standard motions of a life. They keep putting on their clothes (which suggests getting up & starting the day) & putting things away (which suggests cleaning up as the day ends). A day-by-day routine, of not much interest.

So far Brooks has shown us her couple from outside. In the third stanza, she moves inward. As they move through their daily routines, their lives mostly over, those lives reappear in the shifting shape of memories. & they react to these memories with both twinklings & twinges (& can your life be considered truly over if you are still reacting to your memories of the past?). Twinklings suggests happier memories, & twinges moments of regret. Again, there's nothing extreme about this Mostly Good couple: twinklings rather than joy, twinges rather than searing pain. Has age gentled down their reactions, or were they always like this? Nothing tells us, one way or the other; another bit of mystery around this seemingly mundane couple.

So far in the poem, the lines have been short & descriptive, with most lines rhyming in a pleasing but unobtrusive way, lines as plain as the couple. The third stanza also begins with short lines, but the ellipsis after the first line signals a break, to the movement inward mentioned above: first we get the mention of their remembering, then in the second line we get some of their reactions to their memories (our first sign of their interior lives), & then the third line blooms out to complete the poem. The line is not completely alien in tone to the rest; it begins with the sort of light rhyming we've been seeing (as they lean over the beans: not quite a perfect rhyme, & perhaps that little disjunction in sound is a reminder of the difference between what we're seeing outside the couple & what they are feeling inside); the line  continues with a reminder of their social & economic status (not only a rented room, but a back room).

But the line, easily the longest in the poem, then unfurls with a wonderfully eclectic list of the detritus of a life: it begins & ends with a suggestion of past frivolity & fanciness: beads & fringes. Where do they come from? from fancy old clothes that have gradually fallen apart? from broken necklaces? Is the fringe from old-fashioned furnishings, perhaps something brought up from whatever country they moved from, something filled for them, though not for anyone else, with memories of those buried back in that past? Vases: it's funny how vases accumulate. There are no flowers in these vases, but there must have been, once. Where did the vases come from? Where did the flowers go to? Why does the couple keep them? & the dolls: survivals of a childhood, & if so, their own, or perhaps that of some child of theirs now long gone? Cloths: dust cloths? dust covers? scraps saved for some thrifty purpose? Receipts & tobacco crumbs: the flotsam & jetsam of everyday life, but suggestive of a certain level of pleasure or pleasure-seeking. The items are shared between the two: we might assume that the dolls belong to the woman, & the tobacco crumbs to the man, though maybe not; maybe the dolls are from his childhood, & maybe she smoked. They are pooled together, part of a life shared for so long there is no separation between their things. The items listed are nothing special, simply the things that accumulate around us in the course of life, though enriched for the couple by their remembering. We are not given any of their memories, only this array of physical items, which their rented room is full of (the use of full here is our first indication of something other than humble surroundings for this couple, our first suggestion of abundance). The length of the list & its variety reinforce a concluding sense of abundance associated with this couple & their circumscribed lives, even though the items listed are mostly humble & everyday odds & ends, & we never find out what exactly they mean to the couple. We are told that this old pair remembers, but not what they remember. They share these things, but only with each other, not with us. We see only that they do share an intimacy. We do not share in that intimacy, but we end by seeing that it is there, a mystery & a blessing illuminating these two people who had appeared so plain & dull.

I took this from Selected Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks; there appears to be an updated edition, which you can find here.

Museum Monday 2024/7

 

Covered bowl with design of dragons, a porcelain piece from eighteenth-century Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province, China, now in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

We are now in the Year of the Dragon

Friday Photo 2024/6

 

crispy duck

Shotgun Players: Babes in Ho-lland

Recently I was at a Sunday performance of Shotgun Players' world premiere production of Babes in Ho-lland by Deneen Reynolds-Knott, directed by Leigh Rondon-Davis. It is the story of two Black women students in the largely white environment of the University of Pittsburgh (the Ho-lland of the title is a joking reference to a dorm on campus) in the 1990s: Ciara (Sundiata Ayinde), a freshman from a middle-class background (her mother works in finance) living in the dorms, & Taryn (Tierra Allen), a sophomore from a less financially stable background, living off campus, who fall in love with each other. There is a third character: Kat (Ciera Eis), a sort of grunge-goth-adjacent white girl who is Ciara's roommate.

Here's the short version: the performers are fine, the play is sweet, but dull. I think I read somewhere that it would be 90 minutes without intermission. That would be stretching it a bit, but OK. Then at the theater we were told it would be two hours & ten minutes, including a ten-minute intermission. The show ended up being two & a half hours. I've seen productions of Macbeth that are shorter. Before I go into how thin the material was stretched to fill that time, I'm going to talk about my experience in the theater.

We bring our baggage into the theater with us; ideally, the play will lighten our loads in some way: make us laugh, or think, or even just forget whatever we need to forget at the moment. The last few years in particular have been difficult ones for me – & for the world at large, of course, but I'm talking about my individual situation. I won't go into the details, because it's not the kind of thing I discuss here, but I'll summarize by saying when someone I know sent me a Christmas text wishing me "merriment & brightness coming my way" my immediate & visceral reaction was, Why are you making fun of me? Then I realized he wasn't; I'm just not expecting merriment & brightness from . . . well, anything.

So I went into the theater with that, hoping I would enjoy the play. If I weren't basically an optimist I wouldn't keep going to the theater, right?

