Welcome to the twilight zone. When I read stories such as Microsoft possibly borrowing to increase its dividend and stock buybacks, I see it as just another sign of the American economic system gone wild. There was once a day when companies borrowed money to finance expansion for the production of goods. Now we borrow to pay shareholders or make titanic bonuses to executives. Or we finance our deficit by borrowing from China to keep the American consumer, AKA Hamster on a Wheel, buying at the local official distributor of goods made in China (and other emerging countries), Wal-Mart. But even with interest rates at all time lows, we cannot create borrowing demand in housing, or small business so unemployment remains intolerably high.
In the past I’ve written about many of the pieces of the economic conundrum we’ve created for ourselves, the problem of job creation, the local government crisis, the underfunded pension guarantees, entitlements, banking bailouts, the inflation/deflation tug of war, and in general our consumption oriented society. In fact, while everyone feels a little better as we have thrown so much $$ at the economy to keep it afloat, repair some damage to everyone’s 401Ks, the really major challenges lie ahead, and in one of the more divisive political environments as the midterm elections loom. The more things change, the more they stay the same…. Alphonse Karr
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Friday, September 17, 2010
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Slouching Towards Nostalgia
When I first began this blog, I really did not know where it would take me. I should have maintained an index as entries have floated like a dandelion in the winds of our time. They are idiosyncratic reactions to the macro and micro moments of my life, but true to my “mission statement” it has been focused on my primary interests, publishing, music, reading and writing, economics and business, photography, and boating. The presidential election occupied a fair amount of angst, not to mention the ongoing Great Recession, the disaster in the Gulf, and “circus occasions” such as the Madoff affair which led to a number of entries.
John Updike’s death was a great sadness to me, the passing of America’s greatest contemporary writer, but luckily, it appears that the baton has now been placed in the capable hands of Jonathan Franzen who has followed up his promising Corrections with Freedom, which has even been acclaimed as the latest “Great American novel.” I got my hands on one of the first copies from my friends at Amazon (a printed copy that is not a Kindle, which I continue to resist). I am so looking forward to reading it, that I am delaying the pleasure until we take a trip in a couple of weeks. Interestingly, taking a page from Updike’s Rabbit series, Franzen has neatly spaced his two novels a decade apart, giving us an opportunity to kaleidoscopically view the differences in our times. So Franzen, I am hoping, will be a worthy successor to a writer I have loved to read for the past fifty years, although he will never be as prolific as Updike, who could move gracefully in many genres, from the novel, to the essay, to the short story, to poetry.
While writing this blog over the past few years, I also “discovered” Raymond Carver, not that I had not read him before, but I immersed myself in his short stories with the publication of the Library of America’s complete collection and Carol Sklenicka's excellent biography, Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life. Many of his stories, such as Gazebo, continue to resonate in my consciousness, so perfectly constructed and moving. Carver always wanted to write a novel, but he was the master of the short story and was wise never to leave that field, including writing some very good poetry. Perhaps Franzen will follow suit, recognizing his territory as the novel, and one absolutely brilliant novel each decade would be more than enough by any standards.
I also renewed my passion for the theatre during this time, especially the productions of Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, and am looking forward to my preview seats for the forthcoming season so I can comment on the productions before traditional media intrudes.
But I started this blog with several entries of a personal nature, about my family and childhood, the good, the bad and the ugly and I see that several of my last entries hark back to more nostalgic feelings than was my original intent. This is a far cry from providing a ‘first hand” account of “our” times, and although family and reflecting on my life will always be a part of what makes me write, I’m taking a vacation from that for a while.
