Great Godot in New Hampshire
July 1, 2009 · Leave a Comment
Scurry to the Lebanon Opera House to see their production of Waiting for Godot.
As superb an evening of theater as you can ever have, anywhere.
William Michael Maher directs. In his program notes he ways there are three moments in (western) theatre history:
Oedipus Rex, Hamlet and Godot. Hmm. He makes his point.
Gogo played by Donald Wakefield
Didi played by Mark Irish
Lucky is David Shaw
Jeff Berry is fantastic as Pozzo
All four are just electric, brilliant, monumental.
Irish is in the new tv series Nurse Jackie
The play is very funny & casts a halo over your life for a good while
Walking through WalMart this evening, everyone, every move, felt straight
out of “A country road. A tree. Evening.”
In fact as we drove into the parking lot a woman walked toward us, bent way over,
pulling her loaded basked with great effort with one arm, talking to her cell
phone with the other, wild long flowing hair, Mother Courage herself, Gogo &
Didi wrapped up in one, pure music hall comic tramp, waiting herself for Godot, too.
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Blogroll
Tagged: Godot in Lebanon, NH
art installation at the anthropologie store in Philadelphia
July 1, 2009 · Leave a Comment
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Blogroll
Godot in Lebanon
July 1, 2009 · Leave a Comment
we saw Waiting for Godot last night—don’t see much live theater but this was superb. Over in Lebanon NH,
Hanover area so they have the money to hire real first-rate actors. Happy to report that it really works
well after fifty years and on stage. had only seen parts probably of the old bert lahr version on film.
I probably just can’t read plays very well—but on stage in with these terrific actors it was just superb. So
happy to see that it really holds up, stands up, is as great as its reputation. Very funny in a steady
deep belly sort of quiet chuckling mode and then out loud every so often. Bleak too but/and about
as bleak as reaching 65 is pretty much. For about two hours afterwards we felt that every move we
made was another extension of the play itself. Good effect. I know it is also now on broadway and I
am positive I enjoyed this performance much more than I would have the one in NY because Celebrity
would interfere with your pleasure in the script and performances. You are always saying to yourself
that is John Goodman playing Pozzo & isn’t he great & there is the famous Nathan Lane etc etc. It
has always been so I suppose in theater—all the greats of the history of theater—-and yet our
sense of media celebrityhood feels even more distracting and vapid. Anyway, I enjoyed these
actors tremedously and second again your paen of a few weeks ago to these professionals who stay
with their careers and survive somehow in a world that is not at all supportive of theater these days.
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Current Affairs
Tagged: Beckett, Godot, Lebanon Opera House
Errors and last words
June 26, 2009 · Leave a Comment
Reading more Steiner is both exciting and irritating. He is perfect and pure “old school” and I finally thought to myself, Yea, why didn’t God get rid of one of the weaker commandments (thou shalt not not) and have the 10th be Thou shalt not demonstrate your own brilliance until After you have demonstrated your own blindnesses before imposing power of any sort over another, including views and opinions and interpretations. Steiner is the “best” of high humanistic education of two generations ago—-or presents himself that way. But maybe he was just the best A-grabber, too.
Maybe at least it should be a law for all memoirists and autobiographers—you may not publish your book unless you have a chapter called “My Blindspots” that has been edited by someone outside all your major spheres of influence. I guess that would take all the fun out of reading memoirs.
Finally though I gave up on Steiner—the way I think I have every time I have looked into one of his books. Insufferable pedant is I guess the short phrase. His memoir is entitled “Errata” and his stance toward his readers is precisely that—”you did not get my points earlier so let me try once again you dummkopf to correct your errors.” Yes he is brilliant, polymath, cultured, worldly blah blah blah—but if this is the best that a life in literature has to offer then no wonder the study of literature is as in sharp decline—-as all other studies.
He was smart and wise enough to reject Theory & he mastered the old style philology & now he makes endless discernments and judgments. Maybe he should have been a canon lawyer or a corporate defense lawyer.
Once again I find that it is the voice–the voices—of the “truth-tellers,” the historians and memoirists and auto-biographers that I have little patience with after I’ve satisfied a curiosity here or there about this or that point of needless trivia or gossip. For real pleasure and truth, give me the lying sons of bitches who write fiction every time.
Historian John Lukacs, also in his 80s, calls his recent memoir Last Rites. Maybe that is just as magisterial, just as bad.
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Books · Fiction
Tagged: biography, Fiction, George Steiner, history, John Lukacs, memoir
Kehlmann’s Punch Line — Perspective suggested
June 26, 2009 · Leave a Comment
Spoiler alert—-if you plan to read the novel Measuring the World what I say from here on might interfere with your pleasure in the book.
Daniel Kehlmann is a young German author who has made a splash in Europe. Today—two-thirds of the way into Measuring I found out one reason. This book retells the achievements of two great German scientists of the early 19th Century—Gauss, the mathematician, and Humboldt. Ok, great, the early heros of the nation.
Key scene with Humboldt is when he is in Mexico after having been the first man to climb the tallest peak in South America. He can’t believe the scale of the city. He sees the huge carved stone wheel and realizes it is a calendar. He meets the grandson of Moctezuma and hears about the conquest and especially about the twenty thousand or more killed by the Aztec priests to dedicate the huge temple that Cortes had destroyed. Under the last high priest, the viceroy explains, the kingdom has become addicted to blood. Humboldt is incredulous at the claim.
My good man, said Humboldt, don’t talk nonsense!
Twenty thousand in one place, in one day, was unthinkable. The victims would never tolerate it. The audience wouldn’t tolerate it. What was more, the world-order would not support it. If such a thing ever happened, the universe would come to an end.
The universe, said the worker, doesn’t give a shit.
A bit later Humboldt goes out to see the ruins of Teotihuacán. Again he is dumbfounded by the scale and using his scientific instruments figures out how the city was planned in relation to the stars as a calendar. He was the first person in a thousand years who could read the city plan correctly. Bonpland, his companion and assistant in these travels asks him why he seems so depressed.
So much civilization and so much horror, said Humboldt. What a combination! The exact opposite of everything that Germany stood for. (177)
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Fiction · history
Tagged: Aztecs, blood, Gauss, Germany, Humboldt, Nazism, science
