Italics are mine

Rising Stars in "Chicago" at DeSales

 Later today I'm going to the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival at DeSales University to see the musical Oklahoma! (and before you point out that you weren't aware Shakespeare had written about a US state before it even became part of the union: the festival isn't only about Shakespeare plays - every year there are a few additional offerings to draw in subscribers).

This reminded me I never wrote about the musical Chicago, which I saw at DeSales in April shortly before I left for Paris, this time as part of the regular theater season for the university - meaning all the roles were played by DeSales students. (At the Shakespeare Festival the key roles are usually played by professional Equity actors who come to the area for the occasion.) So, here is a long overdue post about a fantastic program and a hidden gem of the local area.

The university has an extremely strong theater department, the graduates of which often find themselves in successful performing arts careers throughout the country. If you know me - or have been reading this blog for a while - you know I particularly care about giving young people a chance in making their dream a reality, and so it gives me great pleasure to state the following: the DeSales productions never, ever miss. The students always, always shine. Forget about Broadway - this is where you want to buy tickets, and they are an order of magnitude cheaper.

A more developed version of my thoughts would be: it has been my experience, in every single show I have attended, that the young men and women in the theater and musical productions at DeSales - whether during the academic year or as part of the Shakespeare Festival - deserve enormous acclaim for their extraordinary performances.

This of course is not only due to them, but to the great creative and technical crew that provides them with the environment to show off their talents on stage in such spectacular manner, and delivers - day in and day out - productions that are consistently of the highest quality. I've seen Broadway productions that bored me to tears or pushed the definition of awfulness into never-treaded-before territory. DeSales, with its amateur cast and small budget, outshines them regularly. (This is not something the people in charge seem too eager to advertize, given that antagonizing the world of commercial theater could hurt their graduates' chances of getting a job.)

I feel that at DeSales the director is more likely to remember how important it is for the students to shine in their roles to attract agents and job offers, and so puts them first instead of putting himself first, while directors of Broadway plays may go on an ego trip because they're aware of the productions that came before theirs and want to distinguish themselves somehow.

Theater-goers, though, "only" want a memorable experience and don't care about how this production differs from the ones that came before. (See my previous post about Phèdre for more details...) I'm glad that I'm not the only one to know that DeSales theater is the hidden gem of the area: the Chicago run was sold out even before it opened. The students deserve to play to a full house.

(Photo credit: Morning Call.) So, back to the students. I can't single out every one of them for praise, so I'll keep my comments for the main characters, shown in this picture by the Morning Call. (I wish there were better pictures of the students online but apparently no one thought of making them available.)

First of all, you want to remember the name Phoenix Best - the girl on the right in the picture. She's a rising junior majoring in theater at DeSales (a sophomore during the production run), and she stole the show as Velma. One day she's going to be a star. Whenever she's cast in a future DeSales production, do not think twice and get a ticket.

One of the greatest pleasures in returning to DeSales for theater again and again is that you see students in different roles during their tenure at the university - it makes you feel you're walking a bit of the road with them. I'd enjoyed seeing Julia Pfender (Roxie) in The Tempest at the Shakespeare Festival last summer; also, John Cappelletti (Billy Flynn) had been a superb "bad brother" Jonathan in the hilarious Arsenic and Old Lace.

Many actors witness their love for the stage getting stamped out of them as they progress in their career. Perhaps too many disappointments are to blame, too much hardship. But when you watch a DeSales production you can see what Broadway theater could be like, if actors and director and technical crew always hit the mark, if the pure joy of acting never faded. 

So remember these names: Phoenix Best, Julia Pfender, John Cappelletti, and buy yourself tickets for next season.

