Vladimir Shcherban | Being Harold Pinter / 2011

sunday, bloody sunday (2)

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vladimir Shcherban (adaptor and director) Being Harold Pinter, Belarus Free Theatre / New York, La MaMa Ellen Stewart Theatre / the performance I saw was the evening of May 8th, 2011

 

The moment I left the production of Jerusalem, I caught a taxi downtown to the East 4th Street La MaMa theatre. I was looking forward to seeing the highly respected Belarus Free Theatre's Being Harold Pinter, in part because I am a great admirer of Pinter, but also because I feel a great sympathy with a theater company that speaks out about political issues, a company who currently cannot return to its homeland.

     I should have realized that this production would also show a great deal of blood, from the very first moment of the work when Pinter writes in his memoirs about falling on the street, the actors holding up bloody hands as evidence, straight through to a gripping series of confrontations between prisoners and prison guards.

     This production, which begins by speaking of Pinter's method of creating characters, uses the playwright—himself an increasingly politicized figure as he aged—as a kind of lightning rod with whom and against whom they play out their various notions of what makes theater political, or, in their eyes, something of value.

     They begin with the openness with which Pinter creates his figures, first setting them off from each other as alphabetical numbers which, as they react to one other, grow ultimately into full-grown characters. The company is intent, it appears, upon revealing the domestic violence of Pinter's figures, displaying their relationships and language alongside their own renditions of absurd prison interviews and punishments by officials and guards.

     Anyone who knows Pinter's plays well, along with his later critical writings and his Nobel Price acceptance speech, will realize that this playwright is a political figure, and his plays, while sometimes moving into more and more abstract territory, became increasingly insistent about the nature of human torture and suffering. Using scenes from "Mountain Language," "One for the Road," and "Ashes to Ashes," the group helps the audience to perceive just how similar and, yet, how different Pinter is from the company's own presentation of Abu Ghraib-like stories of life in Belarus prisons. "Ashes to Ashes," in particular, points up Pinter's use of a dialogue between a jealous lover and a woman who is haunted by torturous memories that may never have happened.

     Yet there is a sense among these actors, also, that what they love in Pinter is something they will rarely be able to reach, for they are out to present political realities, no matter how absurd the situations may be, while Pinter is far more interested in human relationships for good or bad. His characters often seem to torture one another less for what they see as mistaken ideas and actions as they do for the simple joy of it.

     Particularly when these Belarusians performed scenes from Pinter's earlier play, The Homecoming, the group somehow got it all wrong. Yes, as they point out, the play begins with a hostile conversation between a father and a son, but the heavily brooding way in which they performed it is not, thank heaven, a standard reading. Often behind the hate expressed in Pinter's interrelations is an enormous amount of wit, a dark humor which cloaks and confuses the meaning, allowing us to see new aspects of each character's personality. In Pinter there is no simple good or bad. We may be morally disgusted by both Max and Lenny, but to be so we have also to give both their due; we have to recognize the fabulous energy behind their never-ending duels and laugh at the absurdity of life.

    The Belarus free theater performers—Nikolai Khalezin, Pavel Gorodnitski, Yana Rusakevich, Oleg Sidorchik, Irina Yarshevich, Denis Tarasenka, and Marina Yurevich—are all very serious minded, which, given the difficulty of their artistic lives, is completely understandable. But Pinter, even as they admit, is not truly what their theater is all about. The prison scenes they play out may be equally absurd, the characters using language as a torturous device to break down the individual will, but there is little wit and joy behind it, and we recognize in that difference why political theater is often so predictable. The company was brilliant in its performances of those political scenes, and the substance of their criticism truly moved me. But then I have seen that play over and over again in the pages of newspapers and books of history, whereas each time I have seen a play by Harold Pinter it is as if I am discovering it for the first time.  

 

Los Angeles, June 6, 2011

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 2011).

Jerome Moross and John Latouche | "Lazy Afternoon" from The Golden Apples / 1954

my favorite musical theater songs: “lazy afternoon”

by Douglas Messerli

Composers: Jerome Moross and John Latouche

Performer: Kaye Ballard, original cast recording, 1954

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVaEiPjLgtE

 

Composers: Jerome Moross and John Latouche

Performer: Lucy Reed, with Bill Evans on piano, 1955

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SYREijmrKQ

 

Composers: Jerome Moross and John Latouche

Performer: Helen Merrill

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pvzz-CtsJuM

 

Composers: Jerome Moross and John Latouche

Performer: Joe Henderson (orchestration only)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrK4HEfkl7U

 

Composers: Jerome Moross and John Latouche

Performer: Anita Daren, TV version, 1978

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7CxdvHfHTQ

 

Composers: Jerome Moross and John Latouche

Performer: Shirley Horn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh5yakbQXLQ

 

Composer: Jerome Moross and John Latouche

Performer: Tony Bennett

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMggiJYGkfA

 

Composers: Jerome Moross and John Latouche

Performer: Eartha Kitt, 1992

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHldRPM6FEk

 

Composer: Jerome Moross and John Latouche

Performer: Barbra Streisand

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYmLDJ0H5Bg

 

It’s difficult to really talk about either the composer of this marvelous song, Jerome Moross or the rather amazing lyricist, John Latouche. In many respects these talented artists, born one year apart, were both completely involved in their classical and performative worlds—Moross was influenced by both Bernard Hermann and Aaron Copland, and La Touche had so many major literary, operatic, and theatrical connections that one might suggest that he was the most connected individuals of his era—yet both were still extreme outsiders, daring to take music and theater into different dimensions. Had La Touche, who died at the early age of 41, primarily of alcoholism, and Moross who died, also a bit early, at the age of 69, have been allowed their full dimensions, we might have truly seen a great revolution in theater and operatic history.

     As it was, both left behind several important works—Moross, an operatic musical Susanna and the Elders, several classical pieces, and the musical The Golden Apple, and Latouche, wonderful lyrics for Cabin in the Sky, Candide, and The Golden Apple. One aches for their talents to have been more appreciated in their day, and not basically forgotten as they seem to have been. My poet friend, Kenward Elmslie, who lived with Latouche for many years, had long encouraged me to write about him; and I eventually I did. Had I only known what I pretended to.

      The Golden Apple is filled with wonderful musical numbers, but one stands out, and has been recorded by nearly every performer of the 50’s: “Lazy Afternoon.” That song is so languid and restful that it hardly seems to have been written: it appears to be a song spun out of the boring community of Angel’s Roost, Washington, and the nature surrounding:

 

It's a lazy afternoon

And the beetle bugs are zooming

And the tulip trees are blooming

And there's not another human in view but us two

 

It's a lazy afternoon

And the farmer leaves his reaping

In the meadow cows are sleeping

And the speckled trouts stop leaping up stream

 

As we dream

A far pink cloud hangs over the hill

Unfolding like a rose

If you hold my hand and sit real still

You can hear the grass as it grows

 

     It’s amazing to me how Latouche seemingly embeds words in his text that are never heard, but remain in our head nonetheless. In the very first stanza we “hear” the word “human being” despite its absence. In the second stanza, despite the afternoon occurrence, he still expect the rhymed word “moon” which would hook up easily with the last stanza’s “dream.” In the last stanza of this section, the word “seems” keeps creeping out to rhyme with “dream.” And we know that that “rose” must soon “close.” Not to even speak about how everything in this piece continually “slows.” The lyricist says always far more that he seems to say. Our ears naturally hear words that aren’t even spoken.

     This is perhaps one of the most slow-motion songs ever. Shirley Horn slows in down to a stunningly hover, expanding its notion of laziness to a practically stalled, minimalist musical number, when the lyrics almost counter the emotional content of the young Helen (originally Kaye Ballard) from any of her possible seductiveness. And the usually brassy Kaye Ballad even sings it, in 1954, with a seductive breathiness that you might have never imagined possible from her. She’s quite charming in this early version.

     Lucy Reed is one of the best interpreters of this piece, with Helen Merrill and even Barbra Streisand coming in close. But I’d give the best to Eartha Kitt’s utterly seductive version from 1992: she truly summarizes its slow, steady, intonations that brings Paris to her woodland bed. Even I, as a gay man, would follow her to the “place that’s quiet / ‘Cept for daisies running riot / And there’s no one passing by it to see.”

