Becky Mode’s Fully Committed

Amphibian Stage Production’s staged reading of Becky Mode’s play Fully Committed this evening was very good. It’s a very funny play about an aspiring actor working in a high class restaurant answering the phone and taking reservations. He has the lowest job in the place (literally, secluded in the basement), but it puts him in contact with all the restaurant’s rich and influential clients. He takes lots of shit from customers, his boss, and his coworkers, but he manages to leverage his position to achieve his acting goals.

One actor, Carman Lacivita, played all the parts—the aspiring actor and all the people he talks to on the phone—changing his voice appropriately to represent each character; he was very good. The audience loved it.

Chaos: Making a New Science

Chaos: Making a New Science is about a variety of topics: the sensitivity of some systems to their initial conditions, the weather being a prime example, which makes detailed long-term forecasting impossible; nonlinear systems; fractals; strange attractors; dynamical systems; etc. It is also about the people who discovered and studied these phenomena. It describes their difficulties in introducing these ideas into the scientific community. That’s not an unusual situation in science. Einstein’s special theory of relativity, for example, despite it’s mathematical simplicity and fit with evidence, was not readily accepted.

Gleick sometimes strays a bit from his topic, as when he briefly talks about Darwinian thinking in biology. He writes, “In biology, however, Darwin firmly established teleology as the central mode of thinking about cause. [...] Natural selection operates not on genes or embryos, but on the final product. [...] Final cause survives in science wherever Darwinian thinking has become habitual.” (se p. 201 in the original hardback edition) I don’t know where he got his information, but he got it wrong. Darwinian evolution through natural selection is not teleological. In What Evolution Is, Ernst Mayr writes, “… those who adopt teleological thinking will argue that progress is due to a built-in drive or striving toward perfection. Darwin rejected such a causation and so do modern Darwinians …” In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett writes, “The theory of natural selection shows how ever feature of the natural world can be the product of a blind, unforesightful, nonteleological, ultimately mechanical process of differential reproduction over long periods of time.” The nonteleological nature of Darwinian evolution is one of the principle themes of Dennett’s book.

Chaos is a long book about somewhat difficult ideas, mostly of a mathematical nature, but the mathematics is largely suppressed. One important point that I think he makes very clear is that very simple equations when iterated in real space can exhibit surprising behavior.

The topics of this book are mostly outside my areas of even limited expertise, but I was wondering as I read it how many of the phenomena it describes depend on the use of real numbers, i.e., numbers that in general require infinite precision, e.g. π. If physical theories were to be developed on the basis of discrete mathematics, would some of these problems of chaos disappear? Consider the very first topic in the book: the sensitivity of weather models to initial conditions. With limited precision measuring instruments there are infinitely many states of the weather, if described by real numbers, that cannot be distinguished. So, if small differences, below the precision of measurement, can make a big difference as the weather develops, we have a problem that limits predictability. But, if the physics of weather were described by a mathematics with finite precision, then we might be able to make completely accurate measurements of initial conditions—in principle.

I found Chaos interesting to read, but I am always skeptical about reading explanations of science written by journalists, just as I am skeptical of explanations of science written by philosophers.

The Private Diary of Mr. Darcy

The Private Diary of Mr. Darcy is a companion piece to Pride and Prejudice, relating events in the life of Mr. Darcy from just before he meets the Bennets to shortly before he and Elizabeth are wed. It is written in the form of a personal diary, in the first person. There are, of course, events in his life that have nothing to do with the Bennets and the tale of Pride and Prejudice, but I found them mostly uninteresting. I read The Private Diary of Mr. Darcy in parallel with rereading Pride and Prejudice and the styles are strikingly different. The former is often tedious and rarely funny. The latter is often funny and always engaging.

Circumference: Eratosthenes and the Ancient Quest to Measure the Globe

Circumference, by Nicholas Nicastro, tells a story about Eratosthenes and the times in which he lived.  While it purports to be about his remarkable measurement of the circumference of the Earth, it is mostly about other things and at times it  feels like the author has gotten seriously sidetracked.  Surprisingly, the author shies away from math, which is ridiculous, given that Eratosthenes’s method for estimating the Earth’s circumference only depends on elementary geometry.  The method is summed up, incompletely, in one paragraph and a diagram in a sidebar.  The assumption that the Sun’s rays arrive at the Earth as parallel lines is not mentioned.

There are serious problems with evaluating Eratosthenes’s measurement.  His unit of measurement was the stade, whose length we do not know.  We also do not know how accurate was the measurement of the distance between Alexandria and Syene, the basis of his calculation.

None of Eratosthenes original writings survive and what other writers have said about him is sparse.  This does not make him a very promising topic for a book, which perhaps explains the author’s frequent digressions.

