London Leg of Overseas Trip

I already posted a few pictures of our trip to London and the return via sea, nearly a full month beginning the end of August.  My hope was to post more photographs and let them do the talking; thus this entry on the London leg of the trip. Another one will follow on the transit from Southampton, England, to New York City.

The full narrative on the trip can be found here. 

My years as a publisher brought me to London and Frankfurt on a regular basis, particularly for their book fairs.  My company published academic, reference, and professional books, mostly in the social sciences and the humanities.  There was a substantial market for those publications aboard and to effectively distribute our books throughout Europe we partnered with a relatively young firm at the time, Eurospan, which was run by its charismatic founder, Peter Geelan. Danny Maher was the chief financial officer and over the years we became close to Peter’s family and Danny’s as well.  Our youngest son, Jonathan, was a few years younger than Danny’s two daughters.  We made it a point to visit them at their home in west London. 

There, Danny and Pat, his wife, would prepare a typical English Sunday dinner, our two families, including Danny’s mother (“Mum”) growing closer over the years.  They came to our home in Connecticut to stay with us as well.

After Peter died, his son, Michael, who had been working with Peter, took over the business with Danny.  I also had a close relationship with Peter’s middle son, Jeremy,professionally and personally, who tragically died recently of pancreatic cancer.

So, that sets the stage for our London visit, the main reason was to reconnect with people we consider “family.”

I already posted a similar picture of our “reunion” but this one was with another camera, so I repost:

Our visit to the Eurospan offices, where they’ve been all these years in the heart of Covent Garden but soon will be relocating...

An interesting contrast, Michael, Danny, and me in 1980 and one of us at the recent reunion dinner...

And another English Sunday dinner feast, prepared by Danny and Pat’s daughters, Claire and Lisa, and served at Lisa’s home...

Part of this nostalgic tour was to revisit our “old neighborhood.”  We used to stay at The Cavendish London Hotel near Jermyn St and made a regular routine to visit the exquisite Fortnum and Mason as well as dining at Rowleys...

Then, via underground to Oxford Street.: Ann wanted to do some shopping and I wanted to see Selfridges again, especially after enjoying the BBC/PBS series.  It is impressive how they’ve maintained the building and their high standards...

A trip to London demands time in its great museums and galleries. Here is the National Gallery entrance....

But our greatest pleasure was spending a day at the V&A – the Victoria and Albert Museum.  Its decorative arts and design collection is unparalleled.  Ann’s particular interest was the exhibit from the Jane Austen era.  Here you can see her posing behind one of the waistcoat dresses of the time...

In fact, as I write this, Ann is attending the Jane Austen Society of North America conference in Washington with sister “Janeites.”

Other related exhibits are a music room and sitting area from that era...

I liked the contemporary hanging design entitled Breathless at V&A which is Silver-plated brass wind instruments, flattened and suspended on stainless steel wire...

It was a hot day, even for London when we visited the V&A and having the requisite Scones and Tea for a very late lunch, emerging into an unusually warm day for London...

Not to visit the London stage while there would be heresy.  The narrative link describes the five performances we saw, the one disappointment was not being able to see the Outdoor Theatre performance of Pride and Prejudice in its entirety because of rain.  Here we are having pre-theatre dinner outdoors on the site, in the rain of course!...

I tried to get shots of the stages of the other four plays we saw but was unable to get one for The Entertainer.  Here are ones for In the Heights, The Go Between, and The Truth...

And those are certainly the highlights of our memorable London visit.  And so after a very full week there, we departed for Southampton to board a ship for our transatlantic journey.   That photographic story can be found here.

The Night of the Iguana at Dramaworks – Tennessee Williams’ Poetic Drama

Dramaworks’ opening season traditionally begins with a challenging masterwork, with a full scale cast, and The Night of the Iguana, perhaps Tennessee Williams’ greatest play, is no exception.   This is their first Tennessee Williams play, something director Bill Hayes felt the company could not do until they were ready.  Opening night occurred after one preview performance (delays in rehearsals courtesy of Hurricane Matthew), conceivably an obstacle in making this a totally flawless production.

Under the allegorical canopy of a tropical sky The Night of the Iguana unfolds as two improbable “kinsmen met a night” – the defrocked Reverend Lawrence Shannon and the persevering artist Hannah Jelkes.  Williams’ setting is an unforgiving universe where survival and endurance are requisite attributes.

As an epigram to the play, Williams quotes the last four lines of an Emily Dickinson poem, “I Died for Beauty.”   Shannon and Jelkes are indeed “brethren” in that they are out of place with the rest of the world on the Mexican coast at The Costa Verde Hotel in 1940 – an actual hotel where Williams himself stayed during that time, loosely basing the play on his own personal experience.

I quote the entire poem as it has relevancy in my opinion:

I died for beauty, but was scarce

Adjusted in the tomb,

When one who died for truth was lain

In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?

"For beauty," I replied.

