Archives for 2011

Stephen Hinton, a music professor here at Stanford, sent me a link to a rather wonderful essay that Brian Eno wrote (and then read out aloud for the “This I Believe” segment on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday) in 2008 about the power of singing — and group singing in particular. Eno’s words basically echo my own thinking on the subject. So I couldn’t resist sharing his articulate words:

 

Singing: The Key To A Long Life

by BRIAN ENO

I believe in singing. I believe in singing together.

A few years ago a friend and I realized that we both loved singing but didn’t do much of it. So we started a weekly a capella group with just four members. After a year we started inviting other people to join. We didn’t insist on musical experience — in fact some of our members had never sung before. Now the group has ballooned to around 15 or 20 people.

I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness and a better sense of humor. A recent long-term study conducted in Scandinavia sought to discover which activities related to a healthy and happy later life. Three stood out: camping, dancing and singing.

Well, there are physiological benefits, obviously: You use your lungs in a way that you probably don’t for the rest of your day, breathing deeply and openly. And there are psychological benefits, too: Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. And then there are what I would call “civilizational benefits.” When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

Well here’s what we do in an evening: We get some drinks, some snacks, some sheets of lyrics and a strict starting time. We warm up a bit first.

The critical thing turns out to be the choice of songs. The songs that seem to work best are those based around the basic chords of blues and rock and country music. You want songs that are word-rich, but also vowel-rich because it’s on the long vowels sounds of a song such as “Bring It On Home To Me” (“You know I’ll alwaaaaays be your slaaaaave”), that’s where your harmonies really express themselves. And when you get a lot of people singing harmony on a long note like that, it’s beautiful.

But singing isn’t only about harmonizing pitch like that. It has two other dimensions. The first one is rhythm. It’s thrilling when you get the rhythm of something right and you all do a complicated rhythm together: “Oh, when them cotton balls get a-rotten, you can’t pick very much cotton.” So when 16 or 20 people get that dead right together at a fast tempo that’s very impressive. But the other thing that you have to harmonize besides pitch and rhythm is tone. To be able to hit exactly the same vowel sound at a number of different pitches seems unsurprising in concept, but is beautiful when it happens.

So I believe in singing to such an extent that if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing become a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for co-operation with others. This seems to be about the most important thing a school could do for you.

Credits: Independently produced for Weekend Edition Sunday by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman with John Gregory and Viki Merrick. Special thanks to Davia Nelson of The Kitchen Sisters for recording this essay.

 

Bay Area culture is a many-splendored thing. You don’t have to go to a theatre, concert hall or art gallery to have a cultural experience.

The only “traditional” arts event I attended all weekend, which happened to be the least engaging of all the things I did, was a production of The Gate Theatre of Dublin’s stage adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley. The production, presented under the auspices of Cal Performances, is built on texts selected from the book by Barry McGovern, who also performs the piece. It’s an hour long, it rambles, and, with little effort made to transform Beckett’s quirky-opaque prose into a stage worthy vessel, feels like a costumed recitation. But though I had trouble staying awake at times, McGovern is an engaging performer and delivers Beckett’s poetic language and wit with plenty of gusto.

On Friday afternoon, I joined a journalist friend from Reuters on a tour of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford where I spent a fascinating two hours learning about the joys of particle physics. The research lab is home to a two-mile linear accelerator — the longest such building in the world. I got a strangely vertiginous feeling standing inside the structure, which extends in both directions further than the eye can see. It’s not everyday that you’re indoors and can’t see the edges of the space you’re standing in.

On Sunday, I took my first archery lesson with SF Archers in Pacifica. The community-minded organization offers two free “outreach” days a month where anyone can go and get three-hours of personalized tuition on how to shoot a recurve bow and arrow. To my immense surprise, I find that I have a knack for this sport. The club members are expecting a deluge of new visitors in 2012 with the release of The Hunger Games, an upcoming Hollywood movie based on a series of science-fiction books in which a young woman runs amok in a futuristic landscape surviving on her wits with the aid of a bow and arrow. According to SF Archers, every time there’s a movie with archery involved, the club gets an influx of new people. “It happened with Robin Hood and Lord of the Rings,” a club member said. “We’re bracing ourselves for a busy year with The Hunger Games.”

