I’m seeing Waiting for Godot tonight at the Mark Taper Forum.
Just recently, I was telling the playwrights in my workshop that I would not being seeing this, given how many productions I’ve seen of this play. Just off the top of my head, here are some of them:
a college production in 198x starring my friend Joe Stafford. (Still probably the best Pozzo I’ve seen. Joe had a commanding and imperious presence, leavened by an impish humor.)
the filmed version with Burgess Meredith and Zero Mostel
as much of the staged version with Robin Williams and Steve Martin as I was able to stand
a production in… was it 1989? At the Taper, Too. (Now known as [Inside] the Ford.)
a production at the Matrix starring Robin Gammell and David Dukes. They were superb. Dukes may have been the best Vladimir I’ve seen — you really felt his pain when Godot didn’t show up, and his desperate desire for the man to make an appearance, for God’s sake
a production by the Dublin Gate Theatre in 2006 at UCLA Live that, despite its acclaim, I didn’t like at all because it was so meaningful. “Godot” is much better when played as vaudeville; Robin Gammell (above) was an excellent clown. The play is intended to be played that way — one stage direction has a character “scratching his head like Stan Laurel.” When it’s filled with portent, it’s a drag. And that’s what this production was like.
I’m sure I’m leaving out four other productions. Minimum.
And yet, I’m going again. Why? Top-notch cast, including Alan Mandell (who is now 84 and unlikely to be doing this sort of thing much longer; sorry, Alan), and featuring two actors who knew and worked with Beckett himself (Alan, and Barry McGovern); a video clip (above) from the production that, just in this excerpt, shows that the approach is right; it’s one of the most important plays of the 20th century and one I find deeply effecting; and, well, my friend Dorinne had an extra ticket and invited me.
The Onion is moving its editorial offices from Chicago to New York. As they peel away for another city, much of the editorial staff is staying behind, and they’ve been in skirmishes with ownership about benefits, going so far as to try to find a new buyer. That’s all according to this piece in The Atlantic. I love the sharp-witted satire of The Onion — it’s one of the few sites I consistently repost on my Facebook page. I hope this move and change in staff doesn’t leave a lot of Onion fans crying.
I’ve met Mel Brooks three times, and he’s been kind, warm-hearted, and funny all three times. Almost 20 years ago, I attended Buster Keaton’s 100th birthday party at Silent Movie. (Buster, being dead, wasn’t there.) Before the screening, I got into a nice conversation with my seat mate — Eleanor Keaton — and then afterward did the same with three other fans who turned out: Mel Brooks, Ann Bancroft, and Dom DeLuise. Mel was especially effusive about Buster, and I had the advantage of having seen not only all of Buster’s silents, but also “Silent Movie,” so I had a lot to contribute to the conversation.
This terrific interview with Mel Brooks, which I just found online today, shows just how great an influence Keaton was on him. I think Mel is absolutely right about Keaton: that he was an astonishing performer, and that even if he were starting out today, he’d be a sensation.
I dropped in on Wonder Con yesterday in Anaheim, and “dropping in” reminded me that, once upon a time, one could also “drop in” on its very big brother, the San Diego Comic-Con International. Whereas Comic Con is now a sold-out extravaganza featuring 150,000 people sluiced into one space and requiring military-style strategic planning to attend, when I first attended it in 1988 I believe there were 20,000 attendees and I was able to drive down on a lark, buy a ticket, and walk in. In other words: pretty much the way one can still do with Wonder Con. While at Wonder Con yesterday, I was able to do something else almost impossible now at Comic-Con: walk the entire exhibitors’ hall. At Comic-Con, that requires several days, good rations, and a sturdy camel. Wonder Con also had the added benefit of being staged in the same complex as a high school girls’ volleyball competition, but my friends and I pledge that we didn’t stop and watch any of that, because it was of zero interest to us. Zero.
My friend Larry Nemecek was once again hosting his show “Star Trek: Between the Cracks.” Three of his friends have pledged to gently help him find a better name for it. One name might be: “Everything you (n)ever wanted to know about ‘Star Trek.’ ” I realize that pronouncing that “(n)” is tricky, but it can be accomplished. Larry is impressively knowledgeable about Star Trek; I’m sure he knows Gene Roddenberry’s shoe size, and the whereabouts of Mr. Data’s missing car keys. In his show, Larry shares a lot of behind-the-scenes shots and a lot of trivia. As I can attest, having seen the response last year at Comic Con by my college kid’s friend, some people do want to see the inside of Rick Berman’s production trailer, circa 1987. (And I can understand that. I’m up for a discussion of all the costume and identity variations of Hank Pym, aka Ant-Man/Giant Man/Goliath/Yellowjacket/the Wasp.) So here’s the good thing: If you didn’t make it to his panel yesterday, or catch him at some other convention appearance, you can visit his website where you can learn all sorts of Star Trek stuff every day, and sign up for his newsletter to find out even more. Here’s the link.
