STAGE: Evocative Portraits of Iraqi Women

Nine Parts of Desire
Written and performed by Heather Raffo
Directed by Joanna Settle
Arena Stage
Through Nov. 12

By Alexander C. Kafka

Heather Raffo's Nine Parts of Desire has received rave reviews on its path from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2003 through London and New York on its way to D.C. What might read like hyperbole turns out to be simply accurate reporting. Raffo's one-woman dramatic portrait gallery of Iraqi women in the midst and wake of two wars is an astonishing theatrical tour de force. Richly imagined, poetically written, superbly acted, and masterfully directed with the aid of a first-rate technical team, it's not to be missed. It will leave you emotionally wrung, politically disoriented, and artistically dazzled.

Raffo, a Midwesterner with an American mother and Iraqi father, started concocting the performance in 1993 on a trip to visit her dozens of relatives in Iraq. Some of these encounters became a master's thesis for her M.F.A. in the acting program at the University of San Diego. She has developed and updated it since, from its New York production under the guidance of director Joanna Settle.

To describe what it is, perhaps it's best to start by describing what it's not. Its approach is not journalistic in writing or interpretation. We aren't hearing transcriptions, but characters; not impersonations—though in voice, accent, carriage, and mannerism, Raffo's portrayals are exceptional—but melded types and histories. Nor is the play just a tribute to heroic women—though it's often that too. These are flawed women—a politically compromised, narcissistic, maritally unfaithful painter favored by Saddam Hussein, for instance; an emigre in London who's fled violence and oppression right into a whiskey bottle.

It's not a plain leftist political cri de coeur, either. "In '58 everyone who was intelligent was communist," pronounces the London emigre. But her politics are more conflicted now, and so, for certain, are the play's. We hear of an American bunker-busting bomb killing hundreds of innocents in a shelter, and of the dire genetic consequences for Iraqis of American depleted-uranium weapons. But we hear just as much about Saddam's sons and henchmen beheading women the dictator made into his prostitutes, or setting dobermans upon a stripped, honey-slathered out-of-favor girlfriend of Uday's, or forcing a mother to see her infant devoured by starving cats. If there's a clear indictment of America, it's more of our blundering gigantism, military and otherwise, our compartmentalized world consciousness, and our self-limiting routine and superficiality. "People they work out to the war on three channels," says the Iraqi-American New Yorker who seems to be at least in part a stand-in for Raffo. Says the painter, in explaining how she couldn't leave her war-torn Baghdad: "What are you creating with your freedom? I am more free than you."

And finally, it's not a linear narrative, though there are traces of story arc spotted fleetingly like the traces of flying shells in night-vision green. The first character we meet—an older woman mending old souls through the washing of old shoe soles in the river—warns that there are holes in those soles, and in her feet, and in her story. And that's true. For, as I said, this is a portrait gallery more than a traditional play. More than a sketch pad, mind you. More like the translucent, unfocused figures of the painter's watercolors (she is among the most vivid characters, perhaps, because she is emblematic of the artistic strategy and vision of the production). She says, "With oil, you just paint over what you've done." (The associations with that oil paint are with an oil economy and heavy-handed foreign and military policy seeking to redo and undo in single bold gestures.) Watercolor, on the other hand, is never black and white. Figures are never utterly distinct from their backgrounds or surrounding people or objects. Nor are Raffo's portrait subjects here.

The title comes from a seventh-century imam: "God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one part to men." And it is these women's sexuality writ large that unifies them over borders, time, country, sect, and circumstance. In the painter's case, it is sexuality as lust and the freedom to lust. To be free to be with whom she wants, to be free of being taken by whom she doesn't, and perhaps most of all to be free of judgmental assumptions—Arab or Western, religious or secular urbane—about that freedom. She wishes to be free, also, of saintly expectations. "I'm a good artist," she says in her matter-of-factly cape-flinging, cosmopolitan way, "I'm an OK mother, I'm a miserable wife."

A cheerfully forthright Bedouin character's desires are more idealistic—to be with her one true love. And if, in so doing, she has to discard the last couple men she thought were her true loves, so be it.

The woman who gives us a tour of the shelter where more than 400 innocents died is, in this context, sexual in a more fundamentally biological and philosophical way. She gives her name only as the Mother of Tomorrow. Tomorrow was her daughter, one of the victims of the incineration. The dark overtones abound. For in her no-nonsense description of the tragedy, in her remembrance, she is the mother of tomorrow who sustains the images of an Iraqi life that could be sweet and normal, the kind of images that wars erase. But she's also the mother of tomorrow in that others, if not she, might also harbor the bitter resentments that could lead to tomorrow's escalations and retaliations.

My quibbles with the script: One might wish a little less contrivance in the 'N Sync-dancing teen's discovery of her disappeared father's journals, or a little more clarity in the distinctions between the older Baghdad women.

But forgive me as I gush a little about Raffo's talents as an actress.

As that same Justin Timberlake-smitten teen, she evinces a lively girlishness even as the school-deprived character describes her heartbreaking education in the sounds made by different weapons from America and Russia. As a doctor bemoaning the number of deformed babies being born (apparently because of remnants of depleted-uranium weapons) and her legless husband at home, Raffo cuts our consciences to the quick. Contrasting Iraqi healthcare in its heyday to its state now, the doctor says, "What are we now? We're the experiment."

Depicting the Bedouin woman, Raffo's high, quavering voice, heavy posture, and beckoning conversational hand gestures made me think of a young Streep, and "a young Streep" is a phrase I weigh like precious metal. How Raffo has kept up these performances year after year is a gripping mystery in itself—you worry for her even as you applaud for her. Though it doesn't sound, from an excellent profile in today's Post, like that's where she's headed, I can only wish Raffo a long rest around Thanksgiving followed by a dipsy role in a light living-room comedy.

Settle's direction wisely relaxes into the rich moments, and with the virtuoso immediacy of lighting designer Peter West and sound designer Obadiah Eaves, tears through the transitions like the breathlessly turned pages of a quality graphic novel or the scene-change "wipe" of a film. Antje Ellermann's set is authentically artful and artfully authentic, using water, distressed tiled floors, scaffolding, battered and broken soot-bordered walls, sandbags, and rugs to mirror a variety of physical and psychic locales. Kasia Walicka Maimone's layered costumes enable Raffo to grow and shed her textile skins with the necessary alacrity and character conviction.

Whatever most of us Americans create with our freedom, Raffo has created a stunning piece of art with hers. I can only imagine the D.C. run will add to her list of awards and nominations. When the applause dies down, though, will we take all from Nine Parts of Desire that we've been given? The painter character says of America and Americans—with equal parts satisfaction and pity—"We have you chained to the desert." Will we become wiser there—it happens sometimes in books, after all—or merely more dizzy and desperate?

Photo by Irene Young, courtesy of Arena Stage

STAGE: Lost in Translation

The Foreigner
By Larry Shue
Directed by Stewart F. Lane
Olney Theatre Center
Through Oct. 22

By Alexander C. Kafka

Enter the theater for The Foreigner and you'll pass a sign warning that the production involves fog and haze. Does it ever! And that's aside from the effects. The plot's built on fog and haze, and so's the development, and so's the outcome.

Two Englishmen, an amiable military explosives expert named Froggy (Field Blauvelt) and his shy friend Charlie (JJ Kaczynski) come to a fishing lodge in the rural Georgia outpost of Tilghman County. Froggy's in the area on business and has lodging elsewhere, and he's brought Charlie along, supposedly as a research assistant, but really just to give the poor bloke a break from his dire straits at home—his wife is fatally ill yet has urged him (however unselfishly) to take some time for himself. Charlie, who is socially awkward even under familiar circumstances, wants to be left entirely to himself during his stay at the lodge. Froggy arranges this, in a somewhat improvisational manner, by explaining to his pal, the lodge's owner Betty Meeks (Rusty Clauss), that Charlie is a foreigner, but Froggy gives no specifics, hinting that they're top-secret.

