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Tag Archives: theater

Life As Theater: Morality Play

12 Monday Oct 2020

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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Barry Unsworth, blasphemy, book review, Catholicism, fourteenth century, historical fiction, justice, literary fiction, morality plays, mystery (criminal), mystery (religious), plague, role playing, sedition, superstition, theater, traveling players

Review: Morality Play, by Barry Unsworth
Doubleday, 1995. 206 pp. $16

On a cold December day during the second half of the fourteenth century, Nicholas Barber steals upon a group of traveling players who stand away from a dying man, one of their number. Fascinated by the players’ wordless empathy, Nicholas watches too long, and they spot him and demand that he come forward. It’s a dangerous time in England, where the plague rides again, and suspicion and fear influence every interaction, not least with vagabonds.

But Nicholas is a vagabond himself, a priest who has left his diocese without permission. He has abandoned his good cloak in a house where he was committing adultery, and knows his way with a pair of dice in his hand. And when the actors move on toward Durham, where they are to perform Nativity plays for the lord’s court, Nicholas accompanies them.

He could have said that they’d just lost a man they need to replace. But Nicholas is also burning a bridge. The bishop of Lincoln, his patron, might take him back if he turned around right then and honestly repented his lapses. But appearing on stage violates the law. And though that scares him, Nicholas can’t resist — something about playing a part, belonging to the small, tightly knit troupe, has touched him.

However, the next village they happen on has recently witnessed a murder; a young boy has been killed, and a deaf-mute young woman sentenced to hang for it. Martin, the leader of the troupe, convinces the others to perform a play based on the killing, as it has been recounted in rumor and disputation around the village. To do so risks severe punishment, for, on stage as in life, truth comes only from God, and the players, already at society’s margin, will overstep if they pretend to interpret their world — and a profane event, no less. Nicholas, understanding the religious proscription intuitively, is appalled. But the show, as always, must go on.

Frontispiece to Wynkyn de Worde’s 1522 edition of the morality play Mundus et Infans (courtesy G. A. Lester, ed., Three Late Medieval Morality Plays, via Wikimedia Commons)

What a premise, as elegant as you could want. And what a title, literally evoking the medieval mystery play while figuratively showing the changeable nature of moral choices. Further, what the medieval mind called a mystery had to do with Scripture and God’s actions, ever inscrutable. But here we have that framework and an actual mystery alongside, which the performance of the play helps to solve.

I have read this novel several times over the past decade or two, and it remains among my favorites. Most people, if they’ve read Unsworth, will point to Sacred Hunger as his masterpiece, and it’s hard to disagree. Yet Morality Play has so much to say about the role that subsumes the player, not just the other way around, involving so many aspects of private, political, and social life, that I’m in awe.

Success here hinges on the characters, and you’d have to look hard and long before you found a more finely drawn ensemble, literally and figuratively. Besides Nicholas, whose desires outstrip his common sense (which makes him human), you have Martin, teacher, leader, and group conscience; Straw, the outwardly fragile, gifted mime; Stephen, the brooding drunk with a commanding presence; and others, each sustained in-depth without more than a line or two of backstory. Together, they create an amazing performance.

Then there’s Unsworth’s prose, simple, highly physical, conveying the time and place from the inside out. Among other things, the medieval theater comes to life in full panoply, as with a performance of the play of Adam, in which Nicholas changes roles between the Devil’s Fool and a normal one:

I shook my bells and struck the tambourine as I went back through the people. I was a different person now, they did not hate me. They knew me for a japer, not a demon. I understood then, as I passed through the people and shook my bells and saw them smile, what all players come to know very well, how quickly shifting are our loves and hates, how they depend on mocks and disguises. With a horned mask and a wooden trident I was their fear of hell fire. Two minutes later, still the same timorous creature as before, with a fool’s cap and a white mask, I was their hope of laughter. I was discovering also the danger of disguise for the player. A mask confers the terror of freedom, it is very easy to forget who you are. I felt it now, this slipping of the soul…

Morality Play is a work of genius, a mirror on human nature in the fourteenth century and now.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book for my bookshelf, where it has pride of place.

One Big (Almost) Happy Family: Kiss Carlo

17 Monday Jul 2017

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1949, Adriana Trigiani, book review, commercial fiction, family feuds, follow your dreams, historical fiction, Italian-Americans, South Philadelphia, theater

Review: Kiss Carlo, by Adriana Trigiani
Harper, 2017. 524 pp. $28

Nicky Castone drives a cab for the family business in South Philadelphia in 1949. But it’s not his family, exactly, for when his parents died, the Palazzinis, his Aunt Jo and Uncle Dominic, took him in and have treated him as their own ever since. His aunt, uncle, and army of cousins assume that Nicky will follow the same path they have. He’ll marry his fiancée of seven years, Peachy DePino, drive a hack as he’s always done, and live with his bride in the rambling Palazzini house on Montrose Street. He’ll father children, be a regular at church, and sit down to his Aunt Jo’s fabulous cooking every day. That’s what life’s supposed to be, and since the Second World War is over and business is good, why not?

