FLYING OVER SUNSET - Lincoln Center Theater Review

SPRING 2020 ISSUE NO. 76

Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Spring 2020, Issue Number 76 Lincoln Center Theater Review Staff Alexis Gargagliano, Editor John Guare, Executive Editor Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editor Strick&Williams, Design David Leopold, Picture Editor Carol Anderson, Copy Editor The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc. Board of Directors Eric M. Mindich, Chairman Kewsong Lee, President Marlene Hess, Leonard Tow, and William D. Zabel Vice Chairmen Jonathan Z. Cohen, Chairman, Executive Committee Jane Lisman Katz, Treasurer John W. Rowe, Secretary André Bishop Producing Artistic Director Annette Tapert Allen Eric Kuhn Allison M. Blinken Betsy Kenny Lack James-Keith Brown Memrie M. Lewis H. Rodgin Cohen Ninah Lynne Ida Cole Phyllis Mailman Judy Gordon Cox Ellen R. Marram Ide Dangoor John Morning David DiDomenico Brooke Garber Neidich Shari Eberts Elyse Newhouse Curtland E. Fields Rusty O'Kelley Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Andrew J. Peck Cathy Barancik Graham Robert Pohly David J. Greenwald Katharine J. Rayner J. Tomilson Hill, Richard Ruben Chairman Emeritus Stephanie Shuman Judith Hiltz David F. Solomon Linda LeRoy Janklow, Tracey Travis Chairman Emeritus Mila Atmos Tuttle Raymond Joabar David Warren Mike Kriak Kaily Smith Westbrook Caryn Zucker John B. Beinecke, Chairman Emeritus John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Ellen Katz, Augustus K. Oliver, Victor H. Palmieri, Elihu Rose, Daryl Roth, Honorary Trustees Hon. John V. Lindsay, Founding Chairman Bernard Gersten, Founding Executive Producer The Rosenthal Family Foundation— Jamie Rosenthal Wolf, Rick Rosenthal and Nancy Stephens, Directors— is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor.

Additional support is provided by the David C. Horn Foundation.

Our deepest appreciation for the support provided to the Lincoln Center Theater Review by the Christopher Lightfoot Walker Literary Fund at Lincoln Center Theater.

To subscribe to the magazine, please go to the Lincoln Center Theater Review website—lctreview.org.

Front Cover: Photo collage by Strick&Williams. Sunset over ocean © Littleny / Alamy Stock Photo. Vintage postcard of Santa Catalina, CA © Antiqua Print Gallery / Alamy Stock Photo. Back cover photograph: pr 16 © Martin Elder. Right: Flying saucer © ClassicStock / Alamy Stock Photo. Airplane © INTERFOTO / Alamy Stock Photo. Opposite: “Mouth, Nose, & Lips” blotter acid design (detail). Courtesy of the Mark McCloud collection.

Following spread: “Blazing World” by Inka Essenhigh.

Courtesy Inka Essenhigh and Kavi Gupta, photographs by John Lusis. On view in “Skirting the Line: Painting Between Abstraction and Representation” at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art opening March 21st.

© 2020 Lincoln Center Theater, a not-for-profit organization. All rights reserved.

Issue 76

CARY GRANT: THE MAKING OF A MAN BENJAMIN SCHWARZ 6 ALDOUS HUXLEY: EXPLORER OF UTOPIA STEFFIE NELSON 8 GERALD HEARD: GRANDFATHER OF THE NEW AGE STEFFIE NELSON 10 CLARE BOOTHE LUCE: WOMAN OF THE CENTURY PAMELA HAMILTON 12 VOYAGES DEBORAH KASS, FRANCINE PROSE, AND GREGORY BOTTS 14 BEYOND THE VEIL AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHELLE DORRANCE 16 SEEN IN A DIFFERENT LIGHT SHIRA NAYMAN 19 SANTA MONICA ENLIGHTENMENT DONNA RIFKIND 21 HAMLET FREDERICK SEIDEL 23

A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Before there was Timothy Leary, before the 1960s, before people dropped acid, there were doctors and psychiatric facilities and studies of a new drug that expanded perception, allowed you to see the world afresh, and fostered psychological and spiritual transformations that doctors believed could be healing. James Lapine, Tom Kitt and Michael Korie set their musical in this unexpected and little-known scene in Santa Monica, California, in the 1950s. Lincoln Center Theater audiences will be familiar with Lapine’s work from Falsettos, Act One, A New Brain, and Twelve Dreams. Flying Over Sunset features Cary Grant, Clare Boothe Luce, and Aldous Huxley, all of whom partook in this early path to enlightenment and self-understanding for wildly different reasons; they had separate lives, spheres of influence, and personal journeys, but each of them arrived in Santa Monica seeking something. What might at first glance appear to be an unexpected and spectacular drug-fueled romp is instead a gorgeous meditation on human connection and friendship.

This edition of the Lincoln Center Theater Review explores the people, the history of what is often con­sidered a conservative time, and the then mysterious drug that Huxley described in his book The Doors of Perception, which resurfaced in a totally different way a decade later when it inspired the name of the band The Doors. Both the book and the band were gestated in that paradisiacal place of legend and endless possibility: Southern California.

James Lapine has brought all this together in Flying Over Sunset with his dazzling vision and imagination. We have explorations of the main characters and how their lives brought them to this particular moment: Benjamin Schwarz on Cary Grant, Steffie Nelson on Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, and Pamela Hamilton on Clare Boothe Luce. Shira Nayman limns the 1950s medical experiments with LSD. Donna Rifkind delivers us to the Santa Monica of the 1950s. Deborah Kass, Francine Prose, and Gregory Botts invite us to accompany them on their

own LSD trips, and Frederick Seidel’s poem takes us behind the curtain of perception. Michelle Dorrance, the show’s choreographer, spoke to us about tap dancing, creativity, and how profound a psychedelic experience can be as the drug pulls back the veil so that one can see what normally isn’t visible.

Enjoy the trip.

Flying over sunset!

To a place you'd never dare.

Flying over sunset Like a painting in the air.

Breaking free of safety To a place of no return.

No way else to grow until you learn How to navigate the airspace Of the world beyond your view!

Constantly exploring for The reason why you’re you.

