Had a harder time connecting and concentrating this week, but some time with friends helped and I still found a few unalloyed joys.
Theater: The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World aka The Negro Book of the Dead by Suzan-Lori Parks, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz reunion reading presented by Signature.
Suzan Lori-Parks was probably the first contemporary playwright I loved with the same fervor as the classics I grew up with. I read Topdog/Underdog at least a dozen times before getting my mind blown with CATCO’s visceral production in 2004 and I’ve been a rabid fan ever since. Most recently, I saw a riveting revival of her Death of the Last Black Man in 2016 right after the last election.
It gave me immense joy to revisit that work with a reunion of that cast under the same director, Liliena Blain-Cruz. Parks uses rich mythic language to revisit the death of the play’s eponymous black man, from different angles and with different emotional beats, and in doing so opens up and celebrates his life over and over again.
It felt as urgent in 2016 as it was when it premiered in 1990, and seeing it four years later with peril out in the open, shoved in the faces of those of us who might have had the luxury of looking away before, was a gorgeous volcano of our shared pain and joy.
Music: Mountain Goats, presented by Noonchorus
Both full-band streams – the second was Thursday the 29th – from a studio in North Carolina to celebrate the release of their excellent Getting Into Knives record find John Darnielle’s Mountain Goats continuing their hot streak creatively and releasing the pent-up energy we’re all feeling at not being able to live the life they’ve grown into.
That Faulkner line about the only subject worth writing is man in conflict with himself and Mary Oliver’s line about paying attention as our endless and proper work always come to mind when I think about the Mountain Goats. He melds those impulses together and finds, in that conflict, in that attention, a way to celebrate.
Both shows hit the wild extremes of emotion Darnielle crafts so well, and his brilliant use of the push-and-pull of a set list. The first stream, on the 22nd, was riddled with highlights. He paired two songs off Transcendental Youth, the gut-punch of shame in “Cry For Judas” with that terrible ambiguity wrapped in a sunny singalong hook, “Long black night, morning frost – I’m still here but all is lost,” sets us up for the celebration and encouragement of “Amy aka Spent Gladiator 1”: “Find limits past the limits, jump in front of trains all day, and stay alive. Just stay alive.”
The second was full of highlights – a simmering “Stabbed to Death Outside San Juan”, a joyous, raging “Foreign Object” but two moments near the middle of the set still haunt me a couple days later. The low-at-the-heels vignette “Lakeside View Apartments Suite” hit this perfect note of devastation in the synchronicity of text and singing with “Ray left a message thumbtacked to the door. I don’t even bother trying to read them anymore,” and then this pause weighed down with regret that’s as bleak and beautiful as the “Scuse me while I disappear” on Sinatra’s best version of “Angel Eyes” or the stutter into smoke on Basinski’s “Disintegration Loops”. Not long after that, on “International Small Arms Traffic Blues” he delivers “My love is like a powder keg” with no wink or any bravado, it’s the perfect distillation of a character with nothing left to lose or offer but an earnest truth.
The encores – if you can call them that here – both ended with the closest thing he’s produced to a hit, the perennial, everyone-finds-their-meaning perfection of “This Year.” The first show followed it with another classic climax, “No Children” with jokes from the band about how odd it is to play it without people screaming along “I hope you die, I hope we both die.” The latter went into the more subdued “Spent Gladiator 2,” about shrugging off the expectations of a life and learning to live with them, finding some last bit of defiance in the throes of exhaustion.
Screen of Distance 