Jean Trounstine : Italian Prison Inmates Perform Theatre Behind Bars

Italian prison inmate performing in Romeo and Juliet: Mercutio Does Not Want to Die. Photo by Clara Vannucci for The New York Times.

Compagnia della Fortezza:
Theatre in an Italian prison

Punzo says that it is not therapy that drives him but creating good theatre.

By Jean Trounstine / The Rag Blog / May 30, 2013

I've been interested for years in the Italian prison theatre company recently featured in a The New York Times report. Since 1988, Compagnia della Fortezza, the company named after the Medici-era fortress that houses the Volterra jail where the men are imprisoned, has performed a variety of Italian spectacles and tragedies.

From Alice in Wonderland, a Theatrical Essay on the End of a Civilization to Romeo and Juliet: Mercutio Does Not Want to Die, director Amando Punzo has dedicated himself to art behind bars.

The photo above is one of many in the photo essay by Clara Vannuci, an Italian photographer who has documented in amazing pictures the essence of Punzo's vision.

For 21 years, working five hours a day, six days a week, Punzo has embarked on a challenging repertoire for the company, including, per the Times, in an article from 2009, "plays based on works by Brecht, Peter Handke, and even the tale of Pinocchio." He says that it is not therapy that drives him but creating good theatre.

I too felt that way during the run of eight plays I directed behind bars. The idea was not to go after building self-esteem -- although that happened -- but to go after revealing the truth of the play and getting the women to be the best they could be at portraying their roles.

We did plays at Framingham Women’s Prison in Massachusetts that expanded the women’s horizons and gave them access to literature -- ranging from Shakespeare to Aristophanes.

Here is Dolly dressed as a Suffragette in Lysistrata, the famous play where women refuse to have sex with their spouses until they end war:

Scene from Lysistrata, performed at Framingham Women's Prison in Massachusetts.

Punzo says, “It’s not about giving the inmates an outlet or a recreational break. It’s work.” The side effects of theatre programs behind bars are self-respect, community building, and a love for the stage.

In the United States, it is a struggle to get plays inside, in fact to create anything worthwhile. The goal of prison is repression. The goal of education is expansion and opening one’s mind to the world. The goal of art is freedom and beauty.

But the Italians love art so much, the rumor goes, that prisons would rather risk an arrest than not show their performances to other Italians. Many plays tour and many prisoners work outside during the day. And believe it or not, over half the 205 prisons in Italy have acting companies.

Compagnia della Fortezza has won some of Italy’s most prestigious theatre awards and houses a gourmet restaurant where prisoners work and serve food to the public.

The 2009 production of Alice in Wonderland, a Theatrical Essay on the End of a Civilization (photo below) was loosely based on Lewis Carroll’s masterwork, but the text wove in soliloquies from other authors, in this case Shakespeare (predominantly Hamlet) but also Genet, Pinter, Chekhov, and Heiner Müller.

Inmates perform in Alice in Wonderland, a Theatrical Essay on the End of a Civilization. Photo by Sondro Michalles for The International Herald Tribune.

While Punzo, who has an acting background, creates a new play every July, his dream is to create a stable repertory company, with a winter season and a permanent theater, which would allow him to pay the actors. Ah Italy!

Photographer Vannuci relayed in the Times article how she asked a prisoner why no one tried to escape. The response reflected how much theatre has the potential to change lives: “Why should I run? Where would I go? Twenty years I’ve lived in prison. Now I have something to live for. Life has meaning.”

[Jean Trounstine is an author/editor of five published books and many articles, professor at Middlesex Community College in Massachusetts, and a prison activist. For 10 years, she worked at Framingham Women's Prison and directed eight plays, publishing Shakespeare Behind Bars: The Power of Drama in a Women's Prison about that work. She blogs for Boston Magazine and takes apart the criminal justice system brick by brick at jeantrounstine.com where she blogs weekly at "Justice with Jean." Find her other contributions to The Rag Blog here.]

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THEATER / Jonah Raskin : Zayd Dohrn's 'Outside People'

Cast of Outside People at the Vineyard theater in New York. Inset photo: playwright Zayd Dohrn.
We’re all outsiders now:
Zayd Dohrn’s new play, Outside People

The play -- which is part situation comedy, part soap opera, and part prophecy -- plays with and deconstructs stereotypes of Americans and Chinese.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / January 5, 2012

Zayd Dohrn’s new 90-minute drama, Outside People, doesn’t advertise any of its influences -- and that’s not a criticism. Authors aren’t obligated to make disclosures to audiences about the individuals, the creative works, and the sources that impact their imaginations.

An earlier play, Reborning, that was reviewed in The Rag Blog in 2011, seemed to bear the imprint of his parents, Bernardine Dohrn and William Ayers. His newest work might have been shaped in part by the experience of his wife, Rachel Dewoskin, who lived and worked in China and appeared in a popular Chinese soap opera entitled “Foreign Babes in Beijing.”

Outside People reminded me when I saw it recently at the Vineyard theater in New York -- where it’s currently on stage -- of two books from the 1950s -- Colin Wilson's The Outsider and Eugene Burdick’s and William Lederer’s The Ugly American.

Dohrn’s 21st-century version of the outsider and the ugly American is named Malcolm and for most of the time that he’s on stage he’s holed up in a hotel room in Beijing, China, all dressed up in jeans and a T-shirt and with nowhere to go but back home, after he’s caused a little mayhem among the locals.

Unlike the American characters in The Ugly American, he isn’t loud and ostentatious and unlike the hero of the novel he doesn’t come to understand and appreciate the needs of the Asians he meets. Dohrn’s Malcolm is shy, quiet, neurotic, and needy in an obnoxious sort of way. He doesn’t look and see or hear and understand.

A twenty-something-year-old kid from New Jersey, he has a diploma from Stanford and a passport from the U.S. State Department that gives him political clout and makes him sexier than he’s ever believed possible. His college buddy, Da Wei, an Americanized Chinese entrepreneur, has brought him to Beijing to repay a social debt incurred while the two young men were undergraduates. It seems that once upon a time Malcolm was outgoing and hospitable.

Two women -- the babes of the play -- round out the compact cast. Xiao Mei is a Chinese woman from the countryside who has come to Beijing to work and hopefully escape her lot in life as the daughter of peasants. Samanya is the privileged daughter of an African diplomat from the Cameroon who speaks Chinese and feels Chinese, though she doesn’t look Chinese.

They’re all outside people in their own individual ways. Malcolm is way outside his own stomping grounds and his comfort zone. Da Wei, or David as he’s called, is an outsider in his own country after life at Stanford. Indeed, with his foul mouth and his sexual vocabulary -- he tells David to stop using “pussy repellant” -- he seems more American than Malcolm.

Da Wei is the connector in the group. Samanya is the spark plug who supplies much of the electrical current that keeps the drama on edge. Xiao Mei provides the sex and the sincerity, too. Malcolm offers the key line in the drama when he asks in a state of bemused innocence, “Are we all using one another?” The word “we” is crucial here. Malcolm is all about Malcolm; he’s all about me; “Do it for me,” he tells Xiao Mei when he invites her to go back to America with him.

