“That dude is weird,” Joy said.
“Too weird,” Doug said.
Passionately, I disagreed. And though two weeks ago I couldn’t have articulated what made someone a good actor, now—after thirty hours of auditions—I was starting to get an inkling. Because he used the language, not just the emotion; because he was naturally responsive; because he could take direction. And thanks to four years of arguing about Vergil with my classics peers, my persuasive ability was at an all-time vehement.
Okay, okay, my codirectors said. If you really feel that strongly.
By the time we got to rehearsals, Joy had to drop out due to other commitments, which meant that I was now officially 50 percent responsible for the play. In a panic, I went to the library and took out everything I could find on Troilus and Cressida, and more on Shakespeare besides. But no matter how thoroughly I prepared, when it came time to actually work with the actors, it was always more difficult than I had anticipated. Blocking one simple gesture—Ajax grabbing Thersites’s arm—could take half an hour.
“Where should I grab him?”
“There,” I said, pointing.
“Sight lines!” the stage manager called out.
“Ouch,” Thersites said. “That kinda hurts.”
“Actually,” Doug said, “I think it works better if he doesn’t grab him now at all, but waits until—”
Achilles stuck his head around the door. “When’s my cue again?”
Directing was one of the most challenging things I had ever done, harder than translating Aristotle, harder than writing my thesis. I wasn’t used to working in three dimensions, nor was I used to working in a group. Everything I had done up to that point—papers, exams, and presentations—had been solo. But in theater, nearly every moment is about collaboration and communication, balancing your own ideas with everyone else’s. After I got over the initial shock, it was a thrilling revelation: we were all in this together.
I was also shocked to learn how much ground the title director covered in a student production. In addition to running rehearsals, we were also figuring out costumes, props, and sets. In the weeks before the show, I learned what kind of fabric makes the best cape, where to find the cheapest metallic belts, and that if you spray-paint soccer shin guards gold they look kind of like greaves. Thankfully the actor playing Thersites—the one I had insisted upon—stepped in and offered us the entire costume stock from a production of Camus’s Caligula he’d starred in. You’re welcome, I told Doug.
Back in rehearsal, we continued making breathless choices that seemed like the height of brilliance: giving the play’s prologue to the doomed seeress Cassandra; cutting the role of Helen; interpreting Achilles’s Myrmidons as vinyl-clad dominatrices. (Actually, I didn’t think that last one was a very good idea. But Doug swore it would go over well with the Spring Weekend audience, and indeed, he was right.)
As the performance date neared I became a jittery, jubilant wreck. Even when I wasn’t on the phone with the sword-rental company or safety-pinning tarps together to make tents, I was so keyed up I couldn’t sleep. The same thoughts kept cycling through my head: the play was perfect, the play was terrible, the play was perfect, the play was terrible.
The Troilus and Cressida that ran could not be called perfect; this was student theater, after all. But it wasn’t terrible, either. It had energy and chemistry and conviction, and a cast that threw themselves into every joke and soliloquy. I remember standing there, transfixed anew by scenes I’d watched two hundred times: we had made this thing, and it wasn’t half-bad. Miraculously, the audience seemed to agree. They laughed at the right moments, gasped a few times, and even stayed in their seats through a minor rainstorm. At the end they stood to applaud.
That’s still one of my favorite things about theater—the way a show suddenly comes to life when there’s an audience, the way cast and crew snap together to make all the moments you’ve practiced over and over actually work. Seeing it happen was extraordinary and, as it turned out, addictive. I was inspired to direct a second production, and then a third, and eventually ended up founding a Shakespeare theater group (with that same Thersites) that would become one of the great loves of my working life.
Thinking back to those peer counselors, I’m grateful that they encouraged me to try something new: they were right, it did change my life. But I’m also aware that I would never have had the chance—or nerve—to attempt the play without all that time I spent in classics. Having such a solid foundation gave me the confidence to branch out.