Update 6/30: What a surprise to discover at DeSales that Phoenix Best was also part of the cast of Oklahoma! She played Ellen, and needless to say, she was wonderful. I was also thrilled to recognize some familiar faces, such as (pictures of all available here):

• Erick Huertas, whom I'd already seen in South Pacific and The Tempest, and who - having just graduated from DeSales and planning to move to New York City for a career in TV/film acting - deserves as much success in the Big Apple as he'd had in Pennsylvania, 
• Kaitlyn Kurowski, a 2011 DeSales grad, whom I'd seen in Pride and Prejudice, and who shines in roles of beautiful, "bitchy" women (the competitor of the leading female character, in other words), and seems destined for great things on TV or the silver screen,
• Jequery Slaton, also an alumnus of South Pacific,
• Leah Poyo, also an alumna of The Tempest,
• and probably more I didn't have a chance to recognize because of the make-up and the costumes!

I'll also take this opportunity to mention some incredible performers who made their first appearance at the festival this year:

• Doug Carpenter is a heartthrob with a splendid voice in the leading male role of Curly, as well as the winner of the 2011 American Traditions Competition and 2013 Lotte Lenya Competition, a graduate of UNLV and UCLA, and a regular on regional stages in such coveted roles as Camelot's Lancelot, West Side Story's Tony, Miss Saigon's Chris and Pride & Prejudice's Mr Darcy.
• Sean McGee played the dim-witted Will Parker, who has trouble raising and then holding on to the $50 that will allow him to marry the woman he loves, and frankly he was hilarious through and through, but especially in the "Oklahoma hello".
• Fran Prisco as the peddler Ali Hakim was phenomenally funny. He just was. I was bent in two from laughing during his scenes with Will Parker, and people around me were laughing so hard too they had tears in their eyes. I can't believe anyone anywhere - including Broadway - can play that role better than him.

What a privilege to have attended that show! If you're in the area and care to see it too, it closes today Sunday June 30, so don't wait!

“Phèdre”

(Photo credit: Comédie-Française) I saw Phèdre not too long ago at the Comédie-Française while I was in Paris. I’d bought my ticket before the production premiere (I would’ve bought a ticket for anything that was performed during my time in Paris – I like to see a lot of plays when I’m in France), and regretted it once I read the lukewarm reviews. Then I went to see the play, and I was glad I’d bought my ticket again. Don’t take me wrong: the production isn’t perfect (more on that later), and I still think the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival – of all places – produces the best classical plays in the business, but there are some truly stunning moments by amazing comedians, and overall it was money well-spent.

First, the things (and actors) I liked. The production has been criticized for the use of amplification, i.e., there is a microphone on stage. This apparently made a number of theater reviewers gasp in collective horror. Perhaps some changes were made to the production between opening night and the afternoon I saw the play, but I thought the use of the microphone was spot-on. It expanded the range of the actors by allowing them to whisper or speak in a very soft voice while still being heard and conveying emotions that would have been hard to share with the audience otherwise. In particular, the microphone was used when Hippolyte tells his love to Aricie, when Phèdre whispers to Thésée, and when Théramène recounts the death of Hippolyte. (You knew he dies in the end, right?)

The role of Hippolyte is shared by two actors, Pierre Niney and Benjamin Lavernhe. The day I went I saw Benjamin Lavernhe, who was phenomenal. I’d already seen him in a small role in Three Sisters, and he was apparently also on stage the night before for a Feydeau play – his range as an actor is clearly impressive, and he made a very convincing Hippolyte - from his shock at Phèdre’s love declaration, to his emotion when he admits his love to Aricie, to his denial when his father confronts him with Phèdre’s accusations. His acting was superb through and through, and one can only hope he’ll be able to show the full measure of his talent in the next plays he’s cast in.

I do have a major issue with the program, which had four pictures of Niney and zero of Lavernhe. From the little I know (remember, I spend most of my time in the US, and I usually don’t keep track of what’s happening in French theater when I’m abroad), Niney is the new heartthrob for French teenagers who care about theater, and perhaps he does play in most of the performances – there’s no way for spectators to know, since we’re only told Niney and Lavernhe are alternating in the role throughout the run.

