WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME: see it before it closes

. . . if you haven't already.  The story of how, as a teenager, actor/writer Heidi Shreck put herself through college by performing in debates about the U.S. Constitution sponsored by the American Legion, What the Constitution Means to Me is a unique and extraordinary show--and timelier than ever.

The play--nominated for Tonys and other awards--is running through August 24.  If you miss it in New York,  try to catch it (with a new cast) in the national tour, scheduled to begin in Los Angeles in January 2020.

First begun in 1938, the competition still exists.  For a description, see

https://www.legion.org/oratorical/about

and the rules

https://www.legion.org/oratorical/rules

Nassim

"It's like a pop-up book," said my friend Peter, about the play we'd just seen--NASSIM--which is named for its Iranian author, Nassim Soleimanpour, and has to do with, among other things, the challenges he's faced in getting his work into the world, and the need to overcome the barriers of language and culture that divide us. It was an astute observation:  NASSIM wasn't like anything else I've seen--but it was a bit like a picture book, and I ended up seeing it twice.

The first time, late last year, I thought, my sisters (both educators) would love this.  Then in January, my sisters were coming to town for a long weekend, and discount tickets were available, so I seized the opportunity, knowing that the show would be different since the guest actor would be different from the one I'd seen.  But there would be Farsi lessons, there would be tomatoes, and there would be audience participation.

My sisters loved the show, and, once again, I did, too.

It's running through April 20 at City Center, and for some performances you can find out who the guest actor will be.

https://www.nycitycenter.org/pdps/2018-2019/nassim/

The Talking Band's latest

I'm a huge fan of the Talking Band--for me, one of NYC's finest theatrical treasures--but I sometimes miss their shows because, typically, they only do one a year, running a mere 2-3 weeks.

This year, along with a couple of friends, I'm going to their latest--City of No Illusions--on opening night, 2/8, at La Mama. 

Here's how they describe the show, which runs through February 24:


"Set near the U.S. - Canadian border in Buffalo, New York, a funeral home run by two twin sisters has inadvertently become a sanctuary for two young immigrants."

 They're currently offering $20 tickets for the first four performances, with the discount code CITY1.
  
How can you resist? 

https://talkingband.org/works/city-of-no-illusions/ 

Yes, Karen Finley's back!

But then, she never left.

Brilliant, fearless, and deep, Karen Finley will forever be associated with a 1989 performance, We Keep Our Victims Ready, in which she applied chocolate to her bare torso, while speaking disturbing truths about sexual abuse and the claims of love that accompany it.

Outraged conservatives spearheaded the passage of a law mandating that NEA grants comply with "general standards of decency and respect for all the diverse beliefs and values of the American public," thereby leading the NEA to veto Finley's latest grant application, along with those of three other artists. The NEA Four, as they were called, sued the agency on the grounds that their First Amendment rights were being violated, won in the lower courts, but in 1998--after the Clinton administration elected to continue the appeal--lost in the Supreme Court.

Through the years since, Finley has continued speaking truth to power in performance and in print.
 
Her latest, Grabbing Pussy, is as timely and provocative as the title suggests.

You can catch her Sunday, August 5 and 12, at the Laurie Beechman Theatre at the West Bank Cafe, in New York City, an intimate space that's well-suited for her.

And on September 12, she'll be at the ISSUE Project Room, as part of the Brooklyn Book Festival.

She tours, too.

Still true, I think

The things that turn up in old notebooks . . .

In one of mine, dated August 9, 2004, something Clinton (Bill, I assume) said, more or less, on the Daily Show:

"If you're a Democrat, you win when people think."

Political Poemette

In the latest group of poems posted in "Such an Ugly Time" on the Rat's Ass Review site, you'll find a tiny poem of mine--probably the smallest there.  Poets are listed in alphabetical order.

http://ratsassreview.net

Gardens Speak

Last month I participated in a play, Gardens Speak, part of the Public Theater's Under the Radar festival, that I'm still thinking about.   Here's what I remember:

In an outer room, the guide instructs you to take off your shoes and put on a light raincoat.  

In the next room, you sit on one of two benches along two facing walls.  In the middle of the room is a rectangle with grass, dirt, and ten wooden tombstones--the garden.

You are given a piece of paper with a name in Arabic.

