Come Back, Little Sheba at the Huntington: An Elusive Balance

Adrianne Krstansky and Derek Hasenstab in Come Back, Little Sheba. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

Come Back, Little Sheba is the drama that put playwright William Inge on the map when it was produced on Broadway in 1950. Shirley Booth created the role of Lola, the slovenly, nostalgic wife of Doc Delaney, a chiropractor in a small Midwestern college town. (Her legendary performance is preserved in the 1952 movie version.) The play, which David Cromer has staged for Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company in its South End space at the Calderwood Pavilion, is about two people who have, in different ways, failed to accept the passing of their youth. Doc impregnated Lola when he was a medical student; he dropped out to marry her, they lost the baby, and he’s lived in regret for the sexual indiscretion that resulted in the loss of the life he’d planned for himself. Alcohol fueled that regret and disappointment; it also ate up his inheritance. When the play begins he’s been sober for a year, attending AA meetings regularly. Lola, lonely at home while Doc is seeing his patients, luxuriates in her memories of the youthful amorousness he’s trying to forget. (Her lost puppy, Little Sheba, is a rather obvious symbol of her vanished youth.) Their distinctive attitudes toward the past are illuminated by their reaction to their boarder, Marie, a coed with a serious boyfriend back home in Cincinnati who is carrying on a casual affair with a football player named Turk. Lola is touched by their lovemaking; it reminds her of her own romance with Doc, when she was young and pretty. Doc prefers to think of Marie as pure; he doesn’t like Turk, who he thinks isn’t good enough for her. The truth is that Turk’s sexuality recalls his own twenty years ago. The incontrovertible evidence that Turk and Marie are sleeping together forces a confrontation with his own past that knocks him for a loop – and right off the wagon.

Varieties of Romance: Spring, The Duke of Burgundy, and Accidental Love

Lou Taylor Pucci and Nadia Hilker star in Spring.

We’re almost a quarter of the way into what has so far been a pretty quiet year for movies, with signs of life visible mostly in some small, out-of-the-way places. One of the most distinctive (and least-heralded) of recent small movies is the appropriately titled Spring, which at first seems to follow a familiar template for horror movies: a sweet-natured, emotionally volatile young American played by Lou Taylor Pucci who’s at the end of his rope takes off for Italy to try to get his head together in unfamiliar surroundings. He winds up courting a beautiful, mysterious woman (Nadia Hilker) who may just be entrancingly, frustratingly hard to read, or who harbor some dark secret that makes emotional intimacy impossible and physical intimacy even scarier than usual.

Record Store Day: Yea or Nay?

We just celebrated Record Store Day 2015, and for a couple weeks on both sides there have been arguments about whether the concept is serving or hurting the people it’s designed for. The local independent record store and smaller labels. The question from the labels side is whether or not they can get vinyl records produced in time, because the pressing plants are so bogged down pressing bigger orders for the major labels. One might also wonder who actually needs a vinyl copy of the soundtrack for The Darjeerling Limited? For the record stores across the world (yes…Record Store Day is celebrated in other countries too, with appropriate product) the problem is how much stock to bring in, and what to do with whatever you get. The stores can order specific titles but may not receive what they order, due to limited quantities, and arbitrary decisions.

Off The Shelf: Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994)

Johnny Depp in Ed Wood (1994).

At the Star Wars Celebration press event this past weekend in Anaheim, a preteen kid stepped up to the mic to ask J.J. Abrams how to become a filmmaker. Abrams (doubtless sensing the same starry-eyed wonder in this kid that he must have felt while channeling his own idol, Spielberg, for his 2011 film Super 8) told him gently that he and his peers have access to technology and distribution platforms that never existed when he was that age, and that if you have a smartphone in your pocket then you already have far greater tools for moviemaking than he ever did. His advice was to use those tools, as often as possible, and to get your hands dirty making movies, no matter the result. Abrams’ apparent love for the art of spectacle – it’s what earned him a job directing a new Star Wars film, after all – would have made him right at home in cinema’s golden age, where he might have kept council with directors like Ed Wood. His advice certainly sounds like something straight from the famous cult filmmaker himself.

