Let It Snow
It is February. Ice is general. —Anne Carson
It was cold.
Not chilly. Not brisk. Not merely nippy. But bone-chilling cold. Or at least a slap-your-face-if-you-walked-into-the-wind cold.
And there was snow. Lots of it.
But two days after the record winter storm, the city is not at a standstill. Even in the auto-choked city, the single-digit temperatures keep the snow from melting. A shutdown? Not on your life. This is New York City and life goes on. Compressed, perhaps. But still loud and vibrant and alive.
New Yorkers make it so. As always, their energy and drive is tempered by courtesy. Sidewalks are mostly cleared for pedestrians, but curbside snowbanks have only a notch carved out at street corners. Crossing is a thread-the-needle enterprise: single-file, one-at-a-time from both directions. People have places to go, but they wait their turn, assist the elderly, help stroller-pushing parents and nannies over the icy bank.
Subway cars, as always, offer lessons in civility. Shared chuckles at the scratchy, indecipherable announcements: “Next stop, what?!” The occasional small talk between strangers. The intuitive orderliness: passengers exit first, then new ones enter. It's in the NYC-DNA, perhaps. An evolutionary trait spawned by decades of day-to-day elbow-to-elbow existence.
To many--residents and outsiders--it is an absurd life. Shoebox apartments selling for a million dollars. Commutes that consume half the work day. Absurd wealth butting up against homelessness and poverty. But no matter the season or wind chill, it is America—as much as its majestic mountains and fruited plains—filled with its own kind of beauty and grace.
Let It Snow (II)
A few climate zones to the north, where trees outnumber pedestrians, winter is a still shimmer. Snow coats the landscape without interruption, save a path forged by deer or squirrel. Ice is a crystalline accent on a pine bough or lake shore.
McNeal
Ayad Akhtar.
So Artificial Intelligence is coming for us: Collapsed job markets, Orwellian disinformation, environmental chaos. Given these prognostications, the threat to the novel and the artists who make them might seem like small potatoes. But examining its impact on art and creativity lays bare the core of our anxiety about neural networks variational autoencoders and all those gleaming “initialisms” and acronyms that are floating around Silicon Valley.
That’s the achievement of Ayad Akhtar’s fascinating new play, McNeal, now playing at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater.
The cast of McNeal at the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre.
When we first meet Jacob McNeal (Peter Bradbury), he’s in a hospital gown waiting be reminded once again that he needs to curb his drinking before his liver explodes. In the meantime, he obsessively Googles his odds of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. In between the doctor’s warnings and attacks that leave him writhing on the floor, he gets a much awaited call from Stockholm.
As those first scenes suggest, McNeal is not altogether a sympathetic protagonist. You might even call him despicable, and nothing we learn about his professional and personal life challenges that idea. His various bad behaviors—generally in the pursuit of women, fame and literary recognition—don’t occlude his seductive charms. Bradbury finds both the dark and the shimmer in McNeal’s driven personality.
Peter Bradbury is McNeal in the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre’s new production.
Akhtar is after something much deeper than a soapy exposè of bad behavior. Uncovering the “inspiration” of McNeal’s work, he explores a well-worn of conundrum of fiction writers: how much of one’s consciousness—fed and shaped by experience as well as the exposure to the minds and thoughts of others—is truly one’s own. AI, which theoretically gives us instant access to a vast repository of human thought, pushes that question to an almost absurd breaking point.
At one point in the play, McNeal requests his AI companion to craft a story containing elements of several “classics”: Oedipus, King Lear, Madame Bovary and others. That, of course, mirrors the possible thought any author might have when embarking on a new project. But instead of pondering it in a book-lined office, the request is buzzing through a network of data centers. As McNeal shows, the post AI-world promises to be strange indeed. A brave new world that has such people (?) in it.
A New Space
McNeal is the inaugural production of The Rep’s new second stage, now called the Herro-Franke Studio Theater. While the theater has emphasized the space’s increase seating capacity and expanded lobby, it’s also clear that there have been technical improvements. The gorgeous scenery projections in McNeal (designed by Jim Kelly) are certainly courtesy of new tech systems. Like the other spaces at The Rep, audiences will recognize an expanded lobby with a more comfortable space to have a drink before the show.
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison.
Toni Morrison was born February 18th, 95 years ago. Her novels are filled with gems of insight and description, but since I’m still in a New York state of mind, here’s an excerpt from Jazz, her 1993 novel. (Thanks to The New Yorker’s Vinson Cunningham for reading it in the latest Critics at Large podcast.)
“I’m crazy about this City.
Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things. Hep. It’s the bright steel rocking above the shade below that does it. When I look over strips of green grass lining the river, at church steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of apartment buildings, I’m strong. Alone, yes, but top-notch and indestructible-like the City in 1926 when all the wars are over and there will never be another one. The people down there in the shadow are happy about that. At last, at last, everything’s ahead.”
See you next time.