Folk Tales

Folk tales aren't just harmless stories people told each other B.T.V. (Before Television), according to three women who will speak Sunday at the Jewish Community Center of South Orange County in Laguna Beach. Folk tales embody universal truths, and they're powerful enough to cross cultural boundaries and carry political messages, say artist Vicki Feldon of Irvine and UC Irvine professors Leslie W. Rabine and Maria Herrera-Sobek . In Sunday's presentation, Feldon will tell two Eastern European Jewish folk tales--"The Golem" and "The Dybbuk"--and the professors will give commentaries.

What gruesome casualty statistics fail to do, a horse made of wire mesh and plywood pulls off with profound simplicity: Joey, the magnificent puppet stallion at the center of"War Horse,"communicates to a broad public the staggering waste of war. Yes, it's sentimental. Yes, there are scenes that might have given even as inveterate a melodramatist as Charles Dickens pause. But this 2011 best play Tony winner, which launched its national tour at the Ahmanson Theatre on Friday, takes the audience on a thrilling roller-coaster ride in which innocence is thrown into a man-made hell.

As scientists grapple with the mysteries of Williams syndrome, UC Irvine professor Howard Lenhoff can't help but wonder if past generations turned to folklore to explain the presence of people among them with the distinctive traits that accompany the birth disorder. "It seems logical to me, and to others, that the legends we hear about music-loving, kindhearted fairies and elves might be the way people used to talk about Williams," the biologist said.

"What you call happiness keeps me from living" — so says the preternaturally confident young heroine of Catherine Breillat's "The Sleeping Beauty. " Anastasia disdains the dainty twinkly things — tutus, kimonos — that she's expected to adore and prefers to see herself as Sir Vladimir, a knight. One could argue that, in varying degrees, all of the iconoclastic French director's films have dismantled femme-centric fairy tales. But in this, the second of a planned trilogy, she's confronting burnished old folk tales head-on.

There's a phenomenon, in the tradition of the American theater, known as the "out-of-town tryout," whereby a play has a trial run away from the area where it will have its main performance. The local actor-producer team of Lorrie Oshatz and Royce Herron, whose production of ethnic folk tales called "A Story Circus" may be seen at several Los Angeles Public Library branches in the Valley this weekend, have their own way of "trying out" shows.

"What you call happiness keeps me from living" — so says the preternaturally confident young heroine of Catherine Breillat's "The Sleeping Beauty. " Anastasia disdains the dainty twinkly things — tutus, kimonos — that she's expected to adore and prefers to see herself as Sir Vladimir, a knight. One could argue that, in varying degrees, all of the iconoclastic French director's films have dismantled femme-centric fairy tales. But in this, the second of a planned trilogy, she's confronting burnished old folk tales head-on.

I come from storytellers. My grandfather, the best storyteller in the family, often taught his 22 grandchildren lessons through stories. Just before I left home for college, Granddaddy told me about a college girl who never drank or did drugs. He said, "She was a good church girl, just like you, Charlayne. One night she went to a party with some of her friends. There was dancin' in some rooms and people was watching a movie in the other. The college girl preferred to dance. While she was on the dance floor, somebody offered her a can of soda.

An audience of nearly 400 was swept into Jackie Torrence's imagination Saturday night as the storyteller wove her traditional folk tales at the Santa Ana City Hall Annex. Her performance climaxed a day of African and Afro-American cultural activities, sponsored by the Black Cultural Council of the Bowers Museum Foundation. Known as "The Story Lady" of Granite Quarry, N.C., Torrence is riding the crest of a nationwide storytelling revival, spearheaded by the National Assn.

Good children's plays are hard to come by. That's one reason you see so many Snow Whites and Cinderellas treading the boards. Last spring, though, South Coast Repertory asked its own literary manager, John Glore, to write a play for the Young Conservatory Players, 10-to-17-year-old members of SCR's youth theater training program who put on several shows a year. The result--Glore's refreshingly different "Wind of a Thousand Tales," in which a pragmatic little girl named Kimberly-Kay discovered her own imagination by taking a magical journey through three folk tales--was one of the Players' finest offerings.

