He Made a Hat

It's a wrap, a life of joy and genius, the second volume of Stephen Sondheim's biographical and encyclopedic collection of his lyrics and recollections, Look, I Made a Hat; Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany  (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). My enthusiasm for the first volume, Finishing the Hat, led to writing about it before I was finished reading it and then again upon completion more than a year ago.

My initial observation on reading the first volume bears repeating for the second as well: "As the subtitle hints, it is not only an erudite, introspective, and sometimes self deprecating account of his own works with the complete lyrics, both those retained and discarded for the shows he wrote during the period, it is also a frank discussion of the 'major players' of his time, most of whom he of course knew or knows, and some of whom he did not but nonetheless influenced him in some way. I call this book 'a document' as only a first-hand participant of Sondheim's stature could make his reminiscences a treasure-trove which will be studied by students of Broadway for years to come."

The amusing subtitles of the two volumes at first glance look similar, but there are subtle differences. Both have "Attendant Comments" and "Anecdotes" in their subtitles, but Finishing The Hat's "Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines" have been replaced by "Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions," and the all encompassing, "Miscellany" and "Amplifications" in Look, I Made a Hat's subtitle.  Sondheim is too precise a thinker to imagine these changes were made only because of his playful, almost sardonic sense of humor.  This second volume is less about others in his profession (although it is still that to a degree), than it is about himself, the process of creating, an attempt to tie everything together, the dominant figure of the NY Stage coming to grips with the process of aging and looking back at what defines his work.

This second volume covers his more mature works, 1981 to the present.  It also reviews a wide range of "miscellaneous" works, ones I've never heard of, some incomplete or unproduced pieces.  The "big four" here are his well-known Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Assassins, and Passion. 

Sunday in the Park with George is about the life of George Seurat and, in particular, the two years he took creating his "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte."  Of significance to Sondheim is this musical united him with the author of the book, James Lapine, with whom he would frequently collaborate afterwards.  The song "Finishing the Hat" is from Sunday and as he uses the title as the general metaphor for both these volumes, it bears some closer examination.  He says it "reflects an emotional experience shared by everybody to some degree or other, but more keenly and more often by creative artists: trancing out -- that phenomenon of losing the world while you're writing...."

 He continues with an anecdote.  One of his pleasures is "inventing games" and he was once playfully challenged by his friend, Phyllis Newman, the actress and singer, wife of Adolph Green, to create "a game of murder" (a more interesting one than the card game of the same name that already existed) and once Sondheim started to work on the game, he labored continually through the night, saying  "I hadn't moved for eleven hours. I must have, of course, if for nothing else than to go to the bathroom, much less get a drink or a snack. But I had no memory of it. I had left the planet for eleven hours, completely absorbed in a world of instructions, gunshots, diagrams, and clues, calibrating every possibility of the players' movements and observations. I've never had a better time making a hat. No matter how trivial the goal may have been, the intensity or the concentration was the same as that of writing a song, and just as difficult and exhilarating. 'Finishing the Hat' is an attempt to convey that treasured feeling. ...Relinquishing the world may be easier in the privacy of a study or during a walk in the woods, but it can happen in a public place, too.... When the cocoon is self-created, the surroundings matter not at all. As befits the creative act, 'Finishing the Hat' is a stream-of-consciousness lyric. There is no complete sentence."  

....That, however you live, / There's a part of you always standing by, / Mapping out the sky, / Finishing a hat... / Starting on a hat../ Finishing a hat... / Look, I made a hat.../ Where there never was a hat.

Into the Woods came right on the heels of Sunday in the Park with George, Sondheim wanting to collaborate with James Lapine again.  It started off as a "quest musical along the lines of The Wizard of Oz," one of Sondheim's favorites as the songs help define the characters and convey the story. Into the Woods became a potpourri of famous fairy tale characters going into the woods, "the all-purpose symbol of the unconscious, the womb, the past, the dark place where we face our trials and emerge wiser or destroyed..."  Sondheim says of the two main characters, the baker and his wife, "their concerns a quotidian, their attitudes prototypically urban: impatient, sarcastic, bickering, resigned -- prototypical, except that they speak in stilted fairy-tale language and are surrounded by witches and princesses and eventually giants.  This makes them funny and actable characters, and their contemporaneity makes them people the audience can recognize." 

Sondheim thought the work would be producible by a wide range of theatre companies, from schools (as there is an absence of obscenities) to professional theatres, and the musical works on two levels, one for just entertainment and the other as a sophisticated adult parable. "I predicted that Into the Woods could be a modest annuity for us [he and Lapine], and I'm surprised to say I was right."

I've "feared" seeing Assassins as having lived through so many of them in my lifetime, I just did not want to have it in my face on the stage, pretty much the same reason Ann and I don't see violent movies.  But, after reading Sondheim's description of the musical, it's on our list to see if it should ever be revived. Leave it to Sondheim (and his collaborator, John Weidman, based on an idea by Charles Gilbert, Jr.) to make a musical out of nine of the thirteen attempted presidential assassinations.