Betty, who is getting on in years, hasn't traveled, and is feeling down and not a little provincial, is thrilled by the guest's exoticism. She explains Charlie's linguistic innocence to the ex-debutante Catherine Simms (Lindsay Haynes); to her beau, the goodly Rev. David Marshall Lee (Clinton Brandhagen); to Catherine's slow-witted brother, Ellard (Ben Shovlin); and to the malicious property inspector Owen Musser (Delaney Williams). Immersed in a stew of overheard confidences and intrigues involving family inheritances, municipal skulduggery, religious duplicity, and the Ku Klux Klan, Charlie finds himself at first helpless, then drawn, to make sense of and influence them, acquiring, as he puts it, a personality in the process, and a new pseudo-Slavic language in which gok means yes and blit means no.

This sounds like rich ingredients for an irresistible farce, and nothing would please me more than to report that it is—but it isn't. Shue, a playwright and actor, died in 1985 at age 39 in a plane crash in the Shenandoah Valley, and I wish I could say that he'd left us with a comic gem. If he did, The Foreigner isn't it. That's not to say that it's awful—it's certainly not that either. Its wit hovers at a couple clicks above quality sitcom, and as a habitue of quality sitcoms I don't shrug that off. Whether it merits the undoubtedly handsome, conscientious treatment Olney is giving it under the direction of Broadway veteran Stewart F. Lane, not to mention audiences' time and money, is another question—and one I'm hesitant to answer. When The Foreigner played off-Broadway in 1984, critics were unenthusiastic but viewers gung-ho, enough for a 685-performance run.

It's not too hard to see how that split might have occurred. The Foreigner plays with timeless notions of the innocent, frolics in the seas of constructed language and quick, head-spinning absurdities, and downplays the threats of racism and religious radicalism in a manner that must have been winning in the Moral Majority days of Reagan's first term and that remains pertinent if not fresh. I associate its dramatic tool kit with the British—I'm thinking of Stoppard's Jumpers and Frayn's Noises Off, among other works—and maybe it's telling that it's two Brits that come to Georgia, even though Shue was inspired to write the play by experiences he'd had in Japan. That The Foreigner Osterizes these exotic motifs into a palatable American smoothie might explain why audiences found it accessible but refreshing. That its wit is pretty pallid in comparison to the British imports they were seeing could shed light on critics' coolness. Just a theory.

Beyond—or maybe short of—all that, I'd add the reservations that the work's setup is torturously forced, and that its comedy and menace blend poorly. Would that Klan members and their ilk were as easily freaked out as here, and that xenophobia were so quickly identified, quarantined, and treated.

For all that, I can't imagine a more amiable and sturdy production of the play than this one. The ensemble work is tight, the timing snappy, the tensions roiling. Blauvelt's Froggy is all have a glass on me and Bob's your uncle. Clauss's Meeks is fragile but tough, and pleasantly pixilated. Haynes's Catherine levels her loneliness and disenchantments at us like an air gun. Shovlin, as Ellard, is mighty sympathetic as the innocent's innocent to Kaczynski's Charlie. (They have a fun monkey-see, monkey-do table-manners scene.) Williams's Owen is like the lost scary Georgia cracker brother of George Wendt's Norm in Cheers. And Brandhagen's too-good-to-be-true Reverend is just that, and dives from saintly to snakey in good form. Kaczynski's Charlie, in the center of the real and figurative storms, is also fun. His pseudo-Slavic tongue, with bits of Italian and even a classic French film title thrown in for good measure, sounds, as he "acquires" his English, a bit like Baryshnikov on speed. In general, though, the cast's accents seemed a little Acme thick and sometimes roamed (like when Brandhagen got upset).

James Kronzer's lodge set is grand, and technical director Sean Culligan's storms and explosions also top-notch.

And yet that's a lot of firepower for a few chuckles. So can I recommend it? Blit. Should you seek further counsel beyond the critical agonizing? Quite possibly, gok.


Photos by Stan Barouh, courtesy of Olney Theatre Center. TOP: JJ Kaczynski as Charlie, Ben Shovlin as Ellard, Field Blauvelt as Froggy, Rusty Clauss as Betty, and Lindsay Haynes as Catherine. LOWER: Delaney Williams (top) as Owen and JJ Kaczynski as Charlie.

TV: 'A Small Revolution'

Steven Delano, and his documentary, measure up.


No Bigger Than a Minute
Directed by Steven Delano
P.O.V. series
PBS
Oct. 3

Until he was 35, Steven Delano never met anyone else who, like him, was born with a form of dwarfism. And it wasn't until 13 years later that he decided to search for some answers about an abnormality that he'd at once taken in stride and tried to ignore. That quest is the subject of his forthright and captivating film, No Bigger Than a Minute, a phrase taken from a barker's patter at a Coney Island sideshow.

Delano's career had always been behind the camera, yet he explains in his unassuming narration that dwarfism is "a kind of imposed celebrity status that dwarves don't ask for but maybe there's something to learn from."

He describes feeling like he's in his own constant film whether he likes it or not, so maybe it was natural that he'd seize control of that sentiment and actually be in his own film. Interestingly, though, his ambivalence on that point permeates the project. For while he does weave the narration around his story, in the course of the fleeting 57-minute production he constantly darts to interviews with others. He flirts ironically with the notion of his anti-glamourous glamour, even having a portrait photographer shoot him posing in period costume and stage setting, for instance as the 17th-century Spanish painter Velázquez's Dwarf Don Sebastian de Morra. But then his lens quickly zooms off for another soundbite from actor Peter Dinklage (The Station Agent); Joe Gieb, a clown and former president of Little People of America; actress Meredith Eaton; guitarist Adam Stark; and so on.

In other words, the project itself may say more about Delano than anything in the project--it is half prideful I'm small and I'm proud, and half self-effacing professional humility. And while that combination is appealing, it leaves you wanting to know more about Delano than the sketchy details we learn especially about his childhood experiences and his seemingly level-headed, encouraging parents.

We watch him head from his Denver home to his native New Bedford, Mass., where he interviews his mother, Josephine, about the days after his birth when she realized something was off. He asks her point blank whether, in retrospect, if she'd know his condition, she would have aborted him. She says no, convincingly if not enthusiastically. From his deceased father James's drinking buddies and from Steven's cousin, Kris, we picture a dad willfully undeterred, telling one and all that "You play the cards you're dealt." Delano recalls fondly that after childhood hip surgery, when he was in a body cast, his dad pushed him around the neighborhood in a modified baby carriage just to get him out of the house. And some of that can-do attitude wore off early on. As Kris puts it: "You never felt sorry for yourself. I never saw sadness in you."

But we see sadness in him, not an obvious tearful kind, but a quiet kind as he ventures to a Little People of America convention in Portland, Ore., attended by a couple thousand little people, or dwarves, or people of short stature--nomenclature remains a charged and tricky subject for all involved. Had he sought out those of similar stature early in his life, he might have found a life mate, he says. He was in love once, he confides. He is alone.

A filmmaker is naturally interested in images and representations. So the documentary is chalk full of film and TV clips featuring little people. The interviewees, like Joe Gieb, the clown, and comedian Tanyalee Davis (who refers to herself as a different kind of "eye candy") talk about how show business is at once a natural way to make a living for someone who is stared at all the time anyway, and a sort of socially embraced way to celebrate oneself. Actress Meredith Eaton, however, says she wishes that writers would think more creatively about potential roles for those of short stature and that actors with dwarfism would be more selective in their career choices.

Clips like 1938's exploitation cowboy comedy The Terror of Tinytown remind us that in our treatment of those with dwarfism, we've had no place to go but up. Scenes from Austin Powers (1997) and Me, Myself, and Irene (2000) evoke more mixed feelings, for they're surely exploitative of their little-people characters, but often at the even greater expense of their regular-sized characters, and certainly no more so than they are of, say, the British, or state troopers. The films Frankie Starlight (1995) and The Station Agent (2003) are held up as exemplary character studies, in part because they cautiously explore the dwarf characters' sexuality, and others' sexual response to them (either despite their stature or, at least in part, because of it).

