Saturday Night in Kingsbridge: Old Rugged Sauce at An Beal Bocht Cafe

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Tuesday Evening in the Northwest Bronx: No.11 Productions presents "Lysistrata" at Van Cortlandt Park

Tonight we trekked up to the end of the line of the 1 train to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx to see No. 11 Productions' sprightly, sexy one-hour performance of Aristophanes's Lysistrata, adapted and directed by Ryan Emmons.

The only other time we'd seen a production of Lysistrata was on Broadway, at the Saturday matinee before Nixon got re-elected in November 1972. We were a college senior then and we took our friend Debbie, a sophomore, to see in the title role the incomparable Melina Mercouri, nominated for the best actress Oscar for Never on Sunday (for which she did win best actress at Cannes), and later, after democracy returned to Greece, the nation's longtime minister for culture.

That Broadway production, directed by Michael Cacoyannis of Zorba the Greek fame, was widely derided by critics and closed in a week (Debbie and I saw a preview). We liked it, actually. We were 21 and in the antiwar movement and what appealed to us in the production's modernish setting were frequent topical allusions to Vietnam: the use of "effete snobs," a term Vice President Spiro Agnew derisively called us peace activists; the mention of "the un-Hellenic Activities Committee"; and the protesting women saying "Fuck the war!" just like we kids did. Most critics felt the great Mercouri deserved better. In his Times review, Clive Barnes allowed that "Aristophanes does not seem to play well in modern English translation."

We agree. For the past four years we've taught Lysistrata in our Literature and Writing spring class (this year, we taught in the summer, too) and we now think it's a very hard play to stage. A good translation - we use Douglass Parker's from 1964, but we ask our students to bring in others for interesting contrasts - can work well on the page (or e-book reader), but really, the controlling conceptions of the play don't really make logical sense to our lawyerly brain (if men are away fighting a war, just how is their wives' sex strike going to affect them except if they're home on leave, as Kinesias apparently is? wouldn't their chastity-induced painful erections be taken care of with nocturnal emissions or masturbation even if they didn't have sex with prostitutes or each other?).

Nevertheless, Lysistrata keeps being done, especially in times of unpopular wars, and its battle-of-the-sexes theme is always timely. The play is sometimes misunderstood as smutty, and although the original play does have an incredible number of sexual references, scatological jokes and double entrendes, there's also much that is totally obscure to a contemporary reader or theatergoer (such as references to now-obscure events in Athenian history or the mention of a local celebrity everyone in the 411 B.C.E. audience would know was gay).

So it usually has to be cut, altered and re-thought, like all Aristophanes productions (the Curious Frog company did a vastly altered Plutus last year). The No. 11 Productions adaptation by Ryan Emmons wisely dispensed with much of the original - the warring choruses of elderly men and women, lots of discussion of pan-Hellenic unity (Lysistrata, and apparently Aristophanes, didn't disapprove of all wars, just this costly civil war among Greek city-states), details involving peace treaties and references to now-forgotten people and events.

Instead, adaptor/director Ryan Emmons (co-artistic director of the company), in this version - previously seen last summer in Sara D. Roosevelt Park on the Lower East Side for Fringe NYC and at the 2008 Saratoga Arts Fest in Congress Park - has taken a broad (and broadside) approach, getting the comic spirit of the play, its energy and sexual punning, and using a lot of physical comedy, choreography, a little music, and an attractive very young cast (at least they seemed very young to this doddering observer) to put together a neat little package that was fun-filled, sparkling and joyous.

The setting was especially beautiful, even in tne New York City park system. We don't know Van Cortlandt Park well at all; the only day we can remember spending here was the month after we saw Lysistrata on Broadway; on Christmas afternoon 1972, we came here with our then-girlfriend after an early holiday dinner with her father and his wife, who then had an apartment in Kingsbridge, to the south. (We last saw all of them earlier this summer at a bat mitzvah for our friend's daughter.) Van Cortlandt Park looked gorgeous in winter 38 years ago, and it was even prettier this evening.

The play was performed in a sunken courtyard south of the Van Cortlandt House Museum, the oldest house in the Bronx, currently under renovation apparently. The Red Steps, an amazing staircase, served as an upper stage, and the lush foliage around us was truly beautiful.

Margot Perron, the president of the Van Cortlandt Park Conservancy, formed last year (not without controversy), spoke first today to the sadly small audience of perhaps a dozen people. (It wasn't easy finding info on tonight's performance, and not easy for those of us unfamiliar with the park to physically find it). She said they'd been trying for years to get some kind of performances here; Black Henna Productions did its Much Ado About Nothing here on Sunday, and this evening we had Lysistrata.

It was pretty much of a light, breezy romp of a production. Lysistrata was presented as a bit of a hectoring grand dame: she never seems to leave the stairway and rarely speaks without benefit of her bullhorn, even when the women are standing nearby.

