More than a million people wrote letters to Jackie Kennedy after her husband’s assassination. Some were famous, like Langston Hughes, but most were just normal people, sending their condolences and expressing their sadness and bewilderment. In her new book, “Letters to Jackie: Condolences From a Grieving Nation,” released by HarperCollins, Ellen Fitzpatrick went through these letters, and then went back and found the people who had written them (or their next of kin) to get their permission to republish them. The Times did a feature today which included a slideshow of several letters. Aside from being touched by how much a politician meant to ordinary people, I was struck by how well ordinary people – even those whose spelling and grammar suggests that they’re pretty much uneducated – knew how to write then. It’s hard to imagine letters like this being written today, or what they would look like if they were. For images of some of the letters, click “Read More.”

OneStory, a wonderful publication that mails out one carefully chosen story every three weeks has just launched an editor mentorship program. For twenty-five bucks, you can sit down with one of the editors, who will have already read your work and will give you feedback as to how to make your story one of the eighteen they select each year from thousands. They are accepting submissions now for sessions on March 14th and the 21st at The Old American Can Factory in Brooklyn.

When Gods walked the Earth and the Great American (And English and Irish) Novels were being written in Paris, Sylvia Beach’s English language book store Shakespeare & Company was heaven.  Though it was forced to close after the fall of Paris–and even Ernest Hemingway’s campy but symbolic libration of the site could not bring it back to life–George Whitman’s reincarnation of the store lives on across the Seine from Notre Dame. Here the next generation of expats–themselves deities in the literary pantheon–Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, James Baldwin, et al, made their home (sometimes quite literally). The strange warren of atticky aisles are just the way they were back when.  Now George’s daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman (no kidding) runs it and still maintains its great legacy.  While tourism the world over has turned great things that have lasted into museums of their former selves S&C keeps on.  Whitman has a literary festival and continues to host readings by the greats of contemporary English literature.  A hero and a heaven indeed.

Listen to Michael Silverblatt chat with Whitman fille here.

The author of poetry collections The Amputee’s Guide to Sex & Translating the Body reads from her debut novel, The Colony, just out from Soft Skull Press. She’ll be in the company of novelist Eric Puchner, reading from his own newly released Model Home. KGB Bar. 85 E. 4th. That’s this Sunday. 7p. Will it be a good night? Yes it will! A grand gathering at a beloved bar on our beloved Lower East Side.

The great “farhearinged” Barry Hannah passes away way too damn young. 67 years. He will be madly missed. “The pier [of heaven shakes] under his feet, wrapped in socks and sandals.”

Sharon Olds reads with the Dickman twins this Thursday. Sharon Olds is the author of nine books of poetry including The Dead & the Living, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent book is One Secret Thing. Matthew Dickman is the author of All American Poem, which won the 2008 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry.  Michael Dickman’s first book of poems, End of the West, was published in 2009. 
Apparently they are all somehow related. I would like to be in that family. I bet they write the best birthday cards.

March 4, 2010, 7 p.m.  Free and open to the public.

Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th Street, New York, NY

FOUR SWITCHES

1. VENT

I can feel the Christ inside me with his side cut open

so he can breathe like a fish

like someone who has been choking on a small bone, maybe

a tiny part of another animal’s vertebrae,

when a friend grabs him from behind, forces

him to lunge, the bone flying out into the restaurant’s candlelight.

And I feel like I am inhaling for the first time all day, a wind

from some mountain or the mouth

of a woman in boys underwear and blue lipstick

who has been chewing Wintergreen gum or smoking a menthol

exhales into my chest, slides her thigh along my ribs, oh

I can feel the Christ inside me shutter

and then sigh, the heaviness of his lungs let free like ripping

the Duct Tape off your lovers mouth

and pulling the soaked

handkerchief from the back of her throat in one long wet movement.

