The Millers' Son

As Dolores pointed out in the comments to this post, Arthur Miller's claims to being a great moral example are severely compromised now that the story of how he institutionalized his son, who had Down's Syndrome, has been revealed. What really stings is the fact that Miller rarely visited and never talked about Danny; it's one thing to decide that doctors and professionals can take care of your disabled child better than you can, but another thing to pretend that he doesn't even exist.

Though it can never be easy to raise a disabled child, I feel it must be worse for people who work in creative fields--people who don't earn a steady salary and who need time each day to be alone with their thoughts. For someone who works a regular nine-to-five job, raising a disabled child may require cutting back on overtime hours, advancing more slowly up the career ladder, socializing less often with friends. But for a playwright like Miller or a globetrotting photographer like his wife, Inge Morath, it may require completely abandoning one's artistic vocation--an integral part of oneself. And most artists aren't even as successful/famous as Miller and Morath were when they had Danny; if Miller needed money he could always give lectures or something, but most other artists need to have a day job to pay the bills. It would be superhuman for anyone to work full-time, and raise a disabled child, and write great plays. It might be possible to do two of those things, but not all three...

Therefore, even though I'm not sure whether I want to have children and if I do have them it will be many years in the future, I already worry about giving birth to a severely disabled baby and being forced to give up writing and theatergoing and everything that I have worked so hard to achieve. Could I accept it without bitterness? Could I find the strength and selflessness that would be required of me?

Even if I didn't have playwriting aspirations--if I were just an intellectual young woman--these worries would still haunt me. I have written before that I think I am very much like A.S. Byatt's character, Frederica Potter. In Babel Tower, Frederica is the mother of a little boy named Leo. Previous books show Frederica as very cerebral and quite self-centered, so you assume she'll be a cold and distracted sort of mother, but I like that Byatt makes a less obvious choice. Although Frederica doesn't really do baby-talk and cuddles, she is nevertheless a very good mother--because she takes Leo seriously, listens to what he has to say, answers his questions with care and honesty. The mind is so important to Frederica that she cannot help but be concerned with what is going into the formation of Leo's mind and personality--as all parents ought to be.

This strikes me as a very truthful portrait of how cerebral women express their love for their children. And if I ever am a mother, I think I will be similar to Frederica. Thus, the idea of having a child who is mentally disabled--who may never learn to talk--with whom I could never share a mature conversation, or even the kind of conversation that adults have with curious five-year-old children--frightens me a lot. Because it wouldn't play to my natural strengths as a mother. Because to me, the reward for raising a child is watching him develop all the way to adulthood and feeling your relationship with him evolve.

Other people must have similar worries, and in fact, I just learned about a new play that addresses this issue. When Jason Grote tweeted that a play called Precious Little is the best thing he's seen in years, I quickly looked it up. It is by Madeleine George (who, let me note in passing, is another former winner of the Young Playwrights Contest) and deals with "a linguist who, in her early forties, decides to have a baby on her own and discovers through prenatal testing that the child may have a genetic abnormality... She tries to figure out whether she can deal with having a child who might never speak to her."

I'm intrigued already.

2-Year Blogiversary / Off to Japan

Tonight is the night before my long-anticipated trip to Japan. It also happens to be the 2-year anniversary of marissabidilla. When I started this blog, I'd quite recently come back from France--now I'm about to take my first overseas trip since that time.

I'm not bringing my laptop--meaning that this will be the longest time in, I think, 5 years, that I will be away from my computer. It should be healthy for me--clear my head a bit, separate the woman from the machine. I'll borrow my friend's computer to check e-mail and read the headlines, but I don't plan to write any new blog posts from Japan. I have set up a few things to post in my absence, though, so keep checking back here!

Surely I'll write plenty of posts about Japan when I return, but in the meantime, I see that Slate.com has a columnist in Japan this week and next, so you might enjoy reading his articles too. Maybe I'll have to compare my experiences to his!

