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The Grand Manner by A.R. Gurney

Directed by Mark Lamos

Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center, New York City

June 2-August 1, 2010

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

American playwright A.R. Gurney’s work immerses audiences in Northeastern WASP culture. Much of his material draws from his background in this milieu. Born in Buffalo, Gurney graduated from St. Paul’s prep school in Concord, NH, then attended Williams College in Williamstown, MA, and the Yale School of Drama. While teaching at MIT, he began to write plays. In 1981, he debuted The Dining Room, a comedy of manners exemplifying Gurney’s career-spanning terrain. Like Jane Austen, Gurney understands that close readings of social microcosms yield universal truths; with ample doses of wit and wisdom, Gurney dramatizes hidden agendas and blatant pretensions. Yet barbed as his humor can be, Gurney brings an insider’s affection to his characters and their foibles.

Longtime Gurney colleague writer Romulus Linney described his fellow Yale graduate as bold and adventurous, referring to Gurney’s interpretations of theater conventions.1 For example, Gurney’s The Fourth Wall (1992), soon to be staged by TheatreWorks at The Fourth Wall Theatre in Upper Montclair, NJ, challenges the invisible barrier, or “Fourth Wall,” between actors and audience. In this play, Gurney conflates the “real” and the imagined by eliminating the fragile boundary between the stage and the seats. The Fourth Wall also expresses Gurney’s doubts about his career direction at mid-life and a playwright’s influence beyond the footlights.2

In June, Gurney’s most recent work, The Grand Manner, opened at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, directed by Mark Lamos.3 A poignant, compressed drama laced with signature Gurney humor, The Grand Manner recounts a brief meeting between the young Gurney, called Pete, and a theater legend. At the time, Gurney was at St. Paul’s. His father insisted he become a physician, but Gurney toyed with pursuing a less secure career choice. In February 1948, he traveled to New York with a ticket for a performance of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra at the Martin Beck Theater, starring First Lady of the Stage Katharine Cornell.4 The Berlin-born Cornell was raised in Buffalo. Wherever she went, whatever location she chose for a residence, Cornell considered Buffalo as her home. When Gurney’s grandmother writes to Cornell to arrange a meeting with the boy post performance, Cornell readily accepts. Gurney’s father believes the visit will squelch the theater bug but, again, the boy has other plans.　

Cornell’s legendary status derives from two tributaries: her never-failingly gracious, well-bred presence, and her pioneering efforts to revitalize American theater. “Grand” in the noblest sense, Cornell had every advantage that wealth and prominence affords. Unlike Gurney, whose family disparaged the theater, Cornell’s father was an amateur director and, later, managed a local theater. When Cornell put on backyard plays, he encouraged the child’s passion. By the time her mother died in 1915, Cornell had already set her sights on Broadway. With inherited money, she moved to New York. Soon Cornell’s glamorous looks and engaging personality began to win leading roles.

Dubbed “Kit” as a child because of her boyish features, Cornell cultivated interior qualities. She understood the human need to be recognized, as well as the appeal of good manners and humility. To her, audiences were not faceless crowds of ticket holders. Her words, smiles and tears were for individuals. They knew it and became devoted fans. For admirers from her hometown, Cornell’s welcome extended to backstage visits for the sharing of news and memories. She opened some of her plays in Buffalo, and whenever she appeared there while on tour, Cornell performed her most convincing role: hometown girl.

In 1921, Cornell married actor/director Guthrie McClintic. The production company they formed put little-known playwrights to work and exposed audiences to rarely performed works (including those by George Bernard Shaw and Shakespeare). They employed many actors who became legends, including Orson Wells, and they gave work to others who might otherwise have forsaken the stage. McClintic directed his wife in some of her most famous projects; for example, Candida (1924), The Brownings of Wimpole Street (1931), Lucrece (1932), Alien Corn (1933) and St. Joan (1935).

In Gurney’s flashback, Pete’s visit comes at a juncture in Cornell’s career. In her mid fifties, she feared but accepted the fickle nature of celebrity.5 Connecting her fate with the decline of live theater Cornell dreaded being pigeon-holed as a tragedienne, too “grand” to play grittier parts. A wide-eyed Pete decides to be accommodating and readily critiques her performance as Cleopatra. Too long protected from genuine criticism by her husband, her faithful personal assistant, Gert, and the notable reviewers who counted her a friend, Cornell hungers for truth. Without it, she tells Pete, theater is dead. Television and film, she cautions, capture dead performances. Even at the end of her career, when producers offered few parts, Cornell scrupulously avoided both. Roles, she believed, were created between actor and audience.

