The fist meta-presidency

This is right. He creates "crises" to "solve" them. Trump is a political Mobius strip. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but erasure.

The heart of our darkness

Although I mostly have abandoned politics on the blog-- reserving those observations for Facebook -- I want to park this here. Jessica Winter's piece is a particularly acute observation of the misogynist-geopolitical parameters of the Trumpville horror. She captures the sadistic, self-pitying psychopathy of fascism  One longs for the day that we hear, "Mistah Trump, he dead."

Timing

In comedy, we know, timing is everything. But in a Trumped-up world, everything is comedy, of the blackest hue (all puns intended)... so it follows that everything one sees is timely. Or so it seems. On the plane over to the Netherlands 11 days ago, I watched The Death of Stalin and The Post, both of which are commentaries on the present moment. The former is a better film, but both wind up resonating with us because we're actually living in fascism redux and Nixon redux.

What's Pixar got on tap?

P.S. Steve Buscemi and Meryl Streep are terrific, respectively -- though Buscemi, my fellow Sloper, is more of a revelation. A hail-fellow buffoon was certainly not type casting, but it didn't end there. He managed to keep Kruschev's character clear and consistent throughout, while undergoing a real arc. Should get an Oscar nod, though he probably won't (as, of course, Streep did).

Confined

Ambivalent. That's the word to describe the achievement of Phyllida Lloyd's all-female productions for the Donmar Warehouse of Julius Caesar, Henry IV and The Tempest.

Most centrally, one is ambivalent about the productions' primary schtick -- that we are watching inmates of a women's prison perform these plays, and that those performances unleash the feelings and capture the fates of these women whose lives, freedom and selfhood are literally cabined, cribbed and confined. For all its forced artificiality, it's an idea with rich expressive possibilities: the intensity of forced confinement channeling the intense immediacy of live theater, both architecturally and emotionally; the opportunity for women doubly controlled -- as women in a misogynistic world, and as prisoners -- to express their buried feelings, hopes, longings and rage with the full-throated abandon allowed to men; the bitter irony of their absolute masters being the ones who both enable and control the women's raw self-performance and self-revelation; and the ways in which this trope lights up themes and energies within each play -- Julius Caesar's contests of machismo; Henry IV's battles between anxious control and anarchic play; The Tempest's dramatization of Prospero's discovery that, for him, there is no escape from imprisonment (the "cell" of this bare island) except death.

Ben Brantley of the Times was taken with each production, and his verdict has proven to be that of the culture at large (vs. the dyspeptic, snide dismissal of the Telegraph critic on the original Caesar).

And yet... the potential of the prison trope remains more affecting in the breach than in the observance. If they really meant it, really wanted us to feel the feelings of these imprisoned women, they had to bring them more to life as actually imagined people. In each play, there is prisoner schtick at the start, prisoner schtick at the end, and one scene of prisoner dramatics (or, rather, metadramatics) interrupting the action in the middle. But the imagining of the women prisoner-actors is sketchy, and the metadrama isn't thought through deeply enough for it to shape their performances in character.

To be sure, pulling off that dance of metadramatic levels would be challenging -- but it's not undoable. Witness Robin Phillips's famous Midsummer Night's Dream in the 1970s at the Stratford, Ontario Shakespeare Festival.

Having said all that, these Donmar productions are major successes -- despite, rather than because of, their dominant and, on balance, failed frame. They are successful for the most basic of reasons -- the acting is terrific. Harriet Walter is great as Brutus, King Henry and Prospero, but so is everybody else. In particular, Sophie Stanton gives us both a Falstaff and a Caliban to remember, with all the characters' deep reserves of explosive wit, joy and imagination and without any support from the usual costuming of either. Indeed, Henry IV and The Tempest are more moving and satisfying in the end than Julius Caesar, in large measure (pun intended) because of the dynamic the larger-than-life-force Stanton creates with Walter's tight, taut angst.

Films of all three productions are running this weekend at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn Bridge Park, where all three had their American debuts. I don't know how available the films will be once this brief run is done, but I hope anyone reading this blog gets a chance to see them.

Perfect

As everyone who reads this blog knows (all one of me), it has been moribund for some time. The horror of post-asteroid political America is both too constant and too obvious to prompt analysis here. However, I am nothing if not critical, including lit critical. And a forum entitled Falstaff is entitled to post about Shakespeare.

Last night we saw The Acting Company production of Twelfth Night that closes this year's season of Theatre for a New Audience. It isn't an interesting take on the play. To the degree that there's any take at all, in fact, it makes no sense. We're led to understand that it was Feste who rescued Viola from the sea, and who therefore knows that she is disguising herself as a he (Cesario). This makes nonsense of much that happens later (most notably the exchange of wit between them in IIIi). It's all in service of what is intended as a coup de theatre at the end, where the once-again shipwrecked-looking Viola wafts back onstage during Feste's closing song, and disappears back into the sea -- suggesting, Sixth Sense-like, that she was never rescued and the entire play was Feste's dream.

Whatever.

The performances are mostly competent but uninteresting. Best is Susanna Stahlmann as Viola. The biggest disappointment is Stephen Pelinksi's Malvolio, whose self-love is less sick than stiff. He has some decent schtick during the famous letter scene, but he gets to none of Malvolio's explosive joy at his (false) discovery that Olivia loves him. Malvolio is usually given to a troupe's lead actor -- the one who plays Lear or Prospero -- because of this scene. But without his ecstatic transformation into a mad lover, his emotional meaning in the play disappears.

Thing is, though, it's still okay. This play is such a perfect construction that no performance, however inadequate, can ruin it. It's like a Mozart symphony. You can spoil As You Like It and Much Ado -- and, of course, an inadequate Hamlet or Othello or Lear can bring down a production. But Twelfth Night is robust against all theatrical failure (as, also, is Midsummer Night's Dream). It can soar -- as it did in the Globe Theatre's all-male production a few years ago with Mark Rylance as Olivia and Stephen Fry as Malvolio. And any given production can tap into its energies in brilliant, delightful, moving ways (as Oliver Platt's Toby Belch did a couple of decades ago in Central Park... and as Trevor Nunn's 1996 film version did, especially Ben Kingsley's Feste). But no matter how little inspiration is brought to bear, nobody ever leaves the theater without hearing its music. It plays on.

Yes, it's sad

It's sad that Hillary Clinton will never be president, and it's sad that she's being sidelined now. It's also sad that she winds up being chronicled by someone as shallow as Amy Chozik. I'm very glad that Rebecca Traister beat her to the punch, and will continue to be the chief chronicler in the mainstream media for both Hillary and feminism in politics.

In Michael Wolff, Trump got the historian he deserved. In Chozik, Hillary did not.

And yet

David Frum has been admirable throughout the Trump catastrophe. He is a person of principle and intellectual honesty, and has the moral decency to condemn the indecent. His latest piece in The Atlantic provides further evidence of all that.

And yet, he's still living in a bit of an illusion. "To be a conservative" hasn't had much actual meaning for 25 years. There has been nothing remotely "conservative" about the GOP or its fellow travelers. The right has become increasingly radical -- the polar opposite of conservatism. They want to rip things up from the root (the root word of "radical"). Grover Norquist's bathtub long predates Trump's descent on that escalator. From Gingrich & co forward, the Republican Party had devolved into an anti-Constitutional, anti-American rolling coup. Trump has taken that coup to terrifying and disgusting places, but he didn't start the fire.