Godgiven by Miranda Kassidy Franceschini

Reviewing this text is a challenge for me because it is an unpublished draft of a play and it is written by my niece. I was glad to have a full conversation of my thoughts with the playwright, and I hope that this short review can do some justice to Godgiven by Miranda Kassidy Franceschini. Godgiven is a play about desire, manipulation, responsibility, and the persistent hunger for more.

The play opens with a meta component: Echo emerges onto the stage with a participatory experience, I imagine, similar to the actual Greek tradition. The introduction to her character is a creative and clever trojan horse for bringing up some of the trigger warnings in the play. Franceschini and I talked through the implications of this opening and how to sustain its promise throughout the play meaningfully (Echo promises to warn the audience of the more traumatizing parts).

From there, the play begins in earnest with a bar scene of various Greek Gods having a good time. After six months, Helios, Maia, Elektra, Alkyone, Merope, Taygata, and Kelaino are having one last night on the town. The opening is engaging and light, and I think Franceschini really nails the dynamics of an ensemble, with characters bantering and talking over one another. There’s a great energy and rhythm to it. Then, enter Midas—probably my favourite character in the piece—who is a sordid figure who has been feeding them drinks all night and attempts to lure some of the ladies to go along with her.

Knowing nothing going in, I fully expected Midas to be one of the central sources of conflict in the play, but Franceschini subverts that expectation. Instead, we see Arvika the following morning prepared to worship Her Radiance, Kassiopeia. If you’re like me, you have only a little working knowledge of Greek mythology—luckily it’s not that important to know the backstories. In any case, in the course of her worship, Helios literally bumps into Arvika and, in an unfortunate turn of events for Arvika, Helios is selected to be Kassiopeia’s High Priest.

From there, the play becomes somewhat like Doctor Faustus: Helios has powers he doesn’t know how to grapple with, made all the more challenging due to his reluctance. He’s under the direct guidance of Echo (Aspect of Truth), Midas (Aspect of Fortune), and Ikarian (Aspect of Justice). Again, I think the dynamic between the characters is what helps the play to shine. In particular, Echo’s humour and levity plays against Helios’ doubt and self-seriousness effectively. For example, when Echo introduces Helios to the idea of the confessional, it plays Helios’ skepticism against Echo’s blind optimism in a fun, critical scene. Sometimes I found Echo to be a bit much, but if the performer sells the exuberance well it works well.

I don’t want to spoil too much of the play, but it’s partly about Helios taking on the role of High Priest, partly about his love for a mountain foundling named Vertmont, and partly about Kassiopeia giving Helios the “gift of hunger” (I like that phrase and premise) such that he can’t really be satiated.

One of the things I noted about the script is that Franceschini could trust her actors and audience a bit more and scale back in turn. Several characters have lengthy soliloquies that, in my view, overexplain what could be shown through the performance or inferred by the audience. Sometimes the exposition works; there’s a sneaky moment early on when the characters are explaining their situation and one character justifies the exposition by saying, “my memory went away six drinks ago” (4). Moments like that feel contextually justified. Some of the monologues, though, narrate more information than is necessary and the subtlety of less-is-more would help those scenes shine stronger. Similar, there’s a moment of innuendo that Helios apologizes for, but I think letting the innuendo sit without drawing attention to it would be more powerful—at the culmination of the conflict between Helios and Vert similarly feels like it could be scaled back to feel more natural. 

Speaking of staging, I am very curious to see how this play would be staged. There are a number of moments in the text that open up for a great deal of creativity. For example, when Helios bumps into Arvika, he spills wine on her and then removes the stain with magic. In another scene, Helios disappears from a confessional, the confessional is lifted into the air by a giant, and the confessional goes up in flames. Actually, the play has a lot of fire and I don’t know how one of the characters is going to get incinerated into ash.

There are a few standout lines that give the play some extra poetry. A few that stood out to me are that “when the moonlight shines over the water, it’s like the sea is space’s mirror” (3) and “he knew better than to let weeds take what belonged to the flowers” (15). There’s also a play on “saviours” and “savourers” (49) that is pretty clever and fits thematically with the text. From a technical perspective, I think there’s still a fair amount of work to do on the play—it’s in draft form, after all, but the punctuation and spelling could be cleaned up for a stronger final product.

As far as characters go, I really liked Midas as an agent of chaos. The wild card factor is fun and she’s also a creep that preys on women. There’s a scene where she’s pitching a nunnery and she’s such a gross predator, but it’s presented in kind of a fun way that is hard to resist. I just wish the characters had more of a chance for an ensemble; the opening scene of the play offers such rich characterization and seeing them interact more throughout the play would be a nice addition (though there’s a logical reason it doesn’t happen…). Helios also has a really nice trajectory; he has a redemptive arc as a reluctant messiah type to someone who is actually pretty selfless. It doesn’t work out great for him, but it feels like a genuine transformation.

