More Local Theater...August Wilson's Radio Golf

If I were to put together an anthology of world literature, I would like to include one of August Wilson's plays from his Pittsburgh Cycle.  In fact, if I teach EN 202HM again, I would assign one of these plays as the extra reading.  I would be interested in seeing how Gem of the Ocean or Fences or Joe Turner's Come and Gone or even Radio Golf would work with our readings, both the African and African-American works as well as our plays.

Compared to Mother Courage or Gem of the Ocean, Radio Golf is a fairly traditional, straightforward play.  It emphasizes Harmond Wilks' interactions with the other characters (his wife, Mame; his business partner, Roosevelt Hicks; his old schoolmate and current employee, Sterling Johnson; and Elder Joseph Barlow, a seemingly homeless man who turns out to be Wilks' cousin).  Wilson seems to have been wrapping up his cycle in this play.  Elder Joseph Barlow is the son of Citizen Barlow and Black Mary from Gem of the Ocean.  Black Mary was the protege of Aunt Ester (who died in the 1980s), and Elder Joseph (or "Old Joe") is fighting to preserve Aunt Ester's house at 1839 Wylie Avenue.  Harmond Wilks, on the other hand, is the grandson of Caesar Wilks, the black police constable in Gem of the Ocean.  Harmond is a real estate developer with plans to demolish 1839 Wylie Avenue and replace it with a condo complex complete with Barnes and Nobles, Whole Foods, and Starbucks.  He is also running for mayor of Pittsburgh.  If he's successful, he will be the first African-American mayor of Pittsburgh.


Here are a few images of the various characters in Radio Golf.  The play, by the way, is set in 1997.

In this poster from a Broadway production of the play, we see Harmond and Mame together.



On the other hand, Chicago's Goodman Theater depicted the couple in this way.  The actor playing Mame looks quite young.

This picture of the irrepressible Roosevelt and Harmond together comes from the Boston University Theater's production from 2006.  BTW, the actor playing Roosevelt (he is wearing glasses) looks a little like my ex-boss from the 1990s.

Or you may prefer this picture of Roosevelt in his golf outfit.  He is obsessed with golf!  This picture is from a British production.

There the two men are with Elder Joseph (seated).  Roosevelt is trying to browbeat him while Harmond looks on.  This production is a very recent one from Detroit.


Then, in this picture, Harmond and Sterling (the painter) are with Elder Joseph.  Here Anthony Chisolm plays Elder Joseph.  This again is from the Broadway production of Radio Golf.

Pictures from Live Arts' Mother Courage (Charlottesville VA)

While I'm online today, I'd like to post some pictures from Live Arts' production of Mother Courage.  (Live Arts is a community theater group from Charlottesville, VA, and my sister-in-law and her husband are very much involved in this group.   )

Here is Mother Courage pulling her cart.

Mother Courage is selling a capon (or chicken) to the Cook.

Yvette sings a song about her affair with the Cook.

Mother Courage is doing brisk business at her canteen.
Yvette arrives with her husband who is going to buy Mother Courage's cart for her.

Am not sure which scenes these are:



Below looks to be the scene where Kattrin is killed.

Mother Courage sings a lullaby to her dead daughter.

Here you may see the stage where everything took place.

After Going to See Mother Courage!

At long last!  Today (6/7) I was able to see Mother Courage at the Clark Street Playhouse in Virginia.  I have wanted to see Brecht's play for a while.  My husband and I were actually supposed to go last Sunday, but the matinee was canceled...due to a bike race.  

The picture above is of Colleen Delany (Kattrin) and Nancy Robinette (Mother Courage).  By the way, the Post gave Ms. Robinette quite a rave review:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/03/AR2009060303294.html

Here's a picture of the theater.  It is incredibly hard to find either on foot or by car, so it's no wonder that the bike race could cut off access to it.



The inside of this playhouse is just as funky, which fits Mother Courage, a play set on the battlefields of the Thirty Years War.  Also, Mother Courage is not intended to be a painfully historical or realistic play.  Even though it is set in the 17th century, historical and geographical details are not that important.  Mother Courage and her children might as well be on a treadmill as the years go by.   I would also say that Scena Theater's production was particularly austere.  Compare these two productions below.  The first is from a 2004 production that appeared in several cities in the UK and was set in modern-day Africa.  Another is from Cambridge (MA)'s American Repertory Theater.