Flying out of body To experience the mind.

Love’s the one thing I won’t leave behind.

Through a transcendental portal, Where a moment feels immortal...

We’ll go flying over sunset!

Flying over sunset, all!

Just don’t fall.

From Flying Over Sunset, Book and Direction by James Lapine, Music by Tom Kitt, Lyrics by Michael Korie

Alexis Gargagliano

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LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

CARY GRANT: THE MAKING OF A MAN

BENJAMIN SCHWARZ

CARY GRANT INSPIRES MORE PURE DELIGHT THAN

any other actor in the history of the pictures. His effortless winningness, though, was born of a strenuous self-seeking and self-creation. Grant pursued what had eluded Gatsby—a heroic act of self-invention that integrated who he was with who he would become. After much struggle, he attained that self-invention on-screen, giving the world the persona that is “Cary Grant.” But fully unifying within himself an affectionate avowal of the person and the background from which he had emerged with the glamorous aspiration he had formed when not yet a man was an even longer, often painful, private effort. “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant,” so the saying goes—and part of Grant’s allure lies in the universality of the wish, together with the plain impossibility of pulling it off. The key to Grant’s imperishable magic, however, is that somebody did, in fact, pull it off: Archibald Leach, the son of a Bristol pants presser.

Ensorcelled by the music halls of his childhood, Archie Leach—a lonely working-class latchkey kid whose mother abruptly disappeared from his life when he was nine (his two-timing, alcoholic father had secretly committed her, despite her apparent sanity, to the Country Home for Mental Defectives)— ran away with a vaudeville troupe when he was fourteen. For the next nine years he would perform as an acrobat, juggler, stilt walker, and mime, honing his phenomenal physical grace and exquisite comic timing, and developing a professionalism and a team-spiritedness that were universally

praised and would serve him throughout his fiftyyear career. When his troupe left America after one of its tours, he stayed. Eventually, he abandoned a well-paying if unremarkable Broadway career to try the movies, choosing a screen name that conjured the image of the man he aspired to be.

The talisman didn’t take. An actor named Cary Grant spent the next six years as a cog in the studio machine, playing pomaded pretty boys.

In nearly thirty movies—close to half of all the pictures he would ever make—his acting was stiff, his demeanor tentative, his smile weak, his manner ingratiating. His obvious discomfort in these creaky movies is the only evidence of his innate intelligence and taste as an actor. But, in 1936, he shone in Sylvia Scarlett as a Cockney swindler, a character close to his roots. The film’s director, George Cukor, recalled that the nearly thirty-two-year-old Grant “flowered; he felt the ground under his feet.”

In middle age, Grant wrote that in his youth he had lacked “daring and abandon,” as well as “confidence and the courage to enjoy life.” But now he suddenly came into his own. With his contract at Paramount soon to expire, he broke from the crushing studio system, becoming the first freelance star in the modern era. While the other actors of Hollywood’s golden age remained cosseted salarymen in thrall to the studio bosses, Grant would henceforth manage his own career, adeptly choosing and developing his own roles and collaborating with directors (and, by forgoing a wage in favor of a percentage of the gross of his shrewdly selected projects, becoming immensely rich, even by Hollywood standards). He soon made The Awful Truth—and, from nowhere, Cary Grant gloriously emerged, fully formed.

Top: Cary Grant. Left: Grant with Sofia Loren (detail). © Album / Alamy Stock Photo.

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“I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point,” Grant later wrote of the history of the relationship between Archie Leach and Cary Grant. The meeting was years in the making, but all at once he achieved the artistic self-mastery that would remain with him. There was the detached, distracted wit; the knowing charm; the bemused self-mockery; the good-natured ease combined with a genius for pitiless teasing; the exquisitely timed stylized comedic movements— the cocked head, the double takes; and, in a neat trick that allowed him to be simultaneously cool and warm, the arch mindfulness of the audience he was letting in on the joke.

I PRETENDED TO BE SOMEBODY I WANTED TO BE AND I FINALLY BECAME THAT PERSON. OR HE BECAME ME. OR WE MET AT SOME POINT.

When Cary Grant assimilated Archie Leach, he amalgamated qualities previously irreconcilable in movies and popular culture. Clearly the movies’ most handsome leading man, Grant nevertheless dropped the lover-boy act and shunned playing the neutered Englishman (Leslie Howard, Ronald Colman), the aw-shucks, vaguely smug rube (Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda), and the mischievous hunk (Clark Gable). Instead, he developed a novel way of interacting with a woman on-screen: he treated his leading lady as both a sexually attractive female and an idiosyncratic personality.

This approach often required little more than just listening to her—a tactic that had previously been ignored in the pictures. His knowing but inconspicuously generous style made his co-stars simultaneously regal and hilarious. With his sui-generis accent (itself a blend of the lowborn and the refined, of West Country lilt and hard Cockney, overlaid with the clipped patter of baseball talk), his subtle phrasing, and the clean bite of his diction, he delivered lines with a precise sparkle. But he also joined this gift for quick, clever, complex dialogue with a brilliant comedic physicality. That physicality itself was at once delicate (watch him punctuate a joke by simply bending a knee or arching an eyebrow) and broad. James Agee wrote that the

Cary Grant as a child. Courtesy of celebrity / Alamy Stock Photo.

BENJAMIN SCHWARZ

silent comedians “combined several of the more difficult accomplishments of the acrobat, the dancer, the clown, and the mime,” a skill set that was lost with the advent of the talkies. Grant, assimilating Archie Leach, more or less singlehandedly recovered it. He could execute clumsy pratfalls without forfeiting his uncanny grace.

In his blending of the urbane and the rambunctious, Grant found a way to be true to his own background, aspects of which he plainly adored, while reconciling that background to the vision of a suave man-about-town that he had aspired to as a working-class young man. Although Grant’s early Hollywood image seemed a denial of his former self, after he came into his own he kept Leach very much with him: he always spoke matter-of-factly and lovingly of his working-class origins, and he savored playing Cockney characters; his references to “Archie Leach” were an affectionate running gag in his pictures. Grant’s unique appeal emerged from the melding of his two identities. As the film critic Pauline Kael noted, Grant’s “romantic elegance is wrapped around the resilient, tough core of a mutt, and Americans dream of thoroughbreds while identifying with mutts.”

