Author: ian-macdougall

stage

It’s opening night for The Tell-Tale Heart and the Mind of Poe, and things don’t look good for the Endstation Theatre Company, the troupe staging this dramatic analysis of the great Southern writer (and one-time UVA student) Edgar Allan Poe. The small, third-floor theater is far from overflowing—the audience outnumbers the seven-person cast by all of three people. There’s no immediate explanation for the paltry showing.

The Endstation Theatre Company came tapping, as if gently rapping, to Live Arts with The Tell-Tale Heart and the Mind of Poe

Whatever the reason, the actors seem unfazed. They conduct themselves with brio as the noncrowd trickles in. The tableau consists of an enormous, three-piece dresser holding various knick-knacks including two human mandibles, dead animals in jars of formaldehyde and a dark, mysterious box—the usual gothic fare. Arranged around the dresser, or in cages built into the dresser, are six of the dramatis personae engaged in various activities. A near-catatonic man paces; a girl rocks back and forth, clutching a baby doll with a noose tied around its neck; another man, the Narrator, pounds out frenetic and brilliant beats on various buckets and pots. The seventh cast member, the Doctor, wearing the raiment of a mad scientist, directs the others, who, we come to realize, are his madhouse wards. The madhouse itself, not surprisingly, is Poe’s mind—the patients, aspects of his id; the Doctor, his superego, trying to maintain control.

Over the course of the one-hour play, the six patients recite or enact Poe’s “The Raven,” “Berenice” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” supersaturated with sudden loud noises, screams and the whispered echoes so popular in cheap horror flicks. The Doctor starts and stops the performances with a cowbell and, along with his reluctant henchman, the Narrator, interjects his own Poe-penned speeches, struggling to preserve decorum as the behavior of his patients becomes increasingly erratic. In the end, he fails; the others, including the Narrator, overpower him, and lock him inside the dresser. The id vanquishes the superego, and madness reigns.

The Tell-Tale Heart and the Mind of Poe succeeds but not without its problems. The storyline—the interplay between the Doctor and his intractable patients—is compelling; it’s a pleasure to hear Poe’s work recited. But the Poe dramatization and the overarching narrative felt disconnected from one another. I found myself so engrossed in the poems and stories themselves that I hardly noticed the goings-on about the stage. Which was just as well—aside from the Doctor (Justin Humphreys) and the excellent Narrator (Joshua Mikel), the acting was largely overwrought. On Thursday, it was Poe himself, not the actors, who carried the night.

book

A Zen monk senses death approaching, slowly stalking up the mountainside towards his temple. Languid and contemplative, the monk picks up a pen, unrolls a parchment and, like generations of monks before him, writes a jisei, a death poem. The jisei’s writer doesn’t dwell on death explicitly; he contemplates endings, the course of life, the emptiness of existence. The monk may die that night; he may live for months or years. He writes not because he knows when he will die, but because he knows death is coming for him. He wants to be prepared, mentally and spiritually, when it raps on his chamber door.

Charles Wright, recent recipient of Canada’s Griffin Prize, makes giant leaps with Littlefoot, a new, book-length poem.

Charles Wright’s new book-length poem, Littlefoot, is his jisei. Wright, to my knowledge, isn’t dying. Rather, like the monk in his mountaintop monastery, he is aware of death’s approach. Aging, he feels death climbing steadily over his beloved Blue Ridge and slouching towards his Locust Avenue home. At 87 pages, Littlefoot is about 86 pages longer than a traditional jisei. But the careful contemplation of life and incipient death is no less elegant or refined for its length. In the spirit of Jack Kerouac’s American haikus, Littlefoot might be called an American death poem.

Indeed Wright’s dharmic influences are tempered by his attachment to the poetic sensibilities of Americana, conjuring not just Virginia and his native Tennessee, but the shades of great writers of the American heartland. Like misguided Buddhists, “we tend to congregate/ in the exitless blue/And try to relive our absences,” but while “it may not be written in any book…it is written—/ You can’t go back,/ you can’t repeat the unrepeatable.” You can’t go home again, as Thomas Wolfe put it.

This impossible longing to “go back” undergirds Littlefoot. A kind of associative narrative, the poem traces each month of the poet’s seventieth year. (References to April, and tired invocations of T.S. Eliot’s “cruelest month,” are thankfully avoided.) Thirty-five sections, which can be divided almost evenly into long and short sections, dreamily tap “unrepeatable” moments past and present, like metaphysical Morse code with a southern drawl. Ultimately, the unfulfilled longing fulfills the death poem’s purpose—”I find it much simpler now,” Wright assures us, “to see/ the other side of my own death,” to acknowledge the inevitable future.

Traditionally, it was common for writers of jisei to revise their poems over time. Wright’s finest work since 1997’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Black Zodiac, Littlefoot leaves me hoping that there’s more to be added to this American death poem. Hardly the end of something, it suggests a beginning, the first words of a new and fruitful phase of Wright’s poetic career.

art A solitary figure lies splayed out in a grassy field; an anonymous hand pickpockets a young girl as she helps a man collect his fallen groceries; a lonesome creek winds its way past the trunks of two dead trees bathed in moonlight.  Sounds disjointed, right?  These three scenes come from prints by Betty MacDonald, Foust—who, like Prince and Homer, is known by a single name—and Margie Crisp, the three artists currently displaying their work at Migration, on the Downtown Mall.

“United” by Betty MacDonald at Migration: A Gallery

At first glance, Migration’s “Women in Printmaking: A Variety Show” seems a default summer exhibit hastily cobbled together.  Aside from sex and medium, the artists have very little in common, certainly not enough to warrant a group show.  But first impressions, or so the saying goes, can be deceiving.  And, if you take the time to consider and reconsider the works by MacDonald, Foust and Crisp, a subtle and nuanced connection emerges.

