in progress: a life making theater

reflecting on the frame

It’s a couple of months since The Chosen closed at TheatreWorks in the South Bay. I played Reb Saunders, a tzaddik, the spiritual leader of a Brooklyn Hasidic community that he had led out of Russia after a devastating pogrom. The play is a recent adaptation of the 1967 novel by Chaim Potok which became an instant classic and may well be the most widely read modern American novel about Jewish life.

This was the first major production outside TJT that I’ve done in 31 years. The last one was at the Public Theatre in New York: Joseph Chaikin’s production of The Dybbuk, arguably the best known play from the Yiddish theatre and one of the only ones to have “crossed over,” via translation, to mainstream American and European success.

I’ve been intrigued by the symmetrical framing around my 31 years as co-founder and core member of TJT^[1] by these two productions of extremely well-known Jewish works, and I thought I’d reflect on this notion on this blog. Well, friends, I’m now at 37 pages, over 10,000 words, and there’s a lot more where that came from.

Each time I’ve opened that file, ostensibly to cut it down to something postable, I end up writing more and cutting exactly nothing. In writing about my experiences in New York, working on The Dybbuk, for example, I find myself telling you how I first read the play in Los Angeles and then, of course, I need to write about what I was doing in Hollywood in the first place which has to include my experiences in the UCLA Theatre Department in the early sixties and so it goes, back and forth between childhood, middle age, youth, Jewish identity, avant-garde theatre in America, the founding of TJT… The common thread is the search for the events, the moments of insight and struggle, the teachers and teachings that shaped the actor that I became.

It’s obvious to me that some faction of my inner editorial board has seized control and is off and running on a book-length memoir.

But I really need to complete this post so I can get back to work on the two plays I’m writing, on the music and language experiments I’ve been recording, on my 2009 tax returns…

So here’s the compromise: I’m going to post a handful of excerpts, that can stand on their own, from the growing body of memoir material. Please let me know how they hit you in the “comments” below.

Photos above from The Chosen at TheatreWorks by Mark Kitaoka (top)and Tracy Martin (two lower photos). Pictured with Corey is Thomas Goorebeeck as Daniel

the dybbuk

At some point in the early seventies, the Mark Taper Forum, L.A.’s resident theatre that sits between freeways in what is ironically called “Downtown” in a city that has no center, produced a version of The Dybbuk translated and directed by one of Canada’s most respected directors, John Hirsch. I auditioned for the lead role of Chanon, the young scholar who dies of a broken heart and comes back as the eponymous Dybbuk to possess the body and unite with the soul of his beloved Leah.

The Dybbuk’s historical context starts in the new cracks that were appearing in the once-solid barriers to education and civil society that had kept Jews of Eastern Europe isolated for centuries.

Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, the sanctions against Jews began to ease as the Napoleonic code inspired new freedoms throughout Europe. A growing number of young Jews dared to leave the prescribed path of an exclusively religious education (from which women were barred). They sought lives with greater possibilities than the few offered by a closed

religious community. Instead of studying nothing but Torah and Talmud, they learned physics, mathematics, literature, psychology, anthropology, the whole big apple of – if not forbidden, then certainly suspect – secular knowledge. Thus came about the movement within Jewish society known as haskalah, the Enlightenment. As if making up for lost time, a secular Jewish culture – something that had never before existed in this part of the world – asserted itself with enormous energy and appetite.

In 1911, one of these newly secular Jews, S. Ansky, led “The Jewish Ethnographic Expedition” into Volhynia and Podolia, a forested region in which Jews lived as they had for centuries. (It’s now part of the Western Ukraine.) This was the birth-place of the semi-legendary figure, Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, the charismatic religious rebel who is credited with founding the religious revival known as Hasidism. The Expedition collected songs, stories, magic spells, healing amulets, rituals and incantations. Out of this material, Ansky wrote a play that served as a capacious hold-all for the songs, stories, beliefs and customs that he wanted to preserve. He took seven years, until 1919, three years before his premature death, to finish the play. The Dybbuk is an early version of a mash-up, layering, in one work, a variety of found elements. Many scholars believe that it’s this aspect of the play that accounts for the fact that, alone among the thousands of plays produced by Yiddish theatre companies in the old and new worlds, The Dybbuk was the most often performed, translated, cited, and adapted. It has been adapted as opera, ballet, puppet shows, modern dance, film, and still inspires works of all kinds.

Meanwhile, back in L.A., at that audition, I did Chanon’s tortured monologue during which his Kabbalistic meditations are interrupted by the news that Leah, his beloved – to whom he has spoken only once – has been betrothed to a young man from an extremely wealthy family. Hearing this, Chanon sinks into despair, but then, surprisingly, is catapulted into an ecstatic vision of union with his beloved–his ultimate vindication–and dies.

I’d been trying to understand the work of the Polish visionary of the theater, Jerzy Grotowski, for a few years by then, without the benefit of any actual teacher of that extreme, intensely physical approach to the actor’s training. But that didn’t stop me from having my own ideas of what Mr. G. meant by his opaque formulations. As best as I can recall, I did parts of the monologue while moving into various yoga-like body shapes culminating with a standing bridge in which I bent myself backwards like a bow, supported by my hands and feet, pelvis aimed at the sky. Very hard to speak with any coherence in that stressful a position, but I must have thought it was expressive of either anguish or ecstasy or both. Fortunately Hirsch wasn’t there. Gordon Davidson, the Artistic Director of the Taper whose tenure would last around 40 years but was, at that time, about 15 years into his tenure, was running the auditions. Hirsch would arrive for call backs. When Gordon mercifully asked me to stop, he said nothing other than complimenting me on the ethnic shirt I was wearing.

