Menlo Park Public Library (click to enlarge)
A salute to National Poetry Writing Month, especially those fearless writers who wrote a poem every day in April. On the last day of April, I present my first poem ever:
I am comfortable here
In this room of books
Words
Tickling my ears
Warming my toes
While I wade their depths
–Carto, NaPoWriMo 2013
Ways to Change, SU Knight Center, Peter Wegner
A salute to all poets— I hope you enjoyed the month.
Carto
Mariana Faithful stars in Girl On A Motorcycle, 1968
The opening scene of The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner takes place near the Isonzo River in northern Italy during the First World War, 1917. An Italian motorcyclist called Valera is fighting an anonymous German trooper hand-to-hand after the cyclist stopped to salvage parts for his American made Pope motorcycle. After a fierce struggle, Valera KOs the German with a headlamp and, with the scarce part in hand, Valera heroically rides off to return to the battle. Valera survived World War I with his interest in motorcycles intact, and went on to found the Valera Company, which became a premier Italian company selling racing motorcycles and rubber tires throughout the world. (Think of this fictional company as a combination of Pirelli Tires and Ducati Motorcycles).
Kushner’s story then moves to Nevada and 1976. Reno a young art school graduate packed her Bolex Pro movie camera and sold her beloved ‘65 Moto Valera to buy a ticket to New York where she planned to make movies. Like a fairy tale, one year later, her dreams have nearly come true; she has a job with a small movie studio and she is back in Nevada on a brand new Moto Valera GT650 (a gift from her boy friend Sandro Valero the wealthy grandson of the founder of the Valera Company). She is heading to Bonneville Speedway to ride the Moto Valera over a measured mile, and capture the experience on film.
Thinking back to 1976: that year the US detonated an atomic bomb in the Nevada desert, and the USSR retaliated with an underground explosion at their North Test Site at the edge of the Arctic Circle . Thus, the Cold War returned to its shaky balance. In Italy, home of the Valera Company, the Red Brigade (Brigate Rosse in Italian) was waging an armed insurrection against the corrupt government, and workers were on strike. In The Flamethrowers Kushner writes that the Red Brigade is menacing the Valera Company, run by Sandro’s brother Roberto. Flaming Molotov cocktails are the Red Brigade’s favorite weapon; call them the Flamethrowers.
Oblivious to these world events, Reno rides across the Nevada desert crouched behind the windshield of her new Valera motorcycle. She is driving fast, too fast, as she heads east on US Highway 95 from the Reno towards the Bonneville.
Ducati 1971 750 GT; prototype of the fictional Velara motorcycle
Needing gas, Reno slows the motorcycle, pulls off the highway into a truck stop and breaks to a stop along side a truck where some truckers are gathered:
One of the truckers spoke to me as he passed. “That yours?”
For a moment, I thought he meant the truck. But he tipped his chin toward the Moto Valera.
I said yes and kept braiding my hair.
He smiled in a friendly way. “You know what?”
I smiled back.
“You won’t look nearly so good when they’re loading you off the highway in a body bag.”
–The Flamethrowers
A body bag was the fate of Rebecca the doomed heroine of the 1968 movie The Girl On A Motorcycle, who crashes her motorcycle into a truck and dies tragically. Thinking of the trucker’s remarks, Reno pulls out of the truck stop going east toward Bonneville. As she accelerates she finds herself blocked by a Greyhound Bus:
I passed the bus, shifted into fifth, and hit ninety, the orange needle steady on the face of my black speedometer. I tucked down into my little faring. I loved that faring the moment I saw the bike at the dealer in Reno, where I picked it up. Metal-flake teal, the color of deep freeze. It was a brand new 650 Supersport. It was actually a ‘77 –next year’s model. It was so new no one in the United States had one but me. I had never seen a Moto Valera this color. The one I’d owned in college, a ’65, had been white.
– The Flamethrowers
Reno rides on down the road to continue her charmed fictional existence, and she has unexpected success at the track–she got a ride on the Valera world record speedster Spirit of Italy. This part of the story reminds us of the world record runs of Spirit of America driven by Craig Breedlove. Craig’s wife Lee also drove Spirit to the woman’s record speed of 308.506 mph over the measured course at Bonneville. Imagine riding a motorcycle at over 300 mph!
