Author: doug-nordfors

Anticipating a one-person show—even if it’s Doug Wright’s Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning play, I Am My Own Wife—isn’t an altogether pleasant experience. It’s just so hard to believe that a single actor can strike up the whole band, so to speak, let alone make resonant music. Visions of Jerry Seinfeld with no Jason Alexander and Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Michael Richards to bounce his passable acting off of—or any number of comparable analogies—chill the spine. And such anxious rumblings especially apply to a small-city theater scene like Charlottesville’s.

The good news for Heritage Theatre Festival’s reputation, which perhaps needs a little renewing after last summer’s hiatus, is that full-out pleasure kicked in not too long after its production of I Am My Own Wife began.

In the opening sequence, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (Malcolm Tulip), based on the real-life German transvestite who lived through both Nazism and communism in Berlin and East Berlin, steps onto the stage, smiles coyly at the audience, disappears, comes back on stage, steps toward an antique phonograph and begins to talk lovingly about how the invention was developed and how it works. Mahlsdorf then plunges over to a desk and suddenly becomes U.S. News & World Report Bureau Chief John Marks—one of seemingly countless roles Tulip played throughout the show—who, in typical postmodern fashion, is writing a letter to the playwright, Doug Wright, telling him about Charlotte. And then Marks becomes Wright, who goes to Berlin to interview Charlotte. And then Wright changes back to Charlotte. And so on as Charlotte’s incredible history—her exploration of her intricate sexuality, her Nazi father, her life as a spy for the Stasi after the war, and much more—is gradually revealed.

Tulip, along with director Gillian Eaton, made some smart choices while dealing with the obvious challenges the play presents. First of all, Tulip didn’t do a Robin Williams act, aggressively bouncing from character to character. The way Tulip eased into each part—even when executing a quick change—snuffed out any hint of disjointedness, and, in effect, kept Charlotte always in the spotlight. As a result, Wright’s initial impetus for the play—to filter labyrinthine periods in 20th century history through one psychologically layered character, and to some extent confront virility with effeminancy—was never compromised. Second of all, inherent in Tulip’s delivery as Charlotte was the natural calmness with which people recall trying times, save for bursts of emotion that are quelled before any damage is done to a human being’s fragile equilibrium.

A fine play delivered with finely manipulated skill and authenticity—what more can theatergoers ask for?

Gentlemen and ladies, open your programs: The 34-year tradition of summer theater at UVA is back after a hiatus last year due to construction of the Arts Grounds Parking Garage. One thing has changed: The somewhat stuffy name “Heritage Repertory Theatre” is now the more festive “Heritage Theatre Festival.” And another thing hasn’t: The audience still largely consists of senior citizens. The middle-agers and variations thereof, and the handful of college students, stand out like clichés in otherwise original sentences.

Which is a way to jump to City of Angels, the first musical offering of the Festival season. Larry Gelbart, of “M*A*S*H” fame, who wrote the book, asks theatergoers to indulge in the overdone trope of a film noir spoof, with all its attendant devices: sultry interior monologues in the form of voiceovers, characters changing their lines as a writer revises them on his typewriter, glaringly sexist witty banter, etc. 

His protagonist is Stine (Garen McRoberts), a young novelist in 1940s Hollywood writing a screenplay about a Sam Spade-like private detective (Rob Marnell) on the hunt for a missing heiress (Holly Williams). There are two parallel stories: the screenplay as it unfolds, and Stine’s many struggles with pea-brained movie mogul, Buddy Fidler (Geno Carr). The tension between illusion and reality mounts as the musical proceeds.

Sounds fun, doesn’t it? It is. Despite the more serviceable than electrifying music by Cy Coleman and lyrics by David Zippel, it all essentially works, thanks to Gelbart’s bad (i.e. good) ear for purposely bad one-liners, and the clever way he presents the competing stories, slicing, dicing and reassembling them. After a while, adding one more time to “I’ve seen this a thousand times” doesn’t seem like a big deal.

