The Inteligent Homosexual's Guide

Saw "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide To Capitalism And Socialism With A key To The Scriptures" by Tony Kushner, directed by Michael Greif, with Michael Cristofer, Stephen Spinella, Linda Emond, Steven Pasquale, Brenda Wehle, K. Todd Freeman, Danielle Skraastad, Matt Servitto, Hettienne Park, Michael Esper, and Molly Price, at Joseph Papp's Public Theater.  It started at 1PM and ended around 5PM.  I loved it.  Michael Cristofer's monologue about the worker in the second act made me want to rise to my feet and yell "strike".  I felt I was at the Group Theater's production of  Clifford Odets' "Waiting for Lefty".

But first I want to talk about the Jonathan Franzen's piece in the 4/18/2011 New Yorker: "Farther Away".  He is a National Book Award winner for "The Corrections" and recently wrote "Freedom" which some reviewers have called a masterpiece.  He starts this piece talking about Robinson Crusoe and an island in the South pacific that he has decided to visit because "of a need of being farther away".  The need comes from having  promoted a novel non-stop for 4 months and the fact that his friend David Foster Wallace, author of "Infinite Jest" and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, had hanged himself.  Mr. Franzen grew up with an autodidact loving father who read two books aloud to him, "Les Miserables"  and "Robinson Crusoe".  Mr. Franzen also wrote a collection of essays: "How to Be Alone".
This is what he wrote in the New Yorker:
"Robinson is able to survive his solitude because he's lucky; he makes peace with his condition because he's ordinary and his island is concrete.  David, who was extraordinary, and whose island was virtual, finally had nothing but his own interesting self to survive on, and the problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto the cyberworld: there's no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning".
That appears to be the argument of the father in "The Intelligent Homosexual".  He's not depressed.  He's not bored.  It's the lack of satisfaction that makes him feel imprisoned in life.
My thinking is different.  No one's island is concrete.  Reality is not fixed; time changes everything. Survival is what's extraordinary.  Acceptance is the hardest work we will do.

Now to get back to the intelligent homosexual.  The attempted suicide by their father is what brings this family together in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.  There's a lot going on in everyone's life.  I love the second act.  It begins with one son reuniting with his prostitute lover, while he has a boyfriend for the last 26 years.  The extraordinary K. Todd Freeman plays the boyfriend and his monologue in the first act is breathtaking.   The three of them living happily ever after, Mr. Freeman makes perfectly clear, will never happen.  They're on the stoop, talking this out.  While in the dining room the meeting is going on about Dad.  Sister, who has just slept with her ex-husband whose girlfriend is pregnant with Brother's sperm is threatening to call 911.  Dad wants a consensus that the family will not call 911 and will let him finish the deed.  The others come in from the stoop.  There are 9 of them in the dining room and at one point they are all talking at the same time and for quite awhile.
I have to stop.  I can't do it justice.
One negative about the play.  The father's choice to kill himself is never fully rounded out.  At the end, after a long third act where he gives his reasons to his daughter, it seemed to be repetitious of what he had said earlier, which hadn't convinced anyone in the family.
In the Jonathan Franzen piece he mentions that David Foster Wallace had been clinically depressed for some time and had stopped his medications. 
Life is filled with contradictions, paradoxes and art.    

Houses of Worship

It's Palm Sunday and people are celebrating Christ's entry into Jerusalem.  Many in the East Village are walking around with their palm branches.

This is the 6th Street Community Synagogue, between 2nd and 1st Avenues.  From 1857 to 1940 it was The St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church, and served the residents of what was known as "Kleindeutschland", little Germany.  On 6/15/1904 the church congregation went on an outing.  They boarded the General Slocum ship and proceeded to sail up the East River.  Near Hell Gate the ship caught fire.  1021 of 1350 passengers, mostly woman and children, were lost.  Until 9/11 it was the single worse fire in New York History.  The survivors of the congregation moved to Yorkville and Astoria.
Today, the synagogue's spiritual leader is Rabbi Greg Wall, also known as "the Jazz Rabbi".  He has performed around the world, and at the same time has built a congregation that appears to be thriving.

This was Congregation Adas Yisroel Anshe Meseritz Synagogue on East 6th Street between 1st Ave and Avenue A.  It has been slated for demolition many times, but the Historical Preservation Society keeps fighting to preserve it.  It is the only still standing "tenement Synagogue".  They were called that because the buildings fit with the size of local tenements and their members for the most part lived in those tenements .  It opened in 1892 and served the Polish Orthodox Community.  When they moved out of the area the synagogue fell on hard times.