The roles of the Commissioner, Myrrhine and her husband Kinesias, Lysistrata's blithe neighbor Kleonike, the Corinithian girl (here Corinthia) with the prodigious rear end, and the strapping Spartan woman Lampito, as well as the Spartan herald (named Harold here), are preserved in rudimentary form mostly, and some of the Athenian men and women are given names and characters from recognizable types (the blustery warrior Akillthese and Socraplatristmenideuripphanes, who wears glasses and seems to be an NYU philosophy major).

The troupe was very energetic moved the action vibrantly. The sound - the actors were miked - worked surprisingly well, and the costumes (mostly white gowns for the women and gym shorts for the men, with some simple ornamentation) were perfectly attractive. The funniest scene, as usual, was the teasing interplay between Myrrhine, who's delaying all she can, and Kinesias, desperate to have sex with his wife; the actors added contemporary accoutrements like sunglasses to the list of objects Myrrhine cooks up to put off the inevitable husbandly disappointment.

Some of the inventions worked better than others. The Spartans' dialect, apparently dumb-sounding to the Athenians, is rendered in some translations as Appalachian/Ozarks hillbilly talk (Douglass Parker takes that tack), dese-dem-and-dose Brooklynese, or (in British translations), as East End Cockney; here, Harold the Spartan Herald talks like Yoda, with inverted word order that takes getting used to. But there were wonderful touches such as the cute little stuffed horse that the Commissioner keeps between his legs to "ride" it and the very sweet musical interlude.

All in all, this was a sparkling hour of lively outdoor theater, and the schlep up to Van Cortlandt Park from Brooklyn (on the way up we outsmarted ourselves by thinking the A train up to 168th Street would be faster, but we waited for it for 17 minutes at 14th Street; going home we stuck to the 1 train all the way downtown) was well worth it. We'd come back - even all the way from Williamsburg - for more like it.

Thursday Evening at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum Bookstore: Launch Party for "From Kingsbridge to Canarsie: Reflections by 8 NYC Girls"

We were only able to stop in briefly this evening at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum on Orchard Street (where our father and grandfather used to have many customers for the men's slacks and jeans they manufactured).

(We'd say something nice about the Tenement Museum, but to us they are better known for their mistreatment and oppression of their workers than anything else.)

We wanted to celebrate, if just for a few moments, at the New York Writers Coalition's launch party for this great organization's latest publication, From Kingsbridge to Canarsie: Reflections by 8 NYC Girls. So we had time only to say hi to some of the teenage authors of the book, all of whom are students at Urban Academy High School.

We'd gotten the book in the mail earlier this week through the kindness of Aaron Zimmerman, the dynamic founder and executive director of the NYWC, which provides free and low-cost creative writing workshops throughout the city for New Yorkers from groups that have been historically deprived of voice in our society.

NYWC is one of the partners in the New York City Neighborhood Story Project, a documentary book project replicating the highly successful and innovative New Orleans-based Neighborhood Story Project.

As the NYWC website notes,

Through writing, interviews, and photography, neighborhood writers create portraits of New York City, then edit the stories with the neighborhoods to ensure authenticity. We publish the book and have block parties to celebrate. The first group of New York City writers comes from the innovative Urban Academy High School.

The 18 month project at Urban Academy began in February 2007, and engaged young people from throughout New York City in intensive instruction in creative writing, oral history, urban anthropology and photography. The students honed their skills through participating in creative writing workshops led by NY Writers Coalition, by conducting interviews with the support of instructors from StoryCorps, and meeting the young authors of the New Orleans Neighborhood Story Project books.

We loved From Kingsbridge to Canarsie: Reflections by 8 NYC Girls and will be using it, tomorrow evening in fact, with our own Borough of Manhattan Community College creative writing workshop students at the Brooklyn College campus. Some of them come from the same places -- Kingsbridge, Millbrook Projects, Inwood, Harlem, Upper West Side, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Lower East Side and Canarsie -- that the book's authors do.

(Hey, so do we. Sort of. The Philadelphia Inquirer review of And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street began by saying, "Richard Grayson is a funny guy from Canarsie, Brooklyn" - though we actually hail from just across the border in Flatlands - and during the second year of our MFA program at Brooklyn College, we worked as a delivery boy for Canarsie Laundry, driving loads of once-dirty duds all over the neighborhood.)

Anyway, a book like From Kingsbridge to Canarsie - edited by Kesha Young, the NYC Neighborhood Story Project's director - can tell you what these neighborhoods are really like.

Julianne Reynoso, for example, takes you on a tour of her part of the The Bronx, Kingsbridge Heights, and can tell you about neighborhood hangouts like Delis and Breakfasts, which

also known as just "Peter's," is a small store right next to Middle School 143. A most-of-the-time-grumpy Asian man named Peter owns it. All of the students from OLA [Our Ladies of Angels] and 143 go there, and he locks all the doors to the drinks and makes sure that if you want to buy something, one of his employees gets it for you so you don't forget to pay. We would always buy the giant baked cookies or blue slushies after school before heading out across the street.

Zaira Simone tells you more about the real Brooklyn than you'll read about in hipster blogs:

When my brother moved to Seaview in Canarsie and I needed a break from the crazy people in my mother's neighborhood, I would get right on the bus. These rides are about an hour long, but I needed relief from the Pratt Institute yuppies and the Lafayette Garden people. . .

Pratt yuppies are the new residents who have established cafes, bistros, and boutiques. They are the artsy, youthful class of gentrifiers who attend Pratt Institute. I have seen them buying marijuana from the local drug dealers and playing craps in front of their apartments. Some members of the community, predominately landlords, accept their presence. However, they refuse to assimilate into the community or communicate with others on a personal level. Even their favorite hangout, "Sputnik," is exclusive and rejects the people who live in the projects. Throughout the past two years, there has been only one Latino working in there. . .

The neighborhood that I once knew was changing, and I didn't fit. . .

Seaview is very diverse. Many of the residents in the neighborhood are working-class families. The majority of residents are Italian, Jewish, West Indian, and Asian. The neighborhood is also now integrated, whereas in the early '70s it was not. Between the early '70s and late '90s, it was hard for many Black families to move into the area because it was occupied by many Italian families, who, in some ways, had the power to choose who moved into the neighborhood. During this time, not much real estate in Canarsie was being sold to Blacks and other minorities. However, many Jewish real-estate owners began to rent to Black families, specifically people coming from the Caribbean. many of these owners believed that they would gain much revenue from renting to new immigrant families, because many were refusing to move into federal housing.

Seaview is green and quiet. The architecture almost seems to replicate that of Colonial times. There are houses painted in yellow and cream, with huge lawns of cedar trees and beautiful flowers. There are Black people who drive SUVs or classic Porsches. Beautiful Grenadian construction men reside there, bickering about the World Cup while renovating their stairs.

As someone who still misses the Seaview Theatre and the great charbroiled burgers with Spanish onions from the old Seaview Diner next door on Pennsylvania Avenue, we can tell you that Zaira's descriptions are as accurate as they are compelling.

In another section of the book, Upper West Sider (we lived there too!) Faith Harris interviews her Aunt Dee:

You said you lived in Spike Lee's brownstone. Did you know him personally?

Yes, I met Spike. That's when he was attending NYU, and he was doing his first film. I think it was Joe's Barbershop [Jose's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads]. I used to talk to his father, who's a musician. I got the apartment because at the time, I was working as a paralegal in Bed-Stuy for an attorney, whose name I would rather not mention. I was also going to Brooklyn College. It made more sense for me to live in Brooklyn than to live in Manhattan, so I rented from Spike's dad for about a year. It was a brownstone with a really nice apartment.

How does it feel to live where there are a lot of gangs?

When I was growing up on 116th Street, heroin was number one. My neighborhood was the hot spot in the whole country for heroin. Living on 116th Street was not a big transition because I was used to living in a very rough neighborhood. I was just not comfortable with a lot of gang activity.

Who do you live with now?

I live with my daughter, Nayo, and I have a kitten named Brooklyn.

What are some of the hotspots in the neighborhood where you like to go?

I like to hang out in Harlem. If I hang out in the neighborhood, I go to a little Italian restaurant on 91st Street. I know the owner; he's really nice, very friendly. The food is great; the prices are reasonable. It has a nice atmosphere. That restaurant has lasted more than any other, so he's doing something right. You know, we like to go to Tex-Mex every now and then.

Yeah, I also I like the Italian restaurant with the virgin Shirley Temple.

We not only like this book - we love it. The other five authors - Jennifer Arzu of Millbrook Projects in the Bronx, Noelle Tannen from Inwood, Sofija Kulikauskas in Harlem, Bed-Stuy's Alyssa La Caille and Makeda Gaillard-Bennett - also have gems on every page. Muchas gracias, New York Writers Coalition, NYC Neighborhood Story Project, Urban Academy, and everyone connected with this book.

We can't resist ending this post with Sofija's poem "Back at Ya, Boys":

Pssst!!!!
Stud muffin
Hey fella!
What's up sexy?
Hmmm...
He's so fresh
Ay papi chulo
Yo cutie!!
Ayo sexi!
DAMN!
What a stud!
Que gaupo papi
He's a hottie!
What a hunk.

What a book. Get a copy of From Kingsbridge to Canarsie: Reflections by 8 NYC Girls and you won't be sorry. It's really wonderful.