Performance Art: Stories

by David Kranes

Part of our socialization is the urge to perform. We perform images of ourselves for others. For some, the urge is so great and the talent sufficient that we become performers. Performance Art is a series of short stories about performers and performances that are extreme—fire-eaters, knife-throwers, stand-up comedians, escape-artists, weight-loss artists—why we watch them, and why they do what they do. David Kranes dives into the inner lives of these risk-takers, exploring the allures and the costs of “performance.”  His characters are unpredictable, quirky, and sometimes bizarre, but Kranes also reveals their humanity and insecurities. The result is a collection that is engagingly unique, sometimes comical, ironic, heart-tugging, and full of unexpected insights and delights.

Genres: Literary Fiction, Short Stories

192 pages, Paperback

Published October 5, 2021

Reviews

[Will Byrnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m missing a dove, he tells me, a small water fountain…half an assistant.
I’ll keep my eyes out, I tell him.

--------------------------------------

It’s that awful moment when any of us realize that why we began something is no longer why we’re doing it.

In his latest short story collection, literary lion David Kranes puts on quite the show. Performance Art offers up stories about people who perform in public. Nine of the stories in the collection were published between 1991 and 2015, with four new tales fleshing it out to a baker’s dozen. While offering some new material the collection serves more as an introduction to a powerful literary writer you may not know. Kranes is 84, and has been at this a long time. He writes in whatever vessel seems appropriate for the stories that occur to him, whether that is poety, plays, novels or short stories. Sometimes the stories migrate. One of the included tales here was the inspiration for a novel.


David Kranes - image from Continuum

The external focus in this collection is performance, stage performance, for the most part, although the definition is somewhat fluid. The talents on display run quite a gamut, from a daredevil to a stand-up comic, from an actor to an escape artist, from a spokesperson for a weight-loss program to a magician, from a fire and glass eater to a master of sleight of hand, to a world-class photographer, to a carnival knife thrower, and a bit more.

There are some themes, images, and issues that run through, central among which is invisibility. People feeling unseen, maybe even being unseen.

Scott paces four rooms, each one of which, even when he’s in it, seems empty. (A Man Walks Into a Bar)
--
Nothing about me took up—space or anything else (Target Practice)
--
Ginger’s twenty-seven and has almost perfected invisibility. (The Weight-Loss Performance Artist)
--
I turned and moved away. Went. Didn’t stop. Didn’t look back. Instead: became invisible. Became a ghost anchored only by an abiding faith, finally, in the power of absence. (Escape Artist)

Painters permeate. Two of the lead characters paint, and painting is an element in several others. In Daredevil, a character is fascinated with Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death. Target Practice includes a character very into Turner. The Garden of Earthly Delights get some spotlight in Devouring Fire.

Celebrities drift or flash through the stories, and not in a particularly favorable way.

Several characters are faced with potentially life-changing opportunities. A painter has a chance to be a very in-demand actor. Another painter might have a chance to direct a film for a household name producer. A stage performer has a chance to revive a career long thought dead and buried. An obese woman is offered a huge sum to be the public face of weight loss. A drug addict is offered a chance to be the knife instead of the target.

The notion of next comes up. In Daredevil, pop offers useless advice to his son re next steps in life. In Target Practice a social services report on the narrator calls her directionless. (“I had no comprehension of next. I had no next moments; obviously no next month, no next week.”)

The stories are set in Vegas, mostly, the southwest, generically, Idaho a time or three. It is pretty clear that Kranes knows The Strip and Vegas like a local. He lives in Salt Lake City. I do not know if he ever lived in Vegas or maybe spent a lot of time there. Both seem likely.

There are a few tales that include bits of fantasy. Most do not. I would not categorize this as a fantasy collection, per se.