 

However, an elaborate set or central idea is not always a sign of a fantastic production:

http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N11/Mother_Courage_.11a.html

http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/arts/theater/documents/00630946.htm

In Scena Theater's production that I saw, the play was staged on a concrete floor while the audience sat above in bleacher seats...ok...not quite bleacher seats.  The seats had backs.  The actors used all of the stage and more.  In fact, as the play began, the two army recruiters sat among the audience and spoke the first of their first lines there.  It was not until Mother Courage's sons Eiliff and Swiss Cheese pulled her cart out from the wings that the recruiters joined them on stage.  The cart was quite sizable, by the way.  It opened up so that Mother Courage and Kattrin could stand inside serving drinks in one scene.

Imagine the truck above without its engine and with a long pole with a long handle instead.

But what was it like to hear and see the actors performing the play?

I think that a performance of Mother Courage moves more quickly than one thinks if one has only read the play.  The scenes really fit together in performance.  Of course, this production showed information about each scene as well on screens well above the actors' heads.  However, watching the play, I saw how much the characters' situation changed and how much it remained the same.

Surprisingly, the songs did not jump out from this presentation, which detracted from more than one scene.  To compare, here is a link to Antaeus Theater's version of Mother Courage:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUmpBu_qkD0

Probably the actors at Antaeus were miked.  Or Scena's taped music overwhelmed the singing of the live actors.  Or the Clark Street Playhouse is a little too intimate, which discourages the actors from projecting.  Mother Courage has been performed in more formal settings as in the picture of the University of Denver's production from 1985 (see below).  I'm not sure which.  It may even help to carry a tambourine as the actors at Antaeus do.



A number of scenes play differently in real life.  The scene right before Kattrin's death is a lot less sentimental than I imagined it.  The peasant woman telling Kattrin to pray is basically telling her to get lost.  Nancy Robinette's Mother Courage also seems to love her children more than I imagined her to, which affects the scene in which she is bargaining for Swiss Cheese's life or when she is reunited with Eiliff or when she responds to the attack on Kattrin.

However, as this picture from Yale University's production shows, actors do represent Mother Courage as more emotional and less hard-bitten -- despite playwright Bertolt Brecht's strictures.



My impression of various characters changed as I saw them in performance.  Joe Baker's Eiliff seemed more hostile and less stiffly heroic.  Rashard Harrison's Swiss Cheese was more bumbling.  Of course, since she is mute, Kattrin's role enlarges in performance.  I was really surprised by how much she aged in this production.  At the beginning, she was very sprightly and childish, but by the end, she was quite weary and moved very slowly until of course she broke away from the peasants to beat the drum warning the villagers.  If I were to watch this or another company's performance, I would play closer attention to the actor playing Kattrin.   (I couldn't find another picture of Colleen Delany as Kattrin, but here is a picture of Hilary Burns, a British actor, in that same role.

I happened to see someone videotaping the production.  Perhaps some scenes will end up on YouTube.  They would be useful for someone wanting to see a professional yet less distracting version of Mother Courage.  I wish that I had been able to go to Charlottesville last year or to the American Repertory Theater back in 2001.

The Story of the Stone (part five)

Apologies for not posting sooner, but here is the final installment of The Story of the Stone. 

At the beginning of the story, Bao-yu still has not recovered his jade, so he has relapsed into a stupor.  Baochai's brother is still in prison despite the family's best efforts to bribe the officials into releasing him.  Bao-yu's father Jia Zheng has been posted to a job in the provinces where his naivety and rigor will get him into trouble...ironically...for corruption.  (His servants are notoriously corrupt, and one man has even convinced his master that servants expect to be able to make money from corruption in their position.  He said that if they are unable to do so, the master will not be able to do his job.)  The narrator also implies that the Jia family is out of favor with the government.  In fact, later in this volume, the family compound will be raided, and two senior members will have to go into exile.  Ironically, by then, Bao-yu's father will be working in the capitol at a job more suited to his strengths.

