Martin Luther

Image of Martin Luther, ca. 1523

I've just finished reading Lyndal Roper's "Martin Luther:  Renegade and Prophet."  I knew little about Luther before I read the book, other than Western Civ. in high school and the Netflix documentary starring Hugh Bonneville. 

A couple of things that I learned:  any woman giving birth "was under the sway of the devil, and that if she were to die before being churched, she could not be buried in the church yard."  I think the Roman Catholic Church outdid itself on that one! 

The secular powers had little say in the institution of marriage:  "As a sacrament, it had fallen under the purview of the Church, which decided which marriages were permitted and what counted as incestuous and required dispensations; it all was made more complex because godparenthood created an additional spiritual network of kinship and so a host of potentially incestuous unions."  So this was where the Church was when Luther wrote "On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church," where he began evolving his ideas about marriage, eventually denying that it was a sacrament. 

Roper also devotes the final chapter of her book to Luther's anti-Semitism.  To read his words about what he believed Christians should do to the Jews is horrifying.  Anti-Semitism was essential to Luther's theology:  "it was not incidental to his theology, a lamentable prejudice taken from contemporary attitudes.  Rather, it was integral to his thought; his insistence that the true Christians-  that is, the evangelicals-  had become the chosen people and had displaced the Jews would become fundamental to Protestant identity."

McCarthy's Bar

'McCarthy's Bar' is an odd book.  The title makes one think that the author owns a bar named for himself.  Not true.  McCarthy has a penchant for visiting bars of that name.  The beginning of the book is rife with frat boy-like drunkenness, to the point where I almost gave up on it.
But then it starts to get interesting.  McCarthy was born in England, though he thinks of himself as Irish, and he starts picking apart exactly what that means, as he explores Ireland's west coast.  (I cannot call it the 'Wild Atlantic Way'-  that just sounds silly.)  He also explains the difference between English and British.  If a white man commits a crime, he's British.  If a black, Asian or Irishman commits a crime, he's English.

It is well worth the read, but I can give you the highlights.  McCarthy stumbles upon a Famine memorial in Skibereen, with victims buried beneath it.  He considers why it was so rarely spoken of by his relatives, and comes to the conclusion that it was shame.  He guesses how many victims were in the pit-  maybe a few hundred?- and is astonished to read that it held 9,000.

McCarthy travels with William Makepeace Thackeray's 'Irish Sketchbook,' if only to not look like everyone else, clutching their copies of Lonely Planet.  He is impressed by the settled-ness of immigrants in Ireland who swear they feel very Irish.  In the midst of a religious pilgrimage on one of the Aran Islands, one of his companions says:  "It's an easy place to be at home in, in Ireland.  I notice, watching the different nationalities on the mountain, the fluidity of interaction the Irish people have with the visitors, and with each other.  It's a skill that's less developed in other nationalities, and it's so instinctive, it doesn't even look like a skill."  

The Ikarus Play

Photo:  Emily Ann Banks (Kara) and Kendra Mittermeyer (Deedee).  Photo by Christie Marie Clark.


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I have a new one-act going up at Open Source Gallery soon.  It’s an adaptation of the Daedalus/Icarus myth called The Ikarus Play, based on sculpture by Sana Obaid.  It will be performed Sunday, August 6th at 6 and 7 pm, and Monday, August 7^th at 7 and 8 pm at Open Source Gallery, 306 17^th Street (near Sixth Avenue), Park Slope.   Featuring direction by Christie Marie Clark, costume design by Cathy Small, Kendra Mittermeyer as Daedalus and Emily Ann Banks as Icarus.  Admission is free. 

Nearest subway stops are the F/G/N at 4th Ave./9^th St., or F/N at 7^th Ave./9^th St. 

If you want to read on, it gets complicated:

I’ve worked with Open Source and its artistic director, Monika Wuhrer, for ten years.  I’ve premiered six plays there, all based on art being shown in the gallery:  painting, sculpture, local artists, European artists.  Monika and I met last summer, when she suggested that Sana would be a great person to work with.  Sana and I Skyped in May; she is intelligent, candid and funny.  I immediately wanted to have her come over for dinner.  Sana’s art is not inherently political; she is interested in metaphoric walls between people, and walls of self-preservation.

Until now, Open Source has never had a problem getting an artist and their art to Brooklyn.  They got an NEA grant to bring Sana here (she’s based in Karachi), and then applied for an artist visa, which the State Dept. denied.  So there’s still a show (video), but there’s no artist.  And no art juxtasposed with the play.  Which I find deeply troubling.  But, damn it, there will be a play!

For more details:  http://open-source-gallery.org/

Photo:  Emily Ann Banks (Kara) and Kendra Mittermeyer (Deedee).  Photo by Christie Marie Clark.

Fritz Lang

I recently finished reading Patrick McGilligan's massive biography, 'Fritz Lang:  The Nature of the Beast.'  It was so big and overly detailed, I almost didn't make my way through it.  I can only think even St. Martin's Press is cutting down on editors.

But there were some interesting bits.  The set for Lang's film 'The Spider Woman' was constructed in the Hagenbeck Zoo in Hamburg (the first modern zoo, where its founder Carl Hagenbeck revolutionized animal training).  His 'Lady in the Moon' (a sci-fi classic from 1931, which he co-wrote with his then wife, Thea von Harbou) invented the countdown (yes, that 5-4-3-2-1 countdown).    Having decided that Peter Lorre would whistle the 'Hall of the Mountain King' from Grieg's 'Peer Gynt,' he didn't like the way Lorre whistled, so the whistle in the movie is Lang himself.

When he was working in Hollywood, Brecht had to keep the same twilight curfew that other enemy aliens did.

And finally, von Harbou became an enthusiastic Nazi (she stayed when Lang fled to Paris).  After the war, she served time in prison, and labored as a Truemmerfrau, separating usable bricks from bad in Berlin's rubble.


Photo credit:  Wikipedia

Interview, Take 2

This is a corrected post.  There's punctuation now, which helps:

http://m.axs.com/news/interview-with-playwright-anne-phelan-86519

An Interview with the Dramahound (that's me)

An interview with me by Meaghan Meehan on axs.com:

http://m.axs.com/news/interview-with-playwright-anne-phelan-86519?utm_campaign=ex_content_axs_approved&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Sailthru

Hades

Fool’s Progress and Dramahound Productions are pleased to announce the world premiere of a one-act play by Anne Phelan, Hades.  It will be performed on Saturday, June 18 at 4:30 and 5:30 PM at Lazy Susan Gallery, 191 Henry Street, between Rutgers and Clinton Streets, on the Lower East Side.   Admission is free. 

The play was commissioned by Fool’s Progress Productions, and is inspired by Tom Bovo’s Merge photograph (above) in Curiously, a group show featuring the work of Tom Bovo, Gail Flanery and Karen Gibbons at Lazy Susan.  The production is directed by Katrin Hilbe.  It features Jacob Grigolia-Rosenbaum as Dante and CK Allen as Virgil.

Dante has been driven from his home in Florence, Massachusetts.  Disillusioned, homeless and broke, he meets Virgil on the streets of Brooklyn. Virgil then proceeds to guide Dante through three circles of Hell in South Slope and Gowanus where they encounter a murdering wife, a notorious Welsh traitor from King Arthur’s time and finally Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger, the murderer of Julius Caesar.  By the end of the play, Dante has begun to rebuild his spirit, and he and Virgil go off to further adventures. 

Dramahound Productions is happy to be working with Fool’s Progress Productions on their fourth world premiere, the first at Lazy Susan Gallery.  Previous plays include The Mermaid Won’t Sing for Tom Bovo’s The Other Side of Summer; The Skull Beneath the Skin for Tom Bovo’s Genius Loci and Ellen Chuse’s Everyone in the Pool; and Did You Hear the One About the Carp Who Hailed a Taxi? for Tom Bovo’s New York.   

Opened in January of this year, Lazy Susan Gallery is a creative project space with a revolving roster of curators and artists.  Its curator is Jill Conner. 

Directions:  To reach Lazy Susan Gallery, take the F train to East Broadway. 

Lazy Susan Phone:  646.736.2457 

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