Southern Bookman

Hemingway and Gellhorn Hit the Small Screen

I'm looking forward to the HBO film "Hemingway and Gellhorn," to be broadcast Monday night. The movie will look at the relationship of Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, herself a renowned journalist and novelist. From what I've read, it appears as if the movie will be fairly true to life.

Clive Owen plays Hemingway and Nicole Kidman Gellhorn. The two writers' affair and subsequent marriage played out during the Spanish Civil War and World War II, when the much younger Gellhorn was reaching her prime and Hemingway had already done much of his best work, although years of stories and novels would follow.

Hemingway, one of the characters in Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris," looks to have continued appeal 50 years after his death. No doubt a movie is in the works about F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, especially with the latest film version of "The Great Gatsby" imminent.

Atlanta Theater Feels the Cold

As a lapsed Atlanta drama critic, I have theater envy reading the rave reviews and glowing articles about "The Iceman Cometh" revival at Chicago's Goodman Theater. Yes, Atlanta's Alliance won a regional Tony a couple of years ago, but Atlanta's premier theater is off-course seeking to develop Broadway-kitsch musical monstrosities such as the recent disaster, "Ghost Brothers of Darkland County."

The Goodman's "Iceman," with the possibly miscast Nathan Lane in the role of Hickey, is the kind of innovative revival that Atlanta audiences rarely if ever get to see. A couple of years ago, the Alliance did put on a good performance of "August: Osage County," and Georgia Shakespeare and the New American Shakespeare Tavern from time to time leave the Bard's work to do a revival, such as the outstanding "Glass Menagerie" a few years ago at the Tavern.

With the demise of Marietta's Theater on the Square and recent financial troubles at other venues, Atlanta theater has declined. The Alliance's announced new season doesnt hold much of interest for me. Chicago's "Iceman Cometh" shows the chill in Atlanta theater.

Memoirs of Punk Glory

I've been reading a cluster of memoirs from the 1960s-1970s on the punk/left wing/hippie era of New York City, from the lower east side over to the Village. All three I downloaded on my Nook, which seems all too easy too do, like another glass of wine when it's going down smooth. I doubt any of them will be on Rick Santorum's list, or that of any other GOP candidate for that matter, although Ron Paul might enjoy the liberatarian spirit of the times.

The first finished, Patti Smith's "Just Kids," about her love affair/friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe. As the 60s were burning out, and the '70s came like the horrible morning after, Patti came out with her "Horses," which I quite liked if I recall. The cover photo was by Mapplethorpe, which I'd forgotten, or perhaps never knew, until I read the book. Despite her wild, cutting edge personna, Smih comes across in her book as a shy, nice, small-town girl, an innocent in the big city always finding a new man to cake care of her. The first part of the book talks about her meeting Mapplethorpe and her close early relationship with him, and it begins with narrative energy from the time-honored motif of two kids from the sticks in Manhattan. Then, as they hang on and establish a daily life of trying to become artists, the book's drive dissipates, with too much mundane detail about squalid apartments, bad jobs, folks met and drinks downed. At end end, the book regains its opening power, fnishing with a poingnant account of Mapplethorpe's death.

The lastest I'm reading is James Walcott's account of the same time, wrriten from his jounalist's perspective. Walcott is a more fluid writer than Smith, better able to give dramatic force to the details and anecdotes he recalls, although he often overreaches with his verbal effects. His hip asides are amusing when on-target, but are annoying when he goes amiss. He too hits a dead zone in the middle of the book,which I hope he spins out of soon.

The most disappointing one is Ed Sanders' memoirs about the Fugs and his Peace Eye Bookstore, As with Smioth, he piles on surfeit of details that read more like a private diary without putting them in a broader context for the reader. The book is still entertaining, but too many chapters pile up with unrefined facts about places played, folks met, songs written.

Thoughts of Rothko on a Rainy Night

As I left the Theatrical Outfit's performance of "Red," in downtown Atlanta, a light rain fell. The play, full of art talk and aesthetic musings, left me in a sombre mood. The longtime Atlanta theater master Tom Key truly made himself into the haunted Rothko, showing a man covering an acute sensitivity with an art-cumedgeon persona, and young Jimi Kocina as his helper and dramatic foil was excellent. 

Once again, I decided against driving home on the interstate and took the local route from Spring to Peachtree. I always like going down Peachtree, imagining it a grand boulevard like say Park Avenue, although Peachtree, along with so much else in Atlanta, is quite mediocre. Still, artistic efforts like Tom's Theatrical Outfit in a once dying part of downtown kindle a hopes for the city, whose lustre has dimmed in recent years. 

