Podcast: Interview with John Sayles (1983)

Linda Griffiths (left) and Jane Hallaren in John Sayles' Lianna (1983).

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1983, one of those guests was American independent filmmaker and screenwriter John Sayles.

When I sat down with Sayles in 1983, Lianna (starring Canadian actor and playwright Linda Griffiths) had just been released. Lianna was the second film Sayles directed, his follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut, Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980). Since 1983, Sayles has directed sixteen features, including Eight Men Out (1988), Lone Star (1996), Sunshine State (2002), and most recently Go for Sisters (2013).

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with John Sayles as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1983.


 

The Business of a Woman's Life – Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will

 Charlotte Brontë by George Richmond, 1850. (National Portrait Gallery, London)

My story begins, dear reader, with a description of a not-so-distant journey that took me through the sky to the isle of Manhattan, and ultimately inside the workings of a most extraordinary intellect. The destination was that seat of high repute and learning, the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. I entered through its glassy doors off Madison Avenue as the autumnal sky above streaked plum and apricot, the colours dancing rich and vibrant on the shadowy walls. After perusing the rare gilt-edged books and illuminated manuscripts lining what had once been banker J.P. Morgan's private library, I ascended to the second storey aboard a chrome elevator. Turning right, I spied a treasure of a different stripe, a simple cotton and wool dress, patterned over with the petals of pale blue flowers. It guarded the entrance of Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will, a unique collaboration between the Morgan and the Brontë Parsonage Museum in England. Commemorating the 200th anniversary of the author's birth in 1816, the intimate exhibition closed in January, but not without creating a lasting impression.

Man vs. Nature – Kong: Skull Island

Tian Jing, Brie Larson, Tom Hiddleston, and Thomas Mann in Kong: Skull Island.

I had one thought going into Kong: Skull Island, and it was a fervent hope that the film wouldn’t cleave to the story we’ve all already seen more times than we can count. I went in ready to condemn the film if any of the following were depicted: the big ape and the titular island become separate entities; the humans want to capture or control him in any way; his murderous rage is soothed by his fascination with a beautiful blonde ingenue. I’m pleased to report that Skull Island contains none of those story beats, and is distinct enough from all the other iterations of the King Kong story to justify its own existence.

But if it isn’t any of those things, then what the hell is Skull Island, exactly? This is a movie about King Kong, isn’t it?

In God’s Country: The Joshua Tree by U2

A couple of weeks ago, I posted images of the inner-vinyl labels of side one and side two of U2’s 1987 release The Joshua Tree (Island). It was my way of marking the 30th anniversary of the release of one of my prized albums. And I don’t mean compact disc either. This was a vinyl pressing, gatefold jacket and lyrics insert edition as it was intended on March 9th, 1987. I was thirty years younger and listening to jazz exclusively, since pop music and rock 'n' roll in general weren’t engaging my ears at the time. But U2 was the exception. I was immediately impressed when they launched in Canada in 1980, thanks to the support of CFNY radio and The New Music television program, long-time sources of new groups in the post-punk age of my generation. By posting the inner-label images on my Facebook page, I wanted to remember the record as a two-sided experience where you centered your focus on the rotation of the long-play album and flipped it to side two. In those days, music was a little more precious in its physical form. Digital files are simply no match for the texture and engagement in a record. To those pundits who fail to see the value in “things” such as vinyl albums, you’re way off the mark and rude to think that “things” are worthless, backdated forms of media.

Off the Shelf: Lunch with Charles (2001)

Theresa Lee and Nicholas Lea in Lunch with Charles.

Lunch with Charles is a relaxed and genial romantic comedy about a number of couples who begin to feel dislocated and dissatisfied with the lives and partners they've chosen. Making his feature film debut, writer-director Michael Parker sets in motion a charmingly low-key Feydeau-style farce that's sprinkled with granola and cured in heady coastal air. Set in British Columbia, a province most easterners wrongly assume to be catatonically relaxed, Lunch with Charles examines with a droll undercurrent a number of partners who fear they've lost the itch for love, but turn out to be anything but sedate. The movie puts these mismatched duos, who are from different cultures as well as different walks of life, on a collision course that leads them to question the choices they've made in their lives.

