To contact us Click HERE
JUST A QUICK COMMENT on the play seen last night, Other People's Money, a comic oleo, I think you could call it, on a very topical subject, by Jerry Sterner, about whom I know only what Wikipedia tells me, which is little beyond the epitaph on his headstone: "Finally, a plot."
The play is equally sardonic. You may know it from its 1991 film version, which starred Danny DeVito, Gregory Peck, and Piper Laurie — strange, how long ago that all seems now! I haven't seen the film, but last night's performance makes me curious to.
Not that the production we saw was deficient, crying out for Hollywood's more lavish resources. This was community theater, though one member of the cast is Equity; but the casting was good, the acting persuasive, the production resourceful given the small house and crowded stage facility.
The play's about a villainous New York corporate raider who's after a midsized Rhode Island factory, publicly held but tightly controlled by the family that founded it many years before. The company's small-town owner, whose father had founded the factory, yields to his second wife's pleas to let her daughter, at the beginning of her law career — his stepdaughter — to try to prevent the takeover.
Further complications involve the family dynamics and various interferences by employees, but the main action is in the emerging duel between the smart and idealistic young lawyer, Kate, and the villain, Lawrence Garfinkle. (Interestingly, his surname was changed in the film to "Garfield.") They are played here by Laura Lowry and Keith Baker, and I thought both were superb.
We went to the play at the suggestion of a couple of friends, with whom we often see theater; they'd heard this was very funny, and after the previous night's presidential debate a funny play was in order. Well, of course, corporate raiders are very much in play these days, and it was perhaps too bad that the one in this production is as funny, as darkly attractive, as he is. Oily, rancid, yes; you can almost see him twisting a Simon Legree mustache as he eyes the sweet young daughter. But his frankness, as he discusses the nasty business he goes about, is refreshing, particularly after the less "transparent" explanations Mr. Romney gave the other night.
• Other People's Money, a comedy by Jerry Sterner. With Larry Williams, John Craven, Joan Hawley, Keith Baker, and Laura Lowry, directed by Elizabeth Craven. Main Stage West, Sebastopol, through October 6.
9 Kasım 2012 Cuma
Theater down south
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In flight, november 6, 2012—
TWO DAYS, THREE PLAYS. Three very different plays, in two quite different venues. We began Friday night with Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma, thoughtful, still apt after its hundred years, but talky and, especially in its exposition, discursive. The action centers on a doctor whose new treatment will cure otherwise terminal tuberculosis, but who has only a very much limited supply of medicine. In order to save a brilliant young artist another patient, already selected for the cure, will have to be allowed to die.
There are plot complications, of course, and considerable mockery of rival doctors, all cynical to one degree or another and all ultimately ineffective (for Shaw loathed the medical profession). In the end, though, the play 's a stand-off between fixed morality and social convention, represented by the doctors, and personal freedom — license, in fact — as lived by the dying painter.
I've always had my problems with Shaw, who seems to me to have spent his career wanting to merge or at least mediate Wilde and Ibsen. His greatest flaw is forgivable: he can't resist bringing in side issues. Like many over-intelligent writers he knows that everything is quite complex, and he wants his audience to know that too. Prolixity was rampant in his era: if only he'd satirized that.
I liked virtually everything about the cast and the production; only problems with British accents distracted from the effect. (If we can have American voices in Shakespeare, why not also in Shaw?) An audience-cast discussion after the performance revealed the seriousness of the company's approach and left me impressed with the degree to which they evaded traps Shaw himself doesn't always escape. I still think, though, a little (more?) judicious cutting, especially in the first act, wouldn't have hurt. Surgery has its value, pace Shaw.
ODDLY, THE VERY DIFFERENTLY conceived comedy You Can't Take It With You, with its slapstick and sight gags, delivers the same sermon: lighten up, have fun, live free, escape the tiresome social conventions — especially the drive to work and wealth. After all, you can't take it with you.
The stand-off in this play is between the Sycamore (extended) family, screwball bohemians who write plays because a typewriter was mistakenly delivered, who play the xylophone, dance ballet, make candies for the neighborhood, read Trotsky, and keep a pet snake; and the pompous, priggish businessman whose handsome son has fallen, of course, for the one Sycamore who yearns for a simpler — well, more normal — life.
