If "Tales of the City" Were Written in Verse...

...it would be The Golden Gate, by Vikram Seth.

I know I posted a little about this book last week--how it is a novel written entirely in Onegin stanzas. Not an "epic poem," because its concerns are far more down-to-earth. Set in the Bay Area in the 1980s (Napa Valley, the Peninsula, and S.F. proper), it mostly follows the love lives of a group of yuppies. As with Tales of the City, parts of it are dated--some of the "yuppie lifestyle" satire, as well as the Cold War fear of nuclear annihilation that forms a major subplot.

All the same, it hooked me from the first stanza, in which a man has an existential crisis while walking through Golden Gate Park. And some of the San Francisco atmosphere that the book captures is truly timeless--first dates at the Cafe Trieste, the Golden Gate Bridge and the skyline itself... Here is a sample stanza (perfect for this time of year!):

They park the car by the Marina.
The surface of the cobalt bay
Is flecked with white. The moister, keener
October air has rinsed away
The whispering mists with crisp intensity
And over the opaque immensity
A deliquescent wash of blue
Reveals the bridge, long lost to view
In summer's quilt of fog: the towers,
High-built, red-gold, with their long span--
The most majestic spun by man--
Whose threads of steel through mists and showers
Wind, spray, and the momentous roar
Of ocean storms, link shore to shore.

The characters of the novel are more types than individuals, but all the same, by the end I was curious to learn how their tangled relationships got sorted out, and moved by the final chapters, when darker matters intrude on the blithe innocent California world. Another charming aspect of the novel is that the characters' pets play a role in the story and are made just as vivid as their human owners. (I can't easily think of another novel that has such good writing about animals.) One of the pets is an iguana named Arnold Schwarzenegger, which is, of course, all the funnier in light of recent California history!

The narrator is not nearly as funny and garrulous as the narrator of Eugene Onegin, but he has a few good digressions, including the beginning of Chapter 5, where he defends his decision to write a novel in verse. He ably rises to the challenge of rhyming--OK, "Oregon" doesn't rhyme with "gone," and "merely" doesn't rhyme with "really," and some of the rhymes only work when spoken in a British accent, though presumably Seth, who grew up in India, has that kind of accent. But those are just a few mishandled rhymes in a sea of thousands of perfect ones--300 pages, 13 chapters! Not to mention that the acknowledgments, chapter list, and author bio are written as Onegin stanzas too. (Seth made his task slightly easier by naming the main characters things like "John," "Liz," and "Phil"--one-syllable names that rhyme with some of the most frequently used words in our language.)

Highly recommended for anyone who is fascinated by rhyme and structure and "constrained writing"; people who want to be exposed to a different sort of contemporary poetry than that which we usually encounter (this book flatters your intelligence, rather than making you feel stupid for "not getting it," as some of the more oblique poetry these days does); and of course any proud citizens of the Bay Area!

"So-Called Post-Racial"

"It's fairly easy to get beyond [Thomas] Bradshaw's purposefully thin surfaces--unless, of course, you're unwilling to look at what contorts all America: racism, and the bullshit notion that it doesn't affect our view of sex and love in a so-called post-racial country."

--Hilton Als, "Critic's Notebook," The New Yorker, Sept. 28 2009

Given this vehemently expressed attitude, I am surprised that Hilton Als was as polite to me as he was last summer, when I met him and asked him my confused question about what playwrights should do if they wanted to write a post-racial play!

But at the same time, I can't help but wonder if my use of the term with Mr. Als – and my kinda-naive, bourgeois-white-girl-from-San-Francisco-by-way-of-Vassar attitude--is one of the things that provoked him to write this in the first place? The New Yorker isn't often this profane nor this angry, you know.

Previously: Theater à la Als
The "Post-Racial" World and Contemporary Playwriting

P.S. Sometime I must write about the playwriting workshop I had with Thomas Bradshaw as one of the perks for winning the Young Playwright's Contest (and if you know Bradshaw's work you know that he is a rather dubious choice to give a writing workshop to 15-to-19-year-olds)... but later, later.

"Trovatore" at the Ballpark: A Distanced Viewing

Saturday the 19th, my friend Chanelle and I went to AT&T Park, where the Giants play, to see the live broadcast of San Francisco Opera's Il Trovatore. The ballpark atmosphere was relaxed and convivial, despite the chilly San Francisco night. Chanelle and I sat in the bleachers above third base and shared chicken tenders, garlic fries, and an ice cream sundae while waiting for the opera to start.

