Lo and Behold (Herzog)

I've been holding off writing this review of Werner Herzog's Lo and Behold for a couple of months now.  How appropriate that I have been struggling so much with my internet connection for months as well.  It is sometimes the Wi-Fi adapter and sometimes the router that has to be reset, but it is very rare that I go 48 hours without having major connection problems that drive me so batty that I have to go off and read a book to cool down.  Not that spending some time off-line is a bad thing, but I want it to be on my own terms.  These are my local problems, nothing to do with wider internet outages.

Of course, most people are aware that there was a huge cyber-attack that compromised the web for several hours on Friday (Oct 21).  The wikileaks people tried to claim their supporters had did it, but that seems fairly unlikely.  The more probable claim is by a group called New World Hackers, who say that this is only a dry run for an even bigger attack in the near future.  Oh joy.  Due to the nature of the attack, perhaps the only good to come out of this is that it will slow down the "internet-of-things" where all kinds of things are connected to the internet for no good reason.  For instance, this man spending 11 hours trying to get a kettle hooked up to the internet so that he could start it boiling on his way home from work.  However, I also realize that some of these "improvements" that seem so silly to us now will be seen as essential and basically inescapable in the future.

The real problem is that after a certain tipping point, you can't go back.  It is too hard to be the lone hold-out when everyone else has migrated some particular business line to the internet.  This actually happened to me a few weeks back when I went to get my bike from a bike shop.  The merchant had no internet access and couldn't figure out a way to take payments without an internet hook-up.  I somewhat pointedly asked about the machines that took a credit card impression, and he said you couldn't buy them anymore.  I strongly doubt that, but rather he just didn't want to be bothered.  At any rate, I wasn't willing to walk four or five blocks to an ATM and he seemed pretty hopeless without the computer telling him what to do.  (He couldn't even calculate the tax.)  While this may have been a particularly inept manager, it does speak to what happens when we move too many functions to the digital realm and let computers (or other machines) do all our work for us.  (Emerson warned about this as far back as 1841 in Self-reliance, but then also Forster's The Machine Stops (1909) and Pixar's Wall-E (2008) portrayed the danger of getting hooked on mechanical aids.)

In any case, it happens that the internet of things and over-reliance on the internet are two of the ten "chapters" in Herzog's documentary about the internet.  It appears that you can already stream the documentary on Amazon, and in about a month it will be coming out on DVD/Blu-ray.  However, those of us in Canada are screwed yet again with no apparent release date.  However, we did have the chance to see the film, at least in Toronto.  Apparently, this Friday the documentary final will be screening in the UK.  I'm sure the DVD will eventually make it across the border, and of course if not there are always the torrent sites...

It's sort of interesting checking out a couple of reviews (here and here).  I would not really agree with the Guardian review that this is an overall upbeat assessment of the internet; I thought it was considerably more pessimistic about the negative aspects of the internet, not least of which it is so hard to escape it.  Actually, this Wired article about the documentary gives you a much better sense of the documentary, including the fascinating tidbit that the whole documentary was actually paid for by an internet security company called NetScout!  (Herzog retained final cut.)

I liked the documentary a lot, though I felt there were several areas where Herzog had gone in for a symbolic story and I wanted a broader grappling with the issue.  I'll come back to that shortly, but I want to digress and engage in some internet nostalgia.

Herzog manages to track down the original computer that sent the original email message.  It was supposed to type "login" but hung at "lo."  This leads to some elevated banter about "lo and behold," which of course became the title.  Another computer programmer involved from the very beginning hauls out a phone directory of everyone who was on the internet at that time.

University of Michigan was among the first universities outside California to be part of a computer network: a Michigan only network in 1971 and then they were linked into the T-1 backbone by 1988.  I can't quite recall when I first got email but I know that I was able to write the equivalent of email messages to other UM students by 1989.  Actually I had played text-based games off of a computer mainframe before that, probably by the mid-80s, but it that case you had to be seated at a terminal and log into the system.  You couldn't dial in from just anywhere.

