November 2009 – A Honey of an Anklet

The Royal Family

Not even a minor technical derailment in the third act can hinder the momentum of this venerable piece of American theater, which first appeared in 1927. This light comedy still has the power to summon chuckles, albeit not guffaws. The first act’s biggest line can perhaps only be played for applause instead of a laugh, as it is in MTC’s production. Kaufman’s gift for mayhem blends well with Ferber’s deep-rooted sense of family tradition—whether she’s writing about Midwestern farmers or here, the Cavendishes, a slightly veiled stand-in for the talented and mercurial Barrymore family of actors at the top of the American twentieth century. It is a play that calls up W-words to describe it: waspish, wistful, wacky.

Director Doug Hughes spins up the tempo to near-farce levels, overlapping as much expository dialogue as he can and more. A booming sound effect for the front door (about which I am ambivalent) sets a bass drum rhythm that keeps the show on pace to stay under the three-hour mark.

Jan Maxwell as Julie, flinging herself about the stage in the first act like the colt she once was, is nicely balanced by Ana Gasteyer as the grasping, talent-free Kitty. In early scenes of bickering with her husband Herbert (John Glover as a graying leading man), Gasteyer’s elastic mug looks like she’s just gulped a glass of vinegar. However, as the frenzy spirals up in the second act, both of the ladies’ performances skate on the edge of caricature.

Reg Rogers brings the swash and buckle as rakish Tony (the would-be John Barrymore), especially in a very good fencing sequence at the top of Act 2 with Rufus Collins.

A meticulous, beautiful two-and-a-half level set by John Lee Beatty is lit by Kenneth Posner (who places countless practicals in this grand New York apartment).

The Royal Family, by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, directed by Doug Hughes, Manhattan Theatre Club, Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, New York

Fela!

The set (panels of corrugated tin) for Bill T. Jones and his collaborators’ new production spills out into the auditorium of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre (even as far as the exit doors), promising to break the boundaries between performance and viewer. As we enter, the ten-piece band, led by Aaron Johnson, is already rocking. Yes, there will be dancing in the aisles.

What the evening delivers is not quite so revolutionary, but entertaining nonetheless. This review of songs drawn from the work of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Nigerian musician and activist, is brought off with high energetic athleticism, heart and soul, and fiery politcal rage. The book for the musical, however, is inconsequential and choppy: Fela is haunted by the ghost of his mother Funmilayo, who apparently died in the course of a government raid on Fela’s compound. It is his mother, we can only conclude, who actually accomplished more towards reform in West Africa in the 1970s. Fela takes a spirit journey (admirably realized with fancy light effects, video projections, and lasers) to reconcile with her, and then the show’s over. (Alas, some of those lighting effects tend to blind us in row Q.)

Jones’s production doesn’t put a face on the corruption against which Fela (on this evening, the charismatically muscular Sahr Ngaujah) militates; there’s no dramatic arc to the work. As an audience member, one always feels vaguely manipulated when asked to stand and perform a bump-along of hip-shaking dance moves. And the jokey passage about crap and marijuana should be cut.

The unseen (but not unheard) star of this show is Stuart Bogie on tenor and percussion, who ghosts the wailing sax played by Fela.

(Disclosure: I saw this production thanks to the generosity of one of the technicians on the production staff.)

Fela!, conceived by Bill T. Jones, Jim Lewis, and Stephen Hendel, music and lyrics by Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, directed and choreographed by Bill T. Jones, Eugene O’Neill Theatre, New York

Wolf Rock, Chimney Rock

Turkey Vultures were kettling above the toll road to Leesburg as I set out for Catoctin Mountain Park in Frederick County, Maryland on this unnaturally warm and sunny November day. Some hiking, some field work in support of the paper that I am writing about the park for my geology class.

From the visitors’ center, I followed the clockwise loop suggested by PATC trail guides. The trails in the park are not blazed, but are wide and generally easy to follow, even when covered with the hazard of the season, slippery leaf litter. The side trip to Cunningham Falls is perhaps not worth the bother: the way to the falls is popular and boardwalked.

Back on the main circuit, I climbed to the Blue Ridge Summit Overlook (600′ from my starting point), snapping images of the Catoctin metabasalt. Crossing back to the east, I entered the region of the Weverton quartzite, exposed as Wolf Rock (at left) and Chimney Rock. I found a nice small boulder of Weverton conglomerate, too. Mountaintop bird life was sparse: I was a little surprised to find no juncos. A raven quorked along the way; a nuthatch didn’t seem concerned; a Pileated Woodpecker was rattling the doorknobs of a pine tree.

A little pressed for time and daylight, I followed the guide’s backtrack route, getting back to the car in 3:50, covering about 7.5 miles. My notes say that I covered a 8.3-mile circuit in 1995 in 3:30. I guess those were someone else’s legs.

Good intentions

Ariel Kaminer realty-checks volunteering at a soup kitchen for the holidays:

So though [Joel] Berg [executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger] appreciates the thought, he says the best way to contribute is to lend your specialized abilities, such as legal or computer skills.

“The truth is, spending a few hours at a food pantry or soup kitchen helping people apply for food stamps will do a lot more to end hunger than months serving soup or moving cans around,” he said.

Nature is never finished

Randy Kennedy visits Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty with conservators from the Dia Art Foundation, who have devised a low-tech way to document the structure’s changing condition year to year.

…the institute, which often works in countries where conservation projects are carried out on shoestring budgets, came up with a remarkably simple solution: a $50 disposable latex weather balloon, easily bought online.

Along with a little helium, some fishing line, a slightly hacked Canon PowerShot G9 point-and-shoot digital camera, an improvised plywood and metal cradle for the camera and some plastic zip ties (to keep the cradle attached and the neck of the balloon cinched), a floating land-art documentation machine was improvised, MacGyver-like.

Submerged by the rising waters of Great Salt Lake in the 1970s, the piece is now exposed to the air, covered with a layer of salt, and subject to alteration by human visitors.

Blue Ridge, Ridge and Valley

The sun was burning off the morning fog, residue from our several days of rain, as we set off northwest on I-270 on this car-powered field trip, stopping at nearly a dozen places in the Blue Ridge and Ridge and Valley provinces. We were again led by the local naturalist community’s answer to John Malkovich, the equally intense, hyper-organized Joe Marx.

Our first stop was actually still in the Piedmont, in the parking lot of a Pier One Imports in Frederick, just down the U.S. 40 strip from the Barbara Frietchie restaurant. We looked at the Leesburg Member of the Balls Bluff Siltstone, a breccia composed of broken material from an alluvial fan under conditions similar (except for aridity) to those in the eastern edge of Death Valley. The boulders in the image were broken off from the bedrock and placed by construction activity.

In class lectures, we’ve just been introduced to the various metamorphic rocks, so the timing of this field trip was apt. Moving farther west into Frederick County and into the Blue Ridge province, we explored the formations that make up the South Mountain Anticlinorium: a metagranite; the Catoctin Formation (composed of epidote-rich greenstone, a metabasalt); and the Weverton Formation, a sandstone metamorphosed to quartzite. We checked out the Weverton at Gambrill State Park from the grounds of an amenity known as the Tea Room. Nice views. Bluebirds, juncos, and lady beetles greeted us at the park. Moving on to Boonsboro, we stopped for the Loudoun Formation (phyllite) and the Harpers Formation (shales and phyllite).

Continuing west, we entered the Ridge and Valley province. Our first stop was at the stone Wilson Bridge, built in 1819 by Silas Harry (and rehabbed in 1984 by LeRoy E. Myers) to carry the National Road across Conococheague Creek. Bedrock here is limestone and shale, and the creek follows the shale (lest it dissolve its bed of limestone). On the west side, up a short hill, are outcrops of the Pinesburg Station Dolomite (ca. 472 Ma) and the Chambersburg Limestone (just younger, 472-461 Ma). The dolomite, uptilted into almost vertical layers, laced with shale, is pictured.