 

Los Angeles, December 24, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (December 2017).

 

Franz Schreker | Die Gezeichneten (The Stigmatized) / 2010

oh glowing night

by Douglas Messerli

 

Franz Schreker (libretto and music) Die Gezeichneten (The Stigmatized), presented by the LAOpera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion / the performance I attended was on Sunday, April 18, 2010

 

As I am writing this commentary, I am listening to a scene from the last act of Franz Schreker's little known opera, presented for the first time in this hemisphere in April 2010 by the LAOpera as part of their Recovered Voices series featuring works by composers suppressed by the Nazis. The glorious aria "Oh Glowing Night," is a literally shimmering, violins-harp-and-celesta-infused aria to a magical night on the paradisiacal island of Elysium, built by an ugly deformed hunchback who has put all of his aesthetic talent and buried desires into creating the near-perfect forum for beauty and love. 

      As this opera's curtain goes up, the local nobles of Genoa, to whom Alviano Salvago has given over his island, have turned this paradise into a nightmarish world where they have taken the kidnapped young daughters of Genoese locals and raped them. Fearful that his own ugly appearance might spoil the beauty of his creation, Salvago has not himself gone to the island since its transformation, but now that he has discovered what has become of his masterwork, he is determined to sign it over to the city and its people, thus laying open the hidden grotto where the nobles have taken their prey.

       The libretto of Schreker's 1918 opera, which he first wrote at the request of his fellow opera composer Alexander Zemlinsky (whose Der Zwerg/The Dwarf was presented in the same series in 2008), is a strange mix of stories that parallel tales of inner and outer beauty by Oscar Wilde, fictions of secret sexual orgies celebrated by the rich (such as Arthur Schnitzler's later Dream Story), and other Viennese fin-de-siècle tales of decadence, Freud's psychological theories, and including the older myth of the hidden grotto of Venusburg, the temple of Venus. What becomes immediately apparent is that Die Gezeichneten's Renaissance Genoa is a shadow portrait of turn-of-the-century Vienna.

      A bit like early American filmmaker D.W. Griffith, Schreker planned his opera to include an enormous chorus and a large orchestra of 120 or more, along with a complex storyline that moves in many directions. The LA Opera production, hampered by their larger production of Wagner's Ring cycle and recent financial woes, were forced to diminish these cinematic aspirations; yet the Los Angeles production, directed by the ever-popular James Conlon, did well with a smaller 72-piece orchestra, and projection designer Wendall K. Harrington, lighting designer Daniel Ordower, and director Ian Judge to effectively call up some of Schreker's filmic ideas through a series of well-lit projections in back of and upon a constantly changing scrim.

      It is, however, hard to recreate the sense of manic action and grandiose proportion with such a small cast as this production was allotted. The grand orgy scene in Act III had to be represented by a single naked couple, the woman raped by the man. But I believe the audience understood the shock of the original work.

      The music of The Stigmatized, influenced by Richard Straus and, obviously, Richard Wagner, simultaneously points to elements of Debussy and Puccini; yet Schreker is original in his determination to take his Wagnerian intensity into new territory where there is hardly ever a resolve, and what might begin as a stirring aria, such as "Oh Glowing Night," trails off in incompleteness. Indeed, one might say, despite the over-arching abstraction of Schreker's stated ideas, there is no one possible solution or position to be taken in his work. People and things musically flow into indeterminacy in way that seems so modern that it is quite at odds to the 19th century concepts he posits.

      The issues here—and they are often clumsily presented as just that, opposing ideological forces—concern the battle between the ideal and the real, between beauty and beast, between the forces of guilt, and the eternal battle between sin and retribution and love and transfiguration. Despite his self-loathing and the concurrent resistance to passion, Salvago represents desire unfulfilled. Similarly, the beautiful Carlotta, daughter of the Genoese mayor, suffers from a heart condition and is, accordingly, afraid of giving herself over to love. Carlotta, like Salvago, is an artist, a painter who has watched him pass her studio and witnessed him, one day, standing straight up against the sun proudly before retreating to his crippled decrepitude, painting him as such; she needs only his face. Fearing she is toying with him and terrified of being hurt once again, he nonetheless agrees to go to her studio, where she admits her love. For a few seconds, it seems that these reluctant lovers have found themselves and might suddenly spring to life, but both avow their devotion without consummating it. 

