Month: June 2017

Busted²

Filip Bondy’s piece about using video to apply an equalizing scale to home runs, irrespective of peculiar ballpark topography, warrants a dubious achievement award for a lede that promises something the story doesn’t deliver:

Spoiler alert: If you wish to continue enjoying gargantuan home runs in the future with unspoiled pleasure, free of all polynomial equations, read no further. If you persist, however, then there is much math to consider.

Continue on, dear reader, but you will find nary an exponent—indeed, not even any arithmetic.

HIR

Emily Townley brings considerable skill to the role of Paige, the long-suffering mother of a dysfunctional family in this preachy satire with themes of gender fluidity and the fight between chaos and control. She delivers a rainbow of colors in her line readings; of particular note is Paige’s signature phrase, “It’s fantastic,” when reality is anything but. Alas, the events that unfold constitute little more than a revenge fantasy.

Misha Kachman’s first act set is a treat, dressed in glitter, googly eyes, feather boas, and TP sculptures, and a smiley-face throw pillow. It’s as if a tornado blew through a Michael’s.

  • HIR, by Taylor Mac, directed by Shana Cooper, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

In his field

Kriston Capps profiles D.C. artist Kenneth Young, one of the Washington Color School painters (Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Alma Thomas, and others). He explores an unintended happy consequence:

… the collapse of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, … for better or worse, brought Young and many other Washington painters to greater prominence. The 2014 court-ordered agreement that dissolved the historic Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art + Design—handing the collection over to the National Gallery and the college to George Washington University—divested hundreds of paintings by D.C. artists (and thousands of other artworks) to the nation’s official art treasury. When the East Building reopened in September, the new installation of the permanent collection included 43 artworks on view from the Corcoran’s holdings.

Sidebar: a timeline of the Washington Color School.