(That's one healthy tooth.)
Transmutation
7 years ago
Monday, June 30, 2008
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Here Be Monsters
Yesterday we visited our friends Nikola and Fanni. Nikola is a playwright-novelist-poet-writer from Croatia. Since we're going on vacation in Croatia next week he drew us a map:
Nikola waxed poetic about the beauties of Croatia, which he loves but has a complicated relationship with (Nikola hates all borders. "Have you ever seen such a country? Shaped like a fucking pretzel.") But somehow all his tales of gorgeous beach holidays slowly morphed into The Hills Have Eyes horror stories. A simple off-trail hike around Susak became a day-long death march. Expecting a quick stroll around the tiny island they only brought a bottle of wine and half a loaf of bread. No water, no sneakers, no directions, no roads. And they soon discovered ... well, take a closer look.
In case you can't read Nikola's handwriting, the notes in order from left to right say:
1. No More Wine Point
2. I Wanna Die
3. Knife Rocks
4. Inbred Fisherman
According to Nikola, the people on this island mistrust all of their neighbors, and have intermarried strictly among themselves for centuries ("Their motto is 'We Save the Blood.' That's why they've got the short little freak legs, you know?") He claims that a bunch of Susak islanders migrated to Pittsburgh, where they all now live on one block and continue to Save the Blood.
Then there was his story about the beautiful canyon that turned out to be a...
... snake pit full of incredibly poisonous jumping snakes that live in trees and prey on unsuspecting hikers at night. ("The snakes with the horns ... we call them a 'snake snake.' You know it? If it bites you, you have maximum one hour to live. Completely fucked.") Other terrors noted on the map include black widows and giant vultures.
Maybe we should go straight to Sarajevo ...
Nikola waxed poetic about the beauties of Croatia, which he loves but has a complicated relationship with (Nikola hates all borders. "Have you ever seen such a country? Shaped like a fucking pretzel.") But somehow all his tales of gorgeous beach holidays slowly morphed into The Hills Have Eyes horror stories. A simple off-trail hike around Susak became a day-long death march. Expecting a quick stroll around the tiny island they only brought a bottle of wine and half a loaf of bread. No water, no sneakers, no directions, no roads. And they soon discovered ... well, take a closer look.
In case you can't read Nikola's handwriting, the notes in order from left to right say:
1. No More Wine Point
2. I Wanna Die
3. Knife Rocks
4. Inbred Fisherman
According to Nikola, the people on this island mistrust all of their neighbors, and have intermarried strictly among themselves for centuries ("Their motto is 'We Save the Blood.' That's why they've got the short little freak legs, you know?") He claims that a bunch of Susak islanders migrated to Pittsburgh, where they all now live on one block and continue to Save the Blood.
Then there was his story about the beautiful canyon that turned out to be a...
... snake pit full of incredibly poisonous jumping snakes that live in trees and prey on unsuspecting hikers at night. ("The snakes with the horns ... we call them a 'snake snake.' You know it? If it bites you, you have maximum one hour to live. Completely fucked.") Other terrors noted on the map include black widows and giant vultures.
Maybe we should go straight to Sarajevo ...
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Two Deals with the Devil
Faust
Directed by Silviu Purcarete
For Teatrul National Radu Stanca in Sibiu, Romania.
Faust was staged in a warehouse in Sibiu, one of the prettiest towns in Transylvania. Sibiu was built by medieval Germans (Swabians), and its historic center looks like a fairy tale illustration. It was magical to see Faust here. Sibiu’s old town was projected in the windows of Faust’s study, a reminder of the city’s medieval past and the story’s modern-day relevance.
Talk about total theater. There’s only one word for this production: Fantastaspectaculomongogantic. The cast was roughly 80 strong. The live original musical score used two full choirs (one of them made solely of children) and a rock band. Dancers, children, puppets, fire-blowers, pyrotechnics, animals, exhausted stagehands – just imagining what it takes to produce a spectacle that size gives me acid reflux.
The design was gorgeous. The foreground of Faust’s large, decaying study was dominated by scholarly junk – a partial skeleton on a stand, a model of the digestive system, a stuffed rabbit standing on its hind legs, hunted by a stuffed fox. It made me miss my buddies at Curious Expeditions. The production was full of these kinds of obsessive details.
Despite the show’s epic proportions, the bald, potbellied Faust and tiny, twisted Mephistopheles (played by a snow-white woman in men’s clothing) dominated the action. Both gave incredibly intense, alive, physical performances.
Ilie Gheorghe (Faust) and Ofelia Popii (Mefisto)
I don’t speak Romanian, but it was clear Goethe’s play had been heavily adapted, streamlined to focus on the relationship between Faust and Mephistopheles. Marguerite/Gretchen appears, but Martha is gone, along with Siebel, Wagner, and many of the story’s other secondary characters. Still, I was able to follow the adapted story perfectly, thanks to Purcarete’s visceral images. To name just a few:
- As Faust summons Satan, the floorboards of his study tremble and rock, then suddenly burst open as an army of white demons leap out.
- A black dog runs through Faust’s open door. Faust eagerly catches its leash as it dives into a wardrobe. He pulls the dog back out into the open – but at the end of the leash he finds Mephistopheles.
- As she tempts Faust to sign away his soul, Mephistopheles slowly strips off her black tuxedo to reveal red flesh beneath her moon white face. She has a woman’s bare breasts, and a big red codpiece.
- As Faust flies off to Walpurgis Night, the stage splits in half. Demons leads the audience through the gap into the fire-lit, grotesque world of Walpurgis Night. Mephistopheles, dressed like a baroque aristocrat, wears an immense, aristocratic, red beehive wig. Rings of dancing demons cackle beneath a wall of fireworks. Debauched Gretchens, smeared with mud, rut with gigantic swine…and nightmarish murals in black and white loom on the walls…
- Death appears as a tall, thin, bald man wearing a corset and hoop skirt, his face painted like a skull. His movements are unbelievably gentle. When he speaks, his velvety, reassuring voice is so loud, it echoes in your bones.
Then there was Gretchen. I’ve always thought Faust and Gretchen’s relationship is hard for modern audiences to fully appreciate. After all, these days sex outside of marriage is extremely common. So is having a child out of wedlock. So how can we really understand how wrong it is for Faust to seduce Gretchen?
Purcarete solved this problem in a risky but effective way: Gretchen was played by a chorus of barely teenage girls, wearing white shifts, little anklet socks and mary janes. They carry lanterns and ring little silver bells to protect themselves against spirits. They are painfully young – and the middle-aged Faust becomes a borderline pedophile. What he’s doing is not noble, not sexy, not romantic, but just plain wrong. In the play’s most disturbing image, Mephistopheles lays one Gretchen on the floor, and slowly buries her hands beneath the girl’s white shift. The hands emerge bloody, and Faust trembles with excitement.
The Gretchen chorus helped me see the Faust story in a completely new way. It became a tale about how the devil uses the wicked to hurt the innocent. The message: people think they want love, but they crave sensation. And those who can’t feel love – the bored, the despairing, the damaged – can enjoy inflicting their pain on the whole and pure.
Perhaps the most surprising moment was at the very end, when God wins his bet with the devil by forgiving Faust. Mephistopheles is angry, hurt, but also inspired. She marvels at the miracle of divine love, the one thing the Devil isn’t expecting, is never expecting. She even flirts with the idea of repentance– but soon slowly spirals back into the old habit of hate.
My own favorite part, though, was actually the curtain call. After all of the spectacle, the suffering, the whole horrible tale, all 80-odd performers came out together to take their bows. There was something so touching about watching angels and devils, saints and sinners, children and monsters, turn their faces to the light and take a bow. That’s what we love about theater, right? And I thought I hope that’s the way it is when we die: the show is over, take a bow, and everyone is friends.
The Seafarer
By Conor McPherson
Directed by Jimmy Fay
at The Abbey Theatre, Dublin
The Seafarer was reviewed right and left during its New York run, so I’m not going to summarize the entire story here. The first act introduces the characters, all pretty standard-issue Miserable Irish Losers. Most are pickled, and all are stuck in dysfunctional relationships with their families and friends. The second act, a Christmas Eve card game, is much, much better. Most of the characters think they’re just playing poker with an affable, wealthy stranger. Only one man realizes he’s playing the devil for his soul. Now all the mundane details of the first act begin to resonate and take on cosmic significance. A man’s offer to loan his brother 20 Euros is actually a chance to save his sibling’s soul; a desperate bet becomes a prayer for redemption.
Different Devils
In The Seafarer, the Devil wants to damn people because he’s lonely. He doesn’t understand why God loves man so much – and he wants the whole world to suffer his own exile from the divine presence. (There’s a great Hungarian expression for this, roughly translated: “also the neighbor’s cow should die.”) He doesn’t really have any special powers (except pain rays that shoot from his fingers like the Emperor in Star Wars and, of course, omniscience). He must convince men to damn themselves.
The Seafarer’s men are lushes that still have faith. Their sins are despair, envy, and mourning for the lost past – the sides of themselves that mirror the Devil, trapped in his fear, dread, and bottomless longing. These men are pretty sure they’re doomed, but they gamble on divine forgiveness.
Purcarete’s Faust offers a far different vision of man and devil. Faust delights in the drama and excitement of evil. He destroys other peoples’ lives just to see what will happen. He’s in the grip of an epic self-delusion: he thinks he’s a romantic hero or a deep thinker, when in fact he’s just a common criminal. But in the end, he’s still saved. Faust says the more God can forgive, the greater he is. We deserve to be damned, but we are not – and we’re lucky the decision is not up to us.
Many thanks to Andras Visky for bringing me along to see Faust in Sibiu – but even more for his amazing, gut wrenching play Long Friday, which I got to see in Cluj’s Hungarian State Theater. Stay tuned for more on his work!
Directed by Silviu Purcarete
For Teatrul National Radu Stanca in Sibiu, Romania.
Faust was staged in a warehouse in Sibiu, one of the prettiest towns in Transylvania. Sibiu was built by medieval Germans (Swabians), and its historic center looks like a fairy tale illustration. It was magical to see Faust here. Sibiu’s old town was projected in the windows of Faust’s study, a reminder of the city’s medieval past and the story’s modern-day relevance.
Talk about total theater. There’s only one word for this production: Fantastaspectaculomongogantic. The cast was roughly 80 strong. The live original musical score used two full choirs (one of them made solely of children) and a rock band. Dancers, children, puppets, fire-blowers, pyrotechnics, animals, exhausted stagehands – just imagining what it takes to produce a spectacle that size gives me acid reflux.
The design was gorgeous. The foreground of Faust’s large, decaying study was dominated by scholarly junk – a partial skeleton on a stand, a model of the digestive system, a stuffed rabbit standing on its hind legs, hunted by a stuffed fox. It made me miss my buddies at Curious Expeditions. The production was full of these kinds of obsessive details.
Despite the show’s epic proportions, the bald, potbellied Faust and tiny, twisted Mephistopheles (played by a snow-white woman in men’s clothing) dominated the action. Both gave incredibly intense, alive, physical performances.
Ilie Gheorghe (Faust) and Ofelia Popii (Mefisto)
I don’t speak Romanian, but it was clear Goethe’s play had been heavily adapted, streamlined to focus on the relationship between Faust and Mephistopheles. Marguerite/Gretchen appears, but Martha is gone, along with Siebel, Wagner, and many of the story’s other secondary characters. Still, I was able to follow the adapted story perfectly, thanks to Purcarete’s visceral images. To name just a few:
- As Faust summons Satan, the floorboards of his study tremble and rock, then suddenly burst open as an army of white demons leap out.
- A black dog runs through Faust’s open door. Faust eagerly catches its leash as it dives into a wardrobe. He pulls the dog back out into the open – but at the end of the leash he finds Mephistopheles.
- As she tempts Faust to sign away his soul, Mephistopheles slowly strips off her black tuxedo to reveal red flesh beneath her moon white face. She has a woman’s bare breasts, and a big red codpiece.
- As Faust flies off to Walpurgis Night, the stage splits in half. Demons leads the audience through the gap into the fire-lit, grotesque world of Walpurgis Night. Mephistopheles, dressed like a baroque aristocrat, wears an immense, aristocratic, red beehive wig. Rings of dancing demons cackle beneath a wall of fireworks. Debauched Gretchens, smeared with mud, rut with gigantic swine…and nightmarish murals in black and white loom on the walls…
- Death appears as a tall, thin, bald man wearing a corset and hoop skirt, his face painted like a skull. His movements are unbelievably gentle. When he speaks, his velvety, reassuring voice is so loud, it echoes in your bones.
Then there was Gretchen. I’ve always thought Faust and Gretchen’s relationship is hard for modern audiences to fully appreciate. After all, these days sex outside of marriage is extremely common. So is having a child out of wedlock. So how can we really understand how wrong it is for Faust to seduce Gretchen?
Purcarete solved this problem in a risky but effective way: Gretchen was played by a chorus of barely teenage girls, wearing white shifts, little anklet socks and mary janes. They carry lanterns and ring little silver bells to protect themselves against spirits. They are painfully young – and the middle-aged Faust becomes a borderline pedophile. What he’s doing is not noble, not sexy, not romantic, but just plain wrong. In the play’s most disturbing image, Mephistopheles lays one Gretchen on the floor, and slowly buries her hands beneath the girl’s white shift. The hands emerge bloody, and Faust trembles with excitement.
The Gretchen chorus helped me see the Faust story in a completely new way. It became a tale about how the devil uses the wicked to hurt the innocent. The message: people think they want love, but they crave sensation. And those who can’t feel love – the bored, the despairing, the damaged – can enjoy inflicting their pain on the whole and pure.
Perhaps the most surprising moment was at the very end, when God wins his bet with the devil by forgiving Faust. Mephistopheles is angry, hurt, but also inspired. She marvels at the miracle of divine love, the one thing the Devil isn’t expecting, is never expecting. She even flirts with the idea of repentance– but soon slowly spirals back into the old habit of hate.
My own favorite part, though, was actually the curtain call. After all of the spectacle, the suffering, the whole horrible tale, all 80-odd performers came out together to take their bows. There was something so touching about watching angels and devils, saints and sinners, children and monsters, turn their faces to the light and take a bow. That’s what we love about theater, right? And I thought I hope that’s the way it is when we die: the show is over, take a bow, and everyone is friends.
The Seafarer
By Conor McPherson
Directed by Jimmy Fay
at The Abbey Theatre, Dublin
The Seafarer was reviewed right and left during its New York run, so I’m not going to summarize the entire story here. The first act introduces the characters, all pretty standard-issue Miserable Irish Losers. Most are pickled, and all are stuck in dysfunctional relationships with their families and friends. The second act, a Christmas Eve card game, is much, much better. Most of the characters think they’re just playing poker with an affable, wealthy stranger. Only one man realizes he’s playing the devil for his soul. Now all the mundane details of the first act begin to resonate and take on cosmic significance. A man’s offer to loan his brother 20 Euros is actually a chance to save his sibling’s soul; a desperate bet becomes a prayer for redemption.
Different Devils
In The Seafarer, the Devil wants to damn people because he’s lonely. He doesn’t understand why God loves man so much – and he wants the whole world to suffer his own exile from the divine presence. (There’s a great Hungarian expression for this, roughly translated: “also the neighbor’s cow should die.”) He doesn’t really have any special powers (except pain rays that shoot from his fingers like the Emperor in Star Wars and, of course, omniscience). He must convince men to damn themselves.
The Seafarer’s men are lushes that still have faith. Their sins are despair, envy, and mourning for the lost past – the sides of themselves that mirror the Devil, trapped in his fear, dread, and bottomless longing. These men are pretty sure they’re doomed, but they gamble on divine forgiveness.
Purcarete’s Faust offers a far different vision of man and devil. Faust delights in the drama and excitement of evil. He destroys other peoples’ lives just to see what will happen. He’s in the grip of an epic self-delusion: he thinks he’s a romantic hero or a deep thinker, when in fact he’s just a common criminal. But in the end, he’s still saved. Faust says the more God can forgive, the greater he is. We deserve to be damned, but we are not – and we’re lucky the decision is not up to us.
Many thanks to Andras Visky for bringing me along to see Faust in Sibiu – but even more for his amazing, gut wrenching play Long Friday, which I got to see in Cluj’s Hungarian State Theater. Stay tuned for more on his work!
Friday, June 20, 2008
Travels with Bip: Dublin
Spring 2008:
Note to self: never follow a tour of the Jameson factory with a visit to an interactive history museum.
You might see Elvis on the way home.
Note to self: never follow a tour of the Jameson factory with a visit to an interactive history museum.
You might see Elvis on the way home.
Kiri Te Kanawa
Apparently soprano Kiri Te Kanawa has a fanatical Budapest fan club...
Is she the new Andre the Giant?
Or maybe she's marking her turf? You know, just to warn Renee Fleming to stay the eff on her own side of town.
Is she the new Andre the Giant?
Or maybe she's marking her turf? You know, just to warn Renee Fleming to stay the eff on her own side of town.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
The Future
So it's finally completely official: Rick and I are moving back to New York at the end of August. I'm going to get an MFA in Dramatic Writing at NYU. Rick will be holding it down on the day job front while continuing to write the world's most awesome short stories.
More recent news, photos, theater thoughts, funny stories, and randomosity coming up soon.
More recent news, photos, theater thoughts, funny stories, and randomosity coming up soon.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Back in Effect
My last post was just after New Year’s, and here it is the last day of school in Budapest. There’s no excuse for my chronic blog silence, so I’m not going to attempt to make one. Instead, I will rescue several trivial, but funny, episodes from blogless oblivion.
1. Yoda.
Apparently Yoda speaks Hungarian. The story (which I really don’t want to check out, lest it prove to be false) goes like this: during shooting for the Yoda scenes in the first star wars, George Lucas worried that Yoda didn’t sound alien enough. So they asked a Hungarian cameraman on the crew to translate Yoda’s lines from English into Hungarian and back again, word for word. The result? Crazy backwards Yoda talk. “Many years study you must if a Jedi you would be.” It’s Hungarian syntax! I wish someone had told me this before, I might be conversational by now. Thanks, Bob!
In other news, my 12-year-old English student Kata continues to be a source of unintentional amusement. When I asked her to use the word “rebel” in a sentence yesterday, she confidently replied “When you are sick, and you want get better, you must eat a rebel.” Next, I asked her to use the word “church,” and she offered “I church my ball.” Then she giggled uncontrollably. I'm beginning to think she's just messing with me.
2. Cherry Pie.
This winter, Rick and I both wrote books on global warming. What does this have to do with Cherry Pie, you ask? This week, we decided to use some of the fresh sour cherries at our local market to make a delicious cherry pie. We decorated the top of the pie with a cute, goofy sun made out of dough. Unfortunately, I turned the oven up too high. Much like our earth, pies are vulnerable to rising temperatures. When humans are careless, our pies pay the price.
3. Unintentional Poetry
It’s summer time, and that means I’m working on new background articles for The Met radio broadcasts. I’m ridiculously paranoid about getting rid of text, so when I edit articles I create an “outtakes” document, where I paste erased phrases. Sometimes this results in tiny, unintentional poems. Here are three of my latest:
THE DAMNATION OF FAUST
Remembering the sensation
the lures and dangers of knowledge
torn between longing for the infinite and lust for earthly pleasures
set in the years before and during Germany’s descent into Nazism.
Towards the Damnation (In the mean time in between time)
and at the end of that decisive section I was obliged to abandon the peroration of my piece
It wasn’t mere paranoia.
THAïS
(“so all three virgins are martyred virgo intacta – a real Medieval crowd-pleaser.”)
What’s a marionette lay?
Their virginity (though not their lives) is preserved through miracles
which provided the famous first couple of humanity with operatic love duets to sing
he marches her through the desert, delighting
and ultimately dies a magnificent martyr’s death in the desert.
It’s almost a Romeo and Juliette story.
the difference between spiritual love and erotic love
LA RONDINE
the original spaghetti western,
with no higher philosophical purpose
And the world was unstable, changing rapidly, and frighteningly, every day.
kept his head in the sand about the war for a long time.
What, she just walks away from the relationship, and that’s the end?
About the death of youthful illusions.
and willing them to become present reality
sorrow, the regret of the passing of the world, the waste and sorrow and heartbreak on the way to the future,
He can’t write what he wants, and he can’t create a perfect muse.
held a poignant sweetness
The past will never return (and nothing will ever be the same again.)
It’s a small tragedy,
It’s a human-sized tragedy.
1. Yoda.
Apparently Yoda speaks Hungarian. The story (which I really don’t want to check out, lest it prove to be false) goes like this: during shooting for the Yoda scenes in the first star wars, George Lucas worried that Yoda didn’t sound alien enough. So they asked a Hungarian cameraman on the crew to translate Yoda’s lines from English into Hungarian and back again, word for word. The result? Crazy backwards Yoda talk. “Many years study you must if a Jedi you would be.” It’s Hungarian syntax! I wish someone had told me this before, I might be conversational by now. Thanks, Bob!
In other news, my 12-year-old English student Kata continues to be a source of unintentional amusement. When I asked her to use the word “rebel” in a sentence yesterday, she confidently replied “When you are sick, and you want get better, you must eat a rebel.” Next, I asked her to use the word “church,” and she offered “I church my ball.” Then she giggled uncontrollably. I'm beginning to think she's just messing with me.
2. Cherry Pie.
This winter, Rick and I both wrote books on global warming. What does this have to do with Cherry Pie, you ask? This week, we decided to use some of the fresh sour cherries at our local market to make a delicious cherry pie. We decorated the top of the pie with a cute, goofy sun made out of dough. Unfortunately, I turned the oven up too high. Much like our earth, pies are vulnerable to rising temperatures. When humans are careless, our pies pay the price.
3. Unintentional Poetry
It’s summer time, and that means I’m working on new background articles for The Met radio broadcasts. I’m ridiculously paranoid about getting rid of text, so when I edit articles I create an “outtakes” document, where I paste erased phrases. Sometimes this results in tiny, unintentional poems. Here are three of my latest:
THE DAMNATION OF FAUST
Remembering the sensation
the lures and dangers of knowledge
torn between longing for the infinite and lust for earthly pleasures
set in the years before and during Germany’s descent into Nazism.
Towards the Damnation (In the mean time in between time)
and at the end of that decisive section I was obliged to abandon the peroration of my piece
It wasn’t mere paranoia.
THAïS
(“so all three virgins are martyred virgo intacta – a real Medieval crowd-pleaser.”)
What’s a marionette lay?
Their virginity (though not their lives) is preserved through miracles
which provided the famous first couple of humanity with operatic love duets to sing
he marches her through the desert, delighting
and ultimately dies a magnificent martyr’s death in the desert.
It’s almost a Romeo and Juliette story.
the difference between spiritual love and erotic love
LA RONDINE
the original spaghetti western,
with no higher philosophical purpose
And the world was unstable, changing rapidly, and frighteningly, every day.
kept his head in the sand about the war for a long time.
What, she just walks away from the relationship, and that’s the end?
About the death of youthful illusions.
and willing them to become present reality
sorrow, the regret of the passing of the world, the waste and sorrow and heartbreak on the way to the future,
He can’t write what he wants, and he can’t create a perfect muse.
held a poignant sweetness
The past will never return (and nothing will ever be the same again.)
It’s a small tragedy,
It’s a human-sized tragedy.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Hungarian Jazz
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