THEATER - "Nora"

The problem with Nora is that it makes the superior, natural A Doll’s House into a technical, surreal production. It’s Ingmar Bergman literally doing Henrik Ibsen, and is about what you’d expect. And even after all the clever cuts and additions, the lengthy, proselytizing ending (long enough to be an honorary opera death scene) is still there, almost word for word. Plays today are too often about telling people off and explaining everything; A Doll’s House balanced that with the rich character growth that Nora so easily shrugs off.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

BOOK - The Wisdom of Crowds and the Wisdom of Comics: "The Wisdom of Crowds" and "The ACME Novelty Library"

Don’t read just this review, or you’ll piss off James Surowiecki, author of “The Wisdom of Crowds.” After all, one of the major points of the socio-economic study is that an individual is almost never as accurate as a group. Instead, you should take all of the individual reviews and find the aggregate score, through www.metacritic.com, perhaps, or some other compiling device. Much as I might enjoy you placing all your trust in me, Surowiecki is correct in his assertion that no one, be they the sharpest of CEOs or most intelligent of scientists, is going to be right all the time.

Then again, if you base your purchase of this magnificent book solely on the amount of positive press it receives, Surowiecki may grow wealthier, but he’ll still be pissed at you. After all, another of his points—supported by the most appealingly bite-sized of anecdotes and studies—is that simply going with the flow won’t always be correct. This is far from contradictory, as “The Wisdom of Crowds” will show, but merely a statement towards the intricate structure of society. Knowing how to best utilize the group, or for what types of problems it will be most efficient (there are three, cognition, coordination, and cooperation) is part of what you’ll learn. True to his message, Surowiecki supports the whole agglomerate of work with case studies taken from—where else?—the crowd. Those delightfully well-summarized issues span the second half of the book, ranging from what really went wrong with Space Shuttle Columbia, to the machinery of investment bubbles, and even to the mundane problems of traffic jams, a day-to-day failure to communicate.

It’s all extremely digestible and written so suavely that it’s barely like reading nonfiction. Conversational and relatable for both the white- and blue-collar, “The Wisdom of Crowds” is a fantastic, intelligent read—like “Freakonomics,” only more relevant.

On the other hand, Chris Ware’s omnibus of assorted cartoons and depressingly solipsistic ruminations, “The ACME Novelty Library” is wholly irrelevant. Which just goes to show that a book—or comic book, though Ware is hardly kid-friendly—doesn’t need to have a point to be enjoyable or enlightening, so long as it is exceedingly well-written, aesthetically playful, and above all, different. If you can’t tell from the packaging (hint: the world’s smallest comic strip is on the ridge of the book, another strip accompanies the author’s information), Ware’s collection is unlike anything you’ve seen before (unless you’ve seen his other work before, in which case, you’ve probably already picked this up).

Ware has been taking risks like these for years, perfecting a uniquely geometric form of cartooning that eschews realism in favor of a more cubist expressionism. Though the characters may not be anything more that three loosely connected spheres, their situations, expressions, and dialogue more than convey the intensity of emotion—mostly sadness, though there’s abundant humor in that, too—and allow Ware to be intensely affecting, even as the author himself attempts to distance himself through more and more obscure metafiction.

For all his tricks (and his bag is just as inexhaustible as Felix the Cat’s), Ware manages to cram more onto one page than any other author does, even when he’s using just a few panels. Each strip is a wholly self-contained story, and each is immensely satisfying. Ware uses still panels of inaction to show desolate loneliness, and skips years at a time using symbolic conjunctions (and, but, so, then) to get right to the essential of what is really a life story. Even in small doses, “Big Tex,” “Rocket Sam,” and “Rusty Brown” (to a name a few) are emotionally devastating—examples, allegories, or reminders, depending on the reader.

My personal favorite, “Big Tex,” follows the adventures of a somewhat retarded southerner whose father hates him. While other writers might play up the comic aspect of a father trying to kill his son, Ware doesn’t joke around at all. On one page, his father simply finds himself unable to pull the trigger of the gun (Tex, of course, is oblivious); on another, Tex is driven by his father out into a clearing and left with the most brusque and definitive dialogue I’ve ever seen written:

“Okay Tex, you git out and go over there by the big tree cuz there aint gone be no goddamn icet cream for you today and there aint gone be any no more ever and then you don’t never come back or try to find me or the house again because you aint welcum there anymore at all, unnerstand?”

