Lucy Gellman Photo
Lovett-Graff, Dymond, actors Deena Nicol-Blifford and Scarpa.
One celebrated, countryside wedding in a French chateau. Two slightly awkward American guests sleeping in the old servants’ quarters. From another era, three rotating armies, French, German and American. Four courses, and then some. Five times to admit faux pas and embarrassment as out-of-town guests, working sloppily through the language. Six doves, leading a white flock released after the wedding. Seven fireworks to begin the end of the night.
A varied, unlikely handful of scenes, perhaps, bound by O. Henry prize winner Justine Dymond’s compelling “Cherubs” (2005), a winding, time-hopping short story that revels in childlike wonderment, adult imagination, and cultural contrast. Tuesday night, they sprang alive as Steve Scarpa, director of marketing and communications at Long Wharf Theatre and member of the New Haven Theater Company, read from Dymond’s story at the Institute Library, part of the latest installment of the IL’s “Listen Here” series.
For New Haveners who haven’t yet been, the series is a grown-up story time that Scarpa and New Haven Review Publisher Bennett Lovett-Graff have nurtured carefully since its rebirth last year. (Read about that here.) A year in, the two have got that format on lockdown. So Lovett-Graff added a twist. To close out the year, Dymond came to the reading — and sat quietly in the second row until the talkback portion of the event, when she was introduced to hoots and decidedly un-library-like applause. For the author, who is from Western Massachusetts and made the drive to New Haven with her husband and daughter, hearing the story was exhilarating.
“When Bennett sent me the email I thought it was a hoax,” Dymond (pictured) said after the reading, laughing as she spoke. “And then once I digested it — I looked up the Institute — I pinched myself. For me, it’s such an incredible pleasure to hear someone else read my story … it was just an amazing gift.”
That feeling extended to the audience, as Lovett-Graff led a salon-style discussion on intentionality, authorial intent, and the value of liberal interpretation that has been one of Listen Here’s best yet. Lovett-Graff’s daughter, Shoshana, questioned the authenticity of the narrator’s historical recollections. Another attendee contributed that she “felt like I got to participate.” The Haven String Quartet’s Annalisa Boerner wanted to bring up the value of a double narrator, who spoke as a “we” and whose sex played no part in the story. The evening’s other story, William Trevor’s “The Room,” wasn’t totally abandoned either: attendees and Dymond herself placed it in conversation with “Cherubs” for its depictions of layered space and time.
That is, of course, one thing that is so distinctive — deliciously so — to Listen Here, the deeply pleasurable, no-muss version of the book club you may or may not have time for.
“There’s things that the actors can only do so much of without stepping outside of the story and ruining the illusion … interrupting the reading of the story,” said Lovett-Graff. “That’s why we engage in a talkback.”
“Part of the writing is unconscious” said Dymond. “So some of the things that readers or actors pick up on, I’m thinking: ‘oh, yeah! Great!’ Those connections across [the story] … they’re not always consciously happening, so it’s just great to hear what people think.”
To find out more about events at the Institute Library, check out the organization’s calendar here.