Trovatore has a famously nonsensical plot, and I'm not even talking about the whole "throwing the wrong baby on the fire" business, because Stephanie Blythe was so good at portraying a deranged Gypsy woman that you believed she could've gone into a delusional trance and killed her own child. No, what bothers me is how the characters must behave in increasingly illogical ways in order to prolong the plot, when a simpler solution is often staring them in the face. Act I ends with Manrico and Count di Luna dueling beneath Leonora's window. In the next scene, Azucena asks Manrico, "Why didn't you kill Luna?"

"Yeah, why didn't he kill him?" I said to Chanelle. "Oh, that's right. He can't kill him because then the opera would be over."

"Maybe it's because killing him would've been too dangerous," Chanelle suggested. "Manrico is already a wanted man and if he killed a Count, he'd probably be in even more trouble."

But unfortunately, Chanelle's explanation is far too logical for an opera like Trovatore. Instead, Manrico sings, "My sword was poised above Luna's throat--and then I heard a voice from Heaven say 'Do not kill him!'" Talk about a deus ex machina!

A similar problem crops up at the end of Act II. Leonora is about to enter a convent and Luna arrives with his soldiers to kidnap her--only to discover that Manrico and his band of Gypsies have also arrived to bust Leonora out of there! There is a clash and Manrico's group wins, so as the curtain falls, we see Luna surrounded by Gypsies who point guns and knives at him. But in the next act, with no explanation given, he's free, back with his own soldiers. I wish that the staging of the Act II finale had shown how Luna escaped from the Gypsies. Otherwise, it's just another lapse of logic.

Other than that, I thought the production (directed by David McVicar, seen at the Met last season) was OK, if not dazzling. Updating the era from medieval times to the early 1800s respected the opera's Romantic/melodramatic atmosphere, while also making the costumes more flattering and less laughable than medieval doublets would be. The Anvil Chorus, despite the presence of bare-chested men with big hammers, even managed to avoid campiness.

It was a solid cast, too, especially on the female side. I already said that Stephanie Blythe made a terrific Azucena. Sondra Radvanovsky (Leonora) reminded me a bit of Marcia Gay Harden, looks-wise--a "handsome" woman, not a flighty young girl. Her voice is well-controlled and (at least as broadcast in the ballpark) loud; unfortunately, she was totally upstaged during her Act I aria by a little boy who slipped under the ropes surrounding the baseball diamond and started running around the field, quite agilely evading capture. Marco Berti's acting did not illuminate any hidden depths in the character of Manrico (he stuck to typical "Romantic Opera Hero" poses) but his voice navigated the challenges of this role. As for Dmitri Hvorostovsky, who played Count di Luna, I can't decide whether I'm glad he resisted the temptation to act like a Snidely Whiplash villain, or whether he should have taken a less subtle approach. I'm inclined to say the latter, though--the story is so melodramatic that old-fashioned stage villainy would fit right in, and besides, since Hvorostovsky is much handsomer than Berti, the audience needs a clear reason to hate him!

All the same, I'm not describing these performers with as much detail as I sometimes would--and that's because I still don't feel like I saw the opera. Overall I found Opera at the Ballpark a frustrating experience--my vision constrained by the shots and camera angles that the director of the broadcast chose; my ears uncertain whether these singers would really sound this way in the theater; and, though the screen was indeed as big as advertised, I was sitting much further from it than I would typically sit from the stage of the opera house. I've seen opera broadcasts on TV and even once in a movie theater and been cool with that, so I wasn't expecting this experience to frustrate me so much--but somehow, perhaps because of the sheer number of people in the ballpark and my extreme distance from the screen, it did. (Furthermore, with the Sonnambula broadcast last spring, my reaction was "Cool, I get to see something that is happening 3000 miles away!"--whereas Trovatore provoked the question "Why am I watching this as a broadcast? It's happening only two miles away!")

Maybe this speaks more to my own personal issues than to anything else, but I have recently been fetishizing the immediate experience--and Opera at the Ballpark, obviously, is a heavily mediated event. Sometimes I feel like I am wandering through life in a fog (ok, I live in San Francisco, so I literally wander through fog on a regular basis--but you know that's not what I meant)--I fret that I intellectualize things too much, that I see things through the prism of books, that I am too guarded and cynical, that I do not live life to the fullest or allow life to permeate and astound me. Big, idealistic words, I know! But I can't help feeling that it would be easier to be astounded if I were seeing the performance live. Our reactions in the ballpark felt muted: though we cheered after the big arias, our applause never lasted as long as it did in the opera house. We were sheepish; the people who were there in person were moved, transported, enthralled.