It was a mask-mandatory matinee, which leads to the first incident. I took my seat in the front row, mask firmly in place (I am very careful about observing such rules). Between allergies & medication, my throat gets dry, which leads to coughing. Since that would disrupt a performance, I carry a small bottle of water in my messenger bag. While waiting for the show to start & without thinking much of it, I took the bottle out of my bag, briefly half-undid my mask, took a quick glug, put the mask back on, & replaced the bottle in my bag. Before I could finish putting the bottle back (please note I never fully took off my mask, & replaced it before putting the bottle away – I later timed myself doing this & the whole sequence takes about two minutes, during only about half of which time my mask is partly down), I heard screeching behind me: "TAKE THAT OUTSIDE!!!!: I was facing the stage, so I turn around, & there, quivering with rage, is a short pile of unruly grey curls in a lumpy tie-dyed sweatshirt. "What are you talking about?" I said. "TAKE THAT OUTSIDE!!!! THIS IS A MASKED MATINEE!!!!" I point out to the trembling troll that I am wearing a mask (by then it was fully back on). She kept screeching. She had been sitting in almost the back row of the theater. That means she must have charged down the stairs the minute I started reaching into my bag. (If I was exuding harmful viruses, wouldn't it be safer to stay back where she was? But of course safety isn't the point.) Best of all, in order to come down to where I was in the front row, she had to pass a woman who was sitting several rows behind me, blatantly flouting the mask policy: her mask was down around her chin & she was leisurely sipping her cup of coffee. The tie-dyed troll kept screeching at me, even though I was, let me reiterate, already fully masked with my water put away, so I'm not sure what more she wanted. Finally I nodded to the maskless woman, who must have heard what was going on but just kept sitting there, & said, "Are you going to go yell at her?" "YES I AM" she said, but of course she didn't yell; she quietly mentioned that it was a masked matinee & she should take her coffee outside (which the woman did).

I guess technically I did violate the rule, though I didn't even think of it that way as I was only partially exposed for a minute or two. I didn't even think of what I was doing as "drinking", I thought of it as "preventing a coughing fit". I certainly understand the exasperation & frustration of seeing people ignore the rules. But if you're so tightly wound about masking that a momentary & partial exposure on the other side of a substantial space is going to make you lose it completely, maybe you shouldn't be sitting in a theater audience quite yet. But of course the masking wasn't the point. The point was to scream at a man (I can state this firmly, as she ignored the mask-down woman until I made a point of it, & that's a fairly typical example of how my male "privilege" works for me). I'm so used to bizarre levels of hostility from random strangers that it wasn't even until the next day that it occurred to me she could have simply said something to me, or alerted the house manager, without screaming. I think she actually did alert the house manager, as I saw her poke her head in a few minutes later & scan my row, obviously looking for the law-breaker. Since my mask was firmly back on before the troll had finished her first screech, well, I'm not sure what she thought her point was. (For the record, during the performance people around me were lowering their masks to eat cookies. I know this because the cookies were wrapped in cellophane.)

So after that random attack I'm standing there at my front row aisle seat, still waiting for the show to start (I get places early). A white-haired woman sits next to me, eyes me up & down, & announces to me that we're in the movable chairs (the other rows are basically church pews) & I could easily move my seat over & the theater wouldn't even notice. I just stared at her. I am extremely careful about respecting other people's space, a courtesy that is often not reciprocated or even recognized. Moving my chair over would in fact have partially blocked the stairs, making it difficult for people going up or down. I hadn't even sat down. I don't know what her problem was, other than my existence.

Then, during the performance, the woman directly behind me, when not talking to her companion, grunted & moaned in agreement with any "political" points, & . . . sang along with the songs. She sang along. & there were a lot of songs in this show.

So let me move on to the show, starting with the music, which the theater kept highlighting. Pop music from the 1990s means absolutely nothing to me. Given the age of most of the rest of my audience (even older than I am), I can't believe it means much to them, either: maybe their children listened to it? I didn't hate it, but I sure didn't feel I'd missed anything by not hearing it before. The music helps define the personalities of the three (Kat in particular listens to more rock-type stuff), but once that point is made . . . well, it keeps being made, & then made again (hence the extended run time; anytime action threatens to develop, on goes the CD player). Sometimes the young women dance along or lip-synch the words. I can't even remember if they actually play air guitar or if I was just plunged back into the embarrassment of watching fellow dorm-dwellers do so: after your initial grin, to show you think they're so cool, when they keep going on, what do you do but pretend to still have a reaction while your soul slips away, its place taken by crushing emptiness & boredom? At least in the theater it doesn't matter if you don't have a reaction. You can just sit back, blank-faced, basking in the stereophonic stylings of the random woman behind you singing along in her very average voice to songs you've never heard of.

Speaking of familiarity, easily the biggest reaction of the evening came when Ciara says she wants to go into journalism & be on a TV show where she can make Pat Buchanan cry. Big laughs & applause for that – this aging Berkeley audience may not know Courtney Love from a Hole in the ground, but we know & despise Pat Buchanan!

The thought of a student in the mid-1990s wanting to go into journalism made me wonder why no one did the obvious thing with this material: compress the whole thing into a first act (under an hour) & then write a second act, set in current times, updating us on these three characters. If nothing else, maybe we could find out what happens to their sense of self when the music they use to define themselves turns into oldies or "classic hits" or nostalgia.

So these two young women fall in love, & that's kind of sweet, of course. But there's really no conflict as they slide together. Ciara is the less experienced of the two, but she doesn't have much angst over falling in love with another woman – the whole "Oh my God, am I . . . that way?!?" drama, & the coming-out drama, are a bit passé on the stage, though not in life. The two women don't run up against much homophobia. Kat is cool with it, as a young woman like her would be. There is racism, but mostly of the "white people are clueless" kind rather than the overtly hostile kind. At one point, when Taryn has financial problems, Kat asks about her scholarship. Both Taryn & Ciara are immediately offended by this. I was puzzled, as Taryn's financial problems have been a running theme & it seems unsurprising that she would receive financial aid, but apparently there's a racist thing I had not even heard of, in which all Black students are assumed to have scholarships "for diversity". Is this a variant on "you're only here because of affirmative action?" But the affirmative action thing is more insulting & the scholarship assumption is more along the lines of well-meaning but clueless. This is the sort of portrayal of racism that lets the Berkeley audience off the hook – we are so much more sensitive than that young woman! It was one of several points when the woman behind me grunted & "mmmm'ed" loudly to let everyone know she totally got it. (Do I even need to clarify that this woman was white? as was most of the audience.)

