Italics are mine

Review of “Grey Gardens” at the Civic Theatre

I somewhat recently attended a performance of “Grey Gardens” at the Civic Theatre of Allentown, a local community theater that had staged a good production of “33 Variations” a few weeks earlier. I’d heard of “Grey Gardens” before – the musical, the documentary and the movie – but had never had a chance of seeing either, so I jumped at the opportunity.

For those of you who don’t know about “Grey Gardens”, it tells of the love-hate relationship between a woman and his adult daughter, relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who lived by themselves in an enormous, decrepit mansion in the Hamptons with many cats. The mother, “Big Edie”, abandoned by her husband, turned to her only daughter for emotional support and later made the young woman, “Little Edie”, who aspired at a career in the performing arts, come back from New York City to take care of her after the girl had successfully managed to escape her grip. The daughter moved back and never left. Big Edie thus deprived her daughter, who might have had her own issues to begin with, from her normal development as a grown-up woman.

After seeing the musical I stopped by the B&N store at Promenade Shops and bought the “Grey Gardens” documentary – better than the musical, in my opinion, but in hindsight something I should have watched before attending the performance to fully enjoy all the winks to the real-life Big Edie and Little Edie Beale. A lot of the best lines of the musical are taken straight from the documentary, and in the production I saw, Little Edie’s costumes were exact replicas of clothes the real Little Edie wore when the documentary was shot. The musical does take some necessary artistic license with the truth to attract theater-goers, when it presents Joe Kennedy Jr as an early love interest of Little Edie, who is then scared away by his would-be fiancee’s possessive mother.

It was interesting to see it at the Civic Theatre, which itself is in sore need of a fresh coat of paint and refurbishing, on Mother’s Day to boot – it was the only Sunday matinee in the production run, and I was surprised to see how many women came with their mothers and how many others came with female friends, with whom they agreed during the intermission that, while what happened to Big Edie and Little Edie was extreme, the main plot line, of a woman unhappy in her marriage who uses her daughter to provide for her emotional satisfaction, is very common, at least among this self-selected crowd.

The staging was very good and the actors, mostly local, gave outstanding performances, but given the state of the building, the lack of easy parking nearby and the competition offered by the new facilities in Bethlehem (for the movie theater side of the business), I’m not sure how long the Civic Theater can continue to operate. It seems that it also runs a youth acting school every summer, which might help bring in some money, but that building is not a structure I’d care to re-visit if there was another year-round venue for high-quality professional live theater in the area.

Allentown certainly deserves its own first-rate entertainment facilities. It’s one thing to repeat as often as possible that the West End is enjoying a “renaissance”, quite another to see it happen. In the meantime, the productions, although good, are vastly overshadowed by the extraordinary shows of the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival at DeSales University, which shows Shakespeare and non-Shakespeare plays every summer in some of the very best stagings I’ve seen to date. But ShakespeareFest doesn’t show “Grey Gardens” (this year’s non-Shakespeare play is “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” by Tennessee Williams, the festival is also staging the musical “Sweeney Todd”), and I find myself lucky to have been able to see it live in Allentown.

I do plan to go back to the Civic Theater once or twice next year. The 2012-13 season has been announced and I particularly look forward to “August: Osage County”, by Tracy Letts.

Random things about me

(This post is in the spirit of my Versatile Blogger post some time ago.)