I’ll save for another posting the flash-forwards to several meetings with Jerzy Grotowski himself, the last of which was in an all night diner on the Pacific Coast Highway near Irvine, where he was teaching at the University of California, which he gleefully referred to in his heavy Polish accent as “Planyet of the Apes!”

Gordon Davidson must have really liked my shirt. I was called back for The Dybbuk, this time to read for John Hirsch. In the meantime, I finished reading the play and was struck by a story that a character called the Messenger tells the audience in the middle of the play. I later discovered that it was a fragment from The Seven Beggars, one of thirteen tales considered sacred by the followers of Nakhman of Bratzlav, who first spoke them in a trance, in Yiddish, while his scribe Nathan wrote them down and later translated them into Hebrew. The fragment, called The Heart of the World and the Clear Spring is a lyrical parable about the way time is created from unrequited longing. The story conflates erotic and spiritual love in the same way that the entire play does, tapping a current that as always run deep in the Jewish collective psyche. The Messenger character was rumored to have been added by Ansky at the suggestion of Stanislavski who read a Russian version that Ansky had written.

At the call back, I remember asking John Hirsch if I could read the Messenger’s story. I think he said no. I don’t remember what I did read. But I recall his large and sad eyes, and I recall wanting to tell him something about the feelings that had been stirred up in me after reading the Heart of the World story. At the time I did not know John Hirsch had been born in Hungary in 1930 and had somehow survived the slaughter – in one year – of half the Jewish population, late in the war. He’d been adopted by Canadian Jews after the war. He said that he was going to cast a number of Canadian actors who had been in his previous production of the play. A few days later, I was offered a very small part as one of the layabouts in the synagogue. On my agents’ advice, I turned it down. Nor did I manage to see the production at the Taper. But I began reading all I could about Nakhman of Bratzlav.

photos from top of section: S. Ansky [2nd from L. with Yiddish authors]; the legendary Habima production of The Dybbuk; TJT's 1989 production of Bruce Myers' Dybbuk for 2 actors w. Corey and Sarah Fry; TJT's 2004 production of same, w. Karine Koret and Keith Davis. Last photo by Ken Freidman; others unknown.

reb zalman of naropa

Shortly after my Dybbuk audition in LA, I found myself at a Northern California retreat center taking a workshop with one Rabbi Zalman Schacher-Shaomi, a unique figure in the annals of American Jewish life. Reb Zalman is now known as the “Zeyde of the Jewish Renewal Movement.”

[He] was born in Zholkiew, Poland, in 1924. Raised largely in Vienna, his family was forced to flee the Nazi oppression in 1938. Settling in Brooklyn, young Zalman enrolled in the yeshiva of the Lubavitcher Hasidim. He was ordained by Lubavitch in 1947. He later received his Master of Arts degree in the Psychology of Religion in 1956 from Boston University and a Doctor of Hebrew Letters degree from Hebrew Union College in 1968.[2]

He left the Lubavitch world, studied with Trappists, yogis, Buddhists and Sufis and became a bridge between traditional Hasidism and contemporary Jews who were seeking a more vital spiritual connection and community than what they found in mainstream American synagogues. At the end of the workshop, I told Reb Zalman that I had a vague idea that I might someday do something that would bring together my Jewish identity with my longing to create theatre that would have the spiritual power of religious experience. He said that conventional ways of bringing Yiddishkeit to life were exhausted and the arts were the only path left for Judaism to take if it were to survive in America. He thought a new Jewish theatre would be a fine idea.

But before I would take Reb Zalman’s implicit and simple suggestion, some years elapsed, that in hindsight seem to have been a preparation for the task of creating a theatre that didn’t yet exist. But, at the time, without benefit of hindsight, they were pretty depressing.

From about 1966 to 1976, in spite of my growing passion for theatre, I chased Hollywood’s version of success. Whether I succeeded or not, though, there was a price. To get work in the “industry” requires a lot of auditioning, and, as Joe Chaikin would later put it, even when I’d gotten a job, it became an audition for the next one. That’s how it works. And worse, I found myself becoming addicted to the rush of getting the part, winning, being wanted, being chosen, having something special to tell my parents who, between them had many years of unlived life in the theatre that I had been born to redeem. All right, I’m exaggerating, But as an only child I had no help in supplying them with the small successes that gave them so much pleasure it shamed me.

vancouver: crow

One year when work seemed to be drying up, I decided to leave it all behind and start a new life in Vancouver, B.C. – Canada. I’d spent almost four months there shooting McCabe and Mrs. Miller, the last of the three Robert Altman films that I was in. While there, I got to know some young theatre people from the area and in the following year, as work in L.A dried up, I accepted an invitation to help lead a summer workshop in Gestalt Therapy and the Arts on a farm on Vancouver Island.

Before I left L.A., I discovered a book-length poem cycle called Crow by Ted Hughes. Crow was part bird, part archetype – a deformed godling who has animal drives, human foibles and spiritual longings. I was drawn to Hughes, in spite of the reputation he had been tarred with by dintof his having been married to Sylvia Plath when she took her life, because he had recently worked with Peter Brook in Iran, creating a new language of primal. Brook and his actors used this language, called Orghast, in the wildly ambitious project based on the myth of Prometheus that they performed at the ruins of Persepolis in 1971. I read that they also studied an ancient Persian language, older than Farsi, called Avesta, and that one Jewish actor had incorporated some texts in Hebrew into the work. I read everything I could find about the project. Perhaps I knew, in a deeper way than I was aware of, that the powerful currents that ran through Orghast would, in time, touch my own life. Then I discovered this other work by Ted Hughes as I was packing to leave L.A. for good, or so I thought then. I stuck it in a duffel and forgot about it.

On Vancouver Island, as that long, intense but good-natured summer of group therapy, bio-energetics, music-making, theatre games, began to wind down, I found the slim volume of Hughes’ poetry and began to read it and then read it again. And again. It was a spare enough work to be able to do that kind of close reading. As I did, I saw that it would be possible to arrange a sequence of the poems as a narrative of Crow’s birth, childhood, initiations, lessons, failures, transformations, eventual death and possible rebirth. During my last days on the farm, I spent as much time as I could in the barn, finding my way though these texts in movement, working the language in my voice until I found a score I could repeat, a score that held Crow’s story.

In Vancouver, in the fall and winter, I found two actors, a director, a cellist and a place to rehearse on Granville Street, at the time, Vancouver’s skid row. I’d take the bus everyday from the big house I lived in with a wonderful group of young architects and social workers, one of whom was a former American war resister who had reinvented himself as a Canadian youth advocate. We lived at the far edge of the bohemian Kitsilano neighborhood, and the bus ride took me over the Burrard Inlet, to downtown Vancouver. Once, in the midst of a snowy winter, I walked from our house across the Burrard Bridge to Stanley Park on the western tip of the city and spent the day observing crows strutting and hopping, black against white,

After three or four months of concentrated work, expanding, elaborating and in some cases, jettisoning parts of my solo score, we had a coherent, funny-scary-sad piece of highly physical, ensemble theatre, for three actors and cello. I “played” Crow, the other two actors, Alex Daikun and Liz Murphy, who had both been in McCabe, played everyone and everything else and Suellen Primost improvised a cello score that acted as a non-verbal commentary on the story. We premiered Crow at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the city’s central art museum, as part of a sound sculpture show that was being curated by John Grayson, a sound-sculptor who co-directed the Gestalt farm on the Island.

The day after our premiere – which we thought went extremely well since we had gotten through it without serious mishap or missed cues and the audience had responded with genuine enthusiasm – we received a review in one of Vancouver’s two major dailies that dismissed us as yahoos who did nothing but obscure Hughes’ wonderful poems and suggested that a simple reading of the poems would be a much better idea than whatever we thought we were doing. A couple of weeks later, the reviewer from the other paper caught up with us as we toured around Vancouver and its suburbs (with one cross-province run out to the interior of British Columbia). He gave us a rave, praising our ensemble work, our risk-taking and our talent.

It was the first validation of my instincts, my vision, if you will, that I’d received. At the same time, I understood, on some level at least, that it wasn’t my “little” self that was responsible, happy as it would be to claim all the credit In fact, it had everything to do with a confluence of elements – the powerful text by Ted Hughes that offered so much to the imagination, body and voice; the willingness, energy and talent of Alex, Liz, Suellen and Gary Pogrow who directed; a process that allowed each of us a voice in the making of the piece; venues where we could perform and audiences who accepted our offering. Though I had experienced ensemble work before this, mainly in an improvisational group in L.A., this was the first sustained effort with a group of like-minded artists that I had undertaken.

It was also my first experience in completing a work of homemade theatre. In my room in Kitsilano, I drew the posters and program covers, I wrote letters to get possible bookings for the show, I corresponded with Ted Hughes’ agent and sister, Olwyn, who was not very pleased to hear what I was doing without her permission. Fortunately, in those pre-internet, pre-fax days, communication across the Atlantic was slow and by the time her displeasure reached us, we had closed the show and had no further plans to perform.

In the weeks after Crow ended, I grew restless again. No one among the actors I knew was ready to initiate new work. With no project and no relationship, Vancouver began to seem less generous. I developed a case of viral pneumonia. While recovering, I had a telephone call from an agent I’d known in L.A. Could I fly down to audition for a TV movie-of-the-week? Not likely, since I didn’t have the airfare. He called back. Seemed that some of the movie was going to be shot in Vancouver and the producer and director were in town at that very moment scouting locations. I was given the name of a hotel in the West End and showed up, guitar in hand, the next day. The role was a drop-out rabbinical student-guitar player in a folk rock trio fronted by the male lead. I met George Eckstein, the producer, known for having given the young Steven Spielberg his first job, directing Dennis Weaver in The Duel, a legendary TV movie, and Joe Sargent, the veteran TV director who had started in the halcyon years of live TV drama. I read a scene, played and sang a song of my own, and got the part.

drawing by Leonard Baskin from Crow

the open theater

Around 1975, I finally saw the Open Theatre, an avant-garde theatre ensemble from New York founded by Joseph Chaikin, that I”d been reading about, with longing, for ten years, in The Tulane Drama Review and an occasional New York Times review. I sensed that of all the legendary companies in the world – Peter Brook’s CIRT, Odin Teatret, The Polish Lab Theatre, Mnouchkine’s Theatre de Soleil – it was the Open Theatre that I recognized, intuitively, as the one closest to my heart.

They were touring the country for the last time. Joe had decided it was time for the company to disband. At one point in the sixties, at the time of their early success with The Serpent, an exploration of the story of Adam and Eve created in a collaborative process with playwright Jean Claude Van Itallie, the group had swelled to forty or so members. By this time, though, there were only eight performers in the company. I saw Terminal, the oldest work still being performed, built around human responses to the idea of death and dying; The Mutation Show, a dream cabaret of life as transformation, full of sly, non-verbal humor. Nightwalk, the last work they had created, on sleep.

I saw them at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the last stop on their last tour. At the time, I was working on a new play by Harvey Perr, a wonderful and very original playwright whose work garnered some off- and off-off-Broadway attention for a while but, sadly, slipped off the so-called radar. Harvey, most recently, has been working as an actor. Harvey knew Joe well so I hoped to meet him and the company members in Santa Barbara.

