Dignity

Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had.

   - Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953)

Seattle Rep: Tiny Beautiful Things

I recently saw Tiny Beautiful Things at the Seattle Repertory.  It was awful, just terrible.  Between 2010 and 2012 author Cheryl Strayed worked as an advice columnist for the website The Rumpus; her nom de plume there was Sugar.  She was very good at this job and soon developed a big following.  In 2012 she published a collection of her advice-column correspondence under the name Tiny Beautiful Things.  That book is the source for this adaptation by Nia Vardalos (of My Big Fat Greek Wedding).

The play is set in Sugar's apartment, where she reads the letters which pop-up on her laptop.  Three people on stage act as the letter writers; they go in and out of various characters.  Sugar is a winning confidant.  When people present her with their life problems - adultery, depression, miscarriages, etc. - she usually responds with a story or confession of her own.  Her advice is exactly what one would expect - upbeat, affirmational, heart-felt, etc.  

If you are (or were) a fan of those confessional daytime TV shows - Jerry Springer, Maury Pauvich, Sally Jesse Raphael, etc. - then this play is for you.  It has the same earnest banality.  Someone tells Sugar their problem.  Then she relates an anecdote from her own life and delivers advice of TED-talk-esque depth - believe in yourself, you have more strength than you know, you inspire me, etc.  Then on to the next letter - and so on for an hour and forty minutes.  It's all very easy, neat, simple to digest.  But the more I thought about this play, the more I disliked it.  In no other art has the human condition been put forward more starkly than in theater, yet this play is little more than a parade of pat and facile answers to the difficulties of life.  And if you believe that theater has something important to say about being human (and I do) then there's something off-putting, even offensive, about Sugar's ultimately shallow responses in the face of suffering.  No doubt if we dropped her into the end of King Lear she'd tell the old duffer that his courage under his misfortunes is an inspiration to her, that his love is greater than his grief, etc.  If she popped in at the end of The Iceman Cometh she'd let everyone in the saloon know that the resilience they'd shown over the past few days fills her hope and optimism, and that, deep down, all of them, especially Hickey, need to learn to forgive themselves.  And I'm sure she'd have some uplifting words for Oedipus: "Don't be so hard on yourself.  So you have a thing for MILFs..."

Julie Briskman, Charles Leggett, Chantal DeGroat, and Justin Huertas (Photo: Alan Alabastro)

Sugar is very candid and open about her own life but I'm not sure that serves her well.  At one point she admits that her grandfather sexually abused her.  Apparently he made her give him handjobs when she was between the ages of two and five.  This obviously fucked her up.  Years later, she dealt with this trauma in an unusual, and for me a very questionable, way.  One day when she was outside she came across a newly hatched bird that had fallen out of its nest and onto the ground.  She picked it up (which she knew automatically meant that its mother wouldn't acknowledge or care for it).  Then she put the little birdling in a paper bag and smothered it to death.  The writhing of the struggling creature against her hands somehow recalled grampy's flaccid penis.  Eventually the bird stopped moving.  This experience was cathartic for Sugar (though, one imagines, less so for the bird).  Although at this point, if I, too, may be candid, I had to ask myself "Is this really someone I should be taking advice from?"

The most powerful letter is one from a man whose 22-year-old son was killed in a car accident.  It’s a missive of pain, grief, and anger.  Effectively it constitutes a long confessional monologue, and it’s a genuine tour de force for the actor performing it.  Charles Leggett plays it in this production and, like a dog with a bone, once he gets hold of it he ain't letting go.  He stammers, hems and haws, pauses very pregnantly.  He's very good - and I do mean that seriously.  As the letter goes on, he starts blubbering.  Then everyone in the audience starts blubbering too.  How could we not?  Sugar starts to give him her advice, and soon there's more waterworks in the audience. It’s so sad.  And yet - thinking about it later - there was something cheap about the whole thing.  Cheap and sordid.  Like when they shot Old Yeller in the movie just to get a roomful of kids to cry.  Ultimately, it felt very manipulative.