Heritage artistic director Robert Chapel has often been in the director’s chair for musicals over the years, and he’s in it again for City of Angels. His style, in tandem with whoever his choreographer is—in this case, Perry Medlin—is essentially not to take chances. Given his always rich resources—this time out, McRoberts, Marnell and company, some playing two or more characters, are fine singers and competent actors, and the lighting design by Ryan Bauer and scenic design by Shawn Paul Evans, featuring shafts of smoky light, swathes of shadow, seedy rooms, a sparkling mansion and more, is close to impeccable—Chapel is like a sports team with a big lead playing not to lose. The resulting blocking and pacing has a kind of chiseled stateliness. There’s a distinct pleasure in that, especially in Charlottesville, where musicals over the course of the academic year are often pretty ragged. Some, however, might find Chapel’s approach plodding, or even dull.

But “dull” is certainly not the word to go out with. It’s nice to have Heritage productions of musicals back, whether you’re looking to relax after a tough day or week at the office, or retired and itching for a fun night on the town—though the latter, apparently, don’t need anyone to tell them that.

To that inevitable social gathering/getting-to-know-one-another question, “What do you do?” Lisa Russ Spaar has more than one answer at her disposal. “I’m an English professor at UVA,” is a sure-fire choice. And here’s a good backup: “I’m a poet.” Not too many people find that vocation odd these days. But let’s hope that at least once, just to see the look on the questioner’s face, she’s said, “I’m an anthologist.”

All That Mighty Heart, an anthology of London poems, is her follow-up to Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems (1999). It’s no wonder she’s convinced that there’s a reading public hungry for this genre. Easing into a single concept, while at the same time feverishly trying to anticipate the nuances and personality behind each new variation, is like being a clairvoyant who still enjoys surprises.

The concept of All That Mighty Heart is not simply London, but human minds bent on embracing or subsuming or fathoming or overcoming or rendering or delineating a human place—and somewhere in all that mighty effort and mighty irony lies the heart of what it means to be alive. 

Speaking of effort, Spaar made some deft decisions about which poems to include, as well as found a way to assemble them into a coherent whole.

The book has four sections named for the four elements: water, fire, earth and air. “Water” begins with William Wordsworth’s “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge” (where the anthology title comes from), and then soon morphs into a lyricism bordering on ferocious, courtesy of Ted Hughes’ anti-Romantic “On Westminster Bridge.” “Earth” ranges from Robert Lowell’s grimly amusing sonnet “Living In London,” to Gertrude Stein’s cryptic-as-cryptic-can-be “Threadneedle Street,” to Amy Clampitt and Arthur Rimbaud exposing details of Chelsea and Covent Garden and the London Underground to the opulence of their imaginations.

“Fire” offers up William Blake’s “London,” still electrifying after all these years, and also brims with unexpected twists and turns. Dame Edith Sitwell’s direct and incantatory “Still Falls The Rain,” written during the London Blitz, is as powerful as Yiddish poet Avram Nochum Stencl’s oblique and plain spoken “A Linden Tree in a Whitechapel Street.” “Air” is no less bewitching than the other sections. One moment it’s Mary Coleridge’s Victorian lucidity, and the next it’s Jorge Luis Borges’ modernist daring, each as if transfixed by London’s timelessness.

If the book has a weakness, it’s that the several excerpts from longer poems don’t always come across well. The 17 lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” look lonely and pale, and the small section from H.D.’s monumental “Trilogy” may not draw more readers to that neglected masterpiece.

But such a quibble doesn’t do justice to Spaar’s skill as an editor. In the end, the anthology feels like one grand poem, with nary a word left out.

Oh my, what a shock for literary snobs to behold a comic book image on the cover of the new issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review. Regular readers of the journal know, however, that one of the features of Ted Genoways’ editorship is frequent nods to the art of the graphic novel and all its permutations.

But wait—that’s not quite what’s going on this time. The “spring fiction” issue contains three “superhero stories,” each with an accompanying illustration by Gary Panter that looks like the cover of a comic book. These stories, says Genoways in his introduction, “share the goal of demythologizing the nature of heroism.” The main character of Scott Snyder’s “The 13th Egg,” for instance, is a war veteran battling post-traumatic stress disorder. The whole package has a dual effect: Immersion in a specific theme offers much pleasure (by the end of George Singleton’s “Man Oh Man—It’s Manna Man,” the satire lies replete in the mind, like a thought-through thought), and at the same time the theme often feels forced (Tom Bissell’s “My Interview With the Avenger” begins with the line, “This is a story about heroes”).

