LADY DAY AT EMERSON'S BAR & GRILL *** out of ****
THE LIBRARY ** out of ****
SOUTH PACIFIC ** 1/2 out of ****


LADY DAY AT EMERSON'S BAR & GRILL *** out of ****
CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE

Audra McDonald? Playing the role of Billie Holiday? Like the rest of the theater world, that struck me as the most bizarre, unlikely casting I'd heard of since Bernadette Peters was playing Annie Oakley. McDonald can do anything, but Billie Holiday? Really? McDonald's voice famously glides between Broadway and opera. Even in Porgy & Bess or her solo albums, she's never come within a mile of jazz singing. How crazily misguided can you get?

Well, not so crazy. The moment McDonald begins to sing, you wonder where the heck this sound has been hiding. If an unknown steps up and sings Janis Joplin, you can admire how well they perform the songs, but not be astonished that their voice sounds like that legendary singer. It happens. But when a multiple Tony-winning artist who has performed so many different parts suddenly sings in a voice nothing like you've ever heard before, it's pretty astonishing.

Let's be clear: she is imitating Holiday down to a "t." This isn't McDonald putting her own spin on songs in the vein of Holiday, the way Dee Dee Bridgewater recently did in her own bio-play about the great jazz singer. This is McDonald as Holiday, the same way Ben Kingsley inhabited Gandhi or Michelle Williams did the same with Marilyn Monroe or other artists have embodied Winston Churchill and countless other legendary figures on stage and film. Done on a surface level, it's just mimicry, a pale copy of the original. Done on a cellular level the way McDonald does here, it brings this artist to life again. She elevates what is inevitably a pedestrian excuse to share some anecdotes and -- far more importantly -- sing some songs. The show itself is nothing special, but McDonald's performance makes it eminently worthwhile.



Bridgewater did much the same recently off Broadway. That show used a rehearsal and an evening's performance as an excuse for Holiday to shoehorn the story of her life while chatting with the boys in the band and sneaking some drinks. It was a hoary device and the machinery never stopped creaking. In contrast, this bio-musical depicts a straightforward night club appearance by Holiday months before she would die in July of 1959. Stories are told but there's no desperate attempt to chart Holiday's entire life and the result for much of the show is a far more natural affair, where character is revealed casually and tellingly.

Holiday comes out in a lovely white gown, launches into "I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone" and we're off. The way she manipulates her jaw (does it hurt?), slurs the words a la Holiday, tells jokes and slowly, all too predictably disintegrates is made fascinating by McDonald. Her voice, by the way, is not the broken down beauty of Holiday at the end of her life. It's more like Holiday at the peak of her powers, when she was recording for Decca. The dark shading is there, but any loss of range is more than compensated for by Holiday's masterful phrasing. The truth is that at least on recordings, her voice was a ravaged shell of its former self by 1959. It was like a grand old estate with the roof caved in, the windows busted, and nature slowly reclaiming the structure for itself. That voice still had a faded majesty, but it was as much for the hints of what it used to be as anything else. (Not to say Lady In Satin isn't marvelous....)

McDonald isn't so perverse as to croak like that. She performs "What A Little Moonlight Can Do," "Crazy He Calls Me," "God Bless The Child" and more with passion and conviction and a swinging self-assurance that is both perfectly in character (she's singing as Holiday, not McDonald) and satisfying on its own. Nothing in the show will surprise you for a moment other than her singing style, but surely that's what you came for?

But about the show. It sets the scene so effectively that the real goal of such an evening -- to make you feel like you really have stepped in a time machine and are watching a great artist at work -- is achieved for a while. Then playwright Lanie Robertson blows it by getting heavy-handed. A moment where Holiday must pause for a second and turns her back to the crowd is all the drama we need -- Holiday's anguish and pride and humor come through every song loud and clear. But this subtle emotion is squandered when Holiday wanders off stage to do some heroin. She returns sleepy-eyed and slurring her lyrics even more than usual, nodding off in the middle of half-remembered anecdotes.

But in case we still aren't sure what's been going on, her long-sleeved glove is shoved up towards her wrist, needle marks dot her arm and blood is marking a trail of tears. This sledge-hammer approach turns the final scenes into pathos as Holiday tumbles off the stage and can barely get through any more numbers. It's a deeply unsatisfying turn, no matter how "true" the details may be.

This lack of confidence in the central conceit is reflected in the set design of James Noone. It makes great use of Circle In The Square, putting a bar and tables on the stage where audience members sit and drink while Holiday wanders among them. (You definitely want to sit there if you can.) Great. Unfortunately, they also feel obliged to add hokey touches like Victrolas that float in the air behind Holiday and ghostly photos of the important people in her life that appear on the wall behind her. Every such gesture pulls us out of the idea that we're in a nightclub watching Holiday and is utterly pointless to boot. Do we really need to see what the great Lester Young looks like?

On the plus side, Esosa has McDonald looking glorious in a lovely white gown and the lighting by Robert Wierzel and sound by Steve Canyon Kennedy is very effective, moving in close on McDonald at dramatic high points (like "Strange Fruit") with a tight spotlight and (I believe) bringing her voice slightly higher in the mix as compared to scenes where she is wandering through the audience. Simple and effective. Director Lonny Price has paced the show well. It's a pity they didn't cut the dramatics and let Holiday be Holiday. Nonetheless, for much of this brief, engaging evening, McDonald delivers her spirit and more importantly her songs with the loose, improvisational greatness that was Holiday.

It's tantalizing to imagine how this show might send McDonald off into a new jazzy looseness on other appropriate roles. Certainly, jazzy is not a word I ever associated with her before. But apparently, McDonald can do anything, as she proves again here.

THE LIBRARY ** out of ****
THE PUBLIC THEATER

Anyone following the career of Steven Soderbergh knows that he is constantly challenging himself. In film, Soderbergh has tackled all manner of genre and style, from one-man documentary style performance pieces to popcorn flicks like Ocean's Eleven. It's the one through-line in a seemingly random career that has ping-ponged from one project to another. Now he's moved into TV and theater, insisting he's bored with film. That could be theater's gain if Soderbergh continues his foray into this art form.

Unfortunately, his latest directorial effort on stage is based on a dramatically flat spin on the Columbine high school massacre. Longtime collaborator Scott Z. Burns took a real-life incident from that terrible day and spun off this story. I'm not remotely surprised Burns took inspiration from this footnote to that crime because it fascinated me too. In real life, one of the killers was stalking students in the library. A girl silently praying was shot in the head and killed instantly. A few minutes later, another girl was asked if she believed in God since she had blurted out "Oh God, help me." Quite reasonably, she said "no" and then "yes," desperately trying to tell this lunatic whatever he wanted to hear. He just walked away, saying "God is gay" but didn't kill her.

However, their back and forth was subsequently and wrongly attributed to the girl who had been praying silently and was shot in the head and killed without saying a word to the killer. She became a martyr in the eyes of many who heard this fanciful tale: songs were written about her, her story was passed around on the internet as inspiring and the bereaved mother of the girl published a memoir about her daughter as a Christian martyr titled She Said Yes.

I go into detail because this story fascinated me when it became incontrovertibly clear what really happened. In essence, no one cared it wasn't true. People kept repeating the story even though a thorough investigation detailing the attack minute by minute clearly ruled it out. The story continued to circle the internet. A young relative of mine wrote an essay about this girl and her inspiring Christian faith and when I pointed out to her parents it wasn't true, they seemed nonplussed and saw no reason to correct their daughter. What harm would it do to believe this? And you can imagine the delicately awkward situation of the survivor. Who would want to add to the pain of a grieving mother? Who would want to take away the one shred of comfort she had latched onto: the false idea that her daughter had been a martyr for her faith? And yet, it wasn't true.

Here's Soderbergh discussing The Library with Charlie Rose.



Burns was clearly intrigued by this moral dilemma as well. But after earlier drafts sticking closer to the Columbine event, he spun off a wholly fictional tale that tries to up the stakes dramatically. In this case, Caitlin (Chloe Grace Moretz) has survived a school shooting and remains oblivious for a while about what people are saying. Instead of someone else being attributed with her saying yes she believes in God, Caitlin is horrified to hear that the media is reporting that she told the killers where some people were hiding and was thus spared while all the others she "snitched" on were killed.

Unfortunately, this isn't remotely as interesting a moral dilemma. Caitlin has no reason to be quiet -- of course she's going to try and prove her innocence. And we really never doubt her, even though the police and her parents and friends and neighbors and seemingly the rest of the world never believe her for a moment. So Caitlin has no reason NOT to challenge a man of the cloth using her as an example of lack of faith. She has no reason NOT to ask the mother of the "martyred" girl to stop saying Caitlin failed this moral test. The Library becomes a banal mystery where we wait for everyone else to realize what we've instinctively understood from the beginning: Caitlin is telling the truth. It's not a moral dilemma, just a weak Law & Order episode where even minimal police work might have raised doubt about her guilt from the start.

Under the circumstances, Moretz does a very convincing job as Caitlin, waking up from the nightmare of a shooting to the nightmare of having no one believe her. It doesn't help that she's been hiding some facts about vaguely knowing the killer beforehand. While the show does a decent job of showing the media firestorm and how quickly rumor becomes fact once it's been repeated on the evening news, I don't think it was attempting to denounce this so much as simply describe it. When the mother of the martyred girl (Lili Taylor) shows a savviness about TV movie rights when talking to a publisher, it didn't feel like a condemnation of her sincerity but just a reflection of how even newbies just rescued from a natural disaster know their parts when news cameras are rolling. In fact, I thought Taylor's underwritten part was actually pretty decent and understanding, given that the entire world was telling her that Caitlin was badmouthing her dead daughter over guilt about revealing the hiding place of schoolmates.

But other than Moretz, only Tamara Tunie as a detective investigating the crime struck me as a fully rounded character I believed in. Everyone else felt sketchy and unconvincing. Soderbergh directed capably and the sets by Riccardo Hernandez and lighting by David Lander are initially striking. (The set feels more like a morgue or a futuristic hospital setting than anything else.) But the already shaky play by Burns takes a thuddingly banal turn at the end and all the other tech elements follow suit.

The play ends with the members of the cast quoting from the final report. One scene earlier, we saw a student being walked through the library by the detective (why, we wonder, wasn't this done before?) when she suddenly realizes he's confused about who was standing where and has made a terrible, terrible mistake. It's not wildly affecting, but it is dramatic. But to follow that with a banal reading of the report -- whose only purpose is to make clear Caitlin was telling the truth -- becomes a tiresome repetition of facts. The play is not about the massacre, as such, so why are we detailing who was shot where and when at the climax? Each time the killer is described as shooting someone, a strobe light blinks and blood red lighting flashes on the stage, about the most literal minded and dull way of depicting such a tragedy as one could ask for, especially when it is repeated over and over, the way actual footage of a tragedy can be repeated on TV news until even the real thing loses all impact.

A kernel of a fascinating play is here. But real events have been tragically amped up in an attempt to add "drama" in a way that unintentionally leeches the story of moral complexity. But Soderbergh shows the desire as he always has on film to tackle work of complexity and ambition. And he certainly has good taste in actors: it's to be hoped Moretz will pursue the theater as successfully as she has film.


SOUTH PACIFIC ** 1/2 out of ****
PAPERMILL PLAYHOUSE

If you haven't seen South Pacific on stage before (or in a long time), Papermill Playhouse has a decent revival to offer. If however you saw the brilliant Broadway revival that ran from 2008 to 2010, this production (and any other production you ever saw, including the still-born feature film) will pale in comparison. If you've never read Tales From The South Pacific by James Michener, it's an excellent work and easily the best thing he ever wrote. Rodgers & Hammerstein took that collection of disparate short stories and stitched them together into a show that seamlessly captures romance during wartime, military life and not so incidentally racism. As usual, they also offered up a clutch of catchy songs.

It almost seems to have begun before we arrived at the theater: the nurse Nellie (Erin Mackey) and rich island planter Emile de Becque (Mike McGowan) have fallen in love so quickly they haven't even told each other yet. But it's wartime and Emile knows life is precious so he asks her to marry him and she excitedly agrees to think about it. At the same time, Lt. Joe Cable (Doug Carpenter) has volunteered for a dangerous mission to spy on the enemy and needs Emile's help. Before risking his life, he takes a little r&r with the daughter of Bloody Mary (Loretta Ables Sayre), a local entrepreneur who knows a handsome catch when she sees one.

Both these romances are poisoned by prejudice: Cable can't imagine bringing a "native" home with him to America and Nellie is horrified to discover that Emile is a widower and that his late wife was also colored. (She seems less surprised that he asked her to marry him without mentioning the fact that he has two children, a bizarre little plot failing that should have been corrected by now.) You can wash that man right out of your hair but you can't wash prejudice out of your heart.



This production is directed by Rob Ruggiero, choreographed by Ralph Perkins and with sets by Michael Yeargan and costumes by Catherine Zuber. Perhaps my mind is playing tricks on me but it feels deeply in debt to the Lincoln Center production, down to when pieces of the set are taken off stage by extras. The only area that doesn't feel like a facsimile is the lighting design by John Lasiter -- and not in a good way. The Broadway production was gorgeously lit with so many eye-catching variations on sunsets; this lighting seems to change at the drop of a hat, more of a mood ring than a subtle scene-setter.

This can be a problem with any classic. Once you've seen a definitive production, you begin to mentally compare what you think you remember with what you're seeing. A guest of mine couldn't enjoy the new revival of Les Miserables because their fond memory of the original Broadway run was so deeply ingrained in them. I'd never seen a fresh, good production of that show, so I enjoyed the new one greatly. Even at its best, this production of South Pacific is probably just fine. But if you have no competing memories, that will surely be fine indeed, given the songs and the story.

Mackey leans a little too heavily on her accent; her Nellie seems more of a dumb hick who would be overwhelmed by Emile's world -- she's more of a pet than a partner. Worse, Mackey tries to sing in an accent rather than with her lovely natural voice. Even in the middle of songs, she'll switch awkwardly from accented lyrics to unaffected, distracting us every step of the way. She'd be wise to drop the twang while singing and playing it down while talking. McGowan is strictly in the Mario Lanza tradition of Emiles, though his accent becomes a little heavy especially when he's being impassioned. Again, less is more.