I’m not sure why the main character, Joseph, in Aurora Theatre‘s new theatrical adaptation of Stravinsky’s 1918 chamber music work The Soldier’s Tale needs to be played by a puppet rather than a human actor. But what I appreciated about yesterday’s opening night performance was being able to watch the skills of Joseph’s deft puppet master, Muriel Maffre.

Aurora’s thrust space is very small and I had a seat in the middle of the second row so could observe Maffre at close range. She’s a startling performer. I had known her for years as a principal dancer at the San Francisco Ballet. Until last night, I had no idea that she could manipulate the body of an otherwise inanimate marionette as expertly (in the relative sense of course) as she moves her own body.

Maffre used careful movements. There was a spareness to the way in which she walked Joseph around the stage that belied the complexity of the emotions that she was able to put across. I also loved the way she used her face to respond and register a wide variety of moods and emotions. The puppet seemed extremely lifelike as a result.

The theatre salons that I’ve been running every few months for the past seven years or so with a cohort of friends from the performing arts world in San Francisco often surprise me — in a good way. We come up with a theme after a protracted debate, figure out the logistics at the eleventh hour and worry if anyone’s going to show. Amazingly, things always turn out better than I think they will. We get around 50 people, we have a mostly engaging discussion about some aspect of the performing arts, we reconnect with colleagues and make new acquaintances. Not a bad way to spend an evening.

Last Sunday’s effort, however, left me feeling a little disappointed. The topic at hand was “criticism” and we conceived of the term in the broadest sense — we wanted to explore not just the traditional relationship between theatre artists and sanctioned  members of the media who review the artists’ work, but the level of critique that goes on (or fails to go on) within the arts-making community itself.

Given the fact that Bay Area arts people are notorious for being nicey-nicey even when the work sucks, this is a prescient topic. However, as the evening evolved I became more and more dispirited. I wasn’t sure at the time what was bugging me beyond the fact that I felt tired .

But since then, I think I’ve figured out at least in part the problem with Sunday night’s Salon: People seemed to pay lip service to the idea of true critical engagement (“We need to stand up for ourselves!” “Only if we’re honest about each others’ work can we improve!” “We owe this to our audiences!” etc) without getting into specifics about how the really important critical conversations might actually take place in an environment that doesn’t really support critical discourse.

If I had thought of this at the time, I would have tried to steer the conversation in a more productive direction.

Perhaps this blogpost can serve as an opener to a new discussion then: What needs to happen in the (Bay Area) arts scene in order for people within the community to be able to have frank and constructive discussions about the work being produced?

I like it when performance artists succeed in integrating most or all of the senses into their productions. This is a hard thing to do. Smells and tastes in particular can be so overpowering that you risk turning off an audience entirely or even causing health issues (e.g. people are allergic to certain foods and odors.)

At the weekend, I came out of a production of On The Scent, an intimate theatrical exploration of the relationship between scent and memory utterly transfixed.

The show, which in this iteration was set in adjoining rooms of a private house in San Francisco, involves three monologues created and performed by theatre artists Leslie Hill, Helen Paris and Lois Weaver. The production was first performed in 2003 as part of the FIERCE Festival and has toured in the UK as well as the USA, Canada, Brazil, China, Europe, and Australia. At the weekend, the piece was performed a number of times on Saturday and Sunday afternoon and evening in front of audiences of just four people.

The first monologue features Lois Weaver, who plays a slightly batty lady in her Golden Years. This section of the piece takes place in the living room of the house. Perfume bottles strew the floor. There are animal skulls on the walls. And video recording apparatus on a tripod stands in the middle. Weaver’s kimono-wearing character is obsessed with perfumes and believes that the world is all about give an take. She eats greedily from a box of chocolates and covets whiffs of her little bottle of “Obsession” perfume. But she won’t let the audience members have a sniff or taste because we haven’t brought her anything in exchange, she tells us.