China Girl/Leader Lady
When Reno first left Nevada to go to New York she discovered, like so many others, that the city is a lonely place. As she gradually settled in she found a job as a receptionist with a small movie company. Literally, it was her skin color that got her the job, she was hired to be the company’s China Girl (her picture, taken holding a standard color pattern, was attached to each movie negative to help technicians balance skin tones on new prints).
In New York Reno met and fell in love with Sandro Valero an established Minimalist artist and (unknown to Reno) womanizer. The plot follows the lines of the 1999 movie Guinevere, where the ingénue falls in love with older artist who deceives her, but, in a neat plot twist, Reno is invited to Italy to ride the Spirit of Italy for a press promotion and Sandro must follow. The most dramatic events of the novel take place in Italy.
Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers is an imaginative tale that takes the reader from the Nevada desert to the New York art scene of the late ‘70s. Then, Reno and her artist lover travel to Italy to meet his aristocratic family. Reno tries to fit in with his family on their palatial estate, but everything gets turned upside down when the Red Brigades make a lethal appearance.
The Flamethrowers is an entertaining novel. Reno’s story is a fairy tale full of unlikely coincidences—she is “the China Girl on an Italian motorcycle.”
Notes: 1. The author published an essay in The Paris Review #203, Winter 2012, in which she discusses the sources she used in writing The Flamethrowers. I strongly recommend the essay to readers interested in the background and evolution of the novel. In this essay Kushner discusses the novel’s cover artwork—I, however, was not convinced. I think the cover is ugly; read the book, but ignore the cover.
2. China Girl/Leader Lady: the photographs of (most often) women that appear in the countdown that begins every reel of motion picture film. Film lab workers used the images to register color values when copying prints. The illustration is from the Northwest Chicago Film Society collection.
Carto
American Chess Grandmasters Susan Polgar and Gata Kamsky in tournament play.
Two Grandmasters plan their moves as the battle for domination of the chessboard begins—Polgar has played her queen pawn two squares and Kamsky echoed her move. If Polgar moves her queen’s bishop pawn 2 squares, she will be playing the Queen’s Gambit. This chess opening was a tournament favorite; complicated, with chances for black and white.
Once a man’s world, championship chess is now played by both men and women. Championship chess players are rare people; most can play chess blindfolded and playing against several opponents simultaneously is not uncommon. No wonder then that chess play and the drama of the chess tournament is a subject for fiction.
My favorite book about chess is Walter Tevis’ 1983 book The Queen’s Gambit, which tells the story of fictional chess prodigy Beth Harmon’s journey from an orphanage in Kentucky to the international chess circuit. Harmon’s ability at chess is world-class, but to become an international grandmaster she must first control her addiction to tranquilizers and her craving for alcohol.
Her addiction to tranquilizers began in the orphanage:
Beth was given a tranquilizer twice a day.. So were all the other children, to “even their dispositions.” Beth’s disposition was all right, as far as anyone could see, but she was glad to get the little pill. It loosened something deep in her stomach and helped her doze away the tense hours as the orphanage.
Mr. Fergussen gave them the pills in a little paper cup. Along with the green one that evened the disposition, there were orange and brown ones for building a strong body. The children had to line up to get them.
The tallest girl was the black one, Jolene. She was twelve. …
—Tevis, The Queen’s Gambit
The street-wise Jolene is older than Beth and she becomes Beth’s best friend. It is Jolene that will show Beth a way to control her inner devils.
It was chance that led Beth to learn to play chess. One day in the orphanage she was sent by her teacher to the furnace room to clean the erasers. There, she me the janitor who had a chessboard set up. She had never seen a chessboard:
“The girl put down the erasers she was cleaning and took the seat opposite the old man. She was playing black; the janitor picked up the white king pawn and moved it forward two squares. P-K4, the oldest opening move in the history of chess.
—Tevis, The Queen’s Gambit
In a few weeks, Beth learned chess moves, gained skill and could easily beat the janitor. He arranged for her to visit the local chess club (all boys, of course). She played the boys in the club simultaneously, and won every match. Soon she was playing them blindfolded and she still won. But then tragedy struck: a newspaper wrote a story about Beth. Her sudden notoriety upset the director of the orphanage and he retaliated by forbidding Beth to play chess. It was years before Beth was adopted. She returned to chess and found that she was still a prodigy, but she had much to learn.
The Queen’s Gambit is a “feel good” story where young people surmount problems in realistic ways. It is also a story of the intrigue and infighting that goes on in tournament chess. It is one of my favorite books.
