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In 2012, Linnette Edwards, a Bay Area real-estate agent, produced a video promoting NOBE, a name conjured up by developers for an area covering parts of Oakland, Berkeley, and the town of Emeryville. She posted it on NOBE Neighborhood, a Web site she created to drum up buzz among potential home buyers. The video includes interviews with enthusiastic young residents, a local cupcake maker, a bartender at a new watering hole, and with Edwards herself. It also features a local, volunteer-run enterprise called the Golden Gate Community Garden. “We’re super psyched that there’s a community garden across the street—it’s definitely a bonus to this block,” a new homeowner says, over footage of greenery. “The fabulous edible garden movement is in full swing,” the NOBE Web site notes. “It’s not uncommon to find neighbors crop swapping their homegrown edibles and frequenting the local Farmer’s Markets.” The site listed several neighborhood community-gardening programs, including one run by a nonprofit called Phat Beets Produce.
NOBE is a fiction. It lumps together several longstanding neighborhoods that, since the fifties, have been largely inhabited by low- and middle-income African-Americans. The rebrand was designed to attract mostly young, upper-middle-class transplants who were fleeing high prices in neighboring San Francisco. When volunteers at Phat Beets saw Edwards’s video, and her Web site listing their programs, they were livid. The Golden Gate Community Garden is run by the city of Oakland, but many people involved in Phat Beets also used the space. “Our work wasn’t the cause of gentrification, but our programs and our aesthetics were being used to sell land and help displace people,” Max Cadji, a Phat Beets volunteer, told me. In December, 2012, Phat Beets created a caustic parody video on its own Web site, repurposing the term “NOBE” to stand for Neighbors Outing Blatant Exploitation. Phat Beets launched a campaign against the video, demanding that Edwards remove Phat Beets’s market from the NOBE Web site.
Edwards understands the criticism, and is sympathetic to those forced out of their communities, but she believes that promoting local gardens and markets benefits longtime residents as well as newcomers. “The energy of community gardens helps curb crime,” she said. “Having a new park in the area creates a hub of community and conversation.” She went on, “First, there’s a community garden. Then what we hope will follow is a café, and a little market that might pop up, providing organic food. These all draw people to an area.” As an agent, Edwards represents both buyers and sellers. “The way that these community gardens translate into home prices is self-evident,” she said. “It impacts resale value.” She told me that she didn’t know of any real-estate agents actually funding community gardens, “but maybe they should.”
Before the NOBE rebrand, it was hard to find grocery stores in the area; for years, there was an abundance of liquor stores and bodegas but a scarcity of healthy, affordable food. Such neighborhoods have been the focus of community organizations like Phat Beets, which strive to provide access to low-cost, high-nutrition food in low-income communities. Initiatives like theirs typically have an anti-commercial ethos: we don’t need to buy our food from big chain stores at a high markup, or rely on government handouts, because we can grow our own.
But for house buyers, these community gardens simply have aesthetic appeal, contributing to a kind of rustic, down-home vibe that makes nearby real estate more attractive. And it hasn’t taken long for real-estate agents and developers to take advantage of that commercial potential. “It’s not uncommon for real-estate agents to stage veggie beds in the back yard,” Edwards told me. She often uses this strategy herself. (When my boyfriend and I attended an open house in West Berkeley, I noticed a small bed of vegetable sprouts in the backyard. It was obviously a gimmick, but—kale!—I was sold.) “It’s a life style that buyers buy into,” Edwards said. “The life style of growing food. Which they may or may not do, but they’re buying into that food culture.”
The “blighted” lots suitable for urban agriculture are often found in lower-income neighborhoods like NOBE, as well as in post-industrial neighborhoods like West Oakland and West Berkeley. These also happen to be neighborhoods that developers see as ripe for construction. For decades, the overgrown grass across the street from Jeff DeMartini’s commercial property in West Berkeley (formerly his grandfather’s cabinet factory) had been giving him trouble: weeds encroaching on the sidewalk, phallic graffiti, dead trees that occasionally came crashing down. Last year, a community-agriculture organization called Urban Adamah acquired the space, and announced plans to install a small farm—chickens, goats, and all. At first, DeMartini worried that the animals might degrade the site even further. “I thought, Will it smell?” But, within a matter of weeks, interest in his property spiked, and prospective renters came calling.
“One of the signs of a so-called ‘quality’ neighborhood is open space and green space,” Gopal Dayaneni, a member of Movement Generation, an advocacy organization, said. But quality, in real-estate terms, means higher prices. Many community gardens are started with the intention of supporting lower-income communities, Tiny Gray Garcia, an activist and journalist, said. But once they are built, she added, “the real-estate companies come in and start to reassess the land and use the property value to displace poor people of color. The community-gardening people may be well meaning, but they don’t always understand that they’re pawns in the game.”