Delano relates the extreme responses people have had toward him--like the crazed lady in the Boston subway who mistook him for the killer puppet Chucky in the horror series and started kicking him in the shins, or the folks on the bus who couldn't hold themselves back from hugging him. Again, it appears that Delano's belated fascination with himself and his medical condition is ambivalent--he is both appalled at the extreme associations people have when they see him, and thrilled at the extreme creativity that he and others have developed to celebrate and combat physical circumstances. He quotes the filmmaker Werner Herzog in that vein in reference to his 1970 movie Even Dwarves Started Small, and Delano self-consciously seeks out not the standard talk-show little people who are ostensibly just like the proverbial you and me in every other way, but, instead, at least some of the ones who don't blend in so well and don't want to, like the self-confident and foul-mouthed Louisiana rapper Bushwick Bill.

Whatever else he is, Delano is not Michael Moore, as highlighted in a somewhat forced sequence when he interviews Randy Newman about the songwriter's '70s hit, "Short People." Newman asks Delano if the filmmaker's going to turn him into this documentary's version of Charlton Heston in Moore's Bowling for Columbine. Newman shrugs off the song's success, explaining (yet again) that he couldn't imagine anyone taking the lyrics' persona as anything but crazy and satirical. It's a non-issue, and Delano politely demures and heads off.

Delano pokes fun at himself, in college days going off to preppy Providence College thinking that, hey, the right polo shirt and no one will notice that he's a little small and club-footed. "Whoever said the clothes made the man never shopped for his in the boys' department," he quips.

At a Denver hospital, after all these decades, he decides to determine through genetic testing which of some 200 kinds of dwarfism he has. "If you're a freak, it's advantageous to know what kind of freak you are," he explains. Then--and I love this--he has a composer base the documentary's theme tune on the mutated DNA code. Somewhere in heaven, John Cage is grinning. There's some talk by a doctor, by a scientist/author, and by media critic Dan Kennedy, whose daughter is one of the 50,000 Americans with some type of dwarfism, about whether genetic testing portends an end to the evolutionary variety that includes such mutations. That important and resonant question is left hanging in the air.

What isn't, though, are the societal revelations, and Delano's personal ones, about living with differences.

"A small revolution has happened over the course of my lifetime," he says. "Things have changed. It's OK to be a dwarf."

And I, at least, hopefully imagine a sequel, in Delano's mental film of his own life if not in another actual documentary, in which he is the romantic star, at the Little People of America convention, perhaps, or just at some Denver club, dancing with the second great love of his life--whoever that may be, and however tall.

-Alexander C. Kafka

SHELF LIFE: Light's 'Gravity'

Gravity's Dream: New Poems and Sonnets
By Kate Light
The West Chester University Poetry Center
79 pages
$14.95

By Alexander C. Kafka

I wish the marvelous poet Kate Light every happiness. But meanwhile, her every unhappiness and mixed joy are at least being channeled into some fine work, as evidenced in her latest volume, which stays true to her history of smart, lyrical, but also accessible verse.

Many of these poems focus on her ambivalent and troubled passions. They speak eloquently of rocky love affairs, romantic and musical. (Light is also a professional violinist who evidently feels somewhat chained to her instrument.) Other poems explore the legacies of childhood experiences, particularly family neuroses and perceived slights. All have the fine rounded textures of work that has been refigured and polished repeatedly and painstakingly. They are priceless psychic figurines, and their creation is also a subject Light explores.

"If you speak, or blink, commit something new to ink,/it becomes ... mind-of-its-own ... a kind of True," she writes in "Poem." "You are a piece of it, and it of you./You woke suddenly, and it awakened too."

The nexus between poetry and love is surveyed in "Tale." Comparing poets to gloriously ornate peacocks, Light writes:

This is where the poets would be blessed--
their words score highest, and consummate.
Oh I see. So what they lack in fancy fins or tail,
dancing ability, height, whatever you care
to make the list, they soar up the sliding scale
with wings of words; and how well they share
determines if their objects of desire advance to mate
with them, come away with them, stay with them, or leave.

That is one of many things one may believe.

Light, as you can see, brings a playfulness to her imagery, and to her wording. She most directly revels in it in the wistful "Zeug-O-Matic."

These foolish things happen and remind me of you.
It is a far cry and country.
You have a big day ahead and heart.
There is a lack and time.
There comes the train and strangest moment.
I like her style and anyway.
Then the sea sighed.
You miss the boat and him.

The melancholy twist of that last line sneaks up on you.

That "Then the sea sighed" bounces back to us as the title of a later poem in which Light demonstrates that if her imagination plays mostly in the fields of her own heart, she's not blind to the savage larger world, or at least not blind to how so many of us are blind to it.

We've got military strength and we have shown it;
still we want our quiet nights and shopping days.

Weddings have wound up in many places,
all around the world and right here in our hands;

only to see the features blasted off of faces,
only to find the bodies buried in the sands.

Nor does Light idealize the arts, comparing the life of a musician to that of a tortoise, "rigor-mortised to your back's your livelihood/and all your world good,/your disposition./... I've been for years/that turtled, that burdened, bundled;/rooted to wood that's rootless/and nestles on my neck,/leaving its bruises and calluses, its speck .../wordless, ruthless."

It gets more bitterly ambivalent still (think of this next time you hector your child into practicing):

I gave up twenty years or so
on spec, to try to make the darn thing go.
I cannot even list
the sum of all the things I missed,
travel, money, fun, and straying,
though a greater fun was had by playing--
all that eternal repertoire.
That is what I did it for.

But now I rest the child well,
unwrest the case, the crown, the shell.

The same antagonisms flare up in "Sabbatical."

The book's most moving offerings, though, are its love poems, many in sonnet form. There are odes to damaged lovers and damaged loves in the title poem and the remarkable "Nicknames; or, Undoing the Snaps." There are expressions of patience with a fickle love, like "Seeing You Begin to Consider Loving," and the pained cries of love unrequited, as in "The Self-Taught Man." There are tales of bad romantic timing, like "She Can't Outrace the Lightning Arrows."

In "Absence," a woman wonders why, if absence makes her lover fonder, presence isn't more fulfilling to him.

Sometimes she cried inside the night.
Sometimes he held her, and she leaned toward
his chest, her fingers in his hair, his heart through
her heart, tempering her beat by beat.

Why then would he leave her, like something obsolete?

Layered between the meditations on love and loss are sensitive descriptions of aging and regret. In "What I Did to Time," she writes:

What I did to time was ball it up, and
throw it out, when I was unhappy,
years ago; chucked it, sprained my hand
wadding it tight, waiting for an end ...

Now I'd give anything to have that plethora, that stack;
to feel its truth and call its slow pace back.

In "Feeling for Two":

Well, here I am now with a few badges of waged war;
here I am growing older and less
floating in possibility, and I who waved flags of More, More,
want less of flags and more of happiness.
A place in the country, for quiet, for finding out what's true;
a few soft shirts, and lots of art, and you.

She finds reflection, and reflections, in the meeting of her life and her art, as in "The Halls."

Funny thing, since I've been far from home
I've written mainly couplets, as if the lines--
like me--can barely bear to be alone.
I used to make threads intertwine.
Now they lie neatly packed in rows.
Whatever's open wants to close.
Will this stop if I start favoring crude,
unfettered, freeflown solitude?

Perhaps it will if she does. However her loneliness might be resolved, one expects the lines will flow beautifully. As she writes in "Cleaning,"

As I learned to hear my mother's call
from upstairs, downstairs, down the hall;
so, still, I hear the sounds of test
and task and things that do not let me rest,
until I've tried to tame--or name--them all.

That burden on her part becomes pleasure on ours. That doesn't seem fair--or wouldn't, anyway, if she didn't have such remarkable poetry to show for it. However she tames things, she names them well.

Two Fatherhood Poems

A Sick Day With Adrienne

I encourage her to look at the board head-on
instead of sideways,
to better see the pawns advancing straight,
only lurching on attack.
But aside from the awkward circularity of our kitchen table,
she seems to prefer the sideways view,
the battle as narrative as much as strategy or rote.
Or, in truth, as all three.
For a 5-year-old, she’s pretty damn sharp.
Her little arms, reaching for a knight,
might unsettle a bishop.
The rook she takes just a square or two,
his infinite linear powers suspicious to her.

Audacious to the point of cockiness at times;
others, she peers up at me and asks, of her queen,
“Is she safe?”—as skeptical of my judgment on the matter
as she is of the decorum of the in-your-face pawn
who dares jut up against the royal gown.

Then, in checkers, she wears me down,
the game a quick mutual massacre
till the last several indecisive kings
play zone when shy, man-on-man when spry.
Then it is a war of attention’s attrition.
We both have our reckless moments,
then two of her high-headed goons
corner me at 4-A.

“Can I go tell mom?,” she grins at her victory,
leaving me to make Tuscan pork chops.

In the morning, she watched the second half
of The Sound of Music, because she’d never gotten that far.
I was to sit on the big bed with her and read my book,
but Mr. Kim,
the contractor who came to help us
with our leaky basement windows,
wanted to confer,
then sang “Edelweiss” with Christopher Plummer.
“One of my favorite songs,” he claimed.

“That awful Rolf,” I think to myself in disgust.
“What could make a guy turn so quickly? One minute
prancing around a garden singing to his gal, the next
delivering Nazi naval commissions with nary a good day?
But why would Captain Von Trapp goad him on that way
at the end was that Sudafed 12 hour or 24 hour endangering
his whole big harmonious family just to get the last word in?”

“At my church, I sing in the choir,” said Mr. Kim,
I read in The New Yorker
about Chalabi duping the Pentagon and hopping up Bush,
and the CIA-fronted PR agency in London leaking
word of bioweapons to Fleet Street. “You’ll never
be one of them,” the Captain sneers at Rolf. So
gratuitous, really Adrienne brings me
a Post-It note and asks me to write the children’s names:
Brigitta, Liesl, Marta, Gretl…

Everything hurts her throat,
but still, at dinner, she sings:
“You look happy to meet me…”
At bedtime, we air-hug and blow kisses.
“But you can kiss me. We’re both sick.”
“But my cold might be a little different.”

A little after midnight,
she comes to me with a bloody nose.
I have nothing to tell her but lie back,
press the cloth gently, it will stop.
Parents aren’t good for much
beyond confirming the obvious,
are we?
Glasses off, I stare at the clock,
numbers indeterminate.
Shouldn’t watch, I scold myself,
old Frank Sinatra movies
about junkie-drummer-poker dealers
before bed did I take one Benadryl,
or two for a junkie, he’s pretty
enterprising being both
a drummer and a poker player
and having Kim Novak
as a gal on the side, to boot what
the hell does to boot mean?
Wish I could get back to sleep…

“I did it my way,” sings Mr. Kim.
With the cement
and a one-and-a-half inch aluminium reinforcement
under the plastic bubble, he
will give us a one-year warrantee
in return for just one hit,
just to get me through the audition, man,
then I swear I’ll kick I know I can.
You’ll want to exchange clay for this top
soil to keep the runoff grade.
The choir conductor nods solemnly,
and now a hymn, first in Korean,
then in English. “You’ll never be,”
the sopranos sing, angelically,
“one of us” of course,
the moisture trapped inside the paint
is a different matter, probably wetness seeping
in from the bottom would have
to re-tar that whole side of the
house, which would take some digging
probably four, five grand.
“You’re very luck to have me,” says Mr. Kim
his hand bloodied by the carpet staple.
“How do you hold a moonbeam in your
hand?” sings the bishop,
moving diagonally into Najaf to avoid the
rocket grenades of the Sunni insurgents.
“With butter and salt.
No pesto. I’ll have veggies at dinner.
Can I have Sprite. Sprite. Sprite.”
“You forgot a word.”
“Can I have Sprite, please,
you little fink, you’re lucky I don’t kill you.”
“I swear it’s a clean game,
I’ve never held cards in my sleeve before. I’m
just so tired.”

At six in the morning
Adrienne comes to us in her dress.
“I’m hungry.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Throat still hurts.”
“But a little better?

A bite of cinnamon toast. A sip of milk.
“A little better,” she says.
“And how ’bout you?” asks Lauren.

“I think,” I say, “I’ll go to work today.”

________________







Icing

The kids made sugar cookies yesterday with their mom.
Because they ate a good dinner—steak, noodles, green beans—
they got to decorate the cookies with four colors of icing.
They decorated not just the tops, but the bottoms.
They squeezed the tubes and squirted the bold blue, green, yellow, red.
They got it on their hands and their cheeks and their sleeves
and their tongues and their eyebrows and their place mats.
Then they added, again to top and bottom, some bright sprinkles.
I hovered and tried not to say:
Too much. It’s dripping. Won’t even taste good. Too blue.
They ate their cookies. I bit my tongue.
My son, between chews, as clairvoyant as I am compulsive,
not even looking up at me, but instead at his cookie, said,
“Try to remember, daddy—it doesn’t matter.”
I grabbed an ice-cream sandwich and thought,
What the hell.
I made it to bath time.

- Alexander C. Kafka

Six Love Poems

Love Drops

In candlelight
by the vase of purple and yellow carnations,
snacking on peanuts and light beer,
icing a pulled heart,
he remembered a muddier, scarier,
sweeter, more endangered night.

He came home from work
to a dim, pleading flame.
On the floor
of his suburban, beige-carpeted nest
was a splendid Chinese picnic
spread in coyly polished elegance
atop a soft, forgiving blanket
the color of a dry spring sky
at dusk with the unendingly deep light
of a flexible soul.

Wicker basket, thick sturdy porcelain
of tempting, minimal caressing curve,
rice grains aglow with soft oil absorbed,
dumpling skins pinched into infant wrinkles,
meats and peppers and fish,
and palm-pleasing vessels of gentle green tea.

Her eyes—question comets of impatience,
the thick, black plumb line free-falling mane of hair,
the cheeks pastel planets of heat
pressing from the blurred tan cosmos
of wide Asian face in tired night,
the lips scolding, hungry, impertinent,
a language apart in prescient pressures.

Plain white T, long cotton skirt,
lift and fold aside.
A brow, a lash, a nipple.
Skin’s dialogue, tongue’s solo, finger’s itinerary.

How many ways they found to embrace,
to show the angry, clutching aptness of longing.

Along with the other utensils,
they lay on the flat twirling plane of delight—
moist, empty, oblivious.

________________

























Passing the Moon with Dad


“Even life and death aren’t matters of life and death.”
–my dad

I dreamt Dad and I were on a spaceship
that was a plane as big as a city.
The wings were terraces, open to the un-air.
One could enjoy one’s leisure there,
the torpid essences pirouetting
through the galaxies’ vacuum,
the harsh sun bombarding unsuspecting orbs
with a jagged intensity of electron anger.

Dad and I sat together on the wing,
relishing the spacious melancholy,
when we passed the moon, blazing,
spread, peremptorily, before us,
larger than thought, than joy,
larger than love and age,
and we lingered greedily there
in its brilliant sleepy stillness.

As it shrank to our side,
the planets and stars ahead
began to speed up and shiver and diminish
in a purpling Einsteinian frenzy.

“Better go inside,” Dad said. “Relativity.”

We retreated into the ship, said goodnight,
and went to our separate quarters.

There we slept until
what must have been
the end
of a period
of time.

________________















My Love and Abstract Art

You are in the luscious window voids of light,
the tossed, sweet precipitation of ecstatic color,
the steamy suns of whiteness
lurking freely behind contrivances.