"And I for truth, -the two are one;

We brethren are," he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,

We talked between the rooms,

Until the moss had reached our lips,

And covered up our names.

The play is heavily constructed around symbolism and metaphor, the most obvious being a captured Iguana which is tied at the end of a rope awaiting slaughter.  It represents the human condition. Shannon exclaims that he is going to go down there with a machete and cut the damn lizard loose so it can run back to the bushes because God won’t do it and we are going to play God today.  The very difficult role of Rev. Shannon is played by Tim Altmeyer who endeavors to express the anguish of this tortured character, but at times he makes Shannon appear more pathetic than desperate. Unfortunately, not all of Altmeyer’s dialogue could be easily heard (or understood) and therefore some of Williams’ brilliant language was lost on the audience. 

Although Shannon is “a man of the cloth,” Hannah’s own theology (her philosophy of living) gives her the power of redemption, Shannon admitting to her that he arrived, at this place in time, his voice choking, to meet someone who wants to help me, Miss Jelkes.  Williams’ stage direction describes Hannah as “remarkable looking – ethereal, almost ghostly.  She suggests a Gothic cathedral image of a medieval saint, but animated.  She could be thirty, she could be forty: she is totally feminine and yet androgynous-looking – almost timeless.”  Katie Cunningham masters the mysterious Hannah, capturing her delicacy on the one hand, and her steely strength on the other.  Her performance is almost certainly what Williams had in mind when he originally wrote the part for Katharine Hepburn (who was unavailable at the time the play was staged). 

Jelkes has traveled to Mexico with her 98 year old Grandfather, Nonno.  He is a “minor” poet who hasn’t written anything in decades, but is now working on what will be his last poem.  Hannah and Nonno, in spite of their obvious education and Nantucket upbringing, are now reduced to a peripatetic life of “depending on the kindness of strangers” to borrow from another Tennessee Williams play, Hannah doing quick artistic sketches and Nonno reciting some of his poems for money and room and board.  Dennis Creaghan, the seasoned professional, his ninth time on stage at Dramaworks, plays Nonno, deftly mines his character’s aging angst trying to finish his first poem in 20 years.

A group of German tourists are also guests at the hotel.   As it is the summer of 1940, they are closely following the Battle of Britain on the radio.  Their demonic, bacchanalian behavior – and their sense of arrogance, knowing that they are “right”-- is juxtaposed to the inner struggles of Hannah and Shannon to find themselves. 

If Hannah is a Freudian superego, the other key female character, Maxine, is clearly the id.  She is sultrily played by another Dramaworks veteran, Kim Cozort Kay.  Maxine was married to Fred, Shannon’s friend, a Hemingwayesque character who, unknown to Shannon, had just recently died.  Shannon detoured his tour group-- women from a Texas Baptist college --  to the Costa Verde Hotel in a last ditch effort to salvage his job with the third-rate Blake Tours, hoping that Fred would be able to rescue him.

The woman who engaged Blake Tours for the Mexican tour, Judith Fellowes, is enraged by misrepresentations made of the tour and by Shannon’s one night sexual encounter with the youngest woman in the group, the 16 year old Charlotte Goodall, played by Alexandra Grunberg making her Dramaworks debut.   Fellowes is a one-dimensional character (always angry) but a catalyst, off stage and on, for moving the action; she is played by long time south Florida actor, Irene Adjan. 

With Fred deceased, Shannon is now desperately dependent on Maxine as she is on him.  Prior to his unexpected arrival, she was a lonely widow being “serviced” by two young Mexican boys, her only source of intimate human contact after years of a celibate marriage.  She needs Shannon, but he is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.  He has suffered these episodes before (“the spook” as he refers to it), a condition Maxine is very familiar with.

Williams masterfully brings all of these themes together probing Hannah and Shannon’s relationship and their recognition that they are both damaged creatures, at the end of their ropes.   Ultimately Shannon has to be restrained in a hammock, much the same way as the Iguana is tied, while he is pursued by “the spook.”   Hannah rescues him as he ultimately rescues the Iguana.  She observes while he is tied up:  Who wouldn’t like to suffer and atone for the sins of himself and the world if it could be done in a hammock with ropes instead of nails, on a hill that’s so much lovelier than Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, Mr. Shannon?  There’s something almost voluptuous in the way that you twist and groan in that hammock – no nails, no blood, no death.  Isn’t that a comparatively comfortable, almost voluptuous kind of crucifixion to suffer for the guilt of the world, Mr. Shannon? 

The play culminates in Nonno’s completion of his poem, one that embodies Williams’ themes, man’s relationship to nature, to God, to death and to a new kind of love that transcends “the earth's obscene corrupting love.”  Full circle back to Emily Dickinson’s virtuous love of beauty and truth, the two main characters’ “failures” (“he whispered softly for what I failed”) being an intimate knowledge of one another, a kind of uncorrupted understanding.  It is Williams’ most hopeful play, or, as he put it “how to live with dignity after despair.”