It goes without saying that at this point the garden (called Prospect Garden) is haunted.  Some of the family then become possessed by the spirits in this garden after You-shi (one of Bao-yu's aunts) takes a short cut through it.


By this time, hardly anyone is living there or even goes there.  Even the older women who were tending fruit and vegetable gardens there have left.

A number of characters also die in this volume.  The first is Xia Jing-Gui, Xue Pan's wife.  She appears to commit suicide, yet as it turns out, she was tricked into drinking the poisoned soup that she was about to give to Caltrop.  All this is revealed in an inquest.  The next is Ying-chun whose husband had been abusing her.  Grandmother Jia dies a while after the government raids the family's compound.  Ironically, she becomes ill at Baochai's birthday party.  Her protege Xi-feng is responsible for Grandmother's funeral, yet the family's finances, the politics within the family, and her own frailty make it impossible to carry out her duty.  She collapses during the funeral and dies but not before asking Grannie Liu, a poor woman from the country, to watch out for her daughter, Qiao-je.  This will be very important as after Xi-feng's death relatives will attempt to sell Qiao-je as a concubine to a Mongol prince.  Grannie Liu will then rescue the girl, hiding her at her own home in the country. 


Robbers also attack the Jia family compound in this volume, carrying off all the treasure that the late Grandmother Jia hid from the government.  Seeing Adamantina, a beautiful nun whose convent is within the compound, one robber kidnaps, rapes, and (probably) murders her. 

The tide begins to turn for the family towards the end of the book.  A mysterious monk returns Bao-yu's jade.  (As Adamantina predicted, the stone went into hiding at Greensickness Mountain for a time.)  Jia Zheng as head of the family continues to flourish in the capitol.  After all of her tribulations, Caltrop becomes Xue Pan's wife, not merely a "chamber wife."  Xi-feng's husband similarly "promotes" Patience after his wife's death.  Bao-yu and his precocious nephew Jia Lan take the civil service exam, enabling them to carry their weight in the family.  However, shortly after excelling on this exam, Bao-yu disappears.  As it turns out, he has become a monk, having completed what he was destined to do.

The Story of the Stone (part four)

Cultural China's picture of Baoyu, Baochai, and (I think) Dai-yu will be a good lead for this entry on the fourth volume of the Story of the Stone.  Here the cousins are older.  Bao-yu has begun to take his studies much more seriously, in part to please his father and the rest of his family but also because he is no longer able to spend time with his female cousins.  Some have returned home; some are married.  In fact, his family is making arrangements for his marriage to Baochai (the young lady on the right) as well.  Bao-yu, on the other hand, loves Dai-yu even though she is pushing him away.  (She continues to be ill in this book and at one point even tries to will her death.)  Yet Dai-yu hopes that she will marry Bao-yu.  Finally, despite what this picture implies, Baochai is pushing herself away from Bao-yu as well.  She has moved back in with her mother and taken on more responsibilities as her family situation has become worse and worse, even with the marriage of her brother Xue Pan, who seems to have reformed. 

However, Xue Pan has also married Xia Jin-gui, a spoiled yet wealthy young lady who is constantly trying to assert herself and cause trouble in her husband's family.  She is jealous of her husband's "chamber wife," Caltrop (whom she arbitrarily renames); her own maid; and, of course, Baochai.  Then, after her husband is sent to prison for killing a waiter, Xia Jin-gui attempts to seduce her husband's cousin, a clean-cut young man.

In this volume, even more so than in Volume 3, we see the rivalries within the family and among their servants.  I have already mentioned Xue Pan's wife.  In addition, as Wang Xi-feng becomes weaker and the family less rich, she becomes vulnerable to attacks from others.  At one point when her daughter is very ill, Jia Huan, the son of a jealous concubine, knocks over the medicine that Wang Xi-feng has gone to great lengths to make for her daughter.  Then the convent located in the family compound is the site of a lurid scandal.  The family member responsible for maintaining this convent is caught partying with the young novices.  The family then disbands the convent, returning the novices to their families. 



