theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
Another very complimentary review of the show: this one is from Michael Toscano.
June [Schreiner] is a seventh-grader at Reston’s Langston Hughes Middle School, but she seems to be one of those kids with outsize talent who eventually could end up on Broadway. With a crystal-clear voice and lungs of steel, she radiates charisma that reaches to the back of the good-sized theater.
A powerful, compact, thought-provoking piece of theater: at St. Nicholas Church School in the Bronx, academic principal Sister Aloysius (the heralded Cherry Jones) becomes convinced that the parish priest Father Flynn (genial, robust Chris McGarry) has made inappropriate contact with one of her students. The time is the early 1960s, when the Catholic Church was undergoing the reforms accompanying the Second Vatican Council, taking steps towards accessibility, tolerance, and openness.
Yet flinty Sr. Aloysius, for whom even “satisfaction is a vice,” remains committed to the severities and regimen of the past. She gave up sugar for Lent one year, and when the season was over, forgot to resume the indulgence. She is convinced of Fr. Flynn’s misconduct on the merest shreds of evidence—and yet, she would ask, how much proof is needed when the exploitation of a twelve-year-old boy is at stake?
Fr. Flynn, for his part, answers her from the pulpit with a homily about accusations: as impossible as it is to catch the feathers of a torn pillow scattered to the wind, just so is it impossible to unsay a word of unsupported suspicion. As solid as Aloysius is in her certainly, Flynn finds comfort and a reminder of his own humanity in doubt. Of himself and his blamelessness? Perhaps.
Between the two stands Sister James, a young teacher at the school, played particularly effectively by Lisa Joyce. This is a role that in lesser hands would reveal its structural nature of providing exposition and comic relief, but Joyce gives the role reality. Despite her stated convictions, first on one side and then the other, it’s clear that she remans troubled with her own doubts.
As directed by Doug Hughes, there is a certain judiciousness in the early scenes, which play out for the most part in Aloysius’s cinderblock office and in the plain flower garden that separates the school from the priest’s quarters. Blocking is minimal. Jones keeps her hands bundled inside her habit, so that when she reveals them to ask for support or to make a point, the simple gesture has a lot of punch.
So it feels a little too much when emotions get the better of Flynn and Aloysius and the proceedings culminate in a shouting match between the two.
All around, dialects were sometimes difficult to place, sounding more Boston than Bronx.
But the closing moments of the play are perfectly modulated and genuine.
John Patrick Shanley’s notes to the play include an epigraph from Ecclesiastes 1:18: “…in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”
We replaced box 67, and since we had another box made, we decided to work next week to replace box 79, which we had abandoned to the field mice a few seasons ago. (This despite my opinion that the box will not be used, and is too difficult to get to through the vegetation and mucky marsh bottom.) Lots of ducks stopping by on their way through: shovelers, two kinds of teal, pintails. Red-Winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) and Eastern Phoebes (Sayornis phoebe) have arrived for the breeding season.
Three things that I learned recently:
Via Boing Boing, Dylan Hears a Who.
Austin Bay introduces his compilation of warrior slang.
Artomatic is coming to Crystal City. The every-two-years-or-so artistic free-for-all will take place on two floors of the former Patent and Trademark Office building, April 13 through May 20.
Potomac Stages gave Seussical a very nice notice—and a rather perspicacious one, IMO.
Michael Hoskinson… spends the entire evening in what must be a hot stuffy grey elephant costume, yet still manages to avoid letting the adorable JoJo steal the show back from him.
Guest poster Quentin Cronk explains Marasmius oreades, fairy-ring fungus.
Leta reprised her role as Vanna White at WATCH this year, handing envelopes to presenters and lucite trophies to award winners, standing on stage all shiny-bright, and wearing possibly the best dress in the place. Bridget thanked her from the stage for her contributions to the award-winning production of Coyote on a Fence by Silver Spring Stage, which was one damn fine piece of theater.
We opened the monitoring season for nest boxes this morning. We found lingering ice at some of the pond edges, some scattered trash to pick up, box 67 missing its door (we’ll put up a replacement next week), and two boxes with merganser eggs already laid.
A portal to New Scientist articles in the area of endangered species includes a recent report from Peter Aldhous identifies a new threat to the recovery of California Condor (Gymnogyps californianus): lead shot-containing carcasses killed by human hunters and consumed by the birds.
Theodor Geisel built The Cat in the Hat from a word list for 6- and 7-year-olds, as Lynn Neary reports. The book is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and it’s Dr. Seuss’s birthday too.
“Seuss was used to inventing words when he needed them, so to stick to a word list was a huge challenge for him,” [Philip] Nel [author of The Annotated Cat] says. “And, in fact, his favorite story about the creation of The Cat in the Hat is that it was born out of his frustration with the word list. He said he would come up with an idea, but then he would have no way to express that idea. So he said…: ‘I read the list three times and almost went out of my head. I said I’ll read it once more and if I can find two words that rhyme, that will be my book. I found cat and hat and I said the title will be The Cat in the Hat.'”
Arthur Lubow submits an instructive profile of aptly-named photographer Jeff Wall, whose lightbox-mounted transparencies are measured in feet, not inches.
Men Waiting, with its cast of 20, its two-week shoot and its on-the-street location, is a small-scale Wall production. Not long before, the artist devoted a full year to In front of a nightclub — a picture of young people standing outside a Vancouver club at night. The shoot took so long because the club Wall found, on a heavily trafficked thoroughfare, could not be photographed as he wished. There was no place for him to stand with his tripod and large-format camera. So he had the club exterior — the columns and grille-work of the facade, the gum-spotted sidewalk, the concrete curb — reconstructed in a studio. One assistant worked for six months dressing the set. “Of course, you can’t see everything he did, but that doesn’t matter,” Wall says. “There is dirt and moss growing in the cracks where the bottom of the building is crumbling, but you can’t see it. The discoloration of the sidewalk is extremely accurate, and it took many layers of application. My son and his friends came and chewed gum. That was their job for two weeks.” He placed his strobes in the precise locations occupied by the street lamps and other lights that shine opposite the real nightclub. Concealed in a van with blacked-out windows, he and his assistants parked outside the actual club on several nights and, using a telephoto lens, took 300 or 400 snapshots of the kids gathered there. Wall scrutinized the photos for characters and clusterings he liked, then he hired 40 extras from a casting agency. Dividing them into two groups and giving them general directions, he photographed them over the course of a month on alternate nights. (“People’s metabolism is different at night, their coloring is different,” he explains.) For each group he finished with only one frame that satisfied him. “You only need one,” he points out. Using digital technology, he combined the two photos of the crowd with a third one of the building into his final picture.