Raves&Rants

The New "New McCarthyism"

2009-09-21T13:27:00.000-07:00

I have been out of commission on this blog for way too long. Feeling guilty about it, I've started at least three, and maybe five pieces. Unfortunately, they are still in the works, but I will try to edit and get them posted before this month is over and Judy and I go to Mexico for the first time. (Yay!)

But an interesting article in Huffington Post entitled "The Return of McCarthyism" has finally inspired me to pen a new blog post. The article and its accompanying video clip focus on neo-McCarthyite attacks on Obama as a "communist." This parallels a somewhat crazier--and definitely creepier--trend in recent right-wing attacks blurring the line between "liberal," "fascist," "socialist," "communist," and "nazi."

For the past several years, I've noticed that the loud mouths on the Right (you know who they are) have been running a stealth disinformation campaign to confuse the undereducated American public about the nature of Hitler, fascism and the Nazi Party, in order to inoculate themselves against the charge they they themselves are clearly manifesting tendencies in that direction. I first noticed this at a cast party about three years ago, when I casually opined that just as communism was the extreme of the political Left, so fascism--and by extension, Hitler and the Nazis--represented the extreme of the political Right. Someone at the party immediately became terribly offended by this (to me) self-evident statement of historic fact, and insisted for the rest of the evening that I had personally insulted her by daring to associate the "the Right" with Hitler.

At first I couldn't understand this. I hastened to assure her that I wasn't saying all "conservatives" were fascists, any more than all "liberals" are commie pinkos. But she was adamant that I was insulting the entire "right" of the political spectrum by daring to say that Hitler was a representative of "the Right" --albeit in its extremist form--rather than "the Left."

It gradually dawned on me that this person had been the victim of a conscious disinformation campaign designed to confuse the public about the nature of "the Right" and "the Left." The Right Wing blowhards in this country have done this in two ways: first, by repeatedly citing the use of the word "socialist" in the name of the Nazi party; and second, by simply repeating the Big Lie over and over again ad nauseum that all "socialists" are "Nazis." As absurd as it seems, they have established in the minds of some that Hitler was a left-wing socialist, or even a "liberal."(If you don't believe me, see here, here, here, here, and here.)

Of course, this claim is totally, utterly false -- indeed the truth is the very opposite. Hitler purposely used "socialist" in the Nazi Party name to confuse the German populace. In the 1930's, the idea of socialism was very popular throughout Europe in general and in German in particular. In fact, the Nazis were the biggest opponents of the German Socialist Party at the time. Fascism is the very opposite of socialism. Under pure socialism, ownership of industry and the means of production is placed in the State as the representative of the People. In contrast, under fascism control of the State is given to the largest corporate monopolies, which rule the country as an oligarchy led by an all-powerful Leader. Fascism was defined by its inventor -- Mussolini -- as a "corporate state": authoritarian, totalitarian, militaristic government by and for the corporations. Fascism is thus capitalist to its core -- in fact, it is extreme capitalism. Extreme socialism, i.e. communism, is similar to fascism in the fact both are totalitarian. Otherwise, the goals of fascism and communism are basically the opposite (viz., rule by the elite and wealthy versus rule by the proletariat masses). And this similarity is confined to communism. Democratic socialism, as practiced throughout the world today, can hardly be called totalitarian, much less fascist.

Bottom line: the American Right has been purposely confusing the public about the difference between far Right and far Left or order to distract from the fact they themselves present the clearest threat of real fascism -- authoritarian, super-nationalistic, racist, corporatist dictatorship.

A New Era

2009-01-13T17:36:00.000-08:00

January 20, 2009, the day Barack Hussein Obama is inaugurated the 44th President of the United States, will mark the end of an era in our history--and the beginning of a new one.

Whatever else may happen that day, at least one thing is for sure. The country will be rid of George W. Bush. Thanks to the 22nd Amendment--an excrescence to the Constitution added by (what else!) Republicans in 1951 in retribution for FDR's election to four terms--Dubya couldn't run for reelection even if he wanted to. So that alone marks the day for celebration.

I actually think term limits are a bad idea, as demonstrated by FDR himself. Thank God he could be reelected in the middle of World War II! And if someone in office is really awful, like the current Occupant, the chances are good he/she wouldn't be reelected to a third term if he/she tried.

Anyway, it's moot; after twelve o'clock noon on Tuesday, January 20, 2009, we won't have George W. Bush to worry about any more. At that historic moment, we will usher in the first African-American President of the United States, an uncommonly brilliant and exciting individual who brings a unique--indeed, unprecedented--set of skills and experiences to the office. Based on his presidential campaign, and his own personal history as revealed in the several books he has written, all signs point to a progressive Presidency that will usher in significant change for the country.

So here's to the future, and the inauguration of Barack Obama. Judy and I will be there, in Washington D.C. on January 20, 2009, to witness history being made.

And just incidentally, to verify with our own eyes that George W. Bush is no longer soiling the Oval Office with the special kind of "stain" he brought to the office--a stain far more insidious and dangerous to the very fabric of our constitutional democracy than any of the more inconsequential stains left in the Oval Office by his predecessor.

Cycles of American Political History

2008-11-16T02:39:00.000-08:00

As readers of this blog know, I have long felt that Barack Obama represented the best candidate for the Democrats to nominate because he offered the best chance for securing a realignment of the American electorate in an progressive direction. Actually, it wouldn't have mattered who the Democrats nominated out of the sterling lineup of potential candidates running this cycle. The election of any one of them--certainly including Hillary Clinton, not to mention John Edwards, Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd or Dennis Kucinich--would have brought about the same result. I just felt that the election of a progressive African-American would have been so historic that the realignment would have been undeniable. And, sure enough, now that Obama has in fact been elected, the word "realignment" is popping up in the press and in commentaries everywhere. (Among many such cites, see here, here, here, here, and even here.)

36 years seems to be a special, almost magical number in political cycles. Counting forward from the beginning of the Republic in spans of 36 years -- give or take 2 to 4 years -- one finds at the end of each such span the occurrence of a presidential election marking a major watershed transitional moment in American politics. Thus, counting forward from the first President, we proceed from Washington (1789) to Andrew Jackson (1828) to Lincoln (1860) to McKinley (1896) to FDR (1932) to Nixon (1968).

The presidential election of 1968 represented the last great realignment in American politics. It marked the boundary between the great liberal era ushered in by Franklin Roosevelt--and continued under Truman, Kennedy and Johnson--and the deeply conservative era we have all been living through ever since. (Note that Eisenhower, the sole Republican to serve as President during the period of liberal ascendancy, actually governed as a centrist, and did nothing to upset the liberal hegemony with regard to social policy. Indeed, in many ways Eisenhower furthered liberal causes, particularly with regard to racial desegregation, judicial appointments, and investment in public infrastructure. But that's another story.) As with most realignments, the coming change could be seen before it actually took effect. Thus, in 1964, the apparent Republican debacle of Barry Goldwater's massive loss to Lyndon B. Johnson actually marked Republicans' pioneering use of the new "Southern Strategy," which had employed cultural conservatism and veiled appeals to racism to peel the Southern states away from the Democratic Party's historic grip. Following up on Goldwater's lead, in 1968 Richard Nixon piggy-backed on the third-party candidacy of George Wallace to peel the old Confederacy away from the Democrats, narrowly defeat Hubert Humphrey, and effecting the first major political realignment since F.D.R.

The Republicans subsequently perfected their use of the Southern Strategy in 1972 and later under Reagan in 1980 and 1984, cementing their grip on the South and identifying their party more and more with Southern values, world views, and cultural prejudices. It is no accident that the dominant accent heard in the corridors of power for the past 40 years has been Southern--whether the accent hails from Texas, Arkansas or Georgia. Even Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were part of this conservative ascendancy. Both were elected under somewhat unusual circumstances: Carter after Nixon resigned in disgrace and was pardoned by his successor, and Clinton with the help of third-party candidate Ross Perot after conservatives had turned on George H.W. Bush for breaking his "pledge" not to raise taxes. Although they were both Democrats and nominally liberal, they were forced to trim their ideological sails to the dominant conservative political philosophy of their times, and had trouble governing in that environment. Moreover, it was Bill Clinton who famously said "The era of big government is over," after right-wing conservatives under the leadership of Newt Gingrich took over Congress.

Counting 36 years past the watershed year of 1968 brings us to 2004 as the next predicted cyclical realignment. The election results of both 2000 and 2004 were aberrations. At the very least, both of these elections were extraordinarily close. It has been argued (and this writer firmly believes) that they were effectively stolen by electoral manipulation and chicanery in the swing states of Florida and Ohio, respectively. (Two words: Karl Rove.) In fact, the country was getting ready for a new realignment.

Historically speaking, the elections of 2000 and 2004 were closely comparable to the election of 1824, in which John Quincy Adams lost both the popular and the electoral vote to Andrew Jackson, but nevertheless became president through backroom political deals in the House of Representatives with another failed candidate, Henry Clay. Adams' victory was entirely Pyrrhic; the election actually signaled the onset of a massive political realignment. This became obvious when Jackson roared back to defeat Adams decisively in 1828, crushing him in both the electoral college and the popular vote.

The situation for the past eight years of George W. Bush's Presidency is thus much like that which obtained during the administration of John Quincy Adams, with the significant difference that the unexpected occurrence of a massive terrorist attack on American soil on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent onset of Bush's trumped-up war on Iraq artificially extended Republican dominance for a full six years. Karl Rove's dream of instituting a "permanent Republican majority"--in actuality, a right-wing conservative majority--has ultimately proved illusory. (See here and here.) The latest progressive realignment -- which had actually already been predicted by some commentators and observers -- was deferred artificially, as it were, by the irregularities of the electoral situations in 2000 and 2004.

Harbingers of the new realignment actually became evident in the bi-election of 2006. By that point, general dissatisfaction with the Iraq War and widespread economic dislocations suffered by the struggling middle class had generated an unmistakable popular demand for a truly progressive change in direction. The Democrats "whupped" the Republicans out of Congress, making Nancy Pelosi the first woman Speaker of the House, and taking over the Senate as well.

With the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the new progressive realignment has come to full fruition. This is seen most clearly in the change in the electoral map. The Republican Party, which once secured its 40-year dominance by snatching the "solid South" from the grip of the Democratic Party in the series of elections between 1964 and 1972, has now actually become the Party of the South, confined to the very region upon which it once relied as the base for its national electoral coalition. In the height of irony, the party of Lincoln--the Grand Old Party which fought the traitor secessionists of the Confederacy, emancipated the slaves, saved the Union and amended the constitution to give equal rights to all Americans--has itself become the party of the Confederacy. Lincoln would not recognize as his own the political party which continues to claim him as its founder. In a very real sense, it is the Democratic Party of Barack Obama which has become the Party of Lincoln.

In this respect, it is interesting to compare the electoral map of the realignment election of 1896 (McKinley versus Bryan) with the recent election. The party divide is almost precisely the opposite of that which exists today. Thus, McKinley's dominant Republican Party was based in the Northeast and Northern Midwestern States, exactly like today's Democratic Party; while Bryan's Democrats were based in the old Confederacy of the South plus the states of the Great Plains. Like Barack Obama, McKinley was able to win because he also took California and Oregon. The South was far less populous in 1896 than it is today, and had correspondingly fewer electoral votes. However, if the 1896 electoral map were duplicated today, removing the modern states of Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska and Hawaii from the map--none of which existed as states in 1896--McKinley would still win.)

In short, the Democratic Party has become the new dominant political party in America. It has inherited the base which the Grand Old Party of Lincoln created, and which McKinley's election in 1896 secured and made the governing national political party up until the Great Depression. After 1896, the Republicans became the big tent party, capacious enough to embrace conservatives like McKinley, Coolidge, Harding and Hoover, as well as great Republican progressives like Teddy Roosevelt and Robert La Follette. On the other hand, after McKinley defeated the populist Bryan, the Democrats were relegated to regional status, becoming little more than the party of the old Confederacy, nursing its grievances against the dominant north. It took the advent of the Great Depression and the rise of working class unions for the Democratic Party to reassert itself under FDR, beginning with the next great realignment election of 1932.

Today, the defeated Republican Party appears to be falling into the kind of disunity and disarray that appears on the losing sides of major political realignments. Republican office holders are searching for scapegoats to explain their party's recent loss. The various disparate factions of the Party--libertarians, social conservatives, Christianist fundamentalists, neoconservative authoritarians and free market fanatics--are busily forming a circular firing squad of blame. (See here, here, here, here and here.) Meanwhile, demographic trends in the country point inexorably toward continuing Democratic dominance for the foreseeable future. (See here, here and here.) It appears that the long predicted emerging Democratic majority has in fact finally emerged.