Troop 152 observes Scout Sunday at St. Francis de Sales Church in Philadelphia, 1949 (courtesy Bernie Kelley and Bruce Andersen, via Wikimedia Commons)

Why, indeed? What Nicky hasn’t told anyone–certainly not Peachy, who’s an even straighter arrow than his kinsmen–is that he moonlights at a struggling neighborhood theater. He does everything for the Borelli Theater that anyone backstage can do–clean the floors, hold the prompt book, you name it; that’s Nicky Castone, ever helpful, ever self-effacing. But one night, an emergency forces the prompter into playing Sebastian, a lead role in Twelfth Night, opposite the director, Calla Borelli, to whom he’s attracted.

Much hinges on that fateful moment, from which point forth, our Nicky is a different man, no longer content to follow his cousins’ path, though he loves them and worships his Aunt Jo. I won’t tell you how he tries to break free or the scrapes he gets into, some of which are howlingly funny. Just a hint, though: The Carlo of the title is an ambassador from an Italian mountain village who takes ship for the United States and the Pennsylvania town once settled by the villagers. When his path crosses Nicky’s, hi-jinks ensue.

Humor is therefore the great strength of Kiss Carlo, and Trigiani lovingly re-creates this South Philly Italian clan. There’s a pair of feuding brothers who “severed ties over money, the cause of every split in every Italian family since the Etruscans,” during which “the grievances stacked up, one upon the other, like soggy layers of wedding pastries on a Venetian table. Then it got personal.” Through these observations, which pepper the narrative, and characters who never lack for a quip, Trigiani captures the postwar striving, the ambitions, the jealousies:

Jo’s simple gold wedding band remained on her hand, but Nancy [her sister-in-law] traded up. The prongs on Nancy’s modest quarter-carat diamond engagement ring were stretched to accommodate the glitzy three-and-a-half-carat upgrade. The delicate gold chain around Nancy’s neck was replaced with one as thick as a strand of pappardelle, from which dangled a new medal more miraculous than a pope’s.

The geniality and generosity Trigiani displays toward her characters and readers go far to make Kiss Carlo enjoyable, funny, and occasionally thoughtful, a paean to those who follow their star in life no matter what anyone says and risk everything to be happy. It’s a nice message and good tonic. In particular, I like how Trigiani makes Nicky (and others) suffer to get where they’re going. For the most part, there are no easy fixes here, and plenty of reversals.

Nevertheless, she rescues her characters in the end, and it feels forced, just like the sepia-toned harmony in which they bask. This is 1949, after all, and racial and ethnic tensions weren’t in hiding, not in South Philadelphia or anywhere else. Yet the Palazzini business has an African-American dispatcher, Mrs. Mooney, and not only would one ever dream of casting a slur, you get the feeling she’d be welcome in the family. Likewise, one Palazzini daughter-in-law, Elsa, is a Polish war bride (read: Jewish) who survived “by working in a hospital,” a miracle that goes unexplained. As the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust, Elsa suffers no apparent trauma, seems perfectly happy among devout Italian Catholics, yet when she announces that she wishes to attend synagogue once more, no one blows a gasket. It’s all in the family.

It’s that desire, understandable but unreal, to rescue absolutely everyone that mars Kiss Carlo for me. Maybe it works for Nicky, but when his attempt at self-liberation inspires Mrs. Mooney and Elsa to break free as well, that’s pushing it. Developing those supblots to their pleasant but dubious conclusions also makes the novel longer than it should be. As a light confection with its sober side, Kiss Carlo would have worked better than the many-layered pastry it is. The layers aren’t soggy, but they can’t bear the weight put on them.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

The First 1800 Words: A Glimpse of My New Novel

14 Wednesday Sep 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1930s, Broadway, Federal Theater Project, Great Depression, historical fiction, Larry Zuckerman, new fiction, Nora Webster, theater, WPA

Today, I’m offering a peek at my new historical novel, tentatively titled Curtain, inspired partly by Colm Toíbín’s fine book, Nora Webster. If you care to comment, I’d be happy to know whether what I’ve written here would tempt you to read more.

