Ordinary Time

The Rise of General Arthur
phillip andrew bennett low
Augsburg Mainstage
2211 Riverside, Minneapolis

Sat., Aug. 1 @ 5:30 p.m., Sun., Aug. 2 @ 10:00 p.m. Tue., Aug. 4 @ 7:00 p.m. Wed., Aug. 5 @ 8:30 p.m. Sat., Aug. 8 @ 8:30 p.m.

http://www.fringefestival.org/2009/show/?id=975

"I sometimes wonder if it's me that's being made love to. I feel like I'm being harpooned by some raging monk in the act of receiving God."  Emily Jessup, Altered States.   

I saw Ken Russell’s adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky's novel in 1982 with a man who aspired to be Eddie Jessup.  I married him anyway.  When phillip andrew bennett low gets on the stage, I have flashbacks. 

This is an artist with a passion for Arthurian legend, who connects deeply – and I suspect quite personally - to the themes inherent in these texts: loyalty and betrayal, free will and destiny.  The quest that is at once choice and compulsion. The burden of trying – and failing – to live up to a moral standard that preserves the social order.  The uneasy harnessing of violence in its service.  What it means to be worthy of love.  And of allegiance. 

To set Arthurian themes in the context of the first Gulf War is intriguing – though I cannot say I understand more about the nature of either leaving the theater.  Nor am I sure I want low to push it.  A connection between Kennedy and Camelot – that I can stomach. 

I like to think at the Fringe.  I like to be challenged by the material.  I am grateful to anyone who sees fit to bring myth, legend, literature to the stage, and can get an audience to come out and watch it instead of sitting glued in front of the oxymoron that is Reality Television.  I may, in fact, be one of the few people in the universe who wants to see low do more work with the Gnostic gospels.  The piece I saw at Spirit in the House two years ago blew me away. I not only want to experience it again.  I want others to experience it.  I want others to understand why they should want to experience it.

The energy low pours into the esoteric, the unabashed love of brain food, his palpable, intense love of language – we need that.  He is clearly a genius.  But he pummels us with it.  Like Emily Jessup, I sometimes wonder why I am there.  Virtuoso performance does not draw you in.  It calls attention to itself.

I want to see low’s work with complex, difficult material become more accessible. Paradoxically, this means I want both more and less of him in the performance.  I want it to be less of a demonstration of how intelligent he is – we already know - and more an effort to engage the audience with the text.  To do this he has to care enough about that audience to move them through his own experience of it so they, too, get to feel that energy, that sense of connection, that intense love.  I am tired of being a voyeur.  And he is capable of more.  Of creating that altered state - in which both the individual and the community are fully present – which is the bard’s Holy Grail.  Whether or not he is a Rockstar.

Katherine Glover

A Cynic Tells Love Stories

Augsburg Main Stage

2211 Riverside Ave., Minneapolis

Fri., Jul. 31 @ 10:00 p.m.., Sat. Aug. 1 @ 1:00 p.m. Sun., Aug. 2 @ 8:30 p.m., Thu., Aug. 6 @ 5:30 p.m. Sat., Aug. 8 @ 7:00 p.m. 

No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.  Lily Tomlin.

When the meltdown of my marriage began, I turned first to bibliotherapy.  By this I mean the “Relationships” section of Barnes and Noble. (Actually, with some premonition of my future economic state, I browsed at Barnes and Noble, wrote down the titles, and then surreptitiously took them out of the pubic library.) Phillip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz’s Peer Marriage. John Gottman’s Why Marriages Succeed or Fail.  Peter Kramer’s “Should I Leave?”  I was trying to work out the issues, trying on ideas.  It was all just theoretical. Ashton Applewaite’s Cutting Loose.  Constance Ahron’s The Good Divorce. Isolina Ricci’s Mom’s House, Dad’s House.  My library card knew what was happening before I did. 

“What is more important, passion or compatibility?” Katherine Glover asks in “A Cynic Tells Love Stories.”  I hear the question, coming from a woman whose parents divorced when she was three, and wonder if my own daughter, whose parents divorced when she was seventeen, asks herself the same question. Or if, like me, she sees this as a false dichotomy. 

