The glories of our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things; There is no armour against Fate; Death lays his icy hand on kings: Sceptre a
The glories of our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things; There is no armour against Fate; Death lays his icy hand on kings: Sceptre and Crown Must tumble down, And in the dust be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade.
I’ve loved this little dirge ever since I first encountered it—adorned with the title of “Death the Leveller”—in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury over fifty years ago. Since the dramatist James Shirley was listed as its author, I assumed that it served a funereal function in one of his many plays, but I failed to encounter it in my reading of Shirley’s works. (And—trust me—I have read more than my share of Shirley). Finally, I decided to seek out its origins, and found that I was right …. well, almost right. And behind the need for that “almost” lies a tale.
James Shirley was the premier poet of the Caroline drama, a term used to designate British theatre in the reign of King Charles I. He was at the height of his powers—in his forty-sixth year—when Parliament, under the control of Oliver Cromwell, closed the theaters in 1642. But he lived long enough not only to see the son of his king return to England in 1660, but also to see his old plays revived on the Restoration stage.
During the Puritan years, since a public performance of his dramatic works was denied him, Shirley supported himself by teaching, probably in the White Friars section of London where he lived at the time. Ver and drama, however, were never far away. He continued to published poetry and plays in verse, and even used his facility in verse composition to assist his students in the memorization of Latin grammar.
One of the works he published during this period was The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses for the Armour of Achilles (1649), which is described as being performed by “young gentlemen of quality, at a private entertainment.” Best guess: Shirley directed his White Friars students in a performance of The Contention as a school play. It was here that “Death the Leveller” first appeared, as a funeral dirge for the unfortunate Ajax. Although the play remained obscure, the dirge became a favorite of King Charles II, and was eventually heavily anthologized, becoming James Shirley’s most famous work.
So how is The Contention as a work of art? Polished, professional, but slight. It is an interlude, after all, not a finished play. Still, the individual voices of Ajax the blunt bombastic soldier and Ulysses the subtle thinker are effectively delineated. Here’s a sample of each:
AJAX:
Great Jove, immure my heart, or girt it with Some ribs of steel, lest it break through this flesh, And with a flame contracted from just fury, Set fire on all the world: How am I fallen? How shrunk to nothing? my fame ravish'd from me? That this sly talking Prince is made my Rival In great Achilles Armour: Is it day? And can a Cloud darker than night, so muffle Your eyes, they cannot reach the Promontory, Beneath which now the Grecian fleet rides safe, Which I so late rescued from Trojan flames, When Hector frightful, like a Globe of fire, By his example taught the enraged youth To brandish lightning; but I cannot talk, Nor knows he how to fight, unless in the dark With shadows. I confess, his eloquence And tongue are mighty, but Pelides sword And armour were not made things to be talk'd on, But worn and us'd, and when you shall deter∣mine My juster claim, it will be fame enough For him, to boast, he strove with Ajax Telamon. And lost the prize, due onely to my merit.
ULYSSES:
Wisemen joyn policy with force, the Lyon Thus with the Fox, makes up the Souldiers emblem. And now I look on Ajax Telamon, I may compare him to some specious building, His body holds vast rooms of entertainment, And lower parts maintain the Offices, Onely the Garret, his exalted head, Useless for wise receipt, is fill'd with lumber, A Mastiff dares attempt to combate Lyons, And I'll finde men among your Mercenaries Shall fly on Hydra's, if you name that valour: But he, that we call valiant indeed, Knows how, and when to fight, as well as bleed.
Marriage reminded me of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. Not because their plots are similar, because they aren't. Both are farces, but very different Marriage reminded me of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. Not because their plots are similar, because they aren't. Both are farces, but very different kinds of farces. Errors--about the reconciliation of two pairs of twin brothers—depends on misunderstandings for its humor, whereas Marriage—about the arrangement of a marriage—depends on stock characters and their artful manipulation for its laughs. But both works shows us a sort of perfection, but perfection it an extremely basic level. Young Shakespeare and young Gogol both proved themselves with these effective but shallow artifices, proving both to their audiences—and to themselves—that they had the ability to write polished, successful plays.
The first drama Gogol attempted was The Order of Vladimir, Third Class. It was an ambitious work, about a petty bureaucrat who strives to attain the aforesaid order (a mark of nobility), goes mad, and comes to believe that he has been transformed into the Cross of Vladimir himself. It is a great idea—at least in theory—but the twenty-three-year-old Gogol abandoned it as unwieldy, and began writing Marriage the following year instead.
It was a wise choice. Marriage is an entertaining, well-constructed play in which Ilya Kocharyov, good friend of the clerk Ivan Podkolyosin, decides to interfere with the matchmaker Fyokla and bring about Podkolyosin’s marriage all by himself. The ways in which he thwarts the other three prospective suitors—a managing clerk looking for a fat dowry, a retired military officer who wants a wife who speaks French (very fashionable in good Russian society), and a navy man who bores people with his experiences abroad at every available opportunity—are amusing, as are his continual, mostly unsuccessful attempts at encouraging his timid friend Podkholyosin. It is all pretty conventional stuff—until the surprise ending. I won’t tell you what that ending is, of course. But it was memorable enough that Tolstoy mentioned it thirty years later in Anna Karenina. ...more
Radio Golf, the tenth and final entry in August Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle,” and Wilson’s final plays, marks a fitting ending both to an award-winning Radio Golf, the tenth and final entry in August Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle,” and Wilson’s final plays, marks a fitting ending both to an award-winning cycle and an illustrious career. Although it lacks the expressionist daring, the resonant music, and the larger-than-life characters that grace many of the other nine plays, it benefits from a tight dramatic structure, a keen sense of the ironies of city politics, shrewd observations of the black middle class, and—as always, with Wilson—superb realistic dialog and a profound grasp of heritage and history.
