Nine Parts of Desitre at Performance Network

Paul Krugman’s column in the New York Times today suggests that we may be on the edge of an economic abyss, the kind that would produce chaos, ripping apart the lives of many Americans. Heather Raffo’s one-woman play, “Nine Parts of Desire,” directed with crisp precision and a careful eye to character by Ed Nahhat, now at the Performance Network, shows us how nine very different Iraqi women cope with the kind of political disorder that yanks out from under them the expectations of their accustomed lives. Sarab Kamoo’s passionate and carefully etched profiles of the women lets us see and feel their frustration, bravado, anger, hope, despair, and grudging acceptance, yet this production doesn’t tell us how to react. Kamoo’s nine characterizations are neither sentimental nor brutal, but brutally honest.

Monika Essen’s lovely and useful set puts you at once somewhere in the Middle East but has only one specific location: a flowing stream downstage right that has you hoping for a Middle Eastern Huck Finn to sit down and drop a line.

Raffo, an American of Iraqi heritage, wrote the play after ten years of interviews with Iraqi women. It could have been a polemic against war, but it’s about women living as best they can in their suddenly dangerous world.

A human life is very short in the grand sweep of history. The fortunate, born into comfort and privilege, come to consider as birthright the lives in which they were brought up. Some die never having known anything else. But history is relentless and those on the cusp of changing times are its victims, their expectations dashed, their lives filled with new and powerful dangers. We don’t have to reach back to the Holocaust for examples. In recent times, the abyss of ruined lives has appeared in Bosnia, Durfur, Iraq, New Orleans, and Manhattan, among others. Once civilized cities like Beirut and Baghdad have become horror zones. We are all on the edge of the cliff and maintain equilibrium only by refusing to look down.

Yet, people in disarray find ways to survive: religion, anger, work, whiskey. Since the end of the Great Depression and the Second World War we’ve lived in anticipation of continued plenty, our fortunes borne aloft by an economy supported mainly by expectation. Now we may be facing the abyss. How will we cope? Many will go on like Heather Raffo’s nine women. Does survival trump ethics? The comfortable have one answer, victims another. Listen to them before you decide.

In Praise of Joe Dumars

William Rhoden, in his New York Times column today, (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/sports/basketball/29rhoden.html?_r=1&ref=sports&oref=slogin) praised Joe Dumars for going back to college. I replied.

Your column on Joe Dumars made be smile because I’ve been a huge fan ever since his first preseason when I saw him in a televised game. You knew immediately he would be a star. Later, after the Bad Boys had run their course, I saw Dumars facing down Karl Malone from courtside. At six feet the look is his eye was terrifying, the quiet determination of a movie hit man.

I say all this to disagree with the conclusions of your column. There is no chance that Joe Dumars’ college degree will improve his life in any way that would impress a young athlete on the make. His life is what he made it. He is the sort of man who would have succeeded if he had to drop out of kindergarten.

I guess my point is that we are what we are. Very few of us have the inner resources of a Joe Dumars. We’re the ones who needed degrees to come to something. Going back to college for his kids’ benefit is in Joe’s character. If Joe Dumars runs for Governor, I’ll be on his side. Call me, Joe: I’ll man the phones, walk the streets, buttonhole my friends, do what it takes. Whether or not you have a diploma.

"The Little Dog Laughed" at the Performance Network

“The Little Dog Laughed” opened last night at the Performance Network in Ann Arbor. It earns six stars: four pitch-perfect performances by Barton Bund, Jacob Hodgson, Roxanne Wellington and Chelsea Sadler, the crisp and loving direction of Ray Schultz, and the evocative and perfectly suited set design by Monika Essen. It’s a sparkling entertainment, in depth somewhere between Hamlet and “Sex and the City.” The sophisticated, literate script and hair-trigger delivery provide a constant stream of clever laugh lines and a charming love story with a disarmingly realistic ending. All this comes wrapped in a puff pastry of happy cynicism.

The actors talk and move fast which challenges the lazy listener, but to brilliant effect. No one begs for a laugh but they come anyhow, because the comic timing of the actors and their utter ignorance that what they’re saying is funny hones the humor to a fine edge.

When the satirist Stan Freberg opened an advertising agency in 1957 he adapted the hypocritical MGM motto, “ars gratia artis” (“art for art’s sake”) to the more realistic “Ars gratia pecuniae” (art for money’s sake). This might well be the motto of “Little Dog Laughed,” yet only the hardest heart could fail to sympathize with these characters groping for land in a sea of selfishness

The nudity and the very limited boy-boy sex action will disappoint the raincoat crowd and should offend only those who come to be offended. Without them, the show would be childishly coy, unsuited to the stark hyper-realism of the script.

