Milorad Pavić 1929-2009

It goes to show just how out of it that I have been with work and other seasonal madness (including two feet of snow in Washington D.C.) that I somehow missed the death of one of Serbia's most innovative and provocative writers: Milorad Pavić.

Pavić's greatest work was Dictionary of the Khazars -- a novel written in the form of dictionary entries that purported to retell a mythical Khazar polemic in which Christian, Jewish and Muslim divines debated before the Emperor of the Khazars, who would then decide to which religion he and his people would convert.

The book is clearly an allegory about the divided religion and culture of Yugoslavia, but its playfulness and panache make it a terrific reading experience even if you know little or nothing about Yugoslavia. In particular, Pavić's pastiches of the writings of various medieval and Renaissance holy books is devilishly delightful.

Pavić's other works took equally novel forms: crossword puzzles, tarot cards. Much of his work has been translated into English. He's definitely worth exploring if you are a fan of fictive innovation.

I had the privilege of meeting Pavić on two occasions, when he cheerily signed books for my friends and seemed absolutely delighted to hear that he had a substantial readership in English.

Read the excellent obituary in today's New York Times here.

Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Anti-Semitism

Over at Ibishblog, my good friend Hussein Ibish has a fascinating post about The Merchant of Venice, The Jew of Malta and whether either or both plays are anti-Semitic.

I'd encourage you to read his argument in full, especially since I have had the privilege of discussing this a few times with Ibish as he's wrestled with his interest in this question.

The literature on The Merchant of Venice is voluminous, of course, so I would like to add a few thoughts on The Jew of Malta.

For me, the prologues (published in their entirety in the Penguin Classics editor of The Complete Plays) are the key to bolstering Ibish's argument that:

Marlowe's play is simply cynical, misanthropic and deeply antireligious. He holds all cultures, civilizations and religious traditions in equal contempt and in that sense, I think it is perfectly impossible to describe the Jew of Malta as anti-Semitic. It's anti-everything.

It can't be put much more simply or clearly than in "The Prologue Spoken At Court":

We pursue
The story of a rich and famous Jew
Who lived in Malta. You shall find him still,
In all his projects, a sound Machevill;
And that's his character.

Machevil, of course, gets his own speech in the actual Prologue to the play proper, and the framing device for the play is laid out quite clearly:

Albeit the world think Machevil is dead,
Yet was his soul but flown beyond the Alps;
And, now the Guise is dead, is come from France,
To view this land, and frolic with his friends.
To some perhaps my name is odious;
But such as love me, guard me from their tongues,
And let them know that I am Machiavel,
And weigh not men, and therefore not men's words.
Admir'd I am of those that hate me most:
Though some speak openly against my books,
Yet will they read me, and thereby attain
To Peter's chair; and, when they cast me off,
Are poison'd by my climbing followers.
I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.
Birds of the air will tell of murders past!
I am asham'd to hear such fooleries.
Many will talk of title to a crown:
What right had Caesar to the empery?
Might first made kings, and laws were then most sure
When, like the Draco's, they were writ in blood.
Hence comes it that a strong-built citadel
Commands much more than letters can import:
Which maxim had Phalaris observ'd,
H'ad never bellow'd, in a brazen bull,
Of great ones' envy: o' the poor petty wights
Let me be envied and not pitied.
But whither am I bound? I come not, I,
To read a lecture here in Britain,
But to present the tragedy of a Jew,
Who smiles to see how full his bags are cramm'd;
Which money was not got without my means.
I crave but this,--grace him as he deserves,
And let him not be entertain'd the worse
Because he favours me.

This is a moral universe turned upside down -- a seething pot of lies, conspiracy and power politics in which nothing is as it seems, where the moral rule of the universe is Machevil's amorality. Those who rule this world speak not of him and keep their knowledge. Those who seem the most religious are, in reality, his greatest adherents. I think these Prologues bolster Ibish's case: The Jew of Malta is not anti-Semitic, but a screed against the common hollowness and hypocrisy of all the Abrahamic faiths.

Remember Remember: Gunpowder Plot as Early Modern Terrorism?

Today is November 5th, and many of us know what that means. Guy Fawkes Day. Gunpowder Plot. 1605 and all that.

But were the plotters (right, in a contemporary engraving) terrorists -- especially in the sense that we know that term?

The Folger Institute held a terrific seminar on that topic four years ago -- one that I was lucky enough to attend as a reporter.

I wrote this article about it for The Chronicle of Higher Education. It used to be free -- and live on my links column to the right of this post. But CHE changed up its website and put everything that once was free back behind the paywall.

No worries, however. At least for a few days. That temporary link lets you read it. Happy bonfires and fireworks, everyone.

Dusan Makavejev: The Last Yugoslav

So the article about Yugoslav filmmaker Dusan Makavejev that I have been promising since July has finally been published in the print and web versions of this week's edition of The Nation.

Though I had to scrunch and smoosh to get it all in, I'm pretty happy with the piece. In particular, I was happy to get a chance to talk about a few things:

(1) The brilliance of Makavejev's first three feature films -- Man Is Not a Bird, Love Affair -- Or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator, and Innocence Unprotected -- which have been recently been rereleased for the first time on DVD as a set by Criterion.

Because they had not been released previously on DVD when I had to write the piece, I had to buy all three movies online as used VHS tapes. That alone should tell you how valuable this new collection is in tracing the arc of Makavejev's art.

(2) A chance to make the argument that WR: Mysteries of the Organism is a more audacious and satisfying film than Sweet Movie, which is a much more notorious though less intellectually adventurous film. I was also delighted to remind readers of Makavejev's trenchant critique of the absurd priapism of the American combination of violence and capitalism -- something that critics who have been transfixed by Makavejev's stinging critique of communism in that film usually omit or elide.

(3) An opportunity to reevaluate Makavejev's last full-length feature, Gorilla Bathes at Noon -- and argue for its excellence as a film and as a portrait of the exhaustion at the end of the Cold War that so animates WR and Sweet Movie. Particularly viewed on the cusp of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gorilla Bathes at Noon is -- as I mention in the article -- a "portrait of Berlin as a filthy, cold and abandoned siege line of the Cold War." It is criminal that this film has not been released on DVD. I can only hope that my piece might urge that possibility on someone who can do it.