It tells the story of Harmond Wilks, a successful real estate developer and aspiring candidate for mayor. He is putting the finishing touches on a grand building project he hopes will revitalize Pittsburgh’s black Hill District—two upscale high-rise apartment buildings, with room for a Whole Foods, a Barnes and Noble, and a Starbucks—but he has to wait for two things: 1) for the area to be designated as “blighted” (which will free up some government money), and 2) for the demolition of the only remaining old house, 1839 Wylie Street (the home of the spiritual mother of the district, Aunt Ester, well known to those familiar with the Pittsburgh Cycle). Although the “blighted” designation is almost certain to come through, there is a problem with the demolition. Old Joe Barlow has started to paint the rundown house on Wylie; he claims old Ester’s house is his.
I liked this play very much. True, the dialog isn’t as lyrical as in many other Wilson plays, but that is because Wilson wishes us to see that the black middle class characters who dominate—or attempt to dominate—the action have lost much of the music and poetry and once filled the souls of their fathers and mothers. Radio Golf is a successful—though somewhat melancholy—conclusion to the Cycle, yet it leaves its audience with much to think about.
I’ll leave you with a taste of the dialogue. Here Old Joe Barlow is discussing with Harmond Wilks the nature of the American Dream:
HARMOND: This is America. This is the land of opportunity. I can be mayor. I can be anything I want.
OLD JOE: But you got to have the right quarter. America is a giant slot machine. You walk up and put in your coin and it spits it back out. You look at your coin. You think maybe it’s a Canadian quarter. It’s the only coin you got. If this coin ain’t no good then you out of luck. You look at it and sure enough it’s an American quarter. But it don’t spend for you. It spend for everybody else but it don’t spend for you. The machine spits it right back out. Is the problem with the quarter or with the machine? Do you know? Somebody running for mayor ought to know that.
HARMOND: If it don’t take all the quarters you fix it. Anybody with common sense will agree to that. What they don’t agree on is how to fix it. Some people say you got to tear it down to fix it. Some people say you got to build it up to fix it. Some people say they don’t know how to fix it. Some people say they don’t want to be bothered with fixing it. You mix them all into a pot and stir it up and you get America. That’s what makes this country great.
I'll answer the obvious question first: no, King Hedley II is not as good as Fences. I have read all ten plays of August Wilson’s “Century Cycle” exce I'll answer the obvious question first: no, King Hedley II is not as good as Fences. I have read all ten plays of August Wilson’s “Century Cycle” except Radio Golf, and not one of them is as good as Fences, that masterpiece of modern drama. Then again, not many plays—by anyone, from anywhere, at anytime—are that good. Wilson, however, has written other very good plays: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and The Piano Lesson, come immediately to mind. But King Hedley II,though it has fine qualities, is not one of the very good plays.
The plot has possibilities. Set in the 1980’s, the play features a cast of characters enmeshed in a societal decline, caught in the inescapable web of history. Its hero, King Hedley II bears the name of the prophet Hedley featured in Wilson’s earlier Seven Guitars, and part of his destiny is to discover his proper relation to this long vanished father. But he has more immediate problems too. Recently released from prison for murdering a man who cut him in the face, he literally bears the scars of his painful past. Can he move forward, become a success (he wants to open a video store), and make a life for his woman Tonya and the baby she carries? Or will the forces of the past be too much for King?
Wilson makes us feel the urgency of King’s challenges and the enormity of the past, but somehow there is no progress or struggle in Hedley's life—nothing but a unrelated series of hustles and stumbles. The play is loose in construction and disorganized in its effects. True, Wilson has always favored expressionistic techniques and an organic approach to structure, but, in his best work, the rhythms of speech, the power of music, and the hint of a pervasive mystical unity lend to even the most arbitrary misfortunes a sense of purpose and meaning.
Still, I have the nagging sense that I may be wrong about King Hedley II As always with August Wilson, though, the language of the characters is filled with a convincing music. Here four characters—King, King’s best friend Mister, King’s mother Ruby’s old hustler boyfriend Elmore, and Stool Pigeon, the neighorhood eccentric—discuss how even violence itself doesn’t make the sense it used to anymore:
ELMORE: “Teen Killed in Drive-By.” I’m tired of hearing that. See . . . a man has got to have honor. A man ain’t got no honor can’t be a man . . . Now what is honor? You evedr see that movie where this man goes to kill this other man and he got his back to him and he tell him to turn around so he can see his eyes? That’s honor. A man got to have that else he ain’t a man. You can’t be a man stealing somebody’s life from the backseat of a Toyota. That’s why the black man’s gonna catch hell for the next hundred years. These kids gonna grow up and get old and ain’t a man among them.
KING: It used to be you get killed over something. Now you get killed over nothing.
MISTER: You might look at somebody wrong and get in a fight and get killed over that.
STOOL PIGEON: I see a man get killed over a fish sandwich. Right down there at Cephus’s. Had two fish sandwiches . . . one with hot saucs and one without. Somebody got them mixed up and rthese two fellows got to arguin over them. The next thing you know it was a surprise to God to find out that one of them had six bullets in him.
ELMORE: That’s why I carry my pistol. They got too many fools out there.
You can learn important things about a great writer by reading other great writers who have imitated him. I learned about Twain’s Huckleberry Finn by You can learn important things about a great writer by reading other great writers who have imitated him. I learned about Twain’s Huckleberry Finn by reading Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate, I learned about Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d’Arthur by reading Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and I learned about Shakespeare, his tragedies and histories, by reading Alexander Puskin’s Boris Godunov.
Shakespeare was fascinated by political history, the motivations of kings and would-be kings, and the young Pushkin—an early admirer of Byron, the philosophes, and the revolutions in America and France—was fascinated by political history too. His revolutionary sentiments earned the young poet an exile to his mother’s estate, and there, in his mid-twenties, he immersed himself in the histories and tragedies of Shakespeare (in a French translation) and in Karamzin’s History of the Russian State.