      Meanwhile, the nobles, in their attempt to thwart the gift of Salvago's island to the city, seek to gain the support of the Duke, who must approve the city's accessions.

      One of the nobles, Tamare has fallen in love with Carlotta as well, and admits to the Duke not only his love, but the secret grotto and the scandalous events within. The Duke now has little choice but to veto the acquisition for fear that all the nobles of Genoa will be exposed.       

      Tamare, rejected soon after by Carlotta, vows he will make her his whore. When Carlotta, joining the local citizens, visits Elysium, he gets his opportunity and succeeds, as she is overcome by his and the island's sensuality.

       With this somewhat ludicrous series of events and situations, Schreker sets up the battle between Tamare, the brave but cruel lover, and Salvago, who, with self-loathing, has sublimated his desires. The rich are opposed to the everyday citizens, the evil tyrants of flesh to the ideal of beauty and love. Fortunately, despite his heavy-handed thematic, Schreker, as I mentioned, neither in his music nor his libretto, takes a stance. Salvago may be a sympathetic dreamer, but he is, as Tamare insists, a man who refuses to love life, to take charge of destiny and enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. If Tamare is a fallen man, Salvago, in anger for Carlotta's statement of preference for Tamare over himself just before she dies, takes revenge, and in doing so reveals his own fallen condition. Both men have been "marked" or "drawn," words close to the German meaning of Die Gezeichneten. 

      The opera ends in near absurdity as the hunchback goes mad, slowly crawling through the crowd, as the orchestra, which has so artfully kept the ever-flowing joy of life in motion, comes to a crashing halt. The glowing sky, we now perceive, is an explosion, as Salvago's island is soon to be set afire. The shimmering sky that we witnessed was more like from the fires of hell itself.

     Schreker, as one might expect, was labeled a degenerate artist by the Nazis, and after he was removed from his position as Director of the Musikhochschule in Berlin, died of a stroke in 1934, two days before his 56th birthday.

 

Los Angeles, April 19, 2010

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2010).

Harold Pinter | The Dumb Waiter / 1960 [reading of play]

in service

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harold Pinter The Dumb Waiter in The Caretaker and The Dumb Waiter (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1961)

 

The "dumb waiter" of Pinter's play of the same name is, of course, Gus, who with his partner Ben murders unknown individuals they are assigned. Each time they meet in a room and wait for the arrival of the victim, accomplish the dark deed, and leave. This time around they are holed up in a small room that appears it may once have been a kitchen for a restaurant or bar above, a presumption they must accept since there is a dumb waiter and a speaking-tube between the floors.

    Gus is dumb not only in his inability to fully express himself but in his choice of career—although unlike his partner, Ben, he seems to have some sort of sense of guilt, at least for their last job, the murder of a girl:

 

                     GUS: I was just thinking about that girl, that's all.

 

                     GUS sits on the bed.

 

                     She wasn't much to look at, but still. It was a mess though, wasn't

                     it? What a mess. Honest, I can't remember a mess like that one.

                     They don't seem to hold together like men, women. A looser

                     texture, like. Didn't she spread, eh? She didn't half spread. Kaw! But

                     I've been meaning to ask you.

 

                     BEN sits up and clenches his eyes.

 

                     Who clears up after we've gone?

 

    It is perhaps these second thoughts, emanating from the horrible memory of the body obviously torn asunder by their gunshots, that threatens the end of his service. For what character and audience simultaneously discover in the final moments is that he is the victim this time around; as he goes out for a drink of water, he returns to find himself facing Ben with gun in hand.

