Nassim Review of Nassim, a play by Nassim Soleimanpour

 

Nassim

Review of Nassim, a play by Nassim Soleimanpour

At the Calderwood Pavilion of the Huntington Theatre through October 27, 2024

By Andy Hoffman

Nassim, currently playing at the Calderwood Pavilion and presented by the Huntington Theatre, defies all expectation of a theatrical experience. It features a new co-star every performance, and that co-star has not seen the script prior to the start of the show. As the play begins, we see the featured performer struggle to gain his or her footing as they attempt to act out a play about which they know almost nothing, cold-reading their lines projected on a screen behind them. The audience instantly sympathizes with the performer as the script they read pokes fun at stage conventions. On the night I saw the production, Armando Rivera, the Puerto Rico-born Co-Artistic Director of Teatro Chelsea gamely kept up with the process, even when the text on the screen appeared in Italics, as stage directions typically do. He boldly faced the challenge of talking to the audience while glancing back at the screen for his lines. A pair of hands sometimes appear with the lines, changing the words or forcing an emphasis the performer elides. About 20 minutes into the play, we learn that those hands belong to the playwright himself, Nassim Soleimanpour.

Soleimenpour has a fascinating story to tell in this autobiographical play. Born in Iran, Soleimenpour cannot produce his plays in his repressive home country. Living now in Berlin, the playwright feels always disoriented, writing in his native Farsi for audiences that will not understand him and then translating the script to perform elsewhere. As a result, NASSIM deals with language and the ways in which language both divides people and brings them together. Soleimanpour has gathered many languages on tour with his plays. He lives in Germany now, and seems largely fluent in English, though he speaks little. In the almost 500 performances of NASSIM, he has gathered words from around the world, which he shows the audience in the journal he keeps of words contributed by the audiences and defined by the performers. Through his “new best friend” – the performance’s special guest – Nassim and NASSIM reach a remarkable plateau of feeling and insight. And as you might expect, if you attend NASSIM, you might have the opportunity to learn some Farsi – onstage, in front of a supportive audience.

I would like to take this opportunity to praise Loretta Greco, the Huntington’s Artistic Director, who has shaken awake the somewhat staid old-guard company with a stunning and excellent line-up of inventive productions. And she has transformed the Boston theater scene not only through the Huntington Theatre’s annual schedule, but also through her policy of partnering with small theaters in the city, most particularly with African-American companies like the Front Porch Arts Collective. Under Greco, The Huntington will present Mfoniso Udofia’s multi-play cycle about a Nigerian American family. Efforts like this have opened up theater in the city, making it a truly a cultural institution for all of the region’s cultures. NASSIM carries this attitude forward with charm. Greco has the knack of staging shows that push the theatrical envelope while embracing the audience. Having sat through adventuresome but painful and destructive seasons at theaters elsewhere, I wish to give Greco unstinting praise for embracing the new without alienating traditional theater fans. It’s been a remarkable growth to watch. I hope the Huntington can keep Greco in Boston for a good long time.

NASSIM has an entertaining line-up of performers scheduled for its run, including Mfoniso Udofia, Tony Shalhoub, Jared Bowen, Keith Lockhart, and Imari Paris Jeffries. Every night will bring a different performance of the same play as these public figures and sometimes actors play with Nassim Soleimenpour’s script. Bringing in community leaders to perform makes NASSIM a bit of a gimmick, a gimmick that Soleimanpour used previously in his 2011 WHITE RABBIT RED RABBIT. But just because it’s a gimmick does not mean that it is easy to do or that it isn’t effective. My party left the theater feeling more connected to the world, and we can all use that feeling, however we acquire it.

The Biographer Poems by David M. Katz

 

The Biographer

Poems by David M. Katz

Dos Madres Press

Loveland, Ohio www.dosmadres.com

ISBN: 978-1-962847-07-0

71 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Spectral power belongs to ages and cultures long past. But here and there evidence emerges of its elusive endurance in the form of poetic techniques such as projection and personalization. Here imagination (Cotton Mather aficionados take notice) provides the proper venue with insight, empathy, and understanding as value added attachments. In his new book of poetry, The Biographer, David M. Katz haunts his set of chosen characters with his mnemonic underpaintings. He merges his rich emotional values with the objective facts of his characters, real or fictional.