The epigraph of the novel is from The Long-Legged Fly by William Butler Yeats:
That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practice a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
—Yeats, The Long-Legged Fly
The girl in this verse is Helen of Troy. Yeats is quoting a famous line about her: “Is this the face that launched a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Illium?” Clever of Tevis to apply this poem to a young girl’s journey into the world of chess.
Judit Polgar, 1992. She is now a Grandmaster.
Judit Polgar is smiling because she has just won a match. She is the sister of Hungarian-American chess Grandmaster Susan Polgar.
Susan is a Grandmaster, an Olympic chess champion, a chess teacher, coach, writer and promoter and the head of the Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence (SPICE) at Texas Tech. Susan was the first woman to earn the Grandmaster title through open tournament play. She broke a number of gender barriers in chess and is a champion who shares her talent with young American hopefuls.
Judit is now a Grandmaster.
Carto
Week 29 -2012: The Queen’s Gambit, Walter Tevis (1983).
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California City, California is 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles.
Paraditas, Street Prostitutes on Coahuila Street, Tijuana, El Sol de Tijuana,2010
As this futuristic look at California opens, Ramona, a 36-year-old scientist, leaves work early because she feels queasy and light-headed. Distracted, she drives her car into the path of a ‘prime status’ car carrying a religious leader to the Paradita Temple where he is to perform the equinox ritual. Danny Rose is the driver of the Prime’s car.
Neither driver is cited, but Public Safety holds both for examination and testing. Ramona is at fault for driving poorly, distracted by the physical effects of a pregnancy she knew nothing about, and Danny Ross is at fault because he was stoned on Dream Gas from his recent visit to the Cleopatra. The off-setting faults cancel each other according to Public Safety guidelines, and charges are dropped.
But, the accident has interfered with an important religious ceremony, and Danny Ross is evaluated by his boss Ishmael Guyirere, a Sufi:
“Ross has no connections, no reputation, and not even any important relatives. Damn, I’d like to throw him to the wolves at Public Safety. And then the way the ritual ended. They don’t know it, but I heard the voice outside the knowing room. What could ‘enough, you have your answer’ mean? Further, the ritual in March was so strange. We didn’t get anything that made sense. Only those crackling noises and the sighing.”
—Burns, Every 400 Years
TRY 2004: Shimizu Corporation model of a dream pyramid city for 1 million people.
“Two hundred miles northwest of Paradita was Bay City. The remains of old San Francisco were incorporated in a larger city which had the bay as its center. At the top of a hill in a pyramid shaped building was the headquarters of the regional Prime. He sat in his room thinking about the incident two weeks ago.”
—Burns, Every 400 Years
The regional Prime is thinking about the car accident and about the successive failures of the equinox rituals. Trouble is brewing and the Religious Cabal does not know where to turn for a solution.
The next equinox Ramona’s baby is born, and she is given the name Mary Edyth. As the years pass the problems with rituals continue and unrest in the desert increased to the point of insurrection and revolt. Paradita becomes unsafe for the privileged to visit. Finally, the Scientist Cabal looses faith in finding a solution to the unrest and Hugh is put in charge of building a shelter and secure outpost for the scientists and other elite members of the government.
Yucca Mountain, Emma Hill’s enhanced photo using geodetic rendering techniques.
Every 400 Years is published by BookLocker.com, Inc. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The quality of the printed version is top-notch. The softbound volume is $16.95; the eBook is $4.99. Like many self-published novels, Every 400 Years could benefit from another pass of editing and proof-reading, but it’s an interesting read on a challenging topic.
BookLocker is a POD (print on demand) publisher. A print-ready book can be published for $500, but most books cost more.
In the interest of full disclosure, Kerry Burns and I went to high school together.
Carto
Week 28 -2012: Every 400 Years, Kerry Burns (2012).
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Hugging an English oak, Hampstead Heath, Dave Bonta, Flicker.
Summer reading takes us to London. Something is not quite right in London’s beautiful Hampstead Heath Park. Is a dog-walker hugging that majestic English Oak? No, she is talking to it. How odd.
Oh the infamy of it all – the dog-walker is the Greek goddess Artemis, protector of nature, and the down-on-her-luck Olympian is just talking to the tree. No harm done, I think. But why is a Greek god walking dogs and talking to trees in Hampstead Heath?