You are in the targeted tension of layered texture.
And watching you spread wonderfully,
tauntingly,
across the stretched canvasses
of skins and linen,
I think to myself,
“She is everywhere. Just everywhere!”

And suddenly it comes to me, whatever is to come,
that this is my time to be happy,
and that you are my endless, endless pleasure.

________________

Boulogne

I read today in the Globe that a ferry had
capsized in the ocean near Boulogne.
Fifteen people were trapped and died in the hull.
There was a photograph
of a woman at the memorial service
mourning for a loved one.

Boulogne was the town
where I learned the names of flowers and,
having drunk too much espresso, went
wild over the smells and the colors
of the fruits sprawled out
carelessly and abundantly
in the stalls of the downtown market.

My girlfriend and I sat half nude on the beach,
not acknowledging that it was a little chilly
and a little far north
for that kind of thing.
It was the first stop on our trip
south through France and by the
Cote d’Azure to Italy and then
up and east through the thick of
strange dim countries—
satellites.

Drunk and full of ice cream,
we went one night to our hotel.
Giggling and terrified,
she fiddled in the bathroom while I
contained myself beneath the
stiff and freshly laundered sheets.
Finally, my friend, my mate, my
animal and me animal were
paws and mouths,
shivers and cries
and tears and gasps,
trapped beneath each other’s hulls,
then happily asleep.

Boulogne is far away
and so is she
and so am I.
We’re friends,
and wonder how it ever came to be
that once we were afloat,
once were trapped,
once were saved.

________________

Fairgrounds—Corpus Christi, Texas, 1988

She and I spin in the bottomless barrel,
stuck happily to the planked wall,
Guns ’N’ Roses obscenely loud,
“Sweet Child O’Mine,” trashy and ethereal,
plastering us securely to its crinkled floating decibels
in the hot wet seaside night.

Dazed, fetally inspired by the lights and crowds and litter,
I clutch her to me and tickle her pale neck with my eyelashes.
We eat junk and burp and wonder
how we willed ourselves into this coastal chaos.

________________

To Jojo at Six Months

If I could only see as much as you do,
in those recessed, limpid pools you use as eyes;

if I could only say as much as you do
in a random, static vowel;

if I could only be as cunning
as is your wet, thick-lipped,
undaunted, lopsided smile;

I'd be a brilliant, wealthy, ecstatic man,
even happier than I am now
looking at and holding

your soft, warm, ineluctable density.

- Alexander C. Kafka

FILM: Politics as Usual?

By Michael Nelson

Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore? is the question, and the answer is ... hard to say. Jeff Smith, the brash young hero of the new documentary film by Frank Popper, came tantalizingly close to winning the 2004 Democratic primary in Missouri’s third Congressional district: He finished second in a 10-candidate field, less than 2 percentage points behind the winner. But then Tantalus came close to plucking the fruit from the tree too. It was that very closeness that made the impossibility of his ever getting a piece so cruelly apparent.

The third district, which spans parts of St. Louis and its suburbs, had been represented for 28 years by former House Democratic leader and failed presidential candidate Richard Gephardt. It’s like most Congressional districts in the era of highly calibrated partisan redistricting—so tilted toward the dominant party that winning the primary means winning the election. Republicans need not apply.

The worst thing going for Smith was that most people in the district assumed that the seat would go to Russ Carnahan, a state senator and, more important by far, the son of former Governor Mel Carnahan and former Senator Jean Carnahan. “I’d like to vote for you,” one voter tells Smith, “but I’m afraid you’re not going to make it because too many people are going to vote for Carnahan.” Carnahan’s mother works her national political database to raise money for him in huge quantities; Smith’s mom tells him to get a stable job and not to ask his aunt, uncle, or cousins for money.

The best thing going for Smith, in addition to a bottomless well of idealism and ambition, was that Carnahan is an empty suit, a duller-than-dishwater speaker who is little more than the last name on his birth certificate.

In a Hollywood movie (think: The Candidate) Smith’s David would have beaten Carnahan’s Goliath. Documentary film makers are stuck with the facts, and thus face the challenge of infusing as much drama as possible into whatever actually happens. For all its good moments, Can Mr. Smith is a 53-minute episode of Frontline pumped up to a theatre-length 82 minutes with about a half-hour more footage of Smith making fruitless cellphone calls than we really need in order to get the point that he’s an underdog.

The film’s most effective moment comes when Smith learns that St. Louis’s African-American newspaper, The American, is going to endorse Carnahan rather than him. If anyone ever compiles a video dictionary, they can use this footage to illustrate the meaning of the phrase “his face fell.” The oddest moment in the film shows a weepy Smith saying goodbye to a remarkably dry-eyed group of campaign volunteers on the morning after the election.

So can Mr. Smith—the citizen idealist—“get to Washington anymore”? Perhaps he can if he does what a postscript to the film tells us Smith is doing this year—namely, running for the state senate before mounting any further campaigns for Congress. A whole body of research on Congressional elections by political scientists demonstrates that most voters regard paying one’s dues in local government as a minimum credential for election to Congress.

The real mistake for audiences would be to presume that the experience of the original Mr. Smith—the Frank Capra character played by James Stewart in the 1939 movie—in any way represents a golden age of citizen politics. Stewart’s Smith, after all, got to Hollywood’s version of the Senate by appointment, not election, courtesy of cigar-smoking political bosses who chose him because they thought he would be easy to manipulate. The "Anymore" in the title of Popper’s documentary represents little more than nostalgia for good old days that never were.

Michael Nelson is a professor of political science at Rhodes College and a former editor of Washington Monthly.

STAGE: Naughty and Nice

Cabaret
Book by Joe Masteroff
Based on the play by John Van Druten and stories by Christopher Isherwood
Music by John Kander
Lyrics by Fred Ebb
Directed by Molly Smith
Arena Stage
Through Oct. 29

In polite society, one doesn’t discuss sex, politics, or religion. Cabaret is not polite society, thank heavens, more the id to The Sound of Music’s superego, and Arena stage delights in its dour decadence in a wonderfully sensuous, politically charged production featuring a superb cast.

American journalist Clifford Bradshaw (Glenn Seven Allen) arrives in Berlin in the early 1930’s. On the train, he meets the mysterious Ernst Ludwig (J. Fred Shiffman), who—with Cliff’s help—plays keep-away from the customs officer with a briefcase Ernst later explains to Cliff contains funds smuggled from Paris for a worthy cause. In gratitude, Ernst introduces Cliff to Freulein Schneider (Dorothy Stanley), who rents him a room in her boarding house. Ernst also brings Cliff on New Year’s Eve to the Kit Kat Club, the hottest cabaret in town, where he encounters the club’s star—and free-spirited force of nature—Sally Bowles (Meg Gillentine), who is English in Joe Masteroff’s script but American in this rendition. A subplot involves Fraulein Schneider’s on-and-off romance with, and brief engagement to, the kind Jewish grocer Herr Schultz (Walter Charles). The prostitute Fraulein Kost (Sherri L. Edelen) and her steady stream of sailor clients provide for some running gags, but her friction with Fraulein Schneider soon takes on a more sinister cast, as does Herr Ludwig’s secretive political activities.

All this revolves around—and is reflected in—the riotous and raunchy numbers performed at the Kit Kat, showcasing not just Sally and a cadre of scantily clad chorus girls, boys, and yet to be determined, but the boisterous Master of Ceremonies (Brad Oscar).

In such an iconic show, an unfair but inevitable test is whether performances measure up to or bypass the memory of star turns like those of Liza Minelli and Joel Grey in the 1972 Bob Fosse film version—or, for Broadway denizens, perhaps, Natasha Richardson and Alan Cumming in the recent 1998 Tony-winning revival. The principals director Molly Smith has assembled here pass with flying colors. Better yet, they pass the hard way, not by trying to out-Liza Liza or out-Joel Joel, but by making the roles quite their own.


Allen’s Cliff conveys a wide-eyed awe frothed with a coy delight at the Kit Kat’s sexual anarchy and Sally’s omnivorous, though jaded, energy. His Dudley Do-Right looks and casually confident singing complete the endearing portrayal. Brad Oscar, from his first fiery moments, sidesteps Joel Gray’s seductive slither, and adapts the Emcee role to his own more boisterous, vivacious bearing, not to mention the kind of huge singing and speaking voice that would serve well to organize a crowd in the event of an emergency.

And Gillentine doesn’t bother with the hungry-eyed Liza schtick, fab as that was for Liza herself. Gillentine’s Sally is more sad, soused, seductive girl next door gone astringently astray. Yes, beneath her reckless promiscuity she does have a heart of gold, but it’s lax, laden, and saturated like an old olive in a glass of gin. It’s not that she’s only alive, as the maudlin cliché goes, on the stage. She’s alive and kind, in her unerringly manipulative way, most of the time. But in Gillentine’s interpretation, Sally’s only happy on the stage, never mind Cliff’s nasty knocks on her career—and we’re pretty damn happy, too, when she’s up there. Not only is Gillentine a superb singer—controlled while not distractingly mannered, rawly emotional without distorting her numbers’ shape and momentum—she also moves with a delectable abandon. She is, no doubt, sexy and knows what to thrust where and how to shake when. But it’s more than that. Her shoulders and back speak their own languid language of unrequited longings, ambling ambitions, and unspeakable pleasures, both captured and imagined.

Dorothy Stanley and Walter Charles bring a lovely, brittle tenderness to their tentative world-embattled romance. And filling out the cast are the fine ensemble players who bring snappy, surreal life to antic showstoppers like the manic “Money Song” and wistful lyricism to their bittersweet turnabout on the Nazi “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”

George Fulginiti-Shakar’s music direction and the Kit Kat band are marvelous. Their timing is unobtrusively Velcroed to the singer’s phrasing, and their tone ranges fetchingly from circus crisp to reedy tender. Anne Patterson has devised a clever minimalistic set enhanced by elevating platforms. The opening curtain and industrial-strength all-purpose “piano” are ingenious touches. Austin Sanderson’s sensational costuming is smart flapper casual, with bursts of outré haute for the club production numbers. And David Neumann’s innovative choreography shines in “The Money Song,” “If You Could See Her,” and “Cabaret.” I’d like to have seen more tight and contrasted lighting from designer Joel Moritz to help intensify, particularly, the love scenes and the framing episodes on the train. And about that train—you’ll see what I mean—I have mixed feelings about a technical gimmick that’s sort of fun initially, but also unintentionally and weirdly belittling at a crucial moment later on.

More broadly, while Smith’s direction is sure-handed and the pace brisk without veering—as it well could—into mindlessly frenetic, her political underscoring, not just on stage but in the entrance hall and the program notes, is a little much. She’s careful to write in her notes that Bush does not equal Hitler nor do his minions equal the Nazis. But the production pretty much says he does and they do. OK, so the shoe search on the train might just be au courant, but those passing Abu Ghraib photo references when Cliff is beat up are just plain heavy-handed. It’s not a question of whether or not one agrees with her viewpoint, but whether the material should be trusted to speak for itself—and it should.


On the other hand, while slinky outfits and raucous tunes are the face and voice of this show, politics surely comprise its heart. Because of Cliff’s sexual, Sally’s relational, and Fraulein Schneider’s political ambivalence, there is no traditional love story to Cabaret, never mind hesitant odes to romance and domesticity like “Perfectly Marvelous” and “Why Should I Wake Up?” and “Maybe This Time.” The show’s real love story is about the love for political, sexual, emotional, and artistic freedoms, and it’s a compelling one that Smith was wise to schedule at this delicate ideological moment.

Any doubt as to its timeliness was quickly dispelled on my ride home. On the radio, Bill Frist was explaining why—even against the judgment of stalwart conservatives in his own party—he wanted to bolster Bush’s tweaks to the Geneva Conventions to ensure that American methods of torture adhere to the letter of at least someone’s laws.

Food for thought, old chum.

-A.C.K.

Photos, by Scott Suchman, courtesy of Arena Stage:
1. (From left to right) Erica Sweany, Julie Burdick, Deanna Harris, Lynn McNutt, Meg Gillentine, Monique L. Midgette, and Hillary Heather Elliott
2. Brad Oscar
3. Glenn Seven Allen and Meg Gillentine
4. Dorothy Stanley and Walter Charles

TV: Warhol—Complicated in His Implications

Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film
Directed by Ric Burns, written by Ric Burns and James Sanders
PBS
September 20-21


By David Sterritt

When he got the idea of painting well-known commodities and their labels—Campbell’s Soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles—the young Andy Warhol hoped he’d found the key to changing his image and transforming his career. He was already New York’s most sought-after commercial artist. But he wanted to be a serious artiste with a vision independent enough to distinguish him from the likes of Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein, who were already launching Pop Art as a radical reaction against the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock and company. Painting everyday items from the supermarket, he decided, might be just the ticket.

Anyone who thinks Warhol simply jumped into his new style will learn differently from Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, a four-hour movie directed by Ric Burns for PBS’s long-running “American Masters” series. The artist invited four friends and opinion makers to his studio and showed them two different versions of the Coke-bottle motif. One had marks of painterly technique, with detectable brushwork and other signs of the artistic “interpretation” that true paintings were supposed to have. By contrast, the “tight” version was almost photographic in its direct, uninflected effect. The friends voted for the tight one, and Warhol cheerfully accepted their verdict, just as he’d have accepted the opposite verdict if that had been handed to him.

Warhol has plenty of detractors, and they’re likely to see this as confirmation of the view that he was no less a commercial sellout during the “art” phase of his career than he’d been in the advertising/journalism phase, happy to deploy any trick or gimmick that would titillate the art world and satisfy his hunger for money and fame. His defenders might argue that Warhol saw himself as a tabula rasa, less an “original” thinker than a conscientious reflector of the signs and signals beamed out by contemporary American culture. Firing back, the detractors might say this was nothing but passive-aggressive nonsense, fueled by the narcissistic notion that if Warhol liked staring at a boring thing then everyone would like staring at the boring thing. Firing back in turn, the defenders could say that things aren’t boring when transplanted into an artistic context. To which the detractors could say …

And on it would go, soup can after Coke bottle, arguments without end, amen. To my mind, much of Warhol’s art is as daring and beautiful as it is witty and, yes, original. But one of its most appealing strengths is its capacity to open up thought and debate on an enormous variety of fronts, from the merits of particular works to the theoretical import of terms like “style” and “content” and “originality.” Warhol’s best achievements, from the early Coke bottles to the stunning self-portraits and monumental Mao pictures of his late career, are forever oscillating among multiple levels of meaning and interest, rewarding both the casual gaze in the gallery and the deeper ideas prompted after you leave. As an art dealer interviewed in Burns’s movie puts it about the “simple” soup cans, “They’re complicated in their implications.”

Despite the deadpan image he cultivated, Warhol was complicated too. Born in 1928 to an immigrant family in Pittsburgh, he was afflicted as a child by everything from poverty and his father’s untimely death to a case of rheumatic fever that left him with blotches on his face, tics in his movements, and many days home from school. He whiled these away by drawing, perusing his mother’s movie magazines, and getting infatuated with Shirley Temple, who sent him an autographed photo he revered.

After studying design at Carnegie Tech he overrode his mother’s objections and headed for New York, quickly establishing himself as a hugely inventive commercial artist. One of his trademarks was a blotting procedure that made images look “printed” fresh from the drawing board. As an expert in Burns’s documentary notes, this showed he intuitively understood the magazine world’s mania for mass production as a way of life. It also meshed with his affection for the assembly-line sameness of modern artifacts. When his first work was published, a typesetter’s error dropped the final letter from Warhola, the last name he was born with. True to form, he stuck with the tighter version.

In all, Warhol was doing mighty well for someone “with a bad nose and St. Vitus's dance and blotches, et cetera, who was gay and really, really swish … and was bad with people, was probably dyslexic, a little autistic,” as writer Wayne Koestenbaum puts it in the documentary. He had some disappointments, as when he replaced his long-distance Shirley Temple crush with a fixation on Truman Capote, who showed no interest in even meeting him. But such eccentricities rarely interfered with work, work, work. Warhol sometimes appeared to be sabotaging himself in peculiar ways—why did he use those cheap, ill-fitting wigs to hide his thinning hair?—but Burns’s film provides a salutary reminder that he was a very hard, very disciplined worker in every stage of his career.

It was in the 1960s that Warhol started to click with his Coke bottles and soup cans, which drew little attention at first, but soon became a sensation on the art scene and beyond. Some of that sensation was couched in sneers and derision, of course, but I’ve always thought Warhol was smarter than his negative critics realized. Looking up something recently on the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, for instance, I glanced at the Warhol entry and was delighted to see one of my all-time-favorite Warhol quotes there. Finding an utterly American democracy embedded within low-end consumer culture, he said:

You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

I don’t agree that all Cokes are good; quite the opposite, I think all Cokes are bad—useless bottles of junk-food crapola produced only to make money for corporation stockholders. But hey, the stuff is democratic, and Warhol is astute and witty to point this out.

Finally recognized as more than a commercial artist for hire, Warhol turned to silk-screening as a way of cranking out large quantities of work—without violating his aesthetic for a second—and moved his base of operations from an Upper East Side apartment to a large loft. This was dubbed The Factory after a friend decked the walls with spray-painted silver, a color that Warhol associated with the future, the past, and the trait of narcissism, since mirrors are backed with it.

In this larger space Warhol could experiment further with sculpture and, most dramatically, with film. Moviemaking appealed to him in many ways, since it hooked up with the glamour of Hollywood and stardom, and also with his assembly-line aesthetic—a film strip contains picture after picture after picture, each slightly different from the next, rather like the serial paintings and prints he was already making. These lines of thought converge in the idea of movie studios as dream factories. Warhol had The Factory and the dreams, so nothing was stopping him.

Roughly speaking, Warhol’s films can be divided into three groups: silent pictures made with a fixed camera, such as Empire, his eight-hour portrait of the Empire State Building, and Eat, in which artist Robert Indiana slooooooowly consumes a mushroom; sound productions with zooms and camera movement, such as Vinyl, based on Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange, and the epic Chelsea Girls, with two reels projected side by side; and narrative movies with dialogue and editing, such as Trash and Flesh, which Paul Morrissey directed under the “Andy Warhol Presents” rubric. Even more roughly speaking, these three categories recapitulate cinema’s history, moving from silent to sound and from black-and-white to color.

Warhol’s movies, especially before the Morrissey period, drew highly deserved praise in enlightened precincts of the avant-garde community, which recognized them as adventurous, often phenomenally creative works. Playing into his public image as an ultracool artist with a minimum of emotions, Warhol gave the impression that he liked film because the camera did all the work, and because transforming ordinary people into “superstars” was an amusing diversion. In reality, though, he took painstaking care with framing and lighting. It’s no accident that his best pictures—such as the silent Haircut and the sound Vinyl, both excerpted in Burns’s documentary—are stunning visual experiences.

It was The Factory that allowed Warhol to move in these fascinating new directions, but it was also The Factory that caused the greatest problems of his career. Looked at from one angle, the place was as democratic as a case of Coke, welcoming anyone who wanted to join the gang and allowing rich celebrities to rub elbows (and other body parts) with working-class hustlers and drag queens. Looked at from another angle, it was a magnet for deluded and sometimes seriously disturbed people ill equipped to handle the drug abuse and hyperactivity that eventually ran rampant there.

Warhol has been harshly criticized by detractors and supporters alike for maintaining his inexpressive, voyeuristic posture even when a close companion like Edie Sedgwick was visibly falling apart at the seams, and I agree that his failure to intercede at such times was deplorable. He paid an extremely high price for standing mute while The Factory slid downhill, however. One day in 1968 the Factory denizen Valerie Solanas showed up packing two pistols, furious that Warhol had lost the script for her play Up Your Ass, which she’d expected him to adapt into a film. She fired several shots, wounding Warhol almost fatally in the process. Turning herself in to the police, Solanas said she’d done it because Warhol had “too much control over [her] life.”

Some feminists applauded Solanas for her act, which is preposterous—as my girlfriend observes, Warhol posed about as much threat to women’s rights as Liberace did. In any case, he never got over the terror of the attack. When he’d recovered from his wounds and his lease on The Factory ran out, he moved operations to an office suite and entered the final phase of his career.
For all the frenetic activity of his ’60s period, Warhol hadn’t made a great deal of money then, so his closest associates got together to put things onto a more stable financial footing. While the artist focused on commissioned portraits for wealthy collectors, the others took his enterprise into related fields—starting Interview magazine, for instance—so that different facets of Warhol’s talent would support one another financially. In his 1975 book, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, quoted in the documentary, Warhol said, “Making money is art, and working is art, and good business is the best art.” That may be rationalizing, but it’s consistent with Warhol’s longtime rejection of boundaries between culture and commerce.

Warhol died in 1987 after gall-bladder surgery. It’s likely he was still weakened by the wounds Solanas had inflicted. But the immediate cause, as Burns’s film makes clear, was outrageous medical negligence by a hospital that failed to monitor his postoperative condition and allowed him to be drowned by fluids backed up into his lungs.

Burns’s movie, narrated by performance artist Laurie Anderson, gives as thorough an account of Warhol’s life as can be expected from a four-hour condensation. Its archival footage is accompanied by interviews with experts—filmmaker Morrissey, brother John Warhola, critics Dave Hickey and Stephen Koch, curator Donna De Salvo, art dealer Irving Blum, author George Plimpton, and more—plus Warhol quotations spoken by artist Jeff Koons.

Inevitably, the documentary has flaws along with its considerable merits. Some moments are simplistic, as when the iconostasis in Warhol’s childhood church is discussed as if it single-handedly explains the icon-like look of his celebrity pictures. As usual, the six-hour Sleep is talked about as if were a single unbroken shot rather than a highly edited film, and the superb Sedgwick movie Poor Little Rich Girl is said to be good even though half of it is out of focus, whereas Warhol deliberately chose its out-of-focus footage. Warhol’s links in the 1980's with other artists (Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, David Salle) are pretty much ignored. The occasions when he remade his public personality are either superficially psychoanalyzed or passed over with too little comment. And it’s tiring to hear the narration hype one Warhol period after another as his most explosive burst of creativity.

Such shortcomings aside, Andy Warhol is engrossing almost every step of the way. If he could see it, I suspect Warhol’s main complaint would be that it just isn’t boring enough.

David Sterritt, chair of the National Society of Film Critics, was film critic of the Christian Science Monitor for more than 35 years until his recent retirement. He is professor emeritus of theater and film at Long Island University and has taught most recently at the Maryland Institute College of Art. He is also programming associate at the Makor/Steinhardt Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York. His books include The Films of Alfred Hitchcock and Screening the Beats: Media Culture and the Beat Sensibility, and his writing has appeared in Cahiers du Cinéma, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other periodicals. His most recent book is Guiltless Pleasures: A David Sterritt Film Reader.




Photos courtesy of PBS:
Andy Warhol (Billy Name/OvoWorks, Inc.)
Andy Warhol on the phone at the Factory. (Billy Name/OvoWorks, Inc.)
Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Andy Warhol and Mario Montez on the set of Chelsea Girls. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

STAGE: Slipping Away

Christopher Lane as Neil, and MaryBeth Wise as Jennifer in 'In the Mood.' Photo by Stan Barouh, courtesy of Olney Theatre Center.