As the car pulls away, Ware’s cinematic camera (he could easily direct film, instead of drawing still comics, but the effect is somehow stronger when static) focuses on Tex’s confused expression.

There are jokes, too, mostly self-referential ones to the “doomed” art of cartooning, and some historical homage is made to the classic adverts of the 1930’s. But all that is just kid’s stuff, the icing on a rich and multi-tiered cake. Ware, an intelligent revolutionary, doesn’t need to be overt: he simply lays the cards on the table and lets the world take it as they may. As they say, it’s “Something for everyone, a comedy tonight!”

THEATER - "Paradise Lost"

Apparently, Death wears heels and suspenders and looks like Cabaret’s emcee. A snake didn’t tempt Eve, Lucifer’s hand puppet did, and all the trees in Eden danced and sang along. Angels and demons never fought, they modern danced­—oh, and they were all metrosexuals, too. Clearly, Paradise Lost is the biggest piece of religious camp since Godspell. The problem is, while one of the writers (and the director), Rob Seitelman, understands this, the other one, Benjamin Birney, seems to be making a serious play. No matter how they dress up the actors or stage the action, their lyrics never fit Birney’s swinging piano score: his music never fits the mood. It’s not bad enough to be funny, and it’s not funny enough to be good. Is Paradise Lost supposed to be over-the-top or straight? It’s not even gay: it’s as ambiguous as an angel’s sex (though not in Paradise Lost; sexual tension is rampant, and there used to be orgies in Heaven all the time).

The plot, as you may have guessed, loosely follows the novel, which in turn followed the Bible. There’s not much room for imagination, nor is this adaptation very creative, despite creating a female counterpart for Lucifer, named Sophia. No; everyone plays their parts as one-dimensionally as possible, like Beelzebub, who cackles and crawls across the floor, spitting and hissing. Adam and Eve remain wide-eyed and curious (even if Darryl Calmese, who plays Adam, has a lovely high baritone voice), even after they’ve eaten the forbidden fruit, and Lucifer, the richest character in the text, is apparently nothing more than “the Adversary” after all. Paul A. Schaefer, who plays this juicy part, is content just to vamp as the suave embodiment of evil, though it’s at least better than Patrick Ludt’s ridiculous portrayal of Death as a sadistic sideshow attraction. Then again, most of the actors play to the freak show; what else can they do in this mishmash of a show?

Well, they can sing. In fact, most of these actors can sing. It doesn’t do them much good when the music is out of synch with the lyrics, or when their voices pile on top of each other like an unappetizing pupu platter. What does it say for this pop opera musical that, despite hearing close to thirty “original” songs, I left the theater humming “Seasons of Love” under my breath? Again, they try to dress the whole thing up, but the songs are just text in a very strained harmony. I got excited when they stopped singing and Lucifer molested Eve in a dream set to a techno beat: at least that was something different.

An agnostic like me may just see things differently, but I can only say this next bit in a review of a religious play: please, for God’s sake, don’t see Paradise Lost.

Producer’s Club II (616 9th Avenue)
Tickets: $18.00 (212-868-4444)
Performances: Thursday-Saturday @ 8:00; Sunday @ 2:30

THEATER - "Acts of Mercy"

Acts of Mercy is about an abusive father at his deathbed who pleads for love from his emotionally stunted and disturbed children. Though billed as a play about reconciliation, nothing from the plot is resolved or clarified, and is instead just a simple exercise in the endless frustrations of humanity. Playwright Michael John Garcés’s scenes are equally endless, not to mention boring, and because of the poorly-imitated (and worse-acted) Mamet-speak, hard to follow and even harder to care about.

[Read on] at Show Business Weekly

BOOK - Paul Auster's "The Brooklyn Follies"

Paul Auster's tenth book, "The Brooklyn Follies," rolls out all the usual Austerian tricks—you really can't teach an old dog new ones—but those tricks have never felt so funny or lucid before. Don't let the ominous opening ("I was looking for a quiet place to die") fool you; the whole novel is a joke, and the punch line ("Someone recommended Brooklyn") is a long and happy life. It's that ancient Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times."

