RESTAURANT ROCK
By Terresa Marta Costa
"Poets get very hungry after they read..."
claimed an old poet friend of mine. So of course
no poet in their right mind would eat a full meal
& get up to read/perform...
Usually, we stop at diners, which are not like
they used to be. Most times the help is bringing
out the mop which reeks drastically of ammonia,
which if you're like me. your appetite is gone &
all you taste is ammonia. So I stay away from
diners.
Downtown Woodstock offers a small variety
of places to eat. One which notoriously also has
poetry readings on Monday nights, music the
other nights. Of course this is inside the famous
Wok 'N Roll Restaurant in the most famous
small town on the planet. The food is
scrumptious. Not too pricey. Yet one could order
a plate of chow fun, & not be too hungry
afterwards. In fact the editor of Home Planet
Newss has a fondness for chow fun w/shrimp...
And they serve a nice portion of it too. This
delicious plate comes w/yr choice of chicken,
tofu, shrimp or pork. It's very very yummy. And
if you love spicy foods, they have the spiciest
soup on record: Hot & Sour. I always know
when the heart palpitations start, the food cannot
get any spicier. But I LOVE hot & sour.
The menu is full & their number one specialty
is sushi. There is Chinese, Japanese &
Cantonese... & vegetarian.
My all time favorite appetizer is steamed
dumplings. They are delicious.
Most all the portions are just right. Just like
their prices. Wok 'N Roll Restaurant is located
on Mill Hill Road, downtown Woodstock, just
past Not Fade Away. <>
Lehman weichselbaum
PERFORMANCE SPACE
LIVING WITH HISTORY; SARTRE, CAMUS, DE BEAUVOIR
By Howard Pflanzer
Medicine Show Theatre Ensemble.
Three points on the
twentieth century's most
brilliant philosophers'
triangle dart through a
darkish romp in Howard
Pflanzer's idea epic Living
With History: Sartre,
Camus, De Beauvoir. the
Medicine Show's spring
feature. The play's two
halvesÑskipping more or
less neatly through two
wars, one hot, one coldÑ
wants us to believe that
ideas really do matter,
despite what seems to be
significant evidence to the
contrary. Exhibit A is
Jean-Paul Sartre,
interpreted zestfully by
David Elyhu as an
alternately blustering and
bemused breathing icon of
his day, as massive forces
upend the world in general
and his native Paris in
particular, in the face of
his gasping and globally
scrutinized struggles to make
sense of it all.
The slaughter of millions
on three continents? Nazi
occupiers making a
quotidian hash of the City
of Light? Jean-Paul
springs into action,
penning No Exit both as an
act of intellectual anti-
occupation suversion and
a lens to cast this life in a
fresh, deservedly bitter
light. Hell is genocidal
wannabe empire builders
at your doorstep? No, hell,
famously, is no more than
other people. It's left to the
curfew-flouting "fiestas"
of Paris' intelligentsia, the
scuttling gunplay of
Resistance street guerillas
and ultimately
Eisenhower's and Patton's
liberators to bump hapless
France a couple of infernal
(and welcome) circles
north.
Then there's Albert
Camus, played searchingly
by an almost naively
earnest Mark Gering.
Sartre's rival existentialist
brother settles in his
writing and his own daily
habit on a less floundering
solution to the first
problem of philosophy
(it's suicide, remember?).
in the form of a life
unaffectedly and adventurously lived.
Camus, of course, proves
the supreme exemplar of
his set's standard of
personal ''authenticity,"
dying at the wheel of a
too-fast car.
But in the play's grand
triumvirate, Jascha-Janet
Bilan's Simone de
Beauvoir comes closest to
carrying the day for the
case of the philosopher-
hero. With her steadfastly
beaming face and ringing
voiceÑas well as a
striking physical
resemblance to the real de
BeauvoirÑBilan delivers
a robust sketch of a
champion of the "second
sex" who undeviatingly
restates her brief against
social oppression rooted in
historical antipathy toward
women and for a course of
free love notoriously put
into steady practice by
herself (including a
dalliance with Camus) and
her paramour Sartre.
Unlike Sartre, she appears
to suffer few moments of
being caught
philosophically or
politically short, as
questions of passive
collaboration or softness
on Stalinism rear their
heads over the years.
________________________________________
Lehman weichselbaum
PERFORMANCE SPACE Cont...
"Under the direction of
Barbara Vann, who in this
play of ideas clearly has
her own idea about making
philosophy "fun," this
haute comic-strip
panorama of great minds
and impassioned hearts
across three decades
barely pauses to catch its
breath in its broad two -
hour run time. As the three
principals step through
their complex dance of
thought and rhetoric, a
large cast and chorus mill
and dart, sing and dance in
careful and nimble staging
through swift-changing
vignettes, against a set of
hanging red swastika
banners and shards of
faux-cubist paint. Other
stars of the time and place
in questionÑPicasso,
Arthur KoestlerÑmake
appropriate and worthy
appearances.
Given the built-in hazard
of any historical play, the
epochal scope of Living
With History leaves the
work both a little
overstuffed and a little
thin. At the same time,
perhaps most remarkable
about the script by
PflanzerÑalso the author
of a just published book of
poems. Dead Birds, or
Avian BluesÑis the
author's free and copious
use of his protagonists'
own words not as mere
markers on biographical
timelines, but as integral
engines of the human
drama coursing from scene
to scene. Sartre dithers on
the need for "action" while
Germans and maquis
rebels shoot it out in the
alleys. De Beauvoir
discourses on open
relationships as inches
away Sartre cruises a
tableful of cafe hotties.
Camus delivers his Nobel
address to pro-Algerian
hecklers. And there are no
less than four verbatim
excerpted plays-within-
the-play. It's high credit to
Pflanzer that the viewer
quickly finds it impossible
to fell apart the
playwright's applied
plagiarism and his own
original words, implicitly
raising fundamental
questions of authorship
and perhaps, yes,
authenticity. Can Sartre,
Camus and De Beauvoir
be listening? <>
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