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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.

Agora (2009, released to the U.S. market June 2010)

Directed by Alejandro Amenábar, screenplay by Amenábar and Mateo Gil

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

At its most dramatic, political ambition and religious fanaticism have destroyed entire civilizations. Yet these dangerous bedfellows also threaten culture at subtle levels, no more so in the ancient world than in our own. Director Alejandro Amenábar’s latest film, Agora, works both ends of the spectrum. Set in a Roman-ruled Alexandria torn by religious hatred between pagans, Jews and early Christians, Agora centers on the life, work and death of fourth-century Neoplatonic philosopher, mathematician and teacher Hypatia (ca.360-415 AD). On the surface, Agora is a bloody exposé of the death of reason. Under the blood and gore, the senseless savagery and massacres, the director orchestrates a human drama fueled by fear, hunger and greed. Digging to the roots of violence, Amenábar reminds viewers that, indeed, we have not come so far.

Born in 1973 in Santiago, Chile, just prior to Pinochet’s coup, Amenábar was politicized at an early age. His mother lived through the Spanish Civil War, and after the coup his Chilean father moved the family to Madrid. With poor scholastic achievements behind him and a talent for film and music, Amenábar switched course.1 Now known for his fever-pitch psychological thrillers, he has been dubbed by reviewers as Alfred Hitchcock’s successor. Like Amenábar’s 2004 release The Sea Inside (Mar adentro), based on quadriplegic Ramón Sampedro’s 28-year crusade to legally terminate his life, in many ways Agora is atypical for his work. With The Sea Inside, the director risked a more elastic treatment than he used in his previous, highly controlled horror films.2 Viewers get to know Ramón (Javier Bardem) through two women who love him. In a 2004 interview published in Venice Magazine, Amenábar spoke of Ramón’s writings:

“He talked about loving, but not possessing someone. To be able to accept not owning a person. At the same time, he felt that he owned his own life, but he also didn’t mind getting rid it.”3

Similarly, Agora considers Hypatia through the people who love and admire her. Otherwise, she remains closed, yielding little evidence of an emotional life. That said, the beautiful Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) has plenty of passion for her studies, the contents of the last great bastion of learning in Roman Egypt, the Alexandria library, and the Chinese puzzle presented by Ptolemaic astronomy. While her students (young pagans, Christians and slaves) pine over her and noble pagans wrangle with Christian persecutors, Hypatia literally has her head in the clouds. She submits to no god or God, champions learning as the salvation of humanity, and believes that true justice is logical and egalitarian. The only axiom she never questions, “More things unite us than divide us,” reverberates through the film.

Ironically, Hypatia contemplates a universe far beyond human imaginings, symbolized by Amenábar’s cutaways to expansive clips of the cosmos; but her personal experience is narrow, limited to the sheltered environment provided by father Theon (Michael Londsdale). Theon encourages her to forsake marriage and motherhood for scholarship. Another irony: Hypatia’s beauty sits uncomfortably with her scrupulously honest (i.e., blunt) speech. For example, when student/suitor Orestes declares his love she responds with a handkerchief soaked in menstrual blood. Could she be less clear? Could he be less offended? Nevertheless, despite his lighthearted approach to lessons, Orestes remains devoted to Hypatia’s mind as well as her body.

As the film progresses Amenábar stacks irony, contradiction and opposition. Orestes’ counterpart, slave Davus (Max Minghella), thinks deeply about Hypatia’s theories and offers lines of inquiry that impress her. Where Orestes can state his feelings, Davus must hide them. Where Orestes not only survives her rebuff but renews the chase, Davus bristles when Hypatia refers to his slave status. Like other slaves, he is ripe for the Christian’s promises of power and bread for the meek and hungry. Perhaps more so, with wounded pride igniting his resentment. Viewers will not wonder at his vulnerability to recruitment by charismatic street preacher Ammonius (Ashraf Barhom) for the black-robed Christian militia, the Parabolini.

Amenábar sets Davus’s conflicted religious zeal against Orestes’ politically motivated conversion when Orestes becomes Roman prelate. Against these, the director places Synesius of Cyrene’s conventional, if peaceful, faith. Eventually, former Hypatia student Synesius becomes a powerful bishop. The devotion of all three of her formal pupils attests to Hypatia’s truly noble character but cannot save her. She is sacrificed to Christian extremism and martyred for the truth. She will not forsake reason, even when it fails. She has pledged her life to the agora, the open-air forum for trade–ideas as well as commodities. Like Sampedro in The Sea Inside, she feels she fully owns her life and its disposition.4

Weisz (The Lovely Bones; The Constant Gardener) plays Hypatia to perfection. Suspicious of emotion, Hypatia discounted its value to intellectual discourse and reasoned judgment. Hypatia can shed tears: for her father, bludgeoned in the agora; for the scrolls burned by the rabble; and for Orestes’ and Davus’s compromises. In the film’s most powerful scene, Orestes attends Hypatia while she ponders the lack of love in her life. Clearly capable of feeling loss, Hypatia then easily turns her thoughts to her astronomical quandary. Is her mistrust of emotion a subterfuge? Due to lifelong training? Or a well-reasoned choice. As Hypatia would no doubt counsel, viewers should judge for themselves.

1 Amenábar has scored most of his films. Dario Marianelli scored Agora.

2 Amenábar wrote the screenplay for The Sea Inside with Agora collaborator, Spanish director Mateo Gil.

3 The interview is available at: http://thehollywoodinterview.blogspot.com/2010/01/alejandro-amenabar-and-sea-inside-open.html

4 For a lyrical fictional portrait of Hypatia, readers should acquire a copy of Ki Longfellow’s moving Flow Down Like Silver (Eio Books, 2009).

The Golden Child by Penelope Fitzgerald

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

Media hype surrounding the recently opened Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs at New York City’s Discovery Center Times Square echoes the “Egypt-mania” coloring much of the 1970s. Viewing approximately 3,500-year-old Egyptian funerary art and artifacts displayed in a global tourist mecca is a bit unsettling but, in 21st-century America, anything might happen, including King Tut’s appearance at Disney World. In the 1970s some of the artifacts discovered in the 18th-century dynasty boy king’s tomb came West, once again since their discovery in 1922, first appearing at the British Museum in London for more than 1.6 million visitors.1 From there, the exhibit traveled to the former Soviet Union, Japan, France, Canada and West Germany. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York provided the U.S. venue, which ran from late 1976 to spring 1979. In America, more than 8 million people waited hours to see these gilded, priceless objects. As art works, they dazzled the eye; as cultural objects, they provided a glimpse of early human history far removed from the modern age. Initial reception to the Discovery Center’s show indicate that all things Tut continue to enthrall adults and children.

In 1977, English writer Penelope Fitzgerald reflected on art as entertainment in her first novel, The Golden Child. Although she began to publish at age 60, the Booker Prize-winning writer appears to have been born to the profession. Daughter of Punch editor Edmund Knox (1879-1958), Fitzgerald counted among other illustrious relatives her father’s brothers: crime writer Ronald Knox, cryptographer Dilly Knox and biblical scholar Wilfred Knox. Her aunt Winifred Peck was a novelist, and her stepmother daughter of Winnie-the-Pooh illustrator Ernest H. Shepard. From 1977 to 1985, Fitzgerald wrote eight novels filled with refined wit, ironic humor and incisive social commentary. For many of her settings, plots and characters, Fitzgerald drew on personal experiences as World War II correspondent for the BBC (Human Voices), drama school teacher (At Freddie’s), houseboat denizen (Offshore) and bookshop clerk (The Bookshop).