Best known for his 1959 disaster Plan 9 From Outer Space, Wood was a miserable failure as a Hollywood filmmaker, earning neither critical acclaim nor significant box office returns. His legacy as one of the worst directors of all time has led to a posthumous cult following, thanks to film buffs coming together to celebrate the indomitable spirit that kept Wood in the movie business despite bomb after insufferable bomb. Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic, named for the man himself, is celebratory too: a joyous examination of the passion for spectacle and wonder that endures behind the money-grubbing cynicism of the Hollywood we know. Ed Wood never had a smartphone, but that sure didn’t stop him from making movies.

An American in Paris, Sans Alan Jay Lerner

Robert Fairchild, Brandon Uranowitz and Max Von Essen in An American in Paris (All photos by Angela Sterling)

Vincente Minnelli’s 1951 movie musical An American in Paris is simultaneously breezy and lush. With its smart, sometimes cheeky Alan Jay Lerner script, its Gershwin score and the ebullient choreography by its star, Gene Kelly, it’s one of the highlights of the golden age of M-G-M musicals. Kelly plays Jerry Mulligan, an American G.I. who sticks around Paris after the war to paint. He finds a patron, a wealthy émigré American socialite, Milo (Nina Foch), who wants to add him to her roster of bohemian lovers, but he falls in love with a shopgirl named Lise (Leslie Caron) whom he spots at a café. He courts her and wins her love, but just as he’s hampered by his attachment to Milo (he doesn’t reciprocate her sexual interest in him: these are still the days of the Hays Code), Lise also has other claims. She’s engaged to the affable music hall performer Henri Baurel (Georges Guétary), whom she doesn’t love but to whom she feels beholden, since he took care of her during the war when her parents, Resistance fighters, were captured by the Nazis. (Here Lerner reworks a plot strand from Casablanca.) To complicate matters further, Henri and Jerry have just become friends, through their mutual pal Adam (Oscar Levant), a struggling composer.

Conflict in Context: War on the Silver Screen

Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964) is one of the many films profiled in War on the Silver Screen

Anyone looking for a history of film will find a plethora on the market. Among them are Norman Cousins’s compendium of world films Story of Film (published by Pavillion books in 2004, with a new edition in 2013), followed by his fifteen-hour mega-documentary of the same name, and The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) by film scholar and author of twenty books, David Thomson. Both volumes demonstrate the vast knowledge of their authors about films and filmmaking. Yet there is relatively little about the larger historical context within which the films were made. For example, in Thomson’s chapter on war, he does write a few insightful sentences on context but they are dwarfed by the dizzying array of films he mentions and only briefly comments upon. Looking for that context narrows the options. What I have found most valuable is Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (Henry Holt & Co, 1995), edited by Mark C. Carnes, that consists of sixty reviews of historical films by historians and other authorities in the field. I liked these reviews because most of them do not, in the words of one reviewer, “quibble about inaccuracies, simplifications, invented characters, imagined dialogue, anachronisms” but focus on whether the film is true to the spirit of the character or historical issue. The reviewer of the film, Malcolm X (1992) criticized director Spike Lee for underplaying the political evolution of the eponymous character, and the reviewer of All the President’s Men (1976) acknowledged that although the film was accurate, it was untrue because it misleads the audience into thinking that the revelations of two reporters were responsible for the downfall of Nixon even though the film ends with the re-election of Nixon. The actual history behind these films is largely confined to a sidebar on each page. Of the sixty entries, seven of them are on the subject of twentieth-century war films. More recently, Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (Penguin Press, 2014) by Mark Harris is very good on how that war shaped the career of five Hollywood directors, but there hasn't been a book that provides an overview of how war films have shaped their audiences’ consciousness – until now. 

War on the Silver Screen: Shaping America’s Perception of History (Potomac Books, 2014), a crisply and accessibly written monograph by historian Glen Jeansonne and film critic David Luhrssen, is a welcome corrective. The authors combine their talents to argue that war films have done more than books or history lessons to influence people’s perception of war. Their thesis is bracing, perhaps even self-evident, but it is difficult to prove with empirical evidence. The book’s greatest strength is that it gives almost equal space to the historical context as it does to the films themselves. I do have some reservations about their treatment of the films they have chosen for major analysis and with certain key omissions.