2. LIGHT

When you slap me hard across the face

there’s a lightning field of joy that hits the two thousand points

of my body’s galaxy

and makes me think of the powerful bodies

horses have. It’s amazing how far a single molecule of the sun

has traveled just to slip across your finger,

your lower lip, the three freckles below your left breast. It means

so much that you would take one of my hands

and put it around your throat

while you hold the other one down onto the white pillow

with every muscle you have left, and that you would turn your head

up to the ceiling fan and open your mouth

toward the light bulb which must be, by now,

turning into a cloud, spinning like a top made out of milky blue china.

3. HEAT

I remember the sound you made the first time

my hand was inside you

and how that sound became deeper like a dark color

at the palm and how it finally rang

like a clear piece of glass at the wrist, the beads of sweat

beginning to drip from your forehead, your ears, until the room

took on a shade of bright yellow

somehow in the dark. I can hear it now. I can feel the vibrations

coming off your chest like flags

of electricity and how you would start like someone in a fight

but in the end, curled up

in the damp sheets, every inch of your body

was like a pool of warm water

that had been thrown onto the tile floor of an elaborate

dinning room, and how you would run a bath so that, stepping

into it, you almost sounded the same, a sharp pain

that made your teeth grind, the water so hot

that every part of your body that touched it was like Mars turning red.

4. NIGHT LIGHT

The whole house frozen like a glacier but for the ghost

our clothes make in the corner of the room

as if they can still remember what it was like to be taken off,

still humming, almost warm. The moon

in the window and the sky

part cotton field and part obsidian, the kitchen towel we used, full of ice,

melting onto the hardwood floor. There is nothing

in the sky better than you. Nothing on earth that feels better

than the ribbon you took out of your hair

and tied around my wrists. Your eyes closed. Your chest rising

and falling like snow

in the windy dark, your mouth a little swollen, the blood in your lips

filling them back up, your arms above your head,

a little spit in the corner of your mouth, the things I love about you,

your legs kicking a bit when you dream, your ugly pajamas, your beautiful name.

Above image by Nicholas Lorden

Matthew Dickman is the author of All-American Poem (APR/Copper Canyon Press 2008). He is the recipient of the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, The Kate Tufts Award, the May Sarton Award from The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the 2009 Oregon Book Award. His work has appeared in Tin House, The New Yorker, and McSweeneys, among others. He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Every once in a while, if we are lucky, we stumble upon a work of art so staggering that it whirls about our memories long after our initial encounter.  Something about it, even if we can’t pinpoint what that “something” is (which, of course, only adds to its intrigue), resonates.  A most curious kabuki-based play, ironically named Forgotten, just happens to be one of those works.

Thanks to its host, the Irish Arts Center, New Yorkers now have the opportunity of experiencing Forgotten at the Donaghy Theatre in Hell’s Kitchen.  Directed by Jim Culleton, and written and performed by Pat Kinevane, this Dublin-born play has been touring Europe since 2006. A Japanese-inspired, one-man-show about two men and two women, Forgotten defies all genres; it is, perhaps, inimitable.  Its production, with all of its intricacy, is a challenge of Everest proportions.  Yet, Culleton and Kinevane have mastered their craft.  Kinevane is impossibly entertaining.  He is a sprite, nimbly slipping out of one character’s skin and into the next, his seamless morphology an indication of the time-nurtured harmony that has grown between director and actor.

Essentially a story on rotation, Forgotten shuffles the personal histories of four elderly individuals, who, for various reasons, have been admitted into retirement homes (or, as they see them: geriatric asylums).  Each life is brilliantly realized through monologues of pieced reminiscences, with role changes signaled by interludes of dance, onstage accessorizing and self-applied cosmetics. Desperately lonely, the characters look to the audience for companionship. They prattle on, uncovering hole-riddled narratives, all of them scattershot by heartbreak and regret, dementia and a preoccupation with looming death.  Each person is scraping to remember, with the hope of sculpting some sort of legacy—a little known truth about his or her existence.  And it is us with whom they entrust their secrets.

