The Royale, a new play at the Kirk Douglas Theater

The Royale(click to hear interviews) is a new play by Marco Ramirez, which has its world premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theater in Culver City. It's the story of a black boxer fighting a white boxing champion around 1910. This play is a good pairing with Joe Turner's Come and Gone at the Mark Taper, one of August Wilson’s century cycle plays, set in Detroit. The theater experience with Royale required a lot of imagination from the audience and turned poetic and surreal at one point. Boxing matches were staged as surreal choreography. There were only five characters, all with great performances. I love all the theater coming to Los Angeles with the African-American themes running through them, like Clybourne Park (Taper), Raisin in the Sun (Kirk Douglas), Joe Turner, and now Royale. It's like a cycle of plays about the black experience in America. These plays are also resonating for me with James Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain, about the migration from the South to Chicago, and the nonfiction study by Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, about the great migration from the South to the North over a many years. All these works help me to get a larger picture overall of the migration from South to North and how it is every bit as important to America as the migration from foreign lands in shaping our history. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952)has a chapter called Battle Royale which is often anthologized as a short story. In The Royale, near the climax of the play, the protagonist’s boxing trainer tells him of his first boxing match, which is very much like Ellison’s chapter. Overall, this play adds to the body of work, both classic and newly emerging, that is helping fill in the rich history, both painful and uplifting, that makes us who we are today. Live theater truly has a role to play in quilting our cultural experiences together.

The Royale at the Kirk Douglas 2013

Resolution: Go to Art Museums!

 A year ago, I resolved to go to more Art Museums. For a while I did go, but lately I count that it's only twice a year. But I live in the middle of Los Angeles, with easy access on weekends, when the traffic is clear, to The Getty, LACMA, The Norton Simon, so many more! And the first weekend of every month, some of them are free with a Bank of America card. But still I get too busy to go.



So--Today I walked across the street to  LACMA, (walking through a dog adoption festival in front of the La Brea Tar Pits, with so many cute dogs), and into the Japanese Pavillion to see the traveling exhibition of Hokusai prints from Japan. We know the image of the Great Wave by Hokusai, but to see it in person is a different experience. It's smaller than I thought it would be and more beautiful. The artist had many other prints that were touching and charming as well. Why do I so often forget to include art museums on my list of weekend chores?

I go to a fair amount of live theater, and sometime music, such as the LA Master Chorale, occasionally the LA Symphony, but rarely if ever do I see live dance,  never opera.

But my cousin and I want to go to see a Monster Truck rally and a colleague has invited me to see a boxing match and a mariachi festival.
Would you call those culture or sub-culture? 

The point is: Let's all get out more. If we're going to live a a large city like L.A!

Great Wave



Eurydice by Sandra Ruhl

Welcome to a blog on personal encounters with live theater, books, and art. Let’s get started.

Last night I saw the play Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl at A Noise Within Theater in Pasadena. I've seen the play three times, twice by this company and once in 2006 by Circle X Theater inside the Ford Theater on Cahuenga. The play reminds me of Metamorphosis as staged by The Looking Glass Theater in Chicago, which I saw in 2012. It's rare to see a play thrice (unless your child’s acting in it). As an English teacher, I emphasize the power of RE-reading; everyone notices more when re-watching films. To read Ruhl's Eurydice is equivalent to seeing it staged, but more puzzling, since you are trying to envision it. Both productions were quite similar perhaps due to the fact that Ruhl puts all the quirkiness of interpretation into the script, which acts as a blueprint for the quirkiness the actors and director bring to it. In some sense, she's already staged it on paper and merely invites others accurately execute her vision. In both productions, strong directing and acting, along with strong set design, lighting design, and sound design, were critical to pulling this play off. But it's not about re-interpreting a classic (like Julius Caesar set in the 1960's with all actors costumed like Secret Service agents trying to prevent an assassination). Updated versions of well-known plays make them resonate with today. But Eurydice is already a classical myth made contemporary, so the playwright has done that work already.