However, I can’t resist the temptation to recount one very recent personal experience, occurring on the night of Labor Day. We had taken our boat to our mooring off Crow Island which we have visited now for some thirty years. There we met friends, thinking we would stay for the day and return to our marina before sunset. Instead, we were easily persuaded to stay the night, enjoy a pot luck supper, including fresh dug steamed clams, and although my instincts told me that an exceptionally high tide might make it uncomfortable, I relied on the NOAA forecast of “relatively light winds” for assurance that we would not excessively rock at high tide as we slept. By dark the winds increased to some 20 knots pushing the water of the Long Island Sound over the bar that protects the anchorage. The End Result: all night we rocked, rolled, banged, bow and spring lines loudly snapping and tugging, things thrown off counters, to the point of virtually no sleep. By morning, with the tide subsiding and the wind backing down, we were greeted by this sunrise, a small consolation to a night from hell.
And a few minutes later…..
.
John Updike’s death was a great sadness to me, the passing of America’s greatest contemporary writer, but luckily, it appears that the baton has now been placed in the capable hands of Jonathan Franzen who has followed up his promising Corrections with Freedom, which has even been acclaimed as the latest “Great American novel.” I got my hands on one of the first copies from my friends at Amazon (a printed copy that is not a Kindle, which I continue to resist). I am so looking forward to reading it, that I am delaying the pleasure until we take a trip in a couple of weeks. Interestingly, taking a page from Updike’s Rabbit series, Franzen has neatly spaced his two novels a decade apart, giving us an opportunity to kaleidoscopically view the differences in our times. So Franzen, I am hoping, will be a worthy successor to a writer I have loved to read for the past fifty years, although he will never be as prolific as Updike, who could move gracefully in many genres, from the novel, to the essay, to the short story, to poetry.
While writing this blog over the past few years, I also “discovered” Raymond Carver, not that I had not read him before, but I immersed myself in his short stories with the publication of the Library of America’s complete collection and Carol Sklenicka's excellent biography, Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life. Many of his stories, such as Gazebo, continue to resonate in my consciousness, so perfectly constructed and moving. Carver always wanted to write a novel, but he was the master of the short story and was wise never to leave that field, including writing some very good poetry. Perhaps Franzen will follow suit, recognizing his territory as the novel, and one absolutely brilliant novel each decade would be more than enough by any standards.
I also renewed my passion for the theatre during this time, especially the productions of Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, and am looking forward to my preview seats for the forthcoming season so I can comment on the productions before traditional media intrudes.
But I started this blog with several entries of a personal nature, about my family and childhood, the good, the bad and the ugly and I see that several of my last entries hark back to more nostalgic feelings than was my original intent. This is a far cry from providing a ‘first hand” account of “our” times, and although family and reflecting on my life will always be a part of what makes me write, I’m taking a vacation from that for a while.
However, I can’t resist the temptation to recount one very recent personal experience, occurring on the night of Labor Day. We had taken our boat to our mooring off Crow Island which we have visited now for some thirty years. There we met friends, thinking we would stay for the day and return to our marina before sunset. Instead, we were easily persuaded to stay the night, enjoy a pot luck supper, including fresh dug steamed clams, and although my instincts told me that an exceptionally high tide might make it uncomfortable, I relied on the NOAA forecast of “relatively light winds” for assurance that we would not excessively rock at high tide as we slept. By dark the winds increased to some 20 knots pushing the water of the Long Island Sound over the bar that protects the anchorage. The End Result: all night we rocked, rolled, banged, bow and spring lines loudly snapping and tugging, things thrown off counters, to the point of virtually no sleep. By morning, with the tide subsiding and the wind backing down, we were greeted by this sunrise, a small consolation to a night from hell.
And a few minutes later…... 
Monday, August 30, 2010
Batter Up!
It is a moment one almost likens to tales of the unbelievable, news about one's 50th high school reunion. When I graduated from Richmond Hill High School in 1960, it would have been the class of 1910’s turn; it would never happen to us. Now in 2010, it is our turn, my generation no longer on deck, but in the batter’s box, approaching a full count. Baseball metaphors were in my thoughts as I held the invitation to my 50th HS reunion from one of my old classmates.
