Steve Mentz

What can you send to a beautiful baby boy who’s three thousand miles away during a global lockdown?

Poetry! What else?

This past Sunday 3/31/20, my nephew Ford Bryant Sterling was born in Los Angeles. Thanks to the kindness and dedication of the health care workers at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, he is home now with his parents in North Hollywood. The way things are looking, it’ll be some time before I can go see him in person.

Last night, after hardly being able to read at all during the first several weeks of our Covid-frozentime, I was thinking about Baby Ford when I picked a new book off the disorganized pile at my bedside: Habitat Threshold, the latest book of poetry by the brilliant Craig Santos Perez. Eco-poetry and sea lyrics, these poems narrate the story of Perez’s family in Hawai’i, his native Guam, and California. A touching cover photograph shows the poet’s father dipping his granddaughter’s feet in gentle surf. The poems explore bringing new life into a broken world, the intersections between children and climate change, and the suturing power of the World Ocean.

I’ve contacted the independent publisher Omnidawn to order a copy to be sent to Baby Ford, c/o his parents, who will need to hang on to it for him until he learns to read. It’s a small gift, and one that Ford won’t be able to understand for years. But these poems seem the right present to offer to this new presence in the world.

Habitat Threshold combines a bleak and accurate view of eco-crisis and the polluted ocean with the salty blue taste of hope. Its images of Perez and his family are heartening in this dark time. They make me think of the world we are making and breaking and passing on to our children.

My favorite line in the whole book might be from the lovely poem “Echolocation,” which concludes that “love is our wildest / oceanic instinct.”

The book overflows with witty pastiches, including Wallace Stevens’s thirteen blackbirds reprised as melting glaciers and William Carlos Williams’s cold plums recast as Impossible burgers. The poem “Love in a Time of Climate Change” channels Neruda rather than Garcia Marquez, reframing the great Chilean writer into eco-immortality, “in the nitrogen-rich compost of our embrace.”

Two structuring spines of the collection appear in the longer poems “Chanting the Waters” and “Praise Song for Oceania.” The first, dedicated to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and “water protectors everywhere,” sprawls out water’s physical meanings — our planet is 70 percent water, our skin is 60 percent water, our eyes are 95 percent water, “because mountains embrace ocean into blessings of rain” — that echo like a home-marking drum.

The closing poem, “Praise Song for Oceania,” has already been turned into a gorgeous and lyrical short film, created by Hawaiian filmmaker Justyn Ah Chong. Dedicated to World Oceans Day (June 8), the poem gathers together so much of what draws us to the great waters, what collects us near tidepools and beaches, and what resists our final knowing. “praise your capacity for birth,” says the poem to the Ocean and to Baby Ford. “praise your capacity to remember,” it says to me and to Baby Ford’s scattered relations. “praise your capacity for communion,” to us all, separated as we are today.

The Praise Song even includes a generous nod toward the idea that when we look at the Ocean we should “praise your blue humanities.” This line recasts the phrase that many people, including me, use as a description of a group of scholars & writers & teachers. In Perez’s song, the blue humanities swim outside academic and intellectual cultures to become the plural humanizing features of the World Ocean itself, insinuating its green-blue fingers into our minds & onto our bodies.

So, with thanks to the poet and the many tentacles of the World Ocean, from the cold gritty beach down the street from my house in Connecticut to the wide shores of Santa Monica and Venice near Ford’s home in Los Angeles to the warm waters where Craig Santos Perez dips his daughter’s toes in the Pacific in Hawai’i, these poems are my gift in absentia to Baby Ford, newly arrived in this moment of crisis in our world.

Live happy in this habitat, little one. I look forward to seeing you someday soon!

Music filled my socially-distanced hours yesterday, which was good. Two very different songs, both from aging masters who’ve been crooning a soundtrack to my life for decades. They could not have been more different.

Bob Dylan’s new seventeen-minutes of melancholy and bitter wistfulness has a title from Hamlet, “Murder Most Foul.” It circles around the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, and meanders with typical Bob-mania into, through, and around a psychohistory of America in rhymed couplets that drop one after the other, sometimes doggerel but at other times hitting true, with Dylan’s distinctive off-kilter slice —

The day that they killed him, someone said to me, “Son
The age of the Antichrist has only begun.”
Air Force One coming in through the gate
Johnson sworn in at 2:38
Let me know when you decide to thrown in the towel
It is what it is, and it’s murder most foul

The other song I listened to a few times yesterday turns out, upon inspection, to be a 2019 recording of Robbie Robertson, Ringo Starr, and an all-star international cast performing a gorgeous, uplifting rendition of The Band’s old standard, “The Weight.”

Which one’s the right one to put on repeat right now?

