The Hysteria Report

Just as I predicted, the movie Hysteria has turned out to be a full-on non-misogynist romance movie. In fact, this might just be the quintessence of the non-misogynist romance movie - Hugh Dancy is adorable as the doctor (Maggie Gyllenhall is adorable too, but not in quite the same way), the script is extremely well-plotted, lots of good roles for women, a great feminist message without being tiresome and doctrinaire, fascinating historical facts and details and really funny. I laughed aloud several times. I don't want to give anything away, but I will say that for me the funniest part involved goggles. Go see the movie, you'll understand.

I confess I was a little worried. When I blogged about this last week I said that I thought it would be silly, and almost considered waiting for it to come out on iTunes, but I read this positive review by Roger Ebert and decided I had to see it sooner rather than later. And it wasn't silly at all, but clever and charming and thoughtful. And Hugh Dancy plays Victorian diffidence extremely well - you want to just jump on him, in his adorable vests and cravats and sideburns.

Yes, as you might expect about an experience that involves adorable men and "paroxysms" I came away extremely satisfied.

death by Golden Gate Bridge

This year is the 75th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and while reading up about it, found this ghastly section in Wikipedia:

Suicide
More people die by suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge than at any other site in the world. The deck is approximately 245 feet (75 m) above the water. After a fall of approximately four seconds, jumpers hit the water at around 75 mph or approximately 120 km/h. Most jumpers die from impact trauma on contact with the water. The few who survive the initial impact generally drown or die of hypothermia in the cold water...

An official suicide count is kept, sorted according to which of the bridge's 128 lamp posts the jumper was nearest when he or she jumped. By 2005, this count exceeded 1,200 and new suicides were occurring about once every two weeks...

People have been known to travel to San Francisco specifically to jump off the bridge, and may take a bus or cab to the site; police sometimes find abandoned rental cars in the parking lot. 

And I'd never heard of this movie.

The Bridge is a 2006 documentary film by Eric Steel that consists of the results of one year's filming of the Golden Gate Bridge in 2004, which captured a number of suicides, and additional filming of family and friends of some of the identified people who had thrown themselves from the bridge. The film was inspired by an article titled "Jumpers", written by Tad Friend, that appeared in The New Yorker magazine in 2003.

 The trailer

Occupy Union Square

We recorded the video of OCCUPY DISNEY the NYCPlaywrights May Play of the Month today, in Union Square Park.

Hopefully it won't take me a month to edit this, like it did to edit the February Play of the Month which took place on the subway.

The clip here is a bit of business that the actors came up with, but I'm sure the author won't mind if I put it in the video. The actors for this video are Tony White, Larissa Adamczyk and Tim Lueke. That's Larissa and Tim dancing - only Larissa has dance training but you can't tell by watching Tim, who was clearly enjoying himself. They all did amazing work.

naked Greek god at 4 o'clock

Well, 4:36 if you want to get technical.

 

I took the photo above, but the NYTimes has a much closer, clearer version - click on it to really zoom in.

 

But what's with the eagle and the other naked guy and the lady with the party hats? This web site has the details. Jules-Felix Coutan is the sculptor and that's Hercules and Minerva hanging out with Mercury.

cat meditation

This is a sad sight from Roosevelt Island...

 

And to make sure there was no unauthorized meditation, they fenced off the meditation steps.

Mr. Fuzz, however, doesn't need no stinking meditation stairs to relax. He likes to hang his head off the table and rest a foot on my laptop screen for optimum results.

 

John Simon - still hanging in there

Here is John Simon's web site - JOHN SIMON - UNCENSORED. What I found really fascinating was that one of his sponsors appears to be Yoko Ono.

As a crusty curmudgeon, I imagine that John Simon was in the same camp as Al Capp in regards to Lennon/Ono during their bed-in. Al Capp was notoriously nasty - this clip demonstrates:


One of the ways that Al Capp reminds me of Simon is the way he disparages Yoko's appearance here in an amazingly nasty and blunt way. Simon is infamous for making snide remarks about actors' appearances. Roger Ebert had one of the best come-backs:

"I feel repugnance for the critic John Simon, who made it a specialty to attack the way actors look. They can't help how they look, any more than John Simon can help looking like a rat."

Simon is officially working for the Yonkers Tribune although he doesn't seem to have written anything since last year.

I still haven't found it in their online archives, so I have no proof, but I distinctly remember about ten years ago on Theater Talk, John Simon suggested that Suzan-Lori Parks was a "social climber" because she married a white guy. I still can't believe he said that.

Fun fact: John Simon once dated Katha Pollitt.

New Yorker Parity Report: May 28, 2012

This week the parity rate nudges up one point to 35%. However one female author, Lizzie Widdecombe, is counted twice with an article and a restaurant review.

And Woodie Allen (ugh) does Shouts and Murmurs this issue. As with Mac Wellman's intro to "The Bad Infinity" which I blogged about last week, Allen also name-drops Kierkegaard, although in his case it's a feeble attempt at humor. I guess Kierkegaard is the prestige name to drop for 70-something men. The New Yorker just can't stop worshipping Woody Allen, no matter how old and tiresome his schtick grows. I would look forward to his finally dropping dead, but no doubt an entire issue of The New Yorker will be devoted to his wonderousness. It's always a trade-off, isn't it?

I will say that Allen's son Ronan Farrow has turned out to be quite the hotty - mainly because he looks much more like his mother.

The New Yorker Parity Report

A regular report on the gender parity - or lack thereof - of the current issue of The New Yorker based on table of contents by-lines
Includes fiction, non-fiction, poems. Does not include illustrations.

---

A score of 50% means that half of all writers in the issue are female.
A score of greater than 50% would mean more female than male writers. This never happens.

---

Parity change from previous week: +1%

May 28, 2012

Total writers: 20
male: 13
female: 7
gender parity score: 35%

Last week's score
Total writers: 23
male: 15
female: 8
gender parity score: 34%

Responses for Thickpenny

My pal Amanda Thickpenny is conducting a study and asked me to participate. Below are her questions and my responses:

Q. Do you identify as a Feminist, why or why not?

I do identify as a feminist - because a feminist is in favor of equal rights for women. What kind of person is against equal rights?

---

Q. Do you think that women are guilty of being sexist towards other women?  Please give an example.

Yes, because many women have internalized culture-based misogyny. There are so many examples of sexism by regular women, especially Republican women, and there are some women who have made a career out of bashing feminism and women in general, for example:

Katie Roiphe
 http://www.shakesville.com/2012/04/today-in-your-feminist-backlash_16.html

and

Caitlin Flanagan
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/19/the_creepy_condescension_of_caitlin_flanagan/

---

Q. Do you think that women are guilty of being sexist towards men?  Please give an example.

Yes - anybody who buys into the whole Mars/Venus gender essentialism is not only sexist towards women but also men.

However, a most egregious example of cross-gender bigotry against men is the widespread cultural belief that prison rape is funny - if it's men being raped by other men.

http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/141594/why_does_popular_culture_treat_prison_rape_as_a_joke/?page=entire

---

Q. Why do you think current state governments are clamping down on reproductive rights?

It's part of the current Republican far right-ward tilt.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/04/10/150349438/gops-rightward-shift-higher-polarization-fills-political-scientist-with-dread

---

 Q. Why now in 2012?

The ascendancy of the Tea Party, a mostly astro-turf organization created by David Koch and friends which exploits social-conservative sentiments to help push fiscal-conservative goals - and of course the personal enrichment of Koch & company.

http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2011/07/13/little-shop-of-horrors-corporate-astroturf-campaign-turns-into-giant-venus-flytrap-eats-master/

---

Q. Do you think that Feminism has changed since the 1970's - for better or worse?

I'm not sure how "feminism" is defined here - if the definition is the quest for equal rights for women then I don't think there's been a change in feminism.

Although I do think there is still much work to be done, I wonder sometimes if some of the despair over women not having achieved equality yet is the result of lack of historical perspective. After all, extreme patriarchy has been the rule for thousands of years. Women in the US have had the right to vote for less than 100 years. (In Switzerland women got the vote in 1971.)

And only in the last 50 years have women been able to be self-supporting (at least in developed countries), thanks to previously "men-only" jobs opening up for women, as well as equal-pay laws. The fact that perfect equality has not been achieved in a mere half-century, after millenia of female dependence should not be taken as a sign that feminism has "failed" but rather as a sign that feminism's time has arrived.

Bonus response - one of my favorite musical numbers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kvk1NZDFvZU&feature=related

Words words words

Lots of web sites about words - but then written words is the primary means of communication on the Internet...

• Word Origins
• Old English Made Easy
• The English to Elvish Dictionary
• The Phrontistery - link to list of obscure words
• The Oddities of English
• The Shavian Alphabet

New Yorker Parity Report - May 21, 2012

This week the parity rate nudges up to 34%, thanks to one more female and one less male than last week - the overall number of bylines is again 23. If this keeps up we may reach parity in a month. But it won't.

And speaking of the New Yorker, I couldn't help responding to this trashing of DEATH OF A SALESMAN with this:

DEATH OF A SALESMAN may have flaws, but as even Giles Harvey admits, that hasn't kept it from being deeply moving to many people. Although Harvey quotes Thoreau in a rare positive comment on SALESMAN, Thoreau has more in common with Harvey than with Miller:

"Thoreau was tilting at a century earlier, when he wrote, in “Walden,” “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

The people who have friends and family living in Maine and Texas, who believe that a magnetic telegraph might contain communications that could be deeply meaningful to them personally are fools to the anti-social Thoreau, who, like Giles Harvey, is certain that the only way to respectably experience worthwhile meaning is through pristine austere self-contained perfection.

The New Yorker Parity Report

A regular report on the gender parity - or lack thereof - of the current issue of The New Yorker based on table of contents by-lines
Includes fiction, non-fiction, poems. Does not include illustrations.

---

A score of 50% means that half of all writers in the issue are female.
A score of greater than 50% would mean more female than male writers. This never happens.

---

Parity change from previous week: +4%

May 21, 2012

Total writers: 23
male: 15
female: 8
gender parity score: 34%

Last week's score
Total writers: 23
male: 16
female: 7
gender parity score: 30%

3 movies to see

This is certainly unusual - there are now three movies recently released or about to be that I want to see - and I want to see so few mainstream movies in any given year:

Marley - Bob Marley was a supreme musical genius and this movie promises all kinds of previously unseen footage



The Dictator - I've been a fan of Sacha Baron Cohen since Da Ali G Show. I haven't seen his Borat or Bruno movies - I feel like I saw that schtick on Ali G - but I really want to see The Dictator. He gets to have an actual plotted story this time, and he gets some good satire into this one. Word from critics is that he gives a speech at the end that is a critique of the US financial system. A perfect target.



And finally Hysteria, which is on the exact same theme as Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room.

It does look rather silly, but who could object to the cause of female orgasms? The movie is classified as a romantic comedy and I strongly suspect it will end up on my non-misogynist romance movies list.

Also Hugh Dancy looks much cuter in Victorian get-up and hairstyle than he does in his current incarnation in VENUS IN FUR.

Tom Tomorrow featuring the Mighty Krug-Man

Getting zapped...

Mothers Day Frittata

Look at the wonderful brunch my daughter made for me for Mothers Day - that's a frittata with goat cheese, asparagus and tomatoes, baby potatoes and greens with balsamic vinaigrette - and of course mimosas. The best Mothers Day brunch ever!

Prince of Princes

I exchanged my copy of The Bad Infinity for a biography of Prince Grigory Potemkin - "Prince of Princes: the Life of Potemkin." The biographer, Sebag Montefiore is a much more entertaining writer than any of the Catherine the Great biographers I've read so far, and he writes almost as much about Catherine as Potemkin, which makes sense since their lives were so intertwined for over twenty years. He's made one of the most sensible statements yet on Catherine's favoritism:

The nature of "favouritism" derived from the Empress's peculiar position and her unique relationship with Potemkin. It was undeniably true that anyone becoming a favourite of Catherine's was entering a relationship in which there were three, not two, participants. Favouritism was necessary because Catherine lived in a man's world. She could not publicly marry again and, whether in law or spirit, she already had a husband in Potemkin. Their egos, talents and emotions were too equal and too similar for them to live together, but Catherine needed constant loving and companionship. She yearned to have an effective family around her and she had strong maternal instincts to teach and nurture. These emotional longings were easily as strong as her famed sexual appetites. She was one of those who must have a companion, and often did not change partners without finding a new one first. Usually such habits are more based on insecurity than wantonness, but perhaps the two are linked. There was another reason why Catherine, as she got older, sought younger lovers, even at the cost of her dignity and reputation. She touched on it herself when she described the temptations of Elizabeth's (the Empress who reigned prior to Catherine's husband) Court. The Court was filled with handsome men; she was the Sovereign. Catherine did it because she could - like the proverbial child in the candy shop. Who would not?

My emphasis at the end of the passage.

Harumph! A man's world indeed. Powerful older men who get young women are not consider to be risking their "dignity", and if anything it enhances their reputations.

I sure do hate the persistent double standards of the Patriarchy.

And I hate with equal vehemence the servant of the Patriarchy, Evolutionary Psychology, which tries to enshrine an indisputably cultural convention as "nature."

hopefully the last post about Mac Wellman

I mean really, if some people enjoy the plays of Mac Wellman, who am I to tell them they are wrong? Maybe they like those precious names or the endless monologues. Maybe they hate coherence and plot. Whatever, just because endless monologues irritate me, and just because I prefer coherence and a well-wrought plot, who am I to dictate my tastes?

But what really annoys me is when Wellman starts expounding on The Problem with Naturalism in Theater as he does in his introduction to a collection of his plays "The Bad Infinity" which I recently took out of the library.