Taryn is portrayed as relentlessly cool: she wants to be a social worker! She loves kids, & they love her right back! She is pals with all the service workers on campus! Her mac & cheese is fire! She goes to poetry slams! She listens to the coolest beats! She sneers at people who watch Friends! She plays a mean game of pool! Her Granddad taught her, because her family is so close! When they party, the neighbors don't complain, they party with them!

The play is weirdly reluctant to criticize or question her. But let's look at some of these things, starting with palling around with the service workers: she & Ciara have a conversation about this. Ciara says these people are just doing their jobs. Taryn gives her a little lecture (one of several she gives, meant to enlighten Ciara & presumably us) about how her Mom worked at a hotel reception desk & some guests treated her like dirt but others were courteous because they knew she could make or break their vacation (yeah, Taryn, we know; we've all seen Fight Club). Ciara has no response & clearly has been both thrown for a loop & shown the light. But there's a pretty big spectrum of behavior between treating people like dirt & being friends who have lengthy conversations with them while they're working. Sometimes respect means letting people do their jobs, or realizing that maybe they're not there to give you a rounded social life, or even that they may not like you that much.

Here's an example from years ago in my working life: I was at a job where my desk was a bit out of the way. You could get to it, but you had to go around some low cubicle dividers that kind of walled off the area. So when the man would come around to empty our wastebaskets, I would pick mine up & carry it over to him. This was mostly to be helpful but also partly because it allowed me to move from my desk. One time when I did this, he thanked me & said I was the only person who handed him the basket like that. English was not his first language, or one he spoke well, so saying that was an effort for him. I thanked him. I was glad I could do that for him & show him that sign of respect. But we never were pals, the way Taryn is with the campus crew. I didn't feel I should take up his time with chat mostly designed to show how cool I am for talking to him. (Most people would assume I was, at least financially/economically, the privileged person there. I'm not sure that's accurate. I was unable to find a full-time job & so was working one in a series of long-term temp jobs at the same company, for which I basically received no benefits, only my salary – after the temp agency had regularly skimmed a huge amount off the top, in return for nothing but issuing me a check every other week. My bosses always wanted to hire me but HR kept insisting they had a "hiring freeze". It's possible the man who picked up the trash at least had a full-time job with some benefits. I mention this to underline how ambiguous & deceptive appearances of power & status can often be, in life though not in this play.)

Another point about palling around with the service workers: for all the dramaturgical talk of "intersectionality", Taryn's lecture, as well as the rest of the play, doesn't really seem to have any comprehension of how it would actually work. To take an obvious example, a man chatting up a service worker (particularly a woman worker) is going to be read differently from another woman doing that. (I once had a conversation with a retired librarian, a woman, about killing time before shows in Civic Center. She told me that she liked to go to the children's section of the SF Public Library & read, and "you're really not supposed to be there without a child, but they don't mind if you're reading the children's books." &, not for the first time, I thought, Oh, should I tell the nice lady why she can do that & a man can't?) There will be complicated cross-currents depending on the race of the person, & the age, &, of course, personality. & in a college setting, there's an inherent barrier between the students & the service workers, no matter how much some of the students may like to pretend there isn't.

Here's another example: Taryn lives in a house off-campus. She has trouble making her rent. She tries to make up for it by making her roommates occasional dinners (as mentioned, her mac & cheese is fire!). Eventually they have a house-meeting to let her know they can't keep carrying her rent & other bills & she needs to move on. She is a bit resentful but basically understanding. But we've all known or heard about people like this –people who owe money but provide some lesser service as compensation – & generally they tend to think that what they're doing should carry full weight. But of course to those to whom money is owed, it doesn't. Taryn isn't given that flaw, of course, as she is not given flaws. But the whole "I make them dinner" thing raised questions for me: who cleans up? who pays for the ingredients? If she's paying, I'm sure the roommates are thinking, "How come you can buy all this but can't pay your bills?" If anything, the dinners would make them feel guilty & resentful, though we don't hear any inkling of that. But they're also students, & why should they pay her bills as well as their own, despite the deliciousness of her mac & cheese?

Are there class & racial considerations here? We never find out, of course. The roommates never appear & we are given no details about them, other than that they are also students. Dorm residents other than Kat also never appear (not even to complain about the loud music late at night). I understand the economics behind having very small casts (three people is actually larger than in many other new plays I've seen), but if you're concerned about presenting & respecting many voices, you can't have said voices mediated through the filter of the two or three people we actually hear from on stage.

At one point Taryn, whom Ciara has been treating when they go out, wants to reciprocate, because suddenly she has money. Ciara asks where she got it, Taryn, it turns out, has signed up for a cash-advance card (she doesn't seem to know quite what it is or how it works). This happens at the point in the evening when they have to have a fight of some sort; everything has been mostly frictionless up to now, but something has to happen to produce some tension, so Ciara starts telling her how insidious those cards are, Taryn gets offended ("my mom uses them & you're calling my mom stupid!"), & she flees. Of course they soon re-unite, & Ciara apologizes (!!!), says she could hear her mother speaking through her & regrets that (!!!!!!), & Taryn grudgingly accepts her apology because deep, deep down she is sure Ciara meant well (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). Ciara, honey: Your mother is right. Cards like that are one of the predatory ways financial institutions take advantage of people who are financially ignorant (not the same thing as stupid) or desperate for income. But that issue will not be addressed here. It's downright weird that Ciara is presented as the one at fault here, & typical of both the play's reluctance to interrogate Taryn & its superficial handling of any actual social issues, which is what I meant by putting "political" in quotation marks above. (We never do find out how Taryn managed to pay off the card or whether she continued to run into debt.) I understand that this is meant to be a positive portrayal of queer Black love, & that's great, but it achieves that positive feeling by skating swiftly over any unpleasantness. You know, the same thing that happens in real life!

