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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC
Amicable and Cabal
Amicable comes from Latin
amīcābilis, meaning "friendly," and amāre, "to feel affection
for" or "to love." Amāre has a number of English descendants,
including amiable ("friendly, sociable, and congenial"), amorous
("strongly moved by love and especially sexual love"), and amateur,
which, though it might seem surprising, is related to amāre by way of the Latin
amātor, which means "lover" as well as "enthusiastic
admirer" and "devotee."
A cabal is a group secretly
united in a plot. Cabal has been associated with a group of five ministers in
the government of England's King Charles II. The initial letters of the names
or titles of those men (Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale)
spelled cabal, and they have been collectively dubbed as the "Cabal
Cabinet" or "Cabal Ministry." But these five names are not the
source of the word cabal, which was in use decades before Charles II ascended
the throne. The term traces back to cabbala, the Medieval Latin name for the
Kabbalah, a traditional system of esoteric Jewish mysticism. Latin borrowed
Cabbala from the Hebrew qabbālāh, meaning "received or traditional
lore."
The rule of three
Omne trium perfectum (everything that comes in threes is perfect)
The rule of three is a writing
principle that says that a trio of
events or characters is more humorous, satisfying, or effective than other
numbers and that an audience is more
likely to remember the information conveyed because having three entities
combines both brevity and rhythm with having the smallest amount of information
to create a pattern. The rule of three is
often used in words, phrases, sentences, lines, paragraphs/stanzas,
chapters/sections of writing, books, poetry, oral storytelling, films, and
advertising and. Photography (dividing an image into three vertically and
horizontally.
Related to that is the term hendiatris,
meaning a figure of speech where three
successive words are used to express a single central idea. When used in a
slogan or a motto, it’s is known as a tripartite motto.
Here are some examples;
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of
Happiness
Stop, Look and Listen
Stop, Drop and Roll
Faster, Higher, Stronger
Veni, vidi, vici
Disney Left Out the Most Gruesome Aspects of the Original Snow White Story
Disney Left Out the Most Gruesome Aspects of the Original Snow White Story
Oh, Snow
White, that classic, if a little retro, fairytale of good triumphing over evil.
It’s a sweet story of an innocent young beauty who is banished by a vain,
cruel, and jealous stepmother and who, with the help of seven lovable dwarfs,
ultimately finds everlasting true love. Walt Disney turned the fable into the
first full-length animated musical feature film in 1937. Snow White and
the Seven Dwarfs is to this day one of the top-10 films of all time
(adjusted for inflation), beloved by generations of children.
It turns
out the American animator left out a few gruesome details. Disney’s well-known
Snow White is a sanitized version of the original German Brothers Grimm
fairytale, which was a lot more, well, grim.
Jacob and
Wilhelm Grimm didn’t actually come up with the story of Snow White or
Cinderella, Rapunzel, or any other storybook princess associated with their
(and now Disney’s) name, for that matter. The Grimms were German scholars,
researchers, and authors who collected folktales that were part of a rich oral
tradition, having been passed down from generation to generation of women
telling the stories to pass the time. In 1812, they published the collection
as Nursery and Household Tales.
Despite
its title, the book was not originally intended for children. The text included
violence, incest, sex, and perhaps most deadly of all—footnotes. In the
Cinderella story, for instance, the stepsisters cut off their toes and heels in
order to fit into the glass slipper.
In
“Little Snow-White,” as the original story was called, the Evil Queen asks a
hunter to take Snow White into the forest to kill, as happens also in the
movie. (In the original version, the child is also only 7 years old, as opposed
to Disney’s 14. Neither seems old enough to consider marriage.)
In the
Grimm version, the Queen orders the huntsman to bring back Snow White’s
internal organs, saying “Kill her, and as proof that she is dead bring her
lungs and liver back to me.”
He kills
a boar instead, and brings back to the Queen the boar’s lungs and liver—which
the Queen thinks belongs to Snow White and so promptly eats. Ewww!