It’s hard not to love the Robertson/Starr ensemble’s gorgeousness, put together by Playing for Change, an international collaboration dedicated to using music to advocate for peace. The YouTube splices together musicians from many beautiful places in the world, from Jamaica to Los Angeles to Africa, Bahrain, and a close-up of what looks like my long-ago haunts of Venice Beach in California. It’s a wonderfully uplifting recanting of this great old tune, and I have every intention of listening to it many more times. I might even chase down each of the individual artists.

Dylan’s project is harsher and darker. Inhabiting the role of JFK himself, he ventriloquizes something like the shock of the modern. He name-checks lots of old time rockers and pop stars, from the Kingston Trio to The Eagles, Jelly Roll Morton, and “the great Bud Powell.” His gravel-voice sounds sad, smooth, nostalgic. He tells an old story, about possible futures lost:

Tommy, can you hear me? I’m the Acid Queen

I’m riding in a long, black limousine

Riding in the backseat next to my wife

Heading straight on into the afterlife

I’ve been through the 17 minutes about a half-dozen times now. My first thought was that the song was a semi-reprise or extension of his great song “Tempest,” from his 2012 album of the same name, which narrated a fantasia of the sinking of the Titanic in thirteen minutes of dirge-like waltz. It’s an old habit or maybe intentional practice of Bob’s to leave some songs off an album, including great songs like “Caribbean Wind” (left off Shot of Love) and “Blind Willie McTell” (left off Infidels).

The timing seems acute. “Murder Most Foul” pours into our ears a dark vision of a crisis past, dropped by our living Nobelista during a present crisis. Is November 1963 when it all started to go sideways? The song concludes with a long, patient, insistant litany of songs to play, from “Misty” and “Old Devil Moon” to, last of all, “Murder Most Foul” itself. Are we meant to find the melancholy sad clarity that sometimes can beaccompanied by art, a way of looking at the nightmares of history without looking away. It’s a hard vision that the singer puts in front of us:

Freedom, oh freedom. Freedom from need
I hate to tell you, mister, but only dead men are free

There’s also a lot of Shakespeare to chew on, from the title, which quotes the Ghost of the dead King (Hamlet 1.5) to call outs to both “Merchant of Venice” and “Lady Macbeth.” Should this go on my summer syllabus? If my course runs?

There’s an ice-hard clarity and even just a glimmer of joy in full-throated tragedy, in leaning in to the crisis and refusing to avert your eyes. Each time I listen to Bob’s latest, it sounds warmer, more human, more capacious. It’s good to hear from our artists in dark times.

“Shut your mouth,” said the wise old owl

Business is business, and it’s a murder most foul.

My mostly-virtual, socially distanced world these days finds me surrounded by books and words on screens. Few phrases have rolled off more typing-fingers than variations on the title of Love in the Time of Cholera, the Columbian Nobelista Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s great novel, published in Spanish in 1985. I pulled my 1988 Knopf hardback off my shelf last night to read and think about the phrase that’s been sloshing through my mind and my email inbox. What does cholera have to do with love? What does time have to do with either?

This lush, gorgeous, sentimental novel is also one of very few that I can remember rushing out to buy after reading a newspaper review. As a junior English major at the time, I remember picking up the New York Times on April 10, 1988, where I saw my literary hero Thomas Pynchon, who I’d worshipped since high school, gushing about the latest novel by the Latin American master I’d encountered more recently. Returning to that review now, I remember two passages in particular. In one quotation, Pynchon and Gabo together perhaps anticipated all my decades-later scholarship in the blue humanities about humans and bodies of water. When the hero protests that he cannot do his job as river navigator because he only thinks about love, his wise uncle replies, “The problem is, without river navigation, there is no love.” Love and Navigation — have I found a title for my next book?

And, at the review’s end, Pynchon rhapsodizes the novel’s final chapter:

There is nothing I have read quite like this astonishing final chapter, symphonic, sure in its dynamics and tempo, moving like a riverboat too, its author and pilot, with a lifetime’s experience steering us unerringly among hazards of skepticism and mercy, on this river we all know, without whose navigation there is no love and against whose flow the effort to return is never worth a less honorable name than remembrance -at the very best it results in works that can even return our worn souls to us, among which most certainly belongs ”Love in the Time of Cholera,” this shining and heartbreaking novel.

The rhythms of that final chapter, re-read in our plague-y present, feel like a re-imagining of time, as if the true subject of Gabo’s late masterwork is not just love and cholera, whose symptoms the novel draws together, but time, itself, “this river we all know,” as Pynchon calls it. Time’s a strange place now, under semi-quarantine, cut off from other people. It’s worth asking this novel about it.

So — a few ideas about time, the river, infectious diseases, and love, as these things call to me from the young man who was first transfixed by this novel in the spring of 1988, and whose heart still moves with it in these dark spring months of 2020. It’s a story of love against time, and also, to my surprise, a story about environmental devastation, and about the physical labor of writing.

Love against time: Throughout the novel, the hero-lover Florentino keeps track of the exact time elapsed since his love Fermina Daza rejected him when they were young. The final tally, on the book’s last page, is “fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights” (348). Some kinds of time crave measurement. There’s something mad about Florentino’s precision.

The broken river: When Florentino and Fermina in the final chapter at last cruise up the river together on one of Florentino’s steamers, the riverboat operator is shocked to witness the destruction his boats, foraging ashore for wood, has visited on the environment: “Captain Samaritano explained to them how fifty years of uncontrolled deforestation had destroyed the river: the boilers of the riverboats had consumed the thick forest of colossal trees” (331). I didn’t know what the environmental humanities were when I read this book in 1988 — but I now see love’s manic cost, and the bitter price of modernity, in those denuded riverbanks.

The power of quarantine: When Florentino and Fermina, illicit lovers at an embarrassingly old age, seek to conceal their affair from passengers who want to board the steamer, they hide themselves under the yellow flag of cholera. “The ship would be quarantined,” they conspire with the Captain, “it would hoist the yellow flag and sail in a state of emergency” (342). The novel plays throughout with the interchangeable symptoms of love and cholera: fever, isolation, misery. In the end love hides itself under fever’s flag.

Having arrived downriver, trying to conceal his false yellow flag from the harbormaster, the Captain snipes at Florentino: “And how long do you think we can keep up this goddam coming and going?” He describes a time of iteration, “coming and going,” step by step, moment to moment. It reminds me of today’s inside-time. What is our steamship’s destination?

The lover has his answer ready: “Forever” (348).

I can still dimly remember what it felt like to be 20-ish years old and reading for the first time that dazzling declaration. I remember shutting the book and rushing to stare out my window at that twentieth-century spring day. (I think I remember finishing the novel for the first time during a sunny afternoon, looking out my dorm room window at flowering trees. But maybe I’m imagining that?) The novel wears its lovesickness on its sleeve, and states outright on the last page that “it is life, more than death, that has no limits” (348). I feel that power still today.

But today, in the shadow of a new infection, with three more decades behind me and in unsettled times, I think also about the connection between Florentino’s ruthless love and the desecration of the riverbanks. I think about how counting the days, months, weeks might mean missing something about time’s river, and about other rivers. I think about Shakespeare, with whose works I was (briefly) bored as an undergrad: “Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending sickle’s compass come” (Sonnet 116). I think about multiple times crossing and mingling: Florentino’s calendar, the river’s downstream flow, the Captain’s “goddam coming and going,” today’s confined hours of corona-quarantine, the wayward and love-filled years that have passed beneath the keel of my own boat from then-student to now-professor. I think about times of cholera, of anger and fragility, about invisible forces in the air.

When I re-opened this novel after many years that it sat closed on bookshelves in different apartments and houses, I remembered the boat trip, and the incandescent final lines. What I’d forgotten about the close of the novel was the epistolary exchange. To re-start his courtship, after Fermina Daza’s judge-husband dies during an extraordinary scene involving a tree and a parrot (which really you might want to read for yourself), Florentino teaches himself to type so that he can correspond with Fermina without the evidence of handwriting. He builds or rebuilds love through one-finger typing, the mechanical muse of the modern writer.

I am thinking now about how we are writing today in covid isolation, as I read about Florentino’s old man’s love letters, laboriously typed on a machine he was just learning to use. I think about Thomas Pynchon, who was more or less in hiding from literary fame when he wrote that review in 1988, and who remains mostly hidden today, somewhere in virus-filled Manhattan, after having published a few more brilliant novels of his own. I am thinking about my students, separated in their homes and their disrupted lives, communicating with me through fingers-on-keyboard language and glitchy video-chat, making sense of poetry and catastrophe and Othello and literary theory though the awkward, hard to use, ungainly tools of language and time.

Writing opens the heart and the mind, in times of cholera and in this time of COVID-19.

Be well, everyone!

About halfway through the glorious romp of Ethan Lipton’s “Tumacho,” which I saw for the third time last Saturday night amid the drip, drip of quarantine notices and university closings, the beleaguered citizens of the “one horse town, where the horse broke down” ask for a little help. The town Doctor’s hands are covered in blood, the saloon is empty, the last living dog turns out to be a coyote, and an ancient demon-spirit of mayhem may have just taken over the body of the last decent person in town. They all sing together, in harmony —

We need a break,

Give us a break!

Simple stuff, but it sounded just right.

It’s not easy to put my finger on what I love so much about this play. I first saw it back in the summer of 2016 during its early workshop, at which point I deemed it a “hopalong Oresteia” that joked and sang against the gun-worship so central to ideas about the American West. That still seems right, and I might broaden my sense of the play now to suggest that the story of a town confronting its gunslinger demon might even parallel another revenge tragedy that does not believe in revenge that’s been playing in New York this month. (I guess the great Irish production of Hamlet starring Ruth Negga has just closed.)

Tumacho, unlike Hamlet, rolls out a joke a minute, interspersed with easy-listenin’ ballads and sentimental songs by a wondrously balanced cast including Hamilton-star Phillipa Soo in the lead role as Catalina Vucovich-Rio Lobos, a female gunfighter who transforms herself from revenge-seeker to village redeemer, with a few other stops along the way. The songs bring out Ethan Lipton’s distinctive combination of goofy earnestness and emotional heft. When Catalina faces a gunfighter whose son she has accidentally shot, his warbling song confronts her with half-baby talk, half profundity:

Rub your tummy

Pat your head,

There can be no justice for the dead.

I’ve been watching Ethan Lipton’s plays and songs since the 1990s, when he was part of a theater troupe in Los Angeles with my brother in law. More recently in New York, his No Place to Go and The Outer Space have been among my favorite things to see at Joe’s Pub. “Tumacho” shifts the genre from lounge-singer fantasia to a sendup of Western tropes and cowboy tunes. I don’t think I was the only old guy in the audience who hummed along with Marty Robbins’s Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs when it played over the sound system as we too our seats!

Art’s hard in the best of times, to say nothing of today’s anxiety-inducing world of viral infections and institutional fragility. “Tumacho” sings out, in one of our nation’s basic idioms, a song of solidarity, humor, loss, and unexpected joy. These are good things to remember in viral times.

Go see it during the next two weeks, even if we’re supposed to stay away from large gatherings. The Connelly Theater on Avenue B is cozy and not too crowded. Plus the patrons don’t seem to mind if you work your way all the way through the “Out, damned spot” speech while washing your hands!

Two more weeks!

[Guest Post from Douglas Clark]

[Written on a non-striking day from the United Kingdom]

Steve and Nicholas asked the participants of the ‘Watery Thinking’ seminar to explore the role that water ‘as a metaphor and feature of the environment’ took in early modern representations of cognition.[1] This stimulus offered an opportunity for the group to blend together scholarship from cognitive studies and the blue, or oceanic, humanities, to refine or perhaps redefine our understanding of period’s literature. Lyn Tribble’s previous blog post encouraged us as a group to reflect on the staging of immersion in early modern drama, and the broader interplay of ‘imagination, physiology, skill and affect’ in literary ‘waterscapes’.[2] The papers in the ‘Fluid Cognition’ sub-group address the presence of hydrological thinking in early modern historical writing and the dramatic presentation of watery ‘perturbations of the minde’ in Shakespeare’s canon.[3] 

Andrew Brown’s paper on ‘Memory, Loss, and Infrastructural Thinking in Early Modern Texts’ examines John Stow’s Survey of London (1598) and Marc Lescarbot’s Histoire de la Nouvelle-France (1609). Brown neatly demonstrates how the ‘extraction and management’ (page 2) of water is used in these texts to memorialise London’s past, and to frame the interaction between French colonists and their attempted mastery over the environment of Nova Scotia. Fresh emphasis is placed on the role that subterranean waterflows take as active agents in the reformation of London’s environment, in addition to the potential connections that may be made between the ‘aquatic entertainment[s]’ (page 8) produced in early seventeenth-century London and the French colony of Port-Royal. Attending to the shifting flow of waters in England and the new world may illuminate how key ‘infrastructural thinking’ (page 11) was to the early modern civic and colonial imagination. Taking Brown’s thesis into account, I wonder what further work needs to be done to address the importance of hydrological thinking in early modern European historiography and literature. Brown’s work opens up some exciting routes for future research to take.

Benjamin Bertram’s paper, on the other hand, addresses a classic problem associated with character studies of early modern drama: how should we approach claims for the presence of psychological realism in Shakespeare’s canon, and what place should the pursuit of identifying the genesis of “authentic” modes of subjectivity take in the field’s development? Bertram places emphasis on the humoral and elemental construction of Richard of Gloucester’s dramatic subjectivity through the Henry VI plays and Richard III, with the aim to ‘rethink the human-centered narratives of Richard’s development’ (page 12) in line with an ecological understanding of emotional turmoil. Combining Bertram’s approach with the scholarship already completed on grief, anger, and emotional affect could be profitable.[4] Bertram’s stimulating reappraisal of Richard’s psychogenesis also chimes well with the resurgence of critical interest in character studies, and the difficulties associated with appraising the psychological complexity of dramatic personae.[5] Bertram’s work shows how the artifice of interiority presented in dramatic works may be further understood by attending to the liquid imagery associated with the presentation of self-knowledge.

My own paper addresses the terms that we use, and that early modern writers used, to describe and define mental activity. I suggest that we may re-orientate the way we understand the texts of the period by attending to the definition that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers made between cogitation and cognition. Take John Florio’s entry for these terms in his A World of Wordes (1598) for instance: ‘Cogitatione, musing, thinking,cogitation … Cognitione, an acknowledgement, a recognison.’[6] This kind of distinction between ‘cogitation’ as ‘thinking’ and ‘cognition’ as the ‘recognison’ of knowledge is found in a range of early modern works. My paper attends to the place that concepts of cogitation take in early modern philological and philosophical texts, as a way to appraise incidents of mental disturbance and mind travel that centre around watery environments in Cymbeline and Merchant of Venice. Ultimately, I query what new directions may we take in our examination of the history of the mind by examining the cogitative principles of early modern writing.

All three papers in this sub-group address the preoccupation that early modern texts had with mental, corporeal, and environment disturbances caused by the flow and flux of water. I hope that this group’s efforts help the seminar as a whole to think more fluidly about the place that watery modes of cognition took in the literature of the period.

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[1] See the entry for Seminar 58: http://www.shakespeareassociation.org/annual-meetings/seminars-and-workshops-2/.

[2] See ‘Watery Thinking 2: Submersive Tendencies’: https://stevementz.com/watery-thinking-2-submersive-tendencies/.

[3] James Perrott, The First Part of the Consideration of Humane Condition (Oxford: 1600), sig. G3^v.

[4] See: Elizabeth Hodgson, Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Gwynne Kennedy, Just Anger: Representing Women’s Anger in Early Modern England (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000); Erin Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy: Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Jennifer C. Vaught, Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008).

[5] Nicholas R. Helms, Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare’s Characters (London: Palgrave, 2019); Jelena Marelj, Shakespearean Character: Language in Performance (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).

[6] John Florio, A VVorlde of Wordes (London, 1598), sig. G2^v.

Watching an oft-staged play like Hamlet for the nth time often carries a sense of being, as the not-penitent King says, “to double business bound,” since I’m often half a line ahead in my imagination. Sometimes a familiar line breaks through, as when Ruth Negga’s electric, energized, antic Hamlet sang out above a newly-dug grave,

I loved Ophelia!

Her cry started me counting under my mind’s breath, how many brothers was it that Hamlet exceeds with his love? Five hundred? Ten thousand? Or was it —

Forty thousand brothers / Could not with all their quantity of love / Make up my sum!

That seemed about right. Hamlet beats Laertes, played by Gavin Drea in an Irish production that arrived in Brooklyn from the Gate Theater of Dublin, by about 40,000. That’s pretty much how I felt about Ruth Negga’s coiled-spring performance. Diminutive and mobile, one of two dark-skinned actors (along with Steve Hartland as the Ghost) amid a pale Hibernian cast, Negga was at her best when she was antic and overflowing, dancing around her shocked mother in the closet scene, extending a kiss with an embarrassed Ophelia when almost sitting on her lap right behind me in the audience before they watched the Mousetrap, nimbly fencing in one of least exhausted stagings I’ve seen of the closing bloodbath. I gobbled up her performance of the soliloquies a bit less eagerly, because her Hamlet seemed uncharacteristically social and eager to reach others, from the Ghost he followed in act 1 to the false friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Director Yael Farber’s decision to stage the first soliloquy — “O that this too-too solid flesh…” — to Ophelia rather than alone on stage was odd, and it made Hamlet’s self-revulsion feel performative more than sincere. But in thinking about it now, I wonder if this Hamlet might just be less solitary than most versions of the role. Plus I’m not sure this play believes in sincerity very much.

In addition to Negga’s stage charisma, another reason this Hamlet might feel more connected may have been the range and power of Aoife Duffin’s Ophelia. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this role played with more force, from the lingering kiss she planted on Hamlet before his first soliloquy, to her heart-wrenching songs, the lines of which she mostly spoke after a musical rendition from an off-stage performer, to the knowing smirks with which she managed her brother and father in the opening act. Ophelia’s tragedy seldom finds as much room for itself as Duffin claimed for her in this production. Even though she ends up drowned and buried, this performance made me wonder about an Elsinore initially disrupted as much by the counselor’s powerful daughter who isn’t willing to accept her place as servant, as by the better-known melancholic prince.

It doubtless shows my age that I continue to appreciate a straight-backed Polonius, played by Nick Dunning as more master of courtly intrigue than foppish father — though his children do roll their eyes as they repeat along with him, “to thine own self be true” in act 1.

The royal couple itself felt a bit weaker to me, or at least less dramatically interesting than they can be. Owen Roe’s stout Claudius wore a faux-Fascist military uniform, which seemed off since I think of Old Hamlet as the warrior among the brothers. Fiona Bell’s Gertrude held her cards close with her brother-husband, then turned toward Hamlet’s side in the second half of the play, but mostly without claiming much emotional investment, from me at least.

But that’s probably because in this Hamlet I was as engaged as I’ve ever been by the young lovers, and the brutality of their separation by politics, revenge, and the prince’s choice to heed dead voices rather than living ones. I’ll remember Negga’s Hamlet for a series of brilliant exchanges, hamming it up with the Players, teasing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with the recorder, holding Horatio to his “heart’s core.” But when Ophelia first kissed him and he responded with the extended poetry that includes “Frailty, thy name is woman” it seemed clear that the prince who can reach everyone has lost track, at least until he out-faced Laertes at her grave, of the one figure who might have matched him.

I think all the rest of the performances through March 8 are sold out — but if you’re near the Brooklyn waterfront, it might be worth checking for cancellations!

It may be that the warm glow I felt in the Belasco Theatre listening to “Idiot Wind” transformed into a love ballad, “Duquesne Whistle” as a show tune, and “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” as chorus-backed hootenanny comes from my own many years of confirmed Dylan-o-mania, or maybe from knowing all the songs, or perhaps even from my eagerness to welcome the gorgeous new voices that subbed in for Bob’s old man growl. But really — it was just lovely to hear.

Written and directed by Conor McPherson, the musical “Girl from the North Country” drafts twenty-one songs out of the Dylan catalog, from “Like a Rolling Stone” (1965), re-sung as a dirge, to “Duquesne Whistle” (2012). The selection is heavier from 70s-Bob than one might expect: it opens with two slow numbers from 1970’s New Morning, “Sign on the Window” and “Went to See the Gypsy,” and includes both the title number from Slow Train Coming (1979) and, somewhat oddly, three from 1978’s Street Legal: “True Love Tends to Forget,” which was an absolute show-stopper and maybe the most unexpectedly wrenching song of the night, “Is Your Love in Vain,” and “Senor (Tales of Yankee Power).”

The songs graft themselves onto an overflow of stories set in a 1930s boarding house whose owners, as well as its residents, present the full Dylan carnival: a slippery-tongued preacher, boxing ex-con, family with a damaged adult son with a secret, wise old town doctor, &c. Many stories circulate and overlap, but most of the night’s pleasure was watching how each riff would set up another song. Mostly the turns were unexpected, which was nice.

Top singing marks go to Broadway veteran Jeanette Bayardelle, who also belted out “Pressing On” as an encore, though the whole cast was excellent. The most compelling character in the story was Elizabeth Laine, played by Mare Winningham, the owner’s wife whose long standing mental instability represents just one of many crises in the boardinghouse while also making possible a lively, random, surprising performance, including the throw-away unsung non sequitur, “God said to Abraham, kill me a son.”

I’m not sure the story will stay with me. But if you, like me, have been living with and loving these songs for a long time, it’s worth paying Broadway prices to sit in a happy dark room and let them wash over you in new voices and arrangements.

Still in previews, which means it should be belting out gospel Bob and crooning the love songs through the summer!

One of our four paper-groups for “Watery Thinking” will explore the perils and possibilities of staging immersion. Lyn Tribble’s essay provides a helpful overview of the “dramaturgy of immersion”:

In Shipwreck Modernity, Steve Mentz writes that “wet representations emphasize the shock of immersion and its threat to human understanding and survival.” On the early modern stage, the  dramaturgy of immersion is complex because it cannot usually be directly staged. Thomas Heywood, naturally, is one of the few exceptions to this general rule; in The Brazen Age, he stages Hercules fording a river to save a nymph from the centaur Nessus. More often, immersion is either narrated by a character or a chorus or is represented through an off-stage on-stage transaction, an exchange between spaces, or as Lowell Duckert has noted,  ‘a before and after’ (5).  Many wet plays draw from the romance tradition, marked by a narrated or implied offstage shipwreck and subsequent rescue or rescues. Heywood’s The Four Prentices of London presents no less than four such moments in the aftermath of a shipwreck of the brothers:  their boats “split on strange rockes, and they enforc’t to swim to  /  Save their desperate lives.”  The brothers are each rescued at  “seueral corners of the world.”  Godfrey enters “as newly landed and half naked” in Bologne and helps to deliver the city from the Spaniards.  Guy attracts the attention of the King of France and his daughter, who watch him come ashore on a raft and realize that although he is “basely clad” he has “sparks of honor in his eye.” The stage direction reads “Enter the King of France, and his daughter walking: to them Guy all wet. The Lady entreateth her father for his entertainement: which is granted; and rich cloathes are put about him: & so Exeunt.Charles enters “all wet with his sword” and becomes the captain of a group of Italian banditti, while Eustace fetches up on the shore of Ireland. Eastward Hoe parodies such a scene, when Slitgut narrates from ‘above’ the fortunes of a set of drunken characters who struggle to shore off the Thames after their boats are capsized. The dynamic of a ‘wet’ character rescued on land and afforded with clothing is also featured in Pericles, in which the titular character enters wet and is furnished with a cloak by passing fishermen (who shortly fish up his armour in a net).  So the romance dynamic of staged wetness involves the entry of a victim, ‘naked,’ half-naked or ‘basely clad,’ and a rescue that takes the character out of the watery margins and affords him with dry clothes or a cloak that reintegrates him into the dry world of the stage.