Chanelle said she liked being able to watch opera in a relaxed, unpretentious environment, junk food at the ready. But I have never been one of those people who is uncomfortable with formality; rubbing elbows with wealthy opera patrons doesn't intimidate me, and if anything, I like the opportunity to wear a nice dress! Then I tried to think of Opera at the Ballpark as a throwback to Rossini's or Mozart's time, where opera audiences ate and chatted throughout the performance. But then, when I did talk during the opera (engaging Chanelle in that conversation about why Manrico didn't kill Luna), our neighbors shushed us! This seemed to me like the worst of both worlds: you couldn't experience the opera as well as you could in the opera house, and yet you still had to be on your best behavior.

I don't want to make it sound like I hate Opera at the Ballpark or think it should be discontinued. I recognize its utility and would certainly recommend it for people who want to learn more about opera or introduce their kids to it, people who can't afford tickets, and/or people who are put off by opera's "high-culture" trappings. But at the same time, for someone like me--who already knows she likes opera, and can afford to buy tickets, and doesn't mind putting on nice shoes and going to the opera house--it is not so useful.

Images from San Francisco Opera. Top: Manrico and Azucena. Bottom: Leonora pleads with Count di Luna.

Onegin Stanza #1

Currently I am reading The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth, a crazy and great sui generis book: the story of a bunch of San Francisco yuppies in the 1980s, told entirely in verse. And not just any verse, but Onegin stanzas, one of the hardest verse forms to employ in English--but one which, if done well, can create stunning effects.

And, just as seeing a Shakespeare play makes me want to start speaking in iambic pentameter, reading The Golden Gate has inspired me to compose my own Onegin stanzas. Of course, iambic pentameter is relatively natural and easy to compose, while Onegin stanzas are artificially and strictly patterned--a great challenge!

When the beginning of a quatrain popped into my head the other day, I decided to develop it into a complete poem. So here, after much crossing-out of lines, and much consulting of a thesaurus, is my first-ever attempt at an Onegin sonnet.

When we are faced with disappointments,
They should not come as a surprise,
For well we know that sweetest ointments
Inexorably lure the flies.
But just as sand, within an oyster's
Shell, its secret nacreous cloister,
Is transfigured from grit and grime
Into a pearl; so can the slime
And dirt and bugs that Life provided
Transfigure, too. This may sound odd,
But flowers spring from barren sod;
And with an insect trapped inside it,
An amber lump gains an allure
More precious, even though less pure.

I'm not sure I agree with the message of my poem, nor do I like its moralizing tone, but the verse scans correctly and the images work--which is all that one can really hope for on a first attempt, right?

Super-Duper Trivia Quiz!

This year, some of my co-workers and I have been participating in a daily trivia game. Someone bought a page-a-day calendar that features Trivial Pursuit questions, and every afternoon, we ask that day's question and award bragging rights to the winner. And sometimes, when this is not enough to satisfy our hunger for trivia, someone prepares a special Friday Trivia Quiz. This week, it was my turn.

The people at my office, I should note, all have different areas of expertise. Some of the guys have an awe-inspiring knowledge of sports trivia. One girl knows everything there is to know about Russia. And I am the resident theater and literature expert, so I prepared a quiz heavy on those subjects. I wondered if I was making my co-workers go too far out of their comfort zones; nevertheless, I realized that the only way to write a good quiz was to choose subjects that made sense to me. For instance, I know so little about sports that I have no way to judge whether a sports trivia question is easy or hard, obscure or common knowledge. Whereas I am able to judge the difficulty level of the questions on this quiz. The musical theater questions, for example, require a good general knowledge of who wrote some of Broadway's biggest hit songs. But if I were making a quiz for an audience of theater geeks, I could also have chosen songs and lyricists who were way more obscure.

Even so, I really stretched my co-workers' brains... they all agreed that this was a hard, hard quiz! Want to see how you stack up? Here are the questions that I e-mailed to my co-workers yesterday. I'm going to post the correct answers to the quiz in the comments section, so write down your responses on a piece of paper and click over there when you're done. Feel free to post your score, as well--and to let me know what you thought of the quiz!

THEATER

Who wrote the following lines? Choose from: Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams. (Yes, there are four quotes and five potential authors. This is to make it harder!)

1. "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."
2. "Attention must be paid."
3. "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness."
4."We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

MUSICAL THEATER

Who wrote the following lyrics? Choose from: Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein, Alan Jay Lerner, Frank Loesser, Cole Porter.

