Once again, something I took for bedrock has proven to be wrong.

I can’t stand dysfunctional family dramas of the Tennessee Williams/ Eugene O’Neill type. Williams I’ve seen too many productions of, that horrible Glass Menagerie thing, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (even the film adaptation with Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor). Awful stuff. Irredeemable stuff. Cat multiple times possibly.

That changed when I was given tickets to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at Drury Lane in Oak Brook. I expected the worst, but at least figured on stopping at Barnes & Noble in the mall first.

For one thing the show was well cast. Brick (the Paul Newman role) looked like Brick, something Adonis like albeit too young; and his wife, Maggie, supposed to be sexy and attractive, actually was. Smoldering. It makes a difference to the roles when the actors lack the prescribed (and talked about) characteristics.

But the stars were Big Daddy (Matt DeCaro) and Big Mama (Cindy Gold), both parts that require some range and I’d only seen them portrayed by actors of very narrow capability. Big Daddy is especially difficult to play (or direct I suppose) in that he is almost a thoroughly unlikable man, yet has to show himself seamlessly as sympathetic. It’s the type of role actors usually play with an on/off switch: now I’m detestable, now I’m likable.

I’ve known the famous “mendacity” line since I was a student, and its execution, prior to this production, always felt clunkerish—but at Drury Lane all its dramatic pathos and import came out. The plot is a bit contrived, and of its time to be sure; but drama depends on contrived and implausible plots which the “suspension of disbelief” allows for, all else being well-executed.

The set was good & production values, etc. But the acting carried it.

So now everything I knew turns out to be wrong.

Also unexpectedly, the production has given me pause to think about my preconceptions about color-blind casting and the like. August Wilson notoriously suggested that Black actors should be automatically excluded from performing in any plays of European or White-American origin (unless, I suppose, the part was specifically tailored for a particular ethnicity). My view has been contrary. As I have noted, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is not dependent on the skin color of its cast (however he or his estate might have seen fit to intervene), and for me the definitive production was that directed by Ron O.J. Parson at Chicago’s Court Theatre recently.

(In a recent controversy, Parson directed Blood Knot at American Players Theatre in which a casting choice was foist upon him which might have horrified August Wilson: a white actor portraying a light-skinned (and “passable”) Black man who squares off with his darker-skinned brother. Parson defended the choice saying he “wanted… a white guy saying those hateful things and then representing all the hate that’s in the world. For me, the payoff of that one time when he uses ‘n’ word in that scene—the payoff is more relevant if it is a white guy.”)

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, set in “a plantation home in the Mississippi Delta,” reeks of what we would call “white privilege” (the words an anachronism if transposed to the time in which the action is set), and that comprises the warp and woof of Williams’ exploration—even dissection—in the play. Color-blind casting might have weakened the play; in fact productions of Williams that I have seen have all occurred in Chicago, where “anything goes” casting is the norm more than exceptional. Perhaps Williams is best played in hoity-toity suburbia? (I exaggerate and stereotype for the sake of brevity.)

I’m not ready to concede to August Wilson. Let a black actor hew the part of Big Daddy and see what he makes of it. Given the direction of a Parson why wouldn’t it fly? A woman? Give it a try! (In either case the non-conventional casting is more likely to cause a distraction than make a statement, but nothing says that audience expectations must be pandered to.)

Merce Cunningham knew that dancers of all body shapes and sizes—not hampered by age or disability we might add—deserve their time on stage as much as those happening to fill some arbitrary standard of physical acceptability; though training (ours) has rendered uniform body-types easier to watch.

A fat, slovenly Maggie however? A Maggie of no allure? That might be harder to pull off.

For a long time the be-all and end-all of English poetry, the high aim, was the long poem or the epic. Keats strove for it, so did Pound. If Milton stands at the fore of that tradition, the end is not in sight.

My Facebook friend Surazeus Simon Seamount has written a long poem (some say the longest) about the lives of the philosophers. Another, Brendan Dempsey, has employed verse to narrate an attempt “to bring the Sacred back” after the death of God. And of course I have my two efforts in the long form (scroll down for photo).