But immersion is not only a feature of the romance tradition; some characters are submerged in the everyday wetscapes of early modern England. Dunking is inherent comic and inherently humiliating. If being shipwrecked in the ocean in romantic, falling into a ditch or a pond or a lake — or ditch running by the Thames near Windsor — is a form of comic retribution.  Such a fate befalls Cuddy in The Witch of Edmonton, who is lured by an evil spirit into a dark watery landscape and nearly drowns, as the title page of the play shows:

Cuddy’s misadventure is a reminder of the grim statistics around drowning in early modern England. Drowning was one of the chief hazards of everyday life, accounting for up to half of all accidental deaths. Some drowned at sea or while pursuing occupations on the river, but many more died in more quotidian landscapes. Water was everywhere: water pits for household use, ditches, streams, standing water from rain, rivers. In Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London, Craig Spence argues that despite the prevalence of drowning, “little attention was paid to those who suffered such a fate on an individual basis . . . .Perhaps a more difficult issue for early modern mentalities, and one that may go some way to explain this omission of cultural recognition, was the character of drowning as at once irreversible but also unavoidable.”

Conversation around this group of papers will help us explore what Tribble describes as the “physiology of immersion” and the “nexus of imagination, physiology, skill and affect” in the waterscapes of early modern England. 

For more fun with watery dramaturgy, here’s a great blog post about back-stage possibilities for the opening scene of The Tempest, from Hester Lees-Jeffries.

Marina Zurkow’s art explores the oceanic pressures and distortions that have become tangible in our age of climate disruption and global capitalism. She draws on the ideas many of the same scholars and thinkers that I do, including Phil Steinberg and Kimberly Peters’ great essay “Wet Ontologies” and the works of Stacy Alaimo, Una Chaudhuri, Stefan Helmreich, and many others. I contributed to Marina’s More & More project in 2016, and she contributed to my Oceanic New York in 2015.

For all those reasons I was especially excited to see her new gallery show, Wet Logic, produced in collaboration with Sarah Rothberg, at bitforms gallery on the Lower East Side Thursday. It was stranger and more lingering that I had thought it would be. I’m still processing it, and I’m hoping to go back. How can we live in this world of broken and overflowing oceans? I glimpsed some parts of some answers that afternoon.

One of my favorite things about this show is how little it relies on language. I’m word-obsessed and mostly live inside phrases, syntax, and other linguistic genre-systems. A visual show like this one can be difficult for me to access or engage with — but that’s the fun part. It’s helpful to be pushed away from the tools I usually use.

The first element of the show is Zurkow’s Accretions, reprised from 2016. These silk-screens on cardboard boxes represent, =”propositions for sculptural masses,” or perhaps resonant objects from our present or future. Each cardboard square has one or several four-digit codes stamped onto it, which refer to the Harmonized System of the More & More project.

Toilet Joke 1, a collaboration between Zurkow and Rothberg in 2020, shows a toilet overflowing with plastic pellets in which float a cracked iphone, playing a video of the surf: “the ocean virtualized.” Invitation to a slow-moving future?

I wasn’t able to fit the virtual reality goggles onto my too-big cranium, so I can’t describe Sarah Rothberg’s Water without Wet — but maybe some commentary will be forthcoming.

The heart of the exhibition features six screens of different sizes cycling through Zurkow’s Oceans Like Us animations. Overflowing with shapes and figures that include humans, mermaids, jellyfish, kelp, dancing otters, “nervous squiggles” and many more, these video animations — Zurkow titles them “Love Me,” “Milkcrate Plastisphere” and “Bow Null” — present an alien, enticing, startling, and deeply disorienting ocean. Sitting amid the screens feels like swimming in the ocean, in that it overloads the senses, pushes against the imagination, and leaves you unknowing but inspired.

I spent my time immersed in the screens thinking many different things, often about water’s polarity and its capacity to serve as “universal solvent,” the fluid that renders all things into their pieces. Oil and plastic appeared to displace the fishes and humans from their spaces at the centers of the ocean-screen. Mechanical images cross-hatched coral and plant life. Can the ocean be big enough — harmonized enough — to contain all these things? (In the front room of the gallery, the clogged and overflowing toilet joke kept its unmoving answer.)

The last piece in the show, Study for Toilet Joke II, also produced jointly by Zurkow and Rothberg, features a whirlpool eddy “suspended in an infinite flush,” inside a goldfish bowl. Its wet motion frames the plastic stillness and virtuality of Toilet Joke I on the other side of the gallery. Which future is our future? The neverending flush or the plastic stasis? Both, maybe?

