Pasadena Theater

In flight, October 26, 2017—

Dickens, adapted by Mike Poulton: A Tale of Two Cities, directed by Geoff Elliott & Julia Rodriguez-Elliott Giraudoux, tr. by Maurice Valency: The Madwoman of Chaillot, directed by Stephanie Shroyer Shaw: Mrs. Warren's Profession, directed by Michael Michetti   Seen in Pasadena at A Noise Within, Oct. 19-22, 2017

REVOLUTION IN THE AIR in Pasadena, through the canny programming of this thoughtful, enterprising, estimable repertory theater company. I think we were lucky to see these plays in the order listed, describing an intelligent sequence: in Stephen Dedalus's formulation, they were epic, then lyric, finally dramatic. A Noise Within — the company took its name from a stage direction in Hamlet — is a fully professional company, now a quarter-century old, I think, characteristically producing three plays in the fall season, another three in spring, in revolving repertory to the extent actors' schedules make it possible. (Most of them are veteran professionals, gainfully employed in film and television; I suspect they engage in legitimate theater out of love for the art.)

The repertory tends to the classical, including classical 20th-century theater. You don't subscribe to this company to see new plays. There's a Shakespeare play nearly every year; there's usually a French play (in translation, of course); there's a survey of the significant American repertory. We like to visit Pasadena for four days, fall and spring, when we manage to catch three plays. (And catch up on botanical gardens, favorite restaurants, and old friends.)

Lately the seasons have illustrated themes of one kind or another: this year, social revolution. It's in the air. I've written here before of my theory that theater was born with a social responsibility: in early societies, it was through public performance that social problems — ethical, moral, religious, political — were pondered. Theater offers a unique merging of intensely personal and intrinsically public introspection and expression, and the rituals theater has evolved over the years offer a kind of adjustment, a tuning, an alignment of turbulent events with the human norms needed for stable social life, whether on the small scale (couples, families) or the large.

IT IS SIXTY YEARS and more since I read Charles Dickens's novel A Tale of Two Cities as a required text in the ninth grade, and I thought I remembered of it only the opening and closing lines and the description of Mme Lafarge knitting as the tumbrels go rumbling by. Watching this adaptation, however, brought the characters, the situation, even the dialogue out of some long-closed chamber into active memory. The play is compressed, of course; parallel sub-plots and minor characters are gone — two acts across two and a half hours, on a relatively bare stage, can only accommodate so much. But the result is, as I've suggested, epic theater: it was impossible to attend to it without thinking of Bertolt Brecht. Who knew Dickens was a forerunner? (Probably lots of graduate students.)

Dickens's plot rests on the possibly confused identities of two men, a young French nobleman whose ideals and empathy lead him to renounce his title and a similarly young English barrister utterly devoid of moral discipline yet dedicated, ultimately, to similar humane ideals. They are human counterparts of the "two cities," London and Paris; and Dickens's larger purpose is, through narrating their individual human predicaments, to investigate the commonalities of privileged and tradition-bound English legal society and resentful and erupting French rebellion against a thousand years of monarchy.

I was surprised — still am, a week later — at how detailed, profound, and often subtle this undertaking was: the novel, the adaptation, the production, the performance. This in not unusual: these theater trips to Pasadena usually leave me mulling over the productions for days afterward; it's one of the rewards of the visit. But, perhaps because I was expecting Dickens to exaggerate sentiment at the cost of insight, I was particularly impressed with the evening. I won't detail the cast and crew; I haven't the program at hand; you can always find the credits at the company's fine website. Everything about this production was strong and affecting.

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JEAN GIRAUDOUX wrote his lyric fantasy The Madwoman of Chaillot in Nazi-occupied Paris in the dark days of the early 1940s, perhaps to take his mind off the daily unpleasantnesses. The play is utterly French, set in the Chaillot quarter of Paris, whose denizens are ordinary workers: café waitress, barman, ragpicker, shoelace peddler. Well, there's a deafmute, too, because mimes have to make a living.

Into this charming world enter a group of Important Men — a miner, a chief executive, an investor; that sort of crew. They are convinced there's oil under the Paris streets, precisely here at this corner, and they plan enthusiastically to drill for it, to install derricks partout, with no regard at all for the charm of the place, so necessary to pleasant, stable everyday life.