The Stupid Peoples' Party

2008-10-30T03:21:00.000-07:00

The other night, during a break at an evening rehearsal of the choral group I sing with, a friend told me he'd decided that there were three kinds of Republicans: (1) the stupid, (2) the ignorant, and (3) the evil. After some discussion, he agreed with me that "evil" was too loaded and absolutist a term, and we substituted "selfish." He also agreed that "ignorant" was a bit too close to "stupid," so we settled on "uninformed." In the end, we settled on defining the Republican electorate as a triumvirate of the stupid, the uninformed, and the selfish.

Now, as a (retired) lawyer, I can really get into obsessing over fine verbal distinctions. Thus, I could happily argue the subtle differences between "uninformed," "misinformed," and "incurious" for hours. I actually prefer the term "misinformed," because it removes some ethical taint from this large category of Republicans--which happens to include some of my best friends and family members. The term "misinformed" conveys the truth that the errors of the Republican electorate are not actually entirely their fault, but rather are largely the result of a deliberate misinformation campaign. It also gives hope that this large group may ultimately be persuadable. After all, somebody's going to have to do the tough work of saving the two-party system in this country by converting today's authoritarian "Republican Party" back to the true spirit of its founders. As for the term "selfish," although it is preferable to the absolutist label of "evil," it nevertheless doesn't quite convey the combination of moral depravity and banality that my friend and I were trying to describe. I'm currently debating between and "greedy" and "venal." (For related discussion of individuals and groups fitting these various description, see here and here.)

But I have no problem with the first term in this list--"stupid." Whatever else they may be called, a large percentage of Republicans can only be described as just plain dumb. So (with a hat tip to Paul Krugman) I have decided that--at least in its current manifestation--the Republican Party should be known as "the Stupid People's Party."

It was John Stuart Mill who said: "Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative." Mill's dictum rings true for today's Republican Party. For every intelligent, honest, honorable Republican (Senators Richard Lugar, Chuck Hagel, and Olympia Snowe spring to mind) there are hundreds of Republicans who appear to have abandoned critical thinking as an annoying hindrance to maintaining blind faith in a deeply reactionary, top-down authoritarian ideology. Rather than applying critical analysis in an effort to solve the catastrophic problems facing this country, Republicans consistently exhibit a knee-jerk preference--sometimes approaching almost theological dimensions--for imposing a simplistic, black-and-white philosophical template on every issue, invariably resulting in rigid adherence to an ideologically predetermined result in defiance of facts, evidence, history, or reality. (For a classic discussion of this phenomenon in action, see here.)

Here's another great Mill quotation: "Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think." (Mill, On Liberty, Ch. 2) In other words, it is better to exercise one's critical intelligence and reasoning even if it leads to an erroneous conclusion, than to accidentally avoid making a mistake while blindly trusting to one's "gut instinct" in defiance of critical thinking and analysis.

Mill's paradoxical dictum is based on a profound insight. In a recent article in Salon, neurologist Robert Burton described how, with the decline in critical thinking, the average American voter is becoming increasingly unable to make informed decisions about which candidate or political party to support. The problem is that a person's awareness of his or her own competence (or lack thereof) appears to vary inversely with that person's actual intellectual ability. In other words, the more intellectually unskilled a person is, the more unaware of it he or she will be. As a corollary, a person who has difficulty recognizing his own incompetence will often have an inflated self-assessment of his own abilities. Thus, incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill; fail to recognize genuine skill in others; and fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy. As a result, the least intellectually competent people tend to overestimate their own cognitive abilities, and simultaneously believe they are smarter than individuals who are demonstrably of far superior intellect and ability. Conversely, even though they can more accurately assess their own abilities, intelligent individuals tend to overestimate the performance of others, and believe that everyone else "gets it" just as they do. As Burton notes, this phenomenon "should serve as the epitaph for the Bush administration: 'People who lack the knowledge or wisdom to perform well are often unaware of this fact. That is, the same incompetence that leads them to make wrong choices also deprives them of the savvy necessary to recognize competence, be it their own or anyone else's.' " (Burton, "My Candidate, Myself," Salon.com Sept.22, 2008.)

As with the political leaders, so with the voters who elected them to office. An electorate of incompetent voters will tend to favor incompetent politicians. Such voters will overestimate their own ability to make reasoned choices, fail to recognize genuinely able politicians when placed before them, and ultimately fail to recognize the extremity of their inability to distinguish between competent and incompetent politicians. The political history of the past 30 years is studded with real-world examples of this phenomenon in practice. Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry were all clearly more intellectually competent than the men who defeated them in their respective presidential contests. Yet the sliver of the American electorate that actually determines elections in this country decided differently. Time and again, the lesser candidates were adjudged by swing voters to be "more Presidential" than the superior ones. What does this say about the critical intelligence and competence of those swing voters? The catastrophic results are clearly evident today, as the second Bush Administration stumbles to its ignominious end.

For 40 years, the standard Republican political strategy has been a toxic brew of subtle racism and blatant appeals to class and cultural resentment: the so-called "wedge issues." This has manifested as support for so-called "states rights," vicious attacks on affirmative action, "welfare queens," expanded civil rights, and "voter fraud," and demonization of liberals as weak-kneed pacifists who will "raise your taxes," take away your guns, turn your children into homosexuals, abort your babies, and somehow do away with your (fundamentalist Christian) religion. As such, Republicans have successfully defined liberals--and by extension, the "Democrat Party"--as a failed political philosophy wedded to issues unpopular with a majority of Americans and out of touch with mainstream American values and interests. It goes without saying that this simplistic approach to all issues has channeled political discourse away from reasoned analysis of the actual problems facing the country, and toward simplistic labeling and name-calling based on appeals to fear and greed. In short, all the characteristics that have made the Republican Party a haven for the stupid, the ignorant or misinformed, the venal and the greedy.

The problem for Republicans is that reality is catching up with the fantasy world they have created for themselves, and in which they have forced the rest of the country to live for the past eight years. In the face of the massive catastrophes caused by the Bush Administration's monumental incompetence, corruption and arrogance, the majority of people in the center--the growing segment of the population calling itself "independent"--is catching on to the fact that the entire Republican ideological construct is both a scam and a sham. The Republican "brand" is rapidly collapsing under the weight of its own failures, and losing its selling power. As the bubble bursts, the Republican bubble-heads who have been living inside it have been thrust into the much harsher conditions of the "reality based community." As a result, the more educated and intellectually honest of them have been deserting the Republican Party in droves. This trend--particularly visible among members of the professional classes--has been noted by conservative commentators like David Brooks (here) and David Frum (here).

Lately, with the polls appearing to show the Republican Party in increasingly dire straits, the news has been full of reports of deep divisions within Republican Party ranks, indeed within the entire so-called Conservative Movement itself. Libertarians, Neoconservatives, Christian fundamentalists, evangelicals, social conservatives, authoritarian corporatists, old-line free-market types, and main-street business people are all pointing fingers at each other in a veritable circular firing squad of blame. Let us hope that the fast-approaching election will mark the final collapse of the old Stupid People's Party. Can we then hope for the return of the original "Grand Old Party"--the Party of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Earl Warren, and the Rockefellers? Only time--and the election returns--will tell. But it may be that the ghosts of those worthies have long since deserted their old haunts, and become ethereal Democrats.

Political Realignment

2008-10-22T02:11:00.000-07:00

Today (October 21) the Washington Post/ABC poll reported that "first-time voters" favor Barack Obama over John McCain by a margin of 73 to 26 percent. This is an astounding margin of 47 percent in Obama's favor. By way of comparison, in 2004, first-time voters favored Kerry over Bush by 53 to 46 percent, or a margin in Kerry's favor of only 7 percent. Similarly, the poll shows that Obama is up 12 points over John McCain among white voters under 30, a complete reversal from 2004 when Kerry lost these voters by 10 points. These poll numbers are of tremendous significance. They mark a generational paradigm shift. In my opinion, they presage a major political realignment of the sort seen this country approximately every 30 to 40 years.

The last political realignment in this country occurred between the elections of 1968 and 1972, in which Richard Nixon used the now infamous "Southern Strategy" to steal conservative southern votes from the Democrats and cement a new working center-right political majority for the Republican Party. We have been living in a conservative political world in this country ever since, broken only by the two Democratic administrations of Carter (an accidental product of the Watergate scandal) and Clinton (a conservative Democrat elected on a plurality vote with the third-party assistance of Ross Perot).

The recent polls indicate that this conservative hegemony may well be coming to an end. Of course, it is still too early to break out the champagne. There are two weeks left until the election--a lifetime in politics. Although recent polls show Obama considerably ahead nationwide and in the battleground states, McCain may yet succeed in his effort to eke out a Rovian 50.1 percent victory through his campaign of fear and loathing about "socialism" and Obama's "otherness," along with Republican operatives' incipient efforts at voter intimidation and suppression.

But win or lose, it is not too late to make one prediction. We are witnessing a major sea change in the American electorate. With numbers like those reported in today's Washington Post, the Republicans have lost the next generation of voters--big time. Voters under 30--the leaders of the future--are turning decisively away from the Republican hegemony that has dominated American political culture since Nixon, and even more from the rigid right-wing ideology that has controlled the Republican Party since Reagan. The "culture war" issues that have so exercised the electorate since the 1960's--abortion, guns, gays, "family values," flag burning, prayer in schools, etc.--no longer carry much weight with the rising generation. Liberal and progressive ideas once dismissed automatically out of hand are being embraced by young people who have little use for the tired old doctrines that for so long have been used by Republicans to beat Democrats into submission and defeat them time and time again. The toxic tactics used by Republicans to win elections ever since Richard Nixon simply aren't working any more.

As a result, we are on the cusp of historic change. I believe the mid-term election of 2006 marked the beginning of a political realignment like the historic realignments that occurred in earlier transformational elections, like those of 1932, 1968 and 1980. That realignment will burst fully into flower with this transformational presidential election.

I'll go out on a limb. I predict this election will be seen historically as at least as significant a political earthquake as the election of 1932, which ushered in a generation of liberal/progressive dominance with the defeat of the old-guard Hoover/Coolidge Republicans and the accession of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Indeed, we may be witnessing an even more historically significant moment. Eight years of George W. Bush's arrogance, incompetence, hubris and unprecedentedly authoritarian overreaching has left this nation in perilous straits on every front, and at the same time more deeply divided than at any time since the Civil War. The election of 2008 may well be the most important election since those of 1860 and 1864. Not since Lincoln became President has the fate of our nation hung so perilously in the balance of a divisive electoral contest.

Shock and Awe

2008-09-13T13:02:00.000-07:00

I've seen some bloggers and/or commentators refer to the McCain campaign's rollout of its choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as having the effect of "shock and awe" on the Obama campaign and Democrats in general. That's a pretty good description.

In his column for September 12, 2008, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert states: "While watching the Sarah Palin interview with Charlie Gibson Thursday night, and the coverage of the Palin phenomenon in general, I’ve gotten the scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually prevail. How is it that this woman could have been selected to be the vice presidential candidate on a major party ticket? How is it that so much of the mainstream media has dropped all pretense of seriousness to hop aboard the bandwagon and go along for the giddy ride? For those who haven't noticed, we’re electing a president and vice president, not selecting a winner on 'American Idol.'" Indeed.

When the Palin nomination was first announced, my reaction was identical to that of my wife and all my friends--McCain just threw away any chance of winning that he might have had. How could the American public possibly accept the nomination of an obviously unqualified, inexperienced outsider, whom no one has ever heard of, and who came from a sparsely populated state cut off and far away from the rest of the union? Particularly when up to that point McCain had based his entire campaign on the alleged superiority of his "experience" to Obama's, and the youthful inexperience of the latter. Surely, McCain was depriving himself of his central argument, right?

What I and my friends didn't take account of at that moment were two undeniable facts. First, Palin was not totally unknown. She was in fact quite well known to the hard right-wing and its sycophants--particularly the right-wing commentariat most prominently represented by Rush Limbaugh, who had himself been pushing for McCain to choose Palin for quite some time.

Second, the relatively small sliver of the electorate located almost precisely in the middle of the political spectrum--which will decide the fate of the nation in any close election--is poorly informed, poorly educated, and frankly not very bright.

How else can one explain the fact that these people are still been making up their minds about how to vote at this late stage of the presidential campaign? I mean, really, how long has this thing been going on already? And these people are only NOW making up their minds? That in itself proves that they haven't been paying any attention to what has undeniably been one of the most exciting and transformational political campaigns in modern American history. And if they haven't been paying attention to that, it's a good bet they haven't been paying any attention at all to what the Bush Administration has been doing to the country for the past eight years. Unlike the presidential campaign, the machinations of the Bush Administration have not been advertised and trumpeted to the public at large; to the contrary, they have been blanketed in deep secrecy and masked by constant propaganda unlike anything this country has ever seen.

