Spring Awakening

We took a spring break road trip to Huntington, West Virginia to see a performance of the touring musical Spring Awakening, and it was well worth the time, effort, and expense.  We knew the music, but it's always better to see a musical's songs performed in context and it turned out we were missing a good bit of the story by conjecturing what happened between songs.  The real show-stopper, of course, is the song Totally Fucked, which I had previously dismissed as trying to be shocking by using a needlessly vulgar word, but I was wrong.  At the moment the action of the play freezes and the male lead begins to sing, there's really no other word that would better describe his situation.  Here's a video of Jon Groff performing the song on Broadway, but the touring lead, Chris Wood, was even better, I thought, expressing more of his pent-up adolescent male rage and pain with leaps and jerks that added up to one of the most impressive physical performances I've ever seen on stage.

The story is loosely based on Frank Wedekind's 1891 play entitled Spring Awakening: A Children's Tragedy. The translator, Jonathan Franzen, points out in a preface, that the play is "casually and thoroughly amoral" and objects to the way the musical has "maimed" it.  I think this is the argument of someone who loved the play first and so misses the point of the musical.  Franzen's criticism of a sub-plot in which one of Wendla's friends reveals that she has been sexually abused by her father particularly misses the point, which is that this is a musical making fun of parents who think they own their children. 

Wendla's accidental pregnancy is a reflection on her mother's attempt to shelter her by refusing to tell her the facts of life (and her eventual murder by back-street abortion doctor is a discouragingly timely comment on this week's abortion-outlawing effort in Ohio).  Moritz's failure at school is a failure for his father, who had bigger ambitions for him (the kind of parental ownership that hits closest to home for me, the feeling that if a child gets into a good college, graduates, and has a successful career, that the parents get some of the credit).  The sexual abuse of one girl is just another indicator that these parents think their children belong to them, with some pontificating about how "the Lord won't mind" on the side, the pontificating mostly unheard as "blah blah blah."

Parental ownership extends, as it does in our society today, to the schools, which are run like prisons, with children in uniforms, all learning the same thing with no room (or time) for interpretation, and with overly strict discipline.  I found the schoolboys' songs most effective, with their literally knee-jerk rhythms, as each one is another effort to express questions and viewpoints for which they get no answers, no guidance.  Hanschen's masturbation to Othello read out loud is a comical and quite effective salvo in the boys' battle against the "in loco parentis" tactics of their school/prison system (not merely a sex for sensationalism scene, as Franzen asserts).

There's always a reason for revivals, and this one is a punch in the face to a supposedly adult society in which adolescents are discouraged from thinking or acting for themselves, in which they are sheltered long past the point of reason, their vibrant physical promise squandered, their ideas born secretly and alone, and too often left to die.

It's another version of one of William Blake's Songs of Experience, The Garden of Love:

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And "Thou shalt not" writ over the door;
So I turn'd to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore;

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys & desires.

A Position at the University

We are off on a road trip this afternoon. I don't know that West Virginia would have been my chosen destination for either live theater or getting out of Ohio for a day, but that's the way things work sometimes.

I leave you with the news that I am definitely going to be reading Professor X's new book In the Basement of the Ivory Tower when it comes out on Thursday (see his interview).  The interview and comments, with what I see as the circularity of the arguments about why he has to be anonymous and how the tenured don't get that, make me think of this prose poem by Lydia Davis:

A Position at the University


I think I know what sort of person I am. But then I think, But this stranger will imagine me quite otherwise when he or she hears this or that to my credit, for instance that I have a position at the university: the fact that I have a position at the university will appear to mean that I must be the sort of person who has a position at the university. But then I have to admit, with surprise, that, after all, it is true that I have a position at the university. And if it is true, then perhaps I really am the sort of person you imagine when you hear that a person has a position at the university. But, on the other hand, I know I am not the sort of person I imagine when I hear that a person has a position at the university. Then I see what the problem is: when others describe me this way, they appear to describe me completely, whereas in fact they do not describe me completely, and a complete description of me would include truths that seem quite incompatible with the fact that I have a position at the university.

Enough of that nonsense, I say! On to some other nonsense, adolescent yammerings about sex and freedom (Spring Awakening).

Fun Reading

It's spring break for the kids' school, and we celebrated Walker's birthday on Saturday at a chess tournament, so now a bunch of deadlines have been met and all we have to do is catch up on our sleep and play with the new toys.

Because there were so many deadlines in the last week or two, my reading time was spent on amusement. I read the next few Kage Baker novels about the Company.  The parts about what we're like in the future from Sky Coyote were good satiric touches, I thought, and I loved the philosophizing about the meaning of time for immortals in Mendoza in Hollywood.  My favorite so far is The Graveyard Game, where much of the overarching plot of the story is played out, with scenes like one in which two immortals appear to get drunk on hot chocolate in a public place and the discovery of what really happened to that ninth Roman legion.

