I'm agnostic when it comes to UFOs. I don't believe in them but I don't disbelieve either. I've never seen a flying saucer or anything resembling one. If there are aliens or life forms on other planets, it has little to nothing to do with me so it rouses no extreme feelings whatsoever in me.
So when I was invited to Segal Centre's opening night of We Are Not Alone, I was a bit apprehensive because I didn't want to be preached to for 90 minutes by someone who passionately believes. The one man show, written and performed by Damien Atkins, starts out without much promise, I thought: a brief "history" of UFOs (albeit a very North America-centric version) in a few remarkable and noteworthy cases. He asserts that the evidence IS there and that it's not particularly controversial. That those who deny UFOs just need to do a little research. This isn't done stridently but with various character voices and personalities that he manages to bring to life though he's alone on that stage. Again, for someone who has no vested interested or emotional need to believe or disbelieve, this started to get to me. Nothing's worse than a work of art with "a message."
Then the play got better: Atkins set up an entire series of scenes where he visited a UFO conference in Phoenix, Arizona, with the play's director, to do research. This is where Atkins' skills as an actor really became apparent: how he could create such a rag-tag collections and freaks and geeks while being funny and evocative. He talks about the bizarre aspects, the belief (and need to believe) that many in this community inhabit. The new age-y links. The oddballs. The goofballs. The nutters. A scene about going out into Sedona in the Arizona desert to "tune" some vortex with two hilarious believers was hilarious but also moving. Though Atkins is no fan of this commodified part of the UFO industry, he still manages to see the humanity in his characters, even characters that are screwball, odd, out there, totally nuts.
Actor/writer Damian Atkins
In the end, he won me over: the story (of a guy writing a play about UFOs) won me over and I wanted more.
But what struck me most (and impressed me) was the fact that the Segal Centre even put this show on. As someone in charge of programming in a cultural organization, I know the eternal tightrope one has to walk in Montreal between giving people what they want and expect but also challenging people, trying new things, experimenting. And this play was certainly more of the latter. I admire, Lisa Rubin, Artistic Director at Segal, for giving it the green light. It's not a 100% successful play and I did feel that another actor on stage might have allowed for more depth and complexity (the actor playing the writer of the play and another actor playing the director of the play would have been wonderfully meta).
One thing about Montreal English theatre is that it's often too safe and takes few to no risks. It's something I think about: because the English community is older on average than the Francophone community (particularly devoted English theatre-goers), there is less of a tendency to challenge and it's much easier to just go with the safe choice, something that English theatre companies are definitely guilty of. So it's nice to see Segal Centre doing something a bit out of their comfort zone.
Whether this pays off and translates into box office is a different question.
We Are Not Alone runs through March 15. Check it out.
I can't escape Chekhov recently, which is a good thing. First, it was a trip to Asia and hanging out with a writer who's somewhat of a Chekhov "expert" (translator of his work into Chinese, producer of plays, critic). We had about 10 conversations about him and this expert had the uncanny ability to connect just about any literary topic to some play or short story by Chekhov.
Chekhov: he could be a Mile End hipster
And this article from The Millions about how reading Chekhov can make one more empathetic. They, in fact, issue a challenge to read Chekhov for a more empathetic 2014. The writers do caution, however, "that Chekhov doesn't provide easy answers to becoming a kinder, more caring person. There's no five-step solution, no short prayer that will increase your fortunes and lay waste to the fields of your enemies."
Still, if I do make any resolution (and I rarely do), it's related to books I will read. I haven't read Chekhov in many years and so he is on my list for 2014 (as is re-reading William Styron's Sophie's Choice and Thoreau).
Idea: a great way to start the year: see Chekhov on stage:
The tag line is "In the Winter, don't you wish Summer would go on forever?" and MAN can I relate to that right now (January, cold, blustery, grey).
The Millions writer suggests that Chekhov "doesn't make us better people by restoring our faith in the fundamental goodness of humanity or by charming us with the bright hope of a happy ending." And to me this is what a "good" writer does: create characters that somehow straddle our pat views of good vs evil or happiness vs unhappiness.
After the Segal's performance on the 10th, there will be a post-show opportunity to interact with the artists bringing the play to life.
At the end of his life, when writer Isaac Babel wrote a speech, indirectly staring Stalin's censors down, he did so with his usual ironic humour and sarcasm. He suggested that "bad writing" was a right that all writers had and a right that the Soviet authorities were refusing to allow. His irony was one that was not lost on his audience: "Let's not fool ourselves: this is a very important right, and to take this right from us is no small thing...let us give up this right, and may God help us. And if there is no God, let us help ourselves."
