CHRISTMAS CAROL'D at the Performance Network

Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” is a stirring and beautiful story, about a bad guy who gratefully grabbed his last chance to reform and was redeemed. Dickens loved the secular aspects of Christmas and celebrated them in this story, but the master story teller knew it was the story that counted. Yet adaptations I’ve seen on the big and small screens and four on stage miss the mark in one way or another. Some are just treacly and play on the holiday season, and some are so bound-up in the text they turn this lovely tale into so many sticks of wood or get lost in details.

Tonight, I was treated to Joe Zettelmaier’s crack at the chestnut, “Christmas Carol’d” thoughtfully, even brilliantly, mounted at the Performance Network Theatre in Ann Arbor, and had a very happy surprise. Joe Z obviously understands Mr. Dickens’ book and knows how to dramatize it. The words are preserved for the most part, but the dramatic scenes are neatly intertwined with the narration, done by four excellent and well-cast actors who also play all the roles but Scrooge (B. J. Love, Terry Heck, Chelsea Sadler and Kevin Young). David Wolber’s direction keeps the story flowing so the two complement each other as they gracefully flow back and forth. What emerges is not an adapted book, but a play.

This jewel of a show sits on a luxurious cushion of Christmas Carols, artfully selected and beautifully sung – a cappella – by the four non-Scrooge actors.

None of this would be quite as moving or as enjoyable without John Seibert’s touching depth and sparkling wit as Scrooge. He nailed that part.

Monika Essen’s lovely and cleverly serviceable set and Dan Walker’s lights work hand in hand with Wolber’s direction to facilitate the action. And Ms. Essen’s costumes are pitch perfect.

I was entertained and moved. What more can you expect from an evening of theater?

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
---------------------------------------------------------------

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
----------------------------------------------------------------

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.

LOVE SPRINGS LAUGHS AT THE PLANET ANT

Do yourselves a favor and catch the double bill at the Planet Ant in Hamtramck called “Love Springs Laughs.”

The Perfect Solution by Kim Carney is touching and sweet and funny, and One Man’s Truth by Joe Zettelmaier that ends the evening is down and dirty and funny, funny, funny. My friend and I laughed all through the show, through the obligatory post-performance actor-hugging, into the car, all the way to the Cass Café and until the drinks arrived. It’s the funniest show I’ve seen since The Odd Couple forty years ago and the first act of Albee’s The Goat (featuring sex-with-a-goat jokes by the carload). Zettelmaier's humor is a delightful mix of sophisticated and childish, as if the guy in your junior high who told everybody dirty jokes had suddenly taken up reading Updike, and Roth.

The actors (alphabetically Patrick O'Connor Cronin, Jaime Moyer, Beth Ann Thibault, Brian Thibault, and Jackie Strez) played their characters earnestly and honestly as befits comedy high and low; the direction (by Nancy Kammer and Shannon Ferrante) was crisp, clean, peppy, and imaginative, and the stage craft was perfectly suited to the shows and the space.

For fifteen bucks (and maybe a discount on Friday or Sunday) it’s a cheap and glorious high. The show continues through May 16.

Why "liberalism" is still a dirty word

Two pieces serendipitously juxtaposed on the Op-Ed page today, Timothy Garton Ash’s restrained suggestion that liberals restore honor to their unjustly tarnished name, and Maureen Dowd’s mélange of ad-hominem attacks, irrelevant insults, and twisted logic that make her the Rush Limbaugh of the left, show why liberals have a hard time reclaiming their once-respected name.

Dowd, the superannuated sixties kid, ignores facts and shreds people she doesn’t like. Her trash can has equal room for the uncertain Patterson and the happily evil Blagojevich, as if there were no moral difference between Hamlet and Iago. It’s from the left, but hardly liberal. That’s one reason the right has been successful in trashing the name and why we dare not speak it.

This is the sneering, snarling, shouting-down legacy of the “new left” that not only doesn’t respect opposing points of view, but refuses to tolerate them. Until the left starts to act liberal again it doesn’t deserve the word.

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.