In the second part of the show, we walk through to the house’s small kitchen where Leslie Hill, in jeans, boots and t-shirt, ushers us in to sit by the table. There are glossy red chili peppers and juicy limes scattered on the surface, as well as a bottle of tequila and five glasses. An empty, heavy-based pan sits atop the lit gas-stove, warming. Over the course of her conversational yet more abrasive monologue, Hill combines cuts chili powder with a razor blade and snorts it through a folded bill, cooks a pork chop and makes popcorn while sharing strong, politically-tinged stories about her past. At one point, Hill passes out tequila glasses and we salt our hands, knock back shots with her and suck on crescents of lime. The tastes and smells are completely overpowering in this section of the show as well as the sounds — the popcorn machine goes crazy, sending puffs of the snack cascading onto the counter and floor. Combined with the sizzling pork and the music playing on the stereo, we’re in sensual and intellectual overload mode. It’s thrilling.

The third part of On The Scent, performed by Helen Paris, is completely opposite in tone. We cross from the kitchen and through the lounge to a darkening bedroom where, in the sepulchral winter afternoon light, the performer lies in bed, energy-less. We sit quietly. Paris explains that she’s sick. Gradually he manages to rally herself despite her ill health and launches into a beautiful meditation on her past relationships. At one point, she guiltily talks about her love of sweet things and reveals a tupperware box of biscuits whereupon she sticks her head in the box and does a headstand up the wall.

As a sort of coda, we all end up back in the living room with Lois. She informs us that we can in fact give her something in return for whatever it is that she thinks she’s given us: a description of a previous scent-memory of our own. With the camera rolling, we each in turn relate a story from our past involving the olfactory sense.

And then we’re given a heavily rose or lilac-scented chocolate from the once-forbidden box and we are asked to leave.

Should media organizations be producers of live events in addition to (or instead of being) producers of traditional ‘mediated’ content?

Having experienced Pop-Up Magazine‘s live journalism event at Davies Symphony Hall last night, I am of the belief that live events can be a fantastic way to enrapture audiences stories of all kinds — and potentially generate quite a bit of revenue.

It’s astounding to me that Pop-Up Magazine managed to sell out Davies, which holds several thousand people, within about two hours of opening its box office a few weeks ago. The venue was utterly packed. I haven’t seen this much of a turn out since a recent appearance of Yo-Yo Ma with the San Francisco Symphony.

The set-up of the event also surprised me in terms of its simplicity. Stage right, there was a microphone and a lectern. Center stage stood a huge projection screen. Stage left was a space for the couple of musical contributions to do their stuff. Beyond that, the stage was huge and bare. Actually, I think Davies somewhat lacks the intimacy that this kind of storytelling soiree needs, though what the event lost in coziness, it most likely gained in income.

The event featured a wide array of shortish presentations by journalists and other creative types with a penchant for reportage and storytelling. Contributions ranged from Stephanie Foo’s slide-accompanied journey through the early superhero comic book drawings of a few current rising stars in the industry, to A C Thompson’s investigation into fabricated death row inmate defense arguments.

Some content pieces were better than others. In addition to the two aforementioned contributions, I loved in particular Steve Silberman’s look at the sketchbooks of an early Apple employee, Dana Goodyear’s affectionate portrait of an old-school gourmand who traveled the world for more than two decades in search of the perfect steak and Charlotte Buchen’s beautifully-told “where are they now?” story about a once-famous Iranian boy band of the 1980s and the relationship between their most famous song and Iranian politics and life today.

Most presentations featured some use of video or audio in addition to the creator speaking his or her words live on stage. Bonnie Tsui’s profile piece about a guy who made a career out of diving for urchins in the waters around the shark-infested Farallon Islands before retiring and launching a new career filming underwater life for scientific researchers, provided perhaps the most engaging example of how a piece of journalism can make the most of the live experience. I enjoyed the way in which Tsui combined reportage with film and a live on-stage interview with the subject.

Pop-Up Magazine founder, magazine journalist Douglas McGray, is an inspired curator. He has a leaning towards the sort of ephemera and arcana that appeals to a hipster New Yorker-reading audience, but his scope as an editor is appealingly broad.

Nevertheless, some of last night’s pieces fell flat.

Ironically for a live event, the least successful contributions of the evening were the ones that were most self-consciously performance-oriented and the least journalistic in feel.