As the play unfolds, and his layers are peeled away, it’s apparent that he’s really incapable of taking responsibility for his own actions and unable to make “I” statements all, of which makes him not only ugly but dangerous when it comes to personal relationships.

Ambiguity infuses many of Dohrn’s plays and it infuses Outside People. Xiao Mei seems innocent enough; she cries real tears and her heart seems to be broken at the end of the play, but she also appears to be using Malcolm as a stepping stone out of China and into her own version of the American Dream -- whether she knows it or not.

Da Wei claims to be Malcolm’s friend, but he also tries to seduce Xiao Mei behind Malcolm’s back, and while he brings the two lovers together he also pushes them apart. If he’s meant to be emblematic of the new Chinese economy, than we’d all better watch our own backs or we’ll lose the shirts that are on them and everything else we own.

The play -- which is part situation comedy, part soap opera, and part prophecy -- plays with and deconstructs stereotypes of Americans and Chinese. It moves along very quickly with punchy one-liners and real sizzle. The actors -- Matt Dellapina as Malcolm, Nelson Lee as Da Wei, Li Jun Li as Xiao Mei, and Sonequa Martin-Green as Samanya -- are all good for 90 minutes in a play that has no intermissions.

Portions of the dialogue are in Chinese and with no translation into English. One scene between Da Wei and Xiao Mei even takes place only in Chinese. The audience becomes the outsider here and has to become the insider by listening to the tone of voice and by watching the body language and the facial expressions of the actors.

We’re all outsiders now, Dohrn seems to be saying; we’re all pushed and pulled here and there with little if any psychological or existential advantages attached to the status of the outsider. Once upon a time -- back in the 1950s when Colin Wilson wrote the classic The Outsider -- it was supposedly cool and hip to be an outsider.

But not now, or so Dohrn’s “Outside People” seems to suggest. Better hold on to your American passport if you don’t want to be on the outs permanently. Moreover, if you want a kind of insurance policy it might be a good idea to learn to speak Chinese and to try to feel at home in Beijing, even if you’re a long way from home.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of For The Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman, and The Radical Jack London. A professor at Sonoma State University, Jonah is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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THEATER / Jonah Raskin : The 'Reborning' of Zayd Dohrn

Scene from Zayd Dohrn's Reborning at the San Francisco Playhouse.
The Reborning of Zayd Dohrn:

A fascinating piece of theater from the son of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers that speaks to our time now and where we've come from as a society...

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / May 16, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO -- What do you do if you’re a young, rising playwright and you’re the son of Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers? You write plays about parents and children and about parenting.

That’s what Zayd Dohrn, the oldest of three sons raised by Dohrn and Ayers, has done in his one-act play Reborning, which is on stage off, off, off Broadway at the San Francisco Playhouse.

If you don’t live in the city or nearby it might be long way to go to see a 75-minute play that races along, but if you can go in the next month or so it’s a fascinating piece of theater that speaks to our time now, and that also shows where we’ve come from as a society.

Part comedy, part tragedy, Reborning mixes satire with real pathos, and makes for laughter and for tears. The play features only three characters: a young woman who has been abandoned by her mother; an older woman who has lost a baby and wants a replacement; and a young man who brings them together tenderly in a kind of family.

The older woman might in fact be the biological mother of the younger woman, but the play leaves the relationships ambiguous, as though to say that we can choose or not choose our parents and our children, and make the families we want to make.

The narratives we tell ourselves and one another are all-important. Nothing is fixed or unalterable in Zayd Dorhn’s world and everything is possible. Secrets come to light, the past is peeled away, and scars are healed almost overnight.

It’s tempting to read Reborning as an autobiographical work, and there’s no doubt that Zayd Dorhn drew upon his own emotional crosscurrents to write his play. Growing up an underground kid with fugitive parents wanted by the FBI gave him plenty of sensational material and dramatic, real life characters to mirror.

Still, his characters aren’t copies of his parents or their contemporaries. Unlike them, his fictional people are pulled to art rather than to ideology, and express themselves in creative work rather than in political struggle.

Reborning takes theatergoers through a kind of emotional hell that includes dumpsters, death, and denial, but it’s a therapeutic work that ends on a note of reconciliation. The characters clash with one another; they shout and they argue, but they don’t hit, shoot, and bomb, and the play offers no big blow-up.

The final scene is an unclimactic kind of climax, but nonetheless genuinely heartfelt. It reflects a world in which mistakes are unmade, and seemingly irreconcilable differences are resolved peacefully.

The tensions between the two women -- the mother/daughter figures -- drive the play, but it’s the male character who brings them together. He’s also the comedian of the piece and he supplies the sexual energy that can be as funny as it is steamy.

In the first scene of the play, he walks around on stage holding a huge phallus in his hand and that irreverent image sets the tone for much of the play. Could the male character be inspired by his father and could the women be inspired by his mother? Maybe so.

Zayd Dohrn was in the audience the evening Reborning had its premier in San Francisco -- the celebrity in the crowd. His parents were in the audience, too, though no one seemed to recognize them. They might still have been anonymous underground fugitives out on the town for the evening, not the infamous Dohrn-Ayers duo in the media at the time of Obama's election.

Like many of the sons and daughters of former Weather Underground fugitives, Zayd Dohrn has come of age, and put the underground behind him. “Reborning” seems an apt metaphor for his own evolution as a playwright who dramatizes the theater of the human heart.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman, and teaches media at Sonoma State University. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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Marc Estrin : Infiltrations

Skulker by R. Crumb.
INFILTRATIONS

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / January 11, 2011

Last week, I wrote about what I consider politically unearned infiltrations supporting rampant consumerism. I will not sing Hallelujah in the mall.

Infiltrations, however, do have real potential for thought-provoking events.

When I was in theater grad school in the 60s, everybody was all hot for Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, in which the audience was made to shit in its pants, and paradoxically for Brecht's teaching plays which asked the audience to think cooly and carefully about society's givens. We young directors were concerned with breaking down barriers between audience and actors -- new kinds of staging, new kinds of scripts.

But for me, the prior problem was one of "audience" itself -- that there should be people who buy (usually high-priced) tickets, sit comfortably in chairs, applaud, then go out for a meal or a drink to socialize, and perhaps, perhaps, "discuss the play."

Too compartmentalized, too boxed in, too unengaged with reality.

So I gathered a group interested in practicing Infiltrations -- theater pieces which would not be perceived as such, but which would just be reported at home as "something interesting that happened to me today."

Here are two such Infiltrations to give you an idea of what we were up to, one in an emporium, and one in a smaller store. Next week I will discuss the ethics involved.


Cost Plus and American imperialism

Cost Plus is a mammoth import store on the San Francisco waterfront which caters to tourists and Bay Area bobos by supplying them with hand-wrought goods from around the world -- from inexpensive mass-produced trinkets to costly one-of-a-kind curiosities. It is self-help, with no sales personnel on the floor. We began to wonder about the flow of goods that went through the store, and after getting some information from one of the buyers we came up with the following piece.

