Bohemian in Suburbia

I am very sleepy.

I stayed up last night folding laundry and watching Elizabeth: The Golden Age (the wretched sequel to Elizabeth, both starring Cate Blanchett), hoping some sort of Renaissance dance would occur because I am supposed to be choreographing a Renaissance dance for the production of Henry VI Pts. I, II & III that I am assistant directing. (Actually, there was a brief Renaissance dance scene, but it was not a routine I think I could legally ask minors to replicate.) There were also some pretty horrifying 16^th-century torture scenes, which I was slightly concerned would invade my nightmares, but I was so tired that despite being on the couch (since my bed has preceded me by an embarrassing number of days into the new apartment that I am paying rent on, though I have yet to actually spend more than thirty minutes there) I slept soundly till it was time to hit snooze on my alarm at 8 a.m.

Unfortunately, my attempt to then continue my sleeping in ten-minute intervals was thwarted by my mother, who announced that either my brother or I was going to have to get our ass out of bed and keep my sister company till it was time to go to the bus. Neva (age 10, 5^th grade) helpfully pointed out that since my brother is picking her up from school today, it was only fair that I be the one to get her off to school. I announced, without opening my eyes and still horizontal, that I would rise to the challenge, and my mother, though regarding me with some suspicion, left for work.

Neva sat down on the couch and picked up the sheets of paper I had been looking over the night before, my highlighted and partially scanned lines for Mercutio in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

“What’s a troach?” she asked, rhyming it with coach.

“What?” I said, still desperately trying to pretend I was asleep. I thought there was a typo in one of Romeo’s lines about torches, or maybe she was just reading it wrong.

“It says ten troaches,” she said, showing me my handwritten notes next to the typed text.

“Oh trochees,” I said, understanding now. “Um, a trochee is like, a beat…it’s a DUM dum…” I paused. How do you explain poetic rhythm to a ten year old at 8 a.m. before you even have your contact lenses in, much less your morning caffeine? “Usually Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter which sounds like dum DUM dum DUM dum DUM dum DUM dum DUM. But this line is made of trochees which sounds like DUM dum DUM dum DUM dum DUM dum DUM dum. And that is…important…to know.”

The wonderful thing about my sister is that she nodded and accepted this and continued to peruse the page. “Why does it say 12 and 6 here?”

I sat up and started to put my contact lenses in, wincing as I stuck my fingers in my dry, allergy-red eyes. (I HATE WINTER.) “Because there are usually ten, what’s called, feet in a line, and in those there are twelve and six.” As soon as I said this I remembered there are really only five feet in a line because each foot is two beats and realized I had led my sister astray in the one area I could legitimately offer her some expertise. Instead of trying to backpedal I decided to deftly change the subject. “Did you eat breakfast? And do you have a lunch packed?”

The answer to both of these questions was of course yes. Neva is about 100 times more capable, functional and punctual than I am. (She is also a better swimmer.) But I like to feel that I bring a certain sparkle to her life. Last night she and her best friend and I were galumphing about the kitchen, the two of them reading Romeo’s lines and me trying to remember the Queen Mab speech, till my mother told Neva to get thee to the shower, forsooth. (When I was in an Irish play, she would tell her to get up to bed, by Jaysus, or the potato blight would come. My mother has a creative streak too, but she hides her light under a bushel.)

Anyway, Neva left for school in plenty of time to catch the bus, and I breakfasted on high-fructose corn syrup and read a so-so A.R. Gurney play (in a coincidence, also called The Golden Age. Though in Gurney’s defense, I did also just reread Love Letters and find it fairly delightful). Thus fortified, I drove through the sickening DC Metro area traffic to the invigorating mix of scanning, data entry and staple removal that pays for my burgeoning artistic career, in addition to my as yet uninhabited apartment. As I drove, though, even though I hated traffic, winter, commercials on the radio, my dry itchy eyes and how long it would be before I could go back to sleep, I took some comfort in the thought that all I had to do was go to work, go teach my drama classes, and then go unpack my new apartment, whereas Elizabeth I, when I left her last night, was wracked with angst over whether to order the execution of her cousin Mary Stuart. My day might be long, but at least it was simple.

