1. COURAGE AND CONVICTIONS
As Putin has cracked down on dissent, Russian artists have fled the country, fallen silent, fallen in line, or continued to bravely, publicly resist.
As The Guardian reports, “In the early days of the war, when opposition to the conflict had not yet been criminalised, more than 17,000 Russians working in the arts signed an open letter demanding that the invasion should end.”
Last month, however, the Russian parliament passed a law imposing jail terms of up to 15 years for spreading “fake news” about Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. And, in a nationally televised meeting with cultural leaders, Putin compared the treatment of Russian artists abroad to Nazi book burning.
“His message was clearly heard in Moscow,” The Guardian says. “Soon after, the city’s Bolshoi theatre announced that it would stage a series of performances in support of Russia’s ‘military operation’ in Ukraine, with all proceeds going to the families of Russian soldiers who had died in combat. The Oleg Tabakov theatre posted the pro-war military symbol Z across the three-floor facade of its building in central Moscow.”
Other artists are quietly showing solidarity with Ukraine. When the new gallery GES-2 opened earlier this month — at 52,000 square meters, it’s meant to be Moscow’s answer to the Tate Modern — there was little art on the walls. Evgeny Antufiev, a Russian artist who asked for his works to be removed from GES-2 shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, says, “We need to end this illusion that things will get back to how they were before the war. Drinking cocktails at art openings as people are being killed feels criminal.”
Yet GES-2 has not used its platform to criticize Russia’s war of aggression. Francesco Manacorda, the former artistic director of the V-A-C Foundation, which manages GES-2, cites the potential legal consequences.
But, for some, art is still an arena of active resistance. Raw Story echoes reports that, in Ivanovo, a town about five hours northwest of Moscow, activist Dmitry Silin has been arrested for handing out free copies of 1984 — even though George Orwell’s novel makes no mention of the Russian military.
Last week, St. Petersburg artist Alexandra Skochilenko allegedly replaced supermarket price labels with messages protesting the Russian war. Investigators described the peace activist’s motive as “political hatred for Russia.” She is facing five to ten years in jail.
And, a week ago Tuesday, police raided an anti-war classical music concert in Moscow. When two officers took to the stage, pianist Alexei Lubimov defiantly finished playing the final bars of Schubert’s Impromptu Op 90 No 2. As he struck the final notes, some audience members leapt to their feet, shouting “Bravo!” (To get a visceral sense of that encounter, watch the 40-second clip. It’s available on Twitter and it’s embedded, in a better version, in the Guardian article.)
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David Mamet told The Guardian that “People are walking around impossibly confused about what a man is and what a woman is.” (Photo: Mark Sullivan/WireImage, via Getty Images)
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2. AMERICAN BUFFALOED
For the past several years, ground-breaking playwright David Mamet, who was once leftist, has become a purveyor of right-wing distortions.
Writing plays such as American Buffalo and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Glengarry Glen Ross in the 70s and 80s, Mamet dissected capitalism. Then, in 2008, he signaled a sharp turn to the right when he wrote an article that the Village Voice titled “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal”. Mamet is smart, so the piece is bracing.
But, having taken that right turn, he just kept going. Earlier this year, he told The Guardian that Trump had done a “great job” as president. Asked about the theory that Biden’s election was rigged, he called the results “questionable”. And, this month, he released the essay collection Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch, in which, The New York Times tells us, he “decries ‘the Left’s anti-Trump psychosis’ and suggests that it was Democrats and the media who threatened ‘armed rebellion’ in the event that their preferred candidate lost the 2020 election.”
The weekend before last, Mamet appeared on Fox News to discuss the Florida law that prohibits discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten to grade three — opponents call it the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — and claimed that teachers are inclined to pedophilia, “particularly men, because men are predators.” Mamet told host Mark Levin, “If there’s no community control of the schools, what we have is kids being not only indoctrinated but groomed, in a very real sense, by people who are, whether they know it or not, sexual predators.” To get a sense of the perniciousness of Mamet’s current politics, watch the full seven-minute interview, in which Levin decries the “racialization” of American history and Mamet bemoans the country’s “sick society of sexual indoctrination.”
After watching that video, it’s a relief — like a bath — to read Broadway Beat’s short satirical article “Broadway to Dim Lights in Memory of Mamet’s Relevancy”: “Mamet’s Relevancy is survived by four children and his physical body.”
The spotlight is on the playwright these days because a revival of American Buffalo, starring Laurence Fishburne, Darren Criss, and Sam Rockwell, just opened on Broadway. Reviews are mixed. In the New York Daily News, Chris Jones calls the script “a work of genius”, but says the production doesn’t delve “deep into the real emotional core of the drama.” Nostalgically (for me), Jones identifies the “crucial Mamet theme”: “How American capitalism screws over those cut out of the elite, forcing them to emulate its competitiveness without any hope of real achievement. All they can do is damage. Both to themselves and to their young.”