Chinaka Hodge’s slam poetry take on life in the Bay Area parsed through a screened crossword puzzle upon which words in the poem gradually revealed themselves as she spoke was shrilly delivered and didactic. Scott Snibbe’s contribution to the evening, which involved an amorphous pixelated doodle “improvisation”  projected on the screen from Snibbe’s iPad while the Calder Quartet, a string quartet based in LA, performed an uninspired and weirdly truncated version of the second movement of Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major (the musicians completely omitted the slow middle section of the piece) seemed completely pointless.

Overall, I relish the opportunity that Pop-Up Magazine provides to hear writers perform their own work, rather than the more usual thing (as with your typical writer-focused lecture series) of having writers talk about their work. That being said, great writers don’t automatically make for great public speakers and a few of them could use some help in this regard.

I also like the way in which the experience isn’t recorded or disseminated in any way post-event. This gives the concept a sense of occasion that is so often missing from the experience of opening a magazine or listening to a broadcast. It also makes it possible for a journalist like Mac McClelland to tell a story on stage that, for reasons of preserving the livelihood and even the life of her subject who is in constant danger of persecution, is better left out of online news archives, Lexis-Nexis searches and YouTube.

A couple of other quick observations to end:

1. The program was divided into “shorts” and “features” but it wasn’t clear to me what the difference was between the two categories. Some of the shorts were quite long and some of the features seemed like the equivalent of “amuse bouches.”

2. I admired the quirky way in which Pop-Up Magazine worked with its key advertisers, Skyy Vodka and the Anchor Brewing Company. At two points during the presentation, live “ads” featuring the sponsoring products, each a few seconds long and light-hearted in their approach, were performed on stage. In one of these ads, for instance, a cocktail waitress wheeled a small stand which served as a “bar” on stage and showed the audience how to mix a drink using a Skyy product. Clever.

It’s weird to be an arts person on a campus that’s much more focused on business, science and sport.

Only yesterday, during a workshop I was leading with the few students who serve as writers and editors on the Stanford Arts Review, the university’s recently launched online arts magazine, we devoted a great deal of time to thinking about how the make the arts more visible on campus.

It’s telling that I couldn’t get anyone from my fellowship to take me up on the offer of a free ticket to one of the last performances ever to be give by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company last week when they came through town. But a few days later, within about 30 seconds of posting a message to the Knight Fellowship email list, I had four offers for takers of a spare ticket I had in my possession for a Stanford Cardinals football game happening this coming Saturday.

It’s also telling that on the first day of orientation, the head of my program talked about the university’s big new initiatives on Human Health, the Environment and Sustainability and International Relations, but failed to mention the Arts and Creativity Initiative. (Mind you, he didn’t give props to The Initiative on Improving K-12 Education either.)

On the other hand, I’m entirely ignorant about campus sports, which are a huge deal here. If I ran into Andrew Luck in the line at Ike’s (a popular sandwich bar around here) I wouldn’t know the university’s star player from any of the other All-American boys that roam around campus in hoodies and short haircuts. And that’s in spite of the gaggle of adoring undergraduates that can’t help tweeting hysterically every time they catch a glimpse of the athlete. This profile of Luck in today’s Stanford Report (the university’s daily news circular) says it all.

I consider my ignorance about sports to be a terrible shortcoming. How can I expect people to pay attention to the arts around here if I’m just as blind to athletics?

A few thoughts carried over from a weekend of getting up to various things:

1. Carrying the Keys: A few months ago, I spent a tense hour or two watching three burly guys transport a piano belonging to a dear friend of mine up several flights of stairs to his apartment. It looked like back-breaking work. So I was amazed to come across this wonderful short documentary film about Edward Gong, a 75-year-old Bay Area piano mover who had transported around 7,000 pianos singlehandedly during his long career. Turns out that Gong, who sounds like an eccentric character, passed away last weekend. The San Francisco Chronicle posted an affectionate obit about him.

