Merry Christmas, Mr. McNabby!

This year, the restaurant where I work will be open on Christmas Day. I just so happen to have near-perfect recall of "The Muppet Christmas Carol," and recently when I was imagining myself heading off to work at 9:30 on Christmas morning in my coat and booties while nearly everyone else leans back with a Bloody Mary and stretches a woolened toe towards the television to switch on the Yule Log, this bit of dialog sprang into my mind. The place: the firm of Scrooge and Marley (or, for muppet purposes, Scrooge and Marley and Marley). The players: Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit, Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge, rat rabble as book-keepers. The time: late on Christmas Eve.

Scrooge: Be here at eight o' clock tomorrow morning.

(muttering from book-keepers)

Cratchit: (hesitantly) But...tomorrow's Christmas, sir.

Scrooge: Eight-thirty, then.

(insistent muttering from book-keepers)

Cratchit: If you please, Mr. Scrooge, half an hour off hardly seems customary for Christmas Day.

Scrooge: How much time off is customary, Mr. Cratchit?

Cratchit: Well--the whole day.

(mutterings of approval)

Scrooge: (shocked) The entire day?

(mutterings of consternation, disapproval: the frog's crazy, it was the frog's idea)

Cratchit: If you please, Mr. Scrooge, other businesses will be closed. You'll have no one to do business with!

Scrooge: It's a poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every December the 25th. (Heavy pause--little rat hearts sinking) But as I seem to be the only person round here who knows that, take the day off.


I'm not saying anything remotely negative or actionable about the proprietor of this fine eating establishment. I'm merely saying that, when a person ruins Christmas through his own greed, that person is sometimes called "Scrooge." So what to call someone when they're, um, worse than Scrooge? It's a Christmas riddle.

There's still hope though--maybe a spiritual visitation? Or maybe Saint Nick, who I have to believe loves all children (even those who are twenty-five and single and living in Brooklyn far from their parents) will bring us a blizzard and no one will go out to eat. My Christmas wish is for the world to grind to a slow and gentle halt, like it's supposed to. Wars: pause! Businesses: shutter! People: stay in. Me, I think I'll get through the day by humming this little ditty. Merry Christmas, and God bless us every one.

Recursion, and also how fun it is to destroy the meaning of a word by repeating it.

On my bike a few days ago (surely the last time I'll ride in this cold) I was thinking about thought,* and then thinking about how I was thinking about thinking, and then I thought: you can only get about two iterations out (thinking about thinking about thinking) before you're not really thinking about anything, because all you're thinking is, "I'm thinking about thinking about thinking." Unless you have the thought that you're not really thinking anything when you think about thinking about thinking, which is actually a thought about thinking about thinking about thinking.

I think.

*thinking about thinking happens naturally. For example when Hamlet says, "Haste me to know't that I with wings as swift/ as meditation or the thoughts of love/ may sweep to my revenge," he expresses a thought about thinking, i.e. it's pretty swift.

Adventures in Amateur Translation, Part II

The most controversial word that Lorca uses in the "Oda" is "marica," which is closest to "fairy" in English and which Carlos Bauer translates as "faggot." The Ode's voice is a puzzle--a gay poet reaching across half a century to address another gay poet, only to bitterly accuse an amorphous mass of pansies of some vaguely awful sins.* The maricas first appear in stanza nine, "on the rooftops, / huddled in the bars, / coming up in gangs from the sewers, / trembling between the legs of chauffeurs / or spinning on the ramparts of absinthe, / the fags, Walt Whitman, are pointing at you." Why do they point? There's something accusatory, and threatening, and also something of the supplicant in that gesture, like Adam stretching out his hand on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Do they want to claim Walt Whitman as their own, when in reality he doesn't belong to them? And if not to them, then who?

What is "Walt Whitman" to Lorca, and what are "maricas"? Walt Whitman is sensual and elemental. He is the "Adan de sangre," he is alone on the seas, he is all man. But his sensuality has nothing in it of excess or debauch. He is the "enemy of the satyr, / enemy of the vine." His thighs are the thighs of a virginal Apollo. In spite of his supposed sensuality, there's something cold and rational about Lorca's Walt Whitman; he's more of a marble statue than a warm-blooded Adam. The maricas, by contrast, wallow in the muck of a Dionysian swamp, gyrating in a perpetual orgy. They will be buried alive in a bacchanal. They are incoherent; like cats and like serpents, they throw upon Walt Whitman's luminous beard "a multitude of cries and gestures." They are a hot mess.

In his introduction, Bauer writes that Lorca was preoccupied with something called "the homosexual question" (which one is that, now?) at the time of writing. He goes on to say, "What a few critics claim to be his ambivalence about homosexual love in Ode to Walt Whitman is rather a firm call for--or a return to--an all-encompassing pansexualism." He quotes Palo Umbral: "When homosexuality is locked up behind doors and concealed within the society that proscribes it, it then turns into something clandestine and sinful. It loses its grandeur, it becomes degraded."

I simply don't understand how Umbral can claim that Lorca deplores clandestine homosexuality in this poem. In fact, the only forms of love that "Oda a Walt Whitman" elevates are clandestine and even full of shame: "the boy who writes / a girl's name on his pillow, / ...the youth who dresses up like a bride / in the darkness of his closet / ...the men of the green gaze / who love other men and whose lips burn in silence." It seems that what really bothers Lorca about the "faggots of the cities" is that they practice homosexuality openly, that their true sexuality is a part of the identity they present to society, and that they are more or less accepted for it. Lorca deplores the gay scene he witnesses in New York because he thinks that practicing homosexuality openly robs it of all its romance and purity. When men can only love one another in secret, their sexuality retains its integrity, its complete otherness. Closeted gay men in Spain in the 1930s were non-participants in society--their real lives existed only at the margins, in dark spaces where enforcement couldn't penetrate. They were sexual conscientious objectors. They were cut off and guiltless.

In the America that Lorca portrays in his poem--a capitalist nightmare of mud, wire, and death where pulleys churn up the skies and a dance of walls will soon destroy the prairies--gay men living openly in the cities have bought in. They've assimilated, and what is for Lorca something pure and sustaining seems to have been perverted into a wearisome, endless orgy. He has a point--acceptance has its price, and who doesn't get off on forbidden love?--but his exaltation of secrecy and silence is also a longing for annihilation, and I think it's impossible not to perceive a note of self-loathing when Lorca writes, ""faggots of the cities / swollen flesh and filthy thoughts. / Mothers of lust. Harpies. Tireless enemies / of the love that bestows crowns of joy."

It's because I think that the poem's address is not only outward, but inward, that I've translated "marica" as "fag," where Bauer uses "faggot." While faggot is a word that straight men direct at gay men (and at each other), "fag" is a word that gay men use--sometimes playfully, sometimes derisively--among themselves. When straight men use the word faggot they are taking aim directly at homosexuality (and indirectly at women), but when gay men use the word "fag" in a negative way it means something else, something closer to "slave" or "bitch." It carries an implicit criticism, an anxiety--stop making the rest of us look bad. Stop being such a fag. It's a complicated word, like Lorca's attitude in this poem--it doesn't have the direct brutality of faggot and its meaning shifts depending on context. Bauer's translation was published in 1988; a faggothetical exegesis of the type that would be able to say with confidence that "faggot" and "fag" were used the same way 20 years ago is totally beyond me. I can only avow that the way the word hits me in Bauer's Ode accords with his notion that Lorca was criticizing, not homosexuality in general, but "socially proscribed homosexuality." The "I" of Bauer's poem is on the outside looking in, is essentially living as a straight man. I hope that, by addressing "the fags" in my version and not "the faggots," I've conveyed a more turbulent, conflicted Lorca, both crying out against capitalism and industry and tormented by self-loathing, by an Apollonian ideal of silence and restraint that's killing him.


*I don't believe that the the "I" in the poem can be ironically distanced from Lorca. Not that the "I" is Lorca, because that would be silly, but that the poem was written in the sincerity of a mood or a moment--it's not the studied performance of someone else's point of view.

Ode to Walt Whitman

By the East River and the Bronx
the boys were singing, showing off their waists.
With the wheel, the oil, the leather and the hammer
ninety thousand miners hewed the silver from the rocks
and the boys drew stairways and perspectives.

But not one of them slept,
not one wanted to be a river,
not one loved the broad leaves,
not one, the blue tongue of the beach.

By the East River and the Queensborough
the boys struggled with industry,
and the Jews sold to the river faun
the rose of circumcision,
and the heavens emptied on the bridges and rooftops
herds of bison pushed about by the wind.