In describing how he came to Assassins, Sondheim reveals much about the process and writing lyrics in particular.  It also shows his own level of enthusiasm for this work, not to mention the level of reflection and prose in Look, I Made a Hat: "Writing lyrics is an exasperating job, but there are occasional moments which compensate, such as finding the right word that sits exactly on the right phrase of music or stumbling on the surprising but appropriate rhyme. It is those moments that propel you (me) to continue groping through the morass of banalities and not-quite-good-enough stabs at freshness and grace which constitute the bulk of the writing. And there is no moment more invigorating than reading the initial pages of your collaborator's work, especially if your collaborator is first class, the kind with whom I've been repeatedly blessed (not by chance, I can assure you - I've approached, and agreed to be approached by, only those whose work I like). Suddenly, what have been weeks of theoretical palaver, circling the subject, finding the spine and mapping the trajectory of the story, analyzing the characters, improvising scenes and songs, discussing style-suddenly, all that - becomes crystallized in a page or two of dialogue which makes the idea into words, much in the way a first rehearsal makes the word become flesh. Because of the quality of my collaborators, I have experienced that moment often, but the most exhilarating of those highs was the evening I read the first pages of John Weidman's script for 'Assassins'."

Passion is another collaboration with James Lapine, although the idea itself was conceived by Sondheim after he had seen an Ettore Scola film Passione d'Amore  which struck him "as a story worth singing." He was concerned about making it into a musical as "the characters were so outsized."  It might have demanded an opera, not a musical, and that is an art form that Sondheim (I am happy to learn) does not enjoy.  I say "happy" as I too have carried around the scarlet letter of "OP" (opera-phobic) even though I enjoy both music and theatre. Sondheim has exonerated the tinge of guilt I feel about opera, even though I briefly studied it in college when I used to go to the Met, sitting at the student's desk which had a very limited view of the stage in my day where I followed the score of the opera.  Maybe I simply don't go in for pageantry. 

Here's Sondheim's take on opera: "I have successfully avoided enjoying opera all my life. There are many moments in the operatic literature that thrill me, but few complete scores, and even those that do ...I would rather listen to on records because they strike me as way too long. I was brought up on the swiftness and insubstantiality of musicals, and I'm not as enthralled by the human voice as I would like to be. For me it's the song, not the singer; I don't really care who sings 'Vissi d'Arte,' I care about what she's singing. I discriminate among singers of popular songs and show tunes, but for some reason I'm both less enthusiastic and less critical when it comes to the higher stratum of the art form. I recognize that this is my loss, and I sometimes envy (but not a lot) the swooning pleasure my opera-buff friends get from it. The thing that puts me off most is that most opera composers seem to have little sense of theater. They spend as much time having their characters sing about trivialities as about matters of emotional importance, and they too often resort to recitative to carry the plot along-for my money a tedious and arid solution to a problem easily solved by dialogue."  You are preaching to the choir, Mr. Sondheim.

Passion is an epistolary musical, with the songs, as Sondheim puts it, "somewhere between aria and recitative...[and] there's enough dialogue so that no one could mistake Passion for an opera. I hope."

Then, some one hundred plus pages of the book are dedicated to the on and off again fourteen year affair of creating a musical based on the Florida resort architect, Addison Mizner and his raconteur brother, Wilson Mizner, perfect models of picaresque lives.  Wise Guys/Bounce/Road Show went through four different incarnations, finally ending up pretty much as it began as far as the main theme is concerned, the relationship between two brothers.  The show had "four distinct scripts; three distinct directors; nine leading actors."  Sondheim had written thirty songs, most of which did not survive all four versions. Among the directors who impacted the show was, ironically, Sam Mendes in London who was also the director of the film Revolutionary Road, based on the novel by Richard Yates which I republished when thefirst edition had gone out of print.

But the director who had the most impact was John Doyle, who put the work on the course of becoming Road Show, after its previous variations over its ponderous life as Wise Guys and then Bounce.   About Doyle, Sondheim says, "He was enthusiastic about the story and understood the style, and at the same time saw what the show was trying to say about America with the objective, yet sympathetic, eye of a foreigner. He also saw that what the show needed was compression, to give it the kind of pace that defines the American image: speedy, impatient, determined, brash and humorous, all of which was expressed in what we had written-except for the speed, which wasn't speedy enough....Doyle turned out to be an exception among directors; the script he handed us after his tinkering, although it had its fair share of misguided and awkward moments, brought the mix of family dynamics and American penchant for reinvention into one focus, and that was what we had never properly been able to accomplish. 'Wise Guys/Bounce/Road Show' was about so many things: American enterprise, American conniving, American promotion, American greed, the class system, sibling love and rivalry, road movies- a soup that Doyle (and Oskar) boiled down for us, which is what a good director, like a good editor, can do."