Wellman loves to reach out to the Great Men of History for affirmation. He starts with Kierkegaard:

 ...Kierkegaard said that a direct relation to the deity was the definition of paganism, and he meant by this that the attempt to grasp and seize divinity by the appropriation of a human definition was to create an idol, an unreal apparition that possessed no truth. If we take the world we know as an act of collective imagining, an idol of the modern mind, it becomes apparent that reality as such becomes subject to the same - or a similar - danger: decay of the perceptual process, enactment of an unreal idol reality. The banishment of the real world. In other terms, the thing itself is replaced by successive (repetitive) images of the thing...

If you can find any actual substance in the above excerpt you are a better semiotician than I Gunga Din.

First off, Kierkegaard was a theist who thought Christianity needed reforming. Presumably along the lines of Martin Luther - Kierkegaard was raised Lutheran and is commemorated in the Lutheran Church's "Calendar of Saints."

Kierkegaard's attitude towards Christianity is similar to Luther's - that salvation, or a connection to God is on an individual basis, not to be mediated through the Catholic Church (in Luther's day) or the Protestant establishment (in Kierkegaard's day.) So what does a non-Christian - an atheist even - care about these ecumenical squabbles on the supposed evils of paganism? I mean, really, why would I care if the relationship to "the deity" is direct or indirect? It's a relationship to a fiction either way.

But even if I did care,  what do I make of Wellman's interpretation?

...the attempt to grasp and seize divinity by the appropriation of a human definition was to create an idol, an unreal apparition that possessed no truth

What exists outside of "human definition?" Unless you are a mystic, you must agree that nothing does. Whether your relation to deity is direct or indirect, it is defined by you - or by a group of individuals as in the Catholic Church - as a human. And surely even a mystic, one who believes humans are created by the deity in question, can hardly fault humans for defining the world around them based on human understanding.

Or could you? If you don't worry about logic or coherence, then I guess you could.

So with that in mind, onto the next statement:

If we take the world we know as an act of collective imagining, an idol of the modern mind...

That's a big if, and it depends on how you define "the world" and "collective" and "imagining" - but you fans of Wellman don't need to be told, you're already among the knowing. Clearly from the context, the world we know, "an idol of the modern mind" is bad... we know it's bad because Wellman continues:

...it becomes apparent that reality as such becomes subject to the same - or a similar - danger: decay of the perceptual process, enactment of an unreal idol reality.

Danger. That's bad. So is decay. And the danger is enactment of an "unreal idol reality." From this we can infer that real reality - or "reality" - is good.

So there we go. Idols are bad, because they are not reality, which is good.

I would argue that idols in themselves are neither good nor bad, but just a symbol of something. You know, just like these words you are reading inspire thoughts in your head, but the words themselves are just black marks on a white database field. And Wellman doesn't think words are bad since he generally uses an excess of them whenever he wants a character to speak.

So how does all this evil idolatry connect to theater? Wellman continues:

In American theater this idolatry bears the name of naturalism. Its origin is the same as that of the paganism Kierkegaard wrote of: the desire to subsume all human experience under labels, definitions, and explanations and therefore to substitute rationalizations for experience.

It should be noted that Wellman's distaste for unreal paganism doesn't stop him from providing his own labels, definitions and explanations.  Although perhaps all can be understood with what comes next:

The logic of The Bad Infinity is an attempt to suggest the logic of this decayed act of collective imagining. It is not interesting at this point in human time to portray the real world as it seems to be in its own terms; but it is interesting to unfold, in human terms, the logic of its illogic and so get at the nut of our contemporary human experience.

At least, it's Wellman's opinion that his plays are interesting and that they unfold in human terms the logic of illogic (or I guess the blackness of white, or the fullness of emptiness, etc.); and that this in turn somehow gets at "the nut of our contemporary human experience."

I'd say his plays are as interesting and as penetrating as his anti-naturalism philosophizing.

You do have to at least be grateful that he will allow the unfolding to take place, you know "in human terms" rather than presumably in his more native direct-from-deity terms.

He then goes on to ask us to worship more of his personal idols, the aforementioned Great Men of History in addition to Kierkegaard - he name drops Beckett, Handke, Witkiewicz, Twain, Bierce and Mencken:

We need a dozen Mark Twains, a score of Bierces, a hundred Menckens to do justice to the times. Those of us involved in this critique of apparent reality cannot expect to convince many, much less can we expect our views to prevail (the time may be past for all that); all we can expect is to have some fun, share some laughter, and go out with a modicum of self-respect. We must love the truth not because it favors us but because it is the truth.

What "the truth" is, Wellman doesn't actually say, but maybe if you have to ask it's a sign you're not a member of the mystical anti-pagan truth brotherhood and shouldn't even bother asking for a definition - you know "in human terms."Although maybe he really is saying nothing more nuanced than "naturalism in theater is bad and untruthful" and "postmodern theater like mine is good and truthful."

I have to laugh at his inclusion of Twain, who I seriously doubt would be a fan of Wellman's plays or  theories. Twain's own play, IS HE DEAD? is about as naturalistic as they come (and also a big mess), and so are his novels. Then of course, as lovable as he often is, Twain was a raging bigot against native Americans, and Mencken was an anti-Semite.

In any case, I'm taking "The Bad Infinity" back to the library, and with any luck won't have to think about Mac Wellman much more in the future, apart from bumping into the occasional Internet hagiography.

In defense of Julia

Stand tall Julia! Haters gonna hate!

Well I've criticized President Obama on occasion here on this blog, but I'm feeling the love for the POTUS right now thanks to his stepping up for social justice.

And I don't think this will hurt him in the election - as Frank Rich observed:

I, for one, never understood the point of saying you were “evolving” when many of the voters you were pandering to don’t even believe in evolution.

But I'm nevertheless annoyed with Frank Rich for his criticism of the Obama campaign's The Life of Julia which seems to focus entirely on aesthetics and on whether the Right will be able to parody it:

But the Obama camp’s didactic comic strip suggested what Cathy might have looked like had it been conceived by a humorless committee of social planners in a Scandinavian government bureaucracy; it played into every right-wing caricature of Obama as the “socialist” avatar of a nanny state. That this thing saw the light of day suggests that the Obama campaign has management and quality-control issues that had better be addressed.

Over at the New Yorker, Jill Lepore has the same concerns:

“The Life of Julia” borrows its aesthetic from USA Today and its narrative logic from Chutes and Ladders. It is a very bad place to begin a campaign. As a story, “The Life of Julia” is a mess; it’s got the verisimilitude of a string of paper dolls. As an argument, it’s worse. Better public education and affordable health care are worth fighting for, urgently, and they matter to everyone, but the heart of the fight is not over whether Julia, a fictitious college-educated Web entrepreneur, can one day plant Brussels sprouts.

First off, I disagree. I like its aesthetic, and I think it gets the message across succinctly and clearly. And the "Brussels sprouts" line is Lepore's own invention. What it actually says:

Under President Obama: Julia retires. After years of contributing to Social Security, she receives monthly benefits that help her retire comfortably, without worrying that she'll run out of savings. This allows her to volunteer at a community garden.

Under Mitt Romney: Julia's benefits could be cut by 40%.

There's not a damn thing wrong with that.

