These politicos can be found wheeling and dealing in neighboring productions of The Columnist and The Best Man on Broadway, where the spring theater season seems to be imitating the current political one in terms of accusations, revelations and other campaign machinations. But rest assured that Broadway’s characters are far more piquant than the colorless candidates in this spring’s Republican race.

The rise and fall of Joseph Alsop, political journalist par excellence of the JFK era, is a long-awaited saga in the retelling. David Auburn’s absorbing new play, The Columnist, dramatizes the story of the ultimate political insider.

Alsop (1910-1989) was the Cole Porter of politics – talented, flamboyant and elitist. In a career that spanned several presidents (from FDR to Johnson), he rose to unprecedented heights during John F. Kennedy’s administration. In one of the play’s early scenes, set on the night JFK was elected, Alsop sits in his Washington D.C. suite at 2 a.m., minutes before a surprise visit by the president-elect himself. It was an event that made Alsop’s status as JFK’s closest advisor all but official.

Isolated over Vietnam

Alsop was WASPish, stylish, witty, and “establishment” (he was a cousin of Eleanor Roosevelt and educated at Groton and Harvard), and so he came to personify the glamour, excitement and energy of the Kennedy years. He was also outspoken, opinionated and deeply feared. At the zenith of his power, his syndicated political column appeared in more than 190 newspapers, and he traveled the world in VIP style.

Inevitably his outspoken and opinionated style generated enemies— and that’s the stuff of Auburn’s play. Alsop’s devout hawkishness on Vietnam alienated David Halberstam, a talented young New York Times journalist (and a character in the play) who became one of Alsop’s bitter opponents. James Reston and other influential journalists of the day soon join Halberstam’s camp and form a steadfast anti-Alsop alliance.

Then comes Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas and, with it, Alsop’s dramatic reversal of fortune. Without JFK, Alsop’s position in the Washington establishment begins to slip.

Entrapped by the KGB

Then the other shoe drops. Alsop’s tryst with a male prostitute in a Moscow hotel, dramatized in Act I, turns out to have been a KGB entrapment, which catches up with Alsop in Act II. Photos are leaked to his enemies in the press.

Cornered, Alsop becomes more venomous and vindictive. His hawkishness on Vietnam intensifies, as does his paranoia (he alleged that Lyndon Johnson was tapping his phone). One by one, Alsop turns on those around him– including his devoted wife and loyal brother Stewart (they had co-authored a column for decades).

“I love my country,” sighs a defeated Alsop in the end. “I just don’t care very much for the people in it.”

In the title role, John Lithgow brandishes a signature cigarette holder, sports a signature bow tie and owlish glasses, and generally cuts the quintessential figure of power and privilege to perfection. It’s a dying breed of elitism, now almost extinct in the Internet Age, when anyone with an opinion can find an audience. Still, I couldn’t help savor that bittersweet taste of nostalgia for a glamorous political era when the power of the press was wielded by a select few.

Ruining reputations

Alsop’s life was fictionalized in a 1967 novel called Washington D.C., by Gore Vidal, another elitist of the Kennedy era. Coincidently (and ironically), Vidal is also the author of The Best Man, the other political play currently on Broadway, set also in the 1960s. Unlike Auburn’s Alsop, Vidal’s stage politicians are fictitious. Nevertheless, they play the same perilous games, in which reputations can be ruined with the dialing of a telephone.

Vidal’s smart comedy/drama is set at a national party convention in Philadelphia in July 1960, in an era when conventions actually meant something and balloting wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Vidal’s fictitious candidates, William Russell (played by John Larroquette, a Bill Clinton look-alike) and Joe Cantrell (played by Eric McCormack, a Rick Santorum look-alike), are running a heated primary race, and Russell seems likely to win the nomination on the first ballot.

But the devious Cantrell has uncovered a secret in Russell’s past– a hospitalization for a nervous breakdown– which he intends to leak to the press and turn the tide of the nomination. Meanwhile, secret information lands in Russell’s hands revealing a gay relationship that his opponent Cantrell allegedly had years ago in the army. But Russell declines to use it. He wants to win fair and square.

Star cameos

Whether they’re moralistic or opportunistic, righteous or devious, these politicos are engaging to watch as they play their Machiavellian games. Even with stock characters who verge on caricature (e.g., the candidate’s wives), the plot offers some surprising twist and turns.

This entertaining and satisfying production also boasts two old-fashioned star cameos: the charismatic James Earl Jones as the wily former president, and the irrepressible Angela Lansbury as a political grande dame. Director Michael Wilson turns the entire Schoenfeld Theatre into Philadelphia’s (former) Convention Hall, with banners, flags, TV screens, ushers sporting campaign hats, you name it.

Romney’s skeletons

As this relevant revival of The Best Man shows, negative material can always be found to cast new light on a rival politician in the throes of a presidential campaign. Mitt Romney’s transporting a family dog on the roof of a car for 12 hours during a vacation trip or indulging in lavish home expenses (like a car elevator) may not rise to the level of a serious misdemeanor, but his bullying incident in prep school very well might. What we’ve learned in the past half-century since The Best Man is that a candidate’s past misdeeds don’t shed as much light on his character as the way he responds when the old deeds are dredged up.

How Romney handles these allegations— serious or small — may indeed determine who “the best man” is in 2012, whether that man wins or not. Maybe someone should buy Romney some theater tickets.

Wait! You could at least finish reading this column before you rush off to the bookstore.

The good news about Father’s Day is that Bissinger has apparently conducted extensive research into the psyches of writers. Remarkably, he concludes that all writers’ psyches closely resemble his own!

“All writers silently soak up despair for our own advantage,” he informs us. “Like dogs rolling in the guts of dead animals, the stink of others makes us giddy. We deny it but we lie in denying it.”

And of course he’s right (even if he’s ungrammatical). Bissinger acknowledges what self-deluded writers like Louisa May Alcott and me refuse to admit: that one of the reasons we can’t string beautiful sentences together is that we’re too busy cleaning the guts of dead animals off our desks after we’ve rolled around in them.

Here comes Janet

The even better news is that Bissinger has entered the Janet Malcolm sweepstakes.

Malcolm, of course, is the New Yorker writer who famously declared, “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”

The beauty of that passage is two-fold: (a) its sweeping generalization and (b) its reflexive kicker, stipulating that anyone who disagrees with her statement is by definition stupid or full of himself. Bissinger employs much the same rhetorical device: Anyone who denies the truth of his words must obviously be a liar.

We deny it, but...

But why leave this field to Janet Malcolm or Buzz Bissinger? You too can play this game. Let me take a crack at it.

— All good writers are miserable. And if you’re not miserable, you’re not a good writer.

— Happy writers are all alike; every unhappy writer is unhappy in his or her own way. We deny it but we lie in denying it.

— All writers dress funny. We deny it but we lie in denying it.

— Every writer who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that when he rolls around in the guts of dead animals, he should take a bath afterwards.

— Every writer who is stupid enough to roll around in the guts of dead animals needs an agent.

— Every writer who is too stupid and full of himself to think he doesn’t need an agent, needs an agent.

— Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is gong on knows that it takes about two hours to drive from Philadelphia to New York, even with E-Z Pass, except when there’s really heavy traffic on a Sunday night, in which case it may take two and a half hours or even three.

— Journalists are what’s left of the people who aren’t bright enough to be lawyers, strong enough to be actors, and don’t have hands steady enough to be surgeons. We deny it but we lie in denying it.

— Every surgeon who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that deep down, he’s an axe murderer.

— Every con man who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Come to think of it, he is a confidence man.

— All women want to kill their mothers and marry their fathers. They deny it, but they lie in denying it.

— All Italian restaurants in Philadelphia are really run by Albanians. They deny it, but they lie in denying it.

— All writers attract attention by making sweeping generalizations. We deny it, but we lie in denying it.

OK, it’s your turn.