I think it sends an appalling message to the audience to only put pictures of Niney in the booklet – when Lavernhe steps forward on stage so that we can finally see which one of the two actors we’ll have for our performance, there were audible disappointed murmurs behind me of “Oh, it’s not him”, and I was close enough to the stage to imagine that some nights Lavernhe must be able to hear some of those comments. (One thing I’ve learned in my years of teaching is that what my students tell each other in the classroom projects forward.) Hippolyte counts as one of the great roles, for young men, of the French theater repertory and it is just callous to put one of the two actors in such a position. The least one could do would be to send a strong message, by giving Niney and Lavernhe equal treatment in the program, that both are outstanding actors and we should be glad to have either. I saw Lavernhe at work – he is just as deserving of the acclaim.

I was particularly impressed by the second roles: Eric Génovèse as Théramène (Hippolyte’s governor) and Clotilde de Bayser as Oenone. I would never have expected to care about Théramène’s account of Hippolyte’s death (it’s well known he dies, so I wanted to see the reactions of the protagonists rather than hearing about Neptune and the very unlikely sea monster that causes Hippolyte’s death), but frankly Génovèse – speaking softly in front of the microphone, with no gesture whatsoever and only pure emotion in his voice – gave a stunning performance that just made my jaw drop. My students would say that my mind was blown, and they wouldn’t be too far from the truth. That’s acting at its best, and you don’t realize what you’re missing in humdrum performances until someone like Génovèse (who was also in Three Sisters, by the way) finds his way to the stage and enlightens you. If you only see that of the play and sleep the rest of the time, it will still have been worth the thirty-nine euros.

Clotilde de Bayser, as Oenone, also treated us to a first-rate piece of acting. She conveyed masterfully Oenone’s devotion for Phèdre – giving her the advice that will ultimately lead to the family’s destruction because she wanted to save Phèdre from the slow death the queen had condemned herself to. When Phèdre finally repudiates her, we can’t help but feel for Oenone’s pain – and I’d forgotten she kills herself in the sea, but de Bayser’s (slow, silent) acting at that point was so powerful the ten-year-old boy sitting next to me leaned toward his father and let him know, in case the fact had eluded the father: “She’s going to kill herself!” There was nothing in the text up to that point that told you she would do so, but after de Bayser’s powerful acting you couldn’t imagine any other end. (And, indeed, Oenone drowns at sea.) That’s another lesson in acting right there, for students learning their art. 

Special mention to Emilie Prevosteau, student-actor at the theater company, who gives an outstanding performance as Ismène. She is undoubtedly bound to a great career.

Elsa Lepoivre shone as Phèdre, especially when she makes her love declaration to Hippolyte and is rebuffed, and later learns he is capable of love after all, but loves another. Like Lavernhe, she displays a great range as an actress, and conveys a broad spectrum of emotions very convincingly. It’s even more to her credit that she portrayed the far different role of Macha in Three Sisters throughout much of the spring. Nitpicking (and I realize it’s nitpicking, but at the same time as an stage actor you want to pay attention to details): if you’re going to portray the queen of Athens, wife of Thésée, perhaps you can make sure that you don’t have two inches worth of brown roots showing in your hair that you dye blond. Otherwise it makes the contrast with the women in your employ – Oenone and Panope, both with regal airs – all the more glaring, and it distracts those in the audience who begin to wonder whether this is part of the director’s read of the play or just an oversight.

This matters even more so here, because Ismène, in knee-long skirt, high heels and sophisticated bun, is also more prettily dressed than Aricie – with her long, grey pants, buttoned-up shirt and flowing, long hair, and both the king Thésée and his son Hippolyte are dressed in drab suits, like Théramène. Phèdre with her beautiful white dress was one exception, but the hairdo gives a very different impression of her, if you’re seated close enough to notice her roots. If the “lowly” characters in the play (Panope, Oenone, Ismène) all look better than the ones in position of power (or potentially in position of power, like Aricie), is this part of the director’s interpretation or shouldn’t we read too much into it? But again, Lepoivre’s acting was stellar, and she was very well cast as Phèdre.

The production has also been criticized for the presence of a radio on the set (and yes, the radio works). That’s indeed one thing I couldn’t find an explanation for. A number of times during the performance, I caught the beginning of some sort of music and thought a cell phone was going off, before realizing it was the radio on stage. I also was puzzled that the director – who cares so much about his actors being heard that he resorts to a microphone – would let them speak with their back to the audience (for instance, facing the sea on the terrace of the house), or from behind the set. At those times the actors were very hard to hear, and I was sitting close to the stage.