Before her death in 2000, Fitzgerald commented that she wrote The Golden Child for her husband, an Irish soldier, who was declining from a terminal illness. Set in an institution meant to recall the British Museum and its 1972 Egyptian exhibit, The Golden Child opens with an unforgettable scene: faceless crowds of men, women and school children on a queue circling the museum and park. Encouraged by newspaper headlines across the country, they wait to see the “golden treasure” of the Garamantes, an ancient race of Saharan desert dwellers. This trove consists of a young king’s relics and a cache of gilded toys for afterlife amusement. Securely ensconced in the museum’s upper reaches, their elderly eccentric discoverer, Sir William, refuses association with his 1913 find. Yet he expresses concern for the queues subjected to inflated entrance fees; freezing temperatures; and inferior refreshments and facilities. In return for their patient endurance, the queues receive a few moments to view the treasure. As efficient security staff keeps the ball rolling (and the queue moving) and curators seethe at the public’s intrusion on their hallowed halls, Fitzgerald manipulates the curators’ long-simmering fears, jealousies and ambitions into a well-plotted whodunit.

But in Fitzgerald’s hands, murder and mystery merely expose museum politics and human greed. Provoked by doubt of the treasure’s authenticity, the impeccably attired museum director sends a lowly exhibition planner named Waring Smith to consult an elusive Soviet authority. Not surprisingly, the Soviet regime has a stake in the treasure unearthed thousands of years ago in Central North Africa.2 Arranged by the director’s perfectly correct secretary, Waring Smith’s travel plans place him in a group of savvy tourists. Unlike him, they own winter-wear equal to sub-zero Moscow temperatures. Dodging their hostile stares and shivering through snow-laden streets, Waring Smith struggles with personal problems (mortgage, neglected wife, career potential). Meanwhile, his consciousness matures. Fitzgerald narrates his trip as something of a comic opera or visit to a hall of mirrors. He cannot fail to connect the queues outside his museum with endless lines of citizens waiting outside the Kremlin to view an embalmed Lenin; one night spent at the circus opens his eyes to the skewed perceptions of power and authority promoted from above: underneath their polished veneer, he realizes, the clowns lead the band. Dressed by the best London tailors, educated at Oxford and Cambridge, the men pulling the strings are fools. And in the hands of fools, power is dangerous.

Before the exhibit, Waring Smith knew his superiors to be capable of professional murder, never imagining that they can kill more than a reputation. Now summoned back to London, he realizes that Sir William and the odd-ball museum personnel he champions (a nap-prone, pregnant secretary; a devoted body guard; a conflict-promoting technician) are models of decency. Governments, museums and multinational corporations hope to gain pots of money and prestige from the treasure, but Sir William wants none of it.

Quiet and quirky, Fitzgerald’s novels are wonders of subtlety and wisdom. Their plots and characters reveal absurdities in the human condition hidden in plain sight. While it is easier to ignore our failings, it is far more entertaining to consider them played out in finely crafted fiction. In The Golden Child, the museum stands as one powerful element in a vast politically motivated chain. In truth, the Greatest Show on Earth is a human drama, and art an intangible given material form and driving the action.

1 The tomb was opened by English archeologist Howard Carter and his team in 1923.

2 Believed to be of Berber origin, the Garamantes of Southern Libya ruled the interior central part of North Africa from ca.500 BC to 500 AD.

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.

Contemporary Filmmaking at its Best at the IFC

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

For independent film fans, New York City is a great place to live. A visit to the small but stylish Paris Theatre in midtown provides a bit of culture between morning window shopping on Fifth Avenue and (we recommend) afternoon tea at the New York location of the famous Viennese Demel Café.1 Downtown, venue choices expand with the Angelika Film Center and Landmark Sunshine Cinema on Houston Street and Anthology Film Archives in the East Village. In Greenwich Village, the Independent Film Center (IFC), housed in the historic Waverly Theater, presents a low-key face to the world and might easily be missed by those walking up and down Sixth Avenue on their way to Fourteenth Street or Bleecker. But film buffs know it well; one look at the IFC marquee or printed calendar of events whets the appetite for gluttonous indulgence. It is no wonder that many of those “in the know” stop here, skipping the shopping (and, alas, the pastry) for a three- or four-course meal of superior filmmaking.

Opened in June 2005, the IFC underwent a four-year renovation to create five state-of-the-art cinemas with living room-style seating. Along with new independent and foreign films and documentaries, the IFC has a Weekend Classics series; a “Short Attention Span Cinema” consisting of short-film screenings prior to the start of featured films; and a gallery displaying vintage movie posters from around the world. Viennese pastry does not figure into the snack-bar mix, but there is organic popcorn with, yes, real butter.

On the spring 2010 calendar are three films as diverse as they come: an Academy Award-nominated animated feature inspired by a medieval illuminated manuscript (The Secret of Kells); a blistering exposé of greed and political intrigue in the art world (The Art of the Steal); and a revisionist fairy tale (Barbe Bleue/Bluebeard) starring the first recorded serial killer. While only one is truly appropriate for children–and it isn’t the fairy tale–most adults will be variously charmed, entertained, provoked and enlightened by all three.

The Secret of Kells, directed by Thomm Moore and Nora Twomey with a screenplay by Fabrice Ziolkowski

Compiled sometime between the sixth and ninth centuries, the illuminated manuscript that has come down through the ages as the Book of Kells (also known as the Book of Columba after the sixth-century, book-loving Irish saint who travelled to the Scottish island of Iona to spread the Christian faith) continues to intrigue scholars, artists and folklorists, as well as general audiences entranced by the intricate designs etched in harmonious hues that decorate each page. Even more astounding, the book survived hundreds of years of threats from natural disasters, fire, religious turmoil and foreign invasions.

This animated feature directed by Thomm Moore, a joint venture of production companies in Belgium, France and Ireland, makes real for children and adults the power of the book’s visual symbols and the lengths to which people–here 12-year-old Brendan and an aging master illuminator–have gone to protect it. Viking invasions during the eighth and ninth centuries caused monks on Iona to flee to Ireland. In Moore’s film, the Vikings who overrun the abbey in Ireland where Brendan lives with his uncompromising uncle, the abbot, and a group of monks colored in an ethnic rainbow, are shown as dark, looming shapes. The invaders and spirit figures from Ireland’s pagan past are mildly frightening, as they are whipped into a frenzy by Celtic music (pulsing bodhrán beats overlaid with haunting penny whistle).

Although Moore glosses over the history of the Book of Kells, it is likely that many viewers will want a greater understanding post closing credits. Such is the success of Moore’s visuals, a kaleidoscopic melange of mostly hand-drawn swirls, spirals and bold geometrics lushly colored to resemble a Celtic Garden of Eden, that his whimsical film will appeal to the widest range of ages.

The Art of the Steal, directed by Don Argot

The subject of Don Argot’s documentary is money and power, but the conclusion here defies the certainty that one equals the other in the eyes of the world. Centering on the multimillion-dollar art collection amassed by Albert C. Barnes, who rose from working-class background to Philadelphia physician, medical researcher and pharmaceutical company owner, Argot’s film promotes the view that Barnes’s will has been deliberately subverted by the city (Philadelphia) and institutions (e.g., the Philadelphia Museum of Art) from which he hoped to protect the works.

At the time that Barnes (1872-1951) purchased top-shelf pictures by the likes of Van Gogh, Renoir, Picasso and Cézanne, the American art establishment jeered at their work. Barnes reviled the museum system as a commercial enterprise prostituting great art works to draw large audiences that did not appreciate them. He built his own private gallery in the suburbs of Philadelphia, decorated to his idiosyncratic aesthetic code, and invited scholars and students rather than city museum-hoppers. The Barnes Foundation stipulated a by-invitation-only policy and seemingly prevented his collection from being sold or lent to other museums.

