DON RUSSELL, HONOURING A COACH

The best head coach I ever had, Don Russell, was inducted into my university's Sports Hall of Fame  (our 1969 football team is already in en masse), along with our defensive coordinator, Pete Kostacopolous, who also, in his other role on campus, coached a Wesleyan baseball team all the way to an NCAA final. In fact, in this photo the defense must be on the field, and Don is probably yelling into the headset to ask Kosty what he wants to do!

Let me tell you a few things: when Don was 'recruiting' me (he spoke at a New Haven Register/National Football Foundation awards dinner where I was being honoured and mentioned I was headed to Wesleyan, which I had chosen after being recruited heavily by the University of Pennsylvania) he told me that if I came to Wesleyan I would play football because I wanted to, not because he or anyone else could make me, or take a scholarship away, and frankly, not many people on campus would care one way or the other. And that sold me on the school. That and my student guide around campus that day driving me home, rather than making me take two buses from Middletown to Milford.

In the summer of 1970, when there were layoffs at the Fafnir plant where my dad worked and I lost my summer job, Don got me one on building & grounds at Wesleyan, and I worked there all year round for two years. At that point, following the student strike, I was seriously debating not returning to Wesleyan, so by a strange synchronicity the loyalty of my football coach in getting me the job I needed to pay my share of the costs not covered by my scholarship was a big factor in my returning for my final two years of college. And doing much better at it than I had in the first two.

And when in 1972 I was applying for conscientious objector status I asked Don to write a letter of reference to the draft board. He wrote that although he disagreed with my stance, he respected the way I'd made my decision, understood my grounds for it as I'd expressed them, and would support me 100% because he believed in my honesty.

All three of those things meant a huge amount to me at the time, and still do. I want to thank him for that, and for being a fine coach who led us to an undefeated season, The Lambert Cup, and two Little Three titles in the two years I played for him (he stepped down in my senior year to concentrate on being AD; we stumbled to a .500 season that year and didn't win another Little Three title for more than 40 years). Don succeeded in part by recruiting a few very good players, but more by understanding that he needed to get the best out of a bunch of less talented players who played because they wanted to, because they enjoyed it, but who also had other options. We called him the Silver Fox, and it was a term of respect.

And I can't help by recalling how the defense on that undefeated team, which Kosty coordinated, featured among others a 175 pound middle linebacker and a 155 pound rover, and when asked by a reporter if he didn't think his players were a little too small, Don reportedly told him, 'we may be small, but we're slow'. And he told another reporter that the key to our beating Williams in 1969 was that we 'held Jack Maitland to 167 yards rushing'.

Plus he (and Kosty) chewed tobacco. I hadn't ever met anyone who did: it was reserved for red necks down south and baseball players, not two mutually exclusive groups. I always figured it was because they were from Maine. But what was frightening, and funny when the coaches' weren't looking at you, was watching the brown juice run down Don's chin when he got angry or excited. I can remember it once spattering over someone still lying on the ground who was being berated for doing something wrong and landing there. It was hard to keep a straight face, but as a football player you knew you had to.

I was very sorry I had to miss that induction banquet. To think all these years later I'd still be doing football on a weekend: this time the NFL playing their first ever game at Twickenham, which I first visited with my Wesleyan teammate Blake 'Mole' Allison, in 1972 to watch the Combined Services play the All Blacks.

DAVE REVENAUGH, IN MEMORIAM

My college football teammate, and Wesleyan classmate, Dave Revenaugh, died recently. Rev was, to me, a force of nature: and there's a nice photo from our 30th reunion in 2002 that to me captures our essences just as they were in 1968-72. I saw Rev once or twice after that, but we never really got the chance to talk with as much relaxation as that night: though I also recall he ducked out of the reunion dinner just afterwards. We shared one other thing: he had his final child even later than I had my first, and we both named the boys Nathaniel. 

Rev was probably the best football player on our undefeated team. I'd managed to get Herb Kenny, one of our coaches, to be a guest speaker at the dinner, and talking with him he told me what a coup getting Rev to come to Wesleyan was. 'He was a legit Div One player, Herb said, 'and we didn't get those guys usually'. Of course Herb got another one, Rev's friend Jim Akin, for his basketball team that year too. I knew his reputation from Fairfield Prep, and playing both ways with him on our minescule freshman team, I got to see first-hand what an explosive, fully committed 6-1 225 pound force he was. I also came to understand, talking with him, that he had chosen Wesleyan because he wanted to be challenged in other places than the football field.

We went undefeated and won the Little Three in 1969. I'm present in the pictures of Rev making the game-winning TD catch against Williams that year, doing my best celebration leap having cleared the zone out for him. My claim to football fame.

