CITRIC DISTRICT

Proud to be part of the #CriticalFlamily. Since its inception in 2008, The Critical Flame has sought to address the disparities and imbalances of the literary establishment. Editor Daniel Pritchard publishes six issues a year, devoted to long-form essays, critical reviews, and interviews on literary and cultural topics (under 5000 words), written by blazing upstarts, middle-careerists, and old pros. You know the scrappy stand-up comedian who shows up to open-mic night and blows the crowd away with their observational humor, even though they’re truck drivers, AARP, women, queers, LGBT, immigrants, and waiters. The Critical Flame wants to foster the literary equivalent of that community.

The latest issue contains more goodness on last month’s theme: motherhood. Ailbhe Darcy reflects on writing for a year about the atom bomb and her bewilderment at having it both improved and defaced in post-production by her male partner in crime and collaboration; my essay on Monica Youn “Blackacre” (2016 National Book Award Finalist) delves into the opposite of motherhood: infertility. It continues my exploration of writers who explore hope and humor, gender, friendship, and community, beyond the miasma of inadequacy. At Kenyon Review, I reviewed Christopher Salerno’s Sun and Urn, a slow dance between son and grandmother around the toxic masculinity of the father. This time around, I address Monica Youn’s “staring contest with judge, jury, and sonogram” and the poem she’s written for anyone who has ever asked that important question: “how did I ever become friends with this douchebag?”

You can read the whole essay and other fierce pieces at The Critical Flame.

I advocate the Great Squall of Chen Chen. My take on his poems and the politics of the cute at Harvard Review Online (May 2017).

Even in his dazed moods, Salerno writes with more spunk than the dutiful elegist. His poems explore how the playbook of game face destroys the fathers and how going off-script may save the sons. Bittersweet and radiant, Sun & Urn shows how to fall out of a horse race and into the arms of a slow dance. You don’t need a plot to fall in love with this story.

Ocean Vuong writes poems as svelte and sturdy as fire escapes, bridging readers with the most fragile and fraught of situations. After paying his dues as the refugee troubadour of Burnings (2010), he honored the lives of gay suicides in No (2013)...His full-length debut Night Sky with Exit Wounds ..shows us what it means to shatter the oracle of public expectations, recovering the heroism of the helpless and staring the abyss into submission.

Read my full review at The Rumpus.

Jenny Zhang for New York Magazine. 

If you’ve ever read Jack Kerouac’s Subterreaneans, you may remember Mardou, Mardou, the mixed black and brown girl from Berkeley, who never gets a word in edgewise through the bromance of Beat writers and is made to say “I’m just a silly girl,” when she says something too profound. I won’t get into how tastelessly the Yankee Doodle can write about ambitious women of color, because this isn’t the place, and because the novel is an honest attempt to face up to the social disparities between the black girl from the ghetto who’s trying to get an education, and the children of tenured professors who are slumming it as wannabe ragamuffin or beatniks. This is a story told from the standpoint of Mardou, the ingenue of color messing up the white boy’s treehouse of literature.

Review: Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, music and lyrics by David Malloy; directed by Rachel Chavkin; scenic design by Mimi Lien; costumes by Paloma Young; Loeb Drama Center, American Repertory Theatre; Cambridge, MA. New Years Day 2016.

The author during intermission.

What do you want to call this shebang, Mr. Malloy. An electro pop opera. How about the Bois & Grrls Kick Tolstoy’s Can all over the Place Musical. The press will never go for it. What about Vodkalicious, then? I need to start off the Year of the Monkey on the right note, with Zany Pizzazz, as I haven’t posted here in ages. Vodkalicious isn’t in the dictionary. But that’s what poets are for!, darling. How else do you expect me to describe your angsty burlesque tart of a nineteenth-century love story…

We were a little skeptical when the A.R.T. made us tunnel through corridors of butcher paper and oddly-placed coatracks representing what we thought were the ruins of post-Communist Russia. So we flapped with flabbergast to discover ourselves in this chic supper club with 19th century taste arranged by Gertrude Stein on the cycloramic red velvet curtains. Not Stein, you doofus. Mimi Lien. Yes, Mimi Lien. It’s just…it’s just so hard when everyone thinks you’re all wallflowers on wall paper made of rice paper, and someone like Lien comes along with this extraordinary sense for space and spectacle and renews your faith in humanity.

Scenic designer Mimi Lien won a 2015 Genius Grant on the strength of her innovative solutions for various productions on the Off-Broadway circuit. For Natasha, she promoted the lowly pawn of armrests into the burlesque queen of catwalks.“I noticed that when people sit in booths, there’s often this flat area behind them at shoulder level, and I went, ‘Aha!’” At the Loeb Drama Center, home of the American Repertory Theatre, here in Cambridge, Mass, she offset the gap between stage and seating by tiering the stage to mirror the seats at the back.