I’m hoping to get back for more immersion in the screen-oceans. You should too! Get down to Allen St before it closes on March 15!

What is Shakespeare for?

The question rattled around in my imagination last week as I was teaching for the first time Carlyle Brown’s 1989 play, “The African Company Presents Richard III.” Watching the play with students on Friday night at the Queens Theater intensified the conundrum. What is Shakespeare anyway?

In class in the morning, we’d talked about two competing but perhaps not contraditory ideas in Brown’s play:

• that Shakespeare’s plays can be performed and embraced from many perspectives besides the one in which they were first written
• that many other kinds of literature besides Shakespeare have claims on our attention, our stages, and our ideas of what literature has been or should be

Those two ideas swirled through Titan Theatre Company’s forceful and compelling production in a tiny theater near the World’s Fair site in Queens. I loved the show, and I kept trying to reconcile those two strains in it: the evident love of Shakespeare, and the equally strong — or perhaps stronger? — desire to write an independent history for African-American theater.

The play re-stages the history of the African Company, founded by Billy Brown in 1820s New York. The story explores a night when their “Black Richard” was attempted to be played opposite Stephen Price’s Park Theater production of Richard III, starring distinguished English actor Junius Brutus Booth. (That famous actor was also, although this detail goes unmentioned in the play, the father of John Wilkes Booth, another Shakespearean actor who was also Abraham Lincoln’s assassin. The three Booth brothers, John Wilkes, Edwin, and Junius Brutus, Jr., famously appeared in a production of Julius Caesar in Central Park in 1864, playing the roles of Mark Antony, Brutus, and Cassius respectively. A year later John Wilkes shot President Lincoln. Shakespeare and white supremacist violence are often much closer to each other than we who earn our paychecks teaching the plays might wish.)

The modern play features a love story between Jimmy Hewlett, who plays Richard, and Ann, who plays Lady Anne. Darius Aushay presents a charismatic and compelling Jimmy-Richard, sliding in and out of the King’s character with a hunch of his shoulder. But Psacoya Guinn’s Ann was the scene stealer: composed, powerful, and with a keen stage presence, she performed her struggle with the part of Lady Ann — “I cannot be such a slack woman as this Lady Ann,” she tells Jimmy — in a way that undergirded the play’s larger struggle with the Shakespearean overplot. Why should she have to submit to the evil, manipulative King? Jimmy explains that everyone play-acts, that “This Ann, she ain’t no different from Lady Ann” — but partly through Guinn’s powerful performance, I could not help but feel that she had the better argument.

Another key character who jumped off the page to the stage was Papa Shakespeare, a formerly enslaved African who’d also live in the islands before he traveled to New York with Billy Brown in somewhat unclear circumstances. Papa Shakespeare, played with Falstaffian gusto by Anthony Michael Stokes, carries a drum and interweaves his own Afro-Caribbean musicality with his roles on stage (he plays Catesby in Richard III) and his sense of what Shakespeare means. He knows that his master in the islands “call me Shakespeare so to mock me,” but he also asserts that “If Shakespeare was a black man, he would be a Griot,” a traveling poet-performing in West African cultures.

Papa Shakespeare loves Shakespeare but also transforms him. Billy Brown’s intentions aren’t always clear. Jimmy insists that Billy wants to co-opt Shakespeare and Jimmy’s performance as Richard III for his “great Negro revolt.” Jimmy’s not sure what he wants. “I get to be loved and to be accepted,” he says to Billy Brown — but he’s also playing an evil king, even if it is one one of Shakespeare’s iconic roles. It’s not always clear what Jimmy’s Black Richard represents: rebellion against artistic limitations? an effort to connect with classical theater from the perspective of a formerly enslaved person? the more personal drama and exchange between Jimmy and Ann? All those things at once?

The African Company’s production of Richard III ends up with the five actors in the Eldridge Street jail, but the modern play finds a new role for Jimmy. “The Drama of King Shotaway” is a now-lost play written by Billy Brown about an Afro-Carib revolution on St. Vincent in the 1790s, possibly witnessed by the historical Billy Brown, staged by the African Company in the 1820s. The play closes with Jimmy finding in these lines an even more regal voice than he’d had when performing Shakespeare:

Restore yourselves, your wives and your children to the inheritance of your ancestors, who inspire your fury and who show you the way. These marvelous, struggling spirits who suffered to you the air you breath; who knit time for you to walk on; who give you stars to cover your body.

Next week in class we’ll go back to Shakespeare, finishing up Timon of Athens before turning to King Richard III. I can’t teach King Shotaway because there’s no extant copy. But I look forward to talking with my students about the ways that the plays we have can imagine themselves into conversation with plays we’ve lost, and those we do not know we’ve lost.

“The African Company Presents Richard III” has a short run and closes Sun Feb 9. Get there if you can!