The Antaeus space, in a storefront, is very different from A Noise Within's, with its lights, rigging, traps, amd sound system. The contrast was pushed further by the curious distance between the playwrights' own stances to their subjects: Shaw can't help being as moralistic as the prigs he satirizes, in insisting on the illogic and inconsistency of their "values," while Kaufman anf Hart are content with Marx Brothers zaniness, preaching by example rather than argument.
The Antaeus production was a delightful jumble of props, costumes, voices, attitudes, and gags, delightfully in your face; the Dilemma kept its place, separated from its audience, presenting itself rather soberly. Each approach has its place; both were appropriately used. An instructive polarity, instructive, as Horace requires, and delightful.
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING completely different: a late Shakespeare play, completely new to me. I've read Timon of Athens and Pericles, at least, though it was getting om sixty years ago and I have no recollectioon of them now; but until Saturday I was completely innocent of Cymbeline. O ye Muses, what a magnificent play!
Devices familiar from many other plays in the Canon — sleeping potions thought fatal, long-lost brothers, a disobedient daughter waking to love, the aging benevolent tyrant, rustic horseplay, among others — are reworked here to what seems to me a completely new and finally completely total resolution. There seems no doubt Shakespeare wrote this, the characters and the lines are unmistakable; but the result doesn't feel like a Shakespeare play, its feet in the 16th century. This is modern, new, Baroque. What a pleasure that Noise Within gives us this play in the wake of the Corneille romance The Illusion,, mounted last spring. They make a splendid case, these two productions, for the idea that a sort of Pirandellian Modernism was going on three centuries avant la lettre.
Bart DeLorenzo's direction places Cymbeline in legendary Rome-threatened Britain, appropriately, but softens the place-time specificity to underline its abstraction of universality and fantasy. The play's also intelligently framed by a Prologue in modern dress, divided into a pair of compères in formal suits, telegraphing the theme of counterparts, syzygy and resolution. Given the close proximity of the plays I couldn't help seeing Kaufman and Hart's Grandpa Sycamore in this Cymbeline, Alice Sycamore in Imogen; I don't think anyone would have minded.
I was distracted by a young audience whose laughter seemed inappropriate at times, but there I go moralizing; The Bard clearly enjoys my discomfort, and continues his puzzling and disorienting seriocomic lurching. Even in spite of the intrusive canned music I left the theater enthusiastic, excited, transported; this was truly a memorable night. Why on earth is Cymbeline so rarely produced?
•The Doctor's Dilemma, by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Bart DeLorenzo: A Noise Within, 3353 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena, through November 25, 2012;
•You Can't Take It With You, by George Kaufman and Moss Hart, directed by Gigi Bermingham: Antaeus, 5112 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, through December 9, 2012
•Cymbeline, by William Shakespeare, directed by Dámaso Rodriguez: A Noise Within, through November 18, 2012
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
TWO DAYS, THREE PLAYS. Three very different plays, in two quite different venues. We began Friday night with Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma, thoughtful, still apt after its hundred years, but talky and, especially in its exposition, discursive. The action centers on a doctor whose new treatment will cure otherwise terminal tuberculosis, but who has only a very much limited supply of medicine. In order to save a brilliant young artist another patient, already selected for the cure, will have to be allowed to die.
There are plot complications, of course, and considerable mockery of rival doctors, all cynical to one degree or another and all ultimately ineffective (for Shaw loathed the medical profession). In the end, though, the play 's a stand-off between fixed morality and social convention, represented by the doctors, and personal freedom — license, in fact — as lived by the dying painter.
I've always had my problems with Shaw, who seems to me to have spent his career wanting to merge or at least mediate Wilde and Ibsen. His greatest flaw is forgivable: he can't resist bringing in side issues. Like many over-intelligent writers he knows that everything is quite complex, and he wants his audience to know that too. Prolixity was rampant in his era: if only he'd satirized that.
I liked virtually everything about the cast and the production; only problems with British accents distracted from the effect. (If we can have American voices in Shakespeare, why not also in Shaw?) An audience-cast discussion after the performance revealed the seriousness of the company's approach and left me impressed with the degree to which they evaded traps Shaw himself doesn't always escape. I still think, though, a little (more?) judicious cutting, especially in the first act, wouldn't have hurt. Surgery has its value, pace Shaw.
