"Champion": A New Opera

“CHAMPION,” a new opera composed by Terence Blanchard with a libretto by Michael Cristofer, tells the story of Emile Griffith, who arrived in the US from his native St. Thomas and became the first-ever world boxing champion from the Virgin Islands. Griffith became a boxer by accident: One day, working a shift on a hot day in a New York City hat factory, he asked to take off his shirt. His boss, a former amateur boxer, was so impressed by his physique and strength that he brought Griffith to legendary trainer Gil Clancy’s gym. (Clancy later worked with Ali, Frazier, and Foreman.) Within only a couple of years, Griffith had won the New York Golden Gloves competition (in 1958), turned pro, and was fighting Benny “The Kid” Paret for the welterweight title.

That first championship bout took place in April 1961, with Griffith winning in a 13th round knockout. Paret won a rematch six months later on a narrow split decision. A third fight was organized at Madison Square Garden for March 24th, 1962 and it is that bout which in many ways forms the central turning point in Griffith’s life. During a weigh-in several days before the fight, Paret taunted Griffith, calling him a maricón— a word roughly equivalent to “fag.” Whether intended as an anti-gay slur or more general pre-fight provocation, Griffith had to be restrained at the time, and later, in the ring, may have used it as motivation. When Clancy told Griffith, in his corner prior to the 12th round, to keep punching and not let up, Griffith took the advice to heart, landing 17 unanswered blows in seven seconds before the referee stopped the fight. Griffith was once again world champion, but for Paret the stakes were greater than a title belt: he never regained consciousness and died ten days later.

Though Griffith continued in the ring for a further fifteen years, the incident haunted him. Not only riddled with guilt over Paret's death, the truth was that Griffith was bisexual, a fact he shared with NY Times columnist Bob Herbert many years later. Griffith couldn’t possibly have revealed this during his career, and it wasn’t much easier even later. In 1992, Griffith was savagely beaten outside a gay bar near NYC's Port Authority, an attack which left him near death and hospitalized for more than four months.

A public reading of “Champion” took place last weekend (Oct. 27-28) in Cincinnati as part of the College Conservatory of Music’s “Opera Fusion: New Works” series. The program pairs the artistic and creative teams of new operas with CCM student vocalists and musicians so as to further develop and perfect their work. (Last year’s inaugural effort, the opera “Doubt,” composed by Douglas Cuomo and based on the award winning play and film by John Patrick Shanley) receives its NY premiere this evening at the Guggenheim Museum. [The performance is streamable online through the museum’s website, beginning at 7.30.]) I was there to see my daughter, Chelsea, a senior mezzo-soprano at CCM, and one of the fifteen vocalists in the cast. (Chelsea was one of the small ensemble chorus.) Though the team had spent about two weeks working on the entirety of the piece, our performance was limited to, perhaps, a dozen selections from the work presented three or four at a time. In between, James Robinson from Opera Theater of St. Louis, who was integral to the commissioning of the work and will direct its world premiere next June, filled in the narrative gaps.

In selecting Terence Blanchard as composer, OT-StL clearly chose someone who clearly doesn’t want to be pigeon-holed. Yes, he has the musical chops of a successful jazz trumpeter: Summer camps as a kid alongside fellow New Orleans-native Wynton Marsalis, stints on tour with Lionel Hampton and Art Blakely’s Jazz Messengers, a shelf full of recordings complete with Grammy nominations, five of which he has won. He’s scored more than 30 films, including almost all of Spike Lee’s work, and wrote music for the revival of A Streetcar Named Desire that ran on Broadway earlier this year. He’s an educator, and served as artistic director for the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz at USC and (currently) at the Henry Mancini Institute at University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. Clearly, he’s not afraid of musical challenges.

But what drew him to spend two years developing an opera? An opera based on the life of a mostly forgotten boxer? Blanchard’s father, it turns out, was an amateur opera singer, and he has been a fan since childhood. Perhaps the creation of “Champion” was partly an act of personal homage. This project was also an opportunity to challenge the boundaries that keep genres like “jazz” and “opera” separated. Blanchard’s music in “Champion” uses traditional operatic form but finds moments to incorporate American and Carribbean rhythms and idioms. A haunting duet between Emelda (Griffith’s mother) and a young Emile, for example, contained shades of the lyrical beauty of Gershwin’s “Summertime” while finding the emotional resonance of the finest duets by Puccini, say, from “Madame Butterfly.”

But, sitting center stage at Cincinnati’s College Conservatory of Music last Saturday evening, Blanchard got straight to the point, noting a motivation that was equally important and so much simpler, more humane: “There’s a line in ‘Nine, Ten, and Out’— a book that tells the story of Emile Griffith’s life— that went right to the heart of the story. Griffith says, ‘I killed a man, and the world forgave me. I loved a man, and the world wanted to kill me.’” That tidy couplet, Blanchard said, spoke to him. He mentioned that when he won each of his Grammies, he turned to his wife and kissed her. What would it be like, he wondered, not to be able to share your triumphs and achievements with the one you loved? Michael Cristofer, whose talents as a playwright have been rewarded with an armful of awards (a Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award and a Golden Globe included), has penned a libretto that skillfully weaves intimate episodes between a small cast of characters into a fabric that unearths core universal truths. Truths about freedom, identity, and authenticity. As such, the opera feels like a moment of both gifted storytelling and pointed advocacy. Advocacy for the values of tolerance and mutual acceptance, of the possibility of lives lived without shadows and shame. "Champion,” the work reminds us, is not only a noun but also a verb.