In the opening scene of Marie Phillips’ debut novel Gods Behaving Badly, the reader is introduced to the goddess Artemis who has left Olympus and is eking out a living in London. She is living with the other Olympians, including her brother Apollo, aunt Aphrodite and father Zeus, in a London flophouse. Artemis’ day job is walking dogs.
On her morning sojourn through the Heath, Artemis has spotted a tree that shouldn’t be there. It’s a tree that didn’t exist yesterday:
“Dragging the mutts behind her, Artemis made her way over to the tree. She touched its bark and felt it breathing. She pressed her ear against the trunk of the tree and listened to its heartbeat. Then she looked around. Good; it was early, and there was nobody within earshot. She reminded herself not to get angry with the tree, that it wasn’t the tree’s fault.
Then, the goddess spoke to the tree:
“Hello,” she said.
There was a long silence.
“Hello,” said Artemis again.
“Are you talking to me?” said the tree. It had a faint Australian accent.
“Yes,” said Artemis. “I am Artemis.” If the tree experienced any recognition, it didn’t show it. “I’m the goddess of hunting and chastity,” said Artemis.
Another silence. Then the tree said, “I’m Kate. I work in mergers and acquisitions for Goldman Sachs.”
“Thank God for that,” said the tree. “I thought I was going mad.”
– Marie Phillips, Gods Behaving Badly
As soon as I read these lines from the first chapter of Phillips’ debut novel, I knew I needed to put the novel on my “must read” list for the summer. But first, I needed to review a little Greek mythology. Who exactly were the Olympians?
A long, long time ago a god named Zeus defeated the Titans and Zeus took up residence on Mount Olympus. Zeus was a fearsome warrior, whose favorite weapon was the thunderbolt (that fact will become important if you read the novel). In all, there were 12 gods on Olympus, but Zeus was the leader—he was definitely in charge.
Web Greece, All Things Greek, Especially Greek Mythology.
The story of Olympus is interesting, but not actually needed to enjoy the novel. If you are interested in a review, here are two web sites that have brief summaries of Greek mythology: Encyclopedia Mythica or Web Greece. Web Greece is especially readable and Greece needs the extra attention these days.
Phillips’ novel hit the big time when it was reviewed for the New York Times. The review by Janet Maslin describes how far the gods had fallen:
“Aphrodite has a cellphone with the song “Venus” for its ring tone. In a world that has lost much of its romance, she spends her time saying things like “Hello, big boy” to anyone who’ll pay her for phone sex.
“Meanwhile Apollo should be doing his job as sun god instead of chasing women. “Two words,” says Aphrodite to Apollo, her vain and lazy nephew. “Global warming.” But Apollo has fallen so far — specifically, into a television show that uses a Styrofoam version of the Delphi oracle as its backdrop and “Zorba the Greek” as its theme music — that he is almost beyond saving.
“We were … famous once,” Apollo tells the book’s actual heroine, a timid young house cleaner named Alice. “The adulation, the fame, it was like — well, it was worship, really.” Alice finds this very weird but chalks it up to this family’s Greek heritage and all families’ eccentricity. Her own parents eat cereal in the afternoon.
— Janet Maslin, NY Times
Getting involved with the gods is generally a bad idea for mortals. Look what happened to Kate from Mergers and Acquisitions in the opening scene. Alice was in for trouble as soon as Apollo singled her out as she sat in the audience for his TV show. Apollo fell in love with her, but she rejected him. She was in love with Neil, an engineer at the TV studio, and that was that. But, nobody stiffs Apollo!
Alice is the cleaning woman in Neil’s office. She had noticed Neil as she made her rounds cleaning the studio. She finally spoke to him in her cleaning store room:
“So what do you think?” whispered Alice.
The door was shut; there was no risk of them being overheard. But Alice never liked to speak loudly in case it drew undue attention to herself.
“It’s very nice,” said Neil. “Very tidy.”
He had the reward of Alice beaming at him, her cheeks flushing pink with pleasure and embarrassment.
“When I first started working here it was terribly messy,” she confided. “The cleaning products were all over the place and some weren’t properly sealed. That can be dangerous, you know. With children, for example, or pets.”
Neil nodded. It was unlikely that children or pets would find themselves inside the locked cleaning storeroom of a TV studio, but Alice thought of everything.
– Marie Phillips, Gods Behaving Badly
The reader can see that Alice and Neil make a nice couple, but are they ready for adventure and fame? Doesn’t matter; that is what writer Phillips has in store for them.