But maybe it doesn't work for most voters - I think it will - and I seriously doubt it's the disaster Rich or Lepore both claim it is - but I have no evidence.

But neither do Frank Rich or Jill Lepore.

All they have are their aesthetic complaints and concern that it's able to be parodied. Whether or not it accomplishes the goal of its existence - reaching the voters - does not seem to matter at all to either of them.

I mean, of course it can be parodied by the Right. The Right will find a reason to parody anything. The Right found it hysterically funny when Rush Limbaugh imitated Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's symptoms. Does Frank Rich really thinks there's a way to make anything parody-proof?

And as far as aesthetics - I guess Rich and Lepore wanted it to be illustrated by R. Crumb, but I think it looks just fine, and many voters don't share Lepore's tastes.

The New Yorker and New York Magazine are good publications, but let's face it, their writers are a tad, shall we say, self-impressed.

inmates of Blackwell's Island

Prior to 1921, Roosevelt Island was called Blackwell's Island (it was called Welfare Island from 1921 - 1973) and it is notable for the number of famous women who visited, and for one of two reasons - prison or insane asylum: Emma Goldman (imprisoned several times for being pro-anarchy, pro-birth control and anti-draft); Mae West, on public obscenity charges for her play SEX; Billie Holiday on prostitution charges; and Nellie Bly, who had herself committed to the Women's Lunatic Asylum so she could report on the atrocious conditions there.

There were a few other women there who are not so famous now, but were in their time: Becky Edelson, an associate of Emma Goldman; Madame Restall, infamous for performing abortions, and accused of causing the death of Mary Rogers due to failed abortion, although it's generally thought Rogers was outright murdered (her death was the inspiration for Poe's The Mystery of Marie Rogêt"); and Ida Craddock, described by Wikipedia as "advocate of free speech and women's rights."

Craddock is a fascinating figure, in that she had bizarre religious beliefs - although really, all religious beliefs are bizarre by ordinary workaday rules of logic and rationality. Hers were just more idiosyncratic than most. The infamous censor Anthony Comstock seems to have made persecuting her his personal past-time - he eventually drove her to suicide - she made sure to name him in her suicide note. George Bernard Shaw also despised Comstock and coined the term "comstockery" in his honor.

Much of her work can be seen at IdaCraddock.com and here's a taste of her Heavenly Bridegrooms - Craddock claimed to have sexual relations with an angel:

It has been my high privilege to have some practical experience as the earthly wife of an angel from the unseen world. In the interests of psychical research, I have tried to explore this pathway of communication with the spiritual universe, and, so far as lay in my power, to make a sort of rough guidebook of the route.

Which sounds pretty helpful. Later on she points out the erotic nature of some Christian practices:

The celestial being who, whether as God or an angel, becomes the Heavenly Bridegroom of an earthly woman, is better known to the literature of the Christian Churches than most people who are not theologians are aware. But he is not peculiar to Christianity. He has been known and recognized throughout the world in all ages. The woman to whom he comes is, as a rule, distinguished for her purity of life. Usually she is a virgin; but where already married and a mother, she must be recognized as chaste or, at least, there must be no stigma of impurity upon her reputation. I am not at the present writing aware of a single exception to this.

Let us, however, first consider the Heavenly Bridegrooms of Christianity, from the popular orthodox standpoint.

There are two Heavenly Bridegrooms--the Holy Spirit and Christ.

The first of these, the Holy Spirit, is, according to the New Testament, the Being through whose agency she whom the Catholic Church delights to honor as the Blessed Virgin became incarnate with Jesus. The second of these, Christ, is the Being honored alike by Catholics and by Protestants as the Bridegroom of the Church; by Catholics also as the mystic Spouse of the ecstatic and purified nun, as in the case of Saint Teresa; and by Protestants as the Bridegroom of the Soul, in that popular hymn beginning:

"Jesus, Lover of my soul,
"Let me to Thy bosom fly!"

I once attended a young women's revival meeting at Ocean Grove, held under the auspices of an evangelist who was noted for his success in converting young girls. When the enthusiasm flagged, and his hearers were slow in responding to his appeals to "come to Christ", he started the above hymn, and the ardor of his fair congregation was at once kindled, girl after girl rising to publicly give herself to Christ. That which earnest pleading for their soul's salvation had failed to accomplish, was brought about by this simple suggestion of the "Lover of the Soul". In thus stimulating the untrained emotions of a maiden to aspire to the Divine through symbolism of earthly affection, this revivalist not only showed keen insight into human nature, but was also instinctively true to the teachings of the innermost truth of all religions, as I hope to show further on.

Ocean Grove is a town just south of Asbury Park, NJ, and is still known to this day as a location for Methodist "camp meetings" and as a religious resort.

Pointing out erotic aspects of Christianity is, I'm sure, what drove Comstock to consider her Public Decency Enemy #1.

The Heavenly Bridegroom, unfortunately, shares almost no "practical experiences" of being the wife of an angel. Instead almost the entire thing is devoted to quasi-scholarly justifications for her belief system. She uses the Bible extensively to support her theology.

What it really comes down to is a woman's response to the extreme constraints placed on female sexuality on the Victorian era, as well as the disappointments of marriage to earthly men:

The angelic bridegroom, as well as his earthly partner, must live a correct moral life and think clearly; and this means that he must exercise a tenderness, a considerate regard for his wife's comfort and happiness, and also a marital self-control of which too many earthly men are ignorant. No wonder, then, that on the plane of sentiment she should prefer this ghostly spouse to "anie mortall man". And on the plane of physiological relations, I think I have already shown that the husband who is an initiate in the third degree, who has trained his wife therein, can assure her of "connubial bliss which is perpetual". The Borderland bridegroom has this advantage, too, over the earthly bridegroom: being able to read his partner's thoughts, he can adapt himself to her most delicate fluctuations of sentiment at a moment's warning, and so never fail to be truly her companion.

New Yorker Parity Report - May 14, 2012

This week the parity rate nudges up to 30%, the high-end of the typical female parity range. Although it must be said that three of the by-lines are by one woman, Joan Acocella. I like the cover this week, and James Surowiecki's Financial Page is always great.

The New Yorker Parity Report

A regular report on the gender parity - or lack thereof - of the current issue of The New Yorker based on table of contents by-lines
Includes fiction, non-fiction, poems. Does not include illustrations.

---

A score of 50% means that half of all writers in the issue are female.
A score of greater than 50% would mean more female than male writers. This never happens.

---

Parity change from previous week: +3%

May 14, 2012

Total writers: 23
male: 16
female: 7
gender parity score: 30%

Last week's score
Total writers: 22
male: 16
female: 6
gender parity score: 27%

Freaky Roosevelt Island

Wow Roosevelt Island is weird. It's only a 30 minute walk from my apartment over the Roosevelt Island bridge and it's like another world. Or to be specific, it feels like a small seaside town, not the middle of New York City.

I decided to rest my eyes some more, since they still haven't fully recovered from the vicious bout of eyestrain I had, and had been curious about Roosevelt Island. And for a beautiful day in May, it was practically deserted.

You can see the UN building in this photo looking south - look at the walkway. There's nobody there. Every now and then a runner would run by.

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To get a real understanding of how deserted the place is, here's a shot of Carl Schurz Park, across the river from Roosevelt Island:

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If you click to see the larger version you can make out all the people along the walkway. And I guarantee the place is crowded because I used to live a block away from the park and it was always crowded, especially on the walkway,  even in the winter, much less a mid-spring Sunday.

And here's Roosevelt Island:

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You can tell the day was fairly low-humidity by my barometer-like hair.

There's also a lighthouse on the northern end of the island - and again - look at how there's no people here.

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The place is also a hypochondriac's dream - there are two hospitals on this one tiny island, as well as remnants of former hospitals. Here's the sun dial in front of the Octagon.

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The Queensboro Bridge goes right over the middle of Roosevelt Island. Here is the tram about to land in the tram garage, or whatever it's called.

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This picture is looking east to Queens - there's the giant Pepsi sign.

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 If anything the southern end of Roosevelt Island is even more deserted that the northern end. Here's a small park with benches - nobody there but me and that squirrel.

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And here is the ruins of the Smallpox Hospital.

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It's so exotic, and yet about three blocks from here, I caught the Q102 which dropped me off two blocks from my home. Amazing.

Team Snake

It turns out that the two women who played the Snake in two different versions of MISTRESS ILSA, Carolyn Paine and Vibe Normann, make a pretty good team. Here they play sisters in the NYCPlaywrights April Play of the Month. I absolutely cannot watch Carolyn say the line: "One time a customer wanted all the kid mannequins, and I made a hundred dollars" (at 7:44) without cracking up. It took all my self control - and three takes - before I could record her saying that line without bursting out laughing before she finished.

Internet Eye Health Day

No posting here yesterday (Friday, May 4) because I declared that day as "Internet Eye Health Day." I normally spend too much time online and then I decided to get involved in the whole Drupal/MAMP programming environments and blam! gave myself a serious case of eye strain. So in order to force myself to stay offline for a whole day, I went to lunch with a friend and then off to Central Park.

I must confess I did peek at my email and Facebook with my iPhone. I'm not a saint.

But I got some very nice photos at the Conservatory Garden on the upper East Side of Central Park. And now that it's no longer IEHD I can post them.

The statue in the English garden

tulips eye view

I'm not sure what these flowers are - this is in the French garden

The well-named butterfly bush - I got some amazing butterfly pix

In this zoom-in you can see there are two butterflies in the shot

You can see the butterfly's probiscus in this shot - freaky!

The theatre boys club report

I see that the three newest playwrights in Martin Denton's "Indie Theater Now" lineup are men. Of course Denton gives lip service to the idea of more female playwrights - don't they all? But when it comes to walking the walk, not so much.

I see Denton is also promoting the work of Edward Einhorn, who believes that if you have a disagreement with him over a small-claims court sized director's payment, he has every right to take a copy of your script, file it without your permission or even knowledge, with the US Copyright office, and then turn around a year later and sue you for producing your own play in federal court at a cost of over $300K.

It only took six years and the focused effort of the Dramatists Guild to finally - finally! - get Einhorn's ill-gotten copyright de-registered - and that's years after all that money was down the federal court drain.

Well, not like it matters. It doesn't seem to have harmed his career with the would-be gatekeepers of the theatre world.

When I criticized Denton's boy's club on this blog last summer, the girlfriend of one of Denton's playwrights informed me, while she was trying to justify the relative absence of female playwrights in Denton's line-up:

Martin Denton (and his lovely mother, who runs the company with him) have invited (the playwright) and I into their home with graciousness and hospitality.

No surprise, Denton has published everything this playwright has produced in the past four years. It pays to schmooze.

I've seen a selection of the plays listed on Indie Theatre Now and I thought the best of them was just OK. Maybe the rest of them are so excellent they make up for that, but I doubt it.

As always, the justification for not including work by women is that the selectors only consider "quality" - because of course white males are just naturally better at writing plays. The artistic director at the Guthrie recently justified his line-up:

DOWLING: (interrupting) NO! No no no. I will continue to do the job that I am obliged to do, and that is to pick the best possible plays, irrespective of gender, irrespective of other issues. It's got to be the best work that we can put on our stage. 

A former Facebook friend of mine with four plays published by Denton scoffed at the idea that there was a pattern of bigotry concerning female playwrights, claiming likewise that Denton only responds to quality, and men just happen to be better playwrights. And I didn't even de-friend him for that, I de-friended him for mocking Joni Mitchell because in his opinion her music is too "girly." You know because girls suck at the arts, so "girly" is a horrible insult. That's the mindset out there - just because it's rarely stated so bluntly doesn't mean that these people are actually enlightened and progressive.

Dowling, and one of Dowling's defenders, Tad Simons in mspmag.com,  both mention economics as a reason for the selections. Simons writes:

Underlying it all is the question of how much responsibility the Guthrie has to reflect and serve the community that supports it, and what that should look like onstage? This is very different from asking what the Guthrie’s responsibilities are to its audience. The larger community of the Twin Cities may be getting increasingly diverse, but the Guthrie’s audience, however much one wishes it to be otherwise, is overwhelmingly white. Why? Because the number of people in the Twin Cities who can afford to pay $25-75 a pop for a Guthrie play is relatively small. And white.

Yet women make up 70% of the ticket buyers. But somehow that doesn't translate into  more plays by female playwrights being produced. Funny how that is.  And I don't know about the box office for non-white playwrights, but plays on Broadway by female playwrights actually earn 18% more than plays by male playwrights, according to Emily Glassberg Sands' famous study. And yet not only are plays by female playwrights less likely to be produced, their play productions are less likely to be extended than productions of plays by male playwrights.

And that, as Julia Jordan noted in her keynote address at last June's Dramatists Guild conference, is the clearest sign of bigotry - producers are actually operating against their economic self-interest to favor male playwrights.

But unfortunately too many women, like the playwright's girlfriend I quoted above, are willing to buy into the idea that all the male producers, publishers, etc etc simply select on the basis of quality and economics. The playwright's girlfriend suggested that a. it's the fault of women that we haven't achieved parity, and b. there are more important things in the world to complain about:

 Aren't women (in this country at least) at the point where they need to start also looking within themselves to see where our, collective or otherwise, baggage may be preventing us from achieving what we surely can? Or maybe we need to take our petty resentments and dissolve them by telling the stories of women in regions of the world who have got it really bad. Boo hoo hoo, Nancy didn't make Martin Denton's list again this year.

 Also she seems to think that this is personal - because I didn't make Denton's list that's the only possible reason I could have a problem with parity issues. Apparently she can't imagine that this could be about a general principle of justice, and not just about me. I guess she really believes that if Martin Denton doesn't approve my work I must be devastated.

And anybody who is familiar with Elevatorgate will recognize the similarity between the girlfriend's argument and Richard Dawkins's attitude towards any non-Muslim women who complain about sexism - those women over there have it really bad so you women in the West can just STFU.

It is attitudes like these that keep majority female theater-ticket-buyers from saying enough is enough and start boycotting theatre organizations that persistently avoid work by female playwrights.

And one more important point - NYCPlaywrights has been doing a Play of the Month project for over a year now, and so far we've selected eleven plays - 5 have been by women and 6 by men. And this was not a deliberate attempt at parity on my part - I am not the only one choosing the plays, I use teams of people to make the selections. And if I hate a play, there is no way I will select it, whether a woman wrote it or not. A bad play is a bad play. So without even trying we've reached perfect parity (given that we are at an odd number at this point) - why is that? Well maybe because we don't look at any previous successes and productions given to the playwrights, and we don't schmooze with the playwrights - we select the work based purely on the individual scripts alone. That's how you reach parity.

Oh and one more thing - we don't charge a fee for people to watch the readings we video-record for the Play of the Month, but we can see how many hits each play gets, and the run-away favorite play according to that is by a female playwright.

Somehow I'm not surprised.

Maddow & Krugman

Krgthulu appears on the Rachel Maddow show!

For everybody who is visiting this blog today via the hunt for krgthulu

There he is again - on reddit!

I’m Paul Krugman. I've been a columnist for The Times on the Op-Ed page since 1999, and I’m also a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University. I’ve written extensively on international trade and finance and was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 2008 for my research on global trade patterns. My latest book, ‘‘End This Depression Now!,’’ will be published later this month. In it I look at how we got stuck in the recession of the past four years and offer ideas for how we can free ourselves from its grip. An adaptation from the book, questioning some of the decisions made by Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, was published in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday. Here are links to my blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, and tweet verification that I am, in fact, Paul Krugman. Update, 6:04 p.m.: Thank you, everyone, for your thoughtful questions. I'm off now for a short break and then on to Rachel Maddow's show tonight.

Krugman and Rachel Maddow - yay!

New Yorker Parity Report - May 5, 2012

Back up to the average parity rate - 27%. The New Yorker is in a groove of having about 22 bylines per issue with the number of female bylines somewhere in the 3 - 7 range. In other non-parity news, the situation for women in Australian theatre is getting worse, and the artistic director of the Guthrie Theatre thinks anybody who isn't a white male playwright and director can suck it - white males are just the best at everything and that's why they get their stuff produced and that's why they get to direct.

The New Yorker Parity Report

A regular report on the gender parity - or lack thereof - of the current issue of The New Yorker based on table of contents by-lines
Includes fiction, non-fiction, poems. Does not include illustrations.

---

A score of 50% means that half of all writers in the issue are female.
A score of greater than 50% would mean more female than male writers. This never happens.

---

Parity change from previous week: +9%

May 5, 2012

Total writers: 22
male: 16
female: 6
gender parity score: 27%

Last week's score
Total writers: 22
male: 18
female: 4
gender parity score: 18%

non-misogynist romance movies part 2

I wrote about non-misogynist movies a month ago and it's time for another installmen.

*** SPOILERS AHOY ***

• The African Queen - produced over a decade before the second-wave feminism of the 1960s, this movie is not intentionally feminist, but it is anyway, because it treats both its characters, the riverboat captain (Humphrey Bogart) and the missionary (Katherine Hepburn) as individuals not male/female "types." In fact they are so far from the usual romance movie types that this isn't even classified as a romance - according to Wikipedia it's an "adventure" movie. And Hepburn's prissy missionary, Rose, is unlikely to ever be involved in a romance except that she and the rough-hewn captain Charlie undertake a mission together and the heightened emotions involved in going down an unpredictable river towards a dangerous goal throws them together. There are a couple of moments in the movie where they think they are going to die together and it's very moving how they handle those situations - which only makes their ultimate success even sweeter. It's no wonder it's considered a classic.

• Impromptu -  not considered a classic, but I very much enjoy Judy Davis's portrayal of George Sand - the pen name of French author Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin. The movie is about the difficult start of the romance between Sand and composer Frederic Chopin, although many liberties are taken. The movie exaggerates their opposite-sex traits to amusing effect - Sand often dressed in men's clothing so that she had the freedom to move around on her own and go places where women were not permitted, although I doubt Sand was nearly as boyish as Davis's portrayal - she is seen galloping away on a horse to avoid her discarded, jealous boyfriend, and at another point shoots him in the arm when he's dueling with Chopin. "You're a menace to art" is her droll justification. Meanwhile Chopin has fainted dead away. Chopin is played by Hugh Grant, and he's very entertaining - hyper-sensitive but not effeminate. And it's true that Chopin was sickly which could explain his "feminine" aspects. Bernadette Peters plays Marie d'Agoult as the villain, a scheming bitch who deliberately tries to keep Sand and Chopin apart. It's a great injustice to the actual person, not only for the nasty personality of the movie d'Agoult - not only scheming but constantly nagging her lover Franz Listz. Worst of all the movie never mentions that d'Agoult was also a published author with her own masculine pen name.  So that unjust portrayal does take away a little from the over-all feminist sensibility, but the main thing is that Sand and Chopin are both artists with distinct, contrasting personalities who find a way to make it work.

• The Owl and the Pussycat - also not a great movie (although it received two award nominations and did quite well at the box office) but it's the original inspiration for my play Julia & Buddy so I wanted to mention it and it does count as a non-misogynist romance. Like the previous two movies here, this is about opposites attracting - Felix, played by George Segal is a prudish bookworm and Doris, played by Barbra Streisand, is a loud-mouth prostitute. The movie is better than the play as far as presenting a romance of equals, thanks no doubt to Streisand - the play is much more focused on the bookworm Felix. The movie is pretty zany and it seems like Doris never shuts up for the first 30 minutes, but I thought it captured pretty well the feeling of longing for somebody you don't even like or relate to much, as Felix does for Doris after their night together. And his excitement and embarrassment while trying to by a ticket to see Doris in the X-Rated "Cycle Sluts" is really funny and the pot-smoking & bathtub moments in Felix's fiancee's parents' house is pretty amusing. And the ending, filmed in Central Park, is surprisingly moving.

A clip from the movie - gross and funny at the same time. Unfortunately they skip over the part where Felix is buying the ticket.



"Ohhh - my gawd you could."

Introduction to THE RIMSKY-KORSAKOV AFFAIR

I have the first draft of the introduction to my newest play THE RIMSKY-KORSAKOV AFFAIR:

ABOUT CATHERINE THE GREAT

Catherine the Great did not have sex with horses. If you are shocked that I even thought it necessary to mention this, you are most likely in the minority. Many people, including me, were first introduced to Catherine the Great via the rumor that she died when a horse fell on her while being lowered on top of her. I heard it from, of all people, my high school history teacher. And I don’t remember the teacher actually denying it. She just told us the rumor and let it go at that.

The story is due to sexism, naturally. Catherine the Great availed herself of the privileges that come with being an absolute monarch, including sex with beautiful young subjects. But since she was a woman it was seen as unnatural. And since she was engaging in unnatural practices, who knows how far she would go? If she likes beautiful young stallions so much, why not an actual horse?

And three hundred later, it is still seen as a defiance of nature for a woman to take the same sexual liberties as a man, even though for the first time in recorded history, a larger than tiny fraction of women are taking those liberties. You can tell that there is still a double-standard because the term for women who enjoy sexual relations with younger men is “cougars” and the term for men who enjoy sexual relations with younger women is “men.”

Patriarchy has no intention of dying without a fight. And to that end the boosters of Patriarchy have developed a “scientific” theory to explain the divergent sexual behaviors of men and women under Patriarchy, “evolutionary adaptation.” Also known as “men are from Mars and women are from Venus.” The official umbrella term for this political movement (in spite of the claims that it is science) is “evolutionary psychology” and it is all the rage among big media opinion leaders. At least three of the name-brand columnists in the New York Times, John Tierney, David Brooks and Maureen Dowd have cited evolutionary psychology “studies” to justify their own belief that men and women have opposite, essential natures and anybody who denies this belief is simply anti-science.

Both cougars and Catherine the Great flout the basic tenets of evolutionary psychology which are that

a. women are innately more monogamous than men, and
b. women innately prefer older and wealthier men, whereas men prefer younger, beautiful women.

It should be mentioned that evolutionary psychologists have yet to figure out what to make of homosexuals. As far as they are concerned all modern sexual behaviors are the result of the procreational choices of our pre-historic ancestors. Since the sexual preferences of homosexuals don’t lead to procreation, they don’t fit into the iron-clad algorithm of strict adaptationism that evolutionary psychologists swear by.

What Catherine the Great and 21st-century “cougars” have in common is economic independence. Unlike women under the extreme patriarchy that has dominated the world since forever, Catherine and women in industrial/post-industrial societies can hold jobs that pay at least a living wage, and control the disbursement of those wages themselves, and are therefore not obliged to marry a man on the grounds that he has enough money to support her and their children, with the only other options being prostitution or living a life of economic and sexual impoverishment as an “old maid.”

However, the economic realities that shape human sexual behavior are never acknowledged by evolutionary psychologists, because that muddies the streamlined perfection of their belief system. So much so that the leading proponent of "evolved" gender essentialism, David Buss, went so far as to insist that a culture in which women were sold into polygynous marriage by their families  (the Turkmen of Persia) was an example of female sexual preference for older powerful men.

What I’ve done with this play, in part, is to suggest a possible scenario for how the rumors of Catherine’s alleged "unnatural" practices began - rumors spread by disgruntled men informed by the traditional sexual double-standard. The main difference between then and now is that the 18th-century justification was God’s will, whereas now it is the workings of “nature.”

In all cases the insistence that it is unnatural and unfeminine for a woman to choose younger sexual partners, or have more than one sexual partner at a time should be refuted and opposed by all who believe that women have a right to sexual self-determination without the interference of the bullies of the Patriarchy.

THE SIBERIAN SHAMAN - a review

THE SIBERIAN SHAMAN by Catherine the Great starts off with such promise! I really had high hopes during the first thirty pages of the play.

It starts off with something I didn't expect - Mavra the maid from the play OH THESE TIMES! is back. Actually, nowhere in the play does it indicate she's the same person as the Mavra in OH THESE TIMES! - maybe "Mavra" was a sort of generic name to give all Russian maidservant characters in Catherine's day. But I was hoping it was the same character. And then the play starts out like some kind of 18th-century Marx brothers routine with Mavra as Chico.

   BOBINA
Mavra.

   MAVRA

(with both hands in her pockets)

Your wish, madam?

   BOBINA
First, listen carefully to what I have to say, then run as quickly as you can.

   MAVRA
Very well, I’m listening.

   BOBINA
Run to my daughter

   MAVRA
At once.

(Turning around, she starts to run out.)

   BOBINA
Where are you going?

   MAVRA
To Prelesta Nikolaevna, your daughter.

   BOBINA
To tell her what? You haven’t let me finish.

   MAVRA
I’ll tell her you told me to run to her.

   BOBINA
I’m sending you to my daughter with instructions.

   MAVRA
Ah! I thought -

   BOBINA
Run to my daughter, and tell her I’ll be right there -

   MAVRA
Very well.

(Turning around, she starts to leave.)

   BOBINA
Wait a minute. Don’t be in such a hurry.

Catherine also dropped the Restoration Comedy characteristic-names that we saw in the previous play (Mrs. Tattler, Mr. Notshallow) although the names are funny sounding anyway - in addition to Bobina there's Flena Drobina - I don't know how that's pronounced in Russian but I kept hearing it in my head as Fleena Drobeena. And the daughter's name, Prelesta, sounds like a prescription.

As an aside - I really hate the format that Catherine follows in dividing up her scenes. Basically a new scene begins whenever a character enters or leaves. For example:

SCENE 10

MAVRA
Prokofii! Prokofii!

SCENE 11

(Prokofii enters.)

PROKOFII
Your wish?

So annoying!

In present times, whenever there's a holy man, especially one from an exotic religion, there's a very good chance that he's not really a holy man, just a guy running a scam. I thought maybe that was only a modern trope, but no, sure enough it turns out that the Shaman in this play is also running a scam, in cahoots with the Butler of the Bobin household, who turns out to be the Shaman's brother.

Catherine may have been diplomatic and subtle as a politician but she certainly wasn't as a writer. She lets us know that the Shaman is a fake almost right away, with another promising scene. The Shaman has been invited into the home of Mr. and Mrs. Bobin because Mrs. Bobin (or rather Bobina - in the Russian mode, women's last names are feminized) has taken ill.

   MAVRA
Well here’s what happened... our mistress fell ill, from a simple chill. (The Shaman) brought her some kind of herbal water - 

   BRAGIN
Which she took...

   MAVRA
No sir, she never did... the vial broke. We were afraid to say anything...

   BRAGIN
But how did she - 

   MAVRA
We are to blame. 

(Smiles. Prokofii laughs.) 

   BRAGIN
What are you laughing about? What happened? Please tell me. 

   MAVRA
Very well, all right... I’ll tell you... only if you promise not to tell anyone. 

   BRAGIN
Don’t worry... tell me. 

   MAVRA
We put another vial in its place -  

   BRAGIN
With medicine in it? 

   PROKOFII
No sir... just plain water. 

   BRAGIN
And your mistress drank this water? 

   MAVRA
Constantly... with a small spoon. 

   BRAGIN
And did she become better? 

   PROKOFII
Bit by bit, sir... the water began to act as a laxative! 

   MAVRA
But around here the rumors flew that she recovered thanks to the the Shaman’s precious potions. 

   PROKOFII
But please don’t tell on us. 

The Bragin in this scene is a friend of the suitor of Prelesta (side effects may include...) and Prokofiii is a manservant. I thought it bode well for the future plot that he and Mavra were in cahoots.

And then we get to see the Shaman for the first time and that scene is just wild:

(The Shaman runs across the stage and stands with his back to the wall, near the orchestra)

   BOBIN
Look! Just now he drew nearer; perhaps I can attract him somehow. If I don’t succeed, you try something to get his attention.