Tally Sessions is Luther, an enlisted man with a crush on Nellie. He's a lot better at unrequited love than the show's admittedly thin attempts at slapstick humor. And I think Newsies has sucked up all the chorus boys in town since the sailors here look to be about the oldest group of enlisted men in World War II. (Casting them at 21 and younger would also add to the pathos of impending battle and make Emile stand out as an older man more effectively.)

But Doug Carpenter intrigues the most. He's a square-jawed, old Hollywood handsome leading man to say the least. He's also got an excellent singing voice. One look at him and you know precisely the sort of roles he's played: Curly in Oklahoma, Tony in West Side Story, the Prince in Cinderella, Lancelot in Camelot. (What, no Marius in Les Miz?) A ripple of excitement burst through the audience as he launched confidently into "Younger Than Springtime" and he was equally effective on the scathing, angry "You've Got To Be Carefully Taught." As a singer, he's an excellent actor and performs these songs well. And to be fair, Cable is a rather one-dimensional secondary role. But I fear from this brief impression that Carpenter has coasted too long on his looks and let his profile do his acting for him. He somehow managed to be cheesy even in silhouette during scene changes. Carpenter has the charisma and the voice to be much much more than a soap-worthy pretty face. Here's hoping this was simply a role that slipped away from him or he applies himself more completely as an actor in the future.

That's a lot of caveats for a pleasant night with some great songs like "There Is Nothing Like A Dame" and "Some Enchanted Evening." But Papermill has raised its standards as a launching pad for Broadway worthy shows so we've come to expect more. And Sayre proves how great this show can be. Bloody Mary is not an avaricious woman trying to trap a wealthy white man into marriage. She sees a handsome man of good character and genuinely thinks her daughter and he would be happy. She offers him her money to make the pairing more palatable. Even when he rejects them, she recognizes her daughter's genuine love and will put the kibosh on a far more profitable marriage to a planter if only Cable will follow his heart. Six years later, Sayre's Tony nominated performance as Bloody Mary is just as fresh and convincing as ever.

THEATER OF 2014

Beautiful: The Carole King Musical ***
Rodney King ***
Hard Times ** 1/2
Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead **
I Could Say More *
The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner **
Machinal ***
Outside Mullingar ***
A Man's A Man * 1/2
The Tribute Artist ** 1/2
Transport **
Prince Igor at the Met **
The Bridges Of Madison County ** 1/2
Kung Fu (at Signature) **
Stage Kiss ***
Satchmo At The Waldorf ***
Antony and Cleopatra at the Public **
All The Way ** 1/2
The Open House (Will Eno at Signature) ** 1/2
Wozzeck (at Met w Deborah Voigt and Thomas Hampson and Simon O'Neill)
Hand To God ***
Tales From Red Vienna **
Appropriate (at Signature) *
Rocky * 1/2
Aladdin ***
Mothers And Sons **
Les Miserables *** 1/2
Breathing Time * 1/2
Cirque Du Soleil's Amaluna * 1/2
Heathers The Musical * 1/2
Red Velvet, at St. Ann's Warehouse ***
Broadway By The Year 1940-1964 *** 1/2
A Second Chance **
Guys And Dolls *** 1/2
If/Then * 1/2
The Threepenny Opera * 1/2
A Raisin In The Sun *** 1/2
The Heir Apparent *** 1/2
The Realistic Joneses ***
Lady Day At Emerson's Bar & Grill ***
The Library **
South Pacific ** 1/2

Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the founder and CEO of the forthcoming websiteBookFilter, a book lover's best friend. It's a website that lets you browse for books online the way you do in a physical bookstore, provides comprehensive info on new releases every week in every category and offers passionate personal recommendations every step of the way. It's like a fall book preview or holiday gift guide -- but every week in every category. He's also the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day and features top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It's available for free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes.

Note: Michael Giltz is provided with free tickets to shows with the understanding that he will be writing a review. All productions are in New York City unless otherwise indicated.

©Mike Masters Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Romania (CC BY-SA 3.0 RO) (Creative Commons)

April 18 is the International Day for Monuments and Sites, a day when we remember and celebrate the places that mean the most to us. This year's theme is commemorative monuments. Many of our monuments were built to commemorate an event or to memorialize the builder. From the pyramids at Giza to statues of Stalin and Lenin, these monuments can have very charged political meanings within a moment in time, but also tend to take on new meanings as time passes. Today we may value these places for reasons that have nothing to do with why they were built.

An astonishing commemorative monument in this context is Brancusi's Endless Column ensemble in the small town of Târgu Jiu, Romania, which is today hailed as one of the greatest works of twentieth-century public art. The sculptural ensemble was born as the commission of a sculpture by the National League of Gorj Women. They had in mind a classic World War I commemoration of the decisive battle for Romanian independence that was fought in the town, defending a bridge across the River Jiu. Originally they offered the commission to a local sculptor, Militsa Petrascu, who had recently completed another commemorative work in the town. With remarkable candor, he told them he was not up to the task, and suggested Brancusi. We can only thank him for this act of modesty.

Brancusi was living in Paris, but had been born and raised in the nearby town of Hobita. He promptly accepted the commission. It gave him an opportunity to execute on a large scale a theme that he had worked with over many years -- the "endless column." Brancusi carved several endless columns in wood starting in 1917. The earliest of them is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and others can be found in his studio, now conserved as it was left when he died in the Pompidou Center in Paris. The columns were based on a local style of house post in Romania, which Brancusi transformed into an enigmatic and spiritual symbol, brimming with energy. Brancusi described the form as "art imitating nature."

Brancusi planned a monumental column for Târgu Jiu as a symbol of heavenly ascension after death. He carved one module in wood, standing more than six feet high, then proposed that a string of 16 of these modules, cast in metal, would stand end on end, ascending into the sky. As the site of the column, he chose a former hay market standing on a hill above the town. With the help of an engineer, Stefan Georgescu-Gorjan, an ingenious spine was fabricated to hold the modules of the column, which stand upright, one on top of the other, held by the force of gravity. The Endless Column, an artistic and engineering tour de force, was dedicated as the clouds of war were once more gathering over Europe, in 1938.

By then, Brancusi, Gorjan and the patroness Aretie Tatarescu had conceived an even greater scheme. On the site of the battle of Târgu Jiu, Brancusi created a place of contemplation, the Table of Silence. To link it to the town, he built a triumphal arch, the Gate of the Kiss. To reach the Endless Column from the memorial site, you traversed the town from the river's edge, walking through the neighborhoods where the young fallen soldiers had lived, to the hill. He called this the Way of the Heroes.

Although Brancusi had ambitious dreams for public art ensembles around the world, only the one in Târgu Jiu was executed. Developed through improvisation and serendipity, the ensemble can today be read in a variety of ways. It is the nexus of town life; it remains a commemoration of a now obscure event. But for the contemplative visitor, the constant play of light and shadow over the sculptures' forms can be understood as a magnificent metaphor for the passing days and nights of a person's life, from the ritual feasting table, through the portal of maturity to the column of eternity -- a celebration of life itself.

In the 4th part of the National Poetry Month blog, I ask America's best poets to answer five more questions by readers of poetry.

1. April 23 is Shakespeare's 450th anniversary. If you went back in time and could ask him one question, what would that question be?

Alfred Corn (author of Unions, forthcoming in 2014):
I would ask him about his various loves and what bearing those had on his works.

David Lehman (author of The Last Avant-Garde):
Did you mean "solid" or "sullied" when you wrote, "Oh, that this too, too solid [sullied] flesh would melt. . ."?

Henri Cole (author of Touch):
I would ask him if he likes American poetry, and if he thinks we're doing okay by the sonnet, and if he would like to eat a sandwich in the park next door.

CAConrad (author of Ecodeviance):
OH MY GOD, I say, "William!! PUT DOWN that quill, grab my hand and get on the time machine built by the Huffington Post (apparently) and come to where poetry is COOL!! It's in a year called 2014!! NO STOPS ALONG THE WAY MY FRIEND!!" Actually we STOPPED to grab Kafka, and then the three of us made out, my lips simultaneously tingling wet with Elizabethan England and early twentieth century Prague. How thrilling!!

John Gallaher (author of In a Landscape, forthcoming in 2014):
How long did you think your writing would last? Were you aware you were a genius?

Adam Fitzgerald (author of The Late Parade):
I would ask about his sex life, starting with the identity of the Young Man of the Sonnets.

2. What bothers you most in your literature community?

Adam Fitzgerald:
Cliquish self-interest.

Alfred Corn:
Careerism. Which leads people to put the goal of visible "success" before actual literary achievement. And, too often, ahead of probity and basic regard for others.

Henri Cole:
Cronyism in editing, hiring, judging, and reviewing. It's deadening to think about, but I try to cultivate hope as a virtue.

John Gallaher:
It bothers me less than it once did, as it's gotten better in recent years, but I still come across a kind of tunnel vision in corners of the poetry community, where writers speak of a small group of poets as if that was all there is. It's a big tent. I'd like poets to poke around in it a bit more in their reading and writing habits.

3. Which poets, alive or dead, are overrated/underrated?

Adam Fitzgerald:
Underrated: Bernadette Mayer, James Schuyler, A.E. Housman, Charlotte Mew, Robert Hass, Christina Rossetti, Swinburne, Donald Justice, Melville, John Crowe Ransom, Léonie Adams, T.E. Brown, Walter de la Mare, Harryette Mullen.

Matthew Zapruder (author of Sun Bear):
I am continually surprised at how misunderstood and underrated James Tate is. I think he might very well be our greatest living poet. People think he is a joker or surrealist (he can be both), but there is also an intense real dread and deep humanistic love in his poems. Those things come in odd forms, and often mixed up with other elements (like narrative), but they are there for us.

Henri Cole:
All poets are underrated, except a few. I don't really like one-line-joke poetry that gets a laugh at the expense of others or poetry that has a hole in it where the heart should be.

John Gallaher:
Underrated: First up, I think is Robert Lowell. He brought quite a few new things to the art. I think he'll come around again in a few years. Similarly, Anne Sexton isn't talked about as much as she once was, but I also think that'll be turning again. As well, Kenneth Fearing. No one talks about him much, but he was doing things 80 years ago that still seem fresh. I'm glad to see Rae Armantrout coming into her own in recent years. For a long time I would have listed her as the most underrated poet in America.

CAConrad:
Time deals with the overrated, so I can't be bothered. But the under appreciated, oh my what a LIST!! My obsession for the most delicious in everything poetry drove me to ask this very question of poets I know, love and trust a few years ago. I called it THE NEGLECTORINO PROJECT. And I DO BELIEVE it's due for an update, a PART TWO!! But here is the original, many MANY things to set your hair on fire!! Poets like Rosalie Moore, Merle Hoyleman, Alexandra Grilikhes, AND OTHERS!! Click here: http://neglectorino.blogspot.com

4. Are prizes like Pulitzer, NBA, NBCC are good for poetry. Is there discrimination against women poets, non-white poets, gay poets?

Alfred Corn:
A big prize like the Pulitzer will certainly advance the career of the poet who wins, bringing prize money, well-paid invitations to read, and a boost in book sales. Also, the domino effect: those who win one prize are likely to win others, since committees like to make choices that seem plausible.

David Lehman:
Such prizes are good for those who win them. Their market value goes up. Otherwise, the prizes don't mean shit.

Henri Cole:
Prizes don't matter much if other poets don't admire you. I'm always hoping to convert those who discriminate against me.

John Gallaher:
Prizes are fine and good things. They give newspapers a reason to mention poetry. There is discrimination of all kinds, as these things are run by people. A specific complaint I have is how narrow the aesthetic focus of many awards is. They claim to be rewarding the best, but what it seems is more that they are rewarding a kind of poetry more than a general regard for the totality of what's being written.

Adam Fitzgerald:
Prizes are for poets, not poetry. Where there's people, there's discrimination.

5. Is poetry useful?

Henri Cole:
Must we ask this? Is air useful? Food? Love?

CAConrad:
Absolutely!! As important as any tool that prevents us from languishing in the hypnotic call to war from the president, the generals, and their well cloaked bosses on Wall Street.

John Gallaher:
Yes. For instance, I was driving a van of famous writers at a festival years ago, when a wasp flew in through an open window and began to harry them. Philip Levine killed it with his Selected Poems. In less practical ways poetry is also useful. It gives me the opportunity to ponder the human condition with a measure of distance.

David Lehman:
No, and that's what makes it useful.

The comedic chameleon Arnie Burton first came to view in the 2008 parody version of Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, a four-character romp in which he was one of two men who played all the roles other than the hero and heroine. He was even more prominent as the featured character woman in Peter and the Starcatcher, where he was an over-the-top delight as the nanny Mrs. Bumbrake. Burton has also appeared in dramatic roles (including The Temperamentals, A Free Man of Color, and Machinal), but comedy seems to be his métier. He offers a display of high-octane clowning in the roles Charles Ludlam wrote for himself to play in the self-described "penny dreadful" The Mystery of Irma Vep, at the Lortel. Burton can grab us, and control audience laughter, by merely widening his eyes; he doesn't even have to roll them to get a roar.

Appearing opposite him in the roles originated by Everett Quinton is Robert Sella, who made a memorable debut in 1998 in the central role in Warren Leight's Side Man; departed during the run to replace Alan Cumming in the very different role of the Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret; and then returned to Side Man. He has not been much in evidence hereabouts since, except for a role in the brief Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. (He also appeared as Prior in the National Tour of Angels in America, and with Maggie Smith in the 2007 West End production of Edward Albee's The Lady from Dubuque.) Sella turns out to be an adept comic actor, contributing a fair share of hilarity while not necessarily quite so adept as his scene partner.

Which takes us, inevitably, to a discussion of the play itself. The Mystery of Irma Vep -- astute anagrammers will immediately read "vampire" for "Irma Vep"--was a veritable laugh riot when Mr. Busch and Mr. Quinton (under the direction of Busch) played it on Sheridan Square in 1984; and it was arguably just as funny when Mr. Quinton and Stephen DeRosa (under the direction of Quinton) played it at the Westside in 1998. The new revival (directed by Quinton), from the Red Bull Theatre, retains the laughs and features the aforementioned skillful performances. But what had formerly seemed a sprightly satire is missing a good deal of its former sprightliness. What has heretofore been irrepressible felt sketchy, at least at the preview performance I attended. The audience got the jokes, and appreciated them, but there was a general listlessness that surprised this viewer.