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Photo of Viola Davis by Ruven Afanador for The New York Times
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3. A HAND REACHED FOR MINE
I feel like I know Viola Davis. This is madly presumptuous; I’ve never met her, and her life experience is wildly different from mine. But I admire her work so much that I feel a personal sense of gratitude. And she creates a unique kind of intimacy with her audiences. As Jazmine Hughes writes in this profile in The New York Times — it was prompted by the upcoming publication of Davis’s autobiography Finding Me — her characterizations “can seem so truthful that it feels almost uncomfortable, as if you’ve barged in on something you weren’t supposed to see. By going slightly too far, letting her tears drip uninterrupted, she lets you in on a secret no one else will tell.”
This profile is wide-ranging and I don’t want to be reductive, but I do want to focus on one thing: the importance of representation.
Davis’s early life was impoverished and traumatic. Her dad “regularly abused his wife after drinking binges.” (He later softened and “spent the last years of his life catering to the needs of his wife and family, as if every single one of his remaining days could be an apology.”) As children, Davis and her sisters “would tie bedsheets around their necks before they went to sleep to stave off rat bites.”
But “her sisters were her anchor,” Hughes writes. “The eldest, Dianne, had recently reunited with her siblings, moving from their grandparents’ home in the South, and Viola was obsessed with her. She had a new coat and pocket change, and she smelled nice. It was the first time Dianne saw how the rest of her family lived, and she decided that her baby sister needed to get out. She whispered to Viola: ‘You need to have a really clear idea of how you’re going to make it out if you don’t want to be poor for the rest of your life. You have to decide what you want to be. Then you have to work really hard.’
“One evening, Davis sat watching TV, the working set sitting atop a broken one, connected to an extension cord from one of the few functioning outlets in her home. ‘The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman’ came on, and for the first time, Davis saw a dark-skinned woman, with full lips and a short Afro, on the screen. She thought the woman was beautiful; she thought the woman looked just like her mother. ‘My heart stopped beating,’ she writes. ‘It was like a hand reached for mine, and I finally saw my way out.’ Dianne had made clear that Viola could be somebody. Cicely Tyson was somebody Viola could be.”
Davis fights racism, colorism, and misogyny — and she has experienced huge success, winning an Emmy, two Tonys, and an Oscar. Finding Me will be published on April 26. This month, she stars as Michelle Obama in the series The First Lady (on Crave in Canada, and Showtime and other providers in the US.) The Woman King, a historical epic about the all-female army of the Dahomey kingdom, premieres this fall. JuVee Productions, which Davis started with her husband, is behind it. She stars.
Completing the circle, Tyson played Davis’s mom on the series How To Get Away with Murder. No wonder the scenes between them are so elevating.
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Leonard Cohen's father was also dapper. (Photo: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty)
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4. THE CRACK IN EVERYTHING
The cliché of the melancholy artist is nonsense, right? Uh ... no, not exactly. It appears that sadness can spark creativity.
Susan Cain begins her essay in LitHub: “In 1944, when the poet-musician and global icon Leonard Cohen was nine years old, his father died. Leonard wrote a poem, sliced open his father’s favorite bowtie, inserted his elegy, and buried it in the family garden in Montreal.”
Many of Cohen’s songs — “So Long, Marianne”, “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” — are about the grief of leave-taking. Referring to his music, Cohen said, “There are some people that have a tendency towards saying hello, but I’m rather more valedictory.”
According to the studies Cain cites, “An astonishingly large percentage of highly creative people were, like Cohen, orphaned in childhood” and “even creatives whose parents live to their dotage are disproportionately prone to sorrow” — including mood disorders.
In 2017, economist Karol Jan Borowiecki published one of the most fascinating studies, “How Are You, My Dearest Mozart? Well-Being and Creativity of Three Famous Composers Based on Their Letters”. Using analytic software, Borowiecki reviewed 1,400 letters written by Mozart, Liszt, and Beethoven. He tracked references to positive and negative emotions and compared those references to the composers’ output at the time. He found that sadness was particularly predictive of bursts of creativity.
This needs to be contextualized: depression (as opposed to sadness) kills creativity, insight is most likely to visit when we’re happy, and many artists are more happy than sad.
Cain suggests that the link between sadness and creativity might lie in the impulse towards transforming the feeling. As Cohen writes in his song “Anthem”, “There is a crack, a crack in everything/ That’s how the light gets in.”
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In Lviv, rapper Stepan Burban stands next to a drawing by Kyiv artist Vlada Ralko. (Photo: Kasia Strek for The Washington Post)
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5. SLAVA LVIV
The Ukrainian city of Lviv has become a gathering place for Ukrainian artists seeking relative safety within their country. On Monday, five Russian missiles struck the city, killing at least seven people and injuring at least eleven.
