The Weekend Special

Pieces are given up to three KATs (for fiction), Anunobys (for essays), or Brunsons (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one KAT, Anunoby, or Brunson indicates a generally positive review.

🏀 Fiction

“Appeasement, Ohio” by George Saunders. No KATs. An outrageously obnoxious tale, rendered perhaps worse by Saunders’ ability to keep things moving snappily and with his usual dry humor. Because: That dry humor keeps bumping up against a political ‘satire’ in which rural Midwesterners commit political violence over their blinkered Civil War denialism, and the idiot narrator helps them do it. Obviously the idea is that we see ourselves in this portrait of appeasement, but Saunders is unwilling or unable to think through the actual political stakes and meanings of this; in the interview, unbelievably, he adds a parenthetical stating that “the Civil War denial in this story has a definite white-supremacy vibe crouching slyly behind it”. (It is about as sly as a drifter drill.) Saunders apparently thinks that even the figures directly responsible for political violence are basically well-meaning but dense people who need a stern talking-to from someone smarter; meanwhile, I’m not sure he thinks about the victims of this violence at all. This is as condescending as it is stupid. Saunders apparently worked on this story for six years, which partly explains the dustiness of its political perspective. But no amount of massaging was going to grow this plot a spine.

🏀 Weekend Essay

“My Year of O.C.D.” by Andrew Lipstein. One Anunoby. Unaccountably sunny in tone, with Lipstein meticulously recounting his stretches of anxiety-run-amok, during which he loses the “ability to function”, but without ever really describing the physical feeling of anxiety, such that his journey toward radical acceptance is bizarrely devoid of pain. This is very weird, but it doesn’t break the piece; while its early stretches do feel removed – and will be very familiar to a reader who knows the basics of exposure therapy – as Lipstein grows compulsively driven to overcome his compulsions, his insights get more productively twisty, and perhaps less reliable. There is a wonderful scene of olive-oil pouring that makes anxiety sound orgasmic. I appreciate that Lipstein is uninterested in landing the reader on stable ground; he drives himself to a panic attack, describes what sounds a bit like a manic state on the other side, then ends the piece. How unsettling are we meant to find this? I can see it more than two ways; call that Obsessive Compulsive Dialectics.

🏀 Random Pick

“The Megacity” (A Reporter at Large) by George Packer. (November 13, 2006). One Brunson. Paints an image of Lagos as a powder keg that hasn’t exactly come to pass; instead, the city has developed infrastructure, slowly and painfully and often in an ad-hoc manner but without any collapse or explosion. Packer’s portrait of chaos definitely feels written by a guy on a very bad work vacation; that doesn’t mean it isn’t accurate, or that the grim struggle of Lagosians has been subsequently resolved in any neat way. The idea that their lives have “nothing to do with” the macroeconomic West certainly doesn’t ring true anymore, though that says as much about our decline as anything else. Packer finds a series of vivid scenes; the final portrait of trash-pickers is particularly indelible, even as time and privatization have resigned their story to, well, the trash heap.

🏀 Last Week About Town

I Became We at Atlantic is another Mona Pirnot effort that manages to be both rigorously experimental in form and thoroughly crowdpleasing, moving, and fun. A choir chamber musical on the decision to have or not have children, I thought mostly of Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, a similarly rambling and casual-feeling text that reaches toward ecstasy. Pirnot gets most of the way there; if the repetitious signifiers of her coastal-elite mundanity grew a bit tiresome for me, most of the audience was invested, and I became willing to go along with them.

Doll Day Afternoon at LaMaMa had an incredible text, taken from interviews with the real trans woman behind the character in Dog Day Afternoon, and a hugely committed performance from an authentically-accented Daphne Kinard. The staging got in its own way too often, unfortunately.

Two Girls at the Cherry Lane is an entertaining sliver of verbatim theater, taken from interviews with men about the titular video. I found it very funny, but the deliberately deflationary ending doesn’t pull off what it’s attempting, and there is a general vibe of a space that’s perhaps too formal for the piece. School Pictures at the same space struck me as significantly more sad, bitter, and even nihilistic than in its first run, though the text and performance haven’t changed at all. It’s just that the immediacy of the subject, during the original run, let Cramer get away with some elision and political slipperiness; the revival, after so long, gives an unfortunate, probably accidental sense that he’s been thinking about the issue for years but has come up with nothing new to say.

Turn of the Screw, a short-run Adult Film thing at their spot near Ridgewood, is a fun little Halloween-y take on the material, with some clever theatrical gambits.

The Hairy Ape at Irish Rep is a bit of a mess dramaturgically, as though every scene had a different director and they weren’t allowed to talk to each other, but it’s a faithful take on a fascinating text, and well worth seeing as that alone.

Rope by the New Group is an idiotic and abysmally overwritten script given a lovely, smoky mounting; Cameron Monaghan is a startlingly persuasive lead despite the words he has to say.

Sunday Song: