Category: Culture

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My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 4: Performing, Professing, Posterity

The last of four parts

[See Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here]

Broom Street Theatre reconnects with the University. Author again in the back row of photo.

Soon after our return to Madison, we began a series of performances there, along with a few around the state. In Madison we played three shows a weekend for three weeks in October, all of them in the large hall at the Eagles Club.  We also did a live, in-studio two-hour radio interview and demonstration for the Madison affiliate of NPR.  I thought the radio show was going well until the host asked which one of us had never acted before.  He knew damn well, and I hesitated to answer, instead preferring to avoid the subject.  My castmates interrupted the brief silence by whispering loudly and in unison, “Peter.”  I don’t recall the host’s follow-up questions or my answers.

But I did pass that doctoral qualifying exam despite all.

Continue reading “My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 4: Performing, Professing, Posterity”

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My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 3: Road Trip!

A Series in Four Parts

[See Part 1 here, Part 2 here]

We looked pretty much like this.

We left Madison August 28, 1976, nine people in a white van pulling a trailer with our props, costumes, clothing and camping gear.  We would average almost 500 miles a day over four days, and camp in tents three nights along the way at such locations as Billings, MT, and Coeur d’Alene, ID.  Our technical director, John Miller, did most of the driving.  In the rows of seats sat Joel and six of the actors: Kelly Henderson, Max(ine) Fleckner, Melanie Sax, Frank Furillo, Gary Aylesworth, and Adrienne Rabinowitz.  I resided mostly on the platform behind the seats, at the very back of the van.

I hadn’t been consigned to that space.  I had asked for it. Continue reading “My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 3: Road Trip!”

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My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 2: Making a Play

A Series in Four Parts

[See Part 1 here]

Joel Gersmann addressing the audience before a show, and soliciting contributions to Broom Street Theater

In addition to our cast-in-waiting for a play to do, we had one of American experimental theater’s magicians.  Of course I had no sense of this as we gathered for those first meetings.  Truth be told, I knew very little about theater at all, let alone this new experimental form that had bloomed around the country as part of the cultural and political revolutions of the 1960s that had shaken many of our institutions, from art to politics to religion.  But given that we needed a finished play in a little over two months, I thought that we were dithering in those first meetings. Continue reading “My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 2: Making a Play”

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My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 1: With Both Feet

In celebration of the passion of our younger family members who are currently pursuing their love of theater in venues ranging from high school and summer shows, through national tours, to Broadway: Ezra, Chloe, Lizzie, Allison, and Julie. And in fond memory of Joel.

The first of four parts.

Broom Street Theatre bought and converted an old radiator repair shop on Madison’s Williamson Street in 1977, where it has operated since.

One sun-filled day in June 1976, near the beach and sailboats of beautiful Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin, I suggested to a friend that we walk over to watch auditions scheduled that day for the city’s prominent experimental theater group, Broom Street Theatre.  I had never seen one of its plays, but I had read and heard that it was a gonzo outfit producing plays ranging from wild adaptations of classical scripts to outrageous original satires of the human condition.  I was not aiming to audition myself.  Instead, I simply wanted an inside look at this operation during its audition process.  At age 26, I had just completed my third year of doctoral studies in sociology at the University and, after having colored for so long between the lines, I was hoping to have a look at some measure of creativity, even if only briefly. Continue reading “My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 1: With Both Feet”

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GOP Speak: You can talk about it, just don’t mention it

Almost 75 years after it was published, George Orwell’s novel 1984 has nothing on today’s Republican Party when it comes to language.  The novel features such ideological practices as “newspeak” and “doublethink” that conform language to the needs of a society’s authoritarian leadership to maintain control of its population.  Newspeak is a minimalist language designed to make the utterance of heretical thoughts–those that challenge central authority–impossible.   Doublethink refers to the ability to believe and say that black is white, in contradiction of plain facts, in order to uphold the regime.

Does any of this sound familiar today?  Since the rise of “Trumpism” in the Republican Party, we have seen the explosion not only of blatant lies, but also the creation of “alternative” facts to support law-free rule.  We have seen “Don’t say gay” restrictions for the early grades of schools in Florida, and the deletion of critical race theory from curriculums ranging up to college level.  Lately we’ve seen an apparently new development in the distortion of language in the service of ideological manipulation:  the notion that one can speak of things without mentioning what they are about.

