pt at large

The Pillowman, a play by Martin McDonagh

This Pillowman is not related to The Sandman. The Sandman sends us off temporarily to the land of nod. The Pillowman sends people to the land of eternal rest. In one man’s opinion, both have our best interests in mind.

The Pillowman, a play by Martin McDonagh is the kind of theater that plumbs the macabre corners of our psyches, and manages to make us laugh as we cringe. The play finished its run at the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown on Sunday. An epic 2 1/2 hours long, it loses its way from time to time but contains bursts of acting that are riveting.

A writer of stories that portray gruesome deaths that have a morbidly moral rationale is questioned about recent deaths in town that resemble the murders in his stories. During the course of the interrogation, we are left guessing about what is fact and what is fiction, both in the writer’s stories and in his life. Be prepared to feel whiplash as truth is interpreted differently by the play’s four actors.

Billy Crudup, Zeljko Ivanek, and Jeff Goldblum in a Chicago production of "The Pillowman"
Photo by Joan Marcus

Playwright McDonagh injects enough themes for several plays: artistic freedom, the power of love given and withheld, the real or imagined emotional scars we bear from our childhoods, the question of who is responsible when a fan acts out perversions written by a writer, and the need for the state to punish crime - no matter how guilty the accused may be.

We’re all complicated human beings, and the actors are up to showing just how we’re shaped by the accumulation of our experiences. The Pillowman, a mythic character invented in one of the writer’s stories, gently warns children whom he knows will meet with deep emotional or physical abuse in their future lives, and offers them a chance to avoid it by arranging their deaths in what appear to be random accidents.

Both the writer and his retarded brother have been abused by their parents; the police suspect one brother or the other committed the unsolved grisly murders in town. Like the daily headlines, conclusions often jump way ahead of facts; we’re continually off balance as we wonder whether what we’re hearing is true or is the public mask of each of the four characters.

“There are no happy endings in real life,” the writer says during his interrogation. The exception to his mantra comes from an unlikely source at the play’s conclusion and is satisfying, if not happy.

Steven Barkimer and Philip Patrone are terrific in their roles of two interrogating policemen. John Kuntz as the writer and Bradley Thoennes as his retarded brother often overact but when all four are firing on all cylinders the play packs a terrific emotional wallop.

Patricia Barber, singer/songwriter, intense lyrics, elegant playing

The Patricia Barber Quartet
Scullers Jazz Club
400 Soldiers Field Rd.
Boston MA 02134

September 21, 2006

The voice. Sultry, clear, alto modulated to loft to the back of the room and no farther. The piano playing. Trained, understated, tightly constructed, elegant. The quartet. Technically brilliant, seasoned, tuned to Barber’s quirky style, voicings, and improvisation.

Scullers, the dusky lounge at the Guest Quarters Suites in Boston, was a perfect venue for a recent Patricia Barber concert. Dozens of elbow to elbow little round tables packed around the L shaped room, decent sight lines to the stage, fine sound system, it’s got it all going for the right performer. And Barber is all of that.

For one recent transplant to Boston, she was a lifeline to the Windy City. “I’ve been following her since her days at the Gold Star in Chicago where she was the house piano player in the late 80's. The last place I saw her play was at the Green Mill, where she plays frequently,” he said of Chicago-based  Barber. The carefully wrapped white rose on his table was to be an offering to Barber after the concert.

Few players get inside the music like Barber. Long black hair piled on the back of her head, hoop earrings dangling, she hunches her shoulders and leans over the keyboard, her ear cocked close to the keys as if her breath would coax the right notes from her fingers,

When she begins her second song with gorgeous a cappella lyrics “If I should lose you, the leaves would wither and die,” her dusky hushed voice walks you to the edge of love's abyss,your hand outstretched to your lover. There is nothing syrupy about her style. Her perfectly pitched whispery singing bares her heart but doesn’t surrender her soul. The mood of her faultless phrasing is picked up by guitar, percussion, and bass. Occasional most unladylike yelps rise from Barber as she adds keyboard fills to the group’s performance. The piece’s gorgeous ending cements the fact that I’d follow this woman anywhere.

To snap us out of the romantic vibe, Barber fires up “Hunger” a tongue-in-cheek vamp. Wacky with a Latin backbeat and a funky guitar solo, the tune has the audience chuckling with its spoofiness. The song appears on her latest CD, “Mythologies” The song’s first lines “The more you want me/ the more you want/ the more you want to be free/ there’s no slaking of thirst/ no quenching of need/ and there’s never enough… to eat,” give you some idea of how Barber’s lyrics can bob and weave between silly and serious when she feels like breaking the spell.

She finishes the set with renditions of “Icarus” and “Pygmalion” from her “Mythologies” CD that featured brilliant solos from long standing quartet members - guitarist Neal Alger, bassist Michael Arnopol and drummer Eric Montzka. And encores with the sultriest version of “Light my fire” you've ever heard. I'd  walk to Chicago to hear her again.