As The Washington Post informs us, in the early days of the Russian invasion, hundreds of displaced people sheltered in the Lviv Municipal Art Centre. “Now it is an art gallery again, showcasing the wartime work of artists from around Ukraine.”
Students from the Kharkiv Academy of Design and Arts — rector Oleksandr Soboliev says at least 30 of its more than 1,030 students are missing and unaccounted for, and one has been confirmed dead — “have been submitting posters about the war to an initiative started by the school and working to get them seen by Russians on social media.” The Snake Island defenders’ advice to the Soviet warship, “Go Fuck Yourself”, has become a popular theme.
Street posters flutter all around the city.
“At the Lviv National Academy of Arts, students turned a campus bomb shelter into an art gallery, in part to boost morale and in part to entice apathetic and fatalistic college students to actually use the shelter when the air raid sirens wailed across the city. Upon entering, visitors are welcomed with a red bell and sign that says ‘ring for Putin’s death.’
“The tenor of the gallery shifts as one travels down narrow corridors that bear witness to what has been lost. One exhibit asks visitors to draw something they miss from homes that many cannot return to on a tiny piece of paper and slide it into a matchbox painted with the Ukrainian flag.”
In one of the tenderest uses of art, musicians are offering music therapy for kids whose families have fled the violence of the Russian invasion in their hometowns. “Art is a beautiful way to say something when we don’t have the words,” musician Michael Balog says. “What is the result of the therapy? Like a smile on the kids’ faces? Yeah, this is the result.”
A disarming video about the kids and their music therapy is embedded in the Washington Post article.
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Alana Bridgewater in da Kink in my Hair. (Photo by Itai Erdal, who’s doing the lights.)
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6. SEEING THINGS
Ongoing Theatre
In presenting the six-year relationship between a celebrated short-story writer and prof named Ruth and her student-then-protégé Lisa, Donald Margulies’s Collected Stories asks a question I already have my answer to: Is it okay for one writer to cannibalize the life of another writer in fiction — without their permission? My answer is an unequivocal no, which means that there isn’t a lot for me to chew on in the heart of Margulies’s play. Still, his drawing of the characters is complex, which could allow for bravura performances. In this production, Jennifer Fahrni rises to the challenge: her Ruth is as crusty as all hell, but also vulnerable — and Fahrni’s performance is effortlessly naturalistic. Avery Crane is less successful as Lisa: she settles down as the evening progresses but, off the top, she so overstates Lisa’s fawning adulation of Ruth that I couldn’t understand why Ruth didn’t throw her out of her apartment.
Presented by Log House Productions and Artist Collective Productions, Collected Stories is running at the Red Gate Revue Stage until April 22. Here’s my full review and here’s where to get tickets.
There were some bumps along the way, but I was moved by Dave Deveau’s Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls and I’m grateful for it. The story is about Fin, who’s coming out as a trans boy just as he’s entering grade four. (The target audience for the show is seven- to twelve-year-olds.) My problems: Fin’s sister Holly is classically girlish, and here that means that she’s stupid and superficial; the dynamic in which Fin’s dad is accepting and his mom is well-meaning but resistant gets circular; and the performance style set by director Jennica Grienke is gratingly over the top. But there’s a lot to like, including Shizuka Kai’s pink-and-blue set, Christopher David Gauthier’s playful costumes, and Mary Jane Coomber’s subtle sound design. When they’re not overdoing it, there’s also heartfelt work from all three performers, especially Matheus Severo, who plays both Dad and Felix, a new kid who shows up at Fin’s school. Severo brings a different style of clowning, a winning emotional purity, to his characterization of Felix. And there’s no doubt that Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls is doing good work in the world, championing not just trans kids but all kids who are trying to live authentic lives. By the end, I was in tears.
This production from Carousel Theatre for Young People is running at the Waterfront Theatre until April 23. Here’s my full review and here’s where to get tickets.
Upcoming Theatre
Vancouver theatre is busy this week.
Tonight, I’ll be at the opening of the Arts Club’s production of Trey Anthony’s ‘da Kink in my Hair, which is running at the Stanley until May 15. There will be audio-described performances on Sunday, May 8, at 2:00 p.m. and Friday, May 13, at 8:00 p.m. Here’s where to get tickets for all performances.
Tomorrow night (Friday, April 22), I’ll be seeing Tara Kootenhayoo’s White Noise at the Firehall. Presented by the Firehall and Savage Society, it’s running until May 1. Tickets
And on Saturday, April 23, I’ll be at the opening of Ins Choi’s new script Bad Parent. Produced by Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre, it will be in The Cultch’s Historic Theatre until May 1. Tickets
All of these reviews will be up on my blog late in the afternoon the day after I see the shows.
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