One feels a certain amount of pressure to love this play: Women telling women's stories! Queer joy! Black joy! Queer Black joy! (Joy is very zeitgeisty). But the pressure to offer positive stories means much of what gives our lives texture &, you know, drama is elided here. We don't even know if the two women stay together after Taryn has to drop out of college at the end of the play. Looking back on freshman / sophomore year of college from a more aged perspective, how many such relationships last, especially when one party drops out of college & moves away? The class differences between the two women aren't made much of, & neither is Taryn's greater sexual experience. In fact the relationship that rang truest to me is the one between Ciara & Kat: initially Ciara thinks Kat is cool & different, then gradually she grows disillusioned with how self-centered & ultimately conventional she is; Kat is always going on about & mooning over her boyfriend, who is of course off-stage so we never see his perspective, but apparently he's ready to move on & she can't accept that. Towards the end of the school year & the play, Kat, pretending to be drunker than she is, propositions Ciara, in one of the few really dramatic events in this show. Ciara is disgusted by this & fed up with Kat in general, so she blocks off her side of the dorm room. That's what happens in the spring: the roommate you thought was hip & interesting in the fall is a bore & a burden by spring. But I can see Kat & Ciara gradually becoming some sort of friends in the future. I'm less sure of Ciara & Taryn; the happy ending here seems more like an artificial stop so that we don't have to experience their future troubles, or even just their drifting apart under the pressures of the different directions in which their lives have taken them.

All in all, an unsatisfying evening & an unsatisfying end to a very mixed season at Shotgun Players.

Poem of the Week 2024/6

The Ivy Green

Oh, a dainty plant is the Ivy green,

That creepeth o'er ruins old!

Of right choice food are his meals I ween,

In his cell so lone & cold.

The wall must be crumbled, the stone decayed,

To pleasure his dainty whim;

& the mouldering dust that years have made

Is a merry meal for him.

    Creeping where no life is seen,

    A rare old plant is the Ivy green.

Fast he stealeth on, though he wears no wings,

& a staunch old heart has he.

How closely he twineth, how tight he clings,

To his friend the huge Oak tree!

& slily he traileth along the ground

& his leaves he gently waves,

As he joyously hugs & crawleth round

The rich mould of dead men's graves.

    Creeping where grim death has been,

    A rare old plant is the Ivy green.

Whole ages have fled & their works decayed,

& nations have scattered been;

But the stout old Ivy shall never fade,

From its hale & hearty green.

The brave old plant in its lonely days,

Shall fatten upon the past:

For the stateliest building man can raise,

Is the Ivy's food at last.

    Creeping on, where time has been,

    A rare old plant is the Ivy green.

– Charles Dickens

Ivy is terrifying stuff. Years ago when I moved into my current residence & my first Christmas rolled around, I went into my yard & cut down some of the holly-branches from the trees lining the driveway & some of the bright-green ivy twining around them. The holly & the ivy – festive, right? When the holidays passed, I tossed the holly branches into my green bin outside & put the ivy into my compost pile in the back. Months passed, & every time I turned the compost pile, while everything else in there decayed (or, as our poem would have it, in its British spelling, mouldered) into dirt, the ivy emerged as fresh & green as the day I threw it in there; the only change was that it was now bright & glossy from the moisture in the compost. Eventually I pulled it out of the compost pile & put it in the green bin for pick-up. Let the industrial composters handle it!

Dickens wrote this poem for inclusion in his first novel, The Pickwick Papers. Pickwick & his traveling companions are staying with their new friend Mr Wardle, a well-off country gentleman, at his place in Dingley Dell. It is a winter evening, & an elderly clergyman joins the party & recites, at their urging, this poem, which he wrote as a young man. Given the chronology of the novel, that would make the intended time of this poem sometime in the late eighteenth century, but its style hearkens back to even earlier days, to the times when ballads were the main popular form of poetry. The basic ballad beat is  there (four beat lines followed by three beat lines), the regular rhymes (ababcdcd), the refrain that ends each stanza, the archaic -eth endings to the verbs.

Not just the style but the substance of the poem evokes a by-gone time: the ruins old, with crumbling walls & decaying stone, suggest, in this English setting, one of the monastic buildings deserted after Henry VIII broke with the Roman Church, a suggestion almost sealed by the reference to a cell, the typical term for a monk's or nun's room (the cell is lone & cold, which not only reinforces the picturesque quality of the ruin but brings to mind a typical English Protestant idea of a monk's or nun's life as something unnaturally cut off from normal human sensuality & domestic happiness). The fictional creator of this poem is, as I said earlier, a clergyman, & in the late eighteenth century country clergy of the Church of England were often more noted for antiquarian research than for spiritual zealotry. That sets the stage here: a romantic view of dilapidated Gothic buildings, stately buildings gone to dust, & the graves of the people (unnamed, probably forgotten) who built them.

There's a certain morbid element at play in this view, belied by the stealthy vigor of the main protagonist, the ivy. The ivy is consistently associated with green, the color of growth, of Nature at its most robust & lively. But the plant's full strength is revealed only gradually; the first description tells us that the plant is dainty, which is not a word that connotes strength, & that it creeps (creepeth) along, a style of movement associated with lowly & humble creatures. But we soon find out that the daintiness is deceptive: it indicates not fragility but the finicky tastes of a decadent connoisseur, insisting on a certain level of decay before he will consume what's left. (This is a standard trope in poetic mentions of ivy: that a seemingly weak exterior – ivy is frequently depicted as clinging, as it is in the second stanza here – hides a crushing & persistent strength.)

