February 8, 2001 Review of Joe Fante’s “1933”
Every year, on January 17th, I celebrate my birthday. Looking back, it’s difficult to know whether I’ve gained a year of experience, or lost a year. I guess it depends on how you look at it—is it sand in an hourglass running out, or is my life something that evolves toward a possible future I am becoming?
Blake understood this so well that he was able to create a single work of art out of it (Songs of Innocence and of Experience) that wasn’t so much a series of poems as a series of slides that moves through time and leaves little tracers, like afterimages in a film. Blake took the same moments—a nurse calling children in for dinner, for instance—and balanced the perspectives of innocence and experience so that they’re both equally true—and contradictory—without choosing sides. We see the poems and both points of view without anyone standing at our shoulder explaining things.
Innocence is right that when we’re in love, it’s as if we’ve never been in love before. Experience is right that when it’s over, it’s hard to believe that love exists at all. But Blake’s question is larger than that: What if a lot of what happens in life depends on what we do when we have innocence’s energy behind us? And what if some things are no longer true merely because we no longer believe in them?
This is the central conflict in “1933,” appearing at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. The play is based on the novella “1933 Was a Very Bad Year” by John Fante, who was raised in Boulder, and, like Dominic, the central character of the play, turned 17 in 1933.
It was a different Boulder back then. There were only 10,000 people in town, for instance, and Dominic knows just about everyone in town by name. Dominic, like Fante, is the son of Italian Catholic immigrants, who are trying to find a place for themselves and their religion in a strange land. They are artisans—masons, bricklayers, carpenters—and their work is seasonal; in the summer they work, in the winter they struggle to survive and dream of spring.
Fante’s father, and other Italian immigrants up from Denver, helped to build the University of Colorado, Sacred Heart School, and many of Boulder’s public buildings. As Boulder citizens, they were tolerated (at best) and (more commonly) scorned and treated like animals, especially by their employers and Boulder’s rich (often one and the same). They lived in unheated, tin-roof, one-room shacks on Arapahoe Avenue beside Boulder Creek. Their bathroom was a bush outside.
That much is clear in the play, but that’s not what the play is about. Dominic wants to be a major league baseball player. Pitching for Regis High, one day he strikes out 19 Boulder Prep boys, and attains mythic status in town. In the end, after much rigamarole, he tries out for the Cubs. He fails.
Earlier in the play, his father predicted he would, and how it would embitter him—how this dreaming, this inability to face facts, is what destroys dreamers like Dominic. At the time, his father sounded like an embittered old man, but by the end we’re not so sure. There are other clues Dominic is ripe for failure—at 5’3” he’s remarkably short, for instance, for a pitcher. Even his best friend pauses overlong before finally encouraging him to go.
His older but presumably wiser self is onstage throughout the play, and often steps in to narrate between scenes (and to give a long prelude and epilogue that further confuses the play with Fante’s life). It’s a cautionary tale, but told with extreme fondness for young Dominic, as if his failure isn’t in failing at being a Cub, but that he stopped believing in anything at all.
Fante’s desire was to be a writer—but he was a noted high school pitcher at 17 too, and the play suggests that perhaps writing was a second choice for Fante. In L.A. he was to write very good novels in a raw style that was to influence Salinger and Bukowski. But mostly he wrote Hollywood B-movie scripts to pay the bills, suffered from diabetes, lost a leg and an eye, and died in at seventy-four. “1933 Was A Bad Year” must have been written during a particularly tender moment for Fante, who spent the last years of his life as an altogether unpleasant husband and human being.
But this is far more interesting than what happens onstage, as actors awkwardly stand to deliver their lines and then shuffle across the stage in half-light as the simple carried-on props—door, bed, stove—are rearranged. The lighting design, however, is excellent, using slides so broadly projected that even the theater becomes part of the stage. But, like the few superior performances in the play (especially Bryant Richards as Dominic and Michael Twist as Ken Parrish), this only seems to accentuate the barrenness of the staging and script.
There is hardly any acting in the play. And when we do have it, it seems horribly wrong (when Dominic pushes his pasty gruel into his younger brother’s face, for instance), or when scenes such as those between Dominic and his best friend Ken suggest that there might actually be a play in here somewhere if someone looked hard enough. For too much the play, the actors appear onstage and recite their lines, mostly as walk-ons or broadly drawn caricatures—the grandmother, for instance, is something of a witch, casting spells in Italian (including a fully articulated “evil eye”) and cursing America.
As we walked out of the theater, Kai turned to me and said, “You know, with all those people involved—two writers, a producer, and everyone in the cast—you’d think someone would have mentioned they didn’t have a play.”
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