Betty MacDonald’s work is clever and playful.  Her “Floating Hearts” don’t float but flop atop what appear to be long poles.  In “Motioning Growth,” a stern human finger gestures a bundle of foliage to come hither; the weeds and flowers recoil in horror. But for all their levity, MacDonald’s prints eventually betray an underlying sense of isolation: The hearts look deflated and remote; at odds, man and nature are separated by an increasingly vast gulf.

Foust relishes a different kind of isolation. Forgoing MacDonald’s lighthearted touch, she portrays stark scenes from the streets and apartments of cities not unlike her hometown of Richmond. For Foust, the most lonesome spaces are those filled with people: people ready to steal from you sooner than look at you, people who refuse to forgive, who turn away and won’t turn back. Unwilling to laugh at life, Foust finds people alone together.

Margie Crisp designs prints defined by romantic solitude.  Her favored perspective—a lofty and removed bird’s-eye view—detaches the viewer from the pastoral scenes she depicts. We see the country garden but we can’t stroll through it; we’re left to wonder what’s behind the single illuminated window in that isolated cottage.

Despite its misleadingly facile title, “Women in Printmaking” presents the work of three talented artists who beautifully convey—and here’s that common thread, if you missed it—loneliness and isolation, each in her own understated way.  In their intricacy, these prints demand repeat visits to Migration between now and the show’s close.

book

Mexico City, late 1975: Crime is on the rise; the economy is starting to backslide; political upheaval looms on the horizon. This was a turbulent time for our southern neighbor’s capital. But, despite the chaos and uncertainty, it is a time marked by nostalgia, remembered fondly for its student uprisings and passionate popular protests.

Watching The Savage Detectives: Roberto Bolaño’s newly translated novel is the summer’s first must-read.

It is also the launching point of Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives, only recently published in English translation. In many ways, The Savage Detectives resembles the city in which it begins. Following a group of renegade poets—the visceral realists—and the far-flung travels of their leaders, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, the novel revels in the grittier aspects of life—sex, drugs and violence abound. And, like modern day memories of 1970s Mexico City, the novel colors everything with a romantic tinge, mythologizing the seedy underground.  But The Savage Detectives refuses to be blinded by these mythologies and debunks them as quickly as it creates them—the human is rendered divine then human again; the ugly turned beautiful, then ugly once more.

It’s no coincidence that this style (which could itself be called visceral realism) sounds a lot like the reality of experience. A Chilean by birth, Bolaño spent much of his youth, during the ’60s and ’70s, in Mexico City, where, like Belano and Lima, he and the Mexican poet Mario Santiago led a poetry movement before becoming global itinerants for two decades.

The Savage Detectives is told in two ways.  The journal entries of the new-minted visceral realist Juan Garcia Madero bookend the novel.  Initially, he allows us only shadowy glimpses of Belano and Lima; in the end, he finds in them not the mysterious heroes of poetry, but two confused and searching young men. In contrast, the central 400 pages of the novel take the form of interviews with over 50 different characters who have known or heard of, befriended or rejected, made love to or reviled (sometimes both) Lima or Belano during their travels.  Reading these two styles of narration is like watching a rocket go up then trying to follow the thousands of multicolored sparks as they fall back to Earth; it’s a challenge, but it’s breathtaking.

With its innovative form, compelling narrative and insistence on its own kind of visceral realist perspective, The Savage Detectives is a tremendous success.  The reader cannot help but inhabit the world of Lima and Belano, crafted so handily by Bolaño before he died of chronic liver failure, in 2003.  The Savage Detectives isn’t always pretty, but it’s a joy to read and a worthy addition to any summer reading list.

stage

On April 23, William Shakespeare’s moldering corpse celebrated its 443rd year on this planet. The Bard’s body has little to hope for, besides one more year of slow decay. His body of work, on the other hand, can look forward to another year of life on stages around the world.

One such stage is situated within the Blackfriars Playhouse, a replica Elizabethan theater in downtown Staunton, where A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of two Shakespearean plays on the spring schedule. The Blackfriars staging of this solstice comedy, however, isn’t much of a birthday present. To the contrary, it might well set Shakespeare spinning in his grave. The performance is funny and engaging, but laughs don’t conceal serious problems with the production.

No, he’s not the fairy queen: Henry Bazemore, Jr. does the deceased Bard proud as Oberon in the American Shakespeare Center’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is set in two parallel worlds—the Athenian court and the forested fairy kingdom. Like an expert tailor, Shakespeare seamlessly stitched together the two worlds, fashioning a trend-setting comedy. But it’s up to the performers how they wear the Bard’s couture, and the Blackfriars troupe wears it rather badly. Their Athens and their fairy kingdom come together like two clashing fabrics. The result? The thespian version of blavy.

The Athenians sport stiff business attire. The fairy king and his minion, Puck, call to mind stripped-down S&M versions of Darth Vader. The fairy queen vaguely resembles a troll doll and her coterie prances and squawks like a loosed coup of campy chickens. The acting, equally patchy, follows suit.

Admittedly, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a difficult play to stage. Shakespeare’s tailoring must be fitted just so for the performance to be a success. Nevertheless, I expected the Blackfriars troupe to live up to its reputation as a Shakespearean class act. Maybe their Julius Caesar, also on the playbill this spring, will redeem them and prove a suitable gift in whatever is left of the birthday Bard’s eyes. And then there’s always next year; Shakespeare isn’t going anywhere.