The other thing that is a bit hard to remember is that it wasn't particularly easy to just get an email account, even if you had a dial-up modem.  AOL was just starting to take off.  I don't think I ever signed up with them, however.  And there really wasn't all that much content on-line, though it was still easy to waste lots of time.

I still remember going from a super primitive browser (probably Gopher) to Lynx, which allowed hyperlinking between articles.  This was probably 1993 when I switched over.  But within the year, everyone moved to Mosaic, since it had graphic capabilities.  Nonetheless, the internet still was fairly text-heavy in the beginning.  From my perspective, 1993-1998 or so was a great time for emails, and I still have some long back and forth missives saved.  This was a time when I was the most connected to a lot of people whom I no longer saw face to face.  It was sort of a perfect embodiment of Simmel's Web of Group-Affiliations (the part where he talks about long-distance associations of like minded people).  But the trend has definitely been away from writing emails (and long-form blogs) and towards shorter, pithier messages as well as pictures, including pictures of what one is eating.  To me, these developments have been quite a disappointment, and, in that sense, the internet has not lived up to its potential, but mostly through human laziness.  Still, it was neat to be around to see it all happen.  (However, I am particularly glad not to have lived in an era where everything ended up on the web.  The 80s are basically a black hole as far as the internet is concerned.)  My children will have no understanding of growing up in a less-wired era and they will also always have to be aware that almost everything they do will end up on line (and they will almost certainly be cyber-bullied at some point or other).

That's enough with the digressions.  I thought the documentary was quite good on robots, driverless cars, computer security (basically an impossibility as long as there are people in the loop) and the total collapse of Western civilization that will arrive once hackers (or a solar flare) can take down the internet for a week or more (essentially, we have eliminated so much redundancy in the system that there are no non-internet back-ups as that bike shop owner claimed).  Where I thought he needed to go deeper was on internet (and particularly internet gaming) addiction.  He brought up the case of the Korean parents who let their child die because they were playing an on-line game (about raising an internet baby).  And a treatment center in the U.S. for internet gaming addicts.  However, I would have liked some discussion of whether this is really any worse than the video game addicts of my day.  What proportion of internet users or even gamers are truly addicted to the internet, and is this substantially larger than other types of addicts?  I suspect that a certain percentage of the population has an addiction profile (whether truly genetic or not), so if it wasn't the internet it would be something else.  On the other hand, the way that the internet feeds the need for "the new" might make it a truly new and more challenging source of addiction.  I definitely wish the documentary had delved a bit deeper here.

I was going to write something about trolling and cyber-bullying, but this is a huge topic (only illustrated by one horrifying case in the documentary), but this review has already gone on too long, so I'll hive that off into a separate post.  It should be clear that I found this a really rewarding documentary that just was a little thin in a few places.  The Wired article hints that Herzog has a lot left in the can (including material on bitcoin) and that he is shopping it around to become a mini-series of sorts.  I definitely hope that happens, but if it does, he has to make sure that Canadians have the right to watch it too!

Childhood cliques

I have really tried to restrain myself from writing much about the children, but I think I can say that I was quite saddened to find out that one of them is always the center of attention and one is left out at birthday parties. To some extent, this is age-related sorting, and there isn't much to be done about that. (I don't think in this case there is any intentional cruelty going on.)  It will get somewhat better as they get older, but it would be unwise to claim that the patterns laid down in childhood will be completely effaced in adulthood.

At any rate, I will pivot to write more about my childhood, which is safer territory. I think it must have been different for many of us growing up as Gen Xers that there were certainly kids around but most neighborhoods weren't bursting at the seams with them, like it was for the Boomers. There weren't any kids my age or my brother's age on our block, and there were a few kids closer to my brother's age one block away.   My friends were further, and I did spend a fair bit of time with them, but I had to travel a fair bit.  Fortunately, we lived in an era where even 2nd and 3rd graders could go by bike many blocks away.

