Author: David Gorsline

Civilization (all you can eat)

Sarah Marshall is monumental in the role of Big Hog in Jason Grote’s Civilization (all you can eat). It’s a fable (with more than a little debt to Orwell’s Animal Farm) in which most of the desperate, lonely people of its overlapping subplots are on the way down, while the hogs are are the way up. Grote usually dreams big, and here he swings from a scene watching the stars to a painfully frank confession at an open mic night. Daniel Escobar handles the latter with a deft touch, as he speaks of walking the waste paths of the city, noting every bit of trash along the verges.

All these scenelets make for a lot of scene transitions, and director Howard Shalwitz manages them skillfully. Nearly all the action takes place along a narrow strip downstage of a two-story barn wall marked with faded painted advertisements. Actors and set pieces always move on from stage right and go off to stage left, and the one-way movement begins to suggest a treadmill. And here’s something you don’t see much any more: the coffee shop tables, chairs, and people brazenly roll into view while the previous scene is still playing. Choreographer Diane Coburn Bruning contributes a fun dance with shopping carts for another scene change.

But it’s Marshall who’s the star. As the piggie who went to market and came back with a thousand-yard stare into our future, she will put you off your bacon for a while.

  • Civilization (all you can eat), by Jason Grote, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

The Language Archive

Forum Theatre offers a thoughtful comedy that follows the link between the words we use and the world that they create. George, a professional linguist (the multi-colored monologist Mitchell Hébert), preserves dying languages on tape, tracking down their last native speakers. Unfortunately, at home, relations with his wife Mary (the rock-steady Nanna Ingvarsson) are less successful: incapable of converting his love to words, George’s emotions are bracketed by quotation marks.

One of George’s interview subjects explains forcefully to him that the decay of a spoken language does not lead to the disappearance of a way of life; rather, it is the other way around, the disappearing world causing the language’s vanishing. And yet playwright Julia Cho leaves the question for us to decide, as the play often suggests the contrary, especially on the micro scale. George and Mary’s communication gap is neatly echoed by the argument between interview subjects Alta and Resten, a married couple and the last speakers of a vaguely north-central Eurasian tongue known for its musicality; their spat culminates in a mutual silent treatment. Covering several ensemble roles as well as those of Alta and Resten are Kerri Rambow and Edward Christian, and they do a fine job with each of them.

The play is enlivened by a few quirky breakings of the fourth wall, most notably the group Esperanto lesson that opens the second act.

  • The Language Archive, by Julia Cho, directed by Jessica Burgess, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Md.

At the park: 48

Both of the new boxes that we mounted in mid-February are home to clutches of Hooded Merganser eggs. The crew of wildlife photographers were very grateful for the activity at new box #10, which is quite visible from the boardwalk. They tried to convince us to set up even more boxes, in racks condo-style; we politely thanked them for the suggestion.

reddeninggreeningDownstream of the observation tower along Barnyard Run, it still looks pretty brown, although the flush of maple flowers is apparent in the treetops. At the water level, duckweed is starting to green up.

I stuck around until the afternoon to join a different volunteer team, this one organized to whack away at some of the invasive alien Japanese Honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) and Asiatic Bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) that threatened to make a play for a sunny clearing. We worked in a section along the pond trail in the northwest section of the park, not accessible from the boardwalk trails but rather from the hike-bike trail with its trailhead on South Kings Highway.

statelyWe cleaned up vines in the vicinity of a stately Osage-orange (Maclura pomifera). I spent a good chunk of my time working over a patch of bittersweet that was more tenacious than Audrey II, all the while leaving the native Poison Ivy and Virginia Grape alone.

At the park: 47

Monitoring season began this morning, and we were rewarded with 4 Hooded Merganser eggs in box #13, while another merg was stationed in the entrance hole to brand-new box #4 (which we installed just two weekends ago!). She sat there for a couple of minutes, so we didn’t approach that box.

new beaver damTwo articles of new construction are visible in the image: the new weather-resistant, recycled-materials boardwalk, and the beaver dam. Our castorine friends have enlarged the pond around the first observation area, where the boardwalk enters the wetland. The gradient between the water levels I judge to be about 20 cm.

Per the Friends newsletter, the latest word on (man-made) dam construction for the wetland restoration project calls for ground-breaking in summer/fall of next year. The Park Authority has contracted with Wetland Studies and Solutions, Inc. to provide final designs, acquire permits, and oversee construction.

Silver Line progress report: 22

I spent one of my votes on a write-in candidate in Metro’s poll on station names for the Tysons-to-Herndon section of the Silver Line: I plumped for “Freedom Hill” for the station on route 7 near the Westpark Drive intersection. I am very pleased that “Scotts Run” is in the running for the east-end route 123 station. Maybe they picked up on my suggestion.

Metro has a policy that requires that names be:

  • Relevant: Identify station locations by geographical features, centers of activity or be derived from the names of cities,communities, neighborhoods or landmarks within one-half mile (or walking distance) of the station;
  • Brief: Limited to 19 characters with spaces and punctuation, including both primary and secondary names;
  • Unique: Distinctive and not easily confused with other station names
  • Evocative: Evoke imagery in the mind of the patron

Take the poll and hold them to it!

As close as I’ll ever get to Ebbets

Via The Morning News, cartoon drawings by Gene Mack of the fourteen major league baseball stadiums of the 1946-47 seasons. So that’s what baseball in the Polo Grounds looked like.

Fourteen parks. But weren’t there sixteen teams? Yes, and the A’s (before they moved west) and Phillies shared Shibe Park, and the Cardinals and Browns (before they moved east to Baltimore) shared St. Louis’s Sportsman’s Park.

And actually, fifteen parks are portrayed, because the Indians were transitioning from League Park to Municipal Stadium.

Great Backyard Bird Count 2012

rip and rapRepair work has begun on reach 6 of the Glade, to fix 2010’s restoration work that was undone by the flood of September 2011. There’s some heavy gear scattered about. Nevertheless, 17 species of our mid-Atlantic winter suburbans were represented on my mid-day count. Mostly cloudy, but with the sun overhead, viewing conditions seemed to be both too dark and too glaring. No real surprises on the bird list, though the briefly heard starling was a little unusual for this patch.

cruel to be kindI was taken aback by the stumps of half a dozen large trees that were sacrificed, but perhaps the undercut stream bank that you can see here is the explanation. Stream restoration is a little like sausage-making.

looking for some friends to make a thickethanging outA little farther upstream, near the footbridge, a Smooth Alder (Alnus serrulata) was proudly displaying its male catkins.

Cooper decoded

James Fenimore Cooper spends a surprising amount of space analyzing a real estate transaction in The Pioneers. The novel takes place in upstate New York, north of the Catskills, in 1793. These passages are from chapter XVI, and is an exchange between Jotham Riddel and the town patriarch, Judge Marmaduke Temple.

“So, Jotham, I am told you have sold your betterments to a new settler, and have moved into the village and opened a school. Was it cash or dicker?”

The man who was thus addressed occupied a seat immediately behind Marmaduke, and one who was ignorant of the extent of the Judge’s observation might have thought he would have escaped notice. He was of a thin, shapeless figure, with a discontented expression of countenance, and with something extremely shiftless in his whole air, Thus spoken to, after turning and twisting a little, by way of preparation, he made a reply:

“Why part cash and part dicker.”

Dicker here has the sense of barter. But, as well shall see, Jotham’s sale was mostly dicker.

“I sold out to a Pumfretman who was so’thin’ forehanded [well-to-do]. He was to give me ten dollar an acre for the clearin’, and one dollar an acre over the first cost on the woodland, and we agreed to leave the buildin’s to men. So I tuck Asa Montagu, and he tuck Absalom Bement, and they two tuck old Squire Napthali Green. And so they had a meetin’, and made out a vardict of eighty dollars for the buildin’s.”

Jotham and his buyer agree to arbitration to assess the value of the buildings. Each party chooses one arbiter, and the two arbiters between them choose a third. A tidy solution, if you ask me.

“There was twelve acres of clearin’ at ten dollars, and eighty-eight at one, and the whole came to two hundred and eighty-six dollars and a half, after paying the men.”

(12 ac · $10/ac of cleared land) + (88 ac · $1/ac of woods) + ($80 of structures) – (3 arbiters · $X/arbiter) = $286.50, so each arbiter received a 50-cent fee.

“Hum,” said Marmaduke, “what did you give for the place?”

“Why, besides what’s comin’ to the Judge, I gi’n my brother Tim a hundred dollars for his bargain; but then there’s a new house on’t, that cost me sixty more, and I paid Moses a hundred dollars for choppin’, and loggin’, and sowin’, so that the whole stood to me in about two hundred and sixty dollars. But then I had a great crop oft on’t, and as I got twenty-six dollars and a half more than it cost, I conclude I made a pretty good trade on’t.”

It would seem that Jotham has indeed flipped his property after one growing season for a $26.50 profit, but I wonder how much is “comin’ to the Judge,” and for what? Property taxes?

“Yes, but you forgot that the crop was yours without the trade, and you have turned yourself out of doors for twenty-six dollars.”

“Oh! the Judge is clean out,” said the man with a look of sagacious calculation; “he [the buyer] turned out a span of horses, that is wuth a hundred and fifty dollars of any man’s money, with a bran-new wagon; fifty dollars in cash, and a good note for eighty more; and a side-saddle that was valued at seven and a half—so there was jist twelve shillings betwixt us.”

Jotham has accepted $207.50 in goods in lieu of cash (by his estimate), and a promissory note for $80, against a sale price of $288. At this point, he seems to be saying that that he will receive the balance of a dollar, or maybe a dollar and a half (12 shillings); it’s not quite clear. In a footnote later, Cooper writes, “In New York the Spanish dollar was divided into eight shillings, each of the value of a fraction more than sixpence sterling.” But he way I read it, the seller owes Jotham a balance of 50 cents, but in turn Jotham still owes the arbiters $1.50.

“I wanted him to turn out a set of harness, and take the cow and the sap troughs. He wouldn’t—but I saw through it; he thought I should have to buy the tacklin’ afore I could use the wagon and horses; but I knowed a thing or two myself; I should like to know of what use is the tacklin’ to him!”

Jotham has the horses and the wagon but no gear to hitch them to it.

“I offered him to trade back agin for one hundred and fifty-five. But my woman said she wanted to churn, so I tuck a churn for the change.”

I read this to mean that Jotham took the butter churn instead of the remaining cash, so no money changed hands at all. Except for those arbiters.

“And what do you mean to do with your time this winter? You must remember that time is money.”

“Why, as master has gone down country to see his mother, who, they say, is going to make a die on’t, I agreed to take the school in hand till he comes back, It times doesn’t get worse in the spring, I’ve some notion of going into trade, or maybe I may move off to the Genesee; they say they are carryin’ on a great stroke of business that-a-way. If the wust comes to the wust, I can but work at my trade, for I was brought up in a shoe manufactory.”

Even if the numbers don’t true up, they make more sense than the arithmetic in my friend Steve LaRocque’s Perfectly Good Airplanes.

Time Stands Still

Time Stands Still is not a play that will wrap everything up for us in a tidy package, that will tell us what we need to know and feel about putting your life and values in danger to do journalism in a war zone. Rather, this comedy-drama requires that we do the work ourselves, guided by what the characters do and say: Sarah and John, together for eight years as foreign correspondents, and their friends Richard and Mandy, a May-December pairing that ultimately bears fruit and happiness. And they do not always express themselves consistently: photographer Sarah (the deeply resourceful Holly Twyford) especially, who shields herself from atrocity with her camera lens and a workmanlike defense that taking pictures is “doing my job,” and yet is shaken by a bleeding woman in a market, victim of a bombing, who smears blood on Sarah’s lens, crying “no pictures!”

It will come as no surprise that Sarah begins and ends her journey on the reporter’s side of the mental barrier that divides her from the civilian, despite her life-threatening injuries from a roadside bomb attack. What’s perhaps more interesting is the move to the nurturing center taken by her partner James (the funny, solid, loving Studio newcomer Greg McFadden), even if it does entail a retreat to pseudo-scholarly writing about pop culture and celebrity interviews for Vanity Fair. And let us not overlook Mandy (played by Laura C. Harris with serious depth), who begins the play as the earnest, pretty young thing girlfriend, a figure of ridicule by Sarah and James (Sarah’s look to Richard when Mandy feels it necessary to define “pro bono” is genius) and becomes a grounded, articulate voice for getting on with the task of living here and now.

John McDermott’s lovely live-in New York apartment set on the Metheny’s thrust stage at times presented a blocking challenge; a character would come to the extreme lip of the stage for a monologue with no reason to be there except to talk to us. And I had the feeling that occasionally light spill into the audience was a source of actor distraction.

The piece is one of Donald Margulies most accomplished, unified works, an equal to his Dinner with Friends (albeit with fewer working kitchens required).

  • Time Stands Still, by Donald Margulies, directed by Susan Fenichell, The Studio Theatre Metheny Theatre, Washington