I remember two Rev stories, both from our senior year. That year Bill MacDermott decided to switch our offense to an I formation. As the tailback, Ed Tabor lost his ability to gain yardage by his quickness through the hole, and wasn't great at taking the option pitch. As a fullback, Rev had his vision and foot-quickness taken away: he could dance through a hole and outrun people, even though he was one of the biggest guys on our team. The previous year we'd set some sort of New England record for rushing yards per game. It wasn't broke.

During the football season, I timed a trip badly, and when I went to practice I was still psychedelicizing. Calesthenics were proving a challenge. At one point, trying desperately to get my situps right, I looked over at Rev, lying next to me. He smiled. 'You too?' he said.

That spring Rev decided to play lacrosse. We were on our preseason southern tour, playing our southernmost game at Princeton. As we walked out to the field (where, as I recall, we drew with the Ivory Leaguers, as Mac would call them) we passed the Princeton Cyclotron. Rev looked at it, and at me. 'They even have a bicyling team here?' he asked, and to this day I'm not convinced he was putting me on.

There was no better competitor, no one you'd rather have as a teammate. It was a joy and a privilege to have played with him, gone to school with him, and to have known him. RIP Rev.

F.D. REEVE: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of the poet and translator F.D. Reeve, father of the actor Christopher, is in today's Independent; you can link to it here. Because I had been at Wesleyan when Reeve was teaching there, I wrote a bit more than I'd been asked. In my researching I found the lists of poetry readings at the Honors College, and saw that I had read with other student poets not long after Reeve had performed as 'the Blue Cat'. Because my friend Seth Davis was in the College of Letters, he knew him well. Seth was kind enough to share his memories with me, thus the piece may give the impression I knew Reeve, which isn't so. Because I over-wrote, little bits were trimmed here and there in the paper. Rather than explain what's gone, I'll just post my copy here. Seth is the student who received an evaluation written in rhyming couplets--among the other differences are my description of the Frost-Krushchev confrontation as 'ill-tempered', my analysis of Richard Wilbur's translations from Russian, and the reference to Reeve's 2005 novel My Sister Life.

F.D. REEVE: POET AND TRANSLATOR

In the early stages of his career, the poet F.D. Reeve, who has died aged 84, found himself best-known as the translator who accompanied Robert Frost on his famous 1962 visit to the Soviet Union, the man in the middle of Frost's ill-tempered showdown with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Years later, having established himself as a poet, novelist, and translator, Reeve would find himself overshadowed again, by his eldest son Christopher, who achieved worldwide fame as the actor playing Superman in the smash 1978 movie hit.

Ironically, Reeve himself had given up acting to pursue poetry. If anything, he was better-looking than his son; I was a student at Wesleyan University when Reeve was a leading light in the inter-disciplinary College of Letters and his poetry was receiving its highest acclaim. Richard Wilbur was the University's poet in residence, and the two shared an almost impossibly handsome patrician elegance. I found that most striking when they performed on campus with the Russian poet Andrei Vozhnesensky, reading translations of his work. Reeve was fluent in Russian; Wilbur didn't speak the language but worked from Reeve's literal translation and his own sense of the intonation, meter and rhyme . The dueling verses were equally thrilling.

Franklin D’Olier Reeve was born in Philadelphia 18 September 1928. His father ran Prudential Financial, and although F.D. often told students his middle name was Delano, after President Roosevelt, D'Olier was his mother's family name. He was educated at the elite Philips Exeter Academy, and then at Princeton, where he studied under the poet and critic R.P. Blackmur, and became entranced with Russian literature after reading Anna Karenina. After graduation he travelled in Europe and worked in the Dakotas harvesting wheat, which would provide the material for his first novel, Red Machines (1968). In 1951, he married Barbara Lamb; Christopher was born in 1952 and a second son, Benjamin in 1953.

Reeve began graduate work at Columbia University, while working as a longshoreman and a jobbing actor. But he quit acting because he said he would have to 'give up too much of my inner self' to continue writing poetry. In 1956, he and Lamb divorced; she took the children to Princeton, and married a stockbroker, while he married a fellow Columbia student, Helen Schmidinger. That marriage also ended in divorce, as did his third, to Ellen Swift. His relationship with Christopher would always be difficult, and didn't improve with the son's fame. In interviews Christopher spoke of resentment toward his father over the bitterness of the marital break-up, and the awkwardness of his shared upbringing.

When F.D. Reeve gave his first public poetry reading, in New York, he was introduced by Blackmur, and shared the stage with Denise Levertov and the priest and future anti-war activist Daniel Berrigan. He received his PhD in 1958, and taught Russian at Columbia, where his first book, a study of Aleksandr Blok, was published in 1962. By then, he'd been selected for one of the first academic exchanges with the Soviet Academy of Sciences, which led to his selection as Frost's translator. Later he wrote a fine memoir of the trip, Robert Frost in Russia (1964), noting how he used the trip to introduce Frost, and himself, to the younger, more open, generation of Soviet writers.