Exuding charm, Kate Burton (The Constant Wife; The Elephant Man) plays Cornell from all sides: confident professional, aging has-been, vain celebrity and humble Buffalo gal. As Pete, Bobby Steggert (Ragtime) is suitably awe-struck, the perfect blank-slate against which the others reveal their secrets. Gurney gives his ironic, quick-shot jokes to McClintic (Boyd Gaines) and Gert (Brenda Wehle). Gaines (Gypsy; Twelve Angry Men) as McClintic alternates with increasing rapidity from sophisticated producer to flawed human being. Wehle’s (Pygmalion) Gert organizes Cornell’s life with military precision, gruffly advising Pete on the ways of the world from a Broadway perspective. Hints of a magnanimous spirit and love for Cornell will endear Gert to audiences, while a pathetic seduction of Pete punctures McClintic’s pomposity.

The Grand Manner might be considered a coda to Gurney’s Buffalo Gal (2008), also directed by Lamos. Buffalo Gal examines the predicament of aging film star Amanda, who returns to her hometown Buffalo for a revival of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Working under a director who represents the unsung stalwarts of regional theater, Amanda begins to note uncomfortable parallels between her own life and that of her character, Madame Ranevsky. Both go home hoping to recapture a magic that exists only in memory. In reality, home is already lost to them. In the end, Amanda decides that Hollywood’s promises trump live theater’s rewards. With The Grand Manner, Gurney allows another Buffalo Gal to tell a story in which live theater is the victor.

1 “A.R. Gurney” in BOMB (96/Summer 2006): http://bombsite.com/issues/96/articles/2838. Linney met Gurney in the 1950s at Yale.

2 Opening on September 24, 2010, the TheatreWorks production features Gurney’s The Fourth Wall and Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound. For more information, go to: http://www.4thwalltheatre.com/index.html

3 The Grand Manner opened at Lincoln Center on June 2, 2010, and runs through August 31.

4 Cornell was so fashioned by New Yorker critic Alexander Woollcott.

5 Born in 1893, Cornell gave her birth date as 1898. She died in 1974.

Saturday, June 26, 2010, 10am - 1pm

Participating artists:
John Valadez – Memorial Park Station
Cheri Gaulke – Cypress/Lincoln Station
Michael Amescua – Union Station
Paul Botello – Indiana Station
José López – Maravilla Station
Clement Hanami – East LA Civic Center
Ulises Diaz, ADOBE LA – Atlantic Station

Join them as they bridge East Los Angeles and Pasadena on the Metro Gold Line. Meet the artists of the following stations: Memorial Park Station, Union Station, Indiana Station, East LA Civic Center, and Atlantic Station. The artists will describe their artwork in the community they’re involved in. Join in refreshments plus lunch as they travel along.

Lunch will be provided by Home Girl Cafe. Wine stop at Heritage Winery after the tour. Gallery stops in Pasadena and East Los Angeles.

Tour will be led by Vanessa Acosta, Board Member, owner of Cultural Arts Tours and Workshops, and founder of Peace, Culture & Education Center/Foundation.

For More Information Contact Vanessa Acosta at: 323-963-0555

Donation: $40 per person
Please make checks payable to “Avenue 50 Studio”

To reserve your spot, mail checks to:

Avenue 50 Studio, Inc.
a 501(c)(3) non-profit art gallery
131 North Avenue 50
Highland Park, CA 90042

The Secret Life Of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn (Norton, 2010)

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

In the mid-1990s, New York University libraries drew on the papers and printed books in its Jerome Charyn collection for an intriguing exhibit. With Master of Mythologies: The Fictional Worlds of Jerome Charyn, NYU spotlighted Charyn’s characteristic handling of his many and diverse subjects.1 Author of novels, memoirs, non-fiction, short stories, graphic novels, essays and reviews, Charyn revels in complexity. His portraits of people and places run deep; his interpretations of their histories, real and fictional, follow risky routes. Blending verifiable fact with emotional and psychological truths, accessed by him through great heart and imagination, Charyn creates worlds within worlds; like an archeologist, he sets forth to uncover entire civilizations teeming below the most benign exteriors.

One of the best examples is his recent rendering of Emily Dickinson, the beloved 19th-century New England poet. With The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, Charyn goes far beyond accepted scholarship, however mythologized. His Dickinson is dearer, closer and more real than any painted in the standard biographies. She emerges from her own box of phantoms, animated by hunger, rage and disappointment. Her greatest passion is for people; her poems, the strongest card in her suit. Charyn’s Dickinson yearns for attention from, in her eyes, a few worthy contenders. In his novel, she is a lonely lightning rod held captive in the desert.2

In a 2007 interview with in Book Forum’s Kera Bolonik (http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/014_05/2081 Feb./March 2008), Charyn discussed the evolution of his 2008 novel, Johnny One-Eye, set during the American Revolution. The novel’s protagonist is George Washington’s bastard son. Charyn explained that Johnny One-Eye is something of an alter-ego for him:

“As a child, I was wishing that I was an orphan, that my father wasn’t my father. As horribly cruel as it is to say that, cruelty is sometimes your strongest weapon. Imagining George Washington as your father, that you are the bastard child of this extraordinary man, empowered me in writing it. I could find all the juice–the hostility, the anger–that was necessary to keep the story alive.”

