PITFALLS OF MEMORY

To the Editors:

In Oliver Sacks’s otherwise beneficial essay on the ways our memory of the past may mislead us [NYR, February 21], he maintains that such phenomena as “source confusions,” “autoplagiarisms” and “cryptomnesias” document its frailties. What we sometimes consider to be veridical memories of events may be no such thing and may, in fact, be false. He references the disastrous legacy of the so-called “recovered memory” movement in psychology, aimed at uncovering repressed memories of early sexual abuse. Unfortunately, it is still with us. Assuring us that we possess no cortical mechanisms for determining the truth or accuracy of our recollections, Sacks goes on to underscore the often elusive character of “historical” as opposed to “narrative” truth: what we deem to be past realities may be constructions of our imagination. But then he avers that such aberrations are “relatively rare” and that our memories are for the most part “solid and reliable.”

            You cannot have it both ways. If we lack inborn mechanisms to determine the truth or falsity of our memories, on what basis can we be sure that most of them are, as Sacks insists, reliable? He takes pains to illustrate the vagaries of memory by referring to Freud’s contribution to the subject, indicating that the father of psychoanalysis uncovered “grosser distortions” of memory when he realized that patient accounts of early sexual abuse were “fantasies.” Commentary on the subject in recent years has raised doubts over whether Freud really obtained “reports” or was actually confusing patient memories with interpretations he forced upon them. If the latter, then memory distortion can even assail investigators pioneering the study of the subject. Accordingly, if false memories can infiltrate hallowed corridors of received wisdom, maybe sometimes it’s not better to let sleeping dogmatists lie.

 

D. A. Begelman

New Milford, Connecticut 

‘Master Class’ is riveting drama at Shakespeare & Company

 

By David Begelman

Theater Critic

 

Word has it that Terrence McNally’s play about Maria Callas was inspired both by his love of opera and the classes she scheduled at the Juilliard School in New York City in the early 1970s. But during those appearances, well after her days of glory in leading opera houses, the diva did sing passages from arias in order to demonstrate their proper interpretation.

In McNally’s play, however, the actress who takes the role usually talks around the subject—for obvious reasons. Any simulation of one of the great sopranos of our time doing her thing is bound to result in invidious comparisons between the real diva and the performers who take on the role.

“Master Class” at any rate doesn’t depend on depictions of Callas singing. The play is about her as a person, someone who is portrayed in the drama as intolerant of the artistry of rivals including Zinka Milanov and Joan Sutherland, merciless when it comes to training three aspiring singers at Juilliard, and a survivor of some ravaging personal experiences in her ascent to the pinnacle of fame.

The show opened in 1995, with Zoe Caldwell in the lead and the stunning soprano Audra McDonald as Sharon Graham, one of her students. In Shakespeare & Company’s current production, the veteran actress Annette Miller is Callas, while Deborah Grausman is Sharon.

In the show, Callas’ approach to operatic interpretation involves a near fanatical emphasis on emotional preparation. She stops Sophie (Nora Menken) from singing an aria from Bellini’s “La Sonnambula” before the soprano barely opens her mouth. As far as the diva is concerned, the student has no conception of the emotional work demanded of her.

Maybe McNally’s Callas is a bit too hard on her performers. Although emotional preparation (a.k.a. acting) has improved over the years, the acting abilities of singers with glorious voices like Gigli, Melchior, Tucker and Bjoerling were often less than commanding.

But “Master Class” is only partially about singing, however much the lead character’s part is devoted to its technical aspects. When she pulls back from vocal coaching, McNally’s drama becomes a memory play in which Callas reprises vulnerable moments in her life. These include her youthful days as an “ugly duckling,” being savaged by critics earlier in her career, her marriage and separation from her first husband, her later triumphs at opera houses like La Scala, and her relationship with Aristotle Onassis, as well as the abortion he forced her to have.

As in previous productions, the Director Daniel Gidron’s Shakespeare & Company’s staging includes actual recordings of the real Callas singing signature roles from her repertoire.

Miller’s portrayal of Callas tugs at the heartstrings, although on rare occasions became a bit affected and declamatory. Nora Menken, Alec Donaldson and Deborah Grausman gave pleasing interpretations of students singing arias by Bellini, Puccini and Verdi, while Luke Reed as Manny the accompanist and Josephine Wilson as a blunt stagehand supplied some lighter moments in the production.

“Master Class” runs through August 18 at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble Street, Lenox, Mass. Performances are Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday 8:30 p.m., Sunday matinees 3 p.m. Tickets are $15-$50 and may be purchased by calling the box office at 413-637-3353 or online at www.shakespeare.org.   

     

 

 

  

 

 

Marital Twitters: Donald Margulies’ Dinner with Friends at The Schoolhouse Theater

 

David Begelman

Dinner with Friends is about two couples whose separate marriages go in different directions. It won a 2000 Pulitzer Prize for drama, and recapitulates all the clichés it is possible to track in marital relationships that seem to be going well or are already on the rocks. That playwright Donald Margulies, author of Sight Unseen and Collected Stories, depicts this with at least a modicum of humor in a script that more or less sustains an audience’s attention, says something about his writing ability.

The playwright has a flair for dialogue brimming with yuppie sensibility. At the opening of the play, two of the partners in his drama, Karen and Gabe, have invited their friend Beth to dinner. Before the conversation takes a somber turn, Beth marvels at Karen’s talents in the kitchen, although the latter fears she may have overcooked the pumpkin risotto. She also wonders whether she should have beaten the eggs a bit more when preparing the lemon cake with polenta.

These culinary perseverations should alert any anthropologist opting to catalogue a primal rite of discourse over food and wine in this social set. In some groups, the patter inevitably continues unabated even through the most perilous of circumstances, like hurricanes or earthquakes. No meat and potatoes crowd, this. More likely than not, you’ll also find it watching a sunset rather than a baseball game, just as the couples do in Act 2, Scene 1, when Karen and Gabe introduce Beth to Tom for the first time.

Of course, there are cracks in the veneer. Karen, (played convincingly by Quinn Cassavale as a somewhat prissy and controlling wife), takes an occasion to scream upstairs to kids making noise while watching television. The stridency of her tone has a Bronx tenement, not Martha’s Vineyard, ring to it. But household manners are, for the most part, scrupulously consistent. Which means that when things go awry in a marriage in this crowd, it’s dollars to donuts the problem is pretty nearly always one of communication, or the frustration of unspoken latent need  (as in Act !, Scene 2, when Beth and Tom have at each other). Donnybrooks with flying beer bottles would be decidedly out of character for these folks.

Beth and Tom’s meltdowns are, accordingly, bouts of fury that have natural limits. But those of Karen and Gabe by contrast could have been packaged in Bloomingdale’s. Gabe (played with a marital devotion that sometimes verges on cowering) is especially wary of ruffling the occasionally snippy Karen.  

In the middle of the sedate Act 1, Scene 1 repartee between Beth (played emotionally, and with sudden bursts of tempestuousness by Jolynn Baca), Karen and Gabe, Beth suddenly starts crying uncontrollably. The reason is that her marriage to her husband Tom (played as a spouse struggling to come out of his marital cocoon of unrequited need) has broken down irreparably. The remainder of Dinner with Friends includes scenes between Karen and Gabe, Beth and Tom, Karen and Beth, Gabe and Tom, and a flashback scene when the married couple introduces Tom to Beth at the outset of what will later prove to be a doomed relationship.

All manner of explanation for the rift between Beth and Tom is explored by Karen and Gabe, with a scarcely concealed nervousness about the implications it has for their own marriage. Gabe finally muses about what can happen when “practical matters outweigh abandon,” while Karen poses the searching question, “Don’t you ever miss me, Gabe?” All because what Beth and Tom have been through comes to shatter complacency about a marriage Karen and Gabe thought was as solid as anything could be.

Well, between considering the piety that it’s never wise to be overly smug about anything in a relationship, and the truism that if things don’t work out it’s best to split, there’s not much wiggle room for other options, anyhow. So what’s the literary point of Dinner with Friends? To rehearse two scenarios for audiences so they can wonder which one they are in? There is little here that is imaginative in the way of dramatic conflict. It’s pretty much the same old stuff we’ve heard time and again—off stage and on.

Director Pamela Moller Kareman does a credible job organizing the interplay among four actors who turn in distinct and contrasting interpretations of their roles. Quinn Cassavale as Karen and Steve Perlmutter radiate a conviction about the durability of what they have together, before the dissolving relationship of two friends gives them pause to question their staid thing. Jolynn Baca as Beth and Christopher Yates as Tom battle each other and their uncomprehending friends with verve before they both see newer possibilities in their separate lives.

Ken Larson’s scenic design was a bit on the slapdash side, and forfeited accommodation to the action so that darkened scene changes could avoid seeming awkward and prolonged.   

Dinner with Friends opened at The Schoolhouse Theater, 3 Owens Road, Croton Falls, NY 10519 on May 14, 2009, and runs until June 7, 2009. Tickets may be purchased by calling the box office at 914-277-8477, or online at www,schoolhousetheater.org.

 

Published in Citizen News, May 20, 2009       

Macbeth

 

He is a man at war with himself--in a unique way. He gulls himself into believing he is undecided or uncertain about plans he fully intends to undertake from the beginning. So there are actually two Macbeths who are protagonists in the tragedy.

His dialogues with himself are masterworks of feigned narratives when they are not so transparent that real intentions break through. For Macbeth 1 needs to convince Macbeth 2 he is plagued by internal dilemmas when he only seeks reassurance his plans will not backfire. In line with this, he strains to identify the ambiguity of the world with an internal moral struggle, play acting as relentlessly with himself as he does with others. The masquerade is taken to such lengths, it becomes second nature to him to confuse bombast driven by fear with authentic soul-searching. Only one thing unnerves him: the unknowability of the future, and his Act III monologues, far from being the agonies of a soul cast in self-doubt, are only feigned consolations that it will all go off without a hitch.

Macbeth's life theme is how efficiently he can seize the moment to ensure the inevitability of outcomes that were guaranteed before he began fretting about them. His energies are so bound up with self-subterfuge, he has little time for examining the probity of his aims. Rather, he devotes himself to the destruction of those who would undermine his goals: Duncan, Banquo, and the Macduffs.

Macbeth's determination, amorality, apprehensiveness about the future, and relentless need to cheer himself up combine to create a unique life strategy: casting others in roles necessary to bolster a view of himself. He seems to be saying, "If I wish to accomplish X, I shall convince myself I have certain reservations, and will seek those who will play the Devil's Advocate against my professed uncertainties. Macbeth's career of sham self-doubt creates an aura of moral circumspection. But the hesitant accommodation to natural law is artificial, and manufactured to assure himself he verges on being an all right guy underneath meaner ambitions that make a mockery of such pretensions.

Contrary to the view that Macbeth is a family man however corrupt, he is a totally private person. And far from being under the thumb of his wife, she too is another pawn in his game of self-subterfuge. From Act III to the end of the play she is dramatically unimportant, and is kept in the dark about her husband's designs on Banquo. If after Act II she hardly matters, why should critics assume she matters momentously before it? Macbeth's long-range plans were already finalized before his entrance in the first act, and Act I, Scene VII, is not the picture of a resolute wife resolving her husband's legitimate doubts, but of a husband tricking his spouse into appropriating the role of a partner in simulated war games. "Prove to me I won't fail" demands the general. "You won't if you buck up, old boy," consoles the consultant, "your enemy is within yourself." He has deceived her into thinking he has reservations over murdering Duncan, when what he really seeks is confirmation the whole thing will go off without a hitch. The irony of the scene is that he permits his wife's reassurance to allay his uncertainties about the future, even though it is based upon an inaccurate assessment of his motives.

Macbeth plays the same game with himself he plays with his wife. Witness his monologue at the beginning of Act I, Scene VII, another masterpiece of obfuscation, prefaced by a slew of pseudo-justifications for not killing Duncan:

He's here in double trust:

First, as I am his kinsman and his subject

Strong both against the deed

 

Yet what is the mood of these reservations? Do they smack of personal conviction because Duncan is kinsman and sovereign? Or are they a phony rehearsal of reasons to hold back, as if the general were recapitulating the justification others would supply against regicide? That the latter hypothesis is the correct one is suggested by the fact that Macbeth straddles categorically dissimilar reasons for condemning the deed--too many in fact to convince us the litany stems from heartfelt feeling. Consider likewise another of his recriminations:

Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye

In other words, murder ruins your reputation. But if regicide were morally wrong to begin with, it is redundant to consider how committing it will tarnish one's reputation in the eyes of the kingdom!

Macbeth's litany of reasons against regicide is simply a rehearsal of bromides he has no intention of heeding. But they afford him the luxury of convincing himself he is both human and circumspect in a nerve-wracking business that may, for all he knows, boomerang. Macbeth is topical. He reminds us of all those contemporary politicians who surround themselves with toadies who tell them what they wanted to hear in the first place Afterwards, they insist their decisions were undertaken only after serious consideration of advisor feedback.

Macbeth murders Banquo seemingly to terminate a hereditary line. But there is another motive behind the act: Banquo, after Lady Macbeth, was personally closest to the hero. There are hints in Act I that Macbeth and Banquo feel they were on the same wave length, and could read each other's thoughts. So Macbeth fears Banquo for reasons other than the latter's being a hereditary competitor to the throne, for the victim has a

royalty of nature

Which would be feared. 'Tis much he dares;

And, to that dauntless temper of his mind

He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valor

To act in safety

In other words, Banquo is too savvy a person, and may prove to be a monkey wrench in the murderous designs of the hero. ( Macbeth has the suspicion Banquo sees through him, making him a dangerous adversary. The latter has invaded the general's personal space, and may in future act on the knowledge he gleans from it.) Apprehension over Banquo's personal traits is made to fade into concerns about the future royal line, and it is quite in the mode of Macbeth's thinking to pass imperceptibly to one set of fears from another so that the first is obscured. This way, the general conveys the impression he harbors anxieties about only one thing. Being on the same wave length with Banquo was suggested at the outset of the drama:

Think upon what hath chanced, and at more time

The interim having weighed it, let us speak

Our free hearts to each other

 

The earlier intimacy is yet another threat to vaulting ambition, inasmuch as it portends Banquo's being privy to the general's true character and intentions.

Ionesco’s Exit the King at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre

 

David Begelman

 

Judging from the Neil Armfield and Geoffrey Rush adaptation of Eugene Ionesco’s masterful 1962 drama, Le Roi se meurt, the burdens of royalty extend to many things. In their sumptuous production, director Armfield has three characters, a king and his past and present queens, traipse across the stage in cumbersome, overly long robes they have to manage with royal aplomb, if only to move from one spot to another. Their sweeps of ermine-laced garments accentuate highly placed positions in a realm that is, alas, on its last wobbly legs. Even the sun doesn’t shine as brightly as it once did in the kingdom, while the royal palace is a ramshackle shadow of its former glory.

The 400 year-old King Berenger’s world is closer to collapse than he ever imagined. His death looms but 90 minutes away—the length of the show, as his Queen Marguerite wryly observes—although he resists its clammy proximity tooth and nail, preferring instead to “rage against the dying of the light.”

It is something of a mystery why Ionesco’s Exit the King is not performed on American stages more often. It is certainly one of his most impressive works. Perhaps its mordant note about an end to dreams of empire resonates with our current political situation; maybe the centennial year of the playwright’s birth had something to do with mounting the current production—who knows? Whatever the reason, theatergoers who miss this show will sacrifice an opportunity to experience something special: an impressive staging of a play by the author of The Rhinocerous and The Bald Soprano.

Ionesco has been described as an “absurdist” dramatist along with others, like Samuel Beckett. Yet the term refers to bodies of work of quite different scope. Beckett’s world is one in which language and experience are disconnected against the backdrop of an elusive reality, whereas Ionesco strikes a more Gnostic note: the rejection of the tangible world altogether. Reportedly, this theme had its origin earlier in the playwright’s life when, under a summer sun, he experienced a “luminosity” and sense of well being before a sudden world of empty meaning dawned upon him. Exit the King resonates with the same theme, although one revolving around the efforts of a monarch to stay alive in a world that no longer matters.

The production of Exit the King at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre is a polished one, with six accomplished actors turning in fine, although markedly different characterizations. A bravura performance by the Australian actor, Geoffrey Rush, as King Berenger, is the highlight of the show, and one that in all likelihood will be talked about for years to come.

This is Mr. Rush’s Broadway debut, and moviegoers are familiar with his portrayals in such films as Shine, Shakespeare in Love, Quills, The Tailor of Panama, and Pirates of the Caribbean. Less known is his training under Jacques LeCoq, an innovator in “physical theatre.”  The stint was no doubt instrumental in contributing to the actor’s gift for mime and stage movement. There are several moments in the production at which his accomplished vaudevillian, faux-balletic prancing and jigs drew peals of laughter from the audience. Yet the power of his performance lay in the way he combined the comic and tragic aspects of his role.

Other performers contributed solidly to the success of the production. Susan Sarandon (who had major roles in such films as Bernard and Doris, Thelma and Louise, The Witches of Eastwick, and won an 1995 Oscar for her role in Dead Man Walking) plays Queen Marguerite. The character at first strikes an ongoing cynical note at the pretensions of the king; yet she is the one whose final act of devotion is to guide the anguished monarch into accepting his demise.

The interaction between king and queen at the end of the play, while drawn out, may have been scripted purposely this way by Ionesco, as though he were delineating the end of a life as a slowly diminishing musical note.

Andrea Martin, a seasoned Broadway trouper, plays Juliette, a palace maid who scurries about the business of useless tasks for the king like a harassed gopher, grumbling all the way. Hers was a hugely funny and accomplished portrayal.

Lauren Ambrose is a younger Queen Marie, a royal figure of devotion to King Berenger, whose nerves were continually frayed by his dramatic posturings, while William Sadler as The Doctor brought this character’s obscure wisdom to bear on the king’s existential plight. Part physician, part alchemist, part magician and astrologer, he is every fairy-tale’s version of the court advisor whose head is crammed with the impenetrable stuff of non-existent truth.

Brian Hutchison as The Guard cuts a convincing picture of the palace sentry. Armored and robotic in both his movement and his responses to events going on around him, he is the quintessential yes-man for King Berenger. The Guard is perhaps Ionesco’s playful commentary on military culture, and one that would in all likelihood not sit well with an audience of American Legion veterans.

Humor was no stranger to Ionesco, nor to the current adaptors of his play. In his 1955 drama Jack, or The Submission, the playwright’s version of a son’s rebellion against his parents takes an extravagant turn. Impossibly, they insist he marry a girl with two noses. Quite naturally, he protests—but only because he wishes to marry one with three. In the current production of Exit the King, there is an enormous clap of thunder in a section of the play, whereupon all characters are suddenly seen scurrying about under a strobe light. When the disturbing event ceases, King Berenger exclaims: “What the f__ was that?” This sets the audience to howling, but obviously not at anything Ionesco had a hand in writing. 

Dale Ferguson’s forlorn set was well appointed for the play, and reminiscent of the surreal paintings of Eugene Berman, while Damien Cooper’s lighting enveloped the ongoing action wonderfully.

At the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, there was no advance notice in the playbill of the use of strobe lighting to alert audience members who had seizure disorders. Ordinarily, the requirement to avoid such a mishap is a slower flash rate. Unlike some Ionesco dialogue, not funny.

Exit the King opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 West 47^th Street, NYC, on March 26, 2009, and closes on June 14, 2009. Performances are: Tuesday at 7 PM; Wednesday – Saturday at 8 PM; Wednesday and Saturday at 2 PM; and Sunday at 3 PM. Tickets range from $66.50 to $250.50, Students: $26.50. Tickets may be purchased online www.playbill.com  or at the box office, 212-239-6200.

 

This review was published in the Citizen News of New Fairfield, Connecticut, May 13, 2009           

  

January  28, 2012

NYRB: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

In his otherwise commendable overview of Daniel Kahneman’s contributions to psychology, Freeman Dyson winds up in the latter part of his review close to a conceptual tailspin. Bemoaning Kahneman’s alleged failure to reference Sigmund Freud in his book or its thirty-two pages of endnotes, Dyson launches into broadsides about the omission that bear further scrutiny.

Dyson notes the scientific diminuendo of enthusiasm for Freud’s psychoanalysis, both as an explanatory enterprise and treatment approach, and references commentary by Sir Peter Medawar and Frederick Crews. The contemporary disenchantment, however, is far more widespread than many suppose, and includes commentary by such notables as Thomas Szasz, Ernest Nagel, Karl Popper, Karl Kraus, Vladimir Nabokov, Adolph Grünbaum, Malcolm Macmillan, Ludwig Wittgenstein, not to mention a long tradition of academic psychology that is centuries old. Yet Dyson, opting to ignore the fact that this dissenting tradition includes spokespersons who have harbored doubts about the scientific and empirical basis for Freud’s system, clings to the belief that Hahneman’s work somehow lacks appreciation of the “insights” of the founder of psychoanalysis. The stance is all the more paradoxical, since Dyson elects to characterize the difference between Freud and Hahneman as between “literary” and “scientific” contributions. (As early as 1895, we find Freud admitting that, “It still strikes me as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science.”) But if the value of an explanatory system is its appeal to a “literary,” rather than a “scientific” sensibility, why is it a scientific shortcoming to ignore it in a fresh approach to psychological theorizing? And just why are Freud’s insights “complementary,” rather than “contradictory” to Hahneman’s, as Dyson avers? In just what sense does literary value “complement” scientific value in a purely scientific formulation?  

Dyson makes several other curious observations. As against Hahneman’s experimental approach, he contrasts William James along with Freud as a thinker more given to literary, rather than scientific contributions, calling the two “artists” rather than “scientists.” The example is an unfortunate one to illustrate his point, since James in 1890 published the seminal “Principles of Psychology,” a work that along with the laboratory studies of Wundt, Fechner and Helmholz in Germany in the same century set the stage for what was to later become a rich tradition of experimental psychology. And, contrary to Dyson, it was not Hahneman who “was to make psychology an experimental science,” but a tradition begun a century or so before he was born! Nor did he “revolutionize” psychology; he only made an important contemporary contribution to it.

Other of Dyson’s comments would appear to suggest that his familiarity with psychology may be somewhat on the deficient side. According to him, “strong emotions and obsessions cannot be experimentally controlled,” a proposition that seems to be confusing ethical constraints on certain types of research with methodologies that are quite equal to the explanatory challenge. At any rate, investigators like Stanley Milgram, Harry Harlow, Joseph Wolpe and Philip Zimbardo might take exception to any opinion that they were not dealing in their studies with strong emotions. And a long tradition in physiological psychology investigating arousal states from anxiety to penile tumescence is rich in precisely the kind of knowledge Dyson seems to be maintaining is off limits to its methods.   

   

    

 

 

‘Blithe Spirit’ a treat at Brewster

 David Begelman

Theater Critic

While Director Debbie Levin of the Brewster Theater Company is convinced that Noel Coward’s comedy, “Blithe Spirit” was written in 1941 to distract London audiences from merciless German bombings, there may be another element in its creation .

The play is about arranging the return of Charles Condomine’s deceased wife, Elvira, from the dead with the help of a medium, Madame Arcati. It’s no secret that the British have long had a thing for spiritualism and séances, and if the avidity with which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle pursued the interest—much to the dismay of Harry Houdini—is any indication, the English appetite for the paranormal runs pretty deep.

Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned about the departed forever haunting dark corridors of homes and castles, as in Oscar Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost.” The conceit may be a metaphor for keeping an imperial past alive in an empire that fears the sun is fast setting on everything old and honored. And just maybe a bit of a hankering for the past is haunting “Blithe Spirit” as much as is Elvira.

The real delight in the comedy is the eccentric antics of Madame Arcarti (played with the requisite measure of ditziness by Jody Bayer in the new, enjoyable Brewster production). Her rituals preparatory to raising the dead are so outrageous, they even put off the ghost who is summoned up.

No moviegoer can forget the portrayal of Madame Arcati by the incomparable Margaret Rutherford in the 1945 David Lean film. She carried her flair for delicious dottiness into subsequent roles, like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple.

Charles Condomine (the versatile Bruce Tredwell) arranges a séance in order to come up with material for his novel about a psychic charlatan. He and his wife Ruth (well crafted by Dianna Waller), together with Dr. George Bradman (Brian DeToma) and Mrs. Bradman (Suzanne Ochs) are confirmed disbelievers until their convictions are shattered by knockings and table shakings during the séance.

To the surprise of all except Madame Arcati, these premonitory signs leave everyone visibly shaken, just like their séance table. The Condomine maid, Edith (Kristen T. Casey) seems to be especially vulnerable to the goings on, reacting to them as though panic attacks were coming around every corner. 

 The comedic thrust of “Blithe Spirit” are the complications that ensue as Charles has to deal simultaneously with the wraith of his dead wife and the wrath of his living one. Since Ruth doesn’t see Elvira, Charles is at his wit’s end convincing her of her presence, and things get to be short of the breaking point as comments meant for Elvira are taken to heart by Ruth who feels they are directed at her.

The dialogue is enlivened by the customary sharpened wit we have long come to expect from Noel Coward, although the three-act play has a running time of three hours with short intermissions, a virtual red-flag in overdoing a good thing.

“Blithe Spirit” runs through April 28 at Brewster Theater Company, Melrose School, 120 Federal Road, Brewster. Performances are Friday and Saturday 8 p.m. Tickets are $15 adults and $13 seniors and students, and may be purchased by calling the box office at 845-598-1621 or online at www.brewstertheater.org. 

 

  

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Zero Hour’ is a one-man tour de force

 David Begelman

Theater Critic

Jim Brochu’s life must have been changed forever when his father took him to see Zero Mostel in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

It was an inspirational moment for the young Brochu. Forty years later he went on to author a monologue about the legendary star of such memorable hits as “The Producer,” “Fiddler On the Roof,” “The Rhinoceros,” and “Ulysses in Nighttown”—and  in lesser roles, like the sidekick of Jack Palance in Kazan’s 1950 film noir, “Panic in the Streets,” and 24 other films.

“Zero Hour” won a 2010 Drama desk Award, although Brochu is no stranger to traipsing the boards, having appeared on T.V. in episodes of “All My Children,” “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” and “Cheers.”  

Barrington Stage has the good fortune to be currently producing Brochu’s stunning show. It is a monologue that takes the form of an interview by a New York Times reporter who remains unseen throughout the delivery of the actor’s 90-minute performance.

That is not all. Brochu bears an uncanny resemblance to Zero, right down to the occasionally bellowed vocalization, keen sense of ethnic humor, melodramatic gesturing, and strands of hair plastered artfully on his forehead and converging just above the eyebrows.

There is more to Brochu’s spellbinding characterization than meets the eye. Any monologue that not merely holds, but rivets, audience attention for 1 ½ hours has to have another source of inspiration. In “Zero Hour,” it is the performer’s superb gift for the comedy gag line, the riposte, and the well-timed quip that springs from a wellspring of natural talent, not from the celebrity whom he is portraying.

Brochu’s in-your-face audacious humor is his very own, however a facsimile of Zero’s. And it’s not that far-fetched to assume that he would make a worthy addition to any team of gag writers delivering hilarity for a comedy series—in the manner of a Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, or Mel Brooks.

The show has Zero alternating between puns at the expense of the Times reporter, like: “I see you have a humor bypass,” or “You look like a gentile Jackie Mason,” to more poignant life moments, like the suicide of his friend Philip Loeb because of blacklisting, or his second marriage to a Catholic girl, Kathryn. Reassuring her mother over Kathy’s match with a Jewish actor, he insisted that his uncle was Pope Leo XIII.

Zero survived his own blacklisting days, including a prison term. As a result, he harbored less than a charitable disposition toward informers, one of whom was the choreographer, Jerome Robbins.

But it was Robbins who saved Zero’s performance in “Fiddler” when then actor could not bring himself to perform the role of a father who rejected a daughter who wished to marry a gentile. The scenario reminded him too much of his own mother’s rejection of the son he had with Kathy. Talk about the wheel coming full circle.

“Zero Hour” runs through June 5 at Barrington Stage Company’s Stage 2, 36 Linden Street, Pittsfield, MASS. Performances are Tuesday to Friday at 7:30 p.m.,  Saturday at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $15-$39 Adults, $25 seniors all matinees, Under 18 and students $15 except Saturday evening and may be purchased by calling the box office at 413-236-8888, or online at www.barringtonstageco.org.       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

AT THE MOVIES

David Begelman

“Zero Dark Thirty:” A Moviemaker Under the Gun

 

Critical responses to Kathryn Bigelow’s new film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden have been a curious admixture of praise and condemnation—often by the same writer. The praise celebrates the skill with which she marshals her considerable talents as a moviemaker.

The criticisms, frequently unfair and strident, center around her being “premature” to supply a Hollywood spin on such a “politically delicate—and, in this case, covert” operation that lacks the “crucial historical perspective that comes with time.”

The same critic who voiced these concerns averred that “Zero Dark Thirty” is “one of the best made films of 2012,” adding paradoxically that “It probably shouldn’t exist,”—despite the fact that its depiction of the Navy Seal team raid on Osama’s three-story compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan, was “bravura edge-of-the seat filmmaking that makes The Hurt Locker (a previous war film of Bigelow’s) look like a mere warm-up.”

The critic goes on to complain that the film stands as “an implicit endorsement of political assassination,” a charge that is transparently wrong-headed.

First, Osama was not a head of state, but a terrorist who more than anyone else needed to be taken out. Second, there was no scathing reception accorded “Valkyrie,” a movie in which political assassination was viewed by everyone as a courageous and apposite course of action. In it, Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) undertakes to kill Adolph Hitler with a suitably placed bomb. Evidently, assassination isn’t a vice in all political circumstances. 

A darker verdict on Bigelow’s film was lodged by Naomi Wolf, who contends that the director’s portrayal of CIA “advanced interrogation techniques” (a euphemism to die for) leading to Osama’s killing makes her a propagandist for torture, on a par with Leni Riefenstahl’s apology for the Nazis in her documentary, “Triumph of the Will.”

This reviewer was not aware that “Zero Dark Thirty” was apologizing for torture. Indeed, had the film not included scenes of the interrogation and torture of suspected terrorists, the response to it by those same critics would highlight that such omissions nefariously hide unacceptable CIA practices subsequently exposed by the media at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and other places.

Wolf throws down another gauntlet, and one that is as familiar as it is deceptive in its implications. She maintains that there is no evidence that torture “produced lifesaving—or any—worthwhile evidence.” That may be so. But the other side of this is like the frog who grins residually up at you from the bottom of the beer mug. What if torture did produce information that led to Osama’s death? What then?

The immorality of certain interrogation procedures is an issue that does not rest on the question of how effective they are, but how we define ourselves in a larger moral context. It’s possible to grant the efficacy of certain techniques while still repudiating them because they conflict with values that represent the way we choose to view ourselves.

Revulsion to practicing torture was represented by the actress Jessica Chastain who as “Maya,” a central figure in hunting down bin Laden, registered repugnance to the practices of an interrogator (played impressively by Jason Clarke). However noble her cause, Maya is still subject to moral review in tolerating those methods, rather than challenging them with whatever political clout she wielded.

Moral and political issues aside, there’s no denying the talents of the director and her cast. Jessica Chastain is terrific as the central figure in the CIA plan to kill the man responsible for the death of 3,000 innocents in two World Trade Center buildings. Her portrayal of “Maya” is quite a notch above her characterization as the subservient wife of a paterfamilias (Brad Pitt) in Terence Malick’s pretentious “The Tree of Life.” 

Bigelow’s movie is gripping from beginning to end, whatever the take on the moral problems it poses. This reviewer’s only quarrel with the film is a comment made by a member of the Navy Seal team that launched the assault on the terrorist’s compound. When asked about what he was listening to on his headphones on the way to Abbotabad, he replies, “Tony Robbins.” But as one character at the end of Billy Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot” observed, “Nobody’s perfect.”     

Yuletide Cheers: ‘The Santaland Diaries’ in Lenox

 

David Begelman, Theater Critic

 

David Sedaris is no stranger to a wide readership, not to mention radio and theater audiences hankering for his version of belly laughs galore. A popular voice on the NPR radio series, “This American Life,” Sedaris has authored written works like “Holidays on Ice,” “Naked,” “Barrel Fever,” and more.

He has also co-authored a number of plays with his sister, Amy. Brother and sister Sedaris, by their own admission, come from a family that takes disfunctionality to new levels of grandeur. Never you mind. He is a shoe-in for a revered place in the pantheon of outstanding American humorists. His hilarious monologue about his own escapade as an “elf” hired by Macy’s Department Store is by now a staple in yuletide productions across the land.

Shakespeare & Company’s new production of the humorist’s “Santaland Diaries” is hardly in a minimalist mode. In his days as a struggling young actor, Sedaris recalls his stint as an elf with the disarming moniker of “Crumpet.”. Except in this production he is a fortyish man, relating his past elfin gig in a plush apartment with upscale accommodations including a baby grand piano, and a view of the Manhattan skyline that any hedge fund manager would envy.

“Crumpet” in the current show has evidently come into his own later on in life. But is this what Sedaris intended? After all, the monologue as written is brimming with the kind of sardonic humor that only a put-upon might level at his corporate bosses at Macy’s who have the gall to make him play the fool.

When “Crumpet” (the ebullient Peter Davenport) sheds his staid apparel to reveal his “green velvet knickers, forest-green velvet smock, and a perky little hat decorated with spangles,” the description was intended to be more like a complaint than a cute aside.  “It doesn’t get any worse than this,” says Crumpet, whose satirical remarks about everything are in the Swiftian mode; not simply a tongue-in-cheek badinage about the past.

Davenport, despite his unquestionable ability for portraying many facets of Crumpet’s experiences as a put-upon hireling, loses out on the darker, and more ironic, aspect of the character. Director Tony Simotes, the newly appointed artistic director of Shakespeare & Company, has opted for a different take on “Crumpet.” It is not one this reviewer senses is true to the Sedaris intent.

Crumpet’s observations sometimes cut to a wrenching emotional core, and the counterpart between them and his humorous dialogue is why the monologue is so arresting.

During yuletide, “Parents have an idea of a world that they cannot make work for them;” a lad who visits Santa Claus at Macy’s voices the poignant wish his dead father were alive and for a set of teenage mutant ninja turtles, or “It doesn’t get any worse than this.” Hardly the sentiments of an elf who feels all’s right with the world, or that humor has no darker underbelly.

Shakespeare & Company’s wish to cut to the comic chase in this production perhaps overlooked the downside aspect of “Santaland Diaries” that makes it such compelling fare.

“Santaland Diaries” runs until Dec. 30 at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, 70 Kemble St., Lenox, Mass. Performances are Wednesdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. Saturday matinees on Dec. 11 and 18 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $16-$48, and can be purchased by calling the box office at 413-637-3353, or contacting www.shakespeare.org, 

 

  

 

 

            

Yuletide Blues: The Santaland Diaries  at Long Wharf Theatre

David  Begelman

            The audience filing into Long Wharf’s modest Stage II Theater to see The Santaland Diaries may feel it is being prepped for a routine yuletide show. The house itself is decked out in intimations of America’s favorite holiday. Ushers who courteously show you to your seat wear crimson and white Santa Claus hats, as do the employees at the concession stand and box office in the lobby. Yet even before the talented Thomas Sadoski makes his first appearance on stage in this terrific rendition of David Sedaris’s one man play adapted skillfully by Joe Mantello, you just know something is a bit offbeat about what’s coming. A Christmas tree, situated in front of the proscenium at stage left is drooping toward center stage, as if the patina of holiday cheer had failed to invigorate its sagging spirit.

The tree is, of course, a metaphor for this show, one of the most delightful of the entire Connecticut season. And I mean the season across the state, not just in New Haven’s outstanding area theater. The playhouse is situated a mere stroll down from Brazi’s Restaurant and past a line of empty and—no mistaking it—malodorous meat hauling trucks parked uncomfortably close to the walkway. Navigating past the assault on the senses is well worth the ordeal when it comes to Long Wharf’s current production.    

            The guiding light for this enjoyable escapade is, of course, its author, David Sedaris. He is well known to enthusiasts who listen to his broadcasts on National Public Radio’s series, This American Life. His talents also extend to written works like Holidays on Ice, Naked, Barrel Fever, and his most recent collection of essays, Me Talk Pretty One Day. His body of work has drawn accolades from a large reading audience. Among plays co-authored with his sister, Amy, and produced at Lincoln Center and LaMama in the Big Apple, include Stump the Host, Stitches, Incident at Cobbler’s Knob, The Book of Liz, and One Woman Shoe, which was awarded an Obie   He is a shoe-in for a place among a revered line of other American humorists, from Mark Twain to Woody Allen. He’s that good.  

            Sedaris’s hilarious monologue is currently playing around the country in different playhouses, and is based upon the playwright’s actual experiences of being an “elf” hired by Macy’s for its annual meet Santa ritual for children taking place at its famous midtown department store on 34^th Street. Unemployed actors are familiar with scrounging around for work, some of which, like the elfin gig taken on by the lead character of this monologue (given the disarming sobriquet of “Crumpet”) is more an embarrassment than an uplifting acting assignment. Crumpet’s monologue is a recounting of the experiences he is made to undergo, many of which bring out the darker, more ironic side of his personality.

            Before Mr. Sadoski’s entrance, the stage is set as an enormous green Christmas package tied with a white bow. Familiar ditties of yuletide cheer are piped in, thanks to Daniel Baker’s sound design: Jingle Bells, Let It Snow (as rendered by the incomparable Johnny Mathis), as well as a song by the crooner indispensable to restaurateurs across the country, Frank Sinatra. The performer introduces himself on a relatively bare stage, except for a stool he uses temporarily before opening the set to reveal another: a wintry, but inviting scene of two sloping snow drifts, a blazing fireplace, a rocking chair, and oversized red tree ornaments strewn about on the diminutive snow-filled landscape.

            Before stepping into the wintry scene, Crumpet reveals the elf costume he is required to wear during his stint for Macy’s: red and green striped tights, chartreuse turtle neck, red suspenders, a velvet smock, shoes with turned-up toes, and a funky pointed hat, all of which are designed to avoid misleading a parent or child into believing Crumpet was human. He, of course, refuses to be discriminatory: “Everyone looks retarded—once you set your mind to it.”

Crumpet’s side-splitting misadventures actually begin before he is hired as elf. He tells us he saw the ad for a “full-time elf” in a newspaper. After reporting to Macy’s for the job, he did not take kindly to having to fill out innumerable forms, to take a urine test in order to qualify for a gig that was not only ridiculous but low paying, or to go through endless “elf dress rehearsals.” When costumed, he remarks wryly, “It breaks my heart to see a grown man dressed as a taco,” and he is clearly put off by endless instructions issued by a nameless lady through a corporate sound system. Patience with the outlandish is not one of this character’s outstanding virtues. On the other hand, and as Sedaris invisibly implies, maybe impatience is just the right spyglass through which the outlandish can be perceived in the first place.

While the Sedaris humor always tickles the funny bone in an innocent kind of way, it also smacks of another kind of irony that is Swiftian in tone.  For Crumpet is plainly more than a chap who would just smolder at the inconvenience of it all, end of story. He is the embodiment of all put-upons who must contend with the depredations of a corporate world to which they defer grudgingly—and in many cases, eternally.

When Crumpet alludes to the little boy visiting Santa whose fervent wish is to have his dead father back and a complete set of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the remark has poignancy. But this is only because of a child’s inability to tell the difference between the genuine and the trivial—a mistake Crumpet could not make. His is the burden of always knowing the difference between what is real and what is not, while having to accommodate the latter against his best instincts. Actually, history may have beaten us all to the punch in devising Christmas ironies. Few of us realize that St. Nicholas, a.k.a. Santa Claus, was the patron saint of thieves and murderers. How’s that for a Sedaris-like twist on the merry fellow with a twinkle in his eye who goes up and down chimneys?

I have not seen another performer in the role, but I cannot imagine how anyone else could improve on Thomas Sadoski’s performance. He engaged the audience from the beginning, and his elfin character was always a real person whose sense of irony never deteriorated into peevishness. Not a word of his monologue was lost on the audience, and his delivery was, well, superb. The audience belly laughs that greeted his commentary resounded throughout the house too often to recount. His performance received standing ovations.

Kim Rubinstein’s direction was likewise excellent, and for theater goers who fail to appreciate the point, directing monologues can often be a greater challenge than directing full-scale productions, since the possibilities for repetition and monotony of staging are greater in monologues. Jessica Ford’s set design is a triumph of taste and ingenuity, while Olivera Gajic’s costuming seemed totally in accord with a Sedaris conception of the look of things. Josh Epstein’s lighting design brightened The Santaland Diaries considerably.

The playbill indicates David Sedaris lives in both the United States and France. When the Eiffel Tower begins to droop to the left, at least one reviewer promises not to breathe a word to the gendarmes about the identity of the culprit responsible for the sacrilege.

The Santaland Diaries runs at Long Wharf Theatre’s Stage II at 222 Sargent Drive, New Haven, from December 4 to December 23, 2007. Tickets may be purchased by calling (203)-787-4282. Website: www.longwharf.org

 

 

   

Yale Repertory Theatre’s Lydia: Tales From Telenovella

David Begelman

Yale Rep, under the artistic stewardship of James Bundy, has had the admirable foresight to enrich its schedule of productions with the works of promising Latino playwrights. It produced Jose Rivera’s Boleros for the Disenchanted in 2008, while Lydia, its current production, is Octavio Solis’s dramatization of events in the Mexican-American Flores family of El Paso during the 1970s. The city is the playwright’s birthplace, as well as a border town that at the time reflected many of its ethnic tensions. Lydia had its world premiere last year at the Denver Center Theater Company, to outstanding reviews.

All the same, one wonders whether the family drama that unfolds during the course of Mr. Solis’s play centers on issues unique to Latino communities. The characters might have been any ethnic minority without substantial forfeiture of dramatic intent or purpose. That they speak Spanish tells you something about their lineage; it tells you nothing about why things happen the way they do in the Flores family. And happen they certainly do.

As drama, Lydia has an unfortunate tendency to have the problems of family members not only intensify (often unbearably) over the two and a half hour duration of the play, they appear to tumble out of nowhere at a steady, yet furious pace. It’s as if some infernal engine were churning out distress at breakneck speed. 

 Claudio, the paterfamilias (Armando Durán), is a night-shift cook who is alcoholic, surly, and abusive. When not stuck in his T.V. chair with headphones, he’s browbeating or assaulting family members, like his sensitive younger son Misha (Carlo Albán), an aspiring poet, or retreating to his bedroom in a snit.

Misha’s budding literary talent on occasion shows promise: “A tear from each eye lay on my pillow to make the moon jealous.” Not bad.

Themes of family disarray swirl around Ceci (Onahoua Rodriguez), a girl left gravely disabled, tremor-ridden, and aphasiac after a car crash before her 15^th birthday, her quincea nera. She had been hiding in the back seat of a Pontiac driven by the boy she loves, Alvaro (Christian Barillas) and her brother, Rene (Tony Sancho). She wound up with the car wrapped around a pole.

Ceci is most of the time confined to a pallet on the floor, except when she rises from it to transform into a wraith-like embodiment of what she really feels inside her spastic exterior. One emotion is unfulfilled sexual longing.

Naturally, all family members are guilt-ridden over Ceci’s tragedy, while other epiphanies over gay-bashing, screaming fits, physical assaults, and sudden revelations about homosexuality follow each other breathlessly during the second act. As if to underscore the theme of sexuality gone amok coursing through Lydia, the curtain falls on Misha doing something incestuous with his stricken sister: a tableau the demonic would die for. Misha evidently feels he has to rise to the occasion in order to satisfy his sister’s sexual longings.

The eponymous Lydia (Stephanie Beatriz) is a character who first seems to be a ray of sunshine in the life of the Flores family. An illegal immigrant from Mexico, she enters the household as a maid who turns out to be a skilled cook born to put the home in order. She even strips plastic wrappings off lamps, to provide better lighting in the living room. Tending to Ceci in a nurturing way, she has the gift of divining the girl’s inner thoughts and sentiments, as if she had aptitude in brujeria.

Lydia’s dark side is not long in coming. Out of nowhere she starts a sexual relationship with dad, further alienating him from his self-sacrificing and devout wife, Rosa (Catalina Maynard). Rosa’s faith in spiritual healing is coupled with negligence over administering Ceci’s medication, much to the chagrin of brother Misha.          

The overall effect of Lydia is one that leaves the audience wondering what other nasty surprises will be sprung during the course of the play. The latter showers you with enough brutal family melodrama to last a lifetime (or at least as long as an extended run on telenovella). You can be battered with concussive narrative just so long, before the result is tedium—precisely an upshot of Lydia.

All performers in Mr. Soli’s play are accomplished; their burden is a script that has them hauling some pretty heavy material around in a never-ending, and calamitous bout of darker telemundo fare.

Juliette Carrillo’s direction is accomplished, and Beth McGuire’s Vocal and Dialect coaching lent an authentic aspect to the Latino lilt of English. Jesse Belsky’s Lighting Design had a sameness about it in most group scenes, although put to advantageous use in Ceci’s transformation into her glowing, articulate self.

Although this reviewer was seated in the middle of the house at Yale Rep, some of the dialogue was difficult to hear. The playbill was helpful in translating several idiomatic Spanish terms spoken in Lydia, although longer passages of dialogue in this language tended to disadvantage audience members who are not bilingual.

When one of the characters asks Rosa why misfortune seems to be the lot of the Flores family, she responds, “ Why? There is no why.” Spirituality sometimes makes a good point.  

 

Lydia opened at the Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel Street on February 6 and continues until February 28, 2009. Tickets may be purchased by calling the box office at (203)-432-1234 or online at yalerep.org.

Website of the Connecticut Critics Circle, www.ctcritics.com. 

 

 

Woody Abroad: Vicky Cristina Barcelona

David Begelman

Maybe it’s no accident that Woody Allen films like Match Point and his latest, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, are such successful ventures, whereas Scoop, a film that came between the two, was more or less a dud. Ironically, the director appeared in a major role in Scoop, but not in the other two films. The quality of Woody’s work nowadays seems immeasurably better when he puts himself behind the camera, rather than in front of it. It’s as though the Annie Hall era has been over for some time. Self-casting in roles with one-liners smacking of stand-up comedy routines may have worn thin as a continuing chapter of modern cinema.

At first blush, Vicky Cristina Barcelona seems to be just a comedy about American tourists abroad in Spain. Looks can be deceiving. It is actually a more complicated film than Match Point. The latter is about the sticky predicament of a murderer who evades justice by chance. (One of the graphic images in the film symbolizes the indeterminacy of outcome: a tennis ball teetering on the edge of a net, unsure about which way to fall).

Vicky Cristina Barcelona, a comedy of manners, dwells on the way love is loosened up in exotic circumstances. Yet there is another theme implicit in its narrative. Are novel love entanglements signs of liberation or personal imbalance? Are they manifestations of a new sexual freedom or symptoms of going haywire? And how do we tell these apart?

 In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there was no quandary over dramatic purpose; the unsettling aspects of love gone flukey had to be relieved and equilibrium restored. In Woody Allen’s movie, you’re never sure whether love’s confusions steer its principals in the right or wrong directions. And its characters all ask themselves the same question: “Am I where I should be, or just plain wacky?” Vicky Cristina Barcelona isn’t a comedy of errors; it’s a comedy about whether what happens in love is an error to begin with.

The plot revolves around two friends, Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) who, at the invitation of Vicky’s relative Judy Nash (Patricia Clarkson) and her husband, Mark (Kevin Dunn) are on summer vacation in Barcelona, a gorgeous, ochre-hued Spanish city. The film is graced by the lush cinematography of Javier Aguirresarobe, and there is a voice-over by a narrator (voice of Christopher Evan Welch), who describes the ongoing action throughout the course of the film. Performances of principal actors are beautifully nuanced, and at a high level of achievement—thanks to the director.  

The two women are distinguishable types. Vicky is a staid, somewhat conventional woman with academic interests. (Her attraction to Barcelona is inspired by her fascination with Catalonia, especially the works of the architect Gaudi.) Her commitments are all in place, as well as the one to her fiancé, Doug (Chris Messina). Cristina is quite different. She has just had a disappointing love relationship, is unsure of what she wants in life, and has little sense of achievement, except having recently completed a short film about—wouldn’t you guess?—love.

At a restaurant, the two eyeball an artist, Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), an attractive man they remember seeing at an art exhibition earlier that day. The three exchange glances, after which Juan Antonio approaches their table. Without the drawn-out preliminaries that would distinguish an American approach to hitting on two women, he summarily invites them to fly with him to Oviedo for a night of fun and love making. Cristina is up for what seems to her to be a novel and enticing adventure, whereas Vicky initially protests the outrageous idea. Yet they both find themselves acceding to the plan, whereupon everyone’s world starts to change, and at breakneck speed.

Vicky’s erstwhile composure is shattered after a night of lovemaking with Juan Antonio (a secret she keeps even from Cristina), while Cristina later moves in with him. Into Cristina’s world of new enthusiasms steps Maria Elena, Juan Antonio’s former wife (Penelope Cruz). Maria Elena has recently attempted suicide, and out of concern for her (or emotional enmeshment, depending on the spin you put on it) Juan Antonio brings her home to a love-nest already in place. Maria Elena’s stability seems to strengthen as she gets to realize that the attraction among the threesome is just what the doctor ordered. They all draw closer together, even sexually, as Christina’s talent as a photographer blossoms. (Woody’s ode to the relationship among love, liberation, and creativity?).

The plot continues to thicken as lovers reprise their trysts and separate again. The soufflé has risen in a stunning moment of culinary delight before flattening down to an ordinary existence.

Woody Allen admitted that Vicky Cristina Barcelona fulfilled his fantasy of becoming a European filmmaker. For some time now, he has enjoyed more popularity in Europe than at home. For one who has already gone through his Godard, Truffaut, Fellini, and Bergman phases—not to mention in this film a hint of Pedro Almodóvar—the home away from home must continue to be appealing. But in a rare moment of soul-searching, Allen also admitted that the only place he ever really wanted to be is in his bed. Considering this filmmaker’s prodigious output, not likely.