Then, Sondheim covers his "Other Musicals,"  "Movies" and "Television" (following college he wrote for the TV show, Topper, and Kukla, Fran and Ollie an amusing aside to his career).

In the mix of his lyrics and reminiscences are some of the "attendant comments."  Although Oscar Hammerstein was his mentor, and Sondheim thinks of himself as a lyricist, he is also a first rate composer.  When Sondheim graduated from Williams, he won a coveted prize for music which allowed him to study composition with the composer and music theorist Milton Babbitt.  Sondheim explains why he focused on lyrics in his two books: ".... the technique of composition is impossible to be precise and articulate about without using jargon. The inner workings of lyrics can be communicated easily without resorting to arcane terms; understanding what a perfect rhyme is requires no special knowledge. But understanding what a perfect cadence is requires knowing something about harmony and the diatonic scale. Music is a foreign language which everyone knows but only musicians can speak. The effect is describable in everyday language; how to achieve it is not."

Sondheim has had a love-hate affair with critics and while he takes some head on in these volumes, he writes generally about the art of criticism and the impact of this Internet age:"...It takes a long time to learn not to pay attention to critics, or at least not to let them distract you. ....A good critic is someone who recognizes and acknowledges the artist's intentions and the work's aspirations, and judges the work by them, not by what his own objectives would have been. A good critic is so impassioned about his subject that he can persuade you to attend something you'd never have imagined you'd want to go to. A good critic is an entertaining read. A good critic is hard to find. Then again, to a certain degree good critics are no longer necessary to find. The phrase 'Everybody's a critic' has taken on a universal cast. The Internet encourages people to  share their opinions with the world. In the theater, the 'buzz' created by chat room chatters has become increasingly important to a show's reputation before it opens, and has actually affected some of the news-paper and magazine critics, who refer to the chatter in their opening- night reviews. The irony is that the Internet is in the process of killing off the critics' jobs."

I think of Broadway as having several fairly distinct periods.  Before Rodgers and Hammerstein, the American musical was primarily revues with a loose plot to introduce song or dance, mostly light musical fantasies and comedies without much serious meaning to simply amuse and entertain. R&H changed all this with the introduction of the "book" -- a play in which music, dance, and plot were all integrated.  And musicals became more serious, introducing themes that were largely ignored before. It became the most emulated form for the Broadway musical since.

But the fermentation of social change in the 60s and 70s brought a new period to Broadway.  Sondheim was part of that but so was the so called "rock musical" starting with Hair and Tommy, coming into full bloom with musicals by Andrew Lloyd Webber, beginning with contemporary rock pieces such as Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar, morphing into operetta type musicals such as The Phantom of the Opera.  Broadway came full circle with some of those works, operettas having flourished before Broadway's golden age.  Of those works, Sondheim says, "Rock and contemporary pop are not part of my DNA; worse, I find them unsatisfying when applied to the kind of musicals I like to write because of the limited range of their colors. Perhaps someday (maybe even by the time this book is published) someone will write a rock score that will have suppleness and variety, but the ones I've heard seem to me rhythmically and emotionally restricted, earnest to a fault and, above all, humorless except when they're being 'satirical' (that is, sarcastic). This lends them a pretension which rivals the British pop operas that briefly conquered the world during the 1990s."

 

Sondheim, meanwhile. blazed new trails, the "urban musical" such as Company, in addition to pushing musical limits in areas normally reserved for drama, Pacific Overtures, Sweeny Todd, Assassins, to name but a few.  He also sought vehicles for his love of panache and paying homage to those that made the Broadway theatre, most clearly celebrated in Follies. 

Who will now carry on the tradition of Broadway innovation?  Instead,  revivals seem to be sweeping contemporary theatre (maybe just a deficit of good stuff being written?).  They of course have their place.  It is the lifeblood of good regional theatre such as our own Dramaworks in nearby West Palm Beach.  Sondheim's thoughts on revivals? ".....I suspect that every writer who has had the pleasure of seeing his shows revived, whether on Broadway or in a community theater, has also suffered the chagrin of seeing it distorted almost beyond recognition-if it were truly unrecognizable, it would be a relief. The problem is that a great many directors, not just the academics or the amateurs, reconceive for the sake of reconception, usually in the name of "relevance" or of "fixing" the show's flaws. They want to be considered creators so desperately that they think nothing of rewriting the authors' work. Good directors shine a new light on a piece; the others shine a light on themselves."

Irreverent or outspoken?  Perhaps.  But, if Sondheim isn't entitled, who is? If you decide to read the book, read the "Epilogue" closely.  It reveals as much about the man as it does the artist.  He says that one would think writing songs for the theater, after so much experience, would become easier but "invention" does not.  In fact, "...it gets harder chiefly because you become-or should become-more aware of the pitfalls, especially the danger of repeating yourself. I find myself using the same chords and the same tropes over and over, and I fight against it; but when I lose the battle, I rationalize it as being a matter of style, my style, a style I've developed over the years, an identity as unchanging as my signature. And to a certain extent it is-but notas much as I tell myself it is."