“Beyond Endurance” and BBC's Drama of the Week Podcast

Dominic West plays Ernest Shackleton in Meredith Hooper's radio play "Beyond Endurance" on BBC's Drama of the Week

I'm writing this from Toronto, Canada. Many years ago, our national broadcaster (CBC) pulled the plug on spending for the production of radio drama. It was, in retrospect, the exact worst time to do so. Given the media landscape and the rising popularity of podcasting and archived content, interesting, relevant and new audio drama could have been a popular and important part of the CBC's content mix. This, however, is not a lament about the (mis)management of the CBC. It's a look at another national broadcaster's continued commitment to audio drama: namely, the BBC. And more specifically, since I'm writing this from the other side of the pond, I want to talk about the free BBC podcast Drama of the Week, which can be found in iTunes. 

Indelible Voices: José James, Laura Marling and Angelique Kidjo

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Billie Holiday, one of the most influential jazz vocalists in music. On April 7, Cassandra Wilson released her interpretations of the Holiday songbook on Coming Forth By Day. Last year Canadian vocalist Molly Johnson released the personal but slightly uneven tribute to Lady Day called, Because of Billie. And while José James isn't a household name I think his tribute to Holiday may actually nudge the male vocalists in the jazz world to cover the famous torch singer's most popular songs. Yesterday I Had The Blues (Blue Note) has all the makings of an arranged marriage between singer and song, but producer Don Was goes a step further by creating a real blues record that is thoughtful and well paced. James’s soulful renditions are backed by some of the most articulate and seasoned musicians today. Jason Moran, piano, John Patitucci, acoustic bass and Eric Harland, drums, is a trio that pushes and pulls the music while maintaining a solid foundation on which James can feel the lyrics. His first rate version of “Strange Fruit” uses multi-tracking in way that completely re-invents the song. What was once a call to the injustice of black Americans in 1939 when the song was first heard, now becomes a work song fresh from the cotton fields of the 1800s. For James, the music of Billie Holiday has deep roots going much further back in time.

Digging the Roots: Jayme Stone’s Lomax Project & Ken Whiteley’s Beulah Band

Alan Lomax (1915-2002) was one of the great field collectors of American (and international) music. Together with his father John he traveled the countryside in an old car, lugging a 300 lb. recorder to track down the authentic musicians, and capture their songs and performances. Woody Guthrie, Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, Leadbelly, and many more in the USA and across the sea Elizabeth Cronin, Hamish Hamilton, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger are among the hundreds of names with whom he worked gathering songs and stories recordings of which now reside in the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. His biography is entitled Alan Lomax: the Man Who Recorded the World and that’s no exaggeration.

Jayme Stone is a Canadian banjo player. He won a Juno Award in 2008 for his instrumental album The Utmost, and another Juno the following year for Africa to Appalachia (with Mansa Sissoko). His records dig into the history of the banjo, its roots in Africa, and the variety of sounds it makes. Now he combines his interest in the sound of the banjo, with a collection of songs from the Lomax bag to “renew this material [nineteen…songs…collected by…Lomax].” The result is startling. These songs were captured on the road with an acetate disc-cutter and cactus needle stylus. Wherever Lomax found a player he stopped, the sounds on his records were full of the surrounding lifestyle of his subjects. Wind, rain, ocean roar, kitchen noise, neighbourly chitchat and intricate finger-style guitar, rough-hewn vocals, tin whistles, whatever. These sounds influenced Stone to bring together some like-minded friends to update this homemade music. It all remains handmade and homemade, (in the studios of Canterbury Music, Toronto and eTown Hall in Boulder Colorado) by friends and collaborators like Tim O’Brien, Eli West and Julian Lage (guitar), Brittany Haas and Bruce Molsky (fiddle), Joe Phillips and Greg Garrison (bass) and a handful of other singers and instrumentalists including Stone’s own banjo.

For Your Ears Only – Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island (1979)

What album would you take with you if you were isolated on a desert island? It's always been a tempting question, or a popular party staple in which you get to display your cultural credentials without giving away too much about yourself. For critics, especially those always armed with their lists of favourites, it offers a casual forum to defend your tastes, test the wits of others, plus flex some muscle by bragging about rare records that nobody else could give a fuck about. In the literal sense, the idea of the desert island has always been a bit ridiculous. (What critic would ever want to be isolated on a desert island with no access to concerts, free music, or even an outlet to express his or her persuasive views?) After all, isn't music, even in the current age of solitary streaming, best enjoyed in a communal environment. Maybe now, as music is perpetually pigeonholed by genre, we don't even need a desert island because you can retreat to one anytime you like. But the desert island seems to negate the whole purpose of music. It denies music an audience, save for that one lone fan, to test its true value. Yet this question became the subject of a 1979 book called Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, in which twenty prominent American rock critics were asked by fellow scribe Greil Marcus to contribute an essay in response to this hypothetical request.

Palace of Lies: HBO’s Going Clear

Scientology is markedly different from most other religions, not only in its practices but in how it’s perceived by the public. Has there ever been such a universally disparaged belief system? It’s easy for scoffing cynics to dismiss the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard as pure nonsense – and they’re unequivocally right to do so – but to level the same cynicism at the people who willingly choose to ally themselves with his hated institution is to fundamentally misunderstand, or at least disregard, what keeps them there. For the most part, these aren’t suckers and rubes being conned into participating in something against their will: these are intelligent, thoughtful skeptics, who will defend the benefits of Scientology even when faced with overwhelming evidence of its corruption and malpractice. And so the casual question of how anyone in their right minds could jibe with this stuff becomes a very important one: a question of how belief itself can be dangerous.

Documentarian Alex Gibney shoulders the burden of this question, and of the vicious wrath that his exposé would come to invite from the famously litigious Church. Gibney has established himself as a filmmaker unafraid to venture into the dark corners of society and, of course, tell a good story in the process. Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, based on a book of (almost) the same name by Lawrence Wright, achieves both as a fearless examination of Scientology’s inner workings. Gibney conducts interviews with eight former members of the Church, including Hollywood screenwriter/producer Paul Haggis (a Scientologist for nearly three decades) and several former high-ranking members of the organization like Mark Rathbun (the Church’s second-in-command) and Mike Rinder (former head of the Church’s Office of Special Affairs), whose shockingly damning testimony has earned them accolades from film critics and vitriol from current Church members in equal measure. But what is it, I can hear you asking, that’s so shocking? What could they possibly reveal about this laughable dog-and-pony show that you wouldn’t already know – or, more troublingly, that the Church is desperate to deny? The Church of Scientology’s policy of loudly and ruthlessly denouncing its critics and apostates is well-known, so this may not seem like unusual behaviour. But Gibney’s interview subjects speak candidly about common practices of systemic verbal and physical abuse and behaviour control which borders on brainwashing. Their claims of unchecked corruption at the Church’s higher levels and of the attacks inflicted on its willing members are just cause for retaliation, which makes the effect of Going Clear incredibly potent. These people sat down to speak with Gibney knowing full well that doing so was dangerous to their personal and financial futures, because if leaving the Church wasn’t enough to provoke its wrath, defaming it so publicly certainly is.

Getting High: Robert Lepage’s Needles and Opium

Wellesley Robertson III and Marc Lebrèche in Robert Lepage's Needles and Opium. (Photo by Nicola-Frank Vachon)

