THE ARTS PAPER – ARTICLES

Allan Appel’s Writerly Occupation

Hank Hoffman

Allan Appel. Photo by Hank Hoffman.

Forty years ago this spring, Allan Appel was one of hundreds of Columbia University students occupying campus buildings in protest of the university’s ties to the Vietnam War and its disregard for the local community. This spring, writer Appel is occupying the Oval Office of the White House—figuratively, of course—with the publication of his comic novel The Midland Kid: Tales of the Presidential Ghostwriter.

Begun shortly after the launching of the Iraq War, Appel says he “originally wrote it as my little contribution to putting him [President Bush] in his place, so to speak, or ensure he goes into history’s basement.” Appel, who is a full-time journalist with the online New Haven Independent says, “I’m a writer, so I write this kind of thing. If I was an organizer, I would organize.” It was finished too late to be published prior to the 2004 election. But encouraged by friends’ responses, Appel saw that the novel, with slight tweaking, could be relevant to 2008. As the jacket copy describes, Appel’s novel is a “comic preemptive strike on the Bush legacy.”

As his second term is coming to a close, President Brewster George’s approval ratings are in the toilet. His chief political adviser Raymond Kove, modeled on Karl Rove, comes up with an idea to salvage his legacy: He’ll be the first President to write a novel while in office. A Western novel, where the hero, a Christian cowboy modeled on the President, will form a posse (including a Muslim and a Jew) and ride through important states battling the villain Don Hussein. With a mix of monetary enticements, flattery and veiled threats, they draft struggling writer A.B. Konig—author of Vengeance Valley Days, the President’s favorite book—as their ghostwriter. (Appel has authored a book Vengeance Valley.)

The liberal Konig is conflicted. He detests the President’s policies. But he needs the money. He not only finds himself charmed by George, but he also identifies with him as someone who, as Appel tells me in an interview, “is way over his head and swimming further out to sea.” Konig’s wife Anna, an ambitious yet obscure poet, is seduced by the Administration’s ability to get her poems published in the Wall Street Journal. His centenarian great-aunt Auntie Emma on the other hand, is a fiery political radical. She collaborates with Konig in a fifth column attempt to “undermine the Bush character through writing prose that, while the President thinks it’s superior, the world will be able to see through it,” says Appel.

With libraries filling up with anti-Bush books, Appel wanted to do something uniquely his own. In the conflicts of the Konig character, Appel mirrored the American public. “The fate of my ghostwriter is the fate of the country,” says Appel. “Too many people for too long looked at the smile and wink and forgave the deeds.” While having a strong idea was important, Appel was motivated by the process of storytelling, the exploration of the conflicts. “If I can surprise myself, I have a good chance of surprising the reader,” he says.

The idea to be a writer, Appel says, didn’t really occur to him until after college, “probably as a result of the 1968 craziness. I was at Columbia in 1968 and occupying buildings. I knew that wasn’t going to be a long-term career,” he tells me with a chuckle. Plans to go to graduate school were shelved for a detour in downtown NYC. Appel, in his words, became a “long-haired poet at St. Mark’s Poetry Project.” At St. Mark’s, writers were under the influence of the New York School poets—John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Ted Berrigan and others. Appels describes it as a “fun and joyous” time.

“What happened in 1968 in writing was we unlearned all the things we learned in academia. We learned how to be much freer,” recalls Appel. In the workshops and in one-to-one relationships with older poets, participants were “given blessings to write what came naturally and follow forms that were not necessarily looked upon with favor by teachers in college.”

Appel, who had been a comparative literature major, realized that his poetry had a very long line, more akin to prose. “I don’t think poetry and me were a good fit. My poetry line had a narrative length.”

His first “serious” novel, The Rabbi of Casino Boulevard, was published in 1987 by St. Martin’s Press. But, in an Arts Paper exclusive (and in a now-it-can-be-told moment), Appel reveals that he had an earlier novel published when he was living in downtown New York. At the time, he was driving a cab to make money and placing poems in small magazines. He saw an ad to do novels for a company called Leisure Books. Porno novels. They were offering $1,000, a good bit of change in the early 1970’s.

