ARTS REVIEW: GET-LIT AT THE ACTORS' GANG

An Amazing Display of Wonderful Original Poetry Elegantly Delivered

By: Clare Elfman

February 16, 2011

(February 15, 2011 in Culver City, CA) The kids in their torn jeans and baggy pants and whatever shirts stood before the mic looking like other angry teens making their complaints about the lousy world they live in, their hurtful parents, and the universal woes of being kids in a tough, painful, and challenging world.  But their words had something more. These were young and talented poets from mostly disadvantaged schools who were part of the Get-Lit program which teaches not basic English but classical literature and poetry!   They were delivering, in great passion, not hip-hop with its measured rhyme and cadence, but poetry with metaphor and depth of meaning that astonished an old English teacher who had, a long time ago, led her kids through Browning and Millay. An ex-teacher dismayed at what kids were losing by communicating in bitty bites: texting, Facing, tweeting, listening to dialogue in their demographic  of pop comedy which is fast and ha-ha funny without any real cleverness of language. (Try some of the old “screwball comedies” of the '30s and '40s.)  I’m not knocking teen comedy. I’m just saying that what your own granny or old gramps complained about that they had in the “old days” and what’s being lost in language today isn’t all just nostalgia for times past. Watch Philadelphia Story or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington just for the language.

Yet here was this amazing display of quite wonderful original poetry elegantly delivered to an excited and appreciative audience through the kindness of Tim Robbins and his public-spirited Actors’ Gang.

Get-Lit is a program designed by Diane Luby Lane for the public schools, especially schools at risk, to bring to these kids the gems of literature: not just gliding over a few basics but truly sinking into the ideas, the metaphor--not only to read and explore, not only to absorb the concepts and hear the musicality, but actually to perform! And ultimately to create their own poems and bring them to audiences like this one at Actors’ Gang.

This dragged me back to my grammar school days in '30s Brooklyn. Yes, I am an actual antique, taken out of storage every couple of weeks as “the Old Broad” not only to review current plays and film but to show you something of the “old days” before Facebook, before iPods--from ancient times when, if you wanted to talk to a friend, you had to run all the way home to a land phone.  In my “old days” in Brooklyn, the English teacher took you out in the hall to “recite a poem.” And I could recite, in my Brooklyn accent:

In Fland-ers Field, Where poppies grow, Be-tween the crosses, Row on row, That marked their place, And in the sky, The birds still gaily singing fly… Note the rhyme of grow and row and the iambic pentameter. Nobody teaches rhyme and meter now, since poetry is preferred in blank verse. (Just to explain: iambic is a soft beat and a hard beat, ta-TAH, taTAH, taTAH. If you get lucky in English and read Shakespeare, he writes: You rocks, you stones, you worse than sense-less things! taTAH taTAH taTAH. Etcetra. Not important now, since poetry, except for hip-hoppers, doesn’t rhyme and usually has no meter. To remember rhyming verse, go back to retro pop music. Frank Sinatra? I’ve got you under my skin, I’ve got you deep in the heart of me, so deep in my heart that you are a part of me...  It was rhythm and repetition and rhyme.

Poetic styles may change, but older, more traditional ways of examining life, original presentation, and dramatic passion do not. These young poets of Get-Lit learn not only to express themselves honestly and forcefully but to perform with ease and deliver with passion. One young poet passionately explained her dysfunctional family, the cruelty and abuse, delivered elegantly and well-phrased. One very impressive young man, in his baggy pants and as-it-is shirt, spoke with passion about innocence, the recollection of innocence of his childhood, the tough and cruel life he was living now, and how his heart yearned for that old sense of innocence.

More than that, he performed, at the end of the evening, a poem from my own school days that had touched me so much that it brought tears to my eyes--"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and he felt it and understood it, and at that moment, a 17-year-old who lived in a world I could never truly understand  touched the heart of an 85-year-old writer who had read that same poem at 17. A poem by T.S. Eliot on the sadness of having missed life, of living through it not gulping it down but measuring it out in “coffee spoons.” And realizing that he had heard: …mermaids singing, each to each, and that it was too late and they would never sing to him.  This 17-year-old kid from some tough school on the east side of town felt and understood exactly what I had felt 60 years ago…and indeed still felt.

It’s not only Get-Lit that is keeping alive the beauty and possibilities of our language, but the man who gives them space to perform…and that man is Tim Robbins, who came onstage to himself read an original poem, the subject: the uselessness of war. I have known Actors’ Gang and its little grey building in the heart of Culver City only by a few excellent and imaginative plays…but now I learn of his program called Axis Mundi, which offers a discussion of contemporary problems, and features community cinema screenings, comic voices and poets.

The subject that moved me, after listening to these fine young poets, was “the old and the new.” These were kids who teethed on the new tech and are now being introduced to the “old” world of lit. I’m an old-timer.  I welcome the new tech. As soon as I learn how to flick my fingers the right way and figure out the apps, I will get a wealth of stuff from my new iPad. I’ll have info at my fingertips that once took me weeks to dig out of a library…although, young folk, there is nothing…nothing as exciting as visiting our own L.A. Clark Library, pulling on a pair of rubber gloves, and opening the actual letters written by Oscar Wilde to his friends. The actual letters. And I bemoan the possibilities that when your grandchildren want to find something about their old grandpa and the old days, there will be no letters. Maybe just some old iPods in a drawer. How will they know the intimate past without a hard copy?

Get-Lit weds the excitement of the new and the wisdom of the old every month at the Actors’ Gang in Culver City, CA