I need not go into the reasons at length, for it’s unlikely that any one or two of them would be sufficient. Let it be said that the words I’ve written here over the past ten years will continue to speak for themselves, if there is anyone there to hear them. Theatre, drama, and criticism, all of which I’ve written about at some length, will get along fine without me, as they always have, and I must also say that I never had any messianic visions that anything I did here would fix what’s wrong with any of them — if, indeed, anything is wrong at all; it’s more likely that all three are evolving, and evolution carries with it no inherent moral qualities. It simply is. Theatre is dependent upon community — a community of like souls; and I can scarcely complain, after all I’ve written here, about having no community myself, especially among theatremakers and critics here in New York. It is true that I have none, though, and that also means that I am guilty of indulging in the sin of solipsism — a bad example to my daughters and anyone else.

That community of course provides the cross-pollenization necessary to engage meaningfully with any art — continuing dialogue, continuing participation within the community: time spent within the monster, and I am well outside it (and perhaps I should be thankful). Even the smallest, seemingly the most inconsequential of contacts among those souls keeps the fire burning, but for me these have become increasingly rare. The key to this perhaps is time, and I have none. Like everyone else, I am pulled in many directions at once, and something has to give. For me, it is Superfluities Redux. Lacking time, lacking community, it would benefit no one, especially myself, to do an ass-backwards job of it in the margins of my working days.

It only remains to thank my readers for their time and attention over the past decade; some have claimed that what I’ve written here has made some small difference to them, and for that I’m grateful. I must also acknowledge the kindness and generosity of those artists and writers who have made my own meanderings in this field worthwhile; for them I retain the highest admiration, and I must thank them, too, for changing my own life and perspective enough to make the preceding ten years of my writing here worth doing. Superfluities Redux has sometimes given me the opportunity to meet some of them, and I cherish those moments and friendships. Those I shall always have with me.

Ezra Pound in 1967.

Unlike the situation in continental Europe, the relationship between Modernism and the English-language stage has always been uneasy. Several “High Modernists” wrote for the stage — Yeats, Eliot, Stein, and notoriously Henry James — but, at least in the American drama, Modernist trends were never fully embraced. In America, only Eugene O’Neill wrestled with these ideas and sensibilities at length. Most of the plays of his middle period were attempts to fuse his Modernist sensibilities with the American tradition of melodrama (according to Marc Robinson, melodrama may be the most pervasive and characteristic genre to be found in American theatre), which sought to elicit emotional responses from the collective audience through the manipulation of plot and character, leading, more often than not, to a “happy” ending that satisfied audiences. But somehow it never quite worked. In O’Neill, the Modernist and the Melodramatist were in constant struggle throughout his plays of the 1920s and 1930s. The struggle, more often than not, came to a draw.

Among the High American Modernists it would be hard to find a Higher one than Ezra Pound. Though he translated both Greek tragedies and Noh plays, he never felt the necessity to write directly for the stage himself. In September 1915, James Joyce sent the manuscript of his play Exiles to Pound for his comments, which elicited from Pound this characteristically spiky, polemical response about the theatre in general:

My whole habit of thinking of the stage is: that it is a gross, coarse form of art. That a play speaks to a thousand fools huddled together, whereas a novel or a poem can lie about in a book and find the stray persons worth finding, one by one seriatim. …

and if I had written this letter last night (2 a.m.) just after finishing the “Portrait”, I should have addressed you “Cher Maitre”.

Now what would he want to write for the stage for

?????

Can one appeal to the mass with anything requiring thought? Is there anything but the common basis of a very few general emotions out of which to build a play that shall be at once

A. a stage play
B. not common, not a botch.

There is no union in intellect, when we think we diverge, we explore, we go away.
When we feel we unite. [1]

In the contemporary American drama, it seems that this union is by far the driving force. Unfortunately, it leads to the death of the individual mind, at least in the theatre.

1. Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, ed. Forrest Read. New York: New Directions, 1967, p. 57.

Marilyn Nonken

As part of the “Tracing Our Roots” series of discussions at NYU Steinhardt’s Piano Studies program, Marilyn Nonken will offer a unique program focusing on her own career and teachers this Sunday, 21 April, at 3.00pm at NYU’s Black Box Theatre, 82 Washington Square East. During the free event, Marilyn (who directs the Piano Studies program at NYU Steinhardt) will perform works by Arnold Schoenberg, Luigi Dallapiccola, and Tristan Murail, and also provide reminiscences of her mentors David Burge, who passed away earlier this month, and Leonard Stein. (The New York Times obituary for Burge can be found here.) Her first book, The Spectral Piano, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Did I mention it was free? I look forward to being there. For a brief taste, here’s Justin Urcis’s interview with Marilyn about Murail’s Territoires de l’oubli:

nonken

The Public Theater on Lafayette Street.