The coda to all this is that theater led, in its turn, to a new discomfort: writing my first novel, about that same Achilles and Patroclus. The years I spent directing—telling stories onstage—gave me the experience and courage to attempt one in print. Apparently it’s how I work best: one foot comfortably planted, the other one over the precipice.
Giant Steps
AFAA MICHAEL WEAVER
I play here . . . but let me amend, I assume here
a sepia metaphysics, watch myself emerge in air
breathed twenty-eight years ago, as now nothing
stops me from assembling myself, hair forming
from light, bone tumbling out of tree limbs, skin
making itself a grammar of justice in shadows
along walkways named by seamen, me a newer,
hardier New Englander from southern bourbon.
Learning to love English again, to renew promises
of baptisms as ceremonies in books of rhymes,
a hip-hop not yet sung, one with metric variations
for the opening of The Tempest, I now take the role
of Charlie Patton as Prospero, tint the sky with blues
on a stage that waits for us to dance myths that renew,
the clouds now amorphous facts over Brown’s gate
looking down to the wooden First Baptist Church
where James Baldwin signed The Price of the Ticket.
In this space above time, reassembled, eyes more
a wish than the gel in the socket, I stare into the day
of leaving, graduating, Stevie Wonder being led
to sing to us, after our choral chant for Dr. Seuss,
the green marking what age would do, the toes
that would curl, bright spirits that would leave early,
an abrogation of the soul’s treaty, and the rest of us
would live, live to study the currents of being alive,
me the tired John Henry in his Rockefeller carrel,
up north studying the ways language lives, how
it makes a poet.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the unflappable Wendy Strothman ’72, LHD ’08 hon., P ’07, for steering the Brown Reader project with keen intelligence and good humor; to David Ebershoff ’91 for wearing several hats with astonishing skill; and to Jonathan Karp ’86 and Suzanne Gluck ’81 for their generous support and guidance. I’m grateful to each of the contributors for their inspiring creativity and dedication to excellence. Working with them has been a great pleasure.
At Brown University, huge thanks to Eve Ornstedt, Christina H. Paxson, Norman Boucher, Marisa Quinn, Mark Nickel P ’09, Katie Vorenberg, Jennifer Betts, Gayle Lynch, C. D. Wright, Christine DeCesare, Kat Schott, Raymond Butti, and Russell Carey ’91, AM ’06. I’m also grateful for input from the following members of Brown’s 250th Anniversary Publications Sub-Committee: George H. Billings ’72; Nancy L. Buc ’65, LLD ’94 hon.; Richard Fishman ADE ’73 hon., P ’89; Odest Chadwicke Jenkins ADE ’11 hon.; Carl Kaestle ADE ’98 hon.; Karen Newman ADE ’86 hon.; Ralph Rosenberg ’86, P ’17; Clay Wiske MD ’16; and Gordon Wood ADE ’70 hon., LITD ’10 hon., P ’86, GP ’11.
I’m indebted to Harold Augenbraum, Donnalyn Carfi, Deborah Garrison ’86, Erika Goldman, Bret Anthony Johnston, Sean Kelly ’84, Rick Moody ’83, John Siciliano, and Jean Sternlight for allowing me to pick their brains, and to Abby Weintraub ’93 for the beautiful cover desig
n.
Thanks to Simon & Schuster for partnering with Brown University on this special anthology. The terrific S&S team includes Laura Ferguson, Aja Pollock, and Nicholas Greene ’10.
Finally, I’d like to thank my parents, Lee and Peter Sternlight, for sending me to Brown. What a gift.
Sources of Quotes
THE BROWN AESTHETIC
“The Brown aesthetic”: David Shields ’78, “How We Are in the World,” Brown Alumni Magazine (BAM), March/April 2009.
“Brown remains to this day”: Elena Ferrarin ’96, “Writing from His Roots,” BAM, January/February 2012.
“I met [Nathanael] West at Brown”: Robert Taylor, “S.J. Perelman Takes a Powder,” Boston Globe, November 22, 1970, reprinted in Conversations with S. J. Perelman, ed. Tom Teicholz (Jackson:University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 69.
CAMPUS LIFE
“The closest I ever came to an orgy”: S. J. Perelman ’25, “Cloudland Revisited: Sodom in the Suburbs,” New Yorker, February 12, 1949, 24.
“I loved the fact that”: David Corn ’81, “You Don’t Have to Trust Me,” BAM, May/June 2013.
ACADEMIC LIFE
“As much as we sometimes”: Steven Johnson ’90, “Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on Where Ideas Come From,” Wired, October 2010.
“The semiotics program”: Christine Vachon ’83, “The Freewheelin’ Todd Haynes,” BAM, November/December 2007.
“No matter what I study”: Ted Chiang ’89, Stories of Your Life and Others (East Hampton, MA: Small Beer Press, 2010), 39.
DIVERSITY
“I came to Brown”: Jaimy Gordon ’72, “Providence Baroque: Here Comes Jaimy Gordon,” Gargoyle 22/23, December 17, 1983.
“Though there are no Jewish quotas”: Amy Sohn, “Probing Brown’s Dark History,” Jewish Daily Forward, November 10, 2006.
“The influence [Augustus A.] White ’57 has had”: Beth Schwartzapfel ’01, “The Doctor of Prejudice,” BAM, September/October 2001.
SELF-DISCOVERY
“I was surrounded by fashion-conscious people”: André Leon Talley ’73 AM, A.L.T.: A Memoir (New York: Villard, 2003), 145.
“Senior year I moved into the House”: Sam Lipsyte ’90, The Ask (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 51.
“My own epiphany”: Pamela Paul ’93, “Regrets of an Accomplished Child,” New York Times, November 4, 2012.
POLITICS
“On the morning of May 5th”: Thomas Mallon ’73, “The Year of Thinking Dangerously,” BAM, May/June 1998.
“[At] Brown University, I was always someone”: Dimitra Kessenides, “The Execution of Wanda Jean,” Salon, March 18, 2002.
INSPIRATION
“I think one of the most inspirational”: Kentucky Educational Television, “A Talk with the Playwright: Lynn Nottage,” American Shorts, 2013.
“Mostly I say, just write”: Mary Donnelly, “Kevin Young Interview,” FailBetter.com, October 6, 2009.
“[What] had the strongest impact on me”: Kathleen Potts, “Water by the Spoonful: An Interview with Quiara Alegría Hudes,” Guernica, July 2, 2012.
“[Robert Coover] taught a course”: Courtney Eldridge, “Ben Marcus,” BOMB 89 (Fall 2004).
About the Contributors
Donald Antrim (’81) is the author of three novels, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, The Hundred Brothers, and The Verificationist, and a memoir, The Afterlife. He contributes short stories and personal essays to the New Yorker and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the American Academy in Berlin, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2013, he was named a MacArthur Fellow. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Robert Arellano (’91, ’94 MFA) is the author of six novels, including the web’s first interactive novel, Sunshine ’69, and the Edgar Award finalist Havana Lunar. He is Professor of Creative Writing and a founding faculty member of the Institute of New WritingAshland at Southern Oregon University.
M. Charles Bakst (’66) retired from the Providence Journal in 2008 after more than forty years as a reporter, editor, and political columnist. He grew up in Fall River, Massachusetts. His late mother, Anna Horvitz Bakst, was a member of the class of 1931. Bakst attended Phillips Academy, Andover, and received a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He and his wife, Elizabeth Feroe Bakst ’67, live in Providence.
Amy DuBois Barnett (’91) has shaped the pages and websites of Harper’s Bazaar, Essence, Teen People, Honey, and Ebony, where she is currently editor in chief of the oldest and largest African-American magazine in the country. Barnett has an MFA degree in creative writing from Columbia University. She is the author of the NAACP Image Award–nominated book Get Yours! How to Have Everything You Ever Dreamed of and More.