Nothing like comparing yourself to a 16^th century European monarch to gain a little perspective.

Something Solid and Weighty

Several weeks ago now, I was sitting in the dermatologist’s office looking at one of the trashy magazines and saw a story about Portia de Rossi’s new memoir, Unbearable Lightness. Since I am a sucker for both actress memoirs and body-image stories (aka weight-loss success stories) I figured I would go glance it over at Borders…and then that thing happened in my brain that usually happens when I’m drinking, but can occasionally happen when I’m shopping too, where my id says, quick, impulse suppressors OFF and I go briefly crazy and then I’ve suddenly bought things I should probably have talked myself out of. (It’s the worst! When there’s a book that I feel suddenly I simply HAVE to have, so I can read it RIGHT NOW, and then the moment I finish the last page I realize it’s trash and throw it across the room.)

That being said, however, I read this voraciously, neglecting all other responsibilities, and then instead of throwing it, reread it almost entirely as soon as I was done (partly because I imagined I would write a blog entry about it immediately after finishing it). And despite my tawdry, rubbernecky motivation for buying it, I actually think it’s an excellent, painfully honest piece of writing. It begins, more or less, when de Rossi joins the cast of Ally McBeal, and for the first time begins to really face the pressures of fame. She also reflects back on her teenage years as a model and a failed marriage motivated mostly by her increasing terror that she was gay, and the book is remarkably cohesive in its exploration of her all-encompassing mental illness. Her anorexia is not simply about being thin; it’s a mindset that extends to neurotic insecurity about her work, her sexuality, and her ability to fit into the fabulous world of Hollywood.

What is most striking to me about this memoir is how unflinching de Rossi is about the punishing extent of her mental illness. There is no way, reading this book, to think of anorexia as remotely desirable or glamorous, or to idealize de Rossi as an admirable icon of self-discipline. She describes mixing no-calorie butter spray into everything she eats and using chopsticks so she’s forced to take tiny bites, and at one point in time, admits to living entirely on pickles and mustard. She does sprints through a parking garage in 5-inch platform wedges (which she never takes off, even at home, in case she sees her reflection in a window) barely missing getting hit by several cars in the process, because she “binges” on an entire pack of sugar-free gum (60 calories). She wears only her underwear at home so her body will burn more calories to keep her warm, and vocalizes her self-loathing thoughts because she assumes speaking must burn more calories than not speaking. When she lands the lead in a feature, she avoids telling her beloved brother because she knows he’ll want to take her out to dinner to celebrate. She moves into an apartment that’s left partially furnished and never redecorates, because if she doesn’t commit to her own style, she can’t be criticized for how it looks. Her acting successes bring her no joy, only relief that she hasn’t failed and anxiety about fitting into her costumes. As she gets sicker and sicker, she begins to lose her mind slightly—chasing down a valet parking her car because she thinks it’s being stolen, looking at her emaciated body in the mirror and being relieved she isn’t attractive. “I knew I wasn’t attractive, and that was fine with me. If I didn’t attract anyone, I wouldn’t have to lie to anyone.”

She never relaxes. She seems to enjoy nothing, and finds it difficult to make new connections; her anorexia puts a strain on her old relationships. She’s self-absorbed, closed-off and demanding. The physical toll the anorexia eventually takes on her body is horrifying, but to me nowhere near as powerful as the years she spent desperately unhappy in the mental and psychological grip of the disease. She believes her anorexia is driven primarily by her feelings of shame about her homosexuality, but what seems more evident to me is that from an extremely young age (in the earliest scenes in the book, she’s 12) she was driven by a desperate desire to please, to both fit in and stand out; to be special, without ever quite knowing what was special enough. She becomes a teen model as “proof” that she’s pretty, even though she quickly discovers hates modeling. She attends a year of law school as “proof” that she’s smart, but she’s too busy modeling to go to class. Everything is about external validation, and to be a sexy blonde A-list star in the late 90s means absolutely not undermining that image by admitting she’s a lesbian. Her mother, who is a complicated figure in the book, initially encourages her to keep her sexuality a secret “for the sake of her career;” de Rossi believes she could not have recovered from her anorexia without her mother’s eventual acceptance and reassurance that being gay does not mean she’s a disappointment as a daughter.