I write to you about the horrible torturing and death of six-year-old Khalil Wimes, another helpless child victimized by inadequate services to Philadelphia’s most vulnerable children and their families.

For more than 30 years, I did intensive pro bono work with families who abused their children and with the abused children themselves. My referrals came from the district attorney’s office, from schools, from counselors and even from distraught workers in the Department of Human Services who wanted to get cases out of the system. My approach involved intensive group psychotherapy, supplemented by individual, couple and family therapy as indicated, plus family life education, as well as help offered on a 24/7 basis.

The families I worked with can’t be healed merely by staying off drugs for six months and taking a parenting class— the theory by which Khalil Wimes was allowed to return to his destructive biological parents. The psychological cancers in these families are too deep and long-standing, one generation passing it on to another for decades. Intensive work is needed, usually for many years; and all services by all agencies serving a family must be coordinated so that individuals and families don’t fall through the cracks of the city’s bureaucracy.

Midnight calls

Some parents cannot be helped to change, and their children must be removed from their homes. But others desperately want to learn to parent and love well. Those professionals who work with them must be on call 24/7.

For thirty years I took emergency calls wherever I was. I attended court hearings with my clients, accompanied them to school conferences, and paid visits in the middle of the night when terror overwhelmed them and they feared hurting themselves or their children. I prepped them for job interviews and shopped with them as they chose their interviewing outfits. In short, I worked to give them the support and care they were denied in their own formative years.

In one case, the children and the dad began to trust me. The children began to improve academically, socially and emotionally. Predictably, the mom, who was the prime abuser, grew furious because her husband began to stand up to her cruelty. She complained to her caseworker at the Department of Human Services, as well as a worker from another agency, telling them I was a racist. Although her caseworker didn’t believe this and said so to her superior, the case was removed from my care. When I had to say goodbye to the five children, I don’t know who shed more tears— they or I.

Grudging audience

Two years ago I realized I could not carry this responsibility any longer. That is why I wrote to you, volunteering to train a few city workers who were interested in learning an in-depth approach to help and change. My letters to you were forwarded to the head of the city’s Behavioral Health Department. After I made repeated calls to his office, I was grudgingly invited to present my model of help, with documentation.

I spent many hours in preparation. Afterward, I was told that there was no need or room for my model in the city’s plans. When I asked why I continued to get referrals if there was no need for my approach, there was silence.

I know it does not have to be this bad. I know little ones like Khalil and Danieal Kelly, who died at age 14, can be saved. I also know that the city agencies responsible for protecting such children are overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the stresses, the anger, the violence and the squalor they must confront day after day. Is it too much to ask that they welcome involvement from professionals who might be able to help alleviate the problem?

Some works made the menu because they’re labeled Opus 10. Others got the nod because they’re the composer’s tenth piece for a particular instrument or the tenth entry in a multi-item opus.

At the third concert, scheduled for this coming weekend in Center City and Chestnut Hill, Tempesta’s Baroque orchestra will play large-scale works. The first two concerts, presented Saturday night and Sunday afternoon in Center City, focused on chamber music and solo sonatas.

The restriction to tens produced a Baroque sampler that included one acknowledged classic, several standouts and several pieces worth listening to even though they adhered to conventional Baroque patterns.

This was probably the first time anyone has ever noticed that the acknowledged classic, Bach’s fourth suite for unaccompanied cello, is a double ten. It’s BWV 1010 in the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis catalog of Bach’s works.

Overall, the two programs demonstrated that the Baroque repertoire is so rich and varied that you can put together two meaty, entertaining concerts even when you limit your selections with a gimmicky rule invented for a special occasion.

Violin duets

The violin came into its own in the Baroque period, and Tempesta’s two lead violinists— concertmaster Emlyn Ngai and second violin Karina Fox— received some of the program’s best assignments.

Saturday evening, they scored with two duets. In the first half, they played an unaccompanied sonata for two violins and spent four lively movements creating interesting sonorities and taking turns accompanying each other. In the second half, an accompanied sonata featured two bright fast movements, a dark introduction and a beautiful sarabande.

For Sunday’s solo recital, Ngai presented a Vivaldi sonata that included two movements packed with the showiness that has roused violin audiences for three centuries. The third movement was one of those dreamy slow movements that are just as characteristic of Vivaldi’s work as the high-speed stuff we tend to associate with his name.

Fox soloed on Sunday with an unaccompanied Fantasia that she described as one of the Telemann’s attempts to create polyphony with a single-line instrument. I couldn’t hear all of her on-stage introduction, but I gathered Telemann built the three movements around themes that would have been played simultaneously had he been working with two instruments. The soloist plays them one after the other instead and creates some of the effect of polyphonious, contrapuntal music. Whatever the theory, Fox breathed spirit into the exercise.

Speak up, please

I had trouble hearing most of the on-stage introductions that were provided in lieu of programs notes on Sunday. Musicians should always be provided with microphones when they speak from the stage. They’ve spent their lives mastering their instruments. You can’t expect them to be experts at the art of projecting their voices, too.

The harpsichord, the lute and the cello played supporting roles Saturday night, as they normally do in Baroque ensemble music. Sunday afternoon, they got their turn in the spotlight.

Cellist Eve Miller turned in a solid performance of the Bach suite, even though she was playing it for the first time on the Baroque cello, after years of playing it on the modern cello.

Tempesta’s co-director, Richard Stone, contributed a sonata by a Baroque lute master, Leopold Weiss, that included a long, notably beautiful sarabande. Stone’s precise, poetically nuanced performance was a good example of the work that has earned him a reputation as one of today’s leading lutenists.

Harpsichordist Adam Pearl presented a ten squared— Frescobaldi’s 100 variations on a passacaglia theme. Despite the daunting title, the piece only lasts a few minutes. Overall, it’s a beautiful example of the harpsichord’s ability to sort out the different voices in a contrapuntal piece.

Forgotten composer

Tempesta’s other director, Gwyn Roberts, closed both concerts in high style. On Saturday a chamber version of Vivaldi’s “Goldfinch” concerto featured good-natured allegros, plenty of birdcalls, and a general evocation of the outdoors.

Sunday she presented a gem by one of her personal discoveries, Francesco Mancini, a composer who was overshadowed by Allessandro Scarlatti all his life and seems to have been relegated to the shade ever since. If his tenth recorder sonata is any indication, it’s time he received his due. 

It’s an inventive, highly varied piece that keeps moving in unexpected directions. Mancini’s imaginative writing for the cello accompaniment adds to the surprises. The cello is so prominent that at times the piece sounds like a duet.

Roberts and Stone rounded out the anniversary festivities by announcing Tempesta’s schedule for next season. In addition to a full round of orchestra and chamber concerts, the itinerary includes three “Artist Recitals” at the Barnes, featuring Roberts, Stone and Pearl. This is the first time I’ve heard anyone mention that the new Barnes Museum on the Parkway has added a new concert venue to Philadelphia’s resources.

