Benjamin Alire Sáenz's 'Everything Begins And Ends At The Kentucky Club': Book Review

BY GARTH GREENWELL

The characters in Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s masterful collection are all travelers between borders. Most obviously, they cross between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, where each of them at some point finds himself in the bar of the book’s title. But these seven stories are really concerned with more difficult boundaries—of class, language, sexuality—that both set these men apart and divide them from themselves.

Juarez is famous from American headlines as one of the most violent cities in the world. Sáenz, who teaches at the University of Texas at El Paso, doesn’t look away from its troubles, and his characters live with the knowledge that “all the laughter in the world could be swept away by a capricious wind at any moment.” But their lives aren’t reducible to headlines, and what remains of these stories isn’t the shock of tragedy and crime, but the human response to it.

Tragedy and crime are at the heart of the book’s first story, “He Has Gone to Be with the Women.” Two men—one a well-known Mexican-American writer, the other a Mexican visiting to care for a dying relative—speak after months of silent glances in an El Paso café. As they begin to know each other, tentatively and uncertainly, each explores the grief the other carries—two brothers lost to a car accident, a mother to the plague of violence against women in Juarez—and grief becomes an occasion for love. “His tears were soaking my shirt,” the writer says. “I wanted to taste them, bathe in them, drown in them.” “I wasn’t the falling-in-love kind of man,” he says later. “But watching Javier at that moment, I wanted to need him. I wanted him to be the air I breathed.” When Javier disappears, gone to “all the nameless women who have been buried in the desert,” the narrator doesn’t know what to do with the feeling that has been awakened: “I was angry at my own heart that refused to give up hope despite the fact that I begged it to give up.” 

Earlier this month, Sáenz was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction—he is the first Latino writer to receive the prize—and the book is a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. It has been met with a great deal of praise, but some critics have raised concerns about the emotionality of these stories, hinting at something excessive or melodramatic about them—as though one final border they cross is that of propriety, the closely policed lines of what we sometimes call “good taste,” lines seldom free from often unstated assumptions about race, class, gender, and sexuality.

It may be true that the emotion in these stories strikes a higher pitch than most current American literary fiction. When passion breaks out in these pages, often after being long repressed, it can take on operatic force: “I wasn’t just sobbing, I was howling,” says the narrator of one story before making a confession of love. “I kept hitting my own chest as if I was trying to tell my heart not to do what it was doing, to stop hurting me, my heart, and I found myself kneeling on the floor and howling and I didn’t even know why.”

But such notes are in the heart’s range, and as I read I found Sáenz’s willingness to sound them brave and bracing. One of the glories of this collection—one of the best new books I’ve read in years—is its full-throatedness, its unapologetic willingness to give voice to extremes of experience, even when those extremes challenge the tidy canons of propriety. Good art, especially good queer art, has always posed such challenges. Love, grief, hopelessness and rage wear their brightest clothes in Sáenz’s work, sharing the page with a clear-eyed acknowledgment that the world is seldom accommodating of individual desires. Love may not often win in these gorgeous stories, but it is always fierce. 

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David McConnell’s 'American Honor Killings: Desire and Rage Among Men': Book Review

Garth Greenwell is the author of Mitko, which won the 2010 Miami University Press Novella Prize and was a finalist for the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award and a Lambda Award. Beginning this fall, he will be an Arts Fellow at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

David McConnell’s 'American Honor Killings: Desire and Rage Among Men': Book Review

BY GARTH GREENWELL

In this unnervingly beautiful new book, David McConnell investigates six murders of gay men over the last two decades. McConnell’s focus is on the perpetrators of these crimes—men he interviews and corresponds with and locks eyes with at their trials—and one of the most disturbing and profound aspects of his account is the fact that of desire and rage, the two terms of his subtitle, desire is by far the more resonant. However twisted or thwarted, desire is everywhere in this book—in the victims, who sometimes long for their attackers; in the murderers, some of them gay, all of them longing for an ideal they feel is under threat; and in the author himself, who hovers somewhere between perpetrator and victim, an ambiguity he makes fascinating use of in the book. 

The most gripping of these stories concerns Darrell Madden, who in Oklahoma City in 2007 murdered the 62-year-old Steven Domer (See Towleroad's coverage HERE). With a fellow white nationalist, Bradley Qualls—a partner in the crime whom Madden, in a little drama of dominance, would also kill—Madden posed as a hustler to lure his victim. As he does often in this book, McConnell takes us into the scene, putting us closer to the action than we might like. “Gazes snagged on them, slid down their bodies, and were nervously yanked loose,” he writes, cannily putting us in both perspectives at once--that of the two men waiting for their prey, but also of the men driving past them, most of them much older, most of them solitary, most of them on their own sort of hunt.