In Karamzin, Pushkin became fascinated with a period contemporaneous with Shakespeare: the reign of Boris Godunov (1598–1605) and the rise of the “False Dmitri.” Godunov acted as regent for Ivan the Terrible’s saintly but weak-willed son Feodor, and, after Feodor’s death, for Dmitri, Feodor’s son. When the boy, at the age of ten, was found dead, Godunov was thought responsible. Gudonov was soon acclaimed czar, but Dmitri’s death came back to haunt him: a young man (rumored to be a renegade monk) claiming to be the real Dmitri, recruited an army in Poland and marched on to Godunov's palace.
Pushkin must have been struck with the Shakespearean echoes: the saintly weak-willed king (Henry VI), the murderous Lord Protector (Richard Duke of Gloster), the guilty king unable to sleep (Henry IV, Macbeth), and a march on the stronghold of the king (Macduff and Birnam Wood, Richmond and Bosworth Field). To this he added some unusual, more surprising Shakespearean touches: a courtship scene with a Romeo and Juliet beginning and an ending with a bargain more like Macbeth; an idiot beggar who speaks the truth to Czar Boris like Lear’s fool speaks the truth to Lear; a Duke of Clarence style dream; and a low tavern with drunken monks, featuring a hair’s-breadth escape which looks a little like Falstaff’s Boar’s Head Inn. But Pushkin’s imitation consists of much more than an echoed scene here and there, for he perfectly captures the free, wide-ranging spirit of Shakespeare: unaffected by the shackles of the classical unities, generous and universal in its sympathies, comprehensive in its soul.
I’ll end with a portion of Boris' famous soliloquy (and one of the finest arias in Mussorgsky’s opera too). The echos of Richard III, Henry IV, and Macbeth are strong here:
I have attained the highest power. Six years Already have I reigned in peace; but joy Dwells not within my soul. Even so in youth We greedily desire the joys of love, But only quell the hunger of the heart With momentary possession. We grow cold, Grow weary and oppressed! In vain the wizards Promise me length of days, days of dominion Immune from treachery--not power, not life Gladden me; I forebode the wrath of Heaven And woe. For me no happiness. . . . Ah! Now I feel it; naught can give us peace Mid worldly cares, nothing save only conscience! Healthy she triumphs over wickedness, Over dark slander; but if in her be found A single casual stain, then misery. With what a deadly sore my soul doth smart; My heart, with venom filled, doth like a hammer Beat in mine ears reproach; all things revolt me, And my head whirls, and in my eyes are children Dripping with blood; and gladly would I flee, But nowhere can find refuge--horrible! Pitiful he whose conscience is unclean!
Whenever Trump brazenly arrogates another royal prerogative to himself, I find myself thinking of him—solemnly, and in horror—as if he were Donald of Whenever Trump brazenly arrogates another royal prerogative to himself, I find myself thinking of him—solemnly, and in horror—as if he were Donald of Orange, America's very bad king. And when I do, my mind turns to Shakespeare. Now, what would that sage observer of power, plots, and hubris say about a would-be tyrant like this?
Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt—author of the Shakespeare biography Will in the World, and founder of the “New Historicism”—was way ahead of me. He was thinking about stuff like this even before the election, and writing about it too. (“Shakespeare Explains the 2016 Election,” NYT Op-Ed, 10/8/16.) After the election he couldn’t stop thinking about it, and this book (Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics) is the result.
Greenblatt extends his initial explorations beyond matters Trumpian. He begins with Shakespeare’s connection to a treasonous plot (a special performance of the “regicide” play Richard II in 1601 for friends of the Earl of Essex), goes on to discuss political parties (the White Rose and the Red Rose in Henry VI), bogus populism (Jack Cade in the same play), the non-psychopathic, guilt-ridden tyrant (Macbeth), the tyrant mad or senile (A Winter’s Tale, King Lear), and how a republic may prevent the tyrant’s rise (Coriolanus).
Greenblatt never explicitly mentions Trump, and most of the topics he covers apply to him only tangentially (though his treatment of the mad, senile Lear occasionally comes close). It is in the forty pages devoted to Richard III that Greenblatt deals directly—well, as directly as a restrained scholarly treatment may deal—with the reality of Trump our own personal “Lord Protector.”
My advice, for those with even a slight taste for Shakespeare: pick up the book, read chapters 4, 5, and 6, and, if you like them, sample the rest. Greenblatt knows what he’s talking about, and he shows us the connection between Shakespeare’s plays and our politics in surprising, illuminative ways.
Here is a bit of Greenblatt from the beginning of Chapter 4 (“A Matter of Character”) in which he discusses the personality of Richard III:
He is pathologically narcissistic and extremely arrogant. He has a grotesque sense of entitlement, never doubting that he can do whatever he chooses. He loves to bark orders and to watch underlings scurry to carry them out. He expects absolute loyalty, but he is incapable of gratitude. The feelings of others mean nothing to him. He has no natural grace, no sense of shared humanity, no decency.
He is not merely indifferent to the law; he hates it and takes pleasure in breaking it. He hates it because it gets in his way and because it stands for a notion of the public good that he holds in contempt. He divides the world into winners and losers. The winners arouse his regard insofar as he can use them for his own ends; the losers arouse only his scorn. The public good is something only losers like to talk about. What he likes to talk about is winning.
. . . He is a bully. Easily enraged, he strikes out at anyone who stands in his way. . . . He is gifted at detecting weakness and deft at mockery and insult. These skills attract followers who are drawn to the same cruel delight, even if they cannot have it to his unmatched degree. . . .
His possession of power includes the domination of women, but he despises them far more than he desires them. Sexual conquest excites him, but only for the endlessly reiterated proof that he can grab anything he likes . . .
Sooner or later, he is brought down. He dies unloved and unlamented. He leaves behind only wreckage. It would have been better had Richard III never been born.