Yeats remarkably said of his compeers at the Rhymer’s Club, “The only thing certain about us is that we are too many.” The same might be said of us. In actuality, in both situations, the framing words are wrong. “We” are the right number, or else insufficient, but never too many. T.S. Eliot wrote: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

It doesn’t much matter if your poem or my poem is the one to survive. If any do, that is miraculous enough. This is equally true in speaking of the slightest lyric as much as of the lumbering epic. Poetry is not so much the product of the lone practitioner struggling in his garret (though that may be a facet) nor even an aggregate of the same. He—as indeed Keats was—may be the sine qua non of poetry, but poetry arises from outside the poet. This is the perpetual paradox.

It is frivolous, for anyone over the age of Keats, to obsess about his place in the canon. Canons be the business of future scholars even on the Harold Bloom model. Does the significance of a canon penetrate outside the academy? Probably not.

What is the difference between the ravings of the madman and the prophetic cadences of the poet? Possibly none. At any rate, it is not ours to say.
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The above thoughts, and the above lines from T.S. Eliot, have been in my mind a while. But the immediate catalyst of this post came from Dawn Potter, blogging today of “The Sadness of Poets Who Are Cruel to Their Own Gifts”. She writes of “a friend who is struggling… with the disconnect between how he perceives his talents (as minimal) and how others perceive them (as considerable).” My view is not so much that “hope would be hope for the wrong thing” as that her friend is paying attention to the wrong thing.

The preoccupation with “canon” is not mine, nor possibly her friend’s, but extends seamlessly from such an intellectual struggle.

I’ve never read Neil Gaiman, but if Lifeline Theatre’s adaptation of his Neverwhere is any indication, I’m not missing much (though to my great disappointment).

It was like Lord of the Rings (the movie) done on a slack budget with Salvation Army costumes. Actually the production values didn’t distress me (as they did my companion). My “suspension of disbelief” sufficiently covered the bare bones, and stitched a fantastical sci-fi-type tapestry. But the play was excruciatingly boring (my companion said “juvenile”). Searching for a magical key, people dying only to be miraculously brought back to life, occasional spicings of camp humor (a hallmark of the company not Gaiman I presume), all in a stupid plotline, was insufficient to carry the tawdry effects.

Over the years I’ve heard such good things about Gaiman, but if this is reflective of his work, it’s not to my liking. Somebody said that the company has lost future rights to the book, so presumably it will come out as a film in due time. The production already felt horribly cliched (drawing on popular cinema) so the material is probably ripe for Hollywood. But writing that is done with an eye to film adaptation is not always the best sort qua writing, however remunerative it is for the author. I don’t know if that's Gaiman’s flaw, or if his worldview is simply a media-saturated one initially.

Pop culture has its place. But this reminded me of nothing so much as of a childhood production some neighborhood boys and I put on of Dracula using their father-built sandbox as a coffin. I suppose our mothers liked the performance well enough, but you have to suspect maternal indulgence.

[Edit: Gaiman’s book is an adaptation of and expansion on a BBC television series of the same name, dating from the 1990s, which I had not known. “It was innovative for the time. It had an interesting concept, but the budget for it never allowed for a very deep exploration of the concept” writes a friend on Facebook.]

This is the first book I did at Lulu. Actually it was written in 2002. I’m not recommending it to you because, being the first, I got the formatting wrong, and the pages appear a little shabby. It’s like a companion piece to my Against Holy War (in which I argued for a peaceful response to 9/11), and I wrote a third book employing the same stanza which is filed away somewhere because it felt like an embarrassment.

America’s descent into fascism was well augured, though not much spoken about in 2002. Now, the reality is upon us, and it cannot be said which way the country will turn. A heavy mass favors it, but they were always with us. For me, as I wrote before, these are no times for an artist. Presently, instead of on personal affairs, our thoughts and attentions must be devoted to the public crisis, as Adam Kirsch early on predicted.

The duration of this moment may outlast my remaining life. With climate catastrophe thrown into the mix, the destruction may be permanent, and irrevocable. If, in this case, fortune favors the meek, and a period of relative abatement comes, I will again devote myself to the proddings of the muse (all other factors being favorable), when I can. But now is not the time.