McConnell has written two novels, and it’s out of a novelist’s respect for the twists and textures of individual lives that he refuses familiar explanations for the violence he describes. He rejects from the start the idea of “gay panic,” but he also questions the category of “hate crimes,” proposing instead that we call these acts “honor killings.”

These murders aren’t about individual hatred, McConnell argues, and they’re finally less about attacking a despised group than defending the honor of an ideal of what manhood means: “These killers….saw, or needed to see, themselves as believers, soldiers, avengers, purifiers, as exemplars of manhood.” This may be a question of emphasis—surely a preoccupation with honor entails hating whatever brings dishonor—but McConnell is convincing in his insistence that each of these killers is “a far more convoluted being than our culture...wants to allow.”

This is certainly the case with Darrell Madden, whose life emerges as equal parts tragedy and farce. McConnell spent years meeting and corresponding with Madden, and he gives us his history in pieces, moving repeatedly from the scene of murder to the life that led to it. We learn that Madden had a brief career as a porn actor, and that what led him to white nationalism was his own desperate attraction to skinheads.

Madden speaks to McConnell about these things with an openness suggesting trust and fondness, feelings that are to a significant degree reciprocated. McConnell acknowledges Madden’s charm and attractiveness—“he was, almost reflexively, an expert seducer”—and the scenes between them read like an uncensored version of the relationship between Perry Smith and Truman Capote in In Cold Blood. Hidden desire and fascination pulse in the paragraphs of Capote’s classic book; in American Honor Killings, that desire is laid bare.

And so the most interesting character in these pages is finally McConnell himself, and the book’s key investigations are of his own motives and desires. He writes of “the joy of violence,” of “a wild physical pleasure of release,” of “brute and happy manliness”; he claims, speaking of skinhead culture, that “the solidarity the group engenders is, basically, love.” It’s clear that McConnell understands and to some extent shares the longing for pure manhood and ideal brotherhood that sets the men he studies on their paths. “What am I,” he writes, worrying at “the nagging question of whether I’m more Steve or more Darrell”—more victim or perpetrator of these crimes.

That’s a question many men might ask, and what’s most exciting about American Honor Killings is the way its nuance and detail sharpen the point of its cultural critique. McConnell reads individual acts of violence against gay men as signs of stress or fracture in an ideal masculinity we collectively adore. “The constant irony,” McConnell writes in a telling passage about Madden, “was that daily life among the skinheads in prison was strikingly similar to scenes from the gay porn movies Darrell had appeared in not long before.” The internet is full of porn for gay men in which gay men are brutalized, often by men who match Madden’s skinhead ideal of manhood.  This lends credence to the most unsettling conclusion of this excellent book: that the desire in McConnell’s title is our own.

Garth Greenwell is the author of Mitko, which won the 2010 Miami University Press Novella Prize and was a finalist for the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award and a Lambda Award. Beginning this fall, he will be an Arts Fellow at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

'Pippin’ Revival Opens On Broadway: REVIEW

BY NAVEEN KUMAR

Of the incredible human feats being performed on Broadway, perhaps few are more spectacular than the acrobatics on display in director Diane Paulus’ revival of Pippin, which opened last Thursday at the Music Box Theatre. Circus performers and Broadway veterans alike move through the air with great ease, transforming the much loved though decidedly bizarre 1972 musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and book by Roger O. Hirson into something of a marvel.

Schwartz and Hirson’s story, performed for the audience by a group of players, is a string of trials and life experiments of a boy prince searching for an extraordinary life. In a fitting and imaginative twist on the show’s framing device, Paulus transforms the players into a troupe of circus performers, adding spectacle and structure to the musical’s episodic plot.

Patina Miller heads up the troupe as Lead Player (here reconceived as a female role), driving the production’s momentum with radiant energy and powerhouse vocals. Matthew James Thomas appropriately strikes a more ordinary note as the directionless prince Pippin. Though he goes along with the Lead Player’s spectacular schemes to give his life meaning, from waging war to sexual excess, in the end he seems destined for the conventional outcome that's in store for him.

The limber ensemble and talented featured players relish in their performances, including Rachel Bay Jones as Catherine, Pippin’s ultimate love interest, and Terrance Mann as his father Charles. But it’s Andrea Martin as Pippin’s grandmother Berthe who gives the most down to earth and simultaneously high-flying (and show stopping) performance of the evening. Serving up sage advice with one of the musical’s better-known songs (‘No Time at All’), Martin brings a grounded quality that’s rare among the show’s more showy characterizations.

The production’s awe-inspiring circus elements were conceived by Gypsy Snider, a co-founder of the Montreal-based 7 doigts de la main (7 Fingers) circus company. Including choreography by Chet Walker (in the style of Bob Fosse’s for the original production), this revival’s use of spectacle goes a long way toward making up for weaknesses in the written material. Hirson’s meandering book does little more than connect the dots between Schwartz’s well-known score of musical numbers—most of which (though not all) withstand the test of time.

As with her recent Broadway productions of Hair and The Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (a collaboration with Suzan-Lori Parks on a new book adaptation), Paulus highlights the clear merits of her original material while coming up with creative solutions to smooth over more problematic areas. If the story itself doesn't delight, the production's visual splendor undoubtedly will.

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Bette Midler Opens On Broadway In ‘I’ll Eat You Last:’ REVIEW

 

 BY NAVEEN KUMAR

One Hollywood legend is playing another on Broadway, and there’s a good chance you’ve only heard of one of them. But by the end of I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers, which opened on Wednesday at the Booth Theatre, everyone walks away feeling like old friends.

That includes Bette Midler, and every guest welcomed into the Beverly Hills mansion of Hollywood super agent Sue Mengers for this aptly titled and utterly delightful ‘chat.’ Written by John Logan, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter (Hugo, The Aviator) and Tony-winning playwright (Red), the show offers a delicious insider glimpse into the seedy yet glamorous world of the Hollywood talent business.

Sue Mengers, whose career spanned nearly thirty years beginning in the 1960s, wasn’t just any agent. She discovered Barbra Streisand singing in a gay bar, landed Gene Hackman in The French Connection, represented Sidney Lumet, Mike Nichols and Bob Fosse. But loyalty is not a well-known virtue in this business—as the show begins, Sue is expecting a call from Barbra to fire her.

In the meantime, she spends the evening doing what she loves best: dishing, smoking (tobacco and otherwise), and picking up the occasional phone call from an A-list star. Ms. Midler proves her rightful place in the latter category with her gleefully engaging performance, delivered entirely from the comfort of her plush sofa. Why stand? We’re all friends here.

Under Joe Mantello’s fine direction, Sue’s stories take on a happy rhythm, punctuated with often-riotous punch lines. An opening example: regarding a certain legendary guest expected at her dinner party later in the evening, “Elton’s the easiest dinner guest ever: he’ll eat anything but pussy.”

Through the course of a tight 85 minutes, Sue delivers everything from behind-the-scenes gossip, straight-shot industry wisdom, and enough of the soft side beneath her brassy surface to bring us firmly on her side. Like any animated conversation (one-sided though this one may be), Logan’s script is built on non-sequiturs that nevertheless flow together naturally. Good agents can talk to anyone, and Sue’s certainly no exception.

From gathering courage to approach the most popular girl on the playground to a profession in schmoozing, through-lines from Sue’s formative experiences are simply drawn. But Logan’s economy with storytelling serves the play and its star well, who keeps her captive audience rapt with interest.

If we find Sue in the twilight of her career (Logan’s play is set in the early 80s, Sue died in 2011), her years have made her wise, though she’s no less passionate about show business. She loves the game with every fiber of her being (including her diaphanous kaftan), even as the game keeps changing and she loses her footing.

When she finally does stand to conclude our chat (spoiler alert), the feeling is pretty near momentous.  

(Bottom image: Sue Mengers, 1976, by Ron Galella)

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'Orphans,' Starring Alec Baldwin Opens On Broadway: REVIEW

BY NAVEEN KUMAR

Lyle Kessler’s 1983 play Orphans opened last Thursday at the Schoenfeld Theatre, making its Broadway debut in a powerfully charged production starring Alec Baldwin, Ben Foster and Tom Sturridge. A hybrid sort of drama built on contrivances yet grounded in emotional truths, the play becomes a vehicle for three outstanding star performances under Daniel Sullivan's nimble and dynamic direction.

