Plays I've seen twice

All this talk of doubles has made me try to reach back into the memory bank and determine how many plays I have seen twice, though I mean two distinct productions. I don't actually do it that often, mostly because I tend to focus much more on plot (rather than acting or stage sets or costumes), so seeing a play twice has less appeal than seeing two completely different plays. There are also examples where I have seen an incredible performance of a play, and I simply don't want to risk a lesser performance over-writing the better one in my memory banks.  While this doesn't always happen, it is a risk, especially given the huge number of plays that I have seen over the years (some of which I barely remember even after seeing proof in the form of a program that I attended!).  But for the most part, I am open to seeing a different take on the same play, after enough time has passed.  And clearly I have done this. I've managed to track down details on where and when I saw plays multiple times, though that was not possible in some cases.

Plays I’ve seen (at least) twice:

Shakespeare:
Othello: Kalamazoo (1988?), Stratford (2013); Toronto (2017)
Midsummer's Night’s Dream:- NYC (1992), a couple of other times; Bard on the Beach (2014)
Twelfth Night: Ann Arbor (1990); Chicago; Toronto (2015 & 2017), probably another time
As You Like It: Evanston, IL; Toronto (2015 & 2017)
Much Ado About Nothing: NJ Shakespeare (1992); Toronto (1994)
The Comedy of Errors: NYC; Toronto (2016)
Measure for Measure: NYC; Toronto (2016)
Taming of the Shrew: NJ Shakespeare (1992); Atlanta (2003)
Macbeth: NJ Shakespeare (1992), Bard on the Beach (2012); Toronto (2015)
Henry IV: NJ Shakespeare (1992); Oak Park, IL* (2011)
Romeo and Juliet: Toronto (1997); Stratford (2013)
Hamlet: saw the first half in Cambridge, UK 2006 (totally rained out), Bard on the Beach (2013); Toronto (2015)
The Tempest: Evanston (1997), probably one other time, and I will be seeing it at Bard on the Beach (2014)
King Lear: Vancouver (2013) and I will be seeing it at Stratford in 2014.

Chekhov:
The Seagull: NJ Shakespeare (1992), Evanston (1998)
Three Sisters: Ann Arbor (1988?), Vancouver (2013); Toronto (2017)
Uncle Vanya: Chicago (2010), Vancouver (2014)

Ben Jonson-The Alchemist: Stratford (1999); Cambridge UK (2006)
Beckett-Waiting for Godot: Chicago (1998), Stratford (2013) & a bad mix-up trying to get to the Cultch led to me missing a Vancouver performance
Beckett-Endgame: Ann Arbor (1990?); Chicago (1998)
Brecht-Good Person of Setzuan: New York (1994); Chicago (2007)
Brecht-Caucasian Chalk Circle: Chicago; Toronto (2018?)
Eric Overmyer-On the Verge: Evanston (1997); Minneapolis (1997)
Jason Grote-1001: Chicago (2009), Chicago (2010)
"George Gershwin"-Crazy for You: Broadway (1993); Toronto (1994)
Heiner Müller-Hamletmachine: Ann Arbor (1989), Vancouver (2013)
Dylan Thomas-Under Milkwood: Evanston (1996), Chicago (2009)
Rivera-Marisol: Newark (1995), Evanston (1997), Chicago (2011) - I actually tried to see this in New York around 2001, but there was some strange mix-up
Gilbert & Sullivan-Pirates of Penzance: Kalamazoo (1986?), Chicago (2010)
Wilde-The Importance of Being Earnest: NJ Shakespeare (1992), Chicago (2010), Toronto (2014)**
Tony Kushner-Angels in America: Broadway (1994); Chicago (1998)
Tony Kushner-Homebody/Kabul: New York (off-Broadway); Chicago (2003)
Enda Walsh-Penelope: Chicago (2011); Vancouver (2013)
Tom Stoppard-Arcadia: Chicago (2007); San Francisco (2013); Toronto (2014)†
John Logan-Red: Broadway (2010); Vancouver (2012)
Caryl Churchill-Top Girls: Evanston; Shaw Festival (2016)
David Auburn-Proof: Broadway (2000) - original cast; Toronto (2017)
The Flick: Chicago; Toronto (2019)

So this is actually more than I remembered at the start of this post.  In addition, I've managed to see nearly all the key plays of the 20th Century (by American playwrights at any rate) by keeping my eyes on the listings and spreading myself thin (too thin probably).  Chicago and the Northwestern School of Drama were great in that regards.  Toronto (and the Stratford and Shaw festivals) should be very comparable, if slightly more expensive.  I have seen some really incredible things over the years, and maybe I shall go into more detail down the road.