False dichotomies make wonderful jumping off points, however.  By the end of the hour, Glover’s stories have addressed, in one way or another, all the necessary conditions for love:  Attraction.  Desire.  Trust.  Mutuality.  Respect.  Acceptance.  Commitment.  And a strong enough sense of self in each partner that both intimacy and autonomy are possible.  She does this in a way that is both smart and funny, without being sardonic.   Neither insight nor imagination is sacrificed to the god of Irony.

Gottman claims a lasting marriage is not about compatibility in the matchmaker’s sense at all – compatibility of interests, personality types, values, religious beliefs. If compatibility is necessary in any respect, it is in a couple’s style of handling conflict. Most of us have been trained to believe that a particular style of communication and compromise – validation - is required.  But Gottman’s research demonstrates that volatile couples – the passionate – have every bit as much a chance of achieving stability as those who avoid conflict altogether because they simply don’t see it as worth the trouble. Of course whether a lasting marriage is a healthy marriage is a different question altogether. 

“A good marriage,” someone once told me, “is one in which you are more yourselves together than apart.”  Is it cynicism to wonder how long any one relationship can really bear this burden? Why Marriages Succeed or Fail succeeded in describing my own dilemma precisely. I could see exactly how things had begun to go wrong. But it failed to convince me I could change anything. Like most people, we had waited too long. By the time criticism has turned to contempt, the damage has already been done. 

And yet there are couples who avoid this.  Whose relationships not only last, but stay healthy.  Is it because they manage to remain peers, to have an equal balance of power in the relationship? Equality is a straightforward concept; equity, less so, especially when children enter the picture. Do same sex couples have an advantage over heterosexual couples in this regard, as Blumstein and Schwartz suggest, because they organize their lives, and the roles they play, in ways that are essentially more egalitarian? I used to ask this of my gay friends on occasion.  Eventually I got tired of the uncontrollable laughter.

The story of Glover’s own brief marriage is told beautifully, with candor and compassion, and not a drop of self-pity. It made my heart ache.  In a good way.  In the end it is this story, which convinces me she is not, after all, a cynic.  Anyone who can see with such clarity, who can recreate each detail of a relationship – not without pain, perhaps, but in a conscious effort to move beyond bitterness - is not jaded – or closeminded - enough to qualify.  Nor does my daughter have to be. Stories like this are one of the reasons I see nurturing creativity as a moral imperative. 

Lane McKiernan
Food Shelf Follies
Playwright's Center
2301 Franklin Ave. E., Minneapolis

Fri., Jul. 31 @ 10:00 p.m., Sat., Aug. 1 @ 5:30 p.m., [A] Sun., Aug. 2 @ 1:00 p.m. Thu., Aug. 6 @ 7:00 p.m., Sun., Aug. 9 @ 5:30 p.m.

http://www.fringefestival.org/2009/show/?id=1078 

“I do not have any difficulty believing the Host is Christ’s body,” said my Roman Catholic friend.  “What I have trouble believing is that it is bread.”  Apparently, however, transubstantiation is a fragile process.  Because according to the Vatican, whether real bread or wafer, the priest can't make Jesus without gluten. 

Orders are orders.

My son had a teacher in the fourth grade, at Percy Priest Elementary School in Green Hills, Tennessee, who was a veteran of the first Gulf War.  Mr. Chase.  He was a former Green Beret.  Mr. Chase’s kids lined up differently in the hall from other kids.  They had more homework every night than other kids.  And they won all the contests on Field Day.  Had it been permitted, I think Mr. Chase might have had his students dig their own latrines.  Aidan simultaneously loved and feared Mr. Chase – both wanted his approval, and resented his discipline.   For a young man, however, Mr. Chase was sick a lot.  Gulf War Syndrome, we were told.  Chemical exposure.  Although he came home without obvious wounds, his immune system was shot.  He took medication for this, but it made him sleepy.  During the school year, if he was feeling well enough, he often reduced the dosage, something that was not recommended.  But a soldier needs to be alert.  So does a fourth grade teacher. 

