Monthly Archives: March 2007

After the War at A.C.T.

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Dave and I saw a preview of After the War at A.C.T. last night. The ensemble is absolutely terrific, the set steals the show more than once, but the play itself is dour, earnest, slight, and longwinded. It has something of the feel of what you’d get if you took a slice-of-life play like Juno and the Paycock and muted both the comedy and the tragedy way, way, way down. All is enveloped in permanent twilight, mood-wise.

Despite the many characters living together in the boarding house, the playwright doesn’t have much of a story, and yet it takes him two long acts, three hours in all, to tell it. For a while, I was interested in getting to know the characters, who are a colorful and extremely varied bunch. But an hour and a half later, at the end of the first act, the lights went up and I was still waiting for a story to begin.

(The last scene of the first act has the characters gathering to watch Perry Como on a new television set, which is more than a little reminiscent of the gramophone scene in Juno and the Paycock. But, unlike Juno, the scene is not used to make much of a point about the characters, nor does it lead anywhere in terms of story.)

The story doesn’t get around to beginning, not really, in the second act either. What little dramatic tension there is has mostly to do with who is currently or was formerly sleeping with whom in the boarding house, and who knows and doesn’t know about it. When the various secrets come to light, though, nothing much comes of them. The playwright seems to deliberately shy away from anything that might smack of dramatic conflict or action. He’ll spend a scene building up to the moment when one character finally confronts another with what he or she knows, and then the confrontation comes, and there are maybe two or three short lines and a blackout. Say what? The scene changes take longer than most of the conflicts. Which is maybe only fair, as they are also a lot more interesting to watch. But conflict is the bread and butter of drama, and these ought to be the most important and interesting and crucial scenes in the play. Yet the playwright just tosses them away, over and over again.

It’s not that this isn’t a common enough way of doing things in plays, God knows. It was typical of a lot of mainstream American playwrighting style for a lot of the first half of the 20th century. But it’s hugely unsatisfying. Thing is, if the playwright spends some time early in the play getting the audience interested in the fact that there’s this latent instability in the situation, investing emotional importance into whatever this ticking bomb is that could go off and disrupt things for the characters in a significant way, then, when the bomb is made to go off and it just sputters and fizzles out, it only tells us that the situation was never really worth our concern in the first place, that we have just been wasting our time thinking there was anything going that might matter to the characters. Of course, real life is like that sometimes, but a play isn’t real life, a play is a carefully constructed presentation designed to communicate some sort of view of real life. Quite a different thing. The playwright has had all the time in the world to decide where to direct your attention, and if he or she has done it by implying that this something is vitally important to these characters that you’re being led to care about, and then he or she shows you later that what was presented as being important to these characters isn’t important to them after all — then you’ve been led on a wild goose chase, and rather pointlessly.

What dramatic climaxes there are in the second act seem to occur when characters reach the point of arguing about who has been the most downtrodden by life, whose personal history constitutes the heaviest burden. This is the kind of play where at a climactic moment someone actually shouts, “Your shame! What about my shame!” (I commented on this to Dave afterward, and he said the line that stuck in his memory was, “Because it matters! Because it has to matter!” An awful lot of the dialogue in the second act is like that.)

The most passionate conflict in the play occurs in the second act when a Japanese-American man and a black man, who have been good friends up to this point, quarrel bitterly about whether the mistreatment by America of the Japanese-American man, who spent three years in the worst of the internment camps during World War Two, is significant when compared with that of the black man. The fact that one of the two men is carrying a gun during much of the quarrel doesn’t do much to disguise the fact that these are less characters in a story than they are mouthpieces for opposing viewpoints in the debate the author wants to have with himself. The gun is never fired, nor does anyone so much as threaten to fire it. Nor does the debate come to any conclusion; the author has carefully constructed it, just as he has everything else in the play, so as not to lead to anything that might look like dramatic motion.

Well, that’s not quite true. At the end of the play — and stop me if you’ve heard this one — several of the characters leave the boarding house, suitcase in hand, their fates uncertain. Wandering off into the permanent twilight.

Half the Intelligence of Yogurt, Too

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Saw the other day in Safeway a really, really stupid ad slogan:

Half the sugar of yogurt

in big letters at the top of a sign advertising something called Knudsen Cottage Doubles, which are packages of cottage cheese plus a syrupy looking fruit topping.

Huh? Yogurt has maybe 2g to 3g of sugar per serving, doesn’t it? And according to the label this stuff has 14g. Not half the sugar. About four or five times the sugar.

If you get very close to the sign, though, you can see a tiny asterisk after the slogan, and in tiny words near the bottom of the sign it says

*When compared to 8 oz. of the leading sweetened yogurt

In order words, half the sugar of yogurt after we’ve added a bunch of sugar to it.

Besides, yogurt is naturally a bit sour, and until you get used to the taste it can be nice to add a little honey or jam to it (though given the popular American diet, the leading yogurt is probably the sugariest of them all — or more likely the high fructose corn syrupiest). But who needs to sweeten their cottage cheese? Who wants to sweeten their cottage cheese? We’re not talking about one of those live-culture cottage cheeses you get in the organic food stores that are as sour as yogurt, we’re talking about commonplace mainstream cottage cheese. It’s not like you need half a cup of ice cream sundae topping to make that palatable.

Andrew Sullivan on Anne Coulter and “Faggot” and the Republican Party Today

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Nice essay by Andrew Sullivan from his column, The Daily Dish, for The Atlantic, and I admire how the essay is angry and well reasoned and insightful and dignified all at the same time:

Coulter has an actual argument in self-defense and it’s worth addressing. Her argument is that it was a joke and that since it was directed at a straight man, it wasn’t homophobic. It was, in her words, a “school-yard taunt,” directed at a straight man, meaning a “wuss” and a “sissy”. Why would gays care? She is “pro-gay,” after all. Apart from backing a party that wants to strip gay couples of all legal rights by amending the federal constitution, kick them out of the military where they are putting their lives on the line, put them into “reparative therapy” to “cure” them, keep it legal to fire them in many states, and refusing to include them in hate crime laws, Coulter is very pro-gay. As evidence of how pro-gay she is, check out all the gay men and women in America now defending her.

Her defense, however, is that she was making a joke, not speaking a slur. Her logic suggests that the two are mutually exclusive. They’re not. And when you unpack Coulter’s joke, you see she does both. Her joke was that the world is so absurd that someone like Isaiah Washington is forced to go into rehab for calling someone a “faggot.” She’s absolutely right that this is absurd and funny and an example of p.c. insanity. She could have made a joke about that — a better one, to be sure — but a joke. But she didn’t just do that. She added to the joke a slur: “John Edwards is a faggot.” That’s why people gasped and then laughed and clapped so heartily. I was in the room, so I felt the atmosphere personally. It was an ugly atmosphere, designed to make any gay man or woman in the room feel marginalized and despised. To put it simply, either conservatism is happy to be associated with that atmosphere, or it isn’t. I think the response so far suggests that the conservative elites don’t want to go there, but the base has already been there for a very long time. (That’s why this affair is so revealing, because it is showing which elites want to pander to bigots, and which do not.)

There’s more, and it’s worth a read, especially if you’ve been inclined to buy Coulter’s defense that calling John Edwards a faggot wasn’t an insult to gays as well.

Dinner With Eric

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I had dinner with Eric on Saturday.

Eric lost his partner Tina to cancer last year. I keep being a little bit startled all over again every time I realize they were together more than a decade, because I knew each of them before they knew each other. I tend to think of myself as a loner who’s been fine with moving on when things weren’t going anywhere, or going anywhere I wanted to go, and who’s never spent enough time in one place to have old friends as a regular part of my life. But then I add it up and realize I’ve been in the San Francisco Bay Area now for 17½ years (it’ll be 18 in July). And I met Tina, and then Eric, about a year or a year and a half after that. At my age that’s only a modest fraction of a lifetime, but there still aren’t too many people I’ve accumulated that much history with.

I met them both through the WELL, which is still my favorite online hangout. When I first came to the Bay Area and discovered the WELL, my relationship at the time was in the process of (blessedly) falling apart and I didn’t have much of a social life yet. The WELL was (and still is) a community of smart, literate people, and despite a lot of initial shyness on my part (I used to be cripplingly shy; nowadays I’m still very shy but I’ve taught myself how not to be crippled by it) it wasn’t long before I was mostly fitting in, making friends and acquaintances. The WELL even led to one wonderful, if too brief, love affair. And a few very close friends, one of them being Eric.

For several years Eric and I were frequent companions. We went hiking together many times, sang in a chorale and a madrigal group and several impromptu Christmas caroling groups together (he’s a tenor, I’m a bass-baritone), and had lots of long talks about life and love and politics and society. When Eric divorced his wife, we had many long talks about the issues that were coming up for him around that. Some of it was just comparing notes as to how relationships looked from the somewhat different perspectives of a gay man and a straight man, and some of it was that I had made a breakthrough in my own attitude toward relationships not that many years earlier, and broken up with my partner at that time (I don’t mean to imply cause and effect there — the breakthrough and the breakup were occurring more or less at the same time and I don’t think either led to the other; they sort of fed each other), and I was able to give him some support and understanding in his own similar-but-different breakup and breakthrough. Years later, after my surgery, when I made the frightening change from freelancing at home to working in offices, Eric was able to do some serious supporting in return, and he was something of a mentor to me, giving me tips about getting along in the business world, warning me what to expect and how not to let it throw me.

The WELL is still a big part of my social circle, though since then I’ve found my way into other circles that are satisfying other parts of me — these days it’s the Billy Club — so I don’t show up at the social gatherings as often as I used to. Not too many WELL folks are into theater or opera, there are not too many people who share my particular spiritual interests (which I guess I’d have to characterize as a mix of scholarly and mystical, and yes, I know that’s pretty much self-contradictory), and the gay community on the WELL is a beautiful bunch of people but a smallish group. But I still log on several times a week to chat about current events, what we’ve been up to, and so on.

So on Saturday evening Eric and I went to Britt-Marie on Solano Avenue, which is a wonderful restaurant that I don’t think I’d been to in eight or nine years, and we caught up. We chatted about Eastern religion and the grieving process and cooking and what’s up with Dave and his bookstore and what’s up with Eric’s daughters — good Lord, his daughters are now grown women with careers and I remember them when they were in high school. And a lot of other stuff that’s way too personal to blog about.

One of the cool things about Britt-Marie is that, in addition to the great food, they have an unusual and interesting selection of wines available by the glass. I know little about wine, but Eric suggested a zinfandel to go with my lamb dish and it was terrific and I ended up having a second glass of it as well, which is maybe one glass more than I ought to have since I drink fairly little these days and get tipsy more easily than I used to.