The play centers on la Folle — "madwoman" seems not quite the right translation — who confronts the threat, organizing les habitants du quartier (and two other equally dotty crazy-ladies) to send the capitalists packing. (One of the subtexts of the play, of course, is that they may themselves be victims of their own confidence games.)

Chaillot is sentimental and frothy, and its Paris is not that of 1789. The social protest it describes is far from the stormers of the Bastille. Its resonance with the environmental politics of our own time, however, is inescapable. In the context of the two plays flanking it one sees this thin upper crust of capitalist investors for what they are, a threat to social order ultimately able to achieve a new aristocracy, oppressing ordinary men and women and spoiling the world to satisfy nothing more important than their own insatiable greed.

Again, cast, crew, production were all exemplary. Even the musical cues were impertinently effective, in my opinion, and the musical dimension is often the least effective in this company's productions. (I do find it odd, though, that while various attempts at British accents seem always to disfigure plays here by English authors, no attempt is made — grace à Dieu — to put on French ones in plays like this.)

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AS DICKENS IS too sentimental, says my stupid prejudice, so George Bernard Shaw is too talky. I was looking forward to seeing Mrs. Warren's Profession as a duty owed to my intellectual curiosity, not an enjoyable entertainment. I was wrong. Her profession is that of Madame: Mrs. Warren saves herself from the poverty of the lower classes by turning not to factory work, poorly paid, long of hours, and beset by terribly unhealthy conditions, but to prostitution. A canny woman, she quickly realizes the money and position is to be gained through management, not labor, and she hooks up with a cynical member of minor nobility to develop a richly rewarding empire of houses in Ostend, Brussels, Vienna, and Budapest.

In the meantime she has educated a daughter of uncertain paternity through the English boarding-school system, rarely seeing her until she too attains maturity and casts about for her own way into presentable modern (Victorian) society. The meat of the play is the intricate dialectic between generations — not only of mother and daughter, of course, but of socially evolved, tolerated, and depended upon methods by which the female sex can take its place with in a male-dominated system.

Interestingly, and as is often the case chez Shaw, the males who dominate this action are pretty hapless — a young cynic who'd romance mother or daughter, whichever is handy; a minor ecclesiastic beset by regret, the Marquis (or whatever he is) who profits from Mrs Warren's profession, a likable architect who stands for Art and Free Spirit.

In the performance, the two women were particularly strong, easily, imperceptibly moving from early expository presentation — almost type-casting — to final detail and complexity. There are no solutions to the social problems which are Shaw's quandaries, precisely because there can not be an ideal stable society. There can only be relatively calm periods within the turbulent succession of human history. I suppose the analogy is ultimately with the vicissitudes of daily life, with the successions of hunger and satiety, desire and fulfillment, individualism and responsibility.

Tradition and the avant garde, as seen in 1968

Eastside Road, October 5, 2017—

jUST FOR FUN, and because I've just run across it, a transcription made by I know not who of remarks ad-libbed on Critic's Circle, a review show on the arts I used to participate in at KQED, back when this sort of thing was possible.
It's long.
Charles Shere - CRITICS CIRCLE
April 3, 1968
[transcription of unscripted remarks]

