Ruined

My friend Cheryl Davis and I saw the best play we've seen in ages yesterday at Manhattan Theatre Club. For me, it was the best since Albee's "Peter and Jerry." It is "Ruined," Lynn Nottage's take on Brecht's "Mother Courage and her Children" set in the recent past in Congo. Absolutely fantastic. The play, direction, acting, design- all worked beautifully together. And unlike most plays, it has live music, too. All the actors are good, but Saidah Arrika Ekulona as Mama Nadi is exceptional.

And to Think that I Saw It on Middagh Street

Old, dear friends of mine gave me a copy of "February House", which I've just finished reading. It is the story of a group of artists who lived together in a now demolished house on Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights. It was dubbed February House by Anais Nin, because several of the tenants had February birthdays.
The house was purchased by sometime magazine editor George Davis, for his artist friends to experiment with communal living. I knew his name of course, but not until reading Sherill Tippins' book did I realize that he was the third Mr. Lotte Lenya (she married Kurt Weill twice). Ms. Tippins' prose is not particularly stylistically memorable nor always clear (she refers to a theatrical set design as naturalistic in one sentence and romantic in the next; I doubt it was both). But she does cram a lot of good stories, history and gossip into 258 pages. The house housed at one time or another Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Jane and Paul Bowles, Paul Bowles' cousin Oliver Smith (the set designer and Broadway producer), W.H. Auden (with and without Chester Kallman, and once in awhile his wife, Erika Mann or her brother Klaus).
My favorite story is about some circus performers that Gypsy Rose Lee recommended as tenants. They traveled with their trained animals, including a toilet-trained monkey. I don't mean a paper trained monkey, I mean the monkey rushed past tenants in the kitchen one morning, closed the bathroom door, used the toilet, flushed and skittered out again. Now That's a monkey!
There was also a great deal of pining- Carson McCullers pined for Katherine Anne Porter, Gypsy Rose Lee pined for Mike Todd, and Auden pined for Kallman. And a lot of traipsing down to the Sands Street bars by the Navy Yard. One of them gave McCullers the idea for "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe." Lee wrote her first novel in the house, with Davis' editing ("The G-String Murders"); Britten wanted to write Broadway musicals (I can't imagine) and wound up beginning "Peter Grimes" instead; McCullers began Member of the Wedding; Auden wrote a lot of poetry, and the libretto for Britten's "Paul Bunyan" opera.
Davis bought the house in 1938, and the group began to break up as the war in Europe got worse. The death of the house was the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (Robert Moses strikes again!); it was torn down in 1945. As Tippins writes: "all that remains of the unusual brownstone is a triangle of grass, a square of concrete sidewalk, and a sign: NO STANDING."
Davis went on to bought another house in the neighborhood, which is the one where Capote lived as a young man (I'd assumed they were the same house).

The Times of London

When I was younger and worked for a now defunct division of Time-Warner, I was a serious news junkie. I would read the Irish Times, the Reuters newsfeed, the English version of Frankfurter Allgemeine, CNN's website (in its earlier, more world news friendly incarnation) and the Times of London every day.
I went back to the Times of London on Saturday and found three interesting stories. First, that Faber & Faber is moving into the offices it has when TS Eliot ran it (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/court_and_social/article4974645.ece). I have a soft spot for the romance of English publishers. My first published work was by the US incarnation of Heinemann, which published Siegfried Sassoon's work. I think I grinned for a week.
Second, that Barbara Cartland's (she of the romance novels; in my teens I consumed many) guide to entertaining is back in print (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/court_and_social/article4834182.ece). She insists that a dinner party consist of no fewer than eight people, and assumes one has servants as well. Beyond me.
And last, the death of Scottish playwright Stanley Eveling, who I didn't remember at first. Then realized I'd heard at least 20 performances of "Dear Janet Rosenberg/Dear Mr. Kooning" because I'd been the dresser for it at Dobama Theatre in Cleveland in my youth (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article5548640.ece)

The Spell of the Vienna Woods

This book is my favorite of Paul Hofmann's, but it wasn't mentioned in his Times obituary on New Year's Day (link above). What was mentioned, that I didn't know, was that he was an informer for the Italian underground during World War II, and that he was a lawyer who became a spokesman for the Catholic Popular Federation in the 1930s. Hofmann fled to Rome after the Anschluss where he was eventually the translator for two German commandants. It was in this position he passed along information to the underground. After the war, Hofmann went to work for the New York Times in Rome.
The Spell of of Vienna Woods isn't a typical travel book. Rather, it looks at the Woods' influence on a variety of famous people (Beethoven, Schubert, Freud, Kafka) and events that happened there, like Crown Prince Rudolph's murder/suicide at Mayerling. The Woods cast their spell on Hofmann himself, which is obvious from the writing. Unlike other cities, the Viennese transit system makes it easy to get to the Woods; there is a streetcar that goes all the way to Baden, where Beethoven liked to escape in the summer.

Let Nothing You Dismay

Last October, I was lucky enough to have a wonderful Brazilian actress, Petrucia Finkler, read a excerpt from my play "Let Nothing You Dismay" in Chicago. It was part of a launch party for a new literary magazine, Conclave, that published the excerpt, The Tale of the Duck.
Petrucia has her own blog on Blogger, link above. So if you read Portuguese, you can read her description of the play and her excellent take on the character.

Brooklyn History: Wallabout Market

There is a very cool story posted by Urban Environmentalist on Gowanus Lounge (link above) about what was once the second largest market in the world (link above) on Wallabout Bay. Wallabout is a reference to the Walloons who lived and did business there in the eighteenth century. Unfortunately, the market was destroyed to make way for the expansion of the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II.
The accompanying photo looks like it could have been taken in Holland, but it's Brooklyn at the end of the nineteenth century.

Parks -n- Books

The New York City Parks Department is looking for help from New Yorkers who read. It has history pages for Henry James, J.D. Salinger, and Walt Whitman, and wants us to help them fill out each page's literary references. I can think of one reference for each at the moment (Washington Square, Central Park, Fulton ferry landing), but there have got to be more. Click on the link above to help out the City.