This might be due to what seems to be a slightly larger and wider playing space than before, but perhaps something else is at play. Even in 1984, the idea of doing a spoof of a whole genre of melodrama -- starting with Hitchcock's Rebecca -- was not exactly novel; this had been done effectively for eons. (With the 1896 Biblical novel Quo Vadis and the resulting epic stage version all the rage, ethnic comedians Joe Weber and Lew Fields brought Quo Vass Iss? to Broadway in 1900.)

The two prior off-Broadway productions of Irma Vep -- as well as countless regional, international and amateur presentations -- succeeded with a flair. Have we in the interim became too used to inside joke after inside joke cascading from the stage? I would doubt it. But despite the accomplished work of the Messrs. Burton and Sella, this new production of Irma Vep provides constant amusement but little more. So much so that I sat there thinking of far funnier recent occasions, including David Ives' School for Lies and The Heir Apparent (currently at the Classic Stage Company) as well as Nell Benjamin's The Explorers Club -- which, as it happens, featured Mr. Burton as a mad Warrior Monk.

With Woody Allen at the helm, Zach Braff in a starring role, and a rich ensemble cast that earns both laughs and applause, Bullets Over Broadway has a lot to offer. The 1994 movie may have fallen off the radar for most, but this production comes storming in and doesn't let up until the very end. Even though the show isn't perfect, there's plenty to call on for entertainment.

The choreography, costumes, and sets are arguably the most magnificent part of the performance. Set in 1929, the story weaves together two cultural mainstays of the time: Broadway and gangsters. Braff, a newcomer to the limelight in real life and in this show within a show, is joined on stage by some New York icons like Marin Mazzie and Brooks Ashmanskas. His character, David Shayne, is just trying to keep up with the pace of the play he penned that's quickly being taken away from him at the hands of producers, actors, and, yes, gangsters, who have their own say in what should come next.

But the real star of the show is Nick Cordero, who plays Cheech, a tough guy assigned to watch over Olive, his boss's girlfriend and an aspiring actress herself. Cordero commands the stage and all the others on it with poise and aggression. His chemistry, or deliberate lack thereof, with Heléne Yorke, who plays Olive, makes for some of the funniest situations and moments in the entire show. The secondary story quickly becomes the prime interest. Shayne's own personal indiscretions and questions about morality get swept away by the action preceding and following it.

Not everything is perfect, though. The show struggles to tie together the story at the very end, finishing on one of the stranger numbers in recent memory. In a way, it would have been better off cutting the final scene altogether and allowing the show a little room to breathe and simmer. However, that wouldn't have been consistent with the rapid pace overall. Everyone comes together for a party at the end as if they're making it up on the spot. Some of the smiles seem sincere and real, and not put on for the sake of the audience. With so much on Broadway that can sometimes feel rehearsed and repetitive, that authenticity was refreshing. And we can forgive them for trying for the "happily ever after" finale that they expected we'd need.

When theater veteran Moss Hart published his bestselling Act One in 1959, he packed a lot into it about his impoverished childhood and neophyte playwriting years with the already famous, successful and legendarily acerbic George S. Kaufman. James Lapine, who's adapted the chockfull memoir at the Vivian Beaumont, packs just as much into it--and what can seem like even more--on Beowulf Boritt's magnificent three-story revolving set.

Unlike Hart's title and Lapine's appropriation of it for his Act One treatment, the young fellow's life as shown here is in two acts. And it's proper that he divides it into two acts. In the first and as Boritt's construction turns and the older Hart (Tony Shalhoub) narrates, young Moss (Matthew Schechter) rankles under his stressed mother Lillie (Mimi Lieber) and testy father Barnett (Shalhoub), while, as the somewhat older Hart (Santino Fontana), dropping out of school to pursue theater-related jobs.

The second act of this valentine to show-business and to a young man's pluck follows Hart as he brushes off a disastrous first-play production in the hinterlands and starts turning his Once in a Lifetime script into something hit-worthy with the valuable guidance of now collaborator Kaufman (Shalhoub again, phew!) What the two endure, as observed and pampered by Kaufman's sympathetic wife Beatrice (Andrea Martin), includes episodes where their first two acts work like gangbusters, but they can't solve the third-act challenge. Until they do, and all dreams, as they don't always on Broadway, come true.

When I say Lapine packs plenty into his entertaining diversion about the dogged fulfillment of concentrated ambition, I mean plenty. When the traditional red curtain is initially pulled open, the playwright-director reveals a handful of actors performing a short excerpt from Oscar Wilde's weeper, A Woman of No Importance, while Hart's Aunt Kate (Martin) observes from a balcony seat so she can report to her eager nephew.

From there on, Lapine tosses in everything, including the kitchen sink, represented by the tense Harts-at-home scenes--where boarders are needed to help pay the rent--when Barnett eventually throws Aunt Kate out for accumulated infractions.

What else does Lapine stuff into his extravaganza? Hart's brief stint at a furrier's where Barnett has set him up and his office-boy position for second-rate theatrical producer Augustus Pitou (Will LeBow) are included. Run-ins with the celebrated, much hated Jed Harris (LeBow), who greets Hart completely naked, and the equally accomplished and much more well liked Sam Harris (Bob Stillman) are accorded close-ups. For some hearty laughs, there's the try-out of that first Hart opus, The Beloved Bandit,

Patrons get to see the initially one-sided, increasingly two-sided Kaufman-Hart writing sessions. During one of them, while the pair adjusts a Once in a Lifetime scene, three players (Lieber, Matthew Saldivar, Will Brill) play out the altered script's alterations. Beatrice Kaufman throws a party to introduce Hart to prominent friends like Edna Ferber, Langston Hughes, Alexander Woollcott and Aline MacMahon.

And the set goes round and round as both Shalhoub and Fontana keep the Hart bio firing across the footlights. It could be said Lapine's play is the kind for which the adjective "sprawling" was invented. At one point in the proceedings, someone wonders whether the trying-out Once in a Lifetime is a comedy or a satire, and something of the same tone confusion occasionally snakes through Lapine's two acts--not to mention the intermittent hint that too much is afoot to take in and that less might have seemed more.

Scratch that. All the too-muchness ultimately has the effect the Act One memoir had. It's the stage equivalent of a book you never want to end. Everything that Lapine has worked in to tell the heart-felt and heart-stirring tale feels right. If Lapine were to trim it (word has it that he already has done a certain amount), deciding what to delete would be exceedingly difficult. Leave it all in, and let the devil take the hindmost.

Leave it all in because of the opportunities offered the large cast on that whirligig set to do some mighty impressive whirligigging of their own. First and foremost, there's Shalhoub in his three roles that has to have given him (and his dresser) some unparalleled challenges. Just getting in and out of the Kaufman shock wig to return to the older Hart has to require great facility. How the real Kaufman and Hart would have enjoyed watching one man play them both is great fun to consider.

Fontana, last seen as Cinderella's Prince Charming, has an easier time of it but not that much less stage time to enact Hart's transition from eager wannabe to Kaufman sycophant to young playwright determined to click despite mounting odds--all of which he does with princely charm.

Martin, last seen in her Tony-winning Pippin role, doesn't have to swing upside down this time, but her swinging three characters is as deft as she always is. There's the affected Aunt Kate with her vestigial English accent, the sophisticated Beatrice Kaufman and Hart's aggressive agent Frieda Fishbein, whom SCTV fans will recognize as sister under the skin to the fabulous Edith Prickley.

The truth is there isn't a weak performance among the 22-member cast, many of whom have to be as busy backstage as on. Stillman, Chuck Cooper, Bill Army, Deborah Offner--all of them turn in slick, adept, fast characterizations. And congrats to director Lapine for organizing this circus.

Thank him, too, for rounding up--in addition to Boritt--lighting designer Ken Billington, sound designer Dan Moses Schreier and costumer Jane Greenwood, who's already announced for a special Tony this June. It's about time, since she's been nominated something like 14 times and never(!) won.

Incidentally, Lapine has taken at least a few liberties with Hart's tome. In the party sequence, someone mentions Irving Berlin's standard "Always" with its "I'll be loving you always" lyric. Lapine has Kaufman say to the guest, the lyric should have been "I'll be loving you Thursday." The anecdote usually goes that Kaufman made the remark directly to Berlin. In another party exchange, Hughes says to Edna Ferber, "You almost look like a man," and she replies, "So do you." The standard account has it that the two engaged in that sardonic give-and-take were Ferber and Noel Coward.

Full closing disclosure: Shortly after Act One, the book, appeared, and I'd hung on every word--as had every other reader with even the slightest interest in theater and the arts--I interviewed Moss Hart. He was exactly the suave, well-modulated gentleman whom Shalhoub impersonates. There is, however, one sartorial difference. Although Shalhoub has on a blue blazer and tie, Hart wore a blue blazer with an ascot for that interview--something he undoubtedly had never affected during his Bronx youth. I would have enjoyed Shalhoub's donning one as well.

But, to paraphrase Elaine Stritch, does anyone still wear an ascot?

The Metropolitan Opera returned its vintage production of Bellini's I Puritani to the stage last night and the fast-rising Russian soprano Olga Peretyatko wowed the first-night audience in an auspicious Met debut as Elvira, the daughter of a Puritan leader driven mad by her love for a Royalist supporter during the English Civil War.

Elvira is one of the great bel canto roles and it has attracted some of opera's greatest singers, from Callas to Sutherland. The last time the Met brought its production out of mothballs, it was another standout Russian soprano, Anna Netrebko, who took the part.

Peretyatko is an appealing and attractive Elvira, rather stately and refined. Her love for Arturo, while full of fervor, is more restrained in the Sutherland mold than the wild abandon of a Callas. At the outset last night, Peretyatko seemed somewhat tentative. Her voice is pleasant but it is not a big voice and the top notes seemed a bit of a stretch for her in her opening scene.

With the "Veil Song," however, Peretyatko displayed some vocal fireworks, sparklers that lit up the stage and brought the character to life as she almost raced through an upbeat rendition with delightful vibratos. Her Mad Scene (the soprano always seems to have a mad scene in bel canto operas) that begins "Qui la voce" was impressive. Compensating for a voice that is not overly strong, she begins certain passages almost in a whisper, then crescendos to silver-toned highs that are crystal pure.

I Puritani was Bellini's last opera. It premiered in Paris in 1835, the year he died at the age of 34. Although it is set during the turbulent English Civil War, it is a straightforward romance that ends happily, unusual for most operas but especially for the bel canto repertory.

The story revolves around the love between Elvira, daughter of the commander of the Plymouth garrison of Puritans (or Roundheads as Cromwell's followers were called), and Arturo, a Royalist supporter of the dethroned Stuarts. Further complicating matters is Riccardo, an avid Puritan who also loves Elvira and double-crosses Arturo in the hopes of getting her on the rebound.

Elvira, however, persuades her uncle Giorgio to intercede with her father and the nuptials are about to be performed when Arturo learns that the widow of the beheaded King Charles I is in Plymouth and is about to be executed herself. He drops everything and tries to flee with the queen to safety, leaving poor Elvira at the altar.

Arturo is captured by Riccardo, of course, and sentenced to death himself. He's only saved when word arrives that the Roundheads have won the war and an amnesty has been declared for all Royalists. So Elvira and Arturo can be married, after all.

The present Met production is now 38 years old but is still a serviceable one. The curtain comes up on the chorus, dressed more like American pilgrims rehearsing for a Thanksgiving pageant than a band of Parliamentary rebels in Devon, singing about an expected attack by Royalist forces while Puritan troops, looking like Spanish conquistadors, march around the stage.

The chorus is an integral part of I Puritani, singing the opening of both the first two acts (the second in a tableau that could be taken from an old Dutch Master painting), and the opera's final scene, and as always singing magnificently.

The score is at once luscious and rousing, full of melodious arias and duets as well as thumping good anthems, as in the "Suoni la tromba," and those choruses. And Peretyatko has for the most part a strong cast around her and a friendly baton in the hands of her husband, the Italian conductor Michele Mariotti, in the pit.

The American tenor Lawrence Brownlee delivers a strong performance as Arturo. He has a vibrant and assured voice and is full of ardor in his duets with Peretyatko. And the Italian bass Michele Pertusi is splendid as Giorgio, singing with tenderness and warmth, especially his aria "Cinta di fiori," one of the highlights of the evening.

Another Met debut, this one rather less fortuitous, came when the Belarussian baritone Maksim Aniskin stepped into the role of Riccardo for an ailing Mariusz Kwiecien. While some last-minute stand-ins have made careers, this one did not.

But the night belonged to Peretyatko, and with Mariotti leading the always brilliant Met orchestra in a pensive yet lively reading of the score, it was a family success.

Habib Koite, one of Mali's most beloved singer/guitarists was in town last month to promote his new CD "Soô" on Contre Jour Records. He packed NYC's City Winery with a polyglot audience, which included a hefty West African compliment.

Koité is a seasoned performer, and everyone on stage was relaxed and having fun. The most striking aspect of the show was the use of an unusual hybrid instrument, having a 6-string guitar neck with a banjo head and resonator. While played in the Malian guitar style, it projected the singular tone of a banjo. (Not all that odd, considering the banjo is African in origin.) This is also one of the strong sonic additions to "Soô " which was recorded in Koite's home studio, and which I highly recommend.

Habib Koite: A West African Fête at the City Winery from Michal Shapiro on Vimeo.

I had brought along my intern Molly Marcotte for second camera, and I think I had almost as much fun seeing her reactions to this show as I had to the show itself. As the show progressed more and more people were throwing money at the musicians and coming up on stage to dance with the maestro. While this is typical, down home behavior for an African audience I think it entranced Molly, particularly the style and skill of the dancing. By the time the show ended, Koité was standing in a puddle of greenbacks and the stage was a party in which everyone had a chance to show off their moves. And some of those moves were very impressive!

The song I am presenting is called "Diarabi Niani" a song about the hazards of love, and it occurred fairly early on in the set. But you can definitely see the party is beginning!

For an informed review of the CD, background on the artist, sound samples and more, visit the ever excellent site Rootsworld.

For more of Michal's world music videos visit her site at InterMuse.

What is music for? Is it a pastime, a diversion? Is it a luxury, an amusement for the privileged?