The ivy is deceptive, even treacherous; creeping adds to this impression; it is a sneaky, not-straightforward way of moving. The ivy crawls, it steals along, he is sly beneath his gently waving leaves. Whim & pleasure guide his devouring. But our final impression of the ivy is of its indomitable, even admirable, vigor. The first stanza gives us the contrast between the decaying ruins & the merry meals the ivy makes of them; as noted earlier, there are suggestions of decadence in the ivy's progress over the stones of the fallen buildings. The second stanza emphasizes his tight clinging & his joyous hugs, with an almost sexual physical intensity that contrasts with grim death and the dead men's graves. We find out the ivy not only has a heart, but a staunch one. But what is this staunch heart committed to?

As we find out in the third stanza, the ivy is committed to its own being, its own creative destruction of the world. It becomes a sort of Life Force. In this stanza, we move beyond the specific, limited locale in both space & time of the first two stanzas, with their ruins & their graveyards, into a sweeping view of whole Ages (fled) & whole nations (scattered), & the civilizations that emerged in those times & places are forgotten, abandoned, decayed, or lost, while the ivy crawls endlessly on. The poet's previously ambivalent or questioning views give way to admiration in this stanza: the ivy is stout, meaning sturdy, strong, & tough; it is hale & hearty, it is brave, which suggests splendor as well as fearless. It is also, more poignantly, an old plant, facing lonely days – as if it has outlived whole civilizations & their inhabitants to carry on alone. This is where the bravery comes in: to keep on keeping on. The works of humanity die, decay, & are lost, but the endlessly regenerative force of Nature in the shape of ivy continues, covering all.

This poem combines an intense, almost morbid interest in the picturesque & the ruined, in the grotesque byways of humanity, with an almost frightening sense of ongoing growth & creativity. In this it reminds me in capsule of the works of its great creator. Today is 7 February 2024; on this date in 1812, Charles Dickens came into this world.

I took this poem from the Oxford Illustrated Dickens edition of The Pickwick Papers.

Shotgun Players catch-up: Yerma, The Wolf Play, Hedwig & the Angry Inch

Not many performances for me this month so I'm catching up on some past stuff, starting with Shotgun Players. Their first show this year, Marivaux's The Triumph of Love, was wonderful (my write-up is here). The second play was Lorca's Yerma, & when the season announcement came out it was the Marivaux - Lorca one-two punch that made me decide to renew a subscription that I had let lapse during the pandemic. For years I have waited to see one of Lorca's plays on stage. I'm still waiting, because this mess didn't count as Lorca.

Yerma: The play was translated & adapted (emphasis on "adapted") by Melinda Lopez & directed by Katja Rivera. In her director's note in the program, Rivera mentioned that 1934, the year Lorca wrote Yerma, a play (to summarize baldly) about a woman frustrated by her inability to become pregnant, was also the year her grandmother died from complications of childbirth (the child also died). This coincidence led Rivera to move the location of the play from rural Spain in the 1930s to rural southern California in the 1930s. With all due compassion for the director's family tragedy – though I also have to mention that it is not something that is going to resonate for anyone outside of her family, which would of course include pretty much all of the audience – the relocation was this production's first major mistake.

Rural Spain in the 1930s was a place where the strictures of family (which encompassed those of Church & State as well) lay heavily on individuals. You were to do as had always been done, world without end amen; otherwise you were disgracing yourself &, even more importantly, your family. The United States, however, even in isolated rural sections, even in the 1930s, is a place where change – moving on, moving out, remaking yourself – is practically a cultural imperative. Moving the action from Spain to California undercuts the stifling conventionality of Yerma's society. It also makes nonsense of the ancient pagan remnants still holding on in the countryside: for example, the strange fertility ritual that the desperate Yerma goes to towards the end of the play. In Spain it seems like some atavistic survival of pre-Christian times, lying beneath the official religion, still surviving because it speaks to some weirdly deep need. Transfer that to the California hills & it becomes . . . what, exactly? Some kind of weird musical comedy interlude, complete with Victor, the young man the married Yerma is longing for, dressed in a silly looking bull outfit. (During this episode Yerma is wearing just a slip, & the performer had what I first thought was a large bruise on her upper chest, which turned out to be a large tattoo, which pretty much rules out any time other than the last 10 or so years. I will never understand why actors get visible tattoos.)

Earlier Victor had told Yerma that his family has been ranching in these hills for 100 years, which is pretty impressive by California standards but not so much by Spanish. In Lorca's play, when he announces that he's moving his herds to a different area, it comes as a seismic shock: people just don't move around that much, & his departure means Yerma's longings will never be satisfied. When he makes the same announcement in California, it doesn't mean much because of course he's moving to a better place – that's just what Americans do. This is one of many moments that fall flat because of the switch in locale.

Lorca's character The Old Pagan Woman has been renamed (which, under the circumstances, makes sense: what pagan past could she possibly represent in a community that came to California from someplace else?), & we completely lose the sense that she is somehow outside of Church, State, & Family, a remnant of an older order, one rooted in Nature & the body. Here she's just another one of the conventionally & frankly tediously bawdy women, only a little older than the rest of them. In Lorca's play, when she tells Yerma that her husband, like the rest of his family, is sexually feeble, it has the force of someone speaking truths no one else dares to speak. But in this version, it is another line that falls flat; based on what we've seen of Yerma's husband & their relationship, the description is way off base. In this version, we are told repeatedly that the two have a warm, loving relationship. Yerma feels deeply for him. He feels deeply for her! Juan (Caleb Cabrera) is a charming & sexy guy. He's very sensitive to her desire to get pregnant; when he suggests adopting a baby, it is a considerate & thoughtful approach, not a dismissive one. This version of the play opens & closes with scenes of the two having sex together, & they clearly have a playful, considerate, affectionate, & very physical relationship. & that's the second big mistake this production makes. But before I go into that, a little digression:

Years ago at ACT I saw a production of Hedda Gabler in which Judge Brack came across as very obviously a gay man – not a repressed gay man, but the kind of happy-with-who-he-is guy who would go on Bear weekends with the hubby & bring you a casserole when your cat died. He clearly had no sexual interest in Hedda or any other woman. It was so cozy when he called her "Miss Hedda!" When he urges her to think over the details of her involvement in Lovborg's suicide, there was no undertone of menace or threat; he sounded genuinely anguished as he urged her, "Think, Miss Hedda!" If this production had happened more recently I might have considered that they were experimenting with "queering the classics"; instead I sat there somewhere between amazed & amused: did they really not understand the sexual subtext there? How were they making sense of the ending if they didn't have Brack setting a blackmailing sexual trap for Hedda?

Something similar happens here with sexual subtext. (Are people in these less repressed times just unable to interpret these things? Do they have to be spelled out before people will see them, no matter how obvious they are?) Yerma's inability to become pregnant may well be due to how her body functions, not his. We don't know because apparently she never goes to see a doctor – something else that makes sense in rural Spain & much less sense in California, even in a fairly isolated rural area in the 1930s. The only way we can be sure it's her husband's responsibility is if he's not sleeping with her, or having only a bare minimum of sex. I feel I should put that sentence in italics. He & Yerma do not have an affectionate, loving relationship. They insist they "love" each other because that is what husbands & wives officially feel, & to feel otherwise, to long for the more virile Victor, much less to cheat with him, is an unthinkable violation of social & religious norms (unless you're the Old Pagan Woman, who looks askance at these oppressive formalities). Think of the family name! Unless you see that Juan is neglecting Yerma physically, the action of the play doesn't make much sense – &, indeed, it didn't make much sense in this version.

No one really seemed to know what to do with this play. Lorca's lean drama is padded out with various irrelevant excrescences, including some extended musical numbers. Another example: when Juan berates his sisters for not keeping a close enough watch on his wife, he mentions that they're eating his bread & drinking his wine without being useful. Bread & wine have a certain sacramental resonance in a Catholic country, of course, but also that's just what you mostly eat & drink in rural Spain. But the mention of wine apparently prompted someone to decide that Juan should have a drinking problem. There had been no signs of it before, but suddenly he's lurching around the stage in ever-increasing states of inebriation – until the end, when he's suddenly sober & he & Yerma realize this has all been some sort of misunderstanding (I guess?), because they love each other so deeply, so they reconcile (again, I guess?), & have sex again. Which is when she kills him by choking him to death. Why? (To Lorca's point, though not this version's: Juan would have to be a physically fairly feeble man if he could be choked to death so easily by his wife.)

Lorca wrote a swift tragedy about a woman whose sexual longings, represented by a regenerative, Life-Force wish for a child of her own, are thwarted by the crushing conventional pieties of Family, Society, & Church (probably in that order), with tragic results. This version is the meandering tale of a sexually satisfied woman who is not dealing in any realistic way with her increasingly nutty (&, I have to say, increasingly tiresome) obsession with getting pregnant (& her failure to do so, again, may be due to her physiology, not her husband's), which leads her to murder her husband, who is a considerate, attentive, & sensitive lover & companion. Why exactly am I supposed to sympathize with her rather than with him?

Another thing, about those conventionally bawdy women & the sisters who are supposed to monitor Yerma (a purpose that was not made clear enough or oppressive enough in this production): the director isn't the only one with family associations with this story; my father's side of the family comes from a very similar Latin culture to the one Lorca portrayed, & I am old enough to remember some of these women in real life. The notion that they were slyly subversive of gender norms & of "the patriarchy" is a contemporary American fantasy. They would not be sympathetic at all to women like Yerma; they were there to make sure she toed the line. That is why Lorca had to speak for her.

Usually Shotgun's outside murals do a wonderful job capturing the essence of a play. Here they showed Yerma blowing seeds from a dandelion puff with the tag line "Give me something to hope for." This seems . . . awfully soft for a play about a sexually thwarted woman who murders her husband. Did no one involved have the slightest idea what this play was actually about?

The Wolf Play: Written by Hansol Jung & directed by Elizabeth Carter, this was a bit of a disappointment. It started off strong, with a kind of metatheatrical speech by the boy who thinks he's a wolf (his personality split was portrayed by having the actor voice his thoughts while he manipulated a puppet who interacted with the others on stage). Maybe it started off too strong, because I was expecting something a little wilder than the more straightforward "issue" play we got. The basic situation is that the boy had been adopted by a couple who ended up having another child of their own & decided to unload the adopted boy via the Internet. He winds up with an interracial lesbian couple, one of whom is a professional boxer being trained by her partner's brother. Then the original couple splits up & the man decides he wants the boy back, especially once he finds out that the new family is same-sex.

Maybe if I were more familiar with what is apparently an actual thing that happens – people unloading adopted children via Internet chatboards? that seems only dubiously legal, but what do I know – then some of what happens would have made more sense to me. For example, there is a lawsuit at the end which was staged by having the participants (first adoptive father, the brother, the two women) yelling at & over each other. It was pretty effective but would have been more so if I'd had a clearer idea of the legal issues in play. I was also a little disappointed that the brother (Caleb Cabrera again), who started off making some excellent points to his sister, who is trying to figure out how to raise this new child, about how boys & men are treated & expected to behave in the world, & how he (the brother) can help the child with that, is turned into an easily manipulated, guys-should-stick-together guy once he talks with the original adoptive father.