The images from the Open Theatre that have stayed with me for thirty-five years are the kind Peter Brook talks about in The Empty Space: “The event scorches on to the memory an outline, a taste, a trace, a smell – a picture.” They are: The leaning planks in Terminal against which actors would lie, strangely tilted; the square black patches that adhered to one actor’s mouth, another’s eye, as an emblem of the dead; Shami Chaikin, Joe’s sister, who had always acted in Joe’s projects, singing Ani Mamin, a prayer said to have been sung in cattle cars and gas chambers, in absolute stillness; Paul Zimet and Tina Shepherd in The Mutation Show, moving constantly in a signature shuffle, as they pushed an empty frame on wheels. Ray Barry waltzing with only his pectoral muscles, one two three, left pec, right pec, right pec.

photo above: The Serpent by Jean-Claude Van Itallie and The Open Theater, their earliest major work.

how I changed my life

After another year of unsatisfying TV and film work that I took only for the money I was thoroughly depressed. No theatre project that I had gotten involved with ever came close to fruition because, inevitably, one or more of us would leave to do some paying work. To be an actor in L.A. meant putting the “industry” first. Theatre was what you did between jobs. Then I got a call from The Provisional Theater, a politically engaged ensemble whose edgy and outspoken work I had admired since they had split off from another experimental group to focus on anti-war theater. Some members had left and they needed some new actors to help create a new piece, work into an older one and tour the country. They asked for an initial commitment of six months after which, we’d discuss whether I would stay on.

I’ll tell you about that life-changing tour another time. I came back to L.A. after two months on the road, performing in fifteen cities, universities and festivals, and after burning my bridge to a continuing career in Hollywood by saying no to Stephen Spielberg who had offered me a very small role in his very big movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. To have accepted the job would have meant leaving the Provisional stuck in Knoxville, Tennessee unable to perform. I had central parts in both plays and no understudy. The loss of fees would have had a dire effect on the company. My agents were very disappointed in me. Actors did not say no to Spielberg in their world. But I was no longer living in their world. And yet, though I loved the people in the Provisional and respected their work enormously, I knew that I hadn’t found my artistic home.

While I was trying to figure out what to do next, I got wind of a workshop with Joe Chaikin that the Mark Taper Forum was sponsoring for a select group of actors. The format was that of a master class in which only a handful of actors would have a chance to actually work on their feet with Joe while all the rest watched. I found a friend with an extra ticket to the invitation-only event. He said that he’d heard Joe wanted people to bring in scenes or monologues from the “classics” which for him included the Greeks, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Beckett and Brecht.

I was staying with another friend since I had no idea whether I’d be staying in L.A. or finding another place tin which to be confused. Browsing her bookshelf for “classics” I came across a paperback copy of Oedipus Rex, not by Sophocles, the Greek, but by Seneca, the Roman. I knew nothing about this version. But I knew it was a good bet for me when I saw that the translation from the Latin was by none other than Ted Hughes. It had been commissioned by Peter Brook who had directed it at the National Theatre in London with Sir John Gielgud in the title role. It was on my friend’s shelf because her ex-husband’s painting was used as the cover of the paperback.

I memorized the central monologue of the piece: a servant acting as messenger gives an account, directly to the audience, of what Oedipus did when he heard the terrible truth about his own identity.

The workshop was held outdoors at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, a poured concrete venue that replaced a wooden one that was built in the 1920s as the home for a Christian “Pilgrimage Play,” it’s now owned by L.A. County. It seats over a thousand. But on the first morning of the workshop only the first couple of rows of concrete benches were filled. I knew more than a few of the two hundred or so actors, writers, directors, casting directors and even an agent or two. Some of the actors were close to achieving full celebrity status. Others were there hoping to be noticed by the casting people or the agents. In this town, actors can never stop auditioning. It was late August, sunny and hot but the location of Playhouse in the Cahuenga Pass meant that steady breezes kept the heat and smog from settling in.

“Who would like to, uh, come up and work?” Joe said in a voice that managed to be hesitant and resonant at the same time. There was a pause. No one moved. I was aware of a strange silence in my mind. Without telling myself to volunteer or to not volunteer, I watched myself raise my hand. Joe nodded at me and I got up and walked onto the stage, wondering if Joe remembered me from the handful of words we’d exchanged in Santa Barbara. I felt detached from the voices in my mind who were accusing me of unbridled chutzpah that I would surely be punished for. How dare I, who wasn’t even a bona fide Taper-invited up and comer, usurp this opportunity to work with this legend from New York?

I told Joe and the audience what I was working on and began, assuming Joe would stop me after a few lines and reveal something crucial that I had missed.

But he did not stop me. Hughes’ stark phrases pulled themselves out of me like living things, out of my insides, up my esophagus, out my mouth. I felt as if I was standing a step behind or to the side of myself, watching this story that I was telling happen. I was aware of two presences, one that belonged to Oedipus, the other to the persona telling his story who was not entirely me.

When I finished. There was silence for what seemed like a long time. Then, Joe asked me to do it again.

Later, I think, Joe, who was sweating in spite of the breezes and wore sunglasses that hid his wide-open blue eyes, spoke about the possibilities that open up when the actor becomes a storyteller. Rather than treating me as a student who needed “correction” or repair, he addressed me as a fellow seeker who shared a curiosity about this phenomena that had just occurred, as it happened, in my body and voice. I must have been in some kind of trance. I remember almost none of the content of anything he said, only that I was experiencing a raft of unnamable feeling-thought-perceptions.

During the next four days of the workshop he asked me to do the monologue several more times. Again, he had little to “teach” in any conventional way, but continued to offer reflections on the nature of story, on the storyteller/actor’s movements between different kinds of time, between different places, sometimes being in more than one place at the same time. He was modeling something, I knew. A stance of radical inquiry, a way of deconstructing what acting is in order to rebuild it with a new understanding.

Each time I let that story/language/imagery come out of me during those days at the Pilgrimage I felt that I was in the presence of the sacred. To some extent it came from the emergence of that primal story from my body. But the particular quality of Joe’s attention, and the experience of being its recipient, that was what evoked the numinous.