Pushing on the last of the season’s acid-yellow maples, we came to the Martinsburg Formation, a fissile (breaks in your hands) shale interbedded with graywacke. This turbidity-current deposit was first named by Swiss shepherds as flysch. And then continuing past Hancock, we came to the Western Maryland railroad cuts. The railroad ran parallel to the C&O Canal. When the cuts were made in the rock, ca. the beginning of the 20th century, the intricacies of folding captivated geologists and the lay public. Now the rocks are heavily weathered, but you can still see the lines of synclines and anticlines. At right, the line of white aligned with Joe’s head is an intrusion (perhaps from groundwater) of calcite.

With the light fading, we wrapped up at the new poster child for geology, the giant road cut for I-68 through Sideling Hill. Even with the poor photographic conditions, the lines of the syncline (U-shaped) that form the top of the ridge are unmistakeable. Joe pointed out that it’s very rare for a ridgetop to be formed from an anticline (A-shaped), despite one’s intuition. Rocks stretched over the apex of an anticline break and quickly erode. Rather, what we observe is either a syncline (the rocks are compressed at the bottom of a fold and are somewhat more resistant to erosion) or a breached anticline (the apex is broken off), making two mirror-image ridges. Indeed, the whole of the South Mountain Anticlinorium is one such breached anticline, forming the Blue Ridge/South Mountain to the northwest and Catoctin Mountain to the southeast. The aha! of the trip was Anne’s, as she worked out just how immense the folded layers of rock would have to be to put the summit of Sideling Hill at the bottom of those folds. Our rocks here are the Rockwell Formation, and below that, the Purslane Formation.

One show at a time

The good news (as reported by Missy Frederick) is that Theater Alliance, a local performing company with some great work to its credit, has received a grant of federal economic stimulus money from the D.C Commission on the Arts and Humanities, sufficient to fund half a year’s salary for its artistic director. The appalling news is that the grant is all of $12,500.

“I was in danger of being laid off,” explained [Paul Douglas] Michnewicz. “Theater Alliance only employs one full-time person and that’s me. I’m the one writing the grants that keeps us going and paying the bills, so it was a pretty simple argument to make.”

Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be professional theater people.

Nipped and tucked and buffed

Carrie Brownstein puts in a good word for flubs in recorded music.

Voices, guitars and drums are really expressive instruments for the same reason that they’re really inexact instruments: [You] can’t coax the same note or beat out of them exactly the same way twice, even if you try.

Any stage actor could tell you that, and ruefully.

She mentions, as an exemplar, Denny Doherty’s early entrance for a chorus of The Mamas and Papas’ “I Saw Her Again.” Heck, I always figured that he meant to do that. It was effing brilliant.

Perhaps the only colon in the book

A Tennessean named Webster had been watching him and he asked the judge what he aimed to do with those notes and sketches and the judge smiled and said that it was his intention to expunge them from the memory of man. Webster smiled and the judge laughed. Webster regarded him with one eye asquint and he said: Well you’ve been a draftsman somewheres and them pictures is like enough the things themselves. But no man can put all the world in a book. No more than everthing drawed in a book is so.

Well said, Marcus, spoke the judge.

But dont draw me, said Webster. For I dont want in your book.

My book or some other book said the judge. What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it’s writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all.

You’re a formidable riddler and I’ll not match words with ye. Only save my crusted mug from out your ledger there for I’d not have it shown about perhaps to strangers.

The judge smiled. Whether in my book or not, every man is tabernacled in every other and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the uttermost edge of the world.

—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, ch. XI

Methinks Webster is a 19th-century Facebook refusenik.

Known unknowns and unknown knowns

ROY COHN. So send me my pills, with a get-well bouquet, PRONTO, or I’ll ring up CBS and sing Mike Wallace a song: (Sotto voce, with relish) the ballad of adorable Ollie North and his secret contra slush fund. (He holds the phone away from his ear; Martin is excited.) Oh you only think you know all I know. I don’t even know what all I know. Half the time I just make it up, and it still turns out to be true!