In the Mood
By Irene Wurtzel
Directed by Jim Petosa
Olney Theatre Center
Through September 24



By Alexander C. Kafka

The D.C. artist Jennifer Workman’s career is taking off. The Phillips is going to feature her work in a show of “Contemporary Women Artists” and interview her in an accompanying symposium. She’s afraid, though, to revel too much in what should be a delicious moment because her husband, Neil, has a way of losing control during delicious moments. Jennifer, he chides, is becoming increasingly like her Aunt Julia, who used to dampen every celebratory occasion with a wary, superstitious two spits. And it’s true, Jennifer fears “too much happiness.” “There is,” says Neil, chilling the champagne, “no such thing.”

Yet, of course, there is, and that is the subject of Irene Wurtzel’s insightful and stirring new play, In the Mood, in its world premiere at Olney Theatre Center's Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab. Neil has had bouts with too much happiness for years. A charismatic undersecretary of state for democracy, his visionary euphoria can be constructively contagious when drafting his brilliant and exhaustive briefing papers and cajoling egotistical statesmen into delicate and time-sensitive negotiations. It can also explode into near-messianic grandiosity, with all its accompanying intellectual distortions and horrid insensitivities. His situation has a name: bipolar disorder. And Wurtzel’s drama is at its best when tracing the fine line between the fickle power of mania and the Beltway’s equally fickle mania of power. Also clever is the way the playwright reverses the stereotype of the crazy artist coddled by the sensible, worldly mainstays in her life. After all, Washington's full of unhinged visionaries, and few of them are represented by galleries.

As the booster rockets ignite on Jennifer’s career, Neil is coming off the high of a visit to an unnamed African nation shaking off the bonds of tyranny, a visit that he decides to extend by two weeks incommunicado from his boss Charles, a paternally indulgent but increasingly worried secretary of state who has brought Neil into the corridors of power from Neil’s less glamorous but stable and productive teaching position at the University of Michigan. Neil, we gather from their chats, counterbalances the older Charles’s careful diplomacy with his youthful, idealistic energy and big-picture worldview. But in manic mode, Neil crosses a line, insulting what he sees as his boss’s insufficiently lofty ambitions for his term in office.

Effectively grounded by Charles, who takes understandable umbrage but, more important, can’t trust his loose-cannon right hand to keep national priorities and policies in focus, Neil spins to the other pole of his bipolarity. He hunkers down at home, repeatedly views a football game with its resurrection of a sacked running back, resumes his smoking habit, and is unable to get himself to leave the house to accompany his wife to an important opening. “Neil, you’re slipping away from me,” she says, “…and it’s scaring the hell out of me.” Aggravating the situation is a visit from Neil's mother from L.A., Clara, who's ready for some quality time with the apple of her eye and his wife, on whom she also dotes. Instead, she finds him distant, muted, and rude, asking unenthusiastically how long she plans to stay. Leaving her to her own devices, he says dispiritedly, “Enjoy Washington, Mother. There are those who do.”

Jennifer prods her husband into seeing a shrink, who prescribes meds that keep him from the despondent depths and the orbital heights of an illness Neil is still loathe to admit he has. The pills are supposed to keep him, in the doctor’s words, “blissful and ordinary.” But to Neil, bliss and ordinariness are a despondent depth all their own, never mind the side effects—sexual dysfunction, frequent urination, insomnia. He’s become a zombie and hints unsubtly of offing himself with sleeping pills. His diplomatic skills are intact enough to persuade Jennifer to let him go off the meds. “I love you,” he tells her. “You are the only thing that is right in my life.” She confesses that she too, “wanted him to be alive and alert and a little manic.” After all, this was the man who gave her the courage to quit a job teaching math and to make art more than a weekend undertaking. She lets him abandon the medication, under the condition that they use that date, January 5, as a code for her to signal to him if he’s losing control.

He quickly returns to his old best self, confident, competent, and masterful as an executive and as a husband—if, that is, you don’t make too much of that third glass of champagne he’s slurping down, his quickly accelerating speech, and that sort of thing. Charles finds that he has a heart ailment that requires immediate surgery and gradual recovery, and sounds out Neil and Jennifer on Neil’s fitness to represent Charles at a Mideast summit. Jennifer, though worried, vouches for her husband. It is, she confides to us, “a simple choice between the good of the country and my marriage”—the kind of statement that might sound more melodramatic if you didn’t live in Washington, where such personal forks in the road are encountered by one hapless couple or another just about hourly.

The summit goes well—suspiciously well, both benefiting from and spurring a meltdown on Neil’s part. As he tries to follow up on the progress stateside, Jennifer prepares for a key show in New York. Suffice to say that worlds will collide, and finances, marriage, generational ties, and more are at risk. Whatever an undersecretary is supposed to look like, it’s probably not stalking around his wife’s studio, wielding a hammer and spitting out predictions like “You and I shall probably have a conversation about enlightened sexual behavior.”

Christopher Lane is excellent as Neil, coming off his manic Norwegian energy as Stockmann in Olney’s recent Enemy of the People into his preppier present-day manic incarnation. Lane’s talents are well-suited to Neil’s changes not just from mania to depression, but to those within the manic channels of domestic Casanova, office superhero, condescendingly bullying father, dismissive son, and manipulative whip-cracking boss. And he’s handsome enough, in a smart way, to be plausible as a rising political star and sometime squash partner to the president.

MaryBeth Wise recently excelled in another intelligent and emotionally demanding persona in Round House’s Midwives. Here again she wows us with her wise and wrenching depiction of Jenny, as Neil, Charles, Clara, and Jenny herself all look to her to save a man on the edge of abyss, while also protecting her family and the integrity of her own artistic career.

Leo Erickson is wonderful in the key role of Charles, whose urbanity, humanity, and classic political skills we must believe in for his character to work as the fulcrum between Neil’s personal and professional prospects. We must feel what’s at stake as he gambles that Neil can keep himself in check, and we do indeed believe in his belief in his protégé, even as we squirm at the prospective downside.

Halo Wines excels in the poignant role of Clara, who at first appears a somewhat nebishy stage mom to her darling Washington star Neil, but quickly unfolds as a complex, loving, and long-suffering strongwoman of a sort seen all too often in the families of the mentally ill. Her oblivious denial of her son’s condition—and of her late husband’s—is both tragic and a little heroic. Wines and Tim Spears, as Neil and Jennifer’s college son, Josh, have a sweet connection in their scenes together. And Wurtzel’s dialogue here, as so often throughout the script, is admirably nuanced in the way it alternately targets and swerves around the difficult topics at hand. Spears also holds his own, within the dramatic context and against the practiced dynamism of Lane as an actor, in their confrontational father-son scenes. Therese Barbato makes the most of her small role as Neil’s assistant, embodying the ubiquitous attractive D.C. gatekeeper who can, in the same instant, flatter you and shut you out.

Milagros Ponce de Leon has created a fabulous set—a brick-walled studio with metal balconies and circle-within-circle high windows that resonate visually and psychologically as third-world town square, D.C. jail, and Jennifer's prison of bittersweet memory. Director Jim Petosa, who helped Wurtzel develop the script, has a great feel for its optimum pacing, its prickly pauses, its stops for bewildered breath. With the help of lighting designer Donald Edmund Thomas, unfolding event, flashback, and aside are almost always quickly distinguishable.

As I head to the polls Tuesday, In the Mood will come with me, making me wonder what scenarios are hidden behind the campaign placards and photo-op smiles. I’ll be thinking, admiringly, of Doug Duncan’s candor and wisdom in looking to his health. I’ll be remembering the disheartening headlines about Vince Foster, Sol Wachtler, and about so many other brave, struggling, strong and fragile people in our public and private capital lives.

Along with the appropriate perspective and, if necessary, pills, a night at the theater might be therapeutic for so many stressed out Washingtonians. Perhaps they'll then pause and ponder multiple meanings if their loved ones one day tell them, a little too enthusiastically, “Everything is breaking our way.”