This assimilation took longer to achieve in Grant’s private life. “I have spent the greater part of my life fluctuating between Archie Leach and Cary Grant,” he acknowledged in 1963. “Only recently have I begun to unify them into one person.” Although the reserved Grant consistently conducted himself with uncommon grace, never indulging in the misconduct licensed to stars, his struggle to merge who he had been with who he had become surely contributed to four failed marriages (for which the stand-up Grant unreservedly blamed himself; he remained on excellent terms with all his exes) and an earnest, decades-long project of self-assessment (a project that included extended psychiatric treatment with LSD, which was legal at the time).

As Grant suggested, he eventually achieved self-understanding and happiness, a state that coincided with his final marriage and the birth of his only child. The act of internal integration necessary to become Cary Grant on-screen and off demanded a seemingly rare combination of self-knowledge and toughness. “Introspection,” Grant said, “is the beginning of courage.”

BENJAMIN SCHWARZ is the former national and literary editor of The Atlantic. He is currently writing a biography of Winston Churchill and lives in New Hampshire.

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LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

ALDOUS HUXLEY: EXPLORER OF UTOPIA

OSCAR WILDE WROTE THAT “a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.” Aldous Huxley, the British literary icon and psychic explorer, lived and wrote by this maxim in a way the persecuted Wilde never could. Utopia was the true north of every map Huxley ever drew—whether it existed in shadow only, as in his most famous novel, the dystopian Brave New World (which he said portrayed a “negative Utopia”) or was a driving factor in his quest for evolution and growth. Huxley consistently moved toward creative, personal, and political freedom, and, later, spiritual transcendence—eventually discovering these things and more in his adopted home of Los Angeles.

Born in 1894 into a prominent family of scholars and scientists, Huxley was primed for a life of letters. He started out as a poet, publishing four volumes of poetry before writing his first novel, Crome Yellow (1921). The book was a satire of the literary scene at the country home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, where Huxley befriended T. S. Eliot and, more significant, D. H. Lawrence and Maria Nys, whom Huxley married in 1919. Upon first meeting Lawrence, Huxley was intrigued by his tales of a Utopian community called Rananim that he planned to create in Florida. It never materialized, but Lawrence did travel to America, spending several years in Taos, New Mexico, on a ranch given to him and his wife, Frieda, by the arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan. This ranch, still inhabited by Frieda after her husband’s death in 1930, was one of the first places that Huxley, Maria,

and their son Matthew lived after crossing the Atlantic on the S.S. Normandie in 1937 with their friend Gerald Heard, a writer and lecturer.

The Huxley family, who had been living in the South of France, did not plan to reside in the United States. The idea was to temporarily distance themselves from the rising tide of Fascism in Europe, as well as the hostility being directed at the author because of his pacifist stance. But, like legions of British and European artists and intellectuals before and after them, they succumbed to the lure of California, where the needs of Hollywood’s growing film industry created a steady demand for writers, directors, composers, and, of course, actors. Huxley also believed that the quality of the light in California helped the serious eye ailments that had plagued him since he was a teenager.

Huxley was soon offered a high-paying job writing scripts at MGM, and while his career in film never took off (only a few of his scripts were produced, most notably a version of Jane Eyre starring Orson Welles), Aldous and Maria quickly found themselves at the center of a star-studded social circle that included Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, the screenwriter Anita Loos, the composer Igor Stravinsky and his wife, Vera, and the author Christopher Isherwood.

Maria was openly bisexual, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the Huxleys had an open marriage, with each aware of the other’s lovers, to the extent that Maria was said to arrange her husband’s trysts.

Heard, on the other hand, was celibate, and began to dedicate himself to meditation and the life of the spirit. He became a devotee of Swami Prabhavananda. Huxley’s philosophies, however, were more aligned with those of Jiddu Krishnamurti, who had been chosen as the messiah

Aldous Huxley reading (detail). © Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo.

Aldous Huxley and his first wife, Maria Nys Huxley, ca. 1930 © Everett Collection Historical / Alamy Stock Photo.

STEFFIE NELSON

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of the Theosophical Society when he was still a boy but had stepped down from this role in 1929.

The Huxleys visited him often at his home in Ojai, California, and Aldous was involved in the creation of the Happy Valley School there, founded on land purchased by the Theosophical leader Annie Besant. Krishnamurti shared his knowledge of yoga, and impressed upon Huxley the importance of self-study and free thought versus attachment to religious dogma. Huxley’s 1945 book, The Perennial Philosophy, reflected these inquiries across religious disciplines and experiences of the divine, and it was in this text that he first quoted William Blake’s indelible line about cleansing the “doors of perception.” The further inner work that he would share with the public in the 1954 book of that name would soon begin.

Huxley was introduced to mescaline by Humphry Osmond, a Canadian psychiatrist who was researching the biochemical similarities between schizophrenia and mescaline, a peyote derivative. Noting that William Blake—who saw visions and heard voices—would probably have been given a diagnosis of schizophrenia had he lived at another time, Huxley was curious about the connection between “madness” and the visionary state. He invited Osmond to stay at his home during a psychiatric conference in Los Angeles, and asked the doctor to bring some of “the stuff.” Thus began a legendary journey whose entry point was a bouquet of flowers on the kitchen table which Huxley saw in rhapsodic living color.

Although some of The Doors of Perception sounds today like benign, trippy observations about “seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation,” Huxley was harshly criticized for presenting such drugs as harmless. In one review, he was disparaged as “the witch doctor of California,” and Thomas Mann, who had traveled on the S.S. Normandie with the Huxley family two decades earlier, called the book “the most audacious form of Huxley’s escapism.”

Of course, today the beneficial uses of psychedelic drugs have been well documented. It is likely that Huxley’s experimentation helped him process the sudden death of his wife, Maria, who had kept a breast-cancer diagnosis from him. But when he married Laura Archera, a close friend of the couple, within a year, some friends and family found this unacceptable and shunned the couple.