It’s April 1937, and Jeff Messer has missed the funeral of his closest friend, Broadway playwright Brendan Moore, by staying too long in Europe. Back in New York, Jeff apologizes, but Anna, Brendan’s widow, is too hurt to listen, and she’s furious that her sixteen-year-old daughter, Rosemary, takes Jeff’s side and tortures her at every opportunity. But Rosemary is convinced that her beloved father’s last play is the only thing that stands between the Moores and the relief line, and that Jeff, who directed all of Dad’s hits, must stage this one. However, no one knows that the play evokes a secret from a terrible chapter in Jeff’s life that may even get him killed.
Can these people find it in their hearts to see the others’ pain and grief–and is the play the thing to make it happen?

Chapter One

Anna was out, talking to the lawyer about Dad’s will, and would be gone an hour or two, easy. It was Friday morning, and Rosemary would return to school Monday, wearing this same black dress, most likely. Now was the time, before routine trapped her.
She ventured toward her parents’ bedroom and stopped, as if the heavy, white door, open a crack, were warning her to take care. She’d have to want to widen that passageway, an act of commission.
Rosemary reached toward the cut-glass doorknob, whose facets had used to make her imagine an immense diamond, too big to wear, only to draw back. She pictured faces challenging her in hurt or anger, voices calling her a hypocrite. Not just Anna, but her aunts and uncles, even her friends, anyone whose questions she’d ever rebuffed to protect a secret. This was her parents’ private place. Anna didn’t come into her room without permission, certainly not to snoop when Rosemary wasn’t there. The girl knew that because nothing had ever been disturbed, whether on her desk, in or atop her bureau, or anywhere else. So she’d never trespass the other way. Except that Dad’s legacy was a special case and maybe their best chance to stay off relief. And she, Rosemary, seemed to be the only one to recognize this vital fact. She grasped the doorknob and pushed gently, making sure to note the precise angle the door had made.
The phone rang in the living room. Rosemary ignored it.
Anna had stopped wearing perfume, so the room no longer smelled like lilac. In fact, aside from the ghost of Dad’s Camels, fainter and fainter over time, the only odor came from cabbage cooking upstairs, a scent Rosemary loathed. Cabbage was cheap, so she didn’t hold it against the Bartons, who were struggling, like so many. But she wrinkled her nose just the same, and it struck her: Aren’t we struggling too? No cabbage had shown up yet, but if the rest of 1937 was like the first few months. . . .
She shook her head violently, because she had a job to do, which didn’t include feeling sorry for herself, and stepped into the room. Just crossing that boundary made her hold her breath, as if she expected Anna to leap from the closet and say, “I got you, you little sneak.”
The phone continued to ring. It happened so often these days, like a tired song that repeated the same note over and over until you wanted to scream.
The closet remained closed, and nobody leaped anywhere. Emboldened, Rosemary went further, stood directly beneath the globe light fixture that hung over the foot of the double bed with its pale blue bedspread. The bed she’d been conceived in, most likely.
What a creepy thought. She’d been having thoughts like that recently, imagining her parents creating her. She hoped it didn’t mean she was perverted, wondering about stuff like that. But she couldn’t help it. Had they enjoyed it? Equally? Or had it hurt, for Anna? Something told Rosemary it hadn’t, but still, Anna had never gotten pregnant again. Rosemary would have liked a younger sibling, preferably a brother who’d be sweet and adoring and vulnerable and look up to her. Maybe Anna had wanted another child too. Both she and Dad had come from large families, so having only one child themselves was very different for them. Though the condolence visit from her aunts and uncles had proven having siblings was a hit-and-miss thing. God, what if she’d had a little brother like Uncle Timothy? Disgusting.
The phone stopped ringing, thank God. Now she could think better.
Where did they keep the script? More exactly, where had Dad left it, and had Anna moved it? If she hadn’t moved it, maybe . . .
Dad’s Underwood, covered up like a canary’s empty cage, stood on a table in the corner, out of the way. Tears came. Never again would he tap-tap the keys at the kitchen table, humming and chuckling as he wrote, while a cigarette burned in the ashtray.
Quietly, as if Anna could hear–as if Dad could see and disapprove–she slid open his top dresser drawer and listened carefully for a key in the front door. If Anna caught her, Rosemary could always say she was looking for memories of Dad, and she probably wouldn’t even have to fake her tears, which would silence Anna like a piece of tape over her mouth. But all she saw were Dad’s shirts, laundered, pressed, and folded, like he was about to wear them, his handkerchiefs, and cuff links. His watch. A packet of letters, tied with ribbon. Rosemary reached out, then mentally slapped her hand. She didn’t have time for that, and besides, reading them would really be snooping. She might feel guilty for that, and she didn’t want to do anything she couldn’t excuse. Though Anna had behaved really badly.