2. Arcadia or Al Quaeda?: At almost four hours in length with nearly every aria an expression of the same topic (love — how it lifts the soul, how it tears it apart, how one ensnares a lover, how one ditches him etc etc) Handel’s Xerxes tale of romantic intrigue, though musically vibrant, can become wearing after a while. However, for a variety of reasons, my interest never waned on Friday night when I caught a performance of Nicholas Hytner’s production of Handel’s Xerxes at the San Francisco Opera. David Fielding’s sets and costumes are so packed with visual metaphors, some of which make more sense than others, that the denseness of the imagery threatens to bog down the thrust of the story. Why the astroturf curtain, for example? Still, I love the contrast between the pristine interiors in which the natural world is “captured” and put on display in a set of cases and cordoned off areas as in a museum, and the rocky, barren desert landscape beyond Xerxes’ palace walls. Providing a backdrop for the King’s political maneuverings, the contrast made me think of recent misguided Western attempts to tame hostile foreign shores. “Arcadia or Al Queda?” I thought as I watched what was happening on stage. Also, thanks to some of the best acting I’ve seen on San Francisco Opera’s stage in recent seasons from a cast that included a swaggering Susan Graham in the title role, David Daniels as Xerxes’ long-suffering underdog brother Arsamenes and Lisette Oropesa as the object of both of their affections, Romilda, the time flew by.

3. D-School Drivel: Stanford’s trendy Institute of Design (known as the D-School on campus) has become such a core focus of university life that its methodology (“design thinking”) has been adopted by departments all across campus. Hundreds of graduate students turned up for the D-School’s open evening on Thursday night. But when each visitor was handed a Kleenex by a smiling D-School acolyte soon after entering the building, I knew I was in for trouble. The focus of the event was for professors to pitch their upcoming winter and fall courses. There are some exciting-sounding programs on offer. I’m fascinated in particular by courses on the designing of social brands and storytelling / visual communication. But what continues to be a barrier to entry as far as I am concerned is the inane way in which the D-School people present themselves to their public. A professor asked us all to bark like dogs at one point. Another made us clap together in time. When the Kleenex woman told us we had 15 seconds to design a gift using the prop and then present it to the person standing next to us, I decided enough was enough. I like to play around as much as the next person. (I danced so madly with two little girls at a wedding this past weekend that I left a trail of blood on the carpet of the cruise ship upon which the wedding party was sailing around the Bay. I should never have attempted that break-dancing move which involved landing on my knees one too many times.) But the D-School type of play isn’t usually very satisfying. It appeals to the lowest common denominator of people’s imaginations and often seems superimposed on the ideas they’re trying to put across rather than truly germane.

The Merce Cunningham Dance Company visited Stanford last night on its farewell tour under the auspices of the university’s wonderful arts presenter, Stanford Lively Arts. Memorial Auditorium was packed with dance fans heavy with the knowledge that this would be the last time that they would get to see the iconic company in action before it disbands at the end of the year.

Given the momentous nature of the occasion, it was in a way surprising to see quite a few people leaving the auditorium in the middle of the Company’s performance of Nearly Ninety, a restaging of the late choreographer’s final work which was commissioned for his 90th birthday.

I imagine the ear-ringing industrial musical score was probably responsible in the main for the exodus. Sounding intermittently like a video game arcade, a casino full of maniacally ringing slot machines, a jackhammer breaking up a concrete sidewalk, a helicopter taking off and a the engine of an old car turning over, the music created an austere duet with the glacial beauty of Cunningham’s often slow-motion dance steps.

I was personally transfixed by the movement, a collection of elongated, spacious poses that appeared to combine Cunningham’s adaptations of standard ballet steps like developes, pirouettes and arabesques with Vinyasa yoga poses. The dancers’ control and poise was incredible. I felt like I was watching time move incrementally. With the dancers’ costumes gradually morphing from tight, charcoal body suits that showed off precise lines and clear forms to more fluid, almost amphibious-looking body suits with contours softened by the addition of flowing flaps of fabric that almost looked like fins, it seemed as if the work was visualizing the evolution of life on earth and the process of human aging.

I won first prize at a Zombie Freestyle Dance Competition last night.

My routine, made up on the spot, involved lots of flailing about on the ground.

It was quite postmodern.

I spent Saturday doing something I’ve never done before: performing a section from an opera accompanied by an instrumental ensemble. We’re not talking Wagner at The Met, mind you: I was singing the part of a dopy, lovelorn shepherd in a workshop of a little-known Serenata (a mini opera of the late 17th century) by Severo de Luca, a composer from Scarlatti’s circle in Naples. But it was a big deal for someone who spends most of her life writing about and interviewing great singers and standing in the rank and file of a chorus. Besides the fact that I had to perform in front of about 40 people, I was also backed up by a Baroque string ensemble, led by none other than Nicholas McGegan, the artistic director of The Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, one of the country’s premier Baroque music outfits. As a result, it was quite a scary — albeit deeply fulfilling — experience.