Jim Carroll: The Meta Post

So Scott McLemee blogs about Jim Carroll's untimely death here, swiping (with attribution, permission and wild encouragement) a small moment I had with Carroll that I mentioned on Facebook. We've passed some kind of border here -- at least for Balkans via Bohemia.

The junket where I met Carroll was one of the strangest weekends of my life. It was a joint junket for The Basketball Diaries and The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain. The movie company put us up in a swanky Upper East Side hotel. (Omar Sharif was hanging around in the lobby, trolling for ladies or a bridge game.) The PR people ruthlessly herded us to the screenings, and then through the in-person interviews with cast members and other people associated with the films.

As a novice at these things, I was frankly appalled at the slippery and toxic combination of cynicism and sycophancy in my alleged journalistic colleagues. They would knife these actors and directors with words behind their backs, while unctuously sucking up to their faces. (Guessing that the same dynamic was at play for the movie folks.)

Anyway, I insulted Hugh Grant by asking him why he made so many costume dramas. ("You mean 'frock flicks?'" he hissed back at me.) I really liked Leo DiCaprio. (The angst about Leo's turn to "gay" roles --both in this film and in Total Eclipse, his next film about the affair between Rimbaud and Verlaine -- was a source of much agita among these critics.) And I bonded with Jim Carroll, who pretty much acted like I was the only person worth talking to at the table.

My tablemates didn't know who Jim Carroll was, really, and thus didn't care. They were busily preparing for Lorraine Bracco's appearance at our table. I never went on another film junket again.

Hussein Ibish's New Book: "What's Wrong With the One State Agenda?"

My friend and colleague Hussein Ibish has a new book out: What's Wrong With the One-State Agenda? It's a terrific addition to the intensifying debate on the Middle East peace process, and -- if you read on -- there is also a useful Balkan connection to be made in regards to recent events.

But first to the book, which is Ibish's attempt to nip in the bud what he views as a fallacious and dangerous twist in articulating Palestinian aspirations in the region.

Ibish is a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine. Put simply, he sees the "one-state agenda" as an attempt to elide the considerable difficulties of (a) negotiating an end both to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and its blockade of Gaza and (b) creating two parallel states -- Palestine and Israel -- by simply stating that a single state could encompass all citizens of the disputed region.

He argues that the fantastical nature of the proposal is rooted in its development as "a quintessentially diasporic discourse, largely reflective of the perspectives, imperatives and ambitions of those living outside of Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories." The idea has little support among Palestinians in the region, and virtually none in Israel, Ibish observes.

Yet Ibish takes the one-state idea seriously enough to articulate its claims in an intellectual honest manner before demolishing it. In particular, he poses a series of pointed questions to one-state advocates. The first two questions Ibish poses are particularly stinging in their unmasking of the fantastical nature of the single-state agenda:

* "If Israel will not agree to end the occupation, what makes anyone think that it will possibly agree to dissolve itself?"

* "What, as a practical matter, does this vision of a single, democratic state in Israel/Palestine offer to Jewish Israelis?"

The book -- which is a short monograph of 137 pages -- is available for download here. It is well worth the time to read it. The book had its debut at an event hosted by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars last week, and video of the panel discussion on the book that included Ibish, Robert Malley (Middle East and North Africa Program Director of the International Crisis Group) and Aaron David Miller (Wilson Center Public Policy Scholar) will be available here in the next few days.

The discussion was terrific. But it quickly pivoted from the "one-state agenda" -- which all three participants rejected as fantasy -- to the prospects for the only other available option: the two-state solution.

At the panel, Ibish strongly asserted that a recent plan proposed by Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad -- Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State -- provides the blueprint for moving forward. Fayyad calls upon Palestinians to establish "de facto" institutions of governance, thus creating the necessary facts on the ground that will inevitably lead to recognition as a state. To quote directly from the document, Fayyad says:

... the Palestinian government is struggling determinedly against a hostile occupation regime, employing all of its energies and available resources, most especially the capacities of our people, to complete the process of building institutions of the independent State of Palestine in order to establish a de facto state apparatus within the next two years.

And here is where the Balkan connection comes in. In Kosovo, for nearly a decade after the revocation of the province's autonomy by rump Yugoslavia, Kosovar Albanians created such parallel institutions in nonviolent fashion under the leadership of the late Ibrahim Rugova. The problem with these efforts by the Democratic League of Kosovo was that the effort met with little international support or recognition, especially in the period when the international community was actively soliciting Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic's support in ending the conflicts in Bosnia and Croatia.

Eventually, frustrations boiled over and an armed Kosovar Albanian force -- the Kosovo Liberation Army -- was created to press the issue of Kosovo's independence.

But the lesson for Palestinians in this is clear: create these parallel institutions proposed by Fayyad and actively press for simultaneous international recognition of these efforts.

(Ibish himself posts his thoughts on the questions raised by the Wilson Center panel about Fayyad's proposal and his answers here.)

1989 and all that.... and Colin Woodard

As the 20th anniversary of the momentous events in Europe of 1989 start to come fast and furious, here is something Balkans via Bohemia regulars will be interested in checking out: My friend and colleague Colin Woodard -- author of three terrific book, Ocean's End, The Lobster Coast, and The Republic of Pirates -- is starting to post his reminiscences of his own travels in the region during the collapse of communism on his blog, World Wide Woodard.

The first post in the series follows Colin as he crosses from Austria into Hungary just at the moment when East Germans were permitted by the Hungarian government to transit through the country and get to West German and other parts of Europe.

Colin also has a story in the Christian Science Monitor today about that momentous event. Lets just say that World Wide Woodard is well worth bookmarking... I've done so in my own preferred links.

Burn Your Bookes: The Sneak Preview Recap

After last night's sneak preview of Burn Your Bookes, the proprietor of Balkans via Bohemia knows how lucky he is.

First... let's take care of business. The link to Taffety Punk Theatre Company's sneak preview -- courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and its Millennium Stage program -- can be found here as a streaming web video. (Running time slightly over 21 minutes.)

And my friend Hussein Ibish posted his immediate reactions to the performance at his own blog. Hussein does a terrific job of weaving together the action of the bit of the play we performed last night with larger historical currents. I am immensely grateful to him.

And while we're on the subject of gratitude, let me send shout outs to my cast -- Daniel Flint (Edward Kelley), Joel David Santner (Muller) and Paul E. Hope (Syrrus) -- and our costume designer Scott L. Hammar and all the Kennedy Center Family Theater staff who coped with a full house.