CHAMPION premieres June 15, 2013 at Opera Theater of St. Louis, with a cast including Denyce Graves, Aubrey Allicock, Arthur Woodley, and Robert Orth. Several CCM students (who were fabulous, btw) involved in last week’s reading will serve as “covers” for the production. The run will include six performances. Let’s hope this work finds its way to NYC soon!

Orhan Pamuk at BAM

Orhan Pamuk has an effusive, but many faceted, smile. It takes on a boyish naughtiness when he speaks of the challenge of writing erotic interludes. No matter that he has penned an armful of novels that contain touching insights delicately observed and astutely rendered. Or, perhaps it has a cheeky charm, lighting up his face like a prankster when he alludes to the job security that came along a month after his arrival at Columbia University in 2006, when he won the Nobel Prize. There is the full-faced and relaxed grin that comes just after he has landed an insightful comment about, say, the relationship of literature to history, or perhaps that of objects to memory. And, there is the sentimental twinkle that seems to arrive as he speaks wistfully of his native Istanbul. More than anything, his smile expresses, even exudes, a profound joy, joy that one immediately senses derives from an essential contentment and harmony between his life and the practice of his art.

When Pamuk was questioned about his writing practices, last night at an event at BAM's Harvey Theater (offered in collaboration with the Greenlight Bookstore), he noted his tendency to work in longhand, in regular 12 hour days. He alluded to his novels as trees, noting that each new work involves the construction of several thousand leaves, each of which provides individual details that add to the beauty of the whole. None of this was said with a hint of braggadocio; Pamuk is matter-of-fact and content with the demands his art asks of him. Asked if he ever wished to rewrite earlier works, while confessing to a slight tendency to tinker as his older novels face translation, his answer was framed with a twinkle similar to that induced by a parent being asked to speak of his child: "My life I would like to change, but not my novels," explaining that each of them is like a touchstone of a particular place and time. Despite his planning, he admitted that artistic creation involved allowing for the happy accident. Then, he smiled buoyantly. Limiting regrets and reveling in the privilege of encountering the muse seems to make for a very contented life.

Orhan Pamuk's SILENT HOUSE, a translation of a work originally published in 1983, is just out.

"Developing Nations"

A few thoughts about letting go, as so many of us have done in the last month or two.
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We arrived in New Orleans after a couple of days in Lafayette. We went there beforehand, maybe to pretend we were on vacation, trying to steady ourselves, to find some emotional neutral ground. There were visits to the Tabasco factory and a nature reserve on Avery Island, an Acadian music festival and a trip to a local flea market, some shopping in a mall. All of it was meant forestall the anticipated moment we all were waiting for, the one that lingered in the air like thick fog refusing to lift.

The plan was to set off around 8, but by 7:30 Dylan was already texting me asking if we could leave. He was awake, ready, anxious to get to where he was going. He visited Tulane on a junior year community service trip and liked it so much that the two of us came back to mull it over last October. That trip settled it: We took a tour of campus and asked a few questions, browsed the campus store, then climbed on the St. Charles Avenue streetcar and headed back into town. We eavesdropped on a few conversations and stared out open windows that framed the Garden District. Mostly we kept our thoughts to ourselves— me afraid of putting him off by seeming too positive in my assessment, him trying to make certain this decision about his future was his own. Setting off toward adulthood is full of such awkward moments. Words sometimes rush in, like a cozy blanket to warm the uncomfortable chill of silence. But so often they can keep us from feeling the cool crisp air or the damp of dewy grass that waken us, that remind us it is time to rise and face the day.

A couple of days later, we traveled back to Brooklyn. Dylan sat all afternoon in his room, playing blues riffs on his guitar and listening to recordings of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. He made his decision that day, I think, and in all the months since today is the day we were headed toward. Much as Dylan liked high school, his friends and family, life at home has become one of those xBox games he used to compete at endlessly but now only plays every now and then. Of course, those same patterns and repetitions that he finds boring and leave him itching to move on to something new are what appeal to me— for years they have given my life rhythms and purpose, the familiarity of his presence gave me a sense of what role to play. I still see the white-headed, grinning two year old, lashed at my side in a purple sling or the seven year old playing with his friends after school, kicking his football around. He sees a tall, confident man, nervous and anxious, but ambitious, ready to tame the world. Parenting is a race, though I can’t for the life of me think of what kind of one I might compare it to. There are sprints and tests of endurance, sometimes run as a team, sometimes alone. A race where the rules can change in the middle, without warning. The mileposts come clearer into focus, not that that makes them any easier to accept or understand.