Return to La Grande Jatte: The Latest Sunday in the Park with George

Jake Gyllenhaal in Sunday in the Park with George. (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

I didn’t expect to be reviewing another production of Sunday in the Park with George so soon after the Huntington Theatre’s season opener last September, but who could resist checking out a Broadway revival starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford? Sarna Lapine – niece of the book writer, James Lapine, who did the original Broadway staging in 1984 – worked it up out of the sold-out one-night-only 2016 concert version, and though it’s fully designed, it retains some of the intimacy it must have had in concert. Sitting in the front of the mezzanine at the newly refurbished Hudson Theatre, which dates from the turn of the twentieth century, I felt very close to the actors, especially in the two-character scenes between Gyllenhaal’s Seurat and Annaleigh Ashford’s Dot. Beowulf Boritt’s set is a raked rhomboid with an upstage curtain hung like a circus tent that holds Tal Yarden and Christopher Ash’s projections. In the 2008 revival, which came to New York by way of the Meunier Chocolate Factory in London, the projections felt like a cut-rate approach to a musical that was so visually vibrant in 1984, especially in the first-act finale, “Sunday,” where Seurat puts together his canvas A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte – which he had painted exactly a century before Lapine and Stephen Sondheim wrote their musical. But in this production of Sunday in the Park, the combination of Boritt’s and Yarden’s designs is elegantly understated and quite beautiful.

Electioneering at the Vatican: Robert Harris’ Conclave

Author Robert Harris. (Photo: Karen Robinson)

"Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them."

– Robert Harris, Imperium

As a former political reporter, Robert Harris has considerable knowledge of the corridors of power and an understanding about the frailties and flaws of those who exercise it. He brings those qualities, along with a passion for detailed accuracy and compelling plots, to his historical and contemporary political thrillers. One only has to think of The Ghost Writer and its film adaptation, Harris’ thinly-veiled, withering portrait of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair; An Officer and a Spy, whose protagonist, Georges Picquart, was the French officer who initially fingered the arrest of Alfred Dreyfus, but whose investigation convinced him that an injustice had occurred, thereby invoking the wrath of his superiors; or The Fear Index, whose protagonist, Alex Hoffman, a mathematics nerd, runs a vastly successful algorithmic hedge fund, and whose vulnerabilities set him up for a financial and emotional crash. Harris's latest foray, Conclave (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016) is an engaging investigation into the political machinations and personal liabilities of those seeking the Keys of St. Peter when the Catholic cardinals assemble to elect a new Pope at Vatican City.

Courage, Compassion, and Hopelessness: The White Helmets

A White Helmets volunteer in Aleppo after an airstrike (Beha el Halebi/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images).

For the last six years, death has rained from the sky onto the people of Syria. Unchallenged by any regional or foreign powers, the air force of Bashar al-Assad, more recently supplemented by the attack jets of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, have purposely slaughtered civilians in a bid to wipe out the Syrian opposition. Amid chemical attacks, crude “barrel bombs” dumped out of helicopters onto playgrounds and schools, and “double-tap” strikes that target rescuers who rush to save the victims of a first wave of bombings, Syria’s people have been systematically slaughtered. The world has largely shrugged in indifference.

While horrifying images of the ruins of Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city, capped off the grim parade of news that darkened 2016, a more hopeful story has emerged from the recent rise to prominence of the White Helmets, as the members of the Syria Civil Defense organization are known. These unarmed volunteers don their signature headgear and desperately attempt to pull survivors from the rubble of civilian targets flattened by Putin and Assad’s fighter jets and attack helicopters. Amid Syria’s seemingly endless agony, they’re a rare beacon of humanitarian spirit.

Talking Out of Turn #51 (Podcast): Bob Swaim (1983)

A scene from Bob Swaim's La Balance (1982).

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, I did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it. 

Tom Fulton, host and producer of On the Arts.

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (e.g., Doris Kearns Goodwin sitting alongside Clive Barker). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I were trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. The book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

As mainstream movies became more predictable and packaged in the eighties, some filmmakers turned to the fringes. Not all of the work of independent directors, though, was worthy of being enshrined (any more than all of the Hollywood work earned for itself the right to be trashed). There were good and bad films in both camps. What I wanted to illustrate in the chapter Occupying the Margins: Re-Inventing Movies was the more idiosyncratic styles of people working in the business on both sides of the fence. They included screenwriter Robert Towne, the Hollywood mogul Samuel Z. Arkoff, the then-emerging sibling filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, and film directors Agnès Varda, Bill Forsyth, James Toback, Mira Nair, and Bob Swaim.

When I sat down with Bob Swaim in 1983, his French-language film La Balance (starring Nathalie Baye and Philippe Léotard) had just premiered at the Toronto Festival of Festivals (now the Toronto International Film Festival). Set in the Paris that the American-born Swaim had made his home for more than 15 years, the crime drama stood apart from other action films by forgoing the vigilante qualities of Hollywood action flicks of the era.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Bob Swaim as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1983.

Inheritance: Peter Reich's A Book of Dreams (1973)

(l. to r.) Eva Reich, Jerome Siskind, Peter Reich, Wilhelm Reich, Ilse Ollendorff (Peter's mother) in Maine.

"I am in Lewisburg [Penitentiary]. I am calm, certain in my thoughts, and doing mathematics most of the time. I am kind of 'above things,' fully aware of what is up. Do not worry too much about me, though anything might happen. I know, Pete, that you are strong and decent. At first I thought that you should not visit me here. I do not know. With the world in turmoil I now feel that a boy your age should experience what is coming his way – fully digest it without getting a 'belly ache,' so to speak, nor getting off the right track of truth, fact, honesty, fair play, and being above board – never a sneak ..." 

– Letter from Wilhelm Reich to his son, Peter, aged 13, from prison, March 19, 1957.

When my mother passed away recently from cancer, I fulfilled a promise I made to eulogize her at the memorial. For the first time, however, I decided not to write the tribute as I had for other friends and relatives I'd lost in the past. It might seem to be a strange choice since we choose our friends over time and throughout our life, but we begin in the womb of our mothers. You would think that my eulogy would need the care of consideration and thoughts first consigned to paper. But as I was growing up, I came to know a formidable and peripatetic woman who was as daunting as she was fascinating. For one thing, Sheila Courrier-Vezeau had done many things by the time I was 10. Besides being a striking model in her late teens, she would soon after get her pilot's license. To this day, I still have a distinct memory and knowledge of all the cloud formations she taught me when we took to the sky. If she longed for the stars, she also dove into the depths of the water when she learned to scuba dive. I would often go up to Tobermory, Ontario, in the Great Lakes on summer camping trips, trekking into the woods, while she sought out small shipwrecks.

No More Guns in the Valley: James Mangold’s Logan

Dafne Keen and Hugh Jackman in Logan.

Logan is perhaps the most unusual Marvel film yet made. It more closely resembles director James Mangold’s 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma than its own predecessor, 2013’s The Wolverine (also directed by Mangold), not just in looks, but in spirit. Logan has more of the Western in it than the popcorn-fueled superhero norm; it’s absolutely insane to think that it shares DNA with last year’s X-Men: Apocalypse. It doesn’t feel like a superhero movie, or an X-Men movie, at all. It feels like a swan song, haunting and terribly sad. It also feels like the first time that anyone has been able to truly make a meal of the character of Wolverine – so, of course, it has to be the last time.