When the workshop ended. I waited outside a cluster of people all eager to connect with Joe and when I found an opening I asked him whether he had any plans to teach anywhere near by in the future where I might be able to do some more work with him.

He said that I could come work with him in New York the following winter in a laboratory/workshop he was putting together. “There isn’t a lot of money…” he stammered slightly, surprisingly shy when he wasn’t addressing the large group, “I mean, there isn’t any money to… you’d have to get to New York, you see, but there will be some, you know, funding – to pay people. Not a lot, but…”

When he stopped, I asked him to repeat what he had just said since I was sure I hadn’t heard him correctly. He did, and I understood that, yes, I had heard: I was being invited to come to New York and being offered money to work with Joseph Chaikin.

The joy of that moment was utterly new to me. People, friends, were coming up to me to ask what Joe had said to me. I mumbled something about The Winter Project as it would be called. It would take me a few years to understand the true source of the joy. I had been seen. I had been recognized as someone whom I did not yet know. All I did know was that at age 31, I was finally going to New York.

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[1] My role in TJT has changed fundamentally in the past year (2009) from full-time involvement in all aspects of the company’s life to an intermittent, project-to-project relationship, with the leadership of TJT now in the very capable hands of Aaron Davidman and Sara Schwartz Geller. Artist and Executive Directors, respectively. Another way of marking the changes in the company has been its change of name from Traveling Jewish Theatre to The Jewish Theatre San Francisco, thus retaining the initials by which it is increasingly more known, TJT.

[2] http://www.rzlp.org/index.cfm?objectid=1AC7523B-D612-00A6-AD2660515C50079B (The website that supports Reb Zalman's work)

Here is a short linked bibliography for further reading on:

The Dybbuk and John Hirsch

Tormented Master by Arthur Green, a psychological biography of Nachman of Bratzlav

Joseph Chaikin's evocative (and only) book, The Presence of the Actor

An Acrobat of the Heart, Stephen Wangh's brilliant and practical elucidation of the processes developed by Jerzy Grotowski

Crow by Ted Hughes

Orghast at Persepolis by A.C.H. Smith, an account of Peter Brook's 1971 international experiment.

To Be Continued

Read This Book!

I feel compelled, as never before compelled by a book, even before I finish reading it, to shout, especially to my male friends who, like so many American men, do not read fiction, you must read this book immediately! I’m talking about A Happy Marriage, by Rafael Yglesias.

In brilliant and transparent prose, Yglesias[1] fearlessly explores his own life as a husband, a stumbling young lover, as a devoted caretaker to a dying wife, as a man full of rage and helplessness and as a writer. Here’s one of the many paragraphs that made my heart stop:

“And in that paralyzed silence, he realized that ther was something in his brain which -- despite all the hours spentlearning about survival rates and the nature of metastasis, despite closely watching his father die of prostate cancer -- he hadn't known he would lose, this something in his head that had been present since Bernard Weinstein rang his doorbell twenty-nin years ago. In this silence of her silent, flowing tears, he realized that it was something essential which soon would be gonem and that it was more than simply the expectation that Margaret would stay alive. He had no word for it. A note of music, perhaps it was his name being called, something he didn't always enjoy, something he had grabbed for rescue, something he had possessed with pleasure, something he had resented with anger. In the carpeted silence of this luxury room of disease, he felt it depart for a moment, a preview of his robbed future, and he understood that this was real in a way nothing should ever be real, that their marriage was a mystery he was going to lose, despite twenty-seven years living inside it, before he understood who they were.”

If time allowed, I would have inhaled this book in one reading. Instead, I find myself stealing moments that turn into hours, standing in hallways or at the kitchen table when I should be washing up and getting back to work, transfixed by one devastating recognition after another. I’ve been married the same length of time as Enrique, though, kinehora[2], my wife is healthy. Like Enrique, I could not believe my overwhelming good fortune in winning a beautiful, accomplished and loving woman, though I had to wait until I was almost forty. Enrique meets Margaret in his early twenties. By alternating chapters telling the story of their meeting and courtship in the “bankrupt New York” of the seventies, with chapters set in the novel’s present time of 2004, days before Margaret’s death from bladder cancer, Yglesias has found an ideal narrative structure that allows the reader enough relief from the inevitable arc of loss to keep reading what otherwise might be unbearable. Instead, by moving back and forth in time, he gives us a prismatic view of two lives growing together like wisteria and roses and coming apart as any living being eventually must.

Perhaps I’ll return to this after I finish reading the book, but my admiration, appreciation and sense that this book is answering questions that I had not known how to even ask, prevent me from waiting to post this.

---

[1] Rafael Yglesias is a half Jewish, half Cuban and Spanish novelist and screenwriter who, like the protagonist of A Happy Marriage, Enrique Sabas, dropped out of school when he was sixteen to write his first novel. He stands in the middle of three generations of writers. His parents were Helen and José Yglesias both noted novelists and non-fiction writers who were also part of New York’s left-wing literary culture for many years. His son Matthew is a writer and highly respected blogger on politics and his younger son Nicholas is also a novelist.

[2] Yiddish. Literally, a compressed pronounciation of the sentence: Keyn ayn hara, “No evil eye” used as a magical defense against bad fortune when the possibility of future good fortune or catrastrophe is mentioned

The Tzaddik from Montreal

The Leonard Cohen concert in San Jose, on November 13, was one of the best musical performances I've ever seen/heard in my life. Actually, it was of a whole different order. Here's this seventy five year old man who sings, with only one break, for 3 hours, incredibly complex music with a band of nine consummate musicians and singers, and often, in the course of a song, sinks to a position where he's seated on his heels singing his heart out like Jolson, sometimes to the audience and sometimes to one of the musicians, having a deep conversation with whomever he's with, in musical phrases. Then, he rises fluidly, in one motion on those 75 year old knees, moving like a cat. An old cat, but still... He literally skipped on and of stage several times and constantly, humbly, with no artifice, thanked the audience (after intermission he thanked us for hanging in and not falling under the influence of "my songs which are allegedly so depressing.")

