Two directors transform ‘They fight’ into complex stagecraft in ‘Macbeth’

Aaron Posner, left and Teller

     Though known for writing lengthy soliloquies, William Shakespeare does not offer a lot of guidance with his description of the dramatic business before the last scene of “Macbeth”:
     “They fight.”
     Not much to go on. Which is why plays have a director or, in the case of the upcoming production of “Macbeth” at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, two directors: Aaron Posner and Teller, the silent half of the popular Penn & Teller magical duo.
     “We’re going to take it from toward the end of the fight,” said Posner, during a rehearsal last week.
     No need for a spoiler alert with Shakespeare. But the directors asked that I not reveal any surprises, of which there are many. So let’s just say Macbeth, having left a trail of butchery and betrayal at the goading of his ambitious wife, is about to get his due.
     “You’re now completely surrounded by all these people,” Teller said to Ian Merrill Peakes, who plays Macbeth. “And that’s when we go to the blackout.”
     If your reaction to the above is “He speaks?” you’re not alone. Everyone I mentioned meeting Teller said the exact same thing, even though that’s like wondering how NBA star Chris Paul gets along with his insurance selling brother, Cliff. It’s an act, one he’ll happily expound upon.
     “I think people really enjoy the idea of somebody living his life without talking,” Teller said. “That’s a really cool thing to think about. Because, when you take away talk, there’s so much you add. My experience as a performer on stage is that when you don’t talk there’s a tremendous intimacy with the audience. I think people enjoy that idea and like playing with it. People who talk to me will later say, ‘Oh yeah, he never talks.’ It’s not stupidity, it’s conspiracy; they’re conspiring with me and I’m conspiring with them to help make that idea come to life. We think there so much power in speech, but theres so much power in stillness.”

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'Comforter where, where is your comforting?'

Photo by Michael Cooke

     Grief is like water.
     It finds its way through the cracks. 
     Through fissures in the walls we set up against the suffering of strangers.  
     With good reason. 
     Because there is so much sorrow in the world, we can't feel a tiny fraction of it. 
     We can't, and wouldn't want to if we could.
     Lest we surrender the happiness that we should cherish.
     Before it is our turn. 
     Inevitably, our turn. 
     Like water, grief has odd currents, eddies, backflows. 
     When I heard of the 15 young Canadians, 10 junior league hockey players and five support staff, who died Sunday in a bus accident in Saskatchewan, my thoughts were distant. 
     Those poor boys, those poor families.
     That was about it. On Tuesday I read the story in the New York Times, about the identities, switched for two players in the carnage and commotion—one who had been thought dead was alive, one who was thought alive, actually dead.
      Also unimaginable, yet somehow speaking to the human condition more than the accident itself.
      For we never know if we are among the safe, for now, or the taken, today, and even knowing, we don't know. We only think we know. Those boys and their families thought they knew, on Saturday. On Sunday they were proven wrong.
      A somber thought. 
      But nothing visceral. 
      Nothing personal.
      Then a Canadian friend sent me a stark photo he had taken, of a borrowed hockey stick placed outside his door. 
      Somehow, that stark photo. The lonely stick.
      Canadians love hockey, and they have taken to putting the sticks outside their doors, to acknowledge the loss, to show solidarity for their fellow citizens' suffering, and in the sweetly impossible thought that one of the lost players might need a stick, as players often do.
      It isn't much. It's an enormous amount, in that it's all that can be done, and a reminder that like it or not, we all all part of something, something larger, the great human condition, that feels, each in our turn, love, and connection, each in our turn loss, and sorrow. 
      There is a brief poem by Gerald Manley Hopkins that goes:

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

       And ends this way:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

     It is difficult and necessary to bend your mind toward the tragedy of others, to recognize it, solemnize it, pause from the revelry of our lives to acknowledge the woe in theirs. To let ourselves be forced against our wills to do it. For whom? For ourselves, as much as for them. Or rather, for all of us, for our frayed humanity, so worn and twisted and threadbare. No words suffice; better a mute hockey stick, placed outside the grieving doors of Canada.      
     