Five of us, looking as straight as possible, dispersed throughout the store as customer aides. We approach people who were inspecting possible purchases. A typical dialog went like this:

US: may I help you?

CUSTOMER, generally unsuspicious: No, thank you.

US, waiting a bit, watching over customer's shoulder: Isn't it amazing how we can bring you such an intricately carved box for only $4.99?

CUSTOMER: Why, yes it is.

US: Do you know how we can do it?

CUSTOMER: No.

US: Well, the man who carves this box -- he's very good at it, he can do two a day -- gets 25¢ a day for his work.

CUSTOMER: Oh?

US: Yes. You see, there's a lot of famine and disease in India, and he has to work for whatever he can get.

CUSTOMER: Oh.

US: He has no choice.

CUSTOMER: Uh-huh.

US: And since we control the world economy, more or less, we can decide on the right price.

Silence.

Yes, and you have to realize that what you pay includes the markup for the buyer, the warehouse, the shipper, the import duty, and our own small overhead -- so it's really an incredible bargain.

Thoughtful, non-hostile silence. This was usually a turning point: either the customer began reacting to what we were saying or else we carried it further.

I think it's right -- don't you -- that we in this country should be able to benefit from people's work around the world? After all, we give them a market. They'd starve without it. And we can have these really nice things. I mean Americans work really hard, right? We have to put up with so much -- like the war and everything -- we deserve these kind of beautiful things.

People who work hard should be rewarded. Don't you think so? And the natives? They're hard workers too, but I mean 25¢ a day is a lot for them, right? Did you know that although we're only 6% of the world's population, we consume 60% of its natural resources? That just shows -- we're sort of 10 times ahead of everybody else because were willing to work hard and bring home the bacon.

Etc., etc. Eventually these customers drifted away with an embarrassed “Thank you.” But none of them bought the items they had been looking at.

After an agreed upon two hours, we all met outside the store to trade stories. We were never caught, and the customers, too, would have their stories to tell.


City Lights Ripoff

Lawrence Ferlinghetti started the City Lights Bookstore on $500 in the early 50s; it has since become one of the most complete paperback shops in the Bay Area. The store has been busted several times for selling radical or obscene material, and has an open door policy toward its customers: the police are never called.

Once, City Lights was ripped off for $8,000 worth of books and went that much in the hole. This seemed to me like a typical example of Movement bullshit -- brothers undoing each other in the name of "liberation" or conflicting ideologies -- so we decided to explore our own and the customers’ attitudes toward ripping off City Lights.

During rehearsal, the group rejected playing "roles" in favor of exploring each member's own position. We lined up pretty heavily for the legitimacy of ripping-off. I was one of the few spokesmen against. But the balance worked out in performance, since most of the customers at least started off by defending the store.

The piece took an hour to an hour and a half to develop (we did it three times) and was done with the cooperation of the management and, as it turned out, at their expense. It's hard to record the complexities and meanderings of the performances, but the salient points are as follows:

Beat 1

One of us, previously agreed, steals a book, and hides it in his pants. Very quietly, a young woman (one of us) goes up to him and says she doesn't think he ought to do that here. His very quiet response is "Mind your own business, lady." Totally private so far.

Beat 2

The woman retreats but keeps her eye on the guy. Some minutes later, he attempts to stash another book, and the exchange begins again, just as quietly. This time the guy is a little more pissed off, and the exchange ends with a little louder than necessary "Fuck off!" For the first time, real customers are aware of tension somewhere in the store.

Beat 3

I wander over and ask the woman what's happening. She reluctantly and quietly informs me that some guy is trying to rip off books. I approach him very quietly and ask him why doesn't he do that at Doubleday's or Brentano's. He begins to get uneasy and tries to terminate our encounter as quickly as possible, until another one of us, overhearing, supports the thief by asking me,

"Hey, what are you, a cop or something? Let the guy do his thing."

Beat 4

By now it's apparent to the thief that things aren't working out as planned. But on the other hand, he has support, so he doesn't split. For the first time I chastise the thief publicly.

"Hey man, look, why don't you go down to Doubleday's and rip off the book if you need it? Why rip off your brothers?"

"Brothers, my ass! This place is the fucking pig establishment."

This is the first theme to be taken up -- it generally called up a lot of customer support for the store. Other topics for discussion we planted among the 10 to 20 customers are:

1. Who are brothers; who is the enemy?
2. Are there alternatives to a retail book store?
3. Are "liberals" like Ferlinghetti and City Lights just greasing the capitalist machine?

Our group, more vocal now than at first, pushes the balance way over to the thief's side. This helps justify his sticking around. He's not an outlaw but is acting within the mores of the local population -- and this brings an emotional response from the customers. Each time, someone offers to buy him the book or take up a collection. We follow their trips wherever they go.

Beat 5

1 get more and more pissed off with what I consider poor analysis. I station myself on the steps so I can be heard by everyone, wait for a lull, and say to the thief,

"All right, that's all."

"What do you mean?"

"You're not taking those books."

"Oh yeah? Why not?"

“'Cause I'm going upstairs with you and tell Shig [the guy at the desk] you've got them."

A new uproar! Even the customers don't like it. (There are a few who come over to quietly tell me they agree with me and think I should do it, but no one defends my action publicly.) I am accused of being a pig, of laying my trip on other people, of exceeding my rights.

"What is this, the second grade, you're gonna tell the teacher?"

I argue briefly that when this man rips off City Lights, he's ripping me off (I need the store), and that I intend to defend myself. From that time on, I am generally silent, stubbornly waiting for the thief's exit.

Beat 6

One of us calls for a "rip-in," and tries to get customers to liberate books together. So far, only our own group has done this publicly, although it's hard to tell what walks out when we do.

Beat 7

Confrontation at the desk. The first time we did it the day clerk got completely flustered. He had been told what was happening and was asked to act in any way he wanted. He couldn't get it together, and three people walked out with books. That evening we confronted Shig who, with some kind of invisible karate approach, retrieved two books. A third was grabbed by a customer at the door.

The next night we had a big argument at the desk. Shig surprised us by saying, "Take the books," and several people did so -- to a lot of customers' anger. Shig just felt that that was his prerogative. That really set off some of the people who had been defending the store for the last hour downstairs.

We still haven't resolved for ourselves the implications of our positions and actions. We know the piece is credible and sets a lot of people thinking and talking (and stealing?). But when someone in our group presented me with the complete Beethoven string quartets as a present, I had to send Shig a check before I could enjoy it.

[Marc Estrin is a writer, activist, and cellist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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Marc Estrin : Spanking Your Inner Child

Inner Child. Image from Integral Options Cafe.
Have you spanked
your inner child today?

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / November 7, 2010

I'm just beginning the week run of rehearsals and performances in the pit orchestra for Peter Pan. The Lyric Theater production will be extremely professional as usual, and attended by full houses of an enthusiastic community.

I play in these musicals not because I think the dramatic art is great or the music profound, but because they are such wonderful examples of communities coming together -- 200 people working for months without pay -- to produce a high-spirited event which several thousand people will enjoy.

Nevertheless, I have to admit being irritated by the very thought of Peter Pan. The unthinking enthusiasm with which his motto, “I won't grow up," is greeted reflects the destructive childishness, and embrace of that childishness, epidemic in the American public.