Stand-out literary journals present a mix of well-known and lesser-known poets, and VQR is no exception. What’s especially striking about the mix in this issue is the gap between the two camps’ writing styles. Big names Charles Simic, Charles Wright, Billy Collins, Ted Kooser and Linda Pastan are represented by poems that employ relatively spare language and imagery, while “small names” such as Temple Cone and Sara du Sablon strain—not unsuccessfully—to concoct aesthetic and intellectual sparks. You must earn the right, VQR seems to be saying, to speak quietly and still command attention.

Regular readers also know that VQR dishes up more than fiction and poetry. Among the highlights: Bill Sizemore’s profile of Pat Robertson—the almost overwhelming amount of objective details Sizemore provides doesn’t muddle his strong voice; Ezra Pound manuscripts that are reproduced so clearly that a reader may feel he’s pilfered them from Pound’s desk drawer; and an intimate investigation by Kwame Dawes of HIV/AIDS in Jamaica, with stunning photos by Joshua Cogan.

But back to poetry, and what is arguably the issue’s ultimate highlight: In “Jamie’s Hair,” a poem—perhaps more of a prose poem—about his son who was the German teacher slain at Virginia Tech last year, Michael Bishop generates solace by artfully organizing a wealth of details from a full, if shortened, life, and relishing (and proving) how memory can be more sensuous than real time. The subject alone commands attention, but Bishop sets out for transcendence, and makes it there.

words

Longtime readers of The Virginia Quarterly Review are aware that almost every issue sticks to a pattern: an opening series of articles about some of the political hot spots around the world, followed by an array of literary essays and criticism, art, fiction and poetry. It’s like listening to an hour of National Public Radio news and then, without even having to lift your finger to switch the station, basking in a couple of hours of classical music. Do bloodshed and Mozart really belong together? While some issues of VQR seem to leave that question hanging, the current one answers it in a straightforward as well as conceptual way.

The hot spots in the Winter 2008 issue are Iraq and Afghanistan. Testifying to VQR’s prowess is the fact that it’s garnered four pieces that actually offer laymen some fresh insight, especially Nicholas Schmidle’s “Democracy is not a postcard: Iranian influence in western Afghanistan.” (Seems the Iranians didn’t think much of the Taliban.)

Phase two in the pattern has an inauspicious beginning: the prolific poet Albert Goldbarth’s “The Poppy Fields of Afghanistan,” a testament to his ability to get concrete details into his work—and to his inability to do much with them. But the poem sets the tone for the several marriages of the political and literary to come, including other overtly political poems such as Stefi Weisburd’s inventive and exciting “José Sanchez’s First Week in the Cell” and Garrett Hongo’s sluggish “Kubota Writes to José Arcadio Buendia.” Jane Hirshfield’s essay “Justice: Four Windows” reads at times like a CliffsNotes guide to Greek tragedy and an advertisement for Zen Buddhism. Nevertheless, its concentration on the innate and primal in us is a welcome approach to contemporary politics.

Columbia-born artist Fernando Botero’s artistic transformations of Abu Ghraib photos put a new skin on that grotesque debacle. While parts of the symposium on the life and work of Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski, who tracked political goings-on like a modern-day Herodotus, are so personal that they’re opaque, as a whole it’s an important tribute. Finally, there’s a splendid, well-informed review by Philip Connors of Denis Johnson’s Vietnam War novel, Tree of Smoke.

The spirit of all this material extends to nearly the entire contents. Alejandro Zambra’s short story “Bonsai,” for instance, feels rife with sexual politics. And it’s difficult not to regard local poet Lisa Russ Spaar’s “Empty Nest” as bristling with the politics of family.

As for the larger question of whether this issue of VQR is reflective of the deep-rooted notion that everything—public and private—is political, or simply a sign of the times, we’ll have to leave that hanging.