Off the beaten track in London

Sir John Soane's Museum

    When my older boy told me he wasn't coming home over spring break: he'd be visiting London for the first time instead, conducting research at the School of Economics, I manfully resisted suggesting what he should do in his free time.
    Let him discover the city himself.
    Besides, kids never listen to their parents, mine especially, and I'd describe my favorite places, only to have him shrug them off.
     That would hurt. 
    Well, at least I tried not to make suggestions. I did break down and mention Sir John Soane's Museum—I always do, to anybody visiting London, since somebody mentioned it to me, and I feel the need to pass it forward. The place is special, to me, for reasons that will be clear below. But I mentioned it to my son in a casual, off-hand way, knowing that he'd never go, certainly not, not just because his dad suggested it. Why would he?
    When he got back, he phoned to describe his adventures: lunch at the Dorchester, shopping at Harrod's, drinks at the American Bar at the Savoy. The British Museum and, oh yeah, Sir John Soane's Museum. He liked it. I was surprised, shocked almost. Occasionally old dad catches a break.

    We are all just dice rattling around in fate's dice cup.

     Among the countless reasons why I happened to be walking down Lincoln's Inn Fields, a street facing a park, one was how the square tail fin of a 500-pound incendiary bomb caught the air as it tumbled from a German bomber high above the city in May 1941.
     Not that I realized it, as I searched for No. 13. I thought I was there simply because, a week earlier in Chicago, I had encountered Hal Weitzman, Midwest correspondent for the Financial Times. I've been to London repeatedly, I said, and already seen the usual things.
     "What should I see in London?" I asked. "Something that tourists don't know about; something off the beaten track."
     "John Soane's Museum," he answered immediately. That was good enough for me to find the address though, characteristically, I did so without investigating what the museum might be.
     I'm bad at premeditating trips — I prefer to simply go and see what happens. Surprise magnifies wonder. In addition to quizzing Hal, my sole attempt at planning consisted of asking myself what I would most like to do while in London.
     The answer? "See the queen."
     So I phoned Buckingham Palace, with typical American cheekiness. "I realize we're not going to have tea together," I blathered, "but maybe she'll be cutting a ribbon someplace and I could be in the crowd. . . ."
     Alas, I was told, the queen will be at her castle in Balmoral, Scotland.
     Rebuffed by royalty, I instead found myself in the middle of a block of elegant townhouses, looking at a white stone facade of tall arched windows, flanked by a pair of Greek statues. I went up the front steps, signed my name, and stepped into one of the most singular and unusual spaces I've ever visited.
     John Soane was the foremost architect in Britain in the early 1800s. He designed the Bank of England. The flattened dome atop the red London phone booths that still dot the streets here was inspired by the tomb Soane built for his wife.
     He moved into this house in 1813 and filled it with artwork and architectural ornaments — plaster casts, bits of molding, statuary, urns, medallions — intending it as a place of study for his students. In his old age, the 1830s, Soane was heaped with honors. One of them, in 1833, was an act of Parliament that decreed his house and its contents should remain unchanged forever.
     And so they have, lit by skylights and mirrors. The main hall is painted a deep Pompeian red — Soane was at the excavation of Pompeii in 1779 — its mahogany chairs so inviting that a thistle is set on the seat of each, to prevent visitors from accepting the invitation.
     It took me an hour to get through the first floor, lingering in the Picture Room, a small chamber jammed with paintings. The eight canvases of "Rake's Progress" are there, plus others by Hogarth, and a Turner watercolor, one of three.
     Soane had more masterpieces than wall space, so the Picture Room's walls are ingeniously hinged, folding forward to reveal a second wall of paintings within. That wall also opens to reveal a hidden nymph and other artifacts.
     How could such a place survive the fury of time? It nearly didn't. Soane's son sued to pry away the house. He lost. Despite attentive docents, visitors sometimes walk off with artifacts. My attention was drawn to a black oblong box, whose inscription explained that this was the pistol of Russia's Peter the Great, given to Napoleon, who gave it to "a gentleman."
     The box was empty.
     "What happened to Peter the Great's pistol?" I asked a guard.
     "A visitor stole it 40 years ago!" David Gardener said, hotly, as if it happened yesterday.
     Upstairs, in a yellow parlor, I noticed a small clear window pane standing out from the colorful stained glass. It bore a neatly etched inscription:
     "This window having been broken by enemy action in 1941 was restored with the inclusion of the only surviving panel from the window opposite in 1951."
     During the Blitz, a bomb fell across the park, destroying another museum, the Hunterian.      
     "There's a horrid modern building there now," a guard explained. The bomb blew out the windows and spattered burning rubble inside Soane's house. Gardener showed me a charred patch, the size of an egg cup, on a mahogany bench.
     "Luckily, someone was staying here and put it out," he said. "And many of the most important objects had been moved for safekeeping."
     Jealous Time sent other agents to attack the house — in the late 1980s, robbers struck the museum, but the police had been warned and were waiting across the street.
     "A man was shot dead in the entranceway," said Gardener. As I left, very reluctantly, I saw the bullet hole in the plaster, covered by a small piece of Plexiglas.
     I walked across the park to look at the new building — charmless, flat-faced, glass and red brick. And strange as it may sound, despite all that I've read and seen about the horrific destruction of World War II, the millions dead and cities ravaged, I don't think the terrible random savagery and incredible loss of war ever struck me quite the way it did thinking about that one bomb, whistling and twisting through the sky one day in May, the buffeting winds deciding whether John Soane's lovingly assembled legacy would continue or abruptly perish in a flash, whether a visitor in 2009 would get off the Central underground line at Holborn or go on to St. Paul's.