But not one of them delayed,
not one wanted to be a cloud,
not one looked for ferns
or for the yellow wheel of the drum.

When the moon comes out,
the pulleys will churn up the skies;
a fence of needles will encircle the memory
and coffins will carry away those who do not work.

Muddy New York,
New York of wire and death:
What angel do you carry hidden in your cheek?
What perfect voice will tell the truths of the wheat?
Who, the terrible dream of your stained anemones?

Not for a single moment, beautiful old Walt Whitman,
have I stopped seeing your beard full of butterflies,
nor your corduroy shoulders wasted by moonlight,
nor your thighs—like a virginal Apollo—
nor your voice like a column of ash;
ancient one, beautiful as the fog,
who keens just like a bird does
when his sex has been run through with a needle.
Enemy of the satyr.
Enemy of the vine,
and lover of bodies beneath coarse cloth.

Not for a single moment, my virile beauty,
who among mountains of coal, notices and streetcars,
dreamed of being a river and of sleeping like a river,
with that comrade who tucked into your chest
the minor pain of the ignorant leopard.

Not for a single moment, bloody Adam, big guy,
man alone in the sea, beautiful old Walt Whitman,
because on the rooftops,
huddled in the bars,
coming up in gangs from the sewers,
trembling between the legs of chauffeurs
or spinning on the ramparts of absinthe,
the fags, Walt Whitman, are pointing at you.

Him too! And him! They throw
upon your chaste and luminous beard—
Northern blondes, desert blacks—
a multitude of cries and gestures,
like cats and like serpents,
the fags, Walt Whitman, the fags,
muddled with tears, flesh for the crop,
boot or bite of the overseers.

Him too! And him! Stained fingers
poke at the borders of your dream
when your friend eats the apple
that tastes slightly of gasoline,
and the sun sings on the navels
of the boys who play beneath bridges.

But you didn't seek the torn-out eyes,
nor the dark swamp where they drown young boys,
nor the frozen saliva,
nor the wounded curves like toads' bellies
that the fags bring with them in cars and on terraces
as the moon beats them back through the corners of terror.

You searched for a nude who would be like a river.
Bull and dream that joins the wheel to the algae,
father of your agony, camelia of your death,
who would howl in the flames of your dark equator.

Because it's not fair for a man to seek his pleasure
in the bloody jungle of the morning after.
There are beaches in the sky where you can avoid life forever,
and there are bodies that should never be seen again at dawn.

Pain, pain, dream, tumult and dream.
This is the world, my friend: pain and pain.
The dead rot beneath the clock of the cities.
The war passes by weeping a million gray rats;
the rich give their girlfriends
tiny glowing invalids,
and life is not noble or sacred or good.

Man may, if he wants to, force his desire
through coral vein or heavenly nude;
tomorrow lovers will be rocks and Time
a breeze that comes sleepily among the branches.

Because of this, I don't raise my voice, old Walt Whitman,
against the boy who writes
a girl's name on his pillow,
nor against the youth who dresses up like a bride
in the darkness of his closet,
nor against the loners in the casinos
who gulp down prostitution with disgust,
nor against the men of the green gaze
who love other men and whose lips burn in silence.
But yes, against you, faggots of the cities,
swollen flesh and filthy thoughts.
Mothers of lust. Harpies. Tireless enemies
of the love that bestows crowns of joy.

I am always against you, who give to young men
drops of dirty death with bitter venom.
Against you forever,
“Fairies” of North America,
“Pajaros” of Havana,
“Jotos” of Mexico,
“Sarasas” of Cadiz,
“Apios” of Seville,
“Cancos” of Madrid,
“Floras” of Alicante,
“Adelaidas” of Portugal.

Faggots of the world, the assassins of doves!
Slaves of women. The handler's bitches.
Openly in the plazas, feverishly fanning yourselves,
or hidden in twisting pathways among the hemlock.

I'll give no quarter! Death
seeps from your eyes
and gathers gray flowers at the edges of the swamp.
No quarter! Be warned!
May the confused, the pure,
the classical ones, the marked ones, the pilgrims,
shut you up inside the bacchanal.

And you, beautiful Walt Whitman, sleep next to the Hudson
with your beard towards the Pole and your hands fallen open.
Smooth clay or snow, your tongue is calling
comrades to look after your bodiless gazelle.