Charles Leggett and Julie Briskman (Photo: Alan Alabastro)

So, with the writers I find fault, but I don't find any with with the actual production itself.  The actors are all very good.  It would be hard to imagine a better Sugar than Julie Briskman.  The moment she walked onstage the entire audience warmed to her.  I've already praised Charles Leggett as one of the letter readers; the other two - Chantal DeGroat and Justin Huertas - are equally good, even if they don't have quite the show-stopper that he has.  The set design by L.B. Morse wonderfully captures the ordinariness in which most of us live our lives (no matter how messy), and the lighting by Robert Aguilar manages to sculpt the action and provide a sense of variety to what is essentially a very static play.  Despite this play's shortcomings director Courtney Sale did a commendable job.

Tiny Beautiful Things will play at the Seattle Repertory Theatre until June 23rd.

Intellectuals

Intellectuals are the only group in society who are fundamentally international.  Everyone who believes in the intellect takes his place in the great family tree of the human intelligence in which those who have influenced him are his true ancestors, and these ancestors are from every race, every creed, and every condition.  I am all for regionalism, for decentralization, for the “goût du terroir” [local flavor] in our artists, but I think that nationalism, though it has proved the soundest and deepest instinct in this war, and is beyond praise as a sentiment when our country is in danger, is not one of the most forward-looking of human creeds.  It has won wars, but it has also made them, and it is to that love of truth which unites artists and scientists, that common belief in virtue and reason, that we must look for the perpetuation of peace and the prevention of wars to come.

      - Cyril Connolly, “French and English Cultural Relations” (1943)

The Nose of the Alligator

We drive to the French Embassy in a hired Daimler…The Churchills were the last to arrive and I was surprised to notice that when they enter, the whole room stands up as if they were reigning sovereigns.

Winston pays me lavish compliments on my speeches in the House and deplores my absence from it...He said that he had made friends with de Gaulle at last, whom he had found “much mellowed”.  He said that he had liked the Russians.  “The disadvantage of them is”, he says, “that one is not sure of their reactions.  One strokes the nose of the alligator and the ensuing gurgle may be a purr of affection, a grunt of stimulated appetite, or a snarl of enraged animosity.  One cannot tell.” 

      - Harold Nicolson, Diary, December 19, 1945

Seattle Opera: Carmen

Saturday evening was opening night for the Seattle Opera’s excellent new production of Georges Bizet’s Carmen.  Set in nineteenth century Seville, it tells the story of Don José, a soldier who falls in love with the hot-blooded and dangerous factory-girl of the title.  Once they’re together Carmen easily leads the boy astray.  Soon he abandons the army and they both join up with a group of bandits.  Along the way Carmen hooks up with Escamillo, a bullfighter, and it's with him that she finds true love.  José is soon out of the picture, but not out of the opera, where his murderous jealousy will play out in the finale.  Also in the mix is Micaëla, a sweet, innocent girl (she loves our hero, of course) sent by José’s mother to recall her wayward son to his duty.     

Carmen is often billed as a tale of passion and wild sexuality.  It is supposed to have an air of eroticism about it.  Now I don’t doubt that for some viewers the tale of this impudent cigarette-girl may set their libido ablaze.  But frankly the lass does nothing for me.  Perhaps if you were a normal bourgeois male who saw this in 1875 her insouciance and female misbehavior would have provided just the transgressive spark to blast your Victorian-era lust to new heights, but a century and a half later this is tame stuff.  The opera’s original sexual charge seems to be much more centered around issues of class and power than around anything which goes on between the sheets.  As for Carmen herself, her tale doesn’t strike me as especially dissolute: she sleeps around but then meets a guy who wins her heart.  As the pop-song puts it she “fooled around and fell in love.”  No biggie.  In fact our twenty-first century sensibilities are more likely to be offended by the fact that her boyfriend engages in the senseless slaughter of animals rather than in Carmen’s hussy past.  

Ginger Costa-Jackson and Rodion Pogossov (Photo Credit: Sunny Martini)

Part of this may be due to Bizet’s music: it’s lovely, memorable, a delight, the tunes are immediately hummable.  Listening to Carmen is the musical equivalent of walking into a candy store.  But the score hasn’t a trace of sensuality in it.  There are none of the vocal and/or orchestral surgings and climaxes that we find in Wagner or Puccini.  In fact Bizet’s music doesn’t even rise to the erotic level of the Barcarolle in Offenbach’s Les Contes d'Hoffmann or the aria Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix from Saint-Saën’s Samson et Delilah.  And perhaps that explains Carmen’s longevity; on the surface it seems risqué and naughty, but at its core - in other words, in its music - it’s clean-cut and unthreatening.  