We moved into a different neighborhood just before 4th grade, and the kids next door were my brother's age or younger. I still had to travel several blocks to see friends from school. This held all through high school. I was also in the Boy Scouts, so I wasn't quite as isolated in childhood as it may sound at first. As I got older, I was able to go pretty far afield to see my friends, and by high school I was actually able to drive halfway across town to hang out with various friends. My brother and I were both latchkey kids and were raised basically free-range, though I had a later curfew than he did, since I was more trusted and a bit older.   In one way, I am sorry that my kids won't have the same essentially guilt-free freedom to drive all over town (Kimmy Beach's In Cars really captures this era well). Not only is there too much congestion now, but you have to do all this moral calculus whether the journey justifies the emissions. On the flip side, they are living in a city where transit will take them almost anywhere they want to go.

I do have some fond memories of times I spent with schoolmates, including hanging out with Neil, who lived on a small lake on the south edge of town. I got to go on their sailboat a few times and tried water-skiing, though I was not good at that at all. I also hung out late at his place and we played some of the very early games for Mac and watched movies like Brazil and The Quiet Earth. Occasionally I got invited to Tim's house for pool parties. On a couple of occasions Brian and Ryan invited me to go sledding. But I wasn't particularly popular, and often I was invited as kind of an afterthought, and sometimes I only found out later that some people had been hanging out. There were quite a few Fridays I spent staring at the phone before giving up and playing Atari in the basement...

I think there are a lot of reasons for this, including I can be seen as a bit of a wet blanket and in particular I didn't want to be around people who were drinking. (It's interesting and sad how this reputation somehow stuck in college (and even grad school!), and the parties that I threw were inevitably huge flops (even though I had bought alcohol). Curiously, the only year I was ever completely part of the in crowd was during my Master's program at UToronto.)

Being always somewhat on the periphery means that you become far more independent and self-reliant and yet lonely. You tend to be less swayed by popular opinion, since you have to justify to yourself that you are following the right path (and of course there is a huge danger in coming across as too judgemental or self-righteous). In my case, I think of friendship as fleeting and somewhat contingent. It doesn't surprise me that I have to do most of the work in maintaining friendships and when I stop working at it, then we drift apart. But there are advantages in not having strong ties, namely that you are more open to changing careers and, in my case, moving to different cities and even countries. And perhaps I should say that I usually end up having interesting discussions with work colleagues that stand-in for the talks I would have with friends, but you do have to be more guarded in talking with colleagues and they tend to only last for a few years, at least given how often I change jobs. For me the trade-off has been worth it to prioritize openness to new opportunities over stronger place and personal ties, but barely so.

I'm getting closer and closer to taking up The Study Group again. What I would like to capture is a bit of this insider/outsider perspective. Even among the smarter kids there were kids who ended up kind of loners and some that were more popular. I suppose I was relatively lucky in that, in my high school, the academically talented kids weren't completely shunned and some were quite popular indeed. There were some weird tricks that we played on each other (notes in Latin in lockers and such). Probably we were completely insufferable to everyone else, but as I said I don't think it was quite as extreme as what you saw in the TV shows Square Pegs or Geeks and Freaks. In my high school, you didn't have to be ashamed of being smart, but there were still other somewhat painful dynamics involved. I'll just see if I can represent it adequately, and then I'll see if anyone else is interested in this particular story. So stay tuned.

Double Bill at Buddies

I mentioned briefly that there are two shows playing at Buddies at Bad Times.  These are actually a production of Nightwood Theatre, though at this point they may be a bit of a co-production with Buddies given they are so prominently displayed on the Buddies' calendar.  I wouldn't say I go to Buddies all that often (probably once a year), though I do try to check out their calendar from time to time.  What is even a bit stranger is that at this point, probably 2/3rds of the shows I've seen there have no appreciable queer content -- that includes last night's shows (Quiver and Mouthpiece), Lorca' Blood Wedding (being reprised this season) and Anthony and Cleopatra.

It looks like this season they are doing an experimental version of Thorton Wilder's Our Town (though it may still not incorporate that much gender-bending).  I'm thinking of going to see Sky Gilbert's It's All Tru, which is much closer to the shows Buddies is best known for putting on.

Both Quiver and Mouthpiece are somewhat experimental.  The actual story in Mouthpiece is extremely thin -- a youngish woman is trying to deal with the death of her mother, which happened the previous day.  She has a number of tasks -- picking a coffin, getting flowers, choosing the dress for her mother to be buried in, and then writing the eulogy.  It's been almost exactly 20 years since my mother died, but I still remember how there is a sort of an assembly line of things to do when death occurs, and people that sort of need to prompt you to keep going through the numbness of it all.  In my case, I didn't have to deal with the eulogy, but I think I was somewhat involved in lining up speakers to read various inspirational writings (mostly from the Bible, but also e.e. cummings and a few other things).  I didn't feel quite as alone or as overwhelmed as this woman.  It does seem to be the pressure to say something meaningful in the eulogy that is the final straw for her, and she teeters between a bit of a feminist-inspired harangue and the nice, proper eulogy that her mother would have expected (just confirming that in many ways the mother was a "doormat" (in her daughter's eyes)).  The same dualism creeps in when she decides how to respond to some random catcalling on the street as she is coming back from the florist.

So the actual story is fairly thin, but what makes it special is that there are two performers representing the chaos in this woman's mind.  About 80% of the time they speak the same lines in essentially the same voice, which is already tricky, but then they also parrot back different voices on the telephone (an aunt, a couple of self-involved friends and perhaps an ex-boyfriend).  When they do different voices in tandem, the effect is quite stunning.  I can't imagine quite how much time they put into rehearsing, but it must have been a lot.  From a purely performative perspective, this is worth checking out.

However, if you are more interested in plot, and can only see one show, then Quiver is a bit meatier.  What makes this stand-out is that it is one performer playing all the roles in a show, using a voice processor.  The video here gives a fairly good idea of what the show is like.  It is basically the story of a single mother and her two teenaged daughters with the main focus on the younger daughter, Maddie.  In a way, it reminds me a bit of the family in Freedman's Sister Cities, though if we were watching the mother when she was still in her salad days and was kind of running through men.  It's certainly a bit tragic how Maddie has to grow up so early and become the responsible one in the family, but you do have a sense that she will emerge from the wreckage of her childhood as a fairly strong person.  I just thought of another connection -- Tremblay's Yours Forever, Marie-Lou -- where there is one conservative sister and one fairly wild sister.  In this case, Tremblay somewhat reverses expectations and our sympathy basically lies with the wilder one who ultimately has a healthier attitude towards society and relationships, while the conservative one is just too closed off from the world and a bit priggish to boot.  In Quiver, we aren't supposed to dislike the older sister (she's self-centered but not really a bad seed), but the balance of our sympathy is with the younger one.  Anyway, it was worth taking a gamble on it.

Edit (11/1): It's sort of interesting that most reviewers seem to favor Mouthpiece a bit over Quiver.  I don't mind that so much, but I found this review troubling, since it in some ways just reinforces the idea that women tear down other women, almost as much as they tear themselves down. The quote is "we’re left wondering why describing a woman’s strength means using terms invoking women who operated in traditionally male roles and music that operates in a traditionally male sphere."  This to me just reeks of the dead end that many branches of academic feminism have found themselves in.  Is it not up to women to decide how they want to find their own voice?  Wouldn't the reviewer be carping about how stereotypical it would be if the artists used weaving or macrame or something along those lines instead of singing?  I think the reviewer is being somewhat perverse in claiming that women can't find an authentic voice in a male-dominated profession, i.e. music, when by that token she shouldn't find her voice in writing for newspapers, where the ownership and control is at least as male dominated as the music industry.  I've had a number of issues with this reviewer, and I think at this point, I will just stop reading her reviews.  I would still encourage interested parties to check out the double bill at Buddies and not to worry so much about the fact there is singing involved...

Tarragon - The Circle

I'm just back from The Circle by Geoffrey Brown at Tarragon.  This was preview week, so it is possible they will get even more amped up throughout the run, but this was pretty intense.  It's somewhat interesting that while I sometimes don't mind reading about delinquents (juvenile or otherwise) -- and characters from Madison Smartt Bell's first few novels definitely come to mind -- I am a lot less willing to see them up close and personal as with theatre.  I just remember in high school actively avoiding the kinds of people that populate this play, so it wasn't all that fun getting dragged into their lives now.  And beyond just being delinquents, these characters are truly trouble magnets.  I'd say there were echoes of Bogosian's subUrbia, but this was even a bit darker.

The set was pretty cool -- all set in a garage in suburban Calgary.  I still had a bit of trouble believing that the parent who let her daughter's boyfriend live in the garage (mostly because he paid rent) wouldn't draw the line at his bong collection.  (One big blue bong was named Trudeau!)  Rock and grunge music played in the background for much of the show, since the play was about a get-together that became a sort of party.

Overall this wasn't quite my cup of tea but I liked three things about the play.  First, I knew something bad would happen, but what it was truly caught me off guard, though in retrospect it was adequately foreshadowed.  So props...  Second, I liked how the rest of the play explained the opening scene, but Brown didn't feel compelled to repeat the opening scene, as if to say "remember this?"  The audience had to make the connection on their own.  If this was a movie or especially a TV movie, the edit would almost certainly have repeated the opening scene, at best from a different angle.  Third, though this is a bit of inside baseball, there is an inconvenient in-coming cell phone call that impacts the plot.  One of the more amusing moments in David Henry Hwang's Chinglish is when a cell phone goes off in the main character's pants.  Here the sound effect is similar, though the outcome is quite different.  I'd be very surprised if Brown had seen Chinglish, since it hasn't even been produced in Canada as far as I know, and its Broadway run was quite short.  It's more of the spirit of the times.  Maybe the single strangest thing about this production is that the Millennial characters (actually shading into Gen Z) aren't always texting other people on their phones (and one of the characters is studiously ignoring calls coming on his phone), but that may simply be yet another marker of how much they are all outsiders.

In some ways, I was pretty sure I wouldn't be completely sold on this production, since this is focused on such a narrow slice of today's youth.  Even in the piece I wrote about teens hanging out outside the 7-11 (and I really ought to dust that off and submit to Toronto Cold Reads) they weren't quite such no-hopers.  But I was interested in seeing the dramatic possibilities of a bunch of kids in one room (here the garage).  I think I will push on and write about a bunch of academically talented kids with a very different set of problems all gathered in one kid's basement.  But I'll have to make sure that there really is enough dramatic interest in this set-up.  It might just be too flat, which is definitely an issue with a number of my plays.  I don't like having completely improbable things happen, and I definitely don't like terrible things happening to my characters, which can be seen as too limiting, at least to some theatre-goers.  Anyway, food for thought...

NYC books

This is one of those posts that could completely spiral out of control.  It happens that I've read 3 books on New York City in a relatively short space of time (Tim Murphy's Christodora, Madison Smartt Bell's Waiting for the End of the World and then the non-fictional Floating City by Sudhir Venkatesh).  Also, I recently learned that Ben Katchor's Cheap Novelties is being reprinted (and supposedly with some old strips not previously published in book form*).  Katchor's vision of New York/Brooklyn definitely a special case of deep nostalgia for things that may never quite have existed.  Anyway, all this reading has inspired me to think a bit more about all the other books I've read about NYC, and there are certainly many.  While I can't go into great detail (there are dozens of dissertations written on these topics), there are huge differences in the books that were written in each era -- the pre-Giuliani era and those written after 9/11, for example.

To prevent this post from getting too out of hand, I will first link to two long lists of books about NYC.  One is from Wikipedia and includes a handful of non-fiction works, while the other is a list of 100 novels.

This post will then restrict itself to doing two things: highlight the books off each list that I can recommend and pull together a list of books that I will try to read in the (indeterminate) future.  I may move a book from the TBR pile to the recommended pile, but I don't feel overly compelled to do so.

The lists will be ordered by year of publication.  There are a few on my list to read that I probably should have gotten to by this point, but, as I've learned, you just can't read everything...