While the circumstances are sometimes extreme, there is still plenty to relate to. How many of us have felt unseen, invisible in the world, or maybe want to be. I can certainly relate to the latter. In my theatrical debut (It was Kindergarten I think) I was called on to walk to center stage and recite Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater. I managed to get the words out, but that was not all. By the time I exited stage left my pants had taken on an unwanted yellow tint. Invisibility cloak, please, NOW!!! And we have probably all felt the sting of feeling completely unseen by that boy or girl, man or woman whom we really, really want to see us.

Bottom line is that this collection may not feature all new material (that said, even the previously published stories were new to me) but it offers a splendid sample of a literary talent of great skill and power. David Kranes is a writer worth getting to know. This is top-tier, star-power material, m most definitely worth seeing.

Review first posted – 10/5/21

Publication date – 10/15/21

I received an e-galley from the University of Nevada Press through NetGalley, in return for a visible, performative review. Thanks.

This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi!



=============================THE STORIES
The Daredevil’s Son (2010) - imagine your father was Evel Knievel. Imagine he was dead set on you following him in the family business. Imagine you have the body, the build, and the looks. Then imagine you have zero interest in doing that.

“So then, you don’t want to be like…do what your father does?” people asked.
“No, because my father scares people,” Lucas Jr said.

There is a lot here that resonates with Kranes’s life. He grew up in the Boston area, his father a big-shot surgeon at one of the biggest hospitals in the city. He even enrolled in pre-med, but knew it was not for him. Later even tried Yale Law School. Ditto. Dinners at home would feature Nobel Prize winners (as guests, not on the menu). The bar seemed too high, the pressure too intense to succeed, to perform at that level, at things that did not appeal to him all that much. He headed west instead, opting to follow his own inclinations, not those of his father.

The Stand-up Phobic (2015)
Ethan Fallon feels compelled to perform on stage.
The language of the story mimics the sort of stream-of-consciousness that Robin Williams might have launched into in a moment or that George Carlin might have scripted. It is about words, words, words, and associations, free or otherwise There is a manic aspect to Ethan. It is presented as an interview between Ethan and…someone. You feel bad for the guy, with all this verbal churn going on in his head, and only the stage as a venue for relief.

Ethan’s hair is an air show and he’s sweating. Every performance lately seems a conspiracy-theorist’s nightmare. Any room he’s booked into is slack-jawed and oversized and swallows him. Like a bad Jonah dream. Like having a three-day booking at the Whale. AT THE HOUSE OF RIBS. YEAH! PUT Y0UR HANDS TOGETHER—WON’T YOU, PLEASE—for our own sackcloth and ashes! Ethan Fallon!

A Man Walks Into A Bar (2012)
Scott Elias, a dealer (cards, not drugs) and painter, is approached by two men in a Vegas bar. They mistake him for a well-known actor, but offer him a screen test because they like his presence. They see something in him. So Scott is carted off to appear in the film, sorry, project, they are producing, and life gets crazy from there. But is this the life he wants? He has a roomie, a young man, Tory, also a painter, who had been injured in an auto mishap. It is more of a ward and sponsor relationship, not a sexual one. Tory’s paintings reflect Scott’s inner battle.

Escape Artist (2002)
From birth, Lou has been getting out of things. The need comes with some innate capacity. But there are others who would do well to escape unwanted circumstances, yet lack the native tools and even when they learn the learnable skills, opt for the safety of captivity to the freedom of escape. This story includes a bit about escaping the East Coast, and doctor father, which echoes the author’s relationship with his father.

When I was two, a nurse locked me in a closet under a pile of coats. I got out. When I was six, three bullies tethered me with clothesline, filled my mouth with detergent. I escaped, spat the detergent into the sunlight. It turned green in the bright air, hardened into a nugget of turquoise.
At two, six, I had no words, no plan, only knew my need: lift. Rise, break out, court the insane of the world—if that’s what it took.