Plot wise, there’s a pretty effective escalation. There’s a moment (I think in act 4?) where there’s an unexpected twist that recontextualizes the play. It’s a pretty devastating moment for Helios and actually had me flipping back to a previous scene demanding to know how I hadn’t seen the twist coming and I think that was probably the best plot beat. The conclusion of the play was satisfying, though I wasn’t entirely certain about the villain’s motivations. There might be a bit more baked into the dialogue to show why Helios gets targeted the way he does—same for why Ikarian has a change of heart. Even a little hint in a previous scene could go a long way towards the payoff for those developments.

I sincerely hope that Franceschini gets to stage this play and would be genuinely curious to see how it gets staged. It’s a play of many possibilities. I’m really proud of my niece for breaking into the writing world and hope that this is the start of a wonderful journey for her.

Happy reading!

The Black Joy Project by Kleaver Cruz

I’m interested in the revolutionary potential of joy, and to that effect I decided to check out The Black Joy Project by Kleaver Cruz. The Black Joy Project celebrates and promotes diverse narratives of Black experience and in this text Cruz offers an overview of the projects aim, some of the diasporic history that necessitates it. 

The book is informative and offers good insight into some historical factors for the Black diaspora. In particular, Cruz gives some background into the Dutch colonization of Suriname, which I feel is underrepresented in historical accounts. While that stands out, Cruz provides excellent context for a number of countries and strives to reflect the experience of a number of Black communities; another highlight is pointing to Haiti as a model for historic revolution and resolve.

The book offers a reasonable balance of principles and specific initiatives. There’s an emphasis on joyful and small-scale interactions, including things as simple as having a photo booth at a conference to capture the joy of Black attendees, sharing Black joy on social media to keep it front and center, and so on.

When it comes to principles, there were a few things that stood out within Cruz’s framework:

1) Cruz emphasizes that we need to think beyond the revolution. If our prime motivation is for the revolution, Cruz points out that it’s somewhat short sighted—we need to think of the day after the revolution and envision the joy it will hold. That keeps us motivated and focused on our goals, not mired in the process and living just for the fight.

2) Drawing from the spirit of improv, Cruz refers to the “yes and” principle as our modus operandi in doing this work. It’s clear that there’s a history of trauma in a number of Black communities and ongoing injustice and suffering. Cruz takes a “yes and” to traumatic stories: for example, to the statement “America has continually mistreated their Black communities” Cruz might respond “Yes, and they’ve continued to thrive.” The “yes and” method is a way of returning to joy and focusing on what needs to be done. It’s also a way of highlighting ongoing success and next steps. The narrative does not get to end at trauma: the work and the joy both go on.

3) Put another way, joy has to come first. Like Gholdy Muhammad suggests in Unearthing Joy, when engaging in conversations around Blackness we tend to default to injustice, but that centers the injustice rather than the most directly impacted. I would argue the same goes for talking about Indigeneity—when we talk about colonization, we too often center the impact of colonizers and erase the rich and vibrant culture and contributions of Indigenous people before, during, and after colonization. Joy emphasizes the strength and vibrancy of racialized communities and resistance to the oppressive structures that try to break them. Cruz phrases this in a much more accessible way than I just have.

4) Connecting with nature is critical. Drawing partially on the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Cruz examines the significance of nature as a model for resilience and versatility. For instance, Cruz draws on the image of moss and describes its many uses, linking it to the idea of community and fulfilling everyone’s needs. They also link nature to food and our practices surrounding its preparation, explaining the power of connection it brings. At the grander scale, they highlight the Afro-Indigenous Soul Fire Farm, who enacts food and land sovereignty as an avenue towards BIPOC independence.

5) Connecting with each other and reframing our experiences through the lens of joy is also critical. There’s a moment in the text where they narrate a gathering of predominantly Black attendees at which one mother is expressing her distress: her son was killed at the hands of police and was sobbing and, despite the fact that Cruz did not speak Portuguese, they could understand the pain. The event then became a collective mournful song that gradually transformed into a celebration song. It’s was a powerful account of reframing trauma through a joyful connection.

        Overall, The Black Joy Project is an account of optimism and hope. It’s informative without being overly theoretical and it’s specific enough in the accounts of initiatives while balancing the need for principles. It’s an accessible book that emulates its own call for connection. In some ways, the book isn’t anything revolutionary—but at the same, it absolutely is.

        Happy reading! Be sure to share your joy with others in the spirit of celebration and connection!

Dead and Alive by Zadie Smith

        I can’t believe it’s already been five years since Zadie Smith’s very short collection of essays, Intimations (2020), rooted in experiences of the pandemic. With Dead and Alive, Smith returns with a set of essays on art, film, literature, politics, and life. There are some great insights, but I find myself even continuing to chase the glory of Changing My Mind, a set of essays that would now be graduating high school.