Amidst all of this turmoil Bao-yu and Dai-yu find time to discuss their mutual love of music.  Not only is Dai-yu a brilliant poet but she is also proficient on the qin, a seven-string instrument that is now called the guqin.  (It is pictured above.)  For more information about this instrument, see this link:  http://www.chineseculture.net/guqin/qinjieshao.html 
To listen to what the guqin sounds like, see these videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKNeParT2eQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRFFpxkrfGw&feature=related

At the climax of this volume, right before he is about to go to a viewing party for out-of-season crab flowers, Bao-yu loses his jade.  He attempts to cover it up at first, but he is not successful as he quickly becomes very ill.  Despite everyone's best efforts, including a visit to a psychic, the jade does not turn up.  Bao-yu continues to be quite ill, and in order to cure him, Grandmother Jia and the rest of his family decide to bring about the union of jade and gold...that is...marry him off to Baochai.  Since he is still very much in love with Dai-yu, the family tricks him into believing that he will marry her...hence this scene below.

Then, as Bao-yu and Baochai marry, Dai-yu dies alone, with only her maid Nightingale to keep her company.  (The family has neglected her in this last illness.)  Bao-yu relapses but does not learn about his beloved's death until Baochai informs him.  In the short run, he appears to handle the news well, but in the next volume, we will see about the long run!

I'll close this section with an image from a Shanghai ballet based on The Story of the Stone.  Of course, here, Bao-yu is with Dai-yu.


The fourth volume of The Story of the Stone is also a good point to talk about the novel's authorship.  In the version of the novel that I've read, the first three volumes are exclusively the work of Cao Xueqin (@ 1715 - 1763 or 1764), a descendant of a once-flourishing family that fell into disgrace in the 1720s.  The last two volumes were edited and even reconstructed by Gao E (1785 - 1838) as some chapters were missing and there were different versions of others.  Translator David Hawkes has speculated that the missing chapters had been supressed.  Interestingly, the fourth and fifth volumes contain many references to the Emperor's benevolence.

I'll end this entry with an image of Cao Xueqin's statue in Beijing and one of the Cao Xueqin Memorial Hall in a suburb of that city. The author, however, was not from the capital.  He was born in Nanjing and did not move to Beijing until after his family's disgrace.  However, his novel is set in Beijing.

 

The Story of the Stone (part three)

Since I'm not able to find a large enough picture of the cover to Volume 3, I will post this picture of a couple in the Grand View Garden from www.beijingguide2008.com.  It looks like this couple may be actors dressed as Bai-yu and Lin-yu. 

However, this picture is idyllic and belies the overall tone of this volume, "The Warning Voice."  At the end of the volume, Bai-yu is still living in the garden with *most* of the young people who were there at the beginning, and he and his father have begun to be reconciled to each other, but it is clear that things have begun to fall apart for the family.  Throughout the end of Vol. 2 and the whole of Vol. 3, the adult women (especially Wang Xifeng and Lady Wang but also Bao-chai) are concerned about its financial situation.  Xifeng herself is bedridden at the beginning of the volume after giving birth to a stillborn son.  Bai-yu's half-sister Tan-chun and his sister-in-law Li Wan have taken on Xifeng's duties, and they are constantly struggling to manage the family complex and its servants.  Much of the volume is taken up with the servants' jostling for power, prestige, and stolen goods as well as the family's efforts to discipline them for their thefts, gambling, and drunkenness. Moreover, the family is in mourning for Sir Jia Jing, its nominal head, and the Dowager Consort of the late Emperor.  She is not related to the family, but their social position requires that they enter mourning for her.

Below are 19th century painter Xu Baozhuan's depictions of two of Bai-yu's senior maids.  The first is Skybright, a skilled seamstress with a sharp tongue.  She will be one of the servants fired by Lady Wang, and she will die shortly after she is sent to live with her cousin and his vicious wife.  The second is Aroma, Bao-yu's chief maid and "chamber wife."





In addition, soon after her stillbirth, Wang Xifeng's husband Jia Lian marries another woman secretly and sets up a household with her outside the family's compound.  (As you may know from Raise the Red Lantern, men were permitted to have multiple wives.  However, Jia Lian is afraid how his wife and family will respond to his taking a second wife, and, as I have mentioned above, the family is in mourning.)  Once Xifeng finds out about her husband's secret marriage to You Er-jie, she brings her back to the family compound only to make her life miserable.  Er-jie, by the way, commits suicide after this mistreatment that includes the miscarriage of a son.  This miscarriage was induced by the incompetent doctor whom Xifeng hires for her. 