Thoughts of Rothko and his ruminations on the truth of art/seeing/color/vision vs. commerce/popularity'vulgarity had me thinking about my own life, and others. The New York Times had run three obituaries on three great women who had lived well with full artistic accomplishment: Dorothea Tanning, Wislawa Szymborska and Camilla Williams.

Heading home, I passed the Memorial Arts Center, where once I'd seen some Rothkos at the High Museum. A few other signs of attempts at urban greatness passed by, along with a stretch of strip shopping centers and the like. They have their own truth too, though.

I pass places where I've lived segments of my life, in weekly repeated rituals: Barnes & Noble (alas, Borders gone), Peachtree Pres (where I fitfully go to the gym, and where my children played basketball and went to preschool and where Tom Key annually narrates a Christmas Eve service for kids), and the pond on Lakemoore. I also pass Christ the King, where my wife and I were married, and where I first met Tom at a Sunday morning adult education series. Years of images and memories built up.

The rain grows heavier, and already some parts of Roswell Road are flooded. Again, I'm thankful to make it home.

Ken Kesey's "Magic Trip"

In one of those serendipitous discoveries, I found that Comcast's On-Demand is showing a documentary on Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' psychedelic trip across the United States in a painted bus called "Further." Although the hour was late and sleep called, I had to immediately watch "Magic Trip," the History Channel-funded film.

The film, pieced together from movies taken by Kesey and crew on the trip (the initial motive for the journey was to make a film), was exhilarating and hilarious, although the antics of the proto-hippies now seem ill-conceived, jejune and wasteful.

How wonderful and relevatory to see characters in "living color" I'd only read about previously. Kesey with his physical power and charisma, bursts from the screen. Neal Cassidy, the hero of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," also shows his legendary physical dynamism and electric non-stop raps. Although he was constantly on speed, driving through the night and talking even when no one is listening except for the microphone, Cassidy despite his love of nutty,unexpected adventures comes off as an adult, knowing how to change tires and get out of frequent scrapes with the highway patrol. Cameo appearances are made by an amusingly proper Larry McMurtry,  perplexed when his old Stanford chum Kesey and the Pranksters show up at his home in a rarified Houston neighborhood, a sadly diminished Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. A young and beardless Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead play a significant role in the film's look at the famed Kesey acid tests, the subject of a book by Tom Wolfe (not even mentioned).

The less famous members of the crew come off as silly, confused, bewildered, infantile and mentally derangedl. I felt something like pity for them, along with the sick fascination of watching impaired people acting out their delusions. One or two of them show intelligence in commenting upon the experience. Others are just children trapped in Kesey's artistic and social experiment.

Frequent LSD trips mark the cross-country journey. Kesey is an early LSD apostle, although the film shows Timothy Leary and Ram Dass shunning the group when it shows up at Kesey's LSD experimental station in New York. Kesey first took acid as part of a government-funded experiment at Stanford. The experiment is shown is excruciating detail, with Kesey recording his observations in a tape recorder, then in an interview with a nurse who may be a Nurse Ratched prototype. Kesey's psychedelic visions sound pretty much like any other acid trip, showing how mundane and unordinary the so-called "revelations" really were.

Like other "happenings" and political street theater projects of the time, the trip of Further doesn't hold up aethetically. Most of the crews' antics while on acid don't appear very imaginative and innovative. Yet, the film, with its comments from Kesey and Cassidy and its constant attempt to show the context of the times, still possesses great charm and energy. As with Andy Warhol's similar aesthetic experiments with a crew of acolytes, Kesey's experiment looks like a grand failure. At the end, he turned against the counter-culture folks who kept showing up at his Oregon farm, and the widespread use of acid, although he kept maintaining the value of its use for select visionaries such as himself.

Kesey says to an unnamed interviewer who sounds like "Fresh Air's" Terry Gross that he kept writing to the end. Yet, at least in posthumous works that have been published so far, he never reached the heights of his earlier works, the classic "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," and "Sometimes a Great Notion." Kesey wasted much creative energy in the Magic Trip. While the film is amusing, I wish we would have had instead later, artistically mature, books from Kesey.

By the way, I was glad to hear Kesey say he didn't like the movie made from "Cuckoo's Nest," although he liked the Broadway play (Kirk Douglas played Randall McMurphy.) Kesey thought the movie, starring Jack Nicholson, focused too much on the conflict between McMurphy and the Big Nurse. On reviewing the movie several years ago, I hated the misogynistic portrayal of Ratched, although Louise Fletcher won an Academy Award for her performance.

....Note: Terry Daughtery, interviewed by Southern Bookman after his fine biography on Donald Bartheleme, will have a biography out this month on "Catch 22" writer Joseph Heller. A riveting excerpt is in this month's Vanity Fair. 