What I noticed quickly however, is how much difference it makes singing with a large group of instruments as opposed to a cappella or with a solo piano. You sort of feel carried along by them, as if surfing on a wave. I presumed that it would take a lot more effort to make oneself heard above a group of instruments. But I was surprised to discover that the sound of the strings and harpsichord pushed me along and actually helped me to project. The whole thing felt marvelously effortless. I had a blast. I want to do it again.

In other news, not unrelated: I spent Sunday afternoon in the company of some of the finest Baroque musicians in the world — the French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky and the Apollo’s Fire Baroque Orchestra, a spellbinding period ensemble led by the fiery-tressed harpsichordist Jeannette Sorrell and based out of Cleveland. The concert happened under the auspices of Cal Performances at Hertz Hall on the Berkeley campus and it was well worth the trek (my fourth to the East Bay in one week from Palo Alto where I am currently stationed on a journalism fellowship at Stanford.)

Appollo’s Fire deserves its name: I have never before encountered a Baroque group (or any other classically-trained ensemble for that matter) where the players attack their music with so much vigor and excitement. As with a concert I saw the musicians perform in New York in 2006 (I think it was their New York debut,) they had me on the edge of my seat throughout the program, which consisted of a variety of string pieces and arias by Handel and Vivaldi.

The collaboration with Jaroussky, a young singer of equal temperament, is a natural one and the ensemble and singer are currently exploring their mutual energy on a tour around the country and abroad. There was tantalizing communication between the vocalist and instrumentalists. They seemed to be completely engaged with one another as well as the audience.

Jaroussky has a similar brightness and technical mastery to his voice as Cecelia Bartoli. But while Bartoli tends to set my teeth on edge with a sound that’s half heavy artillery and half chipmunk on steroids, Jaroussky’s tone is smoother and glides more fluidly. It’s less hard on the ears, even in the florid bravura runs of a difficult Handel aria. I only wish the singer would relax his right arm and hand. They remained so crooked and tense throughout almost the entire performance that I wondered if the performer was contending some kind of physical disability.

Another thing that I loved about the recital was the choice of music. I was, like many audience members in the packed hall, unfamiliar with Vivaldi’s operatic repertoire before I heard Apollo’s Fire and Jaroussky play and sing it. Now I want to get my hands on every recording of Catone in Utica, Giustino and Tito Manlio I can find.

Peter Sellars is an extremely articulate person. When the theatre director opens his mouth to speak — and it doesn’t matter whether he’s discussing the inner workings of the US State Department or an obscure form of tribal dance from Samoa — you always feel like you are learning something new delivered in a way that’s thought-provoking yet approachable.

So how is it that I so often come away from experiencing a stage work by the director without wrinkling my brow, shrugging my shoulders, and uttering “meh”?

This was what happened following last night’s performance of Desdemona at Cal Performances. Created in collaboration with the author Toni Morrison and singer-songwriter Rokia Traore, this Sellars-directed riff on the inner-life of the heroine in Shakespeare’s Othello is blessed with Morrison’s beautiful, crystalline verse delivered by the luminous actress Tina Benko and lilting songs performed by the hushaby-voiced Traore accompanied by a trio of backing singers, a kora player and a n’goni player.

I certainly got a fresh insight into the inner-workings of the character of Desdemona and understood something of the racial and social complexity of the relationship between Desdemona and the people around her. And the production made me see how eternal the power struggles between people of different ethnic and economic backgrounds can be.

Yet as the result of the didactic ending, the opaque staging concept involving assorted clusters of glass vessels, hanging lightbulbs and scattered microphones, and the rambling length of the piece (it goes on for well over two intermissionless hours and could have been at least 30 minutes shorter) I left feeling baffled. And not for the first time, as far as Sellars’ work is concerned.

Perhaps I’m too stupid to “get it.” Or could it be that the venerable director still needs to work on translating his verbal skills to the stage?