From these observations, it is but a small deductive step to conclude that the coming election will be decided by the lest informed, least educated, and least involved portion of the electorate, which also happens to be that segment of the voting public most lacking in the capacity for critical thinking. These people--in whose hands all of our fates rests--have apparently only just now "tuned in" to the presidential election. And what's the first thing to come onto the "television screens" of their awareness? None other than the cute, smiling, incredibly perky, amazingly spunky hockey-mom face of former Miss Alaska-runnerup Sarah Palin.

In that context, pace Bob Herbert, the next election really is becoming an episode of American Idol. And in such a contest, Sarah Palin actually stands a better than even chance of sweeping the field. God help us all.

Snide

2008-09-03T23:52:00.000-07:00

I just forced myself to watch the second night of the truncated Republican National Convention, mainly so I could see the mysterious Sarah Palin speak. Ms. Palin--I guess that, in order to avoid the charge of sexism, I really should refer to her by her title as Governor Palin--has been thrust upon us so suddenly and unexpectedly by the Republican spin machine, and subsequently so hidden away to avoid having to answer all those pesky questions from the press about who she is, that at this point she has become something of a complete mystery. She has been plucked from almost complete obscurity to become the most controversial and talked-about candidate for high office in recent memory. Tonight was her night on the national--and international--stage. I had to see her perform.

What I saw was not encouraging. Gov. Palin described herself as a pit bull with lipstick. I think that's a pretty accurate description. Maybe George W. Bush in stiletto heels would be more accurate. The entire tone of her presentation could most accurately be summed up by the word "snide." That word is defined by the online dictionary I use as "derogatory in a nasty and insinuating manner." Other descriptions of her speech (and the others I forced myself to sit through tonight) would be "cynical," "deceptive," "sarcastic," and "dishonest."

Gov. Palin actually reminds me of a horrid girlfriend I had in my late 20's who stole some of my family heirlooms (two violins that had belonged to my grandfather). She managed to get away with it through skillfully evasive fast talking and implied threats of a lawsuit for slander. She was very sexy, very smart, and very sneaky. I couldn't pin anything on her, because she claimed I had "given" them to her when I had actually committed them to her safekeeping upon her promise to have them repaired. When I asked for them back, she claimed either that they had been lost, or that she believed I had intended to give them to her. In fact, she had sold them. This charmer was the spitting image of Gov. Palin in looks, voice type, manner, and even political views. (Yes, I confess to having had a torrid affair with a Republican. In my defense, it only lasted 3 months. Anyway, it served me right. Live and learn.) From what I've heard about Gov. Palin's style of governing Alaska, she might as well be the same person as my former girlfriend.

And in order even to get to Gov. Palin's snide little speech, I had to sit through Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and Rudy Giuliani, listening to them vie with each other on who could out-pander to the most extremist right-wing authoritarian wing of what in the past 8 years had already become an extremely right-wing authoritarian political party. I mean, what is it with Mitt Romney attacking the last 8 years of George W. Bush as having been too "liberal"?? And attacking Democrats as the Party of "Big Brother," as if it wasn't his own Republican Party which has brought this country warrantless domestic wiretapping, extradition, torture, suspension of the Great Writ of Habeas Corpus, politicization of the Justice Department, and grotesquely expanded presidential prerogative? As I watched the roaring approval given by the overwhelmingly white male Republican delegates to these hyperventilated appeals to the extreme right, it occurred to me that Gov. Palin has given the Republican Party just what it most needs in this election: a smiling, unthreatening, "small town," superficially attractive "happy face" to mask its frighteningly hard-edged authoritarianism.

The Republican Party has painted itself into the most extreme right-wing corner it has ever occupied in our history. If, as Romney, Huckabee and Giuliani seemed to claim, the last 8 years have been too "liberal," and the Supreme Court as presently constituted has been too lenient on civil liberties, I shudder to think of the fate of our country if these thugs get into office. In order to prevent that disaster from occurring, those of us who still cherish democracy and, yes, true republicanism, must fight for the election of Barack Obama and Joe Biden as President and Vice-President, and contribute as much as we can in time, toil and treasure to their campaign. The fate of our country demands nothing less.

Ashland in July (part four)

2008-08-11T00:06:00.000-07:00

A View from the Bridge

On our second day in Ashland (July 30), we saw Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner in the afternoon (at the New Theatre) and The Comedy of Errors in the evening on the Elizabethan Stage. This was unfortunate. Not only were these the two worst productions (in my opinion) of the entire season, but it also happened to be my birthday! It was very nice, therefore, that both the productions we saw on the next day were so good -- in fact, two of the very best of the entire season. I have already described that evening's play, Othello. The afternoon production was of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, a play with which I was not familiar. It's a wonderful piece, and the OSF has given it a fantastic production.

The quality of the production starts off with the director. This is the one play directed this season by former OSF Artistic Director Libby Appel. She is a superb director, and very dependable. Everything I've seen by her has been excellent, and this particular production was no exception.

A View from the Bridge was written in 1955, almost exactly in the middle of both the last century and Arthur Miller's career as one of America's most distinguished playwrights. Like all good plays, including Miller's, it tells a story at once localized and universal, time-specific and timeless. Eddie Carbone (Armando Duran) is a second-generation Italian-American longshoreman living in the crowded Italian dockside section of Brooklyn, New York, in a cramped apartment with his wife Beatrice (Vilma Silva) and her niece Catherine (Stephanie Beatriz). Beatrice is pressuring Eddie to do two things he doesn't want to do: first, give his consent to letting Catherine quit school and go to work as a secretary to a local plumbing company; and second, permit two of her cousins from the Old Country to stay in their apartment while they look for work and lay low to avoid the immigration authorities. Eddie reluctantly agrees to both of her desires, which lead ineluctably to the tragic outcome of the play. We gradually learn that Eddie is deeply attached to Catherine emotionally as something between a surrogate daughter and an unattainable mistress. The arrival on the scene of Beatrice's cousins Marco (David DeSantos) and Rodolpho (Juan Rivera LeBron) immediately complicates everything. Marco's old country machismo and pride come into violent conflict with Eddie's similar traits, while the blossoming romance between Rodolpho and Catherine drives Eddie to distraction with his misplaced jealousies and increasingly paranoid projections.

I don't want to spoil the plot any further for those who, like myself, may be unfamiliar with the play. So I'll leave off describing it by stating that it ends badly for almost all concerned. Suffice it to say that the story unfolds in a seemingly timeless way, like some classic Greek tragedy transplanted to mid-century urban America.

This production was perfect in every respect. Armando Duran was so wonderful in the central role of Eddie Carbone that he will be permanently branded in my memory every time I think of this play. His performance was so real, so moving, so utterly genuine that he made me absolutely believe he was the second-generation Italian-American longshoreman he was portraying. Hopelessly tormented by his impossible feelings toward Catherine, and deeply torn between those feelings and his loyalty both to Beatrice and to his community, Eddie's very Sicilian sense of omerta clearly distinguishes him from another Miller tragic hero, the pathetic, end-of-the road Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman. Duran's total commitment to the role was obvious. He was Eddie for the duration of the play.

Duran was not the only standout performance in this play. This was one of those OSF productions in which every single role was distinguished by superb acting. Vilma Silva is apparently incapable of bad acting. Everything I've seen her in has been memorable--Emilia in Othello, and last season both Katherina in Taming of the Shrew and Vera in Distracted. (I can only regret not having had the opportunity in past seasons to see her as Viola in Twelfth Night and as Isabella in Measure for Measure, two great roles for which she would be perfect.) The amazing thing about Silva's Beatrice in this particular play was how completely she disappeared in the character. Silva perfectly conveyed Beatrice's emotional quandary, torn between the conflicting loves and loyalties in her life. At intermission, I was stunned to realize I had seen the same actress in an amazing performance as Katherina just last year. Needless to say, the two roles are utterly different in character.

Newcomer Stephanie Beatriz was similarly perfect in her characterization of the critical role of Catherine. Beatriz very persuasively portrayed the budding and dangerously naive adolescent caught, like the other principal characters, between conflicting loves and loyalties--in her case, between Eddie and Rodolpho. Neither did David DeSantos or Juan Rivera LeBron disappoint as the two immigrant cousins, Marco and Rodolpho; both were completely convincing.

Mention must be made of the reliable Tony DeBruno in the key role of Mr. Alfieri, the community lawyer. DeBruno is a workmanlike actor who never disappoints. Here, DeBruno made Alfieri--who fills the role in the play of narrator or Greek Chorus--a truly sympathetic character, the one person with whom the audience could most readily identify. He rounded out the outstanding cast in this truly astonishing production of the closest thing to a classic Greek tragedy I know of in American theater.

Postscript

There were two other plays that we saw on this visit: Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner by Luis Alfaro, and--for the second time--The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler by Jeff Whitty. You can see my rave review of the latter here, dating from our first visit to Ashland this season. Suffice it so say that both Judy and I loved this amazing play even more on second viewing than we did the first time. That's saying a lot, since we loved it so much the first time that we decided to plunk down the big bucks to see it on our second visit to Ashland, forcing us to drive home late at night and arrive back in S.F. close to midnight. It was worth every penny just to see Robin Nordli, Kimberly Scott, Kate Mulligan, Gregory Linington, Anthony Heald and Jonathan Haugen on stage running through this hilarious yet improbably serious masterpiece again. We picked up a whole lot of references and jokes we had missed the first time, which was great. If you are going to Ashland, do NOT miss this production.

As for Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner--well, there's really not much to say, regrettably. According to the program notes, playwright Alfaro is the recipient of numerous honors including awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Theatre Communications Group and PEN USA, two Kennedy Center awards for New American Plays, and a MacArthur "Genius Grant." Those awards could not have been for this particular play. Despite its generally good cast (the standout was the ever-wonderful G. Valmont Thomas as the central character's husband), it left us--and the rest of the audience at the performance we saw--scratching our heads and wondering just why OSF had decided to produce it.

What after all can you say about a play in which the food-addicted central character keeps putting on weight until she turns into a balloon and floats away, happily leaving her loving husband behind even though he has been totally supportive of her despite her weight "problem"? That's about all that happens, aside from a subplot about the lady's oversexed, narcissistic sister and her "I can't commit" LAPD boyfriend. Don't tell me this play is supposed to be a metaphor about the importance of love and caring for each other. There are many much, much better plays on that subject. We actually saw some of them this season. (Viz.: Our Town, Othello, The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, Midsummer's Night Dream, The Clay Cart, and A View from the Bridge.) They are all far better than this mess of a play. (If you don't believe me, check out this New York Times review. Different production, but definitely the same play we saw.)

Ashland in July (part three)

2008-08-10T14:48:00.000-07:00

Othello

In view of how disappointing the production of Comedy of Errors was this season, the good news is that the production of Othello was its opposite in every way. The play, and all of the actors in it, were as breathtakingly perfect as could be hoped.

If you're reading this blog, I will assume your familiarity with this particular play. Although not quite on the level with Hamlet and King Lear, Othello is still one of Shakespeare's most popular tragedies, not least because Verdi wrote his greatest opera using the story and Shakespeare's own text (in italiano, naturalmente.) (If you are unfamiliar with Shakespeare's play, I highly recommend seeing one of the several versions on film or video, either with Orson Welles, Kenneth Branagh & Laurence Fishburne, or Anthony Hopkins & Bob Hoskins.) After the performance we saw of the current OSF production, I've decided the play is now one of my favorites.

Any production of Othello stands or falls on the casting of the two central roles. In this respect, the OSF production is a winner. In the title role is Peter Macon, a newcomer to Ashland with a resume loaded with extensive experience in Shakespeare at numerous other companies. Macon's Moor was attractively honest, honorable, strong and virile from the start, with no obvious flaws where Iago's poison might work its way. In Macon's performance, Othello was too self confident and in love with Desdemona to fall victim to jealousy right away. One could see Macon weighing Iago's insinuations carefully, rejecting them out of hand at the outset, and refusing to give them credence until it appeared absolutely necessary to do so. This is no mean feat, in light of the relatively short span of time Shakespeare gives in the text before Othello does fall prey to jealousy under Iago's tutelage. I like this interpretation of Othello. The more it seems to the audience that Othello will be able to see through Iago's lies and retain his confidence in himself and in Desdemona, the more the inherent tension of the action and the ultimate tragic outcome of the play are heightened.

The other key role, of course, is Iago. The first half of the play really belongs to Iago; in many ways, he is the principal character until the moment that Othello succumbs to jealousy. This production benefits from one of the most perfect actors to play this role I could imagine. Anybody who knows Dan Donohue's work at OSF will know instantly what I mean. Last season he gave Caliban a creepily nonhuman, subterranean quality in The Tempest, and invested his Mercutio with such frighteningly manic energy that one suspected some of the Veronese youth in the ambiguously modern production of Romeo and Juliet had been experimenting with illegal substances. All of these qualities are appropriate to Iago as well, to be sure, and were certainly present in Donohue's portrayal.