Then I topped off the reading week by finding Alexander McCall Smith's new Mma Ramotswe novel, The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party, on the seven-day-loan shelf at the library, which meant I had to read it right away.  I was quite in the mood for the slow pace and simple plot, with asides like:
"So might we fail to see the real sadness that lies behind the acts of others; so might we look at one of our fellow men going about his business and not know of the sorrow that he is feeling, the effort that he is making, the things that he has lost."
 Mma Makutsi gets married to Phuti Radiphuti in a pair of really good shoes in this one, so it was entirely satisfactory.

Now we have a bookshelf to put together--to hold all the chess books Walker got for his birthday--a schedule of movies to watch, an excursion to see a musical called Spring Awakening, and pet-sitting duties for the kids. We also have some bags of books that Eleanor found at a used book store to fill out some of her list of books she wants her own copies of to take off to college, so I see some bookshelf arranging in our immediate future.  She already had her own copies of the Lord of the Rings, the Narnia books, the Harry Potter books, and the Borribles.  Now she also has the first three Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books, The Thief Lord, Life of Pi, The Golden Compass, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, A Wrinkle in Time, Summerland, Ender's Game, Feed, Hatchet, Nine Princes in Amber, and the Earthsea books.  It's interesting for us to see which books she thinks she can't live without.  It's kind of like seeing which of the many books people have thrown at her over the years made an impression, which ones "took."

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

Children's: What agency, according to a Lucy Frank book, controls everything from screaming babies to unopenable pistachio nuts?

Classics: What statesman's six-volume series The Second World War opens with The Gathering Storm?

Non-Fiction: What 20th-century muckraker spent the latter years of his life investigating ancient Athens for his book The Trial of Socrates?

Book Club:  What city is under siege in 1204 by the knights of the Fourth Crusade, in Umberto Eco's Baudolino?

Authors: What author died of lung cancer at 42, after writing about her life as a "high-functioning alcoholic" in Drinking: A Love Story?

Book Bag: What science-fiction author invites others to write about his time-traveling assassin Jerry Cornelius?

The Effort

Working with high school teachers on the spring musical is interesting; I have more respect for what they do and, oddly, even less tolerance.

On the one hand, I admire how these teachers work--I've imitated them by getting myself a loose-leaf binder and a hole punch, so I can keep the papers the kids give me (like their short biographies for the program) in order and as easily accessible as the rehearsal schedule and the sheet music for each song.  They are organized people; they come to rehearsal with a plan and God help anyone--even another teacher--who might try to influence that plan once they get going.

On the other hand, I find the teachers rigid and unhearing.  It amazes me how patient the kids are with being ordered around and told to sit down and shut up all day and then all evening, too.  I know they have some good ideas that are being lost in the chaos of banal chatter that they're shushed for, but I also know that they could easily fritter away the entire two-hour rehearsal chattering, and so being told what to do--told exactly what to see as black, and what as white--is the most expedient kind of guidance for them, even thought it's not the most penetrating.

The experience makes me less snotty, a little less like the speaker of this Billy Collins poem about high school teachers:

The Effort

Would anyone care to join me
in flicking a few pebbles in the direction
of teachers who are fond of asking the question:
"What is the poet trying to say?"

as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson
had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts--
inarticulate wretches that they were,
biting their pens and staring out the window for a clue.

Yes, it seems that Whitman, Amy Lowell
and the rest could only try and fail,
but we in Mrs. Parker's third-period English class
here at Springfield High will succeed

with the help of these study questions
in saying what the poor poet could not,
and we will get all this done before
that orgy of egg salad and tuna fish known as lunch.

Tonight, however, I am the one trying
to say what it is this absence means,
the two of us sleeping and waking under different roofs.
The image of this vase of cut flowers,

not from our garden, is no help.
And the same goes for the single plate,
the solitary lamp, and the weather that presses its face
against these new windows--the drizzle and the morning frost.

So I will leave it up to Mrs. Parker,
who is tapping a piece of chalk against the blackboard,
and her students--a few with their hands up,
others slouching with their caps on backwards--

to figure out what it is I am trying to say
about this place where I find myself
and to do it before the noon bell rings
and that whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed.

I think this poem is about complication and the kind of incoherence it can cause, and about how high school teachers are often more interested in presenting a coherent point of view than in exploring why it's sometimes so hard to say something "straight out," why we write poetry to trace the almost incomprehensible path of one seam in an infinitude of possibly gold-bearing seams in the great, dark mine that is high school.

"Inarticulate wretches" that we all are, I think we sometimes forget that even people who can't express a point of view well still have one, and we run the rink of bellying through our daily jobs believing that if only everyone would see things the way we do, the world would be a better--or at least a more comprehensible--place.

Tigana Part III

This is the part of the story where I got interested.  All the groundwork has been done, and now the Tigana partisans and prince-in-exile go around stirring people up to rebel successfully against Brandin and Alberico.  Like the long-planning political operators they are, the prince, Alessan, and his second in command, Baerd (the son of the former king of Tigana's favorite sculptor and also brother to Dianora) visit sympathizers in each little town and tell them to get ready.  It's exciting, and we see a lot of it through Devin's admiring eyes, so we love the bravery and courage and strength of the prince and what a good team he and Baerd make.