Red, a short play by John Logan, is based on an incident in the life of abstract painter Mark Rothko. His 1958 commission to complete a series of pain Red, a short play by John Logan, is based on an incident in the life of abstract painter Mark Rothko. His 1958 commission to complete a series of paintings—each in shades of red, brown and black) for Manhattan’s Four Seasons restaurant—and his subsequent “honoring” of that commission—occupy the forefront of the action, but the dialogue between the two characters (Rothko and his assistant) ranges wide, as the prickly painter, reluctantly adopting the role of the mentor, holds forth on a variety of topics from the technique of painting to the struggle between the death principle (“black”) and the life principle (“red”) that is at the heart of artistic expression.
The character Logan draws of Rothko—his fierce independence, his anti-commercialism--is compelling throughout, although it does helps to know a little about the painter beforehand (his lifelong rivalry with Jackson Pollock, his contempt for Warhol, his eventual suicide come immediately to mind). And Rothko’s assistant Ken—a young painter who prepares the canvases—makes sure the old man’s diatribes don’t become monologues: he gives as good as he gets. (Oh, how I wish I could have seen Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne in the original production!)
The play isn’t without defects. The color symbolism (black = death, red = life) is simplistic, and the ending is too formulaic, too pat. But the issues the play raises—about art, life, the responsibility to oneself and one’s audience) are real and relevant, and Logan handles them well.
I like the central conceit of the staging too: the fourth wall—the open space through which the audience views the action--is the wall which holds the painting on which Rothko is currently working. As a consequence, Rothko and his assistant Ken are continually examining and appraising the evolving work of art, which—to all appearances—is the audience itself.
We exist—all of us, for all time—in a state of perpetual dissonance . . . We long for the raw truth of emotion but can only endure it with the cold lie of reason . . . We seek to capture the ephemeral, the miraculous, and put it onto canvas, stopping time but, like an etymologist pinning a butterfly, it dies when we try . . . We’re foolish that way, we human beings . . . we try to make the red black . . . . But still we go on, clinging to that tiny bit of hope—that red—that makes the rest endurable . . .
Jitney, first composed in 1979, was the first of August Wilson’s “Century Cycle” to be written and the last to reach Broadway (in 2017). Although exte Jitney, first composed in 1979, was the first of August Wilson’s “Century Cycle” to be written and the last to reach Broadway (in 2017). Although extensively revised in 1996, it still seems like an early play: sunnier, with a “slice-of-life” realist feel, lacking the dark music and expressionistic touches that one comes to expect from August Wilson. Still, as is always true in a Wilson play, the language is vivid, and the portrait of the black neighborhoods of Pittsburgh is both palpable and believable.
The story—what there is of it—centers around an unofficial cab stand located in Pittsburgh’s inner city, where the drivers of “jitneys” (unlicensed taxicabs) gather to receive their assignments from Becker their respected manager. The regular drivers range from steady old Korean war vet Doub to alcoholic former “tailor-to-the stars” Fielding and the irascible, always up-in-your-business Turnbo, whom nobody seems to like. The main story involves the relationship between Vietnam vet Darnell and Rena, the mother of his little son Jesse, who love each other but have not yet learned to trust. And there other unsettling matters at the jitney station too: Becker’s son has just been released from prison, and there are rumors that the Pittsburgh Housing Authority is planning to tear the old jitney stand down.
For a taste of Wilson’s wonderful language, I give you the voice of Rena, who has just learned Darnell has been planning to “surprise” her with a house, and who is not nearly as happy with the idea as Darnell expects her to be. (I love this passage, because I’m convinced most women—including my wife—would feel much the same way):
You gonna surprise me with a house? Don’t do that. A new TV maybe. A stereo . . . a couch . . . a refrigerator . . . okay. But don’t surprise me with a house that I didn’t even have the chance to pick out!
. . . You can’t surprise me with a house and I’m supposed to say, “Oh Darnell, that’s nice.” at one time I would have. But I’m not seventeen no more. I have responsibilities. I want to kow if it has a hookup for a washer and dryer ‘cause I got to wash Jesse’s clothes. I want to know if it has a yard and do it have a fence and how far Jesse has to go to school. I ain’t thinking about where to put the TV. That’s not what's important to me. And you supposed to know, Darnell. You supposed to know what’s important to me like I’m supposed to know what’s important to you. I’m not asking you to do it by yourself. I’m here with you. We in this together.
I looked forward to this conclusion of Angels in America, anticipating that Perestroika would be the resolution of an undisputed American classic. Ala I looked forward to this conclusion of Angels in America, anticipating that Perestroika would be the resolution of an undisputed American classic. Alas, I was disappointed. It is a powerful work, full of ambitious experiments and powerful effects, but it is too diffuse and disorganized to fulfill the promise of the nearly perfect Millennium Approaches.
I hesitated as I wrote the preceding paragraph, for fear I may be guilty of a common critical failing: criticizing a work for not doing what it never intended to do at all. Indeed, the author Tony Kushner himself issued this cautionary statement in his “Playwright’s Notes”:
It should also be said that “Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika” are very different plays, and if one is producing them in repertory the difference should be reflected in their designs. “Perestroika” proceeds forward from the wreckage made by the Angel’s traumatic entry at the end of “Millennium”. A membrane is broken; there is disarray and debris.
Nicely put, but I don’t buy it. Disorder can exhibited without being modeled; at the very least, they can be contained within an overarching structure. King Lear does this, so does Moby Dick. But I don’t think Perestroika--as fine as it is—achieves this sort of greatness.
The sequence of Perestroika’s scenes is anything but inevitable, and individual scenes sometimes end without anything approaching resolution. Louis condemnation of Joe’s politics, though rhetorically effective, is dramatically inadequate, Roy’s decline seems rushed, and Joe just seems to get lost along the way. Worse, some scenes seem arbitrary, not really necessary at all. (Kushner admits as much in his “Notes,” suggesting Act Five, Scene 5 can be severely truncated in performance, and Act Five, Scenes 6 and 9 cut entirely.)
