Dublin by Lamplight

Michael West’s Dublin by Lamplight, now playing at 59E59 as part of the 1st Irish Theatre Festival, is a vaudevillian portrayal of Dublin circa 1904.  And if 1st Irish is indeed a “celebration of the best of Irish theatre,” as its mission statement declares, then West’s show should get top billing.  It’s the perfect fit. Although it may seem like ninety minutes of nonstop shenanigans, I wouldn’t call Dublin by Lamplight a farce.  Beneath the disguise of exaggerated facial gestures and starry-eyed idiocy, is an ode to the creation of the Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s first national playhouse.

Simply put, the play is about the creation of a cultural monument.  You see, the characters aren’t building just any theater; it’s the Irish National Theatre of Ireland, and the first of its kind.  Dedicated to prideful threads of Celtic mythology, the performances are intended to uplift the spirits of the Irish people by reminding audiences of their own ethnic identity.  The momentum of the Home Rule Movement—the Irish demand for self-governance within the British Empire—had hit a speed bump with death of its charismatic leader, Charles Stuart Parnell (also known as the “un-crowned king of Ireland”), in 1891. Patriots needed some other vehicle to carry them through the gray days of turn-of-the-century Dublin.  So, why not an alternative outlet for self-expression, one that steers clear of Parliament and republican brotherhoods?  As the play’s protagonist Willy Hayes declares: “It’s not political.  It’s just theatre.”  But, really, one may ask: can the two be separated?  Can art be without an agenda?

Now, I admit: at first I was certain that the character of Willy was a fictional William Butler Yeats, while his protest-loving patroness, Eva St. John, was of course Lady Gregory, stewardess of the Irish Literary Revival. After all, the Abbey opened its door with Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan. And the women, well, both are cultural paradoxes; they’re daughters of Anglo-Irish privilege longing to “save” the impoverished lives of Dublin’s working class with a grand institution of the dramatic arts.  They’re the kind of women who, after inquiring about the rate of your rented apartment, respond with a “That’s it?”—as if half of your monthly salary is a pittance to them.  On the one hand the lowly loathe them, yet sometimes they’re forced to think: “Maybe they’re not so bad.”  In spite of their pomp and presumption, they seem to care about the Northsiders—the notoriously wealth-starved citizens who populate the land on the “wrong” side of the Liffey River—and perhaps “seem to” is enough.

After doing some research, I discovered the truth behind Dublin by Lamplight. Willy is West’s portrayal of producer William Fay, who along with his thespian brother, Frank, formed a touring company called W. G. Fay’s Irish National Dramatic Company.  And Eva is Annie Horniman, an aspiring theater manager with gold-lined pockets and a friend of the Irish Literary Theatre, which was founded by no other than Yeats, Gregory, and playwright and political/cultural activist Edward Martyn (who must be the inspiration for the flamboyant, Nervous Nelly character, Martyn).  So, I was wrong, but hey, I learned something.

This is part of what makes West’s play so alluring. He unearths the facts that have been buried by the “big names” and their accomplishments.  You know, people like Yeats, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature and actually—and this is a rarity among most poets and playwrights—sold books.  Lady Gregory is a bit more obscure, but her estate known as Coole Park is now a government-owned park in Ireland and it continues to be one of County Galway’s main attractions, thanks to the “autograph tree” inscribed by the likes of Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge, and others.  But the Fay brothers, after working with the Abbey actors for four plus years, had a falling-out with the Abbey’s management and fled to the United States in 1908.   While Horniman, after purchasing the property for the actual edifice, moved back to England; as a British socialite, one might guess that she was fonder of Irish culture when admiring it from across the Channel. What West has done for these people, whose names have slipped from the pages of history, is rather endearing.  He has given them their “time to shine,” so to speak.  He has illuminated their characters for 21st Century theatergoers.

Etymologists speculate that the word “vaudeville” comes from the French phrase “voix de ville,” or the “voice of the city.”  In a way, West is finally giving William and Frank Fay and Annie Horniman their posthumous freedom of speech.  What would they have said about the Abbey, and about the sociopolitical climate of 1904 Dublin?  And is their contribution representative of the collective voice of the entire city?  It’s also important to know that Dublin by Lamplight debuted in 2004, shortly after the centennial celebration of Bloomsday, the day—June 16, 1904—on which James Joyce’s beloved epic novel Ulysses took place.  The tongues of Dubliners were flapping with all that is Joycean—what that man did for Ireland and their position on the literary map.  To me, it almost feels like West had his own agenda.  Did he want the Ulysses-induced Dubliners to remember the other pivotal event in Irish culture that occurred in 1904 (actually, and not fictionally, occurred that is)?  I think so.  I think West had an agenda, one that was veiled in humor, but an agenda nonetheless.