He introduced the band once in each half of the show, bowing in Zen Buddhist-inflected reverence before each one’s considerable skill and talent. He gave each one a “title.” Dino Soldo, the reed player is “The Master of Breath,” Bob Metzger, legendary studio guitarist is “The Architect of the Arpeggio.” Javier Mas, a string player from Barcelona is the “Shepherd of Strings” and drummer Rafael Gayol is the “High Priest of Precision.” He honored Sharon Robinson, his collaborator for the last 10 years or so, who has written the music for many of his recent songs, and who sings gloriously, with an extended solo version of Boogie Street. Belying its title, the song starts with a heart-rending, gospel-influenced, a capella verse. He also gave the angelic Webb sisters, who, with Ms Robinson form his impeccable back-up chorus, a song of their own. Accompanying themselves on guitar and Irish harp, they had thousands in tears with If it be your Will one of L. Cohen’s most nakedly spiritual songs.

The audience of 10,000 or so at the HP Pavilion ran from young fashionista types to old Jewish types like me with a full range in between. The common factor was the universal appreciation for the man and his music which very often reached levels of collective joy.

Generous, funny, self-deprecating, gallant, graceful, knowing, beautiful, inspiring. The concert may have permanently altered a few of my neurons, in a good way. He is a bona fide Tzaddik. (Heb. a holy person; a spiritual leader similar to the Buddhist notion of the Bodhisattva, one who places the spiritual health of the community above his or her own personal enlightenment.)

My attendance was a gift from my dear friend Jonathan Greenberg, a renaissance man if there ever was one, and an equally serious fan of L.C.

You can buy most of the individual songs from the set on iTunes or at Amazon or get the entire Live In London on CD or as a DVD, (which I have yet to see). You can also hear a typically haimish (Yiddish: down home, personal, real) Terry Gross interview with il Maestro here.

Van Jones, Obama Adviser, Resigns Amid Controversy

I'm very sad that the Obama administration did not stand up for Van Jones. His appointment was one of many hopeful signs I was so grateful for in the exciting times around the inauguration. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't understand why the President and all of us who support him are allowing the demagogues like Beck and his ilk to call the shots by seizing the narrative. Now is the time for all progressives to unite and reject the racist, cynical, hate-filled manipulations coming from a handful of distorted egos like Beck, Limbaugh and the rest. There's no way, in spite of Van's elegant resignation comments, that the the Becks of the world won't see this as their righteous little victory and continue looking for inconsequential but inflammatory factoids they can use to pick off another good person.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Paralleling

Note: I’ve recently published the latest issue of Musing on the Muse. In it you can find links to the works discussed in this post. [go]

I have been living three parallel lives, it seems. I’m not even sure if parallel is the right word to describe the relationship of the three very different places I’ve been inhabiting these days.

First, there’s the so-called everyday or “real” world which, right now is dominated by economics even more than usual. In this world commentators struggle to name the condition the United States and hence most of the world is in. A recession? A depression? Merely a crisis or a melt-down (these last two have the implied benefit of being brief and temporary conditions). Lately, some of the professional namers seem to have settled on “The Great Recession” which, I think, is pretty depressing. Whatever you call it, the poor are poorer, the wealthy are distressed and the middle classes are in shock, panicking and grieving the death of their honorable, American dreams (no irony intended) of home ownership, limitless education for their children and a long, dignified retirement, or regretting the bad counsel they all-too-willingly believed and the indulgences they were given no reason to deny themselves.

Next is the world of Budapest in the year 1944 when the Germans finally invaded and, making up for lost time, set new records for speed and efficiency in achieving their final solution. In a mater of weeks they exterminated three hundred thousand Hungarian Jews. My point of entry to this world is a play I’m writing, inspired by a short piece of non-fiction by Irvin Yalom, who’s known to many as the accomplished author of several novels and collections of short stories and as an eminent psychiatrist who has authored seminal works on group therapy and existential psychology. The material he asked me to adapt for the stage is about his friendship with Dr. Robert Berger which began in the fifties when both were students in the Medical School of Bastion University. Berger, who went on to become one of the world’s great cardiac surgeons, was born in Hungary in 1929. After his family was taken by the Germans in 1944, He escaped from a group that was waiting for trains that would take them to a concentration camp and spent the rest of the war underground. Forged identity papers let him pass as “Aryan” while he worked in in the Jewish Resistance. He was fifteen. In 1947, after a couple of years in displaced persons camps in Europe, he came to the U.S. as a refugee. He put himself through Harvard by working construction and getting scholarships before starting med school.

The Holocaust came late to Hungary. Because the country had allied itself with Hitler’s Germany when the war began, It had not been invaded or occupied until the last year of the war, when elements in the government tried to make a separate peace with the allies. The Hungarian Fascist government that took over, the Nyilas or, “Arrow Cross” are said to have outdone the German Nazis in violence. rapacity, and delight in random murder. Fortunately they were only in power for a few months before the war ended.

I feel honored by Dr. Berger’s willingness to tell me his stories as I write the play. Since he lives in Boston our talks have been by phone. Both he and Irv are amazing men. I need to resist going on at length about their friendship and Robert’s story. I’ll just say that the precipitating event in Irv Yalom’s story and the play I’m writing is a new desire of Robert’s to finally tell his story. During the last sixty five years, he has maintained a nearly complete silence about his life in Hungary. But not too long ago, an unusual and surprising experience triggered a flood of memories, and he turned to his old friend for guidance in forging a relationship to them.

