Poetry: “Welcome to Brooklyn
Criminal Court,” by Chris Butters, 2018
Most poetry in the U.S. is apolitical,
personal and exclusively aesthetic, or its just plain saccharine and
banal. "Precious" is the word that comes to mind. Believe me, I’ve attended a good
number of local poetry readings here in Minneapolis
and it is sometimes quite painful or laughable or both.
Chris Butters is not that
kind of poet. A socialist who worked as
a court reporter, he brings reality and feeling together in this poem about
Brooklyn Criminal Court, a place where he worked for 30 years. A witness, so to speak, to all the misery,
injustice, fear, humor and bureaucracy of that institution.
Butters has published prior
political poetry books, including “Propaganda of a
Seed,” and “Americas”
and others. He lives in Brooklyn, New
York. He has
been a radical activist for many years and his poetry reflects his social
concerns.
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| Electrical Power Outage at Brooklyn Criminal Court |
Chris read it on NYC WBAI (99.5 FM)'s Arts
Express radio last month. Enjoy!
Butters’ poetry books will
be available at May Day Books.
“The
Visit,” by Friedrich Durrenmatt, a play by Frank Theatre,
10/29/2018
This is a play about
revenge. Durrenmatt was a Swiss
dramatist who in style at least followed Bertold Brecht’s epic methods. Frank
Theatre, as is their wont, staged this
at the industrial Minnesota Transportation Museum
in St. Paul, a train
terminal full of vintage trains and tracks.
The play itself is set in a small, depressed town, Gullen, served by a
few trains. The train station is a key
locale in the play. So it fits…
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| The Visitor Comes to Town |
This is one of the more
disturbing plays you might watch, as it tells the story of a young girl of 17,
Claire, who gets pregnant and is betrayed by her lover in two ways. She is ultimately exiled from Gullen due to
the pregnancy and the actions of her lover. The baby later dies due to her poverty as a
prostitute in another town. She wants
revenge, and after becoming one of the richest women on earth from fortunate
marriages, she impoverishes the town for years unknown to them, then returns …
by train.
Claire’s plan is to bribe
the broken citizens of the town with a billion marks, IF they agree to
kill the man who betrayed her. And it
works, as the citizens eventually vote to kill him and do so collectively. The man’s wife and children are even in on
the plan, yellow shoes and all. Your sympathy is with her, then with him, then
– well really, death is not a just penalty for his actions. But for the rich it is easily
accomplished.
Ultimately deeply cynical
but also accurate, it proves money can buy almost anyone. But it also
highlights the treatment of women, especially pregnant working-class girls, who
in many countries were and still are shunned, sent away and in other ways
mistreated - even forced to bear children. At the time the play was first performed in Switzerland
(1956) women could not even vote in that country - they gained the vote in 1971.
A creepy play - partially
class conscious, partly feminist, partly reactionary, half funny, half sad…basically
disturbing. And not really Brechtian in
theme, just in the staging and theatrical methods. I say ‘partly reactionary’ because of the
moralistic structure of the play – almost like a Brothers Grim horror fairy-tale
that is supposed to teach us a lesson through the false extremity of its
choice.
The play is no longer
running here, but it may open in your town some day. Frank
Theatre will soon be
reprising “The Cradle Will Rock,” a
proletarian and left-wing musical they first put on in 2003. It became the basis of the excellent film by
Tim Robbins called “Cradle Will Rock.”
That movie added Diego Rivera’s painting of a mural for Nelson Rockefeller,
hearings by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and anti-communist
agitation against the Federal Theater Project onto Blitzstein’s original play
and the real events surrounding its performance. In 2003 those Frank Theatre
performances were in a torn-apart Sears store - very prescient, given Sears recent bankruptcy.
Other plays reviewed
below: “Oil & the Jungle,” “Love & Information,” “Ideation,” “Things
of Dry Hours,” “Revolt She Said. Revolt Again,” “Puntilla & His Hired Man,
Matti,” “The Lower Depths,” “A Bright Room Called Day,” “The Good Person of
Setzuan,” “Camino Real,” The Dutchman” and 3 written Sean O’Casey plays. Use
blog search box, upper left.
And I saw it in St. Paul, MN,
USA
Red Frog
October 26, 2018
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