Charyn gives readers a satisfying serving of “juice” in The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. Here, she inhabits a number of identities challenging the image of a “mouse” who baked black cake for family and neighbors, scribbled poems with a pen kept dangling from her pocket, took refuge in her garden, and raised eyebrows with her odd behavior. Charyn ignites a profound metamorphosis in her as she changes from father’s “Dolly” living in the family’s Amherst home to the devil’s handmaiden boarding at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. As she matures, Dickinson adopts many guises, among them: the ghost of Currer Bell (Charlotte Brontë pen name); Daisy the flower girl; a “kicking kangaroo”; a mourning Jumbo the circus elephant; the Queen Recluse; Antony to a line of cruel Cleopatras; and King Solomon. She roams Amherst’s streets and alleys after dark, searching for her lovers: an illiterate Mount Holyoke handyman she calls the Blond Assassin, and a rum-ruined rogue “Tutor from Mars” (actually, Yale) she calls her Domingo.

By day, she develops crushes on men and women we know from Dickinson biographies: father Edward, minister Charles Wadsworth, author Thomas Wentworth Higginson, editor Samuel Bowles, volatile sister-in-law Susan, author/editor Mabel Loomis Todd, and Judge Otis Lord. Thirsting for them as she does for her tattooed handyman and Domingo, she resents their desertions: father to his political career; Wadsworth to his preaching; Higginson to his criticism of her poems; Bowles to his family; Susan to her jealousy; and Lord to his rapacious niece.

Edward’s and Susan’s betrayals recur in different forms, best symbolized by his obsession with smoke and fires and her nursing of scarlatina (scarlet fever) patients. Dickinson cannot draw them with her “feathers” and “plumage.” They find heat elsewhere, and she cannot survive his indifference and her “siroccos.” Another masterful image, handyman Tom’s tattoo, reflects Dickinson’s emotional state. At first, she conventionally identifies the tattoo as a sign of love. Then, Tom tells her the design brands an orphan whose heart is blue and broken by pain.

Like Tom, two other fictional characters haunt Dickinson, a charity student at Holyoke named Zilpah Marsh, and the yellow-gloved Holyoke vice principal, Miss Rebecca Winslow. As one of society’s outcasts, Zilpah is free to be as dangerous as she desires, while as the daughter of an Amherst squire, Dickinson must live out her fantasies in visions and dreams. As Dickinson’s alter ego, Zilpah reveals a conflict quite evident in Dickinson’s letters; the poet believed in her scribblings but doubted the sanctity of her soul. Was she really Squire Dickinson’s good little daughter or a devil in disguise? Repeatedly vanquished by death–Edward, her mother, her young nephew Gib–Dickinson seized the promise of immortality. But the only relief she seems to find in Amherst comes from two loyal companions who never withdraw their support: sister Lavinia (who protects her poems) and her Newfoundland Carlo (who protects her person).

In Johnny One-Eye, a vivid Revolutionary-Era America grounds the riveting adventure. In The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, the stolid Christian world of mid 19th-century Amherst is a chimera. Literally blinded by light, Dickinson suffered from an eye disorder acute during her most prolific period, a time when her box of phantoms erupted into words with wings. Charyn’s excavation of Dickinson’s phantoms is as startling as Dickinson’s poems, which invite readers to consider worlds contained on the head of a pin. Alive to the magic of her poetry, Charyn weaves a Dickinson mythology equal to his subject.

1 Author of more than 40 books, including a cult-status detective series featuring New York City policeman Isaac Sidel and three memoirs of his own Bronx childhood (The Dark Lady from Belorusse, The Black Swan and Bronx Boy), Charyn gave his personal papers to New York University libraries. Master of Mythologies: The Fictional Worlds of Jerome Charyn was held from October 31, 1995-February 1, 1996.

2 In addition to William Luce’s outstanding 1976 play The Belle of Amherst (available on DVD), other fascinating takes on the poet’s life and work include Dickinson scholar Judith Farr’s 1996 novel I Never Came to You in White; Joyce Carol Oates’s 2008 Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James and Hemingway; two delightful children’s books (The Mouse of Amherst by Elizabeth Spires, illustrated by Claire A. Nivola, and Emily by Michaed Bedard, illustrated by Barbara Cooney); and biographer Lyndall Gordon’s 2010 Lives like Loaded Guns: Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds.

For spring 2010, the New York Botanical Garden has staged a lovely evocation of Dickinson as gardener. For more information, go to: www.nybg.org

The Gaudí Key by Esteban Martín and Andreu Carranza (Morrow, 2008; Harper pbk, 2009)

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

When Catalan modernist architect Antonio Gaudí died in 1926, not only did he leave his Sagrada Família, a cathedral of vast scope, design and symbolism, unfinished; a labyrinthine trail of imagery, allusions and historical references remains for admirers of his peculiar rendering of neo-gothic style to decipher. Gaudí reviled Renaissance ideals of symmetry and regularity. Gothic religious architecture was conceived to be a mirror of the cosmos, as well as a book of stone meant to be read by the faithful. Messages conveyed in stone directed worshippers to truths too precious to be laid bare before the blind, ignorant or blatantly evil. Elaborate weavings of ancient myth and legend, classical philosophy, medieval theology, zoology, nature and occult mysticism might appear within Christian narratives set in stone. Gaudí’s unfinished masterpiece contains all of these and more. Scholars and aesthetic detectives will continue to conjecture, theorize, project and, of course, argue amongst themselves while, ultimately, Gaudí’s work resists definitive interpretation.