When de Rossi does begin to talk about recovery, she’s equally frank about its difficulties. She doesn’t feel healthier right away; although she knows she has to eat or she’ll die, she’s so conditioned to resist food that it’s incredibly difficult, and she hates the way her body begins to return to its normal, uncomfortable functions—menstruation, constipation, bloating, gas. She gains weight immediately and feels tremendous shame about checking into an eating disorder treatment center weighing 125 lbs. She then gains more weight, stops her treatment before she’s ready, yoyos for awhile, and feels as though she has lost the support system that was so concerned while she was on the verge of starvation. It’s not until she lives with a girlfriend who eats healthily and normally, according to her body’s needs, and stays thin nonetheless, that Portia begins to slowly consider the idea that there might be an alternative to endless dieting.

She met her wife Ellen de Generes weighing 168 lbs, and has a wonderful line about how realizing her two biggest fears—“being fat and being gay”—led her to the greatest happiness she had ever known. She also talks about the importance of replacing her obsession with food with new passions, including horseback riding, emphasizing the way she has to redesign her whole lifestyle, not just her eating habits, to really be healed. Finally, and I think this is crucial, she admits that she looks in the mirror and still doesn’t always love her body the way it is—“I still wish I had thighs the size of my calves. The difference is that I’m no longer willing to sacrifice my health or happiness to achieve that or even to let it take up very much space inside my head.”

Reading this book reminded me of reading Truth and Beauty, Ann Patchett’s memoir of her friendship with the talented, wild poet Lucy Grealy. Lucy suffered regularly from bouts of deep, intense depression where she would cry on the phone for hours, or vehemently insist that she was hideous and no one loved her. Both depression and insecurity are things I’ve struggled with, as I’m sure most of us have at some time or another, and in reading these two books I felt both a sense of recognition and sympathy—god, yes, I’ve been there—coupled with profound gratitude that I’ve been fortunate enough never to descend to those depths of illness. Truth and Beauty is a book I’ve turned to again and again to help me cope, not only with depression but with being a broke aspiring artist, with difficult friendships, and with a friend going through an addiction problem. Over and over, just as I think I’ve squeezed every possible moment of meaning and comfort out of it, I find some new life problem I think Ann and Lucy can help me address. Unbearable Lightness addresses fewer issues, but ones that run deeply for many of us—self-esteem, body image, balancing career pressure and personal fulfillment. I don’t begrudge the $20 I spent on it after all. I suspect it’s a book that will travel with me, reminding me not to attach too much importance to beauty, particularly a distorted idea of my own beauty. It was funny, sad, and in a way heartening to hear how matter-of-factly de Rossi repeats throughout the book, “I knew I wasn’t pretty” when she’s an actress I’ve always considered beautiful. And as cheesy as it sounds, it’s a punch-in-the-gut reminder that self-esteem really doesn’t come from external success, career validation, money, or what would be objectively judged as good looks; it’s a continuing struggle to find something solid and unbreakable within yourself, something that anchors you to yourself, the world and whatever larger cosmos you may believe in.

To A Past Love

So I’ll admit this post is only tangentially relevant to reading, but it is relevant to being a bohemian in suburbia. Last night I was sitting around with two old friends and as part of a discussion of open-source programming, they tried to explain basic computer science to me. I had the slightly panicked feeling I’ve often had over the last four years, of being the stupidest one in the room, and considered, not for the first time, the fact that the things I chose to study exhaustively in college never seem to come up in basic conversation with my “home” friends. I seldom have a chance to impress people with my grasp of Alice Saltzman’s 14 scene study questions, or the vowel progression. (I did try to show my mom how I could speak with different resonances once, but I think she was unconvinced of its larger real-world applications.)