* This worked out really well, as I saw Henry IV and V in Oak Park (an inner ring suburb of Chicago) and then a month or so later Henry VI (all three parts boiled down to one play) at Bard on the Beach.

** I took my son to this performance, and he thought it was amusing, though a lot went over his head.

† This is actually the sold-out Shaw production from 2013, which had been transferred by Mirvish.

Books to reread

It turns out that one of the books that is quickly approaching from my TBR pile is MacLennan's Two Solitudes.  I don't recall this at all, but apparently I did read this, perhaps in the late 90s.

There are a great many books I've read that surely deserve rereading, but I feel I do not have time to do so.  But if that is the case, then why am I hanging onto so many books?  And paying to move them again and again??  I suppose I do have some vague sense that my children will start reading serious literary fiction in their late teens, which is exactly what happened for me.  But if that is not the case, then I will need to do a serious purge.  If there is another big move (and hopefully that will not be the case), I think the academic books will have to go.

As far as books that I remember reading twice, it is a relatively short list (I'm not counting poetry or plays and am not worrying overmuch about short story collections or SF for that matter):

M. Atwood Cat's Eye
Paul Auster New York Trilogy (City of Glass for sure and probably the whole enchilada)
Djuna Barnes Nightwood
Barthelme The Dead Father
Bellow Dangling Man
Bellow Seize the Day
Borges Ficciones
Borges A Personal Anthology
Bulgakov The Master and Margarita (and a third time in 2021!)
Calvino Invisible Cities
Carroll Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Lookingglass
Conrad Heart of Darkness/Secret Sharer
Coover Pinocchio in Venice
Dickens A Christmas Carol
Dickens Pickwick Papers
Dostoevsky Notes From Underground
Ellison Invisible Man
Faulkner Absalom, Absalom
Faulkner The Sound and the Fury
Findley Headhunter
Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby
G. Greene Travels With My Aunt
Hemingway The Sun Also Rises
Joyce Ulysses
Kafka Amerika
Kafka The Trial
Kafka The Castle
Kroetsch The Studhorse Man
Kurkov Death and the Penguin

Lamming In the Castle of My Skin
Leacock Sunshine Sketches of a Small Town
MacLennan Two Solitudes
MacLennan The Watch That Ends the Night
Melville Moby Dick
Narayan Mr. Sampath: the Printer of Malgudi
Katherine Anne Porter Ship of Fools
Powers Morte D'Urban
Rushdie Midnight's Children
Rushdie The Satanic Verses
Tayeb Salih Season of Migration to the North
Swift Gulliver's Travels
Toole A Confederacy of Dunces
Turgenev Fathers and Sons
V. Woolf Jacob's Room
Zelazny Roadmarks

It does seem that being on the short side increases the odds I'll try to reread a particular book.

It's definitely a longer list of books that I think I will probably get around to reading a second time (which is a very small subset of books that deserve a second or third reading, but I don't want to expand this too much).  These are the ones I'll make a real effort to reread, though I notice that only Madison Smartt Bell's Waiting for the End of the World has actually made it onto a TBR list as of yet, though I just added Mrs. Dalloway to the very end.  (I am expecting to start adding Barbara Pym and Lessing's The Diaries of Jane Somers to the list soon, but probably won't get to them until 2016 at the earliest.)