I would like to talk about the PBL [Public Broadcast Laboratory] broadcast of last Sunday night because for the first time PBL give its two hours over entirely to a cultural program — and it gave those two hours to the avant-garde — which is very much, of course, in controversy these days, being only some thirty or forty years old. PBL's program was called Who's Afraid Of The Avant-Garde?: an excessively coy title which I think established PBL's stance toward the subject of its program.
It was never quite sure what its stance was going to be. Television can either act as a recorder, the kind of television that says "let's pretend you're at the Buffalo museum or let's pretend you're at the ball game and we will take you electronically there and you can carry it from there,” or television can act as a participant — and PBL attempted this a couple of times in Sunday night's broadcast.
When it did make this attempt, and when it succeeded, it came up with the most exciting things that it did the entire evening. I'm thinking, for example, of their coverage of Cecil Taylor's jazz group. I'm thinking also of the first coverage of Merce Cunningham's Dance Company, when the television entered and participated in Cunningham's dance and did considerably more than taking you out of your living room and putting you down in the auditorium.
By and large, however, PBL's attitude toward the avant-garde was very much conditioned by what I guess it feared was a recalcitrant audience nationwide; and perhaps that audience is more recalcitrant than we would think, living as we do in the San Francisco Bay Area, an area which is by no means representative of the country as a whole. For example, there were frequent statements on the part of the narrator that the difference between the avant-garde art and normal art was that avant-garde art does not care at all about any kind of representationalism. Taylor's music, for example, it was stressed, had no beat and no recognizable melody. When some underground films were shown, specifically Jonas Mekas’s film Circus, the narrator made a great point of saying that underground.films share the avant-garde prejudice against heroes, against plots, against stories, just as the avant-garde paintings and sculpture is non-representatlonal. It seems to me that there is a reason for this and that this is symptomatic, rather than the end result, of an attitude of the avant-garde artist. I was looking at a copy of a new book which came out recently published by Walker and Company, a book about the French sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon, who died in 1918, and in looking through this book it struck me that his career sums up the difficult time in western art which took place at the turn of the nineteenth century. It was a critical turning point, I think, in European history, certainly in the history of European civilization.
It was the transition between the teleological representational attitude of art until then and the new art which is the art of the 20th Century, representing homo ludens, man who plays games, man who is more concerned with the experience and with the integrity of what he is doing, of his activity, than he is with the pre-conceived concept of what kind of goal he is going to find at the end of his activity. In other words, where the nineteenth century and earlier thought of art as being a search with a goal at the end of the search, today's artists like John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Jonas Mekas, all of the people who were touched upon by PBL, are not concerned with what they are going to find at the end of their search… if you can call it a search. They seem to be considerably more concerned with what it is they’re doing while they’re filling the time ….
And I think that there is probably a lesson for all of us in this. I think that civilization gets the art that it gets because it is the civilization that it is. I think that our avant-garde art partakes of this quality partly because today the artist and intellectual, when he realizes it, is a little bit tired of the civilization which is founded upon things, upon works of art which have commercial value, upon having as late a model of car as your neighbor, and this whole sort of thing.
It's still very difficult to talk about avant-garde art and about Dada, its progenitor, because like PBL we tend to lump all of this activity into one bag. To think, for example, of Buckminister Fuller as being avant-garde, to think of Mary Quant, the fashion designer in England of being avant-garde, the same way as John Cage and Merce Cunningham are avant-garde. Of course this is perfectly absurd. There is a great difference between an industrial architect and an avantgarde fashion designer on the one hand and a painter and a musician on the other. And as John Calder says in his introduction to a new book about English happeners, talking about surrealism. "It will quickly lose its sense of identity as an art movement and become a technique to be used to a greater or a lesser extent by dramatists and artists of the future.”
I think this is true of the avant-garde and it’s true of Dada, and I think that programs like last Sunday's PBL, excellent in places and pedestrian in others, will help to accelerate this feeling, will help to accelerate the possibility of all of these phenomena, with the avant-garde being assimilated not only by the artists themselves but also by we the audience, the people whom the artists serve, the people who in the last analysis feed upon and, in turn, nourish the artistic activity itself.

Well, all of this said, I went out to Mills College Sunday night to see what was supposed to be an evening of Dada and about the only Dada on the evening's program were two films, a marvelous film by Hans Richter called Ghosts Before Breakfast, a film made in 1927, and Ferdinand Leger's Ballet Mechanique, a film made in 1924. I think that its greatly to television's credit that things like PBL are doing programs like that of the avant-garde. Certainly television should be reviving these early films, early experimental films and the recent experimental films as well. Television is the perfect medium of making these films an accepted part of our inheritance, just as the Mona Lisa is, for example, or September Morn was fifty years ago. And until this has become a common part of the culture, the importance and vitality of Dada and the avant-garde will be lost on most of us.
At Mills College there were also some musical performances, notably of the Three Miniatures for violin and piano by Krzysztof Penderecki and, before that, the Four Pieces for violin and piano by Anton Webern. These were very sensitively played by Nathan Rubin who was accompanied by Naomi Sparrow (who played, incidentally, the best I've heard her yet). The Webern could not he heard too well because of a marvelous crotchety woman who was in the audience banging her cane on the floor and barking like a dog from time to time. She was, I suppose, the most Dada of them all at Mills College.