In bed later, I was reading The New Yorker, which I have loved and subscribed to for probably almost ten years, and which I generally aspire (with mixed success) to read cover-to-cover each week. I gave my mom the food issue to read recently and she said she liked it, but that there was a shortage of “warm and fuzzy articles”—that they were all sort of tough. This is fairly characteristic, and usually it doesn’t bother me (I feel I am exercising my brain), but last night I was reading an article about a religious organization which has declared a British political economist their Messiah figure, and finding it uncharacteristically one-sided and a little tedious, when I came across a poem. I often skip the poetry in The New Yorker—it’s usually over my head, and I’m too impatient to spend the time with it that is required—but this one caught my eye because it was titled “New York Poem.” (The author is Terrance Hayes.) It begins, “In New York from a rooftop in Chinatown…” and goes on to give disconnected images of people on the street, audio clips (“Someone says ‘abattoir’ is such a pretty word/ for ‘slaughterhouse.’ Someone says/ mermaids are just fish ladies”), and sweeping, near-cliché statements (“In New York/ not everyone is forgiven”). The poem addresses the city and the people of the city, captures the disjointed bustle, fragmented existence, ambivalence and juxtaposition of unmatching things (sci-fi, Miles Davis) that characterize a New Yorker’s daily life, and although most of its specific images meant nothing to me, the rhythm of it, the stew of all those things, good, bad, mundane, wild, shook me awake. I felt a little jolt of recognition and delight—my city, you’re still the same—that moved me much more than anything in the well-researched, excellently written article about the cult. And this was sort of a double validation—not just, oh New York! but oh poetry! Oh art! At this moment you’re trumping journalism and the “real world,” and my chosen path doesn’t seem so useless and irrelevant.

But of course, the dick of it is, I’m not in New York anymore, and I’ve had a lot of ambivalence over whether to go back. A friend of mine asked me recently what had made me fall out of love with New York, and the answer is complicated. In some ways it really has been like a breakup—when I decided to leave, I felt like I had to abandon something that had been a source of joy and inspiration to me for most of my life. I could no longer read E. B. White’s Here is New York for comfort, no longer feel pride and kinship watching Woody Allen movies. I had to be mentally disciplined enough to stop romanticizing it, the way I’ve tried to make myself stop romanticizing men I’ve broken up with, so I could get over it and start my new life elsewhere.  But it’s difficult, when the friends who do validate the artistic existence, who I can talk to about Shakespeare and Chekhov and Adler for hours, are all inextricably woven into the fabric of the city. One of my best friends called today to tell me about taking a cab the wrong direction to a breakfast date; a line in Hayes’ poem, “everyone/writing poems about and inside and outside/ the subways, dear people underground/ in New York,” made me miss my friends badly, thinking of those girls in boots with bags full of books and notebooks, scribbling and journaling and reading and trying to fit creativity into a hectic life where you travel two hundred blocks a day minimum just to go to work and back.

The answer to my friend’s question about falling out of love, I think, is simply that as a child, I fantasized that I would come to New York and become part of the skyscraper-successful, high-heeled elite; that I would be a glamorous, ambitious workaholic, caught up in the frantic pace, ravenously taking in theaters and museums, mastering the life of the very busy and talented. And when I began to feel like I would never be one of those people, and instead spend my life feeling inadequate as they rushed past me on the sidewalk and cursing the construction crews that woke me up at 5 a.m., it seemed easier to look for a different place to be a star than to tough it out in the Empire City. It really was like a breakup—I wept, I said nasty things, I fantasized about other cities, and in the end, on my last day, I took a walk by the East River and said a calmer, more loving goodbye, acknowledging that it wasn’t New York’s fault, we just weren’t as compatible as I originally thought.