And in the SO’s current staging it is also highly entertaining.  Director Paul Curran has wisely focused on the comic aspects of the opera.  The production is bright, colorful, at times even boisterous.  It is a lot of fun.  If there’s a children’s chorus in this opera - and there is - then it will be an adorable bunch of scamps singing and marching around the stage.  If some gypsy gals (or, “Bohemians,” if you prefer) sing a song at the beginning of Act II which has nothing to do with the story, then Curran sets them up before an old style microphone stand and turns the whole thing into a song and dance routine.  Although never camp, one senses that tongue was not unacquainted with cheek in much of this production.  Escamillo the toreador, for instance, enters on a motorcycle and is dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, and a leather jacket - in other words, he's the Fonz from Happy Days.  As the story turns darker in the second half the staging becomes more sedate but never fails to dazzle.  The sets by Production Designer Gary McCann are vivid and eye-catching, full of bold colors, multiple layers, and diagonals.  His Act III set, which simulates depth of field inside a warehouse, is breath-taking.  

Ginger Costa-Jackson (Photo Credit: Sunny Martini)

Scott Quinn was set to play Don José on opening night but came down with a cold, so instead his place was taken by Frederick Ballentine, who did a fine job in the lead.  Rodion Pogossov’s Escamillo is energetic and lively.  His clowning around during the “Toreador Song” - I believe he steals a move or two from Chuck Berry - fit in nicely with the production's light-hearted tone.  Vanessa Goikoetxea is magnificent in the role of Micaëla.  Her rendition of the Act III aria Je dis, que rien ne m’épouvante - in which Micaëla admits to her own fears in attempting to save José - was deeply moving.  Its vulnerability and beauty really constituted the emotional heart of the drama.  And as for Carmen, Ginger Costa-Jackson is superb in the role.  She has played Carmen many times before and will no doubt continue to do so.  The role seems custom-made for her. Her dark and smokey, yet powerful, mezzo-soprano voice adds just the sultriness the part requires.  Decked out in red for much of the night she dominates the stage not only vocally but physically.  Carmen is only as alluring as the actress who portrays her and Costa-Jackson enchants.  

Carmen plays at the Seattle Opera until May 19.

That Common Earthling

It is quite apparent that there is an aspect of Darwin’s discoveries which has never penetrated to the mind of the general public.  It is the fact that once undirected variation and natural selection are introduced as the mechanism controlling the development of plants and animals, the evolution of every world in space becomes a series of unique historical events.  The precise accidental duplication of a complex form of life is extremely unlikely to occur in even the same environment, let alone in the different background and atmosphere of a far-off world. 

In the modern literature on space travel I have read about cabbage men and bird men; I have investigated the loves of the lizard men and the tree men, but in each case I have labored under no illusion.  I have been reading about a man, Homo sapiens, that common earthling, clapped into an ill-fitting coat of feathers and retaining all his basic human attributes including an eye for the pretty girl who has just emerged from the space ship.  His lechery and miscegenating proclivities have an oddly human ring, and if this is all we are going to find on other planets I, for one, am going to be content to stay at home.  There is quite enough of that sort of thing down here, without encouraging it throughout the starry system.

      - Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (1959) 

SIFF/MoPOP: Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Film Festival

Saturday afternoon was the 14th annual Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Film Festival at the Egyptian theater in Capitol Hill.  This is a joint venture of SIFF and MoPOP.  Now, this festival may sound like fun - and it's true that every year it sells out - but, frankly, it is not.  In fact, it's brutal: sixteen films spread out over five hours with a sixty minute intermission.  Only a handful of these films are any good; the majority of them are dreadful.  It's a marathon of mediocrity.  And that hour intermission doesn't help, either; it should have been fifteen minutes.  In fact, there should not be an intermission.  There should be only two hours of movies, not four.  And if we narrowed it down to the movies that weren't dreck, we would have been in and out in about forty minutes.  Still, a handful of films were noteworthy.

