Pat Kinevane’s “Forgotten”

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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. Read More »

By Jennifer Dwoskin | Posted in Reviews, Theater | Comments (0)

Dickens’ “Hard Times”

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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.

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By Jennifer Dwoskin | Posted in Fiction, Reviews, Theater | Comments (0)

David Mamet’s “Race”

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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. Read More »

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

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)