We piled in the rental, drove through a nearby Starbucks for coffee, then set off on our two hour trip. It’s a picturesque drive along that stretch of I-10 back to New Orleans: long concrete bridges that act like a raised canopy through barren tree-stumped bayou and over mossy swamps. It was Sunday morning, so there was little traffic. The vistas were devoid of people. Looking out over the land and water in glimpses sustained me for a time, the gentle thrum of tires on the roadway providing a lilting rhythm, the pops from seams between patches of pavement dictating a cadence as steady as a metronome. Dylan plugged in his iPhone, and put on a few songs he knew Rosie would enjoy— the Shins, Rolling Stones, one or two by the Bob Dylan. We sang along together, scouring through lyrics for words that matched our feelings, conscious that any of these songs might be the soundtrack for our memories years from now when we thought about this day.

But, before long the dark skies we were headed into opened up into a downpour, and the heaviness of the rain forced our thoughts back into the car. Maybe it was fate, or seizing one last opportunity, but in a moment or two we are talking politics, something Dylan and I often do. Around the table, sitting on the stoop, or over the kitchen stove while making dinner. We like to spar.

Dylan has put on a song by the group Franz Ferdinand, and feeling a need to squeeze in one last lesson, I mention it is named for an historical figure whom I ask him to identify. In seconds we go from the assassinated archduke to a follow-up about Sarajevo to trying to name the six republics of the former Yugoslavia. Deb, my girlfriend, usually feigns disgust at the two of us facing off like this, but try as she might, she this morning she can’t resist weighing in. When Dylan mutters that no one really cares, she is off; Deb worked in that part of the world once upon a time and has no intention of letting even an innocuous comment pass. She gives him a three minute sketch of this history, with hints about exactly why he should care dusted in. Before long she is ankle deep. It’s too late; the natural teacher in her is piqued.

Rosie closes her eyes and pretends to take a nap. She finds conflict difficult, no matter that for the pair of us it is just a spirited family game that might as well be “Jeopardy!” If we were home this is when she would excuse herself and climb the stairs to the quiet of her room. I’m not certain why she finds it so hard to tolerate, but even though Dylan and I know she hates it, and love her, we rarely are convinced not to joust. It’s some insipid form of male bonding, both of us asserting our vitality through self-expression, both trying to subdue each other with the power of our words.

I mention that for a long time I’ve wanted to read Rebecca West’s book on the Balkans, based on her visit there in the 1930’s— “something Lamb and Falcon,” my middle-aged mind failing me, not close enough for Alex Trebek. “Why would small states want to be independent anyway,” he asks. “Why wouldn’t they just all prefer to be part of something bigger, more powerful, maybe more efficient— perhaps that way they would be able to exercise more control.” I’m not sure if he was serious, has enough experience at what will set me off, or some combination of the two. It doesn’t really matter anyway. Bait, snare, or lure, this is where we begin.

There are allusions to old ethnic conflicts submerged but never forgotten, central power being used in tandem with outside governmental and corporate influence to stifle local development. Tito. The Cold War. The domino theory and client states. Like a late night dorm room conversation, it isn’t long before we migrate to Rwanda and Congo and how conflicts played out there. Dylan studied some of this in senior history, so he is conversant, able to allude to aspects of Belgian colonial history, about the political corruption of Mobutu, about the complicated web of entanglements that international trade can generate. We argue over whether US aid should come with policy strings attached. Dylan seems uncomfortable with the idea that history and power relations cast long shadows. Maybe it is easier for him to believe that it is possible to start with a blank slate.

I can’t see Dylan throughout this entire conversation. It’s storming. My eyes are focused on the wet pavement, peering through the mist and the droplets swept away by windshield wipers, trying to make certain we stay in the lane and make sure I somehow don’t miss a turn. My mind wanders ,and I remember a quote that I love from the writer E.L. Doctorow about driving at night: Though we can’t see further than our headlights, we manage to find our way home.

Someone mentions Brazil, and I ask Deb if she’s ever been there, trying to lighten things up a bit. She’s just been for a conference once, in Porto Alegre. Dylan tells her he went with his mom once, down to Sao Paolo. “What did you think?” she asks. He mentions the drive in from the airport, mile after mile of favelas, thousands of people living in shanties spread out as far as the eye could see. “It doesn’t seem right, does it?” I ask. “All those kids your age, not so very different from you. Talented. Smart. Ambitious. Their chances so different because of an accident of birth.”

The car is quiet for a moment. I’d like to imagine that it’s because I’ve hit a nerve and cashed in on a teachable moment, but it’s just as likely that we’ve reached the breaking point. Dylan programs some more music for us to listen to, then in four or five minutes there’s an exit. I pull off so we can go to the restroom and buy a Diet Coke. When we get back in, I let Deb drive. I love doing all the driving, and feel anxious as a passenger, but I know that isn’t fair so I’m trying to share. I sit quietly as we resume, trying to mimic drowsiness to mask apprehension. Anyway, I think as I close my eyes, the storm has passed and there’s only ten or fifteen minutes left to go.

We get back to New Orleans, drop things at our hotel in the French Quarter, pick up and pack in the things he’s taking for his room. There’s not too much stuff, to be honest, but even so the back of the car gets filled from floor to ceiling and the kids end up with his guitar case slung over their laps. Tulane is only a brief drive away, but it’s raining again as we wind our way through the maze of backstreets. We all lean forward in our seats, as if the plane’s nose is tilted down and we are headed for the runway.

Dylan and I leave the girls in the car and walk to his dorm, then are directed to another office to fill out forms and collect his keys. I have to sign something, but otherwise my presence is meaningless. I hang back. He doesn’t need me to say a thing.

Two quick loads of armfuls hauled in and he’s unpacked. Pillows, sheets, and a comforter, a couple of duffels full of clothes. His guitar. A banner for his English soccer team and an electric tea kettle are there to help him feel at home. The room is small and empty as a tomb, a set of blank walls and floor and ceiling that act like a vise to hold in the stale air and sickly pallid light, created by grey skies refracted through slatted milky metallic blinds. The furniture is utterly standard issue, as appropriate to a minimum security prison as a dorm— a pair of cot-like bed frames and rubberized mattresses, small desktops, a small open-faced cubicle with hanging rails, a shelf, and empty drawers. Clean enough, but not fresh. There’s a sense that people have lived here but there’s not a distinctive, recognizable trace. I remember my own room at Ohio State from more than 30 years ago. A different layout, but it’s like theme and variation. The room I saw then with excited eyes now looks drab and cheerless. The space was never what the fuss was all about.

Dylan’s roommate hasn’t arrived, so after a few minutes’ deliberation, he chooses a side of the room and with Rosie’s help begins to unpack. After a few minutes, we settle into our comfort zone: Dylan begins to piece together how he wants his things arranged and I’m dispatched to shop. Deb and I find a nearby Walmart, and assemble a cart’s worth of odds and ends he text messages me— towels, toothpaste, batteries, cans of soda to stock the fridge. By the time we return an hour later, the room looks a bit more like home.

We sit awhile, make sandwiches and trade nervous small talk as Dylan makes a cup of tea. The clock is ticking but no one wants to mention time. Sitting next to him, Rosie tries hard to keep the tears away. I take some pictures of what Deb snidely calls an “historic family moment.” Though Dylan isn’t pushing, I sense it is time for us to leave. I look into Rosie’s sad red eyes and give the briefest nod. I don’t need any words for her to know what I mean.

It’s a long, narrow walkway that leads from the dorm to the parking lot, and we stroll along it, mostly single file. I busy myself opening car doors, checking to see that nothing’s been forgotten. I’m putting off the inevitable, trying to think of what possibly I can say. Deb and Rosie take their turns, sobbing quietly. It’s all I can do not to dissolve into tears, to stifle the howl that is welling, but I’m afraid to let out. When my turn comes, I throw my arms around him and grasp hold as if the laws of gravity are loosening. “Make me proud” are the only words I can manage to sputter, hoping he knows how proud I already am.

Dylan turns and walks toward the dorm, sidestepping puddles. He holds himself upright and gazes straight ahead, maintaining a brisk and steady gait. None of us say a word as we pile into the car. Years of habit leave me using eyes like tracking beams, following him all the way down the path. He gets to the door and opens it. I already know this time he won’t be looking back.


"Developing Nations"
Oct 2012

(Photo by Rosie)

Garth Fagan at BAM: A Review

While the Barclay Center opened down the street last Saturday evening, the Brooklyn Academy of Music featured performances of two Garth Fagan / Wynton Marsalis collaborations— "Griot New York" and "Lighthouse / Lightning Rod." I know very little of dance, but was curious to see these works. Tightly choreographed movement seems in many ways anathema to a musical form based on improvisation. The results are stunning: The visual tableaux created by Fagan's dancers have a lightness and joyfulness that seem to complement, though not imitate, the complex harmonics and rhythms of Marsalis's score. Minimalist sets are accented by individual sculptural elements, and the costumes (sometimes in bright lustrous color, other times in soft nocturnal hues) always amplify, rarely detract. In the end, the focus is always on "people dancing" as Fagan pointed out in the post-performance chat, "not dancers performing people." The last section featured the cast dressed in black with shiny elements seemingly lightly pinned to their leotards, frolicking under a pair of lightning bolts that could easily be aluminum foil molded over cardboard shapes, all set to the fugue-like polyphony of the Wynton Marsalis Septet playing unseen beneath the canopy of the stage. It was a wonderful reminder that great art— despite its pretensions to sophistication, complexity, and subtlety— can still be rooted in our child-like desires to play.