“I could write about anything I wanted. It didn’t have to be serious pornography,” Appel recalls, although he adds that they wanted “some bodice-ripping content.” In three weeks, he whipped out Members Rise. Loosely inspired by the Columbia unrest, the title was a double entendre reference to activists in Students for a Democratic Society rising in rebellion. It was published under the nom de erotique Mark Stone, an allusion to Columbia firebrand Mark Rudd. By today’s standards, he says, “it’s practically a children’s book.”

“The idea to be able to get $1,000 writing something like that was just phenomenal. I said to myself, ‘There might be something in this prose game,’” Appel recalls. After rejecting a book proposal as a wrong fit, one of his publishers told him that the territory he covers is “where two different traditions—usually religious traditions—collide and there’s humor.” In The Rabbi of Casino Boulevard, a rabbi is married to a Japanese woman. “That’s a no-no,” says Appel, who is himself Jewish. “In High Holiday Sutra, I have a rabbi very drawn to Buddhist meditation, also a no-no.” The Midland Kid is the “only overtly or covertly political book” he’s done.

Appel has had three nonfiction books and two books of poetry published, as well as his six novels (not counting Members Rise). He has written for The National Jewish Monthly, The Progressive and National Lampoon and his plays have been staged in New York, Chicago, New Haven and Providence. These days, the lion’s share of his time is spent covering stories for the New Haven Independent, the brainchild of former New Haven Advocate editor and reporter Paul Bass. A stickler for brevity, Bass preaches that concision is a virtue in both sentence and story length, particularly since online journalism is picture-driven. Having worked as a grants writer for nonprofits, Appel has experience in synthesizing a lot of material in a pithy way for executive summaries.

“It wasn’t as if when I became the New Haven Independent’s Jimmy Olsen I suddenly had to learn how to go from Dostoevskian length to like a recipe. I knew how to write short,” he says.

Online journalism is still in its infancy. Appel says he doesn’t think the medium “has quite found the level of diction or the right mixture of adverbs and adjectives and sentence length that’s perfect for the picture environment.” But he loves the fact that people are reading his stories and creating immediate feedback loops from his writing. “You start a conversation and people continue it and it has a life of its own, often more substantive and significant than what you wrote,” says Appel.

The Midland Kid is the first book published by New Haven Independent Press. In an attempt to bypass traditional print publication methods, it is primarily available online through amazon.com and alibris.com.

Accessible Art

Lucile Bruce

	A young visitor to the Connecticut Children's Museum reads a book in Braille.

Stairs are the only way to reach Ruth Feldman’s office at 222 York Street—three flights of stairs, to be exact. The irony isn’t lost on Feldman, her colleagues, or her visitors. “It’s a running joke around here,” she laughs, showing me a sign on her door detailing the “average number of stairs hiked by Yale Rep patrons” (151, according to Feldman).

Stairs notwithstanding, Feldman, director of Education and Accessibility Services at the Yale School of Drama, has not only built the Yale Repertory Theatre into one the most accessible theaters in Connecticut, but has also developed a national reputation in the area of accessibility services. Today, that means offering a lot more than wheelchair ramps and automatic doors.

Feldman credits James Bundy, Yale School of Drama dean and artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre, for raising the bar on accessibility. He expanded the theater’s education director position to include accessibility services, and Feldman was promoted to fill the role. For Feldman—who as a professional stage manager injured her knee and spent five years on crutches—the mission quickly became personal. She was determined to make the theater easily accessible to everyone.

“Accessibility is now about more than buildings,” she explains. “It’s really about programs and services.” This means that if you’re blind or low-visioned, deaf or hard of hearing, you can still experience live theater at the Yale Rep.

Technology has revolutionized the world of arts accessibility. “Open Captioning,” one of the Yale Rep’s accessibility programs, offers patrons a digital display of the play’s dialogue as it is spoken onstage. The Open Captioning screen sits downstage left or right, on a tripod raised approximately to the height of the actors’ knees. David Chu, director and co-founder of c2inc (caption coalition), operates a computer linked to the screen, assuring accurate timing and seamless delivery of the text. According to a Yale Rep program leaflet, “Captioning in theatre has gained momentum and acceptance since its debut in 1996. It addresses the needs of a far larger audience of hard of hearing and deaf people, which includes those who do not use sign language, are late deafened, not self-identified with hearing loss and those who simply might have missed a punchline.”

For patrons with vision disabilities, Audio Description, another Yale Rep program overseen by Feldman, offers immediate access to the visual elements of theater: actions, physical appearance and body language of characters, costumes, sets, and lighting. To experience Audio Description, patrons attend the theater on the evening of its Audio Described performance (the Rep offers one Audio Described performance and one Open Captioned performance during each production run). In the lobby, patrons are given a tiny ear piece, through which they hear a live “Audio Describer” insert descriptions during natural pauses in the play’s dialogue. In the opposite ear (the ear without the microphone), patrons hear the dialogue onstage. Feldman now trains audio describers at the Yale Rep/Yale School of Drama—and several other Connecticut theaters, including the Hartford Stage, are now using Rep-trained audio describers for their very own productions.

For incoming Yale School of Drama students, Ruth Feldman also leads a required, two-hour accessibility training workshop. Students gain practical knowledge, such as how to usher a patron who is blind. But her objective is actually much more subversive. “These students are the next generation of leaders in the theater,” Feldman says. “The more they know about accessibility, the more integral it becomes to their thought process. Students leave here with built-in assumptions that accessibility will be in the theater.”

A habit of mind: that’s exactly how Sandra Malmquist, director of the Connecticut Children’s Museum, describes her approach to making the museum accessible for children. “It’s just a decision,” she says. “You have to look at everything in the museum and ask, ‘is this accessible to everyone? How can we make it more accessible?’”

Under Malmquist’s leadership, the Connecticut Children’s Museum has won two Universal Design for Learning Awards. It also received a federal grant to implement a Museum Multiple Intelligences Inclusion Project (MMIIP). Through the MMIIP, the museum added sensory dimensions to several of its exhibits, increasing accessibility for children with special needs.

Take for example, the beehive in the Naturalist Room. “A blind child couldn’t see the bees, and obviously they couldn’t feel the bees—so there was no way for them to experience this exhibit,” explains Malmquist. “It always bothered me.” Now, two tiny microphones pick up the buzzing of the bees, and the sound is transmitted to child-height earphones.

Accessible Art Works is the museum’s arts-based, interactive literacy program. Offered quarterly, this program brings artists to the museum to engage with children through picture books. Kids have explored the book Henri Matisse: Drawing with Scissors by positioning cut-out Matisse shapes on a giant Velcro-covered canvass. They’ve listened to a blind presenter read from a Brailled copy of Charlie Needs a Cloak, watched a blind weaver weave a cloak on a loom and then woven their own pieces of cloth on a giant weaving wall at the museum.

Visitors can also find the facts and figures on every wall in Braille, listen to an audio-described tour of the museum, and discover over 300 children’s books in Braille. Every Saturday, an American Sign Language interpreter attends and interprets book readings as part of the museum’s Creating Readers program. For Malmquist, it’s all in a day’s work. “It’s just what we do here,” she says. “It’s always in the details.”

While the Connecticut Children’s Museum boasts handicap accessibility far beyond the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Yale School of Drama is still working to retrofit its buildings with state-of-the-art, handicap accessible features. Huge improvements have been made—the Rep has upgraded its assisted listening devices and added handrails on the stairs leading up to the lobby. The University Theater has installed automatic doors and built a restroom just off the lobby. And this May, the Drama School graduation was open-captioned and the program was printed in large font for visually impaired guests.

Like Sandra Malmquist, Ruth Feldman ultimately hopes to change the way people think. “There has to be a cultural mandate to make accessibility happen,” she says, noting that Europe and the United Kingdom are far ahead of the US in this area. But change is gradually happening. Feldman now receives calls from Drama School graduates asking how to implement or troubleshoot audio description and open captioning programs. In August, she will be speaking on panels at the Leadership Exchange in Arts and Disability Conference, sharing her knowledge with people from across the country.

“I once received an email from a blind patron who came to a play at the Rep,” Feldman recalls. “She was thrilled to find a copy of the program in Braille. She wrote, ‘I’ve often wondered what was in those programs.’”

She doesn’t have to wonder anymore.


An Arts Education

Steven Scarpa

Asher DeLerme, of the Afro Caribbean music ensemble Mikata, engages a young student audience.

