After the storm one woman brings literature to life

• Source: Global Times
• [10:09 July 20 2010]
• Comments

By Nick Muzyczka

Those who braved one of the fiercest thunderstorms of the season on Friday and made their way to the Vienna Café on trendy Shaoxing Road were treated to the first of two performances by Anita Michaels, a poet, actress and educator based in New York.

Michael's one-woman show is a semi-improvised rendition of classic American poetry and monologues.

Her program, which she has been performing on and off for the last eight years, includes the entirety of T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, some Tennessee Williams' monologues and a selection of her own poetry.

Rain-soaked audience members were slow to arrive but the quaint venue finally filled and Michaels took to the stage to give a very involved and nuanced version of Prufrock.

Nimbly maneuvering around the tables and engaging up-close with the seated guests, Michaels made effective use of the intimate space, employing only a handful of props in her routine.

Only leaving the stage for quick costume changes, Michaels, who also happens to be a trained behavioral psychologist, confidently worked her way through an hour of literature exploring such themes as regret, weariness and longing.

Music with a moody, Southern American feel introduced the Williams section, with monologues from A Streetcar Named Desire and Sweet Bird of Youth.

For the Global Times, this was the real highlight of the show, with Michaels excelling in the role of Alexandria Del Lago, a charismatic though difficult actress who believes life has shunted her to one side.

"My performance takes the women characters chronologically, as Williams wrote them. The last is an aging ex-star who is boozing and has tuned out, not knowing that they want her back in Hollywood," she said.

"Williams' writing is so beautiful for women that if you step on the stones and try your own route, you really can't miss. And the women are right for me. I've been there and done that," she explained.

Michaels typically researches and edits a new work for at least two years before performing.

Speaking about her time in London, when she was getting a feel for the Eliot piece, she said: "Eliot worked at Lloyds of London and he wrote this during his lunch hours. During my research I went around London and found places on my own. In fact, I went to the pub where Eliot drank and the owner took me down to the basement, where the original pub was at that time. It helped me to solidify how he was thinking while he wrote."

The New Yorker has a very colorful background. She was born in Shanghai in the early 1940s to a Russian mother and a sea-captain father from Italy.

"In order not to be forcibly ousted or to be made stateless we left for Hong Kong in late 1940s," she said.

"If it wasn't for my father, we would have been detained here." They eventually took a two-week boat trip on the SS Cleveland - a ship that Tennessee Williams also traveled on - to the US, where Anita spent most of her adult life.

The final part of Michaels' show included some recent poetry she had written about a previous trip to China.

"My stuff is very 'Boyz n the Hood' and is based on rap and social commentary. The China poems I am doing are mostly about me, about my motherland, about my anger at not being able to participate during a previous visit when I slipped a disk in my back," she said.

The Vienna Café is one of the few locations looking to promote spoken word events in the city.