For Natasha, scenic designer Mimi Lien promoted the lowly pawn of armrests into the burlesque queen of catwalks.

We were lucky to score seats on the stage, which meant they seated us at tables in alcoves (16-20 person occupancy) spaced between instrumental combos that made up the live orchestra. On occasion, the actors would break from the action and play waitstaff serving us Russian Happy Meals of pierogis (potato dumplings), love letters to read, and toy maracas to shake during the infectious choruses (the maracas were in the shape of Ukranian easter eggs or pysanky). And when they returned to the stage, which was a meandering network of catwalks, we would crane our necks like giraffes to catch the actors huff and puff up and down and all around the inverted ziggurat. It was like being an extra in a music video springing forth from a half open Escheresque pop up book.

We were all on the verge of our seats when the conductor/DJ throws the opening downbeat and a jaunty brindisi or drinking song puts at ease by introducing us to all the characters  They point us to the illustrated family tree in the program if we get lost since “it’s a complicated Russian novel, everyone’s got nine different names,” but the catchy song drills the character profiles in our minds, before truncating them to cutesy catchphrases for the sake of economy. Take it away original NY cast:

“Prologue”: “Dolokhov is fierce but not too important” / “Helene is a slut” / “Anatole is hot” / “Natasha is young / [and best of all] “Andrei is not here”!

The story revolves around the inexperienced heroine Natasha who travels to the big city when her betrothed Andrei goes off to war. She’s young and horny and falls in love with the hot hedonist Anatole who’s bad news, but she can’t be blamed, having been cooped up like a country chicken for so long, even slutty Helene says so.

Natasha bares her black arms before a mirror while singing about her fair skin like a Disney princess, but finds herself on the other side of a showdown with the family of the betrothed before the prospective sister-in-law comes to her senses that her rapey father is the evil one. (The most evil thing about him is a grody rastafarian Mozart wig and the shiver-me-timbers acting).

The goody two shoes and the voice of reason, Sonya lets Natasha know that hot people are usually bad news, but of course Natasha won’t be convinced because a hot guy went in for the jugular kiss, and that sometimes is an irresistable turn on if you haven’t yet learned about rapists. But you can’t blame her when even the wooden tables want some of the action: there is some serious eye-fucking between Anatole and Helene (who are sibling!) and Dolokhov (his gonna-drink-tonight bearded hipster bro who’s “fierce, but not too important”!). Of course, Sonya’s hurt, but she just gives Natasha her love space. Can her relationship with either man be repaired, or is there a third way outside of Andre and Anatole.

I love the people at A.R.T. when they pull stunts like this. Lucas Steele is one Hot Comet of 2012, but they gave him the baby-dyke-from-the-back treatment and blocked his beautiful face to emphasize the radiance of Denée Benton. Some marketeer deserves a gift basket for giving us our recommended daily amount of Vitamin C.

Although the romantic leads wear nineteenth century toggery, you can sniff the delicious scent of the Gurlesque all over this production. It was as if Costume Designer Paloma Young had went to some Russian village straight out of Stravinsky and gave the entire town the riot grrl editorial. The chorus of backup dancers were black and white Britney (and Whitney) Spearskayas, in studded chokers, knee high socks, and peasant blouses tied bikini style. Less imagination went in the costuming of their boyfriends punked out as club kids whose hulking arms, newsy caps, and acid wash purple jeans made them look like waifs from an Alexander McQueen show. I kid cause I love.

It was as if Costume Designer Paloma Young had went to some Russian village straight out of Stravinsky and gave the entire town the riot grrl editorial

The burlesque element is distributed across the cast rather than being localized in a single impersonator. There’s no one musical playbook, in other words, by which the actors abide. I imagine the score giving dynamic markings like Salonga up this passage or McLaughlan this solo up. Denée Benton played the role of Natasha to a tee with the honeyed innocence of the animated ingenue. Besties Sonya (Brittain Ashford) and Pierre (Scott Stangland) do proud the stuttering indie songstress and drunken Piano Man. Hot Anatole (Lucas Steele) channels the one interesting member of the boyband who hits the stratospheric C# with a little Bowie. Take away the cigarette holder from Cruella de Ville and you have the gesticulating grande dame of Moscow, Marya. But the character who gave me the most life was slutty cosmopolitan Helene (Lilli Cooper), who steals the show with the kicky and sultry number “Charming”: “(You are such a lovely thing, oh where you have you been. “It’s such a shame to bury pearls in the country // charmante, charmante”).” Take it away Lucille Doll, Amber Gray, from the original Off-Broadway cast.