Executing this play is complicated.  Hayes strives to walk that fine line of being trapped in symbolism and the melodramatic, so typical of the theatre in the early 1960s, seeking to attain a sense of heightened realism.  His assistant director is Paula D'Alessandris.  Hayes is skillfully supported by the incredibly talented Dramaworks technicians.

Scenic design by Michael Amico craftily captures the theatrical realism of a hotel in decay, the encroaching active jungle, alive with danger, and the symbolic isolation of the separate rooms on the verandah (I think of the tombs in Dickinson’s poem).  Paul Black’s lighting design works in harmony with the set, characterizing a wide range of lighting challenges, late afternoon sun, sunset, a long night, and a severe storm.   

Matt Corey’s sound design serves up that storm, echoes from the hills, and appropriate guitar interludes, all in sync with the production.  Brian O'Keefe, PBD resident costume designer creatively captures the era and the sweltering heat, as well as Hannah’s stealthy delicacy, as if she is indeed otherworldly.

Other members of the large cast are David Nail, Michael Collins, Brian Varela, Thomas Rivera, David Hyland, Becca McCoy, Rebecca Tucker, and Jordon Armstrong.

Dramaworks’ The Night of the Iguana is an ambitious production by one of America’s greatest playwrights. 

Adios, Matthew

Palm Beach Country got very lucky with Hurricane Matthew which, almost until it passed, looked like it had the potential of coming very close to the northern part of PBC where we live.  My heart goes out to those in North Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, driving through those coastal cities scores of times up and down on our way to Connecticut as well as once joining our friends Ray and Sue on their boat, taking it from Connecticut via the Intracoastal to our dock in Florida.  So we know first-hand the areas now being devastatingly impacted. It could have been us.

I don’t worry about our house much, particularly as it has been fortified with a combination of hurricane impact windows on the north and south and beefy roll downs on the porch with Lexan impact clear shutters on east and west windows.  I replaced the garage door with one that weighs a ton as it has horizontal aluminum beams for hurricane protection and also replaced the roof using the Polyset roofing system designed to withstand a Category 5 hurricane.

What I do worry about is our health, riding through another hurricane, remembering Wilma, and always concerned about tidal surge as we live right on the water, although that has never been a problem here. Florida is less vulnerable to a direct surge as the ocean depths off of Palm Beach Country drops quickly mitigating surge. 

But Matthew was not coming directly; it was paralleling the coast, bringing in strong NE winds, pushing water over several tide cycles.  Although we were prepared to ride it out, on the morning of the storm’s expected arrival local TV stations were warning about tidal surges of unheard of amounts in this area. This made us rethink the matter.  We’ve done everything to secure the house, so why stay, but where to go?

Calls to local hotels away from the water went unanswered or were put on hold permanently.  Of course, everyone was thinking the same thing.  We were not about to get on the road, aimlessly driving around without a reservation. As Hilton Honors members, I called them and they said everything was booked west of us, but how about the Palm Beach International Airport Hilton where they could get us a room.  Perfect.  Book it!  We’ll be there in an hour before the first feeder bands arrive!

What ensued was a fire drill, the two of us throwing clothes and medications into our overnight bags, Ann organizing food, snacks and water in a cooler in case the hotel lost power. I retrieved some of our emergency supplies, flashlights, spare batteries, a radio, and so on, again in case of a power failure, as well as the all important electronic gear, iPhones, chargers, and my laptop as well, not to mention books.  Half the stuff was thrown into duffle bags or whatever.  We looked bedraggled before we left.

But once in our comfortable hotel room with impact windows we were both so relieved.  We ran down for breakfast, a delicious buffet with made to order omelets & great coffee.  Then we simply hunkered down, rested and watched the TV weather reports for the entire rest of the day until we finally went to bed.  Ann made lunch from the food she brought but we ran down to a crazy noisy bar for a bite of dinner.  We both were able to get a good night’s sleep because by then we knew that the brunt of the storm was going to miss us.  But who knew?  We could have been like the unfortunate people north of us.  A difference of only a few dozen miles in the path of the storm would have resulted in something quite different.  So we were really lucky. We just woke up, packed, got dressed & checked out.

We thought we might lose power in our home for perhaps an extended period and in that case we had the very kind invitation of our friends and neighbors John and Lois to stay in their guest bedroom as they have an all house natural gas generator (we have a generator, but it runs on gasoline and one could not get gas here by the time the storm was a real threat). Our power flicked but was never lost. I'll give Florida Light and Power some credit as they've made some huge infrastructure investments since Wilma roared through here more than 10 years ago

So we’re dodged another one, but can’t help think constantly of those north of us along our normally beautiful east coast, not to mention the poor people of Haiti who have endured so much devastation. 

I took this photo from our backyard the night after the storm.  What a difference a day makes, or a few miles in a hurricane’s track.