—Tony Kushner, Angels in America: Perestroika, Act 1 (“Spooj”) sc. 5

Angels in America

Forum Theatre, recently relocated to Round House Theater’s Silver Spring black box, delivers a commendable production of Tony Kushner’s huge, seven-hour two-part play. Each of the many, many scenes is suggested by only one or two set pieces on wheels—an armchair for Harper and Joe’s home, a counter and a bench for the Mormon visitors center. The dressings are modest, sometimes even a little ratty, in keeping with one of the show’s themes, that of extraordinary things happening to very ordinary people. Directors Jeremy Skidmore and Michael Dove minimize the transitional seams with sound, light, and characters holding in place while the next scene begins. This is a real accomplishment, when you consider the number of scenes that absolutely call for a double bed on stage.

The playing area is configured with audience on three sides and four corner exits. The fourth side is covered a patched-together canvas that suggests a monumental painting by Anselm Kiefer. Lights thrown on this drop, front and back, establish moods and present the burning aleph; and, as you would expect, this cloth parts for the arrival of the Angel (majestic Nanna Ingvarsson) at the end of Millennium Approaches. Rather than put the Angel in a flying harness, this production perches her atop an A-frame ladder on fancy wheels; this design choice works, except for the sequence in which Prior wrestles with the Angel. About all that he can do is climb onto the unit and hang on as it’s wheeled about.

Alexander Strain succeeds at making the problematic character of Louis Ironson likable and sympathetic, because as written, Louis spends so much time being craven, obnoxious, or both, that we wonder why Prior cares for him. Karl Miller gives us a fine, vinegary Prior Walter. The female Pitts in this show, Hannah and Harper, come off as rather subdued. Jennifer Mendenhall does better with her more dialecty roles, like the specter of Ethel Rosenberg. Ingvarsson also has a wonderful short scene as Sister Ella Chapter, an insecure real estate agent with an overcompensating toothy smile. Jim Jorgensen has a gay time as the closeted, hyperintense Roy Cohn—a furioso performance.

Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, by Tony Kushner, directed by Jeremy Skidmore and Michael Dove, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Maryland

Disfarmer

A tornado conjured from scraps of paper fanned with a piece of stiff paper, a minature cow twirling on a stick, light projected through old-school photographic negative plates—such are the simple, powerful effects accomplished by Dan Hurlin in his new puppetry piece presented at the Clarice Smith Center. This time his subject is a reclusive, perhaps eccentric small-town portrait photographer: Mike Disfarmer, who worked in the Ozarks burg of Heber Springs, Ark. from the 1930s until his death in obscurity in 1959. Focusing on the obsessive, solitary life of Disfarmer, the piece has only one puppet character, that of the photographer himself. As conceived by Hurlin, Disfarmer begins as a three-foot bespectacled figure (imagine an elongated Bunsen Honeydew); as his days unwind (as well as the mid-century small-town way of life), smaller and smaller puppets take its place, until the touching final tableau in which a twelve-inch Disfarmer clambers under his photographer’s cloth for the last time.

As with his other pieces, Hurlin puts his own spin on the Japanese bunraku tradition of puppetry. His five performers (along with Hurlin as narrator and voice for Disfarmer’s unspoken thoughts) both manipulate and interact with the puppet. The mix of scales works out because most of the scenes take place on waist-high wagons. Designers and builders for human performance would envy Hurlin’s freedom to position set pieces without the need for chocks, since his artificial actor isn’t in danger of skidding away or breaking through the set. Hurlin compares puppetry to dance, and indeed his performers often contribute to the story by the simple stillness of a standing pose.

Other technical theater elements contribute to this rewarding piece. Music by Dan Moses Schreier accompanies a projected montage of Disfarmer’s portraits. As the images corrode and fade away (as all emulsion-based photos must), the music becomes a demented, polyphonic bluegrass, to be eventually overwhelmed by sirens blasting from speakers scattered throughout the auditorium. The effect is an uncanny echo of Hurlin’s Hiroshima Maiden, which takes place in an overlapping time period. In a stately passage, lights designed by Tyler Micoleau evoke an evening’s twilight that takes 30 years to fall into night.

This bittersweet production is not without lightness: there’s a good running gag of Disfarmer bopping his head on his own studio safe light. Some of the names of Heber Springs’ denizens are too good to be made up (Carthel?).

Disfarmer, conceived, directed, and designed by Dan Hurlin, Smith Center Kay Theatre, College Park, Maryland

Month: November 2009