When the Magician Calls
Daniel Lawrence, or maybe Lawrence Daniel, has tracked Sheila down. (There is a reference in another story to a Sheila who had been at least partly mislaid by a fading magician) He seems to think Sheila will remember him. Sounds like they had had a prior connection. He would like to help her fully disappear from her current, somewhat imprisoned life. Maybe he can conjure a bit of magic, although it may not be his true calling. My stage-self hungers for standing-room-only. Mostly, though. I feel like some kind of bulked tortoise, lumbering to the sea.

Target Practice
The female narrator seems to have almost died too many times to be a coincidence as a kid. Became a target when she got older, for a Sunday school teacher, for boys with an interest and for needles. But when she meets a carnival knife thrower (and former MLB pitcher) she learns, ironically, how not to be a target, but to be the knife, her survival no longer an unexpected miracle.

The Warren Beatty Project (1991)
Ethan Weise has had a bit of success with his painting, sold canvasses to some famous people. He is working on a series of Edward-Hopper-type paintings, set outdoors. Once, he worked as a “visual consultant” with a student at the American Film Institute. And then, one day, Warren Beatty calls, wanting him to direct a project for him. LaLa Land beckons, limo-driven and low on artistic merit, rich with industry glitterati and the suggestion of connection and work, while short on actual delivery. While his girlfriend pulls him in a different direction. Will he gain notice, or remain largely unseen? Is this project the stuff dreams are made of, or something else?

The Weight-Loss Performance Artist (2008)
Ginger is 5’5” and 340 pounds. Two men approach her to take part in a project. They have a weight-loss program called PoundSolve that offers tailored meals to subscribers, and software that can project what someone will look like after reaching certain weight-loss benchmarks. They would like Ginger to be their spokesperson, and will pay her $4k per pound for every sixteen ounces she takes off. It a pretty good deal from where she sits. Ginger’s twenty-seven and has almost perfected invisibility. As she moves up to translucent, and even apparent, life changes in many ways. The question is how she will cope and whether the changes are all welcome.

My Life as a Thief
The narrator here is unnamed. His father is a doctor, working at Mass General (where Kranes’s father worked). He started doing magic at eleven, with a kit his dad bought him. Turns out to be a gateway drug to ever more professional levels of magic. His life as a thief begins when he is thirteen, teamed up with Arthur Foley, a pal, whose father happens to be a criminal. Turns out having a talent for making things disappear offers a direct path to shoplifting. They move on from there.

Devouring Fire—An Interview
Robbie, a young reporter, has a chance to interview an entertainment legend, Anthony Aquila, 89 years young and still scary. Anthony is renowned for his ability to eat both fire and glass.
There is a fun interaction between the two of them, as Anthony totally intimidates the young man, but also sees the potential in him.

I’ll confess here: I was drawn to his image. It was like one I’d seen in my History of Religions course at State; he was an ascetic. A kind of harp with skin. Bare feet. Ribs like a rack of lamb. Deep hollow cavernous eyes. You could almost hear his echos echo. Shabby, torn clothes. I got the sense that whatever he did, at the same time he could stand back and watch himself doing it.

The Resurrection of Ernie Fingers
The Downtown Palace in Vegas seems to be doing everything right, post Covid, yet the players are not showing up. The place needs something

We need an attraction,”Dickie Rice, the GM, said to Tony Padre, Head of Marketing. “We need crowds fighting to get in. We do that and who we offer, what we offer will sell itself.”
Tony Padre agreed, “Attraction! Absolutely! But what? Who?”

They bring a legend back. Ernie Fingers is a fill-the-place-entertaining performer, but he has been out of the business for a while and has gotten way too familiar with a particular brand of hooch. Can Ernie be brought back to his old form? Ernie ha a special ability, though, and his skills may be fading.

The Photojournalism Project (1996)
Melissa Probert is a gifted, very much-in-demand international freelance photographer. Her work has been shown in major national museums. Hunt is a painter, working on a project making tempura images of roadside memorials. They had a thing once but have remained friends. Melissa calls Hunt to help her with a special project, a book. She wants to make a photo history of a binge drunk, her own, she having a history of such antics, sans lens. Hunt and Leah, his wife? gf? have an ongoing conversation while he is at Melissa’s multi-day drunk re what and how he sees and her forbearance of his friends. In offering a stage for the unseen, is Melissa making Leah vanish from Hunt’s life?

The Fish Magician (1997)
Malcolm volunteers from the audience at The Monte Carlo in Vegas to participate in magician Lance Burton’s show. He steps into a Lucite box on the stage and in short order is vanished…well…transported, to Idaho it would appear. Oopsy. And the aging magician cannot recall where he’d sent Malcolm. Some time later his wife, Ginger, alarmed at her husband’s sudden disappearance, and failure to reappear, hires an investigator to find out just WTF happened. This is a fun tale in which the investigator is a psychic former NFL player who dreams of doing standup. The story was the basis for Kranes’s 2018 novel Abracadabra.


=============================EXTRA STUFF

Kranes does not maintain an on-line presence, as far as I can tell.

Here is a profile of him in Mapping Literary Utah

Interview
-----Radiowest - The Legend's Daughter - by Doug Fabrizio - audio - 52:04 – even though it was recorded eight years ago I found this interview very illuminating re this collection

Songs/Music
-----Arthur Rubinstein - Chopin’s Nocturne in E-Flat - From Ernie Fingers

Items of Interest from the author
-----short story from this collection - The Daredevil’s Son
-----short story - A Figure in a Window
-----a one-act play - Infrastructures

[Dogsandbooksanddogsandbooks · Rating 2 out of 5]

A collection of short stories that ended up being such a deep dive into quirkiness that overall it was a fail for this reader. These were mostly non relatable characters and circumstances which made it difficult to connect while their story spun out. I liked the concept of us living our lives as a performance of some sort but this was just a miss for me.
Thank you to University of Nevada Press for an early e-copy. All opinions are my own.

[Bandit · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm delighted to be the first person to rate and review this. Maybe my words will inspire readers looking for something different, something quirky, some kind of a oddball show just like this one. I'm even rating it up for maximum effect.
I found this book on Netgalley late at times and read the description very sleepily, so the actual book turned out to be something of a surprise, since I seem to have expected nonfictional account of lives of extreme performance and instead got the fictional versions thereof. But aside from that, it was a pretty enjoyable read.
Mind you, fictional or nonfictional, this was very much up my alley as most things even remotely circus adjacent tend to be. I mean, give a story about magic and magicians any day and odds are I’ll find it magical In fact, most of my favorite stories in this collection were about magicians, especially about the kid.
I never remember the actual titles, apologies, but there were about ten stories in this collection and all of them ranged from good to very good. The quality was somewhat uneven, but then again the stories span decades of the author’s writing career so that (much like occasional dated references) was to be expected. Actually, as a dedicated movie buff, I found the dated references story to be fun in that who’s who of the bygone era trivia sort of way. It isn’t the only movie related story either and I liked the other one a lot. It was right up there with the magic.
Overall, interesting and entertaining bunch of tales, featuring interesting and entertaining protagonists. There are many different approaches to short fiction, but the author took the one I prefer…an entire three act proper narrative done in reduced page count. Pleasantly offbeat and with an excellent ear for very natural, organic sounding dialogue, these stories were well worth a read and served as an excellent introduction to a new to me author. These artists put on quite a performance. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

This and more at https://advancetheplot.weebly.com/

[Martie Nees Record · Rating 2 out of 5]

Genre: Short Stories/Black Humor
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Pub. Date: Oct. 5, 2021