The child takes a dislike to the brother, & it's not clear why, as the only person he's drawn to is the boxing member of his new family. Why would he resist the brother, who also boxes & was trying to bond with him? It's almost as if the child has to like the Black lesbian boxer because not to do would be uncool. (This notion is reinforced by seeing that the original adoptive father, a fairly dweeby white guy, is really put off by having lesbians raise "his" son – that's a surefire way to damn someone in the eyes of a Berkeley audience.) The other woman was the driving force behind the adoption, barely got her partner's agreement, & seemed to have little idea about what she'd do with a child once she had one; she just knew she wanted one. Maybe I had residual impatience from Yerma a few months earlier, but I didn't have much interest in or sympathy with her. Children are not toys for the mother's amusement! Mikee Loria was very good as the adopted boy, but the whole "I'm a wolf" thing started to drag over the course of two intermissionless hours; the boy just keeps saying, "Wolves do X" or "as a Wolf, I feel X"  & nothing develops or changes.

On the whole, not a disaster like Yerma but a bit disappointing.

Hedwig & the Angry Inch: The John Cameron Menzies / Stephen Trask musical, directed by Richard A Mosqueda. This turned out to be a pleasant surprise, & aside from the Marivaux, the best thing this season. I didn't go in with high hopes; I had seen the movie years ago & liked it, but the words "rock musical" are not ones that set my soul ablaze with excitement & I frankly didn't remember much about the show. Also, Shotgun tends not only to amplify their musicals (for reasons I don't understand: it's a small space; if your voice can't fill it you probably shouldn't be performing professionally) but to over-amplify them. I saw Hedwig on one of the nights when Chris Steele was performing, & a lively & thoughtful performance they gave. The band, Skip the Needle, was energetic & fun. The show was about an hour & forty minutes, no intermission, & before & after I ended up having a pleasant conversation with the woman next to me. She & her wife were visiting from Denver (I think they knew people in the band; they had bought tickets at the last minute, so the wife had one of the stage seats & the other woman was in the front row with me). All in all a very enjoyable evening. I don't have much more to say about it. I have a lot to say about the final play of the season, Babes in Ho-lland, & its audience, but that will have to wait as this is long enough already.

Museum Monday 2024/6

 

detail of The Nativity by the Master of the Retable of the Reyes Católicos, now in the Legion of Honor in San Francisco

San Francisco Performances: Raehann Bryce-Davis

After my three days at Gabriel Kahane's Pivot Festival for San Francisco Performances, I was back at Herbst Theater for the fourth night in a row, this time for SFP's presentation of the San Francisco recital debut of mezzo-soprano Raehann Bryce-Davis, accompanied by pianist Jeanne-Minette Cilliers.

The recital's general theme was In Honor of Women, & the first half had a woman composer setting a male poet (Amy Beach / Robert Browning) & then a male composer setting a female poet (Wagner / Mathilde Wesendonck). Beach's trio of Browning poems was commissioned by the Browning Society of Boston. They are brief but wonderfully varied; from the very first one, The Year's at the Spring, it was immediately apparent that Bryce-Davis uses words very expressively. She was looking very glam in an ivory sheath covered with light-catching strings of beads, some of which hung loose from the arms. The effect was warm, rich, & striking, sort of like her voice made visible. She had Cilliers speak an introduction to the Wesendonck Lieder, as she was one of those who had been urging the piece on Bryce-Davis. The performance was commanding & intimate. The piano accompaniment was poetic but I felt at times perhaps a bit underpowered, but then the mezzo's voice is an attention-grabber. As the man behind me said more than once, "She's got some pipes on her."

After the intermission, Bryce-Davis came out in a new but still glam look, a sparkly black sheath with broad white stripes running diagonally down the front. Cilliers also had a new outfit, which fit around her like a gilded lily. Both were designed by Bryce-Davis's fiancé, whose name I unfortunately did not catch. [UPDATE: His name is Allen Virgo, & thanks to Lisa Hirsch for the information; click here for her blog entry with a link to her review of the recital.]

The second half was all twentieth-century material, most of it contemporary, though it started with two earlier pieces, Birth, a setting by Margaret Bonds of words by her friend Langston Hughes, & Florence Price's The Crescent Moon, a setting of words by Louise C. Wallace. The on-going rediscovery of Price's work is one of the more exciting concert-hall developments of the past few years. These songs were followed by Melissa Dunphy's Come, My Tan-Faced Children, which revises a section of Whitman's Pioneers, O Pioneers! as a song of Black empowerment. This was written for Bryce-Davis, as was the next series, three songs by Maria Thompson Corley: Black Riders' Freedom Song (written as a tribute in particular to the Black cowboys of the American West), The Beauty in My Blackness, & I Am Not an Angry Black Woman. The latter in particular was a whole dramatic monologue, allowing Bryce-Davis to display, once again, her considerable dramatic skills, covering moods from speculative to wistful to defiant.

By now it was clear how gorgeous & big Bryce-Davis's voice is, but also how emotionally open & engaged her whole personality is. I had seen her in the Met Opera livecast last fall of Anthony Davis's X: The Life & Times of Malcolm X, & I am eager to experience her live in opera. The recital closed with three elegant & lively settings of Jamaican folk songs made by Peter Ashbourne, in tribute to the mezzo's Jamaican mother. As she & Cilliers both said, you can't sing in honor of women & not acknowledge your mothers.

Friday Photo 2024/5

 

Market Street, San Francisco, January 2024

San Francisco Performances: Gabriel Kahane's PIVOT Festival

Last Friday was the third & final night of San Francisco Performances's annual PIVOT Festival, held at Herbst Theater & planned this year by Gabriel Kahane, who performed along with the Attacca Quartet & Roomful of Teeth. The three nights felt like one long & wonderful concert.

