Sam Shepard’s “Day Out of Days”

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Photo by Brigitte Lacombe

Surely it would be blasphemy to suggest that the strongest suit in Sam Shepard’s fecund, polymath deck is his prose.  His plays have won him the Pulitzer (“Buried Child”).  His acting has garnered an Oscar nomination (The Right Stuff).  His direction on stage and screen is highly respected, or better.  But it is the stories—seemingly attended to by readers only faintly, as a side project or stepchild—where we find the purest expression of the great writer’s mythos, yearnings and toil.

His latest entry into this canon, “Day Out of Days,” continues the turbulent cross-country scribbling pattern of flight described by a Shepard-ish (male, actor, 60s) character as he flees to and from his lover, pursues and recoils from his childhood home, attacks and then retreats from the many tent-poles of American manhood—freedom, risk, independence, adventure, success and fatherhood.  Composed of a series of jottings, poems, incantations and meditations, some no longer than a few lines, the book feels like a magical mixtape of little hymns dreamt by the recurring hero of Shepard’s oeuvre including “Great Dream of Heaven,” “Cruising Paradise,” and “Motel Chronicles.”  When he was interviewed during the production of his play, “The Late Henry Moss,” for the movie This So-Called Disaster, Shepard was asked what career path, other than his own, he would rather have chosen, he answered immediately, without a moment’s pause, “Musician.” So perhaps it is natural that the drummer and guitarist who has said he conceives of his plays the way a musician does a song, would have found such an arrangement of ballads.

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By Chris Wallace | Posted in Fiction, Film, Nonfiction, Reviews, Theater | Comments (0)

My Mother by Kirsten Andersen

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My Mother

She is bent at the waist at a west coast aquarium,

reclined in the daylight of Brooklyn, sober in her role

as a witness to the state, she is dancing at the club

on public television. She sinks her nails into my neck

at the police station, when I am caught stealing lip balm

from the pharmacy, she is photographed on a rooftop

in her wedding gown—her composure is sealed,

her breasts are buttoned down. My mother secures things

between her teeth, is released from the treatment center,

she is moving ahead. Some people paid for this, she said.

She reads pamphlets on taxation, makes declarations,

wears leather pants and legwarmers, a copper lipstick

on her mouth. Her brown hair is blown out. She stands

at the refrigerator, posing beside a bar, reaching

for the mints in her imaginary purse. My mother

is the body that turned the car onto Lombard Street,

taking off from a short stretch of abstinence.

She keeps her cash in small stacks on the counter.

This is our hand to mouth house. She laughs it off.

Kirsten Andersen’s poetry most recently appears in Tin House, Court Green, and Crab Orchard Review. A former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, she lives on Cape Cod.

Lipstick painting by Jean Hildebrant

By Chris Wallace | Posted in Poetry | Comments (0)

Sam Shepard’s Ages of the Moon

In Waiting for Godot, Pozzo the slave-owner offers the grim yet illuminating commentary, “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”  This idea is a reflection of mortality—life as a flicker—and it hovers above Sam Shepard’s Ages of the Moon, opening this week at the Atlantic Theater.  Although there is no Pozzo, and no Lucky, one could think of Shepard’s tragicomic duo, Ames and Byron, as a new Vladimir and Estragon.  Instead of waiting for a being who may not exist, they’re keeping awake for the moon and its total eclipse, a once-in-a-lifetime moment that, damn it, always seems to occur while the world is sleeping.  Ames and Byron can’t, and won’t, miss it.  For unlike the waxing and waning of the heart, lunar patterns, at least, are predictable. Read More »

By Jennifer Dwoskin | Posted in Reviews, Theater | Comments (2)

Review: Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman

One Dimensional Woman by Nina Power

One of the most interesting demi-myths of contemporary politics concerns neoconservatism as an intellectual movement and its rumoured leftist heritage. Oft commented upon, the Trotskyist origins of some of its early thinkers (Irving Kristol, James Burnham), and an apparent debt displayed in its evangelical policies of aggressively exported global ideological revolution, meant that for disillusioned leftists bobbing about in the seemingly un-navigable tides of postmodern liberal democracy it recreated some of the old certainties: better to be on one side, even if it’s the wrong side, than no side at all. Indeed, though it begs the question somewhat, is this need for a coherent and familiar political narrative (radical youth jading into reactionary zeal) not entirely indicative of just such a shift, as evinced by figures like Christopher Hitchens and Kanan Makiya, that the desire to believe in this kind of myth demonstrates? This is part of exactly what is so impressive about the neoconservative project, the shamelessness of its authoritarian extremism. Leo Strauss made no bones about the need for an elite to create lies necessary to bind the republic to their will, and just what makes this principle so insidiously effective is the disengagement it correctly presumes, that the people will lap up the lie, because they too are lost without the old grand narratives of good versus evil.