And here I'm not thinking of the occasional comico-pathetic gray-hair who earnestly exhorts me to honor my inner child as he or she does, and then trips blithely away in some psychic equivalent of tie dyes and bellbottoms. Rather I am concerned with the rampant embrace of the trivial and superficial.

This pattern has some innocent manifestations such as the recent adult enthusiasm for various children's books, business-suited women carrying them proudly underarm and assuring questioners that they are “really for adults, too.” The infantilization of the reading public -- bad for serious authors, but not all that sinister. Far more so is the dumbing down of news and other information, and the substitution of infotainment and celebrity.

I was reminded of this recently when Obama walked on stage, pre-election, at the Daily Show. The audience cheered and clapped -- but in a way far beyond the polite, enthusiastic greetings routinely offered to even villains and semi-villains. The adulation went on and on. Obama tried four times to stop it, and finally just stood there smiling and waving occasionally.

Now remember, Jon Stewart's audience is made up mostly of lefty liberals who enjoy his satirical critique of the powers that be.

Nevertheless, this very audience offered up an unstoppable standing ovation for a man who stands against everything they presumably stand for: a man who is currently answerable for the worldwide death and starvation of millions; the many domestic losses of home and job; the destruction of climate and disarmament conferences; the ever-increasing expenditures on ever-increasing wars; the now commonplace practice of torture; the undercutting of public healthcare; the shielding of executive crimes past and present; the hoarding of executive power; the resurgence of the nuclear industry; the embrace of Israel's brutal policies in Palestine; the ever-increasing inequality of wealth; and now, post-election, the inevitable strangulation and death of democratic government.

For starters.

Yet the children cheered him, and cheered him, and cheered him, because he is the president and they were in the same room, behaving not unlike swooning teenage girls at early Beatles concerts. Clap if you believe in fairies. I was embarrassed for them.

Ice Cream Boy. Image from IceScreamer.

Burlington, Vermont, where I live, is the birthplace and main home of Ben & Jerry's ice cream. Their motto, plastered all over bumper stickers, and inside their Burlington store, is IF IT'S NOT FUN, WHY DO IT? I've often pondered this question. And I've pondered alongside it another bumper sticker common in our area: Emma Goldman's face next to the line "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.”

Is this a food fight between bumper stickers, or are they finally on the same side? Are they both exhorting us to honor our inner children? I decided to look further into the Goldman quote, and this is what I found -- in her autobiography, Living My Life:

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.

I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister.

f it meant that, I did not want it. I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things. Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world -- prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal. (p.56)

This statement feels significantly different from “IF IT'S NOT FUN WHY DO IT?," for behind the joy and exuberance, Emma embraces a larger ideal to be joyful about. The playfulness of Ben & Jerry's, its flavors, its graphics, is more about honoring one's inner child. and putting out a lot of money -- with a smile -- for an ice cream cone.

I must say that the figure of Peter Pan is more complex then his motto song “I won't grow up” might imply. In Barrie's book, and even in the musical, Peter is a semi-tragic figure, sentenced to repeated loss of the friends who do grow up to leave him, responsible for the parental pain of losing the children kidnapped, and the nostalgic regret of losing one's childhood.

Peter is as much the villain of the piece as its hero. He is boastful, selfish, distructive, and unreflective. And naturally, the children abducted to Neverland give him a standing ovation at his every appearance.

While I may be a churlish old grouch, I really do think that we, the kidnapped, had better begin to honor our inner adults, and not continually embrace childishness -- usually at the expense of others, and ourselves.

Hope is not a method, nor is belief in fairies.

[Marc Estrin is a writer, activist, and cellist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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Marc Estrin : Slaughter of the Innocents

Image from picsdigger.
SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / June 6, 32010

Toward the end of Bread & Puppet's marvelous Christmas Story, after the news spreads of Jesus's birth, King Herod picks up the phone:

"Hello, Third Army? Go straight to Bethlehem and kill all the children."

In the next scene a large soldier marches in, in full battle array, and knocks on the door of a tiny puppet house.


"Good evening, Ma’am. Do you happen to have any children in the house?"
"Oh, yes, of course," the little hand-puppet says. "Hansie and Mariechen.”
“Can you bring them out, please?”
“Oh certainly, Sergeant. But...why?
"We want to kill them."
"Oh."

The mother then tells the sergeant an amazing story that he'll "never believe, but..." about how the children were just taking a bath and then -- by accident -- they were washed down the drain. The sergeant, stupefied, weeps.

"Oh, lady, that's really terrible. Allow me to extend the condolences of the entire Third Army."

He marches off to the next house where he finds that the six children happened to have just marched off six weeks ago and haven't come back yet.

"Men, King Herod isn't going to be too pleased about this."

The next house turns out to be the Bethlehem Nursery, "And we have 55 sweet, little darlings fast asleep in their sweet little beddy-byes," says the Nurse out her window, "AND YOU GORILLAS ARE WAKING THEM UP WITH YOUR SCREAMING. You better go play soldier somewhere else, or I'll call the authorities."

"Lady," says the sergeant, "we are the authorities."

The Slaughter of the Innocents is not an aspect of the Christmas story dwelt on during our consumerist, Hallmarky season. In fact, it's not dwelt on at any other time -- whether the Innocents be the Iraqi, Afghani, Pakistani, or Palestinian dead, the humanitarians aboard the Mavi Marmara or the recipients of its aid, Rachel Corrie herself, crushed by an Israeli bulldozer, or the newly oiled seabirds, fish and fishermen in the Gulf.

"I'll call the authorities," the public says, only to discover that "We" -- the perpetrators -- "ARE the authorities."

It was the authorities who set up the enrichment of the rich and the impoverishment of the rest. It is the authorities who promote the mass murders of the military industrial complex with their endless wars and genocides, and who pocket the cash and power. It is the authorities who enable the destruction for profit of the environment, and call for economy on collapsing infrastructures, concrete and human. Is current "authority" any less than a sociopathic criminal enterprise?

The moment captured at the end of the Bread & Puppet Christmas Story provides the insouciant watchword of our time: "Lady, we are the authorities."

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

Soldier standing at attention (1914). Photo by A.W. Barton / Archives of Ontario.

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Marc Estrin : Endgame (Sam-I'm-Not)

Endgame. Image from Wired.
SAM-I'M-NOT

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / April 20, 2010

Endgame -- that's us. At every level, checkmate threatens -- political, environmental, cultural. Samuel Beckett's 104th birthday last week brought to mind a chapter I had written in The Education of Arnold Hitler. Arnold, new at Harvard, lands the part of Hamm in a university production of Beckett's masterpiece, and along with it takes a Beckett class with Stanley Cavell. If you don't know the play, here's a good introduction -- or a reminder if you do.

Arnold’s spring ‘70 semester consisted primarily of Endgame. His other courses -- French, Biology, the History of American Fascism -- faded into the background in the intensity of its dark light. Odd as Hamm was, it was easy to “get into” him, so many were the nodes of correspondence. That there was to be “no more pain-killer” was frightening, yet somehow bracing. It meshed with Nell’s observation that “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” And unhappiness seemed to be the name of the human game, as it was of Arnold’s. Hamm asks Clov if his father is dead.

