{"id":22369,"date":"2021-04-13T10:13:07","date_gmt":"2021-04-13T17:13:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/?p=22369"},"modified":"2021-10-05T10:21:56","modified_gmt":"2021-10-05T17:21:56","slug":"the-waste-land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/the-waste-land\/","title":{"rendered":"The Waste Land: a review by Victor Cordell"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Lisa Ramirez. Photo by Carson French.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cApril is the cruelest month\u2026..\u201d\u00a0 This famous line opens T. S. Eliot\u2019s \u201cThe Waste Land,\u201d generally regarded as one of the finest pieces of modern literature.\u00a0 At its best, this 434-line epic poem oozes symbolism and begs never-ending analysis of its trenchant insights.\u00a0 Yet, like its opening line, \u201cThe Waste Land\u201d contains endless contradictions and ambiguities.\u00a0 Indeed, Eliot provided lengthy annotations of the poem in its original publication, though some of those confuse rather than illuminate.\u00a0 Detractors would submit that his episodic narrative with leaps in time, and changes in speakers and narrative style lacks cohesion. \u00a0But perhaps that reflected the way he saw the new world around him.\u00a0 Further, Eliot\u2019s frequent allusions to other literary works and use of untranslated foreign languages may seem to impress rather than inform.<\/p>\n

John Wilkens has adapted \u201cThe Waste Land\u201d to the stage as a vehicle for a solo performer.\u00a0 Oakland Theater Project has produced the staging, starring the multi-talented Lisa Ramirez and directed by Michael Socrates Moran.\u00a0 This production is the first live performance with a live audience sanctioned by Actors Equity in the state of California since the start of the pandemic.\u00a0 But to accomplish the approval, the performance is outdoors, and the audience remain in their cars.\u00a0 The good news with this arrangement is that the cars are parked one-deep, so that sight lines are great and the audience is close to the performer.\u00a0 The audio comes through FM on the car radio.\u00a0 The bad news, for the company, is that audience size is seriously limited.<\/p>\n

Because the poem tells stories in different voices and perspectives, it is conducive to dramatic staging.\u00a0 For those who wish to expand their intellectual horizons but can\u2019t muster the motivation to read Eliot\u2019s masterpiece, Ramirez\u2019s recitation with interpretive movement, variation of voicing, affect, and intensity captures the viewer\u2019s attention in a manner that few readers would self-engender.\u00a0 And the performance offers a fine dose of high-brow culture in well less than an hour.\u00a0 As a fine actor, she does emote effectively, although her voice is not long on the gravitas often associated with poetry reading.<\/p>\n

This production offers the added dimension of projected images to enhance the lyrics and acting.\u00a0 A video preface to the live performance of brief clips covers the history from when the poem was written to current day \u2013 a reminiscence of iconic snippets embracing everything from pop culture to war.\u00a0 In the absence of a printed program, I am unable to credit the creator.\u00a0 Few props appear on the earthen parking-lot \u201cstage.\u201d\u00a0 One used to pleasant effect is a strummed mandolin, which accompanies Ramirez as she delivers the words of the blind, Greek prophet, Tiresias, in a manner like an opera recitative.<\/p>\n

The poet doesn\u2019t refer explicitly to a waste land, so what is the poem about?\u00a0 The dominant received wisdom is that it concerns loss.\u00a0 Published in 1922, American-born Eliot had lived for a decade in England, which had just suffered through World War I, and concurrently, the (inappropriately named!) Spanish Flu epidemic.\u00a0 Sensing that the massive loss of life and destruction of property had permanently displaced pre-war society, Eliot foresaw a bleak future.\u00a0 The poem is written in five distinct sections.\u00a0 The first, \u201cThe Burial of the Dead\u201d establishes the overriding motif, and the speaker, Marie, evidences loss of station and things when she leaves childhood behind.\u00a0 The most direct reference to the uncertainty ahead appears in the final section, \u201cWhat the Thunder Said,\u201d with an expressed reference to the nursery rhyme \u201cLondon Bridge is Falling Down\u201d providing the analogy to failed civilization.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Waste Land\u201d particularly resonates as a corollary to our time.\u00a0 \u00a0The impact of Covid-19 in the United States now approaches that of the Spanish Flu, though worldwide, the latter was 15 times more deadly than Covid-19 has been to date.\u00a0 And while a devastating military war loomed in Eliot\u2019s consciousness, this country now faces a cultural war that increasingly cleaves us into two disparate camps with little common ground between us, and in which, tragically, a large segment of the population representing one of those camps even refuses to accept empirical facts that disconfirm what they wish to believe.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Waste Land\u201d is written by T. S. Eliot, adapted by John Wilkens, and produced by Oakland Theater Project.\u00a0 It plays in live performance drive-in theater format at the company\u2019s home, Flax art + design, 1501 Martin Luther King, Jr. Parkway, Oakland, CA through May 16, 2021.<\/p>\n

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\u201cApril is the cruelest month\u2026..\u201d\u00a0 This famous line opens T. S. Eliot\u2019s \u201cThe Waste Land,\u201d generally regarded as one of the finest pieces of modern literature.\u00a0 At its best, this…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":104,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"yasr_overall_rating":0,"yasr_post_is_review":"","yasr_auto_insert_disabled":"","yasr_review_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[664],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-22369","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-victor-cordell"},"yasr_visitor_votes":{"stars_attributes":{"read_only":true,"span_bottom":"