Still, with all its faults, this is an effective work. The angels are appropriately alien and impressive, Louis’ Kaddish for Roy, and Ethel’s reconciliation with him, are extraordinarily moving, and the low key, gentle comic ending strikes just the right note. For all its “disarray and debris,” everything in Perestroika affirms Kushner’s beliefs that “the body is the garden of the soul” and that life is a continual restructuring (perestroika), a leap into the unknown.
This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come
Sometimes I turn giddy when I sense I am reading a classic. I feel impelled, as if by a great force, by an old god who could perhaps kill me, but it i Sometimes I turn giddy when I sense I am reading a classic. I feel impelled, as if by a great force, by an old god who could perhaps kill me, but it is a god who is ridden by genius, a genius who knows how to ride.
I felt like this when I first read Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millennium Approaches. First produced in 1991, Angels is set in 1985 in New York City, during the period when AIDS—a problem in the gay community for at least half a decade—began to be recognized by the general public. It tells the story of four men: openly gay decorator Prior Walter, who is afraid of the process of dying of AIDs, and the loneliness and enlightenment it brings; Louis Ironson, Prior’s lover, who is afraid of the sordidness of death itself and the experience of watching someone die; the recently diagnosed, closeted Roy Cohn, the influential right-wing lawyer, who fears the loss of political influence stemming from the label “homosexual”; and Roy’s protegee Joe Pitt, the unhappy married Mormon lawyer, who is afraid of just about everything: his melancholy wife, his cynical career, his sexual identity, his very self.
From the beginning, the play bursts forth with vivid language and memorable characters, and soon, although it never loses its edge, it breaks the bounds of realism and glories in hallucinatory revelation. Joe’s wife Harper, in a fantasy drug haze, visits Antarctica: Roy Coen converses with the on-stage character Ethel Rosenberg, whose execution he engineered a generation before; and Prior—like a young Ebeneezer Scrooge in a gay “Christmas Carol”—receives visits from two of his ancestors (each named Prior) and The Angel of America herself.
The play is a wild congeries of sensation, filled with searing confrontations, witty dialogue, ambitious expressionistic effects, and almost impossible staging. Yet never for a minute do you sense that Kushner lacks control over his materials: each character is finely etched, with a distinctive voice, and the pace and tone, though continually shifting, always seems connected to the overarching themes, the greater melody.
I look forward eagerly to Angels in America, Part II.
Here is an excerpt that gives a good idea of the poetry and depth of Kushner’s language. Prior, diagnosed with AIDS, tells his lover Louis an old family anecdote:
PRIOR: One of my ancestors was a ship’s captain who made money bringing whale oil to Europe and returning with immigrants—Irish mostly, packed in tight, so many dollars per head. The last ship he captained foundered off the coast of Nova Scotia in a winter tempest and sank to the bottom. He went down with the ship—La Grande Geste—but his crew took seventy women and kids in the ship’s only longboat, this big, open rowboat, and when the weather got too rough, and they thought the boat was overcrowded, the crew started lifting people up and hurling them into the sea. Until they got the ballast right. They walked up and down the longboat, eyes to the waterline, and when the boat rode low in the water they’d grab the nearest passenger and throw them into the sea. The boat was leaky, see; seventy people; they arrived in Halifax with nine people on board.
LOUIS: Jesus.
PRIOR: I think about that story a lot now. People in a boat, waiting, terrified, while implacable unsmiling men, irresistibly strong, seize . . . maybe the person next to you, maybe you, and with no warning at all, with time only for a quick intake of air you are pitched into freezing, turbulent water and salt and darkness to drown.
First published in Three Plays for Puritans (1901), this attractive but somewhat forgettable play by George Bernard Shaw, set in Morocco, tells the st First published in Three Plays for Puritans (1901), this attractive but somewhat forgettable play by George Bernard Shaw, set in Morocco, tells the story of the half-British/ half-Brazilian Captain Brassbound, smuggler and skipper of The Thanksgiving. He seeks revenge against his uncle the judge Sir Henry Hallam, who has dishonored his Brazilian mother and deprived him of his rightful inheritance, by delivering him into the hands of a local sheikh as a Christian, and therefore (according to Islamic law) rightfully a slave. The judge’s sister-in law, Lady Cicely Waynflete, a charming and fearless world traveler, convinces Brassbound he should desist from his revenge, arguing that his fierce justice is as flawed as the British legal system that led to his own disinheritance. Brassbound relents, for he has fallen in love with her. But soon the sheikh arrives, and things get complicated.
The character of Lady Cicely—based on Shaw’s friend the actress Ellen Terry—is the best thing about the play. Although she is naive, always seeing the best in people (even the sheikh who intends to seize her as his “wife”), she is also aware of her own charm and makes full use of it on every occasion, taking charge of everything—and everybody—with a completely natural air of command. Her defense of Brassbound before a United States navy tribunal is the heart of the play:
LADY CICELY. The Sheikh. Sidi el Assif. A noble creature, with such a fine face! He fell in love with me at first sight--
SIR HOWARD (remonstrating). Cicely!
LADY CICELY. He did: you know he did. You told me to tell the exact truth.
CAPTAIN KEARNEY. I can readily believe it, madam. Proceed.
LADY CICELY. Well, that put the poor fellow into a most cruel dilemma. You see, he could claim to carry off Sir Howard, because Sir Howard is a Christian. But as I am only a woman, he had no claim to me.
CAPTAIN KEARNEY (somewhat sternly, suspecting Lady Cicely of aristocratic atheism). But you are a Christian woman.
LADY CICELY. No: the Arabs don't count women. They don't believe we have any souls...Well, what was he to do? He wasn't in love with Sir Howard; and he WAS in love with me. So he naturally offered to swop Sir Howard for me. Don't you think that was nice of him, Captain Kearney?
CAPTAIN KEARNEY. I should have done the same myself, Lady Waynflete. Proceed.
LADY CICELY. Captain Brassbound, I must say, was nobleness itself, in spite of the quarrel between himself and Sir Howard. He refused to give up either of us, and was on the point of fighting for us when in came the Cadi with your most amusing and delightful letter, captain, and bundled us all back to Mogador...So here we are. Now, Howard, isn't that the exact truth, every word of it?
SIR HOWARD. It is the truth, Cicely, and nothing but the truth. But the English law requires a witness to tell the WHOLE truth.
LADY CICELY. What nonsense! As if anybody ever knew the whole truth about anything! (Sitting down, much hurt and discouraged.) I'm sorry you wish Captain Kearney to understand that I am an untruthful witness.
SIR HOWARD. No: but--
LADY CICELY. Very well, then: please don't say things that convey that impression.
CAPTAIN KEARNEY. But Sir Howard told me yesterday that Captain Brassbound threatened to sell him into slavery.
LADY CICELY (springing up again). Did Sir Howard tell you the things he said about Captain Brassbound's mother? (Renewed sensation.) I told you they quarrelled, Captain Kearney. I said so, didn't I? ...
LADY CICELY. Of course I did. Now, Captain Kearney, do YOU want me--does Sir Howard want me--does ANYBODY want me to go into the details of that shocking family quarrel? Am I to stand here in the absence of any individual of my own sex and repeat the language of two angry men?
CAPTAIN KEARNEY (rising impressively). The United States navy will have no hahnd in offering any violence to the pure instincts of womanhood. Lady Waynflete: I thahnk you for the delicacy with which you have given your evidence. (Lady Cicely beams on him gratefully and sits down triumphant.)
Two Trains Running is a unique and pleasing play. Written a few years after the most intense and concentrated works of "The Pittsburgh Cycle," it is m Two Trains Running is a unique and pleasing play. Written a few years after the most intense and concentrated works of "The Pittsburgh Cycle," it is mellow, even autumnal, in its mood. Like Wilson’s other plays, it contains the materials of tragedy, but here his characters are less relentless, reality less intractable, and the promise of some kind of happiness—a muted, yet authentic happiness--is allowed to survive. It reminds me a little of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale: the calm after tragedy, the peace after pain.
The play centers around a restaurant in the Pittsburgh Hill District and the people who congregate there, including the hardworking owner Memphis, his waitress Risa, the numbers runner Wolf, old man Holloway, the prosperous undertaker and property owner Mr. West, Sterling, a volatile young man just out of prison, and Hambone, a brain-damaged man who repeats the same phrase over and over: “I want my ham. He gonna give me my ham.”
Perhaps the reason these characters survive is that, unlike many of Wilson’s characters— Troy Maxson in Fences, for example—Memphis, Sterling and the others learn to be content with what is possible. They have what Undertaker West would call a “little cup” as opposed to a “ten-gallon bucket” philosophy:
STERLING: I'm gonna get me two or three Cadillacs like you. Get Risa to be my woman and I'll be alright. That's all a man need is a pocketful of money, a Cadillac, and a good woman. That's all he need on the surface. I ain't gonna talk about that other part of satisfaction. But I got sense enough to know it's there. I know if you get the surface it don't mean nothing unless you got the other. I know that, Mr. West. Sometimes I think I'll just take the woman part. And then sometimes that don't seem like it's enough.
WEST: That's cause you walking around here with a tengallon bucket. Somebody put a little cupful in and you get mad cause it's empty. You can't go through life carrying a ten-gallon bucket. Get you a little cup. That's all you need. Get you a little cup and somebody put a little bit in and it's half full. That ten-gallon bucket ain't never gonna be full. Carry you a little cup through life and you'll never be disappointed. I'll tell you what my daddy told me. I was a young man just finding my way through life. I told him I wanted to find me a woman and go away and get me a ranch and raise horses like my grandaddy. I was still waiting around to find the woman. He told me to get the ranch first and the woman would come. And he was right. I never did get me the ranch, but he was right.
August Wilson is one of the finest playwrights of the 20th century, but this is not one of his finest plays. The usual elements are here: a setting su August Wilson is one of the finest playwrights of the 20th century, but this is not one of his finest plays. The usual elements are here: a setting superbly realized in place and time, a large cast of eloquent, mellifluous African American voices, the abiding presence of music, hints of dark magic and ghostly hauntings, and an overwhelming sense of a complex and dangerous cultural heritage, a heritage which may lead to wisdom but can also lead to despair, violence, and death. When Wilson combines these elements most artfully, they may be transmuted into a masterpiece like Fences. Here, however, the elements don’t coalesce, the transformation never happens.
The “seven guitars” of the title are the seven voices of the characters in the play, the six mourners who gather after the funeral to celebrate the life of blues singer Floyd “Schoolboy” Barton, snuffed out at the moment when he had begun to achieve success, and the voice the guitarist and singer, the “Schoolboy” himself. Like many expressionistic playwrights—O’Casey and O’Neill come to mind—Wilson is often deficient in structure and relies instead on the music of his character’s speech as a form of organization. This time, though, it doesn’t work. The language of the characters isn’t sufficiently individualized, except for that of the mad old prophet Hedley, who should act as an occasionally chilling symbolic voice, but overwhelms and unbalances the play.
I admit that I could be wrong. This is a play after all, and I believe that, given the proper attention to the actual blues music of the play, a director, sensitive to the rhythms of speech and blessed with a cast of superior actors with their own individualized voices, could make this play into an an extraordinarily powerful entertainment. I didn’t have the privilege of seeing it, though, I merely read it. And in my reading, Seven Guitars--unlike Fences, “The Piano Lesson,” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”—failed to come to life.
I’ll quote here one of my favorite passages . Floyd the blues singer, on the verge of stardom, expresses his frustration at the factors that hem him in, the forces that seem determined to keep him from going to Chicago and cutting another hit record:
I had seven ways to go. They cut that down to six. I say, “Let me try one of them six.” They cut it down to five. Every time I push . . . they pull. They cut it down to four. I say, “What’s the matter? Everything can’t go wrong all the time.” They cut it down to three. I say, “Three is better than two—I really don’t need but one.” They cut it down to two. See . . . I am going to Chicago. If I have to buy me a graveyard and kill everybody I see. I am going to Chicago. I don’t want to live my life without. Everybody I know live without. I don’t want to do that. I want to live my life with.