(Clov raises the lid of Nagg’s bin, stoops, looks into it. Pause.)
Clov: Doesn’t look like it.
(He closes the lid, straightens up.)
Hamm: What’s he doing?
(Clov raises the lid of Nagg’s bin, stoops, looks into it. Pause.)
Clov: He’s crying.
(He closes the lid, straightens up.)
Hamm: Then he’s living.

Then he’s living. If he’s crying, he’s living. What a definition, Arnold thought. For all its weirdness, this may be the most realistic play ever written. “The end is in the beginning.” Surely that must be true. But what would that mean for him? A successful career as some kind of a star? Or the end as in the very beginning, when George né Hitler, accursed progenitor, fornicated between the one and a half legs of Anna Giardini, and created another neighing of the H-name. “Scoundrel!” Hamm cries, “Why did you engender me?”

Nagg: I didn’t know.
Hamm: What? What didn’t you know?
Nagg: That it’d be you.

But he did. George did know. He just didn’t think. And what is he thinking now, my once-father? Two short letters since I’ve been here. Four unanswered. Has he forgotten me?

“We let you cry. Then we moved out of earshot, so that we might sleep in peace...

Arnold shuddered in recognition.


For all the joy and labor of nightly work, the highlight of the six weeks was a visit, late in the rehearsal schedule, by Stanley Cavell, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Professor of Philosophy, literary and film critic, and Ruby’s faculty advisor on the Endgame project -- her senior thesis. Ruby, along with Ed Gould, her stage manager, took the night “off” to sit around at Cavell’s house with the cast -- Arnold S. Held, Hugh Laffler, the physicist dwarf, and Ted Bair, Clov, a slight and wrinkled graduate student at the Divinity School, to discuss the play.

The initial discussion was somewhat diffuse. Cavell, served up some mean hot chocolate on the cold, late February night, and asked the students what they thought about the play. Ruby held back. She and her teacher had already been over her feelings -- how Hamm’s highhanded cruelty, Clov’s inability to escape, and Nell and Nagg’s garbage cans reflect a world darkened by the shadow of Auschwitz. Arnold began to speak of the chess aspects, how Hamm’s tour of the stage and return to center is like a king imagining the boundaries of the pathetic nine-square territory he commands. Hugh observed that it was not only the chess pieces against each other, or against God, but Beckett forcing us to play the very game we play against the world all our lives -- trying to understand -- a game we are invariably fated to lose.

The group talked about the language of the play, the verbal surface of universal disrespect, the dialogue among people barely still human. Were the characters human? Cavell wanted to know. Ed, a biology major, remarked that of the genus Homo, all its species, with one exception, were extinct. If we had the others for comparison, he thought we might see what difference sapiens makes -- whether these four qualified. If they did make it, they only barely did so, so mutilated were they by whatever catastrophe they had been through. Ruby felt that the characters were not recently destroyed, but were playing out, in especially visible ways, the eternal limitations of the race.

“All right,” Cavell said, but what does it all mean? What does it show? Where are we? None of this should affect your acting, but where are we?”

“In some kind of shelter,” said Hugh. “A bunker.”

“Maybe after an atomic war,” added Ed. “I’m sure Beckett still remembered those blackout nights during the bombings.”

“And -- 1957? -- what about duck and cover?” All the students laughed at the atomic attack drills they had done in elementary school.

“It’s possible,” said Cavell. Anything’s possible. That’s the maddening, wonderful thing about the play. No metaphor plays out; there are no neat interpretations that entirely fit. Beckett is a tease and a torturer, negating and contradicting any line you can seize upon. His denial of closure produces some very complex effects.”

“If you frustrate closure, you keep everything open,” Ted insisted. “That’s why I think it’s a fundamentally optimistic piece. Dr. Cavell, do you have Beckett’s Nobel Prize citation from last year? There’s something in there...”

Cavell pulled it from the shelf, and handed it to the young theologian.

“Here," Ted said. “The Committee gave him the prize for his quote ‘combination of paradox and mystery, containing a love of mankind that grows in understanding as it plumbs farther into the depths of abhorrence, a courage of despair, a compassion that has to reach the utmost of suffering to discover that there are no bounds of charity.’”

“I think that’s the only way his sponsors could push it through,” said the dwarf. “You think they would offer a Nobel Prize in despair?”

Arnold listened wide-eyed and vulnerable.

“Wait,” said Cavell. “Let’s go back to the question of where the play takes place.”

“Professor Gilman thinks the shelter is the interior of Hamm’s -- or someone’s skull -- the two little windows, the greyishness, the id being served by the ego, the repression of memory.” Ruby had taken French lit from Gilman.

“What do you think?” asked Cavell.

“I don’t want to come down in any one place. Trish designed the set exactly as Beckett demanded -- no more, no less. A bare interior, two small windows, etc. Non-committal.”

“Well, non-committal is appropriate, given Beckett’s infinite intentions. But I do want to share with you where I think it is and what I think is going on.”

Arnold took out a pad for notes -- things that might help his characterization.

“Put that pad away. Nothing I say should affect the acting dynamic you’ve all already discovered. That’s why we had this session so late in the game.”

Cavell paused to refresh the hot chocolates.

“Beckett may want to be inscrutable, but the fact is that his explosion reverberates within the medium of Western culture. So whatever his intention, his work makes all sorts of things jiggle in the soup -- and the thing that jiggles most for me is the tale of Noah in Genesis. What do tiny windows, telescopes, ladders and gaffs have in common?”

“They’re all ship-type objects.”

“Exactly. What ship is this? All right. I’ve already said. The Ark. What disaster has just happened?”

“The flood.”

“Where are we now in the world?”

“In the Ark.”

“No. Where is the Ark?”

“One window looks out on land, and the other on water.”

“So?”

“So we’re at some shore. Beached.”

“Who is beached? Who is Ham? One M.”

“One of Noah’s sons.”

“The one who saw him drunk and naked,” added the Divinity Schooler.

“Why did God make the flood?”

“To punish sinful humanity.”

“But what about Noah and his family?”

“They were the remnant -- and the animals, too -- from which all life was to spring again.”

“Where is Noah? Where is his wife?”

“In the cans?”

“Maybe. What was Noah’s curse on Ham after he saw his father naked?”

“He would have to be a servant to men.”

“No,” said Ted. “That’s what everybody thinks. But if you check, you’ll see that his curse was that Canaan -- Ham’s son -- would serve.”

“And who is Hamm’s son? Two Ms.”

“Maybe Clov.”

“And what does Clov do?”

“Serve.”

“OK then. A little loose, but a plausible set of reverberations. We’re in the Ark, beached, after the flood -- with the destruction of the the entire world outside. Will you grant me this much, so far?”

“Sure,” said Arnold. The rest muttered in agreement.