Carl Fillion’s set for Needles and Opium, written and directed by the Québecois auteur Robert Lepage and produced by his company Ex Machina – which Boston’s ArtsEmerson series brought to the Cutler Majestic Theatre last week for a four-day run – is an open four-sided figure, like a section of a dollhouse, that hovers and spins above the stage. Most of the time it stands in for a room in the Hotel Louisiane or a recording studio, both in Paris, but depending on how Bruno Matte lights it or how the images designed by Lionel Arnould are projected onto it – and depending, of course, on how it turns – it can become an alleyway outside a nightclub, the interior of an airplane or the backdrop for a nocturnal walk through New York City. And often it emulates the disoriented state of one of its three characters, the French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau (Marc Labrèche), who took opium, the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis (Wellesley Robertson III), who took heroin, and the play’s protagonist, a Québecois actor named Robert (also Labrèche). Robert finds himself in Paris recording the voice-over for a documentary about Davis’s lover Juliette Gréco while trying to deal with a break-up the anguish of which has swallowed him alive, demolishing sleep and leaving him so vulnerable to sentimental triggers that an allusion to Davis and Gréco’s romance in the voice-over script makes him break down in the middle of the recording session. (He’s chosen to stay in Room 9 of the Hotel Louisiane because that’s where Davis and Gréco stayed when he first came to Paris in 1949 – which was also the year Cocteau wrote A Letter to Americans on the flight back to Paris from New York. The Cocteau sections of the piece are derived from that work and from Opium, the Diary of a Cure.) Needles and Opium suggests that Robert’s unmoored mental condition and his romantic addiction is like the drug habits of his heroes. But in Lepage’s brilliantly conceived text, their stories also intersect with Robert’s in terms of love and loss: Cocteau writes about the death, from typhoid fever, of his twenty-year-old protégé, the prodigious writer Raymond Radiguet (the author of the tender romantic novel Devil in the Flesh, published in 1923, the year Radiguet died).

Unexpected Joys: Honoré de Balzac’s The Vendetta

Very few book-lovers actually disdain the classics – your Victor Hugos, your Dostoyevskys, your Henry Jameses – but they can be difficult to pick up and really enjoy. This is not because of any fault in their writing, but because there is nothing quite so capable of sucking the joy out of a new book like being told over and over again what an ‘important’ book it is. Almost anything from the canon of classic fiction authors is going to be important – we all know that. But the joy of a new book is also the joy of uncovering something new and unexpected, however famous the author might be. For several years in my teens one of my favorite books was Anna Karenina, and I would ascribe the great love I had for that book to the fact that I picked it up almost entirely blind, without knowing the first thing about Tolstoy, Russian literature, or really anything at all. If I remember correctly I was about to go on a trip and could only take one book… so I decided to find a nice long one.

Honoré de Balzac is an author that I was never really attracted to – I’m guessing my disinclination can be partially explained by the fact that I was assigned selections from his magnum opus, The Human Comedy (La Comédie humaine), in my high-school French classes. (Books assigned in high school never get the love they deserve. My recent advice to a 15-year-old book lover about to be assigned To Kill a Mockingbird in English class was to read the book beforehand so she could actually enjoy it.) The Human Comedy is a massive compendium of almost all of Balzac’s works, broken down into sections and subsections, containing in the final analysis over 2,000 individual characters. As epic and challenging as such a work is, there is a problem with approaching Balzac through such a tome: it is just too damn much. In the flurry of narratives and characters (though they are almost uniformly wonderfully written and remarkable stories) the individual tales get lost. Such is the case with The Vendetta, written and first published in 1830 and included in Scenes from Private Life in 1833 before being final subsumed into its eponymous section of The Human Comedy. It’s re-release in 2008 by Herperus Press, with a new translation by Howard Curtis, gives us the opportunity to appreciate this novella on its own.

Taming the Beast: Cavalia's Odysseo

A lone horse saunters onto the sand-strewn stage under the 125-foot White Big Top at the edge of Toronto’s waterfront which opened to the public earlier this week. The animal is one of 72 steeds giving heft and direction to Odysseo, the second equine show created by Cirque du Soleil co-founder Normand Latourelle following the outstanding success of Cavalia in 2003. Like that first now internationally touring production, Odysseo uses horse power to drive its unique theatrical presentation into the stratosphere. Original music by composer Michel Cusson, a towering set design by Guillaume Lord, atmospheric lighting by Alain Lortie and large-scale video projection on a rear screen as big as three IMAX theatres combined, round out a theatrical production as transporting as it is awe-inspiring in its command and control of unbridled nature. This Quebec-made production, first unveiled in Toronto in 2012 and back in the city until May 10, gives new meaning to telling a tail.