I am most indebted, however, to Taffety Punk artistic director Marcus Kyd. I gave Marcus the play last spring. He said Taffety Punk was interested in doing it just around this time last year. And at the same time that he gave me that happy news, I signed up to help the Punks with their press relations.

I can say that this has been one of the best decisions that I've made in recent times. Not only because Taffety Punk is doing great work, but because Taffety Punk walks it like it talks it. They say that they want to attract younger and more diverse audiences to theatre -- and Shakespeare at that -- and they do it by keeping ticket prices lower than the movies ($10 or free) and bringing a brash and ebullient approach to everything they do.

Including this sneak preview of my play, of course. We hope to mount the full production in March or April. Stay tuned here.

And while I am on the subject of thanks, I also want scroll back in time and thank the cast and the organizers of the one-act Burn Your Bookes, which won the first Prague Post Playwriting Festival in 2007-- a contest that is now reinventing itself as a production of Prague Playhouse and continuing as strong as ever.

Akiva Zasman, Mark Bowen and Brendan Payne were the first Kelley, Muller and Syrrus. And my director in Prague, Julek Neumann, really put an amazing amount of thought and passion into the play and its first production. I remain very grateful for that experience as well.

Edward Kelley's Alchemy: Fact or Fraud?

Playwriting has some alchemical aspects to it. And like any good alchemist, I don't want to to give away too many of my secrets about writing Burn Your Bookes.

But in writing a play about Edward Kelley, there is no secret about the biggest problem confronting the playwright: Was Kelley a fraud and charlatan -- either as a scryer or an alchemist or both? Was he really talking to spirits and angels? Was he really making gold?

In the spirit of keeping secrets, I will take a pass for the moment on my views on the spiritual actions described in such detail in Meric Causabon's 1659 collection of John Dee's transcripts of the angelic conversations, A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between John Dee... and Some Spirits. It's a complicated question with more than 500 pages of evidence to sift through. I did sift through it. I came to my conclusions. The play makes those conclusions clear.

The question that I wrestled with mightily was the question of Kelley's alchemy. It seems impossible to write about Kelley without taking a position on the question of whether he made gold or not.

Writing Kelley as a fake is difficult in the 21st Century. That's the picture that creative works -- Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, for instance --have given us for centuries now. And the historians have been even worse. The fantastical legends that grew up around Kelley decades after his death in 1597 painted him as a grave robber and swindler whose ears had been cropped in the stocks in Lancaster before he even walked through John Dee's door. His alchemical dealings have also been tarred as fraudulent and criminal well into the 20th Century. A bit of Ralph M. Sargent's 1935 biography of courtier, diplomat and poet Edward Dyer (At the Court of Elizabeth, Oxford University Press) gives a flavor of opinion on Kelley into recent times.

Sargent's biography gets lots of facts wrong as it winds through the complicated tale of Dyer's missions to Bohemia to deal with Dee and Kelley -- and then later, with Kelley alone -- on the instructions of the highest levels of the English government. Indeed, the author's animus against Kelley blinds him to some of the most interesting bits of the story of Kelley's flight from Prague and first arrest in 1591 and Dyer's imprisonment in Bohemia in connection with the affair:

That Edward Kelley was no honest alchemist his dealings with Dyer and [William Cecil, Lord] Burghley attest. Had he been able to perform what he claimed for himself, he would have had need of none of the promises and guarantees he asked for. On the contrary, of course, he was playing the ancient game of all charlatans.... Kelley's career differs from that of an ordinary mountebank by the audacity of his claims and the magnitude of his success.

"The magnitude of his success." Interesting words. Indeed, Sargent even admits that "[h]is tricks, whatever they may have been, were never during his life, or later, satisfactorily exposed."

Dee believed that Kelley could transmute, mentioning the fact on multiple occasions in his private diaries. Dyer's belief was so powerful -- and has the added power of his time working with Kelley in his lab -- that Francis Bacon mentioned it in his Apophthegma, which was published in 1626 -- almost four decades after Dyer first encountered Kelley and 19 years after Dyer's death:

Sir Edward Dyer, a grave and wise gentleman, did much believe in Kelley the alchymist ; that he did indeed the work, and made gold : inso much as he went himself into Germany, where Kelley then was, to inform himself fully thereof. After his return, he dined with my Lord of Canterbury, where at that time was at the table Dr. Browne, the physician. They fell in talk of Kelley. Sir Edward Dyer, turning to the Archbishop, said ; I do assure your Grace, that that I shall tell you is truth. I am an eye-witness thereof, and if I had not seen it, I should not have believed it. I saw Master Kelley put of the base metal into the crucible, and after it was set a little upon the fire, and a very small quantity of the medicine put in, and stirred with a stick of wood, it came forth in great proportion perfect gold, to the touch, to the hammer, to the test. Said the Bishop ; l You had need take heed what you say, Sir Edward Dyer, for here is an infidel at the board. Sir Edward Dyer said again pleasantly ; I would have looked for an infidel sooner in any place than at your Grace's table. What say you, Dr. Browne? saith the Bishop. Dr. Browne answered, after his blunt and huddling manner, The gentleman hath spoken enough for me. Why (saith the Bishop) what hath he said? Marry, (saith Dr. Browne) he said he would not have believed it except he had seen it ; and no more will I.

The other piece of evidence is Kelley's own self-assurance, bordering on arrogance. His famous tract, "The Stone of the Philosophers," apparently written during one of Kelley's stints in prison, is dedicated to Emperor Rudolf II and starts off with one of the most breathtakingly audacious introductions I have ever read:

Though I have already twice suffered chains and imprisonment in Bohemia, and indignity which has been offered to me in no other part of the world, yet my mind, remaining unbound, has all this time exercised itself in the study of that philosophy which is despised only by the wicked and foolish, but is praised an admired by the wise.... Nevertheless, it always was, and always will be, the way of mankind to release Barabbas and to crucify Christ.

And then, of course, there is also the first stanza of Kelley's poem that gives my play its title:

All you that faine philosophers would be,
And night and day in Geber's kitchen broyle,
Wasting the chips of ancient Hermes' Tree,
Weening to turn them to a precious oyle,
The more you work the more you loose and spoile;
To you, I say, how learned soever you be,
Go burne your Bookes and come and learn of me.

The notion that Kelley might be no fake at all was a powerful lure for me to write. But I didn't want to turn the play into a piece of magical unrealism. So I went looking for explanations that might have Kelley making gold but not through magic.

Enter Ivan Sviták -- Czech philosopher and one of the intellectual giants of the Prague Spring in 1968. Faced with a jail sentence after the Soviet invasion, Sviták emigrated to the United States and ended up teaching at California State University at Chico. (His book of essays written during the Prague Spring -- The Czechoslovak experiment, 1968-1969 -- remains one of the wisest. most humane and most ebullient political books ever written.)

Sviták had a passionate interest in the story of Dee and Kelley (and, also, Kelley's stepdaughter Elizabeth Jane Weston). He wrote a trio of books about these three personages which are available in their entirety only in Czech editions published in 1994.

Fortunately, Sviták also published a short article in English about Dee and Kelley in the journal Kosmas in 1986. It contained a bombshell: An argument that Kelley's chicanery was never uncovered because it he was not a fraud at all. Sviták recites the eyewitness evidence of Kelley's "transmutations" and then writes:

We could dismiss these reports as simply common fraud and alchemical tricks... My explanation coincides with the historical evidence available about Rosenberg mining and about his constant effort to improve the conditions in the old gold mines in Jilove (Eule) near Prague.

The short version of Sviták's theory is that Kelley was using mercury to extract trace amounts of gold and other precious metals from seemingly spent soils in old mines. "The metallurgist must have appeared to his contemporaries as a magician," Sviták writes. "Indeed he was producing gold from earth, and everybody could see that..." (Sviták also posits that Kelley's training as an apothecary gave him useful knowledge of all sorts of drugs -- a leg up in making things like aurum potabile, or liquid gold.)

But the important thing for me, as a playwright, is that Sviták's theory -- which I think holds up quite nicely -- also carved out space for me to imagine myself back into Kelley's shoes. He's a bad guy, yes. Machiavellian to Max-iavellian. But he's smart. Super smart. And that fabled arrogance is, in some important ways, justified.

In short, it let me imagine a Kelley that is comprehensible to a modern sensibility without resort to magic or an outright con job. It's all of a sudden a very complicated and very believable story. Which is just the sort of thing to write a play about....

Burn Your Bookes: Tracking Edward Kelley

Over the next couple days, I'm going to post some background about my play, Burn Your Bookes, which gets a sneak preview two weeks from today at the Kennedy Center as part of the 8th annual Page-to-Stage Festival. Full play to follow, courtesy of Taffety Punk Theatre Company, in early spring. Details on the September 6 performance here.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Edward Kelley is the central character in Burn Your Bookes. For many, this English alchemist is a personage of mystery, malfeasance and menace. But I find him fascinating and very misunderstood despite his obvious flaws. My grappling with Kelley is what animates the play. Who was he? What was he doing?

Back in 2007, when I was in Prague for five weeks for rehearsals and the four performances of the one-act version of Burn Your Bookes, I found a place to stay in Mala Strana, near one of the houses where Kelley lived when he was a "golden knight" of Emperor Rudolf II's court in the late 16th Century.

There are a few places associated with Kelley still extant in central Prague, including the famous but wildly misnomered "Faust House" on Karlovo náměstí. Kelley owned that house for a time, but there is no connection between the legendary scholar who sold his soul to the Devil and Prague. (Though that didn't, of course, stop filmmaker Jan Švankmajer from setting the beginning of his version of Faust in Prague!)

The other place associated with Kelley is a house on Jánský Vršek in Mala Strana called "At The Donkey in the Cradle." It is linked with Kelley as a place he lived after his first arrest, and its nook on a narrow street in the shadow of Prague Castle seems the perfect location to try and mount a comeback at Rudolf's court. It also has a tower that peeks out over Mala Strana -- and a courtyard with a wine bar and restaurant. (See photo above of thoroughly-chilled playwright at base of tower.)

I rented a place at the bottom of the same street, a few doors away, to stay during my theatrical sojourn in Prague. I also wrote much of the play's third act during that same trip, and the knowledge that Kelley's stepdaughter -- Neo-Latin poet Elizabeth Jane Weston -- likely stayed in that house as well also provided some good vibrations. (Kelley and Weston are the main figures in the third act.)

Prague is the sort of place where one can imagine oneself back into a Renaissance past, especially on a narrow street like Jánský Vršek. But imagining oneself back into Kelley's shoes is a difficult task, for a number of reasons. And as I unfold them below, you will see why I felt trying to get nearer somehow to the places Kelley haunted felt like the right thing to do.

First, there are the layers of mystery and inscrutability that surround all alchemy in this period. Alchemists intentionally made themselves difficult to understand. Charles Nicholl, in the preface to a new edition of his wonderful 1980 book, The Chemical Theatre, puts it best:

I suspect that a measure of bewilderment and exhaustion attends anyone who attempts to unravel the complexities of alchemy. Like all occult systems, alchemy employs a language of symbolism and subterfuge. You enter a linguistic labyrinth full of cross-references and false trails. Its strange and wonderful images -- its green lions and red kings, its nigredos and albedos, its lactating virgins and cannabalistic couplings -- have a multiplicity of interpretations and counter-interpretations. One avoids with difficulty the old scholarly pitfall of ignotum per ignotius, explaining the obscure by the more obscure.

Nicholl is right. The hardest thing about writing Burn Your Bookes was deciding that I needed to find my way out of the labyrinth of researching alchemy and start to actually write the play. And in that writing, I struggled with ways to clarify and simplify without stripping the science alchemical of its complexity and linguistic beauty.

The second hurdle in representing Kelley is navigating the obscurity of much of his early life, untangling the messy strand of the seven years (1582-1589) in which we have a bounty of detail (too much?) about his life, and then plunging back to shape the fragments that have come down to us about his final years.

When Kelley walks into the house of John Dee, one of the most impressive English intellectual figures of the Renaissance era, in early 1582, he literally walks into history. We know almost nothing about him before that moment. He comes under an assumed name (Talbot), offering his services as a scryer (or crystal gazer). We only know his birthdate (August 1, 1555) because Dee casts his horoscope. Dee is suspicious and with good reason. But he also finds Kelley strangely compelling and useful.

From that moment on, thanks to Dee, we have almost 500 pages recording the "spiritual actions" conducted by the two men, first published in 1659 by Meric Causabon as A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between John Dee... and Some Spirits. We also have almost 70 pages of Dee's personal diaries, scribbled down in the margins of Johannes Stadius' Ephimerides Novae -- a year by year published chart of planetary positions that also served Dee as a datebook of sorts. (More on this material to come in future posts.)

Act I of Burn Your Bookes examines the end of the Dee and Kelley partnership. When the two men part, the trail of information about Kelley thins out once again. (Nicholl does an incredible job of piecing together what we do know about him in a London Review of Books piece from April 2001. Subscription only, alas.)

Even the date of Kelley's death is uncertain, though Nicholl argues that he died in the castle in the Czech city of Most in late 1597. We do have a letter from Elizabeth Jane Weston to her brother John Francis, written from that city in July 1597, and published in her second book of poetry (Parthenica) referring to their "magnificent Parent" (Kelley) in a way that implies he is still alive. (In a letter from October 1598, however, he is referred to as "our magnificent Parent of blessed memory.") The rest can only be pieced together from legal documents, letters about him and legends.

The legends about Kelley, alas, took the firmest root of all for almost 500 years. The blanks of his early life were filled with lurid tales of necromancy, coining and forgery, and a cropping of his ears at Lancaster -- none of which has been conclusively proven in the documentary record. One must also take into account that both the spiritual and personal diaries of Dee record the relationship from Dee's perspective -- though we do not have much cause to doubt their veracity.

A third difficulty in getting a true read on Kelley is modern scholarship on John Dee, which steadfastly denigrates Kelley to reestablish Dee's reputation as one of the great -- and most interesting intellects -- of the Renaissance.

The project of restoring Dee is a worthy and useful one that was long overdue -- and it has produced some rich and wonderful scholarship. (Nicholas Clulee's John Dee's Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion and William Sherman's John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance are among the best.) But all too often the scholars who've embarked upon it have cut through the knotty complexities of the relationship between the two men in favor of deriding Kelley, eliding Kelley, or just plain ignoring him.

Unless one actually does believe that spirits were talking to John Dee through Edward Kelley, it is hard to dismiss the centrality of Kelley to the joint enterprise. But the more vexing question for those who denigrate Kelley as a charlatan or a fraud is that while Dee was eventually sent packing back to England, his former scryer was knighted and moved for a time in the highest circles of Rudolfine Prague.

And what complicates the question further? Contemporary scholarship has largely established that Kelley's first arrest may well have been -- at least in part -- a sort of "protective custody" to prevent him fleeing back to England with courtier and poet Edward Dyer, who was placed under arrest in Kelley's house at the same time that the alchemist was being pursued in South Bohemia and finally arrested in Soběslav. Nicholl posits that Kelley's second and final arrest and imprisonment was because of a duel or debts.

In neither case, however, does it appear that Kelley arrested for alchemical fraud. So the
question is: What was Edward Kelley doing? In the next post, I'll talk a bit about the best theory that has emerged, and what it might mean to our understanding of Kelley.

More on the Kundera Scandal (Sigh)

A very long and detailed article about the Milan Kundera scandal by New York Review of Books staffer Jana Prikryl was just posted at The Nation.

For anyone who is steeped in the complexities of the scandal, the piece is riveting. The big news in the article is Prikryl's close examination of the multiple cross-cutting ripples of influence in Czech journalism, academe, literary culture and politics
that stoked the story.

And the first few paragraphs of the piece are a brilliant evocation and denunciation of the Czech Republic's abject refusal -- across political and intellectual divides -- to embrace its potential destiny as a cultural and political force in contemporary Europe. Unspoken in Prikryl's piece is the near-insanity of the country's global-warming-denying president Václav Klaus, but her close reading of the stultifying and oblivious stunt-art nonsense of David Cerný is staggeringly good.

Cerný is best-known for his painting of a Russian tank that stood as WWII memorial to the Soviet liberation of Prague in 1991. He settled on the color pink for his statement in the heady afterglow of the Velvet Revolution, but the provocative gesture -- set against Czechoslovak efforts to peacefully work out the departure of Soviet troops from its territory -- was read either as cheeky and knowing tweak or as a spit-on-the-grave of the Warsaw Pact. (And let's be clear, when I arrived in suburban Prague in September 1991, the withdrawal wasn't totally complete.)

In her article, Prikryl observes that Cerný -- who was clearly dancing on that thin Spinal Tappian line between stupid and clever in 1991 -- is now completely politically tone deaf 18 years on. His sculpture to "celebrate" the Czech accession to EU's presidency trafficked in every vulgar and stupid stereotype of Europe's recent past (swastikas, scab picking and a bizarre self-loathing). Oh, it's art, dahling. It's art. It's just not any good.

Pushing on from that strong opening gambit, Prikryl demonstrates a wonderful knack for separating out the various strands of unacknowledged conflict and ethical collision in the publication of the article linking Kundera to the denunciation of a Western agent in the Czech magazine Respekt -- and in the attempt to hold the novelist/essayist and playwright to account for the long-ago incident uncovered by researchers.

But for all of the delicate onion-peeling in the article, I am going to be immodest and suggest that The Nation piece is wonderfully-engaging embroidery around the central and largely-indisputable facts of the case that I set out a few months ago in The American Prospect.

The new evidence about careerism and cloudy motives and perhaps conflict of interest in publicizing this incident in Kundera's past are diverting but do not alter what we already knew. (1) This denunciation by Kundera that led to an arrest and long prison sentence did happen, despite the novelist's semantic shimmying away from it; (2) It was completely explicable in the context of its era (and Prikryl's article is weakest in its time-bending citation of Milan Uhde as a potential witness for the Kundera prosecution even as he defends Kundera); and (3) That Kundera's subsequent work and his elaborate fictive and non-fictive personas must be interrogated anew in the light of this news.

Prikryl agrees with the third point in large part, especially regarding Kundera's book-length collections of essays. And it is here that the literary critic -- armed with theory and strategies of close reading -- must also add empathy/sympathy to the arsenal of analysis.

Describing a new Kundera book of essays not yet published in English (and mouth-watering because Kundera tackles the immensely problematic works of Curzio Malaparte), Prikryl writes that "... at one point, recalling an argument he had with a journalist in the early '60s about the novelist Bohumil Hrabal, Kundera hazards a statement that one imagines he wouldn't mind having applied to himself today. Defending Hrabal's refusal to take a political stand in Communist Czechoslovakia, Kundera chided the journalist, who expected more from Hrabal: 'A single book by Hrabal renders a greater service to people, to their inner freedom, than all of us with our gestures and proclamations of protest!'"

As a close reader of Hrabal, it is hard for me to disagree with Kundera's assessment. (And to read Hrabal's self-flagellations in interviews and in works published in translation a few years ago as Total Fears, it is easy to not only reserve judgment, but to forgive any transgressions against outright dissidence by Hrabal -- real or imagined.)

The strangeness of the Kundera conundrum (as Prikryl terms it) is that as Kundera cites Hrabal, he does not follow Hrabal's path (however belated) of transparency. Prikryl's article peels much of the mystery around the circumstances of how and why this incident came to light -- but no one but Kundera himself can shed more light on the central mysteries of its imporatnace to his work and his life.

A Theatrical Death Trip through Bosnia's War

I only got to see one film at the year's D.C. International Film Festival, but it was a film that Balkans via Bohemia readers will be interested in seeing if it comes their way: Goran Marković's film Turneja ("The Tour").

It is a bleak and bitter tragicomedy about a group of Belgrade actors who sign up -- out of boredom and perhaps a bit of greed -- to perform on a "tour" of the front lines of Bosnia's three-sided war in 1993.

Problem is, they don't know that they'll be performing literally on the front lines in an effort to lift the morale of Serbian troops. Let's just say: There will be blood. And rakija. And all the horrors of war. And that an attempt to play Feydeau's farce A Flea in Her Ear cannot help but end very badly indeed.

I've always liked Marković's work. His 2002 movie about the winter street protests of 1996 that nearly brought down Slobodan Milosevic -- Kordon -- was brilliant. And The Tour is very good, though stretched out a bit unevenly in plot and tone to make sure that the hapless actors encounter almost every side of the war.

There are, however, many wonderful performances. (Many American TV viewers will recognize Croatian actress Mira Forlan from stints in Babylon 5 and Lost.)

A couple clips are circulating online, including this harrowing scene in which the actors stumble through a mine field, happening first upon encircled Croatian troops and then upon a Serbian paramilitary commander (played with feverish intensity by Sergej Trifunovic) who is clearly based on Arkan and his troops. (Trifunovic is staggeringly good, getting the notorious down the obsession with his soon-to-be-wife, Ceca, and her song "Kukavica.")

The clip of that scene -- this one shorter and with subtitles, and this one longer, and without. The Tour is definitely worth catching if it comes to your town at a festival or otherwise.

Labor and Theater: Wha'ppen?

The article I wrote for The American Prospect on labor and theater in America -- and the overall lack of cultural juice that unions have had over the past 30 years -- is finally up on the magazine's website.

I got the idea to write from a new selection of plays published this month by Cornell University Press called Staged Action: Six Plays from the American Workers' Theatre. The collection is edited by Lee Papa, an assistant professor of drama studies at College of Staten Island/CUNY, and it really is a terrific window into an often ignored corner of America's artistic life.

As I note in the article, Papa opted not to include better known labor plays such as Waiting for Lefty and The Cradle Will Rock (which served as the focal point of Tim Robbins' 1999 film of almost the same name), preferring instead to excavate two plays from college labor movement, two plays from the International Ladies Garments Workers Union (including the phenomenally satiric and successful Broadway revue, Pins and Needles -- which a few colleagues have pointed out was recorded in 1962 after a Broadway revival with a cast including Barbra Streisand) and two plays from the stormy discontent of the 1920s labor movement, including a long dream play about a hunger striking labor organizer by Upton Sinclair.

The limits of word count did not let me unpack these plays as much as I would have liked, but I do think that the book is definitely worth picking up -- especially for John Howard Lawson's 1925 play Processional (poster on left from LOC). While the poster hypes the works as "The First Modern American Play" (and Eugene O'Neill might beg to differ with that), Processional is an astonishingly audacious but curious piece of work that stretches out a broad American canvas of labor, flappers, the Klan, jazz, big business, journalism and every ethnic stereotype in the book and let then lets those forces slug it out . (Genre also takes a beating, as the play veers wildly from slapstick to tragedy to romance to agitprop.)

As I say in the Prospect article, Processional is undeniably flawed. But it clearly provided a bevy of ideas that have been worked into American theatre since that moment. It may not be the first "Modern American Play," but it definitely accelerated the tempo of modernity on the American stage -- and yoked low comedy and stark social critique in a way that hadn't happened before it.

R.I.P. Harry Kalas

Just got word that longtime (and legendary) Philadelphia Phillies announcer Harry Kalas died this afternoon at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. -- just as he was about to call the Washington Nationals' season opener.

Kalas' voice was a thread woven through my childhood and early adulthood -- through good times (the Ozark/Dallas Green-era, the amazing 1993 season, and last year's World Championship) and bad times (uh, the rest of the time, and the crushing playoff defeats of the late 70s). In part, that was because my brother Tom -- now as sportscaster and anchor for WHYY-TV in Wilmington, Delaware -- does the best impression of Kalas I have ever heard. (Keep an eye on Tom's blog "Unobstructed View" for more info in the next few days: He spent a lot of time with Harry the K as an intern.)

Kalas' idiosyncracies were his best feature: Anyone in Philadelphia circa 1975-1986 could tell you that every home run by Hall of Fame 3B Mike Schmidt was intoned thusly: "Home run Michael Jack Schmidt!" (His call of the Phillies' World Series championship last year is here.)

And for those of you who are so anti-sports that you can't even bear the Super Bowl... Kalas was also the voice of the wonderful Animal Planet counter-programming each year on that day: The Puppy Bowl.

Update 4/13: Tom's post on Kalas here. Though, he sold himself short on his youthful impression of Kalas. It was astonishing in its verisimilitude and nuance for a 10 year-old.

Caryl Churchill Gets Libelled

Because I was off at a conference in San Francisco until today, I was unable to attend the Washington, D.C. readings and discussions of Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Girls: A Play for Gaza. I'm sorry to have missed this event.

Churchill is one of our greatest living playwrights, and her work has been a formal touchstone for my own endeavors. Light Shining in Buckinghamshire taught me so much about how the past can be dragged kicking and screaming into the present without betraying its essence as history. And I've been reading the incredible first act of Top Girls as I grapple with a very complicated cafe scene of my own in a new play I'm writing. She is one of our indispensible playwrights.

First thing: Kudos to Theatre J and Forum Theatre for hosting the readings. This is truly the mission of theatre -- to expose audiences to provocative and excellent new work. Theatre J's Ari Roth and Forum's Michael Dove get mad props from this playwright for doing so.

There has been a lot written about the productions, including this extended dialogue between Roth and Atlantic columnist Jeffrey Goldberg. Despite its length, it's worth reading, especially for Roth's spirited defense of Churchill as an artist and his choice to stage the readings at Theatre J.
For me, this exchange near the beginning is telling:

JG: Let me give you another quote from Caryl Churchill. "Israel has done a lot of terrible things in the past, but what happened in Gaza seems particularly extreme." This is a woman who hates Israel. She's not complicated. I mean, has she ever expressed an ounce of sympathy for a Jewish child victim of a Hamas suicide bomber?

AR: You're a great writer, but you may not love art enough. And you --

JG: I may not love art enough?

AR: Yeah, maybe you don't love the dramatic arts enough. You know a thousand things but you're making assumptions about Caryl Churchill that are not true, in terms of her lack of empathy. So I would invite you to come sit in on a rehearsal. We're just trying to understand what she's saying. Okay?

The other important point that Goldberg makes that needs to be refuted in as clear as terms as possible is that somehow Caryl Churchill is perpetuating the "blood libel" against Jews regarding the ritual killing of innocent children.

I have been thinking a lot about what I wanted to say this issue, but when I came home, I saw that Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon had beaten me to the punch with a powerful cover story in The Nation. The entire essay is terrific, but I found the authors' dissection of the "blood libel" charge leveled against a monologue near the end of the play particularly powerful:

When the two of us first discussed Seven Jewish Children we turned immediately to those lines. We both winced when we read them; we both became alarmed. One of us was disturbed by the line "tell her we're better haters," resonant of Shylock and Alberich the Nibelung. The other focused on "tell her we're chosen people," contending that in this context it reflected a misunderstanding of the term "chosen people," casting Jewish chosen-ness as an expression of divine right and exceptionalism rather than of religious/ethical responsibility. We speculated that these two lines added fuel to the willful misreading as blood libel of the lines that follow: "tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? tell her all I feel is happy it's not her." Those who level the blood-libel accusation insist that Churchill has written "tell her I'm happy when I see their children covered in blood."

But that is not what Churchill wrote. Distortion, misrepresentation and name-calling are tactics familiar to anyone who's spoken out about the Middle East. There's no blood libel in the play. The last line of the monologue is clearly a warning: you can't protect your children by being indifferent to the children of others.

Writing bravely about controversy is the lifeblood of theatre. And Churchill has an amazing track record in doing so -- brilliantly. In my view, making such a charge against Churchill is libel -- and a vicious attempt to chill the expression of all playwrights. But you can read a print out of the play here. Decide for yourself.

NB: Ari Roth has already posted a reflection on the week in the context of his theater's festival -- Voices from a Changing Middle East -- on the Theatre J blog.

Ford's Theatre Renovation: A Short Review

Yesterday I got a chance to visit the recently refurbished Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C.

Ford's Theatre, of course, is the site of Abraham Lincoln's assassination by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865. (He was attending a performance of Our American Cousin.) And I'd been eagerly awaiting the reopening after a significant closure for renovation.

The good news is that the building looks great, and it retains its function as a working theater, which I think is a great thing.

The "tour," however, was not so great. It's free. That's the best thing that you can say for it. The museum of Lincoln artifacts in the basement of the building is not open yet. (Won't open until June at earliest, our presenter said. The coat Lincoln wore that fatal night is on temporary display in the lobby, though no one told us what or where it was during the presentation. You needed to figure that out for yourself.)

Tours run on the hour by a timed ticket system, but visitor should be forewarned that there is no opportunity to poke around the theater. You are herded into the main auditorium and forced to sit for 20 or so minutes. Then a National Park Service historian gives you a lecture that's pitched at folks who know that Lincoln was assassinated at this place -- and precious little else.

Don't get me wrong. Lectures should be pitched at roughly that level. But that presentation was the sum of the present Ford's Theatre experience. The balcony was closed, so no chance to look into the Presidential Box where Lincoln was shot. (I don't know if this will change in future or not.) So essentially you got to go in, sit down, hear a talk, and then file out. Really disappointing. Indeed, the closest thing to a tour you can get at the moment is this "virtual tour" on the Ford's Theatre web site.

Ford's reestablishment in the late 1960s as a working theater was a terrific impulse. The sites of Civil War Washington are disappearing fast, and the rebuilding of the theater (which had been stripped and turned into a government office building for much of the 100 years after the assassination) is a boon to communicate to visitors just what that era was like in Washington's history.

But denying folks the chance to poke around and explore --especially the balconies and the box -- runs counter to that living history/working theater concept. I hope it changes once the museum opens -- and that visitors will get a keener sense of the momentous event that occurred there in 1865.

And, yes, for the curious, who are wondering about the source of my sudden Lincoln obsession -- I am starting research on a Lincoln play set in Washington in 1865. Stay tuned.

Photo of Ford's Theatre after Lincoln's assassination in 1865 from the Library of Congress.

Hypesville: Writing About Pinter in The Nation

I have a short -- maybe too short -- piece on Harold Pinter and his legacy up now on the website of The Nation. I wish I'd had a bit more space to unpack both prongs of the piece: 1) How Pinter's outsized influence has had a double-edged effect on English-language theater -- sharpening its rhythms and language while also shaving down its scope and tolerance of the big play; and 2) How Pinter abandoned his own carefully-nurtured persona and style in the mid-1980s to become a much more political (and less powerful, to my mind) writer. But I think I hit the high spots and I'm waiting for the angry gibes that will likely come my way. You be the judge, however, if you're interested.

Our American Cousin: A Sort of Defense

As far as cultural criticism goes, Slate has -- in its 13 years of existence -- been dedicated to the proposition that lazy and superficial snark is the optimal mode of discourse. (I wrote about this a bit in my article about the web magazine in the Boston Phoenix back in 2003.)

Not much has changed. For instance, let's examine one of Slate's contributions to the 200th anniversary of Abraham' Lincoln's birth this week: Timothy Noah's "belated review" of Our American Cousin, the play that Lincoln was watching as he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865.

It's an oh-so-Slate experience. The play, it turns out, is "terrible." Noah adds that its author, Tom Taylor, was "widely excoriated as a hack" roughly 35 years after that tragic performance at Ford's Theatre for which it is remembered. (Ford's Theatre, by the way, has now reopened after a few years of rehab. Full review next weekend.)

Before he launches into a snarky plot summation of the play, Noah writes:

What was it like to watch? To grasp that, you really have to read it, something I did recently to commemorate the 200^th anniversary of Lincoln's birth. To spare you from doing the same, I provide what is (as best I can tell) the only detailed synopsis available anywhere.

Insert heavy sigh here. There are so many things going wrong here that I'm frankly astonished. (And we'll get to all of them in a moment.) But larger questions loom: What precisely is the point of this exercise? How is it educating the reader at all?

I ask because -- when you scratch a bit below the surface -- there are any number of very interesting things lurking in any exploration of Our American Cousin. About theater. About women's history in American theatre. About Lincoln.

First, let's take the merits of the play -- a discussion that Noah flubs comprehensively. No, I am not going to say that Our American Cousin is some sort of neglected classic. But we can't really know much about how good or bad Taylor's version of Our American Cousin was because we don't have a copy of his original script.

Here's why we don't have it. According to Welford Dunaway Taylor, who edited an edition of the play published in 1990 (Beacham Publishing), Our American Cousin was written by Tom Taylor in 1851 as a melodrama based on his experience of the cultural clashes imported by numerous American visitors to the famous exhibition of Britain's Victorian culture at Crystal Palace in 1851. He sold to a British producer for 80 pounds, but that producer never put the show on in Britain. The playwright gave the American rights to Joshua Silsbee -- the American actor for whom Taylor wrote the main part of Asa Trenchard (the "American cousin").

When Silsbee died without the play being done, Taylor tried again -- assigning a British journalist to find a buyer for the play. That journalist found Laura Keene, whose name is forever linked to Lincoln's assassination as the actress who was featured in the production at which the president was killed. (That's her name in big letters on the playbill above from that fatal night.)

Keene's story is one of the most interesting in 19th Century American theatre without any mention of Lincoln or Ford's Theater. Indeed, her life has all the stuff of the American dream: Keene emigrated from Britain as a single mother with two children -- and she rose quickly on her talents as an actress to become the first female entrepreneur in the bumptious world of New York theatre. (There is an excellent account of her astonishing and fleetingly successful career as a theater mogul in Faye E. Dudden's Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences 1790-1870, published in 1994 by Yale University Press.)

But back to that lost script. Keene was always desperate for new material to fill her calendar, so she bought the play lock, stock and barrel for $1000. (Dudden writes that Keene's "most pressing problem was the never-ending struggle to find the next new play, the next new draw.")

In his introduction to the 1990 edition, Welford Dunaway Taylor observes that when Keene took possession of Our American Cousin, she altered it greatly -- largely in an effort to get actors to play in it. Taylor's melodrama suddenly became a comedy. And some of the actors that agreed to take parts demanded permission to "gag" (i.e. "improvise") their parts to cull laughs from the audience.

The actor who took the part of the lisping and effeminate Lord Dundreary, for instance, managed to "gag" his part from a mere 47 lines to become the center of the comic business of the play -- actually displacing the "American cousin." Edward Askew Sothern became a star as he did so, and much of the play's continuing popularity from its New York opening in 1858 and past 1865 to Keene's death in 1873, came not from Taylor but from the new funny business that Sothern and the rest of the original cast wove into the British play about a funny talkin' American in Britain. (So the play that Noah synopsizes is likely less the play written by Taylor than it is a sort of collaboration -- or collision -- between playwright and ensemble.)

Even on the night of Lincoln's assassination, the actors found ways to ham it up in topical ways. The end of the war a few days before the April 14th performance -- and the end of the conscription of troops -- occasioned this bit of ad-libbed nonsense between Dundreary and a female character:

GEORGINA: If you please, ask the dairy maid to let me have a seat in the dairy. I am afraid of the draft here.
DUNDREARY: Don't be alarmed. There is no more draft.

The Dundreary character in particular became a staple of American culture -- inspiring numerous spinoffs and ripoffs. Which brings us to Abraham Lincoln -- and why he might have liked Our American Cousin.

The cult of Lincoln loves to drone on and on about his love of Shakespeare -- and he certainly was fond of the historical tragedies. But you don't hear much about Lincoln quoting the Bard's comedies. His tastes in humor ran in a coarser and folksier vein -- such as the comic epistlatory fiction of David Ross Locke, who wrote under the nom de plume "Rev. Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby." The Nasby letters were stinging satires of the Democratic party and its willingness to compromise with the rebels (a sampling here), and Lincoln loved to read them aloud to Cabinet members and other guests -- many of whom loathed the experience.

The comedy of Our American Cousin runs largely in that vein. Silly physical comedy. Wordplay that emphasizes the rich descriptive vulgarity of American speech -- and central characters who prick at the puffery of "Old Europe" and celebrate the fair play and common sense of the American character. The perfect light-hearted nonsense for a war-weary president.

So far from worrying, as Noah does, about the "aesthetic experience" that Lincoln had in his last hours, it's easy to see that he was likely after some good old-fashioned and utterly familiar comic relief.

And when you look more deeply into it, there are some fascinating stories as well.

(Playbill image from the Library of Congress.)

Mike Daisey and American Theater's EPIC FAIL

Washington D.C.'s theatre scene has been atwitter and aflitter over the past week or so. Why? Because monologist Mike Daisey's broadside -- How Theater Failed America -- has been in town at Woolly Mammoth, kicking up dust and forcing artistic directors and arts bureaucrats into defensive crouches.

The American Prospect just published my take on the show -- and in particular just how government might be able to embrace Daisey's vision of nurturing ensembles without pumping scads of money into the arts. (Which ain't gonna happen anyway, even with the promise of billions teetering on a trillion dollars worth of taxpayer-funded stimulus.)

I enjoyed the show, though I do wish Daisey had provided answers past a full-throated exhortation to revalue the present priorities of American theater by putting the artists at its center (actors, directors, technical staffers) ahead of capital campaigns to establish snazzy new buildings. But he's kicked off the discussion and where we -- the people who work in this art form -- take it from here is the important thing.