Two orphaned adult brothers still living in their parents’ decaying house on the north side of Philadelphia, Treat and Philip have been fending for themselves since they were children. Foster plays Treat, who has supported himself and his brother as a petty thief, while keeping Philip (Sturridge) sheltered at home in an abbreviated state of development. Though Philip can’t read and doesn’t leave the house, he nurses his curiosity by watching TV or passersby, and underlining words in the daily newspaper.

Treat kidnaps Harold (Baldwin), who unbeknownst to him is not only a mobster but also a fellow orphan. Tables turn when Harold quickly escapes and offers a hand of support (and an encouraging shoulder squeeze) to both boys, effectively threatening Treat’s position as household father figure.

Baldwin is a natural fit for Harold, exuding the particular brand of polished panache for which he's famous. Foster — who replaced Shia LaBeouf after the star stepped off the production shortly into rehearsal, stirring up a Twitter sh*t storm on his way out — is fantastic as Treat, seething with resentful rage while exercising a sadistic protective grip on his brother.

But Sturridge’s remarkable performance as Philip is definitely the production’s most affecting and attention-grabbing. Though both brothers experience profound mental and emotional transformations by the play’s end, Philip has farther to travel. Sturridge brings a careful sensitivity to his every action, and traverses every inch of designer John Lee Beatty’s set with a bounding, agile grace.

Kessler’s play, though written with three roles tailor-made to showcase actor prowess, hangs upon a strangely stylized conceit that doesn’t ultimately add up to a wholly satisfying drama. That Treat just happens to kidnap a fellow orphan criminal is only one of several question marks looming in the play’s framework.

But Sullivan elicits fine performances from each of the three actors, and finesses some of the story’s more incredulous moments with a sure hand. Despite the engineered quality of Kessler’s conclusion, Sullivan’s production moves with a stirring momentum that can’t help but make an impact. 

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Richard Greenberg’s ‘The Assembled Parties’ Opens on Broadway: REVIEW

BY NAVEEN KUMAR

A finely tuned and resonant drama written with impeccable wit, Richard Greenberg’s new play The Assembled Parties, which opened on Broadway last Wednesday in a Manhattan Theatre Club production at the Friedman Theatre, manages to meaningfully encompass mortality, ambition, legacy, and the hidden nature of love—and that’s only in the first ten minutes.   

Set in a labyrinthian Central Park West apartment (beautifully designed by Santo Loquasto), the play follows the lives of an upper crust Jewish family across a twenty-year span, with the first act set on Christmas day in 1980, and the second on the same day in 2000.

When the play opens, a handsome young middle-aged couple, Julie and Ben Boscov (Jessica Hecht and Jonathan Walker) are hosting Christmas dinner—though all of the assembled parties are in fact, Jewish. Scotty (Jake Silbermann), their oldest son and family golden boy, has deferred admission to Harvard Law, derailing their idea that he’s destined for greatness.

Scotty’s friend and former classmate Jeff (Jeremy Shamos), who accepted his own admission and just completed his first semester, joins the family for dinner. Rapt by their posh sophistication, he makes a concerted effort to insinuate himself with Scotty’s parents, and Julie in particular.

Ben’s wry sister Faye (Judith Light) arrives with her husband Mort (Mark Blum), and their awkward 30-year-old daughter Shelley (Lauren Blumenfeld). Though their mother made her life miserable after Faye’s unplanned pregnancy with Shelley and shotgun wedding to Mort, Faye urges Ben to visit her in the hospital as she lingers on her deathbed.

Details about each intricately drawn character unfold strategically through the play’s end, even for those who don’t return twenty years later for its second act. The entire cast is top notch, though ultimately the evening belongs to Jessica Hecht and Judith Light, whose skills with language and emotional nuance are truly marvelous. 

Greenberg contextualizes his domestic portrait within broader historical patterns, with each act set during election years that marked the beginning of two double-term Republican presidencies (Reagan in the first, and Bush Jr. in the second). Both years also mark a naïve sort of calm before New York was thrust into the center of landmark national crises—the height of the urban AIDS crises, and the events of September 2001.

Our knowledge of what’s to come casts subtle shadows over the insular world of the play, as the classic mores of drawing room drama are carefully placed within a contemporary American framework. Greenberg’s New York is at once timeless and mythical, and decaying brick and mortar. Had Edith Wharton been a post-war Jewess, she couldn’t have written it better herself.

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Follow Naveen Kumar on Twitter: @Mr_NaveenKumar (photos: joan marcus)