This rang a bell for me, one that rings back half a century in my work life and that I have always since associated with the most destructive elements of conservative politics in the U.S.  Perhaps it is no small coincidence that Orwell’s book was published on my mother’s birthday in the year that I was born. Continue reading “GOP Speak: You can talk about it, just don’t mention it”

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Thoughts on an Indictment

The first indictment of Donald Trump has landed.  Certainly there are more to come.  In the meanwhile, the indictment by the New York City grand jury and prosecutor has already created feverish media reactions and the expected bombast from the former U.S. president.  What to make of it all?  These thoughts come to mind.

The Media

In our digital age, the mainstream (traditional) media are also all about attracting eyeballs, most especially our television news programs.  Thus, the coverage to this point–before the indictment charges are even revealed–has been, well, hysterical.  It’s odd, isn’t it?  Trump refers to them as the “Fake News” media, and yet he is able to play them to his advantage like a fiddle.  They cannot get enough of him, his antics and his predicaments.  He is addicted to their attention, and they are happy to provide it. Continue reading “Thoughts on an Indictment”

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Language Habits III (A series of occasional rants)

Language evolves over time.  It can also be trendy.  Here’s the difference: Water carves mountains out of stone over millennia.  Many generations pass by the same local mountain, noticing none of these tiny developments.  This is a mountain evolving.

Water carves out snow lickety split.   Relative to the evolution of language, this is more like word or phrase trendiness.  It comes and goes.  And my gripe is with much of this trendiness.  So here goes Round III. Continue reading “Language Habits III (A series of occasional rants)”

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Language Habits II (A Series of Occasional Rants)

Alright, I am going to make a point of this one last time.  Then I am going to bury my revered high school Latin textbook in the backyard, in the sacred ground deep beneath my cat’s ashes.  DATA IS PLURAL!

And that sentence is the only way to say correctly “Data is”!

My former colleagues in the press seem to have long ago given up on the correct usage of “data.”  Even television doctors commenting on the pandemic data, people trained in a science that has long drawn heavily on Latin words and roots, routinely mess up the use of “data.”  You know what the singular word for “data” is?  It is datum which, I agree, does not roll easily off the tongue.  But we don’t need a single datum.  We need an “are.”

So goodbye to “Data are . . .”  RIP with the language of the ancients–and my beloved cat. Continue reading “Language Habits II (A Series of Occasional Rants)”

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Whither Racism in the Land of the Free

He enrolled in my seminar on law and society as a graduate student.  Being in his 50s, he was an unusual enrollee, but his experiences could not have been more relevant to such a course.  He was a long-serving, full-time police officer in the oldest police department in the nation, the Boston Police Department, and he had patrolled some of the city’s highest crime rate districts.  He was also African American, serving in a city long troubled by racial animus.  This animus wasstranger-fruit especially evident in the 1970s hostilities around the effort to use busing to integrate students in the city’s public schools, and later appeared in the Charles Stuart murder case in 1989-90, in which Stuart–who was white–framed a black man for the murder of Stuart’s wife, whom he himself had killed.

I will call the police officer “Hal,” not his real name.  Because the seminar combined undergraduate students with graduate students, every week I asked the grad students to come to my office after class to further discuss the day’s assigned topics with me.  Walking to my office after one seminar meeting, Hal offered that he really loved the reading we had been discussing in class.  The reading by an eminent sociologist of law had argued convincingly that, everywhere and always, law enforcement has come down more punitively on members of lower status groups than on those of higher status groups, even if the offenses were the same.

As we entered the office I asked Hal why he loved the reading.  He answered, “Because (the author) is right,” he replied.  That alone was very interesting to hear from an experienced police officer.  But I wanted to delve further, so I presented Hal with a scenario.  I said, “So if you confronted a young black male who had committed a minor crime (a misdemeanor), and later a young white male who had done the same thing, would you be more likely to arrest the black male and take him in, and more likely to take the white male home to his parents or give him a warning and let him go?”  And Hal said, “Yes.”  I asked why so, and he replied, “Because that is what the community wants.” Continue reading “Whither Racism in the Land of the Free”

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