“The cook
had to boil them with salt, and the wicked woman ate them, supposing that she
had eaten Snow-White’s lungs and liver,” as the Grimm brothers wrote.
The Queen
tricks Snow White three separate times in the Grimm version. The first time,
she has Snow White try on a corset, which is so tight, Snow White passes out.
(The dwarfs save her by cutting the laces.) The second time, she sells Snow
White a poisonous comb, which the young girl puts in her hair, causing her to
pass out. (The dwarfs take it out.) The third time the Queen tricks her with
the same poisonous apple we see in the Disney film.
Having
fainted and presumed dead, young Snow-White is placed in a glass coffin in both
book and movie. When the Prince happens by in the Grimm version, he insists on
taking the deceased beauty away, even though he’s never met her. The dwarfs
hesitantly agree, but as they are carrying her coffin out of their house, one
of them stumbles. Jostled from her resting place in the coffin, Snow White
spits out the apple lodged in her throat and is immediately revived. Without
the influence of the Prince’s kiss.
In movie
and in folklore, Snow White and the Prince fall in love and get married (never
mind that in the original tale, Snow is only 7 years old). In the movie, the
seven dwarfs chase the Evil Queen into the forest, where she tumbles off a
cliff—with a push from a convenient lightning strike—and falls to her death.
In the
book version, the Queen attends their wedding where she is meted out a just
punishment of dancing to her death. (Perhaps this last was thought up by a 19th century
noblewoman forced to dance endlessly to the 1812 version of Bruno Mars’s “Marry
You.”)
The more
Grimm version of the Queen’s death goes like this: “They put a pair of iron
shoes into burning coals. They were brought forth with tongs and placed before
her. She was forced to step into the red-hot shoes and dance until she fell
down dead.”
You can
see why Disney wanted to clean up that unsavory image!
E.L.
Hamilton has written about pop culture for a variety of magazines and
newspapers, including Rolling Stone, Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, the New York Post
and the New York Daily News. She lives in central New Jersey, just west of New
York City
WH Auden's 'The Age of Anxiety'
It was both hailed as 'his best work to date' and damned as
'his one failure'. Leonard Bernstein's symphony, inspired by the poem, is the
better work of art, argues Glyn Maxwell
W. H. Auden
In 1944, in New York City,
against a background of a changed and frightening world, the finest – and most
controversial – English poet of the day began work on a new long poem. On its
publication three years later it would garner some of the worst reviews he ever
got and leave many of his devotees cold: while TS Eliot hailed it as "his
best work to date", the Times Literary Supplement deemed it "his one
dull book, his one failure". It would inspire a symphony and a ballet and
win the Pulitzer prize. It was the last long poem he would write.
"The Age of Anxiety" is
the strangest flower of a marvellously fertile period. The decade following WH
Auden's emigration to New York in 1939 produced not only the long poems
"For the Time Being", "New Year Letter" and "The Sea
and the Mirror" – his sublime meditation on The Tempest – but some of the
finest works of this or any 20th-century poet: "In Memory of WB Yeats",
"At the Grave of Henry James", "If I Could Tell You",
"The Fall of Rome", "The Quest". And the great – and
latterly disavowed – lament for a falling world "September 1st,
1939".
There are still, remarkably, some
who believe Auden's gift deserted him when he left England on the eve of the
second world war, as if this perceived treachery to the motherland crippled him
creatively, but another reason for this position is suggested by the words of
Anthony Powell on Auden's death in 1973, as reported by Kingsley Amis, with
whom Powell was breakfasting: "I'm delighted that shit has gone . . . It
should have happened years ago . . . scuttling off to America in 1939 with his
boyfriend like a . . . like a . . ." But there'll always be an England.
It is in "September 1st,
1939" that we first glimpse the setting for what would become "The
Age of Anxiety":
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play . . .