But Donohue's was a perfectly calibrated reading with no hint of overacting or forced "villainy." To the contrary; his Iago's soliloquies were understated and quietly conversational as though he was making his plans up as he went along and inviting the audience along to help him work them out, rather than arriving on the scene as a fully formed villain to inform us of his carefully thought-out plan for vengeance. This was an almost creepily realistic interpretation, in that it made the audience feel complicit in what Iago was doing until it was too late to stop the terrifying chain of events. It was as though we were watching a truant boy playing with matches and combustibles without being able to stop him, while simultaneously becoming increasingly fascinated by his potential for senseless arson and wanton destruction. Get the idea? It gave me chills while I watched it. It still does! I found myself actually gasping audibly at key moments, even though I'm well familiar with the play and the text.

Iago's foil, Cassio, was well played by Danforth Comins. Cassio is not a particularly deep or complex character, but Comins made him interesting and sympathetic. I should mention that Comins is absolutely riveting and superb as the title character in this season's Coriolanus, a play which no afficiado of either the OSF or Shakespeare should miss. (See my earlier review, here.)

The only slightly weak point in the production, from my perspective, was the Desdemona of Sarah Rutan. Her reading was a bit too contemporary for my taste, both in inflection and in the "I am woman, hear me roar" style of her acting. Call me old fashioned, but I think the tragedy works better if Desdemona is more gentle and feminine than strong and willful. Think Juliet rather than Katherina. It is then all the more horrifying that Othello should fall prey to Iago's insinuations and suspect her virtue. On the other hand, Vilma Silva's Emilia--Iago's long-suffering wife--was flawless. (Silva, of course, was the incredibly magnificent Katherina in last season's Taming of the Shrew.) Christopher DuVal was a wonderfully hapless Roderigo.

Ashland in July (part two)

2008-08-10T01:08:00.001-07:00

The Comedy of Errors

The second production we saw on the Elizabethan Stage was of a play purportedly by Shakespeare. Unfortunately, it wasn't at all glorious. Director Penny Metropulos has mounted a high concept production of Shakespeare's only farce, setting it in the American West of movie myth and indeterminate date. The production comes complete with actors giving their lines in irritatingly grating Texas accents and breaking into musical comedy songs at the drop of a ten gallon hat. For the first time at Ashland, I (almost) walked out at the intermission.

What's the problem with that, you may ask. After all, I wrote a good review of this year's Midsummer's Night Dream, which did a very similar thing by setting that comedy in a radically updated and very hip contemporary "fairy land." Well, in fact all of this Wild West schtick would be perfectly OK with me if it wasn't for one very big thing. And that thing is, that a very great deal of this Comedy of Errors production wasn't Shakespeare at all. At least half the lines read or sung by the actors, including most or all of the song lyrics, sure as goll durn don't come from the pen of no dang Shakespeare dude, dag nab it. (That last sentence had several more or less direct quotations from this Penny Metropulos "adaptation," just for flavor. Can you find them?) That was most obviously the case of the lines spoken in Spanish, and delivered by a character identified as Jose Luis who doesn't appear in any Shakespeare play with which I am familiar. Certainly not The Comedy of Errors. And Jose Luis wasn't the only newly invented character to appear in this production, either.

The one good thing about reviewing a production as annoying and misdirected as this is that I don't feel compelled to spend much time or effort writing about it. Listing the actors who did their parts well just isn't worth the effort. For one thing, in view of the heavy handed schtick, added lines, ridiculous accents, and phony dialectical changes to the text with which they had to wrestle, it was impossible to tell whether they were actually doing their parts well. I will nevertheless mention that several of my favorite OSF performers were in this production -- notably, Tasso Feldman and John Tufts as the two Dromios, Emily Sophia Knapp as Luciana, David Kelly as "The Colonel, a mine owner" (Angelo the goldsmith in the original), and Armando Duran as "Doctor Antonio Pitch, a snake-oil salesman" (Dr. Pinch in the original). Those individuals all did superb jobs laboring under the unnecessary burdens imposed on them by their director and the additional lines and lyrics composed by her and others. I can't speak for the other actors I saw on stage. I will simply assume that the campy performances they gave were the director's fault, and not theirs.

That's about all I have to say on this production, except that The Comedy of Errors is one of my favorite comedies, and I had been very much looking forward to seeing this one. I was therefore pretty pissed off at witnessing the way a ham handed director could ruin a perfectly good farce by loading it up with schtick and anachronisms beyond its limits of endurance. Simply put, Metropulos succeeded in draining the humor, the real comedy, and most of the laughs out of the play by forcing it to fit the silly concept she was determined to impose on it. I'm sure Shakespeare could have written a very funny farce about people like such directors, all too common nowadays. Unfortunately, it's becoming increasingly necessary to distinguish between productions of the real Shakespeare, and misbegotten pastiche productions like this one, cobbled together from a cannibalized Shakespearean text and pop culture cliches. Pity the poor dead Bard.

Ashland in July (part one)

2008-08-09T20:39:00.000-07:00

Judy and I returned to Ashland in July to see the rest of the season. (See my earlier reviews from our trip in May, here, here, here, here, and here.) We stopped off in Ashland on our way north to Portland, via Bend and Mt. Hood's Timberline Lodge, and then stopped off again on our way back south to San Francisco. This time around, we managed to see the remainder of the season, including the following plays: Othello; The Comedy of Errors; Our Town; A View From the Bridge; and Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. We found these five productions to be a mixed bag, with three of them of the very highest quality, one quite problematic, and one a real dud. (We also saw The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler again, just for fun.) Here are my reviews.

Our Town

We saw Thornton Wilder's Our Town presented on the outdoor Elizabethan stage on our first night. Our Town is a perfect play to perform in this setting, and it is a wonderful production. Although set with great specificity in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, starting on May 7, 1901, and superficially presenting in the simplest possible manner the principal life events in two village families (Gibbs and Webb), Wilder's play is actually timeless and universal. The action very simply recounts the everyday events of life and death in those families, objectively and yet sympathetically, without a trace of false sentimentality or mawkishness. We watch the characters grow up, fall in love, marry, age and pass away into death. As we do so, Wilder gently leads us to see that each and every moment of our seemingly ordinary lives is so fleeting and hemmed in by the inevitability of death as to be infinitely precious. The play is nothing less than a meditation on the most fundamental question of existence: whether there is any meaning or purpose to human life and death in the context of an apparently impersonal universe. In simplest terms, Wilder's answer is that life is defined by the inevitability of death; and that life is therefore given meaning by the extent to which we really live it. If we can become as observant and attentive as possible to each moment of the everyday miracle of existence, and stop taking the things or people of life for granted, the meaning of life takes shape in the very living of it.

The program notes from the relatively young immigrant Asian-American director Chay Yew recount how he considered Our Town "sentimental and dull" when he first encountered it in an "Introduction to Theatre" class, and later walked out of a regional theatre production, "bored and unaffected," when he was still in his 20s. When Oregon Shakespeare Festival artistic director Bill Rauch asked him if he was interested in directing the play in Ashland, Yew was naturally "apprehensive." Upon rereading the play, however, he found himself "at a loss for words--profoundly moved, awed and in a quiet joy" at the play's simple timelessness.

The director's confession rang quite true for me, for two reasons. First, it matched my own experience of the the play, which I found annoyingly cloying when I had to read it in high school. Second, in this new production as directed by Yew, I had the same experience reported by the director: a realization that the play was not sentimental or nostalgic, but actually quite moving and even profound. Yew's newly gained insights obviously enabled him to mount a production that brought Wilder's own intentions clearly to the fore.

The casting is completely color-blind, which greatly enhances the universality and humanity of Wilder's message. The amazingly versatile Anthony Heald--last year's Tartuffe, and an incredibly hilarious retro-queen in this year's Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler--serves as the foundation of all the action as the Stage Manager. I couldn't imagine a better actor for this key role. Heald's Stage Manager is warm, yet brisk; no nonsense, but with a gentle twinkle. All the other actors are similarly first rate. Particularly deserving mention are Richard Howard and Kimberly Scott as Mr. and Mrs. Webb. I loved the way these two actors melted so seamlessly into their characters that by the middle of the play one no longer noticed that Howard is a rather pale white man and Scott a dark complected African American.

And in that unconscious, subtle melting away of the superficial distinctions of skin color, the central message of Our Town was given substance: a message of universality, boundlessness, timelessness, and profound humanity. This production, so beautifully presented, made it clear just how great a play Our Town is. It truly deserves to share the glorious Elizabethan Stage with the works of Shakespeare for which that stage was built.

What Would John Do?

2008-07-18T16:45:00.001-07:00

This wonderful piece of creative fluffery appeared on Talking Points Memo's "TPM Café Talk" today, and I cannot resist pointing readers in its direction. It is entitled "Arguments in Favor of the Election of Senator Barack Obama to the Office of the Presidency," and purports to be written by one "President John Adams."

If you know me, you know my personal affection for, nay, identification with the second President of the United States. (See here.) Far be it from me to claim that I could ever claim to possess this Founding Father's great qualities. To the contrary, I must confess to have more than my share of old John's foibles -- irascibility, overly-passionate intensity of opinion, pig-headedness, etc. etc. My admiration for him sprang originally from having portrayed him twice in the musical comedy "1776," which forced me to "inhabit" him as much as I could as an actor. As a (hopefully) good actor, I read a lot about him and his times, and learned as much as I could about what made him tick.

It was President John Adams who said "great is the guilt of an unnecessary war." Adams was speaking specifically of a potential war with France, for which members of his own party (the now long-defunct Federalist Party) were agitating with great enthusiasm. Adams considered his successful avoidance of war and negotiation of a peace treaty with France the greatest accomplishment of his Presidency. For obvious reasons, the sentiment expressed by Adams was never more powerfully appropriate than it is today, when this nation is suffering under the financial, psychological, moral, and all-too-mortal burdens of a totally unnecessary war of choice in Iraq. This is only one of several historical statements by Adams which are of peculiar relevance in the contemporary America of President George W. Bush. (Another one is this: "[A] Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.")

So I read with more than a little pleasure this post on TPM today. It purports to bring us, from beyond the grave, the endorsement by John Adams of Barack Obama for President. Obviously, it's quite tongue-in-cheek. But a great deal of it strikes me as quite astute, and historically informed. (I have no idea who actually wrote it.) The specific points he makes are that Obama: (1) is best placed to reach "past the perniciousness of faction," i.e. end as much as possible the intense polarization in our current Fox/Rove infected politics; (2) end both the endless (and phony) "War on Terror" and the maleficent so-called "Bush Doctrine" of "preemptive" war for the extension of empire; and (3) restore the Bill of Rights, the separation of constitutional powers, and the separation of Church and State. The piece concludes with an amusing reference to Abigail's wish to communicate some words of commiseration, solace and encouragement to Hillary Clinton, which Adams informs us he told Abigail to communicate to the "Inter-Net" on her own.

Please read the piece yourself -- it is amusing and yet touching. I just wish I'd had the wit to write it myself. But then, I'm not really John Adams.

Bruckner

2008-07-03T23:12:00.001-07:00

Bruckner? Anton Bruckner? Why a blog post on a late-Romantic, semi-obscure, very uncool, unhip European white dead male composer? You want something hip? Hey, get your own blog.

Bruckner has been a secret passion of mine for over 41 years: ever since 1967, when I first heard a snippet of the last movement of his Eighth Symphony on the radio when I was still in high school. I remember it vividly. I was in my back yard; my mother had the radio in the kitchen turned to the classical channel. This strangely compelling music wafted outside, something that I could not recognize. I only knew what it wasn't: Mozart, Haydn, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, or any of the other composers with whom I was familiar. It was majestic, awe inspiring, almost frighteningly grand -- "cosmic" in some inchoate way, and unlike anything I'd ever heard. I went into the house to see what it was. The music I'd just heard was so huge, so intense, so climactic, I was sure the piece would be over soon and the announcer would identify it. But no. Amazingly, incredibly, the music went on for at least 8 or 10 more minutes, becoming increasingly intense as it rose to a colossal, shattering climax. Finally, on came the announcer with the information I had been waiting to hear: "That was the Symphony Number 8 in c minor, by Anton Bruckner."

Bruckner. A name I had never heard before. How could there be a composer of symphonic music of whom I had never heard in my 17 years of being a hyper-classical-music-nerd? Especially, a composer of music like THIS?? Even the composer's name fascinated me by itself. It wasn't pronounced like "Brookner," as in Brooklyn, but more like "Bruuukner." It sounded deep, dark, richly hued. I was hooked. From then on, I had my eyes and ears out for this guy Bruckner. (Here, in a later performance under Carlo Maria Giulini, are the beginning, middle, and end of the fourth movement of Bruckner's Eighth Symphony which I heard that day 41 years ago.)