Jia Zheng's return to the family comes as a relief to them and even the reader.  (Remember that he nearly killed Bao-yu in Volume 2.)  Before his father's return, Bao-yu scurries around to complete all the tasks that his father has set him.  In fact, he has to ask his female cousins to help him compile enough calligraphy.  Nevertheless, father and son reconcile.  Jia Zheng even commissions his son to write a poem on a historical figure, the Winsome Colonel, a woman who goes to war to avenge the death of Prince Heng. 

Below is a picture of Mu Guiyung, another of China's woman warriors.


At the end of the third volume, Bao-yu's companions are beginning to move out of the garden.  Bao-chai chooses to move back in with her mother.  The maid Caltrop must move back in with her master Xue Pan once he returns from a long journey.  He soon marries a cruel and capricious woman who torments Caltrop.  Another companion, Ying-chun, marries, and others will soon follow.

I'll finish with a more desolate picture from the Grand View Garden in Beijing.

Story of the Stone (part two)

In this volume of The Story of the Stone, the cousins are a little more grown up (14 or 15), and they are mad for poetry.  The Crab Flower Club is the name of their club, and many of "their" poems are included in this volume.  Our anthology includes only a few scenes from this section of The Story of the Stone, but I think that it is still well worth reading not only to see what happens to Bao-yu and his family but also to understand a little more about Chinese literature and literary studies as well as their attitudes towards gender.

The picture below is China-Guide's illustration of Dai-yu composing one of her poems.



However, this volume is not as wonky as it seems.    In fact, here, the clouds begin to gather over Bao-yu and his family.  Early on, Jia Zheng, Bao-yu's father, attacks his son, giving him an extremely severe beating because of what he perceives as his dissoluteness.  Keep in mind that Bao-yu hates to study and that he shows especially contempt for what is considered masculine knowledge.  His father, on the other hand, is a Confucian scholar and civil servant.  Almost at the beginning of the book, Golden, a servant to Bao-yu's mother, is dismissed for flirting with the young man.  Later she kills herself.  When Jia Zheng inquires into this young woman's suicide, Jia Huan (his other son by a concubine) informs him that Golden killed herself after Bao-yu had raped her.  (Right now I'm reading Vol. 3, and this lie has not yet been exposed although it is clear to the family that Jia Huan and his mother are troublemakers.)  Jia Zheng leaves the family compound shortly thereafter when the Emperor promotes him to high office.  However, Bao-yu's days in the garden may be limited.  His maid and now "chamber wife," Aroma, advises Bao-yu's mother to be stricter with him, move him into lodgings outside of the garden, and encourage him to be more like his father.  In other words, it is time for Bao-yu to learn to be a man.  (Below is a picture of Confucian scholars from www.cultural-china.com.) 



Dai-yu, Bao-yu's beloved cousin, also faces certain gender strictures.  At one of the meetings of the Crab Flower Club, she quotes lines from Dream of the Western Chamber, a risque novel that Bao-yu has encouraged her to read.  How explicit it is you may see here:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7134.html
Afterwards, Bao-chai takes her aside to warn her about her reading and even her absorption in literature.  She reminds her that for both girls and boys literature is just a pastime. 

Unfortunately, I can't find a picture of Baochai at work, so here is An Ho's portrait of Wang Xifeng, the relative who runs the household...or shall I say family complex.  Wang Xifeng is perhaps Dai-yu's polar opposite.  She is energetic, practical, manipulative, and illiterate.  She puts a great deal of energy into humoring Grandmother Jia and managing the servants as well as making money for herself.  Let's imagine that Wang Xifeng is sitting listening to reports from the various servants.



However, all is not well for Wang Xifeng either.  Her husband Jia Lian is a philanderer, and in the Crab Flower Club, we will see her attack him and her servant Patience after she overhears his complaining about her to a mistress.

As you might imagine, at this point, the poetry club, though, is a useful diversion, uniting the younger members of the family, a group that becomes even more numerous near the end of this volume.  Even Wang Xifeng is involved as the enforcer of penalties.


Perhaps I will end this entry with another picture of the Grandview Garden in Beijing: