March 2023 – A Honey of an Anklet

The Griegol

This very fine story of mystery and mourning opens with a walk to a funeral home—and then gets darker (and funnier) from there. But this is also a story about growing up, and hence it ends on notes of hope. And there’s a cat!

Trick of the Light Theatre brings The Griegol to life for a nearly wordless 60 minutes with some of my favorite low tech theatricality, including shadow play, bunraku-style puppets, and opaque projectors, as well as live actors and a musician. A terrifying smoke monster left us wondering, How did they do that? Was that a trick with iron filings?, but the team in a post-show Q&A fessed up that it was pre-produced stop motion video with sand (apparently an unforgiving medium).

A subplot introduced late in the piece confused us for a moment, but it was quickly integrated into the main story. We glad that the company of five was able to make the long trip from Aoteoroa/New Zealand.

The Greigol, Trick of the Light Theatre, presented at the Alden Theatre, McLean, Va.

Kia ora! (easier to write than it is to pronounce)

Mason and Bailey: 7

A splendid time was had by Mason & Bailey Club Auxiliary participants in a joint field trip/going away get-together for yours truly, meeting on 18 March. We walked a loop from Peirce Mill to Pulpit Rock and paused for a snap by A.

In addition to the spring ephemerals that I had scouted earlier in the day, K found a sessile trillium about to bloom (either Trillium sessile or T. cuneatum—I’m in dialogue with some iNatters).

Julius Caesar

Kathleen Akerley is one of the few playwrights working today who bravely peels open her own dramaturgy. In her 90-minute remix of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, she accomplishes this by various means, among them

a docent (frequent collaborator Séamus Miller) waltzing a bemused group of museum-goers across the set;
a dour editor (Miller again) pulling pages from a huge copy of the working script, dismissing each cut page as not relevant to her purposes;
via video projection, a trio of friends parked on the couch, watching/pausing the play as if it were a Netflix adaptation;
two gods (?) commenting on and trying to shape the narrative;
and yet more.

Despite the play’s heritage as a fixture of high school English literature classes, Akerley exposes the work for the “problem play” that it might be. After the assassination in Act III, why does a completely new faction of characters appear?

In Akerley’s version, the death of Caesar is not the point. Indeed, Caesar is never played by an actor, and his dead body is only represented by a bloodied mantle. The calculations that Cassius and Brutus make are still relevant today, and provoke discussion. But Akerley doesn’t take the easy road; early in her script, a character quickly dismisses any parallels to a recent disgraced American president.

Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare, a modern retelling by Kathleen Akerley, directed by Kathleen Akerley, Avant Bard Theatre, Arlington, Va.

Conway Robinson State Forest

Nancy Vehrs led a walk at Conway Robinson State Forest, a new site for me. The 440 acres of woods are near Manassas National Battlefield Park, but not contiguous to it, and they will soon be boxed in by development on all four sides.

Once you walk north and cross through the zone where bedrock crops out, the flora really pops as you descend the slope to Little Bull Run. Round-leaved Hepatica (Hepatica americana) and Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) were easy to find. At the run, Virginia Bluebells (Mertensia virginica) were going to town.

The walk back up the hill was a bit of a puff, especially at the end of the day.

Bonus herp for the trip was a Dekay’s Brownsnake (Storeria dekayi).

At the park: 138

From this week’s report:

We’re seeing surprisingly low activity from our Hooded Mergansers so far: just two nests incubating, with three Wood Duck nests in various stages. Perhaps the go fast-go slow spring has reset their clocks. The Wood Duck hen in box #62 is trying to incubate 20 eggs.

There will be a Master Naturalist field trip at the park on Sunday morning, with parking at [oops – Ed.] and boardwalk space at a premium. So we will switch over to our fortnightly checks, with our next work day on 2 April. Enjoy the extra sleep time!

We didn’t find the loaner waders for M, so we adjusted routes accordingly. We met Chris King at the end of our day and mentioned the miscue on the waders….

Google Translate says that today’s TY in Welsh is “Diolch yn fawr iawn.”

How the Light Gets in

Even though Grace is a successful travel writer, she is so alone and vulnerable that unpleasant news sends her tumbling, grasping at anything to make her feel safe. Keeping up a good front (she says, “Usually I only cry in parking garages”), Grace (as realized by the excellent Tonya Beckman) embarks on a journey that propels this intimate story, well suited to the confines of 1st Stage’s playing space. Unexpectedly, she finds support from a runaway (Madeline Regina), a tattoo artist (Joel Ashur) with a bit of mystic mystery about him, and a Japanese architect with a huge case of designer’s block. Jacob Yeh as Haruki, the flummoxed architect, brings a solidity that enfolds Grace (yes, there is some sweet origami) and proves to be what she needs to move forward.

This 90-minute tale has a bit of whimsy that brings to mind the work of Sarah Ruhl; Ashur and Regina serve as narrators and Greek chorus to keep the story clicking along.

Kathryn Kawecki’s set design is exceptional, giving us an enchanting, cozy Japanese garden that doubles as various other spaces.

How the Light Gets in, by E. M. Lewis, directed by Alex Levy, 1st Stage, Tysons, Va.

At the park: 137

This week’s update:

Steady as she goes: Box #62 has a full or nearly full clutch, but is not being incubated yet. The hen on Box #4 did not flush, so we can figure that she’s incubating. Box #67 now has 6 eggs. We did some maintenance work on Boxes #7, #84, and #3.

Piedmont geology foray

We visited two Triassic Basin sites in Fauquier County, on a trip led by Clifton Institute staffers Andrew Eberly and Bridget Bradshaw. No pix of living things to post to iNat, so the pix are Flick embeds today!

At the Institute, Andrew gave a quick geology refresher. I have trouble remembering that felsic rocks are low in iron (that “fe” is for feldspar) and it’s the mafic rocks that are high in iron and magnesium.

First road stop was an outcrop of Newark Supergroup siltstone on the shore of Germantown Lake in C. M. Crockett Park. Andrew demonstrated that the dip of the outcrop is about 15°.

The siltstone fractures easily, but not cleanly.

We then moved farther south, to Kelly’s Ford on the Rappahannock River. This site is part of the C. F. Phelps WMA.

The siltstone here has been metamorphosed into something much harder to break, and the stone is much darker.

Bedding is clearer in this photo.

We didn’t stop for pix of the blooming Early Saxifrage and Cut-leaf Toothworth, but you are likely to see these in my iNaturalist feed soon.

Patuxent lichens foray

And a second field trip with Natalie Howe, with Tom McCoy riding shotgun. We entered Patuxent Research Refuge’s North Tract (that sign for Bald Eagle Road is easy to miss), signed in (apparently the complicated waivers about unexploded ordnance are a thing of the past), and covered a good 100m, maybe 150m, on the Forest Trail—followed by a short drive to the Hopkins Cemetery enclave on the refuge.

We found a little something that I so wanted to turn into a myxomycete, but iNat’s AI suggests a fungus, Phleogena faginea.

It takes a little gumption to accept that your field ID of most lichens is only going to get you to genus. We looked at a Lecanora, many different Cladonias (and), a Pyxine (get the UV flashlight!), and a Canoparmelia. We were pretty confident that we had a bit of Graphis scripta, as well as Lepraria finkii and Flavoparmelia baltimorensis (most of these IDs are still pending confirmation on iNat).

The Hopkins Cemetery offers a big drift of Cladonia reindeer lichen in relatively undisturbed turf.

Lichenologists in action, checking out the Cladonia.

At the park: 136

The report from last Sunday:

We have a clutch of eggs already incubating in box #5! As well, we have new Wood Duck eggs in two boxes, and evidence of roosting in three more boxes.

We added spring hook-and-eye closures (says safety gate hook & eye on the package) to three boxes. B. and crew will bring materials and tools for some upgrades to the boxes on the main wetland next Sunday. In particular, we lost the wingnut closing box #7, so we will rig up an alternate closure….

Danke schön! Remember that DST kicks in Sunday morning.

One more

ēar-finger is definitely due for a comeback.