Maybe it’s like Yakov Bok says in Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer: “There is no such thing as an apolitical man, especially an Irishman.”  OK, well, it’s really “especially a Jew” that Malamud writes, but I think this new version works just as well.

Dublin by Lamplight will be at 59E59 Theaters until Sunday, October 2nd. www.59e59.org.

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

Dana Spiotta’s Masterpiece

Stone Arabia is Dana Spiotta’s third novel. The time has come to call her one of our best writers.

In Stone Arabia, a woman named Denise describes the slow deterioration of her family: her aging mother, daughter Ada, and her brother, a musician named Nik Worth, who rejects a career as a pop star to create an endless artwork called the Chronicles, which consists of journal entries, interviews, articles and musings, all invented, which amount to an imagined, parallel life. Stone Arabia is anecdotal, intellectual, fleet and frightening and humane, but never acts like love does anything it doesn’t actually do. It is utterly unique.

The slow deterioration of the mind—in other words, forgetting—is an obsession of the novel. Denise’s easygoing mother is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and becomes, in effect, another person, spewing racist epithets and hoarding receipts and paperwork while forgetting what these papers represent, as if the records of transactions are the only way to know that they occurred. (As Nik says, “Self-curate or disappear.”) The evidence of dementia spreads to other characters, and it gets hard to differentiate just what constitutes senility, since everyone has the symptoms. When her mother is diagnosed, Denise herself begins to suffer from aphasia—the forgetting of common words—as when she spends an entire chapter trying to remember the name “Jayne Mansfield.” She takes her mother’s medication, along with pills she finds on the internet, all of which have terrifying names—memextend, mindroids, braintonics—and while she drives, she listens to memory-boosting tapes. This is Dana Spiotta’s frightening mimesis: sitting traffic and helplessly forgetting.

Denise’s daughter Ada attempts to seize her family’s past before its vanishes, but the documentary film she tries to make antagonizes Nik and even Denise, who are weirdly unforthcoming and defensive, as though their memories are better lost than embarrassed into narrative. And Ada is aging, too; she “…looks tired in tiny ways.” Nik’s Chronicles are probably the best solution to this seeming epidemic—though they mirror the mother’s obsession with receipts—for in such transient conditions, where everything is temporary, his fantasy is no more fake then everyone else’s truth.

Because Nik is a musician, Stone Arabia has been described as a novel of rock and roll. In the book, rock music functions as a cultural activity that titillates desire without rewarding it, and imbues its best practitioners with a both a sexual authority and the respect accorded anyone who is successful at their job. The irony, of course, is that Nik’s job is to slack: to drink and take drugs and make music nobody will hear, which somehow only makes his piety more devout, and thus admired. His family never tells him to give up and get a real job: they admire his faith, a dignified abjection close to sainthood, insofar as it has exempted him from worldly, bourgeois pleasures like insurance and a decent house and so forth. The more devoted to the cause of making art one is, the more one stands to lose, which is why Nik is ravaged more than any other character, but also why his family, and the novel, love him so. Because music is a kind of condensed expression of life, Nik comes closest to possessing that which life “half-seriously offers with one hand and pockets with the other,” to paraphrase John Ashbery. Spiotta sees rock music as a realm of pure desire unfulfilled. Stone Arabia is not a great rock novel because it makes up funny bands names like The Demonics—anyone can do that—it’s great because it thinks very critically about what actually happens to the mind of the rock-and-roll listener. To Spiotta, music acts like it will give, but it actually takes away. It doesn’t mediate isolation, it increases it, and the characters apprenticed to it are ruined. Nik keeps records of his loss because he lost the most, though he also possessed the most, stood the closest to desire. This argument is Romantic—and familiar—but because the book is focused on the facts of Nik’s demise, it’s also painfully unsentimental, and redeems what would have been a cliché.

Another, better way to look at Stone Arabia is as a kind of hi-brow horror novel made of the banal. Nik makes certain his career is unsuccessful, and for most of the book, he’s a bartender whose “…lifetime of abuse could only have come from a warped relationship with the future.” In caring for her brother, Denise herself veers toward insolvency, and, when Nik gets ill and has no health insurance, she treats his painful toe infection with Preparation H after vainly searching Google for solutions. Spiotta knows that anyone who looks for closure on the internet is doomed to add an existential panic to their symptoms. Later, as Denise applies for a credit card just to cover her costs, she reads the little print and thinks, “The first time you actually read the words printed on these things was to feel the last connection to your childhood die.” That night, she takes pills to go to sleep, “what we used to call sleeping pills but can’t anymore because it sounds too tragic.”