Katz’s first poem, His Last Book, hooked me with its third person objectification of the artist getting old. Sentimentality and emotional pain are met head on. But they are contained and given purpose. Rather than bathos and mawkishness, the poet elicits an identifiable hard-bitten reality that one can recognize immediately. The poet introduces his protagonist empathically and with reflective preciseness,

… he realized

He was no longer young. He recognized

A periodic feebleness of mind,

A lack of balance, tendency to slip

And wobble in his steps, rise in the night

Repeatedly to pee: of scant concern

In themselves, these irksome little symptoms,

Annoying as mosquito bites,

Together made it seem to him as if

There were just two things in the universe

That mattered: his life and the end of it…

In his poem, The Altitude, Katz fills in the unknowable (read spectral) blanks between father and son. The speaker, no older than five, looks up the length of his father and nurtures the beginnings of an evolutionary understanding of the man. A moment of

drama creates a mnemonic guidepost on which the son attaches facts—both real and quasi-imaginary. Here is the heart of the poem,

… Suddenly I pitched

Forward like a ship, the mica chips

In concrete hurtling up at me before

My arm grew taut. My father’s hand had held

Me back from falling, though he didn’t seem

To notice, and we took a slow next step.

My eyes rose up and saw, beneath his hat,

A jaw, a nose, and something like a smile.

Generally, I am not fond of poems dealing with substance abuse, alcoholism or otherwise. Are You Still Drinking, Dad?, Katz’s piece on this very subject jolted me beyond any personal biases. Dealing with the disease’s phenomenon of quitting and relapse, Katz ghosts his persona with both unspoken and spoken connections that re-live intense, emotional hurts. But it is more than that. Missed opportunities caused by human failings are the bedrock of mortality. This Shakespearean sonnet is, pardon the expression, top shelf and my favorite poem in the collection. The last lines nail the irreversible pain and are not to be missed in any review. So here they are,

… He might have had one shot,

A rye to ease the future shock a bit;

Sweet Gypsy Rose; cheap peach or apricot

Liqueur. I said I’d be a father soon,

And he was miles away across the phone

On some highway with a cowboy tune

Fading behind. He always drank alone.

It’s now or never, Dad, I might have said.

Before my son was born my dad was dead.

Tread-worn spooks flitter past, still in grand context, but not as certain, not as noble in Katz’s mysterious poem The Code, written in memory of John le Carre. The real world is fading into the spectral by half and the activities of the spectral seem confused and leaderless. The poet has withdrawn his added details and leaves his audience in the dark or to their own Kafkaesque devices. The poem opens this way,

They were muttering in half-understood languages,

Half-wanting to be known, half wanting to know,

Half not and half-not. They were in the lobby,

Exchanging the code, partly overheard, the bellhops

Inured to it by now as they hustled

To the ever-ringing bell in their tight red coats…

Notice, everything appears compromised in this piece except the bell, which seems to signal the need for intervention.

Katz’s title poem and masterwork, The Biographer, A Verse Novella, spans twenty-six pages of compelling and imaginative narrative. The poet outdoes himself. He first creates a persona worthy of his truly American story. Then he essentially possesses the persona, not in a hostile way, but in a way that merges both biographer and subject in a dual adventure of creation and kaleidoscopic life.

Telling the story of an abandoned foundling, adopted on board ship on the way to Ellis Island, Katz’s persona intimates her techniques of biography referring to her subject’s newly found (and soon lost) parents,

… While Shmuel gazed, Ida

longed desperately to be off her feet. Their

Internal lives

are of course, my own creation, as is

the bulk

of any biography, a story

based

on a handful of facts. I have seen,

in fact, a creased,

anonymous photo of a pushcart

from that time

with a grimfaced father, mother, and

little girl posed

in front of it…

Katz’s narrative continues in a rapid, almost dream-like fashion, elucidating the life of vagabondage, independence, fame and activism. The reader, along for the ride, can do nothing but marvel at both the external and internal goings-on.

From beginning to end this superb book of poems illuminates the magical sum and substance of human nature, as well as the importance of soulful imagination at the heart of even the most objective life histories, or their fictional and spectral counterparts.

Somerville Artist Michael Silverman: A consummate coffee--doodler

 

Recently I caught up with Michael Silverman, one of the many artists in our creative burg. He writes,

 "My wife and I are both artists in Somerville in that we try to draw something every day at a coffee place. Over the last 6 years or so we have a stockpile of thousands of drawings. The whole thesis we have is to have fun with it.

How is it being an artist in Somerville?

It’s a treat. Love the atmosphere and the city is beautiful. Also it’s nice to be able to walk everywhere or take the T. We don’t have a car and don’t have to worry about parking/gas prices etc. Walking the bike path or down to Harvard and so on is a nice way to relax.

I haven’t cracked into the artistic community here that much as I’m not too social and tend to get hung up on minutiae that distracts from more meaningful discussion at the meetings. We did a few of the Sommer Streets festivals but I think maybe our art wasn’t the best fit for that kind of event. Mostly we just sold some pins and stickers.

