Theater Review: A Prescient, and Newly Relevant, Warning About Fascism

For 30 years, the Mint Theater has specialized in rediscovering plays often unfairly confined to the dustbin of history. In my experience attending nearly 20 of these shows, I’ve found them lovingly and shrewdly presented.

But no production of this Off-Broadway company has struck me so powerfully as Crooked Cross, which has not been revived in the UK since its 1937 premiere at London’s Westminster Theatre—and not produced at all in the US till now.

This drama by British author Sally Carson about the rise of Nazism in the critical December 1932-summer 1933 period only runs through today, so many readers will not be able to see it before it closes.

Even so, I urge you to buy the 1934 novel that she herself expertly adapted, which Persephone Books republished this past April. And while you’re at it, buy another copy for friends still open to understanding its message for today—and, if Persephone gets around to reissuing them, its two sequels: The Prisoner (1936) and A Traveller Came By (1938).

The drama has turned up again at a time when, like Germany transitioning from the Weimar Republic, Americans are unsettled by economic dislocation and a relative loss of power in the world—and decide to embrace a nationalist leader willing to break norms and laws at lightning speed.

A publisher’s reader and dance teacher when the novel and play of Crooked Cross were created, Carson had little time to establish herself in the literary world. Starting a family in 1938, she died of breast cancer only three years later, only aged 38.

By that time, the world was so caught up in maelstrom of fighting the Axis powers that it forgot about the English Cassandra whose warnings were disregarded by a war-weary electorate and appeasers in Whitehall.

Crooked Cross starts like a Christmas romantic comedy, with Lexa Kluger, a vibrant twentysomething woman hanging ornaments with her parents, two brothers and her fiancée, Moritz Weissmann, in their Bavarian home.

Over nine scenes, the tone becomes more like a thriller or horror film, with lives at stake and darkness spreading over their picturesque mountain community of Kranach and their country.

Carson outlines, step by step, how large national events shatter this harmony. Moritz loses his promising job as a doctor in a prestigious hospital because of his Jewish background and teaching first aid to a Marxist audience. Moritz’s father is not only dismissed from his university job because of his religion but is seized and disappeared by the newly empowered Nazi regime.

The trends highlighted by Carson will seem all too familiar to many today:

*A suddenly restrictive border policy meant to punish a minority;
*A new government that uses the slenderest of pretexts to reduce opposition;
*Nationalist right-wing groups willing to overthrow the government;
*Universities that cravenly yield to government pressure.

But what will especially strike a chord with modern audiences is Carson’s psychological understanding of what gives rise to authoritarianism, and the divisions it causes in families.

The Klugers react differently over how to deal with the ascendant Nazi Party. Frau Kluger (played by Katie Firth) nags her husband into joining it. Their son Erich (played with chilling authority by Jakob Winter) embraces Hitler’s principles and strategies with fanatical devotion, while second brother Helmy (Gavin Michaels), though closer to Lexa and Mauritz, swallows his ambivalence in the hope that the party will provide income and a purpose that’s been missing from his life.

Lexa will have none of this. She struggles to make her family grasp the dangers posed by Nazism to the man she loves—and when they urge her to transfer her affection to a nice Aryan youth, Otto, she moves from tense, even barbed, remarks (e.g., telling Erich, a former ski instructor whose work with aging female customers involved more than athletics, “I don’t imagine the Storm Troopers are immune to your charms”) to an outbreak break with them all.

Crooked Cross now plays to audiences passing an awareness of outcomes that British theatergoers of the prewar period could not have possessed, and it is staged now without imposing such retrospective historical knowledge.

In light of that, Carson’s insights are all the more prophetic and prescient, particularly in the damage caused by a nihilistic rejection of imperfect but irreplaceable representative government. Lexa’s question to her siblings reverberates as much now as in the 1930s: “When you’ve broken everything you can touch, all of you — what do you think you’ll do then?”

Quote of the Day (Diane Keaton, on Her Transformative Acting Moment)

“There was no discussion with my parents on the night I sang ‘Mata Hari’ in our Santa Ana High School production of the musical Little Mary Sunshine. Under the direction of our drama teacher, Mr. Robert Leasing, the production was worthy of Broadway—at least I thought so. I was Nancy Twinkle, the second lead, who loves to flirt with men. In my big number, ‘Mata Hari,’ I ran around the stage singing about the famous double agent ‘who would spy and get her data by doing this and that-a,’ ending with a grand finale featuring me sliding down a rope into the orchestra pit. That was when I heard the explosion. It came from the audience. It was applause. When Mom and Dad found me backstage, their faces were beaming. Dad had tears in his eyes. I’d never seen him so excited…. I could tell he was startled by his awkward daughter—the one who’d flunked algebra, smashed into his new Ford station wagon with the old Buick station wagon, and spent a half hour in the bathroom using up a whole can of Helene Curtis hairspray. For one thrilling moment, I was his Seabiscuit, Audrey Hepburn, and Wonder Woman rolled into one. I was his heroine.”—Academy Award-winning actress Diane Keaton (1946-2025), Then Again (2011)

Why did the passing of Diane Keaton over the weekend sadden me the way it did? It shouldn’t have. At age 79, she was at the leading edge of the baby boom, the demographic to which I belong—one that, even among friends and relatives, never mind celebrities, has faced mortality, leaving those of us left behind pondering the losses.

In her memoir Then Again, Keaton herself reflected with rueful irony on the famous people she met whose aging surprised her, notably Audrey Hepburn at the 1977 Academy Awards: “Backstage, I pretended to listen to her words, but in truth I couldn’t get my mind off age and what it does to a person.”

Maybe I was so stunned by the news of Keaton’s death—and why she was, too, by seeing Hepburn in person, two decades after she burst onto the screen—because of the nature of her medium.

If movie actors are lucky and they don’t mind transitioning into character roles, they can continue to work even after gray hairs and wrinkles become impossible to ignore. Yet it remains the case that, unlike the stage, film preserves their early appearances, when they are young, vibrant and luminous.

Maybe that’s why, for today’s “Quote of the Day,” I decided to concentrate not on Keaton’s thoughts on growing older, but on her early days—even before she was a professional.

Her “Eureka” moment in high school, I think, epitomizes what convinces so many actors to pursue this as a calling, no matter how many discouraging experiences they may subsequently have. It’s the same kind of thunderstruck realization that animates the finest show-business memoir I know, playwright Moss Hart’s Act One.

In Keaton’s case, the applause she heard from an audience enabled her to triumph over her awkwardness by incorporating it into her persona and making it endearing, the way she would more than a decade later as Annie Hall—and inspire a moment of pride in her family that would only increase with the years.

This Day in TV History (Georgia Engel, Ted’s Sweet-Voiced Wife on ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ Dies)

 

Apr. 12, 2019— Georgia Engel, an actress who achieved the greatest fame of her five-decade career in her mid-20s, as wide-eyed, sweet-voiced innocent Georgette on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, died at age 70 in Princeton, NJ.

The cause of death was undetermined, because Ms. Engel, a Christian Scientist, had not sought medical for any ailment.

I have had a longstanding fascination in Ms. Engel, and not just because she became a delightful addition to The Mary Tyler Moore Show in its third season.

I find that one takes an extra interest in a well-known person if a relative has encountered that person somewhere. It gives you a sense, though sometimes illusory, that you might know more about this individual than the public does.

That was the case with me, as a favorite uncle of mine, a doorman in Ms. Engel’s New York apartment building, told me once, with a smile, that she was like her character on the great sitcom: “just as nice…and just as dumb.”

For a long time, I accepted that judgment unquestioningly. Now, I am not only uncertain that Ms. Engel was like this, but I tend to doubt it. The dumb part, that is.

It’s not just because actors are often more complicated than the rest of us—able to play multiple character types—but also because many people mistakenly think that individuals with soft, often childlike voices are not smart.

It took a while, but by early adulthood I had learned from familiarity with people with these voices that this was a gross misreading of their brain power.

Ms. Engel’s high-pitched voice was not a trick, the way that Melissa Rauch’s was when playing Bernadette on The Big Bang Theory. It was hers, and it often led to being stereotyped as a dumb blonde.

But those who thought that way in Hollywood did her an injustice. As paradoxical as it may seem, it takes intelligence to play naivete convincingly. In this respect, Ms. Engel was following the path taken by the Oscar-winning Judy Holliday in films like Adam’s Rib and Born Yesterday.

When Ms. Engel joined the cast of MTM, she ended up filling voids left by Valerie Harper and Cloris Leachman when they departed for the spinoffs Rhoda and Phyllis, respectively. She provided a perspective outside the walls of WJM that went missing without Rhoda and Phyllis.

Georgette’s presence as the girlfriend (and later, wife) of Ted Baxter allowed viewers to see the stentorian anchorman not merely as egotistical, but as needy and vulnerable—more human, in other words. 

As Alexis Gunderson's fine tribute to the character (and actress) from Paste back in February 2022 notes, her "apparent obliviousness to the rotten parts of life ends up being her superpower."

Moreover, dedication, self-discipline, and adaptability enabled Ms. Engel to maintain a viable long-term career long after MTM ended its seven-season run in 1977. 

I was thrilled, decades later, to see her appearances on Everybody Loves Raymond, and New York-area theater fans grew to cherish her in musicals like The Drowsy Chaperone and Half Time.

This Day in Rock ‘n’ Roll History (Joni Mitchell Hits Commercial Peak With ‘Court and Spark’)

 

Jan. 17, 1974— Many fans of Joni Mitchell who knew her best as a folk music artist must have heard her sixth studio album, Court and Spark, with some astonishment. 

Her music had long depicted the conflict between love and emotional autonomy. But this new collection of 11 songs reflected her desire for creative freedom beyond musical boundaries, too, as she added new rock ‘n’ roll and jazz textures to what she called her “chords of inquiry.”

The prior year had passed without the release of a Mitchell LP, the first time this had happened since the start of her recording career. It was not a vacation, nor even an emotional withdrawal and regrouping after crushing end of a love affair, as had happened before For the Roses.

Instead, she took to trying out new sounds, and testing which musicians could help her achieve these looser, breezier rhythms. Even many of the Southern California rock musicians that Mitchell had befriended had trouble with concepts that sounded too abstract to them.

The turning point came when session musician Russ Kunkel suggested she find a jazz drummer. She found not only a jazz drummer, but an entire ensemble: Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, whose musicians played on the entire album.

The extended studio recording sessions turned out to be time well-spent. The first single from Court and Spark, “Raised on Robbery” (maybe my favorite song from the LP), benefited from the horns from LA Express and Robbie Robertson’s lead guitar licks complementing Mitchell’s breathless, saucy vocals.

But it was the follow-up, “Help Me,” which became the only record by the Canadian-born singer-songwriter to crack the Billboard “Hot 100,” peaking at #7 and helping the LP achieve platinum status.

Well, you can’t have everything. One thing Mitchell could have used a bit more of was recognition from the recording industry as a whole. 

But Court and Spark won only one Grammy out of four nominations: Best Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s), for “Down to You” (given to Mitchell and Tom Scott), losing out to Olivia Newton-John for Record of the Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and to Stevie Wonder for Album of the Year.