An absolute delight to watch, Forgotten is, nonetheless, a thought-twisting, puzzle of a play.  At first, the characters seem to share nothing more than a social stigma: “senior citizen.”  But, as the tales spins, common threads are revealed, and the patches of yesteryear are carefully stitched whole. There is Flor, the grumbler, a former manor-hand who knew no Irish luck; around to build a free Ireland from the rubble of its Civil War, only to be left with “fuck all” in the end.  Dora, a woman of privilege, recalls an “experimental,” promiscuous romp, her voice conveying the perfect smattering of cheekiness and guilt.  Augustus has endured a stroke, and although he cannot speak, his confessional thoughts stream through the house speakers; he doesn’t believe that he has ever loved his daughter the way that a father should.  Last but not least is Eucharia, who spends her day-outings at Arnott’s department store studying the antics of shoplifters, in a feeble attempt to distract her focus from a particular salesclerk.

Forgotten, simply put, is an exploration of expiration.  Undoubtedly, a play about loss—the deterioration of the mind, the estrangement of loved ones, and ultimately, the termination of life—it is just as much a play about gain.  Each character demonstrates the sort of profound grace, insight—and, yes—good humor that is granted, exclusively, at the milestone of Old Age.

“What do we want?” Flor asks, parroting the jingle of an Alzheimer’s advertisement.

“We don’t know,” he answers himself.

“When do we want it?”

(Pause)

“Who?”

Forgotten is, above all, a tribute to the elderly.  Still, the question stands: why kabuki?  It is true, as Augustus notes, that unlike Westerners, Asians revere the senior members of their societies; caring for them is a duty, not an option.  If it is a cultural contrast that Kinevane is going for, then that anecdote alone would drive his point home.  But, there is a reason for the whistling bamboo instruments, the placement of a geisha doll (slash wine bottle cover) on Dora’s vanity table.  These measures are purely stylistic and seemingly foreign to the Irish stage.

Yet, surprisingly, Kinevane is not the first Irishman to dabble in Japanese theater.  During the early decades of the 20^th Century, Yeats was inspired by the dramatic structure of kabuki’s predecessor, Noh, as evidenced in his two plays: At the Hawk’s Well and The Death of Cuchulain.  Just like Yeats, Kinevane does not strive to emulate the Japanese tradition.  This is cafeteria kabuki: Kinevane picks only the elements of kabuki which are most beneficial to Forgotten:

Cross-dressing: check.

Other actors: what for?

Face paint: absolutely.

Flower paths and trap-doors: no need.

Dancing: God, yes.

With kabuki-esque on-stage transformations, Kinevane reminds his audience that this is not reality: this is a play.  This is art.  Actions and appearances are sometimes exaggerated to convey a message, to stir ideas and emotion.  The make-up is never scrubbed clean, so when Kinevane switches roles, he brings the previous character with him.  The individuals begin to overlap, allowing us to see that they are not as isolated as they first seemed.  The dancing, well, aside from being ridiculously amusing (think: a grown man, bopping about, squealing like a teenager at a karaoke bar), acts as the perfect segue into a new scene.  It allows the audience to regroup, to briefly mull over the words of one character, while preparing for the next.  All the while, Kinevane has your attention in the palm of his hand.  And, we can assume, by the goofy look on his face, that he is having a hell of a time himself.

With all of that said, it is possible that there is no “something” about Forgotten.  There are many things: a delightful chameleon of a performer, an unexpected fusing of two islands, a wondrously knotted storyline full of the laughter and the tears that make life worth holding on to, and the idea that even when we feel we have nothing, there is a past worth excavating.

Forgotten runs until March 7^th, with performances on Wednesday – Saturday at 8 pm, and Sunday at 3 pm.  There will be a panel discussion on Thursday, February 25^th, immediately following the 8 pm performance.

Above image of Pat Kinevane in Forgotten

This week, the Pearl Theatre parts its curtains for Stephen Jeffrey’s page-to-stage adaptation of Hard Times by Charles Dickens.  After sitting through the production, I contemplated suggesting an addendum to the Playbill.  Perhaps, a WARNING on the cover: “This play is long, and the chairs are Amish in comfort level.”  But, I realize that such a statement would only discourage theatergoers, and while it has its flaws, there is nothing rotten about this play.  It holds all the charm that one has come to expect from a Dickens.  So, bring an inflatable donut, and grab a box of Snowcaps during the intermission.  Because if you like A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist and the rest of the gang, then you won’t want to miss this one.