You step into the garden and look for the tombstone with the name matching the one you hold.

When you find it, you brush the dirt off a plaque at the base of the tombstone to reveal the name in English.

You lie down with your head at the base of the tombstone, and the voice of the deceased whispers his or her story in your ear, as if coming from the grave beneath you.

These are all victims of the Assad regime in Syria, many of whom were secretly buried in gardens and parks.  

When you're done listening to the story, you cover the name,  return to the bench, where you find a small notebook in which you are invited to write a letter to the martyr whose story you heard.

You go back to the grave, this time to its foot, and sit a while, as you learn is the custom in Syria.  If you write a letter, you bury it there--perhaps you find letters that others have written.

The letters will eventually be shared with the families of the victims.

Finally you return to the anteroom, where you can wash your feet in a foot bath.

It has been only 45 minutes.

You wish many, many others could share the emphathy-inducing experience you had in that room.


Gardens Speak is the work of performance artist Tania El Khoury, who is based in London and Beirut.

Scoundrel Time

The apt title of Lillian Hellman's memoir of her experiences during the McCarthy era and scathing critique of  the House Un-American Activities Committee, before which she appeared, Scoundrel Time seems at least as appropriate to the present American day, with our scoundrel-led and scoundrel-ridden administration.  So it's an apt name for a new online literary journal that offers a forum for writers to address the issues of our times--something many other literary magazines are doing as well these days.

http://scoundreltime.com/

The wit and wisdom of George Eliot

Despite my best intentions, I've never got around to rereading Middlemarch, and I haven't read anything else by George Eliot in a very long time.  But at last, years after a former roommate raved about it, I'm deep into Daniel Deronda, her brilliant last novel.  Besides a gripping story and vivid characters, she supplies, on virtually every page, deep insights into the human condition, as relevant as ever to our times.

Here's how she begins Chapter 21:

"It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance?  Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.  Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day's dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives a flavour to its one roast with the burnt souls of many generations.  Knowledge, instructing the sense, refining and multiplying needs, transforms itself into skill and makes life various with a new six days' work; comes Ignorance drunk on the seventh, with a firkin of oil and a match and an easy 'Let there not be'--and the many-coloured creation is shriveled up in blackness.  Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy dark as a buried Babylon."


We must not let those about to run the show in our government this term "wax unbound."

The new, improved Village Voice

After years of diminishing content and quality, the Village Voice is beginning to look more like the former self that many of us relied upon for in-depth investigative reporting, local political news, and cultural coverage.   The Voice used to be one of the few places that regularly reviewed off-off Broadway theater and dance--now there's hope that it may be again, with former staffers Elizabeth Zimmer as lead dance critic and Michael Feingold once again heading the theater department.

The July 6 issue featured a gripping and disturbing investigation by Nick Pinto into the new LinkNYC network--a must-read that you can still find on the Voice's website.
 
The Village Voice still comes out every Wednesday.  If you miss it in the kiosks, you can find it online:


http://www.villagevoice.com/

Defenestration

For those of you who don't follow it already,  Defenestration is a lively online humor magazine.  Check out their April issue--and in particular my short piece "Pitch Meeting: Election 2020: Running Mates":

Defenestration: April 2016 - Defenestration

Who's Your Baghdaddy?

Take an Iraqi con man with a good story looking to defect.  Add intelligence operatives, German and American, ready to hear it.  Mix with former UN weapons inspector who finds it echoes what he's sure is true. A US administration ready to act on it.  What do you get?  The war that got us where we are today.

Who's Your Baghdaddy? Or How I Started the Iraq War--a brilliant political musical having to do with bizarre events that led to the Gulf War--proposes that some of those responsible have formed a support group to deal with their guilt. With excellent performances, a fine, rap-inflected score, and lively choreography, the show's as hilarious as it is disturbing.  Not surprising, given that director Marshall Pailet, who wrote the music and co-wrote the book (co-author A.D. Penedo wrote the lyrics), was the writer and director of the wonderful musical spoof Triassic Parq.

In this incarnation (at an intimate theater-in-the-oval at the Actors Temple Theater, 339 W. 47 St.), you have through this weekend to catch Who's Your Baghdaddy?  I trust there'll be others before too much longer, but next time you might not experience actors bounding in and out of the seat next to yours.  