Even if it means disobeying orders.

Several years after we left Tennessee, we heard Mr. Chase had died.  Not from Gulf War Syndrome, exactly.  From food poisoning.  He had eaten a rare steak, and the steak had contained e-coli.  Not a strain that would bother anyone else.  But toxic to him. 

On my way home from a meeting today, I had to stop at the grocery store.   I hadn’t had time to plan the week’s meals; I just knew I was out of a lot of what is normally considered healthy food.  (It should go without saying that this includes dark chocolate and whole bean coffee.)  I ended up in the grocery section of Super Target.  Several people have recently sent me that list known as the “dirty dozen” –fruits and vegetables whose pesticide content remains dangerously high, even after they are washed. So I went first to the organic produce counter.  What was there was small and mean looking, and expensive.  Most of it had been flown in from Mexico or South America.  I found organic chocolate, but none of it was fair trade.  There was organic, fair trade, whole bean coffee, but Eight-o-Clock was two dollars a pound cheaper.  And who was I trying to kid by paying a premium for “cruelty-free” meat?  Did the certification process include an interview with the Meat? 

After forty-five minutes of hemming and hawing, trying to determine the least damaging, most ethical and economical way of feeding myself, I finally said to hell with it, threw in my cart whatever looked good, and vowed to do better next time.

Not everyone has the luxury of being able to do this.  Lane McKiernan is one of those people.  A chemical exposure has made him allergic to a number of foods that you and I can still find nourishing – or at least nontoxic.  Finding foods that do not sicken him – learning to cook without gluten or wheat, avoiding the ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup - has been a difficult process, made even harder by periods of unemployment.  At one food shelf, when he tries to return things he knows he cannot eat so that someone else can benefit from them, the worker takes everything back.  “If you were really in need you would eat what we gave you.”  Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.  When your body itself becomes the albatross, what then do you do? 

Lane is not only chemically sensitive but transgender, and weaves this reality into the story with a refreshing matter-of-factness.  There are no identity politics here:  only a real person, with real needs.  He tells his story quietly, without rancor.  I have never heard anyone speak of working in a minimum wage, food service industry job with such obvious pleasure, even vocation; his description of early mornings at the bakery reminded me of Brother Lawrence, practicing the Presence of God.  Had you asked Brother Lawrence whether he thought gluten necessary for this, I think you would have gotten the answer such a question deserves.

You might think that Lane's show would be a preachy, uncomfortable experience.  Instead it is full of beautiful moments, both in the interludes of music and juggling by Walken Schweigert and Katie Burgess, and in the narrative itself.  There are kind people as well as the insensitive, unskilled in withholding judgment.  Lane presents them without comment.  That is life.  And this is advocacy at its finest, a call for justice which draws people in rather than shuts them out.  Anger is reserved for a system that fails the poor and the disabled, and for the elected officials who balance the budget on the backs of those least able to make their voices heard. 

And even anger with the system, and those who represent it, is tempered with humor.  When a social services bureaucrat accuses Lane of trying to get benefits with a fake ID because the gender on it is wrong, his bewildered response -  “I didn’t know whether to be upset at the accusation of fraud or pleased that I finally passed.”-  gently ushers me into his world and gives me a hook to hang my hat on.  It is the courage to laugh at such experiences that saves a person from despair – and feeds a community’s capacity for compassion.   Because in the end, we must all give.  And take.  And eat.   

Nancy Donoval
Every Pastie* Tells A Story
Playwrights’ Center
2301 Franklin Ave E Minneapolis, MN 55406

Fri., Jul. 31 @ 7:00 p.m. Sat., Aug. 1 @ 8:30 p.m. Tue., Aug. 4 @ 10:00 p.m. Fri., Aug. 7 @ 4:00 p.m. Sat., Aug. 8 @ 7:00 p.m. 
http://www.fringefestival.org/2009/show/?id=1079

You will not learn to make them twirl.  There.  Let me get the only disappointing thing about this story out of the way.  If you were looking for pole dancing, you will also have to go elsewhere. 