Hard Times takes place in the fictional Cokestown, a culture-starved city, where tourists need only to familiarize themselves with three landmarks: Thomas Gradgrind’s school, Josiah Bounderby’s factory row, and Mr. Sleary’s Circus.  At Gradgrind’s, students are taught that facts, and facts alone, are all that matters in life; imagination is equated with idleness.  Every thought must have an “application,” the only worthwhile question being: how will x benefit the progress of Coketown (and maybe elevate my status within it)?  Next up, the mills, owned by man-about-town, Josiah Bounderby.  As he slurps “turtle soup from a golden spoon,” his penny-paid workers unionize and plot a Luddite-like revolt.  Thirdly, there is Sleary’s, a scrappy sprout of color in the midst of gray.  The only reason to know Sleary’s is to avoid it.  The people of the tent are to be pitied, not patronized.  Acrobatic horseriding and the juggling of knives—well, those are activities of distraction.  They are not a means to Coketown’s progress.

Despite it’s three hour running time, in its novel form, Hard Times is by no means a tome; my Signet Classics edition totals a slim 277 pages.  That said, it is perhaps Dickens’s most scathing commentary on society.  What it lacks in word count, it makes up for in punch.  The Age of Industry incensed Dickens.  With its assembly lines and barrack-like housing projects, trades were quickly becoming obsolete.  Skills were replaced with machines, art replaced by mass-produced replicas.  There was no more pride in work; industrialization, according to Dickens, was crushing the human spirit.

These are heavy, complicated ideas, and because it’s Dickens, he is sure to pepper his tirade with humorous relief, satirizing the hell out of every thing and every one.  So, it is quite remarkable how mightily the repertory cast of six carries this play.  They are constantly on rotation, not only skipping from one character to the next, but also acting as narrators and stagehands, uncovering props to reveal trunks and assisting their costars with costume changes.  Indisputably, all of the actors are talented, but it is Robin Leslie Brown who is particularly delightful as the frenzied, meddling spinster, Mrs. Sparsit.  And even if Sean McNall’s accent is more Scottish than English, and Jolly Abraham’s straight-up West Indian, you let it slide because you cannot dream of performing such a production every night—so many lines and transformations—and this troupe does so with unflagging energy.

Although the plot transports us to the 1850s, the themes and personalities of Hard Times live on past the era in which they were created.  We are familiar with Dickens’s world in our own 21^st Century way.  In 2010, milling towns are scarce, but The Man lives on, cementing an updated caste system.  Utilitarianism has withered, but the Gradgrinds remain, people who regurgitate trendy catechisms, judging others by their own models and figures.   We all know a chest-puffing Bounderby who strings big fish stories of a cheerless childhood to emphasize his newfound success, an attempt to gain the admiration of his peers.  There are Sparsits, rumor-mongers who take it upon themselves to weave the fates of others.  And if we’re lucky, we know a pure soul, a Sissy Jupe who sees further than the eye, finding rays of optimism in even the smoggiest of skies.

While watching this play, one should keep in mind that like most of Dickens’s novels, Hard Times was originally serialized, published in the weekly periodical, Household Words—only one chapter per issue.  Readers had seven days to ruminate over a few pages of text.  To reel the people in to the newsstands every Wednesday for the next installment, each chapter had to have a hook: say, the introductory sketch of a ridiculous character, or a plot-twist worthy of the Victorian version of water cooler chatter.  It is said that Dickens was an avid fan of the theater, and even during his day, his plays were performed, sometimes before they were even finished.  But, would Dickens have been satisfied with a continuous 180-minute performance, so much information being showered all at once?