        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 2, 2009

To solve labor troubles, Loyola needs to live its supposed values

Picket line, by Walker Evans (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 

     Teaching is hard.
     I blundered into teaching a class at Loyola University a decade ago: a pal asked if I’d talk to his journalism students about writing celebrity profiles. Happily! I showed up, leaned on a lectern for an hour, droning on about walking 18 holes with Arnold Palmer, discussing Snoopy with Charles Schulz and watching Dizzy Gillespie play trumpet.
     “You’re good at this,” my pal said and, being a fool, I believed him. Everyone dog-paddling in the icy chop of professional journalism has an eye out for a safe harbor, so I stopped by the dean’s office to offer my services. They checked that I had a pulse and waved me aboard.
     The next thing I knew I was photocopying readings, drawing up two-hour lesson plans, then gazing at 21 slack 21-year-old faces. When a student plagiarized an assignment, boldly copying off the Internet, I called in the dean. Without going into details, let’s say I naively assumed the dean would apply discipline, and enforce the antique notion that the ability to cut and paste text undetected might not be the kind of excellence that a Loyola degree represents.
     All for a fee that I could have earned dashing off one of those celebrity profiles.
     So I don’t want to feign impartiality toward the 300 non-tenured track instructors who held a one-day strike at Loyola last Wednesday, trying to spur the university to negotiate more sincerely with Service Employees International Union Local 73.