"Home Invasion": A Review

For the last week or so, I’ve been reading Errol Morris’s new book, A Wilderness of Errors, which re-examines the Jeffrey Macdonald murder case from 1970. Sifting through the record, Morris advances the position that a cocktail of sloppy police work and prosecutorial sleight of hand have resulted in an innocent man spending three decades behind bars. It is a cautionary tale about the justice system. The “CSI” era is deceitful artifice; despite the fact that every week we are bombarded with television programming where every crime is solved swiftly, straightforwardly, and conclusively, Morris (whose previous filmwork included the superb documentary “Thin Blue Line,” which resulted in an innocent former-Death Row inmate being exonerated) is not so sure this is a storyline we can trust.

It turns out that this book was timely background for “Home Invasion: The Whole Truth and Nothing But The Truth,” a new one act play written by Anna Theresa Cascio and performed by Doc Dougherty. The story, based on events that have played out in Cascio and Dougherty’s lives over the past three years, plays out like some form of “method acting” in reverse: Doc (whose roles have included cops of “Law and Order,” a gangster in a daytime soap, and a fake FBI agent in an indy film) has a pair of Connecticut detectives show up on his New Jersey doorstep, accusing him of participating in a “home invasion.” A year or two before, Ann Bass, arts philanthropist and ex-wife of a wealthy Texas oil magnate, was held hostage in her home by masked gunmen, shot up by the invaders with hypodermic needles, told she would only be injected with the antidote if she paid an $8.5 million ransom. Doc, who bartends part-time for caterers in high ticket price charity events, has crossed paths on a couple of stray occasions with Ms. Bass. When an accordion case containing needles and empty cigar cases washes up near the Queens neighborhood where he grew up, Doc falls under suspicion. How? Well, there is a suggestion by the cops of “touch DNA,” the results of which may place someone from his family group on the scene. There is Doc’s history of brushes with the law as a teenager, his service as a medic decades ago in the military. But, there is also the mysterious fact that his brother has only just escaped punishment on a pair of serious offenses. He has seemed distant of late, and there is talk that he is offended by some perceived slight. Did a family grudge factor in?

Before long it becomes apparent that it is Doc and Theresa’s home that is being invaded. There are policemen loitering in cars outside their apartment building, unexplained clicks during phone calls that could be wire taps, cops showing up on the doorstep pressing Theresa and the neighbors to think the worst. It isn’t long before their domestic “fortress of solitude” feels like its secure, protecting walls have been breached. The receipts Theresa finds that could easily be an alibi are challenged by the agents as an elaborate ruse to cover up, and they threaten her with accessory. Doc’s feisty determination to not be steamrolled, the residue of a tough upbringing in Broad Channel, lead him to hard-headed and absolutist resistance that both increases the appearance of his guilt in the eyes of the investigators and the exasperation of a partner who wants desperately to believe the simple act of cooperation will make it all go away.

Doc commands the stage throughout the evening, bringing a wide range of characters (himself, his wife, his interrogators and lawyer, family members, neighbors and friends) to life. Deftly directed by Molly Fowler, the story is complicated and briskly paced, with only a few shifts of lighting and music samples to signal changes of time and location. It is a gift to be able to manage all of this— to use tiny bits of physicality and subtle vocal inflection to suggest the particularity of character in a way that keeps the audience oriented, while not resorting to caricature. Doc managed to bring these perverse events alive, inviting us to use our imaginations to occupy the confused and threatening space he came to inhabit through no fault of his own. By the time, near the end, he comes to ask angrily, entreatingly, to no one in particular how it is that years of hard work and determination to reshape himself— to alter his pathway from the man he might easily have become— count for so little against a police system that seems weighted to assume his guilt, we wonder with him: Is the woman holding scales outside so many courthouses masked out of a desire to mete out unbiased justice, or is she just sometimes blind?

“Home Invasion: The Whole Truth and Nothing But The Truth,” a one man show starring Doc Dougherty, written by Anna Theresa Cascio and directed by Molly Fowler, runs Thurs, Fri and Sat for the next two weeks at the Jorda Production Theater [Oct 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 13] Tickets are available at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/258932.

"Other Desert Cities": A Review

The Wyeths have the kind of life a certain version of the American dream tells to us we ought to aspire to: They are wealthy, well-connected, well-educated, fabulously successful. Lyman, the family patriarch, is a retired movie actor who parlayed his Hollywood connections and celebrity into friendship with a president and an ambassadorship. His wife Polly graduated from Bryn Mawr, then came out West with her sister Silda to write screenplays that led to a series of profitable films. Son Trip produces a successful reality TV show, “Jury of Your Peers,” in which families come to play out their petty squabbles in front of a panel of second rate actors and D-list celebrities so as to grab their fifteen minutes of fame. And then there is daughter Brooke, who lives back East and published a critically successful novel several years ago. Her return home for this Christmas holiday after six years away serves as the ostensible basis for the events being acted out.