And here is a man who knows he has climbed most of the mountains of his life, and is looking back, trying to bring it altogether and make some sense of the inexplicable and iniquitous process of aging. (Fitzgerald had it right with his short story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," but T.S. Eliot best summarized the process in his poem "Little Gidding" -- "Having rehearsed the bitter gifts reserved for age / the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.")

About this universal truth, Sondheim laments, "The diminution of energy and the fear of superannuation are unpleasant enough, but you learn to put up with the first and ignore the second; the loss of memory is worse, and dangerous. The thing that bothers me the most is not forgetting faces or names, but forgetting trivia. Having to search my dwindling gray cells for who directed 'The Sound of Music' upsets me a lot more than not recognizing the stranger who wanders up to me at a party and turns out to be someone I've known for thirty years and worked with half a dozen times. What's dangerous is that not remembering makes you think about remembering, which inevitably draws you into the past. As time goes on, I watch old movies and listen to old songs more and more; when asked my place of residence on a customs form, I always want to write 'The Past.' "

As an amateur pianist I have a special appreciation for the work of Sondheim.  He writes extensively about his lyrics, but his music, to me, is equally brilliant with a fondness for waltzes like Richard Rodgers had..  Some of his pieces are hard to play (for me) as the music is pared to almost recitative lyrics, with many notes to a measure.  His music is always a challenge but a joy to play and no doubt he will always be known as one of Broadway's finest.

I have so many favorites, but his short lived 1981 musical Merrily We Roll Along includes one of his most beautiful, fragile ballads, Not a Day Goes By and for this entry I include (albeit a somewhat flawed) "home video" of my playing the song.  It is a testimony of my great respect for Sondheim's music and what it has meant to my life. His lyrics best express how I feel....

"Not a day goes by,

Not a single day

But you're somewhere a part of my life

And it looks like you'll stay.

As the days go by"

Fiction as Non-Fiction

There are readers who devour mostly fiction and there are those who mostly read non-fiction.  Although I enjoy the occasional non-fiction work, mostly biographies, and, even then, tend to read biographies of writers or musicians, I happily settle down with a novel as my window to the world.  My non-fiction friends tell me I am wasting my time as they lecture about their newest insight into what makes the world tick, or how politics is evolving, and what history really means, from whatever non-fiction work they are reading at the time. 

Except for unassailable facts, what occurred and when, fiction and non-fiction can be topsy-turvy, with fiction being closer to the truth.  Most of my daily "non-fiction" consumption is reading the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, with an occasional Washington Post article for good measure. The WSJ has always had a conservative bent, even more so now that Murdoch's empire has annexed the newspaper and of course the NYT has a more liberal bias.  What the two newspapers have in common, though, is that they are well written.  However, it is amusing how they might look at the same issue, particularly when it comes to politics.  And they have become more polarized during the last four years as we've skirted a near economic depression and our government has moved to a state of immobilization.  That polarization has been further amplified in the media of radio and TV, and has become exponential on the Internet.  People seem to line up to read or view whatever seems to fit their belief system, a form of cognitive dissonance.  So much for so-called "non-fiction."

But writers of fiction and drama drill down to an inner world of their characters, trying to make sense of life from within.  Other artists, those in the performing or visual arts are doing the same, perhaps more abstractly.  What these authors and artists have to say about our world  matter as much as the journalists and non-fiction writers, perhaps more so.  The writers of non-fiction are filtering information even though it is purported to be fact.  The filters of fiction are more intangible leaving the reader not necessarily with neat conclusions, but frequently only with questions.  One has to actually think, something becoming more alien in our sound bite, "facetweet" cyber world.

So I find it fascinating when writers are asked to comment, directly, not through their fiction, about the state of the world.  The P.E.N. (poets, playwrights, essayists, editors, and novelists) American Center is hosting a World VoicesFestival  beginning today and A. O. Scott, a critic for The New York Times asked Margaret Atwood from Canada, E.L. Doctorow from the United States, and Martin Amis from Britain "to consider the question of America and its role in global political culture." 

Margaret Attwood writes a playful parable by trying to explain the state of American culture and politics to a group of visiting Martians, Hello, Martians. Let Moby-Dick Explain.  She uses two well known short stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne "The Maypole of Merry Mount," and "Young Goodman Brown" to make the point that the bickering over individual freedom vs. the rights of the group and the American quest of finding satanic elements in the enemy du jour is deeply ingrained in the American soul (witch hunting then, and "right now it’s mostly ‘terrorism,’ though in some quarters it’s ‘liberalism’ or even ‘evil-green-dragon environmentalism.’ ”) 

The Martians are TV and Internet savvy.  They come to their own conclusions about the US: "Though American cultural hegemony is slipping, we perceive: newly rich countries such as India and Brazil have developed their own mass media. Also, America’s promise of democracy and egalitarianism — the mainstay of its cultural capital, widely understood — is being squandered."

