Roger O Green

Ibsen’s Ghosts, with Uma Thurman

secrets and lies

The Williamstown Theatre Festival in western Massachusetts has been producing great theater since 1955. It is a resident summer theater on the campus of Williams College. Actors who have performed there over the years have included Sigourney Weaver, Christopher Walken, Nathan Lane, Richard Chamberlain, Kate Burton, Olympia Dukakis, Paul Giamatti, Bradley Cooper, Calista Flockhart, Matthew Broderick, Blythe Danner, and her daughter, Gwyneth Paltrow.

Yet I had never been there. Time to change that. I discover that Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts would be performed the week the family was already in the Berkshires. This is a new translation by Paul Walsh, though I am totally unfamiliar with the play. Uma Thurman, who I think of as a film actor, plays the pivotal Mrs. Alving. Carey Perloff is the director.

The bad news is that there are very few seats left, except in the second balcony. The good news is that the tickets are somewhat cheaper, $60 each, rather than $75. My wife and I settled on a Wednesday matinee.

What IS this play? Ghosts was “written in 1881 and first staged in 1882 in Chicago, IL, in a production by a Danish company on tour. Like many of Ibsen’s plays, Ghosts is a scathing commentary on 19th-century morality. Because of its subject matter, which includes religion, venereal disease, incest, and euthanasia, it immediately generated strong controversy and negative criticism.

“Since then the play has fared better, and is considered a ‘great play’ that historically holds a position of ‘immense importance’. Theater critic Maurice Valency wrote in 1963, ‘…Regular tragedy dealt mainly with the unhappy consequences of breaking the moral code. Ghosts, on the contrary, deals with the consequences of not breaking it.'”

Like many plays, it’s the secrets and lies that drive the plot. Helen Alving had sent her son Oswald away to protect him from her now-late philandering husband. Now her adult son has returned. As is my wont, I particularly enjoyed the dueling theologies of the pastor and many of the others, such as the carpenter who kept a confidence that messed up the church registry.

The New York Times called the production “sumptuous”, and I would agree. The actors – Catherine Combs (Regina), Tom Pecinka (Oswald Alving), Thom Sesma (Jakob Engstrand, the carpenter), Uma Thurman, Bernard White (Pastor Manders) – were very accomplished. The one thing that was a distraction was that the large thatched roof sometimes obscured the characters when they were upstage.

On the other hand, I loved the live score by David Coulter, which included water glasses, percussion and all sorts of moody instrumentation. I’ll have to return to the Williamstown Theatre Festival in the next year or two.

World War II: 80th anniversary

“We must suffer them all again”

It will be eighty years come September 1 since World War II began. I have a strong sense that a lot of folks in the US, in particular, have no idea. It’s in part because lots of Americans are oblivious to history. And if they know anything about WWII, it’s Pearl Harbor, which didn’t take place until 27 months later.

When I was younger, I glibly understood that a reason for WWII was that the victors of World War I treated the Germans poorly. The Britannica seems to concur. “The war was in many respects a continuation, after an uneasy 20-year hiatus, of the disputes, left unsettled by World War I.”

In fact, most of the 1930s felt like a precursor of the Second World War: Japan invading China, Italy taking over Ethiopia, Germany annexing Czechoslovakia, etc.

Or maybe earlier: on November 8, 1923, there was the Beer Hall Putsch, when Adolf Hitler unsuccessfully led the Nazis in an attempt to overthrow the German government. Though it was crushed by police the next day, less than a decade later, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany.

Six and a half years after that, the war in Europe began, as Germany invaded Poland. Britain and France responded by declaring war on Germany. Thus began the deadliest military conflict in history, with at least 50 million killed directly by the war and at least 20 million perishing as a result of war-related disease and famine

I am, as is John Green (no relation), uncertain and afraid about the war then and how it may parallel what’s going on now.

So John thinks about the W. H. Auden poem September 1, 1939. Though Auden later repudiated his own work as overly sentimental, it became quite popular.

After 9/11, this couplet was analyzed on National Public radio:
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief,
We must suffer them all again

Auden particularly rejected the sentimentality of the last line of the penultimate verse. Yet it is that line that gives me both hope and despair: We must love one another or die.

H is for the Kingdom of Hawaii

Love, Peace, and Compassion

Hawaii.NASA earth observatory — NASA earth observatory

In a Travel Trvia post called 5 Countries That No Longer Exist, I read about the Kingdom of Hawaii. It was “founded by King Kamehameha I in 1810, about 40 years after first contact with Europeans…

“Remarkably, the political structure of the kingdom was close to a feudal European system, though its religion and customs followed the ancient Polynesian ways. The kingdom was an internationally recognized independent state, securing most of their assurances (including one from the United States) in the early 1840s.” But then it gets interesting.

“The U.S. annexed the islands as a result of the Spanish–American War in 1898 to better fight the Spanish in the Philippines, which is a whole other can of international-sovereignty-violating-worms… There’s a serious case to be made that the U.S. violated a whole bunch of international laws during the annexation, meaning we may never have had the authority to do literally any of the things we did on the island.

“Hawaiian independence is a very real possibility and there are a lot of people fighting hard for it.” While I don’t expect the state will actually secede, I find this bit of history quite fascinating.

