Collected Stories, a play in two acts, approx 110 min including intermission
Written by Donald Margulies, 1997
Setting: Ruth Steiner's Greenwich Village apartment, 1990-1996
Playing at The Theater Coop, 277 Broadway, Somerville, MA
Consider this play a warning if you happen to be friendly with an ambitious writer. Think twice before you let your hair down and wax confessional. Your most private tete a tetes might end up on the pages of a best seller and what you thought was a deepening friendship will go up in flames. Consumed in the conflagration will be loyalty, trust, and your personal vision of who you think are. The sparks will throw off alot of heat and both of you will be singed.
Lynn Redgrave and Karina Mackenzie as mentor and writing student in the Wilmington (Philadelphia) production.
All come to pass in "Collected Stories", a play written by Donald Margulies in 1997 and staged at the Theater Coop on Broadway in Somerville. The compact production is a series of six vignettes covering a span of six years. A talented, star-struck grad student begins an apprenticeship with an established, published professor. Over six years the graduate student goes from awestruck blabbermouth to author on the cusp of fame. In an arc that descends inversely with the rise of her student's, the staid and somewhat arrogant professor becomes unglued and questions her life choices.
Both women are self centered, one driven by repression, the other driven by ambition. At some point in their six year relationship, we must assume they found equilibrium when their mutual needs were fulfilled. We don't see those moments. We see the awkward beginning and the messy ending. Margulies’ dialogue gives us enough to fathom what happens in between.
Margulies explores the consequences of the two women’s use and misuse of the truth as they construct their personal and professional lives. The result is surprisingly topical. In today’s culture, truth struggles to survive in an often harsh environment. Think about Truman Capote's betrayal of his subject when he wrote "In Cold Blood", think about weapons of mass destruction, or the fragments of truth that political parties use to justify their positions.
Truth is relative for both of these women. Early on, Lisa is startled to learn that Ruth lied when she was interviewed on CSPAN. Ruth says, "I didn't lie. Using some elements of the truth, I spun a tale." When Ruth analyzes Lisa's forthcoming collection of stories, she compliments a descriptive passage. Lisa says, "It wasn't a pickle jar that broke, it was ketchup, but ketchup wasn't too interesting to describe." Clearly both women take liberties with the truth.
Lisa plunders her journals for the material for her first well received collection then fears she’s run out of ideas. "I need something bigger and outside myself to write about," she wails. Lisa's entreats Ruth to divulge her long repressed memories of an affair with acclaimed writer Delmore Schwartz. Ruth reminisces, Lisa calculates. The audience sees the eighteen wheeler that's begun to barrel down the highway in Ruth's direction. When Ruth discovers that Lisa's first novel uses 'elements of the truth' to thinly fictionalize a relationship that Ruth had with Schwartz. Ruth howls, "All my life is to you is material, have you no moral conscience? "
"Your stories stopped being your stories when you told them to me," replies Lisa. The finale, in which pride and status overcome love and acceptance, is bitter for both women.
Caryn Andrea Lindsay's performance subtly transforms Lisa from gushing acolyte to author who has outdone her mentor. She also nails the soap opera conniver that Lisa becomes as she mines Ruth's life for material. Lesley Chapman finds the brittleness and loneliness in Ruth, although her internal conflicts seems more intellectual than emotional.
The simple set, Ruth's spartan apartment in Greenwich Village in the early 1990's, is evocative of the circumscribed life Ruth lives. The lighting fades to an eerie blue during each change of scene in which we see the two characters shift around to prepare for the next scene.
The play doesn't come down squarely on the side of either character. It's complicated for the audience, too. How many times have we taken elements of the truth and woven them to suit own set of collected stories? The play's questions about integrity and betrayal linger long after the final curtain.
The novel’s imagery is a collision of symbolism and realism veined with fantasy. After the first forty pages I found myself adopting a reading style to accommodate the intense, fierce metaphors and descriptions of places, people, and emotional states. Once I stopped trying to grasp the book literally, I went along for a Nantucket sleigh ride over the cresting rollers of Tripp’s imagery. If your disposition harbors any shred of melancholy or lingering regret about any of your life choices, the author’s autumnal characterizations will have a tendency reignite those memories like dry tinder. A sense of crushing predestination and the influence of social and natural hierarchy is woven through the novel with a sense of relentless determinism.
