Author: rakemag

Even though it was filmed here and directed by a Norwegian native, Factotum, based on the Charles Bukowski novel, is anything but Minnesota Nice. Like this spring’s film version of Ask The Dust—based on the novel that got Bukowski started as a writer—Factotum offers up Hollywood beauties playing the bums. This time it’s Matt Dillon as Henry Chinaski, the alcoholic who can’t hold even the most menial job to support his booze and writing habits, and Marisa Tomei as Laura, the down-on-her-luck broad whom Chinaski will use and abuse. On one hand, we hope Factotum will retain at least some of Bukowski’s edgy humor and eye for squalor, but on the other hand, his treatment of women could, to say the least, use some softening.

Showing as part of the Heights Theater’s eightieth-anniversary celebration, Vincente Minnelli’s masterpiece is not to be missed on the big screen. For all its nostalgic kitsch, this musical—one of the golden era’s finest—is surprisingly powerful. The gossamer plot, involving nothing more than Father Smith landing a job in New York, thus forcing his family to leave beloved St. Louie behind, meshes perfectly with the music and spot-on performances. Most notably, of course, Judy Garland plays one of the Smith daughters, falling in love, growing up, and singing all the way. Margaret O’Brien, who played younger sister “Tootie,” will introduce the film.

All The King’s Men provokes more questions than interest: Why another version of Robert Rossen’s Oscar-winning 1949 film? To show that Sean Penn can outdo Broderick Crawford’s iconic Willie Stark? To introduce Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to modern audiences, and perhaps draw likenesses to the stumblebum currently in the White House? If so, that’s a stretch—Willie Stark is nothing if not Huey Long, governor of Depression-era Louisiana and probable failed presidential candidate. With apologies to Lloyd Bentsen, George W. is no Kingfish. The remake boasts an all-star cast trolling for golden statuettes and looks like a pleasant diversion for folks who enjoy big-budget costume and set design, but something tells us you’re better off renting the original.

Coming up from the rambunctious Hijackers: a duet exploring the “unique gender” of male figure skaters, and a ballet set to tunes from a polka songstress called Lady Hard On. By boldly approaching modern dance with a certain irreverence, the veteran duo of Kristin Van Loon and Arwen Wilder have become widely known, and quite respected for their oddball tastes (they’ve been at it for a dozen years now, so they’re obviously winning people over). For example, they’re fond of presenting pop-video-style miniatures to dance audiences accustomed to longer and more ponderous fare. For this program they’ve divided their powers, each choreographing in isolation to create pieces for the other to perform. 1420 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-340-1725; www.southerntheater.org

This show was initially set to wrap in July. But after critics laid it on thick with praise and audiences started lining up for their sultry Tennessee Williams fix, the Torch Theater cleared the way for a run into September. No doubt one of the production’s biggest attractions is Stacia Rice, who wowed audiences a couple of years ago with her portrayal of Blanche DuBois (and is also at the helm of this new-ish company). Apparently she knows her strengths, now sinking her teeth into Maggie, the desirable but ultimately sex-starved and childless—and thus, of course, hysterical—woman at the heart of this classic. 711 Franklin Ave. W., Minneapolis; 952-929-9097; www.torchtheater.com

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is notoriously thorny where film and stage adaptations, even the recent premiere that inaugurated the Guthrie’s new theater, are concerned. Leave it to a group of avant-garde New Yorkers to set aside the adaptation imperative and take on the whole enchilada: Basically, Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz is an unabridged audio version of The Great Gatsby performed, word for word, onstage. The conceit is that an ordinary office worker has cracked open the book and, as he gets drawn in, prevails upon coworkers to play out the scenes; the goal is to have certain Gatsby images spring to life onstage as they do, so indelibly, in the minds of readers. And apparently these Service folks have hit on something, receiving wondrous reviews in Brussels, Amsterdam, and Zurich (this is Gatz’s American premiere). While the onstage antics do add some humor that F. Scott never intended, be aware that this undertaking goes for six and a half hours—no joke. View it on consecutive evenings or take it all in during one marathon performance. 612-375-7600; www.performingarts.walkerart.org

Done in the style of an old-fashioned radio play, this production comes replete with the sound effects that go beyond approaching footsteps and door slamming. The zinger part of Kid-Simple’s plot is that its protagonist, a high school science-fair champ named Moll, has invented a hypersensitive listening device that amplifies the world around us. Minneapolis-based playwright Jordan Harrison has written in all sorts of crazy effects that set up the show’s sound artist, another local named Mike Hallenbeck, with quite the challenge. How to realize the racket of batting eyelashes, or create the sound of a field mouse’s growing toenails? Tom Keith, the Prairie Home Companion sound-effects maestro, might have some competition waiting in the wings. 1501 4th St. S., Minneapolis; 612-338-6131; www.emigranttheater.org

This is “sort of a mini Fringe,” according to the organizational brains behind this endeavor, although this particular festival does bear the modest touch of a curator. Hundreds of scripts for ten-minute plays, mostly by local writers, were submitted to the Bedlam company. They plucked the finest of the bunch—which, in most cases, meant the funniest—assigning them a director and cast of Bedlam regulars as well as non-actors from the streets of Cedar-Riverside. The resulting program of sixteen bite-sized playlets leans heavily upon stilt-walkers and other lo-fi antics that are the signature of Bedlam’s punk-rock gypsy aesthetic. 514 1/2 Cedar Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-341-1038; www.bedlamtheatre.org

Dear Nostalgia,

I hate you. And yet, you are brilliant. Because if I ever stop hating you, I will long for the days when I did hate you and then I will hate you all over again.