Martin Amis London Fields
Margaret Atwood The Edible Woman
Austen Sense and Sensibility 
Donald Barthelme Sixty Stories
Donald Barthelme Forty Stories
Madison Smartt Bell Waiting for the End of the World
Bellow The Adventures of Augie March*
Bellow The Dean's December
George Bowering Burning Water
Bronte Wuthering Heights
Cervantes Don Quixote
Chaucer Canterbury Tales
Cheever The Wapshot Chronicle (not read originally under conducive circumstances)
Robertson Davies The Deptford Trilogy (& there is a reasonable chance that I will tackle the Cornish and Salterton trilogies again some day)
Leonard Cohen Beautiful Losers
Don DeLillo White Noise
Kiran Desai The Inheritance of Loss
P.K. Dick The Man in the High Castle (& possibly Flow My Tears/Do Androids Dream...)
Dostoevsky Crime and Punishment
Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov
Stuart Dybek The Coast of Chicago
William Faulkner Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury
Timothy Findley Not Wanted on the Voyage
Carlos Fuentes Christopher Unborn

Garcia Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude
Garcia Marquez In Evil Hour
Garcia Marquez The Autumn of the Patriarch
Garcia Marquez Love In the Time of Cholera
Garcia Marquez No One Writes to the Colonel
Greene The Quiet American
Greene Monsignor Quixote
James Joyce Dubliners
James Joyce Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce Ulysses (yes, a third go-round)
Kafka Complete Short Stories
Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible (while I would like to get through this again, it is probably the least likely of all of them)
George Lamming The Emigrants
Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing The Diaries of Jane Somers
MacLennan The Watch That Ends the Night (I barely remember this at all, other than I did read it)
Mahfouz Midaq Alley
Melville The Confidence Man
Toni Morrison The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison Sula
James Morrow Towing Jehovah (and possibly This is the Way the World Ends)
V.S. Naipaul A House for Mr. Biswas
Flann O'Brien At Swim-Two-Birds
Flann O'Brien The Third Policeman
Tim O'Brien Going After Cacciato
Tim O'Brien The Things They Carried
Ovid Metamorphoses
Barbara Pym (pretty much all her novels)
Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon Gravity's Rainbow (and probably V as well for good measure)
Rushdie Shame
Slesinger The Unpossessed
Steinbeck Cannery Row  
Anthony Trollope The Palliser novels (this may be just a pipe dream -- I definitely need to read The Chronicles of Barsetshire first!)
Vanderhaege My Present Age
Vargas Llosa The Green House
Vargas Llosa Conversation in a Cathedral
V. Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
V. Woolf To the Lighthouse
V. Woolf The Waves

* I'm thinking more and more seriously about rereading Bellow's Herzog and Seize the Day.  It turns out that LOA has a volume with Herzog, Seize the Day and Henderson the Rain King.  It is so tempting to order it, but I wasn't all that taken with Henderson the Rain King.  Seize the Day is a short novel, and I could vaguely imagine reading it a third time, but when would I ever read Herzog more than once more?  So I will try to be mature about it and just borrow these from the library at the appropriate time. 

Saul Bass book

I was quite fortunate that the library had Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design on the shelves last week.  (I have made great progress in clearing out my virtual library For later shelf.)  It is a massive book, full of graphic art and corporate logos.  I had no idea Bass was responsible for so many logos, including AT&T, Dixie Cups, Lawry's Seasoning, United Airlines, Quaker Oats, Minolta, United Way and Girl Scouts of America.

 

But of course, Bass is mostly known for his absolutely incredible title sequences.  

While I hate to gripe, it is a shame that they couldn't have figured out a way to include a DVD of them or link to some on-line archive.  I suspect a number of them are on YouTube (probably illicitly) and that can be very hit-or-miss in terms of quality, including whether sound is actually present or not, and of course the all important question of whether one is forced to sit through an ad ahead of time.

From the book, I've compiled a nearly complete list of films with Bass title sequences.  (There were a few that just didn't strike me as that interesting from the images provided in the book or that seemed particularly uncharacteristic.)  

I think my project for next year* will be to watch most, if not all of them.  Or re-watch them.  But then to go ahead and clip out the title sequences for further study and review.  Fortunately, in many cases, these are enjoyable films in their own right, though there are a few that I would only watch as part of this larger project, and I suspect at least a handful aren't in general circulation (and I may have to rely on YouTube).  I'll put an V in front if I've already viewed the film, and this second time around, I'll use Xs (so I guess a small x if I only manage to watch the title sequence and not the entire movie).