In The Narrow World a gigantic alien craft lands in Los Angeles.  He hasn’t come to destroy us, or to warn us, or to even communicate with us.  In fact, he doesn’t do anything at all.  He’s a bit of a bum.  Immense and possessing insect-like wings, he goes to the beach in the mornings, and then goes to watch the airplanes take off and land at LAX in the afternoon.  That’s it.  (Maybe he’s here for the weed?)  The cinematography of him wandering around LA county is magnificent.  The Narrow World is in the mock-documentary mode, and two scientists - a man and woman - separately appear on screen, each attempting to explain the alien to us.  Apparently his complete indifference to humanity has greatly demoralized the earth’s population.  We just don’t matter to him - and that kind of hurts.  So far, so good.  In fact, very good.  The fifteen-minute film should have ended there.  But it didn’t (and here come the spoilers).  It turns out that the alien craft doesn’t really exist.  Those two scientists are actually lovers, and they’re going through a hard patch.  The alien is a metaphor for the man’s inability to communicate with his woman.  But the lady isn’t giving up on him.  She’s committed to break through and save the relationship.  End of film.  I sigh with disappointment.

From Norway comes The Restrictor.  In a society in which happiness is given out in monthly liquid doses, those who overuse it, or abuse the rules (no sharing of your allotment) are subject to punishment.  A nicely crafted film by Jade Aksnes.  Well-acted.  Good premise.  A bad guy you hate.  One may chuckle at the idea that a society in which people aren’t allowed to be too happy sounds like Norway today rather than in the future, but nonetheless this is a memorable and involving movie.

From Yves Paradis (wonderful name, let me add) comes the animated short M52, which was improvised over the course of a year, a new segment added each week.  There's not much of a story in it.  A figure pushes around a block in a strange landscape, another figure appears, they take some green pills, a tree grows, people have tea in the jungle with animals.  It all may be short on coherence, but you don’t care.  Paradis keeps you interested.  A strange but compelling ten minutes, as you can sense from the trailer above.  In all honesty I think it's best to watch this film when you’re stoned.

Also enjoyable is J. P. Chan's brief Cosmic Dental Associates of Clifton, NJ.  It’s a fake TV commercial about the fabulous astro-dental services available at this imaginary clinic.  If you have a comet flying around in your mouth, or remnants of the Crab Nebula are lighting up your teeth, then Cosmic Dental Associates can fix it.  Doctors and patients give their testimonials ("We treat you like family.").  Very funny and clever.

But the best film in the festival was Brian and Charles.  Like The Narrow World, this is also a mock documentary.  Brian is a lonely sheep farmer living in Britain and one winter when he was feeling very down indeed he built his own robot, Charles.  Charles is the strangest, most shoddy-looking robot you've ever seen.  His head is not quite aligned with his torso, his arms seem to be on different planes, he's balding.  And his personality isn't particularly sparkling either.  He's a bit daft.  But none of this matters to Brian.  Charles is soon his best mate.  The friendship starts to break apart - over, of all things, cabbages - but the two are reconciled in the end.  As we all know, relationships, even with robots, take work.  This movie, directed by Jim Archer, is hilarious and yet weirdly poignant.  It's like Of Mice and Men but with a happy ending and a robot and set in England and with cabbages instead of rabbits (so in many ways, as you can see, it's much much better than Of Mice and Men).  It stars David Earl as Brian and Chris Hayward as Charles.  The two men are also given the writing credits, which makes me think that this film was probably improvised by them.  It is inspiredly goofy, and, luckily, you can watch the whole thing below.

Describing a Nation

Distrust the description of every nation when it can be easily described.  If a people can really be covered by an adjective, you may be certain that it is the wrong adjective. 

      - G. K. Chesterton, The Illustrated London News, 

              December 5, 1908

NLFF: Woman at War

Friday evening was opening night of the 10th annual Nordic Lights Film Festival at SIFF Uptown - a weekend of the best films from Scandinavian countries and islands.  Appropriately, it is co-sponsored by Seattle’s Nordic Museum. 