Much too much ink was spilled in the Seventies on Mitchell’s love life, including in relation to Court and Spark. At a half-century remove, it all feels stale and beside the point.

What matters now—and it should have then—was not her romantic, but her creative, restlessness.

Critics who charged Mitchell with being merely autobiographical and self-absorbed now had to reckon with a lyricist whose powers of observation were never more apparent, fully a match for the watercolor “The Mountain Loves the Sea” that this former art student used for the cover of her latest album.

Readers may point to other examples on the album of her growing tendency to look outward, but these are mine:

·       * “Raised on Robbery,” inspired by Mitchell witnessing a hooker attempting to pick up a man in a Toronto hotel bar who’s more focused on a hockey game;

·       * “Free Man in Paris,” informed by Mitchell’s trip to Paris, watching then-boss David Geffen of Electra-Asylum Records seeking a short respite from his normal round of “dreamers and telephone screamers”; and

·       * “People’s Parties,” in which the singer-songwriter evoked compassion for the kind of people she met at Southern Cal social gatherings who, though seemingly possessing “a lot of style,” are desperately hiding their insecurities, including the “photo beauty” who all of a sudden is “crying on someone’s knee.”

Equally remarkable were arrangements that didn’t make the final cut for Court and Spark. One track I have in mind is this extraordinary, extended “Piano Suite” of “Down to You / Court and Spark /Car on a Hill,” which Mitchell finally released on Archives Vol. 3: The Asylum Years, 1972-1975, this past fall.

In a few years, Bob Dylan would evoke those cursed “to know and feel too much within,” a group that certainly included Mitchell. An eighth grader when Court and Spark was released, I read its printed lyrics without grasping the struggle it took to put them to paper, or to sing them before thousands.

I was even less able to comprehend her album-to-album evolution, the complex chords she wove around her delicate, intricate lyrics, or the dizzying variety in tones displayed in this career pinnacle. All of that could only come from a musician who, though analytical and introspective, also delighted in fun and collaboration. 

But somehow, I still managed to absorb enough of what she was trying to convey to know Mitchell was something special.

Within only a couple of years, Mitchell had become so enamored of jazz arrangements that, with Mingus (named for the jazz innovator with whom she collaborated before his death from cancer), she had more or less left folk and rock—really, the pop mainstream of the time.

As with another contemporary idiosyncratic female singer-songwriter, Laura Nyro, radio stations were not ready to give Mitchell much airtime for such jazz experimentation.

Mitchell didn’t care; she was impervious to the moans of record-company execs for more commercial fare, or record buyers who kept yelling in concert for past hits. As she told Cameron Crowe in a 1979 Rolling Stone interview:

“You have two options. You can stay the same and protect the formula that gave you your initial success. They’re going to crucify you for staying the same. If you change, they’re going to crucify you for changing. But staying the same is boring. And change is interesting. So of the two options, I’d rather be crucified for changing.”

Flashback, May 1973: ‘Rhymin’ Simon’ Continues to Propel Paul’s Post-Artie Career

The 50^th anniversary this month of the release of There Goes Rhymin’ Simon would have been reason enough to write about this LP that cemented the commercial strength of Paul Simon apart from longtime partner Art Garfunkel.

But two bits of news about the singer-songwriter over the last week may well bring to a close his remarkable pop career.

First, Simon released Seven Psalms, a CD that is, by all accounts, not a pop recording at all. With his continual quest to experiment with musical textures (including from outside North America), there is a real question if he cares to return to the rock ‘n’ roll or folk genres that inspired him in the first place.

The second bit of news is the report that, during studio sessions for Seven Psalms, he “quite suddenly” and mysteriously lost most of the hearing in his right ear. After nursing for several weeks the unsuccessful hope that his condition would soon improve, he now wonders if he will be able to perform live ever again.

Certainly other singers and musicians have dealt for years with hearing impairment (indeed, I was astonished to discover, from this 2018 AARP article, just how extensive that list is—everyone from Ozzy Osbourne to Barbra Streisand).

But, at 81 years of age and following a nasty bout of COVID-19 as well, Simon’s opportunities to take the stage will diminish, while his periodic bouts of insecurity and depression may very well increase. In that case, even the creative energy needed to compose a song may well ebb. So it becomes an open question whether we will hear from him in any creative forum.

The Wall Street Journal review that first alerted me to the release of Seven Psalms noted that it was only the 15^th studio album of Simon’s six-decade career. If it turns out to be an unexpected career valedictory, it makes it all the more worthwhile to retrace his artistic evolution--including There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, the second album in his solo career.

In a post from last year, I expressed my abiding enthusiasm for “American Tune” as a powerful lyrical statement on the state of the country, both at the time of its composition (the divisive Vietnam-Watergate era) and today.

I did not realize until further researching the song now, however, that it was based on the 18^th-century J.S. Bach chorale “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” (translated, appropriately enough, as “O Sacred Head Now Wounded"). The mood is one of resignation amid “the age’s most uncertain hour.”

It is a distinct outlier for an album otherwise brimming with looseness, optimism, and humor, reflecting Simon’s joy as a husband (“Something So Right”) and new father (“St. Judy’s Comet”).

In contrast, the album’s first single, “Kodachrome,” is a rollicking retrospective just before the onset of middle age, with the narrator recalling his school days and life as a bachelor. Its jaunty, carefree tone would have been one that other Americans who, like Simon, came of age in the Fifties would have identified with, as the nation indulged in a nostalgia craze that saw the Broadway premiere of Grease, the movie premiere of American Graffiti, and, on TV, the first episode of Happy Days.

