by Terry Pratchett. I admit it, I’m somewhat addicted to these Terry Pratchett Discworld novels, which I find somewhat humorous in their self-referential tongue-in-cheek fantasy humor. Night Watch is not a place to start in the series, but might follow naturally after Men At Arms. In this novel, Sam Vimes, who holds the job of police commissioner, is about to apprehend a vicious serial killer when he gets zapped back in time (with the criminal) to his youth. He naturally has to assume the identity of the copper who trained him when he just joined the force, train himself, thwart the criminal, and so on. All very formulaic, but after one Discworld novel you just start looking for the little humorous bits. I fell like in this novel Pratchett gets a bit more into some Deeper Issues, like what it means to look back on your life and your experiences, the values of naivete, and all that rot. But in the end it’s just an entertaining read. Good for airplanes, that’s for sure.

by James Roose-Evans. This is an old book, and so misses out on any real developments from the 80s on, but it does a nice job of contexualizing and describing the genesis of different avant-garde theater movements. It is restrictive to talk about Theatre rather than Performance, but he doesn’t give short shrift to other modes of performance — instead he describes how they influenced works that grew out of the theatre. A notable exception is Martha Graham, who he talks about in depth, which was fascinating.

For someone who’s read bits and pieces about the Open Theater, Peter Brook, Grotowski, Barba, and Artaud, this book is a short read to tie it all together. I felt like I lacked the big picture view of theater, and now I don’t. Now I feel like the techniques used by these different artists should enter more mainstream productions. A familiarity with different approaches to the theatrical is not just a way to learn some jargon. Many of the ideas of the avant-garde can help to create a more immediate theater, to find ways to make theater relevant to the audience in a way that changes them rather than one that follows blindly the old tropes into the graveyard. More on this to come.

by Naomi Wallace. This is a play about three kids who go down to the US-Mexico border to spot illegal crossings — they get a bounty for each person they help the border patrol catch. I don’t have too much to say about this play, except that it manages to accomplish two things on stage that I have so far failed to really get — how the worship of charisma can make people go against their nature (c.f. my one-act Young and Healthy), and how people escape into fantasy to avoid their problems. These three boys, the War Boys, joke with each other, but their kidding borders dangerously on their own pent-up rage and insecurities.

In the end, the play didn’t work for me, although some of the moments are beautiful — Wallace is a genius at finding something in people talking across each other, in having one character lose themselves in their own fantasy while the others join in, but in a way that comments on, rather than reinforces. And then she lets us get caught up in the beauty of a terrible dream, a terrible story, only to yank the rug out from under us — it was all a story.

It is a play worth reading for its themes and for its specificity of location. But in the end I found it more wooden than her other works.

by Arthur Schnitzler. Since this play was originally written in German (its title was Der Reigen) I’m not sure why the common English title is in French. This play, dating from 1900 and set in fin de siècle Vienna, examines the (hetero)sexual relations across social classes in ten interwoven scenes. Each scene has two sections, pre-coital/seduction and post-coital. The two are separated by a set of dashed lines. In the original production, the orchestra played a waltz, which censorious critics denounced as an attempt to arouse the audience by mimicking the rhythm of the sex act. I’m not sure how modern productions would negotiate the passage of time — possibly with a light cue.

Each scene is played by two actors, a man and a woman, and they form a chain, so that the first scene is between the Prostitute and the Soldier, the next between the Soldier and the Maid, the third between the Maid and the Young Gentleman, and so on. The scenes work their way though the social layers until we have the Actress and the Count, followed by the Count and the Prostitute again, so that we go full circle. The characters have names, but the script names them by their position, which suggests something of the social commentary of the play. I find that the overwhelming message is that people are cruel and maniupulative in their pursuit of sex, regardless of gender, although men are implicated more than women.

It is important to note that this is not a play about sexually transmitted disease, and I think any attempt to direct it as such would be doomed to heavy-handed soapboxing. Instead, we are treated to some true awkward situations — once the passion wears off, where are we left? He realizes it would never work out, she realizes nothing can be gained from him, and they part ways with insincere promises to see each other again.