Attwood urges them to read Moby Dick, which they do in an instant (Martians are very bright) but  "then they consulted translate.google.com™ for an expression that would best convey their reaction. 'Holy crap!' " --- coming to the conclusion that the novel was a predictive metaphor for the very state of America today (check the link for details).  In short, to understand America, one must look to its literature.

In contrast to Attwood's playful but insightful piece, E.L. Doctorow writes a scathing prescriptive "primer," Unexceptionalism: A Primer  

This is a four phase process (we've gone through the first three and are in the process of completing the final phase argues Doctorow) "to achieve unexceptionalism, the political ideal that would render the United States indistinguishable from the impoverished, traditionally undemocratic, brutal or catatonic countries of the world...."

Here is one of America's leading novelists, works such as Ragtime, World's Fair, Billy Bathgate, and Homer & Langley, who is plainly disgusted at the direction of the country.  His "primer" is clearly an invective borne out of the same sense of powerlessness and frustration many feel.

Finally, the UK's Martin Amis weighs in with Marty and Nick Jr. Go to America about when he first visited America as a child with his family in 1958, (he and his brother wanting their names to "sound American" hence, "Marty" and "Nick, Jr.")  I like to read what visitors have to say about their impressions of America and once got caught up in Charles Dickens' first trip to America, incorporating some of his "American Notes" in my 2005 edited collection, New York to Boston; Travels in the 1840's

Amis' family came because his father was a visiting professor at Princeton.  Martin Amis says "We came from Swansea, in South Wales. This was a city of such ethnic homogeneity that I was already stealing cash and smoking the odd cigarette before I met — or even saw — a person with black skin." 

Some people would like to think that we live in a post-racial era but Amis reminds us of the entrenched racism, not only when he lived in America as a child (when he returned to the UK in 1967 his father wrote a poem about Nashville which ends But in the South, nothing now or ever. / For black and white, no future. / None. Not here.) but now as well, concluding with a reference to the Trayvon Martin case, with a cynical twist at the end, "Leave aside, for now, that masterpiece of legislation, Stand Your Ground (which pits the word of a killer against that of his eternally wordless victim), and answer this question. Is it possible, in 2012, to confess to the pursuit and murder of an unarmed white 17-year-old without automatically getting arrested? Ease my troubled mind, and tell me yes."

I wrote about the Trayvon Martin tragedy soon after it occurred.  Mine wasn't a race to judgment, but that is what the conservative press would have you believe is happening. A man is indeed innocent until proven guilty, Amen to that I say.  But who speaks for the "eternally wordless victim" as Martin Amis so forcefully posits? 

We live in volatile times and need to listen to our creative writers.

Wedding Anniversary

I'm feeling very nostalgic today, our 42nd wedding anniversary.  But melancholy also intrudes because as time permits (the irony of that phrase weighs on me) I've been going through the thousands and thousands of photographs I scanned, leaving behind the world of silver halide prints for digital and more manageable copies. Although a smidgeon of the way through reviewing the scans, my life is literally passing before my eyes and I have mixed emotions, some opportunities perhaps lost, but others seized.

In retrospect, though, my childhood, education, first marriage, even my career, is dwarfed by my forty two years married to Ann.  Today, relationships, and even more so jobs, seem to be kaleidoscopic, frenetic, relatively short-lived.   I've lived with a good woman for nearly half a century now and had two jobs in my lifetime of working.  But when did pulsating youth become, well, "old age?"  I use this expression somewhat disingenuously, in deference to when I was younger and the thought of turning 70 meant being really old. Nonetheless, I still feel like I did decades ago, at least mentally. 

And how does one fathom 42 plus years of living with one person?  Prosaic as it may be, the words trust, humor, patience, and friendship immediately spring to mind. And, so, to celebrate our anniversary, here are a few of those scanned photographs from over the decades, admittedly an idiosyncratic selection, ones that amuse me for the moment, not necessarily the best photographs (I can hear Ann saying "Why did you use that photograph!!??).  And they are mostly scanned photos, with the drawbacks of that process. 

PS Blogger (Google) has changed its blogging interface.  It's awful, and the ability to handle photographs is even worse than before.  Another learning curve, sigh.

The Boys of Spring

The boys of spring turn into the boys of summer. If there was ever an argument for the existence of a God, it has to be baseball. Imagine, just the dimensions of the infield, not to mention the nuances of the game, would seem to argue divine intervention. Could man alone have set the distance from the pitching rubber to home plate at exactly 60' 6" and not just 60'? OK, bases are 90 feet apart. That sounds like man-made, but much of the game seems to have been handed down from the Gods.

I played some organized baseball as a kid, pitching because I couldn't hit worth a damn. As a lefty I had movement on the fast ball, tailing away from a right handed batter, like a mini screwball. I was a "crafty left-hander," with slow stuff to make the fast ball seem faster.