But it’s been the case in my romantic life that sometimes, even when I think something’s over, it’s not; and that the time we spent apart was a necessary growth period enabling us to move on to the next stage of being together. And I haven’t given up hope that that may be the case with New York as well. So I’d like to leave you with the other poem in this issue of the New Yorker. It’s a sestina, one of the only poetic forms I’m actually familiar with, because I wrote a sestina about New York in eleventh grade.  Poets.org offers this definition: “The sestina [is] a thirty-nine line form…[that] follows a strict pattern of the repetition of the initial six end-words of the first stanza through the remaining five six-line stanzas, culminating in a three-line envoi.” This sestina by Ciara Shuttleworth is made entirely out of end words.

“Sestina”

You

used

to

love

me

well.

Well,

you—

me—

used

love

to…

to…

well…

love.

You

used

me.

Me,

too,

used…

well…

you.

Love,

love

me.

You,

too

well

used,

used

love

well.

Me,

too.

You!

You used

to love

me well.

The Writing of Plays

One of the many unpaid but arts-related things I am doing as a bohemian in suburbia is reading script submissions for a theatre in DC. So far I’ve read only one script, but I read it a lot, because I wanted to be sure not to a) throw away the next Angels in America or b) waste my supervisor’s time because I was too polite to be honest. Already I feel like I’m getting a bit of an education in playwriting. Like many of us, I suspect, I have my own eternally gestating only semi-autobiographical play that I pretend I will someday write (which was developed mainly in college while not paying attention in class), and I felt a surprising sympathy with the author of this play (who I will call M), despite her semi-rude cover letter (addressed “Dear Whomever”) and the work’s obvious flaws.

For some reason I expected to be cold-blooded, cruelly analytical and highly critical, searching for evidence that I am a better writer than most of the world. (Please tell me that’s how most of us read unpublished writing.) But instead I found myself touched by M’s ambition. Her play is a family drama set on one day in the1940s, framed by the main character as an older woman looking back. In a monologue at the beginning of the show, the narrator has some lovely lines about memory, and the stage directions ask that the lighting mimic the effect of thoughts swirling around the mind. My embryo of a play uses a similar device—it’s in memory, framed by one character’s reflections—and I’m pretty sure I came up with that idea because I just didn’t know how to start. I didn’t know why it was important to tell the story, or even maybe what exactly the story was, so I decided to push that responsibility off onto this poor character. I’d find some reason the story was important to her, and that would carry the weight of justifying the existence of the play as a whole.

The problem in M’s script, however, was that her play ultimately didn’t have anything to do with memory, and the narrator character seemed to have acquired no wisdom in the fifty years that had elapsed since her experience as a young woman. She served mostly as a voiceover of her younger self’s thoughts, albeit with a slightly indulgent, removed tone. She made no mention of a secret family illness brought up in the past-day plotline, nor did she really reflect on the choices she made as a young woman. It seemed silly to have the framing device at all, since it didn’t add any depth to the story.

But the greater danger, I realized, is not that you’ll include an unnecessary style element, but that you’ll be tempted to express in the narration (or voiceover) whatever you’re trying to say—what you want to write a play about—without your play necessarily living up to those promises. M’s play never really got anywhere, even though its dialogue was often entertaining and I was sometimes swept up in the characters. Ultimately it didn’t explore a theme, or come down on either side of a question. What was expressed in the monologues was never really expressed in the dialogue and the action of the greater play. That is the harder trick, I think—to somehow make your characters tell the story, and not by saying, “This is the story.” In Translations, Hugh articulates some of the themes of the play, but his proclamations are in keeping with his pedantic nature, mocked by some of the other characters, and supported by the overall action.

Another difference between experienced playwrights and people like me and M is that the professionals seem to feel less necessity to dictate every moment. (I’m generalizing here, of course; some well-known playwrights are outrageously specific with their stage directions, like Eugene O’Neill, or Frederick Knott, who wrote Wait Until Dark and seemed to think actors had no ability to interpret any but the most straightforward lines). Again, I sympathized with M on this. I definitely understand the impulse of, “I see it in my head, I want to describe it so that the director makes it happen exactly like that.” Ultimately, though, if you’re writing something that doesn’t leave any room for interpretation by other artists (actors, directors, designers), you’re writing a novel. What amazes me about great playwrights is how they learn to tread that line. Write something incredibly specific and evocative, so it’s inspiring to other artists—they have some idea of what to do with it—and yet something that leaves room for them to do what they do. Or, to phrase it more concretely, it’s learning to tell stories mainly through dialogue, which seems like a skill set totally different from telling stories through pictures, as in a screenplay, or through inner thoughts/narration, as in a novel.