There is a modernization of the play by David Hare called The Blue Room, which is meant to be played by two actors doing all the roles (originally starring Nicole Kidman). I haven’t read it, but I think it could be interesting. Schnitzler, shocked by the negative reaction the play received in Vienna, wrote that he hoped it would never be performed again. Of course, he also wrote that it was not a play to be performed in its own time, but rather could serve as a window into the social life of Vienna a hundred years later. So here we are, 100 years later, and it does provide an interesting window to the past.

The play’s main strength and weakness is its rigid structure. Each scene is quite nice in and of itself, but the play’s message might be too simplistic when all the scenes are put together. It would take a deft director to make this work without making the audience hate itself, go into denial, and turn its brain off. The writing is too charming, funny, and true to allow that to happen.

by Harold Bloom. I picked this up on a whim from the Morrison Reading Room after reading Wally‘s Bloom-mania. It’s a slim volume, a sort of post-lude to Bloom’s Shakespeare : The Invention of the Human. In its 25 brief chapters, he treats us to his musings on various topics related to what he concludes is Shakespeare’s greatest play. His thoughts are frustratingly vague at times, which makes them simultaneously appealing and obnoxious — it takes several more hours of thought to end up agreeing or disagreeing with him, and even then you’re not sure if you understood his point. In that way the book is a provocation to think deeper about Hamlet and to discard some conventional classroom assumptions about the play.

Bloom’s observations would make good response papers or starting points for longer analyses. For example, at the end of the chapter on the Grave-digger, he concludes:

The Grave-digger is the reality principle, mortality, while Hamlet is death’s scholar. Shakespeare sets Hamlet’s death, in the Court, at Elsinore. By then, however, Hamlet has long seemed posthumous.

When talking about the given circumstances of the play, he instructs us to

… set aside the prevalent judgement that the deepest cause of his [Hamlet’s] melancholia is his mourning for the dead father and his outrage at his mother’s sexuality. Don’t condescend to the Prince of Denmark: he is more intelligent than you are, whoever you are. That, ultimately, is why we need him and cannot evade his play. The foreground to Shakespeare’s tragedy is Hamlet’s consciousness of his own consciousness, unlimited yet at war with itself.

Later he describes Beckett’s Endgame as one of many famous misreadings of Hamlet. Bloom sort of abuses his reputation as a famous critic in the book by dropping these claims with only a few pieces of text to back him up. Perhaps they are meant to be bones for younger critics to squabble over, or perhaps he sees no reason to justify them further — after all, they are just musings. In the end, I found this book interesting yet unsatisfying. I don’t want Hamlet to be read for me by someone else, but I wanted a little more to go on than (seemingly) deep statement that Hamlet and Falstaff are the supreme comedians of the canon. However, armed with these ideas I can go through the play again to discover new depths in it, which is, in the end, what good criticism is good for.

Hop to it (~ is light and − is heavy):

By Chip Kidd. This is a very cute novel about how a college freshman discovers graphic design though a course on “Commercial Art” taught by one of the funniest cariacatures of the vicious art teacher, Winter Sorbeck. Chip Kidd is himself a graphic designer, and the book shows it — wide margins, painstakingly chosen typefaces, information all over the cover of the book and so on. Many might say that it sufferes from the excesses of the McSweeney’s crowd, but if you are a designer, one expects your book to be itself a design.

The story is straighforward enough, and although there were very few surprises, Kidd’s writing is so funny and engaging that I couldn’t put it down. It’s a wonderful book for a rainy afternoon or a boring commute — it’ll wake you up and you’ll be laughing.

by Naomi Wallace. Perhaps it is not fair to review this play, since I acted in it, but rereading it gave me new insight into the way in which Naomi Wallace creates drama on the stage, and how her scenes string the audience along. The basic gimmick is this — start the scene when it is about to blow up and assume that the actors and director are competent enough to make the action understandable to the audience. Then, rather than resolving the conflict in the scene, have it end with the characters speaking at cross purposes, almost overlapping two monologues. The juxtaposition of the lines creates associations in the mind of the audience, and the tension that is a lack of communication is very dramatic. It furthermore serves to show the audience the separate decisions of the two characters that carry them into the next scene.

It’s a slick trick, and worth noting as a writer but also as an audience member. These are the ways in which a playwright reveals information. I tend to go into theaters in an almost adversarial relationship with the work — I resist its attempts to lead me to easy conclusions, and I question the director and playwright’s intentions. That doesn’t mean I don’t end up agreeing with them, but I don’t want to make their job easy.