A superficial examination of the elements of You Never Can Tell (1897) might entice an observer into believing he was about to experience the best G.B A superficial examination of the elements of You Never Can Tell (1897) might entice an observer into believing he was about to experience the best G.B.S. has to offer. The Shavian preoccupations are all here: the feminist matriarch Mrs. Clandon and her three unconventional children, including a teenage daughter Dolly who says whatever she pleases; their estranged father, a grumpy capitalist patriarch Mr. Crampton; a smart young man and practicing dentist named Valentine who is in love with Mrs. Clandon beautiful elder daughter Gloria; a solicitor and barrister both to compound and resolve misunderstandings; and the expert waiter, old Walter, always ready to be of service, who dispense both refreshments and advice with equal alacrity, and lives by the wide-awake motto “You Never Can Tell.”
Yes, it certainly sounds like an enjoyable Shaw comedy. Yet somehow all the elements don’t seem to work together. I suspect this is because the narrative just isn’t compelling enough. The conversations entertain, most of the jokes still work, but the play never makes us care about what might happen next.
My advice: skip it, and read Candida or The Devil’s Disciple instead.
Since the waiter Walter is the best thing about this play, I will end with one of his brief monologues, in which he describes how his very successful son (a barrister) and he are in reality very much alike:
We get on together very well, very well indeed, sir, considering the difference in our stations. (With another of his irresistible transitions.) A small lump of sugar, sir, will take the flatness out of the seltzer without noticeably sweetening the drink, sir. Allow me, sir. (He drops a lump of sugar into the tumbler.) But as I say to him, where's the difference after all? If I must put on a dress coat to show what I am, sir, he must put on a wig and gown to show what he is. If my income is mostly tips, and there's a pretence that I don't get them, why, his income is mostly fees, sir; and I understand there's a pretence that he don't get them! If he likes society, and his profession brings him into contact with all ranks, so does mine, too, sir. If it's a little against a barrister to have a waiter for his father, sir, it's a little against a waiter to have a barrister for a son: many people consider it a great liberty, sir, I assure you, sir. Can I get you anything else, sir?
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom—the only drama in the Pittsburgh Cycle not set in Pittsburgh—is August Wilson’s first great play. Like his masterpiece Fences Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom—the only drama in the Pittsburgh Cycle not set in Pittsburgh—is August Wilson’s first great play. Like his masterpiece Fences, it presents us with a compelling central character—the great blues singer Ma Rainey—who organizes the play around herself by virtue of her own personal energy, molding what might otherwise be a mere collection of thought-provoking scenes and atmospheric tableaux into a parable not only of black and white power relations, but of the relationship of the artist to his business, and the relationship of the artist to his art. In exploring these complex issues, however, Wilson never loses track of the songs and wounds that form and transform the human heart.
The entire play takes place in a recording studio during the production of a single record: “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” but Ma—although unforgettable when she appears—is not the whole show. The white men, Irv her manager and Sturdivant the producer, have their place of course, but the characters who really give a dynamic feel and color to the play are the other musicians in Ma’s band, particularly Levee, a brash young trumpeter eager to play his own music, and Cutler the trombonist and Toledo the pianist, two veterans reconciled to their status as side men. The way they explore each others pasts, philosophies and musical approaches adds to the depth and richness of the play.
The play ends in tragedy, which comes—as it often does in life—suddenly, without apparent warning. Yet when we reflect upon the nature of the world Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom has shown us, tragedy, as sudden and arbitrary as it seems, does not come as a surprise.
I’ll end with a few things Ma has to say about the Blues:
I never could stand no silence. I always got to have some music going on in my head somewhere. It keeps things balanced. Music will do that. It fills things up. The more music you got in the world, the fuller it is….White folks don’t understand about the blues. They hear it come out, but they don’t know how it got there. They don’t understand that’s life’s way of talking. You don’t sing to feel better. You sing cause that’s a way of understanding life….The blues help you get out of bed in the morning. You get up knowing you ain’t alone. There’s something else in the world. Something's been added by that song. This be an empty world without the blues. I take that emptiness and try to fill it up with something.
Shaw’s one-act play about Napoleon, The Man of Destiny (1897). is memorable for at least four reasons: 1) it gives us a glimpse of an indisputably gre Shaw’s one-act play about Napoleon, The Man of Destiny (1897). is memorable for at least four reasons: 1) it gives us a glimpse of an indisputably great man at the point when he begins to realize his greatness, 2) it presents us with a battle of minds and wills between that great man and an equally resourceful woman, 3) it is filled with witty, diverting dialogue, and 4) it allows G.B.S.--through the mouth of Napoleon—to deliver a devastating assessment of the character of the English people.
The play takes place at a Northern Italian inn where Napoleon has set up his temporary headquarters. It is two days after the battle of Lodi, a battle which—though indecisive in its outcome—helped convince Napoleon he was indeed a “man of destiny,” more gifted than his fellow generals. The general is determined to retrieve a packet of stolen dispatches and letters which—he suspects—are now in the possession of an attractive Englishwoman who is staying at the inn. The search for this packet—and the contents of one particular letter—are at the center of this absorbing and entertaining play.
Here follows an excerpt of Napoleon’s assessment of the English character (which I believe could—with a few minor alterations--be equally well applied to the American people):
No Englishman is too low to have scruples: no Englishman is high enough to be free from their tyranny. But every Englishman is born with a certain miraculous power that makes him master of the world. When he wants a thing, he never tells himself that he wants it. He waits patiently until there comes into his mind, no one knows how, a burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who have got the thing he wants. Then he becomes irresistible….He is never at a loss for an effective moral attitude. As the great champion of freedom and national independence, he conquers and annexes half the world, and calls it Colonization. When he wants a new market for his adulterated Manchester goods, he sends a missionary to teach the natives the gospel of peace. The natives kill the missionary: he flies to arms in defence of Christianity; fights for it; conquers for it; and takes the market as a reward from heaven. In defence of his island shores, he puts a chaplain on board his ship; nails a flag with a cross on it to his top-gallant mast; and sails to the ends of the earth, sinking, burning and destroying all who dispute the empire of the seas with him. He boasts that a slave is free the moment his foot touches British soil; and he sells the children of his poor at six years of age to work under the lash in his factories for sixteen hours a day.
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, the second in August Wilson’s “Century Cycle," is an effective and moving play. On the surface, it gives us a realistic a Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, the second in August Wilson’s “Century Cycle," is an effective and moving play. On the surface, it gives us a realistic and affectionate depiction of an early 20th century Pittsburgh boardinghouse, and of the aspirations and sorrows of the African-Americans who live or visit there, striving to make a living in the prosperous but often difficult north. On a deeper level, however, it is the story of the spiritual and political awakening of a people toward a greater understanding of the word “freedom.”
The poetic realism of August Wilson’s style makes use of expressionist techniques: archetypal characters, rhetorical declamation, and mythic and magical imagery, to name a few. As is often true of expressionist drama—witness the early O’Neill and the later O’Casey—although the individual effects may be powerful, the construction of the plays itself is sometimes defective. When Wilson creates a few forceful personalities—as he does in Fences, for example—such defects are not obvious. Unfortunately, as in Joe Turner—when Wilson task is to manipulate a large number of interesting but not compelling characters—the structural defects begin to show.
The most entertaining characters in Joe Turner are the owners of the boardinghouse, Seth and Bertha Holly, whose affectionate bickering provide much of the humor of the play (and much of the essential exposition too). From a thematic point of view, however, the two most important characters are Harold Loomis and Martha Pentecost. The wandering deacon Harold Loomis, confined to Joe Turner’s work farm for seven years, has now come north with his daughter to search of his wife, but what he needs most of all—as the old conjure man Bynum Walker knows—is a new “song,” a new spiritual anthem. Martha Pentecost, his born-again wife, needs to be united with her daughter and to come to terms with Loomis and her past. The problem is that Loomis’ only tells his story in the second scene of the last act, and Martha first appears in the final scene of the play. The result is that the major themes of the play—finding a song, coming to terms with the past—appear almost like an afterthought.
Still, Harold’s and Martha’sLoomis’ narratives are compelling when they come, and the many interesting characters of the boardinghouse present the audience with a vivid portrait of black America in the second decade of the 20th century.
I’ll conclude with what the old conjure man Bynum has to say about the importance of a song:
I didn’t know what I was searching for. The only thing I knew was something was keeping me dissatisfied. Something wasn’t making my heart smooth and easy. Then one day my daddy give me a song. That song had a weight to it that was hard to handle. That song was hard to carry. I fought against it. Didn’t want to accept that song. I tried to find my daddy to give him back the song. But I found out it wasn’t his song. It was my song...It got so I used all of myself up in the making of that song. Then I was the song in search of itself. That song rattling in my throat and I’m looking for it. See, Mr. Loomis, when a man forgets his song he goes off in search of it...till he find out he’s out it with him all the time.
Set in 1904, The Gem of the Ocean is the first play in Wilson’s “Century Cycle” (sometimes called “The Pittsburgh Cycle") of ten plays, each set in a Set in 1904, The Gem of the Ocean is the first play in Wilson’s “Century Cycle” (sometimes called “The Pittsburgh Cycle") of ten plays, each set in a different decade of the 20th century. It is a good place to start, for—other than mere chronology—it ably articulates the central themes of the cycle: how freedom is always partial, something continually sought, how both our dreams and our cynicism may hold us back—or spur us on—in our quest for freedom, depending on our knowledge of, and relationship with, the past.
Central to Gem of the Ocean--and the cycle—is the ancient Aunt Esther, a spiritual leader and healer of the black community who is rumored to be 285 years old. Convinced he has killed a man, the young Citizen Barlow (“Citizen” is his given name) seeks the help of Aunt Esther in order to expiate his guilt and guide his decisions. To heal him, she takes him on a hypnotic ritual journey to “The City of Bones”, traveling in “The Gem of the Ocean,” which is at one and the same time the small boat of his soul and the great boat of his people. Citizen’s journey—and what he learns about himself on that journey—constitute the core of the play.
Those who only know Wilson through his great play Fences may be disappointed, for Gem lacks the vivid characters and intense personal drama of that earlier play. It is an older man’s play (the ninth of the cycle to be written, although the first in order), reflective and meditative in its language and expressionistic in its dramatic technique. Its characters are often little more than mouths, stereotypes to speak the superb dialogue, and the plot lacks tension and urgency. Still, the climax—the scene of the boat journey itself—is very fine, a marvel of expressionistic theater which brings the play to a satisfying conclusion.
I will end with the voice of Aunt Esther, speaking of the nature of boats (and also hypnotizing Citizen with words in order to prepare him for his journey):
You ever seen a boat, Mr. Citizen. A boat is made out of a lot of things. Wood and rope. The sails look like bedsheets blowing in the wind. They make a snap when the winds catch them. Wood and rope and iron. The workmen with their hammers ringing. A boat is something. It takes a lot of men to make a boat. And it takes a lot of men to sail a boat. Them was some brave men. They left their family and didn’t know if they was ever gonna see them again. They got on that boat and went out into the world. The world’s a dangerous place, Mr. Citizen. It’s got all kinds of harms in it. It take God to Master the world. The world is a rough place. But there’s gold out there in the world. Them brave men went looking for it. Remember I told you you could take a ride on that boat? The wind catch up in them sails and you be off across the ocean. The wind will take you every which way. You need a strong arm to steer that boat. Don’t you feel it, Mr. Citizen? Don’t you feel that boat rocking? Just a rocking and a rocking. The wind blowing.