Although occasionally I'll still "throw" a ball with my neighbor (who batted against Herb Score in high school), I just follow the game when I can, especially the Yankees simply because they were "my team" as a kid. While the game itself hasn't changed much, the players and the business of baseball has. It's big business but obviously the public is willing to pay up, monstrous salaries and baseball franchises being supported by obscene ticket prices and concessions and huge cable TV revenues.

Does that mean the boys of summer play the game only for money? Of course not, but change has its consequences. Like earlier this month when my friend Art and I, with great anticipation, planned to go to the Yankees' penultimate spring training game in Port St. Lucie to play the NY Mets. What could be better, a preview of a NY rivalry? The tickets had been bought months in advance by friends of ours who found they couldn't use them, so we bought them at face value ($70 total). They were selling on the web for more than twice that amount as the game neared, the stadium seating only about 7,000 and the demand for those tickets far in excess of that.

So the day of the game we drove up to the park early to watch batting practice, get our obligatory hot dogs, and just soak up the ambiance. Walking up a ramp to our seats we saw a bus, the driver standing nearby, and Art cried out, "is that the bus for the Yankees?" (thinking they probably flew and this question was rhetorical). "Yup," he said.

We didn't think Jeter, A-Rod, Teixeira et al would be busing it from Miami after the night game in Miami's new stadium the day before so we began to wonder who exactly would be playing. But they do bus the "B" team, and that is what the Yankees mostly fielded. Not known to the fans, most of the Yankee "A" team flew to Tampa for their last spring training game, also against the Mets.

Some "A" players were there, notably Ivan Nova who pitched, the jovial Nick Swisher, and swift Brett Gardner, but that was about it. I knew the "A" team would not have played many innings, but wanted to get some good photos while they did. No such luck. So instead we watched the "other" Yankees, Almonte, Hall, Castro, Bernier, Wilson, not exactly murderer's row. Sad, Cervelli was the catcher, joking with his teammates, not knowing he would be consigned to AAA ball just a couple days later.

While it was nice being at the ball game, any ball game, I could have passed on it given the crowds and the expense, but I was able to get some pictures of Nova (who pitched poorly) and of the Met's lefty, Niese, who didn't fare any better than Nova, both giving up 5 earned runs in the Yankees 7-6 loss. Swisher hit a home run and I was able to capture the swing and the ball with a timely photograph. But, we left well before the end of the game.

Happily, though, last night was our first minor league (Class A) ballgame at Jupiter's Roger Dean Stadium where Ann and I have "Silver Slugger" season's tickets. What a deal, 19 games, a hot dog and a soda all for $25 each (not per game but total!). How can you go wrong? Farm clubs of the Cardinals (Palm Beach Cardinals) and the Marlins (the Jupiter Hammerheads) play there during the summer. And Class A ball is played every bit as professionally as their Major League counterparts. And the joy is there, the hope of one day making it to the "show." A couple of years ago we watched Giancarlo Stanton (then known as "Mike") in action, recognizing he was destined for the majors.

Last night the Cardinals played the Pirate's affiliate, the Bradenton Marauders. And in an ironic twist, having seen mostly minor leaguers at the spring training game, the Bradenton starting pitcher for this minor league game was none other than major leaguer A.J. Burnett, who was making a rehab start after having been injured in spring training. I've always thought Burnett was long on talent but a head case, and pitching like golf gets in one's mind. You need both the physical ability and the mental attitude to succeed.

As a Yankee fan, I had "suffered" with Burnett but I had hoped that a new venue would bring him out of his stupor. While he seemed to have his velocity last night, his pitches were not well placed, unlike those of the Cardinals' starter, Seth Maness who pitched seven shutout innings, most of his pitches in the low 90's and at knee high. Burnett looked dazed most of the time, ignominious as a starter in Class A, and left forlorn after giving up seven runs in less than 2 innings. It was sad and hopefully he has better success in the future. Palm Beach went on to win 10-4 but just being out at the beautiful Roger Dean field and soaking up the crack of the bat and the pop of the catcher's mitt made it a grand slam evening.

About a Bear

Here is a satiric fable, an extended parable for our times, making hilarity of the foibles of human nature, a change of pace from my usual reading fare, The Bear Went over the Mountain by William Kotzwinkle. My Cousin Joan recommended this book to me, surprised I had never heard of it as it was published in 1996 and the publishing industry is the main setting. Joan and I share the same sense of humor, not to mention grandparents.

Simple story. Bear (who adopts the name of "Hal Jam" the last name coming off a jar of jam of course) finds a manuscript (intended to be the Great American Novel") written by an English professor who is on sabbatical in the woods of Maine, makes his way into the big city (the bear that is), poses as a human (you have to throw any sense of reality to the wind) to the extent that he can, and becomes the toast of the publishing world. He happily indulges in honey and other sweets, meeting important people, women pursuing him as if he is the reincarnation of Hemingway. The real author, meanwhile, in a fit of depression realizing he has lost his great novel, also loses his professorship, stays in the woods and, in fact, becomes bear-like, sleeping away part of the winter. I will not give the ending away, but who do you think Kotzwinkle thinks made the better trade of lives?

Meanwhile throughout the novel, the stage is set for some very funny moments. But one thing I cannot get out of my head while I read this is Jerzy Kosinski's novel, Being There, where the simple minded "Chauncey Gardiner" (the gardener at the estate of a well known man) is mistaken by the press to be a wise philosopher in his simplicity. "Plant the seeds and the garden will grow" -- Of course, if we make our investments and some tough decisions, the economy will revive! (Sort of like now.)

Here are but a few examples from The Bear Went Over the Mountain:

Ms. Boykins, a literary agent pursuing Hal, says "The sales forces will insist on a tour..." Hal Jam puts his paws over his ears as the din from the restaurant is overwhelming his "animality." "The racing stream of human speech glistened as it curved around obstacles and glided on, relentless in its gradient, while he panted in animal stupidity And then his nose twitched, the olfactory bulb at its root a thousand times more sensitive than that of a human. He straightened and moved his head around to isolate the natural scent he'd found within the synthetic veil of perfumes. There it was, moist, cool. 'Salmon.'"
Boykins says: "Yes, they do it skewered with tomatoes, mushroom, and green peppers."
"'Raw,' said the bear with resurgence of primal authority."
"'Raw?'"
"'Raw female. Lots of eggs. In my teeth.' The bear tapped at his incisors."
"My god, thought Boykins, he is another Hemingway."

Or when Hal Jam goes shopping in a supermarket... "The skyscrapers of Manhattan had astounded him, and now the endless amounts of honey that man had available to him had humbled him to the ground. The intelligence, the inventiveness, the time and courage, it took to lay in this much honey was the final proof that man wore the crown of creation. 'Bears are just along for the ride,' he said to himself as he filled his cart with honey...."

Or his meeting with a Hollywood agent, Ms. Zou Zou Sharr at whom the bear looked "from under the peak of his baseball cap. It was the first time he'd been this close to a human female for any length of time, and he liked the experience. If she had some fur on her face and the backs of her hands she might be good looking."

Zou Zou misunderstands just about every brief phrase the bear utters as being a demand for a larger take from movie rights, saying "'Believe me, Hal, your piece of the pie is just what it should be and so is CMC's.'" "When I eat a pie, I eat it all," says the Bear. Zou Zou replies: "Of course you do, and I understand. The book is yours, it's your creation, and you want your fair share." Eventually, Zou Zou offers herself to the bear to get the contract. They "do it," the bear tossing her around the room. She's enthralled by being ravished -- he's an animal! Yes, another Hemingway! And they do it in a taxi -- "He'd passed a great human milestone. He'd done it more than once a year."

Eventually, the bear meets the Vice President and the President, again, another hat tip to Kosinski's novel.

As a former publisher, I laughed at almost every page. Indeed, these are the trade publishing people I saw flitting around in Frankfurt every year absorbed by their self importance.

In many ways the book is also reminiscent of Firmin which is about a rat who lives in a bookstore. And a rat figures near the conclusion of this book as well. That Kotzwinkle can keep up the conceit of Hal Jam being part of the American literary, political, and New York scene for the entire length of the novel is a testimony to his satiric artistry. Lots of fun reading this one. Thanks, Cuz Joan!!!!.......

"Master Harold"...and the Boys Triumphs at Dramaworks

Dramaworks has produced yet another classic, in keeping with its mission statement of "theatre to think about." In fact this riveting story is heightened by the Director Bill Hayes' passionate belief that this drama and ones like next season's A Raisin in the Sun need to be performed again and again while we, as a society, still suffer prejudice and intolerance. This new production, in its new home on Clematis Street, solidifies Dramaworks place as the premier serious theater in Southeast Florida. I call it Broadway South.

So much is packed into this production that the simplicity of the plot belies its profound intensity, the action slowly building and escalating on two phone calls. Sam (W. Paul Bodie) and Willie (Summer Hill Seven) are servants in the early years of South Africa's apartheid system, 1950, in a St. Georges Park Tea Room where all the action takes place on a windswept rainy Port Elizabeth afternoon. Sam, while not having the benefit of a formal education is nevertheless possessed of a strong native intelligence and kindly disposition, while Willie is somewhat slow, more sensitive and dependent on Sam's guidance. They are casually cleaning the room, but mostly they are playfully teasing each other about an upcoming ballroom dance competition. Enter the son of the couple who owns the tea room, a 17 year old student , Harold, known to Willie and Sam as "Hally" (Jared McGuire). The off stage parents loom significantly in the plot, particularly the father who is both crippled and an alcoholic, an embarrassment to Hally.