Her web site is exceptionally informative
http://www.patriciabarber.com/index.html
 

Day One

Today. two days after Labor Day, used to mark my annual rebirth as a teacher, the first day of the school year. With it dawned my first chance to meet a new cast of characters - my new fourth graders and their parents. The year would be an opportunity for me to refine teaching techniques and methods, to train student teachers, and to set in motion my own little plan to make the world a better place. Raising the tide in the little known ocean called “4T” intended to lift all the little boats upon it and affect all the ports they’d call upon.

In my second year of retirement, here’s a commemorative re-issue of an essay I wrote in September, 2000. The essay was published in the Brookline TAB and recorded to air on WBUR-FM.
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They are mine. They arrive in all sizes, shapes, colors, temperaments, and dispositions. And in these first tentative minutes of the new school year, something happens between me, a veteran elementary school teacher, and the children who will become my new charges, my new fourth graders.

It makes me think of the process called imprinting in which certain birds, after pecking their way out of their shells, assign the first living thing they see the role of parent and care-taker, the force that will rear them and then send them off into the big world. For me, these first minutes launch the process in reverse. At first sight, I'm the one bonding with my young students, taking them under my wing to nurture them, lead them, and create a unique community with them. Total commitment.

They are mine. Their excitement ripples to the classroom walls and returns to wash over us again. How will it turn out this year, for friendships, for accomplishments in this grade which they’ve heard features probing questions, longer books, and lots more writing. And in fact it's the same with me. I, too, am hopeful and excited about how it will turn out for us.

They are mine. When I assemble them in our first class meeting, I am at once looking at who they are now and who they will be in June. I know our destination, and I know that we must map the route and build the road there together. On the way, the lessons I teach will have as much to do with how to live life as with the fourth grade curriculum, and be useful to them beyond the horizon of this June. They’ll have me with them only that far. After that, they will have only my compass. They’ll fly away on their own.

They are mine. And here’s the irony. In fact, there are several fourth grades in our school. As I walk by those other classes of ten-year-olds, they pale in comparison with mine! My own students always seem to have more personality, to be more creative, more energetic, more sociable ... yes, more lovable. I’ve been challenged at times to do it but I can find something to love about every single one of my students. The irony is that if on this first day, one of those other classes of children had pecked their way out of their summer shell and into my care, I would have forged the same connection with them! A blind but potent force of nature is at work here.

They are mine. They will win me over with their accomplishments, delight me with their bravery as they take on the challenges I set before them, and they will warm me with the pride they feel as they experience their own growth..

They are mine, yes, ... and I am theirs.

Upon First Hearing Hank Williams, Jr.

Within a minute of sliding his Out of Left Field CD into my home stereo system, I’d cranked up the volume and was shouting, “Sing it, Hank, you sing it!”

By the second track, I gave up trying to read the Boston Globe at the kitchen table and started singing along, not giving a damn that in reality my voice was a startlingly poor karaoke version of the man’s.

By the fifth track, I realized that anything that got me out of my chair and singing like a damn fool was grist for my writing mill. I headed upstairs for the computer.

Good Lord, as I'm writing this, I am listening to him camp it up on another track - a playful, jazzy version of “You Got A Dirty Mind”, complete with piano riffs, brush work on the drums, and a bass keeping the rhythm. Is there any style this singer can’t cover?

He gallops through some songs with chaps flying and canters slowly through others, roaming the range from the melancholy of love lost to sweet gratitude for the grace of a loving woman. He inhabits the territory between heartache and heartthrob.

I believe I can hear the entire history of country singing in his lyrics, intonations, rhythms, and subjects. I hear echoes of Johnny Cash, George Jones, and Hank Williams, Sr. This  dude just loads the micro grooves of the CD with his maxi-baritone voice, which easily rises above the accompanying slide guitars, basses, drums, and backup singers. When he sings one of those melancholy songs, it makes me think that people in the southwest get their hearts broken in ways we northerners just don't.

I’d been looking to pick up a Hank Williams, Jr. CD for over a year and never got around to it. Now, I’m at home with his music and his stories of yearnings, losses, and the bliss being held in a loving woman’s arms.

I feel like bustin' out the door to taste that kind of love. Not the kind in the “Someone Special” greeting card section in CVS, but the kind where decent people with good intentions go for broke and win it all or go down tragically in flames, smashing into the earth with enough impact to be felt in the next county.

Yep, I’m aimin' for that all-or-nothin’, Mach Two, pinned-to-the-back-of-the-seat kinda love.

Hank sings, “I’ve loved and been loved, but not at the same time, I’ve been on both sides of good-bye”. Damn, I want to ride my heart south of the Mason Dixon line and live to tell the tale. I'm gonna play that CD again right now.