In addition, I’m sure there’s an explanation for the drab costumes of the leading characters, but it wasn’t apparent to me. I’m also a bit perplexed by the number of comedians who appear in multiple plays alternating at the theater (Lepoivre, Genovèse, Lavernhe), while there seems to be plenty of actors to choose from on the roster – what are the other actors doing in the meantime? Shouldn’t they too have some opportunity to hone their skills, instead of a few being seen again and again? And the ones we do see are stellar, but perhaps the ones we don’t are too, and it’s a pity we don’t get to judge for ourselves.

Overall, though, this was a fine production with a great cast of actors and some truly breathtaking moments. As for the young boy seated next to me, he announced to his father after the curtain fell, with all the authority a ten-year-old can muster, that, “although it was a bit slow at the beginning,” the play overall had been great. And that, my friends, is higher praise than the reviews of a hundred theater critics.

Background Reading: "And the Show Went On"

 Today's (short) post is about another nonfiction book - after The Shameful Peace by Frederic Spotts, which I wrote about here - that will be of interest to those readers of my novella "Isolde 1939" who want to learn more about cultural life in Paris during the Occupation: And The Show Went On, by Alan Riding.

While General de Gaulle "above all people purveyed the healing notion that the French had been united in their resistance except for a few traitors and weaklings" (from the New York Times review), it has been known for a long time that the situation in Occupied France had many more shades of grey than what was politically correct to admit at the Libération. Riding, a former cultural correspondent for the New York Times, focuses on the shades of grey seen in cultural and intellectual Paris.

The Financial Times review provides this quote of professor, literary critic and Résistant Jean Guéhenno, included in Riding's book and which I can't resist to share with you: "The species of the man of letters is not one of the greatest of human species. Incapable of surviving for long in hiding, he would sell his soul to see his name in print." This gives you a preview of many intellectuals' attitude during the Occupation.

I didn't find the book to be a page-turner - at least not in the way I found Villa Bel Air by Rosemary Sullivan, about Varian Fry, to be a page-turner - but it is very well researched and I liked how Riding, in the words of the Guardian reviewer, "traces how [the collabos] came to be by painting an elaborate picture of the terror of the German invasion, the collapse of French morale following the first world war, the immense humiliation and fear of a defeated population." It is only by understanding why some people chose to collaborate with the invaders that we can, perhaps, prevent such behavior from happening again.The book provides a stunning picture of the compromises people make with their conscience in devotion to their art - or their name in the headlines.

"The First Man" by Albert Camus

I recently finished reading Albert Camus' The First Man, a novel far different from the author's earlier works, and absolutely loved it - in part because of Camus's talent with words, but also because his story is the story of my mother's family, and the story of anyone who's grown up in poverty around the Mediterranean.

Camus’s reputation has suffered from his trying his hand at many genres: novels, plays, essays. But The First Man, published in France by his heirs in 1994, thirty-four years after the death of the Nobel-Prize winner in an automobile accident at age forty-seven, establishes his kinship with many self-made Americans, those outsiders who succeed not through connections but through hard work alone.

A key part of the American mythical success story is, after all, based on the same elements that make Camus’s biographical novel on his childhood so utterly compelling: someone raised at the bottom of the social ladder (with much love by his relatives, by at the bottom nonetheless) seizes a chance to move up and far away and – thanks to a good education – finds fame and success.

In that way, Camus lived the American success story par excellence. His father died in World War I when he was one, and he was raised in a poor neighborhood of Algiers by his mother (who worked as a maid) and grandmother (the head of the household) until a teacher saw potential in him and encouraged him to attend high school, which the boy's family hadn't planned on letting him do. (He was supposed to quit school and find a job to bring money home.)