Ah, youth. In 1978, at the green age of 16, I first visited the Public Theater on Lafayette Street on a short weekend trip from my home of Hazleton, PA, for a day of theatregoing that could easily bruise the sensibilities of a callow youth. In the afternoon, I enjoyed Robert Woodruff’s staging of Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class; after a dinner break, I returned for Thomas Babe’s A Prayer for My Daughter (a play ripe for revival here in New York; it had a London revival in 2008).

Those were the glory years for Joe Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival; A Chorus Line was providing a fresh infusion of cash into the Public’s coffers, and it was a rare night on which any of the Public’s (five stages? six?) performance spaces were dark. I returned several times over the next twenty years or so, but I never found the same electricity as I did that March day in 1978. Papp died in 1991, and by then the Chorus Line cash cow wasn’t delivering quite as much milk. During the tenures of JoAnne Akalaitis and George C. Wolfe as subsequent artistic directors, the Public fell into something of an aesthetic and business funk — then, indeed, there were many days and weeks during which all of the Public’s stages were dark.

As a tyro playwright, even in those days, I duly submitted my plays — dreadful imitations of Brecht and Pinter — to the Public’s literary office, which still accepted over-the-transom manuscripts, and after no more than a month always received rejection letters (though sometimes with an encouraging handwritten note asking to see my next play, a sheer godsend for a teenager smitten with the theatre). The Public liked playwrights back then. Legend has it that when Joseph Papp discovered that Wallace Shawn had to work in a copy shop just to make ends meet, he offered Shawn the same amount of salary just to permit Shawn to spend his days writing plays instead. These days, this would constitute a revolutionary commitment to the “emerging playwright”; in those days, it was just good sense and a favor from an artistic director to an artist. (And it paid off, as you’ll see below; on one of my subsequent visits to the Public, I saw Shawn perform The Fever.)

Over the past few years, the Public, under Oskar Eustis‘ artistic direction, has been generating a little more of that electricity — and yesterday’s announcement of the Public’s 2013-2014 season exemplifies the energy. The Public will be co-producing the US premiere of Shawn’s Grasses of a Thousand Colors in the fall (and a revival of his best play to date, The Designated Mourner, this summer); also this fall, the Public is bringing in the Foundry Theatre’s new production of Good Person of Szechwan, directed by Lear deBessonet and starring Taylor Mac, which first opened at La MaMa earlier this year. There’s also Arguendo, a new performance from Elevator Repair Service; four “Apple family” plays by Richard Nelson in rotating repertory; new plays from Suzan-Lori Parks and the Civilians; a new production of Antony and Cleopatra; and 29(!) monologues from Mike Daisey.

It is, even by the standards of the grotesque hype and Facebook blubbering that accompanies these season announcements, a tempting menu, even for a confirmed skeptic like myself — and maybe one that will bring Ron Rosenbaum down to Lafayette Street again. More information here.

Celan began a long poem in which “what’s real happens.” It was his follow-up to “Todesfuge” and moved deeper into inaccessible terrain. “Engführung” pushes his earlier title further, denoting a fugue’s “stretto,” the intense, overlapping entrances of themes, literally a “leading narrowly” or “leading into the straits” — which describes this poem’s form and content alike. An English title might be “Straitening,” but when a French translation was prepared, Celan approved Strette for Engführung. …

“Stretto,” by far Celan’s most demanding poem, came just after the Bremen speech, which ends with the poet “stricken by and seeking reality.” He told an interviewer in Bremen: “In my first book I was still transfiguring things — I’ll never do that again!” “Engführung” reconceives the manner and matter of “Todesfuge,” going beyond the pathos of black milk, exploring memory itself as a dimension of the original trauma. The poem’s close melds into its opening, the way memory almost coincides with reality. And there is something else here, easy to miss. Not only does an asterisk come after each section, but there is also an asterisk between the title and the first line — a mark devoid of purpose unless we are to link “Stretto”‘s last line to its first and set out again, da capo. Repeat this to the six-millionth degree, and “Nothing is lost.” [1]

The Straitening

*

Driven into the
terrain
with the unmistakable track:

grass, written asunder. The stones, white,
with the shadows of grassblades:
Do not read any more - look!
Do not look any more - go!