“Going Home” was the original title of the song, but it was only a temporary phrase. As he told veteran deejay Scott Muni in a 1988 interview, "I was thinking as I was doing it, 'Well, I'm certainly not going to call the song 'Going Home,' there must be 250 songs called 'Going Home.' That's not going to do anything. 

Knowing his ambivalence about any association with his days with Garfunkel, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he also resisted any comparison with their hit “Homeward Bound.”

“Kodachrome” turned out to be a felicitous replacement, at least lyrically. (The use of a branded name led the song to be banned from the BBC.) From it emerged those “nice bright colors” in the refrain, and “everything looks worse in black and white” as a wry comment on the women he knew when he was single.

A couple of years after “Kodachrome’s” release, at an assembly at my high school, the opening line—“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school”—provoked many students to leap to their feet, undoubtedly to the discomfort of the administration and faculty.

There Goes Rhymin’ Simon represented something of a studio departure for Simon, both in the number of multiple producers (not just Simon and his longtime producer from the albums with Garfunkel, Roy Halee, but also Phil Ramone, Paul Samwell-Smith, and even the accomplished Alabama studio musicians, the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section) and the number of multiple voices (also including the New Jersey folk music duo Maggie and Terre Roche, as well as the gospel quintet, the Dixie Hummingbirds).

In general, I prefer Simon’s songs from his collaboration with Garfunkel to his solo work. But his penchant for trying out new sounds and musical directions (demonstrated even more dramatically with Graceland and The Rhythm of the Saints) is something to be respected, and the results in these cases, as with the best of There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, are entirely admirable.

The public certainly embraced it. “Kodachrome” and “Loves Me Like a Rock” each shot to #2 on the singles chart, and the album as a whole sold two million copies in its first year alone. A late friend of mine said she regarded Bob Dylan as America’s pop poet and Simon as its pop psychologist. By that standard, Simon was expressing the mood of a generation transitioning from youthful protest to something approaching private happiness—still tentative, but hopeful.

Song Lyric of the Day (Joni Mitchell, on ‘These Dark Café Days’)

“All good dreamers pass this way some day
Hidin' behind bottles in dark cafes, dark cafes
Only a dark cocoon before I get my gorgeous wings and fly away
Only a phase, these dark cafe days.” — Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, “The Last Time I Saw Richard," from her LP Blue (1971)
 
Like so many other baby boomers, I was astonished to discover that the legendary Joni Mitchell had made a surprise appearance at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival last Sunday. It was even more glorious to think that she had performed nine songs, including one on her guitar—the first time she had done so before a paying audience since her 55^th birthday.
 
On her live 1974 double-LP set, Miles of Aisles, Mitchell expressed her ambivalence about fulfilling fan expectations, telling an audience, “That's one thing that's always the major difference between the performing arts to me, and being a painter. A painter does a painting, and he does a painting — and that's it, you know. He’s had the joy of creating it, and he hangs on a wall, and somebody buys it, somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it, and it sits up in a loft somewhere until he dies. But nobody ever said to Van Gogh, 'Paint A Starry Night again, man!' You know? He painted it, and that was it.”
 
This past weekend, however, the 78-year-old musician and artist seemed genuinely delighted in revisiting old fan favorites like “Carey,” “Big Yellow Taxi,” “A Case of You,” “Help Me,” “The Circle Game,” and “Both Sides Now.” Collectively, they could be her “songs of experience,” to borrow a phrase from William Blake.
 
The lyrics I chose for today’s quote represent perhaps the more dominant strain of her youth: songs of flight (“my gorgeous wings”), of the bohemian yearning for musical, artistic and personal freedom.
 
She would be the first to tell you of the personal price she paid for that quest (discussed in this prior post of mine about “Urge for Going”). But they form as indelible a part of her legacy as her “songs of experience.”
 
The Newport audience was honoring her stunning contribution to music with their full-throated response. But there were other reasons for their warm welcome back to her.
 
Chief among those reasons is this: everybody loves a comeback story, and Mitchell had to overcome greater odds than most to make it back onstage. Vanessa Romo’s blog post for Georgia Public Broadcasting relates how, following the singer’s 2015 brain aneurysm, even relearning how to speak and walk was a struggle.
 
But Mitchell took matters a step further: “Playing an instrument and vocal cord coordination, those sorts of things, are really, super complex fine movements that would take a long time to relearn," Dr. Anthony Wang, a neurosurgeon at Ronald Reagan UCLA Hospital, told Ms. Rono.
 
Mitchell relearned how to play the guitar by watching past videos of herself to see where she put her fingers. But the rest came through the stubbornness that sometimes drove hit-bent record execs to distraction in her youth, or what her attending surgeon correctly termed her “will and grit."
 
Over the past several years, baby boomers have grown used to the icons of their youth leaving the stage through physical decline and death.
 
But for one glorious moment this past weekend, they were able to witness a return of a genius who created words and chords that form part of the collective soundtrack of our lives. It was indeed something to cheer—even sing—about.

(The photo of Ms. Mitchell accompanying this post came from an Asylum Records ad from 1974.)

This Day in Literary History (James Jones Survives Pearl Harbor to Pen ‘From Here to Eternity’)

Dec. 7, 1941—The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor left roughly 2,400 American dead. But one witness in the 27^th Infantry Regiment at nearby Schofield Barracks, Private James Jones, lived to write a bestselling novel about that tragic day and the world it brought to a violent end, From Here to Eternity.