“Civil War and Images - 140 years - Have We Forgotten?”
“Civil War and Images - 140 years - Have We Forgotten?”.
Newton History Museum exhibit at Newton Town Hall
1000 Commonwealth Avenue, Newton, MA
November 9, 2005
In honor of the 140th anniversary of the end of the American Civil War, the Newton History Museum installed a one corridor exhibit in Newton Town Hall at 1000 Commonwealth Avenue entitled “Civil War and Images - 140 years - Have We Forgotten?”.
One look at the four chromolithographs on display prompts the answer. Yes, we’ve forgotten. America has always seemed to be about the here and now. If anything, we look more to the future than to the past. Our civil was an event worthy of legend and myth. Aside from the Gettysburg Address, what do we remember about it? This small exhibit illustrates the immense scale of that war, fought on our soil, waged with staggering losses and stunning heroism.
Over 600,000 men died in our civil war, tens of thousands of them in single epic battles. The four prints on display depict three ground battles, the Battle of Gettysburg, July 3, 1863; the Battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862; the Assault on Fort Hill, July 25, 1863; and one battle at sea, the Kearsarge and the Alabama, June 19, 1864, in which the confederate ship Alabama was sunk off the coast of Cherbourg, France.
Little Round Top on a cold winter day. Photo Courtesy of Mark Voss.
Even in this era of threats of mass destruction, it’s hard to comprehend the level of carnage suggested by the three land battles. The scene at Fort Hill is close combat, with the whites of soldier’s eyes rolling with fear or blood lust as they grapple on a steep parapet. The scenes of Gettysburg and Antietam are panoramic yet filled with telling detail; columns advancing on each other, rolling hills, officers on horseback with sabers drawn, farmhouses suggesting rural life incongruously adjacent to carts dragging cannons, and individual soldiers marching, firing, falling, running, dying. A haze of burned gunpowder hung like a shroud over the battle lines, which were barely hundreds of yards apart. The observer still wonders how men would voluntarily march into a hail of hot lead and cannon fire, seeing comrades around them shredded and bloody, hearing the screams of the dying, the high pitched whine of hot lead cutting through the air around them. Did they think they would be spared? Was there some kind of patriotic hysteria that blotted out the specter of certain death? Finally, can any man ponder these paintings and not ask the question, what would I have done in their place?
These prints are four of eighteen produced in a portfolio called Prang’s War Pictures in 1887 and 1888, and considered the best civil war prints ever made. They were carefully researched and detailed. The text that accompanies them were based on eye witness accounts. They were mass produced at affordable prices and were bought by thousands of Americans.
All the images in this hallway once hung in Grand Army of the Republic Post #62 in Newton. Within a few years of the time the Grand Army of the Republic was established by veterans of the Union army and navy in 1866, there were 104 GAR Posts in Massachusetts. Nearly every town in the commonwealth must have sent farmers and lawyers to the battlefield and never seen them again. If there were 600,000 men killed, imagine the number of casualties, the physically and emotionally wounded men who wandered back to their homes.
By 1890, when the GAR reached its zenith, there were 400,000 members. For those who believe that lobbyists are a recent political blight, think of the GAR members’ voting power. Their cause sought to be give aid to widows and orphans of the civil war and fought for increases in pensions for veterans who suffered disabilities while serving. The GAR succeeded in the adoption of Memorial Day, which first honored comrades who perished in the civil war. The organization dwindled in number and influence as the twentieth century advanced. The last civil war veteran died in 1956.
We don’t need a coffee table book to remind us of the horrors of war. The media barrages us with images and stories daily. Soldiers don’t die by the tens of thousands today but we’re updated after each loss of life minutes after it’s been snuffed. We can almost feel their bodies hit the ground. Ironically, the violence we see in our so called entertainment industry has numbed us from the plasma of death. The scenes of combat in Iraq seem strangely antiseptic, another reality show in our midst. But it’s brutal and very real. Like the civil war, the current war will have repercussions for years to come. Some we can anticipate, others will come out of the blue. The writer at large wonders if our descendants in another 140 years will have forgotten this war, too.
The modest display, formerly housed in the hall of the Grand Army of the Republic Charles Ward Post #62, may be viewed at Newton Town Hall until December 31.
For more information, see www.newtonhistorymuseum.org
November 09, 2005 in Commentaries | Permalink | Comments (0)