The Language of Trees, teetering between the homefront and the warzone

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To see, or not to see this new play? That is the question, and this reviewer is unsure. The Roundabout theater’s production of a young playwright’s off-Broadway debut has magical moments, but does it fulfill its potential in this short and intimate production?

The Language of Trees follows Loretta and her young son Eben at home while the husband Denton goes to Iraq as a translator and is captured. The focus on the mother and son shows us a prosaic world of dishes and cleaning and one pesky neighbor, who befriends and bothers them. As they deal with life after loss at home, Denton finds more than he bargained for as a translator when he is captured and held hostage.

These topical and all-too real issues are imbued with a degree of magic that is charming to watch. Here, Denton converses with Bill Clinton in his cell, providing some of the most enjoyable and also pathos-ridden moments of the play. Denton rambles about his love for his family until he realizes that Clinton is imaginary. The clever Clinton scene was matched by Eben speaking to his father through a tree and by an ending in which Loretta takes on Denton’s words, walk over to him in his cell and kisses him goodbye–and this scene held more emotional realism than all the dull cleaning scenes combined.

The Roundabout Theater keeps a small basement black box theater for the encouragement of young playwrights, such as The Language of Tree‘s Steven Levenson. A pleasure to see a new playwright, but Levenson certainly seemed naive as he focused on Loretta and Eben at home while Denton fights in Iraq. The New York Times noted the play was the first to focus on the home front rather than war zone.

As that article also noted, the plight of the father in Iraq makes the life of the mother and son seem relatively trivial. As they talk about school or pizza, the characters fail to display the depth of talking around things nor do they have breakdowns where one is transported into their agony. This could be due to Ms. Gold’s thin performance as well as the script. The structure of the play itself was flawed. It contained extraneous scenes, and dwelling on dishes seemed to retard meaningful relationships rather than illuminate them. The father, on the other hand, shown kneeling with a black hood over his head, can hardly fail to resonate with an American audience today.

The play tackles serious issues, and ones deeply felt by millions of Americans. I was one of the few theatergoers not crying at the end. However, it was more moving in that it reminds one of reality than because it explores human drama and loss in a specific context. It reminds you of anybody you know in the military, it reminds you of the news…but in the characters Loretta and Eben you only find suggestions of what such people could be like.

Skip this play, but watch for playwright Steven Levenson in the future. There was a candor and ambition in his work that could develop quite magically.

By Steven Levenson; directed by Alex Timbers. With: Maggie Burke (Kay Danley), Natalie Gold (Loretta Trumble-Pinkerstone), Michael Hayden (Denton Pinkerstone), Gio Perez (Eben Trumble-Pinkerstone) and Michael Warner (Bill Clinton). At the Roundabout’s Black Box Theater, at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater, 111 West 46th Street, Manhattan through December 14.

Soho Poetry Reading and its After-effects

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Standing on a stool with papers in hand, the young poet declaims visions. The crowded back room of the Soho bar softly stirs fruit around sangria glasses, as he heaps polysyllabic words on their ears. The warmth and the crowd dull the senses a bit.

This was my night last nigh; a quick bike ride in the suddenly descended chill, and then crammed into a small barrel of a room to be shot at by local wordsmiths.

I didn’t catch much. With all three of the readings I heard, the imagery obscured the train of thought, as if they ambitiously wished to express everything, rather than one thing. ‘Poetry reading’ sounds stuffy. On the contrary, it was familiar and relaxed, even if the deluge of verbal images stirred the heart without reaching the intellect. The energy of the live performance was a treat that somehow left me tracing the words of other poets around the inside of my head.

Is this the best way to experience poetry? Poetry takes one another life when it is read aloud and its musical quality predominates. Yet one–or I, at least–can’t understand it as well as I can by sitting in silence with a poem and reading it again and again.

Yet I was reminded of a favorite poet of mine, who I’ve not read in many months, Edna St. Vincent Millay. The tone of her structured, explosive sonnets number her among my favorites (if I could do such a thing as pick favorites). Please allow me to present, for your reading pleasure, Ms. Millays’ sonnet XLI in Sonnets From an Ungrafted Tree (1923), and allow me to fantasize she is reading it aloud at a Greenwich village speakeasy:

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body’s weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn wtih pity, – let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.

Maddening Queues of Soviet Russia

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Imagine you’ve been waiting in line to buy a pair of shoes. Imagine you’ve waited all day and all night with hundreds of people. Can you imagine how dull that is?

This is the subject of the book I’m reading, The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin. If you went to school in the U.S., you probably came across the book 1984 by George Orwell. Well, I’m halfway through a Russian novel written in 1983 the follows much the same line of poking fun at the communist system. The Queue was the debut of this popular contemporary Russian author, and in it he tackles form with an absolute appropriateness to the subject that exploits every angle, or rather the straightness, of the line.

How does the subject of waiting in line influence the structure? Brilliantly, that’s how. The narrative is actually nameless dialogue of innumerable people in line, making conversations and noises as they stand there. One comes to recognize certain voices, like a little boy and his mother and a young man hitting on a girl named Lena. Even so, it feels like overhearing the hum of the crowd, as people complain about the sun or their feet in short, colloquial snippets. The chain of dialogue moves as the line moves. For example, a segment of the line twists itself to a courtyard with benches where they nap. After settling in, the reader finds page after blank page while they sleep. The text on the pages even looks like a line.

Yet as the reader finds, this farcical line in the Soviet Union is anything but straight. The humor of the book comes from the deadpan depiction of people moving backwards instead of forwards in the queue. Humor, immediately recognizable as it is, is difficult to pin down. The Queue rests on a recognition that waiting in line in a perhaps futile attempt to purchase anything, of the difficulties of merely waiting to do so, such as the Georgians cutting in front and pushing the whole crowd back, is not reasonable, and is incongruous with the society that Communism purported to establish. The absence of the author’s voice keeps the novel from taking on a didactic or even very dark aspect. The Queue is a comedy, but a rather dull one, as waiting in line has little to recommend itself.

Despite the cleverness of the structure, it’s also difficult to become involved in fiction without engaging characters. The struggle of the line seems the struggle of faceless individuals, but not of people despite hearing their voices speak throughout. It’s also because the characters do not act–they wait and wait in line. Following orders is not the inspiring stuff of novels, though it is perhaps truer to life. Only halfway through, and here I am critiquing the novel. This is less unfair that you might think. A disappointment of the novel is the extended stasis of the plot, and leaves me thinking the line will continue forever, without them ever buying the shoes of rumored American-make and brown leather.

Ah, Russians on the joys of communism..The novel really is interesting in itself, but believe me when I say it fully explores its chosen topic. No one, no where need ever write about queue in Soviet Russia ever again. Sorokin has filled that niche.