As he recalled what he was doing that dawn 80 years ago in World War II: A Chronicle of Soldiering:

“On Sunday mornings in those days there was a bonus ration of a half–pint of milk, to go with your eggs or pancakes and syrup, also Sunday specials. Most of us were more concerned with getting and holding onto our half–pints of milk than with listening to the explosions that began rumbling up toward us from Wheeler Field two miles away. ‘They doing some blasting?’ some old–timer said through a mouthful of pancakes. It was not till the first low–flying fighter came skidding, whammering low overhead with his MGs going that we ran outside, still clutching our half–pints of milk to keep them from being stolen, aware with a sudden sense of awe that we were seeing and acting in a genuine moment of history.”

Three decades later, Jones still remembered a Japanese pilot’s toothy grin showing through goggles as he strafed the base; Battleship Row, a “living inferno” where men, “precipitated into full–scale war without previous experience and with no preparation, performed feats of incredible heroism and rescue that seemed unbelievable later”; and, from a distance, Pearl Harbor itself, with “the huge rising smoke columns high in the clear sunny Hawaiian air for miles.”

A 20-year-old assistant clerk with aspirations of becoming a writer, Jones gained enough material from his wartime experience for a three-decade career. But his rookie effort was the one that brought him the greatest success, not only netting him the National Book Award in 1952 but becoming the basis of the Oscar-winning film that has continued to keep his characters in the public eye.

Despite having read Jones’ first novel and being generally familiar with the outlines of his subsequent career, I was unaware of many details of his Army experience until I read Roy Morris’ fine article, “Before Eternity,” in the Autumn 2021 issue of MHQ.

I did not know, for instance, that Jones not only based many of his characters in the novel on soldiers in his own unit but also that in several cases, he used only minimal means of veiling their identities (e.g., not even bothering to change their surnames, in some cases).

I was midway through high school when I read Jones’ blockbuster. It was the time of my life when, with the magic combination of the fewest responsibilities and the most energy, I could spend time with many, often long, books.

Even so, I felt my attention severely strained by a novel that, for more than 800 pages, qualifies as a true doorstop. In fact, it could be argued that, for all its concessions to the censorship code of the early 1950s, Daniel Taradash’s screenplay effectively channeled the essentials of Jones’ sprawling plot.

For all the honesty and ambition of Jones’ first published work of fiction—his attempt to depict an entire complex community—it lost much in terms of economy and artistic control. This might have been part of the reason why his best-known literary achievement has not had the same staying power of Ernest Hemingway’s influential novel of World War I, A Farewell to Arms.

In a profile I wrote for my college newspaper years ago, Frank MacShane joked that he had been labeled “the biographer of the stepchildren of literature” for writing about critically underrated authors. Although his reclamation efforts have borne some fruit in the case of John O’Hara and considerably more for Raymond Chandler, he did not produce a similar widespread revival of interest with his 1985 biography of Jones, Into Eternity.

Nevertheless, From Here to Eternity retains considerable value. Readers prepared to look beyond the pair of romances involving Sgt. Milt Warden, Karen Holmes, Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt, and Alma Burke will find both a visceral picture of the peacetime army before America became a world power and a shocking treatment of a military establishment rife with institutional corruption and abuse of power 

Jones would have none of the “Good War” mythology already taking place in the postwar period. He was intent on delivering a decidedly unromantic rendering of the caste system in the military. This novel and the two others that formed his “World War II Trilogy,” The Thin Red Line and the unfinished Whistle, reflected his belief that “In every war there were two wars, the war of the officers and the war of the enlisted men.”

Thus, while officers in that pre-war period might attend clubs where they would even present calling cards, enlisted men would face overwhelming pressures to conform and arbitrary discipline that could land them in brutal stockades.

In the latter respect, From Here to Eternity functions as what today might be seen as a dissection of toxic masculinity. Females are cheated on and exploited; officers look the other way or even encourage bullying (including pressure by Karen Holmes’ husband, the commanding officer in the unit, to induce Prewitt to join the boxing team); and enlisted men endure tedium that can suddenly transform into after-hours barroom fisticuffs and back-alley knife fights.

Within a year, Jones would be not just a witness to war but also a combatant, participating in the Guadalcanal campaign. His experience there—killing with a bayonet two Japanese soldiers—unsettled him. Wounded in early 1943, he underwent extensive medical treatment at a military hospital before being honorably discharged the following year.  

Although Jones’ physical wounds were visible, his psychic ones—what we would call today post-traumatic stress disorder—were less so. His alcoholism, his daughter Kaylie contended in her memoir Lies My Mother Never Told Me, combined with the malaria he contracted in the war to produce the heart condition that ended his life in 1977. 

The school of realism to which Jones belonged may seem less attractive to modern readers than the surrealism of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. But Jones is just as critical in his way of the military as a soul-killing institution that even destroys its most dedicated members than these two other World War II novels. Clumsy and even artless as From Here to Eternity can seem at points, it also remains vibrant because of Jones’ fierce commitment to truth.

One of Jones’ most eloquent advocates is Joan Didion. Though her exacting, sometimes minimalist style can appear light years away from Jones, she wrote a deeply moving appreciation of the veteran-turned-novelist not long after his death in her essay “In the Island,” published in her collection The White Album:

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image, and not only Schofield Barracks but a great deal of Honolulu itself has always belonged for me to James Jones.”

Will America Survive the Great Trumpression?

I started to think about this post back in late winter, when Americans began to wrestle with the implications of COVID-19. I held back on finishing it, looking for other items to write about that were geared toward specific dates and/or less likely to send my blood pressure climbing.

Unfortunately, the main outlines of this piece remain as valid now as they were then. The only differences are that the list of daily outrages perpetrated by Donald Trump has grown far lengthier and that the American people will be coping with the resulting destruction for at least some time no matter who they elect President this week.

Thousands of articles have been published over these last several months, attempting to assess the unprecedented nature of the current American crisis. To call this a “recession” understates its complexity and, consequently, its peril to every American citizen.

A New Term for Our National Emergency

We need a new word coinage that will encompass this in all its dimensions, and assign responsibility for its creation and perpetuation. That phrase is The Great Trumpression:

*In its economic severity, the term lies between a recession and depression. Earlier this year, the U.S. unemployment rate had climbed to 14.7%, a level not seen since the Great Depression. Even its current rate of 7.9% is well above pre-pandemic levels. Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter remain the preeminent symbols of Presidential haplessness in the face of high joblessness, but Trump enjoys a dubious “distinction” possessed by neither of these two unfortunates: he has thrust 12.6 million unemployed Americans into a disease-ravaged environment, where it is more difficult to interview with or gain the attention of potential employers, and where his administration has been itching for the Supreme Court to rule against the Affordable Health Care Act (ACA) that so many depend on.

*The term also involves suppression of dissenters and even bearers of bad news. Put aside voter suppression (an effort that Trump has been pursuing energetically, as noted by Eric Levitz of New York Magazine). Forget about tolerating Democrats, the press or late-night comics: Trump can’t even abide opposition or even mild internal criticism from fellow Republicans. Last fall, even with high approval ratings for Trump among registered Republicans, state GOP officials canceled primaries in which Mark Sanford, Joe Walsh and William Weld were set to run. They did not dare the remotest possibility that voters could register adverse opinions, or that the President who could send them federal funds might retaliate for not doing their wishes. They surely feared an early-morning Twitter assault. This President hinted in a debate four years ago that he could attack Sen. Rand Paul for his looks, tweeted that Ted Cruz’s dad may have had something to do with JFK’s assassination, fired Attorney-General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Robert Mueller investigation, then ridiculed him enough to turn a majority of GOP voters against him in a race to re-join the Senate. This is also a President who, as soon as the impeachment inquiry was over, fired accuser Col. Alexander Vindman and his brother Yevgeny from their jobs with the National Security Council. (Even Bill Clinton waited till the closing days of his Presidency to sack Linda Tripp for her role in instigating the Lewinsky investigation.) To his everlasting shame, Trump has not only gleefully hinted that he will sack Anthony Fauci after Election Day but has whipped up animosity so extreme that this immunologist, honored by past administrations of both parties, now requires a security detail. But, at last, that suppression may have finally come home to roost. In keeping the lid on eight weeks of coronavirus reports from early to mid-summer, Trump’s aides ensured that COVID-19 would spike just as voters would be going to the polls, with the administration’s denials and sorry performance fresh in their minds.

*It implies repression of marginalized groups at home and abetting autocrats abroad. Trump’s use of federal military force to crack down on protests against police brutality—not just constitutionally dubious but hypocritical, given the conservative movement’s longtime extolling of states’ authority—diverts attention from his failure to mitigate the pandemic. This sham show of strength is being used against a group disproportionately affected by the health crisis and the economic downturn. Trump’s “playbook”—encouraging far-right nationalists and scoffing at COVID-19—has been followed by fellow aspiring international authoritarians, notably Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who, in styling himself the “Trump of the South,” initially scoffed at masks, then, when the pandemic worsened, imitated the U.S. President in advocating tirelessly for hydroxychloroquine.

*It facilitates the proper assigning of responsibility for the twin pandemic-economic collapse. Ten years ago, Republicans fell over themselves calling the ACA “Obamacare.” However one might feel about the nickname, it focused voters’ attention on who should be credited or blamed for sweeping legislation that would alter how Americans received medical care. A similar need for accountability would be met by assigning Trump’s name to the current crisis. Earlier this year, National Catholic Reporter contributor Michael Sean Winters suggested the term “Trump tents” in case the military erected MASH tents in parking lots to handle hospitals pushed to capacity by COVID-19. That event may yet come to pass, but “Trumpression” will certainly in the meantime convey what has been going on since March—and what will likely continue to happen in the new year, even with a change of Presidents.

Trump Branding in Reverse

Another delicious aspect of this neologism is that it inverts Trump’s hideous branding practices. For nearly four decades, users of Trump properties had to stomach seeing his name in big letters and bright lights, no matter the extent of his involvement, all to satisfy his colossal egotism (a practice only recently receding as the name loses its allure). Now, with “Trumpression,” that megalomania will be properly checked.

Throughout his real estate career, Trump sought every opportunity to seize credit but avoid blame. He was everywhere when The Art of the Deal trumpeted him (falsely) as a great businessman, but was saved from a total collapse of his businesses because of cash infusions from his father.

The pattern continued into his Presidency. When disasters occurred on the watch of other Presidents (e.g., John F. Kennedy with the Bay of Pigs, Jimmy Carter with the failed hostage mission), they appeared before the public and accepted responsibility.

In contrast, Trump said, “I don’t take responsibility at all” for virus testing delays in March when they could have made a material difference, just as, a few weeks later, he said he “can’t imagine why” there could have been a spike in hotline calls about disinfectants after he suggested injecting them to treat COVID-19.  

He complains at rallies about media that cry “COVID, COVID, COVID,” even as his campaign requests that attendees sign statements absolving the President of any liability in case they contract the disease at venues in which most attendees disdain mask wearing or social distancing.

The term “Trumpression” assures that this slide away from responsibility ends. For weeks early in the crisis, he conducted daily press briefings—colossal wastes of time surpassed in fatuity only by the interminable anti-capitalist harangues of Fidel Castro at the height of his power. These rambling, content-free, propaganda exercises falsely reassured his followers that the boastful empty suit now occupying the Oval Office was acting like a true President.

