DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS

[From The N. Y. Times Magazine, May 3, 2009].

CORRECTION: An article in The Green Issue on April 19 about the science of decision making and the difficulty of getting into a “green mind-set'' misspelled, in one instance, the surname of an elder statesman of the field. He is Baruch Fischhoff, not Fischoff.

CORRECTION: An article on April 19 about Shai Agassi, an Israeli-American entrepreneur who is developing electric-car batteries, misspelled the model of a car his brother drove around Tel Aviv while being interviewed. It was the RenaultMégane, not Megone. The article also referred incorrectly to a report by a consulting firm about the cost of getting electric cars on the road. The figures of $49 million for developing cars and batteries and $21 billion for building charging networks referred to the creation of 17 million electric and low-carbon-dioxide-emitting cars for Europe, not 1.5 million electric cars for the United States, Europe and Japan. And the article misstated the percentage of total cars in the United States that President Obama's stimulus plan would actually put on the road; 600,000 cars is about one-quarter of 1 percent of the 251 mi11ion cars in the United States, not 2 percent.

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MEMO

From: Ed Sloan, managing editor
To: Harv Bernbaum, controller
Re: extensive corrections in this week's issue
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Harv, Can you provide me with figures on the cost of 5 ½ column-inches of magazine space and the savings on laying off the fact checkers and proof readers? I’m a bit concerned that it might have been false economy to use our readership to catch errors.

Thanks for your help.

Ed

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MEMO

From: Harv Bernbaum, controller
To: Ed Sloan, managing editor
Re: Response to your recent memo
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Ed, I’d like to help you here, but the accounting department is over-worked as it is, what with having laid off most of the staff.

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MEMO

From: Ed Sloan, managing editor
To: Harv Bernbaum, controller
Re: Staff layoffs

Harv, I’m sympathetic to the problem, but we really can’t afford the errors that keep turning up in our stories. A few days ago we actually published an utterly unbelievable story from one of our top reporters claiming that Joe Biden had made some damn fool statement about staying out of the way of swine flu. On the Today show no less. Pretty soon we’re going to look pretty foolish.

Ed
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MEMO

From: Melissa Craig, assistant controller
To: Ed Sloan, managing editor
Re: Response to your recent memo

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Mr. Sloan, I’m sorry to report that Mr. Bernbaum has been temporarily furloughed for an indefinite period as a cost-saving measure. I’m in charge now of the C.P.A. and the clerk who constitute what remains of the accounting department.

All the best,

Melissa Craig M.B.A., C.P.A.

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MEMO

From: Dell Model XPS 420 acting managing editor
To: Melissa Craig M.B.A., C.P.A.
Re: Staff layoffs
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I have determined that this correspondence is economically counter-productive and will be terminated immediately.

LOL HAVE A NICE DAY! SEE YOU LATER ALLIGATOR!

FENCES AT THE PERFORMANCE NETWORK: A FIRST-CLASS PRODUCTION

When Troy Maxson (the excellent Lynch Travis) began talking about his past in Performance Network’s first-rate production of August Wilson’s Fences he pulled me firmly into his narrative and never let go. Fences is really two plays: a lesson in the black history of America, and a moving family drama. Maxson has a lot of personal baggage, enough to make a pretty good play on its own, and a lot of racial baggage, so his load is heavier than, say, Jamie Tyrone’s or Jack Jerome’s.

He coped by building an armor to protect him from himself, a suppression of urges and feelings that keeps him distant from his loved ones but frees him to live his life against the odds as his principles required. He loves his wife, his children, and his long-time friend Bono (the excellent James Bowen) but keeps his distance by insisting rigidly on his notions of a proper life.

Maxson found discipline late in life. In prison as a young man, he emerged a stiff-necked moralist and behaved as if the smallest defection from discipline would lead him to ruin. He gave his entire paycheck to his wife, carefully limited his drinking to precisely one pint of gin that he shared with Bono every payday, and demanded absolute obedience from his sons. Ironically, a single small defection finally did him in.

Maxson is a lot like my late father, who tried hard to get close to his sons but couldn’t quite get there. He gave himself to his job and helping with housework. I cried his funeral because it meant I had lost the opportunity to know the man who raised me. That was the story of many twentieth century fathers and sons, but Wilson’s masterly script tells you that Troy Maxson did his best for the best reasons. And, by his own lights, succeeded. He kept his balance on the log when the currents threatened. That took every ounce of his will and energy, but Lynch Travis’s nuanced performance gives us the unspoken vulnerability and ambivalence as well.

In the last scene Maxson’s mentally ill brother, Gabe (Michael Joseph, a very convincing and appealing psychotic), does a crazy dance of frustration, as if struggling to let out all the terrors he had kept to himself. It seemed to be a physical rendering of the emotional struggle that never let Troy Maxson relax.

When a play is as well-acted (all the performances were very good) and gracefully and briskly staged as this Fences you know you are in the presence of superior direction for which we have Tim Edward Rhoze to thank.

The set deserves its own paragraph. When you take your seat at Fences you find yourself in an urban neighborhood of the mid-twentieth century: there is the back corner of an apartment house bounded by two alleys, one of which separates it from a small single-family home. Both lead to the larger world of Pittsburgh. This set bears a startling resemblance to the Brooklyn apartment house in which I was I was raised and its environs. This marvel created by Monika Essen gives you an immediate sense of time and place before the actors show up. It is a spectacular recreation of the ordinary.

In all, this is the most engaging and affecting play I've seen this year, and maybe many others.

Last election day I worked fourteen hours in a polling place in Detroit. I was an invited guest at the party. I bathed in the rampant joy of election workers and voters. I wonder what Troy Maxson would have said if he were there. If he could have stood to miss a day off from work.