Carmen Jones
V Man Golden Arm
V Anatomy of a Murder
Saint Joan
Bonjour, Tristesse
Advise and Consent
Bunny Lake is Missing 
Seven Year Itch
Love in the Afternoon
V Some Like it Hot
One Two Three
Storm Center
V Around the World Eighty Days (end credits as well)
Edge of the City
Pride and the Passion 
The Big Country
V Vertigo
V North by Northwest
Psycho
Facts of Life
Ocean’s Eleven
Magnificent Seven
Spartacus
Something Wild (from 1961, not the Jonathan Demme movie from the 80s)
West Side Story
Walk on the Wild Side
Nine Hours to Rama
V It’s a Mad Mad Mad World
V Seconds
Grand Prix 

(After a long layoff from doing title sequences for others**, Bass was brought back and worked primarily on Martin Scorsese films.)
Big
Doc Hollywood
V War of the Roses
Goodfellas
Cape Fear
V Age of Innocence
Higher Education
Casino

I don't have anything particularly profound to say about this book.  If you love graphic design, you've probably already bought it.  It's a little too static for someone like myself who is primarily interested in Bass's title sequences and not particularly interested in corporate logos.  Still, with the exception of the Pink Panther sequence from the Pink Panther and the Inspector from A Shot in the Dark I can't think of many other cases where I paid much attention to the movie titles.  So hats off to Saul Bass.

* My project for last year was to work my way through Akira Kurosawa's films, at which I failed miserably.  I only made it through the first 6 films in the AK100 box before stalling out completely (though I've seen 5 or 6 of his late films, including Dreams on its US release). I just ran out of time, not of interest.  But I will get through them sooner than later.

** During this time he actually directed a few short films himself.  Most of them don't seem quite up my alley, though I'll rent them if I have a chance.  The one that I will make an effort to try to catch is called Notes on the Popular Arts.

And another (Greek) thing

That last post went a bit longer than I expected.  This one has the potential to as well, but I'll try to reign it in.  Looking at the influence of Greek mythology and literature on fiction writers suggest there are two strands.  Writers will either pick up some of the Greek characters and repurpose them, or they will actually try to rewrite one of the classics, most typically Homer's Odyssey.  (I mean one could argue that a lot of war stories, particularly if there is a siege involved, are just a retelling of The Iliad.  However, I read so few novels about war.  Still, I'll keep this in mind when I finally tackle Grossman's Life and Fate.)  Personally, I find the themes of the Odyssey much more compelling (persistence, long periods of struggle, longing for home, fidelity, reunion), and it doesn't surprise me that they pop up in all kinds of fiction. 

Well, to be absurdly brief, Joyce's Ulysses is the most famous of all the retellings of the Odyssey.  I'm pretty sure I read this before going off to college, though I certainly wouldn't have understood it at the time.  While I have come to enjoy it a fair bit and find it quite profound, I think it helps a great deal to be in a class or a reading group to help walk you through it the first time.  I actually studied it in my senior year.  Fast forward a couple of years, and I read it right before starting graduate school in English lit. at the University of Toronto.  That was still a young man's reading of Ulysses, however.  I think I'll wait until I'm 50, then tackle it again.

Ok, while it isn't a scene by scene re-enactment, I definitely think Kroetsch's Studhorse Man draws heavily on the Odyssey and his wanderings.  Also, there is a Penelope figure.  And Kroetsch doesn't shy away from the fact that Hazard Lepage (like Odysseus) had plenty of "action" while away on the road, but it would have been unacceptable and practically unthinkable for Penelope to have been unfaithful.

A few years back, Zachary Mason published The Lost Books of the Odyssey, which I finally checked out of the library.  This falls somewhere between Einstein's Dreams (by Alan Lightman) and Calvino's Invisible Cities, in that Mason picks up on certain elements of the Odyssey and magnified them, and comes up with alternative versions of Odysseus's journey home.  For instance, in an early episode, he comes home to find that Penelope has remarried, but just before he erupts in rage (and presumably kills everyone in the household) he decides this is just an illusion cast by a sorceress, and he heads back out to find the real Ithaca.  It seems quite clever, but I haven't finished it yet.  I am not sure how much Telemachus figures into this work (he is reasonably important in Atwood's Penelopiad), and Louise Glück has a short poem about him.  I'd assume he'll turn up soon enough in Mason's many-layered work.