Japan, I think, will be the first place I've ever traveled where I'll really, really feel like a foreigner. Well, I guess that in Cuba I stood out as a foreigner too, but there I was nearly always with a big group of American students, so we all stood out, as a unit. When people stared at me there, they were staring at my whole group; in Japan I will attract attention as an individual. All the more so because Japan is such a collectivist society. In Cathy Davidson's book, she writes that in Japan, "if you are young, or tall, or blond, you are treated as if you are a movie star." Through no fault of my own, I hit the young-tall-blond trifecta, so I am prepared for some weird experiences.

I almost think it should feel even weirder, though, to be an American visiting Japan. Because after all, only one country has ever attacked another with an atomic bomb--my country, attacking theirs. And the city where I will be staying--Kobe--was firebombed almost to smithereens by the Americans! (And then half-destroyed again in the 1995 earthquake. Poor Kobe.)

As for this being the two-year anniversary of marissabidilla--well, I haven't become a blogging superstar, but I think I like it that way, and I believe that keeping a blog has made me a more positive person. When I started this blog, I expected that I was going to write a lot more ranty posts than I have ended up creating--maybe fitting the stereotype of the angry citizen-blogger, using this democratic New Media form to puncture inflated reputations and open my readers' eyes to the truth. But you know what? I don't like spending my Internet time with bloggers who come off as negative and angsty and humorless! So my blog should not be that way either. Of course, if I have negative feelings about a play or book, I'll let you know it. But I try to do it fairly, and I try not to make this a place for bitching about random idiots I encounter or the minor frustrations and humiliations of life.

So, gradually, this blog has become a repository of things that I love, rather than things that make me angry. And, somewhat to my surprise, I keep discovering more things to love and to post about and to share with you! Two years ago, I didn't know whether I could sustain a blog for this long. But now, when I think of all of the things I love that I have barely even mentioned on this blog yet, it makes me giddy!

I'll return from my vacation on July 3.

Trompe L'Oeil "Tosca"

I saw Tosca at San Francisco Opera over a week ago, but I haven't written about it yet mainly because it did not affect me that deeply--and because I can't figure out why it left me so unmoved, I wasn't sure what to say about it. Yet I wanted it to touch me--the way it did Harvey Milk in the last scenes of Milk!

It was a very traditional staging, but since thousands of people have been moved by traditional productions of Tosca over the last century, I can't pin the blame on that. All right, the scenery, which mostly consisted of trompe l'oeil painted flats, was rather too old-fashioned for my taste. If an opera house cannot afford to construct or store full sets for an opera like Tosca, I would prefer some tastefully minimalist scenery to these huge walls of trompe l'oeil--and I think many operagoers my age would agree with me. As for the direction, I thought Tosca's leap could have been more impressive, but I really liked the moment in Act I when Scarpia's minions arrived on the scene. Somehow, they managed to slide onstage silently and appear among the crowd of priests and altar boys before you realized how they'd arrived there--it was really scary!

The cast was not as starry as the one Harvey Milk saw in 1978, but Adrianne Pieczonka (Tosca), Carlo Ventre (Cavaradossi), and Lado Ataneli (Scarpia) were all suited to their roles. I can see how Tosca could be played as an imperious diva, but Pieczonka stressed her neurotic, insecure side; she really seemed vulnerable when Scarpia made her believe that Cavaradossi was cheating on her. This interpretation--with its emphasis on a weakness or sickness in Tosca's soul--also made you understand why she cracks under Scarpia's pressure in Act II, something that a more domineering Tosca might have trouble conveying. Ventre was an appropriately passionate painter, especially when using the last ounces of his strength to shout out a ringing "Vittoria!" in Act II. Ataneli was not a physically overpowering Scarpia, but he was very sly and slimy. He was also quite charming at the curtain call: his eyes twinkled, the embroidery on his coat twinkled, and he smiled as if to say "See? I'm not really a nasty bastard!"