Zadie Smith, author and tenured professor of Creative Writing at NYU, has now gained enough prominence to be a household name—or at least one I hear regularly on TV. Changing My Mind is an incisive and illuminating set of essays, especially when discussing the works of Kafka or Nabokov or Forster or Hurston. It’s that close reading of literary works that has grips me, and in Dead and Alive, Smith remains at her best when discussing literature—I just wish she was a little more extensive in her commentary on specific works.

To that end, there are two parts that stand out. There’s a powerful essay exploring the life and career of James Baldwin as a queer man of colour focused on art within an atmosphere of social justice. She discusses the way he was attacked for his race, for his sexuality, and for his fiction while speaking to his power as someone who can explore the full range of human experience. Smith defends his ‘noncommittal’ stance and speaks to the power of fiction to help us understand one another and preserve a vision of the future.

In addition to her commentary on Baldwin, Smith provides obituaries for a number of famous authors—Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Martin Amis, and Hilary Mantel. The obituaries offer that which is best in Smith’s commentary: there’s a personal connection in these works that humanizes these literary giants, but also enough of a focus to explain, in brief, the significance of these authors’ works. With respect to Hilary Mantel in particular, Smith presents her as an unsung figure whose historical fiction, by Smith’s own admission, puts The Fraud to shame. That said, it was interesting to hear about her process (and also about her historical research for her most recent novel).

Smith doesn’t only talk about deceased authors, though: she also has an illuminating essay on the work of Egyptian novelist Ahmed Naji’s. The essay speaks to the liveliness of Naji’s Using Life while also speaking to the role of fiction in the world. It’s an enlightening work that speaks to the social norms and political ramifications of fiction. It seems odd to think that novels still have the power to spark such strong reactions—Naji was imprisoned for “violating public decency” with his book. Smith’s account of the narrative and accompanying reflections have piqued my interest in engaging with Ahmed Naji’s work, which I think is what good critics and bad censorship do. 

Throughout Dead and Alive, Smith makes some more broad observations about writing fiction. There are several references to the power of fiction as a means for embodying others and imagining possibilities for living. It’s a bit of a facile observation, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Where the conversation gets most interesting is when Smith explores the common concerns and feedback of her students. She says that the primary concern of writing students seems to be that the work is ‘true’. This then becomes a discussion about appropriation and writing and the imperative to ‘write what you know.’ There’s a pervasive mindset that people must only write from their own experiences and that writing gay characters as a straight person or racialized characters as a white person (and so on) is inherently problematic. Smith counters with the idea that we can be profoundly moved by the feelings of works, regardless of whether we are writing or reading from the same perspective. The essay echoes, in some ways, Alicia Elliot’s essay “On Seeing and Being Seen,” which essentially says that writing with love (about Indigenous people) is the key imperative, regardless of whether you occupy the same space.

Smith’s political work in this collection is similarly moderate. One commentator online has criticized Smith’s milquetoast liberalism, which I can appreciate. She refuses, for example, to commit to a ‘side’ in the Israel-Palestine conflict—but she doesn’t do so without nuance. She continues to emphasize the perpetual deaths that happen as we discuss the issues. In that essay, though, she also talks about the admirability of students who have something to risk in trying to get their Universities to divest in weapons funding. At the same time, she doesn’t like the way activists talk about Zionism as if it has always been the way it is now. To reduce Zionism to a singular, atemporal definition challenges activists’ critiques as empty sloganeering. In another essay, Smith talks about Trump’s AI projection of Gaza and connects it to the limited power of AI’s so-called imagination—in particular, she refers to the ‘entrance’ to Trump’s Gaza as a narrow archway that you are forced to conform to. It’s a moment of close reading that helps bridge her cultural studies background and political insights.

In Smith’s collection Feel Free (2018), she writes about the film The Social Network and that compelled me to watch it. I think the same is going to happen with Tár. Neither strictly literary or political, Smith’s work on the Cate Blanchett film addresses both. It was one of the most compelling standalone essays in this collection and speaks to the psychological complexity of the film, its commentary on gender issues, and the way the film speaks to the #MeToo movement and self-serving power. The way Smith dramatizes the summary and commentary compels me to watch the film, which as I always say, is an important part of criticism. I need to see how Todd Field addresses the ‘art monster’ trope.

Overall, I think this set of Zadie Smith’s essays is ‘good’ but not ‘great’. There’s probably something to say about the original inception of these essays. Most were originally published in, for example, the New Yorker (length constraints?), or delivered as a keynote speech (length constraints? audience considerations?), or as the introduction to a book. As a result, a lot of these essays feel like they don’t go quite deep enough to be as satisfying as Smith’s earlier essays, which felt more like peeking in on her lectures.

Regardless, I’ll never -not- read Zadie Smith essays. Happy reading!