Professionally, however, Huxley had never been more revered. To Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later, Ram Dass), who began conducting their semi-infamous LSD experiments with students

STEFFIE NELSON

at Harvard in 1960, Huxley was the patron saint of the psychedelic movement. Leary wrote to Huxley when he was a visiting lecturer at M.I.T. that same year, telling him of their work. According to Leary, Huxley’s response was: “It’s legal and you are experimenting? I’ll get in a cab and see you in five minutes.”

In the long run, the two did not see eye to eye; Leary thought that psychedelics should be in general use, while Huxley believed this was a rarefied experience that should be available only to those who would use it “properly.”

In 1960, a malignant growth was discovered on Huxley’s tongue (he had, in fact, secretly undergone radium treatments just before his sojourn at M.I.T.), and he was given only a few years to live.

In 1962, he published his long-in-the-works final novel, Island, an answer of sorts to Brave New World.

In Island, a mushroom derivative called moksha helps people connect to their “oneness,” in contrast to the addictive artificial pleasures of Brave New World’s soma. The Zen teacher Alan Watts called the book “a sociological blueprint in the form of a novel” and said that it helped inspire the intentional communities of the sixties—so perhaps Huxley did help realize Lawrence’s vision of Utopia, after all. On his deathbed, Huxley requested an injection of liquid LSD from his wife, leaving everything behind as he floated toward oneness.

The Los Angeles-based writer and editor STEFFIE NELSON has covered art, design, and culture for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, W magazine, and other publications.

She recently edited the essay collection Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light and co-authored Judson: Innovation in Stained Glass with David Judson. She is currently developing Cosmic City: The History of Seekers in Los Angeles. www.steffienelson.com

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GERALD HEARD: GRANDFATHER OF THE NEW AGE

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

STEFFIE NELSON

TO SOME, THE SPIRITUAL SCHOLAR AND DEVOTEE

Gerald Heard was the grandfather of the New Age; others knew him best as an advocate of acid (LSD) as a tool for evolving consciousness. A smaller group might remember him for the mystery novels he wrote on the side. What’s indisputable is the fact that Heard, the author of more than thirty books, was one of the most brilliant minds of his time, and that his philosophies and practices would significantly shape future generations.

Born in London to a prominent Irish family in 1889, Gerald Heard grew up intending to join the clergy, like his grandfather, his father, and his oldest brother before him. He studied theology at Cambridge but was unable to accept Christian doctrine as truth. This crisis of faith led to a nervous breakdown in early adulthood that was, in fact, only the beginning of his spiritual seeking.

In the 1920s, Heard moved in literary circles in England and Ireland, and became a writer and a public speaker. He published his first book, Narcissus, in 1924. Charming and erudite, he became a sought-after dinner guest and was a BBC Radio commentator for a time. It was while helping his friend Julian Huxley edit the humanist magazine The Realist that Heard met Julian’s brother Aldous, and the two bonded over a shared commitment to pacifism, occasionally lecturing together on the subject.

With an increase in Fascist and Nazi uprisings pointing to impending war in Europe, the friends sailed for New York on the S.S. Normandie in the

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spring of 1937, along with Huxley’s wife, Maria, and their son Matthew. Heard spent one term in residence at Duke University, in North Carolina, but soon followed his friends to Southern California.

In 1939, Heard came upon the Vedanta Society of Southern California, a hilltop Hindu temple in Hollywood. There he developed a friendship with the resident religious teacher, Swami Prabhavananda, and discovered the practice of meditation. At Heard’s encouragement, Huxley and Christopher Isherwood, who had became a close friend, also began visiting the temple. Although meditation opened a new world of possibility for Heard—it was not long before he was meditating in three two-hour sessions per day—he ultimately found the focus on Hinduism limiting.

Having determined that the benefits of religion could best be experienced by accessing a broad range of teachings across different doctrines and disciplines, Heard dedicated himself to the founding of Trabuco College. He invested the bulk of his family inheritance in a three-hundredacre ranch above Laguna Beach, and in the design and construction of a Mediterranean-style monastery where students came for study and contemplation, vegetarian food, and extended meditation sessions. Opened in 1942 at the beginning of

STEFFIE NELSON

Heard had befriended Clare Boothe Luce in the late 1940s, when the writer, congresswoman, society doyenne, and wife of the publishing magnate Henry Luce was in Hollywood working on a screenplay. A decade later, grieving the sudden death of her daughter, she, too, asked him to guide her through an LSD trip.

Heard’s final years were undeservedly dark. He had dedicated so much of his life to helping others achieve healing and higher states of consciousness but at the end of his life he suffered. Starting in 1966, he had a series of thirty-two strokes, and, having spent his inheritance on Trabuco College, he also struggled financially, until the Luces stepped in to assist. When Heard died, at home in Santa Monica in 1971, there was no memorial service, in keeping with his wishes. Perhaps it is fitting for a man who spent so many of his days contemplating the eternal that even his death should pass as just another moment in time.

The Los Angeles-based writer and editor STEFFIE NELSON has covered art, design, and culture for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, W magazine, and other publications.

She recently edited the essay collection Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light and co-authored Judson: Innovation in Stained Glass with David Judson. She is currently developing Cosmic City: The History of Seekers in Los Angeles.

HEARD FAMOUSLY DESCRIBED THE [LSD] EXPERIENCE AS “THE SOBER CERTAINTY OF WAKING BLISS”

World War II, Trabuco attracted the likes of the religious scholar Huston Smith and Michael Murphy, who founded the Human Potential Movement and its laboratory, Big Sur’s Esalen Institute. Trabuco proved unsustainable, however, and in 1949 Heard donated the property to the Vedanta Society, a profoundly generous act that, sadly, felt like a failure to him.

Before long Heard was on his next journey into consciousness, when he and Huxley tried mescaline. Then Heard moved on to the more readily accessible LSD through his friend Dr. Sidney Cohen, who was conducting legal experiments exploring the drug’s therapeutic uses. Heard famously described the experience as “the sober certainty of waking bliss,” although he eventually found that his preferred role was that of a guide.

Opposite page top: Gerald Heard and Clare Booth Luce. Opposite page bottom: Aldous Huxley (left) and Gerald Heard at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1937. Courtesy of the collection of the Vedanta Society.

Above: Gerald Heard. Roth, Sanford H. (1906-1962) © Museum Associates / LACMA. Gerald Heard, c. 1946-1962. Beulah Roth Bequest. PhA. 1993.5.51. I. Los Angeles County Museum of Art,.

Licensed by Art Resource, NY.

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LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

CLARE BOOTHE LUCE: WOMAN OF THE CENTURY

PAMELA HAMILTON

Boothe Luce at typewriter, 1944 © Yousuf Karsh.

THE ALMIGHTY CLARE BOOTHE LUCE WAS CROWNED

“Woman of the Century,” and she had earned it.

She was one of the most powerful women of her time: the reigning queen of café society, a brilliant playwright, famous magazine editor, war correspondent, diplomat, and presidential adviser. In the course of her extraordinary life, she captured the hearts of the American public with her beauty, brains, and stunning success. “If God had wanted us to think with our wombs, why did he give us a brain?” she said, undoubtedly in a purr for effect.

Her angelic face and soft demeanor belied her steely force. On her desk at Vanity Fair was a sign that read: “Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone.” And so she did.

Clare’s far-reaching pursuits began in her youth. Guided by her mother, who was poor, she understudied for Mary Pickford and cultivated her marriageable qualities—smarts, sophistication, strategy, and the certain je ne sais quoi of the femme fatale. Her big break was delivered by Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, a matriarch of society, who introduced her to an eligible bachelor.

Dripping in jewels, satin, and silk as she sashayed through the great mansions of Newport and the grand ballrooms of New York at the height of the jazz age, Clare had struck her first success.

She had married an heir. Her infinite resources and extravagant Fifth Avenue manse couldn’t soften the blows from bluebloods, however, for they valued lineage and aristocratic titles and trusts built over generations. She felt their disdain. Her husband, she said, was an abusive alcoholic with the emotional capacity of an adolescent boy. And so it went. Clare

Portrait (detail) by Carl Van Vechten, 1932 © Alpha Historica / Alamy Stock Photo.

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filed for divorce, took their daughter, Ann, by the hand, and walked away with a fortune.

In café society, Clare was among her own— intellectual and artistic prodigies who were shaping American culture, and the socialites who supported it. Condé Nast, Bernard Baruch, Dorothy Hale, Isamu Noguchi, Frank “Crowny” Crowninshield, Buckminster Fuller, and countless others, few of whom could match her clever wit. She parlayed her gift for storytelling into a job at Vogue, and then at Vanity Fair, where she took the helm as managing editor. She collected the glitterati for lavish parties at her home. She competed with women and seduced men, and insulted President Roosevelt, and she leveled anyone in her way. “I don’t have a warm personal enemy left,” she said later in life.

“I miss them terribly because they helped define me.” In the 1930s, at the apex of the good life, Clare suffered self-doubt and loneliness and plunged into dark, desolate moods. The antidote, it seemed, was battle.

Her next conquest was Henry Luce, the dashing publishing tycoon who founded Time, Life, and Fortune magazines. Even as Henry’s wife, Clare, and her editorial input, were unwelcome by the male-dominated staff. She referred to them as “Harry’s Little People” and took aim at her next target. Adorned with a pretty blue bow in her hair, she wrote, in three days, the script for the Broadway hit The Women, a scorching satire about the “dirty little trollops,” “double-crossing little squirts,” and “Park Avenue pushovers” she had known. Underneath her pluck and whip-smart sense of humor was a woman who felt the pain as well as the pushback. During World War II, when she caught the spotlight as a war correspondent for Life, Dorothy Parker described her coverage as “All Clare on the Western Front.”

The personification of reinvention, Clare leaped into politics in 1943 as a Republican congresswoman from Connecticut. “They say women talk too much. If you have worked in Congress you know that the filibuster was invented by men,” she said. By 1944, she had conquered adversaries, provoked critics, dazzled admirers, betrayed trusts, and batted her blue eyes to the top. Still, she could not save her kingdom from crumbling. Ann, whom she felt she had neglected, was killed in a car accident. She turned away from the life that preceded the tragedy and would never fully recover from the loss, or the guilt that riddled her.

Clare claimed her next victory in 1953, when she was appointed U.S. Ambassador to Italy. She and Henry reigned supreme as a power couple, sharing a zeal for exploration that continued into

PAMELA HAMILTON

IF GOD HAD WANTED US TO THINK WITH OUR WOMBS, WHY DID HE GIVE US OUR BRAINS?

the early 1960s. They dabbled in LSD, a hallucinogenic gateway to spiritual discovery and the inner mind, where Clare envisioned herself in a “boiling brutal battle.” It had to be a familiar, if troubling, scene. She had fought for success, for peace of mind, and for the happiness that eluded her.

Perhaps she found it, for a moment, when President Reagan awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983. It was the last step in her ascent to greatness, her crowning glory.

And today it’s the incredible legacy of Clare Boothe Luce that marks her final triumph.

PAMELA HAMILTON, the founder of PLH Media, is a former producer at NBC and the author of the forthcoming novel Judge Me Not. She serves on the advisory board of the Art Deco Society of New York and on the board of directors of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Deadline Club.

Booth Luce © Bettman.

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LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

Beyond the Veil AN INTERVIEW with MICHELLE DORRANCE

This winter our editor, Alexis Gargagliano, spoke to Michelle Dorrance, the choreographer of Flying Over Sunset and the founder and artistic director of Dorrance Dance. She is one of the most soughtafter and imaginative tap dancers of her generation, a MacArthur fellow, and the winner of the Alpert Award in the Arts and the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award. In between rehearsals they talked about tap dancing, imagination, and the power of psychedelic experiences.

ALEXIS GARGAGLIANO What first drew

you to tap dance?

MICHELLE DORRANCE My mom was a professional ballet dancer—she danced here in New York, actually, with Eliot Feld’s first company—and my dad is a successful women’s soccer coach. So I grew up using my feet.

My mom started a dance school the year I was born, and the tap teacher at the school was/is this amazing man, Gene Medler. He was my childhood mentor and also a life mentor. In the early 1990s, Gene started bringing a handful of us—his students who were dancers from our youth tap ensemble— to tap at festivals where the living masters of our art form, who were in their eighties and nineties, were being brought together. There were tap dancers that everyone knows, like the

Nicholas Brothers, and then there were all these brilliant artists—innovators and unsung heroes of tap dance who still remain unknown to most of our culture due to pervasive and often institutionalized racism throughout our history.

We were able to meet people like Jimmy Slyde and Peg Leg Bates, the one-legged tap dancer—all these singular masters.

I’m so lucky to have been one of those kids who spent time with our brilliant and generous ancestors in the dance before they passed away. Gene fell in love with tap dance, and through him I also fell in love, immediately. I love nothing more than tap dancing—I felt that as a kid and I feel that now.

AG You are known not just as a celebrated tap dancer and choreographer but also as a keeper of the history of tap.

MD To be a professional tap dancer of my generation is to be a historian. We honor our responsibility toward an oral history that would otherwise not have been kept. To learn the legacy and history of tap dance is to learn the history of racial inequality in America—and how the spirit of that inequality was transcended. The first accounts of tap dance (called buck dancing, or buck and wing before it was called tap dancing) in America date back to the 1800s, on slave plantations. In the mid to late 1700s, drums were taken away from African-American plantation slaves because it was discovered that they were being used to communicate subversively, organizing escapes and powerful uprisings. Body percussion-

hambone (known then as Pattin’ Juba) and tap dance were then born both of a necessity to communicate and to survive, and also as an outlet for expression. Tap dance continued to develop throughout the late 1800s in New York City, where African-Americans and Irish-Americans often coexisted, particularly in the Five Points area of lower Manhattan. Contests, where rhythmic and stylistic innovation and constant one-upmanship were paramount, thrust the development of tap dance as a dynamic improvisational form forward and into vaudeville and popular entertainment. These origins have a profound effect on the art form to this day.

AG How did you begin your work on Flying Over Sunset?

MD When James Lapine sent me an early version of the musical’s book, I was immediately invested in what he was exploring with these characters. This isn’t Hair. James is investigating an often melancholic world. This isn’t about young people dropping acid. These are people in post-midlife crises; these are people in the later part of their lives investigating themselves and what they’ve lost. It is an examination of the darker edges of their life experiences.

AG It is so exciting that James chose you over a traditional choreographer of musicals.

MD I think James might have been drawn to me, as opposed to a traditional theatrical choreographer, because I like to create worlds that live in an in-between place.

Tap is a genre that, by definition, straddles two worlds—the sonic and the visual. We’re constantly pursuing our music as well as our dance. A tap dancer’s ability to hover between the two can be useful in a show that is about people in profound transition. Transition is a powerful concept in the show. And there is something deep yet intangible that James wants to explore in the transitions between scenes.

AG How do you go about translating these ideas and concepts into physical movement?

MD My process is rooted in sound. The first ideas I had about this show were sonic. They weren’t graphic. We had just

finished our choreography lab, and I brought in a dear friend and collaborator of mine, Nicholas Young, because he and I have experimented with what we can do with our sound—how we can manipulate it, how we can change it.

We are obsessed with the sound of what we make, a metal plate on a wood floor. We love the sound, but the tonal value, to us, is much grander than what the audience might hear. When I first thought about these transitions I imagined a pedestrian quality, people moving through space simply. When you’re having a psychedelic experience, each one of those footfalls can be fifty sounds.

A step might echo or mute itself or slow down—some people experience synesthesia when they trip. But it is challenging to convey that distortion of the known world to someone who has never had a psychedelic experience.

AG How do you convey that?

MD The show demands a constant collaborative conversation between me, James, the composer Tom Kitt, and the lyricist Michael Korie. It’s really important to continue to push each other into a place where we’re not necessarily comfortable. Together, we invite people into a world where something simple or mundane can become something that is overwhelming or complex or beautiful or dark or ominous.

AG Have you had any notable experiences taking psychedelic drugs?

MD I was a little experimental as a young person. I was a big fan of mushrooms.

Then I arrived at a place where I didn’t do any more drugs.

AG Tell me about that last trip.

MD I was down in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I spent a long time sitting under a tree with friends. I definitely thought I was in a different place than they were.

AG Was music involved?

MD Yes. That trip started at a Pink Floyd laser light show at the planetarium.

I think my very first trip also included some Pink Floyd.

AG Listening to music when your mind is altered in some way can be a mind-blowing experience.

MD Listening to music during a psychedelic experience is deeply satisfying.

It can help you better understand the

TAP IS A GENRE THAT,

BY DEFINITION, STRADDLES TWO WORLDS — THE SONIC AND THE VISUAL. music. Say I’m listening to a jazz band, and all of a sudden the double bass takes on a specific texture and resonance.

You can hear and feel and maybe even see the texture, and you can experience an understanding of the cadences and tones in a three-dimensional way.

AG Why was that the last trip you took?

Did something happen?

MD When we trip, we are prone to investigate deeper and more spiritual ways of thinking. In my last trip, the one that made me quit doing drugs, I had a very spiritual experience where I realized that what I was experiencing—what I was seeing, feeling, hearing, and understanding—was beyond my mortal capacity to understand. And, in my young Latter-day Saint mind, I thought, Oh, this is technically beyond the veil.

It’s not that it was evil or wrong, but I felt that I was witnessing something that I was just not meant to see yet. Something that I didn’t have the capacity to fully understand or even to fully handle.

Whatever that thing is, I believe it’s important that it is kind of strange, unknown, and just out of your grasp.

AG Do you have a similar feeling of going

beyond the veil when you’re creating?

Like there’s some place just out of reach that you want to arrive at creatively?

MD While the vision for something I want to create might be rooted in an abstract world or place, the root of how and why I’m compelled to create tangibly is often something as simple as my own music—a rhythmic idea I can’t get out of my head or a piece of music that inspires me. The acorn might be wanting to create a particular musical phrase I’m scatting with my feet, and therefore my body does this specific thing to make that sound. And while my first creative language is that process, it is equally inspiring for me to explore creatively with non-percussive dancers. There are so many dancers who didn’t grow up tap-dancing, and they have a musical training that is very different from ours. But, no matter what, when you put your foot down there’s a sound.

Everyone’s walk is unique. And there are limitless possibilities in each step.

MICHELLE DORRANCE

Choreographer/ Tap Dancer

Photographs by Matthew Murphy.

20 minutes after a 50ug dose of LSD

85 min after first dose and 20 minutes after second 50ug dose of LSD

2 hours and 30 minutes after first dose

2 hours and 35 minutes after first dose

2 hours and 45 minutes after first dose

4 hours and 25 minutes after first dose

In an experiment testing the effects of LSD, Oscar Janiger, a University of CaliforniaIrvine psychiatrist, gave an artist crayons and asked him to draw portraits of himself as the drug took effect. The drawings are a fascinating chronicle of his voyage on the psychotropic drug. Image courtesy Erowid Center, from the Albert Hofmann Collection of LSD-related references.

5 hours and 45 minutes after first dose

8 hours after first dose

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Seen in a Different Light SHIRA NAYMAN

IN A RARE PIECE OF FILM FOOTAGE FROM THE LATE 1950s, a young woman, elegantly dressed and

coiffed, peers into the middle distance, raising her hands to point as she marvels at what is unfolding before her. “Can’t you see it?” she asks, her eyes filled with supernatural wonder. “It’s passing through me. There is no me. I see all the atoms—I am one, everything is one. . . . I wish I could talk in technicolor. . . . I’ve never seen such infinite beauty in my life.”

Earlier, Dr. Sidney Cohen, a psychiatrist at U.C.L.A., had handed her a glass of water containing a tiny dose of LSD, the synthetic drug whose effects on the mind were accidentally discovered in 1933 by a Swiss chemist. The woman is a volunteer in Dr. Cohen’s pioneering research on LSD. Dr. Cohen would go on to write a book whose title captured the mood of LSD researchers of the day, The Beyond Within: The LSD Story. Here was a substance that altered perception, allowing people to see the world with new eyes—beauty everywhere, colors and sounds that defied description, and sometimes rich synesthetic experiences in which colors were tasted or heard, and sounds rendered into startling visual configurations. The drug appeared to open up a new space within that went beyond perception itself, taking users into ecstatic states in which the self was felt to dissolve and they were suspended in a miasma of mystical union with the All. Loneliness and malaise had no place here; time and again, subjects struggled to express the sense of inarticulate and engulfing love, beauty and peace brought on by the drug, sometimes reporting full-blown mystical or religious experiences.

SHIRA NAYMAN

Both in the U.K. and in the U.S., psychoanalysis was at its peak. In the psychiatric community, there was a widespread belief that mental conditions, including alcoholism and drug addiction, could be traced to unresolved conflicts from childhood.

Psychiatric researchers wondered if LSD might be used to treat psychiatric conditions. Could the altered mind states induced by the drug lead to psychological epiphanies or transformations?

Might these, in turn, lead to enduring, positive change, even cures? Perhaps LSD could help people access repressed memories, or allow them to confront inner demons in ways that might result in psychological release, growth, and change.

Numerous studies were set up in psychiatric facilities. In Catonsville, Maryland, the Spring Grove Experiment, spanning the years 1955-1976, treated seven hundred institutionalized patients with LSD. The protocol involved weeks of preparation—intensive psychotherapy and instruction regarding how to navigate the LSD “trip.” A compelling 1960s film of the experiment, LSD: The Spring Grove Experiment, follows two patients who participated in it: Mrs. McGinnis, a forty-fouryear-old mother and grandmother, who seems to have been suffering from a paranoid psychosis; and Arthur King, a thirty-three-year-old husband and the father of two children, a self-described alcoholic whose drinking had imploded his life. We see both patients during intimate moments of psychotherapy with their psychiatrist, Dr. Albert Kurland, and then observe them as they drink their dose of LSD.

I SEE ALL THE ATOMS—I AM ONE, EVERYTHING IS ONE. . . . I WISH I COULD TALK IN TECHNICOLOR. . . .

Later, in the full bloom of their LSD trips, we are witness to the extraordinary experiences they attempt to convey to their doctor. Both patients first pass through pain and misery. “Boy, am I afraid,” Mrs. McGinnis says. “I could tell you a hundred million things I’m afraid of.” Her therapist puts an arm around her shoulders as she begins to weep. When Arthur King sheds tears, we watch as he struggles to contain his emotions, unable to speak. But then he begins to laugh uncontrollably.

The trip over, both patients describe the experience as transformative. King remarks, “It was

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the best laugh I’d ever had in my life . . . like a great weight had been taken off of me. Instead of feeling like it was the end of something, I felt like it was the beginning, like something had been opened up and things could be seen in a different light.” Mrs. McGinnis, happily reunited with the husband she’d reviled when paranoid, says, “Now I feel reborn.

I feel beautiful. It was the most amazing experience and I found God.” Follow-up visits months and then years later reveal that both patients had returned to vital, productive lives; the mental illness that had dogged Mrs. McGinnis and the alcoholism that had ruined King’s life never returned.

In Canada, the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, who coined the term “psychedelic”—”mind-manifesting”—treated two thousand patients suffering from alcoholism with LSD and reported startling results: forty to forty-five percent showed no relapse after a year. One estimate puts the number of patients treated with LSD between 1950 and 1965 at forty thousand, for conditions that included neurosis, psychosis, addiction, and even autism.

However, there was also a darker side to LSD. Some subjects experienced states of extreme terror, reporting the appearance of monsters and frightening animals, also dead bodies and the figure of death itself, as well as horrifying transformations of the physical world—melting faces and objects disintegrating before the subject’s gaze. Painful feelings could become eerily magnified, blowing through the soul with malicious intent, and the body could come to feel like a prison: lungs that might fail at any

Photograph of Dr. Sidney Cohen © Ted Russell/The LIFE Images.

Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images.

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

moment, resulting in suffocation; panic that choked and threatened to stop the heart.

Some researchers questioned the idea that LSD was a legitimate treatment, noting limitations in the research and possible serious biases. When new drug-safety regulations were passed by the U.S. Congress in 1962, LSD was designated experimental, and limits were placed on research. Soon afterward, LSD made its way onto the streets and into hippie culture, and quickly came to be seen as a dangerous drug of abuse. In 1968, it was banned by the federal government, and by the end of the 1970s most of the research had ground to a halt.