Specifically, the teacher encouraged the boy to take an exam to earn a scholarship that would allow him to attend high school for free. The grandmother opposed it at first – she was reluctant to let go of his income for several years, all that for more schooling – but the good teacher convinced the grandmother to change her mind.

And the depiction of poverty in Camus’s book, with long, elegiac sentences far different from his usual style, gives the best insight into everyday poverty that I’ve ever read anywhere. What he shows was, to a stunning degree of accuracy, my grandmother’s life in the south-east part of France (in a small Provence town not far from Aix), and my mother’s childhood.

Camus was, truly, a child of France’s “Third Republic” – a political system that lasted from 1870 to 1940 and was based on a parliamentary republic with two chambers, the head of state playing only a figurative role (in stark contrast with the current system.) The ideals of the French educational system were, in fact, very close in spirit to the ideals of the US as a whole. Now the American system has veered in a very different direction, with strong inequalities in schooling depending on the neighborhood one can afford. That doesn't prevent many immigrants to America today to dream for themselves of what Camus was able to achieve: success through public education, with no other help than good teachers along the way. Camus is, in his own self-made way and with his legendary charm, the quintessential American, half Humphrey Bogart half Cary Grant, an engaged gentleman who owed his success to no one but himself.

Below is Camus's speech (in French) when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, uploaded on YouTube by NeroRush23. Take a listen.

Note: This post is based on a draft of a similar passage in my forthcoming nonfiction book, tentatively titled "Paris Notebooks."

Germaine's Son

A key redeeming feature in the main protagonist of my novella Isolde 1939 is the love that Yvonne Chevallier has for her son, who is never shown in the book and yet plays a major role in the end, through a decision I won't name in order not to spoil the story for people who haven't read it.

The purpose of today's short post, then, is to point out that what Yvonne's son does in the book is also what Germaine's son did in real life, and Yvonne's reaction to it is true to the way Germaine reacted as well. Of course I made up a lot of moments, such as the scene in the last chapter between Germaine and the stranger, but the facts remain: Germaine Lubin's love for her son was enormous, which I hope to have conveyed successfully in the book, and perhaps, just perhaps, the enormity of that love may also be what brought about the son's last stand.

“Hannah Arendt” (the movie) and the banality of evil

I’d been intrigued by the movie Hannah Arendt when I first read the blurb about it (“The philosopher Hannah Arendt goes to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Nazi Adolft Eichmann on assignment for the American weekly The New Yorker. From her articles will emerge her theory on the banality of evil”). My interest was only strengthened when I realized that Tony Judt – the 2007 recipient of the Hannah Arendt Prize – devoted one full essay in his collection Reappraisals to the philosopher, who died in 1975, and in particular… her theory on the banality of evil.

In Hannah Arendt and Evil, Judt explains that Arendt was “throughout her adult life concerned above all with two closely related issues: the problem of political evil in the twentieth century and the dilemma of the Jew in the contemporary world.” The “special difficulty she experienced in acknowledging the place of Germany [her homeland] in the story she tried to tell” is also mentioned in the movie. In fact, many of the themes in Judt’s essay are mentioned in the movie, and I heartily recommend reading the essay first, if at all possible, before watching Hannah Arendt. I enjoyed the movie more because I’d read the essay first and could identify its debt to the true historical record.

Central to her work was the problem of totalitarianism, which she already touched upon in her early essays, long before Eichmann’s trial. I’ll let you read Judt’s excellent essay in its entirety, but I’ll end this paragraph about it with a quote: “What Arendt understood best… [was] the psychological and moral features of what she called totalitarianism. […] The arbitrary and apparently irrational, anti-utilitarian nature of life under such regimes destroys the texture of shared experience, of reality, upon which normal life depends… hence the tragic failure of outsiders to perceive the danger posed by totalitarian movements, and the lasting inability of commentators to grasp the enormity of the events they were witnessing.”