In fact, it was governors who were seizing the initiative. They took the risks of lost revenues, lawsuits from businessmen, Fox News harangues, and—in the case of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer—crazed libertarians’ kidnapping plots; he took the bows for the one tangible result of those stiff measures: preventing COVID-related deaths and caseloads from rising even higher. By refusing to lead a federal response to the coronavirus, he let them take the rap for the failures that were his own doing.

The term “Trumpression” puts an end to this charade. It will indicate concisely to future students of American history the identity of the principal National Insecurity President. For contemporary voters, the tag signals that clown time is over.

COVID’s ‘Wartime President’ Surrenders, Without a Shot Fired

Back in his spring five o’clock follies, the onetime Candidate Bone Spur said that he had in fact felt at times like a “wartime president.” How rich!

Too bad he doesn’t seem to have studied the Civil War, or else he might have learned how Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman used a version of their old chief Winfield Scott’s “Anaconda Plan” at the start of the war—till they came along, applied inadequately by prior Union commanders—to coordinate efforts simultaneously across several regions to bring down the Confederacy.

Instead, the struggle to contain COVID was hampered by Trump’s haphazard, half-hearted strategy of letting states fend for themselves, even to the point where they were competing for scarce medical supplies. Later, he even threatened withdrawal of aid from states like Pennsylvania, New York and Michigan whose governors criticized the federal approach.

Trump projects onto opponents the faults of himself or his opportunistic toadies—in this case, the evisceration of attempts to prepare a strategy to fight future pandemics. He laid the groundwork for the fumbled federal response by cutting the number of staffers who could identify health problems in China and by reducing funding for the Centers for Disease Control.

Subsequently, by refusing to take COVID-19 seriously and flashing contradictory signals about the need for wearing masks, he not only undercut pandemic preparation procedures by the Democratic predecessor he has loathed for possessing the intelligence and class that he lacked, but even earlier foundational efforts by the Republican George W. Bush. (“If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare,” Dubya said—as far back as 2005.)

Trump couldn’t be bothered to learn any more than the rudimentary facts about COVID-19, so he put others in charge of dealing with it. But who was it? Not the scientists or doctors who studied the disease’s transmission and who should have been involved. No, it was Mike Pence and Jared Kushner. Even then, he couldn’t decide which one would have ultimate authority.

The upshot? Two adjectives this WWE aficionado loves to apply to others but never himself: “Pathetic” and “weak.” The nation once admired by the rest of the world for its scientific advances muffed the opportunity to lead the international campaign against the greatest medical threat of our time. “Promises kept”? Not by the President who continually said the disease would go away by summer, then that America was “rounding the corner” in dealing with it.

This is what the GOP let themselves in for when they acquitted Trump on all impeachment charges: a resentful, self-pitying Fox watcher and Twitter practitioner who went AWOL against COVID-19. If historian Barbara Tuchman were alive today, she would surely want to add this as a chapter to The March of Folly.

The Lasting Residue of the COVID Nightmare

In the beginning, Trump insisted that the coronavirus would eventually “wash away.” Not only did that never happen, but the casualties have only mounted. Each repetition or variation of that phrase makes him sound more like Herbert Hoover claiming in the Great Depression that “Prosperity is just around the corner.”

Hoover, at least, only thought that restarting production was simply a matter of injecting confidence into the American economy. Trump, we now know from tape recordings released by Bob Woodward, knew as far back as February that "this is deadly stuff."

His claims to the contrary since then have been an attempt to dance around the judgment of voters, just as he managed, from the 1980s to 2000s, to evade bankers’ attempt to claw back the millions he owed them. (Witness his repeated assertions over the last few weeks that a vaccine would be available by Election Day—a date that even spokesmen now shamefacedly agree was “kind of an arbitrary deadline.”)

Trump has been sure that COVID will be gone, “like a dream.” I think the more exact noun is “nightmare,” with scenes not easily forgotten when we awake to the brighter tomorrow he claims desperately will come any day now. (Even his own brush with the disease has left him unchastened about spreading misinformation.)

The danger is that, before then, it will leave a lasting residue on American civic, commercial and even private life. Even before a single state government had ordered a lockdown, many Americans were already withdrawing from going to offices, attending trade shows, using public transportation, eating in enclosed restaurants, or shopping at malls for fear of contradicting a disease that even then was growing exponentially.

Look around now and the danger has spread. It’s more than just the downtowns of blue cities and suburbs that feature gaping holes. Now, states that initially thought their lower population density and Republican voting base would somehow magically save them are experiencing infection spikes and strained health-care capacity. And it is all because Trump feared how the damage to the economy would affect his reelection hopes.

Ironic, isn’t it, that America’s greatest germaphobe forfeited the chance to rally his countrymen against COVID-19—and now risks not only defeat at the polls but a mortal threat to the multinational business portfolio he never divested himself of?

Uniquely in the annals of Presidential leadership, Trump has demonstrated how impaired moral character and intellectual laziness can combine to produce monumental managerial disaster.

I have no doubt that history will judge this Great Trumpression harshly. That will be so whether a victorious Trump immediately fires dissenters like Fauci or a losing Trump orders the destruction of papers and electronic files that would document his mismanagement and crimes.

What I fear is that somehow, the President will win re-election, and go on to lead America to an even worse catastrophe over the next four years—because each time in his life that Trump has been enabled, he goes on to incur a greater risk and experience a graver crisis of his own creation.