     “Confessions of an ex-go-go dancer,” by Merilyn Jackson, was just as good as watching Gypsy and Valley of the Dolls. Go-go on, Merilyn.
Lewis Whittington
Center City, Philadelphia
May 6, 2012

     As always, Merilyn takes us to the moment that is happening. She has a great gift of telling it as it is and involving the reader completely.
Geny Dignac
Phoenix, Ariz.
May 9, 2012

     A tough and funny piece that cuts through all the hand wringing that usually accompanies articles on erotic dancing. This is the reality, folks.
Jack DeWitt
Glenside, Pa.
May 9, 2012

Cabin in the Woods

     Re Jake Blumgart’s review of The Cabin in the Woods—
     I think we have to recognize that a sea change has overtaken the horror movie genre. Whereas the classic horror films of the period 1919-1945 were set in a world of poetic (or pinch-penny, depending upon the studio) fantasy, the new horror is all about reality: Werewolves don’t torture and kill people. Other people torture and kill people.
     I’m old enough now to deplore this trend. If I were 20, I might feel differently. At least the revitalized Hammer Films is trying to nudge things back in the other direction. But I fear there is great divide here. Youth can’t make me want to watch Hostel, and I can’t make youth appreciate White Zombie.
Andrew Mangravite
Yeadon, Pa.
May 9, 2012

Historical injustice

     Re “Who invented the telegraph?” by Dan Rottenberg (Editor’s Notebook)—
     Wikipedia (for what it’s worth) says Joseph Henry’s work on the electromagnetic relay was the basis of the electrical telegraph, invented by Samuel Morse and Charles Wheatstone separately.
     Hmm— no mention of Hayyim Selig Slonimski.
     Wikipedia does mention Slonimiski (Slonimiksy) elsewhere— as the inventor in 1856 of an electrochemical device for sending quadruple telegrams. The system of multiple telegraphy perfected by Lord Kelvin in 1858 was based on Slonimski’s discovery.
     Our own Benjamin Franklin found an easy answer to notoriety. He made his discovery of the lightning rod public to the world— for free. Franklin also believed in letting others have the credit— so I vote for Franklin as the source of your “credit” quote. Of course Franklin may have believed in giving others credit because he had achieved his fame or because he wasn’t beyond using the material of others too.
     Franklin once wrote of Thomas Leeds, a rival in the Almanac business, that Mr. Leeds was going to die later that year. When Mr. Leeds didn’t die, he wrote in his Almanac all sorts of nasty things about Franklin. Franklin responded by saying he knew the real Mr. Leeds; that the real Mr. Leeds would never say nasty things and this only proved that the real Mr. Leeds did die and that an imposter was running the other Almanac.
     Years later Mr. Leeds did die and Franklin said, “I knew it all along.”
     It was a wonderful story— the back and forth sold plenty of Almanacs for both publishers. I should mention I learned of this story from H.W. Brand’s book on Franklin:  The First American.
Joseph Glantz
Levittown, Pa.
May 10, 2012

     Editor’s comment: Is Wikipedia the only research resource available in Levittown?

Sculptor’s complaint

     I’m the bronze sculptor exhibiting this month at Artists’ House gallery. Andrew Mangravite, in his review, made a few errors.
     My work is distributed throughout the gallery and can be found in every room. It does not “infiltrate” somebody else’s front space. The only “animal studies” and “figure studies” I am showing are preparatory drawings for particular sculptures, although your reviewer failed to mention that there are drawings on exhibit at all.
     The rest of my work are bronze sculptures intended to emotionally reach the viewer. While I don’t expect that kind of a response from everyone, the fact remains that all of my pieces on exhibit, figures as well as animals, have titles and none of those titles read “study of.”
     Kindly correct these inaccuracies.
Julia Levitina
South Philadelphia
May 9, 2012

     Andrew Mangravite replies: I think that in grousing over the fact that I overlooked her drawing— I didn’t, I just didn’t think that it was especially noteworthy— she ignored the fact that I likened her Heraclitus piece to a sculpture by Rodin. Perhaps she receives compliments like that every day, so mine really didn’t impress her.

Hollinger’s Ghost Writer

     Re Jane Biberman’s review of Michael Hollinger’s The Ghost-Writer, at the Arden (September 2010)—
     I’ve just attended a fine matineé performance of this amazing play at the Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell, Mass., and was impressed by the creative writing, the amazing performance and the very high standard of production in what was a most enjoyable afternoon! Thanks for calling it to my attention.
William H Davis
Nashua, N.H.
May 12, 2012

Poe on ecstasy

     Re “Edgar Allan Poe: Ecstasy junkie,” by Steve Antinoff (January 2009)—
     It’s not even a real unity anyway; it’s a quantifiable expansion of self that is only satisfying in contrast to the normal limitations of self. If it lasted forever it would get boring, just as isolated consciousness has certain boundaries and a certain degree of space, which becomes boring.
Gordon Blair
Glasgow, Scotland
May 13, 2012

     Editor’s comment: We know what Poe was smoking. What about you?

Jets, Sharks, Jews and ‘Niggers’

     Re “Of ‘Jews’ and ‘Niggers’ ” (Editor’s Notebook)—
     The Gospel of John may have been written as late as 115 C.E., by which time a Christian redactor would hardly have considered himself Jewish. John is certainly, as Harold Bloom points out, at war with Jewish tradition in it, and he even tries to rewrite Genesis.
     "Jew," as an ethnic descriptor and as an ethnic slur, can be discriminated only by context, and John’s use of the word is hardly neutral. It is otherwise with “Nigger” and “Negro,” the former a pejorative of the latter. “Yid” and “Jew” might be comparable for Jews.
     I regret the loss of “Negro.” The word was full of affirmation and pride when Martin Luther King used it, and the hyphenations “Afro-American” and “African-American” are parlor-polite ways of not saying “black.” This does not seem to me a gain.
Robert Zaller
Bala Cynwyd, Pa.
May 4, 2012

     There’s just one flaw in Dan Rottenberg’s thesis. If we assume that John the Evangelist thought of himself as a Jew who was writing for other Jews, then his choice of that word was weak. It was the least-specific way of describing the people who were present around the time of the Crucifixion.
     Rather, by the time that the Gospel was written, its author thought of himself as separate, as Robert Zaller pointed out (above). The Evangelist (or whoever actually wrote John’s Gospel) was resentful that many of his countrymen refused to accept Jesus’s divinity.
     He branded them, pejoratively, as “Jews,” writing with resentment against those who failed to embrace his new theology. He used the word with anger against them, not to generate sympathy, as Hammerstein did when describing slaves as “Niggers.”
     I’d like to turn the conversation back to the parts of that Gospel that humanize Jesus and that appealed to Bach. And I’d like to recognize that Bach was a human being, not a saint, when he failed to discern the malice in the word which he set to music.
Steve Cohen
King of Prussia, Pa.
May 6, 2012

     I liked your “Nigger/Jew” piece.We ought to be able to say/write anything we want. Its the context that matters. When my kids were little and asked me about “dirty” words, I told them their were no dirty words, just dirty intentions.
Merilyn Jackson
South Philadelphia
May 2, 2012

     I was wondering why “Nigger” was equated to “Jew” in your discussion, rather than, say, “kike” or “sheeny.” As I reflected, I came to the conclusion that, consistently throughout history, “Jew” could be applied as a term of denigration, whereas, depending on the period in question, “Negro” or “black” or, I imagine “Afro-American” could not.
     (It also seems that there is no word in the English language for the children of Abraham sufficiently steeped in neutrality that it could not, with some intonation or context, be offensive. I am not sure what to make of this, but it does appear to be the case. I await education from your readership.)
     You seemed to suggest that if the Sharks in West Side Story were a white ethnic group, our response would be different. Is that right?
Bob Levin
Berkeley, Calif.
May 2, 2012

     Editor’s comment: I was referring to the Jets (who were portrayed as a generic white gang), not the Sharks (who were portrayed specifically as Puerto Ricans). My point being: If you say, “The whole world is crazy” or “Everybody killed Christ,” you may be correct, but no one will take offense and no one will give it much thought. But if you say “The Irish are crazy” or “The Jews killed Christ,” you may be mistaken, but at least you’ll arouse enough of a response to provoke a dialogue that might generate some understanding.

Martha Marcy and cults

     Re “The not-so-awful truth about cults”—
     Thank you, Judy Weightman, for a spot-on review, illuminating the tension between cults and their surrounding communities as few do.
     Right now the “dance” is under way in a little spat between the student editors of the Daily Pennsylvanian and the graduating students of Penn who are Unificationists.
Doug Burton
University City/ Philadelphia
May 2, 2012

L’Elisir d’Amore

     Thanks for Steve Cohen’s review of L’Elisir d’Amore by the Academy of Vocal Arts.
     I did want to mention that the Italian tricolore was represented in the final scene (with the “CLN” liberation symbol sewn on it). It was what Belcore was tied up in. You are quite right that it was the Italian partisans who captured Mussolini.
Nicholas Muni
Center City/ Philadelphia
May 2, 2012

     Editor’s note: The writer directed the AVA’s production of L’Elisir d’Amore.