Incidentally, “most people think that “Aloha” is a word that means both hello and goodbye” That is not true. “In Hawaiian we say ‘Aloha’ both when greeting someone and also saying goodbye. But that is not to be taken literally. The real meaning of Aloha in Hawaiian is that of Love, Peace, and Compassion.”

HI Hawaii. I DO , though, like the fact that the two-letter postal code says, “Hi!” Capital and largest city: Honolulu.

The Hawaiian Islands are “an archipelago of eight major islands, several atolls, numerous smaller islets, and seamounts in the North Pacific Ocean, extending some 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) from the island of Hawaiʻi in the south to northernmost Kure Atoll. Formerly the group was known to Europeans and Americans as the Sandwich Islands, a name chosen by James Cook in honor of the then First Lord of the Admiralty John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich.”

One last thing: is it Hawaii or Hawai’i? The state website has a bar that reads “Search all Hawai’i government.” Other sources suggests that the large island is Hawai’i but that the state is Hawaii. It’s still engendering great debate on the islands.

Lydster: Andi Mack finale

Shut up, Jonah!

My daughter and I often watched the Disney program Andi Mack over the past three years. Given some of the painful programming I deigned to watch with her over the years, this wasn’t bad.

The premise was about a girl (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) who finds out that her older sister Bex (Lilan Bowden) is actually her mother, and Celia (Lauren Tom), who she thought was her mother, was her grandmother. Very soap opera, admittedly, but the evolution of the relation of Andi and Bex was pivotal. The other focus was the relationship among Andi’s best friends Cyrus (Joshua Rush), Buffy (Sofia Wylie) and Jonah (Asher Angel) .

I love watching the show with my daughter. She grouses about various characters, most notably Jonah, who was well meaning but totally clueless when it came to attempts at romance, with Andi, seeming mean girl Amber (Emily Skinner) and deaf girl Libby (played by a deaf actress, Millicent Simmonds).

I’ll admit Jonah could be clueless, most notably when the core four salvaged designer clothes from a dumpster and gave them away. when confronted by the police, he said way too much. Shut up, Jonah! My daughter also complained about Andi, when it seemed like the typical teenage behavior I was seeing at home.

In the penultimate episode, Bex has finally married Andi’s dad Bowie (Trent Garrett). For the final episode, more storylines are resolved. My daughter was pleased when Cyrus started a relationship; she was so surprised, though, that she literally fell off the sofa. When Cyrus came out as gay to Buffy, and eventually the others, the group One Million Moms wanted the show cancelled. It obviously didn’t work. Andi Mack was Disney’s most-watched series over the past three years.

My daughter was bemused/confounded by her mother. My wife thought the boyfriends of Buffy (Garren Stitt as Marty) and Cyrus (Luke Mullen as TJ, named for two musicians) were the same character. She didn’t understand why we weren’t appalled that he was two-timing with Buffy and Cyrus. The two young men ARE both white and fairly tall.

As the article notes, the breakthroughs in the storylines for Andi Mack were fairly modest. But for an entity as Disney, it was progress.

Prone to Wander: Luke 15

Hot as H-E-C-K

For the Thursday Triennium sessions, the lesson was Prone to Wander from Luke 15. It contains three parables. Our Albany group talked about two of them, the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin.

Our collective had already been using an app called What’s App to communicate, especially on such a big campus. Cleverly, the room was split in two and we had conversations about the parables using the app, instead of talking. It was a useful attempt to have an intergenerational dialogue, and it allowed those who might not feel comfortable speaking up.

Is finding one sheep worth it when you already have 99? Sweeping the whole house was thought to be a whole lot of effort for one coin. I’m texting about metaphors to my group. What, I’m texting?

Incidentally, that day, I got a notification from my phone carrier that I’d used 85% percent of my high-speed data, which had never happened before. The next day, they clearly had reduced my data speeds through the following Monday.

The sermon that day also referenced the third parable, about the prodigal son who was welcomed back.

One important thing I had not mentioned was that, by Tuesday, it was hot as H-E-double hockey sticks, as some friends used to say when I was a kid. The temperatures were in the mid-90s, at least, and it was dreadfully humid. It felt like 104F (40C) or so every day.

I just couldn’t walk nearly a mile for dinner Wednesday night. By Thursday, I surrendered and got rides from one of the golf carts that were driving around after I would walk to breakfast.

The problem is that they had six or seven carts that could carry five people each. They anticipated about 40 people using the carts, but they were moving about 140. So that day, I got to dinner very early – it was better than walking.

I went up to the lounge of Earhart Hall, yes, named for Amelia, above the dining area. I’d see the Purdue students come out of the hallway, only to see this massive line of Presbyterians. No one had told them about the invasion: “they never tell us anything.”

Back at our dorm, I played 8-ball (billiards) with some kids. I loved playing in college, though I was quite terrible. Good to know these things hadn’t changed.

One last nightly task: a bunch of the chaperones had to check rooms between 10:30 and 11 p.m. to make sure they were present. They weren’t kids from the Albany delegation but were randomly assigned. By 11:30 lights out, I was ready for sleep.

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