Or is it something more?

In our schools, we try to ensure that children are at least given some small introduction to the great artistic accomplishments of history, mainly the classics of the written word. I went to public school, and remember being assigned to read a few Shakespeare plays, a work or two of the ancient Greeks and several of the notable "coming of age" novels of the 20th century.

But never once was I told to listen to a Beethoven symphony.

As a society, we recognize that the written word can be an artistic form of immense emotional power and intellectual value. I cannot imagine a civilized society that did not see the value in educating their young in at least some classic literature. But we ignore the great music that has moved nations and inspired our most profound thinkers to their greatest heights. Why?

Beethoven's music has inspired writers, scientists and politicians. When the Berlin Wall fell, his Symphony No. 9 was performed on the spot, as this was seen as the most appropriate response to one of the most important events in modern history. Yet, most young people in North America know nothing of his music, apart from what they may have heard coming out of Schroeder's piano on a Peanuts cartoon special. Three works of Bach were included on the "golden records" sent into the cosmos on the Voyager spacecraft, but his music is unknown to the vast majority of our children. Mozart, Brahms, Tchaikovsky? These are names to many young people, but nothing more.

I am not by any means alone in lamenting the lack of music education in our schools. But I am not only saddened that there seems to be no time in current curricula, nor money in current budgets, for the possibility of instrumental instruction, but also by the fact that many school boards seem reluctant to even recognize the value and importance of great music as one of mankind's greatest cultural achievements.

If a child were to reach the end of their schooling having never been exposed to a word of Shakespeare, Dickens,or Dostoyevsky, we would accuse their schools of failure. Is this because the written word has greater emotional or intellectual importance than music?

The amazing story of Kwasi Enin, the 17-year-old from Long Island, NY, who was accepted into all eight Ivy League universities, has been well-covered by the press. I think it is worth noting that the subject of his college essay, "A Life in Music," is how music became the spark of his intellectual curiosity.

I was lucky to have a wonderful teacher in 4th and 5th grades, Mr. Don Cuggy, who took it upon himself to introduce his students to great music. For just a few minutes a day, he would play musical masterpieces from his own collection. He remains my favorite teacher from my childhood.

Music is notoriously difficult to talk about. I can fully understand the challenges of creating "assignments" in conjunction with the experience of listening to music. One's emotional and intellectual response to great music cannot be tested or graded. But this does not absolve our education system from the responsibility of exposing our youth to some of the greatest artistic accomplishments in human history.

Popcorn is the perfect crunchy, salty accompaniment to film viewing, but it might be insufficient while watching two new mouth-watering movies -- Tasting Menu, opening today at Manhattan's Quad Cinema, and Chef, a Tribeca Film Festival selection scheduled for May 9 release. In both contemporary stories, when the camera captures the sensuous preparation of dishes, our taste buds are aroused.

Tasting Menu, an English-language Spanish-Irish co-production directed by Roger Gual, focuses on one particular Catalan meal. Jon Favreau's Chef is by contrast a culinary road movie that begins in a tony LA eatery and makes its way to Miami, where Cuban sandwiches are the delicacy.

A small group of diners gather in Tasting Menu at an exclusive Costa Brava restaurant for its last supper, as super-chef Mar (Vicenta N'Dongo) has decided to close at the peak of its success. They include a widowed, impoverished countess (Fionnula Flannagan); a curmudgeon (Stephen Rea) who makes secretive phone calls; a separated couple who booked the dinner reservation at an earlier, happier time, and two Japanese men competing to buy the restaurant. Misunderstandings, confrontations and touching connections play out while they taste delicacies like snail caviar, or sip a margarita inside an aloe vera plant.

When Tasting Menu premiered as the opening-night selection of the Galway (Ireland) Film Festival in July, Gual lamented that -- despite the enticing dishes onscreen -- he and the crew got to eat only sandwiches. But at an intimate dinner created in Manhattan by chef Mario Batali on Wednesday night -- inspired by the film -- the director acknowledged that the cast was luckier: "It's the only film I've directed whose actors were delighted when I asked for another take," he said over a scrumptious first course of Root Vegetable Salad with Foglie di Noce, Bee Pollen Cironette and Tomato Marmellata.


A scene from TASTING MENU. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.


At the Galway Film Festival, Flannagan recalled the shoot as the happiest of her career: "Eating in films is always a horror," she added. "But because each of the little dishes was divinely small, it was intoxicating food. Most of Catalan cooking is magical anyway. And Roger has a sense of humor as well as of the human condition."

Comedy is more central to Chef, an enjoyable ode to food, freedom and Twitter. Favreau plays Carl, a chef whose boss (Dustin Hoffman) forces him to cook old standards, especially when a famed food blogger is about to dine. Carl reluctantly complies and receives a nasty review that throws him into a deep and angry funk.

His 10-year-old son Percy (Emjay Anthony) teaches him to use Twitter, but can't prepare him for the fallout of Carl's vitriolic response to the critic Ramsey (Oliver Platt): what he thought was a personal message goes viral, as does a subsequent video of his verbally attacking Miller.

His ex-wife Inez (Sofia Vergara) encourages him to join her and Percy on a trip home to Miami, where Carl had honed his craft as a chef. In a delightful cameo Robert Downey, Jr. plays Inez's former husband, who gives him a used food truck to start his own business.

Carl gets his mojo back, creating a traveling mobile eatery. (Warning: the mere sight of the increasingly popular Cuban sandwiches that he prepares so lovingly with his son and loyal buddy John Leguizamo may increase your cholesterol, given the generous helpings of ham, cheese and butter on display. Ditto for the deep-fried beignets in New Orleans.)


Emjay Anthony, John Leguizamo, Jon Favreau, and Sofia Vergara in CHEF. Photo Credit: Merrick Morton.

It's no surprise that a filmmaker who has been directing such mainstream crowd-pleasers as Iron Man would make an independent film about a chef chafing at his restaurant boss and wanting to cook with originality and autonomy. Maybe preparing a movie and a meal are not worlds apart: both require skill, passion, the ability to galvanize a staff, and "proof in the pudding"--seeing the recipients of the concoction appreciating it.

The tension is similar too, between 'give them what they want' (which Carl calls being in a creative rut), and invent something unique that might not be embraced by the majority. Both Tasting Menu and Chef succeed in navigating between personal vision and audience expectation, as the characters create dishes that reflect their own juicy emotions.

_____________
Annette Insdorf, Director of Undergraduate Film Studies at Columbia University, is the author of PHILIP KAUFMAN.

I've been thinking about James Franco a lot lately.

Okay, in the wake of his recent controversy, this isn't going to sound great. I was prepared to write this beautiful love letter to James Franco and his quirkiness and his peculiar intelligence. I was so excited to delve into his position as someone who has really reached out to teens through his career by developing films such as As I Lay Dying, or by playing in Of Mice and Men on Broadway. Franco's attention to classic novels, and his uncanny ability to build a solid bridge between this literature and his celebrity persona, has really supplemented my studies in high school. This article was going to probably be the best thing I'd ever written, and as a fellow Huffington Post blogger, I was certain Franco would eyeball it and (hopefully in selfie-form) give me a shoutout on his infamous Instagram account. Then, things got a little weird.

Of course, Franco's Instagram is now infamous for a different reason. After allegedly asking a a 17-year-old to meet him at a hotel room, Franco's sketchy behavior has been posted all over the Internet, a situation in which Franco admits he's "embarrassed." If I could write something eloquent and smart and "mature for her age" about this scandal, I totally would. I just don't know if I can, but I can try to explain why.

For starters, I was vacationing in Florida this past month, so obviously I had a very Spring Breakers-esque mentality going on. More seriously, I was also revisiting Franco's novel, Palo Alto. I had first read it my freshman year of high school, and now, being a senior, I decided to dive back in with a new set of eyes.

Ninth grade wasn't awesome for me. I had gone in really confident that high school was going to be the best time of my life. Obviously, it's not. The ugly truth is this: I've spent a lot of time in high school feeling lonely. I have some amazing friends, and then I have some okay friends, but not everyone has always been there for me. So while there have been parts of my teen life that are like, the best moments of my life, there have also been times where it's like, "Oh, okay. This hurts."

I had grown up as a fan of Spider-Man, so my exposure to James Franco came at an early age. Summer going into high school, I caught Spider-Man on FX or some other channel, and I was seriously hooked. No offense to Tobey Maguire (mainly because he's friends with Leonardo DiCaprio and could be mine one day), but James really stole the show -- his strong jaw, his casual yet guarded demeanor, his nuanced portrayal of Harry Osbourne. As a kid, I hadn't given it much thought -- I loved Spider-Man, so Harry Osbourne was just a sideliner. As a teenager, he was the complete (although emotionally damaged) package.

While other kids were out living the "typical teen life," I was building up my James Franco knowledge. I've been exposed to pieces of entertainment that were new and different for me -- Freaks and Geeks (I still cry over Daniel Desario's "Track 3" speech), James Dean, even the tragically cliché Whatever It Takes. I've watched General Hospital and Howl, definitive signs that my fascination with Franco is intense. I've seen everything from Annapolis to Milk to As I Lay Dying. I saw 127 Hours in the theater three times -- it's one of my all-time favorite films. My favorite short story from Palo Alto, "Jack-O," still gives me chills to read:

I love driving down an empty dark freeway, lit up intermittently by the lights at the side of the road, and when I see the lights, I think of all the little worlds out there, all the little animals living in their habitats out there, and how we could pull over and have an adventure at any one of these forgotten pockets of the world...

Although high school wasn't what I had hoped, I had an ally in James Franco. Yes, his work is often weird, and his lifestyle is unconventional. But in the times that I was at my loneliest, James Franco helped me feel less alone, and that was special. It's strange to say, but through the odd changes and transitions that will undoubtedly occur throughout high school, Franco was almost definitively a constant in my life. I'm grateful.

Even recently, I still find myself stricken by Franco's work, most notably in the field of journalism. Franco recently penned a piece on selfies for the New York Times, in which he asserts that "in this age of too much information at a click of a button, the power to attract viewers amid the sea of things to read and watch is power indeed." While Franco insists that his recent Insta mishap was due to negligence on his behalf, his understanding of the Internet and its power seems to suggest otherwise. Perhaps the theory that Franco's scandal-of-the-week is merely a publicity stunt for the forthcoming Palo Alto film is spot-on, and we've been guiled by Franco's sharp charm.

Of course, I had to see Franco in Of Mice and Men on Broadway. When he walked on stage, my heart instantly dropped. I was taken much in the same way that I experienced an overwhelming emotional connection when seeing Taylor Swift in concert. When you feel passionately about someone or something, it's only natural to feel that passion reignited by their presence. When I saw James Franco, I was reminded that, for being a celebrity, he is human. He probably feels lonely too, maybe more than everyone else, and he channels his emotions through things he loves: art, film, literature, poetry. His face, while handsome, is kind of sad and tired. Maybe that's why I am so moved by him -- his presence is so affected. His face, while handsome, is kind of sad and tired. Maybe that's why I am so moved by him -- his presence is so affected.

In any event, my fascination with James Franco knows no end. He owned up to his weird behavior. While I'm a big fan of James Franco's face, I am more in love with his work and his passions than anything else. I'm in love with the sleazy Daniel Desario, and the overwhelmingly brave Aron Ralston and the crazed Darl Bundren. I'm in love with feeling connected to characters, such as those in Palo Alto, that are so colorfully real.

There's a phenomenon in the art world I like to call the "metamorphosis of crap." It happens in that instant when, after having been initially bored, confused or repelled by a completely artless pile of crap, you stop to read the artist's statement. Now you are in familiar territory. Your art-schooled-MFA brain kicks in, deciphering the elitist, codified language before you. You smile, you get it, and in that moment, the artless pile of crap magically becomes Art. The metamorphosis is complete. You are no longer bored, confused or repelled. You are a wise, self-satisfied cognoscente, dashing off to transform the next artless pile of crap.

Too harsh? Maybe, but artists' statements are a gold mine for someone like me who loves to make fun of the art world. (Note To Self: You should really consider the consequences of biting the hand that feeds you.)

Let's look at the actual process of writing an artist's statement. The two videos below by Jörg Colberg and Charlotte Young, respectively, should take any of the mystery out of it.





Got writer's block? Never fear, anyone can generate their own artist's statement by clicking here. You don't even have to be an artist. Just fill out a form, click a button et voilà, you too can turn crap into art! Here's a paragraph from my generated statement:

" Her paintings demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own 'cannibal' and 'civilized' selves. By studying sign processes, signification and communication, she makes works that can be seen as self-portraits. Sometimes they appear idiosyncratic and quirky, at other times, they seem typical by-products of American superabundance and marketing."

To end my rant, I would like to turn to artist William Powhida and his 2009 polemic, Artists Statement (No One Here Gets Out Alive), (see below) in which he brilliantly sums up what all artists are really trying to say:

"Lacking any other means for social mobility, I have embraced the COMPETITIVE ethos of CAPITALISM and make art to DESTROY my competition so that I can LIVE forever, make MILLION$, drive an expensive EUROPEAN sedan with leather seats, FLY FIRST-CLASS, eat at fucking 5-star restaurants, marry an Italian porn star, design Louis Vuitton handbags, make 3-hour movies with NO PLOT, edition diamond encrusted GOLD dildos, and have a retrospective that TRAVELS THE GLOBE to become the GREATEST ARTIST to EVER exist PERIOD"

Q.E.D.


William Powhida, "Artists Statement (No One Here Gets Out Alive)" (2009), graphite and colored pencil on paper, 18″x15″ (Image courtesy the artist and Charlie James Gallery)

Cross-posted from Jane Chafin's Offramp Gallery Blog

Snow White by Jessie Slipchinsky (@jslipchi)

Disney's female heroines and villainesses stand proudly amongst the most longstanding and beloved fictional characters -- both online and off. Unusually universal in their appeal to children and nostalgic adults alike, these ladies are dreadfully fun to chat about, write about, associate with and of course, draw!


Elsa by Lorhs (@lorshdraws)

To celebrate Disney's fun female characters, Canadian animation student Miranda (aka @snarkies) created a collaborative ode to them, inviting nearly 100 artist friends on Twitter and Tumblr to choose one of their favorite ladies, illustrate her, and send their drawing to Miranda for compilation on one, large, beautiful poster.



