We spend our time in various ways. Most of us aren’t even aware of its passing unless we are cursed with a dreaded word in our brain: waiting. Waiting, for most, is the ultimate dalliance, a disease on the face of time. It brings out the worst in people, pulls on their patience and their minds, forces them to stay without action, to think without purpose except passing time. In a life filled with waiting, we are all of us slaves to one common thought: things will be this way until they are over, though I don’t know when that will be.

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett is an absurdist play, and I find myself asking what is absurd about the ideas present in the play. Two men, Estragon (Nathan Lane) and Vladimir (Bill Irwin) wait on a mysterious Godot, a man who never appears but weighs on their mind as they continually beat their heads against the frustration that comes with staying in a desolate landscape with no purpose. In their waiting they meet Pozzo (John Goodman) and Lucky (John Glover), two other men seemingly trapped in this world where every day repeats itself, where men wait for things that do not happen, will not ever happen.

The play often rolls between comedy and tragedy with a distinct transition; Vladimir is the waning philosophical type who often relies on his brain to occupy the time, while Estragon would much prefer to do things, retaining his somewhat dark sense of humor in an effort to retain sanity. With changes in time of day we see the mood shift to a literally “darker” mode, and Vladimir often gives into his hopeless thoughts about each day being exactly the same with the setting of the sun, and Estragon’s often comical commentary shifts to a wish to kill himself, to hang himself from the naked tree.

Pozzo appears twice, though in two different versions of himself. His first appearance is unnerving; he holds a slave by a rope, demanding of the elderly Lucky everything from continually holding all the luggage to performing tricks on command. The tyrannical nature of Pozzo garnered laughter from the crowd, but as I sat and looked at the forlorn Lucky I was anything but in hysterics. I wondered if it was I or the rest of the audience who was confused with the situation. I did feel as though Lucky got to have his say once he was ordered to “think,” whereupon he recited a diatribe of a monologue of utter nonsense, but for the first time he was free to do whatever he wished until he fell in complete exhaustion. With Pozzo’s second appearance he is helpless in a completely different way; he is blind, and cannot get up off the ground without assistance. Though this too is funny there is that same bittersweet tone to it also—we are glad Pozzo is now blind because he was so cruel before, but if this is indeed a different Pozzo than the day before what does that make us?

The only man who stays the same from day to day seems to be Vladimir. Estragon leaves his too-small shoes at the point on the first day and returns the second day saying that the shoes are too big, as if it were two different people, two different Estragons, one with big feet and one with little feet. Everyone seems relatively content to live the same days over and over again, save Vladimir who must live them all and remember them all. Estragon knows that time is passing and wishes to pass it in new and interesting ways, but it is a desire only for entertainment and not any sort of deeper self-actualization. With all the days bleeding into each other it is understandable that Vladimir worries about the connection between life and death, the “gravedigger with the forceps” who is present at our birth and death because in fact they are the same day, just repeated several hundred times.

There is a commentary on friendship here, but I must have missed it because I was too worried about the passing time. I think in this way I am more like Vladimir, given to melancholy soliloquies with constant thought of the past, present, and future. It might just be perspective that the waiting is unbearable; the two at points seem to be having fun. Sometimes I think I might have to see this again to understand it, at other times I think that I have gotten only a portion of the real message.

I keep waiting for something or somebody to explain it to me.

You are worried about seeing him spend his early years in doing nothing.  What!  Is it nothing to be happy?  Nothing to skip, play, and run around all day long?  Never in his life will he be so busy again.  ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, 1762

With maturity only comes the words to say what we’ve always thought. As a kid, I would get into constant trouble for the worlds I pretended to inhabit, throwing pillows as bricks onto the floor and making forts in the doorways of my house, making up terrible jokes, and showing in my actions the reflection of the world I wanted to see. As children, we can do whatever we wish, but the limitless imagination ends at the boundaries of our heads. The 52^nd Street Project takes advantage of this gap between pure imagination and the reality of invention by allowing kids to perform what would only exist inside their heads, using real actors and real stages.