Babel's humour was his ultimate, most effective, weapon. Later he would suggest that he was practising a new genre, the genre of silence, another dig at Stalin sealed his fate.
I've been thinking and reading about Isaac Babel lately because of the Segal Centre's upcoming production of "Tales from Odessa," a production that was commissioned for the centre and the Yiddish Theatre company, based on the short stories of Babel.
Babel is a writer I've been reading since I was a teenager (one day I will write about how I was this non-Jewish kid growing up in rural America, fascinated with Jewish writers like Singer, Aleichem, Babel and others. One day when I was a little kid, I remember asking my father "What is a Jew?" and he told me that Jews wore funny hats and didn't eat pork. I found this absolutely enthralling.), but only lately have I been revisiting him as an adult, thinking about his tragic life and his unusual sense of humour from the perspective of someone in his 40s.
What I especially like about Babel's stories is the fact that they, like all good writing, are both a snapshot of a time and place vanished forever, but also capture something essential about being a kid, about being a member of a community, about family relations, but unlike Singer or Aleichem, his relationship to his own Judaism is complex and the Jews in his story are largely secular, often brutal or aggressive (one of his stories explores the Jewish mafia of Odessa pre-WWII). Often Babel's protagonists note another character's Jewishness, but never make it clear that the author himself is a Jew. There are even ambiguous digs at Jewesses or old rabbis. This could be read as another example of Babel's ironic sense of humour or perhaps he was just giving his (Russian, Ukrainian) readers what they wanted.
Born in Odessa in 1894, Babel would repeatedly run up against the Soviet authorities in his prime, first banned from writing (thus his suggestion that he was a master of the genre of silence) then arrested in 1937. He disappeared into the Soviet gulag and it only emerged in the last several years that he had died in 1939 or thereabouts, either shot or suffering from typhus (or both, accounts differ).
Joseph Roth (a writer I admire greatly) wrote with a certain tinge of nostalgia, not necessarily for his life in a shtetl, but from a longing to return to the Austro-Hungarian order that he knew as a young man. There is nothing nostalgic about Babel's stories: they are full of violence and murder, humour and terror, love and sex and longing.
Red Cavalry explores the precarious life of a soldier in the midst of the Soviet-Polish war and Babel manages to straddle both the 19th and 20th centuries in the series of stories that both represent the content of the past with the form of the future (unlikely he read James Joyce though there are similarities in terms of form).
But I am glad that Segal is doing his Tales from Odessa because this is the work that I just love. It's so funny and his protagonists find themselves in such funny situations:
They sat down at the table, Yevzel served them with vodka, and Mr Trottyburn unfurled
Socalled: this guy's a genius
his wares. From the bale he produced cigars and fine silks, cocaine and filing tools, loose tobacco from the state of Virginia and red wine that had been purchased on the island of Chios. Each article of merchandise had its own special price, each figure was washed down with Bessarabian wine that smelt of sun and bedbugs...the drunken Malayan, full of surprise, touched Lyubka's breast with his finger. He touched it with one finger, then with each finger in turn. His soft, yellow eyes hung above the table like paper lanterns on a street in China; barely audibly he began to sing, and he fell to the ground when Lyubka gave him a push with her fist. (translated by David McDuff).
The Segal Centre production is part of the Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre and the music is done by the super creative and innovative musician Socalled, so it's sure to get the tone of Babel right on (if a Canadian Jewish rapper can approach a 20th century European writer). Don't worry, there are subtitles in both French and English though part of the charm of seeing anything at DWYT is actually hearing the Yiddish. Not sure if the songs are in Yiddish though I suspect they are...
I am so looking forward to this! Check out more about the Segal Centre production here. The show starts Sunday, June 16 and continues until July 7th.
A really fascinating production of Waiting for the Barbarians has been playing at the Segal Centre these few weeks and there is just one more week left to catch it. I'd highly recommend it.
The play is an adaptation of the J. M. Coetzee novel, a political thriller which looks at the complexities and realities of the South African political system as they existed in the recent past.
And they are giving any friends of Blue Met a special price: anyone who books 2 business days in advance gets a $6 discount.
The Segal Centre production is written and directed by Alexandre Marine, the world-renowned Russian director who premiered the play in Cape Town in 2012. Montreal's production is its second world showing and it's a rare opportunity to see one of the theatre world's stars at the top of his game doing something innovative, challenging and provocative.
Check it out: it's one of Coetzee's best-loved and most critically-acclaimed works and the production is absolutely riveting.