I said I was attending the Thinking Woman’s Fringe, but that doesn’t mean I’m not seeing funny shows.  It’s just that all of the funny shows I am seeing are also intelligent.  Nancy Donoval’s storytelling flawlessly integrates humor and intelligence and I never get tired of hearing her tell.  Since I’m her Girl Friday this year, doing last minute errands, recording (when my recorder works), postcarding, fetching cups of hot tea, helping get the props off the stage at the end, I’m hearing her tell a lot.  Nancy’s stories are remarkable not only for their humor and intelligence, but for their accessibility.  You do not  need to be a “theater person” to be drawn into this tale –  you don’t need to have been a good Catholic girl, or even a girl.  Familiarity with Milwaukee – not required.  You only need to have once been young, and to have thought that the rest of your life was hanging on someone else’s opinion of your talent, your competence, your commitment.  Nancy makes it look easy, this storytelling business – natural, like a conversation.  But don’t be fooled – at each and every moment, she is a dancer on point – a consummate, meticulous artist with words.  The resolution of this story leaves you richer, more capable of humor, generosity and intelligence yourself.    

And in the spirit of that generosity, I pass on this resource.  Girl Fridays also do research.

The Twisted Grin-Assorted Tales to Amuse and Alarm
Mindless Mirth Productions
Augsburg Studio
2211 Riverside Ave., Minneapolis, MN

Thu., Jul. 30 @ 10:00 p.m., Sat., Aug. 1 @ 5:30 p.m., Thu., Aug. 6 @ 8:30 p.m. , Fri., Aug. 7 @ 8:30 p.m. , [S] Sat., Aug. 8 @ 4:00 p.m.

http://www.fringefestival.org/2009/show/?id=974

Kenneth – what is the frequency? In 1986, Dan Rather was attacked by two men who repeatedly pummeled him for no obvious reason, and between beatings, asked this apparently absurd question. The crime was never resolved, though one of the assailants was eventually apprehended. But "Kenneth - what's the frequency?" made a neat song, one Rather got over his trauma long enough to enjoy singing it with REM.

Fifteen years later, iin Harper's Magazine, Paul Limbert Allman claimed he has solved the mystery of this curious assault, pasting together two apparently unrelated lines in Barthelme’s short story “The Indian Uprising” to come up with an equally absurd theory involving the Houston author. Allman has since conceded that he finds his own theory "difficult to accept," and that the assailants could also have been "loose cannons armed with quotes."

Which, interestingly enough, describes Barthleme to a tee. I suppose when you write surrealist fantasy and play with violent themes in fragmentary bursts of flash fiction, echoing the structure and logic of the schizophrenic mind, you should not be surprised when you end up being the source of inspiration for a pair of them - the Jodi Foster of Post-Modernism.

Alternatively, Paul Allman’s piece may in fact be a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Barthelme, who died in 1989. It was written in December 2001. If Barthelme had been alive to see the former Governor of Texas shift the blame for 9/11 from Osama Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein, he might have written just such a story himself.

I appear to be attending, courtesy of my talented and interesting friends, the Thinking Woman’s Fringe. (Although the Woman's Thinking Fringe makes a better acronym.) This has been making it hard for me to review performances in a timely fashion. I just get too caught up in exploring what I sampled afterwards. I have not read Barthelme in a long, loooong time – one short story in a graduate course on contemporary American short fiction at the University of Minnesota in 1979 really doesn't cut it. After having seen Larry Ripp’s Twisted Grin, I found myself wanting to go home and reacquaint myself with Barthelme’s work. This is relatively easy to do online. So I did. I wish I could take credit for the title of this review, BTW, but at least four others got there before me.

I am amazed that there appear to have been so few adaptations of Barthelme’s short stories to the theater. Beckett was a major influence, as were Sartre and Ionesco, and it shows. Many of Barhelme's stories are monologues, often with narrators of questionable reliability. The folks at Mindless Mirth Productions really have something here – though they might want to change their name. Because Donald Barthelme – while playful - is anything but a mindless experience.

Barthelme’s stories appeared mostly in the New Yorker, where for many I suspect they served the same purpose as the cartoons – short, sophisticated comic relief. Not to say that the stories are not challenging. They are, in fact, linguistic koans, semiotic puzzles. As one critic puts it, for Barthelme the highest success is not if the story strikes us as true, but rather if it shows us how it works. I had to learn a new word - heteroglossia - just to understand some of the criticism. Sometimes I am glad I am no longer an academic.

Turns out I enjoy Barthelme more as interpreted theatre than I do just reading him – though it was interesting in several of the pieces to see what Ripp omitted. There isn’t much, and it seldom does damage to the author’s intention. Of course if it did, Barthelme, an academic himself, could hardly complain. He has read his Husserl, his Heidegger, his Barthes and Derrida. No doubt he has told bar stories at MLA conventions with Frederic Jameson and Stanley Fish. Even now the tenure of entire English faculties depended on an ideology which permits, even encourages, the subversion of authorial intent. The editorial changes of one little Fringe Festival playwright don’t mount to a hill of beans in that town.

Jon Eichenlaub does an excellent job with Some of Us Have Been Threatening Our Friend Colby, which is taken almost verbatim from the text, but my favorite stories are those in which the author backs away from fragmented absurdity and meaningless violence as abruptly as he engages it, and imagines instead a different world. We know that this world is as fragile, and as possible, as the other, and yet ending there in some way gives hope. Life is absurd, and we make stupid, even cruel mistakes, but people are essentially good. Sure, the narrator in I Bought a Little City shoots six thousand dogs, proving that power – and capitalism - corrupt. But on deciding he doesn’t like the experience, he just gives it up. At least that’s how it appears in the abridged version. “Took a bath on that deal,” he says cheerfully. And learned not to play God. “A lot of other people already knew that, but I have never doubted for a minute that a lot of other people are smarter than me, and figure out things quicker.” His commentary on the nature of God’s own apparently sadistic imagination - “He does a lot worse things every day” – loses some depth and resonance with the elimination of Sam Hong’s wife. But the essential meaning comes across.

There are times when I sense more gravitas in Barthelme than comes across in Twisted Grin. Like I Bought a Little City, The School, perhaps, loses a bit of its complexity, feeling more like a Saturday Night Live sketch (hence the Mindless Mirth) than a piece that genuinely addresses existential questions. Is it death that gives meaning to life? Or life itself which is its own meaning? Either I blinked or an element rather critical to the ending of that particular story was missing - an element similar to the absence of Sam Hong's wife. Missing that context, I was distracted at first by not knowing whether the narrator was herself a sociopath, or a jinx, or whether the students at the school were just us, confronting what we all must confront –that life, in the end, will kill you. There is also a whiff of Cold War to “The School,” as if it was written in response to the actual absurdity of schoolchildren crouching under desks to protect themselves from nuclear attack. (I was there. We did this.) Yet the story that remained fit the character Rose Johnson portrayed, and I especially enjoyed her expressiveness and comic timing.

Gravitas is there, if you wish to find it. And affirmation of what is beautiful and joyous in life, amidst the absurdity. My favorite story (as anyone who knows me could probably guess) was A City of Churches – which for some reason I will probably never know, is available online in English and Chinese. Like another reviewer who claims he “went to that school,” I have done time in that city, which has a peculiarly Southern feel to it. I feel like Barthelme has stared with me down the length of Hillsboro Parkway in Nashville, where the steeples line up like missile silos. A city where you can “live in the church of your choice.” A choice as American as the color palette of a Model T. Vickijoan Keck’s portrayal of the young woman looking for an apartment in Prester, who has already been offered a job as their “car rental girl” despite the fact that everyone has a car in Prester and nobody wants to leave it, is spot on. She has the ability to act whatever age the part demands, which is a rare gift. For the most part, Cecelia (her name in the story; I do not believe it is mentioned in the play) is the rational voice, the reasonable outsider. Of course she will not take a job renting cars in a town where no one rents cars. That makes no sense. Of course she will not live in a belfry apartment. That would be bats. Are we in the Twilight Zone? But when her guide asks, quite pointedly, what denomination she is, the woman responds with an apparent non sequitur that explodes any precoonceptions we might have had about her character:

"I can will my dreams," Cecelia said. "I can dream whatever I want. If I want to dream that I'm having a good time, in Paris or some other city, all I have to do is go to sleep and I will dream that dream. I can dream whatever I want."