It’s interesting to see the problems of children put into a play. Either things are incredibly unnerving (like the allusions to child abuse), or they are as plain and simply solved—by adults—as an argument between friends. Parody’s of true children’s lives are given names like PB & J Go Sour, detailing the story of how peanut butter and jelly got together with an emphasis on how friendships form mostly through extended time together, and have very little to do with initial impressions of the other person. The acting in this play definitely took the writing to a conscious level, projecting adolescent words and phrases and making them “understandable” to adults. What would seem like a trivial concern is given weight by affectation, words garner deeper meanings, and friendships are built ultimately on our ability to tolerate. Brilliant.

In some ways too the plays showed the purest forms of our deepest worries. In Two Wishes we saw self-consciousness about intelligence turn into a quest to appear smarter, shyness and reticence turn into a wish to be “real” instead of “invisible.” What the characters become are warriors fighting against colossal monsters, the myopic Cyclops of brute force, defeated not with physical force but cunning, and the sinuous giant snake, defeated in much the same way. To children, all problems resemble monsters, but I’m quite sure I still refer to my own worries as monsters to be defeated. In every metaphorical battle there is chance to recover or discover something new. Fairy tales about finding the answer was in us all along are really the only sort of story about growing up; we fight and we sometimes find our swords too blunt to use but eventually we succeed. We get our greatest wishes granted as long as we keep trying.

Watching adults perform the sometimes incomplete language of children gave the whole production a nostalgic feeling. Even in our brightest moments we still sometimes speak like children, stuttering and lacking the right words. Perhaps by voicing whatever ails us, whether Cyclops or abusive father or an annoying would-be friend, we literally see the solution present itself, and when it is us who find the solution to our own problems, we become our own greatest heroes.

I don’t think I can escape religion. Religion is a part of history. Like everything else, religion is a symbol of what could potentially be, the afterlife, heaven and hell, but is also gives us the motivation in the sort of ways we are to be right now, it gives us the morality to find our own way, which it assumes will be through the Church. When we see places like the Cloisters, we are brought inside of this symbolic shroud, looking at all these relics of hope and redemption.

The Tomb Effigy of Jean d’Alluye is not a tomb, we are quick to be told. There are no coffins here, but representations of those might crusaders who traveled to the Middle East in search of God. What doesn’t really matter is the bloodshed per se, but the thought that Jean d’Alluye came back with a relic of the cross from his journal. The True Cross. Though there were only three nails from the True Cross, there exist quite a few more nails circulating with that title, but this shouldn’t matter. Jean sleeps peacefully, hands folded in prayer with a solemn look on his face. His sword and shield hang at his side, his shield to low to represent a still-pugilistic nature; he seems to have given it up for god. At his feet sits a lion, representing courage.

A firm representation of courage can be seen in the painting of Saint Michael the Archangel, Saint Michael, by Master of Belmonte. In this painting Michael stops out a demon, possibly even Lucifer himself, with a golden spear. In Michael’s armor we see what looks like a reflected sunset with gilt inlay, and his wings appear like armor too instead of wings. His pointed armored greaves are silver like his shield, and both appear almost white, representing the purity of the wearer. On the same token the demon is represented in brown and earthy colors, made out of dirty animals sewn together, alligator, goat, snake, and troll. Though the spear goes through his mouth he seems to welcome the violence, and standing on top of him Michael seems to have defeated the demon, but how does one murder something without life? Even the demon’s torso smiles at the violence, but the grim determination in Saint Michael’s face points to an overall victory: “even though I may not kill you, I will always be there to stop you.”

The reliquaries too are mellifluous here; in every shape and form we find ways to hold the holy relics of Christ and the saints, the blood and bones and sinew, the wood and nails. Some are represented golden arms with viewing displays showing the bone behind layers of glass, others are necklaces looking like glass elevators. The gold here is supposed to reflect the richness of the object inside, and in all of these there is always a thin layer of glass protecting the relic (ironically no longer housed within the display).

Religion is perhaps the supreme example of theory versus application. The True Cross is a symbol of sacrifice, redemption, and hope, but I don’t think Christ ever envisioned cutting it up and selling it to the highest bidder. Neither did the saints think while being ripped apart by lions in Nero’s circus or being crucified upside-down that this would have any effect on their post-mortem bone value. With these objects, these symbols, lives and purposes gained legitimacy, but when money was exchanged between hands, I would say that something was lost. But all symbols have some sort of value, and we must accept this, because without them we might forget not only the thing but what it stands for. Without the symbol we lose the idea.