Obviously, there’s a craft involved with any work of art, and there’s plenty of writing, amateur and professional, that would be vastly improved with a more rigorous edit. Maybe one rule of thumb should be to tell your story as simply and concisely as possible, at least as an exercise, to make sure there really is a story underlying whatever fancy stylistic trappings you dress it up in. (Another favourite fantasy of mine is to allow key plot points to emerge through dance, my personal substitute for the movie montage; really just an excuse to be lazy about writing the scene itself.)

But ultimately, I think part of what makes a great work of art is ambition and a willingness to risk overreaching. Every time I read Angels in America, I am astonished at Tony Kushner’s creative audacity. Putting God on trial? Roy Cohn haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg? Talking Mormons in the diorama? Outrageous! But a masterpiece. Thank god he never said no to himself, I always think. On the other hand, he had something to say that was huge and powerful enough to justify his 6-hour two-part epic. And that, I suspect, is the other half of the battle. As one of my teachers might say, you have to develop a huge soul along with a huge craft.

The Gaelic People

So it makes sense that as a writer, one would have a healthy respect for language. (At least, you would hope so.) But in his 1980 play Translations, Brian Friel suggests that in for the Irish, language is not only important—it’s the core of their very identity. Translations is set in 1833 in the fictional town of Ballybeg in Donegal, Northern Ireland. A group of English soldiers have come to the town as part of an initiative to map all of Ireland, and part of this mapping includes “standardizing” (ie, Anglicizing) Irish place-names. The English characters speak only English, and several of the Irish characters speak only Gaelic, but this is shortly to be remedied by the foundation of a new, free public school system in Ireland, in which only English will be spoken. According to my director, the generation of young people represented in the play is the last to speak only Irish; our hypothetical children will go to the National School and speak English at school and Irish at home, and their children will speak almost exclusively English. Thus in one generation the Irish national language is almost swept away, relegated to something studied in school or spoken in a few remote hamlets.

The unease that one of the English soldiers, Yolland, feels about the erosion of the Irish language is dismissed by Owen, a native of Ballybeg who has lived in Dublin for six years and is now working with the English army.  (Sorry for that abominable use of the passive voice there, dear readers.) Owen’s older brother Manus, who has never left Ballybeg, finds it extremely disquieting that the mapmaking is being carried out by soldiers—“It’s a bloody military operation, Owen,” he says. The play is skillfully constructed so that this relatively gentle, apparently innocuous act of English imperialism—changing place-names into English—foreshadows the physical brutality at the end of the play as the English, seeking information on the now-missing Yolland, plan to kill all the livestock in Ballybeg (this is in a society, remember, where agriculture and livestock are so critical to survival that stealing someone’s horse or sheep is a capital offense). If they still have not found their missing officer, they will begin evicting and leveling every house in the parish, rendering all the inhabitants homeless. This violent plan of action comes as a shock to most of the characters onstage when it is announced, but one has the sense that if Yolland or Manus were present, they would consider it no more than a physical extension of the linguistic and cultural attack the British were already carrying out.