Gaudí’s fierce defense of his Catalan heritage and traditional Catalan styles anchors his work. From Moorish and oriental motifs, European art nouveau and ideas promoted by architects at home and abroad (e.g., 19th-century French architect Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc), Gaudí absorbed a prodigious number of influences. He filtered these through his personal, essentially medieval Christian worldview to construct buildings mirroring God’s creation; his aim, to become God’s architect on earth. Certainly, a lofty goal but this giant of an artist was a simple man. Dressing like a pauper, living in his studio, toiling with few breaks and even fewer conveniences, Gaudí dedicated his life to his work and, in his later years, his work to his God.

For readers eager for an exhilarating (and exhausting) ride through Gaudí’s Barcelona, a good place to start is Esteban Martín and Andreu Carranza hair-raising thriller, The Gaudí Key. The authors have made fiction a cauldron in which they stir a heady mixture of fact, fantasy, history and mystery. Although most reviewers have compared The Gaudí Key to Dan Brown’s 2003 blockbuster, The Da Vinci Code, it seems more accurate to place it with Catalan author Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s work. Like Angel’s Game, Zafón’s follow-up to his outstanding Shadow of the Wind, The Gaudí Key is a bit too ambitious. At times, multiple plots spin off, diverting the pace. Still, fascinating considerations of, for example, the Catalan Renaixença, Zeno’s Paradoxes, the Garden of Hesperides, suiseka (the Japanese art of stones), fractal mathematics, ancient Christian societies and an elusive alchemist known as Fulcanelli provide the novel’s high points. The places at which Gaudí’s life merges with these discourses might cause eyebrows to raise and heart rates to rise; in the instance of Fulcanelli, the alchemist disappeared in 1926, the year Gaudí died, and during her childhood María, the main character, read one of Fulcanelli’s critical works, Le Mystère des Cathédrales (The Mystery of the Cathedrals), published in Paris in–you guessed it–1926.

Adept at layering recurring symbols, Martín and Carranza orchestrate echoes that will leave many readers incredulous at Gaudí’s genius. Numerical symbols include the number seven (knights, Greek letters, riddles, buildings). Other types of imagery pop up time and again: animals (tortoises, pelicans); flowers and plants (sunflowers and mushrooms); shapes (circles, squares, stars, crosses, pentagrams), fairy tales (breadcrumb trails, enchanted houses) and maps (Barcelona, Ursa Major, one on María’s skin). As with Gaudí’s cathedral, this trove of sign and symbol masks a simple idea. Martín and Carranza suggest that, as guardian of Christ’s cornerstone, Gaudí was murdered rather than victim of a streetcar accident. Committed by the Corbel, the name of an evil society (as well as an architectural term), represented on the facade of Sagrada Família by a demon holding a bomb, the murder has been repeated 80 years later with the death of Gaudí’s now elderly apprentice. Next in line is the apprentice’s granddaughter, María. She and her lover, Miguel, have six days (echoing the six directions and six days in which God created the world) to find the place where Gaudí hid the 300-year-old relic. Between gruesome murders, María and Miguel accept their destiny as saviors of Christendom and life partners.

The English-language translation of the original, written in Catalan, lacks Gaudí’s flourish, but competently propels the many narrative threads. More felicitous, descriptions of seven Gaudí projects holding clues for María–Casa Vicens, Parc Güell, Sagrada Família, La Pedrera, Casa Batlló, Casa Calvet and Palacio Güell–have force and clarity. If not entirely successful as a thriller, The Gaudí Key succeeds as a bow to a gifted son of cauldron-makers whose vessels of stone contain mystical worlds yet to be revealed. By suspending disbelief, readers will be enthralled as they are caught in Martín and Carranza’s intricate gothic web.

Phantom by Susan Kay

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

Twenty years after publication, English novelist Susan Kay’s response to Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de l’Opéra ranks among the most powerful portraits of one of the most psychologically complex characters in literature.1 Owing in part to its rarity, Kay’s novel Phantom (1990) has acquired cult status. Although in wide circulation in the 1990s, today Kay’s story is available in expensive editions from small publishers and in used copies from out-of-print booksellers.

Comparatively few readers own copies of Leroux’s book, yet the Phantom’s story is well known throughout the world from recreations in books, film and theater; the 1925 film starring Lon Chaney and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1986 musical have become classics. In fact, the English composer’s theater adaptation has earned the fine distinction of longest-running Broadway show in history.2 In her Author’s Note, Kay briefly mentions the wide range of sources informing her version of Erik’s story, including Chaney, and Michael Crawford in the original London cast (1986).3 In the final analysis, Kay judges a 1967 full-length cartoon to be most faithful to Leroux’s vision.