I had attended the 20th reunion and generally was not recognized or probably more aptly, not remembered. The surreal aspect of that gathering was it took place at the school itself, its hallways, classrooms, and the cafeteria where the reunion was celebrated, all seeming to be diminutive, as if we had either grown into giants or the rooms had shrunk. Recognizable was the old route to the high school, partially along Jamaica Avenue which connected my two childhood homes.
Richmond Hill was a working class community of mostly families of German, Italian and Irish heritage. A recent Wall Street Journal article described the evolutionary changes to what used to be called 'Berlin' in the 1800s. Although still a working class community of immigrants, it is now primarily populated by families from India and Guyana. So the baton of opportunity in the New World has been passed on to a new generation of immigrants.
Gone are the landmarks of my youth, in particular, Jahn’s where we spent our teenage after school time or the next door RKO Keith’s where as kids we were drawn to the Saturday matinees and the Triangle Hofbrau diagonally across the street, the restaurant where our family sometimes celebrated special occasions. My father, mother, uncle and aunts had all attended the same high school. Now they are all gone and most of the people I went to school with have migrated east to Long Island or west to New Jersey. Probably no one remains in the old neighborhood.
Our 8th grade graduation photo (I’m second from the right in the first row) shows us on the cusp of entering that high school, with our future selves lying before us. Now we look back and wonder how that deceptively eternal future suddenly became the past, the world of today not even imaginable then.
I had attended the 20th reunion and generally was not recognized or probably more aptly, not remembered. The surreal aspect of that gathering was it took place at the school itself, its hallways, classrooms, and the cafeteria where the reunion was celebrated, all seeming to be diminutive, as if we had either grown into giants or the rooms had shrunk. Recognizable was the old route to the high school, partially along Jamaica Avenue which connected my two childhood homes.
Richmond Hill was a working class community of mostly families of German, Italian and Irish heritage. A recent Wall Street Journal article described the evolutionary changes to what used to be called 'Berlin' in the 1800s. Although still a working class community of immigrants, it is now primarily populated by families from India and Guyana. So the baton of opportunity in the New World has been passed on to a new generation of immigrants.
Gone are the landmarks of my youth, in particular, Jahn’s where we spent our teenage after school time or the next door RKO Keith’s where as kids we were drawn to the Saturday matinees and the Triangle Hofbrau diagonally across the street, the restaurant where our family sometimes celebrated special occasions. My father, mother, uncle and aunts had all attended the same high school. Now they are all gone and most of the people I went to school with have migrated east to Long Island or west to New Jersey. Probably no one remains in the old neighborhood.
Our 8th grade graduation photo (I’m second from the right in the first row) shows us on the cusp of entering that high school, with our future selves lying before us. Now we look back and wonder how that deceptively eternal future suddenly became the past, the world of today not even imaginable then.
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Friday, August 13, 2010
Low Tide
I mean this literally and figuratively, an astronomical low as evidenced by the photo below of the Norwalk River.
And a walk down Westport’s Main Street, my first in many years, revealing that most of the local shops are gone, the Remarkable Bookstore and Klein’s now a figment of my memory and, in their place, trendy shops one would encounter in an upscale mall. In fact, think of downtown Westport, CT as now being mostly an outdoor mall with only Acorn Pharmacy, Westport Pizzeria, the Liquor Locker, and Oscar's the vestiges of the New England town I once knew.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Inflation or Deflation?
I remember watching Wall Street Week with the late Louis Rukeyser in the late 1970s and early 1980s during another alarming economic period, with talk of South American style inflation reaching the U.S. and the mindset that goes along with that fear, people buying gold, eschewing long term US Treasuries which were yielding around 15%. It seemed each and every week investors were waiting for reports on the “money supply” with any large increase reinforcing the then prevailing view. In retrospect, how much simpler and more benign economic matters seemed then.
Now money supply measurements are not even discussed. Instead, we wait with baited breath for the Fed’s latest interest rate decision, endeavoring to parse the Federal Open Market Committee’s statements, comparing them with prior statements for clues as to what the future holds.