At this point, I am just going to defer to a true expert.  Edith Hall, a professor of classics at the University of London.  A few years back she wrote The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey.  And then she recorded a podcast where she discusses the cultural impact of this legend.  The book looks pretty interesting in that it also delves into theatre, movies, and even popular song, like Susan Vega's Calypso. While I wouldn't say this is light bedtime reading, I will probably try to check it out one of these days, particularly if I do tackle Joyce's Ulysses in the next 5-6 years.

To go along with the theme that sometimes it is good learning from others (and that there is no shame in not coming up with every great idea yourself), I remember learning in college that quite a number of Southern writers explicitly started comparing their society with ancient Greece.  Greece was viewed as kind of a largely agrarian paradise and slavery was just naturally a part of this.  What is particularly odd is that this cultural move persists after the end of the Civil War, although it is no longer an uncritical longing for a lost arcadia but a more complex, knowing look at the past.

Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples from 1949 contains allusions to the race between Atalanta and Hippomenes, but also to Zeus in "The Golden Shower."  Other mythical figures appear in the other stories.  While I am quite sure I have the complete stories of Flannery O'Connor somewhere, and I have the Library of America edition of Katherine Anne Porter's stories (and her Ship of Fools separately), I simply can't recall which version I have of Eudora Welty's stories.  After the move and the Great Unpacking, I will try to figure this out.  I may go with the two volume Library of America edition.  Anyway, these were very good stories, from what I can recall.

Faulkner admitted being influenced by Greek tragedy (as well as by the Old Testament, Dostoevsky, Melville, and Conrad), though one sort of sees it in the general shape of a tragedy spanning generations (Aeschylus's Oresteia influencing the Snopes Trilogy for instance) rather than him picking up specific Greek legends.

To go back to the Greek myths in their broader context, Orpheus and Eurydice are very influential, perhaps moreso for poets than novelists.  Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus is certainly the most famous and extended meditation on the myth.  But we have Milton, Auden, Jorie Graham, Czesław Miłosz and even John Ashbery have tackled Orpheus.  Apparently, Thomas Pynchon can't get the whole going down to the underground theme out of his head and has used it both in Gravity's Rainbow and Against the Day.  Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet contains a magical musician drawn from Orpheus.  Finally, Samuel Delany's The Einstein Intersection is a SF retelling of the myth (I don't remember if I actually read this or not, but I did own it at one point).

There is just such richness in these myths.  Louise Glück has a poetry collection titled The Triumph of Achilles, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg (a more obscure poet) has a volume called The Throne of Labdacus -- appropriately enough a much more obscure figure.  However, this volume also contains poems that explore the myth of Oedipus.  (I'll be honest.  I'm not going to touch on Oedipus (or even Electra), as I could be here all day.)  Sometimes the slightly more obscure mythic figures are best, as the poet or novelist can really make them her or his own.  At any rate, the Greek myths continue to inspire writers and artists of all stripes.  To give some very recent examples, I've just encountered a couple of poems riffing on Persephone in the last couple of months.  "As Persephone" by Carmelita McGrath in Escape Velocity and "Pomegranate" by Michael Crummey in Salvage.

And who can forget Daedalus and his son, Icarus, whose wax wings melt when he gets too close to the sun.  Daedalus is interesting, as so many novelists are interested in mazes and maze makers, and Icarus is an intriguing morality lesson on the limits of human ambition.  To restrain myself to just a single example, in "Musée des Beaux Arts," Auden reflects on a painting (Breughel's Icarus): "the ploughman may / Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, / But for him it was not an important failure..."  But if I started talking about the use of Greek mythology in painting, I could be here all day.