Disney Ladies Collab organized by Miranda (@snarkies)

I interviewed Miranda about her experience with this collaboration (aka collab- one of many delightfully-themed artistic endeavors taking place over social media these days) and thoughts on Disney's female heroines. To go back and see how this project unfurled (and admire each artist's individual submission), check out its hashtag on Twitter.


Rapunzel by Geraldine Rodríguez (@GeryRdzArts)

Simone Collins (SC): What inspired you to kick off this collab?

Miranda (M): Collabs have become a big thing on Twitter lately! Seeing so many of them flitting around, I decided to start one of my own! Disney Ladies seemed like a great place to start. I've always been a huge Disney fan and I know a lot of my followers are as well so I thought it would be something fun for everyone to do!


The Bimbettes by Melissa Lyn (@MelissaLyn21)

SC: What makes Disney ladies different from characters from other genres? Have you noticed any common threads amongst them that makes them particularly magical?

M: I was surprised by how many people were interested in contributing! I really didn't expect the signups to fill up within an hour or so! I was also surprised with how quickly everyone finished their pieces and how amazing they turned out! I think the fun really shines through in every drawing.


Perdita by Cheryl Kook (@rollround)

SC: In your opinion, what is the most under-appreciated Disney lady?

M: In my opinion, Giselle is the most under-appreciated Disney lady. She thinks she's got it all figured out -- her animal friends, her new fiancé, her big happy ending... but then her world gets turned upside down and she ends up finding a truer love and becoming the fearless hero of her own story! She wields a sword and saves her man from a dragon! What's not to love? All these reasons are why I chose to draw Giselle for the collab. Plus she has a pretty fantastic wedding dress.


Giselle by Miranda (@snarkies)

SC: Could you tell me a bit more about your background as an artist?

M: I'm currently a fourth year student at Sheridan in Oakville, Canada. I'm taking Animation but I'm hoping to get into visual development!

Moss Hart -- more than fifty years after his death, his name is back up in lights on Broadway with the smash new stage adaptation of his 1959 memoir, Act One, at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre. A Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner, a celebrated playwright and admired director, Hart dazzled the world of show business with his brilliance and innovation.

With George S. Kaufman, Hart was half of one of the most successful comedy-writing teams of the century; there never has been another pair to match the success or enduring popularity of Kaufman and Hart. Moss Hart's brand of wise-cracking, fast-paced humor had its roots in the grimy streets of his immigrant childhood, and it was enriched with the brittle humor of the Roaring Twenties. This talent came to full glory in the grimmest days of the 1930s as Depression gripped America and Fascism swept across Europe.



An evening of Kaufman and Hart was the brightest the Broadway theater had to offer and their impact has been felt ever since -- in television, the movies and on stage. But based on the reviews, James Lapine's adaptation of Act One is in the best Moss Hart tradition.

For three decades, Moss Hart was one of the most familiar names in show business. From his impoverished childhood in the slums of Manhattan and the Bronx, which he described in Act One, he rose to phenomenal fame at the age of 26, with the production of Once in a Lifetime, written with George S. Kaufman. In the next decade, he and Kaufman wrote eight plays, two of which -- You Can't Take It With You and The Man Who Came to Dinner -- are among the most frequently performed works in the American Theater. The Man Who Came to Dinner was a smash hit when it was revived on Broadway in 1999 starring Nathan Lane. You Can't Take It With You, a zany tribute to eccentrics and a devastating broadside against big business, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. Its film adaptation directed by Frank Capra received the Academy Award for best picture of 1938. If Moss Hart had written only those two plays, he would be worthy of our attention today.

But it didn't end there. Before and after he and Kaufman parted professionally in 1941, Hart worked with some of the most creative spirits in show business. He and Irving Berlin collaborated on three shows, including As Thousands Cheer and Face the Music. In 1935, Hart took a cruise around the world with Cole Porter. When they returned, Porter and Hart had written a musical, Jubilee, which introduced the hit songs "Begin the Beguine" and "Just One of Those Things." (In 1998, both Jubilee and As Thousands Cheer were revived in New York.)

On his own, Hart conceived Lady in the Dark (1941), a ground-breaking musical about psychoanalysis, drawing heavily upon his own treatment by two of America's leading therapists. He wrote screenplays for several of Hollywood's most popular films of the post-World War II era, including Gentleman's Agreement (1947), the Academy Award-winning expose of American anti-semitism. Then, in 1956, Hart drew upon all of his skills as a showman to become the principal creative force in the production of the greatest of all musicals, My Fair Lady.

Wealth and fame enabled Moss Hart to enter a world unimaginable to the boy from the Bronx. With Kaufman's introductions, he became a key figure in the legendary Algonquin Round Table set, and his close friends included Alexander Woollcott, Dorothy Parker, Harpo Marx, Edna Ferber, Helen Hayes and the Gershwins.

"Moss Hart!" recalled his agent, Irving "Swifty" Lazar. "[H]e was close to being the god of the theater world. George Kaufman and Maxwell Anderson were right up there, but Hart embodied the glamour, wit, and charm of Broadway at its popular best. In my mind I see him at the center of the circle of Broadway's elite: tall, lean, handsome in an angular way, with a carved wooden pipe in one hand and a cocktail in another, holding forth with an effortless series of witty remarks."

Lazar's vision was precisely the image Moss Hart spent a lifetime creating, consciously seeking to compensate for the poverty of his youth. Along the way he changed his own life story, eliding episodes that delayed the plot, adding a bit of luster to the moments that seemed dull, editing entirely the painful or the embarrassing. Still, Moss Hart carried the dark, brown taste of being poor with him every day of his life, even after he left the hardships of his youth far behind. Understanding the youth is essential to appreciate the man. "Look how it was then," he once advised, "and see how it is now."

The son of immigrant English Jews, Hart's early memories were of an extended family: his parents, his deformed younger brother, Bernard, his mother's father, and his mother's sister, Kate. His father and grandfather scraped out a living rolling cigars in their dark tenement apartments. Until he was ten, Hart's beloved Aunt Kate was the center of his life, and it was she who would introduce this shy, gentle boy to the world of the theater.

"I have a pet theory of my own," Hart wrote in Act One, "that the theater is an inevitable refuge of the unhappy child," enabling him to create a world of his own, a "revolution and a resolution of his unconscious difficulties."

It was Aunt Kate who raised the curtain on that world for young Moss. In later life, upon seeing Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, Hart realized that Blanche Du Bois reminded him of his aunt -- "a touching combination of the sane and the ludicrous, along with some secret splendor within herself." There were more similarities to Blanche than Hart was willing to admit; she also had a far darker side, one that would come to dominate her and ultimately separate her from the boy she loved. But for them both, for a few precious years, the theater was a realm of fantasy, one that Kate shared with a sad and lonely little boy.

Supported by her father and then her brother-in-law, Kate never worked while under the Hart roof. Yet every night, she slipped away to the theater, her tickets and finery underwritten in part by wealthy relations in England, to whom Kate appealed after her father died. When she returned from the theater, she would join her sister and little Moss by the stove in the kitchen and vividly recount every detail. Later, Moss would suggest that in such moments his life was transformed: "Here is how it happened -- here is where the door opened -- this was the turning point."

When Moss was seven, Kate arranged for him to leave school every Thursday afternoon for a matinee at the Alhambra Theater in the Bronx, where he studiously observed many of the great vaudevillians of the day. Then he graduated to Saturday matinees at the Bronx Opera House, where he saw real, albeit second-run plays. And at night, Aunt Kate would grandly depart alone for Broadway, returning to share her accounts with the boy who could never hear enough about the stage.

Two events shook this early pattern in Moss Hart's life. The first was the automation of cigar manufacturing in the early 1900s -- an event that destroyed the cottage industry supporting thousands of people like the Harts in tenements across New York and other major cities. Hart's grandfather died soon after, and Hart's father never really recovered. He tried factory work but wasn't suited for it and later ran newsstands and stationery shops. The family's principal source of income came from boarders.

The second event, even more pivotal, was the fight between Moss's father and Aunt Kate. Her indifference to the Harts' financial plight provoked a disastrous confrontation and her banishment from the household when Moss was ten. Family lore has it that there was more than indifference on Kate's part; she appears to have formed an attachment -- in Blanche Du Bois style -- for her brother-in-law, creating a tension that simply would not do in the Harts' world. For years after, Moss did not see his aunt. In later years, however, she would reappear -- in fact and in fiction.

Nevertheless, Aunt Kate's spirit infuses much of Hart's work, notably his 1938 play, The Fabulous Invalid, written with Kaufman, a cavalcade of the American theater in the early part of the century. One can hear the magical accounts of Aunt Kate through the actors' voices as they describe all the grand theatricals of the century's early years, perhaps in the very words she had used in the Harts' kitchen decades before.

Generally those nights were illuminated by candlelight -- not for romance, but because the Harts could not spare a quarter for the gas meter. Moss and Bernard Hart stumbled to bed in the dark and shivered in the cold. Small wonder a child in such a bleak world would be transported by the tales of a loving aunt with her eye on the footlights.

The sting of poverty didn't end at his parents' front stoop. Moss Hart was 26 before he achieved his first true success on Broadway. He was forced to quit school at thirteen to help support his family. The years in been were remarkable, not because of the Harts' poverty, but because Moss had the vision and the strength to carry on, year after year.

He began this quest even before he left school, with a part-time job in a Bronx music store, which afforded him his first visit to Times Square. He spent two years in a clothing factory and also sold classified ads for the New York Times. Then he landed a job that marked the turning point -- he became the office boy for Augustus Pitou Jr. "King of the One-Night Stands," whose theatrical company traveled from town to town across America in the days before radio, television, or the "talkies." It was for Pitou that Hart wrote his first two plays, produced when the writer was still in his teens. Their failures gave Hart an early taste of defeat, but they also offered him a sense of what might be his if he wrote a play that succeeded.

Hart struggled through the 1920s, spending his summers as a social director at camps and hotels in upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and Vermont and his winters as director of small theatrical groups around New York City. Then, sudden, dazzling success came with the production in 1930 of Once in a Lifetime, which Hart wrote with George S. Kaufman.

Their partnership was uneasy from the beginning. Kaufman was 15 years older, the seasoned veteran of a dozen hits. As theater editor for the New York Times. Kaufman was a formidable force on Broadway. But, as their friends were quick to attest, Kaufman had never met anyone quite like Moss Hart. Young Hart was ambitious and brash, admiring of Kaufman yet envious of his fame and wealth.

Edna Ferber (Kaufman's collaborator on several of hit plays including The Royal Family and Dinner at Eight) recalled the youthful Hart this way:

When I first met Moss Hart, he had just been discovered hidden in the bulrushes. A year later, a tall gangling youth, stunned by his own spectacular success, possessed of an extraordinary zest for life, he had been turned loose on the slippery race track that was Broadway and New York and the world of creative writing. To his amazement, he found himself one of a hardworking, realistic, laughing, talented group made up of people such as George Kaufman, Lillian Hellman, Marc Connelly, Aleck Woollcott, Dorothy Parker, Herbert Swope, Helen Hayes, George Gershwin, and many others. Moss was like a young spindling colt turned out on the track to compete with Seabiscuit and Man O' War. He promptly surged ahead and outdistanced many of them. He was younger than most; much younger than some. For me he was, I suppose, the son I'd never had -- you know, mine son de doctor.

If Ferber became Hart's theatrical mother, surely Kaufman was his father. For all their differences, the two men came to love each other and to depend upon one another's advice and presence, a bond that continued long after their formal collaboration ended.

Both men were haunted by emotional problems. Kaufman's phobias were legendary. He disliked physical contact with others, yet he was known as a great lover (When actress Mary Astor's diary, containing graphic accounts of her amorous relationship with Kaufman, was published in 1935, he had to flee to Hart's home to escape the press and the police.) "George was scary," observed Hart's widow, Kitty Carlisle, many years later. He was intimidating -- to strangers, to waiters, to cab drivers, and to small children. But he was utterly loyal to his close friends, even to his ex-wife. Hart, as we'll see, wrestled with his own internal demons.

Yet, together they banished all gloom to produce some of the stage's funniest plays. Certain scenes from You Can't Take It With You and The Man Who Came to Dinner inevitably bring the house down. From souls in pain, Kaufman and Hart evoked smiles across the faces of Depression-ravaged America -- smiles that have not faded.

In her 1988 autobiography, Kitty Carlisle Hart observed how much success in the theater meant to her husband: "Going to California in our luxurious drawing room on the Twentieth Century Limited, he would look out of the window when we went through the Bronx and scan the tenements looking for his old house. 'There,' he'd say, 'that's where we lived.'"

Other times, standing on a hot summer day in the Harts' swimming pool in Bucks County, built with the money he earned writing Lady in the Dark, his mind would return to his youth:

It's five o'clock. I'm getting into the Subway on Eighteenth Street. So is the rest of New York, and we're all taking the local. The first stop is Twenty-third Street; the second is Twenty-eighth Street." He would name each stop on his way to this destination in the Bronx. Then he would continue his story. "I am trudging home from the subway and my mother is hanging out of an upper window, watching for me. 'What's for dinner, Ma?' I call up. 'Lamb stew.' 'Lamb stew, on a boiling hot night! Well, I think I'll take a shower.' 'No,' my mother answers, 'Mrs. Steinberg had to give her cat a bath and the shower's all stopped up.'

Life in Bucks County was an extension of what Moss and Kitty Hart enjoyed in New York; down the road, George and Beatrice Kaufman had their own estate. "They and Moss shared their guests every weekend," Kitty Hart remembered. "If it was Saturday dinner at the Kaufmanns, it was Sunday lunch at Moss', and the next weekend it would be reversed."

There was nothing rustic about the Hart farmhouse; in 1947, an appraisal of the home listed each room's contents and their value (some $73,000 worth, more than $1 million in today's value, including motion picture equipment in a screening room and four guest rooms named according to the color of their décor -- rose, yellow, green and blue.) Hart believed his guests should be kept busy. Word games, bridge, swimming, croquet and tennis were special favorites. Singers were encouraged to sing, pianists to play. In good times, Moss Hart was at the center of all this, a charming, energetic host.