Today seems to be the inverse of those days with US Treasuries yielding nearly nothing, and the fear of deflation driving investor psychology, leaving few alternatives to us average folk not of CNBC’s fast money crowd. By the Fed’s decision to reinvest its portfolio of maturing mortgages in U.S. Treasury debt, rather than shrinking its balance sheet, it has embarked on a method of monetizing debt. Normally this would ring the inflation bells but not in this economic environment where spending is a higher priority than reducing debt or saving. Deflation is a state of mind that once it takes hold becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, particularly in the wake of the economic turmoil and bailouts of the financial sector of the last few years, with high unemployment and state and local government fiscal problems, leaving the Fed with few remaining options. And, unlike inflation, we have little experience with it other than the 1930s and Japan’s ongoing battle with it since the early 1990’s.
As reflected by CD rates of nearly zero, it is an investment environment where one has two choices, take risk (which is being encouraged by the government’s actions) or put your savings under a mattress (which, in a deflationary environment produces a positive return without risk). Inflation or deflation? One has to wonder what the Fed knows that we don’t. It is a conundrum for the saver. Bring back the good old days of Wall Street Week!
Now money supply measurements are not even discussed. Instead, we wait with baited breath for the Fed’s latest interest rate decision, endeavoring to parse the Federal Open Market Committee’s statements, comparing them with prior statements for clues as to what the future holds.
Today seems to be the inverse of those days with US Treasuries yielding nearly nothing, and the fear of deflation driving investor psychology, leaving few alternatives to us average folk not of CNBC’s fast money crowd. By the Fed’s decision to reinvest its portfolio of maturing mortgages in U.S. Treasury debt, rather than shrinking its balance sheet, it has embarked on a method of monetizing debt. Normally this would ring the inflation bells but not in this economic environment where spending is a higher priority than reducing debt or saving. Deflation is a state of mind that once it takes hold becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, particularly in the wake of the economic turmoil and bailouts of the financial sector of the last few years, with high unemployment and state and local government fiscal problems, leaving the Fed with few remaining options. And, unlike inflation, we have little experience with it other than the 1930s and Japan’s ongoing battle with it since the early 1990’s.
As reflected by CD rates of nearly zero, it is an investment environment where one has two choices, take risk (which is being encouraged by the government’s actions) or put your savings under a mattress (which, in a deflationary environment produces a positive return without risk). Inflation or deflation? One has to wonder what the Fed knows that we don’t. It is a conundrum for the saver. Bring back the good old days of Wall Street Week!
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Thursday, August 5, 2010
Literary Concord
Several years ago Ann cut out an article in the Palm Beach Post about Concord, Ma. and its rich 
literary and revolutionary war history. As we were visiting our son, Chris, in nearby Worcester, it was an ideal opportunity to push on to Concord for a couple of days, stay at a B&B (North Bridge Inn, highly recommended) and see for ourselves. We decided to concentrate on Concord’s literary history, and its place at the crossroads of Transcendentalism with Emerson as the center of that universe. To walk where Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, and Hawthorne walked is awe-inspiring. They were all 
contemporaries, living near each other. This is indeed a sort of holy ground of American literary and intellectual history.
There is no better way to start such a trip than to visit the Concord Public Library, dedicated by Ralph Waldo Emerson when it opened in 1873. In this day of the Kindle and the iPad, it was refreshing to be in a traditional library, befitting the literary community which it is at the center. Inside one can find Daniel Chester French’s sculpture of Ralph Waldo Emerson. French’s tools were given to him by Louisa May Alcott.