“Everything is vocabulary. If one speaks many languages, one is a new non-dichotomous person, but a chronological person. We speak many languages. We must not compartmentalize.” –Hari Krishnan

There is a place that is known as the East, but it does not exist anymore. There was a place that was the Far East that existed before that, which also doesn’t exist anymore. What is in its place is a land similar to the United States, full of a vibrant history and an equally embarrassing streak of pop culture, a disciplined history and an invasive sexuality, but with all of this flowing into and out of itself at the same time. Welcome to India, past and present, without borders or rules, with only the limits of imagination as limits. Welcome to Bharatanatyam.

Hari Krishnan displays a firm grasp of tradition with nearly every possible for of interdiction. In this way the “traditional” dances take on an odd form, both past and present at the same time as in Box, where a traditionally dressed dancer performs the Bharatanatyam dance in synchronization with a woman dressed in no form, a dancer without place in history and a place in all history. It’s not so much a paradox here as a representation of all periods of time, how the dance changes and differs between seasons but remains exactly the same; even the movements of the “past dancer” are not hindered by the traditional garb, though she may be a bit more shiny than her counterpart.

We see this sort of subversion of form in Bollywood Hopscotch too; the dancers appear onstage dressed in glowing necklaces circa techno nightclub and many forms of lingerie, though they perform dances with as much fervor and dedication as in any other section, movements of taking energy and serving it out with the flick of a wrist, flashing the feet around on the floor in quick but distinctly measured movements, and all of this while looking at what Bollywood has done to Indian drama. We see everything here; heavily dramatic crying scenes punctuated by dancers burning, pining perishing, imaginary-gun-toting performers mimicking the bravado of the testosteroned action hero, and in all of these things I see the embarrassments of bad film as a representation of culture, and I think of movies like Live Free or Die Hard, Dirty Harry, the Notebook, and wonder who doesn’t fit into this group of overindulged emotion.

In all of this I don’t see a representation or otherization of India or its dancing, but a form of the core of humanity, both in its representation of the classical and its movement towards experimentation. Like every place else, a vibrant history makes for an interesting soul-searching experiment both in life and on the stage, taking, moving, flowing, and trying to present without glorifying, to show without denouncing. It just so happens that we use what we know, and we know quite a bit from everywhere, and it would be a pity not to throw everything together into the same pot and see what we end up with.

We all have to die. Some of us spend our entire lives dying. Some wait like eager patients for the clinical diagnosis of whatever it will be that will kill us, in order to save the pain of the unknown. Some fear death, the unknown, because they don’t want to die. And some of us, a happy few, get to die onstage, over and over again.

Exit the King, written by Eugene Ionesco, tells the story of the death of a King Berenger (Geoffrey Rush), four-hundred years old and still as stubborn and ornery as he was three-hundred and eighty years ago. Surrounded by his crumbling kingdom, Berenger must come to terms with death through a series of satirical, absurdist looks at humanity, represented by his dwindling court.

In The Guard (Brian Hutchinson), we see the most docile and obvious forms of our emotion, a knight of sheer power and booming voice, paradoxically trapped inside his own suit of armor. Throughout the play The Guard stands proud and defiant, though of course he is moderately helpless and completely useless: there is no kingdom left to guard anymore, no bandits to defeat. In his pitying speeches about how great the King Berenger we see that lost power of masculinity, that supposition of real strength for the appearance of it, declaring things that don’t need declaring (“The King has made dying illegal”) in order to keep something, some power over death. But, like Berenger, The Guard is a reflection of the dumb futility of swords in a world without wars, of a man wearing a suit of armor to protect him from old age.

In Queen Marguerite (Susan Sarandon) and Queen Marie (Lauren Ambrose) we see both sides of the two-headed coin, optimism and pessimism personified. Queen Marie tries to keep Berenger from dying with supplications of his own vitality, of the things he used to do that were grand and wonderful, his feats and great feasts. In her wake we see how youth refuses understanding of death, and her permanent tears written in black mascara on her face don’t show acceptance but the worst kind of refusal, a childish notion of total denial. Queen Marguerite on the other hand performs the role of Charon, the ferryman on the River to the Underworld at the end of the play, and it seems as though her presence exists for only that reason from her first moments on the play. Her job is not to make death any easier, but she stands as facilitation of the truth of death. She says plainly that death will happen and that there is no way to avoid it. Neither one of these women can really show Berenger how to die, for one exists only for life and the other exists only for death; neither of them can come as close as Berenger can to the boundary between the two.

