Archives for July 7, 2006

I’m in between theater-related trips today, giving me just enough time to post the weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser before hitting the road again. Most of my column is devoted to a report on the Georgia Shakespeare Festival, followed by a capsule review of Pig Farm:

Unless you live in Georgia, you probably don’t think of Atlanta as a center of American regional theater. Yet it’s home to a dozen serious companies, enough to keep a good actor working year round–and to allow the Georgia Shakespeare Festival, the city’s best-known summer theater, to put together an ensemble of Atlanta-based artists instead of importing itinerant out-of-towners. In some cities that would be a guarantee of mediocrity, but there’s nothing provincial about Georgia Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” a blunt, bawdy romp directed by Karen Robinson that leaves just enough room for romance in between the slapstick.

No production of Shakespeare’s dizziest comedy of mistaken sexual identity can take wing without a Viola who looks smashing in pants, and Courtney Patterson, who spends the greater part of the evening decked out in riding togs, fills the bill. Gangly, big-eyed and touchingly eager, she serves as the play’s emotional center, and her affecting performance frees the rest of the cast to chase uninhibitedly after laughter….

“Pig Farm” is a crazy-quilt pastiche stitched together out of bits and pieces of “Tobacco Road,” “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” and God only knows how many other half-remembered films and TV shows. It’s as subtle as a whoopee cushion–a really, really loud whoopee cushion–but it kept the audience laughing pretty much continuously, which is, after all, the point….

No link, of course, so be so kind as to buy a copy of Friday’s Journal, or go here to subscribe to the paper’s online edition–an unbelievable bargain, if I do say so myself.

In my next “Sightings” column, to be published in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I consider the case of Jay Greenberg, the fourteen-year-old classical composer featured two years ago on 60 Minutes whose Fifth Symphony has been recorded by Sony BMG Masterworks for release this fall. Not only has he has been signed to an exclusive contract by Sony BMG, but he’s now being represented by IMG Artists, one of the biggest talent agencies in the world. The publicity engine is starting to grind, and in a matter of months Greenberg will be famous. Is this the chance of a lifetime–or bad news for a gifted boy?

For the answer, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal, where you’ll find my column in the “Pursuits” section.

“When a person stands ready to offer his life for another, he obviously knows what he’s doing. I wouldn’t have believed you capable of such a sacrifice, but you never know what a human being is capable of. Not that those who make the sacrifices are always saints. People sacrificed themselves for Stalin, for Petlura, for Machno, for every pogromist. Millions of fools will give their empty heads for Hitler. At times I think men go around with a candle looking for an opportunity to sacrifice themselves.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shosha

This week has been a little rough on me. I have a bum knee, infected corneas, and no captain. The knee is from ice-skating a bit too ambitiously when I was in Detroit last weekend. Until the crash, things were dreamy. It was a perfect, cloudless Saturday afternoon and so, other than the guard, my dad and I were the only people crazy enough to be spending it indoors on a sheet of ice. That translated into a lot of open ice for us–open ice for me to colossally screw up a forward-to-backward transition on. I’ve never had such a disorienting, catastrophic crash. I gathered my wits and kept skating, though; about a dozen skaters joined us over the course of the session–about the number that play in a hockey game–so we still had tremendously open ice, an opportunity not to be wasted. But at the end of it my knee was swollen up like a grapefruit. It was only later that I discovered that two of the knee’s most basic functions were functioning painfully: bending and bearing weight. Whoops. I’ll be seeing a doctor shortly.

Moving along to bad corneas, while I don’t recommend them, they are pretty easy to come by. Simply wear the same pair of daily wear contact lenses for about eighteen months, marveling at all the money you are saving. A mere fourteen or fifteen months might even do the trick! Of course, you will then not be able to wear contacts for ten days or so while treating your eyes with $150 eye drops (I advise you to have a prescription drug plan), but think not of that–think of all the cash you saved over the previous year and a half, and savor the memory, for from here on out your optometrist will prescribe only disposable lenses for your sorry self. For added adventure, be sure the glasses you are resigned to wearing while your eyes heal are at least eight years old. Drive carefully.

As for the captain, it’s a painful goodbye but one that’s firmly in the better-to-have-loved-and-lost category. Steve Yzerman retired Monday as the longest-serving team captain in NHL history. He gave me hockey, essentially. What I felt watching him play for the Red Wings was as intense as many of my experiences of great art. If you aren’t a sports fan that may sound absurd. It might sound absurd even if you are. I never felt it about another athlete before, and I don’t expect to again. It was a unique experience. Thanks, Stevie Y.

Normally I walk to work, but this morning I had to take a train to a meeting downtown. During the ten-minute ride, I pulled out my current reading, the first volume of Anthony Powell’s novel A Dance to the Music of Time, and ran headlong into this account of another railroad trip: Jenkins’s train ride to Touraine.

The journey was being undertaken in fiery sunshine. Although not my first visit to France, this was the first time I had traveled alone there. As the day wore on, the nap on the covering of the seats of the French State Railways took on the texture of the coarse skin of an over-heated animal: writhing and undulating as if in an effort to find relief from the torturing glow. I lunched in the restaurant car, and drank some vin ordinaire that tasted unexpectedly sour. The carriage felt hotter than ever on my return: and the train more crowded. An elderly man with a straw hat, black gloves, and Assyrian beard had taken my seat. I decided that it would be less trouble, and perhaps cooler, to stand for a time in the corridor. I wedged myself in by the window between a girl of about fifteen with a look of intense concentration on her pale, angular features, who pressed her face against the glass, and a young soldier with a spectacled, thin countenance, who was angrily explaining some political matter to an enormously fat priest in charge of several small boys. After a while the corridor became fuller than might have been thought possible. I was gradually forced away from the door of the compartment, and found myself unstrategically placed with a leg on either side of a wicker trunk, secured by a strap, the buckle of which ran into my ankle, as the train jolted its way along the line. All around were an immense number of old women in black, one of whom was carrying a feather mattress as part of her luggage.

At first the wine had a stimulating effect; but this sense of exhilaration began to change after a time to one of heaviness and despair. My head buzzed. The soldier and the priest were definitely having words. The girl forced her nose against the window, making a small circle of steam in front of her face. At last the throbbings in my head became so intense that I made up my mind to eject the man with the beard. After a short preliminary argument in which I pointed out that the seat was a reserved one, and, in general, put my case as well as circumstances and my command of the language would allow, he said briefly: ‘Monsieur, vous avez gagn