The show is mostly set in a movie star’s New York hotel room that could be a display in a trendy, high-end furniture boutique. The cold beauty of black, white, and gray suggests a modern take on a ‘40’s movie and is the perfect backdrop for the struggles between art and business and ambition and love that provide the action.

Black and white costumes of the protagonist add to the metaphor for starkly competing values. Other scenes take place, pointedly, on brightly colored pieces brought on stage ad hoc, presumably to represent life outside show business. The lighting enhanced this effect.

I don’t believe in “must see” shows, but this one comes damn close.

Bo Diddley (December 30, 1928 -June 2, 2008)

Bo Diddley died yesterday. He was 79. For those of us who remember him, the obit in the New York Times provided some laughs, not at Bo’s expense, but at the gormlessness of the writer, Ben Ratliff.

The funniest, and most revealing, was an alleged quotation from the lyrics of Bo’s first hit, “Bo Diddley bought his babe a diamond ring.” Anybody with a radio and an ear knew it was “Bo Diddley buy babe a diamond ring.” Ratliff’s version sounds like William F. Buckley talking about a gift for an infant.” And it doesn’t scan either. He must have downloaded the lyrics instead of listening to the recording. Of course, what can you expect from a writer who refers to “Mr. Diddley?”

Later on, Mr. Ratliff says his subject was a founder of rock n roll, along with Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Including Lewis in this list is like ranking the guy who fixes your lamp alongside Edison . Maybe he meant Huey Lewis. If you’re searching around for a white guy influential in early rock, try Bill Haley, who gradually turned country swing into rock with a southern white feel before Elvis Presley who later hocked his chops for a suite in Las Vegas (or sold his birthright for a mess).

Toward the end of his piece, Mr. Ratliff writes: “But soon a foreign market for his earlier music began to grow, thanks in large part to the Rolling Stones, a newly popular band that was regularly playing several of his songs in its concerts.” To broadly paraphrase Louis Armstrong, if you got to have the Rolling Stones explained, you ain’t never gonna get to the third page of that damn review!

Those of us who remember the crashing revelation of those strange guitar chords know the truth. We white kids had found something that kept our ears glued to the radio and also freaked out our parents. Paradise !

When I was fifteen, my mother and father agreed to buy me a guitar. We went to Sam Asch’s Music Store on Nostrand Avenue and I tried one, another, and another. When I got my hands on a Gibson L-48 I played the Bo Diddley chords and some kid said to his mother, “Mom, he’s playing Bo Diddley!” I knew I had my instrument. And I still have it, beat up and mostly unused, but always at hand.

In April, 1989, I finally saw the man in person at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor. He rocked the joint. I shook his hand like an awe-struck kid, not a fifty year old with a career. Only a few years ago, I saw him again at the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival. He had a different audience and a different show. In addition to his greatest hits he played jazz and did impressions. On that day, “Mr. Diddley” was a funny and versatile entertainer.

ehhh

Later on I kept on hearing Bo Diddley in the music of others. He was to rock n roll what Mozart was to classical music or Ty Cobb was to baseball: an innovator whose influence is everywhere.

APPLAUSE, APPLAUSE

Last season, I took in a college baseball game. I sat close to the field in sunshine and the first inning was sublime. Michigan’s freshman catcher picked off a runner at first with a one-hop peg and nailed a base-stealer with a bullet to the shortstop’s glove. Even the clank of aluminum bats didn’t dull my pleasure, and I fell deep into the memory of Ebbets field, where, I’d watched Jackie, Gil, Duke, Pee Wee, and Roy mow down the national league.

But oh the incessant, polite applause. Applause is for ballerinas and sopranos; baseball demands yelling, cheering, booing. Yet, the crowd applauded such quotidian events as called strikes, routine fly-outs, and even a fielder’s choice, which may be the oddest, because, after all, it was an out for the home team. The fans clapped their hands several times each inning, sometimes in mid-batting turn.

When a Michigan player scored (which happened a lot in this 10-5 win) the bench emptied out to congratulate him even if he had only gotten on base with a walk, while the fellow whose mighty double brought him home waited on second base (This is not quite as silly as basketball players high-fiving and butt-patting a team-mate who just missed a free throw, but still …).

There seems to be a universal itch to congratulate that is scratched at the least excuse. Theater audiences no longer wait for the final curtain to burst forth; clapping has metastasized to the end of each act, even to scene changes. Often, the “turn off your cell phone” announcer gets an ovation as if he had just found a better way to deliver Hamlet’s soliloquy.

Why this need to demonstrate approval? Is it the search of the lonely for a connection, spectators yearning to be part of the action, or just another obnoxious fad, like the misuse of “beg the question” or emphasizing prepositions?

I don’t know. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to applaud a scene change or a called strike. If you’re sitting next to me at a game, you’ll have to put up with some old-fashioned yelling, when it’s called for — and silence when it’s not.