literary and revolutionary war history. As we were visiting our son, Chris, in nearby Worcester, it was an ideal opportunity to push on to Concord for a couple of days, stay at a B&B (North Bridge Inn, highly recommended) and see for ourselves. We decided to concentrate on Concord’s literary history, and its place at the crossroads of Transcendentalism with Emerson as the center of that universe. To walk where Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, and Hawthorne walked is awe-inspiring. They were all 
contemporaries, living near each other. This is indeed a sort of holy ground of American literary and intellectual history.There is no better way to start such a trip than to visit the Concord Public Library, dedicated by Ralph Waldo Emerson when it opened in 1873. In this day of the Kindle and the iPad, it was refreshing to be in a traditional library, befitting the literary community which it is at the center. Inside one can find Daniel Chester French’s sculpture of Ralph Waldo Emerson. French’s tools were given to him by Louisa May Alcott.
In the Concord Museum Emerson’s study is perfectly preserved, moved there after there was a fire in the Emerson home.The Old Manse was home at one time or another to both Hawthorne and Emerson. Here Nathaniel Hawthorne and his bride Sophia rented for three years beginning in 1842. While on tour, we were able to see the following etching in one of the window panes using Sophia’s diamond wedding ring:
Man's accidents are God's purposes. Sophia A. Hawthorne 1843
Nath Hawthorne This is his study
The smallest twig leans clear against the sky
Composed by my wife and written with her diamond
Inscribed by my husband at sunset, April 3, 1843. In the Gold light.
One can still see the smallest twig leaning “clear against the sky.” It would have been interesting to eavesdrop on conversations between Emerson and Hawthorne as Hawthorne was not a Transcendentalist. Henry David Thoreau (pronounced “Thorough” by the natives) is said to have planted the garden at the Old Manse as a wedding gift to the Hawthornes. The garden still blooms there. From the Old Manse Emerson’s grandfather witnessed the “shot heard around the world,” the opening volley of the American Revolution on the Old North Bridge.The Old Manse also houses a 1864 Steinway piano and I was surprised when the docent invited
anyone on the tour to try it. Most items on these house tours are of the “look-but-do-not-touch” nature. As no one volunteered I stepped forward to play a few bars of Memories by Andrew Lloyd Webber, my apologies to 19th century sensibilities. It was out of tune, but all keys functioned, more than 150 years after this piano was built.This is how life was before the “conveniences” of modern life. Parlor games and music, plays written and performed by the residents, writing and philosophical discussions, and books read to the family by candlelight. (Hawthorne read the entire works of Sir Walter Scott to his children while living in Concord.)
The nearby Wayside is now a National Park property and tours of the home and the nearby North Bridge are conducted by Park Rangers. We were lucky enough to have had a private tour of this home. Louisa May Alcott spent her childhood there and many of the scenes from Little Women were set in her memory from that home. It is also the only home ever actually owned by Nathaniel Hawthorne who gave it the name, Wayside.The tour of the Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott actually wrote Little Women was inspired. The docent enacted several quotes from the novel, leaving one motivated not only t
o buy the book (once again) but others as well in the gift shop.Alcott’s father, an educator who struggled to make ends meet, was an enlightened man, encouraging his daughters to learn, building a small desk for Louisa May (unheard of at the time), and having the pleasure of watching his daughter become one of the best selling author’s of her time, certainly making the family wealthy. That small, plain desk has been perfectly preserved. Father Alcott was devoted to Louisa May and she was devoted to him. Eerily, as the New York Times reported at the time in 1888, it is a noteworthy fact in connection with her life and death that Miss Alcott and her father were born on the same day of the month, and that they died within 24 hours of one another.
A couple years ago we had the pleasure of touring Emily Dickinson’s home in Amherst. She is probably my favorite poet. I wonder whether her relative isolation in Amherst, while the literary hotbed of New England was not far away in Concord, but far enough to remove her from that scene, might have contributed to the quiet loneliness of her poetry. I am not aware of Dickinson ever meeting the Concord group.