After returning from Russia in 1962, he moved to Wesleyan, where he taught for 40 years. Originally head of the Russian department, he gave up tenure for an adjunct position in the College of Letters, which allowed him freedom to live and work elsewhere, eventually in Vermont, for parts of the year; particularly at Yale from 1974-86. He was a popular teacher, renowned in my time for his evaluation of one star student's colloquium, written entirely in rhymed couplets. That was his most successful period of writing; between 1968 and 1973 his first two collections of poetry, In The Silent Stones and The Blue Cat were published by major publishers, as were his next three novels, Just Over The Border, The Brother, and White Colours (1973). He would not publish another novel until My Sister Life in 2005.

Reeve translated Turgenev's short novels, and produced two anthologies of Russian drama. His renaissance as a writer was triggered by his move to Vermont, where he settled eventually in Wilmington with his fourth wife, creative writing professor Laura Stevenson. His third book of poetry, Nightway, finally appeared in 1987, followed by an exceptional critical work, White Monk (1989) tying together Dostoevsky and Melville. Between 1992 and 2010 seven more books of poetry appeared from independent presses, as well as a selected poems, A World You Haven't Seen (2001). He wrote two books of short stories based around his working on the Hudson River docks, and translated poetry by Bella Akhmadulina and Leonid Andreyev's 1908 novel Seven Who Were Hanged, which took on added resonance in the age of terrorism. His last published work was the novel Nathaniel Purple (2012) set in rural Vermont.

Reeve died 28 June 2013 in Lebanon, New Hampshire, of complications from diabetes. He is survived by Stevenson, his son from his first marriage, and a son and two daughters from his second. In a 2002 poem, 'Home In Wartime' Reeve wrote:

If I die first, gather the lost years
with the late September apples. At sunset ghost me
beside you on the steps to watch
the tangerine-lavender clouds turn gray.
Go on, go on.

THE REHEARSAL, PLAYING THE DANE: Pan Pan's Egging Hamlet

Forty years ago, in my last semester at Wesleyan, I took a seminar in Hamlet with Prof. Sherman Hawkins—what I remember best about it is that I also got paid, in my capacity as a university building & grounds employee, to drive the class down to the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven to see the play, with a young Stacy Keach playing the lead. But we also covered a lot of the revenge tragedies that were so popular in Shakespeare's time, putting the play into a genre context to see how it transcended that genre, as it were.

I was reminded of that when I saw Pan Pan's production of The Rehearsal at the New Zealand International Arts Festival in Wellington last week. I have to say I was attracted as much by the poster, which played up the play's subtitle: Playing The Dane with a picture of a great dane wearing a huge Ruff collar. It suggested a certain playfulness with Hamlet, a promise which was only partially delivered. In their efforts to deconstruct Hamlet play, Pan Pan have created something that's more interesting than entertaining, often thought-provoking, but often failing to follow up on its own provocations.

The Rehearsal deconstructs Hamlet in two parts. In the first, three actors vie to play the lead role: they are put through audition paces by the director, a casting director, and an academic who has opened the play by reading an essay. The opening essay was delivered by Prof. Harry Ricketts of Wellington's Victoria University and presumably written by him—though the original Dublin production apparently used Trinity College prof Amanda Piese as the lecturer (and what may be a part of her lecture was included in the programme). It was so much not a part of the play itself that the theatre's 'no mobiles' and festival's promotional announcements came over the PA system after he'd finished, as if to cue that now the play itself would begin. It reminded me of Brecht, who liked the didactic because he didn't trust his audience to get what he was trying to say unless he laid it out for them—I'd argue that's because Brecht's plays don't always do what he wants to think they're doing, but that's a different essay. But if such a comparison, of Pan Pan's Shakespeare to Brecht, were intentional, it's not taken that much farther.

At the end of the act, the audience is invited to come on stage and vote for their preferred Hamlet by standing behind him. This is a little bit of theatrical fun which sadly doesn't continue into the second act—and doesn't really tell us much about whether the audience is sympathetic to the various prejudices exhibited by the director, the perceived talent of each actor, or indeed some deep insight into which approach might best suit the character of the brooding prince. But it does give a hint as to where The Rehearsal is going. Particularly when one of the aspiring Hamlets is asked to perform as if it were a play by Beckett.