ODDLY, THE VERY DIFFERENTLY conceived comedy You Can't Take It With You, with its slapstick and sight gags, delivers the same sermon: lighten up, have fun, live free, escape the tiresome social conventions — especially the drive to work and wealth. After all, you can't take it with you.
The stand-off in this play is between the Sycamore (extended) family, screwball bohemians who write plays because a typewriter was mistakenly delivered, who play the xylophone, dance ballet, make candies for the neighborhood, read Trotsky, and keep a pet snake; and the pompous, priggish businessman whose handsome son has fallen, of course, for the one Sycamore who yearns for a simpler — well, more normal — life.
The Antaeus space, in a storefront, is very different from A Noise Within's, with its lights, rigging, traps, amd sound system. The contrast was pushed further by the curious distance between the playwrights' own stances to their subjects: Shaw can't help being as moralistic as the prigs he satirizes, in insisting on the illogic and inconsistency of their "values," while Kaufman anf Hart are content with Marx Brothers zaniness, preaching by example rather than argument.
The Antaeus production was a delightful jumble of props, costumes, voices, attitudes, and gags, delightfully in your face; the Dilemma kept its place, separated from its audience, presenting itself rather soberly. Each approach has its place; both were appropriately used. An instructive polarity, instructive, as Horace requires, and delightful.
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING completely different: a late Shakespeare play, completely new to me. I've read Timon of Athens and Pericles, at least, though it was getting om sixty years ago and I have no recollectioon of them now; but until Saturday I was completely innocent of Cymbeline. O ye Muses, what a magnificent play!
Devices familiar from many other plays in the Canon — sleeping potions thought fatal, long-lost brothers, a disobedient daughter waking to love, the aging benevolent tyrant, rustic horseplay, among others — are reworked here to what seems to me a completely new and finally completely total resolution. There seems no doubt Shakespeare wrote this, the characters and the lines are unmistakable; but the result doesn't feel like a Shakespeare play, its feet in the 16th century. This is modern, new, Baroque. What a pleasure that Noise Within gives us this play in the wake of the Corneille romance The Illusion,, mounted last spring. They make a splendid case, these two productions, for the idea that a sort of Pirandellian Modernism was going on three centuries avant la lettre.
Bart DeLorenzo's direction places Cymbeline in legendary Rome-threatened Britain, appropriately, but softens the place-time specificity to underline its abstraction of universality and fantasy. The play's also intelligently framed by a Prologue in modern dress, divided into a pair of compères in formal suits, telegraphing the theme of counterparts, syzygy and resolution. Given the close proximity of the plays I couldn't help seeing Kaufman and Hart's Grandpa Sycamore in this Cymbeline, Alice Sycamore in Imogen; I don't think anyone would have minded.
I was distracted by a young audience whose laughter seemed inappropriate at times, but there I go moralizing; The Bard clearly enjoys my discomfort, and continues his puzzling and disorienting seriocomic lurching. Even in spite of the intrusive canned music I left the theater enthusiastic, excited, transported; this was truly a memorable night. Why on earth is Cymbeline so rarely produced?
•The Doctor's Dilemma, by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Bart DeLorenzo: A Noise Within, 3353 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena, through November 25, 2012;
•You Can't Take It With You, by George Kaufman and Moss Hart, directed by Gigi Bermingham: Antaeus, 5112 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, through December 9, 2012
•Cymbeline, by William Shakespeare, directed by Dámaso Rodriguez: A Noise Within, through November 18, 2012
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
5 Kasım 2012 Pazartesi
Other People's Money
To contact us Click HERE
JUST A QUICK COMMENT on the play seen last night, Other People's Money, a comic oleo, I think you could call it, on a very topical subject, by Jerry Sterner, about whom I know only what Wikipedia tells me, which is little beyond the epitaph on his headstone: "Finally, a plot."
The play is equally sardonic. You may know it from its 1991 film version, which starred Danny DeVito, Gregory Peck, and Piper Laurie — strange, how long ago that all seems now! I haven't seen the film, but last night's performance makes me curious to.
Not that the production we saw was deficient, crying out for Hollywood's more lavish resources. This was community theater, though one member of the cast is Equity; but the casting was good, the acting persuasive, the production resourceful given the small house and crowded stage facility.