“Now we get to the interesting part. In Genesis the Lord commanded Noah, father of Ham, to build an ark for pairs of all species to insure the continuance of creation. But here Hamm makes every effort to guarantee that his refuge will support no further life, not even fleas or rats. The play is about an effort to undo, to end something, and in particular to end a curse, the most ordinary curse of man -- not so much that he was born and must die, but that he has to justify what comes between -- that he is not a beast and not a god: in a word, that he is a man, and alone.

“‘Something is taking its course,’ Clov says.” Arnold didn’t quite know why he offered that. Cavell nodded.

“Something is taking its course. Hamm’s contribution -- imitating God -- is to see the end of all flesh. But God, unlike Hamm wanted to leave a remnant. Why?”

“Because he couldn’t bear not to be God!” asserted Ruby, the Jewish feminist.

“The answer is unclear,” said Cavell. “To Hamm, as well as to us. What does our Hamm think?”

“He can’t understand why he was chosen,” Arnold responded. “I can’t understand why I was chosen.”

The students took this as a simple donning of character, but Cavell seemed to sense otherwise. “God has reneged on his responsibility,” Arnold continued. “That’s what Hamm thinks.”

“Is that what you think?” asked Ted. The group waited. Arnold was silent.

“My feeling,” said the professor, “is that for Beckett what must end is the mutual dependence of God and the world: this world, animated by its God, must be brought to a conclusion. Hamm’s strategy is to paint the rainbow gray, to undo all covenants and to secure -- once and for all -- fruitlessness.”

“To perform man’s last disobedience,” Hugh the dwarf injected, taking off on Milton. “What a radical move!”

“To uncreate the world,” Arnold thought, “we’d have to become as gods. If we just stay human, we’ll go on hoping, go on waiting for redemption. What was pictured in Godot. This is really a step beyond.”

“Are you ready for such disobedience?” asked Cavell.

“Why not?” the production’s Clov asked. “It’s what my character says: ‘I can’t be punished any more.’”

Arnold wondered whether he had reached his own limit of punishment. As if in response, Ted, the theologian said,

“The main audience member is God. Beckett’s object is to show God not that he must intervene, or even bear witness to our pain, but that he owes it to us, to our suffering and our perfect faithfulness, to leave forever, to witness nothing more. Not to fulfill, but to dismantle all promises for which we await fulfillment. “Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief” now means Help me not to believe.” Even Cavell was impressed with Ted’s courageous leap of thought.

“Solitude, emptiness, nothingness, meaninglessness, silence,” Ted continued, “ -- these are not the givens of Beckett’s characters but their goal, Hamm’s heroic undertaking.”

“Hamm’s problem -- my problem -- is that where there’s life, there’s hope. I have to be able to kill hope. It’s only middle game.” Arnold seemed determined.

“You get the prize for suffering in this play,” said Ruby, oblivious to Arnold’s track. “What a curse to be singled out like that.”

Arnold: “The end of the world is threatened, redemption is promised -- neither is carried through -- and we’re left holding the bag. The real earth is blotted out, sealed away by this universal flood of meaning and hope -- Splash, splash, splash, always in the same spot in my head. But only a life without hope, a life without meaning, without justification, without waiting...” Here he paused.

“Is free from the curse of God,” Hugh added softly.

Cavell got up and came back with more chocolate as the students stewed in this toxic brew. “How about a life without hot chocolate?” he asked, and quickly realized the inappropriateness of his levity. In self-castigation he sat down.

“Pascal said that all the evil in the world comes from our inability to sit quietly in a room.”

The remark floated in the silence like a pearl onion in hot chocolate -- it didn’t quite fit, but it was the last thing everyone sucked on.

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

Endgame. Photo by Donna Bister / The Rag Blog.
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FILM / Peter Watkins' 'La Commune' : A Conceptual Tour de Force

PETER WATKINS' LA COMMUNE

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / March 29, 2010

The Paris Commune, that is -- a citizens' revolt against a royalist government, the organizing of that revolt, and the crushing of it by government forces, all in the course of three spring months in 1871.

After staring at a screen for 345 minutes, my wife and I -- completely revved -- looked at one another, and both asked the same question: "Are we doing enough?" What an outcome from seeing a film we expected to tax our endurance.

Peter Watkins' La Commune (Paris 1871) is unlike any other political film I've seen. I've previously been appalled by suffering depicted, awed at Davids fighting huge Goliaths, frustrated, and angered, and stressed. But never before have I felt so personally challenged to think acutely through my beliefs, to measure my own action against my ideology.

Watkins achieves this effect via an astonishing conceptual move which greatly expands the potential for the art of political film. Assembling a group of 200 non-professional actors, he asked them to research their roles in the great insurrection, and to so understand the history of their characters as to be able to speak for them in interviews, in modern language, perhaps, but accurately, and with passion.

His players thus had to grapple with six different personae, three personal and three collective:

• the historical figures, individually, and as class members at a defining moment of history;
• themselves, as actors presenting those figures, playing them out while simultaneously judging them, a la Brecht;
• themselves, as themselves, as individuals come together for an ambitious, artistic/political project, and also as groups, say of men vs. women.

In the course of making the film, these 200 people had to build their own commune, to establish decision-making groups around their work, and the agenda of the project itself.

What we see is startlingly unrealistic. We are shown around the "studio" by a pair of commentators from "Commune TV," dressed, as is everyone, in nineteenth century garb, but utilizing hand-held mikes for their reporting.

Written commentary flows throughout the film, describing historical events in great detail; the viewer comes out well instructed as to actual history, sometimes with modern comparisons. In general, the rhythm proceeds from these historical introductions to the scenes described, action and interviews, with frequent cuts to contrasting reports from effete anchors on National TV.

Thus, La Commune is also about the media: some news for communards, different news for the haute bourgeoisie. Commune TV itself is also critiqued, with one reporter wanting to self-censor to better serve the struggle, and the other arguing for objectivity.

In the course of scenes and interviews, we experience the difficulty of creating a just society in the midst of competing world views, strategies at odds, and varying levels of commitment -- and the threat of external force. At the same time, we come to understand the individual struggles which must occur at such potentially world-changing moments.

Beyond the designated enemy, who else is the enemy? Does a revolution require a guillotine?

Once the social/historical background is laid, the radical nature of the project emerges with increasing intensity, as Commune reporters start to intercut their interviews with different kinds of questions: Not What are you, the character, thinking?, but what are YOU, the actor, thinking about what's going on? What IS going on -- not for the character you are playing, but for YOU? Would YOU do today what your character did in history?

Such questioning begins gently, so that the actors can be reflective about their answers, but finally it intrudes, overwhelms, fiercely, passionately, right at the peak of the barricades. In the feverish pitch of their historical action, almost hysterical actors are badgered, mercilessly, about their personal reality.

The film emerges as a theater of cruelty, as these amateurs try to access such schizophrenia in the midst of their characters' life and death struggles. The level of emotional and intellectual intensity is unmatched, especially compared to the smoothness of normal, professional productions.

And it is here -- in this harassment -- that the film becomes uniquely interactive. For viewers, rather than settling into the problems of the characters portrayed, are caught up in the inquisitorial demands of the interviewer, and absolutely MUST ask themselves the kinds of questions my wife and I were forced to face. Paradoxically, it is via such a non-realistic theatrical contrivance that Watkins achieves total breakdown of aesthetic distance.

