Six Characters at BAM

Pirandello’s Six Characters at BAM

One of Gertrude Stein’s most famous lines is, “there is no there there.” Theatre de la Ville’s production of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author directed by Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota and currently playing at BAM visualizes Stein’s phenomenology as Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Shadows hidden behind scrims of Yves Collet’s set mask elusive ideal forms which never divulge their true essence. A great piece of art can sometimes make the familiar strange and new, allowing the viewer to feel he or she's seeing the world anew. It also can create a feeling of understanding. In Pirandello the reverse takes place. Art and theater are the lie that doesn’t tell the truth and it’s the unformed protoplasm of reality that’s one step closer to revelation (the playwright, an early practitioner of metatheater, comments dismissively about his The Rules of the Game that’s being rehearsed at the beginning and offered by one Luigi Pirandello). But then even so called reality begins to fail the test and in the end the director (Alain Libolt) simply says “tell the electrician, turn everything off.” And who is this electrician but the prime mover, the force that makes us conscious of the world, Descartes's maxim reversed, “sum ergo cogito.” The current production with its actors playing actors and actors playing supposedly real people points to the huge influence Pirandello has had on both theater and film. Could you imagine Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche,New York where human life is imagined as an enormous stage set, without Six Characters? The other side to Six Characters are also the primordial passions, which can make it sound like something in between an afternoon soap and classic tragedy. And in spite of all the modernity, there were times when the current French version iterated at breakneck speed made Pirandello’s lines sound curiously like Corneille and Racine—minus the alexandrines, of course. Attempting to parse the subtitles, unless you’ve taken speed reading, can also give you vertigo.

The Banality of Coffee

Juan Valdez

According to a Times story Migros, a Swiss retailer put pictures of Hitler on its “mini-cream containers.” (“For Swiss, Distasteful Jolt With Coffee: Hitler Creamer,” NYT, 10/22/14). The Times quotes Tristan Cerf of Migros as saying, “Usually the labels have pleasant images like trains, landscapes and dogs—nothing polemic that can pose a problem…You cannot put Pol Pot or a terrorist on a milk container. It’s unacceptable.” According to The Times article, this isn’t the first time this kind of mishap has occurred. The writer of the Times piece, Dan Bilefsky, comments, “In the spring, a German furniture chain apologized for selling ceramic mugs with Hitler’s face on them.” Can we say that rather than this being a wake up call about the banality of evil, that it’s a case of the banality of evil providing a wake up call? Or shall we assume that this is just a matter of one manufacturer dealing with the problem of the banality of coffee which has never been a match for NoDoz. Usually people drink coffee for the caffeine so seeing Hitler on a creamer or a mug is naturally going to add to the jolt. Apologies are really not necessary. The idea of putting Hitler’s face on common household goods is likely to keep a lot of people on their feet. It wouldn’t be surprising if stock in Red Bull took a tumble when Migros started to add the faces of Hitler and Mussolini to its creamer. And if its line of Hitler and Mussolini creamers proves successful, it won’t be long before we see other giants of annihilation like Osama bin Laden and even Abu bakr al-Baghdadi on the labels (in place of more beneficent faces like that of Elsie the Cow or that  famous representative of the Columbian coffee bean Juan Valdez). Of course, any creamer maker worth its salt is going to claim, as Migros has done, that it’s all a big mistake.  But that, as they say, goes with the territory. 

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Somewhere in Alejandro’s Inarritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) lurks a decent short story. Maybe not a great short story like the Raymond Carver story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,”which in Birdman is the subject of an stage adaptation by Riggan Thomas (Michael Keaton)—a Hollywood actor who has made his reputation as a superhero. Birdman is a play within a movie and at the end, the lead actually shoots himself. The movie’s bevy of theater row critics eventually tout the self-mutilation as a form of super realism and it goes hand in hand with the film’s surrealist birdman doppelgänger. Added to this are the self-consciously post-modernist elements infusing the director’s whole concept. Michael Keaton was naturally famous for Batman and within its own closed universe the movie continually continually usurps art for reality. Mike Shriner (Ed Norton), a famous stage actor is the loose screw in this regard. Remember the Actor’s Studio, method acting and creating the role. Shriner attempts to fire up a scene in the stage motel, by actually having sex with Lesley (Naomi Watts), his real life wife, on stage. He gets an erection in front of the audience though he’s incapable of having one at home. “I pretend just about everywhere else, but I don’t pretend out there,” he says about the theatre. Birdman is an unruly mess. Riggan says about the work which he hopes will legitimize him,  “this play is like a deformed version of myself that keeps kicking me in the balls with a small hammer.” The same might be said for the plight of the viewer watching the movie. Embellishing Carver’s original creations with the backstory of the actors who play them only serves to upstage once powerful narratives and emotions. The fatuousness of artistic ambition infuses the movie. But it was not a major theme in Carver’s work. Inarritu has inadvertently stumbled onto Chekhov territory, but the irony and simplicity of The Seagull, which introduces a similar cast of dreamers and bombasts, is a hard act to follow.

Yet Another Perk For Harvard Students

Everyone wants to go to Harvard and now there's another reason why the application pool will undoubtedly swell. An article in The Times describes how, “Dozens of Harvard Law School faculty members are asking the university to withdraw its new sexual misconduct policy, saying that it violates basic principles of fairness and would do more harm than good," (“Some Harvard Professors Oppose Policy on Assaults,” NYT, 10/15/14). California recently passed an affirmative consent law which basically insures that most students having sex will have to employ the services of a litigator. However, if the Harvard Law faculty initiative succeeds, Harvard will boast one of the lower legal costs for being a sexually active student than any university in the country. This a truly a selfless act by the law faculty whose action will also result in a reduction of their own billing hours. However, what’s most important is that the action taken by the law faculty is likely to turn Harvard into one of the leading centers of educated and enlightened sex offense. Potential sex offenders will know that once they get that fat acceptance package  their rights will be protected as they attempt to rape their fellow classmates. Of course, those Harvard Law faculty who have raised their voices in favor of sexual misconduct have not dealt with an ancillary issue which is the rights of those Harvard applicants who are wait-listed or who don’t get in at all. It doesn’t seem fair that only accepted Harvard student get to pillage and rape while those who are rejected or wait-listed aren’t free to force themselves on others.

Mirandizing Your Don Juan

Max Slevogt’s portrait of Don Juan in Mozart’s Don Giovanni

Say you're making a citizen’s arrest on a California campus for a person who has not gotten your affirmative consent to sex. Say someone has been cajoling you and flirting with you and trying to get you into bed and after hours of being utterly charming, you say ok what the hell I’ll reward him or her for his or her persistence, should you mirandize that person? Taking this further what if you give your affirmative consent to one kind of sex, but inadvertently find yourself being lovingly cajoled into another kind of sex which you partake in but which is not listed on your affirmative consent form, what recourse should you seek? Let’s say you have read the guilty party their Miranda rights, and they are already whimpering and acting contrite, do you enjoin them in some way? Do you attempt to have their paycheck garnished? What are all the possible ways that people can be punished for getting you to do something you were pretty sure you didn’t want to do? Let’s make this clear, the person didn’t rape you or physically harm you, but he or she talked a blue streak and though you were involved with someone else, you became infatuated and were stimulated to do inconceivably dirty and horrible things with that person, things you hadn’t ever done with the person you say you loved because of the passion this charmer created in you and which you were not in your right mind to affirmatively consent to, in the first place. How should this person be punished?