We owe director Margarethe von Trotta an iconic German movie that marked my high school years, The lost honor of Katharina Blum (co-directed with her then husband), which I remember watching in German class with a fantastic teacher of mine, to whom I owe to have been fluent in German before I moved to the States (and it still comes in handy, for what it’s worth, when I go to Germany for a conference or, which is more relevant here, want to follow movie dialogues without reading the subtitles). Hannah Arendt, in a very different genre, extends her contributions to the great movies of our time. Although it is difficult to make a good movie from such a heavy subject – a philosopher grappling with the Holocaust – von Trotta manages to humanize Arendt both through her friendship with Mary McCarthy and through her deep love for her husband (husband who, it is hinted, may be having an affair with a common friend, whose interest in her husband is known to Arendt).

The movie has been praised by many (although not all) critics but has received more lukewarm ratings from the audiences, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I ended up liking it a lot, although I suspect what made it appealing to me will only resonate with a small fraction of movie-goers. First, a large part of the movie is set in New York City, where Arendt and her husband found refuge after they had to escape war-torn France – either at Arendt’s apartment or at the New School where she taught. The movie does show her in Jerusalem, but mostly through scenes of the trial, including archival black-and-white footage of the real Eichmann at his trial. If you like intellectual dinner parties in New York, you’ll probably find the movie of interest. If you loathe such parties, then you might prefer staying clear of it.

The other reason I liked the movie was precisely because of Arendt’s theory on “the banality of evil”. In her New Yorker articles, or at least in what is explained of them in the movie, Arendt grapples at length with Eichmann’s defense at his trial, which is simply that he did the small job he had sworn to do under oath in a large bureaucracy. In his mind, apparently, he wasn’t responsible at all for what happened in the concentration camps – he was only responsible for transporting people there. His abdication of reason and morality in favor of his belonging to a (powerful) group is described by Arendt as his “inability to think”, which is part of the controversy her articles arise. (The brunt of the controversy, however, was apparently aimed at her way of depicting some leaders in the Jewish community, who may not have done enough to protect their members from the Nazi madness and genocide.)

I wouldn’t have chosen the word “inability” which could be interpreted as absolving Eichmann of responsibility, but in today’s fragmented world where people create their own tribes and lash out in venomous, anonymous diatribes on the Internet at those who disagree with them, and where teenagers film themselves in packs kicking lone bystanders or looting convenience stores, I do believe that the overall concept remains very much of actuality, although obviously on a very different scale from what happened in World War II. People like Eichmann viewed loyalty to a wrong cause as more important than individual moral character, and people today with those same beliefs can still commit despicable acts, even if theirs don’t lead to the mass murder of six million people.

This is why I don’t regard the movie as simply a historical document, a testimony of a time. It should make us reflect on Eichmann-like characters in today’s world. In fact, it would’ve been the best possible answer for Arendt to give the female student who asks, when Arendt lectures about her articles and the controversy, when the crimes against the Jews are called crimes against mankind. Arendt’s answer, which starts with “because the Jews are people”, struck me as the only weak part of the movie. (And I’m Catholic leaning toward Buddhist, in case you’re wondering.) The crimes against the Jews are crimes against mankind because the people who become infatuated with power will always want to keep some other groups down, and it was Jews for the Nazis, and it was intellectuals for the Khmers Rouges – something that happened long after the time portrayed in the movie, I’m just giving an example – and it could be some other group next time.

I was also fascinated by the depiction of the controversy, especially the anonymous notes to Arendt and her assistant’s reaction, as well as the attitude of her fellow faculty members, and the more open-minded and perhaps objective behavior of the students. The personal attacks must have exacted a heavy toll on her – people claimed she was a Jewish Nazi, which she wasn’t (although she was Jewish), and had defended Eichmann, which she hadn’t. Vendettas, attempts at character assassination and the like, especially in the United States which has an ambivalent attitude toward intellectuals, are sadly a part of some people’s arsenal. It gave me pause to see Arendt accused of having no feelings, and of betraying her people, because she tried to analyze the trial in a thoughtful manner (although she could have chosen her words more carefully to dispel any impression she was defending Eichmann). In the end she was spot-on on the banality of evil, and I wouldn’t be surprised if von Trotta’s excellent movie received many awards. Its thoughtful portrayal of Arendt and her circle of friends will deserve every single one of them.