Honorary Seats

The last part of Three Sisters was performed on the porch and in the yard in front of the Lefferts Manor. On account of the weather on Friday I was in denial about the inevitability of this, even if I saw the seats under the tent as I walked in, I quickly dismissed them once comfortably seated in the warm kitchen of the old Dutch House, with hardly any yardage between the actors and the audience, making for a fairly intimate theater experience. Still, I was nearly ecstatic to be seeing this show in this venue, the old house in the amazing park, a park without its own indoor theater like the one Corona Park boasts.

When the maid ushered us out for the last act I awkwardly took my place at the front bench under the tent and soon began absorbing enough sleet to soak my coat, so I pulled the hot blanket I'd been handed up to my chin. Just like camping! The actors went on acting in the gloomy winter mix, even if it was especially hard to hear them when the sleet picked up. Those Rebellious Subjects actors are diehards, I kid you not, and inspiring. Talk about surrender and dedication, not to mention talent. Whenever Irina (Sutton Crawford), the vulnerable, optimistic, horror stricken, kitten-faced young sister sobbed, I sobbed too, even while envying the way she rocked her magenta lipstick.

It was especially moving to see how nature had given such daring stage direction to the Company, who seemed especially honored to deliver Chekov's references to trees or snow and direct their words to Prospect Park's astonishing trees around them, to the ground covered with white, and to surrender to the rain/hail/sleet/rain/sleet/hail that pelted them as they performed.

I found it interesting that romance seemed to have no part in Chekov's equation for happiness. So sober was he when it comes to love that even after a lengthy bachelorhood he agreed to marry only if his betrothed kept her residence in a far away city. If The Three Sisters is any indication of his philosophy, work and surrender have much more to do with contentment. I recognized in the play an equation I've been noticing everywhere these days: Mania (for Moscow or whatever) + Reality = Depression + Surrender = Tranquility, or as the Stoics called it, Aequanimitas. But let that old dog Aurelius add flesh to that idea.

Thou must be like a promontory of the sea, against which, though the waves beat continually, yet it both itself stands, and about it are those swelling waves stilled and quieted.

sigh...

buttermilk

An unexpected joy of seeing "Hoffman," an Offenbach opera performed on the Red Hook Pier, was getting such a close view of the Buttermilk Channel, and being shocked by how close Governor's Island seemed. It is, as I read, only a quarter of a mile away. So maybe it's true what Whitman wrote in a newspaper article, that during Revolutionary War times the channel was so narrow and shallow that at low tide dairy herds waded across, leaving a milky trail in the brine. In watercolor painting, that would be called a wet on wet technique. All of this would have been before some hard core dredging, obviously. Now the channel's depth is 35 to 49 feet, deep enough to support the business of the piers, and only passable by very bouyant cows.

The other explanation for the name is that by the time Breukelen dairy farmers made it across the channel to sell their milk in Manhattan it had soured from the rough ride.

Hmmm, these are 2 very different explanations. Being an HUGE fan of the bathers tradition in painting, I fancy the wading cows explanation STRONGLY.

I would have favored a warmer night for the opera. We froze, but luckily the strength of the performance plus a little wine prevented the blood from curdling. We sat there in the outdoor theater flanked by stacks of shipping containers 3 high. The moon was visible through a break in the two stacks on my right, and by the time the show was over it had risen above the highest container. Meanwhile broad swathes of clouds, ethereal drifting proscenium, seemed to embrace The Vertical Players endeavors.

I wondered how far away from us was the pipe that draws the water from the channel a mile inland to flush and oxygenate the Gowanus. If the 600 horsepower pump is the Gowanus' artificial heart, that pipe is a critical ventricle, slowly rinsing the canal of whatever effluvia made it lavender before the pump was fixed in 1989. Of course its original heart was not mechanical, just the endless evaporation and condensation cycle, the tides, and the local watershed created by all the Brooklyn brooks that must have creased the slope of the Slope.