Lisa Birnbach (’78) has published twenty-two books, including The Official Preppy Handbook (1980) and True Prep (2010). She’s written for the New Yorker, Parade, New York, and other magazines. She was the Las Vegas bureau chief of Spy, and eventually its deputy editor. In addition to being a guest on many talk shows and writing for television comedy programs, Lisa was a correspondent for three years on The Early Show on CBS. The Lisa Birnbach Show, a daily syndicated radio program, won two Gracie Awards. She tweets at @LisaBirnbach.
Kate (née Al) Bornstein (’69) is an author, performance artist, playwright, and public speaker who has written several award-winning books in the field of women and gender studies, including Gender Outlaw and My Gender Workbook. Her 2006 book, Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws, is an underground bestseller that has propelled Kate into an international position of advocacy for marginalized youth.
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum (’95) is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Otis College of Art and Design.
Mary Caponegro (’83 AM) is the author of Tales from the Next Village, The Star Café, Five Doubts, The Complexities of Intimacy, and All Fall Down. She is the recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature. She has taught at Brown, RISD, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Syracuse University, and Bard College, where she holds the Richard B. Fisher Family Chair in Writing and Literature.
Susan Cheever (’65) is the author of E.E. Cummings: A Life and Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography. She is at work on a history of drinking in America. She has also published five novels and four memoirs. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and other publications, and she has been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Boston Globe Winship medal. She has taught at Brown, Yale, Columbia, Bennington, and elsewhere.
Brian Christian (’06) is the author of The Most Human Human, which was named a Wall Street Journal bestseller and a New Yorker favorite book of 2011, and is translated into ten languages. His writing appears in the Atlantic, Wired, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. Christian has been featured on The Daily Show, on Radiolab, and in Best American Science and Nature Writing. He lives in San Francisco.
Pamela Constable (’74) has been a newspaper reporter and foreign correspondent for nearly forty years. Since 1994, she has been on staff at the Washington Post, and before that she worked for the Boston Globe and the Baltimore Sun. She has reported from many parts of Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. She has written two books on contemporary Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, and coauthored a book on the Pinochet regime in Chile. She is also the founder of a veterinary clinic and shelter for stray animals in Afghanistan. She lives in northern Virginia.
Nicole Cooley (’88) grew up in New Orleans. She was a Comparative Literature concentrator at Brown and then attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received her degree in fiction. She has published four books of poems, most recently Breach
(LSU Press) and Milk Dress (Alice James Books), and a novel. She lives outside of New York City with her husband and daughters and is the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College–City University of New York.
Dana Cowin (’82), editor in chief of Food & Wine magazine, oversees all aspects of this lifestyle brand, including books, tablet editions, and the website FoodandWine.com. She is devoted to many hunger-related causes and is on the board of City Harvest, Hot Bread Kitchen, and Wholesome Wave. Cowin lives in New York City with her husband, Barclay Palmer, and their two children.
Spencer R. Crew (’71) has served on the board of the Corporation of Brown University and as president of the Brown Alumni Association. He is Clarence J. Robinson Professor of History at George Mason University. During his more than twenty-five years as a museum professional he was the director of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, and president of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Edwidge Danticat (’93 MFA) is the author of four novels, Breath, Eyes, Memory; The Farming of Bones; The Dew Breaker; and Clair of the Sea Light. Her other works include Krik? Krak!; Brother, I’m Dying; and Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Her numerous accolades include a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, an American Book Award, being named a National Book Award finalist (twice), and a MacArthur Fellowship.
Dilip D’Souza (’84 ScM) spent years in software before realizing his passion: writing. He has written for Caravan, the Hindustan Times, the Daily Beast, and Newsweek; his books include The Curious Case of Binayak Sen and Roadrunner: An Indian Quest in America. Among his several writing awards is the Newsweek/Daily Beast Prize. Home, with wife Vibha and children Surabhi and Sahir, is Bombay. Cats Cleo and Aziz rule.
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