But Bruckner was even less well known in America back then in the summer of 1967 than he is today. It wasn't until next fall, when I went away to college at Yale, that I ever heard another note of his music. I was truly fortunate that my freshman year roommate, Joe Margolick, was every bit as much of a classical music nerd as I. He hooked me on this local New Haven radio station that played the "Top 100" Classical Music Masterpieces over and over again (sequentially, of course), enabling one to get to know that repertoire very very well. Amazingly, four of the 100 pieces played on this station were Bruckner Symphonies -- Numbers 4, 7, 8 and 9, to be precise. By the end of my first year, not only was I well acquainted with these four, I was also the proud owner of a boxed set of the complete Nine Bruckner Symphonies (Eugen JochumDGG), purchased at Sam Goody's in New York City. (Only later did I learn that there are actually two additional Bruckner symphonies that had been written earlier, numbered "0" and "00" by the composer because he lacked the self esteem to realize they were good enough to include in his numbered canon.)

By the end of my first year at Yale, I was well acquainted with all nine of the Bruckner symphonic canon, and had progressed to a full-blown love affair with all late Romantic German musical repertoire. This is the corpus represented most famously by Wagner, and by all of what is now referred to as the post-Romantics: Bruckner, Mahler, Max Reger, and Richard Strauss. Mahler quickly became an obsession -- I could still do several blog posts on him alone. But Mahler's so much better known and more popular today than Bruckner has ever become. And I retain a particular personal fondness for poor old, neglected, underestimated Anton. No one seems to really understand him.

And that is why Bruckner never gets his due; because he is fundamentally misunderstood. In discussing his music, most commentators dwell on his naiveté and simple catholic faith. They also usually mention the gigantic scale of his symphonies, all of which last about an hour or more. It is true that Bruckner's religious faith was the most salient feature of his personal life. It is also true that most of his music is not catchy or easy listening; it requires a certain degree of patience in order fully to appreciate. But if one is willing to give it some time, it well rewards the listener. It is a profound misrepresentation of Bruckner's art to call it an expression of blind religious faith. To the contrary, throughout his music is heard the profound anguish of someone not able to experience the inner fulfillment everyone longs for. It is the very universality of this human experience of unfulfilled spiritual longing, and the power and directness with which Bruckner's music conveys that experience to the attentive listener, that makes him such a great composer.

What is the special quality of great music that enables it to last, and gives it power to speak to us today? It is its ability to touch a universal longing for transcendence, to put the listener in a mental space where he or she feels an inner joy of recognition, an epiphany of ultimate truth if you will. "Beauty is in the eye (and ear) of the beholder," yes; but the fact that the experience of beauty is inherently subjective and that no two people may agree that a particular thing is "beautiful" does not mean that beauty in itself does not exist. I think Keats got it right when he said "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." At the same time, Beauty is not so much an abstract conceptual "object" as it is an experience; it is the word we use to describe the recognition of something universal, something profoundly true. Beauty is not an "object"; it is the experience of an object on a more profound level. An "object of beauty" is anything that reveals or resonates with truth or meaning on a deeply personal level. For this reason, something can be "beautiful" whether or not it is at all "pretty" or "charming" in an ordinary sense. Beauty may be harsh; it may be difficult; it may even be deadly. But if something puts one in touch with the truth (or "meaning," if you will) of one's own existence, that thing will also be beautiful, even if its beauty is very austere.

Bruckner was one of the very great composers because his music succeeds in imparting to the patient listener a direct personal experience of the truth of one's own existence; namely, the universal human longing for spiritual connection and fulfillment. Only a small handful of other composers have succeeded in conveying this experience as well and as consistently as Bruckner. You know who they are -- Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. At the moment, I really can't think of anyone else whose music gives me the same experience.

Recently I happened to see a beautiful performance of Bruckner's Symphony Number 5 on KQED by the Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of Austrian conductor Franz Welser-Möst, at the Basilica of the Abbey of St. Florian in Linz, Austria, where Bruckner was born and is buried. I was reminded once again of how the second movement (the Adagio) of the Fifth so clearly (and beautifully) conveys that feeling of intense longing for spiritual consummation, and simultaneous anguish at the inevitable human inability to achieve it in any lasting way.

On one level, of course, and as in nearly all his Symphonies, Bruckner does achieve his consummation musically in the glorious closing pages of his Finale. (Bruckner's musical expression of spiritual consummation is never more gloriously achieved than in the Finales of his Fifth and Eighth Symphonies. To hear the concluding pages of the finale of the Bruckner's 5th, listen here. Warning: please ignore the embarrassingly saccharine religious comments and illustrations placed by whoever posted this to YouTube.) It is those concluding pages which give such great satisfaction to Bruckner lovers like me; they always seem to affirm that yes, one may at least hope that spiritual fulfillment will someday be experienced.

Yet seen as a whole, Bruckner's work does not express any final certainty of ultimate fulfillment. Instead, the abiding experience in Bruckner's music is one of intensely wistful longing, even anguish, at just how out of reach spiritual fulfillment always remains. This is most clearly shown in Bruckner's final and greatest work, his Ninth Symphony, a piece which remained uncompleted at his death. The first three movements of this masterpiece very clearly express a state of the most profound spiritual anguish and fearful anxiety. Although extensive notes and sketches for a concluding, consummating Fourth Movement do exist, it is quite clear that Bruckner was never able to bring them to completion. This inability cannot simply be explained as a result of untimely death. To the contrary, the record shows that Bruckner literally spent years trying to find a way to resolve in his finale the spiritual darkness portrayed so devastatingly in the first three movements. At the end, despite his best efforts, he simply was unable to do so.

Thus, the ultimate truth conveyed by this great composer's lifetime of music was not the triumph of simple faith so much as the ultimate faltering of that faith in the face of death. I do not say failure of faith. Bruckner's music still holds out hope -- the sometimes faltering, always wistful hope that some consummation, devoutly wished, may yet be found. To that extent, Bruckner is a composer of faith -- a faith in the possibility of hope. But one need not have faith or hope (or charity, for that matter); all it requires is the time and patience to listen. For anyone with that, Bruckner's music can unlock doors to an inner experience of very great beauty.

One of Life's Mysteries: Why do Republicans Persist?

2008-06-26T15:29:00.001-07:00

For several years I have had occasion to chat with the individual who manages my parents' investments at a major stock brokerage. We have always gotten along very well, and have had far ranging conversations on many subjects, including the state of the country, the world, and the economy. One subject we dance around very gingerly is politics. Yet recently, she was bemoaning how the economy is a disaster right now, and confessed to be in despair for the first time in her life about the direction of the country. She added that her despair was made worse by the two "idiots" (or some word to that effect) currently running for president. After confirming that she was in fact referring to McCain and Obama, I asked point blank who she thought would be better. Not to my surprise, she answered "Giuliani or Romney." I bit my tongue and quickly changed the subject.

As I say, her reply did not surprise me. Not only because she had insinuated her Republican leanings to me in the past, but also because of where she worked -- in the bowels of the Wall Street Beast, West Coast branch office. It seems to be an article of faith on Wall Street that the stock market -- and with it, the economy -- will do better under the Republicans rather than the dreaded Democrats.

This attitude has pretty well become conventional wisdom in the general public as well. That conventional wisdom holds that the Democrats, as members of the "mommy party," spend all their time and energy worrying about the poor, the disadvantaged, the immigrants, and the victims of society, and whipping up useless government programs to spend our hard-earned tax dollars on various bleeding-heart projects to alleviate the suffering (real or imagined) of these groups. Republicans, on the other hand, as the "daddy party," are concerned with the big important issues, like national security and the economy, and understand the "real world" much better. In this view, Republicans are too savvy to waste tax dollars on liberal do-gooder projects, because they know that the free, unregulated market does an infinitely better job of running the economy for everybody. A rising tide lifts all boats, they say, and if we just let it do its thing, the free market will take care of all our problems. Right? Well, that's the theory, and the so-called Liberal Media has basically bought it hook, line and sinker. This has been true at least since Reagan taught us all that "Government is not the solution to our problem; Government is the problem."

There's only one difficulty with the theory: it's wrong. To quote a different President: "Facts are stubborn things." As the historical facts stubbornly show by every objective standard and in every relevant category -- inflation, gross domestic product, national debt, economic growth, government spending, employment and job creation -- Democrats have consistently done better for the economy than Republicans. The superiority of Democratic economic stewardship extends to every level of society except one -- the very wealthiest. The evidence shows that under Democratic administrations, every income group, from the poorest to the richest, experience improvement and economic growth. By contrast, under Republican administrations, not only is the overall economic performance inferior, but only the very wealthiest individuals fare better; all other income groups do worse under Republicans than they do during Democratic administrations. (See, for example, here, here, and here.)

Why is this? Well, it seems the best explanation is that in their economic policy decisions, Republicans are so obsessed with cutting taxes for the wealthy and making life easier for large corporations, that their policies are of only limited benefit to the rest of the country. In other words, because their focus is on the wealthiest 5%, the other 95% of the country does better under Democrats.

And that's also the explanation for why Wall Street and the Pooh Bahs of the so-called Liberal Media have swallowed the false conventional wisdom about Republicans being better for the economy. Nowadays, those TV anchors and talking heads are members of the top 5%, just like the stock brokers and financial analysts who all pray for the nomination and election of someone like Giuliani or Romney. I surmise that these people are so out of touch with the great mass of the country, they actually don't realize that the rest of us are doing so very much worse under Republican stewardship. As far as they're concerned, life couldn't be better; just refresh my martini and keep those tax cuts coming, please.

Pericles in Orinda

2008-06-22T14:11:00.000-07:00

Pericles is one of Shakespeare's less well-known plays, although performances of it seem to be popping up more and more in the past few years. At the time it was first produced, it was one of Shakespeare's most popular works. For reasons which are obscure, it was omitted from the Folio, and exists only in corrupted Quarto texts which are generally thought to reflect the hand(s) of at least one other author/contributor. (See here.) The California Shakespeare Festival (called CalShakes for short) has mounted a new production of Pericles at its outdoor theater in the hills above Orinda, about 16 miles east of San Francisco. The production, which is "adapted and directed" by Joel Sass, suffers from an over-reliance on schtick and farce. This emphasis on the comical aspects of the play detracts from its inherent romance and beauty, most notably in its poignant final scenes. Nevertheless, the cast of the CalShakes production does an excellent job, the production is inventive and beautiful, and the play is well worth seeing.

Pericles is the first of Shakespeare's four "Romance" plays, the subsequent ones being Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. This quartet of late plays, which used to be categorized as comedies, are now sometimes thought of as the first "tragicomedies," although they could as easily be called "fantasies" on account of their often fantastical and quasi-magical aspects. The word "Romance" is a good all-purpose description, since it is defined as a narrative depicting heroic exploits, marvelous deeds, fantastic adventures or supernatural events, usually in a historical or imaginary setting, and often in the form of allegory. (See here.) An interesting aside: the word "romance" eventually became synonymous with "novel," a word derived from "novella storia" meaning a new kind of story. In fact, in some languages (e.g. French) the words for novel and romance are derived from the same root. It is no accident Shakespeare wrote his English Romances while Cervantes was inventing the modern novel in Spain.

Pericles certainly qualifies as a "romance" under any of these definitions. It recounts the adventures and calamities of Prince Pericles of Tyre as he travels around the eastern Mediterranean beleaguered by villainous rogues, beset by the inimical sea, finding a wife only to lose her in childbirth, losing his beloved daughter through treachery, and finally being reunited with both daughter and wife in a pair of quasi-magical reunions. The play is an allegory of life, with Pericles' travails representing the universal human journey from innocence through disappointment and despair to self-knowledge and wisdom. It has a huge cast of characters, including an on-stage narrator who serves as a kind of chorus previewing and commenting on the action; and is set in at least seven different locations, including several violent storm scenes on board ship at sea.

CalShakes deals with the difficulties of mounting this fantastical epic through a minimalist use of simple easily movable pieces of scenery, and a stripped down cast of eight actors each playing several roles, some as many as five or six. On the whole, the actors are excellent and handle their multiple (and wildly varying) roles well.

The success of any production of Pericles depends principally on the quality of the leading actor. Christopher Kelly, a CalShakes newcomer, proves fully capable of handling the challenges of the demanding title role. Due to the nature of the story, Pericles can easily come off as a guileless innocent wandering from one disaster to another. The danger is that the audience may find him more pathetic than sympathetic. Kelly manages to avoid this pitfall. He invests Pericles with an attractive lack of affectation at the beginning of the play while conveying an intelligent innocence that is free of foolish naivete. Because Kelly lets us see Pericles' fundamental intelligence and goodness, the audience is able to participate sympathetically in the character's deep disillusionment and painful journey from nihilistic despair to wisdom, acceptance and fulfillment.