Go, your hour
has no sisters, you are -
are at home. A wheel, slow,
rolls out of itself, the spokes
climb,
climb on a blackish field, the night
needs no stars, nowhere
does anyone ask after you.

*
          Nowhere
                    does anyone ask after you -

The place where they lay, it has
a name - it has
none. They did not lie there. Something
lay between them. They
did not see through it.

Did not see, no,
spoke of
words. None 
awoke,
sleep
came over them.

*
          Came, came. Nowhere
                    anyone asks -

It is I, I,
I lay between you, I was
open, was
audible, ticked at you, your breathing
obeyed, it is
I still, but then 
you are asleep.

*
          It is  I still -

years,
years, years, a finger
feels down and up, feels
around:
seams, palpable, here
it is split wide open, here
it grew together again - who
covered it up?

*
          Covered it
                    up - who?

Came, came.
Came a word, came,
came through the night,
wanted to shine, wanted to shine.

Ash.
Ash, ash.
Night.
Night-and-night. - Go
to the eye, the moist one.

*
          Go
               to the eye,
                    the moist one -

Gales.
Gales, from the beginning of time,
whirl of particles, the other,
you
know it, though, we
read it in the book, was
opinion.

Was, was
opinion. How
did we touch
each other - each other with
these
hands?

There was written too, that.
Where? We
put a silence over it,
stilled with poison, great,
a
green
silence, a sepal, an
idea of vegetation attached to it -
green, yes,
attached, yes,
under a crafty
sky.

Of, yes,
vegetation.

Yes.
Gales, whirl of part-
icles, there was
time left, time
to try it out with the stone - it
was hospitable, it
did not cut in. How 
lucky we were:

Grainy,
grainy and stringy. Stalky,
dense:
grapy and radiant; kidneyish,
flattish and
lumpy; loose, tang-
led -; he, it
did not cut in, it
spoke,
willingly spoke to dry eyes, before closing them.

Spoke, spoke.
Was, was.

We
would not let go, stood
in the midst, a 
porous edifice, and
it came.

Came at us, came
through us, patched
invisibly, patched
away at the last membrane
and
the world, a millicrystal,
shot up, shot up.

*
          Shot up, shot up.
                    Then -

Nights, demixed. Circles,
green or blue, scarlet
squares: the
world puts its inmost reserves
into the game with the new
hours. - Circles,
red or black, bright
squares, no
flight shadow,
no
measuring table, no
smoke soul ascends or joins in.

*
          Ascends and
                    joins in -

At owl's flight, near
the petrified scabs,
near
our fled hands, in
the latest rejection,
above
the rifle-range near
the buried wall:

visible, once
more: the
grooves, the

choirs, at that time, the
psalms. Ho, ho-
sannah.

So
there are temples yet. A
star
probably still has light.
Nothing,
nothing is lost.

Ho-
sannah.

At owl's flight, here,
the conversations, day-grey,
of the water-level traces.

*
          (--day-grey,
                    of
                         the water-level traces - 
Driven into the
terrain
with
the unmistakable
track:

Grass,
grass,
written asunder.)

1. John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995, p. 118, 125.

Ron Rosenbaum.

I know I’m late to the party, but recently I’ve been enjoying the writings of Ron Rosenbaum, the writer of “narrative nonfiction and essays,” as he describes them, and current contributor to Slate. Over the past several years, Rosenbaum’s published a fascinating contemporary Divine Comedy of the human individual’s capacity for creation, destruction, and self-destruction (and the self-delusions attached thereto) in The Shakespeare Wars (2006), Explaining Hitler (1998), and How the End Begins: The Road To a Nuclear World War III (2011). These are, as the book publicists like to say, “real page-turners” — one wouldn’t think that any writer could make the current textual controversies over Shakespeare’s plays or the theological justifications (or non-justifications) for the existence of Hitler’s career as fascinating as detective stories, but there they are — fine entertainments in the best sense of the word, and demonstrating considerable insight into our own condition. (Rosenbaum also co-wrote, with Helen Whitney, the PBS Frontline documentary Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero.)