Rattle, the Orchestra and death

     Re Victor Schermer’s Philadelphia Orchestra review (“Rattle confronts the Grim Reaper”)—
     Thank you. You not only heard the same concert I did but you know what you’re talking about.
Leslie Kandell
New York
May 2, 2012

     Editor’s note: The writer is a long-time music and dance critic for the New York Times and other publications,

Bach, St. John and anti-Semitism

     Re “Bach, Christians and anti-Semitism”—
     I agree with much of what Kile Smith says so articulately, though I would add that other considerations come into play in modern performances or readings of the St. John Passion.
     I would prefer to characterize the gospel of John as “one of the canonical interpretations of what happened” rather than a “report of what happened,” since there are irreconcilable conflicts between all four of the gospels, all written years after the events themselves.
     More important, while a strong argument can be made that Bach’s St. John Passion wasn’t intended to express or promote anti-Semitism, and that the Gospel itself was probably written by Jews for a primarily Jewish audience, words can take on different connotations over time. When those connotations are so strong as to risk obscuring and distorting the intent of the original creators, I think it’s reasonable for performers to modify them in an attempt to avoid that misinterpretation on a conscious or unconscious level.
     In this case, that can easily be done in modern performances by changing the word “Jews” to “people” in English or ”Juden” to ”Leute” in German in passages where the author’s clear intention is to refer to “all those present.” I am accustomed to doing this in performances of the Bach or Schutz settings of the passions, whether in liturgical or concert contexts, and I know others have made this modification as well.
     I would argue strongly against thinking of such adaptations as somehow morally necessary (i.e., “politically correct"), made only to avoid charges of anti-Semitism. Such attempts to avoid guilt are really more attempts to avoid our own shared responsibility, I think. Rather, this can be simply respected as a legitimate way to acknowledge how unintended associations can become irrevocably attached to language over time.
     At the core of modern anti-Semitism has been the outrageous charge of “Christ-killers.” Given the horrific consequences of that deeply mistaken belief, it’s good to avoid putting Bach or modern performers in the unintended position of rubbing salt into that especially pernicious wound when telling the story of Christ’s passion and death.
Thomas Lloyd
Havertown, Pa.
April 24, 2012

     Editor’s note: The writer is director of choral and vocal studies at Haverford College.

     Kile Smith replies: Changing the sung text is a solution some have used to address the very real power of words that you’ve described; leaving them unchanged, but having a pre-concert discussion, or some type of explanation, is another. Different people coming to different solutions so that the work may continue to live, as you have done, is admirable.

     Thomas Lloyd replies: While generally I don’t think it’s a good idea to change even small details of original texts, I think the texts referring to the Jews in the Passions are a special case, primarily because of the Holocaust, and the way those specific texts were used to justify it. If Bach didn’t intend to single out Jews for criticism but it becomes difficult for modern ears to hear those words without being reminded of their use otherwise, how is Bach’s original intention best served?

     Kile Smith’s last point (above) is perhaps the most important: Bach’s highlighting the ongoing significance of the events of the original Passion, so that the blame for those events is not merely or even primarily historical ("their" fault, whether “they” were Caiaphas, the Sanhedrin, Pilate, the Roman soldiers, or some members of the crowd), but rather universally human-- ontological, if you will.
     Bach’s interpretive libretto and score remind us of orthodox Christian theology. The Nicene Creed says: “He also was crucified for us...” and thus affixes the blame squarely on the realm of the human, rather than the individual, or even the ethnic.
Fred Putnam
Hatfield, Pa.
May 4, 2012

     Editor’s comment: To read my two cents’ worth, click here.

Footnotes about Joseph Cedar’s Footnote

     Re AJ Sabatini’s review of Joseph Cedar’s Footnote—
     I’m currently slogging through an art book that puts notes at the back of the book, together with a separate bibliography for sources of quotations only minimally documented in the notes. Plate numbers of course don’t correspond with page numbers, so an inadequate index and list of illustrations lead to mazes of tracking information. The volume is large and unwieldy.
     This is typical of scholarly art publications now. Literary scholarship too often hides documentation at the back of the book, sometimes even without indication in the running text to what is elsewhere identified. Reading scholarly texts has become an archeological dig.
Mary E. Hazard
Center City/ Philadelphia
April 25, 2012

Pulitzer Prizes

     I enjoyed Dan Rottenberg’s piece on the Pulitzers (Editor’s Notebook). I’m no fan of prizes either. But Faulkner didn’t have much time after his Nobel (13 years) and Hemingway after his Pulitzer (eight years), so you may have pressed the point about their diminished productivity a little. 
     Faulkner did write a very long book in this period, A Fable, which you didn’t mention, and Hemingway a very engaging memoir, A Moveable Feast. That their best work was already behind them (in Hemingway’s case, long behind him) was neither here nor there.
     Thomas Mann’s Nobel didn’t prevent him from writing Doctor Faustus. Harper Lee may only have had one book in her. Allen Drury may simply have had 20 too many.
Robert Zaller
Bala Cynwyd, Pa.
April 25, 2012

     I think the problem is the Pulitzer doesn’t have any good award presenters. I hear James Franco, Anne Hathaway and Ricky Gervais are available
Joseph Glantz
Levittown, Pa.
April 25, 2012

     Editor’s comment: Of course the theoretical justification for prizes is not their effect on the winners but the standard they set for writers to aspire to. Whether they do any such thing is the question I raised.

Uffizi treasures

     Re ”Treasures from the Uffizi,” at the Michener Museum—
     Anne R. Fabbri has managed to take on my least favorite art genre (religious art) and make it enticing, with her down-to-earth commentary about the process, such as artists having used their mistresses to pose as saints, etc. Delicious!
E. Sherman Hayman
Washington Square West/ Philadelphia
April 27, 2012

     Anne Fabbri is not only incredibly knowledgeable about art history, but her writing conveys it in a way to make it accessible to all. Bravo for your insights, Anne, and for what you teach us.
Ilene Dube
Doylestown, Pa.
April 27, 2012

Unsung pianist

     Re “The greatest pianist you never heard of,” by Dan Coren (January 2011)—
     Lisitsa just didn’t pop out of nowhere. I was an employee of the Florida Philharmonic under the direction of James Judd in the early ’90s, and Lisitsa was contracted with us to perform a Rachmaninoff concert. She was the most beautiful creature any of us had ever seen, and a phenomenally powerful performer. Frankly, I thought she would be snapped up by a major agent and would be the next Horowitz.
     There is still time, but she appears to be very savy as far as technology goes and is thriving on Youtube. But she really belongs in the concert halls. She is an extremely intelligent and intuitive performer, and the journey she takes you to is sublime.
Dana DeMartino
Charleston, S.C.
April 27, 2012

     Dan Coren replies: It perplexes me that Lisitsa hasn’t become a regular on the concert circuit the way, for example, Helene Grimaud has. I recall that she performed as a soloist under Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s direction while he was in Montreal, so I hope that he will soon invite her to play in Philadelphia.

For the final concert of Vox’s silver anniversary season, Radu took on two opuses normally played only by major orchestras working with big time international soloists: the Beethoven violin concerto and the Ninth Symphony.

The Ninth Symphony. The one you mean when you don’t mention the composer’s name.

For the concerto, Radu didn’t even bring in a guest violinist. The soloist was his regular concertmaster, Thomas DiSarlo, who returned after the intermission and resumed his normal role, without any indication that he had just assayed a work normally played by soloists who head back to their hotel rooms as soon as they’ve finished their one and only chore for the night.