Next to Pericles himself, the two most important roles in the play are his wife, Thaisa, and their daughter Marina. Versatile actress Delia Macdougall makes an enchanting and deeply affecting Thaisa. Macdougall beautifully conveys the huge transition Thaisa must make in this play, from budding adolescent radiant with the urgency of young love to mature woman scarred by tragedy and deep loss. In one of the more radical (and amusing) juxtapositions in this production, Macdougall also portrays the Bawd who tries unsuccessfully to force Marina (Thaisa's daughter) into harlotry. Macdougall was able to disappear into the two roles so convincingly that I did not recognize her as the same actress.

The young actress Sarah Nealis assayed the difficult role of Marina, the daughter of Thaisa and Pericles, who is believed to have been murdered when she was captured by pirates and sold into prostitution. This is a demanding role for any performer, with two particularly challenging scenes. The first is the one in which Marina manages to maintain her virtuous chastity against an importunate noble customer (Lysimachus) at the whore house where she has been imprisoned, while simultaneously converting him to virtue and making him fall in love with her. The other is the famous recognition scene in which Marina meets the aged Pericles, who has renounced the world and taken a vow of silence as a result of what he believes is the tragic death and loss of both his wife and child. In this amazing scene at the climax of the play, father and daughter gradually recognize each other as Marina recounts her life story in response to Pericles' increasingly urgent questioning. In both of these very demanding scenes, Nealis was fully convincing. This is no mean feat for a young performer, and deserves recognition as such.

The rest of the roles in this colorful pageant were filled by some of the Bay Area's finest and most reliable actors. Ron Campbell was alternately villainous and hilarious in the character roles of Antiochus, Cleon, a fisherman, a knight, and several other worthies. Danny Sheie was--what can I say--delightfully Danny Sheie as Helicanus (Pericles' principle adviser), Simonides (the jovial father of Thaisa), and Boalt (the whoremonger's servant). The versatile Dominique Lozano was amazingly protean in a huge variety of roles, both female and male, including the evil Dionyza, the mysterious physician Cerimon, a fisherman, a knight, and several others flashing by. Alex Morf, as Lysimachus, was convincing in the difficult conversion scene, and amusingly dastardly as a variety of rogues, cutthroats and hired assassins. Finally, Shawn Hamilton was impressive as both the narrator/chorus Gower and the goddess Diana.

As mentioned at the outset of this review, there was a definite flaw in this production. It was obvious from the very outset that the adaptor/director had chosen to emphasize the comical aspects of this Romance in a rather tongue-in-cheek way. At times, the style of the production seemed to veer into farce at the expense of the more serious, romantic, and even tragic aspects of the play. As far as I was concerned, this approach robbed the production of a great deal of its potential depth and emotional impact.

Thus, the villainous Antiochus (Ron Campbell) was presented simply as an over-the-top farcically melodramatic stage villain all too obviously trying to entrap Pericles with his insinuating riddles. Ideally, the audience should feel a frisson of shock and horror as the true relationship between Antiochus and his daughter is gradually revealed. Played instead for laughs as a mock villain complete with a (totally unnecessary) affected accent, the character lost any semblance of mystery or ambiguity.

This choice to emphasize the farcical at the expense of the "romantic" was seen over and over again throughout the play, with an over-abundance of silly accents, silly walks, and other assorted silly schtick. Although the audience ate it up, of course, there was a price to be paid. This became all too clear at the end of the play, by which point we were so used to seeing every scene presented as farce that a large portion of the audience actually laughed during the deeply moving recognition scene between Pericles and Marina. This was not the fault of the actors, who heroically persevered in portraying the beautiful father-daughter reunion with great sensitivity. At the time, I felt annoyed at the crassness of some members of the audience. In retrospect, I think the fault lies more with the director. Perhaps if Mr. Sass had "adapted and directed" a little less and instead let the actors reveal the truth of their characters a little more, the audience would have been permitted to experience some of the deeper joys of this very beautiful play, and not just the belly laughs.

'Tis Pity She's a Whore

2008-06-22T00:36:00.000-07:00

When I was growing up in New York City in the 1950's, I became a theater lover by the time I was 6 or 7. I would avidly scan the New York Times theater section every day for the latest reviews and accompanying Al Hirschfeld cartoon (I became quite an expert at finding the Nina or Ninas hidden therein.) Around this time, some theater mounted a production of the bloody Jacobean revenge tragedy 'Tis Pity She's A Whore by John Ford. I can clearly recollect being deeply intrigued by the mysterious title of the play as soon as I saw the advertisements and reviews mentioning it. What could the title mean? Specifically, what was a "whore," and what could be so pitiable about being one?

I asked my parents, and distinctly remember how obviously uncomfortable the question made them. (This was the '50's, remember; my parents were very conventional WASPs, albeit liberal and well-meaning.) They gave me some vague explanation about it being an unfortunate woman of ill repute, which left me completely in the dark and forced me as usual to seek an explanation from my more worldly classmates at school. I never lost my fascination with the play though, based on its intriguing title and my early encounter with it, and always wanted to see a production somewhere. I finally got my wish just this past week at the current American Conservatory Theater production of 'Tis Pity She's A Whore right here in San Francisco.

The American Conservatory Theater is self-consciously the doyenne of San Francisco Bay Area theatrical companies. Perhaps for this reason, there always seems to be an overly earnest feel to ACT shows, as though the actors, director and management were trying a little too hard to convince themselves and the audience that they really were the top theater company in the Bay Area, and just as good as any theater in New York. My experiences at ACT productions have always been mixed. For every outstanding production I've seen, I have had to sit through two or three so-so, mediocre, or downright disappointing ones, with too few really outstanding actors on stage. All too often, I've thought that ACT had let its own name go to its head; it had become over-ACT.

I'm happy to report that the current production of Jacobean playwright John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore does not suffer from any of these problems. It is the best production I've seen at ACT in ages, without one false note. The production itself, directed by ACT artistic director Carey Perloff, is relatively traditional, at least in its stunning Jacobean period costuming and style. I appreciate this -- there is no self-conscious attempt to impose a director's concept on the piece, and Ford's harrowing vision is allowed to speak for itself. The acting is uniformly superb. This is especially true of the two leads: Michael Hayden and René Augesen as the incestuous brother/sister lovers Giovanni and Annabella. Hayden and Augesen are absolutely incandescent in their depiction of an ungovernable sexual attraction so intense it overwhelms every barrier in its path. I didn't know lust could be so terrifying until I saw these two superlative actors ignite the stage in this production.

I could go on and on about how incredible Augesen and Hayden are. But mention must be made of at least some of the other really outstanding actors in this production. Veteran ACT stalwart Anthony Fusco is mesmerizing as Vasques, the wily servant who instigates most of the blood letting at the end of the play. The ever-reliable James Carpenter -- my personal all-time favorite Bay Area actor -- does a great turn as the duplicitously villainous Richardetto. Susan Gibney is stunningly charismatic in the role of Hippolita, the jilted lover of Annabella's unwanted suitor Soranzo (performed by Michael Earle Fajardo.) Gibney is also a very accomplished dancer, as she proves in the scene at Annabella's wedding to Soranzo. Finally, Robert Sicular and Steven Anthony Jones each turn in solid, completely convincing performances as, respectively, the father of the incestuous lovers and their religious confessor.

The one clearly contemporary -- and utterly original -- aspect of the production is the musical accompaniment. This was composed, and is performed at each performance by, the singer-composer "hard-core" self-described riot grrrl cellist Bonfire Madigan Shive. Shive hails from the Seattle grunge rock scene, but is also classically trained. She plays her gut wrenching jazz/baroque/renaissance cello riffs while seated on a kind of organ-loft like contraption suspended above the stage, where she looks for all the world like some weirdly angelic ornament. Although she is rarely entirely silent, she is never obtrusive on the action. The music that issues from her cello and her incredible voice is perfectly matched to the volcanically emotional action on stage. She well deserved her end-of-show ovation.

I waited a long time to see 'Tis Pity. This magnificent production was worth the wait.

Popular History vs. Real History

2008-06-09T16:07:00.000-07:00

I recently slogged through Michael Beschloss' book Presidential Courage, subtitled "Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989." I found the book profoundly disappointing on many levels. Just having finished Dorin Kearns Goodwin's superb Team of Rivals on Lincoln's life and presidency, Beschloss' entry in the popular history sweepstakes comes off looking singularly pathetic.

The entire book read like the academic equivalent of cotton candy. You don't have to be a trained academician to be disappointed with Beschloss's mamby-pamby history-for-the-masses style. Aside from Goodwin's magisterial Team of Rivals, other recent examples of excellent popular histories abound: see, for example, Joseph Ellis (His Excellency George Washington, Founding Brothers), David McCullough (John Adams, Truman) and Walter Isaacson (Benjamin Franklin). All of these authors have run rings around Beschloss in terms of the depth and weight they bring to their books, without sacrificing readability and enjoyability in the slightest.

The single most damning aspect of Beschloss' pathetic entry in the popular history market is his tendency to give such short shrift to knotty historical details as to render his "analysis" (so called) misleading or even false. One of the most egregious examples occurs in a chapter on Lincoln's decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Beschloss writes: "[That] July, he [Lincoln] summoned his Cabinet and read them his draft of a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. On New Year's 1863, 'all persons held as slaves within any state' would become 'forever' free." (page 109) (Incidentally, this two-sentence squib constitutes an entire paragraph. This is par for the course in this book, in which the paragraphs are rarely even three short sentences long.)

This is the closest Beschloss ever comes to telling the reader what the Emancipation Proclamation actually said. In fact, the full text of the document is as follows: "[A]ll persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." (Italics added.) Beschloss simply omits any mention of the fact Lincoln's proclamation only freed the slaves in the Confederacy, over which he had no actual power, and declined to free the slaves in the Union slave states over which he did have power (specifically, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and West Virginia).

One is left with the unmistakable impression that Beschloss simply doesn't want to surprise his readers with the unpleasant historical reality that Lincoln chose to limit the Emancipation Proclamation to freeing the slaves in the Confederacy while leaving those in the Union still in bondage, either because revealing such a fact might upset their idealistic preconceptions, or because any analysis of the actual political and strategic reasons Lincoln had for doing so would unduly tax their patience. Apparently, Beschloss thinks popular histories must be dumbed down to sell. How dumb.

Gracious

2008-06-07T13:09:00.000-07:00

In the delicate situation in which the Democratic Party finds itself right now, the most important thing for all the supporters of its two leading candidates to do is simply "Be Gracious." Obama supporters need to acknowledge that Hillary Clinton just gave a beautifully gracious concession speech. They must also be willing to acknowledge that Hillary would have made a superb and powerful presidential nominee. Only if Obama supporters like myself can show such graciousness toward Hillary and her supporters, can we hope to receive like graciousness from them. And believe me, the country needs some graciousness right now.

In that spirit, I now acknowledge that I allowed my darker, more paranoid political shadow side too much leeway in my last post about the election. (History in the Unmaking, here.) Specifically, I have been proven wrong in castigating her for acting out of unbridled narcissism and a shameless sense of entitlement during these last two months of the campaign in general, and specifically in her nonconcession speech last Tuesday night, June 3. You can chalk up the somewhat intemperate accusations I made in that post to three things: 1) my passionate desire to see a Democrat win the Presidency; 2) my deep fear that the Republicans will divide, conquer and steal yet another election, as they have so many times in my lifetime; and 3) my own intemperance and tendency to get carried away by the passions of the moment. In my defense, my take on Hillary's June 3 nonconcession speech was quite similar to that of many other commentators, and was actually more temperate than some of the strident advocacy I've seen coming from Hillary supporters in the last several weeks.

But enough of that. Today, June 7, just four days later, Hillary gave a very gracious, moving and brave concession speech calling on her supporters to work for the election of Barack Obama. The graciousness of Hillary's speech is best indicated by her repeated use of Obama's own best lines, themes, and slogans -- as has already been noted on Talking Points Memo, here, and on HuffPo, here. Frankly, she didn't hit a false note. It was beautiful.

Many, many times during this campaign as I've watched the various candidates, I've been amazed at how difficult it was to decide whom to support. The final three -- Clinton, Edwards and Obama -- were all totally acceptable to me. I actually decided to go for Edwards based on his issue positions, until I got swept up by Obama mania. My criticism of Clinton, and the reasons I didn't support her, all boiled down to her vote on the Iraq War, her failure to acknowledge how grave a mistake that was, and my concerns about having an ex-President in the White House partnered to the elected President. All of these criticisms were surmountable, and I would have enthusiastically supported her had she become the nominee. As the campaign progressed, however, I became increasingly alarmed and ultimately angered by what I perceived as the divisive tactics she and her surrogates were using in their fight against Obama. This hardened me in my choice of Obama, and turned me against her.