When I listen to Robert. I’m keenly aware that I’m listening to one of the last witnesses to that world-engulfing phenomenon that is still so hard to talk about, write about or imagine. This has prompted me to look at the fact that I’ve been relating to the Shoah [1] one way or another for many years. Perhaps because I’m an American Jew born in 1945 just weeks after the official “liberation” of Auschwitz or for reasons less knowable, I’ve not been able to avoid it for very long. Having committed myself as an artist to material connected to the Jewish imagination, its shadow is unavoidable.

At one point, Robert suggested I read Fateless a novel by a Hungarian author, Imre Kertesz, who is the same age he is. First I saw the film by Lajos Koltai from a screenplay by Kertesz, who was the 2002 Nobel laureate in literature.

It just might be the most powerful film about the Shoah ever made. Both the film and the novel bring a shockingly fresh approach to the experience of a 14 year old, middle-class, extremely assimilated Hungarian Jew without any sort of Jewish identity before his descent into Auschwitz, Buchenwald and a small slave labor camp.

Probably the most unusual element of both film and book is Kertesz’ refusal of all received ideas, all clichés about suffering and victimhood. Like Israeli author David Grossman whose masterpiece, See Under: Love I adapted for the stage ten years ago, Kertesz refuses to sacralize the Shoah, to treat it with the reverence and piety that overlay so many worthy yet ultimately deadening works about it. This allows Kertesz and Koltai to admit the possibility of happiness and beauty even in the deepest layers of hell.

There is a moment in the film when inmates of the slave-labor camp, in striped uniforms and caps are forced to stand in “roll-call” formation for a horribly long and painful time. Koltai places his camera behind and above the prisoners with the entire group of about fifty or a hundred visible. The camera hardly moves for a vary long time. There is mist or fog. After a while various prisoners can no longer keep still and begin to sway, very slightly. As the swaying spreads, stops, starts again, I could not help but be moved by the ethereal beauty of the human movements which had the same ineffable quality as the movement of trees. At the same time, the raw brutality of the situation remained present. The ability to hold both truths in a single image is the sign of artistic mastery that, in this case, is ruthlessly free of ego, polemic, or any hint of inflation. The same mastery exists in Kertesz’ writing. An example, after the boy is back in Budapest just after the war’s end:

But one shouldn’t exaggerate, as this is precisely the crux of it: I am here. And I am well aware that I shall accept any rationale as the price for being able to live. Yes, as I looked around this placid, twilit square, this street, weather-beaten yet full of a thousand promises, I was already feeling a growing and accumulating readiness to continue my uncontinuable life. My mother was waiting, and would no doubt greatly rejoice over me. I recollect that she had once conceived a plan that I should be an engineer, a doctor or something like that. No doubt that is how it will be, just as she wished; there is nothing impossible that we do not live through naturally, and keeping a watch on me on my journey, like some inescapable trap, I already know there will be happiness. For even there, next to the chimneys, in the intervals between the torments, there was something that resembled happiness. Everyone asks only about the hardships and the “atrocities,” whereas for me perhaps it is that experience which will remain the most memorable. Yes, the next time I am asked, I ought to speak up about that, the happiness of the concentration camps.

If indeed I am asked. And provided I myself don’t forget.

After watching Fateless, I thought about the times I’ve heard myself and Jewish friends say that we’d burned out on the Holocaust, the Shoah, not even knowing what to call it any more. We had studied it, researched different aspects of it. Seen every film about it from Night and Fog to Schindler’s List, laughed at Woody Allen’s neurotic, Holocaust-obsessed persona, hoped that the lessons of the Shoah would make genocide unthinkable and agonized over every new replay of “ethnic cleansing” of madness in Bosnia, Rwanda, Congo, where it kept happening anyway; agonized over the Israeli refusal to let go of the Shoah as the justification for their own brutality only to be confronted with elements of the Muslim world embracing Holocaust denial and nineteenth century anti-Semitic screeds that had been discredited for over a century ago while Hindu nationalists in India started book clubs to discuss the management principles for success outlined in Mein Kampf and progressives, people of the left, in Europe and the Americas, with whom I've always identified, were responding to Israel's overwhelming use of force in Gaza with language that seemed to cross some invisible line into, once again, anti-Semitism.

Even so, I thought, after watching Fateless, continuing to contemplate the endless stream of suffering and madness, selflessness and courage that flows from that fissure in the middle of the twentieth century and allowing it to work its way through my imagination seems to be part of my job description for this incarnation. [more about Fateless from NPR]

Way back in the first paragraph I said I was living in three parallel worlds. The third is the newest. A few weeks ago, a health-care practitioner I know hired me as a creative guide and mentor to work with a young man in his care who is being treated for various cognitive, emotional, and substance abuse disorders. I’m being purposely vague in the name of confidentiality. The relevant part right now is how powerful an experience it has been to spend time with a young man so brilliant, aware, sensitive, multi-talented and so lost. I can remember all too well my own lost years at the same age, in my early twenties, and how much I longed for guidance. Whether it was less available then or I just didn’t know where to look I’ll never know. But I catch myself feeling, now and then, when spending time with this young man, that I’m actually able to live the fantasy, that I know many of us share, of being able to time travel and offer reassurance to my younger self that, more or less, things will improve. I’m sure the therapy industry has a term for this. Something like positive-counter-transference maybe.

So here I am, living richly and fully in a couple of different centuries (and I said nothing about my wife, son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren who are another huge part of the collage) while, from a narrow economic perspective we’re all supposed to be teetering on the edge of the abyss. What I can’t figure out, when it comes to the economy is: how much of the enormous losses of recent months are related to what we could all agree has real value, and how much of this panic is in the realm of consensual unreality? But I’ve never really understood what money really is once it gets very far from its origin as a way to make bartering a little easier.