The First Night: featured Kahane & the Attacca, who began with Ravel's String Quartet, but in a festival spirit of mixing things up, only the first movement; the remaining three were interspersed through the rest of the program. This was a refreshing way to hear what was easily the most familiar music of the evening; breaking the quartet apart gave us a fresh listen to each isolated movement & provided a spine for the rest of the pieces. The Attacca is a lively & intense bunch.

After the first movement came Red Letter Days, a song by Kahane. As with his other songs over the festival, no lyrics were provided. I was OK with this; I think it's within the bounds what an artist can ask of us, his audience. The advantage is that instead of reading along in our program books (or shuffling the pages noisily so we can find the lyrics), we have to commit to listening extra-closely. It does help involve the audience. The disadvantage, of course, is that we're probably not going to catch all the words, particularly if the text is somewhat dense. But even a broken text combined with music & expressive singing (Kahane sounds more like a folk singer than a classically trained singer, but his voice is pleasing) can give us the poetic image & mood.

The song was followed by Part 1 of Paul Wiancko's Benkei's Standing Death (Part 2 came in the second half), an instrumental piece commissioned by the Attacca based on a Japanese legend about the warrior monk Saitō Musashibō Benkei. It's very visual music, especially the second half, with the staccato strikes of the fatal arrows. Then Kahane sang another song, To Be American, followed by the second movement of the Ravel. The final piece in the first half was the world premiere of a revised version by Kahane of his string quartet, Klee, which did for me evoke the painter's strange, slightly surreal figures & patches of color. During the quietest part someone managed to drop an umbrella or something that landed with a loud bang. Other than that, the audience was, for the most part, well behaved.

After the intermission we continued along the path of the first half: first a song by Kahane (Little Love), then the third movement of the Ravel, then the second movement of the Wiancko, then the fourth & final movement of the Ravel, followed by the world premiere of a new arrangement by Kahane of Final Privacy Song, with lyrics by poet Matthew Zapruder, written for Kahane's wedding. He had the words framed up near his piano & finally decided he should set them to music. Again, a verbally complex & thoughtful piece, but the words came through with the music to bring the evening to a lovely & meditative close.

The Second Night: featured Roomful of Teeth. It also featured more talking from the stage than I like, but that does seem to be inevitable these days. The first piece was Caroline Shaw's The Isle; as Shaw is a member of the chorus, the composer was there singing with the rest of the group.  It started with sounds rather than words, murmurs & swells of sound, but when the words started appearing I realized that the isle in question was Prospero's; there were a couple of songs & a couple of speeches from The Tempest flowing along until the piece dissolves back into sounds. (It had been commissioned by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC). This was followed by Movement 4 of Peter Shin's Bits torn from words, which the Roomful speaker described as "bonkers", which is a recommendation, I think. I'd love to hear the whole work. The first half concluded with Angélica Negrón's Math, the one which is sweet, which the Roomful speaker (sorry, I don't know which member of the chorus it was) described as a sweet & sassy long song. I would not have gotten any of those things from what I heard. There were ethereal sounds floating from an instrument (maybe a synthesizer?) over a thudding bass – not the sort of monotonous thudding you get with a lot of pop music; more like a stately progression of thuds. The words floated above that. I found it all . . . OK. Sort of a nondescript end to the first half.

The second half was excellent, though: Kahane's Elevator Songs, written so that each of the chorus's eight members had a spotlight number. I loved the variety in the chorus; the voices are obviously all different (though they also blend together quite well), but they each have an individual look. Some dance & sway while singing, others are still. The songs are Kahane's characteristic blend of empathy with off-kilter oddities, somewhere between comic & weird & sometimes very sad. Kahane mentioned from the stage that he wrote the piece specifically for these singers' voices, & it was conceived as sort of a theater piece: in other words, not just some songs strung together, but songs emerging from instrumental & vocal bits, focusing on different people who find themselves in this odd hotel somewhere out in America. A wonderful way to end that evening.

The Third Night: both the Attacca & Roomful of Teeth were on stage with Kahane. This was the best attended of the three nights, & the audience definitely was there (not just physically present, but in the sense "I am THERE for this!") for modern-music makers. We opened with Kahane's song Where Are the Arms, followed by the first of several pieces by one of the Couperins, this time Louis, the Unmeasured Prelude in D Minor, which, like the other Couperin pieces, was a keyboard work which Kahane arranged for string quartet. I love French baroque music & though it's customary & accurate to mention its elegance & sophistication, there was also a very deep sense of joy which the Attacca gave to it.

That was followed by the first of the four movements of Caroline Shaw's Partita for 8 Singers, which, as with the Ravel the first night, was split up over the program, providing a solid spine to it. I had not heard the piece before. It's wild & wonderful. You can hear everything from medieval church music to Tibetan throat singing reflected in it. It's like some loopy celestial chant from a gonzo monastery. That was followed by François Couperin's La Logivières, the second movement of Shaw's Partita, & another François Couperin piece, Le Tic-toc-Choc, & that ended the first half.

The second half was just as satisfying. Opening with the world premiere of Kahane's song Under a Tree, we then had François Couperin's Le Carillon de Cythère, then part three of Shaw's Partita, the final François Couperin piece, the Passacaille in B Minor (8e Ordre), & then the fourth & final section of Shaw's Partita. The concert, & the festival, closed with an arrangement by Kahane for the chorus & quartet of Paul Simon's American Tune. I don't know this song, but as with Final Privacy Song that closed the first night, it capped things off on a lovely & meditative note. Despite the ebullience on stage, that really was the best way to end a program that, to some extent, was trying to reflect a current American mood.

Kahane mentioned, from the stage & in his posted statements about the festival, that what he was mostly trying to celebrate with these evenings was a sense of community: community that comes from making, creating & performing, music together, & from gathering together in a specific space to listen to the people making these sounds. "Community" is not a word I particularly like or trust, but I saw what he was getting at, & he achieved it admirably & memorably. It will be a long time for me before these concerts fade into memory.