No doubt it helps that, like H.L. Mencken, Rosenbaum is an expert journalist and reporter who gets out of the house more often than not to conduct his own research; it also helps that Rosenbaum is a fine student of close reading of not only literature but also the times themselves, a product of his Yale University education (he spent a year in Yale’s graduate program for English literature, only to drop out after one course, a decision he describes in his 2012 essay “Should I Go to Grad School?”). Except for How the End Begins, these are great thonking big books, but the enthusiasm and meditation they inspire are infectious. Perhaps his career and style come closest to that of the late Christopher Hitchens — but Rosenbaum seems somewhat more charmingly self-critical, a doubter rather than a possessor of ultimate certainties.

If, as they should, theatremakers and others want Rosenbaum to start writing about theatre and drama, assisting in the effort to place them somewhere near the center of the cultural discourse again, well, they’ve got an uphill battle. Rosenbaum is already, as his enthusiasm for Shakespeare demonstrates, an ideal audience for good theatre and drama. But in “My Theater Problem — and Ours,” an essay he wrote in the 1990s for the New York Observer and reprinted in his collection The Secret Parts of Fortune, he describes his  dissatisfaction (if that’s the word) with contemporary theatre and democratically spreads the blame over theatre practitioners, critics, and audiences alike. He writes:

[In] one way or another, I always seem to find myself at the wrong performance. I always seem to be seeing plays that seem utterly unlike what everyone else claims to have seen. I’m forever going to things that have been raved over by critics, chattered about by the chattering classes, awarded prizes and grants, and finding myself thinking — in those moments when I can keep myself awake from the industrial-strength tedium they induce — that this is the most clichéd, empty, contrived piece of ranting I have ever seen. Afterward, I’d find myself wondering, Is it possible I went to the wrong theater; this second-rate, self-satisfied, soporific contrivance can’t be the same stuff that people are taking seriously, can it? …

But it seems to me that the disparity between what’s lauded as greatness in the theater today and the reality of the product is far greater than in any other art form. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t like or haven’t seen good theater. I’ll see any Shakespeare; you learn something even from bad performances. I was blown away by the film of Vanya on 42nd Street; in fact, I think it proves my point. The breathtaking level of intelligence in the acting and staging was so far above almost anything I’ve seen on Broadway or Off-Broadway in memory. I defy you to rent the movie of Vanya and tell me anything that comes close to it on the boards today.

Why is this? One explanation was suggested by Peter Brook, a director I’ve always admired … . In a devastating aside in Looking for Richard, Mr. Brook pointed out that contemporary theater has never solved the technical (and artistic) problem of theatrical ranting: the meretriciousness that infects the attempt to communicate inner life with words and gestures that must resound to distant balconies. It’s particularly a problem for the misconceived naturalism of most “good drama” on Broadway and Off. But I think the larger problem might have to do less with the writing and the acting and the ranting than with the complacency of the audience. With the fact that theatergoing today seems to have less to do with the rituals on stage than the rituals in the seats. With the self-validating function it performs in conferring Culture, like a medal of valor, on the audience: The pain and tedium they suffer through has won them the right to believe they are participating in an important cultural ritual. And it’s rarely felt as pain. It’s felt as resounding waves of self-approbation, a folk mass of self-satisfaction. Who was it that said that religion is really about the sanctification of wealth? New York theater, the secular religion of the city, is really about the sanctification of self. At the close of most performances, I’m convinced the audience is not applauding the play they’ve seen or the actors, but applauding themselves just for being there.

Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett.

According to John Felstiner, Theodor Adorno considered Paul Celan “the only authentic postwar writer to stand with Samuel Beckett.” [1] (Adorno, Beckett, Celan: there’s the beginning of an alphabestiary to contend with.) Along with Adorno’s high regard, Beckett and Celan also shared Paris as their home for most of their adult lives, but surprisingly their paths never crossed. In the 2004 essay “Paul Celan Meets Samuel Beckett,” Felstiner describes the writers’ shared concerns, which become even more obvious as the years go by:

Living alone in March 1970 (with never-healing wounds) on Avenue Émile Zola just across from Pont Mirabeau, apart from his wife Gisèle and son Eric, this “true-stammered mouth,” survivor of “the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech,” has recently returned from a fortnight in Israel, his first visit, elated and drawn to move there but fearful of yet again losing his German mother tongue, his beloved mother’s tongue seized as if overnight by her murderers. Franz Wurm, a poet-friend in Paris, invites him one afternoon to come along and meet Beckett, but Celan says No — to go unannounced at the last minute isn’t right. That evening, given greetings from Beckett, he says: That’s probably the only man here I could have had an understanding with.

But hadn’t there already been an understanding, hadn’t they been meeting all along, those years in Paris — the older man a more-or-less voluntary Irish exile to France and French, the younger man, orphaned, homelandless, reaching Paris but cleaving to German: Beckett chipping away at silence with “this dust of words,” Celan with his “gasping words,” with the “prayer-sharp knives / of my / silence”? During the 1953 opening run of En attendant Godot, where Didi and Gogo go on “blathering about nothing in particular,” Celan composed “The Vintagers,” in which “bent toward blindness and lamed,” a “latemouth” thirsts for wine, a “crookstick speaks into / the silence of answers.” …

April 16 [1970]: He tells his 14-year-old son Eric he can’t after all take him the next day, as planned, to a performance of Godot. Two tickets are later found in his wallet.

May 1 [1970]: Seven miles downstream a fisherman comes on Celan’s body caught in a filter of the river. Beckett’s longtime German translator, Elmar Tophoven, succeeds Celan as Reader in German at the École Normale Supérieure.

Celan me dépasse, Samuel Beckett will later confide to a friend, “Celan leaves me behind.” But can that be so? Beckett, whom everywhere you go in our mind you meet on his way back? Beckett’s trilogy opens with a mother’s death and ends with The Unnamable‘s last words: “in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Interestingly there appears to be no mention of Paul Celan in James Knowlson’s magisterial biography of Beckett; his name does not appear in the index. For me, as I write and think about another kind of theatre minima, Beckett and Celan remain enduring exemplars for the writer, and the writing, of their and my own time.

The full text of Felstiner’s essay can be found here.

1. John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995, p. 107.

Marilyn Nonken and Sarah Rothenberg.

UPDATE: For more on the program, see Ronni Reich’s interview with the performers published today at nj.com.

This Saturday at 8.00pm, Marilyn Nonken and Sarah Rothenberg will perform a two-piano version of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913) and Olivier Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen (1946) in a program called The Grand Gesture at Montclair’s Peak Performances series. Tickets and information are now available for this concert here. According to the Web page for the event:

In 1913, the audience at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées erupted in one of the most infamous riots of the 20th century. The cause? A revolution in music, namely the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s primal Le sacre du printemps, or, The Rite of Spring.

For the piece’s centennial, virtuosi pianists Sarah Rothenberg and Marilyn Nonken have created The Grand Gesture, a stark deconstruction of Stravinsky’s masterpiece. Add to the mix Olivier Messiaen’s equally uproarious Visions de l’Amen (1946) and you have an evening of experimental classics defying convention.

Says the publicity, “Hailed by The New Yorker as ‘two of the finest of new music pianists,’ Sarah Rothenberg and Marilyn Nonken have been praised by The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal and more. As soloists and a duo they have performed throughout the world with some of the world’s leading ensembles and at prominent venues ranging from Lincoln Center, The Gilmore Festival, Miller Theater, (Le) Poisson Rouge, IRCAM and more.” All tickets are $15.00 See you on the bus.

Photo by Paul Cava.

Paul Cava’s recent photographs demonstrate the tension between the vulnerable flesh and the solid object, between the body’s freedom and its restraint and encasement in hard pose. The tentative movements through the sequence set above (a sequence for which the photographer is not responsible, except to provide the discrete moments for ordering) are both away from and toward immobilization, a dream, perhaps, of immortality; as the viewer’s self measures the distances between flesh and containment, the viewer imagines that he or she drawn into a similar tension (as the photographer is mirrored in his subject), to the point that self tenderly enters another’s body with trembling compassion, expectancy, and fear. The spectrum of grays is elemental to the project: stripping both human and inorganic figures of color (the eradication of the differences between the flesh and the stone) they become interchangable. Surrounded by darkness, as flesh’s matter and spirit enter the condition of stone they pray for permanence and entrapment in their own ecstatic sensuality. The hang of her garment exhibits a silky vulnerability even though cast in stone. The photographs themselves become a theatre minima: human individuality, body, negative space, and restraint become expressions of and arenas for the conflict of the erotic self, of subject and (self-)object.

These are passions and compassions, resignations and attractions, earned only over unforgiving time. For narrative, character, monologue (who needs the drama and the theatre?): what one will.

All photos courtesy the photographer, Paul Cava.