As this is spiraling out of control, I will wrap up with one of the more intriguing figures: Theseus who had to get into and out of the maze (with Ariadne's help), killing the Minotaur along the way.  Armchair psychologists have had a field day with this ever since.  I have no intention of reading them, but apparently The Hunger Games is all drawn directly from the set-up of the Theseus myth (7 girls and 7 boys offered up as an annual sacrifice to the Minotaur).

But what if the Minotaur didn't die?  Picasso was deeply obsessed with the Minotaur figure and came up with some great etchings in his Vollard Suite.

Picasso, Scène bacchique au Minotaure from the Vollard Suite, 1933

Steven Sherril's The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break is a somewhat melancholy novel exploring this possibility.  

It seems the Minotaur truly is immortal, though he must have been rescued from apparent death by one of the gods.  He has migrated to North Carolina and has taken a job as cook in a rundown restaurant.  He has a speech impediment, naturally, and is generally mistreated by the other inhabitants of the trailer park where he lives.  It is a big come-down for a mythological beast.  Still, a very interesting novel.  If this post does nothing else, hopefully it will inspire you to check out Sherrill's overlooked novel.

The influence of Greek tragedy on theatre

Now that's a huge topic.  I assume there are dozens, if not a hundred, academic treatises on the subject.  Can I really add much?  Probably not.  But I'll see if I can boil down my thoughts to just a few paragraphs.  There are a few specific things I want to get in there by the end of the post to justify it.

I think almost all classical tragedy has the protagonist driven by a fatal flaw, typically pride/hubris, that sets the events in motion.  There is a sense of inevitability hanging over the play, and of course for most audiences, particularly Greek ones, they would have known the outcome would be a sad one.  Typically, they would even know the ending.*  There may be a few false turns here and there and passages that showed the protagonist trying to escape fate, but largely the tone was the same.  Aside from the chorus, there often are only a relatively few characters, since the focus is on one person and his (or more rarely her) fate.  Of all the Greek plays that I can recall, Medea is probably the most frustrating, as it does not seem inevitable that she must carry through her revenge against Jason.

Now I am not sure where the break really comes from, as European drama that emerged from the Middle Ages was almost entirely restricted to mystery plays and other religious pageants (and for that matter I am not really sure when Greek drama was reintroduced into Northern Europe).  But let's move to Shakespeare.  He was certainly aware of at least the outlines of Greek mythology (as we see from A Midsummer's Night's Dream) and he bought into the idea of the tragic flaw in most of his major tragedies.  But he also had plays that are more properly simply called dramas where people, even kings, just are swept up in plots and betrayals, and their deaths don't seem to be specific to their internal flaws.

For that matter, while Romeo and Juliet is certainly tragic, is it a classical tragedy in the sense that the outcome was inevitable?  Romeo is a bit impetuous (as well as being hot-headed), but it is more a matter of bad timing and bad luck than anything stamped into his character that brings about the ending.  Of the tragedies that I can recall, Othello and Lear feel the most inevitable and the closest to a true Greek tragedy (while I still think there is too much contingency that conspires against Othello, it really isn't that hard to undermine his self-confidence and thus his faith in Desdemona and her love for him, so his downfall does seem a bit inevitable, even if brought about by another).  The others have a lot more twists and turns where it is a combination of character and bad luck that bring about their downfall.  This is arguable of course.  Some would argue that due to Macbeth's ambition, the outcome was inevitable.  I think that fitting Hamlet into the standard Greek mode is by far the hardest.

At any rate, what is definitely different about Shakespeare (and some of his artistic forebears) is the introduction of a number of side plots and tonal shifts.  At least some playwrights (and movie directors) feel that breaking up the tone and introducing comic elements then makes the tragic aspects (and ending) more compelling.  The best of all is when the audience doesn't feel that the ending is inevitable, but that when it comes it "fits" and makes logical sense with what has come before, but it still doesn't feel preordained.  Again, it is mostly a matter of taste, and some prefer the more stripped down and direct Greek tragedy.  Going the Shakespearean route does mean introducing more characters and generally longer plays.

Most contemporary drama seems to be coming out of the Shakespearean vein, and indeed, generally is more dramatic than purely tragic (with the tragic flaw and inevitability of it all).  But there have always been those that revert to more of a classical Greek approach.