Due Midwest: Battle Creek

Dean Winters and Josh Duhamel star in Battle Creek, on CBS.

Russ: "You can't be a cop and be this naïve. It's just not possible."
Milt: "I agree"
                               – Battle Creek (Series Pilot, "The Battle Creek Way")

I wasn't planning on writing on CBS's recent series Battle Creek, despite its notable pedigree – co-created by Breaking Bad's Vince Gilligan and House's David Shore. In the months leading up to its mid-season, March 1st premiere, mentions of Battle Creek in the press were afterthoughts in the build-up to the much more highly anticipated Vince Gilligan series, AMC's Breaking Bad spinoff/prequel, Better Call Saul. Indeed, the story behind the CBS series promised to be more interesting than the series itself: CBS dusted off a shelved spec script Gilligan wrote in 2002, years before Breaking Bad made Gilligan one of Hollywood's hottest commodities, and optioned Battle Creek into series just days before the acclaimed AMC hit aired its final episode. The story behind that story became more interesting still when months later, David Shore, creator of Fox's long-running cranky medical drama House, came on board to co-develop the new series with Gilligan. But as interesting as that story was, the premise of the new series remained altogether familiar, and even unremarkable: a mismatched buddy-cop comedy/drama set in a beleaguered police department. By the time the series premiered last month, I confess I'd completely forgotten to watch out for it, distracted by the evolving brilliance of Better Call Saul (whose 10-episode first season came to a triumphant close a few days ago). It was almost three weeks later that I finally watched the premiere episode, following an offhand recommendation from a friend. True to its lineage, Battle Creek turned out to be much more than the sum of its parts. It boasts a charismatic ensemble of actors, sharp and often hilarious writing, and a unique combination of unabashed sentimentality undercut with bitingly sharp edge. I quickly consumed all previously-aired episodes and the series soon joined a very short list of television shows I watch almost as soon as it airs. Unfortunately though, the series has been suffering from consistently weak ratings from the beginning and seems destined to join another, less vaunted, list of mine: television shows cancelled before their time.

The Lower Depths: American Crime

Caitlin Gerard and Elvis Nolasco in American Crime, on ABC.

The current TV schedule is clogged with shows that use geopolitical and corporate paranoia, apocalyptic fantasies, and the never-ending battle between those guided by faith and ideology and the members of the reality-based community as the grist for sprawling murder-mystery conspiracy thrillers, such as American Odyssey, Dig, Fortitude, and whatever is taking up space right this minute on SyFy. American Crime, which was created by 12 Years a Slave screenwriter John Ridley for ABC, is vastly different. It’s set in a tawdry, exhausted, post-crash America, with a cast of characters who are in the process of being ground up not just by The System, but by life itself. In the unglamorous setting of Modesto, California, a young man named Matt Skokie has been murdered; his wife, Gwen (Kira Pozehi), has been badly beaten and spends the first few episodes in a coma. In a TV landscape where the heroes are searching for answers or stumbling across clues that unlock mysteries that will dictate the fate of whole civilizations, American Crime is full of people who are doing their damnedest to keep the truth hidden, even from themselves.

Neglected Gem #74: Daughter of the Nile (1987)

I’m not too surprised that Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s moving and memorable drama Daughter of the Nile (1987) isn’t highly regarded by the cinematic cognoscenti who so admire his work. Compared to his best known and praised films – Dust in the Wind (1986), City of Sadness (1989), The Puppetmaster (1993) – Daughter of the Nile is a quick ride of a movie, mostly devoid of Hou’s static long shots, (overly) leisurely pacing and slow buildup to mood and emotion. (Significantly, film programmer James Quandt, who wrote the film notes for the recent Hou retrospective at Toronto's TIFF Cinematheque at Bell Lightbox (formerly Cinematheque Ontario), never mentions the film; it is one of the few Hou titles not referenced in his lengthy piece.) In short, Daughter of the Nile is a film that those filmgoers who like their movies to actually move will be happy with. Not incidentally, it’s also a rich, evocative tale that lingers in the memory long after the credits have rolled.