In the end, the guide’s insistence that Cecelia must stay “for balance” – that they need a car rental girl to make their town complete and thus perfect, to quell their own restlessness with the illusion of opportunity – has a certain menace to it. And yet Cecelia – who the narrator of “I Bought a Little City” would recognize immediately as “too imaginative” - threatens to break open their perfection, shake things up. Who will win?

I will admit this story has an idiosyncratic, personal meaning for me. In a past life I lived inside many churches. I know, in less than playful terms, what that does to a woman’s dreams. Especially a woman who is “too imaginative.” So I’m rooting for Cecilia. Dream on, baby.

From July 30-August 9, I will be reviewing Fringe Festival shows.  Reviews will appear on the Minnesota Fringe Festival website of each show, although long reviews will be truncated.  All reviews will also appear here.  For general information about the Minnesota Fringe Festival, go to www.fringefestival.org .  

Death Camp Diaries
Howard Lieberman / Jaded Optimist Productions
U of M Rarig Center Xperimental
July 30 @ 5:30, July 31 @ 8:30, Aug 2 @ 7:00, Aug 5 @ 7:00, Aug 8 @ 4:00 

http://www.fringefestival.org/2009/show/?id=991

What is the difference between a pilgrim and a tourist?  And which one is Howard Lieberman – devout agnostic, secular Jew – as he “does” the Death Camps?   Your guess is as good as Howard’s.  Because clearly he identifies with both.

We know what a pilgrim is, don’t we?  One whose journey into sacred space is a quest.  A tourist – well, a tourist is just on vacation.  A pilgrim encounters the Other.  A tourist consumes it.  Been there, done that.  Got the t-shirt. 

And yet the distinction is not so simple, and never has been.  Nor is it simple for Howard.  The honesty and ironic humor with which he explores that paradox in himself is one of the best elements of Death Camp Diaries.  If Howard is going to go on a psychologically grueling journey, he will at least travel first class.  Not with those other Jews, always looking for a bargain.  He will stay in a nice hotel.  Living well is the best revenge, isn’t it?  He will find a good jazz club, and friend the vocalist on Facebook. 

Pilgrims have been tourists since the merry band of the Canterbury Tales first got the springtime itch.  The rich Saracen and his entourage were a major force in the economy of every little oasis on his haj.  For better or for worse, trade, travel and transformation have always been entwined. 

Transformation is never a one way street.  If you cannot visit the Death Camps without being transformed, you also cannot do so without contributing to the economy of the descendents of those who ran them.  It is easy for the locals to resent tourists.  They swarm everywhere, make the check out lines longer, insist you speak English.  Is it Anti-Semitism I saw in their eyes, these people who claim they never knew?  Or are we just being Ugly Americans?

This is a once in a lifetime experience, the Orthodox rabbi said.  One you will be processing for a long time.

Howard had been back two days when he opened at the Fringe.  Where he finally really does have a Good Venue.  The fact that this is a work in progress does not bother me in the least.  We are all works in progress. 

Besides, I love watching Howard grow.  In many ways all of his previous work as a storyteller – particularly his most recent performance in June with Noa Baum at Loren Niemi’s venue, Two Chairs Telling – has been preparation for this experience, so that even in its rawness, certain themes are emerging.  The one that intrigues me most is the quest for identity, and how inseparable this is from community, even when an iconoclast like Howard defines himself against it.  