It's not like even some Republicans didn’t foresee what he might do—or undo. Jeb Bush called him appropriately “the chaos candidate” during the 2016 primaries. Then, in July 2019—not only before COVID-19, but even the impeachment battle—conservative columnist George F. Will warned, in an interview on MSNBC, of the lasting damage wrought by Trump to the functioning of government, the civility of political discourse, and the solidity of truth:

“You can't unring the bells. You can't unsay what he is saying. And it's amazing to me…how fast something could go from unthinkable to thinkable to action. And it doesn't seem to me it's going to be easy to just snap back as though this didn't happen. It happened, and he got away with it, and he became president, and there will be emulators.”

The most ardent of Trump’s followers have wanted to “own the liberals,” but, by handing him a second term, they will share ownership in the wreck of the world’s greatest economy and the deterioration of the proud leader of democracy on earth.

Theater Review: Cole Porter’s ‘Kiss Me, Kate,’ From the Roundabout Theatre Co.

All hail Kelli O'Hara. With Bernadette Peters and Donna Murphy now aging out of the leading female roles of Broadway musicals of the Golden Age, she is now the reigning queen of the genre. The best way to appreciate Her Majesty is to catch her Tony-nominated performance in Kiss Me, Kate, the glorious production of Cole Porter’s 1948 musical that finished its run this past weekend at Studio 54.

The Roundabout Theatre Co. had to preserve a delicate balance in this “revisal”: how to mitigate or delete the obvious sexism in that original show without losing the sense of fun that has made it an audience favorite over the years. Some changes might make purists break out in hives (e.g., the late-show number “I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple” has been retitled to “I Am Ashamed That People Are So Simple”).

But for the most point, the changes worked, because the bickering but bewitched pair at the heart of the show—egocentric actor/director/producer Fred Graham and his temperamental star and estranged wife, Lilli Vanessi—gave as good as they get, fully an off-stage match William Shakespeare’s quintessential battle-of-the-sexes couple, Petruchio and Kate from The Taming of the Shrew.

Ms. O’Hara took a while to find her footing as temperamental Lilli, but found her groove midway through Act I, as William Shakespeare’s fictional counterpart to Lilli, Kate of The Taming of the Shrew. In “I Hate Men,” she displays the full extent of her considerable vocal prowess—and a comic ferocity to match.

This production also featured the smooth hand of Scott Ellis, who has directed some of the best musicals of the Roundabout, including Holiday Inn, She Loves Me, and Anything Goes. Even for someone with a great track record, this past season was particularly stellar for him, as he also directed the new Tony-nominated adaptation of Tootsie. One sure touch of his clever hand comes in the scene that sets Kate roaring—when she finds not one, but a whole group of peeping toms hidden in a room, leering at her.

Will Chase, though perfectly serviceable in the double role of strutting Petruchio and egotistical producer Fred Graham, was no match for Brian Stokes Mitchell’s Tony-winning turn in the part. On the other hand, Corbin Bleu, who triumphed in the Roundabout’s well-received Holiday Inn a few years ago, is back to perform similar dance magic as Shakespeare’s Lucentio and Bill Calhoun, the hoofer and gambler who draws the unwelcome attention of the underworld.  And Stephanie Styles shines sweetly, whether as Shakespeare’s Bianca and Porter’s somewhat less innocent Lois Lane/Bianca, in “Always True to You in My Fashion.”

I couldn’t let this opportunity pass behind without expressing my appreciation for the brio exhibited by John Pankow and Tom McGowan in one of the wittiest songs in the Porter catalog, “Brush Up Yer Shakespeare.” It is hard to imagine the mix of iambic pentameter and swinging gangster patois rendered more winningly.

I never saw the 1953 screen adaptation starring Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson in its entirety, so the only point of reference I have for this production is the 1999 revival starring Mitchell and the late, marvelous Marin Mazzie. Despite the fact that Amanda Green was brought in this time to revise the Spewacks’ dialogue, no radical differences exist between the two productions like, say, earlier bouncy versions of Oklahoma and the far darker current one.

Longtime fans of the Roundabout have gotten used to its stagecraft marvels, and this production was no exception. Set designer David Rockwell and his crew conjured up efficiently such varying locales as a hotel, a dressing room, as well as the Padua of Fred’s Bard.

As a Roundabout subscriber, I enjoy their “Celebrity” series of post-performance talk-backs. The series title is a bit exaggerated. (I have seldom seen real celebrity leads come up afterward—indeed, I wonder if their contracts stipulate they’re too big to be obligated to do so!). But from performers who have shown up—along with the Roundabout’s Education Dramaturge, Ted Sod—I have learned a great deal about particular productions and the challenges and exhilaration associated with them, and this talk was very much in that tradition.

For instance, I found out that:

*Bella and Sam Spevack were the husband-and-wife team who wrote the “book”—i.e., a musical’s “libretto” or narrative structure—for Kiss Me, Kate, becoming the first Tony Award winners in this category. Though they based the backstage shenanigans of this musical-within-a-musical on a real theatrical “royal couple,” Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, it also mirrored their own situation: though separated as they began work, working on the show brought them together again. (For more on that original production, see my blog post from 11 years ago.)

*The placement of the musicians differed in this production from most other musicals. Music director Paul Gemignani had definite ideas about where the musicians should play. For instance, by being split in two boxes over the stage, they faced the players without being (literally) looked down on. Second, clarinetist Greg Thymius actually appeared onstage with the company as part of the rousing second-half opener, “Too Darn Hot.”

*Bleu spoke candidly but without self-pity about the physical toll the action can take on players—and what they do to counter this. In his case, it involved ice packs, ibuprofen and eating regularly. The night before this performance, he had tweaked his neck, so he and choreographer Warren Carlyle had to work out what he could and couldn’t do this time. The best thing for him, Bleu noted, was, simply, sleep, with Mondays sacrosanct as rest days, not even involving talking, let alone strenuous moving.