But, this is no Dickensian Yuletide celebration, nor a Hallmark family homecoming. The Wyeth home looks more like what a movie set of a family home is supposed to look like than anything genuinely lived in. The Christmas tree is stuck in a corner, looking more likely to have been dusted than trimmed. The furniture looks stylish, but rarely used, the kind you have “for show” to sit in when important company comes to call. Only it is the idea of this collection of people acting like “a family” that is as out of place as a houseguest. Silda drowns herself in drink, pills and sleep to escape her discomfort. So anxious and uncertain is Trip about the idea of this gathering that he has three flights booked for the day after Christmas, each to a fantasy land more exotic and faraway than the next. And, despite her parents’ hints that they would like her to relocate to the house next door (which has recently become available), Brooke notes how she was tempted to pass right by the Palm Springs exit toward “Other Desert Cities.” She would rather risk being alone and wandering in the barren wasteland than face time with her family. Clearly, this home is no oasis.

Brooke’s long-awaited new book is about to be published, and she has brought home a copy of the pages for them all to read. It is a memoir that focuses on Brooke and Trip’s older brother, Henry. Good looking, smart, and charismatic, he seemed destined for the success his parents dreamed of for him until his opposition to the war brought him directly into conflict with his parents. Unable to abide his disapprobation any more than he could bear their politics, Henry was shipped off to boarding school, where he became ever more distant and extremist. Before long, he joined a group of radical activists, spurned his family completely, and took part in a bombing that killed a homeless veteran. Brooke’s book tells what she knows and conjures what she doesn’t: On the run, Henry came to his father for help, only to be turned away by Lyman, who even called the police. Though Henry was never found, there was his suicide note that revealed hints of his disappointment and disillusionment with his parents, as well as his fragile and muddled state of mind. Brooke imagines what his last day might have been like.

Like all children, Brooke wantes her parents’ blessing, their approval, no matter that she is exposing old wounds to the cold, biting air. But, Lyman and Polly don’t want family secrets aired: There isn’t a thing out of place in this front room, and the clean designer lines and hardwood floors don’t allow for any rugs to sweep the dirt under. Amidst the pictures that inhabit the set’s unseen fourth wall— of Rock Hudson, Sinatra, Goldwater and Dinah Shore— we are told there are none of Henry. At one point in the family conversation, Polly even slips, referring to two children instead of three, a point quickly corrected by her annoyed and exasperated daughter. Brooke reads their silence as denial, their resistance to her work as a tacit admission of the blood on their hands. Goaded on in that interpretation by her Aunt Silda, who has secretly been reading and editing the manuscript pages, Brooke wants to unloose the family skeletons. Reeling from hospitalizations for depression and a failed marriage, perhaps Brooke thinks these pent up secrets are the pieces that will allow her to decipher her private puzzle. Locked into a lifelong struggle with a steel-willed mother, perhaps she hopes publishing this book offers a chance of detaching once and for all, even if takes wielding an axe to do so.

Using memoir to discern meaning is no straightforward exercise. Family stories, especially stories involving uncomfortable secrets, can be mirage-like, obscuring every bit as much as they clarify. Though Brooke fancies herself oak-like as her father, Trip reminds her that family resemblance is more nuanced than that. Much as Silda— the drunken fool the theatrical trope suggests is speaking truth— may want Brooke’s text to indict Lyman and Polly, she has her own awkward memories to avoid. Ever the politician, Lyman loves his daughter and his wife and desperately wants to traverse the minefield between the two that Brooke’s memoir doesn’t so much create as underscore. “Brooke, I’m looking for room to navigate, for this to feel less like we are cornered,” he says, equal part observation and entreaty. But, cornered they are, all of them, narrator as much as those whose lives she chronicles. Maybe Henry’s story is less the ticking time bomb they fear it is and more like one of the presents beneath the tree. It sits there wrapped and awaiting the arrival of Christmas morning when the secrets it holds can finally be opened and shared.

OTHER DESERT CITIES (by Jon Robin Baitz, directed by Joe Mantello) is running at the Booth Theater (222 W. 45th St) and features a fine veteran cast: Stacy Keach (Lyman), Stockard Channing (Polly), Judith Light (Silda), Elizabeth Marvel (Brooke), and Thomas Sadoski (Trip).

"Marley:" A Review

Sunday afternoon I wandered down to BAM to see “Marley,” a new documentary of the reggae music icon (directed by Kevin Macdonald). The film features interview footage with Marley’s Wailer co-founder Neville Livingston (known as Bunny Wailer), wife Rita Marley, Cindy Breakspeare (a former Miss World with whom he had an on-going relationship and fathered a child), children Ziggy Marley and Cedella Marley (both musicians in their own right), and a host of former band members, family and friends. Essentially following Marley’s life chronologically, we move from the tiny tin roofed shack at St. Ann Parish in north-central Jamaica to the Bavarian clinic where he lived out his last months being treated for cancer, returning to Miami only days before he died in May 1981. Between, we hear about Marley’s first ventures into a musical career— Bunny tells how as teens he, Bob, and several others sang at night in cemeteries to perfect their harmonies and summon their nerve. At 16,Marley released his first single (“Judge Not), and the next year he, Livingston, and Peter Tosh formed the core of a group “The Teenagers” that eventually evolved into The Wailers. Reggae was just beginning, an organic form arising out of a cocktail of rock steady, calypso, and ska, achieved by a shift of emphasis on the beat. The Wailers found their way to producer Coxsone Dodd, and began to develop their trademark sound.

But, almost before any success could materialize, Bob was off: In 1966, the 21 year old Marley relocated to Wilmington, Delaware to live near his mother. He worked as a lab assistant at DuPont, then as a welder at the local Chrysler factory, before returning to Jamaica two years later, where he resumed recording and performing with The Wailers. He also converted to Rastafarianism, and grew the dreadlocks that would become part of his iconic look. Maybe it was his Samson moment: The small quiet lad who had been teased and felt the outsider, owing to his mixed racial identity, now found his voice and his strength.

The Wailers traveled to London, got £4,000 and a record deal with Island Records (who had just lost the label’s top artist, Jimmy Cliff), went home to Kingston and recorded the album “Catch a Fire.” “Concrete Jungle.” “Slave Driver.” “No More Trouble.” “Stir It Up.” It was a solid beginning, full of tracks that gave hints of the powerful creative force that was still to come. “Burnin’” followed later in 1973— with “Get Up, Stand Up” and “I Shot the Sheriff.” Now, instead of Jamaican acts garnering notariety at home by recording covers of American radio hits, it was their sound that was being imitated and copied. Less enamored with the touring necessary to promote their records, first Livingston, then Tosh withdrew from The Wailers, returning home to Jamaica. Perhaps it was as it was meant to be.

Continuing on, but now as the clear front man, Marley scored his first US breakthrough in 1975 with “No Woman, No Cry,” a deceptively simple song, utterly singable, carried forward by Marley’s haunting soulful storytelling, bluesy guitar accents, and punctuated by organ chord progressions and I-Threes harmonies that carry the wallop of great gospel music. Such was his influence at home that he was asked by Prime Minister Michael Manley in 1976 to headline a concert aimed at halting gang violence in Jamaica. (Two days before the event, Marley survived a gun attack in his home. He performed nonetheless.) Two years later, he did it again, headlining the “One Love Peace Concert,” intended to promote tolerance and conciliation between Jamaica’s two primary political factions. The film features footage of Marley, sprite-like and whirling like a dervish, coaxing and cajoling Manley and his opponent Edward Seaga onto the stage for a ceremonial handshake. Never have two men looked more uncomfortable, their oversized political egos rendered human-scale by the singer.

But, “Marley” is no thoughtless piece of hagiography, much as we may even secretly want it to be. The film presents a nuanced view of the singer— showing, for example, his complex relationships with women (he fathered eleven children by seven women) and his sometime emotional distance as a father. There are uncomfortable moments of Marley traveling to Gabon, initially unaware that it was a dictatorship. Later, he plays a concert for Zimbabwe’s Independence Day celebrations, a hopeful moment of the late 1970s during which, with the hindsight all these years later, we see installed another dictator, Robert Mugabe.

I had not heard Marley’s music when I arrived at Ohio State in fall 1980, where Marley was scheduled to play a concert at Mershon Auditorium that Halloween. Reggae had not yet come to southern Ohio (where I was from), nor had MTV arrived. But, my roommates had a clutch of Marley’s records— “Exodus,” “Survival,” “Rastaman Vibration”— and I quickly and enthusiastically latched on. The music appealed as a combination of opposites— simultaneously strange and familiar, exuberant and melancholy. There were good time, upbeat rhythms that represented the first flush of adult freedom I was feeling, accented by plaintive lyrics filled with human struggles and allusions to the larger wrongs— racism, social injustice, economic inequality— I wanted to right. I laughed a little uncomfortably Sunday, seeing images of sunburnt and drunken white college students singing along earnestly to Marley’s music— in some ways, I was one of them. But, in other ways (I hope), I was not. I look back now and speculate that some the attraction was the universality Bob Marley created in his music. In my case that was a connection to country music and gospel— both of which I detested, because they were my parent’s musics but which I had spent a lifetime listening to around the breakfast and dinner table, had sung in church on Sundays, had absorbed into my DNA. When Marley sang dolefully (in “Johnny Was”) about a woman crying over the death of her son, it had the ring of Hank Williams or Loretta Lynn. When that woman struggles with how to ever go on in the face of such a loss, the song bore hints of “Amazing Grace.”

Marley never played that concert at Ohio State. Having been diagnosed previously with cancer, a month before it was scheduled to happen he collapsed in NYC, and doctors told him the worst— that the cancer had spread throughout his body and that he had very little time to live. He played one last show in Pittsburgh in late September. His band members spoke heartbreakingly of a two-hour sound check during which Marley sang on and on, and of him summoning every ounce of strength to get through two sets of encores. I confess that I shed a tear near the end of “Marley” on Sunday, watching this energetic warrior made vulnerable, losing his dreadlocks to chemotherapy before finally succumbing to disease. It seemed such a loss that Bob Marley was only with us for 36 short years. But perhaps I was also sad at the impossibility that more than 30 years have further passed, that the youthful enthusiasm and idealism I first encountered Bob Marley with have been tempered by experiences over the many intervening years. I went home and put on an hour’s playlist of some of my favorites. The songs were all familiar, it was only the 50 year old me that was strange. But, it’s hard to linger in sadness listening to Bob Marley. There are powerful rays of sunshine sprinkled amidst the sobering words. It wasn’t long until I found myself feeling it was time to get up, stand up, and lively up myself. There’s still a lot to do.