The end of Stone Arabia, which reconciles Nik and Denise’s fantasies with their real lives, may be predictable, but that doesn’t mean it’s not affecting, the way that any kind of bad but inevitable news is. If the book sounds too depressing, it should be said Spiotta’s prose is clear and intimate; as Faulkner would say, “Less claw than velvet.” The reader always feels as though a reasonable human being is speaking to them, even as the fodder of daily life is re-described in terrifying ways that may well keep you awake forever. Stone Arabia does not speechify or engage in fantasies of power. It may act like it seduces but the reader never feels they were deceived, except perhaps by their own self, and that’s how all great parties end. This grave and elegant little novel is a masterpiece.

By Adam Novy | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Watch A Book

Here’s something I love that has come out of our weirdo digital age: book trailers. Sort of like mini-movies, these small little snippets are meant to take us inside the action of a book and want to read it, in much the same way a movie trailer does. Some of them are very smart and very well done and some of them are so stupid and over the top. Either way, as their own unique art form I think they are quite amazing. People choose so many different ways to utilize three minutes of film to sell a book. If you want more, check out the Moby Awards created solely for this purpose. You can waste hours of time looking through all the nominees, winners and such. So much better than the Oscars. I’ve collected just a few of my favorites here below for you to watch. Tell me if any of these make you want to read a book.

Pynchon is The Dude (The Genius Dude) and The Genius Dude doesn’t believe how much his own book costs:

This one is spectacular because there is so much information and so much rage caught in only two minutes:

Not only is The Instructions a great book, but this is pretty great too:

For photo-shop geeks:

Cause Sloane is just cool and so is everything she does:

This one is just really good. It reminds me of Shel Silverstein if he were a little sadder:

By Katherine Krause | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Philip Levine, Poet Laureate

THE WANDERING POETS (by Philip Levine, from Dossier Issue #5)

As they return from their pilgrimage,

footsore and disgusted, only a few

wear jackets and ties.  As usual

Gerald is the most emphatic: he stands

at the corner of Broadway and Spring

and demands that an angel descend

carrying a glass of tea sugared

with a little lemon and milk—

not a big deal when you consider

how far he’s come without the least thanks.

It’s early April at the center

of the known world, somewhere tulips

nudge their way heavenward, forsythias

blaze until you have to look away.

Somewhere an axe falls, somewhere a boy

hurls a rock, somewhere the answer

is waiting to spring from the black leaves

of a mountain oak.  Gerald has fallen

to the sidewalk and the lunch crowd

steps carefully over him; the lesser writers

scurry toward their cars or descend

into the subway to make their appointments.

It’s so quiet only you hear the poem

he’s polished all his life, delivered on

a froth of blood and meaning everything.

By Thomas Yagoda | Posted in Poetry | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Lust Really, Not Love

Upon entering the Robert Moss Theater for a viewing of The Movement Workshop Group’s (MWG) presentation of Wanderlust, I had a flashback. It was the damndest thing. I was instantly transported to middle school, my mind compiling a montage of after-school special videos. “Why were the people on stage forming a semi-circle?” I pondered. “And why did they look like they were going to tell me to ‘just say no,’ or ‘it’s OK to wait?’”

Maybe it was the statement hair styles, unforgiving denim, and gold lame; I mean, the place looked like an incubator for the 80s (I’m pretty sure Jon Cryer’s doppelganger was the guitar player. Note: “Pretty in Pink” Cryer, not “Two and a Half Men.”) All I know is that I’m glad I returned from my nostalgic trip through the awkward years, finally reentering reality as the house lights dimmed. For this show is no after-school special. Other than being part of The Planet Connections Theatre Festivity, “New York’s premiere eco-friendly, socially conscious theater festival,” the players don’t preach anything. They’re just a motley troupe of actors, dancers, and musicians doing what they love and, really, having fun.

Now, the MWG claims to produce only works of dance theater that “transport audiences and the company members to higher, more inspired psychic states.” That’s a bit a bold; I didn’t feel spiritually elevated after leaving the theater, but director Leslie Guyton and her cast have certainly created a serendipitous atmosphere. The girl in gold lame, for example, is called Cosmos, and she cavorts about the stage swirling slivers of sparkling tissue paper on Characters A, B, C, and D. She’s creating scenarios for them—happenstance introductions and “accidental” rendezvous (at least they appear to be coincidences to oblivious pawns). You know the routine: girl wakes up on a folding table, explores her surroundings like a dumbfounded Eve, all alone until her Adam pas de bourrées onto the scene from the sideline. They both go googly-eyed, love at first sight. Then, suddenly, girl meets another guy, and Adam’s cast away. But wait, that’s not all: another girl cartwheels in to propose a triangular dynamic—of lust really, not love.