   SANOV
Very well, we will watch you and then try ourselves.

   BOBIN
Amban-Lai of the 140 degrees, these people wish to speak with you.

(Lai, with his face rapt, stands in one place and hops.)

   SIDOR DROBIN
That got him going!

   SANOV
Mr. Amban-Lai, we would like to hear your wisdom.

(Lai, standing in one place, does a pantomime as if someone is tickling him.)

    SIDOR DROBIN
I will see... if I can do it...

(to Lai with a tone of derision)

Don’t you need a crutch?

(Shows him a walking stick. Lai shakes his head to the right and to the left.)

    KROMOV
Haven’t you stood still at the wall long enough?

(Shows him his watch.)

See what time it is already.

(Lai nods his head forward and to the side, in the manner of Chinese dolls.)

   BRAGIN

(Showing Lai a purse with money.)

Does this please you?

(Lai stretches out both hands in front of him.)

   SIDOR DROBIN
Ha, ha! Mr. Amban... you are certainly no dummy.

(Lai barks like a dog.)

What kind of voice is that? It sounds like a dog barking.

   KARP DROBIN
I’ll try. Mr. Shaman, haven’t you  made us wait long enough in anticipation of conversation?

(Lai mews like a cat.)

   SANOV
Isn’t that Chinese?

   SIDOR DROBIN
Does Chinese sound like the cry of a kitten?

   KROMOV
Mr. Lai, could you perhaps be pretending?

(Lai crows like a rooster.)

   BRAGIN
I’m beginning to think you’re playing a joke on us.

(Lai clucks like a hen.)

   BOBIN
Amban-Lai of the 140 degrees,  come to your senses!

(Lai suddenly rushes forward, pushing the others apart and runs from behind the wings, at full speed.)

SCENE 3

   KROMOV
What a crazy man!

   BOBIN
Never in my life...

   SIDOR DROBIN
He almost knocked us all down.

   BOBIN
Please excuse him.

   SANOV
I don’t know what to think!

   KROMOV
He certainly stretched out his hands to take that money.

   BOBIN
I beg you, don’t judge him so quickly.

   BRAGIN
In many ways he acts just like village women in hysterics.

   BOBIN
His fellow Siberian Shamans all make even more sounds and movements than that. I appeal to anyone who’s ever seen them. But it must seem strange if you’re not used to it. Shamans learn such things by degrees; this one has attained 140 degrees. There are rules so that by degrees they can reach this state of trance.

   SIDOR DROBIN
Live and learn! Who among you, brothers, has ever heard of rules... so that by degrees... one may go out of one’s mind? What a science!

   KROMOV
He has a reputation as both a wise man and a sorcerer.

   KARP DROBIN
He acts like a child...

   BRAGIN
And plays the buffon. 

SCENE 4

(Lai enters gravely with a rapt visage, holding a shamanic kettledrum in his hands. He strikes it intermittently at first, then quickens his steps and then blows  and runs around Sidor Drobin singing oo oo oo, producing a sound like the howling of a storm.)

   SIDOR DROBIN
Don’t tell my wife, she’ll think he’s enchanted me.

(Lai continues his running around them all, shaking and frightening them, hopping and singing ooooo, iiii, eh eh eh eh, a a a a.  Then he runs straight up to the chair, where he falls as if unconscious. His followers leave him after a short ballet.)

Now that is some pretty bold and original dramatic business there. And a huge cast - there are already fifteen characters in the play and then she throws in an indeterminate number of followers who do a short ballet.

I'm sure that all the barking, meowing, crowing, etc. was thought hysterically funny by the audiences of the time - hell, I'm sure today's audiences would laugh too. As I was reading it I thought, "not bad for the Empress of Russia." I mean, she has this amazing, promising set-up - a sham Shaman, mischievous servants, wackiness galore. That narrative train is chugging right along - and then it completely derails.

As I said, she's not the most subtle of writers. It isn't enough to reveal that the Shaman is fake once, we must be told many times.

But then she introduces a character named Ustinia Mashkina who is either extremely stupid or insane and all the other characters express contempt for her. She's certainly portrayed as annoying, Catherine constantly describes her as affected. And I mean constantly:

   USTINIA MASHKINA

(affectedly)

I’ve come from Zaraisk, matushka, from Zaraisk.

   FLENA DROBINA
Did you bring us any much news from there?

USTINIA MASHKINA

(affectedly)

From Zaraisk, I first went on ahead to Moscow, and having met up with some acquaintances there, I accompanied them here.

   FLENA DROBINA
Who do you mean?

   USTINIA MASHKINA

(affectedly, holding a fan in front of her face)

Does it vex you that I have come?

(affectedly to Bobina)

It is my fate, you see; out of jealousy for their husbands, all the ladies envy me!

She's shown to be fooled any time a man says he loves her - she apparently can't tell when somebody is teasing. My guess is she's based on someone Catherine knew who was autistic. This was before autism was recognized as a condition. She's a pitiful character but Catherine displays no empathy for her and she seems to be placed right into the middle of the play as a plot device: she believes that she is engaged to the man that Prelesta (ask your doctor about...) loves, Ivan Pernatov. But of course it turns out that Pernatov was teasing Ustinia Mashkina and she thought he was sincere. But even though they know she's a delusional fool, some of them believe that she's actually his fiancee, especially Prelesta because Prelesta is also an idiot.

So the Ustinia Mashkina character is there to keep Prelesta (do not take on an empty stomach)  from getting together too quickly with her beloved and meanwhile, what happened to the Siberian Shaman plot? Well, we barely see him after his big dance scene and then we find out about his fate through servants' dialog, and then later from the master & family's dialog because why the hell not tell the same thing twice?

   PROKOFII
The trouble’s already happened; he’s been arrested.

   MAVRA
The Amban?

   PROKOFII
Yes, they’ve just led him away.

   MAVRA

Oh, poor fellow! He wasn’t so clever after all.

   PROKOFII
They also say he swindled a merchant’s widow out of her money. He promised her he would reveal her husband in the flesh, and for two day sin a row he brought her some kind of bearded man in disguise. Frightened, she took him for her dead lover. But now the entire sham has been exposed.

And this, by the way, is the only other conversation between Mavra and Prokofii - the smart-ass servant plot was discarded along with the sham Shaman plot to make way for the stupid and mean-spirited Ustinia Mashkina plot.

But the worst thing about the Ustinia Mashkina plot is that at the end of the play Catherine has a character compare her to the Shaman, after she's been heartlessly fooled yet again. These are the last lines of the play:

   USTINIA MASHKINA
You are all leaving, but I must remain.  

   KROMOV
You resemble these Shamans; both you and they follow rules you’ve invented. At first you deceive only yourself, but then you deceive everyone else who puts their faith in you.

This is idiotic. The Shaman was deceiving everyone because he was running a deliberate scam. Ustinia Mashkina is just a haplessly delusional character. But hey, if you're going to destroy a perfect comedy set-up, why not completely blow it away with a wrong-headed moral too?