In the smaller (though no less great) roles of Juliette and The Doctor I think I see a bit of the real world. With a lot of the characters in complete denial and caught up in the world of philosophical thought as opposed to practicality, it is the maid and the physician who point to the effects of death on the outside world, the freezing of the sun, the drying up of the marshes and the rumbling of the starving stomach. For the maid Berenger’s death has real implications—she will lose her purpose if he dies. In the same way The Doctor doesn’t know if he could go on without Berenger. In the name of the King the Doctor has committed horrible atrocities, and without the symbol of near-omnipresent power he will just be another genocidist without a holy edict to point to for absolution. For these two the question is not how will King Berenger learn to die but how can the world go on without him?

The absurdist nature of the play lends itself to this intense talk of death without seeming melodramatic. There is the humor of getting old present, the weak-knees and the loss of color in the hair, the loss of memory and the infantile placations necessary by those that love us. But when this play is dramatic it is dramatic. Berenger wanders the aisles, speaking to the dead that have already come before, wanting and waiting for something to show him how to die happy, proud, powerful, with pride and with solemn acceptance, but in our refusal to answer he receives nothing. Like an old man, the people in his life disappear in a puff of smoke, and we are left with the image of a dying man trying to envision the passage to a new world, something not even we are allowed to see.

Maybe death is like this, long and drawn out, but filled with the events that tell us what we leave behind. Finally, we have no more time, and it is that above all things that keeps us moving forward, the wish to stay as long as possible, to get the most out of every moment. But one can’t spend one’s life counting down, even if one is in a play. We have the our friends to do that for us.

Sometimes people wish they could express themselves in a song. Throughout history, moments of note have been recorded by scribes immediately, hoping never to lose such an event in the chronicles of time. Filled with the fear of the eventual loss of such events, people have taken to song as a form of remembrance. After all, isn’t a song easier to remember than a speech? In this way music can be a form of remembrance, of salutation for an event that happened within the past. It can tell the same story, albeit with more dramatics than a historical reading could do. The Baroque period provided a perfect opportunity for composers to use the new musical techniques to tell the oldest stories in a new way.

The program started off with Henry Purcell’s Welcome to all the pleasures, a song about a Saint Cecilia’s Day celebration. St. Cecilia’s Day seemed like a perfect way to begin this Baroque concert, as in its heyday composers of the time would use this musical celebration in November to showcase their new music, Purcell being one of them. The music frequently broke into oratory patterns, a welcome, a salute, and a petition to sing thanks for all your loss. This pieces builds up unto a crescendo of both command and forcefulness, but leaves the audience with a deep bass thrum, perhaps a sign that things are not over, not even close.

Moving ahead, Selections from Jephte by Carissimi used music to tell the biblical story of Jephthah, a victorious Israelite who returns home with the oath to sacrifice the first person he sees. The harpsichord is used to announce the Greek-like narration, and the switch between this victorious triumph and the later lamentations is echoed by the instrument change: harpsichord becomes organ, victory speech becomes eulogy. After this point his Jephthah’s daughter begins her final lamentation, a piece rife with religious undertones as the organ leads her on a final farewell to both her father and to her young life.

Another favorite was the selections from Les Surprises de l’Amour by Jean-Phillippe Rameau, representing the portion of a musical piece first preformed in 1748 as a celebration of love, and the upper register tones certainly create a celebratory mood. With cascading rhythms bleeding into each other, bouncing between notes almost joyously, the whole piece gives of a sort of “buttered” feeling, as if it isn’t meant to be not only light and airy but sweet, too. Though the notes are often in a high register, they are very rarely shrill, but instead a sort of gentle piping representative of the shepherds who would have played the wooden flutes participating in the song.