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is now the resting place of the Alcotts, Thoreau, Hawthorne and Emerson, Thoreau’s grave just simply inscribed, “Henry.” I cannot visit such a graveyard without thinking of Emily Dickinson’s poem I Died For Beauty which I never forgot since reading it in college and in fact recited those words at Dickinson’s gravesite in Amherst:
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 name
Our wonderful tour of Concord was concluded by having dinner at the Walden Grill with my best friend from college, Bruce, and his wife, Bonnie, residents of nearby Sudbury, and both dedicated teachers of literature. Perhaps learning, teaching and literature are in the water of Concord, Ma. and its environs!
Saturday, July 24, 2010
I Had a Session With Freud
Thursday night we boarded a time machine which began on the ancient New Haven Railroad, the same cars I rode on decades before, still shuffling their way to Grand Central Station, laboring in the heavy July humidity and heat. The seats are worn thin with the years and most riders seem to be as well, with the exception of a sprinkling of younger people, their ears dangling with all the attendant cords from their iPods.
We were on our way to a New York premiere of a play that had been highly acclaimed when it was first performed at the Barrington Stage Company where it became the longest running play in the company’s history, Freud’s Last Session by Mark St. Germain. Our unlikely attendance at the NY opening was prompted by our “new old friends,” Bill Hayes and his wife Sue Ellen Beryl, the Producing Artistic Director and Managing Director of Dramaworks, our favorite theatre in West Palm Beach. They will be producing the Florida premiere of the same play in December and had planned to see the NY production. It was over a recent dinner in Florida that they offered to secure tickets for us as well.
Here is the time machine portion of the story: The NY premiere was at The Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater at the West Side YMCA which is right next door to where we lived at 33 West 63rd Street. Since we lived there forty years ago, the West Side has dramatically changed, losing much of its original character. Our little apartment house is surprisingly still standing, dwarfed by behemoth high-rises on all sides, making it stick out like a sore thumb in its old fashioned hardiness.
As we were to meet Bill and Sue Ellen at the theatre and later, by invitation, at a gathering after the performance, we booked a table at a nearby restaurant, Gabriel’s, to have a pre theatre dinner with a long-time friend from my high school days, Ed. This provided our “once a year” opportunity to look back over the last 50 years and as we always do, laugh at ourselves, and then fill in the news from the last year. While at the restaurant, Bill, Sue Ellen and their theatre party arrived and given there are scores of good restaurants in the Lincoln Center neighborhood, one had to wonder happenstance or serendipity?
It is always exciting to see an opening, to form one’s opinion before reviews can influence it. I suppose that is why we have subscription tickets to the preview productions at Dramaworks. We were lucky enough to see Happy Days at the Westport Country Playhouse before the reviews as well.
Freud’s Last Session has all the ingredients that make for an evening of great theatre, some eighty minutes without an intermission that seemed to pass in eight minutes. The play is set in Freud’s study in London, as WW II is breaking out, only weeks before his death, and portrays a fictitious meeting between Freud and C.S. Lewis, the renowned author and Christian apologist, where they discuss their polarized positions concerning the existence of God and the nature of man. It is a weighty discussion but much of the genius of the play is in the many moments of humor. Comedy brings out the best in serious drama.
Furthermore, the staging was brilliant. The audience felt it was indeed in Freud’s study, and that WW II was just underway. Brian Prather is the scenic designer and Mark Mariani the costume designer. Martin Rayner IS Freud and Mark H. Dold a credible C.S. Lewis. Tyler Marchant’s direction paces the production perfectly.
I could go into greater detail, but I confess, I have peeked at the New York Times review which appeared as I was writing this. It covers most of the facts, although the review is inexplicably lukewarm, criticizing the play for having a “lack of tension” or lack of “suspense.” There is plenty of tension, perhaps not in the traditional dramatic sense, but certainly of a cerebral nature. It is so well written, requiring thought and careful listening as well as an appreciation of the myriad subtleties, something the Times refers to as “clever talk.” It is more than that.