This was my first time seeing Tosca, and though it's known for its melodrama, I was surprised how much humor is in it--the Sacristan's comments that undercut the romanticism of "Recondita armonia," Tosca's crazy jealousy, and her later efforts to teach Cavaradossi how to "play dead." I also thought about how amazingly fast-paced the story is--Tosca begins her day as a rather self-absorbed artist, and ends it as a murderess, a revolutionary, a martyr. And I noticed the themes of art, life, theatricality and ritual that run though the opera. The hero and heroine are artists, and Scarpia manipulates everyone around him, like a particularly evil playwright or stage manager. The Te Deum mass is an elaborate pageant, and after Tosca kills Scarpia, she arranges the body in a ritualistic fashion. The big arias all deal with the themes of art and life. (Indeed, in a more "conceptual" production, the use of blatantly artificial, painted scenery could reinforce these themes. But somehow I don't think that this was the case here.)

But these are all intellectual responses. And I wanted to have an emotional response.



Photos from San Francisco Opera. Top: Act One. The trompe l'oeil nature of the scenery was much more evident in the opera house than it is in this photo.
Bottom: Pieczonka and Ataneli, Act Two.

"Timebends," Crooked Lives, Warped Humor

I've finally finished reading Timebends, Arthur Miller's dense and twisty memoir. Despite its length, Miller still leaves some things out (he hardly discusses his first marriage, and, of course, never mentions his Down's-syndrome son — more on that in a later post). Nonetheless, it is very revealing, sometimes overly so. At one point Miller casually admits to having an Oedipus complex, as if it were no different than having a stomachache. Does he not know how weird this makes him sound? Or does he just not care? On the one hand, it's valuable that Miller reveals stuff like this; on the other hand, it's not fun to read a memoir if you're constantly raising your eyebrows at the author.

Miller spends a lot of the book trying to justify his actions, but sometimes this has the opposite effect--he makes some feeble excuses. You know, if he'd written, "It was the 1950s, I was going through a lot of angst, McCarthyism frightened me, my marriage wasn't working out, women found me attractive now that I was famous, so I'm not saying it was a nice thing to do, but I cheated on my wife," that would be honest and humble, and you could forgive him. But instead he makes it sound like the hardships of McCarthyism not only caused him to cheat on his wife, but justified it--because he deserved the succor that only contact with the "eternal feminine" could provide. (Can female artists ever think that "the eternal feminine" is anything but hogwash? You never hear us extol "the eternal masculine.") The New Yorker titled its review of Timebends "Apologia Pro Vita Sua," and I can't think of a better description.

I have never read this much non-fiction writing from one dramatist before, and it is good that Miller discusses his major plays in depth. And undoubtedly, he has a very clear vision of what theater ought to do. For him, plays must specifically engage with and respond to major social and political trends; otherwise they are worthless. He is right, up to a point--of course theater should be relevant! But his vision can get way too didactic and dreary; it leaves out everything that has to do with amusement and style and the thrill of live performance. In the last part of the book, he veers close to sounding like a grouchy old man who says "Entertainment? Bah, humbug!"

Yes, it makes sense to decry the mind-numbing, commercialized entertainment of the late twentieth century. But when I think about the playwrights who have brought me the most joy and whom I admire most--I don't believe any of them would ever have said "Bah, humbug!" to entertainment.

Then there is the related matter of Miller's humorlessness. Or perhaps I should say, his bizarre sense of humor: in Timebends he says he considers Death of a Salesman a funny title. ("Out of the laughter the title came one afternoon. Death Comes for the Archbishop, the Death and the Maiden Quartet--always austere and elevated was death in titles. Now it would be claimed by a joker, a bleeding mass of contradictions, and there was something funny about that, something like a thumb in the eye, too." A strange thing to say about a play that Americans have always considered "austere and elevated.")

Yet there is also a suggestion that Miller finds humor vulgar and embarrassing. On the last page, he writes, "If only we could stop murdering one another we could be a wonderfully humorous species." As if humor were a frivolity that has no right to exist until all the world's problems have been solved. As if we were not already a wonderfully humorous species, despite all the tragedies that remain with us. As if humor were not a way of dealing with those tragedies. If we lived in a perfectly harmonious world, I daresay we would not need humor--it would not even tempt us. Doesn't some of the best humor result from righteous anger in the face of adversity? The world is imperfect, and therefore the world is humorous.