In Rosemary’s head, Anna had been Anna, and not Mom, for exactly eighty-three days, and counting. She’d officially rechristened her the night she’d overheard Anna say out loud that Dad was dying, the first Rosemary had heard of it. She’d never been so angry, felt so betrayed. Her mother had tried to keep her ignorant of the most important thing that had ever happened in their family. How could Anna, a woman who prided herself on the straight dope, who preached honesty, honesty, honesty, lie like that? It was a stupid lie, too, the kind that would show itself sooner or later. But that hadn’t stopped Anna, whose round, angelic face and light, blue eyes could fool you, and the eggshell chin that would crack before the mouth ever uttered a falsehood.
But the very next day, Rosemary had gone to Dad and asked him, point-blank. He’d looked at her with the dark eyes that had already started to shrink into his head, like there was nothing left in life for him to see, and said softly, in a voice that had begun to dry up like old leaves, “Yes. How it hurts to leave you and Mom.”
That conversation, only a few words, was the most precious she’d ever had–and Anna, in her role as Mom, had tried to prevent it.
The memory of Dad’s confession brought more tears. Rosemary turned away so that she wouldn’t cry into his top dresser drawer. Dad would forever be Dad, but, in her own mind, the only place that was truly safe, Mom had become Anna. Out loud, Rosemary would give her what she required, but in her head, she was a rebel, a resister. Anna had forfeited the right to her intimate name because she’d done something so hurtful, so ordinary, so goddamned stupid and insensitive. And to top it off, she’d treated Rosemary, who was sixteen already, like a little kid who wouldn’t know how to handle the news.
She slammed the first drawer shut and flung open the second. Anna might catch her, but she wouldn’t be lied to.
The phone began to ring again. Honestly.
But the second drawer proved no more enlightening, nor the third and last. A great weight seemed to want to drag her lungs down past her waist, as if they’d fail, like Dad’s. She struggled for air, caught her breath gratefully. What if he’d locked it up somewhere, maybe in his filing cabinet? She closed the drawer, checked to see whether she’d moved anything, and dove into the closet.
No luck. The cabinet was locked as tight as J. P. Morgan’s bank vault. Nothing on the floor, either, or wedged onto a shelf up top.
Anna’s dresser? Rosemary drew back. Rummaging there would be like slapping the empress’s face before the court. If she had to, she’d do it, but only as a last resort.
Wait. One more place. She dropped to one knee and lifted the bedspread, fighting off visions of her parents coupling. The sight of the boxes, neatly labeled in dark pencil, made her close her eyes and exhale in triumph. Left, Right; Pinch Me, I’m Dreaming; One of Us Is Crazy; Barrel Over Niagara; Marry Soon, and Often; and the others–the whole works, literally. She sneezed, twice–the boxes were dusty–and found the newest, which wasn’t dusty at all. Interchangeable Parts. Hallelujah.
The phone stopped again.
Rosemary looked over her shoulder, as if she hadn’t already broken the law and could redeem herself, should Anna surprise her. But Anna wasn’t there, nor did her key enter the lock. Rosemary slipped the looseleaf binder out, replaced the box and the bedspread, and spent precious seconds deciding exactly how far open to leave the door. Then she raced into the hallway, and grabbed her coat and hat from the rack.
Call first? Yes. She had to be sure. She went to the living room, lifted the receiver quickly, before anyone else could call, and dialed. Some people, like the Bartons upstairs, had given up their phones to save money. If Anna and Rosemary had to do that, this call might be–but Rosemary wouldn’t think of that.
“Hello?” A man’s voice. The wrong man; the greasy roommate, Harvey.
“Hello, Mr. Mandel. This is Rosemary Moore.” She thought she heard a woman’s voice in the background, a complaint.
“Oh. Oh, yes. I’m sorry about your dad.” He rushed his words, breathing hard.
Rosemary shuddered. Poor Jeff, having to live with someone like that. Mr. Mandel was a teacher, no less. He must have called in sick just to–“Thank you. Is Jeff there?”
“No, he’s out. He said he was going to Chas Parker’s office, and then to Max’s.” Out of the way, so Harvey and his lady friend could have privacy. Did Harvey ever leave so that Jeff could . . .?
“Thanks. Good-bye.” She hung up before he could reply and reentered the hallway.
Chas Parker. Jeff was already arranging to direct another play. Rosemary wasn’t a moment too soon.
As she turned the doorknob, she stopped short. Those boxes under the bed were her siblings. They couldn’t adore anybody, and you couldn’t talk to them or play with them or button their coats for them, and they wouldn’t look up to you. But they were Dad’s children, not Anna’s. There was something to be said for that. And maybe she could care for her latest and last sibling, in a way.
The phone started ringing. The other night, when Anna was in a particularly foul mood, she’d suggested that she and Rosemary stand in Sheridan Square, handing out postcards that read: “I knew/didn’t know Brendan/Mr. Moore well, and/but I’m sorry for your loss. I promise not to waste your time and patience by calling/coming over/reciting righteous platitudes. Signed, _________.”
Dad would have been the first to laugh. Rosemary closed the door firmly on the ringing phone.