Beyond her insightful panoramic view of Erik’s inner and outer landscapes, Kay’s brilliance can be traced to hundreds of minute details rendering Erik a sympathetic figure, without shying from his volcanic rage and unquenchable thirst for revenge. With his goliath-like physical strength, intellect rivaling Einstein and Hawking, musical genius and unnerving skills as magician and thief, Erik comes off as a flesh-and-blood human being needing, as we all do, acceptance and love.

After escaping while still a child from his mother’s deeply wounding care, Erik travels the world, acquires great wealth, erects monumental buildings, and produces an array of inventions variously futuristic and simple that heal, destroy or merely lend convenience. He makes a few friends, men who admire his talents yet fear the truth behind his mask, which they believe covers a depraved soul. To some he reveals the extent of his depravity by confessing the many murders he has committed (some in self defense, others to assuage his burden of grief and guilt). Mostly, Erik acquires enemies who mock, taunt and tease.

Given the scope of Kay’s novel, readers might be surprised to learn that her epic journey to the heart of the Phantom took only eighteen months to complete. Referring to Leroux’s novel, Kay says:

“The little black book began to live on my bedside table, and I returned again and again to those passages which intrigued and puzzled me. Increasingly, I found my attention drawn to the final three pages, to the brief historical outline in which Leroux accounts for the Phantom’s earlier existence.”

Since Leroux’s work and all subsequent adaptations chronicle a six-month period preceding the Phantom’s death at approximately age 50, Kay decided to uncover his past from birth to ruler of the Paris Opera’s labyrinthine underworld.

Kay sections her novel into first-person narratives offering varying viewpoints of Erik and the characters’ experiences with him, including two sections related by Erik himself. Erik’s vain and spoiled widowed mother Madeleine speaks of the years from birth (1831) to his departure from her home (1840); Erik picks up the tale, describing his mother’s often harsh, mostly indifferent treatment of him to explain the desperation leading to his incarceration as an exhibit in a traveling gypsy show. By this time, Erik has learned to expect torment and abuse from his fellow humans. Escaping to Rome, his precocious knowledge of architecture attracts an elderly Italian stonemason named Giovanni; thus, Erik’s history resumes in Giovanni’s words. Next, readers hear from chief of police Nadir of the years Erik spends in Persia as favorite of an easily manipulated shah and the dominatrix who is his mother-in-law. Erik’s shock when shown kindness and his tenderness toward animals, orphans and abused creatures cannot fail to move readers. Kay’s concluding sections are told by, again, Erik as he works as a contractor in Belgium, then returns to Paris; Christine Daae, Swedish soprano at the Paris Opera; and her childhood friend and suitor, Raoul.

Although at this point Kay deals with a history written by Leroux, not surprisingly she adds layers of depth and possibility to Erik’s biography. For example, upon returning to Paris, Erik laments radical changes obscuring the chaotic beauty of a city he loves. In his voice, Kay tells readers:

“The romantic old city which I had once explored as a wide-eyed fugitive boy–the variegated Paris of Voltaire and Desmoulins–was being swept into oblivion beneath the hands of the emperor and his grand prefect, Baron Haussmann.”

Consisting of wide-open, uniform spaces, Haussmann’s aesthetics appall Erik. Heartbroken by arriving too late to participate in a competition to design and build an opera house for Paris, he forces himself on the winner, Charles Garnier (1825-1898). Together, they develop mutual admiration and respect as co-workers and wary friends. But just as the 2,200-seat Neo-Baroque structure begins to take shape, the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) and civil unrest further threaten the old city and their masterpiece.

Disfigured from birth, Erik has spent his life searching for unspoiled beauty and perfect love. Conflicted himself, Kay’s Phantom expects people to be faithful, true and kind. Never satisfied with their behavior or his own, Erik spirals into depression, delusion and addiction. As others have mocked him, he mocks himself in what he considers to be his magnum opus, a musical score called Don Juan Triumphant. Kay connects Erik’s obsessive love for Christine to tragic tales he tells her in his underground sanctuary (Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose, for instance), as well as to operas performed on the stage above them (Faust, Aïda).

Remembering the Angel of Music conjured by her father, Christine identifies Erik as her promised guide and support. Fragile, innocent and remarkably naive, Christine discovers his dark side and flees from this Angel of Death. But for the mass market, love, however dark and futile, prevails. In the end, Kay’s novel triumphs as popular entertainment that will keep readers enthralled for many more decades. Twenty years down the line, Kay’s own magnum opus is worth savoring and revisiting when “reality,” with all of it horrors, makes one wish the world away.

1 French writer Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de l’Opéra was serialized in Le Gaulois from September 23, 1909, to January 8, 1910, before being issued in a single volume. Poor initial reception to the book resulted in out-of-print status for periods during the twentieth century.

2 Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sequel to his Phantom of the Opera, Love Never Dies, is currently playing in London and set to open in New York in fall 2010.

3 Crawford’s portrayal has left indelible marks on public conception of the Phantom. After three and a half years and more than 1,300 performances of the show, on April 29, 1990, Crawford bowed out of the role.

Ukrainian Museum, New York

Founded in 1976 by Ukrainian National Women’s League of America, Inc. (UNWLA), Ukrainian Museum, New York, is an impressive resource, and not only for Ukrainians living in or visiting the city. The multi-disciplinary approach taken by the museum directors and curators inspires for its reach into all aspects of culture. Perhaps most notable is their commitment to preserving tradition, linking past to present, and discovering ways to retain bodies of work for display in a setting most congenial to their creators’ intentions.

Now located in New York City’s East Village, at 222 East Sixth St., the museum offers a variety of educational programs associated with its exhibits. Consisting of works of folk and fine art, photographs and historical documents, the museum’s exhibits have traveled throughout the U.S., Canada and to Ukraine.1 The permanent collection also contains a delightful group of children’s folk costumes made in divergent eras and regions, reflecting varying styles and motifs, as well as some made in the U.S. in the 1960s based on authentic Ukrainian designs.

The museum’s location on a quiet street sets it nearly worlds apart from the bustle of Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile, with the staff offering a personal welcome that, alas, seems impossible to find at the larger institutions. Inside, pristine spaces on three floors are filled with works ranging from folk art and craft to contemporary works by living artists, labeled with text in Ukrainian and English. On view now are three shows exemplifying the range of the museum’s holdings: Fine Art/Folk Art: A Dialogue (closing February 28, 2010); the on-going A Generous Vision: A Major Gift of Works by Mychajlo Moroz; and The Gift of Art: A Major Gift of Arcadia Olenska-Petryshyn Paintings (closing March 7, 2010). The major exhibit, Fine Art/Folk Art, contains works by Moroz (1904-1992) and Olenska-Petrysyn (1934-1996), placing these artists within the context of Ukrainian art history.

Fine Art/Folk Art: A Dialogue signals the first time the curators have attempted to combine works from the fine and applied art collections, and the experiment works without any jarring seams. Not surprisingly, examples of Cubist/Constructivist sculptor and graphic artist Alexander Archipenko’s (1887-1964) works are highlights. Instinctively, the curators have connected his elegantly stylized The Ray (1956) with typically stylized religious icons, revealing his roots in the spiritual art of Byzantium. Similarly, they have used Archipenko’s bronze sculpture The Dance (1912-1913), along with works by Jacques Hnizdovsky (1915-1985) and Halyna Mazepa (1910-1995) to connect to colorful and still-strong Ukrainian folk dance traditions. Much of the work in this show comes from the Hutsul region in the southeastern part of the Carpathian Mountains. Moroz’s paintings celebrate this area, its folklore and customs.

Other outstanding gifts and long-term loans to the museum gathered for Fine Art/Folk Art are Mykhailo Chereshnovsky’s (1911-1994) noble bronze sculpture Portrait of My Wife (1950), Chereshnovsky’s intriguing wooden The Sun Shines for Everyone (1960) and Vasyl Hryhorovych Krychevsky’s (1873-1952) lovely watercolor and oil landscapes expressing his longing for his homeland. An architect, Krychevsky’s design for the Poltavske Zemstvo building (1902-1903) is a masterfully original take on Ukrainian folk tradition within the prevailing Art Nouveau style of his times.2

A charming array of pysanky, Ukrainian Easter eggs, decorated in the 1920s by Iryna Bilianska (1899-c.1965) reminds viewers of the centuries-old traditions that link generations of Ukrainian artists. After considering the vibrant colors and intricate details of Bilianska’s designs, visitors should view a small display of eggs and embroidered shirts demonstrating the strength and remarkable variety of decorative motifs traced to far flung regions of Ukraine.3

The Moroz and Olenska-Petryshyn exhibits represent large-scale gifts by the artist’s family members; 127 Moroz landscapes and portraits in oil given by his widow in 2007 and 44 works spanning styles, genres and media pursued by the artist during her career by Olenska-Petryshyn’s husband.

On March 24, the museum opens a new exhibit, Ukraine-Sweden: At the Crossroads of History (XVII-XVIII Centuries). Developed by the National Museum of Ukrainian History in Kiev for the 300th anniversary of the Swedish-Ukrainian alliance, the Battle of Poltava and the death of Ukrainian Cossack leader, patriot Ivan Mazepa (1644-1709), the exhibit drew large audiences (including King Carl XVI Gustav of Sweden) in Kiev during its run in 2008-2009. For more information, go to www.ukrainianmuseum.org

1 Past exhibits shown at Ukrainian Museum, New York, include: Traditional Designs in Ukrainian Textiles (1978); Masterpieces in Wood: Houses of Worship in Ukraine (1982); Treasures of Early Ukrainian Art: Religious Art of the 16th-18th Centuries (1989); The Changeless Carpathians: Living Traditions of the Hutsul People (1995); Graphic Works by Alexander Archipenko and Oil Paintings, Watercolors and Drawings by Alexis Gritchenko (1998); The Cossacks: Their Art & Style (2008); Thread to the Past: Ukrainian Folk Art from the 1933 World’s Fair (2008); and an annual display of decorative Ukrainian Easter eggs (pysanky).

2 Krychevsky’s design is shown along with his paintings. The building now functions as the Poltava Regional Museum in central Ukraine.

3 Bilianska’s work as an Easter Egg decorator was discovered in the 1920s by Damian Horniatkewych (1892-1980), a professor of art history and collector of Ukrainian fine and folk art. At the time that he left Ukraine for Canada during World War II, Horniatkewych owned a large collection of Bilianska’s pysanky, which his son gave to the museum in 2008.

Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen: A Manifesto in 41 Tales by Marilyn Chin (Norton, 2009)

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

If the title of this review seems a bit cumbersome, it reflects the number of labels that Marilyn Chin and her work have acquired during the poet’s career.1 A genuine revolutionary, Chin examines through her writings relationships between the powerful dominant culture and the have-nots. Born in Hong Kong in the 1950s, Chin was raised in Portland, Oregon. As an assimilated Asian American, Chin never strays far from the immigrant’s vision of the American Dream and its glaring pitfalls: In America there might be room for all, but space is a hot commodity accorded only to those who buy into a hierarchy fixed by (mostly) white, wealthy, male hands. Of course, those outside the spectrum can gain access to the upper echelons with a formidable title and money, money, money.

Like Chin herself, the Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, her debut “novel,” defies description but has pulled a wide range of labels from reviewers. Readers are advised to skip consideration of format, except to marvel at Chin’s reversals and revisions of classic Chinese literature, history, ancient eastern philosophies, Zen and Buddhist scripture, folklore and legend, ghost stories and fables. Chin’s devotion to contemporary adaptations of historical sources (manga, comics, kung fu-style superheroes) is obvious. One might even add yet another label to her resume: ninja poet. Chin’s means of war against the machine are, indeed, unorthodox. Few could read Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen and not experience an epiphany, however modest; a shift in the spaces of the heart.

Separated into seven sections, Chin’s 41 tales, variously set in (fictional) Piss River, Oregon, Southern California and Hong Kong, center on Double Happiness twins Moon and Mei Ling Wong. Daughter No. 1 Moon’s stoic indifference connects her to countless poor Chinese who have journeyed to America to slave day and night in restaurants, laundries and markets. No. 2, Mei Ling, sits at the opposite end of the scale, determined to squeeze as much out of the system as possible. Mei Ling delights in the spoils she wins by using the dominant culture’s weapons. Guarding these two fiercely intelligent but lost members of the assimilated generation is legendary matriarch Grandmother Wong, reputed to be able to fly and wielding a cleaver with abandon. Moon owes her kung fu skills to Grandmother Wong. Although the girls do not share their grandmother’s unspecified, superstition-based moral code, it is nearly impossible not to respect it. For hyphenated Americans and those born here after the bomb sure bets are off, but Grandmother Wong acts with bullet-proof decision.

Bullies and beasts of burden (animal and human) figure prominently in Chin’s tales. The shocking scenario of Chin’s opening story (”Moon” in the volume’s first section, Mooncakes and Matriarchs) shows a “little fat Chinese girl” brutalized on a West Coast beach by blond teenage twins. It is a chilling lesson in the politics of modern life. Moon and Mei Ling witness another kind of brutality on their parents, owners of the Double Happiness Chinese restaurant. While the girls earn top grades and slots in the educational conveyor belt that will catapult them into their futures (Moon as a professor of immunology, Mei Ling as a professor of literature and a poet), they help their parents by delivering Chinese food to customers living in the ethnically technicolor Southern California landscape. Bitter beyond repair from unrelenting economic and cultural pressures, their father dies of a massive heart attack. Surrendering to despair, their mother returns to Hong Kong.

Chin’s Chinese name, Mei Ling, signals autobiography in her portrait of daughter No.2, a girls-just-wanna-have-fun type. As Chin explains in her endnotes, the fox girl archetype echoes through centuries of Asian literature. Here, Mei Ling plays fox girl, luring unsuspecting men of all races and income levels to their doom. Mei Ling’s sexual appetite astounds, perhaps more so considering the risks she takes in drawing Grandmother Wong’s fire. Chin introduces Mei Ling in “Round Eyes,” the second story in Mooncakes and Matriarchs. The shock here comes from a violation sanctioned by assimilated Chinese parents, who send their children to Japan to achieve “Madonna Eyes.”