I especially like the part about how Alberico's increasingly repressive measures result in poetry about him:
"seeing plots hatching in every barnyard and using them as an excuse to seize fowls and vegetable gardens all over the Eastern Palm. There were also a few, not very subtle sexual innuendos thrown in for good measure.
The poems, posted on walls all over the city...were torn down by the Barbadians almost as fast as they went up. Unfortunately they were memorable rhymes, and people didn't need to read or hear them more than once..."
This reminds me of British 18th-century satires, about "Farmer George" (King George III--yes, the one who later went mad and who we Americans ultimately rebelled against) and of the Leslie Charteris stories about a character called "The Saint" who liked to leave a stick drawing of himself as a kind of calling card.

What happens when Alessan uses his power to bind a sorcerer to his service is described in some detail, and I found it interesting and not altogether predictable. I especially like the part where Alessan tries to make up for what he's done a little bit by playing music he knows the bound sorcerer enjoys.

I previously skipped over the whole big deal about Dianora and Baerd's incest because it seemed like the rankest kind of sensationalism to me, but then I got to this character Alienor, who has S&M sex with Devin, leaving "marks" and shredding his clothes.  I did not need to know that about the two of them, I did not need the pseudo-philosophizing over it ("an admission somewhere in the soul that we deserve no more than this"), and I definitely did not need to see Devin's symbolic pilgrimage to Catriana afterwards, for a kind of contrition and healing.  It's not like you really needed to build her up any more as a perfect mate for Alessan, Mr. Kay.

I like the quiet control and nobility of Marius of Quileia, by contrast--one of the most important of the chess pieces Alessan has set up around the board of little countries he is trying to free.

I also really like this article about cultural omnivores.

Illyria

Eleanor won a prize from the public library, and with this prize, a gift certificate for Amazon, we ordered a book I'd read very good things about, Illyria, by Elizabeth Hand. I thought Eleanor would like it because it's about performing the play Twelfth Night.

But because Eleanor is rehearsing for the high school musical, submitting senior papers, preparing for band contest, and signing up for AP exams, she hasn't had time to read the book yet. So I picked up Illyria and read it first, and it wasn't what I expected.

The author says it's the fictionalized story of her first love/best friend, so perhaps there was more of a feeling of being bound by actual events than I might otherwise have expected from a novel, but what happens just seems wrong to me.  Two teenagers, a boy and a girl, are in love with performing and with each other.  Rather than embracing the love and the boy's genius, the girl accepts the dictates of her family and leaves him to pursue her own career, one that turns out, not surprisingly, to be a pale version of what his could have been, had he received the same patronage and encouragement.

Aunt Kate, the relative who acts as a patron and gets the girl into her first acting school, says to her:
"talent--if you don't encourage it, if you don't train it, it dies. It might run wild for a little while, but it will never mean anything. Like a wild horse. If you don't tame it and teach it to run on a track, to pace itself and bear a rider, it doesn't matter how fast it is. It's useless."
But rather than rescue the boy, Rogan, who has shown his willingness to rebel against his non-artistic family, Aunt Kate (who he calls "Aunt Fate") decides to give only the girl, Maddy--whose family is more easily persuaded-- a start in the theater.  This is a betrayal of a sort, but worse is Maddy's betrayal. She doesn't even protest that Rogan should be included, but accepts her good fortune and leaves him to be berated and beaten by his father for the discovery of the condoms and blankets the two have been sharing.

Rogan is extraordinary in the central performance of Twelfth Night, and this is the way Maddy describes how he makes everyone feel:
"I've seen spectacular performances since then--Anthony Hopkins's Broadway debut in Equus, Kevin Kline in On the Twentieth Century, John Wood in The Invention of Love. Rogan's turn as the Clown rivaled all of them.
Everyone in that auditorium felt it: everyone was bewitched. I felt drugged, light-headed with desire and raw adrenaline. Whatever envy I had burned away at the expectation of sharing the stage with him. It was like sex--it was sex, magnified somehow and transformed into a vision we could all see, all share in; and there was Rogan, grinning and looking as happy as I'd ever seen him outside of the hidden space in his room."

But then Maddy goes off and leaves him, despite the way he begs her not to go:
"They can't make you," he said. "Not unless you let them. They can't force you to go."
"I know."
"I wouldn't go. If it was me....If they tried to make me go without you. I wouldn't do it."

And then, despite Maddy's betrayal, the story is not a tragedy. It's a mundane little story about a girl who went away to become an actress and spent her life playing small parts and a boy who never got that kind of opportunity and spent his life getting older.

I hated it. Perhaps Eleanor will like it better, because it does capture some of the pathos of what it is to be young and passionate about almost everything.  The ending, when Maddy and Rogan meet again, strikes me as pointless and disappointing.  He spent his life taking care of the house and the toy theater that meant so much to them. She came back for Aunt Kate's funeral and saw him only incidentally.

She was just a girl; she couldn't help it... I don't buy her story, the heartless bitch.