However, it's time to move past all that. In her speech today, Hillary did the right thing, and much more. She made it clear just how much this campaign has transformed her. If she had run like this all along, fighting for every vote in the Iowa caucuses instead of running as the "inevitable" establishment candidate trying to out-macho the others in order to prove that a woman could be commander in chief, she might well have beaten Obama and become the nominee herself. (As well analyzed by Politico's David Kuhn here.) Although there are many strong arguments to make against selecting her as the Vice President nominee (see here), I am so concerned about bringing disaffected Hillary supporters on board that I would support such a decision if Obama ultimately makes it. Indeed, based on the speech she just gave, I'm now thinking that Hillary could be a very good choice for VP. At the very least, she should be offered a position of some significance. I still think she'd be great on the Supreme Court! Hang it . . . she'd be a great President.

You Can Do It, Dubya!

2008-06-05T10:59:00.000-07:00

Via Froomkin:

CBS News reports: "President Bush's approval rating is at its lowest level to date. Just 25 percent of Americans approve of the overall job Mr. Bush is doing as President, an all-time low for him and among the lowest approval ratings ever recorded for a President.
"Sixty-seven percent disapprove of the job Bush is doing - the highest such figure in CBS News polls since he assumed office.
"Only Presidents Nixon (24 percent) and Truman (22 percent) have seen polls showing job approval ratings lower than 25 percent during their presidencies, according to Gallup Polls. President Carter's all-time low was 26 percent."
The CBS number for Bush is the lowest yet for the major polls.

Come on Dubya, go lower! Go to just 20 percent approval! Beat Nixon! Beat Truman! I know you can do it.

History in the Unmaking

2008-06-03T23:39:00.000-07:00

After the historic events that occurred tonight with the close of the longest presidential primary season in American history, it's time for something political. You want a rant? I'll give you one. On this, the night when the nation witnessed the first time in history an African-American has clinched the nomination of a major political party for the Presidency of the United States, what should have been an exciting and joyous occasion was totally upstaged by the unwillingness of that individual's principal opponent to concede -- or even acknowledge the possibility of -- her defeat in the primary contest. It was a sorry, sorry sight.

Sadly, the Clintons -- both Bill and Hillary -- are proving they are even more astronomically narcissistic than anyone previously would have believed. They actually do seem to think they are the reincarnation of Franklin and Eleanor. I simply could not believe her speech tonight following her victory in the South Dakota primary (and, not coincidentally, preceding her defeat in the Montana primary). It was one of the most self-absorbed political speeches I've ever heard in my life.

I readily admit Hillary would be a great candidate for president. With her unbelievable tenacity and seeming ability to go on campaigning endlessly, she would easily bulldoze her way over John McCain and straight into the Oval Office, should she be given the chance. I am also willing to admit the possibility that this speech was just a sign that Hillary is still in the "denial" phase of her perfectly natural and inevitable psychological transition to rational acceptance of her loss. I will happily admit that my instant analysis of her speech tonight may be proven wrong -- and that tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, she will come out and do the right thing, congratulating Obama on his historic victory and committing to do her utmost to see him elected President. Indeed, I devoutly hope this will happen.

But somehow, I suspect that my darker suspicions are correct. Dammit, it's over. It's been over for about a month now. Barring some absolutely unthinkable catastrophe, Obama has secured the nomination by virtue of the pledged delegate count. In light of the simple arithmetic, Hillary should have simply conceded defeat tonight, and offered her congratulations and support to Obama. Her bare acknowledgement of his status in the race, and her statement that she has not decided what to do next in this primary campaign, simply staggers the mind. It appears she still wants to screw it up for Obama somehow between now and the convention in Denver, so that against all odds she will be granted that nomination this year instead of him. There is only one other possible explanation, and it's not a pretty one. To quote her speech tonight, "What does Hillary want?" The answer is she wants to be President, no matter what it takes. I think this speech was her official announcement of her candidacy for 2012 -- and by extension, an indication of her intention to sabotage Obama's candidacy in the election of 2008.

Let's look at the facts. The rumor mill is now saying that Hillary is "open" to an offer of the Vice Presidential nomination. But if Obama offers her the VP slot at this point, he will certainly take on the appearance of having been emasculated, whether or not she accepts the offer. It gives a distinct appearance of weakness for a Presidential candidate to give in to pressure to choose an individual with whom he is so evidently incompatible. It would be said that if Obama could not stand up to pressure from Hillary, how will he stand up to the Russians, the Iranians, and the terr'ists?

If Obama were to make such an offer of the Vice Presidency, I cannot imagine Hillary would accept it on any terms other than on his commitment to make her a virtual co-president á la Cheney. That would obviously put Obama in an intolerable position, both during the election campaign, and -- should he win -- in his subsequent presidency. In 1980, ex-president Gerald Ford campaigned for Reagan to put him on the ticket as Vice President with the understanding Reagan needed the "more experienced" Ford as co-president. Ford's campaign for such an arrangement backfired, and Reagan very properly balked at the entire idea. Of course, Ford had already lost the previous election in 1976, having himself been emasculated in that race by Reagan's earlier powerful primary challenge. Reagan went on to win in 1980 on his own, having avoided emasculation by Ford. I submit that Hillary knows her history.

If on the other hand she were to turn down such an offer of the Vice Presidency (perhaps because he was unwilling to make her a copresident with him), Obama would look even more like a loser than he already would have been made to look by virtue of his being forced to make the offer in the first place. "Poor Barack: his offer wasn't attractive enough for Hillary." Evidently, it wasn't worth much. The obvious implication would be that he wasn't going to be winning the Presidency any time soon. Either way, what a perfect way to maneuver him into looking like a loser. And how convenient for Hillary in 2012.

If Obama doesn't offer her VP, Hillary's surrogates -- all those Geraldine Ferraro types who showed up in D.C. last week to "protest" the "theft" of primary votes from Michigan and Florida -- will raise the battle cry of alleged sexism. Hell, they already are screaming that. One can't have missed the rather intemperate charges being made that Obama is an "unqualified" "affirmative action" candidate, the corporate media has always been "biased" against her, and the "party bosses" have unfairly "stolen" the nomination from her, blah blah blah. Obama's failure to offer Hillary the vice presidency at this point will simply confirm the view of these people that he, and the rest of the party establishment, is irredeemably sexist, elitist, and biased against her (and by extension, them).

Whatever the merit of some of these claims of sexism, the fact is a goodly percentage of the Democratic base, as represented by the hard core Hillary supporters in that portion of the primary electorate that voted for her, is now fully committed to her candidacy come hell or high water. These avid supporters want her to fight on to Denver, and threaten to bolt the party if she is not nominated. The Clintons have carefully stoked the growing anger and passion of their followers, and have nursed the mixed feelings of entitlement and victimization they appear to have. In consequence, Hillary is now in the cat bird seat. Obama needs her (or so she thinks), and she can make any demands on him she wishes in return for her support in the electoral campaign. In either case -- whether he offers her the Vice Presidency, or not -- his path to the Presidency is now much more difficult than it had to be, no matter how much overt support Hillary gives him in the general election.

And it is all so utterly unnecessary. She could have been classy. She could have given a gracious speech acknowledging that Obama has accumulated the necessary delegates to secure the nomination, and offered her unstinting support to him in the tough election campaign ahead, with or without an offer of the Vice Presidency. But that's not the speech she gave tonight. Her all too visible inability to be gracious or even realistic would be sad, if it were not so destructive to the party.

I most certainly hope that I'm wrong, and eagerly await proof of Hillary's good faith. But I'm getting awfully tired of waiting for her to start putting the best interests of the country above those of her own candidacy. In her speech, Hillary answered her question about "what [she] wants" by describing the issues of social justice and equity she so passionately cares about. Sorry, I no longer believe her. Hillary is bitterly -- yes, I mean bitterly -- disappointed. She was "in this campaign to win." Her nomination was supposed to be "inevitable." It's no longer about the Democratic Party, nor the good of the country, and certainly not about the issues of social justice which she claims are the motivating force behind her drive to secure the nomination and her inability to concede. If it were really about any of these things, Hillary would be doing everything she could, right now, to make sure the Republicans don't get the chance to steal yet another presidential election and thereby make those goals of social justice and equity even more difficult to attain than they now are. No, it's not about any of these things. It's all about the Clintons and their precious sense of entitlement.

Ashland (part five)

2008-05-30T23:41:00.000-07:00

Fences

The two plays I was most anxious to see on this trip to Ashland were Coriolanus and Fences. I was not disappointed by either one, even though I ended up being even more excited by two other productions I had not expected to enjoy as much -- Midsummer's Night Dream and The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler. Isn't that often the case? That's not to say that I was in any way disappointed with either Coriolanus or Fences (see my rave review of the former below).

Although Judy and I were of course familiar with the name of August Wilson, and had heard of several of his plays, neither of us had ever seen one until we saw Gem of the Ocean at last year's Ashland Festival. For those who aren't familiar with these works, it is essential to know that August Wilson's central canon consists of a cycle of ten plays chronicling the 20th century African-American experience, one play for each decade of the century. These plays were not written in chronological order. Thus, Gem of the Ocean, which begins the cycle in 1904, was written after Fences, a comparatively early play in Wilson's oeuvre that is itself set in the 1950's with a postscript taking place about ten years later in the mid-60's.

Gem of the Ocean tells the story of Aunt Esther, a seemingly ageless African-American matriarch who represents the last generation to have experienced slavery before the Civil War, and her deep influence on and nurturning of the younger people around her. We were so intensely moved by Gem that we were anxious to see another part of Wilson's cycle.

We were not disappointed. Fences is the story of one man's struggle to come to grips with the bitterness and disappointment of failing to break out of the segregated Negro Baseball League and into the newly integrated Major Leagues at the time Jackie Robinson became the first African-American baseball player to do so. Troy takes out his frustration and anger at his perceived "failure" on his son Cory, by forbidding him from pursuing his great talent for football with a college scholarship. Cory, who longs to emulate his father, is ultimately alienated by Troy's harsh treatment. Troy's desperate attempts to validate his manhood also damage his marriage, although his long-suffering wife Rose sticks with him to the end.

The Ashland Festival has a history of presenting the cycle of August Wilson's plays in excellent productions with the very finest actors available. In that tradition, every single role in this production was superbly filled. Charles Robinson was of course the standout in the central role, but he was perfectly matched by Shona Tucker as Rose, Cameron Knight as Cory, Kevin Kenerly as Troy's other son Lyons, and Josiah Phillips as Troy's close friend Jim. Special mention must be made of Ashland stalwart G. Valmont Thomas in the role of Gabriel, Troy's mentally disabled brother. Thomas was so convincing in this poignant role that I totally forgot that he was the same actor I had seen a couple of years ago perform the role of Falstaff so magnificently in Merry Wives of Windsor. It is hard for me to imagine two roles more dissimilar. Yet Thomas was Gabriel as fully and convincingly as he had been Falstaff. No small feat indeed.

Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter

Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter was the first play on our menu when we arrived at Ashland on Thursday May 15 after our five hour drive from the Bay Area. Perhaps because we saw it on evening of our first day after an all-day drive, we were not in quite the right frame of mind to fully appreciate it. Whatever the reason, although we did not dislike the play at all, it did not move or excite us in the way the other productions did. However, as time has passed since we saw it, I have come to realize that this particular play unfolds its beauties slowly and quietly, in much the way the action of the play proceeds.

Jenny Sutter is about a wounded soldier returning home from the Iraq war, and her readjustment to civilian life as she grapples with living with a prosthetic leg. Her story unfolds in the context of her odyssey through the greyhound bus system and takes her to Slab City in the Anza-Borrego desert, the world's largest seasonal encampment of squatters, hobos and transient free spirits. The play proceeds in a seemingly meandering, aleatory manner, as Jenny encounters and responds first to ordinary civilians oblivious to the reality of a war they have largely forgotten, and later to the eccentric characters who inhabit Slab City. Because they share with Jenny the status of social outsiders, the latter free spirits turn out to be more empathetic and ultimately helpful to her in her struggle to adjust to returning home. Interestingly, the play makes no overt political statement about the Iraq war, resolutely focusing instead on the individual human damage inflicted on those who signed up to fight it in good faith and now must pay a highly personal price for that decision.

Because of the ensemble nature of casting at the Ashland Festival, most of the people we saw performing in Jenny Sutter also appeared in key roles in one or more of the other plays we saw. In the title role, Gwendolyn Mulamba was excellent, even though her many talents were shown to better effect in The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler (in which she played a score of roles, some of which required her to sing and dance in styles ranging from 20's rag to Italian Grand Opera). The other standout in Jenny Sutter was Kate Mulligan (who, like Mulamba, had several supporting roles in Further Adventures of H.G.). Mulligan, an amazingly energetic and versatile performer, was quite funny and moving as Lou, the eccentric vagabond who befriends Jenny at a Greyhound bus station and takes her to Slab City.