The play's about a villainous New York corporate raider who's after a midsized Rhode Island factory, publicly held but tightly controlled by the family that founded it many years before. The company's small-town owner, whose father had founded the factory, yields to his second wife's pleas to let her daughter, at the beginning of her law career — his stepdaughter — to try to prevent the takeover.
Further complications involve the family dynamics and various interferences by employees, but the main action is in the emerging duel between the smart and idealistic young lawyer, Kate, and the villain, Lawrence Garfinkle. (Interestingly, his surname was changed in the film to "Garfield.") They are played here by Laura Lowry and Keith Baker, and I thought both were superb.
We went to the play at the suggestion of a couple of friends, with whom we often see theater; they'd heard this was very funny, and after the previous night's presidential debate a funny play was in order. Well, of course, corporate raiders are very much in play these days, and it was perhaps too bad that the one in this production is as funny, as darkly attractive, as he is. Oily, rancid, yes; you can almost see him twisting a Simon Legree mustache as he eyes the sweet young daughter. But his frankness, as he discusses the nasty business he goes about, is refreshing, particularly after the less "transparent" explanations Mr. Romney gave the other night.
• Other People's Money, a comedy by Jerry Sterner. With Larry Williams, John Craven, Joan Hawley, Keith Baker, and Laura Lowry, directed by Elizabeth Craven. Main Stage West, Sebastopol, through October 6.
The play is equally sardonic. You may know it from its 1991 film version, which starred Danny DeVito, Gregory Peck, and Piper Laurie — strange, how long ago that all seems now! I haven't seen the film, but last night's performance makes me curious to.
Not that the production we saw was deficient, crying out for Hollywood's more lavish resources. This was community theater, though one member of the cast is Equity; but the casting was good, the acting persuasive, the production resourceful given the small house and crowded stage facility.
The play's about a villainous New York corporate raider who's after a midsized Rhode Island factory, publicly held but tightly controlled by the family that founded it many years before. The company's small-town owner, whose father had founded the factory, yields to his second wife's pleas to let her daughter, at the beginning of her law career — his stepdaughter — to try to prevent the takeover.
Further complications involve the family dynamics and various interferences by employees, but the main action is in the emerging duel between the smart and idealistic young lawyer, Kate, and the villain, Lawrence Garfinkle. (Interestingly, his surname was changed in the film to "Garfield.") They are played here by Laura Lowry and Keith Baker, and I thought both were superb.
We went to the play at the suggestion of a couple of friends, with whom we often see theater; they'd heard this was very funny, and after the previous night's presidential debate a funny play was in order. Well, of course, corporate raiders are very much in play these days, and it was perhaps too bad that the one in this production is as funny, as darkly attractive, as he is. Oily, rancid, yes; you can almost see him twisting a Simon Legree mustache as he eyes the sweet young daughter. But his frankness, as he discusses the nasty business he goes about, is refreshing, particularly after the less "transparent" explanations Mr. Romney gave the other night.
• Other People's Money, a comedy by Jerry Sterner. With Larry Williams, John Craven, Joan Hawley, Keith Baker, and Laura Lowry, directed by Elizabeth Craven. Main Stage West, Sebastopol, through October 6.
4 Kasım 2012 Pazar
Other People's Money
To contact us Click HERE
JUST A QUICK COMMENT on the play seen last night, Other People's Money, a comic oleo, I think you could call it, on a very topical subject, by Jerry Sterner, about whom I know only what Wikipedia tells me, which is little beyond the epitaph on his headstone: "Finally, a plot."
The play is equally sardonic. You may know it from its 1991 film version, which starred Danny DeVito, Gregory Peck, and Piper Laurie — strange, how long ago that all seems now! I haven't seen the film, but last night's performance makes me curious to.
Not that the production we saw was deficient, crying out for Hollywood's more lavish resources. This was community theater, though one member of the cast is Equity; but the casting was good, the acting persuasive, the production resourceful given the small house and crowded stage facility.
The play's about a villainous New York corporate raider who's after a midsized Rhode Island factory, publicly held but tightly controlled by the family that founded it many years before. The company's small-town owner, whose father had founded the factory, yields to his second wife's pleas to let her daughter, at the beginning of her law career — his stepdaughter — to try to prevent the takeover.
Further complications involve the family dynamics and various interferences by employees, but the main action is in the emerging duel between the smart and idealistic young lawyer, Kate, and the villain, Lawrence Garfinkle. (Interestingly, his surname was changed in the film to "Garfield.") They are played here by Laura Lowry and Keith Baker, and I thought both were superb.
We went to the play at the suggestion of a couple of friends, with whom we often see theater; they'd heard this was very funny, and after the previous night's presidential debate a funny play was in order. Well, of course, corporate raiders are very much in play these days, and it was perhaps too bad that the one in this production is as funny, as darkly attractive, as he is. Oily, rancid, yes; you can almost see him twisting a Simon Legree mustache as he eyes the sweet young daughter. But his frankness, as he discusses the nasty business he goes about, is refreshing, particularly after the less "transparent" explanations Mr. Romney gave the other night.
• Other People's Money, a comedy by Jerry Sterner. With Larry Williams, John Craven, Joan Hawley, Keith Baker, and Laura Lowry, directed by Elizabeth Craven. Main Stage West, Sebastopol, through October 6.
The play is equally sardonic. You may know it from its 1991 film version, which starred Danny DeVito, Gregory Peck, and Piper Laurie — strange, how long ago that all seems now! I haven't seen the film, but last night's performance makes me curious to.
Not that the production we saw was deficient, crying out for Hollywood's more lavish resources. This was community theater, though one member of the cast is Equity; but the casting was good, the acting persuasive, the production resourceful given the small house and crowded stage facility.
The play's about a villainous New York corporate raider who's after a midsized Rhode Island factory, publicly held but tightly controlled by the family that founded it many years before. The company's small-town owner, whose father had founded the factory, yields to his second wife's pleas to let her daughter, at the beginning of her law career — his stepdaughter — to try to prevent the takeover.
Further complications involve the family dynamics and various interferences by employees, but the main action is in the emerging duel between the smart and idealistic young lawyer, Kate, and the villain, Lawrence Garfinkle. (Interestingly, his surname was changed in the film to "Garfield.") They are played here by Laura Lowry and Keith Baker, and I thought both were superb.
We went to the play at the suggestion of a couple of friends, with whom we often see theater; they'd heard this was very funny, and after the previous night's presidential debate a funny play was in order. Well, of course, corporate raiders are very much in play these days, and it was perhaps too bad that the one in this production is as funny, as darkly attractive, as he is. Oily, rancid, yes; you can almost see him twisting a Simon Legree mustache as he eyes the sweet young daughter. But his frankness, as he discusses the nasty business he goes about, is refreshing, particularly after the less "transparent" explanations Mr. Romney gave the other night.
• Other People's Money, a comedy by Jerry Sterner. With Larry Williams, John Craven, Joan Hawley, Keith Baker, and Laura Lowry, directed by Elizabeth Craven. Main Stage West, Sebastopol, through October 6.
Donald Cobb
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I met Don Cobb in 1967, when the soprano Carole Bogard sang his Crazy Jane Songs at the Cabrillo Music Festival on August 26, with Gerhard Samuel conducting a chamber orchestra. Over the years since he drifted across my sight very occasionally and I never got to know him well — he always seemed a little guarded. He wasn't the only one; I'd found that a number of composers — artists too — seemed a little guarded in conversation. I worked as a critic at the time, on the Oakland (California) Tribune, and people don't always trust newspaper critics. Nor is there any reason they should.
He and I shared a few enthusiasms, but were divided by others. I'm a committed Modernist; he wasn't. He like the poetry of Edgar Lee Masters and James Whitcomb Riley and Vachel Lindsay; I preferred Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. He was particularly fond of the symphonies of Roy Harris; I was never interested in them. We were both dedicated Regionalists, I think; but for me Regionalism is a matter of terroir, genius loci; for him it had to do with vernacular.
What we had in common, I think, was preference of one's own way, whatever that was and wherever it might lead, to conformity to successful conventions. That, and a fondness for conversation.
Don taught at various places, always rather on the margin I thought. He seemed rootless to me: you never knew when he might turn up. He liked to spend weeks on the road, when he'd crash with friends, I think, or camp out, or perhaps sleep in the car in bad weather.