I love the quiet ending, Freud left alone in his study to contemplate his discussion with his now departed guest, his own mortality, and the carnage that is about to begin, wondering how one reconciles WW II with religion, listening to the very music C.S. Lewis had admonished him for turning off after the news broadcasts. To me this was a logical resolution to the play, a sign that these opposites had indeed struck a chord in one another, even though their respective positions, Freud’s atheism, and C.S. Lewis’ theism, were left uncompromised.
It will be fascinating to see how this production migrates to the stage in West Palm Beach.
We were on our way to a New York premiere of a play that had been highly acclaimed when it was first performed at the Barrington Stage Company where it became the longest running play in the company’s history, Freud’s Last Session by Mark St. Germain. Our unlikely attendance at the NY opening was prompted by our “new old friends,” Bill Hayes and his wife Sue Ellen Beryl, the Producing Artistic Director and Managing Director of Dramaworks, our favorite theatre in West Palm Beach. They will be producing the Florida premiere of the same play in December and had planned to see the NY production. It was over a recent dinner in Florida that they offered to secure tickets for us as well.
Here is the time machine portion of the story: The NY premiere was at The Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater at the West Side YMCA which is right next door to where we lived at 33 West 63rd Street. Since we lived there forty years ago, the West Side has dramatically changed, losing much of its original character. Our little apartment house is surprisingly still standing, dwarfed by behemoth high-rises on all sides, making it stick out like a sore thumb in its old fashioned hardiness.As we were to meet Bill and Sue Ellen at the theatre and later, by invitation, at a gathering after the performance, we booked a table at a nearby restaurant, Gabriel’s, to have a pre theatre dinner with a long-time friend from my high school days, Ed. This provided our “once a year” opportunity to look back over the last 50 years and as we always do, laugh at ourselves, and then fill in the news from the last year. While at the restaurant, Bill, Sue Ellen and their theatre party arrived and given there are scores of good restaurants in the Lincoln Center neighborhood, one had to wonder happenstance or serendipity?
It is always exciting to see an opening, to form one’s opinion before reviews can influence it. I suppose that is why we have subscription tickets to the preview productions at Dramaworks. We were lucky enough to see Happy Days at the Westport Country Playhouse before the reviews as well.
Freud’s Last Session has all the ingredients that make for an evening of great theatre, some eighty minutes without an intermission that seemed to pass in eight minutes. The play is set in Freud’s study in London, as WW II is breaking out, only weeks before his death, and portrays a fictitious meeting between Freud and C.S. Lewis, the renowned author and Christian apologist, where they discuss their polarized positions concerning the existence of God and the nature of man. It is a weighty discussion but much of the genius of the play is in the many moments of humor. Comedy brings out the best in serious drama.
Furthermore, the staging was brilliant. The audience felt it was indeed in Freud’s study, and that WW II was just underway. Brian Prather is the scenic designer and Mark Mariani the costume designer. Martin Rayner IS Freud and Mark H. Dold a credible C.S. Lewis. Tyler Marchant’s direction paces the production perfectly.
I could go into greater detail, but I confess, I have peeked at the New York Times review which appeared as I was writing this. It covers most of the facts, although the review is inexplicably lukewarm, criticizing the play for having a “lack of tension” or lack of “suspense.” There is plenty of tension, perhaps not in the traditional dramatic sense, but certainly of a cerebral nature. It is so well written, requiring thought and careful listening as well as an appreciation of the myriad subtleties, something the Times refers to as “clever talk.” It is more than that.
I love the quiet ending, Freud left alone in his study to contemplate his discussion with his now departed guest, his own mortality, and the carnage that is about to begin, wondering how one reconciles WW II with religion, listening to the very music C.S. Lewis had admonished him for turning off after the news broadcasts. To me this was a logical resolution to the play, a sign that these opposites had indeed struck a chord in one another, even though their respective positions, Freud’s atheism, and C.S. Lewis’ theism, were left uncompromised.
It will be fascinating to see how this production migrates to the stage in West Palm Beach.
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