Chin the poet brings to each set piece her gift for emotionally laden imagery. The short chapters beg for multiple readings. Her prose is provocative, requiring readers to face a choice, take a stand and question typical viewpoints. For example, Chin asks:

“Don’t you know that every immigrant’s tale is a comic romance? Once upon a time, a couple of absolute nobody girls named Wong are born. They load up a crappy donkey-van with bad Chinese food and drive in circles for 10 hours. They smooch a few silly boys on the way….Then it never fails—by the end of the tale, those certain Wong-named-nobodies finally blossom into somebodies.

Or, do they?”

Readers well-versed in Buddhist koans and parables and Asian animal fables will find familiar ground in Chin’s stories. Hidden in each, like the golden yoke center of a mooncake, a deeper meaning waits for discovery. For those who do not know the originals, Chin provides insight in her endnotes.

In the concluding section of her book, Chin offers three endings that mirror the ambiguity of the twins’ fate. But considering Grandmother Wong’s deep compassion to the fatherless and the widow, unwavering self-confidence, willingness to choose the hard road, make the tough decision and cut off the wound to save the soul (including hacking a Barbie doll down the middle), there seems no doubt which ending she would choose. Clearly, Grandmother Wong’s ancient wisdom has weight even in post-colonial America.

1 Wong’s poetry collections include Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (2002), The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty (1994) and Dwarf Bamboo (1987).

Norman Kulkin. Female Furniture. 2009
(From the series entitled: “Encapsulations”)

This is a multi-media artistic collaboration. The performance of dancers pulls you from room to room, live musicians will play in complex harmony around you, and you are both audience and participant. You choose the pace, but the experience created will be continuous.

Video art, installations, dance, music and more. Envision and visualize the possibilities. This event runs September 25th and 26th at 8pm.

View dance promo:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFiJn_8VpfM

To find out more about ticket purchase visit:
www.phcollective.wordpress.com/the-artists/

Email: bahareh1182@gmail.com for more information.

Phoebe Washer Kokeshi. 2009

Kokeshi originated in the north of Japan in a region called Tohoku, and often were the toys of the children of farmers or souvenirs for visitors to nearby hot springs. Handmade out of wood, they traditionally were characterized by a slim trunk for a body and a larger round head. As a Japanese folk toy, kokeshi are believed by some to be charms that can help ward off dangers, especially fire. The wood of the mizuki tree is often used for kokeshi and mizuki literally translates as “water tree.”

In the post-World War II era, a new style of kokeshi emerged alongside the traditional: the sosaku (creative). Kokeshi with different shaped heads and bodies, an assortment of colors and even the introduction of hair were designed as part of the sosaku movement. In the sosaku tradition, the only limits were governed by the imagination of each kokeshi designer.

The Kokeshi: From Folk Art to Art Toy exhibition will be presented in three sections: traditional, contemporary American; and custom. The traditional will include examples of the 10 classic styles and post-war creative movement. On display in the first section will be over 200 breathtaking examples of traditional kokeshi dolls from the extensive collection of Itske and Anthony Stern.

The second section of the exhibition stands in brilliant contrast to traditional kokeshi, showcasing the work of eleven contemporary artists who produce interpretations inspired by — and which pay homage to — these humble dolls. Artists for this section include Nicole DeLeon, Alexandra Gjurasic, Sachiho Hino Lee, Margaret Kasahara, Emi Motokawa, Joji Okazaki, David and Kazumi Kobayashi Svenson, Phoebe Washer, James Watts, and Kathy Yoshihara.

The third section is curated by Christina Conway in a lively reprise of her hit 2007 show in San Diego. This section presents a thoroughly eclectic display of all new work. Over 100 well-known international contemporary artists demonstrate the breadth of their artistic inspiration and the malleability of form and concept, and all based on the same simple kokeshi form each was given. Among the artists participating are David Horvath & Sun-Min Kim, APAK, Kozyndan, Hine Mizushima, Amy Sol, and Tara McPherson.

Japanese American National Museum
369 East First Street
Los Angeles, California 90012
213-625-0414
www.janm.org

Robert Quijada. Keith Haring Steps Out, 53×24x12, Mixed media.

“My show is a tribute and celebration of iconic subjects
bringing together my imagination with their presence and
talent to create interactive works of art.”
- Robert Quijada

Born near Hollywood studios during the World War II era, Robert Quijada’s unique style of folk art was influenced by Hollywood’s cinema and art culture. Quijada’s formal training in Costume and Fashion Design at Otis Art Institute and Chouinard Art Institute, lead to combining textile design into figurative subject matter. After serving for the United States Army, he moved to New York where he pursued a career in commercial art, specifically advertising and textile design. Quijada eventually left his path as a commercial artist to pursue fine art as a career and continued to display his art in galleries and museums. The exhibition, “ICONS” featuring his latest work will be displayed from June 6, 2009 to June 28, 2009.

Quijada’s artwork and exhibitions have been reviewed in publications such as: The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, Diario de Ibiza, The Christian Science Monitor, La Opinión, and Artillery Magazine.

METRO Gallery
Contemporary Fine Arts
www.metrogallery.org
323-663-2787