Of the major U.S. dramatic playwrights, I would group Arthur Miller with Shakespeare (with All My Sons being the most classically tragic but still not particularly Greek), while Tennessee Williams really does take more of a Greek approach in a lot of his plays, although it is true that they don't all end in death (unless one counts a spiritual death).  The ones that are the most Greek (to me) are Sweet Bird of Youth and, obviously, Orpheus Descending.

Eugene O'Neill is a bit of a hybrid,  I would generally contend that as he matured, his plays did take on more of Greek flavour.  The Emperor Jones really does seem to have Greek roots (though Greek filtered through Othello).  Desire Under the Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra and Long Day's Journey Into Night seem the most Greek, particularly with the restriction of characters in Long Day's Journey to only the most essential.  The Iceman Cometh has aspects of the Greek tragedy, including the horrifying reveal, but O'Neill does tweak it a bit, trying to withhold catharsis from the other characters, as well as the audience.  I do like how the barflies are partly realized characters and partly Greek chorus.

I wish I had more time to go into this in depth, but I'll have to wrap it up (my daughter is bugging me to get onto the computer).  After O'Neill, Lanford Wilson seems to come fairly close to a Greek tragedy in at least some of his works, though perhaps coming through O'Neill first.  Balm in Gilead seems more than a little influenced by The Iceman Cometh, though I wonder if the ending doesn't violate the rules of Greek tragedy by not stemming from a tragic flaw, but rather just being part of the general violence of New York City in the 1960s.

Sarah Ruhl has occasionally taken on Greek myths.  Sometimes it is more of a name-checking, but sometimes it is a more in-depth update of the Greek approach to drama.  Certainly the most notable one is Eurydice, where we follow Eurydice through the underworld.  This play isn't really motivated by the hero's tragic flaw -- it is more of an investigation of the aftermath of Greek gods playing their games and to some extent it is giving a bit of voice to those victims who are almost an afterthought in most Greek (and contemporary) tragedy.  However, Ruhl does revert back to basics in introducing a chorus of three talking rocks.  So that was kind of cool.

Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad is a feminist take on the handmaids who were killed when Odysseus returned from his epic journey.  The legends are hazy on whether this was just a misunderstanding and Penelope couldn't stop Odysseus in time or whether she did in fact view them as being as pernicious as the suitors. (She certainly didn't mind the suitors being bumped off.)  Atwood plays with a few alternatives including that it was just easier keeping Telemachus on board by keeping him in the dark about her actually engaging the maids to distract the suitors.  Needless to say, the maids wonder what happened to female solidarity...

Finally, I think Enda Walsh's Penelope is also a quite interesting exploration of Penelope being left behind.  However, it is almost a running joke that Penelope has no voice (while the suitors completely fill he stage with endless dialogue) and certainly she isn't viewed as being the clever, active agent of the myth.  (There is no shroud to speak of, although this is often staged with Penelope as a distant figure (more a symbol of desire than an actual female) and she could certainly be placed behind a weaving or a tapestry.)  Really the focus is on 4 remaining suitors, and here we really do feel the inevitably of their demise.  In fact, one of the characters relates he had a dream that this was the day that Odysseus would return, and it soon becomes apparent that this is a true vision.  The final scene of the play when the barbeque catches fire is quite powerful.  So definitely a strange version of a Greek tragedy, but still an interesting and powerful take.  I am quite lucky that I was able to see it staged twice.  The second time around (one of the few good productions I did see in Vancouver) allowed me to pick up more on the intertwined themes of fate and masculine rivalry.  And the language really is pretty amazing.  It didn't hurt that both productions were able to pull off a pretty amazing set (the play is set at the bottom of a drained swimming pool where the remaining suitors prepare for their daily attempt to woo Penelope).  I would say that this is a play that really grew on me. I would encourage people to seek it out if it does end up playing anywhere near you.  As far as I can see the only current production of Penelope is at Rogue Machine Theatre in LA, opening next week in fact (and in rotation with Rajiv Joseph's Gruesome Playground Injuries, which incidentally I should catch at the very beginning of July).

* I suspect the ancient Greeks didn't have the same concerns over spoilers that we do today.