The Uncommon Reader

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett is an often funny story about what it means to be a reader. It’s a tale of how the Queen of England stumbles upon a traveling library, takes out a book in a mistaken effort to be polite, and gets hooked on reading. She is guided in her early choices by a gay boy who works in her kitchen and who just happened to be at the library. He knows very little about literature and he prefers to read gay books; so those are the books he recommends to her. She elevates him from the kitchen to her personal assistant for running errands to the library and as someone she can freely talk to about books. Eventually she begins to make her own choices, her advisors arrange to get rid of her assistant, and she finds herself alone in her reading. Her advisors, who think they have regained control over the Queen, discover that she has developed a mind of her own. It’s a very short book, only 120 small pages, and quite delightful.

The Trouble Boy

The Trouble Boy by Tom Dolby was tedious to read.  The main character, and narrator (Toby), is just dumb and boring.  The story is about a guy who is supposedly looking for a permanent partner, while picking up one guy after another, indiscriminately, at gay clubs.  He has no taste about who he brings home.  There is no build up in this book, no development.  Toby is constantly fretting over finding a boyfriend, but he continues to act stupid right up to the end of the book.  A crisis of sorts appears near the end of the book when he’s in a car with some coworkers.  The movie star who is driving (high on drugs) decides (for no apparent reason) to intentionally back the car up into a crowd of people.  She kills one and maims many more.  The star’s publicist pulls everyone aside and gets them to agree to a story that it was an accident.  Toby goes along with this and lies to the police, because he thinks his job, which itself is getting him nowhere, is at stake.  Eventually he turns around and confesses the truth, but not for some time.  The whole incident makes no sense.  It makes no sense that it happened and it makes no sense that he would lie about it and risk a criminal charge.  The person he is protecting is no friend of his, nor are the other people involved.  What it reveals is that he’s lacking in moral sensibility, even a small amount of courage, and common sense.  Even at the end of the book, when he has a boyfriend, it’s clear that it’s not going to last.  He doesn’t change, he doesn’t learn anything about himself, and he’s still thinking in counterproductive ways.  Dolby has a new book out called The Sixth Form.  I won’t be reading it.

Opera and the Morbidity of Music

Opera and the Morbidity of Music by Joseph Kerman is a collection of previously published essays from The New York Review of Books on opera and classical music.  The essays are well written, as one would expect from a Professor Emeritus of Music at UC, Berkeley, and also interesting, especially if one has a particular interest in classical music, or even just in a particular composer.  Much of the book is organized by composer:  three essays on Bach, four essays on Mozart, four essays on Beethoven, two on Verdi, three on Wagner, and the rest single essays on a composer, performer, conductor, or a general theme, such as the sonata form.  People who often read the Review know that the essays there tend to be expansive and not just about the book or books under review.  These are no exception.  One warning:  If you don’t know much about classical music or opera, you are likely to find parts of the essays that you won’t fully understand, since they are written for musically educated listeners.

Before I Lose My Style

Before I Lose My Style, the first novel by Mike Kaspar, is hard to get into, because the characters aren’t very interesting and there’s not much of a plot. Some of the characters are eccentric and sometimes slightly amusing, but there is very little depth to them and it’s often unclear what they contribute to the story, apart from amusing eccentricities.

The story is told in the first person by Damon, who has recently been dumped by his boyfriend. He’s picking up guys for one-night stands when the book begins. They are so inconsequential that we usually just hear that he had a date. He doesn’t seem to be especially distraught by his situation. He’s not moping or getting all depressed. He is responsibly holding down a job. His friends sometimes try to set him up with a date, but he doesn’t really seem to need the help. By the end of the book he’s in a relationship again, with a friend who has suddenly, out of the blue, realized that he’s in love with Damon. Yet this all happens without any crisis in Damon’s life. He’s intelligent, well educated, travels, hangs out with his friends, etc., but none of this is interesting enough to write a novel about, because there is no compelling plot.

There are, of course, the other characters. For example, Travis is a close friend of Damon’s who seems to be psychologically incapable of having sex. You might think that that would be interesting. The problem with it is that it’s not explored. It’s simply a fact. Travis is in love with Nathan, purely platonically, and he encourages Nathan and Damon to hook up so that Nathan’s and Damon’s sexual needs will be satisfied. All three of them are okay with this arrangement, but it’s not part of any further development of Travis’s character. He’s just a weirdo who doesn’t want to have sex, for no apparent reason.

All of the characters are like this, quirky in some way, occasionally amusing (perhaps), never very funny, and mostly just part of the landscape of Damon’s life. What their influence on him might be is hard to say. They are more like slightly interesting paintings on the wall, but they are not causal forces of any significance.

The Scene

I saw a wonderful reading, produced by Amphibian Stage Productions, of Theresa Rebeck’s comedy The Scene at the Modern Art Museum.  From the beginning of the play the audience was laughing, and they kept laughing for most of the play.  That was in part due to the nice performance by Lydia Mackay as Clea, a young woman from Ohio who has newly entered the social scene in New York City.  She meets a couple of old friends, Charlie and Lewis (played by Richard Ercole and Evan Mueller, respectively), at a party and as soon as she starts talking they (and the audience) conclude that she’s ditzy.  Still, she’s good looking and Lewis is interested in dating her, which is the innocent cause of all future troubles.

She tells them about an interview she had with a magazine and complains in fairly rude terms about the woman who interviewed her.  Charlie and Lewis quickly realize she’s talking about Stella, Charlie’s wife (played by Elizabeth Mason).  She talks about how surreal the air and river look from the high-rise where they are and quickly gets into a argument with Charlie over the use of the term “surreal”.   Clea can hardly have a conversation that she doesn’t quickly turn into a defensive argument, primarily because she is so sensitive to the slightest negative vibes from others, real or imagined.  Still, she’s never really embarrassed and always thinks the problem is the attitudes of others, and she doesn’t hesitate to say so.

As empty-headed as Clea seemingly is, what makes the play interesting is how well she gets what she wants.  Men apparently cannot resist her, which makes one wonder who is the most clueless.  By the end of the play she has toyed with and hurt Lewis, had an affair with out-of-work actor Charlie, destroying his 14 year marriage and leaving him homeless, disrupted Stella’s plans to adopt a baby, and landed a job with a TV director who used to be a friend of Charlie’s.

The actors did a really good job with this reading.  Although they had scripts in hand, they knew many of their lines.  The play moved right along, every scene is an essential part of the story, and it’s never boring. If you ever get a chance to see this play, I highly recommend it.

If you’re interested in knowing more details about the play, you can read this review of a NYC production back in January, 2007: “All About Ego, Showbiz, and a Little Black Dress.”

Dark Play or Stories for Boys

Carlos Murillo’s play, Dark Play or Stories for Boys, is currently being produced by Amphibian Stage Productions in the Sanders Theatre of the Fort Worth Community Arts Center.  It is an emotionally intense play about a teenager (Nick) who creates a fantasy persona in an internet chat room, establishes a relationship between this fantasy character and another teen online, and then tries to take his fantasy into real (i.e., non-internet) life and succeeds far too well.  He begins to identify with his fantasy character to such an extent that he imagines the other teen’s love for the fantasy character to be love for himself.  The catch is that both teens are male, while the fantasy character Nick has created is female.  Don’t jump to the conclusion that Nick is gay.  The play opens as Nick and his new girlfriend have just finished having sex.  The girlfriend asks him about some unusual marks on his stomach and this launches the story into one of many flashbacks.

This play has the most elaborate set of any I’ve seen in an Amphibian production, which is not saying all that much.  Five circular, raised platforms are spread across the stage and are connected by cables that emit a soft blue light.  The platforms represent nodes on the internet, but there are no computers on-stage.  The characters stand on these nodes when they are communicating in the chat room.  The characters do not look at each other when talking in the chat room, because they cannot physically see the people they are chatting with in the chat room.  The largest of the circular platforms is also the site of the real life interaction between Nick and his girlfriend.  At the back of the stage is a large translucent wall that is backlit at appropriate times with zeros and ones (the basic language of computers).

The acting is pretty good.  Nick has the majority of lines in the play, because he’s telling the story, which is largely his creation.  He’s played by Jason Cruz.  When the play begins, Nick is a college student and Jason looks the part.  He’s also credible in his role as a psychologically messed up 14 year old (in the flashbacks).  The other characters include Adam (the other kid in the chat room, Joshua Heard), Rachel (Nick’s fantasy girl, Reyna de Courcy), and an assortment of other chat room participants played by two other actors (Richard Ercole and Elizabeth Mason).

It’s a one act play that ran about an hour and forty minutes.  The puzzle of what those marks are on Nick’s stomach is the recurring theme of the play and as the story is told you get closer and closer to the truth, which you may think you know at the beginning, but you don’t, not even if you have looked at the Director’s Notes in the program.  The intensity builds right to the end.  I thought the play returned to the question of those marks perhaps a bit too often, but it’s the mechanism the author uses to keep the audience focussed on the primary plot question.

There are many issues dealt with in this play.  One, of course, is whether the internet is dangerous for kids.  There are no adult predators in this play, but there is a very naive drama teacher.  The kids here do the damage to themselves.  They are too young and too unsupervised.  Another question is whether it is a good idea that people can be anonymous on the internet.  There are benefits to that sometimes.  Two that come to mind:  (1) people who wish to access legal porn may have legitimate reasons to be anonymous and (2) people who may be persecuted for being gay, HIV+, etc. can safely get access to information, advice, support, etc. by being able to use the internet anonymously.  In this play, though, anonymity makes it possible for one person to take psychological advantage of and to manipulate another.  Only hinted at in the play is the question of the fluidity of sexual orientation.  You will leave this play not knowing whether Nick is gay, straight, or bisexual, even though sex plays a prominent role in what happens.

The play is very disturbing.  I was thinking at the end, “It’s hard to believe anyone would do what Nick does, even a messed up 14 year old.”  Yet, I do believe that a messed up kid could do what Nick does.  It’s a good play.  I was a little skeptical before the play began.  I wondered if it was going to be a bash the internet play, raising all kinds of exaggerated fears about the safety of kids.  Well, it certainly doesn’t present kids in too good a light, but I don’t think it’s a bash the internet play.  Dark Play is playing through Oct. 5 in Fort Worth.