Friel’s argument, articulated most eloquently by Hugh, the bombastic but astute Irish schoolmaster, is that language defines identity. This is a question that could be taken back to the most abstract philosophical grounds—does language define existence and thought? Is to think of something to name it?—and a conversation between Owen and Yolland compares their place-naming to God in the garden of Eden, naming things and bringing them into existence. But Hugh also argues that language, and the oral and written cultural heritage that accompanies it, is particularly important in Ireland. He tells Yolland, “Certain cultures expend on their vocabularies and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives…It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes, our only method of replying to…inevitabilities.” He says dismissively of English that it’s a language “particularly suited” to commerce, as opposed to Gaelic’s suitability to romance, mythology, fantasy and hope. In a land of extremely impoverished, poorly educated and politically oppressed people, the spiritual and intellectual treasures of their accumulated literature and history is all the Irish have in the way of pride in themselves and gifts to hand down to their children. And in this way, we see, the leveling of homes and killing of livestock is only a temporary, limited, if devastating attack on a few individuals; the leveling of the Irish language is an attack on an entire people.

McDonagh, You Clown, You

Well, ladies and gentlemen, today we are starting our Irish unit, which will probably go on for the next several months. Joyously, just as I was beginning to fall into the depths of despair, I have finally been cast in something, and that something is Brian Friel’s Translations. Whee! In gratitude, and out of my own natural nerdiness and curiosity about my heritage, I have decided to do some investigation of the literature and history of the Emerald Isle. And this began with the reading of three plays by a playwright I ought to have already known (post B.F.A.) but had never read or seen anything by, the unmatchable Martin McDonagh.

I knew he had a reputation for being both brutal and dark, and as I tend to favor the Sarah Ruhl school of lyrical, optimistic drama, I approached the Galway trilogy (The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara, and The Lonesome West) with some trepidation. The back cover of the book describes the town of Leenane, where all three plays are set, as “so blighted by rancor, ignorance and spite that, as the local priest complains, God himself seems to have no jurisdiction there.” The three plays each feature four characters, none of whom appear in more than one play but several of whom are mentioned in plays in which they do not appear, which not only links the three together but contributes to the sense of a tiny town where everyone knows everything about everyone, and most of them hold grudges for decades. To my surprise, I found all three plays compelling, funny, and sometimes heartbreaking, and although they each stand alone, the experience of reading all three one after the other contributed greatly to my enjoyment and my understanding of Leenane.

 McDonagh’s characters do terrible things to their family members, but somehow (especially in Lonesome West, which I think was my favorite) he makes their quarrels blackly funny; I never feel with him, as I do with some authors, that he’s indifferent to the loss of his characters’ lives or even to the gloom of lives warped by selfishness and loneliness. Have you ever felt that? That a writer (or movie director) is killing someone off or making someone miserable for effect or for a moral, without really weighing the cost of a human life, and you think, hey! You can’t do that! I’m not buying that! It needs to mean more! McDonagh, on the other hand, without taking his characters’ pain lightly, allows them to express it in hilariously human, petty ways (until they give in and murder each other); the complacency and indifference with which most of the town regards their crimes is absurd, almost farcical, and McDonagh allows himself some great self-referential moments to the insanity of it all.  It was fun, in The Lonesome West, to finally meet the ineffective local priest, Father Welsh, whose name no one can quite remember and whose attempt to maintain some optimism about the souls of his parish is gradually worn down by alcohol and the unnatural deaths of several parishioners. Father Welsh is a wonderful character because he, almost alone of anyone, is aware of the awfulness of life in this town, the horrors of people murdering their mothers and fathers and wives, and his flabbergasted protestations that this is altogether unacceptable are both comical and the voice of reason in a mad world.

Maybe McDonagh is simply following the old secret of comedy (and tragedy)—he takes an ordinary human condition (being unable to stand your neighbors and relatives) and pushes it to the furthest possible extreme. Because you recognize and believe the scenes of the mother nagging her daughter about buying the wrong cookies and the brothers fighting about toys they stole from one another as children, it’s an easier leap than one might expect to believing they might blackmail one another for their inheritance money or bash one another’s head in with a fire poker. Without judging his characters or condescending to them, McDonagh never descends to heir level of their ignorance and cynicism. It takes a deft hand for a playwright to express more with his work than what his characters say, without making them unlikable martinets, and McDonagh does it skillfully and entertainingly.