DiSarlo is obviously not one of the legendary violinists whom all fully qualified connoisseurs listen to on the recordings stored in their encyclopedic collections. As far as I know, he was playing the concerto for the first time. But he turned in a solid, perfectly satisfactory performance. If you wanted to spend the first night of your weekend hearing a good live performance of the Beethoven concerto, DiSarlo and his colleagues gave you their money’s worth.

You would also have heard things you don’t normally hear when you listen to a performance by a standard major orchestra.

Changing the balance

Most modern orchestras employ the number of winds Beethoven specified, but they beef up the strings, typically to at least ten musicians in the first violin section. The other string sections are approximately the same size.

The Vox Amadeus violin sections, by contrast, seat only five musicians apiece, and the viola and cello sections are even smaller. The result is a big change in the orchestra’s balance. The winds become more prominent, and Beethoven’s works acquire contrasts and blends that you don’t hear in most performances.

Radu enhanced this effect by seating the winds and the percussion in a semi-circle around the back of the orchestra. The brasses were located about where they’re normally seated, but the woodwinds moved closer to the audience. The piccolo and the flutes were positioned on the far left, near the front of the stage.

Country barn dance

During the final movement of the symphony, the orchestra sounded like a big, festive marching band. The lone piccolo, stationed right at the front, pierced through the strings when it launched into its big solo, like a piper leading a country barn dance. The finale wasn’t just an ode to joy; it was an exuberant outpouring of joy.

One of the great moments in music is the long passage for cellos and basses that introduces the choral finale. I love the sound of massed cellos, which you obviously can’t get from two cellos and two basses. Instead, the passage acquired a pleasing chamber music quality. Like the other changes created by the reduced forces, it was just as good, in its way, as the effects produced by standard forces, and it cast a new light on the score.

The final movement in the Ninth ordinarily tends to get the most attention, but Radu conducted all four movements with vision and understanding. The first movement delivered force and pace without sacrificing Beethoven’s melodies and included some particularly silvery flute work.

Seating the singers

The skitterish rhythms of the second movement scherzo can sound trivial in the wrong hands, but Radu turned it into a happy romp. The slow third movement— my personal favorite— sounded, as it should, like a long visit to another, less troubled world.

Radu even came up with an innovative seating arrangement for the vocal quartet. The four soloists all acquitted themselves with flair, but Beethoven gave the quartet a modest role: They sing only for two relatively short intervals during the choral finale. The rest of the time they sit in their chairs while the chorus and the orchestra blast away.

Radu handled this situation by seating the quartet on the far left side of the stage. The singers had to file across the stage when they made their entrances and exits; on the other hand, they didn’t have to sit in front of the orchestra, in full view of the audience, trying not to look like wallflowers while the chorus erupted into a frenzy of exultation and carried the final moments toward the sky.

Official licensing systems are in some sense easier to work with (or evade). A public censor must permit something to pass, for the sake of propaganda if nothing else. This circumstance gives the artist in an authoritarian state a certain amount of leverage, even as it exposes him to an undeniable level of risk.

The history of Soviet censorship is thus at the same time a history of Russian art in the 20th Century. Under Stalin, it took the crudest of forms: simply eliminating the artist. In the long, gray years that succeeded him, works deemed unacceptable were simply shelved. This was the case with Elem Klimov’s Agony, one of the most ambitious works of late Soviet cinema.

Even today, it’s not quite clear what Klimov intended in this film, whose original cut doesn’t survive. The “agony” of the title refers to Russia in 1916, the last year prior to the Bolshevik Revolution. The country was convulsed by the Great War, a struggle that had gone badly from the beginning and now presented Russia with a political as well as a military crisis.

Neither martyr not hero

Of course, from the Soviet perspective what was darkest preceded the dawn, and the last pre-revolutionary year offered no acceptable story line unless it segued into 1917, especially since the political principals of 1916— Tsar Nicholas II and his court confidant, the Siberian monk and faith healer Grigori Rasputin— were unmentionable except as objects of excoriation.

About Nicholas II nothing much can be said except that he was a tragically inadequate figure, caught in the toils of history. Nicholas receives a better press in post-Soviet Russia as a martyr, but no one will ever make him a hero.

As for Rasputin, he remains a byword for villainy. Dramatically speaking, of course, he is also fascinating: a combination of holy fool, shameless lecher, ruthless operator, and hypnotic charmer that not even a Dostoevsky could have dreamed up.

Rasputin’s particular influence on the royal family lay in his uncanny ability— medically inexplicable even today— to stem bleeding in Nicholas’s hemophiliac son. This talent bound the Tsarina Alexandra to him, and made his word, many feared, law in the household. 

Since Nicholas was in fact the final authority in Russia, Rasputin’s sway left the country in effect at the mercy of a man regarded by half the country as debauched and the other half as mad. This scandal undermined the monarchy more even than military defeat and mass hunger.

The Bolsheviks’ crime

To make a film whose central characters were Nicholas and Rasputin, therefore, involved turning the spotlight on an officially discredited past. Nicholas couldn’t have been portrayed sympathetically in the Soviet Union of the 1970s— Klimov made Agony between 1973 and 1975— without upending the narrative of the Bolshevik Revolution as the salvation of Russia from a decadent tyranny, and that narrative was necessary lest discussion revive about the original Bolshevik crime, the murder of the entire royal family in 1918. 

Rasputin’s story, similarly, raised issues about the persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church in an officially atheist state. A film like Agony, were it to have been made today, would have been viewed as straightforwardly anti-Bolshevik.

Sympathy for the Church

Agony in fact views the monarchy as Russia’s core political institution, whose collapse portends the most devastating consequences. The Church, too, is presented sympathetically; in a critical scene, scandalized church elders entrap Rasputin and ritually beat and anathematize him. As for the Bolsheviks, they are simply absent from Agony, and in the one scene that alludes to them, their expulsion from the Duma is noted with wild applause.

To be sure, Agony provides an agitprop scene at the very end that references the revolution to come, but when that scene was added to the film is unclear. The real ending shows the royal family returning from Rasputin’s funeral, and the Danish-born Alexandra, now deprived of her son’s only protector, saying to Nicholas, “I hate this country.”

That this film was banned in Brezhnev’s Russia is wholly unsurprising; that it was made at all, and on an epic scale that clearly required substantial state resources, is the real mystery.

Debt to Eisenstein

What are we to make of Agony as a film? It owes a great deal to the Russian epic tradition of Eisenstein in particular, although some scenes convey a dreamy inwardness that appears to reflect the contemporary influence of the great Andrei Tarkovsky. The film intercuts stock period footage in black and white, some of it apparently reshot, with color scenes reminiscent of Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace. 

The connection between scenes is often loose indeed, and Klimov indulges himself with apparent relish in Rasputin’s debauches— as does his star, Alexei Petrenko, whose astonishing performance as Rasputin wholly dominates the film. There isn’t really a relationship between Nicholas and Rasputin so much as a contrast, with Anatoly Romashin’s tsar a decent family man completely overwhelmed by the circumstances closing in on him. 

Klimov concentrates on close-up shots focused on the eyes: those of Rasputin mesmerizing, indomitable and more than a little mad, and Nicholas’s reflecting, most often, bewilderment and blank fear. In one scene, Nicholas stops before a soldier on guard duty, who stares fixedly ahead— the tsar’s gaze, of course, cannot be met. Only his wife and daughter return it, both with an icy contempt.

Prophetic cry

If there is a point in Klimov’s pairing of these two men, it lies in what they apparently represent: in Rasputin, the anarchic impulses of Russia itself, and in Nicholas, the frailty of order. In Agony, the latter is clearly no match for the former, and if the film makes any political judgment it appears to be unspoken: that a Rasputin could be tamed only by a worse monster— namely, Stalin. 