1. Beethoven or Mahler? Beethoven.
2. Matisse or Picasso? Matisse.
3. Most fascinating composer? Shostakovich.
4. Three people I'd love to meet? Aung San Suu Kyi, Maya Lin and Regina Dugan.
5. Favorite play? "Death of a Salesman."
6. Favorite TV show? “Friday Night Lights.” (Although the series has come to an end, I enjoy re-watching episodes on DVD.) I also like “Mad Men”, but nowadays it seems everyone I know does. Honorable mention to “The Closer.”
7. Favorite New York memory? Too many to pick one... Walking along Eighth Avenue while the sun sets, sipping a glass of wine by the window at the indie cafe of Lincoln Center Film Society, browsing the foreign literature shelves at McNally-Jackson, listening to a chamber music concert in Alice Tully Hall, attending TEDxEast.
8. Favorite movies? “The Life of Others.” “All the President’s Men.” “Walk the line.” Black-and-white movies from the 1940s, especially "films noirs".
9. Tea or coffee? Mighty Leaf tea at home, Starbucks coffee outside.
10. Favorite magazines? The New Yorker, The Economist, Harvard Business Review, Tricycle. Also Yoga Journal and Dwell.
11. Pollock or de Kooning? De Kooning.
12. Favorite musical? "Grey Gardens."
13. Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center? Either.
14. Juilliard or Curtis? Both.
15. Works I listen to all the time? Brahms, Double Concerto and Sextet, by the Busch Quartet, recorded in Strasburg in 1949. Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra in Dvorak’s Symphony No 9 and Mendelsohn’s Symphony No 4 (recorded in 1953 and 1954). The Emerson Quartet playing Beethoven’s string quartets. And of course many more.

Learning to Stay

Pema Chodron, who doesn't need to be introduced to anyone in the US remotedly interested in Buddhism, often talks about "learning to stay" in her teachings. You can read more about it on the Shambhala website; in short she describes shenpa, which is roughly translated as attachment but more accurately as, in her words, 'scratching the itch' or basically indulging any urge (smoking, overeating, etc) instead of experiencing the unease, learning to stay with it. And somewhere along the way, between the books of her I've read and some of her CDs, it occurred to me that, in the years I've spent in my current city, I've become a master at running away from the unease.

For about a year and a half or two when I had first moved here I didn't know about the bus to New York (also NYC seemed a scary place, I have to admit - I've become unafraid [although not reckless!] as I've aged, but I was scared of a lot of things in my twenties for various reasons I won't get into), and the Promenade Shops hadn't opened yet, and the B&N at the Southmont Shopping Center seemed very far away because I had to go on the highway to get there, and I didn't like driving long distance, at night or in the rain. (I've changed my mind since then.) Frankly I can't thank Amazon.com enough for rescuing me by delivering books on my doorstep so that I could escape with my imagination.

So this is how it started: buying books on the Internet. I've always enjoyed having a few books I hadn't yet found the time to read, but in my years here this has grown to a ridiculous extent, because whenever I feel sad about the area, which is a lot of the time, I get in my car and head to Promenade Shops and in spite of my best intentions I have a very difficult time leaving B&N without a book. Or two. It's not rational - I have plenty of books to read already. But buying a new book makes me feel safe in company of inspiring (fictional or non-fictional) characters, reminds me that there is a exciting world out there that people with lofty ambitions try to change. And I like people-watching at B&N because you do find, on rare occasions, someone who reads something else than a magazine or a travel guide. This is the closest to a like-minded community around here that I'll ever find.

Still, there is the problem of over-consumption. I buy too many books and I go to NYC too much. (Discovering the Bieber bus, which goes direct to Manhattan, as opposed to its competitor that inches its way through several stops, has been a plus in my life. Maybe too much of a plus.) I've started to realize I was fleeing from the discomfort. I get the same sense of relaxation from seeing the NYC-bound Bieber bus pull into the park n' ride than others get from sipping a glass of wine at the end of a long day. One glass is fine. But several? I know I don't want to be fully based in B-lem but I haven't reached a place yet where I feel I've achieved steady state, a way of composing my life - to use a term coined by Mary Catherine Batheson - that is sustainable long-term. But that's what learning to stay entails, in my case. Accepting B-lem's imperfections and deciding once and for all what to do about it instead of getting in my car and heading to B&N because it's the only place around where some people who like books congregate (and many teenagers who like browing through magazines without buying them) congregate. 

Chodron calls it "seeing clearly and fully experiencing the shenpa." I've got to face the uneasiness and sort out my life, one way or the other. I've got to train in staying.