Bedtime is the most natural and easiest time for parents to begin to learn how to tell stories to their children, Norma Livo says, although long car trips can be saved by a story "strung out over several hundred miles." "Stories from literature the parent knows or folk tales retold make a good start," she says. "But also tell a story in which the child or children are the main characters.

A restaurant with a past? A historic marker on Figueroa Street mentions a rumor about the 86-year-old Original Pantry Cafe "that has refused to die." The story has it that in the 1950s, a Midwestern reporter covering the Rose Bowl dropped in to eat and "a couple of waiters had some fun with the out-of-towner, telling him that all the employees were ex-convicts," the marker says. "He duly wrote it up, and the legend, for that's all there is to it, circulates to this day." Who knows why the tale caught on?

DON'T tell the Brothers Grimm, but storyteller Leslie Perry has a bone to pick with the classic tale of poor little Cinderella. "She's a wimp!" he exclaims, pointing out the passivity of the main character. "Look, she doesn't make anything happen. She relies on magic, and she doesn't stand up for herself -- especially with her stepmother and sisters. A lot of fairy tales have this problem. That's why I prefer folk tales."

COLIN MELOY has probably never plucked a lyre, but the gesture would be appropriate. As leader of the Decemberists, Portland, Oregon's master purveyors of eccentric pop, Meloy pens lyrics that can seem as ancient as Homer: tales of seafarers and soldiers that songs have transported for thousands of years. "The Crane Wife," the band's new album, and its first on Capitol Records after several successful indie releases, continues his story collecting.

Elijah Wood has eyes like klieg lights, and to look at them directly for too long is to fear for your corneas, and to wonder what exactly is going on in that sizable but delicately featured head of his. For orbs so distinctive, they are oddly blank and mesmerizing. You half expect his irises to start swirling if you fix on them for too long. In Liev Schreiber's "Everything Is Illuminated," Wood's eyes seem to take in everything and reveal nothing. Which may have been the idea.

I come from storytellers. My grandfather, the best storyteller in the family, often taught his 22 grandchildren lessons through stories. Just before I left home for college, Granddaddy told me about a college girl who never drank or did drugs. He said, "She was a good church girl, just like you, Charlayne. One night she went to a party with some of her friends. There was dancin' in some rooms and people was watching a movie in the other. The college girl preferred to dance. While she was on the dance floor, somebody offered her a can of soda.

Scanning the mostly fresh, mostly young and largely bookish faces crowded into the Troubadour on Wednesday, you easily might have thought a comp lit seminar was about to break out. And that's kind of what happened -- albeit much more tuneful than anything you'd expect in a UCLA classroom.

Before the Spanish missionaries landed in what is now the state of California, there were nearly 300,000 natives living here. It's sad to remember how little survives, often only a few place names--Malibu, Pismo, Hueneme. Smallpox and the white folks' habit of changing every thing they see took care of the rest. Jane Louise Curry tries to remedy that with this collection of legends and folk tales.

A small wooden cabinet went up for auction on EBay. Inside were two locks of hair, one granite slab, one dried rosebud, one goblet, two wheat pennies, one candlestick and, allegedly, one "dibbuk," a kind of spirit popular in Yiddish folklore. The seller, a Missouri college student named Iosif Nietzke, described the container as a "haunted Jewish wine cabinet box" that had plagued several owners with rotten luck and a spate of bizarre paranormal stunts.

There once was a magic golden turtle that lived in Hanoi's most enchanted lake. A creature so powerful, it snatched a divine sword from a warrior king and returned it to the gods of the depths nearly six centuries ago. That tale has long been a favorite among young and old Vietnamese living in the capital city, but folklorists may soon have to rewrite the story to include a very sad ending.