Gods Behaving Badly is a delightful summer read; the story moves quickly and the plot twists and turns in unexpected directions. I especially liked the reactions of the Olympians and the gods faced the challenges of living in modern London. Phillips has written a story with a fresh look at a subject going back to Homer; good for her.
In the end, “love conquers all” in this romantic novel. Don’t miss it.
SF Olympians, Poster for Artemis, a staged reading by the San Francisco theater group.
For a uniquely San Francisco interpretation of the god Artemis and the Olympians see SF Olympians, a theater group that has an annual festival. There is also a book of their plays for sale: Songs of Hestia by Stuart Eugene Bousel.
Carto
Week 27 -2012: Gods Behaving Badly: A Novel, Marie Phillips (2007).
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Hand carved Merry-Go-Round pony, Missoula, Mt. The Pony is on display in the Missoula International Airport lobby.
This merry-go-round pony has a new home at the Missoula airport. The pony’s hand carved relatives are going around in circles at “A Carousel for Missoula“. Check it out.
Summer vacations are great; mine is over now, but still fills my memory with good thoughts. This year I traveled to Montana to see Glacier Park and then I went south to the land of geysers, Yellowstone Park, which is mostly in Wyoming.
It’s August: if you haven’t taken a break this summer, there are only a few weeks of summer left.
Vacation is a great time to travel, explore and take pictures — also, write about the new adventure. Carto’s Log Book is the story of my vacation. (Just another WordPress site).
http://cartoslogbook.wordpress.com/
Carto
Curse of the Starving Class, Revival, LA Times. Yes, She was sleeping on the table, and yes, that is a live lamb, Juju. Open Fist Theater Company, Santa Monica.
As the stage lights come up in the intimate Pigott Theater on the Stanford campus, we see a realistic kitchen of the 70s complete with range and refrigerator, and we are introduced to the down-and-out Tate family.
Last night Weston Tate, an ex WW II bomber pilot who is down on his luck, went on a drunken rampage; the pieces of the shattered door are strewn about the kitchen of the Central Valley farm Weston shares with his wife Ella, teen-age daughter Emma and his almost grown son Wesley.
The play begins; Wesley is throwing the pieces of the door, crash, bang, into an old wheelbarrow. His mother, Ella, comes into the kitchen dressed in a faded housecoat. She begins to nag at Wesley in a loud voice. He should leave the cleanup for his father; serve him right.
Wesley ignores his mother and he sinks into a reverie; he begins talking to the audience, telling us about last night’s dustup, which he heard from his bedroom as he stared up at his model airplane collection. As Wesley concludes his monologue, his sister Emma enters wearing her sparkling white 4-H uniform. The scene shifts to mother and daughter. They begin a loud discussion centering on menstruation and where to buy sanitary napkins—Emma is having her first period, or, as Wesley calls it, the ‘curse’.
Sam Shepard, Curse of the Starving Class, Stanford, July 2012. Wesley, Max Sosna-Spear; Ella, Courtney Walsh; Weston, Marty Pistone; Emma, Jessica Waldman. Dibble house in background.
Stanford Summer Theater has staged a provocative revival of Sam Shepard’s family tragedy, Curse of the Starving Class, which was written in 1976 when Shepard was working as the playwright in residence at the Magic Theater in San Francisco. The play is chaotic, loud and absurd, but it’s good theater. The SST production is entertaining and provocative, but shocking at times. There is a warning in the program that the performance has “adult content and brief male nudity.”
The World Premiere of Curse of the Starving Class was staged in 1977 at the Royal Court in London and the US Premiere was held off-Broadway at the New York Shakespeare Festival on March 2, 1978. Shepard’s Buried Child was staged in the same year and both plays were awarded off-Broadway (OBIE) awards. Buried Child also earned Shepard the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979.
Emma, Jessica Waldman, looks for food in the refrigerator. SST, 2012
Emma is a 4-H club member; she is preparing a demonstration ‘How to cut up a fryer chicken,’ but the chicken has vanished from the refrigerator. Someone ate it. Somehow, that doesn’t surprise the audience, given the usually empty state of the Tate’s refrigerator. Emma’s speaks to the empty refrigerator:
Hello? Anything in there? We’re not broke, you know, so you don’t have to hide! I don’t know where the money goes to but we’re not broke! We’re not part of the starving class! Any corn muffins in there? Hello! Any produce? Any rutabagas? Any root vegetables? Nothing? It’s all right. You don’t have to be ashamed. I’ve had worse. I’ve had to take my lunch to school wrapped up in a Weber’s bread wrapper. That’s the worst. Worse than no lunch. So don’t feel bad. You’ll get some company before you know it! You’ll get some little eggs tucked into your sides and some yellow margarine tucked into your –You haven’t seen my chicken have you? . . .