Things about me, Part 2

(Read Things about me, Part 1 first.)

I like to read and I like to paint, but I hope that my artistic contribution to the world will be through my writing. The publishing world in the US is extremely oriented toward commercial success, large sales and national attention that can translate into big money for the publishing house, so I know I face an uphill road. Agents have no reason to bother with projects with niche appeal (those are not worth their time, monetarily speaking), and most publishing houses don’t want anything to do with unagented manuscripts. But as someone who doesn’t like taking the beaten path, I’ll venture to say this might suit me just fine. It is going to take a bit more time for my books to find their audience if I self-publish, but few people truly have the backbone to act like my characters if the occasion presented itself, and those (only those) are the people I want reading my books anyway. I picked opera singers as the main characters of my story, for goodness’s sake – that says it all about my lack of desire to wow the masses. It is far more important for me to have my writing appreciated by a handful of people for whom it means something. 

I didn’t decide I wanted to switch to the PhD program until weeks before the qualifier exam was scheduled to take place. My parents even framed the copy of the form I had initially submitted, stating that I would not take the exam, which the administrative assistant gave back to me when I submitted the other form (stating I would) instead. My life could have taken such a different turn.  Sometimes you just have to go with the flow and see where you end up. Similarly, I didn’t decide I wanted to pursue a career in academia until I was twenty-five. There are things I knew from an early age – I have wanted to be a writer since I was five – but others I found out along the way. It has been a while since similar serendipitous events took place, and maybe that is a reason for my current restlessness. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have heard of Bethesda if my doctoral student hadn’t found a job there, so maybe coincidences are still happening and I’m just not noticing all of them. I could certainly use a bit more magic in my life.

I do enjoy the path I’ve taken. If I could design the perfect life environment for myself, I might not pick the area I’ve ended up in (LV), but being here has also helped me find time to write and paint, and hopefully develop enough of an identity as an artist that it will stay with me forever even if I leave. Looking back I can’t think of a single crossroad I’ve faced where I wish I would have taken the other path. Of course, in hindsight there are people I wish I would have talked more to, or cut out of my life sooner. But one thing becoming more interested in Buddhist studies has taught me is that the only way to be happy is to live in the moment: not fretting about the past, not obsessing over the future. Not waiting to be happy until Milestone X, Y or Z. Not even waiting to be happy until the novel is published. I have a good job and I have a good tribe. Yes, I would have liked to be published years ago and I would like to have a magic wand that will transport me to the DC area and find me a job as nice as the one I currently have. But I’m not going to postpone my happiness until then.

 

How-To: Sympathetic Characters

The May/June 2012 issue of Poets & Writers had a gem of a column in its Literary Life section, so I thought I'd share the advice of a very insightful author. We, as writers, all want to create characters that readers can feel emotionally connected to, so that they'll stay with us the length of the story, or even the novel. It is tempting, then, to redeem a flawed character with good deeds. (I did some of that in my first draft of The Lost Voice. I am still cutting some of that out.)

The P&W author comments: "She'll start adopting stray animals, cooking casseroles for sick relatives, interrupting her morning jog to help a stranger install new wiper blades..." But, as he points out shortly thereafter, in fiction the opposite of dislike is sympathy, not admiration. More precisely: "Readers feel sympathy when they sense vulnerability... He feels lonely or alienated, guilty or humiliated, frustrated, heartbroken, afraid."

He also touches upon the issue of remorse in a character, as opposed to making excuses for oneself, descriptions that include positive - not all negative - details especially in others, and giving characters tasks to make them interested in lives other than their own to avoid what is apparently a rampant problem in the output of young MFA grads, self-centeredness and (he whips out a big word, apparently as popular in those circles as "paradigm shift" or "leverage" in the business ones) solipsism. Parting words? "[A] kernel of humanity burns inside everyone. Your job is to find those kernels, and then use the right tools to expose them." If his fiction is as good as his advice, I'll be reading a lot of him soon.