Remaining performances are Saturday-Sunday, November 21-22, at 3:00 and 8:00 each day.  

For information, see whoisyourbaghdaddy.com

Who's Your Baghdaddy? is based on an unproduced screenplay by J. T. Allen, which was inspired by reporter Bob Drogin's coverage of these events for the Los Angeles Times.

I'm now reading Drogin's book Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War, which tells the story at length.  It's riveting.

Marchellus Shale: The Talking Band's latest

Of all the theater companies whose work I've seen in New York over the years, none has meant more to me than The Talking Band. I try to catch all their shows, but given the short runs--typically three weeks or less, once or twice a year--I sometimes miss one. Among my favorites: Delicious Rivers, Flip Side, The Walk Across America for Mother Earth, Hot Lunch Apostles. Not everything they do is equally brilliant, but their work is unfailingly intelligent and even their weakest shows leave you with much to think about and moments to remember.

Their latest, Marcellus Shale, written and directed by Paul Zimet with music and sound design by Ellen Maddow, is, to my mind, one of their most powerful, and it deals with an issue some members of the company face, living as they do in areas threatened by fracking. It's set in a community in which many folks have leased their lands to gas companies and have been living with the consequences. Through the windows of their houses, we see those lands, thanks to some extraordinary video design by Anna Kiraly, and the ghostly figures that walk across them--as the characters struggle to find a way out--haunt my imagination.

You have to have till Sunday, June 9, to see this amazing show at La Mama.


http://talkingband.org

Animal Sightings

Birds (and some people) do it--and it's not falling in love

On an Upper East Side street, headed for the Met,
Jim spots a Blue Jay, baby bird in its mouth,
snatched from a nest.

The Jay drops the baby, then swoops around,
coming back for the kill.

Oh, look at that bird! says mom to daughter,
seeing the Jay,
but not what it's up to.

Jim tells them.


Weeks later, I'm thinking we have more than a few Blue Jays in Congress, prepared to sacrifice the young of their fellow citizens to feed the appetites of bigger, richer birds.


Head Dress

Sunday, post-dim sum,
we pass a guy carrying a cat on his head,
leash dangling from collar.

Man and cat cross Canal,
keep going.

I wonder who trained whom.


Seen on a 10-minute truck ride

through John and Kristine's place
in the U.P. of Michigan,
last morning of my visit:

three sandhill cranes flapping,
ten deer a-leaping.

They know it's not hunting season.

GERRYMANDERING: The Movie

Gerrymandering? Sure, I knew what it was--carving up election districts for the benefit of one party or another, one group or another. But like most of my fellow Americans, I hadn't spent a whole lot of time worrying about it, let alone trying to do something about it.

Till I got an email from ACT NOW NY inviting me to a screening of a doc on the subject, followed by a Q & A with its writer-director, Jeff Reichert.

I went to the screening. Gerrymandering proved to be far more entertaining than I'd expected, with illustrations of bizarrely gerrymandered districts and absurdist episodes of redistricting skullduggery, including the tale of the Texas Democrats who in 2003 fled to a motel in Oklahoma in a desperate attempt to stop the Republicans from redistricting at the behest of Tom DeLay.

Amidst the moments of humor, the film made clear just how much voters lose when it's our representatives who draw the lines that determine what, if any, opposition they will face.

The film does offer some good news--California has passed initiatives that take the power to redistrict out of the hands of the legislature.

For information about Gerrymandering, the movie, and links to organizations trying to put an end to the practice, visit

http://www.gerrymanderingmovie.com

To find out how you can help support efforts to at reforming redistricting in New York, check out

http://www.actnowny.org/

Next book by a friend I don't want to read

I don't expect Ron Rosenbaum's latest, How the End Begins, to be a fun read, though the author's brilliant wit will no doubt be in evidence now and again.

I do expect it to be profoundly, stomach churningly scary--given that it's an account by one of our finest journalists of the likely road to a nuclear war.

Not a book I want to read, but one I need to. Just hoping it leaves the reader not in total despair but with some insight into what we might do to get off the nuclear road before the end.

authors.simonandschuster.ca/Ron-Rosenbaum/47903494

The Great Game

It's a rare opportunity: for a few more days, if you live in New York City, you can catch the Tricycle Theater's moving and informative production of The Great Game: Afghanistan--more than a dozen short plays, along with monologues and commentary, that deal with incursions into that country by foreign empires over the last two centuries.