With the mandates of the “No Child Left Behind” Act creating an educational environment that emphasizes standardized testing, local arts educators have found it increasingly difficult to carve their niche in area classrooms.

The argument for arts education is not as esoterically founded as in the past, local arts educators say. It isn’t enough for the arts to simply be a mode of expression or a repository of higher culture. Arts educators have to show that their chosen mode of expression has a direct impact on the traditional three R’s–reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic.

“We have asked our artists to be not only excellent artistically, but have an educational component connected to the state standards,” says Eileen Carpinella, executive director of Young Audiences Arts for Learning Connecticut, a non-profit arts advocacy program that serves 385,000 teachers and students across the state.

This isn’t a difficult connection to make, according to studies. A report released in 2002 by the Arts Education Partnership—a report that reviewed 62 studies of arts learning in dance, drama, music and visual art—sought to make sense of what students gain from the arts. For example, music instruction can develop spatial reasoning, a fundamental skill in understanding mathematical concepts. Other forms of art enhance reading skills by helping students associate letters, words and phrases with sounds and meaning. Additional benefits include increased self-confidence and motivation.

According to the essay “The Arts and the Transfer of Learning” by James S. Catterall, a significant moment in arts education came when researchers at the University of California determined that classical music “made you smarter.” A scramble ensued, Catterall writes, between parents buying Baby Mozart recordings and academics seeking to replicate the university’s findings.

“At the same time, however, increased interest in the arts was serving to shift public and private resources towards arts education in a significant way. Some artists and art educators heralded a revival of the arts, for whatever rationale; others felt their callings compromised,” Catterall states in his essay.

That was six years ago. Now the “No Child Left Behind” Act, a comprehensive set of educational reforms mandated by President George W. Bush, has made standardized testing the norm. Local arts organizations have scrambled to adjust to the new climate, as classroom time and dollars are at a premium.

For Steve Collins, an arts educator with the New Haven Symphony, this new climate has forced him to be more innovative in his programming—and more proactive in seeking ways to engage local schools. “The number of schools that contact us on their own initiative has definitely dropped. The teachers and administrators have decided that it is the arts organizations’ job to find them, when in the past it was the other way around,” Collins says.

To that end, the New Haven Symphony created the Photography Project. Students receive a picture of a Symphony member doing something other than playing an instrument—a favorite hobby, for example. Then the students—unaware of the profession of the person in the photo—spend time in creative writing class creating a biography for the person. Later on, the students meet the mysterious stranger in the photo, and after a brief question and answer period, the musicians reveal their career with an in-classroom concert.

For Collins, the key to this program is that the lesson moves beyond just music and writing. “Students just love it. It challenges them to think creatively, while also teaching them you can’t judge a book by its cover,” Collins says.

The results of this type of programming truly are palpable, Carpinella says, as indicated by Young Audiences participation in a nationwide program called “Arts for Learning Literacy Lessons.” “In all cases the academic scores of the children who participated in the literacy units went up,” Carpinella says.

And not only do organizations want to provide an opportunity for students to improve themselves and their communities, they want to create the next generation of audiences, as well.

“The arts help students become better problem solvers,” says Aleta Staton, program and education specialist at Young Audiences. “They increase creativity and self-worth. Every arts organization, large or small that I’ve been a part of, has made it more and more important to develop educational programming.”

Larissa Hall, youth programs coordinator at Artspace, completely agrees. While not all of the high school students that come to their after school programming have a passion for art, their insight never fails to inspire.

“They see things I don’t necessarily see in a work of art. There are kids who are shy and soft spoken who open up in a gallery,” Hall said. “Being in front of a piece of art is a different experience. I think it is a little bit of them coming out.”

Shakespeare gone Wilder

Kara Arsenault

	The Elm Shakespeare Company will present Hamlet at Edgerton Park throughout the month of August. Photo by Judy Sirota Rosenthal.

High school junior Andrew Carrion never considered himself terribly theatrical. In the 7th grade, he played a clown in a school play—he claims that went horribly. So when his teachers at High School in the Community signed him up for a reading/acting course on Shakespeare—a course offered in collaboration with the Yale Center for British Art and the Elm Shakespeare Company—he felt a bit uneasy. “I thought we’d just open our books, read Shakespeare, and I’d fall asleep,” Carrion laughs.