–Emma, Act I, Scene II
Maybe some food will come to fill up the empty box, but don’t count on it.
Hard Times, 2010. Matt Black.
Curse of the Starving Class was a prophetic vision of the events leading up to the California housing crisis of 2010—a shady developer wants to buy the Tate property to build low-cost housing in California’s central valley. Actually, that very scene was repeated over and over in the seventies and today we have a crisis. Many houses are vacant, the market for new houses has disappeared, foreclosures are endemic and Stockton, the largest city in the central valley, is bankrupt. Who would have thought that was possible in California?
In the play, an unscrupulous land speculator named Taylor seduces Ella with his talk of development riches. She believes his story and is ready to sign over her property. She dreams of moving to Europe with the money, but she has a premonition that this plan too will fail—failure is the curse of the starving class:
“Do you know what this is? It’s a curse. I can feel it. It’s invisible but it’s there. It’s always there. It comes onto us like nighttime. Every day I can feel it. Every day I can see it coming. And it always comes. Repeats itself. It comes even when you do everything to stop it from coming. Even when you try to change it. And it goes back. Deep. It goes back and back to tiny little cells and genes. To atoms. To tiny little swimming things making up their minds without us. Plotting in the womb. Before that even. In the air. We’re surrounded with it. It’s bigger than government even. It goes forward too. We spread it. We pass it on. We inherit it and pass it down, and then pass it down again. It goes on and on like that without us.
—Ella, Act II, Scene I.
Meanwhile, Weston has been drinking at the Alibi Club and he has managed to sell the farm to Ellis the owner of the club for $1500. Weston is desperate for the money because he has bad debts with some tough characters. Shepard modeled the character Weston on his own father, who was a WW II bomber pilot and alcoholic. Both Weston and Shepard’s father had symptoms of what we now call Post traumatic stress disorder, PTSD.
In a moving and emotional scene, Weston wakes from sleep (he was passed out on the kitchen table) and becomes lucid—he gathers the dirty clothes of all the family, washes, dries and folds them neatly on the table and falls into reverie, talking to a sick lamb that is being kept warm in the kitchen:
I remember now. I was in hock. I was in hock up to my elbows. See, I always figured on the future. I banked on it. I was banking on it getting better. It couldn’t get worse, so I figured it’d just get better. I figured that’s why everyone wants you to buy things. Buy refrigerators. Buy cars, houses, lots, invest. They wouldn’t be so generous if they didn’t figure you had it comin’ in. At some point it had to be comin’ in. So I went along with it. Why not borrow if you know it’s coming in. Why not make a touch here and there. They all want you to borrow anyhow. Banks, car lots, investors. The whole thing’s geared to invisible money. You never hear the sound of change anymore. It’s all plastic shuffling back and forth. It’s all in everybody’s heads. So I figured if that’s the case, why not take advantage of it? Why not go in debt for a few grand if all it is is numbers? If it’s all an idea and nothing’s really there, why not take advantage? So I just went along with it, that’s all. I just played ball.
—Weston, Act II, Scene II.
It’s hard to believe that Shepard wrote this in 1976.
Well, there is a tragic ending, of course. The curse cannot be ignored or repealed.
I enjoyed this production by SST; there is great acting by the “old hands” and by the younger actors as well. I liked the set and the lighting and, of course, it’s always a pleasure to watch a play in Pigott Theater.
Lamb (anon), Curse Of The Starving Class, Stanford Summer Theater, 2012
As usual, Sunday matinée was followed by a question/answer session with cast and director on stage. Bravo! The lamb appeared interested and happy when petted by the stage manager during scene changes–apparently the lamb is a born actor. Next stop Actor’s Equity.
There is a short film clip that describes the play and shows the actors performing in the present production. The clip was published in the Stanford News for July 2012. If you can’t see the play, watch the clip and go to the next SST production.
Carto
Week 26-2012: Curse of the Starving Class, Sam Shepard (1978).
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