This Insubstantial Pageant by Estha Weiner (review)
2023; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/abr.2023.a913426
ISSN2153-4578
Autores ResumoReviewed by: This Insubstantial Pageant by Estha Weiner N. G. Haiduck (bio) this insubstantial pageant Estha Weiner Broadstone Books https://www.broadstonebooks.com/shop/p/this-insubstantial-pageant-a-poetry-chapbook-by-estha-weiner 36 pages; Print, $15.00 The title of Estha Weiner's new chapbook, This Insubstantial Pageant, is framed on the glossy gold cover by the proscenium of an old, ornate, once glorious theater, wall and ceiling paint now peeling. The words, shaky as a smoke trail made by an airplane, float in front of a backlit scrim, the figures behind diffuse, the scene amorphous. The photograph, by Elliott Kaufman, would appear to be of an abandoned theater, except for a spotlight, the size of a dime, barely illuminating three empty straight-back chairs on a bare stage. The orchestra seats are empty. So are those in the loge. Perhaps the actors are waiting in the wings, the audience at the door, tickets in hand, the scrim about to be drawn back, the old theater brought to life once again. Or the play is over, for good. Or maybe there never was a play. Before readers open the book, they have an idea of the main theme of this twenty-poem chapbook. Our lives are ephemeral, and may not even be real. Maybe this is all imaginary. But that does not stop us. We act on the stage and off the stage, sometimes both simultaneously. We are performer and audience, and if we cannot be seen, we might be in the stage wings, or waiting for the usher to lead us to our seats. Three epigraphs emphasize the transitory nature of our lives. The actors, as Shakespeare's Prospero reveals in The Tempest, "were all spirits," and one of those "solemn temples," the theater, has faded, just as our stories, our lives, "this insubstantial pageant. . . ." will be ended, without a trace. For, as Shakespeare tells us in As You Like It, " All the world's a stage" and as Ellie explains in "Showboat" (Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern musical about performers on a showboat): Life upon the wicked stageAin't ever what a girl supposes [End Page 116] Weiner, a former actor and speaker on Shakespeare for the New York Council for the Humanities, knows about performance. She riffs on Shakespeare's words throughout this volume, much like a jazz musician might riff on a Coltrane tune. I particularly enjoyed "'Green and Yellow Melancholy,'" a riff on Viola's explanation for a sickness caused by a love she keeps secret in her disguise as a man. Something green and something yellow form eight two-line stanzas, and the point is made that not everything is black and white. The penultimate three stanzas: Greenbacks and acclaim from The Pulitzer,named for a yellow journalist. Wet behind the earsA yellow dog A frog,A coward. Then back to Viola: "Smiling at grief. / Was not this love indeed?" When the secret is exposed in the last scene, all rejoice. Not all secret affairs end happily. In "Lying about Sex," the secret affair between John Proctor and Abigail Williams, in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, causes a witch hunt, for real in seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts, and onstage in the 1950s, during the McCarthy-era "Red Scare," when, often based on lies, people were blacklisted from the theater because someone said they were Communists. The real and the imaginary mesh throughout these poems. And maybe it is all a dream—or a nightmare—and we, like Lady Macbeth, will soon wake up from our sleepwalk, as we hope innocent Juliet "might wake / in time, this time" when "Sieg Heil!" and the nightmare those words recall interrupts a Central Park performance ("And There's Still Free Shakespeare in the Park"). Real life, past and present, becomes part of the staged drama. In "Hell Is Murky, 2020" Weiner fashions a new, collage-like twenty-first-century poem from scattered quotes from Macbeth, a seventeenth-century play about a murder that might have happened for real in the eleventh century. "What need we fear?" says the poet in the words of Lady Macbeth. "Who [End Page 117] knows it when none can...
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