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
At the outset of "The Age of
Anxiety" Auden spotlights four of these faces, solitary drinkers in a
wartime New York bar: Malin, a Canadian airman; Quant, a world-weary clerk;
Rosetta, a buyer for a department-store; and Emble, a young naval recruit. Over
six sections – a prologue, a life-story, a dream-quest, a dirge, a masque and
an epilogue – they meditate on their lives, their hopes, their losses, and on
the human condition. In real terms they get talking at the bar, grab a booth
together, get plastered and stagger back to Rosetta's place. There they drink
some more and dance a bit until the two older gents drift home and the younger
one pledges undying love to Rosetta before crashing out on her bed.
Between these mundane characters
and what Auden requires of them stretches a dizzying gulf. Each of his modern
Americans speaks, most of the time, in long speeches of alliterative
tetrameter, an English form so old as to suggest firelight and the mead-hall.
To a mid-20th-century ear, tetrameter would always seem to have a rhyme planned
ahead, but alliteration is what English used to bind ideas before it used
rhyme, and that's good enough this time for the proudly nordic Auden: "My
deuce, my double, my dear image, / Is it lively there, that land of
glass". The never-fulfilled expectation of rhyme is a suitable curse on
any lonesome quartet of drinkers at any bar, a milieu that Auden calls "an
unprejudiced space where nothing particular ever happens".
Unsurprisingly Malin, Quant,
Rosetta and Emble all sound like Auden, who wrote some lively charades but
wasn't really a playwright. Then again, because they sound like Auden, what
they say is mostly brilliant, beautiful, or both. Here is Malin's description
of the death of an airman: "We fought them off / But paid a price; there
was pain for some. / 'Why have They killed me?' wondered our Bert, our / Greenhouse
gunner, forgot our answer, / Then was not with us . . ." While Quant
imagines the decay of the dead: "Soil accepts for a serious purpose / The
jettisoned blood of jokes and dreams . . ." And Rosetta imagines, with
striking prescience, the world to come: "Odourless ages, an ordered world
/ Of planned pleasures and passport-control, / Sentry-go sedatives, soft drinks
and / Managed money, a moral planet / Tamed by terror . . ."
After several pages of the poem
one is aware only of Auden. I defy anyone new to the poem to conceal the
characters' names and correctly guess which of the four is talking. Auden's
prose introduction to them furnishes us with one man who happens to know his
mythology, one man who is "trying to recapture the old atmosphere of laboratory
and lecture-hall", a woman who daydreams of "those landscapes
familiar to all readers of English detective stories" and a young man
"fully conscious of the attraction of his uniform to both sexes".
That is to say, Auden fourfold. When it becomes clear that the puppet-master
has handed out abstractions to all his characters – Malin is
"Thought", Quant "Intuition", Rosetta "Feeling"
and Emble "Sensation" – one can sympathise with the Horizon reviewer
who called the poem "a re-hash of Auden's psychology divided by
four". John Berryman, who regarded Auden as "one of the best living
poets", none the less called them "the four vaguest characters in
modern literature".
Auden's burned-out Manhattanites
are under no more obligation to chat in American slang than Hamlet is to murmur
in Middle Danish. The speeches are meant to be taken as inward monologues,
dream-soliloquies, while the uniform shape of utterance suggests a commonality,
a shared and inescapable plight. Verse should be neither too free nor too
formed, as human experience is also neither: breath and bloodstream hold in
place a struggling spirit, and Auden is a master of human utterance only
insofar as he's a master of form.
But for all its local wonders,
its unceasing appeal to grace and intelligence – plus some welcome bursts of
satiric laughter – there is something formally wrong with "The Age of
Anxiety". If one is going to create puppets then one has to make them
move, and they don't. They don't really move each other, let alone us. They
begin in thought – "Quant was thinking", "Malin thought",
"Emble was thinking" – and move into conversation – "Malin suggested"
"Quant approved", "So did Rosetta" – but in their actual
speeches they show only the faintest traces of attention to one another. In the
third section, "The Seven Stages", Auden has them leaving the bar
behind, not literally, but, by dint of being drunk, fanning out into a
dream-landscape on a spiritual quest (is any drink that good?) at which point
one wonders why he set it in a bar at all.
The quest requires that at one
point the four ascend "the same steep pass", the only physical effect
of which is to shorten their speeches, but paradoxically this causes them to
sound more than ever like projections of abstractions: Rosetta (Feeling) has
"a horror of dwarfs / And a streaming cold", Malin (Thought) muses
that "The less I feel / The more I mind", while Emble (Sensation)
complains "I hate my knees / But like my legs". One voice hardly ever
responds to what another has said, as if the four abstractions were true
oppositions, or sealed off from each other like the four elements. Those may
be, but voices aren't.
The fifth section, "The Masque",
set in Rosetta's apartment, with Malin ogling Emble and Emble pawing Rosetta,
would seem to require the most interaction, but the four remain symbolic
mouthpieces, and when Emble and Rosetta dance and finally kiss, they render the
following sweet nothings:
Emble said:
Till death divide
May the Four Faces Feeling can make
Assent to our sighs.
She said:
The snap of the Three
Grim Spinning Sisters' Spectacle Case
Uphold our honors.
And so to bed. It's easy to
chuckle at this, but it's merely the sound of a form stretched to its furthest
premise and, well . . . snapping. And yet there are traces of beautifully
resonant writing, evoking the moment, bringing human faces close to our own,
throughout "The Age of Anxiety" – they're just all in prose. They're
the stage-directions.
Malin is watching Emble and
Rosetta flirting. He "had been building a little altar of sandwiches. Now
he placed an olive upon it and invoked the Queen of love". A little while
before, when the group arrives at Rosetta's place, they "all felt that it
was time something exciting happened and decided to do their best to see that
it did. Had they been perfectly honest with themselves, they would have had to
admit that they were tired and wanted to go home alone to bed." Quant
"waved his cigar in time to the music" and "invoked the local
spirits". Rosetta, having seen the older men to the elevator, finds Emble
comatose on her bed: "She looked down at him, half-sadly, half-relieved .
. ."
One must love Auden's poetry to
be able to speak this heresy, but I can't help wondering what fun he might have
had – we might have had – with, instead of the poem, a wartime novel in the
vein of Henry Green or Elizabeth Bowen. In virtually the last words of the poem
something is revealed: "[Malin] returned to duty, reclaimed by the actual
world where time is real and in which, therefore, poetry can take no interest .
. ." This points to the problem with "The Age of Anxiety": time
is real to real people. Abstractions can't change, so they don't listen.
A lesser poet wrote a greater
poem for the age of anxiety: in Louis MacNeice's "Autumn Journal",
set in London on the brink of the war, a recognisably human voice is blown
hither and thither by memories, lusts and terrifying headlines. Auden's
"The Age of Anxiety" isn't even the best work of art called "The
Age of Anxiety": if I'm a junior minister in Auden's world, I'm barely a
tea-boy in that of Leonard Bernstein, but I'd accord that honour to his
Symphony No 2. Bernstein found the poem "fascinating and hair-raising".
From the time he read "The Age of Anxiety" in 1948 "the
composition of a symphony based on [it] acquired an almost compulsive
quality", he wrote, describing an "extreme personal identification of
myself with the poem, the essential line [of which] is the record of our difficult
and problematic search for faith." Three years after the Holocaust, in the
year of the founding of Israel, one can scarcely imagine how "difficult
and problematic" faith had become for Bernstein.
Like the poem, the symphony is
divided into six movements, each movement itself sub-divided, but many of the
movements fade or blur into each other. By his own admission, Bernstein
followed the poem very closely, with the piano representing the self in quest
of meaning and faith, struggling to be understood, to be loved, against a
backdrop of jazzily detached and distracted woodwinds, horns, celesta and wild
percussion. For the quest section, the piano descends a tentative,
untrustworthy scale, like the onset of dream, while "The Masque" –
the bit in Rosetta's apartment – is a scintillating piano solo, a real dance
for dear life. Bernstein's daughter Jaime called it "ridiculously
difficult . . . one of the hardest parts ever written", and it does
magnificently what the poem can't do – spins the characters out beyond reason
in their desire to blot out the dismal world.
Throughout the piece instruments
explode into life, peter out suddenly or are drowned out by others, yet the
same fragile theme struggles on. This gives the symphony the concision and
cohesion wanting in the poem. It is short (for a symphony) and electrifying.
Its voices hear each other. And if the grand closing chords seem more resolved
than anything at the end of the poem – notwithstanding Malin's Christian
optimism as his train crosses the Manhattan bridge at sunrise – perhaps, at
that point where genius in language and music meet, only the latter can seem to
mend what's broken.
* OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
The Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival honors new American plays that provide dynamic performance opportunities for college-aged actors.
The festival endeavors both to recognize playwrights for their outstanding work and to provide a resource for universities across the country to identify dynamic plays with robust roles for college-aged actors for production at their institutions. The festival features both a full-length and short play division.
***
The Eric H. Weinberger Award for Emerging Librettists is a juried cash and production grant given annually to support the early work and career of a deserving musical theatre librettist. It commemorates the life and work of playwright/librettist Eric H. Weinberger (1950-2017), who was a Drama Desk Award nominee for Best Book of a Musical (Wanda’s World), and the playwright/librettist of Class Mothers ’68, which earned Pricilla Lopez a Drama Desk Award nomination.
***
Sundog Theatre in NYC is seeking one-act plays for “Scenes from the Staten Island Ferry 2022”
Sundog Theatre’s 20th annual presentation of new and original, one-act plays about our favorite boats, the Staten Island Ferries.
Since it is our 20th anniversary, the themes are “celebration” or “anniversary”.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** BASED ON A TRUE STORY ***
Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, has put more distance between the theater and the monologist Mike Daisey, who was found to have fabricated details in his one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” which just finished a hugely successful run at the Public.
In remarks offered Thursday night before a panel discussion on the fallout from the revelations, Mr. Eustis was more critical of Mr. Daisey than he had been after the radio show “This American Life” first disclosed that incidents recounted in the stage production, about Apple’s labor practices in China, had been invented or embellished. The radio show had run a lengthy excerpt of “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” only to retract it after discovering the inaccuracies.
“We would not have called it nonfiction had we known that incidents described in the piece were fabricated,” Mr. Eustis said, reading a statement. “We didn’t know, and the result was that our audience was misled. The piece had a powerful, positive impact on the world, and we are proud of that. But that doesn’t relieve us of the responsibility of honoring our contract with our audience.”
More...
***
The musical only barely targets Thomas Jefferson as a "slaver," but most of the real life-characters in the story, including George Washington, Marquis de Lafayette, and the Schuyler family, also were. It's unclear if Hamilton was too; the evidence is scant. But according to historian Michelle DuRoss, the politician's grandson alleged that Hamilton owned one or more enslaved people, referencing a purchase in the politician's expense book. And as Gordon-Reed said before, he helped his in-laws, namely Angelica Schuyler and her husband, purchase enslaved people.
Whether Hamilton was a slave owner or not, Miranda understands that the statesman was "complicit in the system" of slavery, despite his vocal stances against it. "[Slavery] is in the third line of our show. It's a system in which every character in our show is complicit in some way or another," the composer and actor told NPR's Fresh Air podcast last week.
More...
***
Saegert attended a performance of The King and I, along with nine other descendants of Leonowens, including a great-great-great-great-granddaughter, at the Princess of Wales Theatre on Sunday.
Leonowens’ memoirs inspired a novel, which then inspired the films and musical that popularized the story. A dive into the actual facts of her life, however, reveals many things outside of this well-known narrative.
“While the musical is a treat in terms of the musicality and the songs, it really is a small portion of Anna,” Saegert said.
Leonowens, Saegert said, was born in Bombay, India, not Wales as she had said during her life, and is thought to have had Indian heritage on one side of her family.
“She was Eurasian, and after becoming a widow with two children, she faked it that she was a Brit, from England,” Saegert said. Her husband had died some years before she accepted the job in Thailand.
“The fact that she was not a Brit but a Eurasian is not something that in today’s world would be thought of as a limitation. In Victorian times it most certainly (was).”
More...
***
Kaufman goes deep in Quills, but in the end he may stand back from the abyss, too. He’s a bit too much of the civil libertarian to do full justice to Sade, who, for all his preening decadence here, is never depicted in the full measure of his atrociousness. Sade catalogued and exulted in practically every perversion imaginable, but the words we hear spoken from his works are for the most part weak derivatives of the real thing; likewise Sade’s monstrous crimes, while alluded to, are not emphasized. These crimes, which included the torture and mutilation of young women, with possible intent to murder, were at least as responsible for getting Sade repeatedly locked up as anything he wrote.
Quills is one of the few really good American movies of the year, and it’s bursting with intellectual energy and standout performances and good old-fashioned Grand Guignol theatrics. But for all its attention to ambiguity, it’s also pushing a rather neat formulation: In order to know virtue, we must know vice. The film is offered up to us as a kind of curative. But since Sade’s vice has been adulterated by the filmmakers, our ensuing knowledge of virtue is a bit too easily won.
More...
***
Shakespeare is notorious for rewriting history to fit his dramatic needs. Combining characters, omitting important events, and making up iconic scenes in the hopes of boosting the drama of the story all work together to create plays more founded in fiction than fact. For instance, Henry VI Part One contains one of literature’s most iconic and exciting scenes— the plucking of red and white roses, initiating the start of the infamous War of the Roses. It’s a tense, striking scene that sparks the brutal wars of the next few plays. It’s because of this famous scene that we call the conflict the War of the Roses. So what makes this scene really amazing is that it probably never happened.
There is absolutely no evidence that either side ever plucked colored roses during an argument. On the contrary, the Yorkist white rose and the Lancastrian red were heraldic badges worn by either side. Shakespeare’s political flower-picking was really only a metaphor for the noblemen siding with their closest kinsmen. Before Shakespeare, no one thought much of the red and white roses. They were just pieces of the heraldry, nothing more.
More...
***
We feel increasing, wrenching desperation watching this story of coercive confinement, although more and more frustrated with Cosson as an interviewer. He asks questions, but they are of the extremely basic kind. Perhaps he was being understandably gentle with his friend’s mom, but interviews are interviews, and a play is a play—and too much in Dana H. is simply left unasked and unanswered, such as where was Hnath in all this?
He was a New York University student at the time, and the play does not make clear if he knew about his mother’s kidnapping. Indeed, it doesn’t make clear if law enforcement knew and was trying to find her. It seems odd that Higginbotham was kidnapped and essentially left her life for five months, and no family or authorities attempted anything to return her to safety. (The Daily Beast sent a list of questions to the play’s spokesperson for Hnath and received no response.)
More...
***
Mike Daisey has been a monologuist for more than 20 years. Not continuously — though it has sometimes felt like it.
So his disappearance from the stage during quarantine was an especially vivid marker of the pandemic’s devastating effect on live theater. Likewise, his re-emergence in a new show, which popped up on Friday night like a bud in early spring, signifies the beginning of a long-hoped-for renewal.
But what will that renewal be like?
On the evidence of the 90-minute monologue Daisey performed in front of an actual audience at the Kraine Theater in the East Village, it will be — at least at first — a hasty and hazy affair with redeeming glints of brilliance.
The haste is to be expected: Daisey was eager to be the first actor back onstage on the first day permitted by new state regulations. That was Friday, when plays, concerts and other performances were allowed to resume at reduced capacity, with the audience masked and distanced. At the 99-seat Kraine, that meant a sellout crowd of 22; to accommodate others — in all, 565 tickets were sold — the show, produced by Daisey and Frigid New York, was also livestreamed.
More...
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