Astounding.

During the final third of the film the momentum becomes so great and potentially exhausting that the audience is given occasional breaks as the cast comes together to discuss the actual making of the film, the contemporary and personal politics (especially sexual) that got swept under the rug, or hidden behind the historical story.

Yet, though the tempo goes from allegro agitato to andante, one's interest is further intensified by meeting the individuals involved, and comparing their experiences with one's own.

For theater and film folks, La Commune is an outstanding primer of Brechtian technique, with a compositional strategy reminiscent of the Living Theater's Paradise Now, or Peter Brook's Marat/Sade. The emergence of Artaudian effects from Brechtian theory is nowhere better seen.

Yet the prime importance of this work is as an organizing tool. If political action in your community is plagued by low energy or lack of commitment, a viewing of La Commune should solve that type of problem, for no one can leave it at the same ethical or intellectual energy level as before. The political difficulties depicted are daunting; some might find them depressing. Yet witnessing them so clearly can warn us of our own, contemporary, traps.

This is a film of first rate importance for current political struggle.

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

Find La Commune in a three-disc set from Amazon.com.

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Marc Estrin : Happy Birthday, Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht, 1948. Photo from Deutsches Bundesarchiv / Wikimedia Commons.
Of Poor B.B.:
Bertolt Brecht speaks from the grave

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / February 11, 2010

[German playwright, poet, and theatrical director Bertolt Brecht was born on February 10, 1898, and died August 14, 1956.]

Bertolt Brecht lies in his grave. The alarm goes off and off. Time to get up again. Evil-doing comes like falling rain. Get up. We need you.

In the grey light before morning the pine trees piss
And their vermin, the birds, raise their twitter and cheep.
At that hour in the city I drain my glass, then throw
My cigar butt away and worriedly go to sleep.

No, up. Not sleep. Get up. It’s time. Fifteen days the rain is falling. The birds have stopped their cheeping. Cheep, BB, cheep at least. Twitter. Piss. Someone will hear. Someone will understand. Here’s my crust of bread. Eat, BB, eat, then speak. Get up and speak.

Like one whose blood flows from a wound and who awaits the doctor: his blood goes on flowing. So do we come forward and report that evil has been done.

Yes! Good. Come forward. Report. Report on the good times that starve the millions and poison the world.

The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out ‘stop!’

Stop! (My voice is small.) Stop!

When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.

And rain also in winter. And the tree limbs snap, and the wires break, and people huddle under what blankets they have, and the circus band blares out its tunes, and some there cackle and others smirk. I am discouraged, BB. What will become of us?

Of those cities will remain what passed through them, the wind!

And then? When it all comes crashing to the ground, what then? What shall we do?

-- Remember:
Hatred, even of baseness
Contorts the features.
Anger, even against injustice
Makes the voice hoarse. Even we,
Who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness
Could not ourselves be friendly.

Bertolt Brecht wrote poems and essays and plays. He spoke up for the poor. He said, “First, people have to be able to feed their faces -- then they can think about morality.” He was number one on Hitler’s hit list. We need his voice today.

Here -- from the grave -- is what he says:

Nowadays, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties. He must have the COURAGE to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed; the KEENNESS to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed; the SKILL to manipulate it as a weapon; the JUDGMENT to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and the CUNNING to spread the truth among such persons." - Bertolt Brecht, Five Difficulties in Writing the Truth

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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Harold Pinter and Eartha Kitt : Artists and Rebels

Both lived long, productive, exciting lives and went out celebrated by their peers and countless fans; none of us could reasonably ask for more than they wrung out of life.

By Chris Thompson / December 26, 2008

See ‘Remembering Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter: Is Our Conscience Dead?,’ by Ann Wright; ‘Art, Truth and Politics,’ by Harold Pinter; ‘Eartha Kitt versus the LBJs’ by Frank James; and Video of Eartha Kitt singing ‘Everything Changes,’ Below.

It's naturally standard practice to mourn the dead, but we find ourselves checking that impulse when it comes to Eartha Kitt and Harold Pinter. The fact is, both lived long, productive, exciting lives and went out celebrated by their peers and countless fans; none of us could reasonably ask for more than they wrung out of life. Kitt started life picking cotton in South Carolina by day and being beaten by her own family by night; she ended it as one of the most elegant sex symbols, songstresses, and dancers to charm the modern world. Along the way, she threw the Vietnam War right in Lady Bird Johnson's face and made her cry. Nixon put her on his enemies list, a badge of honor in most people's books. Pinter carved out an entirely new sensibility in modern drama, got his name turned into an adjective, and spent his remaining years using his arsenal to dice up George W. Bush quite nicely. And both beat the actuarial tables, so there's that. A tip o' the hat to the both a youse.

Source / East Bay Express

Remembering Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter: ‘Is Our Conscience Dead?'
By Ann Wright / December 26, 2008

On the news today of the death of Harold Pinter, the winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, I remembered hearing his Nobel Laureate lecture/acceptance speech. I was in London in December 2005, speaking at the annual Stop the War conference when Pinter delivered his speech - not in Oslo, as Pinter was very sick and could not travel, but in London via TV link.

I was amazed and thrilled that he chose to use the Nobel Prize platform and devote a huge portion of his speech to shining an international spotlight on the tragic effects of the past decades of US foreign policy and particularly, on George Bush and Tony Blair's decisions to invade and occupy Iraq, on Guantanamo and on torture.

Pinter's Laureate speech question, "Is Our Conscience Dead?" is most relevant today when three years after his acceptance speech, "Art, Truth and Politics," Bush, Cheney, Rice and other administration officials are either trying to rewrite history or, as in Cheney's case - purposefully revealing his role in specific criminal acts of torture and daring the American legal system and people to hold him accountable.

Following is the part of Pinter's lecture that speaks to the invasion of Iraq, torture and Guantanamo - and our collective and individual conscience.

Art, Truth and Politics
By Harold Pinter

[The following is excerpted from Harold Pinter’s Nobel Lecture delivered on December 7, 2005.]

The United States no longer... sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant.

It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.

What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days - conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead?

Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what's called the 'international community'. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be 'the leader of the free world'. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally - a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man's land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture.

What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You're either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.

The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort - all other justifications having failed to justify themselves - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.

How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand?

More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they're interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.

Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the American general Tommy Franks.

Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. 'When do I get my arms back?' he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn't holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television.

The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.

I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as 'full spectrum dominance'. That is not my term, it is theirs. 'Full spectrum dominance' means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.

The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don't quite know how they got there but they are there all right.

The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity - the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons - is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and show no sign of relaxing it.

Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force - yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.

I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man's man.

'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it.'

I hope you will decide that yes, we do have a conscience and that you will join the millions of Americans who say we must hold accountable those who have committed criminal acts while in government - the policy makers as well as the implementers.

Write and call the new President and the new Congress and demand official investigations into war crimes and other criminal acts committed by members of the Bush administration and join us on Inauguration day to remind the new President of his responsibilities.