Vancouver let-downs, part 2

Or more likely part 5 or 6.  I'll keep this fairly short but tart.

I already mentioned how annoyed I was at a Vancouver musical society that raised their door price well beyond the advance price (and if I am recalling correctly what was actually printed in the newspaper).  I left in a huff.

This past weekend I just barely made it in time to see the Vancouver Philharmonic performing Dvorak's Cello Concerto and Symphony 9.  The tickets were the correct price, which was a good start.  I didn't have a lot of experience with the Vancouver Phil, but I thought that Dvorak's 9th is a pretty forgiving piece, so could they really mess it up that much?

Well, it turns out they are essentially an amateur orchestra.  I am surely being too harsh, but I found them pretty sloppy, particularly the horn section.  The Cello Concerto wasn't too bad, particularly in the 2nd movement when the cello largely has the field to itself, but the 3rd movement was kind of mangled.  I actually decided to bail at intermission, so I am not sure if they managed to pull off the 9th, but I certainly have my doubts.  As it happens, the Toronto Symphony is doing Dvorak's 9th in Oct. I believe, so I'll try to catch that.

Then today was free donut day in the US but apparently not in Vancouver (or only at Krispy Kreme, which only has an outlet in Delta, which is a heck of a long way to go for a free donut).  The Tim Horton's people just told the guy in front of me: no--no free donuts here.  So I got out of line.  What gives, Timmy?  You're only giving away free donuts in the States?  Lame.  (Ok, this wasn't a specifically Vancouver-only let down, but I experienced here, and that's what counts, right?)

At this point I am just looking forward to turning the page on Vancouver and returning again to Toronto.  Will being there magically return me to being in my early 20s (when I first lived in Toronto)?  Sadly no.  But it was a place I felt I fit in very well and had the right scale for me.  I don't think that will have changed, even if the traffic is a lot worse and housing prices have sky-rocketed (if only I could have stayed on in the 90s and scraped together some dough for a house then --sigh).  If anything the cultural scene is better than it was when I was there 20-odd years ago, and that I am definitely looking forward to. 

And one more thing... I don't know if this is specifically a Vancouver thing or a Canadian thing or just a rotten-luck thing, but I really struggled to find a place among the writers and artists here.  I kept having ideas including hoping to do a staged reading of one of my plays, and I just could never bring it off.  Now it was not easy doing this in Chicago, but with some effort you could make these things happen.  Not here.  Let's see what Toronto brings. (Apologies to the Hip.)

Inspired by "Art"

In this case I am talking about actual paintings and not the play Art by Yasmina Reza.

Not always, but increasingly, museums in North America have rooms to encourage the creativity, not only of children, but of adult visitors.  The Baltimore Museum of Art had such a room.  Even though I was in a bit of a hurry to get back to the hotel and the conference, I decided I would add something.

In the previous room, I had enjoyed and been a bit inspired by Philip Guston's The Oracle:

Philip Guston, The Oracle, 1974

Thus, I quickly sketched out a bit of a response to it.  This is what I came up with:

Guston was known for all these legs scattered-about, almost looking like what you would see in a charnel house (or given the resemblance to horseshoes, the leftovers from some kind of abattoir or rendering plant).

Philip Guston, Green Sea, 1976

I probably have seen Green Sea on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, but for sure I saw Monument at the Tate Modern on one of my visits.

Philip Guston, Monument, 1976

There is also a bit of a reference to the graffiti Kilroy was Here, which was prevalent in the 1940s and 1950s (and actually figures in Tennessee Williams' Camino Real).  While the meme had faded badly, it still was in common parlance in the early 1980s.  I haven't heard it at all in the last 10-15 years.  It is possible that Styx killed it off with Mr. Roboto...

The other one was a bit of a slow-burner.  I had visited the Walters Art Museum and been quite taken by Paris kiosk by Jean Béraud.  Here it is in its magnet-form:

More on Paris Kiosk and the artist can be read here.

Anyway, I have seen quite a few unusual posters in downtown Vancouver these past few weeks, and I decided that a bit of Photo-shopping was in order.

So (with apologies), here is Paris Kiosk 2014: