At Issue with Captain Phillips

This film, along with Gravity and Prisoners, easily gripped me on a long flight from the US to the Middle East last March, and kept me awake when I should have been sleeping.  But oh well.  You see what grips me, and scores of others, is the drama: story, acting, filming, script etc.  We know it's art, and in absorbing ourselves in it, we deliberately break from the reality of our lives.  The drama of course may have frank elements of fact in it, but on the whole it's a piece of fiction.  So there is a truly a Richard Phillips who wrote A Captain's Duty, on which the film was based.

Then the headline from the New York Post screamed: Crew Members: 'Captain Phillips' is one big lie.  To wit:

According to this crew member, during the first attack, as two pirate boats came into view, clearly chasing them, Phillips was putting the crew through a fire drill. In the film, it’s a security drill.

“We said, ‘You want us to knock it off and go to our pirate stations?’ ” the crew member recalls. “And he goes, ‘Oh, no, no, no — you’ve got to do the lifeboats drill.’ This is how screwed up he is. These are drills we need to do once a year. Two boats with pirates and he doesn’t give a s- -t. That’s the kind of guy he is.”

At first, Phillips maintains this is a lie. “No,” he says. “The mate called up and said, ‘Do you want to stop the drill?’ They [the boats] were seven miles away. There was nothing we could do. We didn’t know the exact situation.”

But is it true that he ordered the entire drill completed anyway?

“Correct,” Phillips says.

You see, it's one thing to fictionalize facts.  We may like it or not, and we may or may not be cognizant of it, but what makes any art so ennobling, even cathartic is its artistic license, that is, to create whatever it is that the artist wishes to create.

Consider the following exchange between the protagonist and his lady companion in another brilliant film - V for Vendetta:

(image credit)

It's another thing altogether, however, to factualize fiction.  Some people may be prone to believe what they see in a film or read in a book, even if they know it's fiction. That's something each of them has to reconcile on his or her own. But when the media steps in, and the President comes calling, then it truly is quite another thing indeed:

“We vowed we were going to take it to our graves, that we weren’t going to say anything,” Perry told CNN in 2010. “Then we hear this p.r. stuff about him giving himself up . . . and the whole crew’s like, ‘What?’ ”

“If you’re gonna shoot somebody, shoot me!” Hanks pleads in the film.

It didn’t go down like that, say several crew members: The pirates just reneged on the deal, grabbing their guy and making off with Phillips in a Maersk lifeboat.

While the remaining crew waited for the Navy to reach them, they sat and wondered: What just happened?

Four days later, Phillips was rescued by SEAL Team Six. He was hailed as an American hero. He met with President Obama in the Oval Office and wrote a memoir.

In the run-up to Friday’s release of “Captain Phillips,” [actor Tom] Hanks has appeared on the cover of Parade magazine with Phillips and the headline “The Making of an American Hero.” The film won the opening-night slot at the New York Film Festival on Sept. 28 and opened the London Film Festival last Wednesday. It has won raves, all of which note the film is based on real events. The two men have walked the red carpet together.

We may never know the real story of that pirate assault of Captain Phillips and his crew, but it bears investigation, as some media outfits have evidently done, if only to hear the multiple sides of the story (i.e., from crew members as well).  At best, then, hailing Phillips as an American hero sounded rather premature, and, at worst, it was a big oops, if not an outright lie.

Studying The Cherry Orchard (3)

Chekhov family in 1874, with 14-year old Anton standing second from left

32-year old Anton, front and center, with family and friends in 1892

Growing up in a middle-class family on the shores of the Sea of Azov in pre-Revolution Russia, Anton and his sister and five brothers went fishing, played tennis, and spent leisurely days in the country at their grandfather's. A great lover of nature, young Anton was robust with activity and intelligence, always making jokes, affectionate and playful with his siblings. They also worked hard in their father's shop (now a museum, the "Chekhov Shop") where Anton collected memories and ideas for future stories based on the people he met there. He studied music and was a voracious reader, spending afternoons at the Taganrog town library (now named after him). For many years until his death he sent books to be added to its collections. He read literature and the Greek classics including Homer, and also works by Miguel de Cervantes, Ivan Goncharov, William Shakespeare, Ivan Turgenev and Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. A French governess taught the children languages. To add to his already vivid imagination, Anton's nurse entertained the children with fantastical tales while their mother told them of her travels around the world with her father as a young girl. "Our talents we got from our father, but our soul from our mother." (from The Letters of Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Clara Garnett, 1861-1946). Anton's father, born into serfdom, had a great love for music. He was a very strict, religious man but they were a close-knit family, sharing evenings after school singing, playing musical instruments, and singing in the church choir and attending Mass on Saturday evenings and Sunday mornings.

Reference: Anton Chekhov.