But before he knew it, Shakespeare had swept him away. First the folks at Elm Shakespeare helped him become better acquainted with the works and words of The Bard. Then they helped him transform into a true actor. “We did everything that actors do,” Carrion says. He practiced diction, spit out tongue-twisters and memorized the mind-boggling lines of Malvolio in Twelfth Night and Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing—a character he particularly came to respect. “He’s so versatile. He expressed his love for Beatrice but still kept his manly stature.”

By the time the class’s final performance rolled around—a special presentation for middle school students—Carrion felt like a star. “It was absolutely amazing,” he gushes. “The first week we started, I really just joked around. But by the end, I decided to give it everything I had. This was definitely my best class all year.”

This kind of story is music to James Andreassi’s ears. As artistic director of Elm Shakespeare Company, Andreassi considers this innovative artist-in-residency program—now 13 years strong—the cornerstone of all that they do. “The final performance would have blown your mind,” he says, particularly the question and answer session with the performers and middle school students at the end. Q: How did you learn all those lines? A: Lots of hard work. Q: Was it fun? A: Sometimes no. Q (from a teacher): Why did you come to this class but none of your others? Nothing more poignant than hearing words of wisdom from your older, and often cooler, high school peers.

Yet the residency program is only one small piece of the Elm Shakespeare pie. Every August since 1995, the team at Elm Shakespeare has presented professional Shakespearian productions in New Haven’s Edgerton Park. In the beginning, Andreassi hoped to gather just 200 folks a night. But by the end of their first year, the outdoor crowd had hit 1,000. Today that number has grown to over 30,000 people over the entire month.

If the numbers weren’t daunting enough, two years ago, Elm Shakespeare decided to offer not just one production a summer—but two, switching back and forth between them almost daily. “It’s always been the dream of the Company to work with actors and to explore and demonstrate our capacity as actors.” Occasionally Andreassi hears an astonished “Excuse me? Two plays?” from the actors he approaches. But usually they enthusiastically embrace the idea. “It’s an incredible undertaking—to sit back and watch the sets change over night. But it’s also incredibly exciting.”

This year is certainly no exception. The work usually begins in the fall, when folks at Elm Shakespeare officially pick the plays. Then they start talking with potential actors. This part is “a bit of a coquettish dance,” Andreassi laughs. Next, formal auditions are held and then the light and set talk begins.

And finally the blissful period starts—the time to sit back and read the chosen productions over and over again. This year, that means close readings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker. “Hamlet is so well-known because the text is so amazing.” But the entire play takes a full four hours. So Andreassi had to cut the story down to a slightly more manageable bite. “I could envision Shakespeare spinning in his grave as I beat at his text,” Andreassi laughs. “But we as an audience get it. We’ve heard so much rhetoric as a population. As Shakespeare said, “Brevity is the soul of the wit.”

Andreassi is particularly excited about the pairing of these two fascinating plays. “Our company has shown that we can do two plays at once—so now we want to stretch a bit more—swashbuckle a little less. We’ve clearly shown that we know what to do with swords.” With Wilder’s The Matchmaker, Andreassi found himself completely drawn to the story. “It’s a brilliantly constructed farce, set in 1880’s Yonkers. It’s a slice of Americana—everyone knows their place and people are loathe to rock the boat.” Hamlet on the other hand, boasts complete chaos and disorder. “It’s an interesting juxtaposition,” Andreassi says, and he’s on pins and needles to see just how the audience reacts.

Andrew Carrion can’t wait for the reaction, either. He so thoroughly enjoyed his experience at High School in the Community that he applied for and received a paid apprenticeship with Elm Shakespeare this summer. “I had a bit of a love/hate relationship with Shakespeare,” Carrion laughs. “Some days we forgot lines and everyone would start laughing. But sometimes when we were rehearsing—just the way it sounded—it came out so perfectly.” Those were the days he was in love. So for now, Carrion’s happy to stick with Shakespeare.

The Elm Shakespeare Company will perform Hamlet and The Matchmaker at Edgerton Park, August 7–31. A special treat for theatre-goers this year: the venerable actor Alvin Epstein will play Polonius in Hamlet. For more information, please visit the website at www.elmshakespeare.org.

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