All of which leads me to one of the areas that this manoeuvre makes itself most frequently apparent: language. The ideological reorientation of words traditionally associated with the progressive and emancipatory realm of political expression is something of which we see an ever increasing amount, and to which we seem to unable to formulate a staunch response. The excellent new book from the London-based academic Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman, hones in on a particular facet this broad problem, and tackles it head on, armed with voluble wit, confidence and clarity of thought. We are dealing with “a fundamental crisis in the meaning of the word. If ‘feminism’ can mean anything from behaving like a man ([Jacques-Alain] Miller), being pro-choice ([Jessica] Valenti), being pro-life ([Sarah] Palin), and being pro-war (the Republican administration), then we may simply need to abandon the term, or at the very least, restrict its usage to those situations in which we make quite certain we explain what we mean by it”.

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By Jackson Boxer | Posted in Nonfiction, Philosophy, Politics, Reviews | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Review: A Streetcar Named Desire

Blanchett in A Streetcar Named Desire

The particular brand of emotional devastation that comes at the end of viewing a great production of either of Tennessee Williams’s two best plays, The Glass Menagerie or A Streetcar Named Desire, depends on the audience developing a sympathetic bond with the female lead.  In The Glass Menagerie, we watch fragile innocent Laura Wingfield on the verge of romance with her high school crush.  In A Streetcar Named Desire, we hope that Blanche Dubois can escape her past and find salvation and a husband in the sturdy and seemingly kind Harold ‘Mitch’ Mitchell.  We look on as Blanche and Laura come so close to having their prayers answered and then we must watch in terror as all hope is taken away.

“Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable,” says Blanche in Streetcar, “It is the one unforgivable thing in my opinion and it is the one thing of which I have never, never been guilty.”  But, of course, she has been guilty of deliberate cruelty.  As she reports, Blanche found her young husband with another man and publicly humiliated him for it, leading to his suicide.  This act of cruelty is paralleled by Stanley’s later deed, when he exposes Blanche for having been the town floozy of Laurel, Mississipi.  Both Blanche and her deceased husband are victims of the prejudices of a chauvinistic society, and both Blanche and Stanley are envoys, enforcing that society’s ideals.  These circumstances account for the heartbreak we experience at the end of a great production of Streetcar—we watch an individual, however flawed she may be, destroyed by the society in which she lives.   Read More »

By Eric Rosenblum | Posted in Reviews, Theater | Tagged , | Comments (0)

“Interruptions” by Alana Joblin Ain

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The table saw interrupted the carpenter’s banjo—

Brian’s two fingers fell

to the floor.

Now I’m the girl who weeps uncontrollably at work

sobbing like when my car spun down St. Mathews

interrupting a class full of silence.

Crying when Madame Wagner called me to the front to recite Baudelaire

and I couldn’t, but can still feel the cool pink tiles against my forehead as I knelt

in the bathroom and wept.

I could do half  of Howl but she didn’t care and left

to become a flight attendant, her dream

to fly the world,

which seemed so huge and forgiving the morning Helen Warner

interrupted our English class to tell us that Brian’s hand

had been sewn back

and he would still be able to play guitar—

All of us losing our pages and thinking

anything is possible.

Alana Joblin Ain grew up in Philadelphia. Prior to making Brooklyn her home eight years ago, she earned her B.A. at Oberlin College, studying English and Religion. Alana received her MFA in poetry from Hunter College, where she currently teaches creative writing and literature.  Her writing has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Quarterly West, RealPoetik and The New York Times.

Image by Martin Benninge

By Alana Joblin Ain | Posted in Poetry | Comments (2)

Review: The Starry Messenger

The Starry Messenger

During the course of the nearly three hour long world premiere of The Starry Messenger, writer and director Kenneth Lonergan’s newest play, we witness the protagonist, Mark (Matthew Broderick) comfort his mistress Angela (Catalina Sandino Moreno) who has just lost her 9-year-old son; we see Angela, in her job as a hospital nurse, kiss a dying 72-year-old man (Merwin Goldsmith) on the lips to comfort him; and we see Mark repeatedly tell his wife Anne (J.Smith Cameron) how much he loves her, as he assures her he’s not on the verge of asking for divorce.  Throughout The Starry Messenger, Lonergan showcases his characters as they baldly express themselves, often on the verge of or in the midst of tears.  But the portrayal of all this emoting is in no way saccharine; there is a painful irony beneath each of the characters’ sincere expression of their feelings.

The Starry Messenger, which takes its name from Galileo’s 1610 treatise on the wonders of the telescope, takes place in 1995, when the original building that housed New York’s Hayden planetarium was about to be torn down.  Mark, who long ago settled for a career as a City College astronomy professor rather than pursuing the field work about which he is truly passionate, meets an attractive 28-year-old single mom and begins sleeping with her on the sly.  The play covers a month or so of their lives, and the production features a single set with four different sections.  The action drifts fluidly back and forth between scenes in Mark’s classroom, his apartment, Angela’s apartment, and the hospital room of Angela’s patient Norman, a 72-year-old dying of cancer.   Read More »

By Eric Rosenblum | Posted in Reviews, Theater | Tagged , , | Comments (0)