It’s interesting to think of the Baroque period as a response to the music and culture that came before it. Renaissance music certainly had its day, but at the time I can’t help but think the Baroque music must have seemed terribly avant-garde, moving in an entirely new direction, and I wonder if early Baroque composers ran into the same problems that all new musicians run into, trying to create within a form that’s new and controversial. Of course there is something to be said for the lack of distinct timeline; Baroque in a lot of ways existed at the same time as other musical periods with no distinct cutoff period. Pieces that had been played slow were sped up, dramatics were added, and humor too, something that made the performance more enjoyable in that the singers seemed to be having fun, too.

Every generation thinks it’s the first to be rebellious. And every generation just happens to be wrong.

We really can’t help who we fall in love with. It seems to be that fate picks the most inopportune person at the most inopportune time and says “you will love this person and there is nothing you can do about it.” In Romeo and Juliet, the “star-crossed lovers” found love only to have it taken away from them due to ignorance and hatred. Taking this story to the modern era, West Side Story tells the tale of Maria (Josefina Scaglione) and Tony (Matt Cavenaugh), two teenagers who find love despite their different ethnic backgrounds. Bringing together the Jets, a gang of young American boys with the Sharks, a gang of recent Puerto Rican immigrants, this musical brings together two very different music, and dance styles from two very different music traditions. Altogether, this musical is about joining unlike things in a way you wouldn’t expect to work at first glance, but for some invariable reason they do.

The dance follows this parent in the most obvious way. Though a person could easily point at the costumes, the speech patterns, the different styles of hair between the Jets and the Sharks and say that this is a racial divide, but this is not a complete depiction. The difference here seems to be a cultural one, and the dancing, even though done within similar age groups, is different from culture to culture. The Puerto Ricans favor the more ethnic dances, moving from the stark stomping and clapping of the flamenco to the quick shuffle of the mambo, salsa and meringue, most especially during the Mambo Dance in the school gym. The Jets however, prefer 20^th century American dances like the Charleston, the jitterbug, swing and tap. While these would seem to be so contrasting as to create two different scenes occurring side by side with no similarities, they don’t, and the dance moves them from opposing circles (once while they are forced to switch to “unlike” partners, and again when they crowd around in two different circles) begin to move together by the end of the song.

The contemporary dancing, moves that were neither exotically-induced nor early 20^th century American were the types of dances that couldn’t be classified into either group. Hands that had been glued to the sides of the dancers or cocked in half-fists opened for the first time. This feeling of togetherness by shedding animosities can be clearly seen in the song “Somewhere” performed by a Tony and Maria wishing for a world without boundaries, and both the dancing and costumes reflect this. Instead of leaps punctuated by kicks or sweeping, slashing arms, the dancers soar through the air wearing white colors, no longer tied to either a pride-riddled homecountry or an obsession with the American Dream.

The songs reflected the back and forth motion of the two cultures, switching between Latin and swing, all played over a big band orchestra. Songs like “America” captured the essence of the flamenco, the quick staccato-like lyrics accompanied a more-than traditional dance, as the women dancing spoke about rising above that land which they came from, Puerto Rico. Other songs like “Cool” showed the other side of the tracks and played a jazz melody for the American Jet boys, snapping their fingers along to the beat. There was also an operatic feel to some of the melodies; some involving the love between Tony and Maria had a showstopping quality to the notes, high and sustained as opposed to most of the other songs, heightened-tensions with a fast pace. Perhaps the intent with using these types of songs for Tony and Maria was to show that their love existed beyond all boundaries and time periods.

It is interesting to think that this is based off of Romeo and Juliet. The fights were the same, the notices of peril and affectations of love, but in my head I wasn’t really seeing Romeo or Juliet onstage: for what it was worth, these were more real people. I think back to Romeo and Juliet, that foolish feud between the Capulets and Montagues, and I wonder why anyone would get into such a ridiculous contest, pitting men and women against each other for the sheer sport of it, choosing superficial differences to unite and divide. Both plays show that love is possible even amidst so much hate, but neither of these loves last. Tony is murdered by his “Paris,” instead of the other way around, and in both stories the lovers lose. In a lot of ways we leave the theatre with a broad definition of love, spanning ages, bringing people together in miraculous ways, but also breaking our hearts in its sudden dispensation, its disappearance and whimsical nature. We have no idea how people survive after this sort of love.

I guess Shakespeare showed that they couldn’t.

Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. You don’t need anything else. -Malcolm X

Oftentimes there’s a dissonance working between what we get and what we’re promised. Privilege, which is something you see only if you don’t have it. It’s why for the longest time people couldn’t get served at diners, use specific bathrooms, vote, and even now why some people can’t get married. It’s what can keep people out of neighborhood and keep people from making friends.

Emma Amos is an artist forced to deal with Privilege; she is a black woman, and so she is obligated in that terrible way we all must become warriors against racism if we can’t help but fly the colors of the minority team. This is very interesting to talk about, not only because it is politically commentarial art, but because it is “race” art, Mrs. Amos’s art becomes marginalized, and you can see this sort of artistic revolution in her methods. Both black and white men and women frolick in the nude in her paintings, not in that “all we are saying way” but in that lascivious way we all know as common sex. Oftentimes her work represents the failure of the American Dream, throwing X’s over the American flag decorated with a black and white lithograph of some poorly-dressed black children standing sullenly for the picture (“Stars and Stripes”) . She speaks honestly about contemporary ideals of beauty, and the necessary advent of the hair extension as a requirement for perfection (“Tribal Headdresses- 20th Century”). But in most of her art she is speaking against something, pressing some necessary and often overlooked issue.

In Tightrope (1994), Emma has painted a self-portrait of herself on a tightrope, holding a t-shirt print of Paul Gauguin’s Two Tahitian Women with Mangoes, 1899, and a quill in her other hand. Underneath her painter’s smock she wears the wonder woman’s uniform, and over all of this Mrs. Amos has thrown two symbolic X’s, because of course she isn’t supposed to paint about stuff like this, and she does for exactly that same reason. In this painting Emma Amos is calling attention to the unrealistic depiction of women, their otherization into purely physical beings. She takes notice of being a necessary champion for women in her placement as a woman artist, balancing the established ideas of women’s role and her own desires, literally on one hand the status quo and on the other a quill, the artist’s tool. While online critics are the first to point out the X as being a comparison to Malcolm X, this too is a silly notion: the x is simply a x, stating that she shouldn’t have created this.

It wasn’t appropriate.

-Where did you live before the War?

-St. Petersburg.

-Where did you live during the War?

-Petrograd.

-Where did you live after the War?

-Leningrad.

-Where would you have liked to live?

-St. Petersburg.”

-Interview with resident of St. Petersburg, Russia, 1970s.

Sergei Prokofiev could be thought of as a new interpreter of music during the early part of the twentieth century. In some ways, many of the composers from this time grew up with a notion of radical change—the world around them was radically moving, progressing in some ways, and in other ways not so much. Russia especially perfected the revolution and internal conflict, and coming from such a turbulent location Prokofiev reflects a lot of Russia in his music, its rises, its falls, the constant changing of names and governments, and after all of the turbulence his story could be perhaps declared a chronicle of an era, his music stamped forever with that impermeable hammer and sickle.

The second piece played at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center as part of a Sergei Prokofiev collection was Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major, which was actually the first that was composed chronologically, written in 1917. According to Harlow Robinson, Professor of History at Northeastern University “the aesthetic environment of the Soviet Union led to the defense of the symphony,” and Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major reflects a passionate embrace of this form, in addition to referencing Prokovfiev’s love for the sonata/allegro form. The pastoral atmosphere this piece evokes a playful atmosphere, containing elements that seem playful and almost bucolic in its treatment of the stringed instruments, the violin especially. The violin plays a dancing melody against the orchestra gently setting a coda of stringed thumps. In this way the first chair violin both pushes and is pushed; he leads new choruses, towards new melodies, but he still sways to the beat of the orchestra.

Symphony No. 2 seems entirely different from the second piece, and in their differing ways I am at first deceived. These cannot be the same composer. They are too different. The Bolshevik Revolution perhaps can be blamed for this: On the eve of his Violin Concerto, while traveling to Moscow for his concert, he gets word of the starting of the Revolution and decides it would be best to turn around. That concert composed in 1917 wasn’t put on until 1923, and with its forced cancellation in addition to Prokofiev’s departure from Russia his view seems to have changed of the country.