The second act takes place on a gorgeous set lit by candles and filled with gleaming dustbins. The desk behind which those who cast the play sat is moved to the rear, and none of those characters play any part in the rest of the play, until the academic delivers a smaller essay to close it out. Their presence is hardly noticeable, unless you're expecting something from them, in which case you'll be disappointed. The set, with huge mirrors on each side, to a great extent overpowers the performance—at times it is far more interesting than what the actors are doing, as when they perform Hamlet's 'to be or not to be' soliloquy as a round. It makes its point: that it is not only Hamlet who faces such existential dilemmas, very well, but once made, the point is lost amidst the dustbins.

But like those giant mirrors, the scene reflects the uncertainties around the character, the way Shakespeare plays with language, and has Hamlet himself play with language; the way he deliberately renders insights into his nature uncertain. At one point there is reference to Hamlet in terms of the 'instability of being', and surely Shakespeare's point is that all being is unstable. Pan Pan's point may be more that all interpretation is unstable; in the second act there are a number of reflections on legendary performances, particularly Irish ones. It may be post modern commentary of our perception of the play through its adaptations, but it's also something that suggests the academic essay, or the pub debate, is somehow more memorable than the performance itself.

That the two failed Hamlets play Laertes and Horatio adds a sense of reflection to their characters as well—highlighting the parallels which Shakespeare has drawn into the play. When the traveling players arrive, they segue from playing The Murder Of Gonzago, the famous play-within-a-play, to doing Hamlet itself, thus making a play within a play within a play. This is acted out by local schoolboys, who were quite good in their roles but left me wondering if this device, like that of the local academic, was intended to show that anyone could perform Hamlet (in which case, why Pan Pan?) or maybe to providee a sort of local relevance with which to sell the play more easily to festival programmers around the world?

The one element of the play that becomes more certain is its treatment of Ophelia. Judith Roddy's sassy interpretation steals the show—the production leaves you in no doubt of the strength of Ophelia's character, and the way that strength is ignored, indeed repressed, by a particularly misogynistic set of attitudes from virtually all the male characters, including her brother, her father, and her lover. Given that Gertrude's presence is diminished greatly, this seems to me the most straightforward of the play's reinterpretations.

The least straightforward element is the play's failure to engage fully with the Beckett references it litters through its various Hamlets. That they are there shouldn't surprise coming from an Irish production, and given the other Irish references in the performance (aside: isn't it fascinating how the greatest 'English' novelist, poet, and playwright of the past century were all Irish?). But it was disappointing they weren't taken further, because once it started my thinking down those lines, seeing Clove and Hamlet together at last, the potential for re-evaluation seemed overpowering.

Because Hamlet is as much a prototype of Theatre of the Absurd as an apotheosis of revenge tragedy. In the Absurd, characters tend to be trapped by their neuroses, which are usually traceable to things buried in childhood, as in Freudian psychology. They are able to cope only by re-enacting rituals, often of a nature that seems ridiculous when we watch. It is not a perfect fit, but given that the undercurrent of the incest theme (as I mentioned, played down by Gertrude's diminshed role), and given Hamlet's almost ritualistic see-sawing, it makes a lot of sense (think too of the extreme Freudian interpretations many famous Hamlet productions have put forward). So when you have highlights from Hamlet performed on a giant Endgame garbage-can set, you'd expect the connection to be exploited more fully. And that, in the end, is the problem with The Rehearsal—it is indeed a rehearsal for ideas about Shakespeare's play, more than a working out of those ideas. It is content to end with another footnote from a professor, and leave us thinking. This is not a bad thing, it would just be so much more satisfying if the literal great dane on set had actually done something, if the play itself had finally come down somewhere, instead of all over the critical place.

WARREN KIMBRO; NEW HAVEN ACTIVIST

My obit of Warren Kimbro is in the Guardian today, you can find it here. Kimbro's was an incredible story, one I felt grateful to the paper for letting me write. Growing up in the New Haven area, I watched my hometown change from a thriving real city to a ghettoised shell surrounding an ever-more-fortified Yale. I remember being at an FT Christmas party and having an editor who'd been to Yale tell me how much the college had done for New Haven, and I said, that's why we all is so rich and so grateful! This did little for my future as a freelancer for the pink-only-in-colour one.

One thing that didn't make it into the piece was that Kimbro was, surprisingly, a huge Yale sports fan; when I read that it brought his story closer. Even more than that, though, was the memory of having gone on strike at Wesleyan that May, of demonstrating on the New Haven green, and of how even in the middle of all that seeming chaos there was a feeling that something better would come from it. In Middletown, when the body was found in nearby Middlefield, we figured some of the guys I used to hang around the gym with were probably in on the deal. Those were very different times. I'm not sure how much good came from them, but certainly Kimbro's story proves something did, and it gives us all some hope.