As with the Shakespeare plays I’ve already written about, there are so many moments and lines I’d like to copy out for you, things that made me laugh or stuck in my head or haunted me a little. But one thing I am slowly learning (after years of compulsive quote-copying into my notebook) is that at a certain point, what you’re really trying to do is copy the whole book, and you can’t do that. At that point, just go back and read it again. So, dear readers, I would like to urge you to go out and read these plays yourself, if you haven’t already. I can promise you’ll be entertained—I have a weak stomach for violence and darkness, so if I found McDonagh not only palatable but hilarious, chances are so will you. 

P.S. More on Translations soon!

Girl in Hyacinth Blue

Susan Vreeland’s occasionally exquisite novel Girl in Hyacinth Blue traces the heritage of a painting believed to be by Vermeer in eight discrete, reverse-chronological chapters. Beginning with Cornelius, a late-twentieth-century professor at an American boys’ school, and moving backwards to the painting’s subject in seventeenth-century Holland, the book uses the painting to investigate the role of art and beauty in a variety of societies; the ability of a physical object to outlive its creator by centuries; and the question of whether the inherent aesthetic and emotional value of a painting can be separated from its material and historical value as the work (or not) of a master.

The first chapter is narrated by Richard, Cornelius’s art teacher colleague. Cornelius invites Richard to his apartment to show him the painting, insisting it is a Vermeer but refusing to have it appraised or show it to anyone else. It emerges that Cornelius’s Nazi father looted it from a Dutch Jewish family he deported to a concentration camp during WWII.  The guilt of keeping his father’s secret has warped Cornelius’s adult life, preventing him from sharing the painting with anyone (until now) and even from making any close friends. Cornelius even considers burning the painting, as an act either of atonement or erasure of the past. On the one hand, the thought of destroying an undiscovered, unrecorded Vermeer is legitimately spine-chilling. On the other, it seems almost too easy and contrived to pit the epitome of evil, the Nazis, against the incarnation of beauty, Vermeer.

The narrative then moves backwards in time to the Jewish family in Amsterdam who owned the painting before Cornelius’s father, and continues to trace its heritage as it moves around the Netherlands. There are some unexpectedly lovely descriptions of the Dutch countryside, but some of the little girls and young wives aching for beauty in a bleak existence failed to assert themselves as distinct characters. I liked a cynical, materialistic French diplomat’s wife who committed adultery under the eyes of the painting and then sold it to buy passage back to Paris, giving the seller the wrong artist’s name to raise its price; her regret over rendering the painting “illegitimate” by distancing it from its true parent is an interesting and telling contrast to her blithe indifference to her and her husband’s mutual infidelities. She reflects, “How love builds itself unconsciously out of the momentous ordinary,” a phrase that echoes a recurring theme of the importance of contemplation and the appreciation of the small details before you. This entreaty, along with the necessity of beauty and art even in a life struggling for survival, supports a value system I agree with and enjoy reading about, and initially I loved the way the Vermeer was a stand-in for all art. For some reason, perhaps unfairly, my appreciation was slightly diminished by learning that the author is planning several other books about artists (she teaches art history as well as writing). I’m not sure if it led me to question her true love for Vermeer (I was similarly discomfited to know she’d never seen a Vermeer face to face, though she’d read numerous books and gallery catalogues on his work), or to wonder if rather than seeing the painting as a metaphor for all art, I should have taken a narrower view on Vermeer’s specific talents and contributions. Fundamentally, of course, this speculation is irrelevant to the novel’s merits, but somehow it dampened my enthusiasm just the same.

Several of the chapters were initially written as stand-alone stories and published separately, and it wasn’t until Vreeland filled in the gaps in the narrative that she found herself with a novel on her hands. Although later chapters explicitly answer plot questions raised in earlier chapters, I felt the book failed to build on itself in a more fundamental way, and that each chapter existed separately. I also felt that several of the characters had similar voices and experiences with the painting, and wish she had explored a broader range of reactions and characters. The French woman was merrily amoral, but still able to, at the last, appreciate the innocence and purity of the painting; several of the other stories could have benefited from that level of complexity and ambiguity.