The only other thing I did at Wonder Con was, well, sleep. I arrived early at room 210-B, where Larry’s panel was, and sneaked off to a secluded little corner of the completely 210-A (no chairs, no tables, no people) and fell asleep on the nicely carpeted floor. This too was something that was once possible at Comic-Con — as it was at all the cons I attended in the 1970s. It felt like returning home.
The podcast includes two interviews with Mike Daisey, and in one his facts are taken apart stitch by stitch by a reporter from public radio’s Marketplace show, a reporter who lives and works in China and who has toured the very factory Mike Daisey talked about, and who knows that the facts shared are not true. Yes, Mike Daisey lied about what he found. Evidently, he did not find children making Apple products. He did not interview as many people, or tour as many factories as he said. He wholecloth appropriated the story of a factory accident that happened 1000 miles away. He said that the factory had guards with guns, which it didn’t. He did not interview a man whose hand had been turned into “a claw” who had never before seen an iPad, even though he’d made his living assembling them. All these things, plus more, are fabrications, and Daisey cops to it. I don’t like what Mike Daisey did here, and I share Ira Glass’s outrage and barely sheathed anger at being lied to.
It’s also painful to listen to the last segment of the show — in which an actual reporter is interviewed by Ira Glass about the actual working conditions of the factories in China where Apple products are manufactured. Many of the sort of abuses that Mike Daisey made up exist in actuality. According to this report, Apple has made some course corrections — in eliminating child workers, for one — but there’s still work to be done, and I hope they mandate it quickly. They need to establish stricter standards and insist upon them.
I hope that two things come out of this sad story. One is that, ultimately, factory workers in China and elsewhere get better working conditions. The second is that we all take this as yet another reminder that lying — whether you’re Mike Daisey, or James Frey, or Richard Nixon, or Bill Clinton, or Jayson Blair, or Janet Cooke — is wrong.
“One of his weaknesses is his sanctimoniousness,” says this person, who wished to remain anonymous. “That’s true with most artists. Most playwrights don’t like to see other people’s plays, most writers are not kind of about other people’s writing. Mike has made himself an easy target because he can’t keep his mouth shut. He got really excited about the press.”
While I’m not prepared to issue a blanket indictment of “most artists” as being sanctimonious, I’ve caught myself at it in the past, and I’ve seen it in plenty of other artists and non-profit arts organizations. We do like to think we’re changing the world for the better. So perhaps Mike Daisey’s story is not one of perfidious self-service (I hope not); perhaps it’s one of hubris, of honest error, and of getting caught up in his own press. I just wish he’d clarified the lines between fact and fiction.
I think we should also mention that it’s not just artists who try to change the world. Business does that too. I remember the argument by the Clinton administration during the NAFTA debates that the best way to improve the lives of people in other countries was to welcome them into the big economy. In spirit, I agree with that, and that is the argument underlying many of the pro-Apple comments found on various sites covering this story (including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal): that conditions in Chinese factories will improve precisely because Apple is there, subcontracting these people. The argument is also occasionally expanded to claim that doing work on Apple products is already better than the alternative. As the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal Business & Finance section reports:
The company [Apple] also went on a media offensive of its own, inviting ABC News into a Foxconn factory. An ABC reporter found evidence of teenagers doing work of “soul-crushing boredom” that was better than the conditions where they were from in the countryside.
Why is Apple making these products in China in the first place? According to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, it’s because Chinese factories were able to implement changes almost overnight — in keeping with Mr. Jobs’ mercurial personality. When Jobs decided he didn’t want plastic for the first iPhone screen, Tim Cook, now the CEO of Apple, realized that U.S. factories couldn’t shift to manufacturing the necessary specialized glass screens in time to make their proposed launch date, and he moved the company to manufacturing in China, where employees could be made to live on-site, and be awakened at any moment to be put back to work.
Why are factories able to enforce such work conditions in China? Because of government complicity and the lack of labor unions. And what led to the creation of government oversight and labor unions in the U.S.? Grueling work conditions and workplace calamities such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Those 146 garment workers who died in that fire in 1911, most of them young immigrant women, were the Chinese factory workers of their day. As China (and India) spring into modern industrialism, they will find that brutal government repression is required to keep their work standards low. That, and the sort of cold heartlessness almost all people everywhere thankfully lack.