The premiere film of the festival was Woman at War, a winsome and first-rate Icelandic comedy/drama about, of all things, eco-terrorism.  The woman of the title is Halla (Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir), a forty-nine year old music teacher, who wages a one-person war against the industries disfiguring her country and destroying the global environment.  Pictures of Ghandi and Nelson Mandela hang on the wall at her home so her actions are about as non-violent as a terrorist’s actions could be.  The film opens with her out in the Icelandic countryside bringing down power lines using nothing more than a bow and arrow and some wire. Her courage, resourcefulness, and prowess with the bow make her a worthy descendant of her Viking forebearers.  But in the midst of leading this double life, she is notified by an adoption agency that an application she submitted four years earlier has now been processed and there is a young orphan girl, Nika (Margaryta Hilska), waiting for her in the Ukraine. 

One of the charms of this film is the effortless and skillful way it juxtaposes the personal and political, the small and the large, the present and the future.  Nika’s mother and father were both killed in the recent fighting in the Ukraine.  Nika went to stay with her Grandmother, but was found alone in the apartment with the grandmother dead.  She has no one.  Inclined to wriggle out of the adoption at first, Halla’s heart melts once she hears Nika’s story and sees a picture of her.  This is a good she can do now.  Halla has a twin sister, Åsa (also played by Geirharðsdóttir), a yoga instructor of deep, if occasionally silly, spirituality.  Her greatest ambition is to secluded herself in an Indian Ashram for a few years and meditate.  “Save one person and you save the world,” she tells her more aggressive twin when she learns about Nika.  We know this touches Halla to the core.

Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir

Director Benedikt Erlingsson, along with co-writer Ólafur Egilsson, has fashioned a thoughtful comedy about politics, responsibility, and sacrifice.  In its own way Woman at War even raises that fundamental Philosophy and Ethics 101 question - what course of life is best?  That it doesn’t answer that question definitively is to its credit.  And don’t think for a minute that Woman at War is ever preachy or self-righteous.  No, no, no.  Erlingsson is too smart a director for that.  He tells his tale and lets the viewer find any deeper meanings if they choose.  In fact, my one complaint with this film is Erlinsson's addiction to a goofy joke that, to my mind, soon wears thin.  The film’s music, composed by Davið þór Jónsson, is performed by a trio consisting of drum, piano, and tuba.  It plays in the opening scene when Halla brings down the power lines.  As she makes her getaway, the camera pans with her as she sprints through a field and we see the actual trio there in the background playing the music.  It’s a nice whimsical joke.  But Erlingsson doesn’t let it go.  The trio keep popping up throughout the film - in Halla’s home, standing on the roadside, etc. - every time the music plays.  I found this distracting and ultimately cloying, though, frankly, the rest of the audience never grew tired of it.

Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir and Margaryta Hilska

Geirharðsdóttir's beautiful leading performance is at the heart of this film.  It's not an easy task to make a terrorist sympathetic.  Most actors can do passion, but political passion, especially to the point of violence, is a whole other beast.  Believability is the issue; most actors are simply not convincing as terrorists, revolutionaries, etc.  (Some of them are scarcely believable as actors.)  But Geirharðsdóttir pulls it off.  We feel her commitment to her cause in every action. When Halla distributes her manifesto, literally throwing copies of it from a rooftop, the Icelandic government soon spins it to their own advantage.  Halla simply stares at the TV in shock, feeling completely powerless and even betrayed by the government's distortion of her message.  At the same time, Geirharðsdóttir manages to convey Halla's innocence in thinking they would do otherwise.  As Åsa, she has created an entirely separate character.  In that strange way of siblings, the sisters are totally different and yet very much the same.  In fact, this is as much a film about the bonds of family as it is about politics.  The beefy Jóhann Sigurðarson was also very good as Sveinbjörn, a farmer who shelters Halla when she's running from the authorities.  From their discussions we learn that they may have a common, and very randy, kinsman from the past; it turns out they may be cousins (or "alleged cousins" as Sveinbjörn puts it).  And, finally, there's the Woman at War's breathtaking cinematography by Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson.  Much of this film takes place in the Icelandic countryside, and Björgúlfsson's sweeping and majestic camerawork does for that landscape what Lucien Ballard did for the American West.