Charles Isherwood reviews Peter Stein’s adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s “The Demons” – whew, and wow.  Exhilarating material, a long tightrope walk; I’d love to see this production. If you have, comment, please, on what the demon-haunted said to you.

As for the actual history — well, the fact is I didn’t think beforehand about the book as historical fiction, as any “kind” of fiction; I understood in a backdoor sort of way that it would be part of a genre per se, but other than that I thought not at all; I just wrote. When I needed to know if a certain activity or device was present and/or available in my variant Victoriana, I looked it up (and sometimes became pleasurably lost among the byways of the pince-nez and buttonhook et al) and then added, or did not, accordingly.

What was most important to me, what is always most important to me when I write, was recreating on the page that world I saw so clearly in my mind’s eye: the universe of Rupert and Istvan, that most faithful and intimate world they had built and sustained between them, and all the concentric temporal worlds of society and custom, the road, the stage, the brothel and the salon, through which orbits they passed in turn and tandem on their way. Anthony Lane’s wonderful observation about Flaubert’s use of detail – his research “furnishing and feathering a world that had already taken shape within his mind” – is exactly my model.  Everything on the page is there to feather that nest, to hold you in that world until the story is done.

Is it odorous, sex-charged, boots-and-corset puppet-mad, this world? Oh absolutely. Is it neo-Victorian? It can sit at that table, I hope, without annoying its fellows. Need you wear pince-nez when you read it? Only if you want to. Did I make it all up? Yes and no, like all fiction, like the best fiction it aspires to be. Read it, please, then you tell me.

And afterward, Cynthia Grieg and I talked about women in pants, another kind of representation. To become something, do we dress the part first? To try on identity and see how closely the mask becomes us?

Theatre has always known this, of course, intuitively and externally. So on to Don Giovanni.

In our continuing quest to make the Poppy onstage all it can be, Diane Cheklich and I were out and about last night, having a peek at Noir Leather‘s steampunk fashion show.  And the fashion was both onstage and off, as these pictures attest. We invite a crowd with similar style to our exclusive little cabaret-brothel.  See you soon! [All photos courtesy DC.]

And while we’re on the subject of film, interesting to see, in last Sunday’s New York Times, this overview of the use of onstage projections in the theatre. Michael Mayer, director of the Green Day musical “American Idiot” about to open on Broadway, is quoted as noting that the growing popularity of projections reflects “a whole generation’s response to the media” and that generation’s comfort with that media’s ubiquity.  Which is not, as such, a reason to include projections, film, anything, to a story onstage, unless it suits that story’s story, which ours emphatically do.