I love reading about Chekhov abiding curiosity and budding intellect at a young age.  I find that just as inspiring and instructive as his work of art.  I was like that, too.  We arrived in Chicago, from Manila, and 3rd grade was my first year in an American school.  I knew English, but my command and grammar were weak at best.  From there, through junior high and high school, I methodically improved my English and read deeply if not quite widely, from Harold Robbins and Erica Jong, to, in time, Sigmund Freud and William Shakespeare.  I loved the arts, and I loved life in general, like Chekhov.  But as I embark on stage and film projects, among many arts, I don't have any designs per se on following his footsteps.  Simply, I want to find learning and inspiration, and carve a path that is uniquely my own.

Studying The Cherry Orchard (2)

I found the playbill to The Cherry Orchard staging at Northeastern Illinois University, which I wrote about previously in Studying The Cherry Orchard (1).

Beth Ann Smukowski in front and center as Madame Ranevskaya

Lily Stephens affords us comic relief as the housemaid Dunyasha

Mark Dodge as the pragmatic but often dismissed Lopakhin

I really appreciated director Dan Wirth's notes, as they illuminate not only the world of the family, but also the staging of Chekhov:

Chekhov's plays have a reputation of being sad, slow, tedious, and boring. There is a problem with that because Chekhov isn't any of those things. Those sorts of performances are conducted by people that have a misapprehension of Chekhov, and perhaps they themselves are sad, slow, tedious, and boring. Chekhov himself always claimed (even protested) that his plays were comedies, and who am I to take issue with that? He is the one that wrote them. He should know, after all.

Wirth has a point well taken.  But, you see, how a director stages this or any other play is, to whatever extent, inevitably a reflection of him or her.  It is always autobiographical in one way or another.  Sad and slow is one thing, but tedious and boring means a failed staging of the play.

My first exposure to Chekhov was a production of his play Uncle Vanya. I was in college in Michigan and took a trip to the Stratford Festival in Canada where it was playing. I really had no idea what I was in for. I was introduced to a collection of confused and contradictory people who were often unaware of both their best and worst qualities. They either had plenty of ideas about what to do to make life better or they had no ideas at all, but either way, they lacked the capacity to take action to do anything about it. Their struggles were very frustrating - and very funny.

I suppose that kind of inertia, in Chekhov's handling of it, can be frustrating for the action-oriented, practical sort and funny for anyone who can see a certain absurdity and farce in life itself.  Somehow The Myth of Sisyphus comes to mind for me.

My first experience with The Cherry Orchard occurred a year or so later when I was in graduate school. My classmates and I were enjoying a unit on Chekhov and we were reading his four major full-length plays. I went to the library and listened to an audio recording of a performance of the play. It was a production from The Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, featuring Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, directed by Tyrone Guthrie.

As I sat listening I realized I was having the same experience I had with the production of Uncle Vanya. Here again was a collection of deeply flawed and deeply human characters. They were caught in a trap and were struggling to get out, but they themselves had made the trap, and they alone would be able to devise a way out. However, they couldn't see that. They thought the trap was their fate. Some couldn't even see the trap.

I have argued in my Theory of Algorithms that he must grasp reality as it is and things as they are, if we are to solve whatever problem we face.  That reality and those things speak to our human nature, what I have come to call The Human Algorithm, that is, the elemental essence of who we are and what we are made of.  So just as with Shakespeare, Chekhov helps us understand the characters he has created and the nature of our humanity as a whole.

This is how it is with Chekhov's characters. It's as if they are wearing blinders and can only see certain things. And when it comes to their own flaws, they either beat themselves up over them or project them and make others guilty of the very things they dislike in themselves. In either case, nothing gets done about them. When his plays are done well, the audience has sympathy and empathy for the plights of the characters, and they also feel annoyance and frustration because the characters are often so unbearably stupid. Audiences feel sad when the characters lose, and at the same time they laugh at how ridiculous they are.

Much has been written about the gloominess of the Russian people, the so-called Russian "cult of suffering," as though the people of Russia have the market cornered on being sad and mopey and depressed. It is an interesting stereotype, and as with all stereotypes there may be a grain of truth to it, but I think Chekhov was writing about all of human-kind, not just Russian human-kind. In viewing Chekhov's plays, we are viewing ourselves - our foibles, our denial, our strengths, our weaknesses, our victories, and our defeats. I think of Chekhov's plays as a mirror held up to our souls. The mirror has some Russian trimming around its edges, but the center reflects us back to ourselves just as we are.

Reference indeed Theory of Algorithms. 

At one time or another perhaps all of us have said or will say goodbye to our own personal cherry orchard.

Very well said, Dan Wirth. 

Studying The Cherry Orchard (1)

As part of writing The Room, a play on housemaid abuse, I study iconic plays.  I had the pleasure and privilege of studying drama and comedy, along with poetry and Shakespeare, for a year each at Northwestern University.  So we read the likes of Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), Jean-Paul Sartre (No Exit), and Joe Orton (What the Butler Saw).  I've watched film adaptations and stage productions of these plays over the past two years.

But what else?

