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Nov. 18th, 2007 01:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
(Mis)understanding Mammy: the Hattie McDaniel Story
This one-woman show about Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American to win an Academy Award (for her portrayal of Mammy in Gone with the Wind is set in the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital, where Ms. McDaniel is dying of breast cancer. Through the device of having her "see" and confront Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP, whose campaign against "mammification" helped destroy McDaniel's career, playwright Joan Ross Sorkin allows the actress to tell her story.
Capathia Jenkins, who portrays McDaniel, is a powerful actress with a gorgeous voice, and does an excellent job with the role (you don't really notice that she's rather young for it). A lot of people in the audience had issues with the way Sorkin villified White, and that was certainly less nuanced than it could have been. One could argue that this is McDaniel's story, and if that was her point of view, so be it. But I'm not sure that we know that was her point of view. I think Sorkin oversimplifies things, and she certainly left out others (the blacklist, McDaniel's lesbian affairs). But it was worth seeing to discover Jenkins!
The performance was held in the atrium space at Little Black Pearl.
Philip Pullman (x2)
I'm a big fan of Philip Pullman (not just His Dark Materials, but his other young adult fiction as well), so when I saw he was speaking at the Festival, I made sure to get tickets for both his appearances. The first was at the Harold Washington Library Center, and was titled "In Conversation: Philip Pullman". The interlocutors were Lawrence Wechsler, artistic director of the CHF, and his daughter, who must be a sophomore in college, judging by her comments and questions. (Sorry if that's rude, but her pretentiousness and self-absorption did begin to grate after a very short time.) This discussion was almost entirely about the His Dark Materials series, which turned out to be a fantasy, much to Pullman's surprise. Favorite comment: "Religion is at its worst the closer it is to power, at its best to closer it is to the poor and oppressed."
The next day, I went to hear him speak at Columbia College on "The Elementary Particles of Narrative", which was about the writing process. Using "pouring liquid" as an example, he showed how one small action can work in a variety of contexts, and how it can show up without the author necessarily being aware of it until after the fact. This was an illustrated lecture, and the images of "pouring" ranged from the famous Chas. Addams cartoon of a cauldron of boiling oil about to be poured on carollers to a Goya illustration. The latter he used to show how, when an image is divorced from context, its meaning can change and either weaken or grow more powerful.
Garry Wills
Wills spoke at First United Methodist Church at Chicago Temple (where there is a Miro sculpture), on the subject "Nature as Revelation -- America's Only Religious Art". He posited that no great religious (visual) art has developed in this country, but that nature has been viewed in a religious way, so that paintings from, for example, the Hudson River school, can be seen as our "religious art". He said that Americans have tended to see god in nature, as with the Transcendentalist movement. The question/answer period got a little bit off topic, but it was, in fact, much more interesting. Not so much because of the content, but because of the fact that Wills became much more passionate and animated when he departed from his prepared speech.
The musical stuff
The second weekend, I didn't go to any lectures or panels, just music.
Ars Antigua performed Vivaldi's Le quattro stagioni (The Four Seasons), on period instruments, at the Art Institute, with the sonnets that inspired him being read in both Italian and then an English translation. We were given the texts beforehand (in both languages), with the movements indicated. Despite having heard this piece a zillion times, I had a new experience, being able to listen to it with the text in front of me. I don't think the Largo movement of Inverno ever brought me to tears before, but it did this time (not because the text is particularly sad, it's not, but the text and music together were, simply, perfect).
Then a dash over to Roosevelt University, for a performance of Noyes Fludde, a reconstruction of the medieval Chester mystery play. What fun!. I love early music, and one of the very first early music performances I ever saw was a mystery play, The Play of Daniel, performed in Rockefeller Chapel by the New York Pro Musica. This wasn't a fully-staged performance, but that really wasn't a drawback (though it would be great to see that done). Q&A afterwards, and, as this was a coed group, I wondered if women had performed in these plays originally. The answer was, generally not, but that in Chester, there was a play, the "Assumpcion Beate Mariae" (Assumption of the Virgin Mary) thatwas presented by "The Wurshipffull Wyffys" of the town. Pity it's lost.
On Sunday, I went to the closing event, "Weathered Standards" (reflecting the festival's theme, "A Climate of Concern"), consisting of cabaret music related to weather (occasionally the relationship was a bit attenuated, but who cares?). Some well-known and beloved Chicago performers, like Beckie Menzie & Tom Michael, and a couple of new ones, including a singer named Mekole Wells, who was fantastic.
And so an end until next year . . .