Klimov’s film was finally cleared for general release in Russia by Mikhail Gorbachev, the Nicholas II of the Soviet Union. Klimov himself became first secretary of the Filmmakers’ Union, a position he resigned in 1988 when the failure of perestroika became evident. The next year, the Berlin Wall fell. Klimov himself, who died in 2003, never made a film after the mid-1980s. 

Agony, for all its flaws, remains his prophetic cry. Like Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, it portrays a time of troubles as emblematic of the national experience.

Will someone finally be able to make a film about Stalin’s Great Terror of the ’30s? Not, I suspect, on the watch of Vladimir Putin, the little tsar in half-boots. But Russians have long memories, and they are accustomed to nursing them.

Carmichael is clearly obsessed, but he’s no nut. Nor does he convey the low-class stupidity of many of the Irish playwright McDonagh’s previous protagonists.

McDonagh’s leading men are almost all uneducated, even when they’re somewhat loveable, like Coleman in The Lonesome West, who’s interested only in eating and attending funerals to collect free sausage rolls; “Cripple” Billy in The Cripple of Inishmaan, who hopes to get a job in movies to escape the boredom of his existence; Roy, the slow-on-the-uptake hit man of In Bruges; and the sadistic Padraic in The Lieutenant of Inishmore, who spends his time pulling out the toenails of Belfast drug pushers.

Carmichael, by contrast, is troubled, yes, but also rational, erudite and clear-minded.

A Behanding in Spokane combines McDonagh’s trademark violence and humor. It’s a 90-mnute play that requires great performances to succeed. Fortunately, Theatre Exile provided them.

Pearce Bunting especially grabbed my attention with his intense performance as Carmichael. His humanity and his intelligence gave substance to what, in lesser hands (no pun intended), might be a freak show.

Behanding, the Irish playwright’s first work set in America, opened on Broadway in 2010. It fails to sufficiently capture an essence of America, relying instead on the familiar crutches of racism and drug dealing. Behanding, really, has no sub-plot and fewer story developments than other McDonagh plays and movies. It does, however, present wonderful opportunities for performers.

The hotel clerk, well played by Matt Pfeiffer, inhabits a world of his own and appears to have less of a grip on rationality than Carmichael. He provides a wacky unpredictability that adds suspense to the play.

A pair of drug dealers who get involved with a scam that’s over their heads are wonderfully played by Amanda Schoonover, who remains effervescently young despite her long list of credits, and a new face (at least to me), Reuben Mitchell.

Joe Canuso directs sure-footedly with a deliberate pace that accentuates the script’s tension.

Some critics have complained about the play’s outrageous violence, but that’s like saying O’Neill should avoid melancholy or Shakespeare should eschew soliloquies. Gore is McDonagh’s currency.

Ten years later, Jeanne expanded soil into a full company production for her “Decade of Dance” celebration. As a former Martha Graham principal dancer, Ruddy retained and uses some of the high drama that Graham liked to inject into her choreography.

Those of us who saw Breathless when it was first staged in 2008 know that Ruddy was always capable of making a dance out of tragedy. Here female dancers were dispatched one by one to watery graves, while we in the audience watched film that showed the dancer victims underwater, hair flowing out around their heads in the water, some with eyes open— a vision that was simultaneously gruesome and at the same time oddly beautiful.

Yet unlike Graham, with her love of Greek mythology, Ruddy looks to the newspaper and TV to find her dramas. It’s well to keep in mind that Ruddy has ever turned the tragedies of daily life as we know it into a dance subject. Yet she’s retained a light touch as well. Lark is just one example of her joyful movement and happy subject matter, with dancers balanced on one leg, the other bent at the knee, looking like a lovely flock of beautiful birds.

For her final local performance, Jeanne showcased her troupe in three works that represented the variety and poetry of her oeuvre. Montage à Trois was originally created to be performed at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts as a contribution to last spring’s Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts. This beautiful blend of art work and dance looked just as wonderful with the Elisabeth Osborne paintings projected onto a screen with dancers moving in front of the paintings as it did when the dance was performed before and with the actual paintings. In some ways it worked better with the projected images.

Fearless three-year-old

Out of the Mist, Above the Real (2004) represented the stages of life: Childhood, Youth, Middle Age and Old Age, as well as a Guardian Angel and a Boat. (Prints of Thomas Cole’s The Four Voyages of Life were displayed in the lobby.) “Childhood” featured the tiny, three-year-old blond Zoe Shae Buzby, daughter of one of Ruddy’s dancers. This little miss seemed fearless as she was carried around the stage. Little Miss Zoe actually threatened to steal the show as she waved and smiled while balancing on shoulders and being carried off stage in a boat formed by the linked arms of two dancers, to laughter and applause from the audience.

“Youth” was Sophia Davis, somewhat older than Zoe but just as charming. Then came “Middle Age,” with Ruddy performing an exquisite solo, looking anything but middle-aged as she moved about in swirling red draperies. Or maybe middle age looks better than we think.

“Old Age” was performed by Brigitta Herrman, one of Philadelphia’s stellar older performers, which is not to say she looks or acts old, but that she’s a theatrical pillar of dignity and talent. The Guardian Angel was Renee Robinson-Buzby, little Zoe’s mother, who carried her beautiful little daughter off stage with her standing on her mother’s shoulders, waving, smiling and clearly having a wonderful time.

Kenyan safari

Ruddy says that everything she choreographs comes out of her own life experience. Thus the farewell evening ended with Game Drive, which was inspired by a recent trip she and her husband took to Kenya. Rick Callender and Gabrielle Revlock performed as the couple, dressed in safari outfits, looking through binoculars, jumping in excitement when some intriguing animal was sighted. Those who looked closely would have seen movement references to giraffes (yes, really) and baboons and even a section Ruddy called “Variation on a Jeep.”

How do I know the meaning of these references? I sat in on many rehearsals and had the pleasure of watching Ruddy transform an exciting vacation into a wonderful dance.

Jeanne Ruddy leaves us on a high note. She and her husband are planning to visit China next. Maybe she’ll be inspired to give us an Oriental dance when she returns.

As the play opens, Anna (Suzanne O’Donnell) is showing off to Claire (Grace Gonglewski) her newly chintz-decorated parlor and her new necklace with a mammoth jewel— gifts from her new lover, a married man.

Claire, who has been away, announces her own news: She’s fallen in love with a young woman. And she has a request of Anna: to use her home as the trysting place.

Excessive expectations

The always marvelous Gonglewski plays Claire as a mannish woman of perhaps 40, confidently striding around the room, conveying sarcasm or disbelief toward Anna’s excessive expectations for her lover.

Yet as an expectant lover, Claire is also vulnerable, repeatedly pulling back the curtain to see if her intended partner is coming down the street (without her chaperone, she hopes).

Anna is jealous—her own liaison presumably is only for the money he showers on her, not for love. O’Donnell rages with a piercing voice and a jutting jaw and perfectly timed rants as the two characters joust for an edge over each other.

A sitcom too long

The dialogue— so-called MametSpeech— is an intellectual pleasure. It comprises a medley of styles: here, rounded Victorian-era sentences, Shakespearean undertones, wit à la Oscar Wilde, gutter slang of our era, all coming at you rapid-fire. There are pointed jokes about marriage (Anna: “Would he require a mistress if he had no wife?”) or men (Anna, her hand brushing her crotch: “In like a lion, out like a lamb”).

But how much of this can one take at one sitting? Even Ralph and Alice Kramden or George and Louise Jefferson went at each other for only half an hour at a stretch.

Boston Marriage reaches its climax at the end of Act I. Claire’s young woman lover comes to the door (out of the audience’s sight); Anna answers, then returns so that Claire can talk to her. Claire re-enters the room with a question from her friend: How did Anna get her mother’s necklace?

A séance?