Immersive: The Neo-Baroque Paintings of James Verbicky

“Sometimes, in order to accurately imitate the original, it is necessary to put something that is not really in the original into its portrait.”  – Lorenzo Bernini

Everything that is happening is happening in our mind. That just might be the skeleton key to the doors of perception. While William Blake wrote about cleansing those doors, and Aldous Huxley characterized those perceptual doors as what lies in between the known and unknown, James Verbicky paints intense and immersive images of the windows of perception. He doesn’t, of course, depict what is seen by looking through them but rather what we experience by looking at them, thus permitting us to be witnesses to the act of accumulating layers of meaning via visual information itself. By doing, so he also engages our imaginations at a visceral level, at the foundational and entrancing level of what has come to be called the optical unconscious. Verbicky’s sumptuous paintings plumb the depths of our media-saturated domain of simultaneous imagery and they are visual verbs, virtually pulsing with dynamic and dreamy data formations.

That optical unconscious, a term first coined by the German critic Walter Benjamin in the 1930's, is the dwelling place of the visual aura in artworks. It resides at the edge of what he called the expressionless: the terminal zone where nothing more can be expressed and at which the truth content of a work of art reveals itself via the aura. The visual aura is not some mystical cloud, but rather an emotional distance which continues to expand regardless of how close you are to the work. James Verbicky’s seductively layered images amount to a veritable archaeology of that visual aura and its portal to the optical unconscious, and this painter is thus an archaeologist of the spectacle of social space itself.

It’s a Gray World: Man from Nebraska

Annette O'Toole and Reed Birney in Second Stage's production of Man from Nebraska. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Man from Nebraska by Tracy Letts (August: Osage County, Superior Donuts) – currently at New York's Second Stage Theatre – is the latest entry in the life-of-quiet-desperation sweepstakes, following closely on the heels of last season’s Tony Award-winning The Humans. The protagonist, Ken Carpenter (played by Reed Birney, star of The Humans), is a Lincoln insurance salesman approaching sixty – with two grown daughters and a mother (Kathleen Peirce) struggling with end-of-life issues – who gets out of bed in the middle of the night, panicked and weeping, because he’s lost his faith. (He’s a Baptist.) His wife Nancy (Annette O’Toole) is sympathetic but stymied, and his daughter Ashley (Annika Boras), who works with him, has no experience of her own to draw on when he tells her about his existential plight. Nancy asks their pastor (William Ragsdale) to talk to Ken, and though he comes across at first as a pleasant man with a cheerleader personality, he offers a suggestion that turns out to be profound for both his parishioners: he urges Ken to take a vacation alone. He travels to London, where he was stationed when he was in the military and of which he has fond memories, and though his crisis of faith leads him to question everything about himself and his past, he manages to makes friends there: Tamyra (Nana Mensah), the bartender at his Leicester Square hotel, and her flatmate Harry (Max Gordon Moore), a gay sculptor. Meanwhile his absence shakes up his wife, whose world is defined by him as much as his has always been defined by his belief in God.

Joie de Mort: Netflix's Santa Clarita Diet

Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant star in Netflix's Santa Clarita Diet.

Early in February, Netflix premiered a new Netflix Original comedy called Santa Clarita Diet. There are many words I could have put in front of the word comedy just now – dark, family, fantasy, horror, zombie, etc. – but none of them on their own would adequately describe this dryly funny, regularly gory, often romantic, and entirely delightful new show. Created by Victor Fresco, Santa Clarita Diet stars Timothy Olyphant (Justified) and Drew Barrymore as Joel and Sheila Hammond, a realtor couple raising their 16-year-old daughter Abby (Australian actor/playwright Liv Hewson) in the very white, button-downed Los Angeles suburb of Santa Clarita, California. High school sweethearts in their 19th year of marriage, Joel and Sheila have clearly settled into a perfectly agreeable rut. ("I wish I was bold," Sheila muses to herself early in the first episode. "I'd like to be 20 percent bolder. No, more: 80 percent. No . . . that's too much. ") Over breakfast they bicker amiably about parenting strategies, kitchen appliances, and new cars, and spend their days hawking suburban homes to potential buyers – until one day, in the middle of an open house, Sheila unexpectedly dies for a few minutes before waking up with a taste for human flesh.

There are many surprising and wonderful things about Santa Clarita, though I don't expect that the presence of zombies is among them. Prior to Santa Clarita's premiere, I believed (and hoped) we were on the other side of the too-popular zombie phenomenon, with two Walking Dead series on AMC and the more consistently entertaining iZombie beginning its third season on The CW on April 4th. But Santa Clarita has learned all the right lessons from the Walking Deads and iZombie, bringing not only brains (sorry about that!) but heart to the story it is telling. It certainly brings the gore – of the cannibalistic, flesh-eating variety – but frankly there's more genuine horror in an average episode of Breaking Bad than in the entirety of Santa Clarita's 10-episode first season. With more in common with a midlife-crisis family comedy than anything in the horror genre, the show has a fairly simple premise, a tight ensemble cast, and a confident sense of its own fun.

Mommy Issues: HBO’s Big Little Lies

Reese Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley and Nicole Kidman in HBO's Big Little Lies.

At first glance, the star power involved with David E. Kelley’s small-screen adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s novel Big Little Lies is so dazzling that it’s easy to believe that this is like nothing you’ve ever seen on TV before. Keep looking, though, and you’ll be able to easily compare the show, which premiered February 19 and airs on Sunday nights on HBO, to other television offerings. That comparison, once made, isn’t always terribly flattering to the new arrival.

The marquee names attached to Big Little Lies include Shailene Woodley, Nicole Kidman, and Reese Witherspoon, with the latter two also serving as executive producers. The show traces the disturbances caused by the arrival of Woodley’s Jane Chapman, an underemployed single mom, and her son Ziggy (Iain Armitage) in the posh seaside neighborhood of Monterey, California. When Ziggy is accused of assaulting the daughter of the high-powered Renata Klein (Laura Dern), it pits Klein against Jane and her self-appointed champion Madeline (Witherspoon), setting in motion a series of events that culminate in a murder in the midst of a trivia night event. Kelley obscures the identity of both the victim and the perpetrator of that crime, giving us brief glimpses of the initial stages of the police investigation into the murder, as well as snippets of interviews with members of the community, in between longer scenes that slowly walk us through the backstory leading up to the killing.

Neglected Gem #98: Some Mother’s Son (1996)

Helen Mirren in Some Mother’s Son (1996). 

Some Mother’s Son proves that a movie doesn’t have to be well made to touch you – and that you can forgive a lot of mistakes when a filmmaker has both a sense of drama and an instinct for playing fair. The film is set is in Northern Ireland and built around the 1981 prison hunger strike by convicted IRA members that claimed the lives of its instigator, Bobby Sands, and nine other young men. It was co-written by Terry George and Jim Sheridan, who had collaborated on the script of In the Name of the Father three years earlier. But Sheridan, who’s a brilliant director, was also behind the camera on In the Name of the Father. Here the director is George, making his directorial debut, and he’s neither imaginative nor skillful: he makes sentimental choices, he uses close-ups like a crutch, and he lacks a sense of rhythm. There are many times in Some Mother’s Son when you wish Sheridan had taken over – scenes that call out for layering and nuance, moments that need to be framed and extended that George just bops past. What the picture has is a sensational story, and its vision is quintessentially humanist: it’s on the side of two grieving mothers whose sons are imperiled equally by Thatcher’s policies and by the pride and extremist stance of the IRA.

Obscure and Beautiful Facts: Paul La Farge's The Night Ocean

Paul La Farge. (Photo: Carol Shadford)

“The only real horror in most of these fictions,” Edmund Wilson wrote in The New Yorker in 1945, assessing the weird tales of H.P. Lovecraft, “is the horror of bad taste and bad art. Lovecraft was not a good writer. The fact that his verbose and undistinguished style has been compared to Poe’s is only one of the many sad signs that almost nobody any more pays any real attention to writing. . . . The Lovecraft cult, I fear, is on even a more infantile level than the Baker Street Irregulars.” Like Wilson, I’ve given Lovecraft’s work an ample tryout; several over the years, in fact, always in the hope that this time something would click into place, and his vaunted visionary genius make itself known to me. Unlike Wilson, I’m actually a fan of horror and supernatural literature, and so more than averagely credulous in these things. Yet for all the dread I’d love to feel from Lovecraft’s interminable tales of New England backwaters beset with ancient curses, extraterrestrial miasmas, and subterranean succubi, I too find him turgid, absurd, and not the least bit unnerving.

I say all this not to slaughter a sacred cow, but to make it clear that an enjoyment of Paul La Farge’s new novel, The Night Ocean (Penguin, 389 pp.), does not depend on being an admirer of Lovecraft’s writing, let alone a member of his cult. Though Lovecraft is the novel’s gravitational center, it’s more the man than the writer who is on display – or who is refracted, rather, through the reverence, resentment, or obsessive curiosity of other characters. The narrator is Marina, a modern-day New York therapist. She’s married to Charlie, a journalist whose specialty is lovingly detailed stories about unknown but singular people. Dogged yet oddly fragile, gifted at “immersing himself in obscure and beautiful facts,” Charlie is uniquely susceptible to the mystery that triggers the novel’s action.

What We've Got Here is Failure to Communicate...: Excerpt from The Johnson Era in Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors

Vice President Lyndon Johnson taking the oath of office on November 22, 1963

Back in 1994, when I was just beginning a free-lance career, I had an idea for a book about American movies. That year, I'd seen Ivan Reitman's sentimental comedy Dave, starring Kevin Kline as a conservative President who falls into a coma and is replaced by a look-a-like (also played by Kline) so the public won't be sent into a panic. Of course, the new President is more liberal and ultimately alters the policies of the true President. To my mind, it was as if we were watching George H. Bush morph into Bill Clinton. From that comedy came the idea for Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism.

I wanted Reflections to examine how key American movies from the Kennedy era onward had soaked up the political and cultural ideals of the time in which they were made. By delving into the American experience from Kennedy to Clinton, I thought the book could capture, through a number of films, how the dashed hopes of the sixties were reflected back in the resurgence of liberal idealism in the Clinton nineties. After drawing up an outline, I sent the proposal off to publishers who all sent it back, saying that it would never sell. One Canadian press almost squeaked it through, but their marketing division headed them off at the pass. From there, I went on to co-write a book (with Critics at Large colleague and friend Susan Green) on the TV show, Law & Order, and later my own books about Frank Zappa, Randy Newman, the album Trout Mask Replica and The Beatles. All the while, though, I kept updating Reflections, seeing my idea change in the wake of Monica Lewinsky, Clinton's impeachment, the 2000 election of Bush, 9/11, and finally the rise of Barack Obama. For the past number of years, Reflections has also been a hugely successful lecture series.The following is an excerpt from the chapter on the key films of the Lyndon Johnson years, 1963-1968.  

At the 1964 Democratic National Convention that August in Atlantic City, the nomination of President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey to the party ticket was merely a formality. On the last day of the event, however, former Attorney General Robert Kennedy came onstage to introduce a short film made in tribute to his late brother. While the legacy of JFK filled the Boardwalk Hall, LBJ seethed at seeing his bid for a Great Society now being eclipsed by the grief and nostalgia the country still felt towards the former president who was gunned down a year earlier in Dallas. It didn't help either that as soon as Robert Kennedy appeared on the convention stage, the delegates erupted into an uninterrupted applause. It lasted nearly twenty minutes and left the sibling of the fallen leader almost in tears. When Robert Kennedy spoke about JFK's vision of the country, he also decided to quote significantly from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: "When he shall die, take him and cut him out into the stars, and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun." In that brief moment, there was no question in LBJ's mind that the country remained "in love with night" and that he was "the garish sun." The bigger irony, though, was the positioning of John Kennedy as the dashed liberal hope of the Party, especially when it was Johnson who would live up to that liberal banner by creating legislation that upheld Medicare, civil rights, aid to the arts, public broadcasting, urban and rural development, and his War on Poverty. But there was something of an unspoken need to position Kennedy to the left, even if in his short term as president he was more of a hawk. It wasn't so much a national conspiracy that made this transformation possible as it was an unconscious need to avoid a more troubling consideration.