But Hart's life was not all glittering weekends and boisterous good times. A dark, as-yet-unexplored shadow of duality, shrouded by depression, enveloped this charming and funny man of the theater. As Malcolm Goldstein observed in his 1979 biography of Kaufman:

...[T]he rapidity and depth of the change in [Hart's] way of life proved punishing to his emotions. His adjustment was difficult. To accomplish it he turned to psychoanalysis in 1933 and continued with it for many years...Perhaps of all the uses to which he put his new wealth, this expenditure was the wisest of all, since not only did it make possible the continuation of his career, but eventually the sharing of his life in marriage.

Moss Hart believed in psychoanalysis and had reason to be grateful for it. One of its principle benefits came in 1940 when, with composer Kurt Weill and lyricist Ira Gershwin, Hart wrote and then directed the first (and still the best) musical about the mysteries of the mind, Lady in the Dark, starring Gertrude Lawrence and Danny Kaye.

In the early years of his success, Moss Hart appeared to be a confirmed bachelor. In him, one found a bit of Henry Higgins, the misanthropic hero of My Fair Lady, and even more of Liza Elliott, the troubled heroine of Lady in the Dark, who never could make up her mind, and thus avoided a decision to marry.

But in 1945, that seemed to change. Hart began courting the singer and actress Kitty Carlisle. It was his first serious relationship with a woman.

They had met a decade earlier, in 1935, when she was 26 and he was 31. It was on the set of M-G-M's A Night at the Opera, in which Carlisle was featured with the Marx Brothers. Although Kitty had appeared in several musicals on film and in a hit production of Rio Rita on Broadway, this would be her most famous role, one that secures a special place for her with movie buffs of every age.

Hart had come to Hollywood -- where Kaufman was working on the screenplay of A Night at the Opera -- to look for a leading lady for Jubilee, he musical he and Cole Porter wrote on their round-the-world cruise. Hart and Porter visited the M-G-M set, and Harpo Marx offered to introduce them to Kitty Carlisle.

65 years later, Kitty would recall that she was so excited at the prospect of meeting "two of my heroes," that she ran across the sound stage: "A movie set is one big booby trap, with electrical boxes, plugs and coils of wire all over the floor. I tripped over one of them and fell flat at Moss's feet."

When they married in 1946, Kitty wrote that Hart "finally set me firmly on my feet."

To friends, however, it seemed as though the warm, generous Kitty Carlisle had planted the frenetic, troubled Moss Hart firmly on his feet.

Many wondered about the marriage, and for years questions have been raised about Hart's sexuality. Interviews by this author of both Robert Goulet, the actor, and Dr. Glen Bowles, a New York psychologist who claimed to have been Hart's lover in the late 1930s, revealed a deeply troubled playwright. Steven Bach's biography, Dazzler, attempted to explore this topic, but kept running into Kitty Carlislie's roadblocks. Hart himself wrote that in the years before his marriage, he was utterly consumed with work and the desire to escape poverty. Inevitably, his years of psychoanalysis and bachelorhood would fuel questions about his life and loves.

Until Kitty Carlisle, Hart seemed satisfied with solo housekeeping in a Manhattan pied-a-terre and in an 18th Century farmhouse in Bucks County. No woman had been able to enter his private life. Perhaps he was unable to find a woman with whom he could share his sense of style and his passion for work in the theater. Kitty Carlisle did.

Indeed, no one was quite like Kitty Carlisle. In many ways, her story is as fascinating as Moss Hart's. Shrewd, beautiful and talented, she attracted suitors as diverse as the financier Bernard Baruch, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis, George Gershwin and former New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey.

Kitty's mother, Hortense Conn, was an ambitious doctor's widow from Louisiana who took her only child abroad as a teenager in search of a royal alliance. That failed, but young Kitty's vocal training positioned her for a career in theater and the movies. Still unmarried in 1945, Kitty viewed the 41-year-old Hart as almost precisely the kind of man her mother had groomed her for. They wed in August 1946, and spent their honeymoon acting together in The Man Who Came to Dinner at the Bucks County Playhouse. "I had married my prince -- not of the blood, but of the theater," Carlisle concluded.

They lived together as theatrical royalty, sharing a fabulous 15-room apartment on Park Avenue, a summer house in Beach Haven, New Jersey, the farm in Bucks County, and in rented homes in Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and Palm Springs. The sensible Kitty Carlisle, who had memories of living from suitcases in hotel rooms, understood the demons that fought within her husband. Instinctively, she seemed to know how to bring out his best, and the rest she learned to accept.

She called him "Mossie." He called her "La Divina." Theirs was a charmed world of literary, theatrical, and political titans: publisher Bennett Cerf, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Lawrence, Katharine Cornell, the Lunts, Irene Mayer Selznick, Adlai E. Stevenson, producer Arthur Hornblow and his wife, Leonora. The Harts' world was culturally the most sophisticated America could offer at mid-century, with the theater its centerpiece.

Some who had only vague knowledge of his origins were puzzled, even irritated, at Hart's taste for luxury. Cartier's was his second home. His wardrobe was filled with hundreds of pairs of shoes, elegantly tailored suits, and fur-lined topcoats. He so thoroughly draped his body with jewelry that Kaufman, a man of far simpler tastes, once dryly greeted him: "Hi-yo, Platinum."

Edna Ferber wrote of Hart's love of luxury: "He is monogrammed in the most improbable places. Just as he stands he is worth his weight in monogrammed gold bouillon; gold gallus-buckles, gold belt buckle, gold garters, gold and seal billfold, gold pencil, gold pen, gold and platinum cigarette case, gold bottle stoppers."

Hart found comfort in his possessions. These were tangible signs that he had made it, like the wad of cash he had picked up at the box office of the Music Box Theater the morning after Once in a Lifetime opened. And as long as he was single, and as long as the money from his big hits with Kaufman kept rolling n, his obsessive shopping posed no real problems.

But by the early 1950s, when he was married and supporting two young children (Christopher, born in 1948, and Catherine, born in 1950), the strain of several expensive homes, servants, travel, and entertaining began to threaten his security. At one point he was so distressed about money that he sold his personal papers to the Wisconsin State Historical Society for $60,000. Near the end of her long life, Kitty Hart still seethed over the sale -- about which he didn't consult her, even though he included some of her papers as well. With his family he traveled to Hollywood to write for films. Hart suffered three heart attacks between 1954 and his death in 1961. Were these crises brought on by economic stress? Could modern procedures -- notably the cardio bypass operation -- have added decades to the playwright's life?

All of his life, however, Hart delighted in a theatricality that was never limited to the stage. "When he went into a restaurant," his wife remembered, "He didn't just walk in; he made an entrance, his overcoat on his shoulders like a cloak; he looked like a great actor, and every head turned."

Kitty Hart carried on her husband's theatrical sense long after he died. On the television game show To Tell the Truth, she would make a grand entrance on every episode, beaming her best New Orleans-belle smile, draped in diamonds, feathers and furs. As chairman of the New York State Council on the Arts, she infused the organization with style because she had it. She learned much of it from Moss Hart.

After World War II, Hart entered a new and fertile period of creativity. Increasingly he devoted his energy to directing. (The last play he wrote, The Climate of Eden, which opened in 1952, was a failure.) Two of the musicals he staged were by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe -- My Fair Lady in 1956, for which Hart won the Tony Award, and Camelot in 1960. These stand as landmarks of the Broadway musical at its peak.

In the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, Hart made periodic sojourns to the West Coast, where he wrote the screenplays for such classic movies as Gentleman's Agreement, Hollywood's most powerful statement against anti-semitism; Hans Christian Andersen, which starred Danny Kaye as the beloved Danish storyteller, and A Star Is Born, Judy Garland's last great musical film.

Moss Hart's interests included work in politics and on behalf of his profession. He bravely spoke out against McCarthyism at a time when few of his peers dared. Of course, everyone knew he was patriotic: His contributions to the war effort included a hit show, Winged Victory (1943), which made more than a million dollars for the Army Air Forces relief fund. For ten years he served as president of the Dramatists' Guild, emerging as a visible and effective spokesman for the playwright's profession. Near the end of his life, he published a memoir that graced the New York Times best-seller list for 41 weeks, and became a film starring Jason Robards and George Hamilton, produced by his old friend, Dore Schary.

Moss Hart's unexpected death at 57 on December 21, 1961, was front-page news around the world. And though he was gone from the scene, the plays and films he created have remained to entertain, consistently, ever since. Now, with Act One on stage, he's back on Broadway in a big way.

As spring again sputters into being and we witness another revolution of the life/death/life cycle, a recently installed artwork in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden stands as a marker of this type of transition. In tandem with the hourly chiming of bells at the Basilica of St. Mary across the street, Kris Martin's lone, bronze bell -- at the center of his sculpture For Whom... (2012) -- swings soundlessly, a wordless meditation on time's passage. Taking its name from John Donne's famous poem of 1623, the work is emblematic of the kind of meaning-of-life questions Martin ponders through many of his other works, from a human medical specimen buried in an unmarked grave on the Walker campus to a new piece in which he wrote the word "Somebody" on a piece of paper using only his finger and human cremation ashes. During a recent conversation -- first published on the Walker Art Center homepage -- the Belgian artist met me in the garden to discuss the strategies he uses in his art -- including humor, absence, and shock (or the lack thereof) -- as well as a favorite film, fittingly, Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.

Paul Schmelzer: One thing I'm struck by in your work is the element of absence. For Whom ... is a bell without a clapper. In Anonymous II, there's a body but no tombstone. In All Saints, you feature empty glass bell jars but no saints. Something is often missing or removed, which creates a gap. This idea of what we're not seeing reminds me, on one hand, of the Nicene creed in Catholicism -- "We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and Earth, and of all that is seen and unseen" -- and of Duchamp, on the other, who is attributed as saying, "It's not what you see that's art. Art is the gap."

Kris Martin: Exactly. The gap is essential in two ways. First of all, visually. When you lack something, it's part of the invitation. You can complete the image with your imagination. And secondly, the gap is also important to make space for your reflection and for your imagination. I try to give viewers an active role in the confrontation with my work without feeling forced, so they can just get active by looking or by thinking about it.

Schmelzer: In an interview with art, Das Kunstmagazin (May 2009), you discussed this open-endedness:

The more you want to tell, the less you should reveal. If, for instance, I came into the bar here and called out, 'please pay attention, my grandfather has just died,' then people would think 'poor guy' and after a moment or two they'd go back to their talking. But if I came in and cried out 'death!' it would have a much stronger effect.

By shouting "Death!" -- it changes the dynamic.

Martin: Well, they'd still think I'm a weirdo, but they can't help thinking, even for a split second, about death in a personal way. That's the reason, for instance, why I have such a big admiration for an artist like Félix González-Torres, because more than anybody else he was able to lift a very personal story, a very intimate story, which is by definition trivial, to the world. It's horrible, but that's normal. We are eight billion, so your personal story is completely trivial unless it's affecting a lot of lives, like some politicians or dictators can do.

That's the big question: how can you elevate this personal story, this trivial story, to a universal level? It's by shutting up -- and time. The best example is the billboard Felix made after his partner died from AIDS, the billboards with the empty bed in New York ("Untitled," 1991) -- it yells very loudly without sound. Actually, that was a big inspiration for the bell, because in your imagination the sound is amplified. It's only in your mind. It's in your head that it's happening, but there is no noise. It can be seen as a deduction. I might admit that this has been a huge inspiration for me. But nothing is more intimate than your bed, and then you make a picture of it and you make huge billboards. But nobody feels forced to look into your private life. You just show it and people are passing by without paying attention.

Schmelzer: When you talked about the global insignificance of an individual's death, that's tied in with the name of this work, For Whom..., from John Donne's Meditation XVII of 1623, which presents the idea of inter-connectedness:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

So, yes, one death might be insignificant, but at the same time it's significant in that it's related to this higher interconnected web of humanity that spans through time and space.

Martin: Yes. For that reason, I'm also very happy that this work is here [outdoors, in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden], because when making works for a public space I tend to think in a different way. It's totally different than making your stuff for somebody who likes it. You don't need to be a specialist to connect with this piece. Many visitors to the park are maybe totally not into art, but I know, just by having shown this very bell for a year in three public spaces that people connect very easily to it, because a bell is sounding during people's most important stages of life. They are tolling when somebody's born, and they are tolling when somebody dies.

Schmelzer: For Whom ... is situated a few hundred yards from your work Anonymous II, a human skeleton buried on the Walker hillside with no grave marker. I was curious about the "conversation" between those two works.
Martin

They are connected, of course. Maybe you could say that this very bell is tolling for the anonymous guy everybody has forgotten. It's also about existence. Everybody's trying to put a stamp on life or on the world, like "Kilroy Was Here." Even the stupid tag of a tagger is dealing with the same problematic. Like, somebody makes an unforgettable recipe for upside-down apple cake, like Madame Tatin back in the 19th century, and becomes immortalized through cake. Another one makes children. Another one makes art. So I don't feel special in trying to do that. It's not unique. I don't have the privilege or the monopoly in trying to put a stamp on life. It's human to try to do that.

It's a way of fighting against mortality. Although you know that you will lose the fight, there are only two options. You get cynical, or you try to use your time doing something that could mean something to somebody else, that makes other people happy. You know that you will lose the fight. That's the reason why I made this bomb [100 Years, 2004] that will explode in 91 years.

Schmelzer: So, it's really a bomb?

Martin: Yes. A bomb is made to harm people, so this bomb is absolutely harmless. I don't have enemies -- none that I know of, at least -- but my biggest enemy is mortality. When I made that piece, back in 2004, I was absolutely convinced that nobody would ever know me in 100 years' time. So going out from the fact that I would be completely forgotten, 10 bombs explode suddenly indicating, hey, Martin was there at some point back in time -- which is absolutely silly. I wanted it to be something of a caricature, something comical.

A very important aspect of my work is a small percentage of wits, something stupid, something idiotic. It makes it edible. It makes it digestible. And it's also me. It's funny, sometimes the most cruel happenings in the history of mankind make the best jokes. Is it tasteless? Maybe. But if you think twice, it's only humor that can make you survive. Otherwise you can't cope with it. If it's too big, you have to start laughing.

Schmelzer: Do you think there's humor in these works? A bell without a clapper?