It’s a great twist of plot. Unfortunately, nothing in Act II comes close to matching it. Both Claire and Anna plan how to reconcile the father and daughter to the idea that they are taking lovers who themselves are probably lovers. Anna decides a séance is the thing and provides silly costumes for them to wear.

“But could such a Byzantine rodomontade restore the girl to me?” Claire asks. “Could it convince the father?” The women will never find out, because they don’t carry it out. Just as well, since we’re pretty groggy by this point.

Here the MametSpeech reveals its shortcomings. It’s entertaining but not engaging. It’s performance (“rodomontade,” indeed), not feeling.

Mamet, it’s said, wrote Boston Marriage after being stung by criticism that he couldn’t write strong parts for women. He still hasn’t. When Claire and Anna are ultimately reconciled, language isn’t the mediator. It’s simply the end of Act II. They kiss— two ridiculous women who deserve each other.

Mamet is fortunate indeed to have two skilled actresses interpreting his work here. They, plus a maid, are the full cast and provide half an evening well spent.

It’s a bleak scene– right out of an Edward Hopper painting, except that’s it’s in a play. A Pinter play. Where else? 

Just when we thought the darkness was behind us and some light was dawning, Harold Pinter has returned from the dead with his unforgiving 1960 play, The Caretaker, to remind us that man’s capacity for cruelty is both infinite and enduring.

Pinter provides only three characters, but that’s all he needs to tell his story of man’s inhumanity toward man. The scene is a one-room flat (set in East London, but it could be any bleak urban landscape). The room is a wreck. A tower of newspapers dominates center stage like an altar to urban living. Piles of rubbish surround it— broken appliances, rungless ladders, unwired lamps, rolled rugs, molding mattresses, crumpled clothing. 

An air of mystery and tension hangs over this miserable scene as it unfolds. Who is Aston, the man in the business suit? Why does he live there? Why has he invited Davies, an old tramp, in from the cold? And who is the third man, hiding in the closet?

The story begins with a glimmer of hope. Aston offers Davies a place to spend the night. He makes up a bed for him, lends him money, gives him a key to the flat. He even offers him a job as a caretaker for the derelict building. (The reason for the job offer never explained, so we’re left to believe that it’s a simple act of human kindness).

But once Aston leaves, the trouble starts (or the fun, depending how you view the theatre of the absurd). A third character, Mick, jumps out of the closet and begins a terrifying game of cat and mouse that turns nasty. Mick terrorizes the old tramp, interrogating him, beating him, screaming in his ear, chasing him around the apartment with a vacuum cleaner. It’s alternatingly hilarious and harrowing.

Bait and switch

It turns out that the apartment belongs to Mick and Aston, who are brothers. What follows is a violent, triangular game of bait and switch, in which Mick and Aston vie for control over Davies, while Davies in turn tries to use them both for his own ends– namely, a roof over his head, a morsel of food and a pair of shoes.

“He’s no friend of mine,” says Davies to Mick about Aston, betraying the man who had had taken him in, sensing that Mick, his torturer, is the force with whom he should ally instead.

As the power struggle plays itself out, some secrets are revealed. It turns out that Aston has had a mental breakdown and been institutionalized. So the only character in the play capable of human kindness turns out to have been, in effect, lobotomized. What does that say about the hope for human kindness and enduring brotherhood?

No hope

Pinter’s bleak landscape offers us three lonely, isolated urban figures, as if they were the last creatures on earth. “We’re all of mankind, whether we like it or not,” says another tramp, Didi, in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

But unlike Beckett’s tramps Didi and Gogo, or old Krapp in Krapp’s Last Tape, here there is no possibility of redemption, no glimmer of hope, no promise of sustained human compassion. Pinter’s answer to the Old Testament question: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (or, in this case, caretaker) is clear, and it’s a resolute “No.

Ultimately, the strength– and the surprise— of this stellar production (directed by Christopher Morahan and starring a riveting Jonathan Pryce as Davies) lie in its scorching humor. (It’s the theater of the absurd, after all.) Why do we laugh at this feral trio as they tear each other apart? Because it’s so outrageous? Or, in eliciting our laughter, is Pinter implicating us in those crimes against humanity as well?

Pinter has been called a master of “comedy of menace.” I never fully understood that expression until I saw this funny, ferocious production.

Not so delicate

Hopelessness seems to be a recurrent theme at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this spring. The Caretaker was preceded there by another classic— the much-anticipated Russian-language production of Chekhov’s masterpiece, Three Sisters, by the acclaimed Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg.

I’ve always maintained that the essence of Chekhov is a delicate balance between light and dark, funny and sad, comedy and tragedy. But apparently director Lev Dodin, who is widely regarded as the pre-eminent Chekhov director in the playwright’s motherland, doesn’t think so, at least not this time around.

Dodin gives us another bleak landscape, even bleaker than Pinter’s, if you can imagine. On an empty stage, with only the façade of the family mansion in view, Dodin’s three Prozorov sisters (Olga, Irina, Masha) gaze out through the gaping black windows into darkness, as their hopes of flight from their provincial prison to Moscow (and fulfillment) are dashed.

“There can be no happiness,” says one. “We can only dream it.”

But Dodin’s sisters don’t even do that. They sit silently in those windows like the Three Fates, or they cluster downstage on a series of narrow steps where the ensemble congregates. In this highly stylized, expressionistic production— one that relies on tableaux rather than plot— it’s all doom and gloom, as one by one the sisters’ hopes are dashed.

Sexual frustrations

To watch these three sisters rolling around on the floor, moaning “To Moscow” or flinging themselves on their respective lovers in desperation, is to witness Chekhov taken to an expressionistic level that is, well, just not Chekhovian. Startling? Yes. But heart-breaking? No. Rendering their sexual frustrations explicit through exaggerated physical action (these three sisters dance and twirl and hurl themselves about) goes against the grain of those portrayals of longing that make Chekhov the delicate impressionistic artist that he is. 

Still, Dodin’s Three Sisters will haunt me, if only for its innovations. I’ll remember this production as the “Four Sisters"— Natasha, the villainous sister-in-law, has been upgraded and given a non-traditionally sympathetic portrayal.  I’ll remember the sisters huddled on those stairs, clinging to each other, seeking shelter as if in a storm. 

Above all, I’ll remember them seated in those dark windows, isolated, alone, just like Pinter’s characters in theirs.

This is the crux of Footnote, Joseph Cedar’s comedy of academic rivalry. As described in BSR reviews by AJ Sabatini and Robert Zaller, the question Cedar poses to his audiences is: “What would you do in such a situation?”

This question is hardly hypothetical. Every day, somewhere on this planet, somebody gets credit that somebody else deserves. It will happen to you sooner or later, if it hasn’t already.

For want of a patent

My favorite example is Chaim Selig Slonimsky, an itinerant Russian-Jewish tinkerer who invented the electric telegraph in the 1830s but neglected to patent it or publicize it, only to learn some years later that the same device had been patented by the American painter Samuel F.B. Morse, who is credited with its invention to this day.

Everyone lacks some dimension. Inventors by their very nature tend not to be very good self-promoters. Thomas Edison did get credit for the electric light and the phonograph but not terribly much in the way of money, which was made by others.

So, what would you do? I suggest four possible responses.

1. “There is no limit to what a man can achieve if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.” Ditto for women. (And if you can tell me the original source of this oft-cited quotation, you get a free subscription to BSR.)

2. “If you work in the knowledge business, your job is to spread knowledge, not to accumulate fame or fortune.” My journalistic work has occasionally been plagiarized, without attribution. That bothers me a little. But it would bother me much more if others had never used my research at all.

3. “Awards— even Nobels and Pulitzers— are ultimately merely popularity contests.”

4. “The truly deserving will indeed be recognized eventually— although not necessarily in their lifetimes.” Slonimsky, for example, was celebrated in a 1977 article in Commentary, about a century after he died.