Symphony No. 2 is a marching strong, and furious beat. It seems almost industrial, with very forceful, powerful, and stark horn sections with uneasy undertones. The whole theme of this piece gives off a sort of grave atmosphere, with strong machine-like noises, an appellation of the 1920 World of Industry he was trying to inculcate, and perhaps in all this noise he was crying out against what had once been the horrible world in which he knew.

It is interesting to think that Symphony No. 2 was not well received. The boy from Russia came to the West with a stark tone and nobody could accept it. Supposedly at points in his life he had to beg his friends for money, and I particularly like this idea. Imagine a man working within what to him would have meant all sorts of mortal danger: rebels, gulags, frozen work camps, undisclosed genocides. His first wife found herself in one of these labor camps, and the places of his younger inspiration, during trips down the Volga river on a steamboat and trips to the Ural mountains, had now become only reminiscent of ongoing Communist oppression. It seemed the easiest things were for him was before the Bolshevik Revolution, and one has to wonder if he ever did get to see those mountains again, or instead had to settle only for the artificial wonders of man.

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

-Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

I’ve read A Doll’s House by Henrick Ibsen before; in fact, in a “Gender, Performance, and the Stage” English class I helped put on a performance of it, though ours looked nothing like the performance of Doll’s House put on at St. Anne’s Warehouse by the Mabou Mines. In our production, a desk was transformed into a piano, a wool scarf into a cashmere shawl with which to dance the tarantella, and our classmates translated into the many forms of Nora Helmer. Our performance couldn’t come close to matching the chaos that was the Mabou Mines performance, directed by Lee Breuer. While the main idea of the play was still there, and the play seemed to be used as the base material, just about everything else had changed. It’s probably an obvious statement to say that any interpretation of this same household of the Helmers will appear different to different audiences and in the light of new movements and new people, but these changes and interpretations by their difference often bring us out of ourselves in new ways that an interpretation directed by us wouldn’t have shown.

I was surprised by many things, which was the intent of the play. I don’t know if I would call it a “shock piece,” for in discussing it I found that even the things I had found over the top to be explained or interpreted in some sort of way by the viewers. While everything from gratuitous sex to pushes at comparing bad relationships to the physically handicapped, we in the audience found ourselves in completely new territory. This was not a play that would let us sit down and enjoy a pleasant day at the theatre, that was for sure.

The main story arc of the play, Nora being presented with a final opportunity to do exactly as her husband wishes or escape from this patriarchal world through personal independence was still the main emphasis, but at times it ran so far from the source text that it couldn’t be said to be the same play. Ibsen’s A Doll House probably didn’t have any sort of sexual undertone save for the obvious incestual-like relationship Nora and her husband Torvald (with an emphasis on their father-daughter-like interaction); this Dolls House seemed overwrought with sexual themes, sometimes in a sort-of Desperate Housewives sort of way we in this culture have all become accustomed to, where everyone is sleeping with everyone else. This revamping of a culture interpretation probably matches our current society a little bit too well, and perhaps our discomfort comes from an innate dislike of how things really are outside the red velvet curtained walls.

The ending was stark in the same way, delivering us to an ending free from all forms of subtle interpretation, Nora discarding all parts of her that make her the woman save her naked body, finally speaking in an woman-like voice (instead of the high wispy child voice), and declaring that she neither loves Torvald nor desires to stay with him anymore. The final image is of a desperate Torvald stalking the aisles of the theatre for his wife, weeping bitterly like a child, and clothed in nothing but underwear and looking like an infant searching out a missing mother.

I think this might be the intent: to show that some relationships are built on a current of Oedipal isolationism, with boys never properly introduced into the ways of manhood (though they think they are, because they now have sex) growing physically and seeing that as a sign that they should have families. These men of a new generation think perhaps because they wear the clothes and do the work of men that they are grown, though everything they have they attribute to some sort of ownership, like their wives. These men refuse any world which the one they’ve created, and in a lot of ways this world will resemble a doll’s house, the walls will be made of cardboard and plywood, knocked down with little effort.

Men like these don’t see the balance and imbalances in a relationship and, like Torvald, won’t notice a ruined one until it has already been destroyed. They are, in all forms of the world, still little children, crying and weeping for mothers to take care of them, abandoned and looking for comfort against a harsh world, though it is they themselves who have refused to give this comfort.

I have forgotten which century I am referring to.