Risk and Reward: Dark Souls & The Balance of Difficulty in Gaming

A scene from From Software's Dark Souls II.

“Hand-holding” is the anathema of modern game design, viewed by many as the ball to which creative, risk-taking design is chained. It’s a necessary evil: developers will want their game to reach as many players as possible, and in capturing a market outside of those who already play games frequently, they must introduce their complex mechanics to a layperson who may never have held a controller in their hands before. Guiding them along with clunky, immersion-breaking tutorials or pop-up hints – holding their hand, as it were – may be helpful for them, but it’s also patronizing and frustrating for those who can pick up a game’s mechanics quickly, or those who enjoy the process of sussing it out. Think of it this way: the first screen of Super Mario Bros never included a prompt that said “Press A to jump”, did it?

And because games are such a massively lucrative global market, this design philosophy has become ubiquitous, permeating almost every new studio title that is released. It’s an alarming trend, indicative of an increasingly profit-fueled industry that is content to deliver lazily-designed games so long as they move enough copies (the parallels with Hollywood are, of course, too obvious to explore). Nintendo’s recent The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, for example, was rightfully slammed by industry critics for its blandly repetitive and lackluster design, and its reliance on hand-holding to teach its simple mechanics – something that was particularly upsetting considering the ingenious design of early Zelda titles, which encouraged exploration and risk-taking. Even if their hand-holding isn’t as widespread as that, most games will at least include a section at the outset that explicitly tells the player how to play the game, usually through a box of text that most people won’t even bother to read. No matter how right these developers are about how stupid their demographics might be, nobody likes being told what to do. They just want to play the game.

Lerner and Loewe and a Touch of Cy Coleman

Vanessa Hudgens stars in Gigi, at Broadway's Neil Simon Theatre. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Gigi, which is now being revived on Broadway, has a long lineage. Initially it was a story by Colette, written in 1945 and set around the turn of the century, about a teenage Parisienne (the title character) who comes from a family of highly respected courtesans and is being brought up by her grandmother, Mamita, and trained by her great-aunt Alicia to follow in their footsteps. (Her mother took another path: she’s a singer in the ensemble of the Opéra Comique and barely present in her daughter’s life.) When Gaston Lachaille, a millionaire playboy who, through his friendship with Mamita, has been a sort of big brother to Gigi all her life, realizes that she’s grown into a beautiful and desirable young lady, Alicia and Mamita make complicated legal arrangements with him to take over her care. But Gigi has a mind of her own and, though she has fallen in love with Gaston, she resists the life of a rich man’s mistress. The story is a delightful comedy about the tension between social and sexual mores on the one hand and emotional authenticity on the other, and about impulses that flout convention – and upset the apple cart everyone has been riding without thinking much about it.

Notes from the Other Side: The Evil Hours and The Invisible Front

US soldiers participating in the Yoga For Veterans program. (Photo: Give Back Yoga Foundation)

“No other people in history has sent as many (soldiers) as far away with as little sacrifice demanded of the average citizen as we do. No other people in history is as disconnected from the brutality of war as the United States today. Were the truth of war to become apparent to Americans, we wouldn’t continue to train, equip, and deploy warriors the way we do. Nor would we ask them when they came home if they killed anyone.”
—David F. Morris, The Evil Hours.
 
“Must you carry the bloody horror of combat in your heart forever?”
—Homer, The Odyssey, cited by Yochi Dreazen in The Invisible Front.

 
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was officially recognized in 1980 by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) in large part because of a decade-long campaign by Vietnam veterans to secure wider knowledge and research into the affliction they suffered. But as David J. Morris asserts in his compelling The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), psychological trauma has always been “part of the human condition,” but badly misunderstood. Part memoir, cultural history, investigation into the scientific research and critique of modern treatment, Morris interweaves the wisdom of psychoanalysts, poets, novelists and historians, with his own struggle with post-traumatic stress. Recognizing that most PTSD sufferers are not veterans, Morris supplements his “biography” with the stories and insights of non-military victims of PTSD, including natural disaster survivors, mountain climbers, and raped women, thereby imbuing his study with a wider human dimension.