Morgan’s mentor

Then there’s the case of the 19th-Century Philadelphia banker Anthony J. Drexel. In many respects Drexel was the father of modern finance. After the Civil War he raised the capital that fueled America’s railroads and created America’s first modern corporations. He transformed a confused and depressed J.P. Morgan into a one-man stabilizing force in the U.S. economy. With Drexel’s help, another obscure banker named Jay Cooke became America’s financial savior during the Civil War, a former clerk named George Childs became publisher of one of America’s most respected newspapers (the Philadelphia Ledger), and Drexel’s niece Katharine Drexel founded a religious order and became a saint.

Yet Drexel was a modest and reticent man who granted no interviews, kept no diaries, held no public office and destroyed his papers He supported hundreds of charities, almost all anonymously. (Drexel University was the exception.) Consequently, journalists, historians and biographers took the path of least resistance and focused their energies elsewhere.

I first became interested in Drexel in the 1970s, when I was working on an article about J.P. Morgan & Co. and was astonished to learn that it had actually been founded not by Morgan but by Drexel. It took me 23 years to interest a publisher in a biography of the man. When The Man Who Made Wall Street was finally published in 2001 by the University of Pennsylvania Press, Anthony Drexel had been dead for 108 years.

The last Yiddish novelist

Nevertheless, a paperback edition followed five years later. And this year a Chinese-language edition of my book was published in Shanghai. Will it surprise you to learn that the first printing in China exceeded the hardcover sales of the English-language edition?

Isaac Bashevis Singer, the last of the Yiddish novelists, was asked before his death in 1991 whether he was concerned that in the future his novels would be read only in translation. Not at all, Singer replied: A century from now, he said, there will be 150 billion people in the world. In order to make a living, people will have to specialize. Some of them will specialize in Yiddish. Out of 150 billion on the planet, there might be a few million learning Yiddish, or at least a few hundred thousand.

To everyone who labors unappreciated in obscurity, I say: Patience! Remember Slonimsky. Remember Drexel. Remember Singer. Your day will come, albeit possibly in a manner you least expect.♦


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Jean-Patrick Manchette, who before his death in 1995 left us ten short novels (three of which are now available in English translations), was a master at the art. Rather than embrace the cool classicism of Georges Simenon, who might be said to have represented the “cinema of quality” tradition in the French crime novel, Manchette became its Nouvelle Vague enfant terrible, writing short, jazzy, ultra-violent thrillers. He brings back the tradition of the pulp novel that’s less than 150 pages in length and luxuriates in few plot diversions.

Manchette has been compared by some to the French film director Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973), who was known for his tragic, minimalist film noir crime dramas. But this is a claim I find difficult to support: Melville’s characters always operated in a moral world, bound by rigid codes of honor.

Exiled strongman

Manchette is closer to the director Luc Besson (Subway, Nikita), in that his world is much more chaotic, and moral codes don’t count for very much. In Manchette’s Three to Kill (1976), there is no real rational reason for an exiled Caribbean strongman to order the killing of a bystander to an assassination that he ordered. The bystander couldn’t possibly have identified the killers, and even if he could have, that ID still wouldn’t have led the police to the reclusive “Colonel Taylor,” living in retirement on a walled estate. No, the memoir-writing, classical-music-loving thug was just playing it safe.

But what a bloodbath ensues before the thug’s paid killers, his beloved guard-dog and finally the thug himself fall victim to one pissed-off electronics salesman, who prefers jazz to Classical.

Assassination gone bad

The Prone Gunman (1981) is a tale of a political assassination gone bad and the resultant fall-out. Manchette was stretching a bit here, trying to write a novel that addresses the tangled morality of the modern world, in which a simple assassin can possess more of a moral sense than the government officials who employ him.

Fatale (1977) is my favorite of the three Manchettes that I’ve read. From the tense opening in which a hunter, encountering a lone young woman in the forest, has the tables turned on him when she neatly drills him, to an over-the-top finale in which half the citizenry of a picture-perfect but corrupt-as-hell seaside resort engage in a midnight manhunt to find the lethal femme before she finds them, this one moves like an express train. Frankly, I’m astonished that it hasn’t been made into a movie.

As in The Prone Gunman, one comes away from Fatale with the sense that the assassin, a simple professional in a messy business, is hardly a match for the smiling villains who hire folks like her to do their killing for them.

The Chestnut Street Singers fit into that tradition because they sing without pay but call themselves a “cooperative chorus.” When I questioned their chief spokesperson, Jen Hayman, after the concert, she said they’ve chosen this designation because they operate without a designated conductor or artistic director.

Hayman and another group member, Michael Johnson, fulfill many of the functions of a music director, but all the members participate in program planning and the other high-level tasks normally assigned to a music director.

That type of freewheeling organizational structure probably wouldn’t work with large choruses like the Mendelssohn Club and Choral Arts Philadelphia. But applied to a small, 14-voice chamber chorus, it produces results that should gratify the most fanatic critics of hierarchical organizations.

Who gives the cues?

The Chestnut Street Singers manage to get along without a conductor even though they’re usually coping with complex pieces that require tight coordination. They sing without accompaniment. Good a capella composers maintain interest by creating complicated interactions among the different sections of the chorus, playing one section against another, much the way orchestra composers exploit the tone colors of the different instrumental sections.

In the absence of a leader, Hayman and Johnson take turns beating time— but that’s all they do. Their colleagues must make their entrances and exits without a conductor to give them cues.

For their season closer, the Chestnut Singers ventured into novel territory. As befitting a concert titled “Songs to the Midnight Sun,” the program featured works inspired by the long days of the Northern European summer and the months of darkness that surround it. Half the composers hailed from Northern Europe, and their scores included odd harmonies, pieces based on unfamiliar folk traditions, and borrowings from other traditions, such as the Tuvan throat-singers of southern Siberia.

Cossacks attack

The Finnish piece that opened the program depicted an exuberant ride into the rising sun, with the lower voices creating a pulsing gallop while the upper voices sang above them like Cossacks on the attack. Other pieces evoked the sound of bells and the feeling of clouds racing across the sky.

All the pieces on the program emphasized ensemble singing, but an occasional outburst from a soloist provided a reminder of the quality of the individual voices creating the ensemble effects. 

The two soloists who received credit lines on the program possess notably pure voices. Soprano Ellen Gerdes added a beautiful, sudden solo to a song about summer rain by a contemporary Icelandic composer, Hildigunnur Runarsdottir. Mezzo Rachel Haimovich contributed a similar moment to a touching traditional Finnish song that mingled loneliness with the cries of the wild duck.

Vocalists in volunteer choruses work without pay, but they earn their places through auditions and maintain their positions through the quality of their work after they join the chorus. Most of them have made significant investments in training and practice time. They’re amateurs in the oldest and best sense of the word—people who do something for the love of it.

For instance, The Blue Dress is as much about earthenware pots as it is about the titular garment-- yet it’s the garment, carelessly tossed atop a highly polished table on which the pots sit, that electrifies the entire composition, drawing your eyes to it.

A similar dynamic is at work in Somnus #2, in which a puffy, bright red pillow battles for visual supremacy with an immaculately rendered stainless steel tumbler.

Gourds, Orientaliste and Mortars and Tamarind take us into the realm of Orientalia. For myself, I enjoy the theatrical nature of these arrangements, with their peeling green shutters and jars straight from The Arabian Nights.

On the other hand, I’ve never been that impressed by Russo’s figure studies. The big one in this show, The Red Kimono, is subtitled “Homage to Whistler.” I find it closer to Sargent myself. It’s all too solid, with nothing of the evanescent gracefulness of Whistler’s Tangara-inspired paintings.

This show also includes several studies of birds and several pure landscapes. Of these, I found Catskills Rainstorm, a simple but effective image, most interesting. The show taken as a whole is well worth seeing.