The French called you maladie du pays—the disease of home—which, though I hate you, does not do you justice. The Spaniards called you el mal de corazón—a wrongness in the heart—which is a lot closer to what you’re doing to me. You used to be a diagnosable medical condition and I give you mad props for that. During the Civil War alone, eighty-six people died from you.

You obviously plan to take me next.

Oh, it’s not my homeland that you seduce me with (though I do sometimes pine for the dollar well drinks at Pat’s Tap in Hawkeye, Iowa). It’s not those stupid 80s shows either, no matter how drolly Mo Rocca can recall the Rubik’s Cube.

It is when I lie down in my bed next to my wonderful husband, while our boys (ages five and three) sleep snugly in their bunk beds. That’s when you poison me. Because of you, Nostalgia, I am not lulled to sleep with thoughts of my growed-up boys’ future double wedding to the virginal twins of my best friend Sharise. Nor am I taken away to a magical island where my husband and I madly make love and then eat a bucket of nachos.

No. Not since Jake Hammond moved to town.

Like a backward-flowing River Styx you have seeped into my nights, Nostalgia. You’ve inked some deal with my Bible-camp boyfriend and Morpheus himself to kill me slowly with my own dream, which isn’t a dream at all, now is it? No! Your weapon is my own memory! It is Jake’s Drakkar Noir-dipped neck, his hands steadily moving toward my ass as we cling to each other during the final song of eighth grade’s “Summer Goodbye” dance!

“Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns N’ Roses, but you already knew that, didn’t you, Nostalgia? Didn’t you?!?!?

Damn you, Nostalgia! Why won’t you let me appreciate those sweet children of mine today instead of longing for today twenty years from now, if you even allow me to make it to then? Why won’t you let me appreciate “Sweet Child O’ Mine” as a stellar rock ballad when I hear it, instead of ripping me back to one sultry night in 1988 at Camp Ewalu. The night I wore a halter top, the night Jake Hammond first feathered his fingers down my bare spine … Oh God! Make it stop!

You’ve got me in your sweaty claws now, Nostalgia. Even “Sweet Child O’ Mine” is about you, you, you. Just keep digging in your nails. The doctors said you induced a “wasting of the vital powers” among Civil War soldiers. You are showing no mercy to me.

If you haven’t killed me by the time you get this, it’s just because I’m not home. I’m parked outside Jake Hammond’s Linden Hills apartment, my eyes of the bluest skies thinking of pain, wondering why it all passed me by.

You’ll find me. It will only be a matter of time.

Thanks a lot, asshole.

Wish I were here,

Stephanie Wilbur Ash
Fridley, Minnesota

Why wasn’t David Rakoff delighted about the prospect of being exiled to a desert island, even a fantasy one? After all, the Canadian-born writer and actor said “OK” when Outside magazine asked him to take “an intense, weeklong wilderness course, where I was trained in primitive skills such as animal tracking, skinning, shelter construction, and the like” (the resulting essay later appeared in his first book, Fraud). Then there was the twenty-day fast, “where one is supposed to just credulously let go and put one’s trust in the lack of food to effect its wonderful magic in releasing toxins and making you feel better than you ever thought possible.” About this experience, he told a story as thought-provoking as it was hilarious on the public-radio program This American Life.

Rakoff also asserted that “on some level I am the perfect person for a game like this. I am deeply concerned with self-sufficiency, even though I can’t drive. I cut my own hair, I recently made my own jeans, I made all the lamps in my apartment, and my freezer is full of bags of animal carcasses suitable for boiling down into stock as needed.”

So what was the problem? Thoroughly confusing us, Rakoff finally admitted, “I am terrible at stuff like this”—not at being exiled to a desert island, that is, but at selecting just five things to take along. Probably it’s his intensely inquisitive nature. For example, during his fast, he had so many questions that his “guru, a man who through his own constant spiritual questing was a paragon of inner peace and enlightenment, a man who was by his own admission a personal friend to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, became openly abusive, and I, for one, can hardly blame him.”

Things began to make sense. If Rakoff seems kind of neurotically self-analytical, not to mention self-contradictory and perhaps a tad self-loathing—well, remember, he is a writer. Also, he lives in New York.

Then there’s his obsession with time travel. Apparently he ruminates “at least once a day” on how he would have been “just as useless a member of society” five hundred years ago as he is now. “I don’t know how to make a light bulb or an electrical circuit or a pill,” he said. “I wouldn’t even seem smart or modern enough to be burned as a witch. I’m not joking. I really do think about this daily and use it as an excuse to feel bad about myself.”

That’s when we felt it was necessary to tell Rakoff to buck up. He did so immediately and, in a “penitential spirit,” came up with the following to pack in his desert-island kit bag:

1. My bowdrill supplies, those wooden implements I carved at wilderness camp, by which I can make fire using nothing more than sticks and some downy vegetable matter like dried grass. (I really can make fire with this. It’s far and away the coolest thing I can do. Children who have seen me do this have never gotten over it.)

2. A good carbon steel hunting knife.

3. A whetstone for that knife.

4. Plastic sheeting, preferably opaque, for constructing weatherproof shelter and for stretching over a hole in the ground and gathering the resulting condensation for drinking water.

5. Finally, Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, a work I have never read and likely will never get to. Only so that when eventually, in that arid and neglected place, those who come after me might look from those pages (now yellowing and curled like dead leaves) to my sun-bleached bones, and think to themselves, What a waste. Of course, they will be wrong.

Rakoff will be the featured guest at the Friends of the Minneapolis Public Library’s annual meeting on October 3; for tickets call 612-630-6155, or visit www.friendsofmpl.org. Don’t Get Too Comfortable, Rakoff’s latest collection of essays, is available in paperback on September 12.