Recommended NYC books:
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West (1933)
Call It Sleep by Henry Roth (1934)
The Unpossessed by Tess Slesinger (1934)
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1947)
Seize the Day by Saul Bellow (1956)
Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. (1964)
The Bag by Sol Yurick (1968)
Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow (1970)
The Tenants by Bernard Malamud (1971) (The Bag through The Tenants all are grounded in a New York City rife with racial tension and a near complete breakdown of social services -- interesting but dark)
Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney (1984)
Waiting for the End of the World by Madison Smartt Bell (1985)
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster (1985-86)
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos (1990)
Marisol by José Rivera (1992)
Angels in America by Tony Kushner (1992-94)
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem (1999)
Jeremy Thrane by Kate Christensen (2001)
The Zero by Jess Walter (2006) (One of the few post 9/11 novels that actually worked for me)
The Empanada Brotherhood by John Nichols (2007) (kind of a minor piece exploring Nichols' life before he became a hit author)
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem (2009) (One of few books to delve into Bloomberg's New York)
Open City by Teju Cole (2012) (I enjoyed Open City, but somehow it doesn't feel that specific to NYC)
Christodora by Tim Murphy (2016) (seemed a bit too focused on artists and/or drug dealers, but had some interesting moments)

NYC books still to read:
Washington Square by Henry James (1880)
A Hazard of New Fortunes by William Dean Howells (1889)
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905)
The Rise of David Levinsky by Abraham Cahan (1917)
R The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)
The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1922)
Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos (1925)
Jews Without Money by Michael Gold (1930)
R A Time to Be Born by Dawn Powell (1942)
R The Locusts Have No King by Dawn Powell (1948)
R Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin  (1953)
The Assistant by Bernard Malamud (1957)
Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote (1958)
Another Country by James Baldwin (1962)
Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell (1938-64)
R Enemies by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1972)
Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo (1973)
Just Above My Head by James Baldwin (1979)
The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (1987)
A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham (1990)
R Moon Palace by Paul Auster (1990)
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez (1991)
The Hours by Michael Cunningham (1998)
Of Kings and Planets by Ethan Canin (1998)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (2000)
R The Good People of New York by Thisbe Nissen (2001)
R The Fortress Of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem (2003)
R Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo (2003)
The Island of Bicycle Dancers by Jiro Adachi (2004)
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill (2008)
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (2009)
Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín (2009)
The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer (2013)

* If you do not have a copy of Cheap Novelties, then by all means buy one of these reprinted ones, but the actual new material consists of only a few more fake ads interspersed at the end of the book.  I feel ripped off (by the Drawn & Quarterly publicists) to be perfectly honest.

Shanley Season

While he is reasonably prolific, I really haven't been that familiar with John Patrick Shanley's work.  It was almost at random that last year I went and saw A Woman is a Secret with the masterclass with Shanley himself afterwards (it really was more of an extended Q & A session).  At any rate, I found he was a bit of a rare breed -- a craftsman at writing plays, which to me seems fairly rare these days.

I've known for a while that the Toronto Irish Players are putting on Outside Mullingar this season.  I have to say doesn't sound all that compelling to me (basically a version of Moonstruck in rural Ireland), but I'll probably go.  It runs from Oct 20 (opening this week in fact) to Nov. 5.  Tickets can be booked here.

What is a bit more exciting to me is that Wolf Manor has decided to put on Danny and the Deep Blue Sea from Dec. 1 to Dec. 18.  I imagine this is a fairly tough play to watch, but I definitely intend to go.*

I vaguely remember that I had the chance to see The Dreamer Examines His Pillow but passed (this must have been in Chicago).  I might still make the same decision today.

I cannot remember if I had the chance to see Savage in Limbo, but I don't think so.  Now that I know a bit more about Shanley, I'll try to catch this one of these days.  In my mind it is somewhat linked up with Lanford Wilson's Balm in Gilead (both being kind of focused on down and out types in seedy bars), but the difference is I still don't want to see Balm in Gilead (and I've passed on it a couple of times) but Savage in Limbo seems a bit more compelling.

* Update: this performance has been moved to Jan. 2017.