But it's a tough choice; if you're not willing to devote more than 7 hours plus travel time to seeing the whole thing, which do you opt for: Part I, which deals with the British empire's adventures--19th and early 20th centuries--that give the event its title; Part 2, with the Soviet Union, whose efforts ended up contributing to the union's breakup; and Part 3--you can guess whose turn it is.

Unfortunately, many of the potential audience seem to be electing not to make the choice--not to see any of it--so there are very substantial discounts available: substantial enough that I went to all three in a one-day Marathon.

If you can only go to one, I'd say, go the Part I--odds are it will persuade you to see the rest.

Presented by the Public Theater, The Great Game is at the NYU Skirball Center through Dec. 19.

For tickets, call 212-352-3101 or 866-811-4111, or go to www.skirballcenter.nyu.edu

But first look around for those discounts.

Wisdom from The Hunchback

Saturday evening before the election, I'd expected to be contradancing, but after a day spent campaigning in Allentown for Sestak, one ankle wasn't up to it.

So instead I checked out Turner Classic Movies's Halloween weekend lineup of horror films--and discovered the 1939 version of Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, directed by William Dieterle, and featuring a brave, heartrending, and unforgettable performance by Charles Laughton in the title role.

Though this version takes significant liberties with the novel's plot, the end in particular, it seems true to its spirit, and has much to say about intolerance.

Among its many memorable lines is this, from one of a band of gypsies being attacked as foreigners:

"You came yesterday, we came today."

GASLAND

Gasland is an award-winning documentary--Special Jury prize at Sundance 1010--that had trouble attracting a distributor, and probably won't be playing at a theater near you anytime soon.

But the environmental horror story it recounts may be already: hydraulic fracturing (fracking)--a radically destructive method of extracting natural gas--is happening all over the country, from California to Wyoming (on the edge of Yellowstone) to Texas to Florida to Tennessee to Virginia to Pennsylvania.

If you're a New York City resident, like me, you, too, have a lot to worry about.

Director Josh Fox began the investigations that led to Gasland after getting an offer to lease his land in Pennsylvania for gas drilling.

First he hears of ominous effects in nearby towns, including water that has turned flammable since drilling began.

Then he sets out across the country--making a real-life, blacker-than-black comedy/horror road movie.

He witnesses many drinking water-lighting shows, learns of people living in homes that could explode, and suffering the effects of toxic air and toxic water, hears about company officials that visit those whose water they've ruined, assuring them the water's safe but refusing to drink it, and delves into the science and politics of Fracking.

Fracking works by injecting millions of gallons of water, along with 80 to 300 tons of chemicals, vertically into a gas well or horizontally into an area that couldn't have been drilled before, to fracture shale, releasing natural gas.

Thanks to the Bush/Cheney Energy Policy Act of 2005 (known as the Halliburton Loophole), the natural gas extraction industry is now exempt from the Safe Water Drinking Act. The chemical stews they use are considered "proprietary," and not subject to any kind of regulation.

An EPA official speaking to Fox off the record tells him, "We're not permitted as a government agency to answer your legitimate question."

A bill to overturn the exemption--the Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act--has been introduced in both houses of Congress, as S. 1215 and H. 2766, but languishes in committee.

We need to do our best to make sure it passes.

For information about the film, the issue, how close you live to fracking sites, and ways of helping to stop it, check out:

gaslandthemovie.com

Through 2012, you can catch Gasland on HBO; the DVD will be out in December.

The Blessing Next to the Wound . . .

. . . a memoir by Hector Aristizabal, co-authored by my friend Diane Lefer, is aptly subtitled "a Story of Art, Activision, and Transformation."

Exiled from his native Colombia, where he survived torture, Aristizabal now lives in this country. Trained as an actor, he works for social justice, often in collaboration with Lefer, who will be discussing their book this Wednesday at the radical bookstore and cafe Bluestockings, 172 Allen St., at 7 pm.

Lefer also writes wonderful plays and short stories. For information about her work, see

http://www.dianelefer.weebly.com

And for more information about The Blessing Next to the Wound, go to

http://www.lanternbooks.com/detail.html?session=f79da872f32a1be8f6672dd7f974c43a&id=9781590561713