Source / truthout

Eartha Kitt sings ‘Everything Changes’ from Mimi le Duck



Eartha Kitt versus the LBJs
by Frank James / December 26, 2008

Say what you will about Eartha Kitt, the American original of a performer who died at 81 on Christmas Day, she certainly knew how to disrupt a White House event.

One of the best Kitt stories ever has to be how she gave First Lady Lady Bird Johnson the blues in 1968. A petite woman, Kitt had an out-sized ego and just as sizable chip on her shoulder, the latter the result of an unhappy childhood she often talked of (a biracial child born out of wedlock in 1927 small-town South Carolina. You get the picture.)

The White House story was captured by David Murphy in a biography of Mrs. Johnson called "Texas Bluebonnet: Lady Bird Johnson."

As the president was contemplating his future, Lady Bird went on with her official duties and hosted a Women Doers lunch on Jan. 18, 1968 that was to focus on crime. Singer and actress Eartha Kitt was invited upon the recommendation of Sharon Francis and Liz Carpenter since Kitt had testified to Congress in favor of the President's anti-crime legislation. When President Johnson entered the room, Kitt confronted him, "Mr. President, what do you do about delinquent parents, those who have to work and are too busy to look after their children?" He told her that Social Security legislation was just passed that provided millions of dollars for daycare centers. Kitt was not pleased but Johnson told her those were issues for the women to discuss at the lunch.

During the question period, Kitt stood up and confronted Lady Bird, "Boys I know across the nation feel it doesn't pay to be a good guy." She moved into (sic) closer to the First Lady and said that boys don't want to behave for fear of being sent to Vietnam saying, "You are a mother too though you have had daughters and not sons. I am a mother and I know the feeling of having a baby come out of my guts. I have a baby and then you send him off to war. No wonder the kids rebel and take pot. And Mrs. Johnson, in case you don't understand the lingo, that's marijuana.

Lady Bird was proud to match her stare for stare and Sharon Francis said she sat ready to stand up in between Mrs. Johnson and Kitt since Francis was closer than the Secret Service. After Kitt finished her tirade, Betty Hughes, wife of the New Jersey governor, rose to her feet and recalled how she had lost a husband in World War II and had sons in Vietnam and said, "I think that anybody who takes pot because there is a war on is a kook. These young people are still juniors. They have to be regulated. I hope we adults are still in control." After the wife of the Washignton mayor, Benetta Washington, who, like Kitt, was African-American, spoke up and said we must channel our anger in constructive manners, Lady Bird spoke:

"Because there is a war on, and I pray that there will be a just and honest peace -- that still doesn't give us a free ticket not to try to work for better things -- against crime in the streets and for better education and health for our people. I cannot identify as much as I should. I have not lived the background that you have nor can I speak as passionately or as well, but we must keep our eyes and our hearts and our energies fixed on constructive areas and try to do something that will make this a happier, better educated land." The room broke into applause. Kitt's confrontations with Mrs. Johnson lead (sic) to a slow decline of her career and she told Newsweek shortly after the luncheon, "if Mrs. Johnson was embarrassed, that's her problem."

As a Lady Bird sympathizer, biographer Murphy clearly had little use for Kitt.

A more dispassionate writer might have observed that Kitt showed a rare courage for an American, especially a black one in 1968, to be as confrontational as she was with a first lady.

The White House has a way of intimidating people, even those who are famous and powerful in their own spheres.

But she obviously wasn't overwhelmed by the trappings that surround the presidency. She spoke truth as she saw it to power. And she did that knowing it wasn't going to help her career, that she ran the risk of being blacklisted, as it were.

Still, it didn't matter. For that alone, she deserves to be remembered.

Source / The Swamp

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Producer Marc Shaiman on Prop 8 - the Musical (With Video!)

The musical itself is the brainchild of Marc Shaiman, the composer of the film and stage musical “Hairspray,” as well as some of the filthier songs in “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.”

By Dave Itzkoff / December 4, 2008

In just one day of online existence, the Funny Or Die video “Prop 8­ — The Musical” has received more than 1.2 million hits. The comedic song-and-dance diatribe about the California ballot initiative to define marriage as existing only between a man and a woman stars a cast of dozens, including John C. Reilly, Neil Patrick Harris, Maya Rudolph, and Jack Black as Jesus Christ.

Assembled in a week, it’s also the result of a process that began when Mr. Shaiman, who splits his time between New York and Los Angeles, alerted his friends and colleagues that Scott Eckern, the musical director of Sacramento’s California Musical Theater, had donated money to a Yes-on-Prop 8 campaign. The proposition has already passed, and Mr. Eckern has since resigned, so what has Mr. Shaiman gained from this video? He discusses the creation of “Prop 8­–The Musical” in a Q&A below.

How did your mass e-mail message about Scott Eckern and the California Musical Theater end up spawning this video?

I sent an e-mail to a lot of people, anyone who’s in my phone book, and said, “Can you believe this guy?” I’d rather almost not talk about him and that situation anymore, because he’s certainly gone through enough. But that e-mail, one of the people it went to was Adam McKay [a co-founder of FunnyOrDie.com]. He wrote me back, basically, just saying, “Why don’t you write a song about it for Funny Or Die?” Which was like, the slapping-my-head moment. Oh yeah, why didn’t I think of that? Or why didn’t I do that in the first place?

It took a few weeks to calm down enough to be able to find the humor in it all. So once he planted that seed in my head, I basically went the next day to the piano and started to write – a week later we were filming it.

Is this the first time you’ve created a viral video for the Internet?

I’m so old, I can’t remember. To this extent, certainly. I have done things that have ended up on the Internet. Luckily, nothing sexual. Yet. But the night is still young.

How do you feel, given that it took the passage of Proposition 8 to motivate you to create a video opposing it?

In my credit, it says, “Written (six weeks too late) by Marc Shaiman.” I mean, yeah, it’s totally bittersweet. Barack Obama’s ascension just had us all so giddy. We were thinking of how to film it, and I said, “Well, maybe that first section should be all of us on a hill, with poppies, and it snows and we’re put to sleep, and then the Proposition 8 people are looking through the crystal ball, like the Wicked Witch of the West in ‘The Wizard of Oz.’” Because that’s what happened. We stupidly allowed ourselves to be lulled into a sense of, everything’s fantastic now, look – everything’s changing. And this couldn’t possibly be voted into law. This is just like some little pesky thing that we’re swatting at, and it will go away immediately.

How did you react to the news that Mr. Eckern had resigned from the theater?

There’s certainly nothing joyous about being partially responsible for a man resigning from his job. I mean, I did not ask for his resignation, nor would it be my place to ask for someone’s resignation. He resigned, though, and I was part of that, and that is a very heavy weight, and I don’t take it lightly. But it has certainly opened up our eyes, and made me get off the couch and out on the street with a picket sign, for the first time in my life. And it felt fantastic.

So this experience has made you more of an activist?

Yeah, I was marching in New York, and that was just the greatest experience. And of course this video is just a viral picket sign. And hopefully funny. I hope that doesn’t get lost. I hope that’s what most people get out of it.

Source / Arts Beat / The New York Times

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