---

[1] Shoah is the Hebrew word for catastrophe that many prefer to Holocaust which carries, in its etymology, a sense of sacrifice and offering which the extermination of Jews, Gays, Roma, the deformed and mentally ill and Communists was definitely not.

art and last two photographs: corey fischer; others from Fateless

Singing Makes me Happier than Worrying

I’ve stopped listening to the radio when I drive. As much as I enjoy Terry Gross and Ira Glass on NPR, I realized that by automatically turning on the radio each time I get in the car, I was overloading myself with proliferating iterations of the bad news I’d already gotten from the NY Times website earlier in the day.

So lately, I either listen to KCSM, the jazz station for the Bay Area, nurturing my new appreciation of a kind of music I never paid much attention to in the past, or I make my own music. If you’ve been reading musing for a while, you know about the song-story-poems I’ve been writing and recording. Recently I burned a CD of some rhythm tracks I had made on my computer so I could improvise with some back-up as I drove. Indeed, this makes me happier than listening to people tell me more things to worry about . *

In a similar vein, I tried something new a while back when I went hiking with a friend. After we’d walked and talked for a while, I asked him if he’d like to do a little free-form vocal improvising while we walked. This particular friend, Evan, is also an improviser so it wasn’t a big leap. Yet, it wasn’t something we’d ever done together outside the studio. One of us started a repeating, rhythmic pattern and the other joined it and after a while, transformed it. And so it went, walking, breathing, listening, feeling the vibrations of voice and the solidity of the ground under our feet, the movement of air that carried our voices. We weren’t trying to make anything in particular, there was no way to make a “mistake.” In improvisation, what might elsewhere we considered a mistake becomes an opening into a new exploration of tone or rhythm. The only real mistake is to stop listening.

For me these are two examples of living the change I want to happen. I feel myself - and sense in others - a longing to balance the insane amount of busy/work/more/overload! imperatives that we live under with activities that are older and healthier, that unfold as we unfold, as we take time to notice our breath and our bodies. That’s why I do workshops and theatre and music and play with rhymes and rhythms. But I find a new desire to make the borders between Art and Not-Art more permeable and bring the attitude of serious play that we cultivate in the studio and rehearsal hall into the rest of life. It comes naturally when I 'm with my grandchildren; it can be embarrassing when we do it with each other. But if I stay with it, the awkwardness soon fades and the pleasure, the joy and the connections grow. And whatever catastrophe I thought I had to prevent by keeping endlessly busy will not take place as a result.

* The offering this time is a sound mix. It's a rhythm track I made on the computer so you can try out what I describe above. Click here to try it. Instructions will be given.

And now, this issue's recommendations (all titles are links to more about the work):

I finally saw The Visitor (on DVD) and found it worth the wait. This compelling film by actor/writer/director Tom McCarthy builds quietly to a climax that left me disturbed, celebratory, sad and angry all in the same moment. Richard Jenkins, whom I've admired since noticing his work on Six Feet Under, deserved the Oscar nomination he got. He's a wonderfully subtle yet fully individuated actor. Also in the movie as a woman who. in lesser hands, might seem too good to be true, is the luminous Haim Abbas, a wonderful Palestinian actor who worked in Israel for years and is now based in Paris. The two younger actors, Palestinian and Senegalese, play unusual, complex people whose fierce love for each other, dignity and generosity are simple and natural elements of who they are and where they come from, and, ironically, are exactly what we North Americans desperately need. In the last frames of the film, all of that knowledge seems to radiate from Richard Jenkins's newly kinetic body.

I'm slowly working my way through The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon. I heard the author on the Moth, tell a story about a recent experience in Senegal taking part in a ritual put together for him by a village healer who uses traditional methods to heal depression. It was such a funny and vivid telling that I was drawn to read his magnum opus. As someone who has had my own troubles with the black dog, I was a little hesitant, but so far I find it anything but depressing. Solomon's willingness, his resolve to tell the truth of his own experience is salutary and his painstaking research into the history, the causes, treatments, symptoms, cultural responses to depression are tremendously informative and in de-stigmatizing the disease, comforting. I haven't finished reading it, but I already sense that anyone who deals with depression in any capacity, whether as someone who is vulnerable to it themselves or as someone who has to interact with depressed people, needs to read this book.

On a purely joyful note, I've been listening to music more than at any time since the sixties. No question that is has to do with the iPhone a friend gave me. I've been discovering a new world of terrific young singers that I enjoy in a big way. If you like downloading mp3 files, click the names. Otherwise, you can find CDs at the usual places. First, there's Hilary Kole who sings the most amazing version of What'll I Do that Irving Berlin could have ever hoped for. Another, better known, angel-voiced singer is Madeleine Peyroux, who at times, sounds uncannily like Billie Holliday, but with a persona and taste all her own. Her version of Dylan's You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go. is delightful and so is everything else I"ve heard her sing.

Finally, TJT's second production of the season opens this week. Pulitzer winner Donald Margulies's Model Apartment gives new meaning to the term dark humor. I'm not involved with this production with Naomi Newman in a central role, but I read the play when we were considering it and I found it both terrifying and side-splitting. I'm looking forward to opening night on Sunday, March 1 at 7PM at TJT. You can get tickets online through the JCC of San Francisco

I’ll be teaching an introductory 3-hour long workshop in Berkeley on Sunday, March 14 called Drop the Blocks that Stop You... It's a chance to get acquainted with your own creativity, usually a much more powerful ally than we expect; one that can give us the energy, the sense of play and hope that we so need in hard times. Appropriate for all levels of experience. $40 up to March 10, $50 after. Click logo at right to register or contact me if you have questions.

Next, I'll be teaching a six-week long class called Finding your Flow: Creativity 101 for Tamalpais Community Education at Tam High's theatre in Mill Valley on Monday nights, 7 to 9 PM, March 31 to May 11. No class on April 13. The cost is $180 and you can click to go to their website to register.

all photographs by corey

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