     Yet the dumb waiter is also an object with which the two men become hilariously involved when they began receiving orders for various dishes, including Macaroni Pastitsio and Ormitha Macarounada. The stove has no gas, and the men have little in the way of sustenance, except for Gus' biscuits, a bar of chocolate, a half pint of milk, and one Eccles cake, stale. Yet, despite his own hunger he gives up these precious objects as replacements for the foods they cannot provide. In short, he remains in service not only to his dreadful job of murdering unknown beings, but his attempts to obey any demand they make of him. He is a born lackey, a man who was determined from birth to act out the demands of those in control, whether they be of some nefarious upper class or of the criminal underground. It hardly matters for Gus. And given the absurdity of the demands for the various dishes ordered up, he might as well have been murdered for his inability to live up to the demands.

     At least he questions, wonders if those in charge are not toying with them, giving them matches, for example, when they know there is nothing to light. Ben, although more literate—he reads the newspaper over and over, commenting on the ordinary events it describes as if they were more horrendous than the murders he commits—but he does not ever challenge the authority of what he describes as the "organisation." For him it is a large system with "departments for everything."

      Ben, in fact, although smarter than Gus, may be a sort of dumber waiter, about which the men's final staredown at the end of the play hints. This time he must kill Gus; but next time might it not be himself who is called upon to unknowingly pass through the doorway?

      This play premiered at the Hampstead Theatre Company in England in 1960.

 

Los Angeles, January 5, 2009

Reprinted from USTheater (October 2010).

Betty Garrett | Betty Garrett: Closet Songwriter / 2007

 

remembering

by Douglas Messerli

 

Betty Garrett: Closet Songwriter, with Betty Garrett, Debra Armani, Daniel Keough, Jack Kutcher, Robert W. Laur, Barbara Mallory, Lee Meriwether, and Andy Taylor, Los Angeles/Theatre West [the performance I attended was on Sunday, November 18, 2007]        

.

     My companion Howard and I saw Garrett on November 18 at what was to have been Los Angeles’s Theatre West’s last performance of Betty Garrett: Closet Songwriter, although the show was later extended for another week.

      Garrett—whom we both loved for her acting in several film musicals we own on DVD—had chosen in this show to sing, along with seven other actors, music for which she had written the lyrics, and accordingly she didn’t have as rich material to work with as the slightly sassier and brassier Stritch. But along with her long-time friend Lee Meriwether (actress, journalist, and former Miss America winner) and other Theatre West regulars she entertainingly presented a medley of 28 songs interspersed with memories of her career.

      Garrett’s is a story of amazing fortune and darkly sinister events. Beginning on Broadway as an understudy to Ethel Merman, Garrett’s career quickly rocketed as she performed in several plays and the musical revue Call Me Mister, where she famously sang “South America, Take It Away,” winning her the Donaldson Award. In 1944 she married actor Larry Parks (star of The Jolson Story and Jolson Sings Again) and moved to California, where she acted in a string of successful films, including Words and Music (1948), Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Neptune’s Daughter, On the Town (all three 1949), and My Sister Eileen (1955).

     In 1951, however, Parks was subpoenaed to appear as one of a group of individuals connected with Hollywood before the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Of that group, only Bertolt Brecht and Larry Parks testified; ten others (Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, Samuel Ornitz, Dalton Trumbo, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Larder, Jr., John Howard Lawson, and Alvah Bessie—a group which came to be called the Hollywood Ten) refused to answer questions and were all blacklisted.

      A few years ago, at a memorial dedicated to the Hollywood Ten and an unstated apologia for the Writers and Directors Guilds’ complicities with the HUAC and McCarthy hearings, Howard and I saw Billy Crystal enacting Parks’ tormented testimony as he attempted to allay the questions of committee members. “I would prefer, if you would allow me, not to mention other people’s names. Don’t present me with the choice of either being in contempt of the Committee and going to jail or forcing me to really crawl through the mud to be an informer.” Later: “I don't think this is American justice...So I beg of you not to force me to do this." Reminding the committee that he had two small children, Parks confronted his questioners: "Is this the kind of heritage that I must hand down to them? Is this the kind of heritage that you would like to hand down to your children?" The committee insisted, however, that he name names. Although Parks was, accordingly, not added to the blacklist, his contract with Columbia Pictures nonetheless was soon cancelled and he made only three more films.

      So too had Garrett’s film career ended, and the two of them had no choice but to form a musical team appearing in nightclubs and theatres across the United States, later, like Stritch, performing in England.

     Betty is anything but bitter, and her lyrics, if at times satirically biting, are never cynical. While a large number of her song lyrics are mere rhymed ditties and “patter” songs, a few of these pieces, in particular “Remember Me” (a song written for her granddaughter), “Lack-a-Daisy Day” (a number she performed with her husband on tour), and a song written for her close friend Lloyd Bridges and his family, “Bridges of Love” are charming songs, the first and last moving, if somewhat sentimental ballads. I believe the entire audience left Garrett’s show with even more admiration for her musical and acting contributions and her lifetime of sustained energy.

     Garrett died almost three years from the day I wrote this in 2011.

 

Los Angeles, February 14, 2008

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2008).

 

 

 

 

 

Elaine Stritch | Elaine Stritch: At Liberty at the Carlyle / 2008

the marvelous party

by Douglas Messerli

 

Elaine Stritch: At Liberty at the Carlyle, with Elaine Stritch, New York/Carlyle Café [the performance I attended with Felix Bernstein was on Friday, January 18, 2008]         

 

    I had seen Stritch’s At Liberty on DVD several times, so I was prepared for the sometimes raw and down-to-earth humor of her artful autobiographical tribute to her survival and past. The treat for me was to see her so close-up in the Carlyle’s small dining room accompanied by the youngest person in the room, 15-year-old Felix Bernstein, son of my dear friends Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein.

 

    Felix, who is quite knowledgeable about musical theater and is an aficionado particularly of Stephen Sondheim, enjoyed this show which included three numbers by Sondheim: “I’m Still Here,” and two songs from her legendary performance in Company, “The Little Things You Do Together” and “The Ladies Who Lunch.” But we also both took joy in her two Noël Coward numbers, “I’ve Been to a Marvelous Party” and Sail Away’s hilarious “Why Do the Wrong People Travel?” And who could not find pleasure in the simple “Something Good,” a song, Felix pointed out, with both music and lyrics by Richard Rodgers. Stritch’s perfectly timed telling of her travels each night from her role as an understudy for Ethel Merman in New York to the New Haven production of Rodgers’ and Hart’s Pal Joey, where late in the show she performed the fabulous “Zip,” is one of the best skits of the show. Later, she would star in the national company role of Merman’s Call Me Madam.

    Stritch’s humorous tales of her strict religious background (her uncle was Roman Catholic Archbishop of Chicago Samuel Cardinal Stritch) and her descriptions of her relationship (or perhaps one should say, lack of relationship) with Marlon Brando and intended marriage to Gig Young are alternatively funny and sad. Stitch was clearly unlucky in love (throwing over Ben Gazzara for Rock Hudson, she described her choice of Hudson over Gazzara: “And we all know what a bum decision that turned out to be!”) until she met and married, later in her life, the British actor John Bay, living in London with him until his death. At the heart of Stritch’s stand-up comedic presentation of her raucous life is a painful story of alcoholism and near death from diabetes. She wrote this show, in part, she proclaims, to get back her life, to recall all those events from which alcohol had kept her from completely experiencing.

     Both Felix and I loved the evening, and although I had come into Stritch’s performance believing that this may be her last act, I am now sure that, given the gusto with which she performed her closing show on January the 18th, she will be back, still here for years.

     As we took the taxi back to the West Side, Felix asked me two questions that deserved more discussion than we had time for. He queried how Noël Coward had become such a legendary figure in a time when there was no television, no cell phones, no easy computer downloads for songs as there is today. I reminded him that most large cities had several newspapers, many of them filled every day with news on actors, writers, and other celebrities of the moment. And, I might have also added, there was radio, with a very large audience and a wide variety of shows. Instead of the tabloids there were a number of quite popular fan magazines which reported on both theater and film.

     Knowing of my great love and knowledge of New York theater and its history, Felix later asked: “I can understand why I love theater; I live here and witness it; I can see it almost any day. But how did you fall in love with musicals and plays growing up in such a distant place as Iowa?”

     “Imagination,” I answered. “I never got to New York until college, but I lived in New York in my imagination for years before that.”

 

Los Angeles, February 14, 2008

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2008).