Adaptation is a daunting endeavor, especially when each chapter is packed with enough tricks to keep an audience entertained for a week.  It seems as if the brave Jeffreys gave the play a mere trimming—some of the text is quoted verbatim—in an attempt to preserve its Dickensian integrity.  Even so, the story feels rushed.  So, if I could make one last suggestion: regardless of whether you choose to see Hard Times, definitely read it.  Allow yourself your own intermissions, forget the Snowcaps and just devour all that is being said.  Revel in the wry, tangential glory that is so peculiarly Dickens.

‘Hard Times’ will be run through March 28, 2010.  www.pearltheatre.org

Photo of the Pearl Theatre Company cast by Gregory Costanzo

James Spader, David Alan Grier and Richard Thomas in Race.

David Mamet’s newest drama, Race, currently showing at the Ethel Barrymore, begins with black attorney Henry Brown (David Alan Grier), of the high profile law firm Lawson and Brown, lecturing his potential client, the white and wealthy Charles Strickland (Richard Thomas), about black people.  Charles has been accused of raping a black woman and his lawyers-to-be are trying to get the facts.  Henry’s monologue, ostensibly an attempt to intimidate Charles into honesty and submissiveness, is also an accusation that the defendant is a thinly veiled racist:

HENRY: You want to tell me about Black folks?

I’ll help you: O.J.  Was guilty.  Rodney

King was in the wrong place, but the

police have the right to use force.

Malcolm X was noble when he renounced

violence.  Prior to that he was

misguided.  Dr.  King was, of course, a

saint.  He was killed by a jealous

husband, and you had a maid when you were

young who was better to you than your

mother.  She raised you.  You’ve never

fucked a black girl, but one sat near you

in science class, and she was actually

rather shy.

Brown assumes that Strickland sides with the cops who beat Rodney King, and he posits that Charles subscribes to right-wing conspiracy theories about who killed MLK.  The most pertinent detail in the opening monologue, though, is the last one.  Brown assumes that Strickland was surprised by what he suspects to be Strickland’s one experience with a black girl because it defied what he had previously held to be true about black girls.

As he speaks, though, Henry is exhibiting the very behavior of which he is accusing Charles Strickland: making assumptions about a person based on his ethnicity and class.

While it seems initially that Race is about whether Lawson and Brown can successfully defend Strickland, the real dramatic question posed by Mamet is: Will the play’s protagonist, the cynical but brilliant attorney Jack Lawson (James Spader), get tripped up by his own brand of racial profiling?

Lawson’s journey in Race is not merely to defend his client, but also to navigate his professional relationship with his pretty, black assistant and protégée, Susan (Kerry Washington), who accuses Lawson of racial profiling. She gets her way by playing on Lawson’s sense of guilt as a white man living in a world where white men have a history of abusing power.  Despite his shrewdness, Lawson overlooks Susan’s disloyalty to the firm because of his feelings of self-reproach as well as the fear that he will be accused of racism.

Mamet creates drama not so much by questioning the morality of racial profiling, but rather by questioning its usefulness.  Each of the principal characters in Race is depicted as using ethnic stereotypes as guideposts for his or her actions.  Susan is convinced of Strickland’s guilt because of his whiteness; Henry Brown is convinced that Strickland is a racist; and Jack Lawson has a habit of summing people up in a hurry based on demographics.

Consider the following interaction between Lawson and Susan, after Lawson discovers that a Latina hotel chambermaid, whose testimony is crucial to his defense of Strickland, has gone to the district attorney to revise her description of the room where the rape occurred:

Jack: You’re telling me, some half-literate illegal hotel maid

suddenly takes it upon herself to go back to the police…

Susan: “Half-literate…”

Jack (off sheet of paper): Rosa fucking Gonzales. (To phone)  I have to call you         back.

SUSAN: “Half-literate.” Hotel Maid.

JACK: Can we call things by their name?  Her social security number is false, her employment application is written in a misspelled scrawl, she is illegal.  God

bless her, that’s what she is.

Lawson’s coarse assessment of the “hotel maid” is offensive, but he seems to redeem himself a moment later when he demonstrates he is merely describing in bald terms the woman’s cultural background.  Or does he redeem himself?  Mamet ultimately shows Lawson as having made a mistake by following assumptions based on the hotel maid’s race.