Enter The Cherry Orchard. 

I read Three Sisters at the university, and my wife and I saw a production at the Goodman Theater in Chicago years ago.  But I had otherwise not read Anton Chekhov.  The Cherry Orchard sidled into my radar, as a play within the film Henry's Crime, and I was intrigued.  So I found this staging at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago from a year ago:

The following are notes from my journal on The Room: 

I like how this production plays up with the audience, in a natural way, that is, in the flow and theme of the play. There is existential humor to this play, clearly. For instance, one character wants to talk to somebody, but bemoans that she doesn’t have anybody to talk to.

I want to make sure sound from the actors is clear throughout the play. I have to work out the enters and exits of the characters. I thought about billiards as a metaphor for what happens to people in a play I can write. What about a title like The Sampaguita Orchard?  The sampaguita is the national flower of the Philippines. 

The house is a metaphor for an era, and its sale because of unpaid debt is the end of that era.  The cherry orchard is a kind of mythic reference for the family, but the fabric of their lives together is actually stitched inside the house.

Studying Death of a Salesman (3)

Arthur Miller

John Lahr with The New Yorker offered the following introduction (2012) to his conversation with Arthur Miller (1999):

For an essay in the magazine on the fiftieth anniversary of the first production of “Death of a Salesman,” I visited Arthur Miller at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, in 1999. With his wife, the photographer Inge Morath, we went to the cabin in the woods that Miller built in order to write the play. (Morath herself had never seen the cabin in all the years they’d been living in Roxbury.) The following is selection of some of the things Miller said about the play during our day together. The newest Broadway production of “Death of a Salesman,” starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Linda Emond, and Andrew Garfield, directed by Mike Nichols, with the original stage design of Jo Mielziner, opens at the Barrymore Theatre on Broadway on March 15, and continues through June 2.

Reference: Walking with Arthur Miller.

I love hearing the artist speak to the reasoning, experience and process of creating what was to become, in this case, an American masterpiece.  When Lahr asked if he knew he had written a great play, Miller said he did the moment he finished writing it. 

Studying Death of a Salesman (2)

Designed by Social Realist painter Joseph Hirsch

I have one or two book copies of this play, and they're either in a moldy box in our basement or somewhere in some storage in Dubai.  I have only a vague memory of the covers, but this one by Joseph Hirsch is powerful in that we see, and we sense, the weight of the world on Willy Loman's weary shoulders. 

The New York Times also asked students at the Parsons the New School for Design to give the cover a go:

Designed by Aija Gibson

Designed by Isabel Castillo Guijarro

Designed by Ashley Butler

Designed by Alina Petrichyn

Designed by Nick Vidovich

Designed by Erik Freer

Death of a Salesman was first performed in 1949, so this iconic American play may have predated these young designers' parents.  The New York Times took the liberty of engaging a design critic to weigh in on these pieces and thankfully also of enlisting the designers themselves to speak out on their work.  Me, I am less concerned about the critique, and more intrigued by how a young audience views what must be an ancient play, judging by the hip media and tech culture of today. 

So in this respect, for better or for worse, I find all of these illustrations compelling.  Note how Willy is either absent (traveling) or partial, even disembodied and amorphous.  Of course I wonder how much the students studied the play itself and how well they were taught and guided on understanding it.  But this is part of my intrigue, too, that is, what happens at school.

To read what the critics and students say, here it is Life of a 'Salesman'.

Studying Death of a Salesman (1)

As part of writing The Room, a play on housemaid abuse, I study iconic plays.  I had the pleasure and privilege of studying drama and comedy, along with poetry and Shakespeare, for a year each at Northwestern University.  So we read the likes of Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), Jean-Paul Sartre (No Exit), and Joe Orton (What the Butler Saw).  I've watched film adaptations and stage productions of these plays over the past two years.

But what else? 

Enter: John Moore and The Denver Post, who surveyed 177 people centered on theater, in order to come up with The 10 most important American plays:

So I begin with the cream that rose to the top.

This storied Arthur Miller story seems to have escaped my curricula at the university, but no matter it is easy enough to find it and research it.  So I watched this production by the Bronx High School of Science: Act One - Death of Salesman and Act Two - Death of a Salesman.  It's a fine effort by these students, but it's a performance meant for their learning and development, if the cast and crew have serious designs on a career in theater.  We as the audience must be forbearing, then, of a less than compelling performance.  Still, I managed to appreciate how the director worked the staging and how the actors navigated their space. 

Then, I found this complete audio recording:

The YouTuber offered no description, cast or credit, but I believe it was the 2012 revival directed by Mike Nichols.  It starred the ubiquitous (now late) Philip Seymour Hoffman as Willy, Linda Emond as his wife Linda, and Andrew Garfield (aka Spider Man) as his son Biff.  This is what the Bronx High School can aspire to, as immediately the tone, import and mood of this staging come through in mighty, polished measures.  Here, also is the PDF of Death of a Salesman.