Auster's protagonist-by-proxy is Nathan Glass, a former life-insurance salesman, who, like all of Auster's characters, starts off totally alone. While Auster is a master of solipsism, he quickly surrounds Glass with a handful of interesting characters, including his nephew, Tom Glass, and his grandniece, a precocious and peculiar nine-and-a-half-year-old named Lucy. That's the whole brilliant plot: a man lives his life, and interesting things happen. There's no overall mystery, no bad guy or obstacle, so the novel is completely unpredictable, as if each moment has been left to chance. In Auster's educated yet simple prose, this is more human than highbrow—a character study, filled with quirky anecdotes and short stories. Don't misunderstand: "The Brooklyn Follies" works as a novel, too, it just doesn't rely upon cheap suspense to keep the audience reading.

Instead of plot, Auster fixates on character: swift, sharp descriptions, believable dialogue, and all the nuances of subtext in their actions. The only sure thing is their eccentricity and roguish behavior. Nathan Glass is the only straight man, the rest are filled to the brim with stories that he leaks with the skill of a master pourer. They are told as succinct summaries, covering a whole life in a couple of pages, but every page is rich with entertaining history, everything from Harry Brightman's scheme to sell a forgery of "The Scarlet Letter" to Aurora's conversion from stripper to cultist.

If this seems like rambling, it's actually quite meticulously swept up by Auster's electric prose. He writes in an ever-widening spiral, beginning at the solitary center, and then circling out in swift swoops until his narrative has encompassed the entire fantastic world. Nor does Auster shy from the mundane: he just wraps it up in his storytelling and makes it beautiful too. Take for example Tom's description of "the indelible moments of grace" he found working as a cabbie: "Gliding through Times Square at three-thirty in the morning, all the traffic is gone, and suddenly you're alone in the center of the world, with neon raining down on you from every corner of the sky." Even as he continues by saying, "you have to pay for it," this "moment or two of genuine, unqualified bliss," Auster is illustrating the opposite: a book of pure bliss, a book where the pages practically turn themselves.

Even Auster’s well-known philosophical asides come across as glossy entertainment. Discourses on Chaplin's "Modern Times" or on letters that Kafka wrote to a girl "from" her missing doll fit perfectly into this well-constructed world, and Auster continues with the story without missing a beat. One exception is a chapter written as a play (replete with a meta-fictional disclaimer) that is perhaps too obvious a discussion of the book's theme (all of Auster’s books, really): a search for the "Hotel Existence," our mind's perception of perfect happiness. But even here, the intellectual conversation is in such vernacular everyman that it's still compulsively readable.

"The Brooklyn Follies,” a perfection of the pseudo-novel that Auster
has been working on since "The New York Trilogy," is a delight to read, full of real wit and character, along with unpredictable events and surprising stories. It’s not what you expect—and that’s half the fun.

MUSIC - Rusty Anderson, "Undressing Underwater"

Practice does make perfect. And Rusty Anderson’s been practicing for a long time, in a wide variety of styles, with the best of influences (like Paul McCartney). Of course, that’s not really practice, nor does Undressing Underwater, his first CD, come across as the result of experimentation. It’s more like the result of a long period of percolation, with ideas bottling up until finally exploding in a spasm of long overdue excellence. Anderson covers all the bases from the psychedelic (“Electric Trains”) to the shred-heavy hard rock of “Devil’s Spaceship” (a song as pleasing to listen to as it is inane) all the way to the slow contemporary rock of today (“Damaged Goods”). This isn't just a well-produced album, it's a testament to rock.

[Read on] at Silent Uproar

BOOK - Kate Atkinson's "Case Histories"

What’s most surprising about “Case Histories,” a spry and whimsical mystery novel, is that it’s surprising at all. The mystery novel is one of the most conventional and stable genres, where things plod ominously forward. The threads are sometimes too elaborate to notice, but we know how the whole thing is going to end: a chase, or perhaps a shoot-out, and, of course, the “whodunit” revelation. Kate Atkinson not only defies these expectations, she surpasses them, all while playfully making fun of those classic and oh-so-outdated staples. She’s not as satirical as Jasper Fforde, but she’s also not as obvious, and this affords “Case Histories” some depth. After all, a book about missing and/or dead children can’t be all fun and games.

Of course, dead children are a blithe cover for “Case Histories”: the real mystery is, and always has been, life itself. That’s a puzzle with no clues, like Atkinson’s narrative. Rather than doling out evidence, she relates character tics and neuroses; she lets them live, and she lets them ramble, and she lets the smaller mysteries work themselves out to a natural, almost graceful, finale.