This production of Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter is being taken to Washington D.C. for performances at the Kennedy Center this summer.

Ashland (part four)

2008-05-28T21:49:00.000-07:00

The Clay Cart

In my earlier post on The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, I pointed out the significance of the fact that Ashland Artistic Director Bill Rauch chose that particular play to make his directorial debut in his role as company Artistic Director. That statement was somewhat misleading, since Rauch is also the director in this his debut season of another significant and very beautiful play -- The Clay Cart.

Written approximately 2,000 years ago by the great Sanskrit playwright Sudraka, The Clay Cart is an epic portrayal of the eternal struggle between good and evil, here represented by the conflict between the unselfishly generous and compassionate protagonist Charudatta and his nemesis -- the vicious, lustful and power-hungry Samsthanaka -- over the affections of the ravishingly beautiful courtesan Vasantasena. It is also a highly erotic love story about the (very nearly fatal) attraction between the saintly (albeit married) Charudatta and the irresistibly sexy Vasantasena. Think Kama Sutra meets Bollywood through the eyes of a modern American director working in a Shakespearean festival context, and you'll have a pretty good idea of what this production is like.

In that light, I was struck by the extraordinary parallels between this ancient play and several of Shakespeare's works. As in the case of the title character in Timon of Athens, Charudatta is a noble man so extravagantly generous with his friends and community that all his great wealth has been given away. Yet when he runs out of money, none of his former friends will help him out. Unlike Timon, however, the saintly Charudatta willingly accepts his lot as Karma, and chooses to meditate on the void rather than turn into a raving misanthrope cursing fate. That's a definite plus for this play; Timon is kind of a downer.

Another Shakespearean play that comes to mind is Troilus and Cressida. As in that play, the love story in Clay Cart is more than a little torrid, and even a bit "nasty," if you will. Vasantasena is, after all, a highly experienced courtesan, and her proficiency in the arts of love is repeatedly emphasized in the story. Moveover, Charudatta is a very married man. Yet, as the action of the play makes clear, this is entirely irrelevant; all that matters is the lovers' overwhelming desire for each other. Charudatta and Vasantasena must have each other, and that's that.

Finally, The Clay Cart very nearly becomes a tragedy like Romeo and Juliet when Vasantasena is believed dead and Charudatta is falsely accused of her murder. But at the last minute, the Indian epic turns into a very Shakespearean Romance with a quasi-magical happy ending when Vasantasena is revived and reappears to rescue her lover -- not unlike the situations in Winter's Tale, Pericles, and Cymbeline.

The most truly "exotic" and "foreign" difference between The Clay Cart and those Shakespearean plays, of course, is not so much in its costuming or the unusual names of its characters as in the decidedly non-Christian cultural assumptions underlying every aspect of the story. Most strikingly, there is absolutely no moral stigma attached to the fact that Charudatta is married to another woman (who indeed is a character appearing in the play named Dhuta), at the same time the principal subject of the play is the trials and tribulations he and the exotically beautiful courtesan Vasantasena must experience before they can enjoy blissfully untroubled sexual union with each other. From a feminist standpoint, the fate of Dhuta is more than a bit troubling. She doesn't appear to be having a particularly rewarding time of it, that's for sure.

The production is beautifully staged in what to this modern American viewer seemed a very traditional Indian style, complete with beautiful music and dancing in the appropriate manner. All roles were well played, particularly the leads -- Charudatta by Cristofer Jean, and Vasantasena by the very beautiful Miriam Laube.

Ashland (part three)

2008-05-28T20:06:00.000-07:00

The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler

Next to Midsummer's Night Dream, my biggest surprise fave at this year's Ashland Festival was The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, a relatively new play by Jeff Whitty, the Tony Award winning author of Avenue Q. It is significant that the new Artistic Director of the Ashland Festival, Bill Rauch, chose this particular play as the first one he would direct in this, his debut season as Artistic Director. That fact alone gives some indication of the importance of this play. I'm happy to say that the quality of this production is of the very highest caliber, and bodes well for Rauch's tenure.

This amazingly imaginative theater piece is a fantasy-meditation on the destiny of fictional characters in relation to the creative minds of their creators who give them life, and the theater-going (and reading) audience who keep them living for as long as they are still performed, read, and remembered. This is a really wonderful play which is well worth seeing, and I don't want to spoil it by giving away too much about its amazing twists and turns. Suffice it to say, our heroine is tired of shooting herself over and over again (by now, for over a century) in narcissistic, self-absorbed despair. Hedda longs for a way to change the course of her destiny in a new and happier direction. She therefore decides to set out to find the fiery furnace of creativity from whence she came, hoping for a "rewrite." Along the way, she (and the audience) discover a great deal about the nature of creativity, and how the fictional creations of literature affect and are affected by their audience over time. In the process, she (and we) also learn something about changing cultural stereotypes; the nature of classic timelessness versus merely transient popularity; and (somehow) even life itself and what it means to be truly alive.

Resplendent in the title role is the stunning Robin Goodrin Nordli, who not coincidentally also portrayed Hedda Gabler in Rauch's Ashland production of the Ibsen masterpiece five years ago. Nordli is alternately screamingly hilarious and genuinely moving as the unhappily married woman desperate to escape her tragic fate and find real happiness, even if it must be with her terminally boring husband Tesman. As she hurls herself passionately around the stage emoting in high tragi-comic dudgeon, she strikes poses like a classic tragedienne who finds herself caught in a Toulouse Lautrec poster. I absolutely loved this performance. Indeed, it was my favorite of any in the six productions we saw.

At the beginning of the play, Hedda awakens or "comes to" after once again shooting herself in the head ("But people don't do that sort of thing!") in the offstage, off-the-page world where fictional characters "live." She is nursed back to health (quickly -- she was never "really" dead) by her house servant, who is none other than Mammy from Gone With the Wind. In this role is Kimberly Scott, a newcomer to Ashland who originated the role in the premiere production at South Coast Repertory. Inspired by Hedda's search for a new destiny and what she learns from other more contemporary African-American characters she meets (including a wise-cracking very 21st century female police detective from Law and Order), Mammy gradually awakens to the possibility of escaping her white-created, stereotypical character and becoming a fully liberated black woman. Her journey of self-discovery and self-realization is perhaps the most moving part of this play. Scott's performance is perfect, and very nearly steals the show.

She has a lot of competition, though. One of the glories of this production is the wealth of amazing performances by the relatively small (seven person) cast, most of whom (aside from Nordli) portray more than one character. Outstanding are Kate Mulligan as, among others, Medea and Cassandra; Gregory Linington as, among others, Lovborg and Jesus Christ; Gwendolyn Mulamba as an amazing panoply of African-American characters, well known and forgotten; and, most especially, Anthony Heald (last year's Tartuffe) and Jonathan Haugen as a pair of flaming queens straight (pun intended) out of The Boys in the Band. The latter two serve as guides, companions and mentors to Hedda and Mammy as they journey toward their fatal encounter with the fiery furnace of creation.

If anyone reading this blog post ever has a chance to see The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, she or he should seize the opportunity by the throat. Better yet, go up to Ashland RIGHT NOW and see it. Judy and I have already purchased tickets to see it again in August.

Ashland (part two)

2008-05-27T13:42:00.000-07:00

A Midsummer's Night Dream

The best single word description for the current production of A Midsummer's Night Dream at Ashland is SEXY. Other equally appropriate words are: fast-paced, raucous, colorful, and very very funny. Although the production pushes the envelope quite a bit, it never falls off the table, so to speak. To the contrary, I would have to call this particular production the best I've ever seen of this frequently performed play. Primary credit goes to Director Mark Rucker, but scenic designer Walt Spangler and costume designer Katherine also deserve mention.

From the very first moment, it is obvious that this production is going for broke. Theseus (the ever-amazing Michael Elich) and Hippolyta (the reliable Shona Tucker) are ensconced on a pair of gigantic white art-deco chairs like an extremely well-heeled power couple from the Sopranos, only smarter and hipper. The young lovers -- Hermia, Demetrius, Helena and Lysander -- are so achingly pubescent their budding sexuality can barely be contained. Visually, this is manifested by the ever-diminishing amount of clothing they wear as the play progresses.

The screamingly hilarious mechanicals literally drive onto the stage in an early 1970's VW luv van and then pour out to begin the rehearsal of their play. None of these characters is presented in a traditional manner, but each of their wonderful characterizations is pitch perfect. Bottom (Ray Porter) is an aging hippy, complete with a long David Crosby mane and hearty enthusiasm to match. Francis Flute is perfectly portrayed by the diminutive Eileen DeSandre. When Quince tells Flute "he" is to play Thisbe, DeSandre brings down the house with the line: "Nay, faith, let not me play a woman. I have a beard coming." I particularly enjoyed Jonathan Toppo's Peter Quince, for once presented not as a bumbling country yokel, but instead as a provincial wanna-be stage director straight out of Waiting for Guffman.

Finally, and most shockingly, the fairies -- with the exception of Tatania (a fetchingly lithesome Christine Albright, last year's Juliet) -- are an all-male, gender-bending band of fey yet macho punks in tutus and combat boots. What can I say. Believe it or not, it worked. Kevin Kenerly -- always one of my favorite performers, no matter what he plays -- is superb as Oberon. I can't imagine a better portrayal of this role. And special kudos to John Tufts for nearly stealing the show as Puck, the sexiest fairy of them all. His evening-closing "If we shadows have offended," delivered with hand-held mike like some kind of cross-dressing Prince at a rock concert, brought down the house and made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Everybody at Ashland appears to love this show. I heard almost no negative feed back, and even the elderly couple sitting to my right was enthusiastic about the whole thing. We aren't in Kansas anymore, fer sure.

Ashland (part one)

2008-05-26T22:49:00.000-07:00

Coriolanus

Having just returned from a wonderful week spent in Ashland, the Oregon Coast and Redwood National Park in far north western California, it's a good time to give a brief review of a few of the plays while they are still fresh in my memory.

We saw all six of the plays mounted before the summer opening of the outdoor "Elizabethan" stage. These were Coriolanus, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, The Clay Cart, Fences, and Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter. Although we enjoyed everything we saw, we were really blown away by the first four plays mentioned above. I will be reviewing them in the next several posts. First up: Coriolanus.

Coriolanus is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. (I am admittedly attracted to the off-beat and under appreciated in general.) It is certainly the most political of all Shakespeare's plays, focusing as it does on the essential tension between the rights and freedoms of "the people" and the authority and power that necessarily must be centralized in and utilized by "the few" who lead and govern them. In Coriolanus, Shakespeare uses the conflict between the Roman mob and the patrician elite as a metaphor for the universal and eternal political battle between left and right, liberal and conservative, the collective and the elite, democracy and dictatorship. The brilliance of the play is that in exploring this inevitable conflict over power between the few and the many, Shakespeare takes no sides. Instead, he reveals the strengths and weaknesses of both. In doing so, he suggests that neither Rousseau nor Hobbes has a monopoly on political truth, and that the ultimate reality is simply the never ending, never resolved struggle for dominance between these two opposing world views.

Veteran director Laird Williamson (whose stunning productions of On the Razzle and Cyrano de Bergerac delighted us in the last two seasons) sets Ashland's current production in a generically contemporary world where modern street people struggle against the power of well-heeled fat cats and authoritarian militarists. The most prominent of the latter is, of course, Coriolanus himself, brilliantly played in this production by Danforth Comins. This is a huge advance from Comins' last role as Orlando in As You Like It, competent as that was. His superb Coriolanus seeths with barely contained anger and contempt for the hoi polloi, and is truly frightening when those emotions spill out. The scene where Coriolanus reluctantly goes through the motions of appealing to the people for their popular votes to elect him consul was wonderful. In Comins' portrayal, it was clear that Coriolanus was sincerely trying to be a good politician even as his contempt for the whole process (and for the people whose votes he needed) prevented him from being successful at it.

Also outstanding in this cast were two stalwarts of the Ashland stage: Michael Elich as Aufidius, the Volcian leader who is Coriolanus' nemesis; and Robynn Rodriguez as Coriolanus' mother Volumnia. Both turned in exceptionally powerful performances, perfectly complementing and not overwhelming Comins' portrayal of the central role. All other members of the cast were excellent as well. The battle scenes were fantastically staged, particularly the intense one-on-one fights (with knives in this production) between Coriolanus and Aufidius. The impact of this production is greatly enhanced by the fact it is staged in the intimate New Theater, with the audience completely surrounding and practically in the midst of the action. Warning: watch out for splattered blood!

I will review Midsummer Night's Dream in my next post.