Good Theater

"A Bright Room Called Day," was written by American playwright Tony Kushner in 1984. It presents a group of young German artists and activists in the dawn of the Nazi regime as well as flash forwarding to a side character in current 1980s who is an activist against the Regan administration. It is a powerful and engaging play and for the first time ever will be presented to a Parisian audience thanks to the collaborative efforts of Hillary Keegin, an American actress living in Paris for several years and French actress Pauline Le Diset, who co-translated the work. Keegin, who stars and directs the play, was inspired to reactivate this work in part through her own frustrations and anger to post 9/11 government policy in the United States. For the last couple of years she has since been working with a cast and crew to put the play together. There will be a screening on the 31st and 1st as well as the week of January 12-16 at La boutonniere theater in the 11. Check out the website for full details. It's a must see. www.brightroom.fr

Guerilla Gardening

Check out this ambitious and most delightfully subversive movement happening across the globe: www.guerillagardening.org and in a recent NYTimes Magazine article http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/magazine/08guerrilla-t.html?ref=todayspaper

Discovered: Irmgard Keun

In the Guardian Book Review last Saturday there was a brief essay about Irmgard Keun, a German author who wrote mainly in the early-middle part of the last century. The title of the essay was "Bridget Jones of the 1930s," perhaps semi-trite of a title, but it relates directly to her female characters who struggled with career and life. In any event, it was a revelatory essay about a woman I had never heard of and look forward now to reading. Keun was born in Berlin in 1905 She began writing in 1920, after feeling defeated in her attempts to be an actress, and was soon printed worldwide, with titles such as "Gilgi,"(1931), "The Artifical Silk Girl," (1932), and "Child of All Nations,"(1938). Her subjects included the rising power and place of women during the war years, the reality of women feeling torn between seeking their own goals/desires and taking the required route of marriage and kids. Her work was subversive enough to cause unwanted attention and she was firmly anti-Nazi, so you see where the story goes...she was blacklisted, her books removed from the shelves and in 1936 she fled Germany. She continued to write in exile, during the late 1930s, a time in which she had left her husband and began living with the Austrian Jewish writer, Joseph Roth, up to his untimely death in 1939. After his death, she moved around quite a bit, including a brief time in America, but returned to Germany just before the end of the war, living very undercover. She continued to write after the war was over but she slipped into obscurity, in part because of a heavy problem with alcohol and hospitalization, until the 1970s when several European feminists, including the Nobel prize winning author, Elfriede Jelinek, rediscovered her work. She refused to ever write an autobiography and died in 1982 at the age of 77. The author of this essay, Michael Hofman, has translated one of her novels into English recently and he states firmly that had she been a man, her work would be in box sets and collected editions. As it is, they are not, but hopefully that will soon change.

Postcard from the edge

An interesting article in the October 1 issue of Time, caught my eye this morning so I am having a bit of a stream of consciousness thought.

The Time essay titled “Postcard: Beirut” http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1663834,00.html carries more weight then is apparent in the one-page essay. This should be a feature story. How often do we have the chance to read about the art scene in a country like Lebanon or Syria? Shouldn’t we as Americans or westerners be allowed that information, to educate ourselves about what is happening in these countries outside of politics and religion? Wouldn’t Americans or shouldn’t Americans be mortified that in some places the only information people read about the country is Cheney’s relentless push on Israel to start war in Iran and George Bush’s continued “war on terror” and “us and them” diatribe? The majority of information that each side of the fence receives is unfortunately the generic, political agenda that will unite the people of that country. What about the individual voice? The creative voice which is really what all countries are made of?

On this same subject, the op-ed piece titled “Death of a Director,” written by Alain Délétroz in the September 22-23 International Herald Tribune, was particularly moving. In the article he poignantly writes about the “thirst for cultural escape in a dictatorship,” and the refuge that people found in Tashkent in the theatrical performances directed by the late Mark Weil. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article2507785.ece

It’s essential that in cities like Beirut, artists of all kinds persist in their endeavors to create and share their work as another form of dialogue to the ongoing, repetitious political and religious banter. Without that individual voice, then the state or religion has won, and in these particularly delicate, uncertain times, Beirut, as one of the most creative and independent thinking cities has to nurture this creativity, in whatever subversive, underground way it can. I am giving total credit to Time for doing the Postcard: Beirut essay and hope that maybe they’ll do a feature story on it next time.