Maybe that’s where the title comes from, for the Characters aren’t exactly world travelers. They never leave their known world—neither physically, nor figuratively. Rather, it’s their sexual interest that is wayward. It’s their lust that is wandering. As for love? Are the initial feelings of attraction and emotional attachment between our Eve and Adam preserved throughout? Well, I’m not going to give it away, but what I will say is that if the premise of Wanderlust doesn’t intrigue you, the music should. The songs are original and the violinist, the globetrotting Josh Henderson, is phenomenal. Why the program dubs him as “AKA Justin Bieber,” I have no idea; his talent surpasses that of the teeny bopper and he’s not creepy, which is an added bonus.

Overall, I would predict that the 20-something Guyton has a boundless future ahead of her. What’s most impressive is that the choreography and soundtrack is all from scratch. While there is a thick coating of fairy dust on this particular piece, I hope that—and I believe that she will—dare to venture into more adventurous territory for her upcoming projects.

WANDERLUST will be playing at the Robert Moss Theater from June 5th until June 25th. For tickets please visit: http://www.planetconnectionsfestivity.com/ And for more information about the show: http://movementworkshopgroup.org/.

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

Ethan Hon on Sherry Mills

Sherry Mills is an artist in New York. She is the subject of a documentary by Nathalie Michel. Her latest project “Perspective” will open on June 30th at Rogue Gallery in Chelsea. More information is available via the artist’s website: www.sherrymills.com

Ethan Hon is from Omaha, Nebraska. He is the co-founder of JERRY: A Magazine and is the art and visual culture editor for The New Inquiry. His poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House, The New Inquiry, Cannibal, and his paper on Samuel Beckett and the blogosphere will be presented this June at the University of York.

Self-Portrait, Target: Sherry Mills’ Commissioned Shadow Boxes

By Ethan Hon

1. Tic Douloureux

There are consequences to the human form; we lack the courage to make it stop and

the strength to participate in our own abuse.

It comes to stand for the pinnacle of civilization, and in addition to an abiding despair,

we have the appalling responsibility of living our lives. The succession of more and

more marvels obliges a registration against, through, and via the known flesh.

Here the low shall prevail. Here roll the darklings and a deficiency of pathos. The very

noise rain produces, densissimus imber, din continuous, spiral wakefulness in the ear.

Weather is anytime. It is the world.

Doomed by the air she is about to suck. Magnificent and monumental tissue breathing,

a gurgle, failed comprehending history from those witnesses who were willing to be

butchered. Cut the children out of me, she said.

She does not know how she lifts her hand, it is a fact, and since no one knew how she

accomplished the task, she could not have done it. There is language in the curling of

her hair, and the one circumstance of her life that was somewhat romantic speaks in the

same argot, saying, saying, “The imperative is to hold the creature out, away from the

body.”

Grand hope measures utter despair. The machine’s patience is infinite, branching

out and twined endlessly. Movement forgives utter rigidity, but only as pain becomes

infatuated with its own avatar.

Working in the fields, touching the wheat, she feels not only the wheat but her fingers

touching. And she doesn’t feel the thorns but her body hurting her.

The shifting weight regulates the lift and fall of giant limbs, and colossal weapons

transcribe the altered-world fragment, our life-destroying disdain for confession,

and dermographism in the ascendant. The pedantic intellect fondles the immensity

forever, and every game becomes an endgame. The real forfeits its strangeness. The

unexpected, its arbitrariness.

The knife slicing through a cow’s neck is a weapon, and when it quarters the carcass

and when it divides the beef onto the dinner plate, that same knife is a tool.

Alteration resides inside function.

Devoid of any content other than complaint, utterances are self-trivializing and dissolute,

negligible, a pre-language of inarticulateness that fails to legitimize hunger, suffering,

exhaustion.

Her main job becomes being inside the shell, keeping a discrete identity. The real

declares itself moment-to-moment, sans intervention, abridgement, or acceleration,

and the search for it extended to the edge of the imperceptible world, that life which

lies between animal and plant. A diorama-cum-video in its casement, and hugging her

tummy in repentance she doubled and then keeled over. To best steady the hand,

constant faith in the convulsive state and the margins wrecked by her quaking hand.