The play’s ending may remind Mamet fans of Speed-the-Plow, Mamet’s tale of two Hollywood film producers, the more powerful of whom almost makes a career-ending error when he over-sympathizes with a scheming female before being saved by his more level-headed partner, whose desire to make money has not been so disastrously clouded.  In both Speed-the-Plow and Race, a boys’ club is almost penetrated by a dangerous, self-interested and attractive woman.  It is surprising to see Mamet recycle this dramatic structure—here it feels like the use of a deus ex machina; Susan’s character doesn’t seem sufficiently developed in the first part of the play to justify her actions in its conclusion.

Also surprising in Race is the pervading assumption shared by the characters that all black people hate white people and all white people are out to screw black people.  Consider the following exchange, in which Jack Lawson proclaims blacks and whites to be mortal enemies:

Jack: I’ll prove it to you. Black know things no white man knows.

Susan: Tell me one thing.

Jack:  That the whites will screw you. Any chance we get. We cannot help

ourselves.

Susan: Now tell me why.

Jack:  Because we know you hate us.

Similarly, Henry Brown says to Strickland  in Act Two:

Henry: “Do I hate Whitefolks?” Z’at your question? “Do all black people hate

whites?” Let me put your mind at rest.  You bet we do. White folks are “scared?”  All to the good. You understand?

This feels like an unsubtle idea, and, although Mamet is famous for using rhetorical devices to present and examine bold concepts, he often looks at an idea from all angles—to the point where it’s difficult to understand where the play itself stand on the issue.  Most conspicuously missing, though, is a dissenting opinion.  Two characters in the play share the above assumption—they express it repeatedly—and no one challenges them.

Lawson and Brown’s assumption that all blacks hate whites calls to mind the paranoid but earnest opening line of Mamet’s 2006 book on modern-day Judaism, The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews.  Mamet writes: “As you have taken the time to read and I to write this book, I believe we should be frank: The world hates the Jews.  The world has always and will continue to do so.”

Does Mamet really believe this?  In an essay about Race in the Times last September, the playwright quotes from a joke comedian Chris Rock made about the American public being surprised that Reverend Jeremiah Wright was a 75-year-old black man who hates white people.   “Is there any other kind of a 75-year-old black man?” Rock asked the audience.

“This rang true to me,” Mamet writes in his Times essay. But it doesn’t feel as true coming out of the mouths of Brown and Lawson, two men in their mid-forties, who came of age after the Civil Rights Era.  Perhaps this facet of Lawson and Brown’s beliefs is congruous with the fact that all these characters live and die by racially-based assumptions, but there are additional moments when the lawyers’ dialogue seems out of line with what otherwise seems to be razor sharp intelligence.  Take Lawson’s summations of the different types of self-disdain that blacks and Jews experience: “All people deal with shame or guilt,” he says.  “Jews deal with guilt.  Blacks deal with shame.  It’s two of the wonderful ways we metabolize feelings of inferiority.”  Of course, the last line here is lovely, but Lawson provides no useful distinction between shame and guilt.  And in regards Jews having guilt, he seems to be merely repeating an age-old cliché.

Race is most successful when Lawson or Brown incisively dissect the legal system as they scheme how to best defend their client.  “There are no ‘facts of the case,’” Lawson explains to Charles Strickland.  “There are two opposing fictions.  Which the opposing teams each seek to impose upon the jury.  That is part of the wisdom you’d be paying us for.” As he did with real estate sales in Glengarry Glen Ross, higher education in Oleanna, and the Hollywood machine in Speed-the-Plow, in Race, Mamet brilliantly lays bare the legal profession.

Race, which seems unusually broad and blunt for the title of a Mamet play (think how esoteric are his titles Speed-the-Plow and Oleanna), is perhaps a double entendre meant to indicate that the true subject of this drama is the one that Mamet returns to again and again: the rat race.  Despite the play’s shortcomings, Race is a bold and nuanced dramatic meditation on race relations and Mamet’s most exciting drama since The Cryptogram in 1995.