5. "I got rhythm / I got music / I got my man / Who could ask for anything more?"
6. "Birds do it / Bees do it / Even educated fleas do it / Let's do it / Let's fall in love"
7. "Some enchanted evening / You may see a stranger / You may see a stranger / Across a crowded room"
8. "Stick with me, baby, I'm the fellow you came in with / Luck, be a lady tonight"

ACADEMY AWARDS

9. In 1968, the Best Actress nominees were Katharine Hepburn, Patricia Neal, Vanessa Redgrave, Barbra Streisand, and Joanne Woodward. The votes ended in a tie. Hepburn was one of the winners; who was the other?
10. How many women have ever been nominated for Best Director?
11. Woody Allen, Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick. Only one of these men ever won an Oscar for Best Director. Who?
12. What actor appeared in only five films before his early death--but all of them were nominated for Best Picture?

GEOGRAPHY IN HISTORY

13. What 1883 event affected weather patterns worldwide?
14. Napoleon was born on an island, exiled to (and escaped from) a second island, and died on a third island. Name the islands.
15. What does "Fifty-Four Forty or Fight" refer to?
16. What city on the Baltic Sea was attacked by the Germans to begin World War II? Extra credit: Give both the German and Polish names of this city.

SCANDALOUS AUTHORS

17. What poet was described as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know"?
18. What American author married his 13-year-old cousin?
19. What writer's published diary reveals that she had an affair with her own father?
20. What American writer stabbed his wife with a penknife, nearly killing her?

COMPOSERS & ROYALTY

21. King Ludwig of Bavaria was obsessed with the music of what composer?
22. Emperor Joseph accused what composer's music of having "too many notes"?
23. What German composer wrote several pieces of music in honor of the British royal family?
24. What composer's music became associated with the movement to get Victor Emmanuel crowned king of Italy?

Awake and Sing!: It Deserves the Exclamation Point

NOTE: Some spoilers ahead for Awake and Sing!, because I discuss its plot construction.

Having read Clifford Odets' play Awake and Sing! last month, I was glad to see the Aurora Theater's production and learn how it plays onstage. Though it is definitely a "kitchen-sink drama" (not at all a "cinematic" play), it moves at a good pace, propelled by the fast-talking dialogue. The plot developments still have the power to surprise: when the janitor announced that Jacob had fallen off the roof and died, the audience literally became abuzz with whispers. These whispers, I guess, expressed sorrow at this likable character's death, and shock at the suddenness of it, shading into speculation over whether it was really an accident, or suicide--just the effect that Odets would have wanted! (And if you examine the script, you'll see that Jacob's death is very carefully set up--but when you see the play for the first time, it comes as a surprise. A really nifty trick.) I also like how the 1-year jump in time between Act I and Act II is something that Odets expects you to figure out gradually, rather than feeding it to you as exposition.

Even though the Aurora is not one of the Bay Area's largest theaters, their production had a terrifically accomplished cast. At first I thought that the actor who played Ralph looked too old for his 22-year-old character, but he grew on me. All the same, Ralph, though ostensibly the hero, is not the best-written role in the play--he's kind of a standard-issue "idealistic youth looking for his place in the world," but many of the other roles are wonderfully pungent character parts. I especially liked Charles Dean as the sweetly hapless father, Myron; and Ray Reinhardt perfectly fit Odets' description of Grandpa Jacob: "an old Jew with living eyes in his tired face." Reinhardt is nearly 80 years old and was a little boy in the Bronx at the time Odets wrote this play--so his performance had a special poignancy and authenticity to it, a link to history.

When watching old plays like this, certain lines sometimes jump out with a surprising contemporary relevance. Here's a moment that made everyone in the theater think of the current health care debate: Moe Axelrod lost a leg in World War I and says that he has three wooden legs in the closet: "Uncle Sam gives them out free." Uncle Morty, a successful bourgeois businessman, replies, "Maybe if Uncle Sam gave out less legs we could balance the budget!"

A moment that would not pass muster in a contemporary play: Moe, at his lowest ebb, says, "What I think a' women? Take 'em all, cut 'em into little pieces like a herring in a Greek salad. A guy in France had the right idea--dropped his wife in a bathtub fulla acid." The cruelty and misogyny of those lines is shocking--from a guy who is ultimately supposed to be the hero, the right man for Hennie! Though we know that Moe doesn't really plan to chop anyone up (he feels betrayed, his pride has been wounded and he's talking tough), I am glad we have reached a point where no contemporary playwright could get away with having a sympathetic character talk about women in this way.