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It was a a very good year

     I try never to get in a tug-o-war with strangers on Facebook.
     There's no end to it. 
     Because there's more of them than there are of me.
     But, being human, sometimes I get sucked in.
     Someone posted a painting of a farmer and his son gazing off into the sunrise with a caption "I miss the American I grew up in."
    Talk about a slow pitch down the middle. I couldn't help it. I swung on my heels.
      "Then you don't remember it," I wrote.
     She objected, naturally enough, and I removed my gotcha question from its special lead-lined case.
    What year, I asked, specifically, are you missing? When is this lost time of happiness that you wouldn't mind returning? 
    "1952," she said.
     I did a little research research—as I said, no end to it—and then returned to her page.
    Did she, I asked, miss the thousands of Americans who died in Korea? 
    Or was it the thousands, mostly children, who died of polio? 1952 was the worst year ever for that dread disease: 57,000 cases in the United States. In one week in July, 11 of the 14 Thiel children of Mapleton, Iowa, got sick. That September, four of six children in a family in Milwaukee caught a particularly virulent strain of polio and quickly died, one after another. Is that what she wants back?
    Maybe it was the Red Scare that she was shedding a nostalgic tear for: Joe Stalin was very much alive in 1952, and loyalty oaths were big. Or McCarthyism—Tailgunner Joe had not yet been chastised by his fellow senators. 
    Maybe it was rampant Jim Crow. That was fun.
    Here the conversation ended. Which is the main reason not to engage in these conversations, to stretch the word. Because even if you win, you lose. Changing your mind is hard, particularly for a person old enough to pine for 1952. They'd rather shrug and move on than face the shattering prospect of being wrong.
    I just don't get that. I'm wrong all the time. I thought the Kinks song "Lola" was about a girl. I thought cell phones were a fad. Being wrong, and the ability to admit it, doesn't undercut my worth as a human—it emphasizes it. When I cop to making a mistake, it's almost like revealing a superpower, because so few can do it. It's as if I could turn invisible or fly, and almost as useful.
    And I understand what motivates people to nostalgia. The wonderful details of your life remain clear; the less felt details of the news fade away.  
     It isn't that I'm not nostalgic myself. I am. I was 17 in 1977, and there were cool things going on. Punk was big in London, and I was there, on Wardor Street, bouncing to the Vibrators at the Marquee Club.  In my hometown, if you stopped at the gas station, Clark's, Jack would come out, pump your gas, check your oil, chat a bit, and maybe slip you stick of gum. That was nice.
    But I would never, ever argue that 1977 was a Golden Age. I'm not saying that all years are the same. Some are worse—1942—some are better. But however you see a year, you have to recognize that you are viewing it through the lens of your own experience. The day my first son was born in 1995 was a very good day. For me. Not so good for the parents of the seven kids who died when a bus was hit by a train in Fox River Grove. 
     I'm going to really try to stop engaging strangers on Facebook. It's a challenge enough to do it with your friends and loved ones.
    My father once said to me, "You know, people were just kinder when I was growing up."
    And I answered, "This era of kindness of which you speak, dad, was that the Great Depression or World War II, because I just don't see it."
    I don't remember his reaction. 

"Everything I ever knew was behind my thumb,"

Left to right, Robert Kurson, Bill Anders, Jim Lovell and Frank Borman

    "Why didn't you tell me it was going to be like this!?" my wife enthused. 
     We were hurrying through a windowless hallway at the Museum of Science & Industry on Thursday night, heading to the Crown Space Center to view the Apollo 8 spacecraft, having been thrilled and uplifted by the launch festivities of "Rocket Men" by Robert Kurson, which featured the author interviewing the three astronauts from Apollo 8. 
     "I didn't know," I confessed. "It could have been Bob at a card table with the astronauts and a handful of people."
      I do have a tendency to underplay literary occasions—just in case. The instance lodged in my wife's mind is when I suggested, in a half-hearted, might-as-well sense, that we go to this library dinner, which turned out to be the Carl Sandburg awards, making cocktail chatter with Don DeLillo and Scott Turow, and me on stage with the assembled Chicago literary luminaries, such as we are. 
     The truth is, with these book events, you really never do know. Perhaps I am influenced by my own book signings, where I can be the only attendee. I naturally assumed that the people going would be like me, longtime admirers of the author acting out of loyalty. The thought that 500 people would cram the MSI theater at $35 a pop out of, not only interest in Bob's work, but from passionate respect for the astronauts and the space program never crossed my mind. 
    But there they were, a full house at the MSI auditorium, giving a standing ovation to the astronauts before they said a word. 
    Maybe I was just projecting. At the beginning of the evening, I had no knowledge of Apollo 8 except that it came between Apollos 7 and 9.  My strong memories were with Apollo 11, and the Moon landing, and Apollo 13, dramatically limping home after the explosion, and of course Ron Howard's brilliant movie.
     Then Bob took the microphone and started by talking about the Apollo 8 mission, how Neil Armstrong considered it more daring than his own, because it was assembled quickly--in four months—out of fear the Russians would orbit the moon first. Up to that point, in mid-1968, only Mercury capsules had orbited the earth and returned. The Saturn 5 rocket, to this day the most powerful machine ever made, had been tested exactly twice, the second time a catastrophic failure.
     Bob made the leap sound like the most exciting thing in the world, and maybe it was. The crew of Apollo 8 would be going on a journey 2,000 times further than what was planned: 240,000 miles to the Moon as opposed to parking 125 miles up in Earth orbit.
    All that was before we heard Kurson lead the Apollo 8 crew, Bill Anders, Jim Lovell and Frank Borman, through 90 minutes that was in turns moving and informative, funny and fascinating.  
     Even before it began there was a surprise. While we sat waiting my wife turned to me and said that astronaut Eugene Cernan, was from her hometown of Bellwood and she remembered him coming back for a parade, and what a thrill it was. She tapped at her phone to call up details of the parade—all this technology surrounding us boosted by the space program. I looked at her dumbfounded—you know a woman for 35 years, you think you know everything about her, so it's notable when you learn something new.
     Then the astronauts, amazingly sharp despite being in their 80s, started sharing their personal stories: Lovell talking about arranging Neiman Marcus to deliver a fur to his wife on Christmas, while they were in space. Borman throwing up, which you really do not want to do in zero gravity.
     Anders talked about the iconic earthrise photo, driving home to those back on Earth what a small blue planet we live upon.