The three on-stage characters have a close relationship, even a loving one. In a twist of societal relationships, Sam has become sort of an ersatz father to Hally, recognizing the boy's conflicted feelings towards his father. Sam tells Hally about his mother's phone call. His father is coming home from the hospital. This is strongly denied as a possibility by Hally until he receives the first of two phone calls from his mother. He implores his mother to keep the father there (not wanting him home).

Hally's demeanor changes after the phone call. He becomes obsessed with his homework assignment which is to write about a significant cultural event and Sam suggests the upcoming dance competition as being a worthy subject. Hally is instantly caught up in the possibilities; with the dance competition becoming a metaphor for a perfect world, where people glide in unison, without colliding with others, where there is no hurt or abuse. This good time is interrupted by a second phone call in which Hally's mother tells him that his father insisted on leaving the hospital and now he is expected home immediately after locking up the Tea Room. It is at this turning point that the play goes from benign to dark. Hally is consumed with anger, knowing the consequences and the humiliation of his father's return, and the multigenerational nature of racism rears its head as Sam suddenly becomes the target of "Master Harold." Sam at first feels betrayed. Although this confrontation becomes volatile, the essential goodness of Sam prevails at the end while Hally departs into the symbolically stormy night. Life goes on. Willie and Sam rehearse dance steps to the strains of Sarah Vaughn on the juke box, Willie wanting to believe that nothing has really happened. They have their dignity at the end.

This drama works on so many levels, one hardly knows where to begin. The consequences of family abuse and shame, apartheid, racism in general and how that reverberates throughout society, witness the recent Trayvon Martin tragedy or the virulent anti-Obamanism that seems to be part of today's political landscape, and the multigenerational nature of racism and family abuse. The abusive, alcoholic father in literature and theater is pervasive. The impact on their families is always disastrous and a son's need to find substitute fathers is profound. And what happens when the substitute father is perceived as your inferior? Ironically, who is really in bondage, Hally or Sam?

The innocence and even nobility of Sam is sorely tested by Hally's demeaning and malevolent invectives, but Hally is caught in the irresolvable conundrum of having to become a man at the expense of treating noble Sam as society (and Hally's father) expects a white man to treat a servant in the system of apartheid. And how different is that from even post Civil War America where Afro American's were merely stereotypes and those of us who grew up in the south, such as my wife, were accustomed to segregated schools, buses, bathrooms, lunch counters, everyplace one went, well into the 20th century. Not surprisingly, Sam mentions Abraham Lincoln as one of history's most significant figures, Fugard's veiled reference to America's race problem. But Sam also mentions Jesus Christ as such a figure and in Sam's goodness and forgiveness and careful nurturing of Hally he too is saying "forgive them for they know not what they do." This is a very autobiographical play. Fugard was 17 in 1950 as well, and this work is his exculpation of the guilt he felt being raised in the system of apartheid.

It is a delicate play to stage successfully. So much depends on the nuances of the set and the acting, the lighting, the ambiance. One thing out of place would be easily noticed and distracting. Here Dramaworks excels as usual, selecting the ideal actors and relying on the behind the scenes talents of the people supporting them.

Under Director Bill Hayes' careful direction, the three actors shine. The pacing of the play is just about perfect. My criteria of pacing is to be completely unaware of time passing, the audience caught in each moment, everything seeming to happen at precisely the right time and place on stage. I love the metaphor of the dance (of life), a leitmotif that weaves throughout the play, Hayes highlighting those at appropriate moments.

Jared McGuire who plays Hally has played the part before. He knows Hally well and although Mr. McGuire is older than 17 (no seventeen year old actor is going to have the experience to play this pivotal role so well), he passes as such, his boyishness coming through in his relationship with Sam as well as the raging testosterone that gives rise to his misguided attempt at "being a man" -- his trying to become one in a corrupt society and a dysfunctional family. This is a difficult role to play and McGuire nailed it.

W. Paul Brodie turned in a bravura performance as the compassionate Sam, a person who is sorely tested but emerges noble at the end. He is on stage 99% of the time and while there he is a force, either of drama, sadness, or, even laughter in his kidding of Willie and sometimes Hally.

Summer Hill Seven's portrayal of dim-witted Willie is perfect, even his glances at Sam and Hally during their confrontations. But Willie lives in the dream world, looking forward to the dance competition, reconciliation with his girl friend who he has abused (all of society is caught up in being abused and passing it on), and Seven effectively plays this role.

The scenic design by Michael Amico is exacting, recreating what a 1950 Tea Room in South Africa must have looked like, using the full stage of the new Don & Ann Brown Theatre to its greatest advantage. Even the detail of making a real on stage cream soda is portrayed. Everything is so authentic. Outside, upstage, the pane glass windows of the Tea Room reflect the falling rain, the dreary reality that the Tea Room symbolizes, and, if I'm not mistaken, the rain becoming more intense as the denouement of the play approaches and Hally goes out into the storm.

A wonderful play by a master playwright, performed by one of America's most professional regional theater companies equals dazzling drama.