Overheard while leaving the theater: "Yes, the grandfather was very loving... But he was a Marxist!" I have to say, though "Marxist" is a dirty word to many Americans, I didn't expect that it would be that way in the People's Republic of Berkeley! And this judgment echoes the cruel mistake that Uncle Morty makes, in the play--judging Jacob for the unrealistic ideas in his head, not for the love in his heart.

I also overheard one person call the play "dark" and another call it "depressing," which just baffles me. Odets, with his agitprop and his speech-making, is the textbook example of a playwright who believed theater could change the world for the better--which is an optimistic, progressive attitude. (Heck, look at the title: Awake and Sing!--with an exclamation point!) All right, I agree the ending no longer seems quite as cheerful as Odets intended: he seems to think that everything will be solved once Ralph becomes a Marxist and Hennie runs off with Moe, while a modern audience is more skeptical. But that certainly doesn't make the play depressing! Indeed, this ambiguity in the ending--though perhaps unintentional--saves it from being mere agitprop.

It kind of amazes me that so few people know about Awake and Sing!, when two plays that it obviously influenced--The Glass Menagerie and Death of a Salesman--are considered major American classics. (Amanda Wingfield, being an overbearing mother in a low-rent apartment, is like a Southern-belle version of Bessie Berger--and Willy Loman's death is an echo of Grandpa Jacob's.) Both these plays, incidentally, fit my idea of "depressing" much more than Odets' play does. In The Glass Menagerie, none of the characters physically die, but a girl's soul is brutally snuffed out. In Awake and Sing!, a man dies, but his soul lives on.

Image: Jacob gives his son Morty a haircut, while Ralph talks to them and Bessie sets the table. Photo by David Allen, auroratheater.org.

Sunday in the Park with Puccini, Verdi, and the Homeless

Only in San Francisco can you attend Opera in the Park and find yourself next to a homeless man who yells "Bravissimo!" after every aria and sometimes in the middle of them too, whistles and hums along with "Che gelida manina," and, when the announcer says something about "pasta e fagiole," yells back at the stage, "It's pasta fazool!" (To which I couldn't help adding, "I agree!") Local color for what has become a treasured city tradition.

This year's concert introduced Nicola Luisotti, San Francisco Opera's new music director, who is expected to raise the company's standards in the core Italian repertory. To that effect, he led an all-Italian program: lots of Rossini, Puccini and Verdi, plus one Italian-language Mozart aria. Luisotti is a slim and animated presence at the podium. At the end of the concert, he gave an impromptu speech about how "San Francisco may not be close to Europe but we can make it the center of the universe for Italian singing," then brought out the singers for a surprise rendition of "O Sole Mio."

At that point the clouds covered Golden Gate Park and a few drops of rain were falling, but it still felt very appropriate. Opera should be communal and joyous and unpretentious. There should be an Italian music director who gives a slightly rambling but very passionate speech and then conducts "O Sole Mio" complete with schmaltzy ritardandos, and the tenor and the soprano trying to outsing each other, and a tambourine banging away in the background.

Luisotti's first production as music director is Il Trovatore, so the concert featured several excerpts from that opera, sung by Sondra Radvanovsky (as Leonora), Marco Berti (Manrico), and Quinn Kelsey (Count di Luna). (In the full production, Radvanovsky and Berti play those roles, while di Luna is played by Dmitri Hvorostovsky.) I will probably have more to say about this opera and these singers after I see the "Opera at the Ballpark" simulcast screening of Trovatore next Saturday. I didn't love Berti's voice in the more lyrical music but he sang a rousing "Di Quella Pira"--which I am sure will be even better with a male chorus to back him up! Radvanovsky passed quite near me as I left the concert and she is certainly a striking-looking woman: very tall, wearing bright red lipstick to match her big red evening gown. She just got a rave in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The program contained a very amusing, but, I'm afraid, far too common typo: Puccini's famous soprano aria was listed as "O Mio Bambino Caro." The idea of the virginal, unmarried Lauretta singing "O My Dear Baby" instead of "O My Dear Daddy" just makes me laugh! However, it was nicely sung by Leah Crocetto.

The final aria (before "O Sole Mio" and the traditional "Libiamo ne'lieti calici" conclusion) was a really beautiful rendition of "E lucevan le stelle," sung by Brandon Jovanovich. I think I preferred him to the guy that starred in SFO's Tosca this summer!

Image: Maestro Luisotti is all smiles. Photo from sfgate.com