The Snowy Day (book)

For the past twelve years, I have been intimately acquainted with the children's book The Snowy Day. This short book, published in 1962 and which won the Coldecott Medal in 1963, is the book we share on the very first day of the Great Lakes Theater School Residency Program. My first day as an actor-teacher I led a class of first graders through the story of a boy who goes out into the world, on his own, on a snowy day, and has the kind of adventures only a little kid can have in the snow.

So I was delighted to discover the Akron Art Museum was presenting The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats. The family stopped in on our way to Athens, and my wife, like a lot of people, was surprised to learn that Ezra Jack Keats was white. Creating the first modern children's story book to feature an African-American child as its protagonist, you might assume the author to be black.

Keats's birth name, Jacob Erza Katz, was born the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. Living in Brooklyn, he was very interested in the beauty of his urban surroundings, and attracted to the other cultures that surrounded him. His first children's book, My Dog Is Lost! (1960) featured a Spanish-speaking boy named Juanito.

He was inspired to create the character of Peter from a photo essay he saw in LIFE Magazine some twenty years earlier, showing a proud and interesting African-American boy, posing in his winter coat. Today the issue-neutral depiction of non-white races is pretty standard. At the time, it raised controversy, which is a pity, but not surprising.

Detail from "Peter's Chair" (1967)

It's one thing to look at EJK's picture books and tell that they are created from collage, something else to see the original artwork itself. Most if not all of them were created 1:1 which, surprised me. Some have special instructions in the margins for the printer, e.g.: No side-lighting. If the images were sidelit, that would create shadows from the many layers of paper (see detail above).

Yes, you can see that children's clothes are cut from patterned cloth, but seeing the actual cloth made me think of the artist cutting several different scraps of cloth from the same bolt of fabric to represent the exact same shirt, numerous times. He would use wallpaper to represent, well, wallpaper (again, see above) but cut and paste the wallpaper over itself to put more of the repeating images, like flowers, into this smaller space.

"After breakfast he called to his friend across the hall,

and they went out together into the deep, deep snow."

- from "The Snowy Day"

A rite of passage for male actor-teacher our school residency program is to perform what we like to call The Sweaty Day, where we pantomime all of Peter's activities while wearing a winter coat, knit hat, scarf and gloves. This photo is from a rehearsal in early 2005 where Peter has decided to call on one of the "big girls" across the hall instead.

The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats continues through June 30.

I Dreamed of Rats (play)

Terrence Cranendonk
"I Dreamed of Rats"

For the past several years, artists have been leaning on the boundaries of live performance by creating interactive or intimate theatrical events, plays where the audience either has a (sometimes very limited) choice in the manner in which they observe or engage with the performance, or are made part of the performance itself in some creative fashion.

One of the most recent, much-ballyhooed productions in 2011 has been the arrival in New York City of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, in which an entire hotel is the setting for a remake of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Emphasis is placed little on the text, and more on the mood and atmosphere. Audience members wear masks, watching as actors murder, party and have sex right in front of them -- and the audience is permitted to get as close to the action as they like (so long as they don’t touch anyone.) One review noted how audience members would pick up things to look at them, like discarded letters, or rummage through cabinets or cases, and discover something relevant everywhere they did.

Over ten years ago I heard of the Neo-Futurists staging their version of Crime and Punishment, where every participant (audience member?) was handed a portable cassette tape player -- like I said, over ten years ago -- and had to follow whatever instructions were given them through their headphones. Which room to walk to next, whether to act as accused or judge. Each audience member went in on their own, though they may find themselves in a room with another audience member, whom they most likely did not know, playing their part in that moment’s scenario.

Nick Denny & I
"Voice In Head"

Nick, my brother Denny and I joined the audience of Voice-In-Head at the Theatre Garage during the 2003 Minnesota Fringe which followed the same model only with absurdist results. We had minidisc players (things change) and were given instructions to carry out throughout the proceedings. My brother told a surprisingly funny joke, considering he is very bad at telling stories, and Nick apparently had two minutes to tell the audience anything he wanted, and chose to praise me and my overwhelming talent and general goodness, and that if everyone that night saw just one more show the the Minnesota Fringe, it had better be I Hate This, which was opening the next evening.

 
I didn’t hear any of this, my brother asked me later if that embarrassed me or if I was moved or anything because I had this frozen mask on my face the entire time Nick was lauding my glory. I had to admit that for the entire two minutes this was going on I was receiving complicated instructions about how it was soon necessary for me to leap up, swirl around the room and deliver the worst fake-Shakespearean monologue I could muster.

Even more recently, the concept of salon performances have swept the theater world. Not simply the type of play where actors perform for an audience of one (although that is also a big deal deal right now) but situations where an actor or small company holds a performance in their own home.

The first I became aware of such an idea was in the early 90s when I first learned of Wallace Shawn’s The Fever which he introduced to select audiences in an apartment near Seventh Avenue. Wow. That’s exclusive, I thought. I wonder who was there. Given the opportunity to experience such a thing, I would not pass it up. Strange that I never had the nerve to do it myself.

Because really, I feel there is an emotional leap required to attempt such a thing, even now that it has become en vogue. And it has to be artistically requisite. A solo performance, sure, but that seems arrogant in the extreme. I have thrown a party where you have to sit quietly while I talk about me for an hour. A narcissist’s wet dream.

Last year I attended a performance of Kirk Wood Bromley’s It Was a Setup … performed for an audience of 20 in his living room in Gowanus, Brooklyn. It was an open, advertised performance, but only if you had a reservation would you receive the address. A play for three, a domestic drama, it was perfectly suited to the realist, well, real space and the confined proximity to the performers.

Yes, it took me twenty years to find and attend a salon performance.

A few weeks back my wife and received a Facebook invitation to Terence Cranendonk’s I Dreamed of Rats. Terry has been working on this piece for over fifteen years, a one-hour, solo adaptation of Gogol's The Inspector General. We attended last night, arriving just in time, at his lovely home in Akron, and joined an audience of eight for a startlingly good event. Terry has always been a member of the physical theater, and he is a joy to watch in performance. Surprise is humor, and his work consistently leaves me surprised and delighted.

And, as most nourishing artistic experiences do, last night’s event left me hungry, wondering what I will do next to fill it.

UPDATE: BorderLight Theater Festival presents The Right Room, a new play by David Hansen and directed by Jasmine Renee, July 16 - 19, 2025. Help support our production by dropping a donation on our GoFundMe campaign! 

Ruth McKenney

Saw Harvey Pekar at the library this morning, he was perusing the for-sale racks. Went over, said "hi," he had that look again which either means, "who are you?" or "are you going to bother me?" I asked if he knew anything about labor unrest in the 30s and he said that's really not his area.

But then he told me about Ruth McKenney, who is probably best-known today for her book My Sister Eileen, which was adapted into the musical Wonderful Town. What fewer people know today is that she was a reporter for the Akron Beacon-Journal and wrote the book Industrial Valley about the Akron rubber strike of 1932-36.

In 1939 Industrial Valley came out to an outcry from Akron community leaders. Akron evangelist Bill Denton urged the Chamber of Commerce to file suit in the federal court, saying the book was full of "profanity, slander and communistic tendencies." That same year, the book won an honorable mention in the non-fiction category at the American Writer's Congress. - Akron Women's History

I imagine the book did have communistic tendencies, as she was a Communist.

LATER: "Industrial Valley" is sitting on one of our bookshelves. Just sitting there. I love this house.