The story begins with three innocuous case histories (the crimes), which occur in 1970, 1994, and 1979. The narrative then jumps forward to today, as Jackson Brodie, a private investigator, takes on two cold cases. The Land sisters want him to find their abducted sister (1970) and Theo Wyre wants the name of the man who killed his daughter (1994). These characters alternate as narrators (Amelia speaking for both sisters), along with Caroline, easily recognizable as the so-called axe-murderer from 1979. These characters often run into the same people or offer different perspectives on identical events, and Atkinson wisely uses parenthetical asides to color her third-person narrative. It’s clever, but it eventually grows tiring and, due to the similarities in voice, is outdone by its own cleverness. So too, the strained connection of Caroline’s story to the rest of the book: she’s connected to Brodie by tangent only, and her case history never really meshes with the others—mainly because hers is obvious, plot-twist or no.

But the case histories aren’t the focus of Atkinson’s novel: they serve more as a launching point for sarcastic social commentary (the narrators have every class covered). It’s also ironic, given Atkinson’s educated voice, how easily she delves into the most deviant discourses. “Amelia had followed Julia inside under the misapprehension that [the store] sold bath products and was stunned when Julia picked up an object that looked like a pink horse’s tail and declared admiringly, ‘Oh, look, a butt plug—how cute!’”

These dissonances, between the expected and the un-, keep surprising the reader, and these nuanced jokes are a modern response to the classicists’ jolly abundance of description. These details also endow “Case Histories” with a sad little gaiety that stresses the underlying sadness¬: dead people can’t laugh. We, however, not only can, we should. So go: it should be no mystery where to start. (Hint: it starts with a “C” and ends in “ase Histories.”)

THEATER - "I Love You Because"

The new Off-Broadway musical I Love You Because is clever, cute, and well-sung, and loveable not despite the generic substance, but because of it. Forget the flaws in pacing and musical composition and take this show for what it is: an entertaining, no-strings-attached fling.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

MUSIC - Paul Duncan, "Be Careful What You Call Home"

You call it post-modern music. I call it laziness. It’s very easy to experiment, but by the time you put together a professional compilation, it had better be good. Mucking around belongs on a B-side because without a structure, the only thing you can hope for is to convince (by which I mean confuse) enough critics that you’ve actually put together music and not just sound.

[Read on] at Silent Uproar

MUSIC - The Fully Down, "Don't Get Lost in a Movement"

Some people make for better addicts than me; they have a limitless capacity for shooting up, often using the same vein, even after its long dried up. They call that commitment; I call it masochism—in any case, The Fully Down have a nice enthused and infused beat, but the way they jam that needle, only the most thick-skinned of rock addicts (the musical kind now) will survive.

[Read on] at Silent Uproar

THEATER - "Buried Child"

Sam Shepard’s Buried Child is a portrait of a slightly deranged family in the American Heartland that unravels and deteriorates when an unknown relative arrives to reveal secrets that tear everyone apart. The psychological equivalent of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," only far more frightening. This family might not wield chainsaws (on the surface), but emotionally, they hack away at each other. Much of this production is Hollywood-ish, in that it’s obvious and overstressed, but Buried Child is still terrifyingly sad; you cannot bury your secrets without burying yourself as well.

[Read on] at Show Business Weekly

FILM - "Go For Zucker!"

Any movie that bills itself as "an unorthodox comedy" just because it has orthodox Jews is bound to be terrible, right? Wrong. "Go for Zucker!," a German film whose very title is infused with delightful glee, just happens to be in good fun. The comedy, in fact, is straightforward, directed with such simplicity and honesty that it’s impossible not to laugh. Even the opening scene, in which Zucker, a salacious pool-shark, gets beaten up by his mark, is funny, full of playful freeze-frames and sly asides to the audience.

[Read on] at Show Business Weekly

THEATER - "What Women Talk About"

“I don’t want to know that you carry something in your bag for taint rippage!” Talk about your non sequiturs, and welcome to the world of What Women Talk About, a unscripted comedy that might not have a point, but certainly makes “the dish” (i.e. gossip, for the un-hip) look (and sound) really good.

Each week, the cast (four women, each a disparate “type”) make the minimalist stage (black cubes for settees) whatever they need, and then wax (sans poetry) about the men in their lives, much as you might expect four regular Jills to do. Think Sex in the City, but brusquer, since these women lack the crucial, terse pacing of a well-revised script. Think Curb Your Enthusiasm, but with more heart, less sarcasm.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

BOOK - Funny Things and Not-So-Funny Things: "The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil" and "The Sea"

If you’ve never read George Saunders before, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is a delightful political satire, filled with Big Ideas and Bigger Jokes. If you have read George Saunders, this is more of the same, and you won’t be surprised to find that the Jokes™, while Bigger, aren’t any more substantiated, and the more familiar you become with this one-dimensional pony, the less you’ll be laughing. (A quick note on Capitalization: Saunders likes this postmodern emphasis, one of the many things he overuses in his efforts to re-brand the ordinary as the Not-So-Ordinary.) No, the comic “car,” so to speak, is low on wit and heavy on circuitous dialogue. It’s fine for a while, but once the book starts to lap itself—impressive, since it’s barely a novella at 120 small pages, not counting illustrations—the repetition is more than a little painful. Ha-ha-ow.

In the case of Phil, it’s a shame the storytelling is impotent, because the story itself is pretty good: a trenchant parallel of modern imperialism, a.k.a. protectionism, a.k.a. Kill-Them-Before-They-Kill-Us-ism. Set on a weird planet, akin in size perhaps to The Little Prince’s abode, there are the residents of Inner Horner—a country so small that only one resident can actually fit at a time, the rest having to reside in a Short-Term Occupancy Zone—and the citizens of Outer Horner, a place so large that huge tracts o’ land are completely undeveloped (although prone, in typical Saundersian exuberance, to have disembodied argumentative cow heads poking up through the soil). The Inner inhabitants are intelligent and thoughtful and spend all day solving mathematical proofs. The Outer Hornerites (like the titular Phil) are ignorant freeloaders, who do nothing but preen and swoon over their own supposed self-importance.

If you can’t see the parallels yet, consider the main gist of the plot. Inner Horner suddenly shrinks, causing the accidental invasion of Outer Horner, and Phil—whose brain keeps sliding out of his rack, causing him to speak in a stentorian voice—comes up with a Final Solution (yes, that one). He puts the residents in a ghetto (“Peace-Encouraging Enclosure”) and proceeds to disassemble them all, right before God, the greatest deus ex machina of them all, shows up to set things right.

If Saunders were able to steer this narrative, it would all be rich and satisfying: Political Satire Gone Wild. Instead, these bitterly funny passages are followed by much much much much much more of the same, which tends to make the humor masochistic.

No, if you want to get away with repetition and doubletalk, you need a first-person narrator, preferable someone reflective and somewhat progressed in years. Someone like that, distanced from the world, a ghost of himself—they, and only they, have a natural way of flickering back and forth from first loves and bright happy summer days to last loves, now dead of cancer, and the permanent autumnal shroud left behind. The Sea, for which John Banville just won the Man Booker, is such a book, which, in conjunction with Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer-winning Gilead, shows that awards tend to go to deeply meditative novels. Banville is more focused than Robinson, though, and his meandering never seems aimless; his lengthily descriptive, difficult passages are what one might simply call painfully beautiful.

Is every passage necessary? No, probably not. There’s too much description, but it’s hard to criticize it when it sounds like this: “The autumn sun felt slantwise into the yard, making the cobbles bluely shine, and in the porch a pot of geraniums flourished aloft their last burning blossoms of the season. Honestly, this world.” Yes, it’s a bit prolix, but doesn’t his keen sense for beauty justify the need to slug through these verbal trenches with dictionary in hand? And the wordy façade is really just an emphasis for the worlds own deceptive clarity and all the language just an attempt to reflexively dig beneath the visual, to uncover the truth.

“That is why the past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold past and colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that. And yet."

What is the world, ultimately, but memory and vision? What is literature, really, but a criticism of life? (Or so says Matthew Arnold.) Walking through The Sea is like letting paint lick at your feet, each recession of the tide leaving a different picture, each new wave another image, another palette of color. Of course, the downside to walking through water for so long—even such picturesque waves—is that the skin dries up, prunes. So too, the brain. The Sea is an immensely difficult book, one that requires strict attention and frequent rereading, and breaks, lots and lots of breaks. So take a mental towel with you, spread out and relax on the beach: this book, especially the beautiful tragic ending, is a masterpiece.