Very few of my favorite artists lack a sense of humor--especially when it comes to playwrights. (For some reason I seem to find humorlessness easier to take in novels, e.g. Atonement, a great book but entirely solemn.) This is why something like Synecdoche New York leaves me feeling almost betrayed--because Charlie Kaufman's other screenplays show that he has a profound and original sense of humor, but it was hardly evident in Synecdoche.

Oddly enough, in the first part of that movie, Caden, the protagonist, directs Death of a Salesman using a "concept" that he hopes will make it even more depressing: Willy and Linda are played by young actors, and Caden wants the audience to realize that the young people will inevitably grow up to become like Willy and Linda, though they seem so full of promise. And the rest of the movie proves Caden's thesis--a perfect storm of humorlessness, really.

Now, before I go to Japan, I am trying to finish up the Anthony Lane compilation as well as read The Complete Short Fiction of Oscar Wilde. In other words, I require not one, but two, preternaturally witty Brits to serve as palate-cleanser after the humorless American. Wilde, the man who said "Style, not sincerity, is the important thing," is a very good antidote to 600 pages of Miller.

Uneasy in my Easy Chair, It Never Entered My Mind

You might not have guessed it, since I wrote a few blog posts in advance to be published while I was away--but the weekend of June 6 & 7, I took a brief trip up to Oregon. And I mean brief, as in "so brief I didn't even get a chance to go to Powell's." But I did get to see a play and hang out with theater people and be gobsmacked at how much cheaper drinks are in Portland than in S.F.

The play I saw was called The Uneasy Chair, by Evan Smith--presented by CoHo Productions. Kind of an offbeat comedy, set in Victorian London, that both avails itself of, and mocks, our stereotypes of the Victorian era and the dramaturgy of that time. It's very much in the Oscar Wilde/Gilbert & Sullivan vein: the plot is set in motion by a misunderstanding, laws get interpreted in absurd ways, characters are driven to do absurd things because of misplaced pride and a fear of society's condemnation. There is a very funny scene when all four of the main characters--spinster landlady Miss Pickles, retired soldier Captain Wickett, and their respective niece and nephew--meet for the first time, and each of them affects a personality that puts them at odds with everyone else. Still, even when the characters drop these masks and reveal their true natures, things don't get much better--for their true natures are stubborn, miserly, and narrow-minded. Ah, that's comedy!

The Uneasy Chair was produced in New York in 1998 and I think one of the jokes might even be funnier now than it was then. The climax of Act Two (yes, it's in three acts--how Victorian) has a judge refusing to annul the marriage of two people who obviously despise each other, because he believes in "the sanctity of marriage"--now that the struggle for gay marriage has made that phrase into a pundits' favorite, it got a big laugh.

Before the show and during intermission, I was having too good a time chatting with Mr. Mead to read my playbill, but when I got home and glanced through it, I learned that Evan Smith went to Vassar, and he won the Young Playwrights Contest! Just like me! I'm rather surprised I haven't heard of him, but it is encouraging to see that someone with a similar background to mine is making it as a playwright. I think I should try to get in touch with him, don't you?

Any idiot can misattribute a quote

Today in a bookstore I saw a greeting-card for sale emblazoned with a quote from Chekhov: "Any idiot can face a crisis--it's the day-to-day living that wears you out." I think I ran across this quote a few weeks ago, too (can't remember where) and was of course struck by its utter Chekhovishness. The truth, the humanity of it. The scorn for the "idiots" who think that our true personalities are revealed only in extreme situations, rather than by the routine ways each of us spend our lives; mixed with a tender, if wry, sympathy for the problems of the "little man."

So when I got home I looked it up--to find out from what play or story or essay it derived. And I couldn't find a source for it at all.

So does this mean that the quote is just too good to be true? Too Chekhovian to be genuine Chekhov? Something that some other clever person once dreamed up, said "Hey! That sounds like Chekhov!" and pretended that it was Chekhov's own words?

