Simple Gifts (1977)

New York at Night (1979)

R. O. Blechman (born Oscar Robert Blechman, 1930) is an illustrator and animator, you probably recognize his work. He made a name for himself creating sequential editorial cartoons for the Village Voice in the 1970s, later for The New York Times and plentiful covers for The New Yorker.

DID YOU KNOW ..? Like all great men, R. O. Blechman graduated from Oberlin College.

Without actually doing any research on the subject, I imagine the artist he is most closely compared to is Jules Feiffer, because of the shaky line. However, whereas Feiffer's people have detailed faces of angst and giddy nervous energy, Blechman's characters visages are so glyphic they are almost childlike, often succumbed by wonder.

R.O. Blechman (self-portrait)

His most-seen animation is probably something like the Alka-Seltzer commercial (1967) in which a man has an argument with his own stomach. My favorite work, however, was when he produced an hour-long holiday program for PBS called Simple Gifts. Seven animators presented works on the theme of Christmas.


Blechman's own piece, No Room at the Inn, retells the story of the Nativity with social commentary familiar to those who treasure his work. This acknowledgement of economic disparity and the plight of the poor is also reflected in Maurice Sendak's Introduction where a shoeless, miserable boy sacrifices his life to become a tree that brings joy to others.

Artist Chwast gives life to a bizarre tale from the bizarre novel Orlando by the bizarre Virgina Woolf, and there is an silly Toonerville Trolley cartoon. Three pieces, however, are biographical, and summon up Christmases from America in the 1860s (rich future President Teddy Roosevelt's My Christmas) and in the 1910s (poor future playwright Moss Hart's A Memory of Christmas)
and the tale most haunting, that of the "Christmas Truce" of 1914.


The story told in this letter from by Sir Edward Hulse was only one example of soldiers, largely British and Canadian, emerging from their trenches to meet and greet Germans (there are far fewer records of any French participating) in no-man's land. First they arranged to retrieve their dead, which led to the singing of hymns, then carols, the sharing of family photos and stories and finally playing soccer and exchanging of gifts.

The afterward to this animation, that Sir Hulse perished in the trenches, doesn't make the story any more poignant, if you are familiar with the wholesale carnage of the Great War. He died on a godforsaken field in France. Of course he did.

Following this dangerous breach of continual murderous violence, those at the top mandated that strict punishments would be meted out if there were any further peaceful gestures made toward the enemy. And once poison gas was introduced in 1915, most Christian amity was successfully broken.

A commercially produced video for Simple Gifts was last released commercial in 1993, and is currently available on VHS for around $130. It has never been released on DVD.

In The Night Kitchen (book)

When Dobama Theater Artistic Director Joyce Casey asked me to curate a late-night series of performances for teenage and young adult audiences, it didn't take me very long to choose a name for the project.  

The play I was currently writing, The Vampyres, was set in a goth-themed coffee house called The Night Kitchen. There a couple allusions to children's books in the play, in particular books that went to dark but dreamlike places.

When Dobama's Night Kitchen started I was twenty-seven. I had already put on the trappings of adulthood -- marriage, home-ownership, divorce -- finding each an ill fit. I was in a new relationship with a woman who encouraged me to re-discover the childhood I had always been determined to scorn, deny and suppress. My mission was to create works which respected and celebrated young people, from their point of view.

Joyce kept trying to thrust This Is Our Youth upon me to direct for DNK. I have a lot of respect for Kenneth Lonergan. I really like his movie. But stories about wasted people acting wasted are really boring ... I couldn't get past the stage direction describing as one of the kids "expertly rolls a perfect joint." Really? That must have been an amazing joint. I think it was eventually produced at Beck Center, but anyway.

We had a basement after dark, when the adults had checked out, to be creative. That was dreamlike in itself. And for this guy in his late-twenties it was a race against the clock, I started getting delirious around 12:30.

In The Night Kitchen was published by Maurice Sendak in 1970. Since publication it has remained controversial, and for all the wrong reasons. Well, there's one reason, and it's between Mickey's legs. There's a boy running around naked in it!

Yes, well. There's a boy running around in my house, naked, pretty much every day, but I wouldn't call that pornographic, and I would have some pointed questions for anyone who does. The child doesn't read In The Night Kitchen and think it is sexual, only a sad and ashamed adult does that.

And there was never any nudity in Dobama's Night Kitchen either, unless you count that time Peer's junk fell out of his pee jays during The Realistic World 3, but I wouldn't call that sexual, either.

In The Night Kitchen was inspired by, practically stolen from the classic, early 20th century comic strip Winsor McCay's Little Nemo In Slumberland. That comic featured a boy's dreams where anything could happen, and did, on his fruitless quest to reach Slumberland to take his place as rightful playmate to the Princess. More on that later. 

Remarkably, I received the second volume in a large-format, collectible edition of the strip which includes at least one strip in which Nemo appears naked. Because in dreams, this happens all the time.

The being naked part. Not being eaten by a polar bear. At least, not to me.

Sendak's In The Night Kitchen also does not include any polar bears. But it does include three, gigantic chefs who may look like Oliver Hardy, but that only softens the fact that each sports a "Hitler" mustache and attempt to bake the obviously circumcised Mickey in an oven. Yes, there are far more disturbing things to trouble a person's sleep than a small child's genitalia.

So this theater project was named for an often-timed banned children's book, and for three years it felt like a cozy playhouse, a respite from the adulthood I thought I'd wanted. Leah, who was in her teenage years back then -- in fact didn't even start attending DNK shows until after I'd stepped down as director of the project -- once recounted to me the feeling of excitement she always had walking down those steps into the basement, it was like a vibration, maybe because the music was always played a little too darn loud, not knowing what was going to happen that night.

A surprise farewell to the Night Kitchen, June 1998.