As you can see, this is no song for amateurs. Ms. Gray is serving the cutesy dangerousness of Eartha Kitt supported by the gravelly growl of Shady Marmalade, Patti Labelle. Lilli Cooper, the actress cast for the A.R.T. production, really sold the voluptuous solidity and conniving that character demands. Cooper dragged her delivery with slinky style, hitting her notes without scooping or straining. She was my favorite performer of the night.

Natasha is a musical that pokes good-natured fun at the conventions of nineteenth century noveland the pastimtes of a prior age when cell phones and email didn’t consume our lives, leading to a score chock with dramatic irony, as in “Letters.”

In nineteenth century Russia we write letters we write letters we put down in writing what is happening in our mind Once it’s on the paper we feel better, we feel better. It’s just like some clarity when the letter’s done and signed.

People in novels drink and write letters compulsively and are ecstatic if they receive a reply in two months time. Compare that to the feisty texter who throws a fit if he or she doesn’t get a reply in less than two minutes.

But as characters in novels, they sing parts that resemble the author, lapsing into third person and achieving in the process ironic distance from their muddle of feelings towards each other. It was a great idea but for the flagging execution at the end. I wanted duets, trios, and choruses interweaving at strange angles with one another and generating the impossible yearning and unresolved tensions, not vocal percussion for an acapella group at 3rds and 6ths, which doesn’t cut it in this context, but that’s a specialist’s gripe.

The Great Comet signals that kind of transfigurative experience that comes once in a blue moon. As the room darkens for the denouement, the chandeliers gleam with their full potential to create a moment. Like the characters, we’ve just watched our own delusions of pride and insignificance play out. The characters of the show feel grateful for the comet as we feel grateful for the theatre for giving us something to talk about on the way home, as the warmth of intimacy intensifies and makes the darkness vanish.

Interview with Mimi Lien and set designs for Ars Nova Production of Natasha, by Jeremy M. Baker, “Mimi Lien creates Art with her Sets,” American Theatre, September 22, 2014.

Miss Sarah Bernhardt sears Yorick to a cindery crisp for new Houghton Library exhibition on Shakespeare

Public art exhibitions always have to toe a certain line of respectability and undersell their provocations to appeal to the broadest public possible. Here is the official spiel from Harvard University Libraries:

To commemorate the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, this exhibition presents over eighty rare and unique objects—many never before seen—drawn from the Harvard Theatre Collection and other library departments.  On view will be important early editions including the iconic First Folio owned by Harry Elkins Widener; creative respondents to Shakespeare from his eighteenth century editor and critic Samuel Johnson through the modernist poet E. E. Cummings; theatrical memorabilia highlighting the careers of great Shakespearean actors and actresses; in addition to an arresting array of visual material that trace the development of Shakespearean stagecraft over four centuries. Play a part in the worldwide celebration of Shakespeare in 2016 at Houghton Library.

The Harvard Gazette article “In His Own Works” that just came out is just as jejune and spineless. Jejune and spineless, however, do not meet our higher style guidelines. Here at the Citric District, we like to advance arguments after seeing the exhibition for ourselves. Ahem…

This world class exhibition puts the Folger and the British Library in the Stone Age. With Paul Robeson and his righteous chorus upstaging the blackfaced Othello; Sarah Bernhardt crisping Yorick, and e.e. cummings swatting the t.s.e.t.s.e fly, this is the Bard seen through the Top Acts, Hep Cats and Brass Belles, Mechanical Bottoms and Cushman Women, designers and couturiers, classic balletomanes and cutting edge directors. If the Bard has to be viewed behind glass, this is the way to do it, not through the eyes of the stiffs who defend him through unthinking superlatives, but through the dark horses who transformed the Bard’s love of clowns, strong women, and moping minorities into the radiant dignity of the gutter.

Tsssssss. You can fry an egg on that.

— Court Jeffster, at the Citric District © 2016

Tuesday, Feburary 9, is supposed to be the big opening reception. The illustrious Stephen Greenblatt will give the Winship lecture on Bibliography, “Editing Shakespeare in the Digital Age,“ and the room will explode from all the tweed blazers and pencil skirts and pant suits and skinny jeans and thick glasses trying to fit in the Thompson Room of the Barker Center. Keep an eye out for his two Asian understudies Misha Teramura and David Nee who will probably replace Greenblatt Julius Caesar style. It’s going to be epic and not in that tired gamer way.

Houghton Library is the brick building on the Yard that looks like a poor man’s Monticello. It faces Quincy St. between Widener and Lamont Libraries.

I might have gotten a little excited….

I repeat the #Eaglemobile has landed! Shot from shotgun (around Castroville, CA. Artichoke Capital of the World!). Don't do this from the driver seat folks!  Not worth it!

Chicago has both your mecca for BreakBeats and your bastion of DeadBeats. Which is still better than the Brahmins and the Old Yellers Network who rule Boston. All by way of saying, I’m in Chicago this week for the groovy Festival of Poets Theatre at Sector 2337 in Logan Square. By day, I’ve been doing some archival work in Special Collections at the U. Chicago, so I’ve had the chance to carefully eavesdrop on random conversations before approaching students and administrators of color who sound street and book smart and might make the hour subway ride north. I’ve slipped to several black administrators and staff working in the library or chilling out sipping lemon tea in the university coffee show to represent because of the strong black, brown, feminist, and queer presence at this years festival, curated by Devin King and Patrick Durgin. Tonight, Avery Young will be doing a revival of Amiri Baraka’s classic of Poets Theatre, “Home on the Range,” and I think we will get the largest turnout yet. But it doesn’t hurt to spread the word. 

So help me parlay a tweet streak @citricdistrict​ into a more full-blown article by re-blogging this rundown. You can read about Day 1 on Twitter. A quick and dirty run down of Day 2 of the Festival. gave us Black. Brown....and Stoned.

I. The Walmart Republic

We ain't in Kansas anymor, Dor. Emily Hooper Lansana & Co. Wiz up her husband Quraysh's homage to Enid, Oklahoma entitled The Walmart Republic, Lansana’s metaphor for the officiation of black and interracial community. The slim guy in glasses gave me the impression of a polygraph lie detector moving through space. He made me feel as though the lines of the poems implicit directions to the body to carry out. In addition to the three actors you see on stage, there was a chorus figure in the audience who (like the DJ spinning beats at the back) punctuates and/or intensifies the dramatic soliloquys that move in and out of solo and group patterns. Call and responsifabulous. Reminded me very much of Susan Lori Parks’ recent play Father Comes Home after the War.

II. El Gato Pussycat Proteja Your Gringo Cheese

Chilean American poet Daniel Borzutsky overdubs and bedevils Speedy Gonzales with verse subtexts of neoliberalism, deftly lapsing in and out of ethnic cartoon and precise oratory. I think we could have used some intro on this economic policy implemented in Chile during Pinochet’s reign in the seventies and which continues to be championed by the 1% of America (privatize public services, deregulate business, watch the rich get richer and the poor shoulder the economic burden  before class and ethnic inequality rend the nation apart. Pierre Bourdieu talks about it somewhere). The “play” is a neo-benshi, which means it belongs to the same genre as Iron Chef. Movies overdubbed by live or scripted alterna-commentary. This was subversive and trippy in the best way and I’m still figuring out how to trim and post video.

III. "Who is React"?

Sharon Lanza directs Silas Mohammad's Avatars Anonymous Meeting, which is based on Google search results but felt like watching a dramatization of CraigsList Personal ads with everyone claiming to be the same person or someone else until the real tragicomic theme comes to the fore (”Hi, I’m Richard, and I’m a Failure”). This Aughts-fraught Flarf-Narf CraigsDregs Theatre was Freakin' Uproarious! Well, you’ll have to wait for the full week’s review, as I'm still holding out for a bigger stage to to turn my brown upside down and give more shape to these thoughts and give a quick on dirty on what Poets Theatre was and is (It ain’t Shakespeare). In the meantime, you can watch me wax fierce as the CourtJeffster on Twitter @citricdistrict.

It takes a certain degree of daring and charisma to transform the raw material of wretchedness into the choreography of one’s fierce convictions, and Jenny Zhang has it. No one was going to put her in the straightjacket of a mute whore or bumbling doormat if she could help it. Much like stand-up comedian Margaret Cho, she has had to learn (with the help of friends) how to parlay the role of the squeaky wheel into the buoyant wit and devastating realness of the self-proclaimed hag, wooing the coffee-and-bathhouse crowd when the gatekeepers of the establishment told her she was un-relatable and irrelevant. They’ve since had to eat their words. 

Through her online contributions and social media presence, Three Penny Jenny has managed to lure a younger generation of teens and quarters to the candy cottages of the prose and poetry presses. “How it Feels,” her ode to performance artist Tracey Enim, is a blessed reminder of the transformative potential of the arts for a broad cross-section of misfits who continue to confront the indignities of second-class citizenship. In addition to the chapbooks Hags (Guillotine Press, 2014) and the full-length collection Dear Jenny, We are All Find (Octopus Books, 2012), The Selected Jenny Zhang (2015) is now available as an epub though Emily Books. My sassy profile on Zhang, the first of its kind, places her poems in a larger avant-garde tradition of women who have adapted the lessons of their queer collaborators to their feminist battles, when the brutes and the housewives prove unhelpful. (May it serve as a corrective to Kenneth Goldsmiths and Marjorie Pearloffs’ white-washed vision of the avant-garde as a post-identity bleach vacation). J-Zhang purrs with the poodles and rides the Yankee Doodles. Cheers and maraschinos to our Chatty Cathay!