I’m now thinking of that scene in Star Wars where the death star designer says “It’s a peaceful life.” lol.

You say the most important thing in creating is to have fun. Can having fun with your work, instead of wrestling with your work or struggling with it— can it bring serious work?

We all know the horrible artist who was obsessed with “My Struggle!” I did some political game stuff a while back that was fun to make and also a bit more… I wouldn’t say serious, but perhaps a bit more socially topical? It’s not my favorite project looking back.

My “fun” approach isn’t for everyone… Or even the path to making the “best” art. The serious stuff is something I don’t know how to tackle rather than something bad to make. Obsessing over somber and dark work and focusing on making that your life… I’m not sure I could stay sane. Or, to make a serious piece that deals with heavy feelings, do you just fake it? Does art reflect the feelings of the artist, or change them? Emotions are challenging for me, I’m not so sure I could look at the whole spectrum of human emotion in the mirror without a lot of support and hand holding and it feels like I already need a lot of support just to make my goofy wacky fun stuff. 

So the direct answer is: I don’t know. I would love to crack it… Serious fun!

The reason I make art is that feeling of freedom: it can be anything, there aren’t any rules (despite what people may argue), so I can just pour my soul onto the page and it’s thrilling to get my heart and mind out there. So maybe my art belongs hung on the refrigerator with the kid’s stuff? I wouldn’t be offended at that!

What was the germ of the idea to pair coffee with your art?

So I would go get coffee every day, people watch, sit there and do basically nothing while I got breakfast or whatever. Also I had some of those adult coloring books where I was deliberately not coloring in the lines and making my own pattern on top of the mandala that was there. It was kind of serendipitous to just combine the two, so I went to that “Blick” art store down near Central and bought a bunch of sharpies and a sketchbook and the “Coffee Doodle” was born.

Actually, I consider the coffee shop patrons my collaborators. Sometimes the antics of people getting a coffee or making some noises or having a conversation will change the direction I move in my drawing. There is a stream of consciousness element to the drawings, and having a bit of a kinetic element changes the work.

What coffee shop do you frequent to work on your art?

We have 3 major places that are near Davis Square, the Starbucks there, Diesel (I actually bought one of their T-Shirts) and the Bagel Place down by Rosebud, which makes a Lox and Bagel sandwich that competes with the real thing in NYC. The choice of place depends on the crowds, mood, and how hungry I am!

From looking at your work  it seem to be mostly colorful abstract paintings. Do you work in other genres?

Sometimes I will do a black and white piece when I am in a more serious mood. Those can be tougher days. As I was saying, when the art gets serious, so does my whole life, and then I start to get a bit down. I also sometimes do more representational stuff, or try to draw a cartoon. I would say about 90% of the drawings are abstract stuff. Actually some of my abstracts have been deemed “too representational” for some of the true Abstract aficionados. 

What artists influence your work?

Obviously Picasso is the big guy, can’t go wrong with him. I love cubism though I wouldn’t say I really am capable of doing it properly. Andy Warhol’s sarcastic post-modern “I want to make fun of the entire art world and make a ton of bank doing it” is admirable and cool. I think Paul Klee said something about wanting to be able to paint like a kid, which I have mastered, lol. I also like Mondrian, just because he is famously a boring person but his art is so impactful.

I also listen to a lot of pop music when I work that has a big impact on the mood of the pieces. I have a playlist of over a thousand songs and they all had their part in my work, lots of 60s, 70s, and 80s hits in there. Occasionally I will literally write down the song lyrics on the canvas, but only rarely.

Are you formally trained as an artist?

I went to an MFA program out in LA and dropped out. So … No. To me, the more formal art stuff goes into a miserable Game of Thrones style, “who will get to show their art to the world?” This is a crazy thing that I cannot stand and can even be traumatic to deal with. I don’t consider my lack of formality to be something good: I would love to make my work more professional. But sometimes if you polish a gem too much you end up ruining the stone.

In my high school days I was called “outstanding” and to be clear my school considered that a bad thing. I’m somewhat inconsistent, and sometimes really basic stuff I mess up, vs sometimes extremely complex things I just do easily.

I’m told my art is “Outsider Art” which is either art made by people without formal training, or the art of insane people. Pretty much the same thing, lol.

Why should we view your work?

When I say my art is about fun, I mean both for the artist and the audience. I’m trying to make the whole loop fun for all parties. For my work, I’ve tried to focus on the desert instead of the veggies, and I’m hoping that’s also what it feels like when people view the stuff. Even if you want to goof on my stuff or critique it, just have fun with that too!

for more info go to:

https://coffeedoodle.art