“You call yourself a Jew?”  The Orthodox says this to the Conservative, the Conservative says this to the Reformed - and all of them say this to Howard.  Who gets to decide?  Enquiring Howard wants to know.  What does it mean to be a Jew?  Is this a cultural category, an ethnicity, or a religion?  I like the rabbi; I like my brother and his wife, who are also on this trip – but the rest?  Do I really even want to associate with these people, with their narrow perspectives and prejudices, their “organized superstitions,” their lack of taste?    If I don’t, who am I? 

One way of handling this dilemma is to plunk yourself down in Lutheran Minnesota, where you are Jewish by default.  No need to Measure Up.  Or, for that matter, to Put Up With.  But there are limitations to this approach. 

Academia has a special word for people who go sightseeing at scenes of death:  they are thanotourists.   There are less intimidating, but no less equally bizarre alternative phrases:  dark tourist, grief tourist.  The category includes trips to the sites of battlefields, cemeteries, natural and unnatural disasters, prisons, slaveholds.  Concentration camps.  You do not need to travel outside the United States to be a thanotourist – you can go to Gettysburg, Wounded Knee, New Orleans, Ground Zero, Alcatraz, Manzanar.  Eventually, no doubt, if we ever find homes for the current tenants, you will be able to tour Guantanamo.  And take home a refrigerator magnet.

Thanotourists are not necessarily morbid – though Sarah Vowel capitalizes on that brand, and builds much of the quirky appeal of Assassination Vacation upon it.  Theirs are educational trips.  This is a safe, neutral term – even a secular humanist can use it.  But is it enough to call visiting the site of an atrocity “educational”?  When you can map an archipelago of such sites  across Europe?   And visit them on a package tour? 

George Santayana said that those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it.  The spate of “histories” purporting that the Holocaust didn’t happen are reason enough to justify the trip.  See for yourself – and never forget. This is one of the primary justifications for atrocity tourism, which comes close to being a moral obligation for Jews and Christians alike.  For different reasons.    

In the middle of the journey of our life
I came to myself within a dark wood
where the straight way was lost.

It didn’t matter to the Nazis if you were a good Jew, a bad Jew, or even a practicing Jew.  What mattered was that you were vermin.  To visit the camps as a Jew is to confirm your solidarity with other Jews – whether you are Orthodox, Conservative, Reformed, secular, or Devout Agnostic.  Whether you live in Israel, or Brooklyn, or Stillwater. 

Those of you who know Howard know that he is always threatening to get naked on stage.  What’s different is that this time he does it.  And that it is not gratuitous.  Indeed, it was one of the most moving parts of the performance.  I do hope that by now he has stopped apologizing for possibly offending people for this afterwards.  Although the fact that I do not believe there was originally a nudity warning on the Fringe site might have been the real issue.

 If I was offended by anything, it was by the way he occasionally lumped all his audience members together as “you Christians” – as if he was the only Jew in the room.  As if there were only two religions in Minnesota.  As if we were all religious.  At times Howard’s attempt to talk about his own prejudices seemed unreflective, which I do not think was intentional.  But admitting that you stereotype Poles at one point and that you know those stereotypes are not an accurate reflection of reality, then talking as if those stereotypes were true several minutes later was confusing.  Which Howard am I listening to now – the one reacting to his experience, or responding to it?    The one who is buddies with the great grandson of the King of Poland, or the one who is convinced that given the chance, the bastards would all do it over again?

Like another reviewer, I would like to see this again in a year, or two, or five.  While I deeply respect the authenticity of Howard’s personal experience, I cannot really say I was challenged by the piece – though it was clearly heartfelt.  But though I am not a member of any organized religion, I have been so.  And I know that religious people have the capacity for complex and nuanced thought. Unlike Howard, I don’t happen to believe religion is “organized superstition,” and I have a healthy appreciation for the Jewish theologians who have struggled with this problem – Emil Fackenheim, Richard Rubenstein, Arthur Cohen – in ways that did indeed challenge me, and remain with me, even after thirty five years.

I cannot say I know these thinkers well.  But the fact that I do know them is attributable to an Introduction to Religion class taught thirty five years ago at a small Catholic university in the southern tier of New York State.  By a Franciscan friar.  Father Tony Struzcynski.  I think he was Polish.