Sleep: nothing remains.
A dance of walls stirs up the prairies
and America is drowned with machines and lamenting.
I wish the strong air of the deepest night
would pluck flowers and letters from the arch where you sleep,
and a black boy announce to the gold-covered whites
the coming reign of the wheat.

Adventures in Amateur Translation: Part I

As with many translated things, the original text of Lorca's “Ode to Walt Whitman,” appears on the left-hand page, while Carlos Bauer's corresponding English lines are printed on the right. When I read the poem in English, I kept a very casual eye on the Spanish text, since my Spanish is, lately, little more than casual (hell, my English is going the same way. I'd tell you about the absolutely ordinary English word that I couldn't remember yesterday, but I've forgotten it*). My understanding of Spanish isn't a sophisticated one. I can count the novels I've read in Spanish on one hand (one of them was about this unspeakable badass), let alone novels from Spain. Though I've read some Lorca, I'm not in touch with his literary burden.

I know a little something about English poetry. I know that "In a Station of the Metro" is the closest thing in the English language to a perfect image: a phrase so potent and evocative that reading it causes a violent existential shock. And despite my hobbled Spanish, I had a strong aesthetic reaction when I read the line, "gotas de sucia muerte con amargo veneno," and found that it had been translated as, "drop by drop, the bitter venom of a foul death." It seemed a wimpy and unnecessarily long-winded rendering of what should simply be "drops of dirty death with bitter venom." I wasn't offended on behalf of Lorca, or the "Oda." I was offended on behalf of the English poetry that I read through the Spanish words--the poetry that was the merest literal translation of what I had read, but which gave me escalofríos, cold stairs climbing up my spine.

Why did the translator, Carlos Bauer, forgo the relentless, rhythmic alliteration of "drops of dirty death?" By separating his drops from the death they bestow, Bauer suggests that the foul death is held in reserve and meted out drop by drop, as from a medicine bottle, and that this ministry is bitter venom. Perhaps he did it this way to eliminate the awkwardness of the hanging tag, "with bitter venom," which has an uncertain function in the more literal translation. The bitter venom is given alongside the drops of dirty death? It just sort of inevitably comes with it--combo number four, a side of bitter venom with your dirty death? Though that last bit may be vague and un-rigorous, I think it's made up for by the shape of the sounds, and by the elemental quality of the line. Dirty drops--like sooty rainwater, semen, or the swirl of blood in the syringe.

My strong feelings about this line prompted me to try to translate the whole poem with only conversational Spanish, an online Spanish-English dictionary, a Roget's Thesaurus, and a copy of Leaves of Grass. My translation is inferior, by several orders of magnitude, to Bauer's. It has a rushed, awkward, inconsistent quality. Overall, it doesn't hit its stride as a poem. But I was pleased with one or two lines, and the process brought up questions about the Oda and about translation in general which I found interesting--it's always fun to bump up against an opinion you didn't know you had. The poem itself is quite long, so I've posted it as a separate entry. The original is here. I wish I could provide you with a fair-use copy of Bauer's translation, but I just can't. It is heavily excerpted below.

I assumed that the literal, bare bones approach that I took with "gotas de sucia muerte" would inform my choices throughout the poem, but this was far from true. I had no consistent approach whatsoever, and my motivation for picking certain words or phrases over others changed from line to line. I was often swayed by the sounds of the words in English, and I was likely to overlook closeness of meaning in favor of verbal musicality. I had originally translated "manadas de bisontes" in the third stanza as "flocks of bison," before it occurred to me on a re-read that bison do not fly. I was tempted to leave it, since the bison in question descend from the sky, but I felt it would likely be perceived as a mistake.

I also saw that it would be necessary to alter the punctuation of the lines--English doesn't have the same capacity as Spanish to pile clause on clause. Sentences that are perfectly correct in Spanish are run-on in English when translated literally. Thus, "los muchachos cantaban enseñando sus cinturas" becomes "the boys were singing, showing off their waists." Mostly I just added a judicious comma here and there, but in one place I was moved to set off a phrase between two em dashes. Where Lorca writes, "tus muslos de Apolo virginal," and Bauer has "your thighs of a virginal Apollo," I decided to fuck with the very structure of the line and this is how I did it: "your thighs--like a virginal Apollo--".There's something more intimate about this clause as an aside, as if Lorca were moved to whisper it in a fit of reverence for Walt Whitman's thighs (and I relate to that).