I would love to know what the story is with this quote. Sometimes the history of how something gets falsely attributed--and how the lie gets perpetuated--is even more interesting than the quote itself.

My quest for the source of this quote did enable me to spend some quality time with the Wikiquote page on Chekhov--always a valuable undertaking. Two of the quotes there absolutely broke my heart: "I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one" and "Lermontov died at age twenty-eight and wrote more than have you and I put together. Talent is recognizable not only by quality, but also by the quantity it yields." These come from letters he wrote in the late 1880s--by the time he died in 1904, had he changed his beliefs, or did he go to his too-early grave convinced that his output was too meager to qualify him for artistic greatness, still doubting his own ability?

On the other hand, I--who have still never written a one-act play that I consider to be any good--found this quote surprisingly heartening: "In one-act pieces there should be only rubbish—that is their strength. "

"God of Carnage" Clafoutis

I spent the afternoon sitting in Golden Gate Park and reading Le Dieu du Carnage. Yes, in French, because I am just that pretentious. A year and a half ago, at Christmas, my French host parents, Thierry and Catherine, sent me a copy of the script, which had recently premiered in Paris. To my chagrin, I didn't make the time to read it until now, when the Broadway production is one of the hits of the season. Yasmina Reza is now the first woman--and the first person who doesn't write in English--to win two Tony Awards for Best Play. Congrats!

Now that God of Carnage is such a success in the States, I wonder if it is going to popularize the traditional French dessert, clafoutis. (A good deal of dialogue is devoted to a clafoutis that one of the characters bakes, including the quintessentially French debate as to whether it is a cake or a tart.) If this becomes the next big culinary trend, I want everyone to know that I have been talking about this dessert to anyone who will listen--and cooking it when I get the chance--for well over a year. As The Minimalist says, this is "the fastest fancy dessert you can possibly make"--it looks much more difficult than it actually is.

A clafoutis is basically a pancake--a thick, eggy, oven-baked Dutch Baby pancake--with fruit folded into the batter. It is most traditionally made with cherries, which you do not pit. Keeping the cherries whole prevents their juice from running out and staining the batter; furthermore, the cherry pits somehow lend a delicious hint of almond flavor to the dessert. Some people will try to convince you that this "almond flavor" thing is just a myth. But trust me: it works.

It's cherry season here in California, so to satiate my God of Carnage-caused cravings, I just baked a cherry clafoutis. The first time I ever made clafoutis, I improvised the batter by modifying my dad's recipe for a Dutch Baby pancake (or as we call it chez nous, "oven pancake") but tonight I used Mark Bittman's recipe from How to Cook Everything. Tasty, if not a complete success: it took a LOT longer to bake than the recipe said it would, and I prefer a slightly thicker batter.

All the talk about clafoutis in God of Carnage makes it fit into a rarefied subcategory of plays: those that include recipes in the course of the dialogue. Ever since my theatrical dinner party in Paris (a party encouraged, bien sur, by Thierry and Catherine) I have a minor hobby of noting when food gets mentioned in a play. So just as Cyrano de Bergerac includes a recipe (in verse, no less!) for Ragueneau's almond tarts, God of Carnage gives you enough information to let you replicate Véronique's clafoutis. It includes pears, apples, and bits of gingerbread crumbled into the batter. Yum! If I ever throw a theatrical dinner party in the autumn, this is what I'll be making.

Oddly enough, God of Carnage also fits into another subcategory that only I probably care to note: works of art that mention corporate shareholder meetings. (It's because of my job.) One of the characters, Alain, is a lawyer who represents a pharmaceutical company; he's stressed out because a study has just attributed negative side effects to one of the company's medications, and it's fifteen days before the annual shareholder meeting! He spends half the play on his cell phone, scheming to suppress or discredit the results of the study. In a sign, though, that I know far too much about corporate shareholder meetings for my own good, I thought "Wait, this play is supposed to take place in November. But if Yasmina Reza had done her research, she'd know that most French corporations have their annual meeting in the springtime!"