A year ago a score arrived in the mail: his Crazy Jane Songs, the accompaniment arranged for piano, in a beautifully printed edition. I wrote him congratulating him on the publication, and told him how much I liked the songs; and I sent him four little songs of mine, to poems of Lou Harrison's — I thought he'd like their style, and Lou's poems. But I never heard from him, and thought perhaps I'd offended him by suggesting, inadvertently, that they might somehow stand comparison to his songs.
Poor Don complained of feeling tired last summer. When he visited a doctor — unusual for him — he was diagnosed with acute leukemia. The end came quickly, and he didn't complain. A friend e-mailed me about his death, and then a couple of weeks ago, at the Milhaud concert at Mills, I learned of a memorial service that was planned.
A couple of days before the service I was working through a stack of long delayed paperwork at my desk and ran across the envelope with my songs and letter to Don: I'd neglected to mail it. He never received it; never knew how much I'd appreciated his letter and his songs.
The memorial service was held in a community church in the Mendocino County town he's settled in. It was jammed. A number of his childhood friends from San Leandro were there, with fond and funny reminiscences. An even larger number of recent friends from Willits, where until nearly the end he was used to singing, teaching, playing his various instruments, delighting in folk music, old songs, bluegrass. He was a true Gebrauchmusiker, a maker of music for any kind of occasion, but above all for social occasions, where music provides a lubricant, a glue, a medium whose purpose it is to bind people into a community.
As I've posted on the website that's being prepared in his memory: I liked Don. He seemed like a man who knew how to be boisterously gentle, or gently enthusiastic, while still maintaining a critical and analytical mind. Above all he seemed honest and forthright, in his opinions, his music, and his conversation. He was in every sense authentic. I’m sorry we fell out of touch — my fault — and I'm sorry he’s gone.
An obituary appeared in The Willits News, posted to the Internet on Oct. 3.
 photo: The Willits News |
He and I shared a few enthusiasms, but were divided by others. I'm a committed Modernist; he wasn't. He like the poetry of Edgar Lee Masters and James Whitcomb Riley and Vachel Lindsay; I preferred Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. He was particularly fond of the symphonies of Roy Harris; I was never interested in them. We were both dedicated Regionalists, I think; but for me Regionalism is a matter of terroir, genius loci; for him it had to do with vernacular.
What we had in common, I think, was preference of one's own way, whatever that was and wherever it might lead, to conformity to successful conventions. That, and a fondness for conversation.
Don taught at various places, always rather on the margin I thought. He seemed rootless to me: you never knew when he might turn up. He liked to spend weeks on the road, when he'd crash with friends, I think, or camp out, or perhaps sleep in the car in bad weather.
A year ago a score arrived in the mail: his Crazy Jane Songs, the accompaniment arranged for piano, in a beautifully printed edition. I wrote him congratulating him on the publication, and told him how much I liked the songs; and I sent him four little songs of mine, to poems of Lou Harrison's — I thought he'd like their style, and Lou's poems. But I never heard from him, and thought perhaps I'd offended him by suggesting, inadvertently, that they might somehow stand comparison to his songs.
Poor Don complained of feeling tired last summer. When he visited a doctor — unusual for him — he was diagnosed with acute leukemia. The end came quickly, and he didn't complain. A friend e-mailed me about his death, and then a couple of weeks ago, at the Milhaud concert at Mills, I learned of a memorial service that was planned.
A couple of days before the service I was working through a stack of long delayed paperwork at my desk and ran across the envelope with my songs and letter to Don: I'd neglected to mail it. He never received it; never knew how much I'd appreciated his letter and his songs.
The memorial service was held in a community church in the Mendocino County town he's settled in. It was jammed. A number of his childhood friends from San Leandro were there, with fond and funny reminiscences. An even larger number of recent friends from Willits, where until nearly the end he was used to singing, teaching, playing his various instruments, delighting in folk music, old songs, bluegrass. He was a true Gebrauchmusiker, a maker of music for any kind of occasion, but above all for social occasions, where music provides a lubricant, a glue, a medium whose purpose it is to bind people into a community.
As I've posted on the website that's being prepared in his memory: I liked Don. He seemed like a man who knew how to be boisterously gentle, or gently enthusiastic, while still maintaining a critical and analytical mind. Above all he seemed honest and forthright, in his opinions, his music, and his conversation. He was in every sense authentic. I’m sorry we fell out of touch — my fault — and I'm sorry he’s gone.