After his death, a devoted follower ran the foundation until her death in 1988. Dramatized in Argot’s film, what happened thereafter will elicit strong feelings, whether one believes that Barnes’s wishes should be respected or that the caliber of his collection demands public display. Between these extremes hovers a very real concern; ignoring Barnes’s wishes may have served money-and-power seekers, not Barnes or his collection.

Barbe Bleue/Bluebeard, adapted and directed by Catherine Breillat

Originally, French author and poet Charles Perrault (1628-1703) wrote his fairy tales for an elite adult audience resident at the court of Louis XIV. Born into an aristocratic family, Perrault aspired to the lofty artistic ideals of his times. He injected intelligence and wit into his romantic stories, inspired by the form and content of oral tales. Perrault’s literary fairy tales were immensely popular, all the rage at court. As with Grimm and Andersen, later Perrault was folded into the children’s cannon, despite the violence and dark themes percolating in his work.

French author/filmmaker Catherine Breillat (The Last Mistress; Fat Girl) remembers reading “Bluebeard” as a 5-year-old fan of fairy tales. The impact that this and other traditional stories had on her emerging feminist consciousness resounds through her beautiful rendering of Perrault’s shocker.2 Known for her controversial portrayals of women’s internal lives as they unfold within class-conscious misogynist societies, Breillat has been marginalized by censors and timid promoters. Reviewers have commented on the comparatively staid tenor of Breillat’s Bluebeard, yet the sense of calm pervading the film reflects Breillat’s reverence for fairy tales and their creators. Like them, she has mined story for the greed and cruelty inherent in quests for domination.3

Breillat organized her film as a story within a story, with two sets of sisters living centuries apart. In interviews, Breillat identifies herself with a defiant young girl, 1950s era, who sneers at her sister’s fears. Perrault’s cautionary tale reveals the price women pay for disobeying men. Breillat’s film reveals the price they pay for fearing them. Fairy tales appeal to children primarily, perhaps, because their finely tuned sense of justice refuses to accept the underdog’s defeat. From Jack the Giant Killer to Clever Gretchen, characters in folk and fairy tales win children’s hearts by using their wits to defeat brute strength. In the murky waters of adolescence, Breillat’s territory, women awaken to the rules of the game. In Bluebeard, the filmmaker once again tackles the hate men have for willful women to highlight the love women have for their murderers. It is a chilling view.

1 Located on the lower level of the Plaza Hotel on West 58th Street, the Demel Café serves world-class Viennese pastry from the Demel Bakery, founded in 1786 in Vienna.

2 For admirers of fractured fairy tales, Breillat work stands with celebrated stories and studies by authors Alison Lurie, Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Marina Warner, Terri Windling and scholar Maria Tatar. For a 2002 addition to Windling’s Fairy Tales series, Fitcher’s Brides, Gregory Frost wrote about a Bluebeard figure living in the 1830s in New York’s Finger Lakes district. An outstanding list of works incorporating the theme (e.g., a novella by Anatole France, poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson, short story by Shirley Jackson, operetta by Jacques Offenback and Maurice Maeterlinck’s play, Ariane et Barbe-bleu) can be accessed at: http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/bluebeard/themes.html

3 Prior to the official March 26, 2010 release date of Briellat’s Barbe Bleue/Bluebeard, Anthology Film Archives showed the film in its Bluebeard on Film series along with Ernst Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), Edgar G. Ulmer’s Poverty Row production (1944); Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (1947); Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door (1948); and Michael Powell’s Bluebeard’s Castle (1964).

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.

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).

William Kentridge, Balancing Act, 2003

Winter can be a dark time, especially in the Scandinavian North, where the sun sets early, snow chills flesh and spirit and blizzards produce pointillist portraits in the skies. But Stockholm is lit with the excitement of art and possesses at this time of year an excellent array of exhibits and enough well-heated museums and galleries to shelter visitors from the cold outside. (more…)