Ideological tensions can emerge even when relationships between developers and farming nonprofits are strong. Before the recession, the Emerald Fund, a San Francisco development company, invested in an undeveloped, two-acre lot in West Oakland, hoping to build housing. The lot abutted a gentrifying area, but it was also rimmed by run-down Victorians, abandoned industrial buildings, and tarp-covered vans and buses that were being used, presumably, as homes. When the recession hit, the Emerald Fund had to give up its housing plan, Marc Babsin, a principal at the Emerald Fund, said. To try to recuperate some of its lost costs, the company got in touch with City Slicker Farms, a community-agriculture organization, which sought and won a state grant to increase urban green space. The grant funds allowed City Slicker Farms to purchase much of the land. “We had to spend a lot of time and resources, when we owned it, keeping the homeless out. People would set up encampments, people would dump things there. Instead of that, having this very activated space where people are coming and going and growing vegetables—it’s got to be better for the neighborhood and property values,” Babsin said.
Still hoping to build homes on its remaining swath of land, the Emerald Fund wanted to make sure that the farm was ultimately a draw to future condo residents, and not another form of blight. The developer suggested several minor changes. “We said, ‘The farm is for the whole community—not just for your condos,’ ” City Slicker Farm’s executive director, Barbara Finnin, said.
Finnin pointed out that poor people have been gardening and raising chickens in low-income urban neighborhoods across America for years. “That it is now fashionable is more a function of whose stories get heard and whose don’t,” she told me. And those stories contribute to a broader association with gentrification—a transformation that is as painful for some as it is profitable for others. If young home buyers like chickens and goats and kale, real-estate agents like them even more.
Lauren Markham writes about youth, migration, and the environment. Her work has been featured in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Guernica, Orion, Vice, and on “This American Life.”
Above: A rendering of City Slicker Farms’ plans for a farm and park in West Oakland. Image courtesy City Slicker Farms.
The engaging young male chorus from the Twin Cities is making a home for itself at the Metropolitan Museum. The season’s entry is a rare classical salute to Veterans Day, a concert that offers not only works of recent years by Lee Hoiby and Jeff Beal (“Beneath Thin Blanket,” a première) but also music by the masters Janáček, Dvořák, George M. Cohan (“Over There”), and John Lennon (“Imagine”).
In 1819, Ludwig van Beethoven, along with some fifty other composers, was asked to write a variation to an undistinguished waltz composed by his publisher, Anton Diabelli. Four years and forty ducats later, he produced Opus 120, not one but thirty-three variations on the waltz, in which he revolutionized the variation form. “33 Variations” (written and directed by Moisés Kaufman, at the Eugene O’Neill) is a musicology lecture disguised as an intellectual detective story within an emotional melodrama. “I need to know what he saw in this waltz,” says the play’s dogged shamus, Dr. Katherine Brandt (Jane Fonda), a classical-music scholar who is in a race to finish her monograph before she succumbs to a motor-neuron disease. Did Beethoven do it for cash? For the fun of teasing the mediocrity of his publisher? For the glory of one-upping J. S. Bach and his thirty-two Goldberg Variations? Or, as seems more likely, did Beethoven hear, in the earthiness of the German dance, a chance to demonstrate through his virtuosity how the commonplace can yield both metaphysical exploration and radical transformation? Or are all these questions just palaver, drummed up so that Kaufman can provide Beethoven with a commercial Broadway show?
Kaufman’s passion for the music is what drives “33 Variations,” a play that is more about time and rhythm than about characterization, in which narrative motifs are orchestrated to mimic the trajectory of Beethoven’s music from the apparently trivial to the transfigured. Kaufman’s scenes may be clumsy, but the interplay between lights, projections, and set and the stories of Beethoven and Brandt is elegant. A concert Steinway (well played by Diane Walsh, whose CD of the Diabelli Variations was selling briskly in the lobby the night I was there) stands beside Derek McLane’s beautifully designed proscenium stage, which re-creates the well-lit shelves and gray manuscript boxes of Beethoven’s archive in Bonn. Kaufman’s characters are stick figures, but the projections he displays of Beethoven’s fierce, blunt musical notations, often gouged into the paper, impose a weightier biographical reality on the events. The hieroglyphic splatter of these markings gives the show a visceral subliminal power. At one point, the archive librarian, Gertie (Susan Kellermann), who befriends Brandt, explains how Beethoven worked. “He wrote first in pencil,” she says, “and when he was sure, he went back over it with ink and highlighted the parts he liked.” She pushes a button for infrared light, and a specially lit sketch appears. Gertie continues, “You see how it turns blue? The bright white is the ink. These are the parts he chose to keep in the piece.” The topography of Beethoven’s creative imagination—with its false starts and its discoveries—is spread out before us: a revelation, a sensation, and pure theatrical magic.
The excitement of Beethoven’s visionary genius doesn’t extend to Kaufman’s plot, however, whose simplistic shorthand is more televisionary. Beethoven (Zach Grenier) and Brandt are both isolated by an obsession with excellence; both are physically declining; both struggle against time to finish their endeavors; both stories begin with the mundane—a waltz, a doctor’s waiting room—and end with an extraordinary leap into the unknown. The play marks Fonda’s return to the Broadway stage after forty-six years, but the role is no test of her emotional range. Her presence—with its curious amalgam of alertness and standoffishness—is a neat bit of typecasting; Fonda provides a sort of scaffolding of willpower and disdain that props up the ambitious Brandt. “You can’t excel at anything if you keep changing careers,” Brandt tells her dutiful daughter, Clara (Samantha Mathis), a professional costume designer who is flirting with stage design. “You’ll always be mediocre at everything.” The froideur between mother and daughter is indicated, stated, even resolved at the finale, but never dramatized. There is no scene in which Brandt reveals herself to her daughter or in which her daughter is appropriately revealed to her. With so much left unexplored in the text, the actors inevitably fall back on their own personalities. In the romantic subplot involving Clara and a gawky male nurse turned beau, Colin Hanks is especially successful at using his considerable charm and decency to beef up a slim role.
Soulful, nostalgic, tender, Beethoven’s final variation moves from a fugue to a minuet, marked grazioso e dolce, a spectral ending to a journey that begins as “a beerhall waltz” and concludes as an immanence of the sacred. In a startling and strangely moving stage image, the present and the past are brought together as the actors dance until Beethoven and Brandt finally stand alone before us, “as if they were about to begin their discussions in earnest,” the stage direction reads. The show is inconsequential, but the feeling into which it taps is not. Both Brandt and Beethoven have undergone a paradigm shift. As the sublime music plays them out, these poorly drawn characters nonetheless become emblems of hopefulness to an audience in the midst of its own paradigm shift, the outcome of which is far from certain.
At one point in “33 Variations,” after Brandt has undergone a series of oppressive X-rays, Beethoven appears and sits behind her on a gurney; she leans back and rests her body against his. The conversation with the dead never ends. As Noël Coward’s 1941 play “Blithe Spirit” (at the Shubert, under the direction of Michael Blakemore) demonstrates, however, the communication is not always so consoling. Written in seven days, in reaction to the “pitiful sight” of London’s wartime devastation—it played 1,998 performances, one of the longest runs in London theatre history—Coward’s brilliant ghost play explores the connections between memory, mourning, and the erotic; it’s a comic demonstration in which the dead’s aggression toward the living confronts the aggression of the living toward the dead.
The novelist Charles Condomine (Rupert Everett) has arranged a séance, as research for a murder mystery he’s working on. In a posh drawing room that’s as proper and sedate as Charles’s sturdy second wife, Ruth (Jayne Atkinson), Madame Arcati (Angela Lansbury), the Martini-guzzling, Irving Berlin-loving local spiritualist, accidently conjures up his late first wife, Elvira (Christine Ebersole). Charles’s second marriage is a comfortable, sensible relationship—“Not the wildest stretch of imagination could describe it as the first fine careless rapture,” Ruth says. When the exciting and possessive Elvira materializes, in a sort of ghostly off-white chiffon poncho, she is a vision of long-mourned passion. She reminds Charles that he once beat her with a billiard cue. “Only very, very gently,” he replies. Charles can see and talk to Elvira; Ruth can do neither. Charles sees the memory of love; Ruth sees an apparent lunatic. The unconscious, in all its wayward self-destructiveness, has been released. Fiasco naturally ensues. Elvira’s malicious mischief ultimately causes Ruth’s death. In due time, Charles finds himself an “astral bigamist,” persecuted by the tyrannical ghosts of both wives. While they trash the drawing room, Coward, as he does in all his major comedies, lets his comic surrogate tiptoe away from the chaos. “Parting is such sweet sorrow,” Charles says, in the play’s last line, exiting as bookshelves and paintings tumble. The moment plays as both a raspberry to melancholy and a huzzah for denial.
At the bar at the Shubert, you can buy a “Madame Arcati’s Ectoplasm Martini.” May I lift a virtual glass of this potent stuff to Blakemore, one of the finest directors of farce around, and to his superb ensemble. A particular tip of the cloth cap to Everett, who in tuxedo and pompadour cuts a fine Coward figure, hitting every upper-middle-class note of the Master’s teasing nonchalance with swaggering languor. Atkinson’s fluting high dudgeon and Ebersole’s flirtatious hostility create a terrific force field for Everett’s droll reactions. At the center of the mayhem, of course, is the eighty-three-year-old Lansbury. The epitome of the swiftness that Coward admired in his players, she scuttles expertly around the stage like a water bug—not a poltergeist but a whirlwind of idiosyncratic expertise. Together, the actors offer a master class in light comedy. ♦