"Marley," dir. by Kevin Macdonald, 145 mins. A soundtrack features 24 tracks by Bob Marley and the Wailers. The film is available for rent on iTunes.

"Van Gogh Up Close"

The first time you see "Almond Blossom" (1890), the centerpiece of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s stunning new exhibition, "Van Gogh Up Close," you are still a full two rooms away. You turn a corner, lift your eyes to see where you are headed off to, and there it is— hovering front and center in the distance, a turquoise haze with a crowd buzzing around it, the prize that awaits you, the answer to some question you sense is being asked. By this point you are some 30 canvases deep into the story, and have spent the last hour or more looking— reveling in the visual pleasure of scrutinizing and pondering bits of nature so common and ubiquitous that perhaps you never considered they were worth appreciating. Oh, there are show stoppers of the kind one expects from Van Gogh’s oeuvre. Those sets of gorgeous sunflowers— the ones from this museum’s own collection, eleven stems set in a simple earthen jug, each a distinctive act of creation, each in search of its unique sun, and the ones that normally live in NY at the Metropolitan, their droopy brown heads thrust so closely in front for our inspection that we can almost feel that if we get too close seeds and petals, all so delicately balanced on the canvas, will dislodge and fall onto the floor. There are vases of luminous red poppies and sapphire blue cornflowers, sunlit patches of slender irises and copper potfuls of fritillaries, radiant golden pears that seem to have just been spilled from a fieldhand’s wicker basket onto a dazzling swatch of table cloth.

But, there are also appreciations of spiny blades of grass, clumps of lawn covered in dandelion, pastures sewn together like quilted blankets, fields of flaxen wheat brushed with just a hint of sunlight, waving gently in slender bands of sky that seem filled with air that is alive. "I…am always obliged to go and gaze at a blade of grass, a pine-tree branch, an ear of wheat, to calm myself,” the artist wrote his sister, Wilhemina. It is clear from these canvases, even if we didn’t already know it from his biography, that the urge for looking— and for calm too— animated much of Van Gogh’s abbreviated life.

A lack of calm is palpable. It is there in a canvas depicting two haunted figures paused in a plot of forest, where rows of tall lean tree trunks seem to stand in for his asylum walls. Or, in dense tracts of sylan undergrowth, thickets drawn so nearly impenetrable that they barely allow a pathway for the eye. It is heartbreaking to hear in the audio commentary that some of the vistas depicted from Van Gogh’s time at Saint-Rémy (the hospital near Arles, where he committed himself and spent almost a year recuperating) omitted the bars in the windows that would have framed his view.

But, whatever disquiet and loneliness lurked within him, there are moments of supreme calm and breathtaking beauty in Vincent’s work, moments of serenity that, no matter how transient they ultimately were for him, transcend time and touch us all these years later by virtue of having been depicted with his brush. “Almond Blossom” (1890, painted in Saint-Rémy) is surely such a moment. Gnarled and knotty branches, scattered and drifting like wisps of smoke against a luminous, tranquil turquoise sky. The scrap of text next to the canvas notes that the painting was made after Van Gogh learned of the birth of his nephew, Vincent Willem, named for him. It might well have been a bittersweet moment— the vitality of new life and pride at having a namesake from his beloved brother Theo tempered by the immediacy of his hospitalization, an omnipresent confusion and uncertainty that riddled him and kept him locked away.

I’ve admired this painting since I saw it in Amsterdam about a dozen years ago, and have been lucky enough to see it again a time or two in the intervening years. I’ve had instincts about what experience the painting might be trying to capture, ideas that came back to me as I stood in front of it here. As I imagine it, the perspective is one of the artist laying on the ground, flat on his back, connected to solid earth beneath him, eyes turned heavenward into the infinity of a lushly lit morning sky. Between him and that limitless expanse are these branches, covered in the most beautiful pink and white flowering blossoms, that occasionally emit a shower of tiny petals that dance in the breeze like butterflies before drifting down on the artist’s face. But, beautiful though they are, the blossoms are only for a season, and from the ground the branches are just out of reach. The artist is resigned to that. And, still, he chooses to hold his gaze and be grateful for the moment. Perhaps, all those years of looking at the details around him, capturing a sense of rootedness and grounding, allowed Van Gogh the courage to acknowledge his own impermanence and to stare deep and full into the vast unknown.

“Van Gogh Up Close” opened today and runs through May 6. After its run in Philadelphia, it will move to The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

Almond Blossom, 1890. Vincent Willem van Gogh, Dutch, 1853 ‑ 1890. Oil on canvas, 28 15/16 x 36 1/4 inches (73.5 x 92 cm). Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.