An obituary appeared in The Willits News, posted to the Internet on Oct. 3.
Back to Einstein
To contact us Click HERE
Los Angeles, November 1, 2012—WE RETURNED ON SUNDAY to Einstein on the Beach, and I have no reason to write much beyond my earlier enthusiastic report, posted here last March. It remains an epochal experience, even a second time within eight months — in fact, we have our tickets for a third performance next January, in Amsterdam. When asked what the opera is about I have no hesitation n answering: it's about the Twentieth Century, and its progress from the age of mechanics and optics at the close of the Nineteenth to that of space and cybernetics at the dawn of the Twenty-first.
There were considerable differences in the effect of the opera, I thought. The Zellerbach stage, in Berkeley, was both smaller and closer than that of the Berlioz Theater in Montpellier. It seemed to me there were fewer dancers as a result — weren't there a dozen on the Berlioz stage? — and the Building scene, Act IV scene 1, was pressed toward the apron, and left less room for individuation among the members of the gathering cast.
More striking, the trial scenes seemed blander, less threatening; and Act II scene 1, the observation car of the train, with its isolated romantic couple, was on the other hand somewhat more ominous. On the other hand the soloists were closer, relating more closely to the audience, or at least to me.
Once again, we did not take any "breaks" from the four and a half hours: the opera is mesmerizing. Zellerbach was absolutely full, for the third performance running as I understand, and the house was quiet and attentive throughout, and tremendously responsive at the end. It was good to look at this audience, young and older, and reflect that while they have been deprived of their immediate cultural heritage by the Establishment theaters, opera houses, and performance organizations, who steadfastly refuse to produce the breakthrough work of the 1960s and '70s, they are receptive and responsive to the few exceptions to that rule. Again, many profound thanks to the generosity of this amazing cast and crew, and to the enterprise of Cal Performances and its partners in presenting this great landmark.
There were considerable differences in the effect of the opera, I thought. The Zellerbach stage, in Berkeley, was both smaller and closer than that of the Berlioz Theater in Montpellier. It seemed to me there were fewer dancers as a result — weren't there a dozen on the Berlioz stage? — and the Building scene, Act IV scene 1, was pressed toward the apron, and left less room for individuation among the members of the gathering cast.
More striking, the trial scenes seemed blander, less threatening; and Act II scene 1, the observation car of the train, with its isolated romantic couple, was on the other hand somewhat more ominous. On the other hand the soloists were closer, relating more closely to the audience, or at least to me.
Once again, we did not take any "breaks" from the four and a half hours: the opera is mesmerizing. Zellerbach was absolutely full, for the third performance running as I understand, and the house was quiet and attentive throughout, and tremendously responsive at the end. It was good to look at this audience, young and older, and reflect that while they have been deprived of their immediate cultural heritage by the Establishment theaters, opera houses, and performance organizations, who steadfastly refuse to produce the breakthrough work of the 1960s and '70s, they are receptive and responsive to the few exceptions to that rule. Again, many profound thanks to the generosity of this amazing cast and crew, and to the enterprise of Cal Performances and its partners in presenting this great landmark.
Commonplace: aesthetic experience
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… THE NOTION THAT art and life are somehow separate has worn out. Dewey argued, and the Barnes demonstrates, that art focusses and intensifies life in the present, invigorating memories of the past and whetting appetites for the future. Aesthetic experience differs from other kinds only in being dramatically cogent. It may happen even in conventional museums, though against the grain of their foregone conclusions. The Pharisees of proper taste deemed Barnes weird for his fanatical orchestration of artistic stimuli. In truth, he was crazy like a prophet.
—Peter Schjeldahl on the relocated Barnes collection, in The New Yorker, May 28, 2012, p. 80.
… THE NOTION THAT art and life are somehow separate has worn out. Dewey argued, and the Barnes demonstrates, that art focusses and intensifies life in the present, invigorating memories of the past and whetting appetites for the future. Aesthetic experience differs from other kinds only in being dramatically cogent. It may happen even in conventional museums, though against the grain of their foregone conclusions. The Pharisees of proper taste deemed Barnes weird for his fanatical orchestration of artistic stimuli. In truth, he was crazy like a prophet.
—Peter Schjeldahl on the relocated Barnes collection, in The New Yorker, May 28, 2012, p. 80.
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