So, a few places where I was especially pleased with my choices, and some places where I had to accept that Bauer had already gotten to the best possible phrasing. In stanza eight, I had originally translated carbón as graphite, because it sounded architectural and urban, but it didn't flow well, so I went back to coal. In stanza nine, I was excited to translate "Macho" as "Big Guy." I think it's best to avoid anachronisms when translating (so "mantastic" would have been inappropriate). But "Big Guy" is subtle enough, and besides, Walt Whitman is the Big Guy in American poetry. Where Lorca has "girando en las plataformas del ajenjo," I prefer "spinning on the ramparts of absinthe" to Bauer's "flitting about on the platforms of absinthe." But I found it difficult to find an English phrase that would satisfactorily encapsulate everything contained in Lorca's phrase, "os cierren las puertas de la bacanal." "Os" is the reflexive form of the pronoun vosotros (which basically means y'all), and "os cierren" implies that the action of "cerrar" (to close) is directed towards the y'all that Lorca is addressing (about whom more later). Not only are the gates of the bacchanal to be shut, or, more nearly, sealed, but they are to be shut on somebody, somebody is to be shut inside. In Spanish this is conveyed so simply and efficiently by adding the pronoun; I couldn't find an equally elegant formula in English. I grumpily settled for "shut you up inside the bacchanal" and looked to see what Bauer came up with: "slam the doors of the bacchanal in your faces." Pretty good.

The poem's fifth stanza is its most mysterious and harrowing. "Cuando la luna salga / las poleas rodarán para tumbar el cielo; / un límite de agujeros cercará la memoria / y los ataúdes se llevarán a los que no trabajan." Ataúd, which means coffin, is probably my favorite word in Spanish. It doesn't sound like other Spanish words; its origin is Arabic, but it lacks the give-away "al" prefix (almohada, alambre, alcatraz). It sounds like what it means--hollow and wooden, a dry scraping sound. I've translated the stanza like this: "When the moon comes out, / the pulleys will churn up the skies; / a fence of needles will encircle the memory / and coffins will carry away those who do not work." The Spanish verb "cercar" is a cognate of the English "encircle;" Bauer has "enclose," which is probably more like the sense of the word in Spanish, as the related word "acercar" means to draw near. I've chosen encircle because of its nearness to the sound of the Spanish verb, and because of the image of a hoop of needles, binding the skull like a crown of thorns, the points facing inwards.

To be continued (next time: Lorca and faggots).

*oh yeah: it was "palindrome."

Barnes & Noble Destroys Community; Community Strikes Back

Who knows what the proprietors of Barnes & Noble expected last summer when they announced that B & N bookstores would begin offering free wireless internet in their in-house coffee shops. On its website, under "Top 10 Reasons to Shop at Barnes & Noble," the corporation intones, "We have always wanted our stores to feel like home—a place where people can relax, explore and connect with ideas and each other at their leisure" (explore each other? In public?). What's happening is that Barnes & Noble is becoming less and less a place where people who have money go to buy books and lattes, and more and more a place where people with no money go when there's nowhere else to go. New Yorkers are turning the Big and Nasty--the name that makes independent booksellers quake in their boots--will-it-nil-it, into a public library. It's a bit like when you steamroll a patch of woodlands (eh, Cornell?), driving the green growing things deep underground. But a few root systems remain intact. Slowly they start putting up cautious little green shoots, spreading long, jagged cracks in the asphalt, and before you know it--in two, three hundred years--WHAM.

A library is basically a secular church. It's a sanctuary, a public space where anyone is welcome, no matter how they're dressed or how badly they smell or whether or not they have somewhere to live. As long as you behave in a way that conforms to the barest standards of civil decency, you can stay there all day and no one will throw you out. You have access to books, bathrooms, microfiles, the long tables with their clusters of studying patrons, newspapers and magazines, computers and wifi--and you don't have to buy anything to get that access. It's your birthright as a citizen of this fantastic country.

A coffee shop is a different beast. All you get at a coffee shop is a couple square feet of table space and maybe wifi, maybe for free. Restrooms are for customers only. If you want to use these resources, you're expected to patronize the shop--to buy, at minimum, a cup of tea. The tea at your elbow, in porcelain mug or lidded paper sippy cup, gives you permission to occupy the table, keeping it from the next ravenous tea-guzzling New Yorker whose pockets may be deeper than yours. But it doesn't give you permission to linger. Many coffee shops have signs asking customers not to hold tables--at The Grey Dog's Coffee by Union Square, an image of Smokey Bear warns, "Only you can prevent table hibernation." The irony is an attempt to laugh away the sign's menacing quality. Exactly how much does non-consumption time cost? Most places don't have this exactly calibrated--Aroma Espresso Bar in SoHo does. Each item you buy, rounding out to about 2.50 a pop for pastries and espresso drinks, comes with a pin number which allows you to use the cafe's wireless for half an hour.

The Barnes & Noble coffee shop represents some kind of misty conceptual Niflheim in between. Signs politely remind you that "This area of our cafe is reserved for cafe customers only." No one enforces them. I have a cup by my computer--who's to say whether it's full of piping hot liquid I just purchased, or empty because I bought a cup of tea two hours ago and have been here ever since? (pssst: it's the latter). As in a coffee shop, the tables are duet-sized, but there are so many of them (I count 64) that you feel anonymous, like you can get away with anything. Just like in a library, you may end up sharing your space with a stranger, because if all the tables are full someone will probably ask to sit with you (which doesn't always work out; one time in the Court St. B & N I asked an elderly lady if I could share her table, and she looked at me like I had offered to punch her grandchildren). One of the most important resources at any public library is the periodical room--a section that stocks newspapers and magazines so that you can be literate and cultured and up to date and still avoid parting with $250 a year for a subscription to Publisher's Weekly. At Barnes & Noble, the magazine racks are placed invitingly near the entrance to the cafe, and people will grab whatever it is--Cardigan Fancier's Monthly, The Journal of Alien Abductee Commentary, Crockpot Cookery for Manly Men--and take it right to their tables to read, by-passing the cashier in the process. When they walk away, will they bring those magazines, on whose pages they have left chocolatey thumb-prints, downstairs to pay for them? Hell no! They'll leave them on the table. A minute later, an attendant will swoop down with a cart and carry them off to be reshelved--just like in a library. The woman to my left has selected an impressive stack of books on physics and the philosophy of math. She's slowly paging through them, taking notes. A girl in a puffy coat has a half-dozen fashion magazines spread out across her table. Two 20-somethings are bending over a standardized test practice book. They are marking it up in pencil. Did they pay for it first? No one asks. Seven young men have pushed together three tables; their bible-study group meets here. The guy I've chosen to table-share with is reading The Game. No wonder this spot was open. Any minute now he's going to look up and say timidly, "That's a pretty goddamn hideous hat you have on."

How can Barnes & Noble countenance this kind of behavior? It's not even so much that the patrons might destroy the merchandise--it's that they are obviating the need to purchase it at all. Why buy books or magazines, when you can read them here for free in relative comfort? It seems to me that the stores stock less literature, and more puzzle books, board games, self-help manuals, and gifty crap, than they used to. Unfettered access to the materials goes up, and the quality and quantity of those materials goes down. I wouldn't be surprised if, in the next few years, books sold in the stores cease to figure significantly in the company's profits--everything will come from online sales and e-books. Whatever hit B & N might be taking in "book" sales is probably just a drop in the ocean.

So if you're going to buy a book--by which I mean paper pages, sewn into a binding--please do it at an independent bookstore. If you just want to read for a couple hours, please join me in ripping off Barnes and Noble. They can afford it.

Review: The Three Sisters

Longer version of a review I wrote for Show Business Weekly, appearing here by kind permission of the editor.*

The Three Sisters
by Anton Chekhov
directed by Jess Chayes
The Assembly Theatre Project
at the Red Room
85 E 4th St.

Artwork by Ethan Gould

Chekhov's The Three Sisters could be a blocking nightmare. The first two acts move between two rooms: a sitting room in the front, and a ballroom which can be seen behind the sitting room, with action often taking place in both rooms simultaneously. The Assembly Theatre Project is staging an inventive, lively, passionate Three Sisters which answers well both the demands of the play and the oddities of their performance space.

The stage at the Red Room is deeper than it is wide (really—it's like a stick of gum); there is some seating at the foot of the stage, but there are also seats disposed along its length, almost all the way to the upstage wall, interspersed here and there with prop chairs. Three television screens upstage, center, and downstage are hooked up to a hand-held video camera (video design by Edward Bauer and The Assembly). Throughout the play, the characters pick up the camera and film, zooming in on one another's faces, clowning around, handing it from person to person. Occasionally they point it at us, and we sit tense and blank, pretending to be furniture.

This device does something to leaven the dreary naturalism with which Chekhov is nearly always treated; after all, people never act less natural than when they're being filmed. It's also an elegant solution to the problem of the second room—when characters disappear into the “ballroom” (a tiny area backstage), the camera follows them, and the screens show us what's happening alongside whatever's going on in the sitting room. We can be in two places at once. The actors use the full length of the stage, striding up and down, conversing from opposite ends of a room, breaking up into little dyads and triads and clustering about tables and chairs. The staging and the television screens create multiple points of focus and intersecting lines of sight; there's always a lot to take in, but the effect is engaging and harmonious. The side chairs are probably the best seats in the house at Three Sisters, since this geometry would be more or less flattened if viewed from the “front.”

The production has other ways of involving us besides capturing us on film. As the audience trickles in, the titular three sisters are already ranged about the stage, and we must walk past them to get to our seats. Richard Foreman's Idiot Savant continued after we left; The Assembly's Three Sisters started before we got there. The play opens with the eldest sister, Olga (Kate MacCluggage), remembering how their father died exactly one year ago, leaving them a rambling house in the provinces, their out-of-place educations and each other. Irina (Emily Perkins), the youngest, is quick and vital; she is determined to work, and orders Chebutykin (Chris Hurt), the elderly army doctor who dotes on the girls, not to be her friend any longer if she grows lazy. Masha (Kate Benson), the brooding middle child, shocks everyone by wearing black and saying what's on her mind. Their brother Andrei (Ben Beckley) will soon betray them (spiritually, intellectually) by marrying the low-minded, house-proud Natasha (Alley Scott), and their only pastime is entertaining some local officers. Their get-togethers have something of the festive, unrestrained quality of an evening with the March sisters in Little Women, but we're never sure if the caustic remarks conceal deep-rooted affection, or if the affectionate gestures conceal simmering contempt. The officers, educated and well-bred, are a cut above the townsfolk, but they're also an energy drain, and they can't seem to stop declaring their love for Irina. Eventually—in six months, in a year—the sisters will tie up their loose ends in town and return to Moscow, and the present will fade a bad dream.

As Masha, Kate Benson doesn't pull any punches. She's hectic and shrill, alienating and weird. Her laughter is shocking and unprovoked. Her rhetoric flies wildly about, striking anyone who gets in its way. She's not graceful or charming: she's an intelligent woman chafing at the confines of an impossible life. There seems to always be a Masha with Chekhov; he likes to dress her all in black and marry her off to a well-intentioned but buffoonish schoolteacher. At least in Three Sisters, unlike The Seagull, Masha gets her man—the romantic, philosophizing Vershinin. As Vershinin, Levi Morger is open and appealing, a pleasure to watch every moment. Just as the sisters dream of what their life will be like in a few months, Vershinin dreams of what the human race will be like in two or three hundred years, how sublime and perfected life will be (indeed, “two or three hundred years” becomes one of the play's refrains, along with “what difference does it make?”). But he's also determined to seize happiness now, with Masha.

Seated literally in the midst of the action, at times we feel like guests at a really good party, and at others—when Andrei is teased and shamed by his sisters, or as Natasha tightens her choke hold on the family—it's almost too much to bear. We stopped being surprised by fourth-wall-violations long ago. But Three Sisters invites us in so gently, so courteously, and the production takes our involvement (and the obligations that come with it) so seriously, that we rush to meet it halfway. The second act concludes with some business about tea; we are brought tea at intermission (last Friday, the stage manager bustled out with his tray and asked, “who wants tea?” We laughed. He said, “No, seriously”). The final act takes place in an orchard; we are given dead branches to hold. This is hilarious, but it's more than superficially clever—peering at the scene through branches, we are standing in for our own voyeurism, which becomes a part of the play. In this way the stage, and the production itself, are redefined to include us and the entire theater, and it is magical. We are transformed.

*Check out some of my other reviews: Jump Jim Crow, Brecht on Brecht, The Seagull, Cross that River, Lizzie Borden