      "It's ironic, we came to explore the Moon but we really discovered the Earth," said Anders.
     Lovell—who, I was surprised to learn, flew on 8 as well as 13—spoke of holding his thumb so it blotted out the Earth.
     "Everything I ever knew was behind my thumb," he said.
     The Apollo 8 mission began Dec. 21—officials worried that a Christmas tragedy in space would forever mar the holiday, that a capsule with three American corpses inside eternally circling the moon would kill it as a romantic nighttime icon. The three astronauts, all career military, were tasked with speaking to the largest audience to listen to human voices—an estimated third of the earth's population. The sum of the guidance they got to prepare their marks, said Borman, was 'Do something appropriate."
     Talk about trust.
     "That's one of the great hallmarks of our country," he added.
     Or at least was. The ghost of our current political predicament hovered over the event, at least for me. While never directly evoked, it flashed when Borman expressed relief that nobody from Washington was involved to mess up their plans, or Bob spoke of the unifying force of the mission, what good people can do when they work together.
     The astronauts ended up, at the advice of the friend of a friend, a former fighter in the French Resistance, reading the opening lines of the Book of Genesis. 
     And yes, they got sued for injecting religion into a government sponsored program, Borman laughed. But the lawsuit was thrown out.
     I haven't read the book yet, but Bob does a typical Bob thing—he explores a section of the story heretofore ignored, in this case the wives and families of the astronauts.
    "We are the only crews in Gemini or Apollo that still have our original wives," said Borman, turning to Bob, and telling him that, of all the books written about Apollo 8, his was "the only one who gave the wives proper credit."
     That was the only unsurprising part of the program, because that's what Bob does. At the beginning of the program, he explained how he was taking friends to the Museum of Science & Industry, noticed the capsule on display, and became intrigued. It was hiding in plain sight. Think of all the people who walked past that capsule. Millions, including me. Which is as good a recommendation of a writer as I know: the guy who looks at something right in front of everybody, sees the thing we all ignore, understands its true value, and then does the hard work to make everyone else finally understand it too. 
    Okay, I'm signing off now so I can start reading.