Shakespeare Troupe Moving to Fort Greene

The New York Times had an interesting story Saturday morning about the Theater for a New Audience Shakespearian theater moving from Manhattan to Fort Greene in Brooklyn, where the city is funding a new $47.5 million theater for the company. The move drew criticism from black residents and artists, who say the move catering to, as the Times said, works of a "Dead White Male" playwright. Said Laurie A. Cumbo of the Musem of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, "We have a role and respnsibility to act as a community so that these institutions that we're building first and foremost benefits the people who live" here. Then we can think about the hipsters, the yuppies, the Manhattanites and that sort of thing."

I can see the need for the city to fund works of emerging black playwrights, along with works from other groups. Artistic merit, not ethnicity, should be the standard. However, while Shakespeare the man might be white and dead, his plays have remained alive for more than 400 years, and speak to all of us. The belief that Shakespeare doesn't relate to black audiences shortchanges them. The article says the Theater for a New Audience does three plays a year; surely other companies and artistic genres can use the theater some of the time. It would be a good gesture for the theater to open itself to contemporary plays, including those of black writers and performers.

The building of the theater recalled to me that Shakespeare's own company built the Globe Theater in London. What does it say about our time that in the Elizabethan era, a theatrical troupe could afford its own stage, not depending on the queen to fund it. Of course, today the theater must compete with much more entertainment offerings. The wealth of "The King's Men" can only be duplicated in mega performances on Broadway, which also continues to struggle along with symphonies, museums, publishers,etc. 

 

 

"August: Osage County" Falls Short of Greatness

The Alliance Theater's production of Tracy Letts' "August: Osage County" engaged me completely. I understood why the play's Broadway production caused a sensation, with critics and audience members extolling it as a new great American play. Yet, the day after, I had misgivings about whether "August: Osaage County" could be compared with "A Streetcar Named Desire" or "An Iceman Cometh."

In retrospect, the play's sensational elements of incest, drug addiction, alcoholism, etc. seemed overwrought and gratuitous. Despite a number of strong scenes, the play's language often sounded ordinary, cliched. The character's words didn't reach those higher levels of poetry associated with the greatest theater. The torments and demons failed to rise into the realms of the highest tragedy. 

Perhaps time, and newer productions will prove me wrong. The Alliance production was an afterrnoon of fine theater, but after I day of reflection, I found myself unconvinced that the play could stand among the greatest works of the theater.

''Gatz" Gives Dramatic Life to "The Great Gatsby"

F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" at last finds dramatic success with the Elevator Repair Service's production of "Gatz" in New York City. In the play, a night watchman begins reading Fitzgerald's novel and its characters arise in his presence. This conceit has achieved success after the failures of a couple of movie versions of "Gatsby."

The movies, including the high-priced bomb starring Robert Redford as Gatsby and Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan, were faithful to Fitzgerald's dialogue, so ebullient on the page, leaden on actors' lips. Funny, in his stints in Hollywood, Fitzgerald showed an inability to write good screen dialogue. His ear for language fell flat. Trying to duplicate the book on the screen was bound to fail.

Now, "Gatz" works by having characters read the book on stage. Perhaps the theater was always the right dramatic genre for the book. The play examines the experience of reading, how characters live in our imaginations as we create them for ourselves from the words we read.

"Gatsby" is one of those books I used to re-read, although I haven't in a while. I fear I'll find it falling short if I read it again. The language, characterization and musings on American desire, ambition and greed are certainly great, but I wondered if they would retain their old power. Since most American classics are encountered in youth, are they really immature, facile works, unable to stand with works by Shakespeare, Proust or others? "Gatz" makes me want to return to "Gatsby," reassuring me that Fitzgerald's magic will last. 

 

Larry McMurtry's "Hollywood" Glitters With Star Power

The wonderful Texas writer Larry McMurtry has given us another volume of his chatty, episodic memoirs, this one about his experiences in Hollywood as a screenwriter/producer. As with his previous memoirs on his bookselling and writing lives, McMurtry writes in a conversational, ruminative style that's highly entertaining. He pokes fun at readers and himself with a comment about complaints he's received about his short chapters; some of them in this book are two or three paragraphs long.

The book is really a series of vignettes, or snapshots, of Hollywood folks he's encountered, from Diane Keaton to Peter Bognanovich and Cybill Shepherd. He calls Keaton a great friend, and gives some of his most thorough dishing in discussing how Peter and Cybill grew to be a couple during the filming of "The Last Picture Show."

Another interesting chapter or two concerns another classic made from one of his novels, "Terms of Endearment." He talks about a dinner at the home of Jennifer Jones, who wanted the lead role in the movie, which later went to Shirley MacLaine. He also covers the making of "Hud" and "Lonesome Dove" and his experiences producing/writing the Oscar-winning "Brokeback Moutain."  One of his most memorable character sketches is that of the late superagent Irving "Swifty" Lazar, whom McMurtry estimates cost him $15 million in clumsy negotiations for "Lonesome Dove."