HOW the play communicates is as important as WHAT it communicates. (This is what I tell my English students ad nauseum to get them to look at writing style.) Ruhl invents a visual language that is akin to a dream language. Images in dreams communicate emotionally, but not logically. Thus, that part of the brain that wants to make sense of what's happening is frustratingly annoyed and confused. Akin to a dream or an hallucinogenic experience, we must let go of meaning making. Meaning during a dream is emotional and completely immersive, but on waking we try to figure out what it really means, which is an analogy for the immersive theater experience of watching Eurydice versus the head-scratching aftermath. Hence, Eurydice is told with a dream vocabulary that communicates the way dreams do: they don't make literal sense but intuition helps one 'get it,' sort of. Sarah Ruhl seems to communicate with the right brain (the creative side) but not always your heart. Ironically, classically crafted dramatic structure a la Sophocles' Oedipus Rex or Shakespeare's King Lear, both displaying Aristotle's dramatic structure in his Poetics have that cathartic emotional release that engages the chambers of the heart.

But Eurydice while not illuminating the myth much, instead using it as a thematic starting point, sill has something to contribute to the stage. Visual spectacle and theatricality are important elements of live theater. Do two actors standing on a stage talking constitute live theater? While language is key, dramatic visuals are a big part of successful theater. Even a stagey fake-looking sword fight stimulates the retina as well as the inner ear. Ruhl's play communicates less to the brain than to the optical nerve, less to the conscious mind than to the unconscious. 

Spoiler Alert:

For me the most memorable elements from the play are the following:

--The boundary between this world and the underworld seems permeable. Mysteriously, but not logically, letters can be passed both ways, from dead father to Eurydice on her wedding day, from Orpheus pining for his bride carried by worms to the underworld. It doesn't make sense, but it seems powerfully symbolic and intriguing.

--Being dipped in the River Styx creates forgetfulness. Stay in too long, and you forget who you are, how to speak, how to read. But a father can rehabilitate and re-teach his daughter how to speak and how to read and how to recall her childhood. Eurydice, hearing her name for the first time or her husband's name, Orpheus, powerfully recalls the past. These are dramatic and moving theatrical moments. Recalling one's past (as in Proust's narrator dipping a Madeline in lime tea in Remembrance of Things Past) is a powerful theme that resonates, especially in the age of Alzheimer’s whers forgetting and recalling are daily occurrences among so many of the aging, who recall the distant past but not the previous five minutes.  

--Metaphorical language: In the underworld, words like 'father' or 'love' are not allowed. But the subversive father can communicate in transliterated language. 'I was your father' becomes 'I was your tree,' and finally Eurydice understands. The play is thus about metaphorical language, dream language, not logical language, connotation rather than denotation. Like the unconscious which also resides below in the underworld, Hades demands different forms of words and language.

--Spectacle and Staging: The set, the constant sound of water, the visual projections, the visual representation of water with lights and the physical manifestation of water in the working fountain onstage and the rain in the elevator are elements not central to the myth but that work to give an atmospheric dreamlike state to the staging that unifies themes of the play. String is used as wedding ring and in the underworld to make a room. There is always an element of playfulness in the staging of the play (coincidentally “play” is the word for drama). From the author's stage directions: 'The underworld should resemble the world of Alice in Wonderland more than it resembles Hades' (Ruhl 7). This is a playful children's retelling of a myth with The Lord of the Underworld riding a tricycle, the Talking Stones, like a Greek chorus, acting childishly, and Eurydice acting naive to the warnings of stranger danger with the Nasty Interesting Man.

--It seems that Ruhl wrote this play in remembrance of her father, even incorporating word games she used to play with her father. The love triangle is between father and husband and Eurydice, with marriage described as important for fathers and daughters, to say goodbye with finality. With choices like this, young women must choose between two men, their first 'husband' or their new husband. In a dream landscape, this choice makes a kind of sense. 

Ruhl, Sarah. Eurydice. NY: Samuel French, 2008. World Premiere, 2003.