Music As History: Freedom Highway by Rhiannon Giddens

Rhiannon Giddens at the 2015 Big Ears Festival Knoxville, Tennessee. (Photo: Amos Perrine)

On the cover of Freedom Highway (Nonesuch), the new album by Rhiannon Giddens, the singer stands alone in a forlorn position, barefoot on a muddy country road. The colours are as subdued as the artist who graces the cover. Frank Zappa once said that album art is often a key to the music inside, yet one would be surprised by the music on Freedom Highway, a wide-ranging sequence of original songs, closing with the "Pops" Staples title track. For Giddens, who prides herself on being a student of African-American history, bowing one’s head in respect to past generations is the first order of the day. After that, a celebration the songs of which Freedom Highway are made.

Wounded Souls at the Edge of a Rain Forest: The Night of the Iguana at ART

Amanda Plummer, Dana Delany and Bill Heck (centre) in The Night of the Iguana at the American Repertory Theatre.
(Photo: Gretjen Helene Photography)

Amanda Plummer gives a wondrous performance as Hannah Jelkes in Michael Wilson’s new production of The Night of the Iguana at American Repertory Theatre. In Tennessee Williams’ 1961 play, set in a hotel at the edge of a Mexican rain forest in 1940, the protagonist, T. Lawrence Shannon – a southerner and one-time Episcopalian minister, now a tour guide for an American company – describes Hannah as a “thin-standing-up-Buddha.” In fact, she’s a Nantucket spinster who travels with her nearly-centenarian grandfather, a poet. He recites and she paints portraits; that’s how they live, traveling from hotel to hotel, though when they appear at the Costa Verde, run by Maxine Faulk, the recent widow of Shannon’s old friend and fishing buddy Fred, they’re distinctly on their uppers. Hannah possesses the sort of philosophical endurance that is indistinguishable from grace, though, she assures Shannon, who has worked himself up to a fine state of hysteria – he’s slept with a teenage girl on this latest tour, of Texan Baptists, and its supervisor, Miss Fellowes, is determined to get him fired – her serenity has come at a steep price. He is trailed by his “spook”; she fought a tense battle with her “blue devil,” defeating him at last because, she explains, she couldn’t afford to lose. Shannon finds an unexpected companion in Hannah, who is almost supernal in her perceptions and utterly non-judgmental of other people. (“Nothing human disgusts me,” she asserts.)

Plummer has been one of my favorite actresses since Lamont Johnson’s lovely, too-little-known 1981 western Cattle Annie and Little Britches, where, at twenty-four, she and sixteen-year-old Diane Lane played a pair of orphans who join Burt Lancaster’s gang of outlaws. Around the same time she took up the role of Jo in a rare New York stage revival of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, and in both projects she demonstrated a poetic ferocity and gallantry that weren’t quite like anything I’d seen before. (God knows she came by her talent honestly – she’s the daughter of Christopher Plummer and Tammy Grimes.) Those qualities ought to be a perfect match for Tennessee Williams’ heroines, but the first time I saw her attempt one, Alma in Summer and Smoke at Hartford Stage in 2006 (under Wilson’s direction), oddly enough she couldn’t seem to get her mouth around the poetry – at least not until the epilogue, where Alma, once the eccentric of her small southern town, has become its scandal, picking up salesmen in the square. Plummer had been off track since the opening scene, but in that last five minutes she was exquisite; I couldn’t help thinking it a pity that she couldn’t start her performance all over again. But she did some fantastic work opposite Brad Dourif in Williams’ The Two-Character Play four years ago, and her line readings in this Night of the Iguana are quicksilver and often very funny and always, always unpredictable. And she’s radiant – a kind of earth angel with a sometimes unsettlingly level gaze.