Martin: Somehow -- well, I don't know. Everybody has his own concept about humor. Maybe it's a bad joke in the eyes of some people, and maybe it has something slightly humorous in my story, but I leave it open. I won't say, "Hey, this is a good joke." It's not even intended as a joke, but let's say wit is a very important motive throughout my work. When it's getting too serious, I insert a bit of humor to create a balance. I don't take myself seriously so why would I ever take my work seriously?

Schmelzer: You're currently working on a piece called Somebody. Can you tell me about it?

Martin: Oh yeah! For more than a year I've been thinking should I do it or shouldn't I? But in the end I said, OK, yes, because it's definitely -- politically and ethically -- incorrect. In a way, I'm old-fashioned: I think that an artist shouldn't be correct. But on the other hand, I really try to avoid trying to shock people, to harm people, to make them feel bad. So I think it's not tasteless.

What I've done, simply: My gallery assistant has been searching for human ashes for a year, and it's resulted in five urns filled with the ashes of five people. And on a big sheet of paper, I've written the word "somebody" with my fingers using the ashes of somebody. They are all anonymous, even for me. I have no idea who they are -- or were. It results in a document. And just as you see art that's made from oil on canvas, this is somebody on paper, literally.

To burn something to obtain a pigment is something very old, as old as mankind, like charcoal. You have to burn -- you have to destroy the tree, or at least a part of the tree -- to obtain the charcoal.

"Somebody" is also a little jeu de mots, a play with words. It's a little matter, a little part of a body. Although people call my work conceptual, it ends up with matter. Only matter can carry the thought or the meaning -- longer than I ever will be able to. Whether people call my work conceptual or not, I don't care. In the end I come up with an image, and I wanted to make these images on paper and not on canvas because it's a document. It's a real document. It's somebody on paper. We're all somebody on paper.

But people hate me for it. But I know with my heart, I dare say, that I didn't want to shock anybody, and it's definitely also not shocking. Imagine if I'd painted a skeleton blue and let it turn on the ceiling in the museum, people would say, "Oh yes, blue skeleton, Kris Martin: no big deal." But just writing the word with ashes is shocking to people, and I'm very happy. You know why? Because people have imagination. So I have triggered their imagination, which I wouldn't have done with the actual bone and with the face of death. Had I used the skull, the face of death, it wouldn't have shocked anybody.

Schmelzer: It reminds me of your Edelweiss piece, which of course is not shocking, because it's the work's title written in the ash of burnt flowers.

Martin: No, but it comes through the same -- the death of the flower is the condition to write the word, which makes the flower immortal, in a way. Same with the forgotten person. Those people are anonymous and their ashes, nobody has ever taken care of them. There is no monument, there is no tomb, so there's nothing.

Schmelzer: How did you acquire the ashes?

Martin: I have no idea, and I don't want to know. For me, it was just functional. I needed the material to make the piece, so I made a total abstraction myself, but it was no fun doing it because I can guarantee you when you are actually going in the urn with your fingers and you are making this piece with the ashes -- it's not the nicest job I've ever done.

Schmelzer: So you didn't use an implement, a paint brush, say. You worked skin to ash? It's rather archetypal.

Martin: Yes, I rubbed it on paper. And then you see that all those people have different colors. There was a brown one, there was a light gray one, one is almost black. The individuality is still radiating through the ashes. It's just strange.

Schmelzer: A moment ago you were talking about the skeleton painted blue and spinning from the ceiling: I'm curious of what your thoughts are about spectacle in art, because there's a scale with For Whom ... and a sort of a spectacular nature of the skeleton in Anonymous II, but they don't come across as using spectacle as a device.

Martin: Maybe it's spectacular to know about the skeleton, but I didn't want to make a spectacle with it. Yes, I'm using the skeleton to make a piece, but I think, hopefully, in a very respectful way. Again, with this piece, people were very shocked. But how far have we come that people are shocked by the most common act of respect -- burying human remains? It's happening now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, all over the world. The thing that makes it awkward is simply: it was somebody, so it was pure subject. It was a person. Then the person dies and his skeleton is brought from Asia to a doctor's practice, and it's just a didactic model: "Here, my lady, your arm is broken here and here and here." It's pure object, and then by burying it again, it reminds us of a human person, of somebody, and it turns immediately into subject again. That's maybe the awkward aspect of the piece, to take it out of objectivity and to bring it back to the emotional.

Schmelzer: But it's interesting that anonymity is monumentality, in a certain way. You chose not to erect a tombstone that says, "Here lies anonymous," which is, again, that sort of subtraction or absence.

Martin: It's also inspired by the very beautiful story of the book of Augustinus and one of the books he wrote called What Can We Do For The Dead? It's a very interesting question.

It's a letter he's writing to a monk, a friend of his in a monastery far away. We are taking care of people, he asks, but what can we do for the dead? And it's a very interesting question because at first sight you would say, "Nothing, of course." So it's also the illusion of doing a favor for somebody, you know? When I would be totally forgotten and I would have been a didactic model, an object in a doctor's practice, and they put me here in a beautiful garden in a museum environment -- it's fantastic. Normally, when I die I will end up in a very crappy, ugly cemetery.

Schmelzer: With a bunch of other dead people.

Martin: Yeah! Like an ugly little suburb. So it's a privilege, although nobody can enjoy it.

Schmelzer: Of course, in the summertime the Walker hillside is activated by a big rock concert, as well as other events. People are dancing on top of the body, dancing on the grave, and it's not a desecration necessarily?

Martin: No, but here it's America. It's different of course, but take every old European city -- you are walking on a graveyard. Under my house there are skeletons, hundreds, because the city has been existing for more than a thousand years. So it's a stratification of life and death.

There's an expression in Dutch; if you would translate it literally, "He's a rich stinker." And you know why? Back in medieval times, the richest family could afford to bury their relatives in the church, but it was just under the pavement so in summertime it started smelling, and from there comes the expression the "rich stinker."

Schmelzer: Wow. [laughs] Speaking of churches, tell me about the history of the bell in For Whom .... I understand it was made for a church in Germany?

Martin: It has a funny story, because it was cast to be inserted in a church tower, but it was too big. They made a mistake. And I bought it. It also mentions the year 2000. It's the last bell before the new millennium, and it was the year in which I started my practice, so there's a small autobiographical aspect.

Schmelzer: Since your work often ponders themes like existence and death and time, I wonder: Is there an autobiographical element here as well? Did you have a big loss in your life or are you pondering your own mortality? Or is it simply that these are the questions we all can't help but address?

Martin: Both. I'm 40, and the longer you live the more risk there is that you are, on a blue Monday, confronted with death in your inner circle, and it makes you reflect. You cannot help it. You cannot avoid the biggest question in life -- the meaning of it -- to start.

I'm still fond of this opening scene of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. It's fish in an aquarium and they have very bad memory. They are swimming in different directions and when they encounter another fish they say, "Morning!", "Morning.", "Morning!", "Morning." So that's like humanity in an aquarium. It's all different stories in a very small aquarium. That's the most hilarious scene of all. I was crying laughing. You see? We're all goldfish.

For more original arts coverage visit walkerart.org.

Paula Abdul, Lori Milken, Jane Seymour Photo Credit: Brian Lindensmith/ All Access Photos


Recently, the LA Ballet honored Lori Milken, Paula Abdul and Jane Seymour with a gala at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.



Jane Seymour Photo Credit: Brian Lindensmith/All Access Photos


It was a beautiful evening filled with dinner, cocktails and dancing. The Los Angeles Ballet entertained guests with a performance of "Stars and Stripes".

The evening not only honored Milken, Abdul and Seymour, but also helped raise money for the LA Ballet.



Paula Abdul & Nigel Lithgoe - Photo Credit: Brian Lindensmith/All Access Photos

Mark Innerst's recent paintings of New York City fuse the artist's sense of awe with his confident ability to improvise and invent. Innerst's midtown cityscapes and Hudson panoramas use geometry as a scaffolding that allows his considerable skills as a colorist to render the city as impossibly beautiful, gleaming and sleek.

I recently spoke to Mark Innerst to ask him a few choice questions about his work and his background.

John Seed Interviews Mark Innerst



Mark Innerst

Tell me briefly about your background and education. I understand that as an undergraduate in Pennsylvania you were mainly interested in printmaking.

Kutztown State College ( now a university) provided me with professors and courses of a great variety. From "Old Master Drawing Materials" to a visiting artist program including Vito Acconci, John Cage and many others. I did independent study in printmaking as well as life drawing. An internship program took me to NYC in my final semester and there I stayed.



Estuary, 2013
Oil on board in the artist's handmade frame
12 x 24 inches (board); 18 x 30 inches (frame)


For years you mainly worked in acrylic and have been transitioning to oil. How and why did that come about?

I worked in acrylic for many years. The introduction of fluid acrylics was what got me started. To be able indulge in rich transparent glazes, pure intense colors, that dried overnight was exciting. At some point I found I had the patience for the drying time of oils and that I didn't need to be so indulgent in that glazing and now find myself very comfortable with oils.



Horizontal Gold Cityscape, 2014
Oil on panel in the artist's handmade frame
16 x 20 inches (panel); 22 3/4 x 26 3/4 inches (frame)


How did your "Midtown" series first develop?

The Midtown subject came to me as I was packing for our yearly rental in Florida. I wanted a compact focused project to take along. That view of those particular buildings was something I'd done once before but now seemed like something worth exploring further. I was in the mood to be neat and make nice straight edges that didn't have to be corrected.

Usually I begin things in a much more gestural painterly way. I thought I'd come back from vacation with three finished paintings. Instead, they took much longer to complete and all those edges did have to be repainted any number of times. Once home making larger versions seemed natural and it did become a sort of series.



Industrial Landscape with Rain, 2014
Oil on panel in the artist's handmade frame
18 x 36 inches (panel); 25 1/4 x 43 inches (frame)

How do you keep your work so fresh?

When you ask how I keep things fresh I'm tempted to resist because it's such a compliment. It might be that I've moved around quite a bit and the world around me is new, and generally speaking the world around me is what I paint.



Market Street, 2014
Oil on canvas in the artist's handmade frame
30 x 30 inches (canvas); 38 1/2 x 38 1/2 inches (frame)

Have you always made your own frames? Tell me a bit about how they are made...

Frames. Well before NY I was infatuated with frames. Whether at a museum or a junk shop they would take my attention. I just like them and they do in fact protect the painting and allow one to handle it, which I think is appealing. I was an art handler myself early on, in a gallery setting, and I saw how easily damage can happen. I began making my own frames half out of necessity and half out of pleasure.



Midtown, 2013
Oil on board in the artist's handmade frame
36 x 14 inches (board); 42 x 19 1/2 inches (frame)

The buildings in the "Midtown" series move towards abstraction and linearity. Is that your way of idealizing the city, or it is simply an attractive direction to take with your work?

That particular row of buildings in midtown is simply that linear. They've stood out in my mind ever since my first trip to the city many years ago. At first they struck me as imposing and a little ominous, but now appear harmonious and graceful. Over the years I've seen a pattern where my subjects, through repetition, evolve and become simplified and more abstract. In this case it's a more faithful and straight forward portrayal. After some years of post modernist architecture, it was interesting to reflect on this landscape of modernist principled architecture.


Mark Innerst
Apr 24 - May 31, 2014
Opening Reception, April 24 6-8 PM
D C Moore Gallery
535 West 22nd Street, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10011

"A mis doce años de edad estuve a punto de ser atropellado por una bicicleta. Un señor cura que pasaba me salvó con un grito: ¡Cuidado! El ciclista cayó a tierra. El señor cura, sin detenerse, me dijo: ¿Ya vio lo que es el poder de la palabra? Ese día lo supe. Ahora sabemos, además, que los mayas lo sabían desde los tiempos de Cristo, y con tanto rigor, que tenían un dios especial para las palabras."



The above quote is from the legendary Colombian Nobel prize-winning author, Gabriel García Márquez, who passed away this week. Translated loosely, he recalls how at 12 years old, while almost being hit by a car while on his bicycle, a priest was able to prevent the accident with only words. At that precise moment, Gabriel García Márquez details, he knew that there was a special god for words.

The world lost one of our greatest writers, Gabriel García Márquez, and I feel the loss of one of the most significant influences in my life. Discovering Señor Márquez during a freshman Spanish Literature class in college can only be explained as suddenly understanding a new language. I had never read anything before that was written in such soul striking introspective truth as what Señor Márquez wrote in his novel 100 Years of Solitude, and I haven't felt such emotion with a book since. It was impossible to not myself feel as naked and exposed as what his writing showed me of love and its lies, and miracles from the least likeliest of places.

Being a Colombian, I grew up hearing of Márquez's writing. To say Colombians consider him to be their greatest literary figure is not an understatement. But it wasn't until I read his work for myself, that I owned the religion of Señor Marquez, rather than just inheriting it. My freshman class had been assigned to read 100 Years of Solitude and as I turned page after page, unable to put the 400 page novel down, this author told me that I was a writer before I knew it myself. His words brought me to tears with the pain of recognition, and I clutched my chest as his truths on the tragedy and comedy of life spared no vulnerability. As I followed the seven generations of the Buendia family, it was in the honesty of their lives that I came to understand the term so often used when describing Marquez' work, "magic realism," the extraordinary of the ordinary, in all of our lives." I only knew it as his masterful ability to transport me into another world that felt as much alive as my own, to a place where lines blurred between questioning possibility and choosing to accept it.

To lose the voice of Gabriel García Márquez is a rift that I feel in my world. There is a sadness when the giants fall. He had a mysticism to his writing, going realms beyond novelist to entrancing storyteller. I am a skeptic of pre-determined fate, but I remember the moment I surrendered and let him prove me wrong. It was there, in his novel's pages when I read these words, "He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words," that I believed Señor Marquez was created to put his words to paper. The exquisite way in which he wrote of life, deceit, forgiveness, and grace, gives testament to the most searing words of his that I have put to memory. On the very last page of 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez illuminates life and its labors for us, "... we have no second opportunity on earth." He spent his time on earth doing exactly that for which he was meant.

I hope that in his death, many are moved to discover the wonder and the reason for our heavy hearts as we mourn the loss of a brilliant storyteller.

Photo credit: Sebástian Freire via photopin cc

Anna Russell used to say that "The best thing about opera is that you can say and do absolutely anything -- as long as you sing it!" And, in all honesty, the operatic repertoire is riddled with thrillingly melodramatic depictions of suicide:

• A beloved singer jumps off the parapet of Rome's historic Castel Sant'Angelo in Puccini's Tosca.


• A soldier drowns himself after killing his wife in Berg's Wozzeck.


• A procession of nuns climbs the steps to a guillotine in Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites.


• A depressed young poet suffering from unrequited love shoots himself in Massenet's Werther.


• A Druid priestess burns to death in sacrificial flames at the end of Bellini's Norma.


• A grieving groom stabs himself to death upon hearing of his bride's sudden demise in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor.

• An infatuated young woman throws herself off a cliff in Wagner's The Flying Dutchman.


• An impassioned teenager poisons himself after discovering the seemingly dead body of his girlfriend in a tomb in Gounod's Romeo et Juliette.


• Having been driven mad by the erratic behavior of her intended, Ophelia drowns herself in Thomas's Hamlet.


• A jealous and humiliated military hero stabs himself to death after strangling his wife in Verdi's Otello.


• The cunning Queen of ancient Egypt clasps a venomous snake to her breast in Barber's Antony and Cleopatra.


• An outcast takes his fishing boat out to sea and sinks it in Britten's Peter Grimes.


• A young Japanese mother who has given up her child commits hara-kiri in Puccini's Madama Butterfly.

"Let him die with honor who cannot live with honor," sings Cio-Cio-San. But when someone commits suicide in a contemporary drama, the decedent's unexpected (and often incomprehensible) death leaves an aching wound for the surviving family members. Parents keep wondering what caused their child to kill himself. Spouses and siblings lose sleep trying to think if there was anything they could have done to prevent an aggrieved woman from taking her own life.

Depression is a mental disorder which can sap a person's desire, twist his logic, and isolate him from those who might be able to help. Ann Brenoff's recent article entitled Depression, A Kitchen Knife, and Phil Hoffman offers a heart-rending example of how someone can fall down a rabbit hole and end up in the depths of despair with little hope of climbing back to the surface.

Two recent Bay Area productions included characters whose lives were haunted by the suicide of their son. The ghost of one son appears onstage; the other is never seen. How the various members of each community responded to an untimely death of someone they had known and loved provides key twists to the plot of each drama. By sheer coincidence, both plays are set in suburbs of Chicago.

* * * * * * * * * *

In 2011, when American Conservatory Theater presented the West Coast premiere of Clybourne Park, much of the attention focused on the piece of real estate which sits at the core of Bruce Norris's dramedy. Inspired by Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 hit, A Raisin in the Sun, the play's two acts are separated by 50 years but take place in the same living room.

Directed by Michael Butler, Center Rep's new production of Clybourne Park offered Bay area audiences a second chance to examine the effects of racism, gentrification, and generational shifts as depicted by the award-winning playwright.

The first act takes place in 1959, in the home of Russ (Richard Howard) and Bev (Lynda DiVito), an aggrieved middle-aged couple -- living in an all-white suburb of Chicago -- whose son hung himself in his bedroom after returning home from the Korean War. The couple has struggled to cope with the lack of support Kenneth (Timothy Redmond) received from a community in which no one would hire a veteran who confessed to having killed people during his wartime service. Nor has Russ been able to tolerate the idiotic platitudes he keeps hearing from their affable but useless priest.




Richard Howard (Russ) and Lynda DiVito (Bev) in Act I of
Clybourne Park (Photo by: Alessandra Mello)


Much of the drama in Act I revolves around the revelation that the couple has sold their home to the Youngers, an African American family. One of their acquaintances from the neighborhood association, Karl Lindner (Craig Marker), is a clueless racist with a deaf and very pregnant wife (Kendra Lee Oberhauser). Karl attempts to question Bev's maid, Francine (Velina Brown) and her husband, Albert (Adrian N. Roberts), about whether they would feel out of place moving into an all-white neighborhood.




Velina Brown as Francine (Act I) and Lena (Act II) in
Clybourne Park (Photo by: Alessandra Mello)


The second act takes place 50 years later, as another wave of gentrification is threatening Clybourne Park. This time, the clueless Steve (Craig Marker) and his pregnant wife Lindsey (Kendra Lee Oberhauser) want to make physical alterations to the home they've just purchased. However, Lena Younger's great granddaughter (Velina Brown) -- who has been named after the domestic worker who purchased the house in Act I -- worries about how their architectural plans will change the face of the neighborhood.




J.B. Wilson's set designs for Act I (bottom) and Act II (top)
of Clybourne Park (Photo by: Lyle Barrer)


I always find it fascinating to see how second or third viewings of a drama can change one's perceptions of the piece. When I first saw Clybourne Park, one of the key impressions was how much trivia people were obsessed with knowing despite the fact that it left them clueless about the larger picture ("If you're so smart, how come you're so stupid?").

Seeing the play again in Walnut Creek left a different impression, largely because of Craig Marker's powerful portrayals of two clueless, arrogant fools whose assumption of white male privilege prevents them from having the good sense to shut their stupid mouths before making a bad situation worse. With the second act set in 2009 (with cell phones being used by most of the characters), it quickly becomes obvious that not one of these people is capable of -- or interested in -- listening to anyone else's issues. Gentrification has come loaded with the rampant narcissism and bloated sense of self-importance the Gen-X and Gen-Y crowds bring to the table.




Kendra Lee Oberhauser (Lindsey) and Craig Marker (Steve)
in Act II of Clybourne Park (Photo by: Alessandra Mello)


When Lena mentions that the reason that her great grandmother was able to purchase the home at less than market value might have been the circumstances surrounding Kenneth's death, Lindsey freaks out at the thought of raising a child in a house where someone committed suicide (even if the traumatic event happened 50 years ago).

While Norris's script gives audiences plenty of food for thought with regard to racism and gentrification, Kenneth's suicide claims center stage during the play's poignant final moments as a plumber (Richard Howard) forces open a foot locker containing Kenneth's belongings that Russ and Bev had buried under the crape myrtle tree in the back yard before moving to their new home.

Because Clybourne Park double casts actors as characters separated by five decades, it requires some strong ensemble work in order for both sets of characters to shine. Lynda DiVito had some strong moments as the vulnerable Bev in Act I which contrasted with her tough real estate attorney in Act II. Richard Howard delivered two widely disparate characters: the grieving Russ in Act I and the loudmouth plumber in Act II.




Richard Howard portrays the grieving Russ in 1959 and Dan the
plumber in 2009 in Clybourne Park (Photo by: Alessandra Mello).


Adrian N. Roberts had some delicious moments as Albert (Act I) and Alfred (Act II) with Velina Brown appearing as his two wives. Although Kendra Lee Oberhauser handled two different pregnancies with comic flair, Timothy Redmond was the only member of the cast to appear in three roles (as the friendly priest in 1959, as a gay member of the neighborhood association in 2009, and as the ghost of the suicidal Kenneth). Here's the trailer:





* * * * * * * * * *


Shortly after being suspended from school by his teacher, a young teen named Gidion commits suicide. Because the Aurora Theatre Company asked critics not to divulge any of the personal secrets or plot twists in Gidion's Knot (an exquisitely crafted suspense drama by Johnna Adams), I'm going to tiptoe my way through this review as gingerly as possible. Let me strongly recommend, however, that you make time to read Soraya Chemaly's provocative article entitled "Why Are So Many Boys Leaving High School Thinking Rape Is Funny?" and think about how it applies -- not just to high school and college students -- but to an extremely precocious fifth grader.

The action takes place in what (up until very recently) had been Gidion's classroom as his teacher, Heather Clark (Stacy Ross), sits grading papers while waiting for a parent-teacher conference. When there is finally a knock on the classroom door, it's the last person Heather was expecting to see: Gidion's mother.





Although she hasn't slept in 72 hours, Corryn Fell (Jamie Jones) is nowhere as distraught as one might expect. While she's twitchy, defensive, and demanding answers about what led to her son's suspension, her aggressive behavior demonstrates the unconditional love this divorced mother (who teaches epic Gaelic poetry at a nearby university) has for a son who was just beginning to show some creative writing talent before he took his own life.





The question of whether Gidion's essay should be regarded as a warning sign or an indication of budding talent had special resonance for me. When I was a student at Midwood High School, I had a job manning the PBX 507B cordless switchboard in the main office during my lunch period.



A PBX 507B cordless switchboard


One of the creative writing assignments from my English teacher was to write a character study of someone in our daily lives. I dutifully drafted a less than flattering portrait of the Principal's secretary. Because my father also taught at Midwood, my English teacher showed him the essay out of concern that I might be headed for trouble (he was happy to make sure it went no further).

Back in the early 1960s, girls were supposed to be interested in things like poetry, literature, and art history. Because my father taught biology, I was being guided down a math and science track. Many years later, when I was attempting to earn a living as a freelance writer, I looked back on that incident and realized that no one ever saw that essay as an indication that I should work on developing my writing skills.

The action in Gidion's Knot takes place in a middle school classroom in which a clock is running in real time. With 20 movable desks designed for small people, Nina Ball's unit set has the kind of cozy ambiance which would encourage children to participate in group activities.

Alas, sometimes "sharing" your creativity isn't the smartest move. As tension builds under Jon Tracy's deft and meticulous direction, clues to the mysterious cause of Gidion's death slowly start to unravel.

• Some of these clues are charming insights into character; others reveal brazen acts and horrific fantasies.


• Some moments reflect the limitations of two adults caught in a tense cat-and-mouse game of withholding critical information; others reveal how a mother's unconditional love can blind her to the warning signs reflected in her son's writing.

The two women facing off during the parent-teacher conference are polar opposites.

• Heather is protective of her students and careful to respect other people's boundaries while Corryn has the subtlety of the proverbial bull in a china shop.


• Heather is well aware of the legal ramifications of the situation while Corryn is more than willing to bully her son's teacher in order to get some solid answers.

Heather (Stacy Ross) reads Gidion's essay to the boy's mother
(Jamie Jones) in Gidion's Knot (Photo by: David Allen)


Masterfully constructed, Gidion's Knot offers a tour de force to the actor portraying Corryn. Jamie Jones rose to the occasion with a bravura performance that elicited gasps from the audience. As Heather read Gidion's essay out loud, it was puzzling to watch the lack of emotion on Jones's face until, at the end of the essay, her reaction was repulsively shocking.




Jamie Jones is Corryn and Stacy Ross is Heather in
Gidion's Knot (Photo by: David Allen)


Gidion's Knot is a 75-minute roller coaster ride featuring two riveting performances that are guaranteed to challenge any audience.The playwright is quick to stress that:

"My mind likes complexity, not simplicities. In a lot of theatres, the strongest powerhouses are women. As they age, the roles go away. I wanted to fill that gap with roles for women that were not necessarily about relationships, and with voices and situations that are a little unusual."

To read more of George Heymont go to My Cultural Landscape

Directed by Joanne Gordon for Cal Rep, "Next To Normal," with music by Tom Kitt, and story and lyrics by Brian Yorkey, tells the story of a family's reaction to a mother's mental illness. The mental illness itself is a reaction to the death of an infant son. In well- enacted (and -sung) detail, it shows how hard it to diagnose much less treat the disease. It shows the effect it has on family members, who in turn have to wrestle with their own demons. Ultimately, though, it's about the persistence of a tragic memory and the options one has to deal with it. The choices are tough, if not impossible. You can medicate and electroshock it, though, as shown here, the cure is worse than the disease. You can kindle it, though it eats you alive. Or you can shunt it aside, and hope it goes away. The number of options makes it clear that any definition of normal is a conditional term.

In fits and turns, the story is outlandish and tragic, edgy and desperate. Some of Diana's (Karole Foreman) actions are funny. Sprawled out on the kitchen floor, she makes a week's worth of school lunch sandwiches. She informs her daughter Natalie (Maddie Larson) that she is about to have sex with her husband Dan (Jeff Paul). When Dan tells her he's found a rock star of a therapist, Doctor Madden (Roberto Icaraz), in her eyes, becomes a rock star. Some aren't so funny. She makes a birthday cake for a son, Gabriel (Alexander Pimentel), who died years ago.

Each moment bristles with energy that coils, uncoils, and recoils. The production's biggest achievement is its supercharged pitch. This pitch reflects Diana's changing moods. These moods include depression, a numb, medicated stability, and an exuberant mania. You know at any moment what she's feeling and what she's seeing. You would think that, being so articulate and intelligent, she would be a perfect candidate for therapy. Alas, it's not that easy.

Elizabeth Smith's set is scrumptious (and, unlike the Goodmans, thank God, stable). A tree made of timber perforates a floating bed. It makes us think of sleep punctuated by a Babel of psychotic voices. It's also the perfect hiding place for Gabriel who lingers, at least in spirit.

The performances are electric. The Goodman family not only has to deal with the lost of baby Gabriel. It also has to contend with a decade and a half of Diana's mental illness. To say this in turn creates psychoses in father and daughter would be the understatement of the year.

We see a large part of the story through Diana's eyes. Foreman turns in a spectacular performance. Her experience is our experience. At first, before we realize that she's manic and not, to put it quaintly, high-spirited, she's a dynamo of a wife and a mother. She is lucid and passionate, even when she's not making much sense. Her singing voice blends into her speaking voice, the same way her delusions merge into her daily life. Her moments of delusion, though, are the most moving. Filtered through memory and loss, they're all the more vivid and real to her and to us. When she finally realizes her illness resides in her soul and not her mind, she takes a courageous and, for her, logical next step.

Larson's Natalie and Paul's Dan and keenly show what it's like to deal with an ill mother. Not only do they have to deal with Diana, they have to contend with the demons she induces. Natalie acts out by binging on Diana's mother's little helpers. Unlike Dan, she has an anchor. Clearly in love with Natalie, Michael Barnum's Henry takes it all in stride. A bong maker extraordinaire, he surveys the druggie landscape of the Goodman household. He notes that, unlike Diana, he's an organic, not a pharmaceutical druggie. Also unlike Dan, Natalie wasn't born when Gabriel passed, so her issues are different from those of her parents. This nicely sets up the story's fantastic ending. Dan finally admits that Gabriel did indeed exist but now is no more.

Performances are 8 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday. The show runs until May 10. Tickets are $6-$25. The Royal Theatre is located aboard the Queen Mary. For more information, call (562) 985-5526 or visit www.calreporg.