Some critics will call McMurtry's book superficial, commercially exploitive and so forth. But McMurtry in his comments on the movie business and movie stars gives more insight in a brief chapter than can be found in most door-stopping tomes on "Film" or "The Cinema." He does complain a bit much about having to attend awards banquets -- oh, the horror -- but overall McMurtry again diplays his unique blend of worldliness, cynicism, wonder, Texas cowboy shrewdness, romanticism, and wry whimsy.

More Ruminations on "King Lear"

Watching a live production of "King Lear," which I also wrote about in yesterday's post, set me off on a frenzy of reading about the play and Shakespeare in general.

One interesting fact stood out: Cordelia doesn't die in versions of King Lear, spelled "Leir," before Shakespeare. Her death is a stunning example of Shakespeare's genius, obviously immensely raising the tragic stakes. While Cordelia's death is an overwhelming dramatic conception, I also wondered if polticial realities of the time influenced Shakespeare's decision. Several commentaries pointed out that the play was written soon after King James I united the kingdoms of England and Scotland, and one of the themes of the play is the benefits of a unified kingdom. In the play, Cordelia is the queen of France and leads an army that invades England, so she could be seen as a traitor her selft, disrupting political unity. Lear also curiously turns against the country he had previously led, joining with the French forces. So, their deaths are justified by the laws of tragedy; they both take actions against the right balance of things.

However, this raises another conflict. In the predominant version of the play, Edgar makes the final speech and becomes the king of England. Yet he earlier appeared allied with the French forces, or at least with Lear. Wouldn't he like Cordelia and Lear be considered as a disturber of the established order, making him unable to rule England? One version of the play has the slowly redeemed Duke of Albany (Scotland) become the king, which would be more logical.

All of this is quite muddled in the play. The production I saw, at Ga. Shakespeare, made it even more confusing by apparently cutting an explanation of why the King of France is absent from the battle, leaving it to Cordelia and the previously muddled king to lead the French forces.

One  of the production's interpretations that I found jarring was presenting Cordelia as a kind of Joan of Arc in drag, weaing a mannish khaki uniform with trousers and boots. Another interesting reading was, after her death, having Lear carry her in over his shoulder, like a sack of potatoes. He also comes from the aisle in the audience. My impression from other productions is that Lear usually carries Cordelia in his arms, Pieta style, and comes from behind the stage. I thought this conception effective, since it makes logical sense that Lear would have cut down the hanging Cordelia and had her fall across his shoulder.

In reading about the play, I consulted the huge commentaries by Yale dynamo Harold Bloom and Harvard's Marjorie Garber. Bloom's is "The Invention of the Human," and Garber's "Shakespeare After All."  Both write in an arching, academic, lit-crit style. I usually lie Garber's commentaries on Shakespeare's plays, but her piece on Lear flung mightly toward big generalizations that rarely hit the mark.

Garber makes insightful comments about how much Shakespeare depends on Christian symbolism and references in "Lear."  With such bleak moments as Cordelia's death and the blinding of Gloucester, the play is often considered nihilistic, the origin of existentialism's belief in the meaninglessness of life. Garber makes a strong case that the play expresses Christian values of love.

Garber takes a more balanced view of Shakespeare than the flamboyant Bloom, who grandly sees Shakespeare as the inventor of our modern consciousness, "the invention of the human. " Shakespeare is surely a great writer, and uncannily anticipates our moral and intellectual perplexities, yet Bloom overstates his case. Along with his giddy assertions, wild, pontificating statements and amusing condemnations of the "school of resentment" and feminist views of Shakespeare (perhaps targering Garber), Bloom displays a deep understanding of Shakespeare's plays, especially how he uses language.

In my burst of research, I rediscovered the most entertaining book on Shakespeare, W.H. Auden's "Lectures on Shakespeare." The book consists of a student's recollections and notes from a serious of lectures Auden made on Shakespeare's plays and sonnents for a course at the New School in New York.

Highly opinionated, Auden approaches Shakespeare with a refreshing lack of reverencee, seeing him as a working writer with faults and strengths and who slowly, painstakingly developed his craft. Himself a considerable literary genius, Auden brings a working poet's perspective to his writing, more practical and grounded than the high-flying critical academic viewpoint of Bloom and Gerber. He also shows a deep knowledge of English history and literature, which Gerber and Bloom also have. Auden, though, is not as theoretical and abstract.

Finally, I consulted the Royal Shakespeare Company's edition of Shakespeare's "Collected Works" and gained a few more insights, more from the point of view of producing the play. The type was quite small for my now aching eyes.