Master Harold and some Double Acts

I made it up to North York for Athol Fugard's Master Harold and the Boys.  I found it very powerful production, though knowing the ending I had more trouble laughing during the various amusing set scenes early on in the play.  It is also quite difficult hearing how Willie really has no problem beating his dance partner, though he does promise at the end to not do that any more.  I think Fugard is sort of lulling the audience into a bit of false complacency with the humor, though Harold is a bit snippy throughout and certainly the phone calls from his Mum signal that there is trouble ahead.  Generally the audience isn't very happy with plays that start out one way and end another.  (David Henry Hwang's Family Devotions is another one that sort of confounds expectations.)  I think in this case, the fact that the play is relatively compact (about 80 minutes) and that there is some signalling of the emotional turmoil in Harold's heart has generally led audiences to accept these shifts.

A bigger question is whether the play is still relevant over 20 years since the end of apartheid.  In a general sense, there is still a huge amount of privilege floating about in the world (more economic than racial, though the racial elements have not withered away completely).  I think the play does help people think about how power/privilege is perpetuated and in that way it is still relevant.  I'm not sure there have been that many plays about it, but there are certainly writers (particularly Faulkner and Eudora Welty) that looked at how Southern men could grow up loving their Black nannies more than their own mothers but who still would fight to maintain slavery.  So it isn't really a surprise that Harold, steeped in white privilege, has no problem ordering around Willie and Sam and, when the chips are down, doesn't see them as equals.  Fugard is making a point that racism hurts whites as well as Blacks, and makes it effectively, but there are certainly quite a few people that feel sympathy for Harold is misguided.  He is ultimately the beneficiary of the system, and, while it is somewhat possible that he will think hard about his position and come around to treating Sam as an equal (maybe as early as the next clear day), that seems unlikely.  Sam is, to my mind, just a bit too much like a stand-in for Jesus, always turning the other cheek and trying too hard to save the "soul" of a fairly callow school boy.

Of course, in our relentlessly shallow world, there is a hashtag devoted to #nowhitetears (referenced by this review), which to me trivializes the question of whether this kind of art makes a positive difference by forcing those with privilege to own up to it, or whether it would be better just to focus on the Black South African experience.  (I believe I already mentioned that Sizwe Banzi is Dead is a far more satisfying production, since it doesn't dwell on the damage that racists have done to themselves and is mostly about how Blacks could survive within a racist system.)  I happen to think there is space for both types of plays, and that this kind of art that does feature whites behaving badly is going to be more effective (as far as it goes) than glib hashtags about checking one's privilege, not that either by themselves would have brought down the apartheid system.  As an aside, I was sitting right in front of two people who knew nothing about the play and thought they were in for a comedy!  I did try to warn them, though they were chuckling heavily throughout the early going.  As I was leaving, I saw that the young man had been crying heavily by the end of the show.  One cannot read what is another's heart, but I would guess the fraught relationship Harold has with his father might have been more moving than reflecting on the insidiousness of racism.  I had a good relationship with my parents, and thus this aspect of the play has always been far more academic to me.

Anyway, I would still recommend seeing the play (as does the Slotkin Letter), but just realize that it isn't really the best play to take a date...  I believe there is one week left in the run.

Next weekend will be a bit of an experiment.  At the Theatre Centre, there is a two-act mime show where you book the tickets for free and then decide on the way out what you want to pay.  I wasn't entirely sure I was going to go, and then I found out that the first act is about the composer Dmitri Shostakovich waiting to find out if Stalin was going to have him arrested or worse.  As an extra bonus, Shostakovich's music plays during the scene.  This review suggests that both acts are fairly interesting, so I suppose I should make sure to bring a reasonable amount of dosh to leave in the tip jar.

I haven't entirely decided on the next double act, which is Quiver and Mouthpiece by Nightwood.  This was a bit off my radar, but I just saw a subway ad for the show(s) and decided to follow up.  The two shows are actually playing at Buddies in Bad Times for three weeks or so (details here).  It's very hard to describe in a few words, but Mouthpiece seems to be two actors representing the different voices in one woman's head after her mother's death.  Quiver is one woman playing 3 characters using a vocal processor and a laptop.  I am torn between going during the preview (though this might be a case where the first show or two features technical difficulties) and the last week of the run.