A Revolutionary Track

Manhattan’s N/R trains which run from Brooklyn to Queens or from Queens to Brooklyn depending on where you’re coming from are remarkable illustrations of the space/time continuum as it manifests itself in mass transit. The trains not only effortlessly traverse three boroughs of New York, but they go East and West as well as North and South. Is there a subway in the world that's so defiant of the inertial force of the magnetic poles? Human consciousness has inevitably been retrofitted with primitive forms of directionality that are driving forces in the grid by which cities, states and even countries are navigated. Indian scouts who navigated pathways through virgin forest to modern highway designers are all subliminally driven by gravitational forces that have a formative effect on their consolidation of information. What caused the designer of the N and R trains (which were originally the BMT 2) to make such a radical shift from predictable and well worn paths? For instance say you want to go from 23^rd and Lexington to Times Square. You could take an L shaped route that involves taking the 6 uptown to Grand Central, but because of the N and the R you can simply walk one block further over to Broadway and 23^rd and make the same trip with one train instead of two! If time is money and all of life were looked at one a spread sheet, then the savings to the individual would be almost as dramatic as that incurred by the city which has expended that much less electricity in allowing its straphangers to take a path that, however, counterintuitive, is ultimately the shortest distance between two points. The N and R are literally so constructed that they cut a vertical line right across the city. Broadway, which makes a dramatic sweep from West to East as it descends in the southerly direction, of course, led the way. But when you consider that the last stop before Queens is 59^th and Lexington (the epicenter of Manhattan's East Side), you begin to realize the transformatively inclusive swathe the N/R set out to cut when it first came into being. Robert Moses is either vilified or sanctified for what he did to mass transit, but the unsung architect of the N/R revolutionized not only Manhattan’s subways but New Yorkers’ attitude about directionality.

The House of Blue Leaves

“Do you know what the greatest talent in the world is? To be an audience,” says Billy Einhorn (Thomas Sadoski), the old-school Hollywood producer in John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves, now in revival at the Walter Kerr Theater. “Anybody can create,” he goes on, “but to be an audience....” Actually, Guare makes it the audience’s job to make sense out of his tableau of gargoyles, from the mentally ill Bananas (Edie Falco), who professes “I don’t mind not feeling as long as I can be in a place I remember feeling,” to Artie Shaughnessy, who takes care of the animals in the Central Park Zoo when he’s not writing mediocre show tunes, to Bunny Flingus (Jennifer Jason-Leigh) the downstairs neighbor who sleeps with Artie but refuses to cook for him until they are married. Add to this a nun who proclaims, “Don’t bother about us. We’re nothing. We’ve just given our lives up praying for you,” an AWOL army soldier, and a deaf actress who gets blown up by a bomb intended for Pope Paul VI. Perhaps when the play first premiered in 1966, the mere presence of these deformed creatures, all paradigms of romantic aspiration gone awry, rang a bell with an audience who enjoyed the pleasure of anarchy. After all, The House of Blue Leaves premiered in the middle of the Viet Nam era, when the schizophrenic relationship between individual values and institutional morality, or immorality, was best expressed by Yeats’s oft quoted lines “the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” But today the bar is higher. We have become so inured to cynicism, particularly in regard to the way individual destinies are shaped by history, that the absurdity of Guare’s characters seems both one-dimensional and predictable. You are more likely to be disturbed and entertained by the standup comedy on a typical episode of Saturday Night Live than you would by the so-called drama going on at the Walter Kerr. To put this more succinctly, Guare was in the gargoyle manufacturing business when he wrote Leaves. Now that gargoyle manufacturing has been outsourced to India, the once unusual images have become commonplace, overused, and in many cases outdated.

Arcadia

The Stoppard universe is like one of those cartoons of an enchanted forest where the trees (in this case ideas) come to life. The current Broadway production of Arcadia begins with a young girl, Thomasina (Bel Powley), asking her tutor Septimus Hodge (Tom Riley) the meaning of “carnal embrace.” He parries humorously with the Latin “Latte et carne vivent,” but then relents, describing the mixture of pleasure and procreation that constitutes the sexual act. “Is it love?” Thomasina asks. “It’s much nicer than that,” he replies. Before we know it, Thomasina, whose project is to stop the atoms of the universe and trace their mathematical trajectory, is on to the question of the proof of Fermat’s last theorem written in the margin of Diophantus’s Arithmetica. The play takes place on an estate in Derbyshire called Sidley Park, first in 1809 and then 150 years later, when a literary sleuth is on the wrong track in trying put the pieces of the past together—in particular Byron’s relationship to Septimus and a poet named Ezra Chater (David Turner). But soon we are dealing with Romanticism’s deleterious effect on The Age of Reason, an overgrown gothic garden replacing classic topiaries, the questions of who created calculus first (Leibnitz or Newton), free will vs. determinism and the laws of thermodynamics. Stoppard employs ideas musically, letting them live for their own sake without the benefit of any conclusion. “That’s the order things can’t happen in,” one character opines during the play. As far as knowledge is concerned, you may only be able to know what’s not true. The statement “in Poland he is a count, in Derbyshire a piano tuner” is one of the numerous absurdities that turn the pursuit of truth to banter. The style of Arcadia is drawing room comedy. The content is the history of thought.