David Kranes is the gifted author of plays, eight novels, and short story volumes, including “Performance Art Stories.” Some of the stories in this book appeared in earlier publications. The title suggests that we all perform for others whether we admit it or not. His characters are more than quirky. They are bizarre which is why I did not finish this novel. I read five of the shorts then skimmed the rest. I was blown away by the first short, “The Daredevil’s Son,” and then had a hard time following the rest of the ones that I finished. In “Daredevil” from birth, his son is pegged as a chip off the old block, a dead ringer of his pop. Alas, the boy was more comfortable in his mother’s closet than his dad’s for the father. It is such a good story that shows us that the boy was mentally healthy, and the father was well, nuts. I did find that the author’s writing to be impeccable. Still, most of the shorts here were surreal, and just too ‘out there’ for me. I get that the tale, “The Stand-Up Phobic” is a dark humor story about a comic who makes tasteless run-on jokes with the audience. I was never sure if the man was hallucinating or not. It reads like an imaginary free-form-art bomb leaving me to recover from the blast. I should mention that Karnes is the winner of many literary awards. Maybe it is just me.

I received this Advance Review Copy (ARC) novel from the publisher at no cost in exchange for an honest review.

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[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher University of Nevada Press for an advanced copy of this short story collection.

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. David Kranes in his new collection of short stories, Performance Art: Stories, writes about these players, the roles they play both in their performances and real life. There is no switch, no this is just my stage persona, the face they use to entertain is the one that is seen by friends, family and lovers.

The characters and stories are diverse and slightly off in some ways. Maybe it is because the the characters are daredevils and escapists, bad comedians, and knife throwers, to pick some occupations. Almost sideshow players in life and their chosen careers. Some are made and love their careers, some hate what they have become, and try to bring everyone down to their level. Some are just damaged.

The stories range in length and quality, as all collections do. A few touch on the same themes, but most are about the masks that we wear, both comedy and tragedy, to get through the day at work, at play or mostly at home alone. A few stories especially the first story will stick with the reader, even now writing this I think of lines from it and the ending and go wow. a very nice collection.

[Larissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received an Advance Reader’s Copy of this book. Performance Art is a collection of short stories focused on the lives of performers. It's an interesting collection and I liked how each vignette really got into the depths of each character. For me, the stories were all unified by one theme but I wish there was a little more connection like we find out one of the characters is another 's next-door neighbor! Overall, it's an entertaining collection of stories and relatively short, so a nice read.

[Trish Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the concept of this book more than the execution. I think it’s true that there is a high level of performance in everyday living. But in this collection of stories, the characters are SO unique, and their circumstances so bizarre that the reading experience felt more like a trip to the circus, where the whole point is that what you see is unrelatable. But if you enjoy well-drawn characters with a high level of creative “wait, how is that even possible?” in their worlds, this an author to keep your eye on.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing me a copy of this book.

[Jennifer Caloyeras · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of short stories all circle around the idea of performance and what it means to be performative, from fire eaters to stand-up comedians. This is a collection for people interested in examining the quirks of these particular groups of people and it made me think about the notion of performance in general and question, are we, as humans, always on stage the moment we begin an interaction with someone else? This is a book full of oddities and memorable characters, bizarre and full of dark humor, overall and interesting read.

[Kelly Parker · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sad to say that the best thing about this short story collection is its brevity. Even as short as it was, I couldn’t finish.
The stories ranged from just okay to boring to flat out bad. I cared not a whit about a single character or how any of the stories would end.
As a lifelong Nevada resident, I really want to support a hometown author, it just can’t be with this book.
Thanks #netgalley and #universityofnevadapress for this ARC of #performanceart in exchange for an honest review.

[mib6475654 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this anthology of short stories of different types of performance artists. The book itself is laid out clearly and concisely while the content remains interesting. I ended up liking this book more than I had expected but I think this would be an important book for any shelf.

[Ann Marie]

Special thanks to NetGalley and the University of Nevada Press for the ARC of this book in exchange for my own opinion.

What a great genre, short stories, my favorite. The author writes stories about people you will find in a circus, like acrobats, flame swallow ers, knife throwers and the like. I really enjoyed the stories and especially the characters vulnerabilities. Really good. 4 stars!

[Carol Custer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an eclectic collection of short stories. Some are poignant, some rather strange, and some out-and-out bizarre. But all are entertaining in their own way.