 

© Larry Zuckerman, 2016

From My Bookshelf: Mary Renault and the Greek Theater

05 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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4th century B.C.E., actors, Apollo, Euripides, Greece, Mary Renault, masks, Peter Arnott, Plato, Sophocles, Syracuse, theater, Tufts University

Review: The Mask of Apollo, by Mary Renault

Vintage, 1988. 371 pp. $17.

I was born to the theater. My parents met in a high-school play on the eve of World War II; they named me, their second child, for a famous Shakespearean actor. I majored in drama in college, thinking I’d be a playwright, where I had the good fortune to study classical Greek theater with the late Peter Arnott. When he recommended Mary Renault’s novels as both scrupulously accurate and good fiction, I read The Mask of Apollo. I loved it.

Last week, I picked it up for another go-round, and again, I was enthralled. Nikeratos, an Athenian actor from the fourth century B.C.E., himself the son of an actor, tells his life story from the time he was a young boy, playing extras, to his career as a great tragedian. Since ancient Greek theater was religious rite, entertainment, social instruction, and political commentary rolled into one, that gives Renault a broad stage to work with, and she directs her drama with unerring skill. Fitting the religious aspect, Niko, as he’s familiarly known, keeps a beautiful theatrical mask of Apollo wherever he goes, through which he communicates with his favorite patron god about important life decisions.

Theater at Epidaurus (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Theater at Epidaurus (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

He needs all the guidance he can get. Greek theater is a demanding life, shaped by hardship, jealousy, low public taste, arrogant producers and stars, camaraderie, disappointment, temptations to alcoholism, gossip, and political intrigue. Has anything changed? When I first read The Mask of Apollo, I laughingly asked myself whether Renault had overheard my friends and me at our dining-hall conversations or visited our green room. Niko tosses off lines like, “Of course we were bypassing Corinth [on our tour]. Corinthians know what is due to them, and throw things if they don’t get it.” And when Plato, a character who appears often in the novel, wrinkles his nose at the character interpretations in Euripides, Niko can only reply, “But it’s such marvelous theater.”

If The Mask of Apollo were merely Niko’s career path, it would be entertaining, though unremarkable. But Renault reaches for more. Through his theatrical interpretations and diplomatic missions, Niko plays a political role, on and off stage. As religious practitioners, actors were nominally protected from harm, but Niko can never be sure that a tyrant (or usurper) will honor that rule. So when he gets involved in the grand experiment to install a philosopher-king at Syracuse under Plato’s tutelage, Niko must use his theatrical talent in various ways just to survive. The Mask of Apollo therefore grapples with a key question, whether philosophers should be kings (or vice versa); or, to put it another way, whether politics and ideal expectations can ever mix.

But the book also has much to say about art and who or what it must serve. As Niko tells a Syracusan leader he admires:


 

It means not setting oneself above one’s poet, nor being false to the truth one knows of men. When one can see that the audience wants the easy thing, or the thing just in fashion, and even the judges can’t be trusted not to want it too, for whom does one stay honest? Only for the god.


 

Niko understands that honesty in theater, as in life, is a precious commodity, and that it comes, when it does, in unexpected ways, sometimes. Peter Arnott taught me that, though not in his lectures–rather, on stage, of sorts. He performed Oedipus Rex (his translation, of course), using marionettes that he’d made himself. Imagine the artifice: a painted stage set scaled to puppets, obviously not human, and a black-curtained hood, behind which Professor Arnott spoke all the lines, in different voices.

Nevertheless, at the play’s climax, when Oedipus realizes he’s murdered his father, the hush that fell over us, the audience, brought awe, sympathy, and pity. And when the marionette Oedipus grabbed the scenery wall and gave it an agonized shake, a gesture daring us to laugh or break our belief in what we’d just seen, the pathos redoubled instead.

I’ll remember that moment forever, if I live to be a hundred.

Disclaimer: I own a much-loved copy of this book, on which I based my review.

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storyteller from a foreign land

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