Before that, a single pencil line never was allowed without sensitivity and reason being

invoked.

Every act of civilization is transcending the body in a way dissonant to mutual needs.

Beyond extraordinary perception and the nuanced petulance of its discoveries, two

methods reveal themselves: to inspect oneself and to despise oneself.


2. Anatomies

Itching is a human transaction. Bleak ambience. Call no man happy so long as he

is alive. His sense of misery proves it. He does not care that he does not care. She

recalled the man that hath seen such affliction spread, and his continuous eloquence

wearied her. Let joy be discovered with those who speak only in groans.

The clot of despairs: “Wonderful! Where people come from.”

She cannot conceptualize how long this will last. The rhythm so unflinching and the

duration insensible, the accretion teaches that one cannot live slowly enough. Transport

is comprehensible, learning each minute, minute, minute.

Earth is not thought, it is the least word let fall in solitude, thereby in danger of no longer

being needed. Cenotaph, or, far from the goat shall be the grass: Patent it is that the

real body is a glorious one. Since it is finite and scalable, she can think into the next

moment by reproducing in slow motion some mental gesture. Thus, human dignity

exists in syntax. The only conception for the future is, under the prevailing conditions,

the infinite populated with whips and scorpions, hot irons and other people.

Remembering the pensum, the task of living, the necessity to choose the correct

methods, and the first requirement of asylum, in the true sense of that word, a cessation

in the burning of the feet is favorable, as then they can return to be fodient appendages,

digging shelter in the open field, unearthing the joy of the worm at the very deep who

did rot. The epiphany of the grave at the end of gravity.

Objects once inhabited climb the darkening skies for last light and are

buried there. Thespace into which one stared clutters them. Baked chicken,

steamed vegetables, rice, Styrofoam, were reversible events, meaning they are trivial things,

like arrangements of furniture, like the issue of our common corruption.

It is Monday morning and she is in pain. The hammer may really be there. The bones

may actually be coming through the skin. To feel the break as it broke and its mutation

as the shards punctured the skin. She bandaged the hammer and the benefits to

sentience are incalculable.

False motives are formal. Nothing sustains its imago in the world, this one or beyond.

For the place vacated by the rarefied choreography of disembodied events, the as-of-

yet heard intergalactic screams, all converge in emptiness. It is a terrible thing to feel all

that one possesses slipping away.

Simply evade madness during youth. Later, confront it and allow the pursuit of this

occasion—the dream inside the dreamer—to drift grotesquely, mutely away.

Vast kingdom, nature’s lonely and bound by its expanse, and somewhere at the

administered limits, a desperate siege is chronicled, as if its perfection were not of this

world. Insistent thrust toward material self-expression, material self-objectification, the

very real head loosed from the imagined demiurge, whether a failed god or a failed

table, both shall be discarded.

Such mobile wonders obey their landscape in self-sufficient felicity. Then the lake

disappeared into nothing. Surely, a dried-up lakebed was meant. No, nothing, she

said, I who lived only in myself with revulsion for any physical effort, I who learned by

watching bees move toward their hive; learned not the systems’ articulation, or perhaps

its entropy, or perhaps skeletons are monsters that live inside us. My body reports

chiefly its own decomposition. Furthermore, it distrusts whatever is not working toward

that end, yet what is wrought, however, is more or less fiction. Let my final concession

be the novel is a bore.


By Sara Femenella | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Watch: Peter Straub

The Dossier Readings #2 with novelist Peter Straub. Bestselling author Peter Straub (Ghost Story, Koko, Lost Boy, Lost Girl, A Dark Matter) reads from the work of the late Donald Harington, an Arkansas-born novelist best known for his many novels that take place in a fictional Ozark hamlet known as Stay More, AR. This reading was recorded in lo-tech fashion in Manhattan in the fall of 2009, only a month before Harington passed away at the age of 73. Peter is a great admirer of Harington’s work, one of many who think Harington’s readership is not nearly what it should be. In an oft-used quote, the author Fred Chappell says of Harington, “[He’s] not an under-appreciated writer, he’s an undiscovered continent.” When Dossier asked Peter if he’d be interested in doing a recorded reading for a website project we call The Dossier Readings, in which writers are asked to read favorite passages from favorite works, he came to us with a pretty serious stack of books, ultimately settling on an excerpt from Harington’s 1972 novel, Some Other Place. The Right Place (Toby Press). Hope you enjoy.

By Thomas Yagoda | Posted in Fiction, Interviews | Tagged , , | Comments (0)