However, in recent years interest in the possible therapeutic uses of LSD has seen a resurgence and appears to be entering a burgeoning new phase. Dr. Kurland, who died in 2014, at the age of a hundred and four, would likely have been cheered. Interviewed while in his eighties, decades after his own research had been discontinued, he poignantly remarked, “Life is hard. And man’s need to escape himself cannot be overestimated.”

SHIRA NAYMAN is a psychologist and the author of three novels, Awake in the Dark, The Listener, and A Mind of Winter. A recent MacDowell fellow, she has published in The Atlantic, O, The Oprah Magazine, and elsewhere.

House on Kronenstrasse, written in collaboration with the composer Ben Moore, will be staged by Chelsea Opera in March, 2020, and her new novel, River, will be published in April, 2020.

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DONNA RIFKIND

Santa Monica Enlightenment DONNA RIFKIND

THEY CAME TO SANTA MONICA for the light. Silver in the mornings, gilded in the afternoons, pink in the smoggy sunsets over the waters of the bay.

“Out here, in the eternal lazy morning of the Pacific, days slip away into months,” wrote Christopher Isherwood, a longtime resident of Santa Monica Canyon, in 1947. “The seasons are reduced to the faintest nuance by the great central fact of the sunshine; one might pass a lifetime, it seems, between two yawns, lying bronzed and naked on the sand.”

As early as 1910, the first film companies had ventured here to capture the light, launching their studios on Ocean Avenue. In the decades that followed, it was the light that lured sunseekers the world over to live in what was once an obscure Spanish outpost, named by Franciscan missionaries for their patron Saint Monica. For these settlers, the light meant lightness, freedom, prosperity. And for many European exiles and émigrés in the 1930s and 1940s, it meant refuge from the Fascist tyranny that had expelled them from their homelands as it enveloped the continent in a toxic brown fog.

Some who landed in Santa Monica had come from similar coastlines. Aldous Huxley, Isherwood’s friend and British compatriot, spent much of the 1930s living in a small fishing village called Sanary-sur-Mer, in southern France.

In Sanary, where Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931, the bay and the seaside cliffs looked a lot like those of Santa Monica. Its mistral gusted with the same electric intensity as the Santa Ana winds of Southern California. Gerald Heard

came to visit Huxley in Sanary during those years.

There they mixed with German artists and intellectuals who were trying to outrun Hitler’s execution lists. By the end of the 1930s, Huxley and Heard were living in and around Santa Monica, while many of those same Germans—including Bertolt Brecht, Franz Werfel, and Lion Feuchtwanger—were desperately seeking to reach its shores. When Werfel finally arrived in Los Angeles, he found refuge in a neighborhood in the hills above the Hollywood Bowl. He wrote to his parents, “The Riviera is just trash compared to this.”

Huxley was just as enamored of California.

“We live peacefully as in Sanary and the telephone rings rarely,” he noted with satisfaction from his house in Pacific Palisades. For him and for other

THE RIVIERA IS JUST TRASH COMPARED TO THIS.

Matchbook from the Eric Wienberg Collection, Pepperdine University. Special Collections and University Archives.

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seaside residents, nightlife rarely meant showing up at Hollywood restaurants or nightclubs, unless it was work-related, to see or be seen. They socialized at the poolside patios and tennis courts of friends and neighbors, or in the living rooms of local salonnières. In 1938, Huxley found himself lunching alfresco at the beach house of the MGM producer Bernie Hyman, pitching story ideas for a Greta Garbo film about Marie Curie with the director George Cukor and the screenwriter Salka Viertel. Huxley was paid $25,000 for the lengthy treatment he wrote, but heard nothing further until Viertel asked Hyman what had become of it.

Hyman confessed that he never read it and had given it, instead, to his secretary, who had told him, without hesitation, “It stinks.”

Having come for the California light, Huxley and Heard stayed for enlightenment. As longtime spiritual seekers, they felt at home among the religious societies in and around Santa Monica.

The landscape was dotted with gurus. In 1950, a branch of the Self-Realization Fellowship of Paramahansa Yogananda opened in the Palisades, on the site of the former Inceville film studio.

Earlier, in 1930, Swami Prabhavananda had founded the Vedanta Society of Southern California, where he counted among his disciples both Huxley and Heard. Earlier still, in 1923, Ananda Ashrama, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, had begun to accept devotees. All three organizations are still

Postcard from the Eric Wienberg Collection, Pepperdine University Special Collections and University Archives.

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW

in operation today. In the 1950s, their attraction spoke to the anxieties of a community that had been kept on edge by the Japanese submarines lurking on the coastline throughout the war.

Mid-century Santa Monicans transferred their wartime fears to the looming threat of Soviet nuclear capability and the paranoia stoked by the House Un-American Activities Committee. The quest for peace turned inward and grew urgent.

In our own era, the latest wave of searchers has arrived to occupy the Santa Monica coastline, renaming it Silicon Beach as technology companies seek enrichment through the merging of men and machines. It’s a most Huxleian vision, this newest of brave new worlds. Even so, the light that first enchanted the novelist more than eighty years ago remains the same, casting its daily spells over the canyons and the curve of the bay.

DONNA RIFKIND is a Los Angeles native and the author of The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Her reviews frequently appear in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times Book Review, and many other publications.

Hamlet FREDERICK SEIDEL

Alive. Yes and awake. Flowers Fall through his mind, in one slant, like snow.

The electric toothbrush flames in his hand.

Mozart sweetens the small room.

LSD tears he wept all night, One hundred for a dead father.

LSD tears, they roll heavy And burn like molten metal drops.

Now as the drug wears off he waits.

For a mother has remarried.

Oh the man swelled, supple bitch, And smiled as if he might give birth.

Completely to be shut of both, Purged pure and bare to all in one’s fate, The drug makes possible at last [The curtain stirs], out of the shell, The old self, new and neat as a chick.

This dew, haze softness on waking has opened His window on the street a crack.

Midnight tolls. The curtain stirs.

FREDERICK SEIDEL’s books of poems include Final Solutions; Sunrise, winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize and the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award; These Days; My Tokyo; Going Fast; The Cosmos Poems; Life on Earth; Ooga-Booga; and Poems 1959–2009. “Hamlet,” from POEMS 19592009 by Frederick Seidel. Copyright © 2009 by Frederick Seidel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

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