DePaul law school ‘N-word’ flap: ‘Intent makes a word hateful’

"The problem we all live with" by Norman Rockwell (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

     This column was almost twice as long when I first finished it, and some important aspects were lost in cutting it to fit the paper. First, that the whole thing was prompted by not one but two thoughtful emails form reader Scott Zapel, a Glen Ellyn attorney. Second, that the above powerful painting by Norman Rockwell—with its subtle but unmistakable taboo word scrawled on the wall above the girl being escorted to school—ran in the Sun-Times without incident last week. "I'm not editing Norman Rockwell" an editor explained. Third, an explanation of why white people can and should comment on racial matters even though some think they can't and shouldn't. I saved the paragraphs to send to those who try to make the case for the latter.
      There were more points I couldn't even begin to enter into, such as the need for law school to anneal would-be lawyers for what can be a tough, demanding profession, one that is undermined if they have to cater to their sensitivities or risk being cut off at the knees by tremulous administrators. All the DePaul students did was wound a veteran teacher, undermine the value of their own degree, and present themselves as unwilling to face the fraught world into which they must practice the profession of law.  

     Let’s pretend that I am passionately against flag burning. It’s disrespectful. One day I am outraged to discover there is an organization that routinely burns flags. To make matters worse, this group is not some band of anarchists, but the American Legion, which collects worn flags and burns them in solemn ceremony.
     So I condemn the veterans’ group. Organize protests. Demand their suppression. And should somebody be so rude as to observe that I’m lashing out at the wrong people — you’re supposed to burn worn-out flags, it’s the respectful way to dispose of them — I reply, “Yeah, but anarchists are elusive. American Legion posts are so easy to find.”
     Would you experience a warm glow of admiration for me? No? Good, because that’s how I feel when the foes of what I am obligated to call “the N-word” manifest themselves, such as recently at DePaul University College of Law, where a professor, Don Hermann, had his class taken away after students complained when he uttered the lately unprintable word in the set-up to a legal problem.
     The professor didn’t hurl the word at a student, or toss it out as the punchline of a ribald joke. The offensiveness of the word was part of the issue students were to sort out.
     No matter. Haters who use the word vindictively, like my flag-burning anarchists, are not easily punished. But the professor is right there.
     Still, my gut impulse was to let the matter pass in silence. History is a horror show, people are hurt, and react in all sorts of curious ways. If some grasp at what they consider empowerment by conducting epistemological snipe hunts, why should I care? My copy of “Huck Finn” isn’t going to be sanitized. It isn’t as if I’m chafing to use the word. Yes, it felt silly not to be able to articulate what noun Ira Gershwin cut from “Porgy & Bess” in 1954; I can’t believe one black child would cry himself to sleep if I had.
     Context is everything. I can't 100 percent support Prof. Hermann because I wasn't there. On one hand, 50 of the 80 students in his class, given the chance to transfer out, did so, which doesn't speak well to his technique. On the other, he has taught college for decades, and if he were a raving bigot, it would have come out by now.
     I've taught college; it's a ballet, and if your students are rushing off to report you, then you haven't taken their measure. You should know before you leap if they're going to catch you.
     Being young, they're extremists, and miss the crux, what Dan Savage, appearing on Matt Fiddler's excellent podcast "Very Bad Words" explained in five words:
     "Intent makes a word hateful."
     Bingo. People get confused because the word is accepted from black comics but can undermine the employment of law professors. Rather than expend mental effort to gauge each instance, they react to the race of the user.
     An understandable lapse. It is a vile word, barbed with suffering from the past, present and—sorry to be the one to tell you—future. Trying to bar it from historical and artistic uses is futile, but is your right. As is mine to oppose you. Which I do because trying to ban a word is an insult to those who were lashed by it. The past is a bad place we must look at with open eyes. Were I to insist that history texts be scrubbed of photos of naked bodies of Jews being cast into pits in the Holocaust, because they're upsetting, I too would be wrong and worthy of rebuke.
     On Wednesday we marked 5o years since the assassination of Dr. King with respectful solemnity. A jubilee of progress it was not, as the sickness of racism festers in Americas. Our president is an unfit white bigot whose campaign was built on hate. The internet, a continuous howl of invective. The finely-honed sensibilities of the DePaul law students are not a sign of racial progress, but of frustration. Denied general victory, they clutch at tiny symbolic triumphs, no matter how vindictive. General white indifference to the controversy is a sure sign of just how illusionary their triumph is, because you know white folk cling to their prerogatives. I object because, in my view, if you respect somebody, you tell them when they're wrong.