Author: David Gorsline

Not in the percents

“But to-day, for instance, Mr. M’Choakumchild was explaining to us about Natural Prosperity.”

“National, I think it must have been,” observed Louisa.

“Yes, it was.—But isn’t it the same?” [Sissy] timidly asked.

“You had better say, National, as he said so,” returned Louisa, with her dry reserve.

“National Prosperity. And he said, Now, this schoolroom is a Nation. And in this nation, there are fifty millions of money. Isn’t this a prosperous nation? Girl number twenty, isn’t this a prosperous nation, and a’n’t you in a thriving state?”

“What did you say?” asked Louisa.

“Miss Louisa, I said I didn’t know. I thought I couldn’t know whether it was a prosperous nation or not, and whether I was in a thriving state or not, unless I knew who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine. But that had nothing to do with it. It was not in the figures at all,” said Sissy, wiping her eyes.

“That was a great mistake of yours,” observed Louisa.

—Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854), book 1, ch. IX

Flexible, neutral, but not slimming

Joshua Dachs offers a provocative look at a fixture of theater in the last half-century: the black box.

This attempt at neutrality is contradictory. It’s hard to imagine anything less neutral than a completely black room. At best you may find it mysterious, elegant and dark. At worst it may feel uncomfortable, enervating, lifeless and depressing. The black mood of a black space establishes a strong first impression, not a neutral one, and sets a specific emotional starting point for a show.

Leesylvania State Park

I was flipping through Barbara Noe’s guidebook of easy hikes around the D.C. metro and I realized that I had never visited Leesylvania State Park before.

This compact park, a one-hour drive from home, lies on a nose of land jutting into the Potomac and bisected by a CSX railway line (the RF&P subdivision). I took the walk highlighted in Noe’s book, which follows the Lee’s Woods Trail, a two-mile loop across the headland of Freestone Point.

the view from MarylandThe point is composed of sandstone, a building material so easily quarried by previous-century settlers that, so the local lore goes, it’s as if someone had posted a sign that read “free stone.”

crossing the lineThe commonwealth-state boundary runs close to the Virginia shore here, so the fishing pier just downriver is technically in Maryland. The river breeze out of the south was quite fresh, so I did not linger long on the pier.

The trail requires only grippy, sturdy sneakers: some gravel road, a little climbing, and a little mud. Chestnut Oak (Quercus prinus) can be found on the ridgetops. There are ample opportunities for river overlooks. The big natural attraction along this stretch of the river, of course, is Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), and I spotted birds three times. At least twice I heard an odd whickering vocalization that could only have come from the eagles, sort of a “whee-whee-kir-kir-kir.”

2012 MCTFA

Silver Spring Stage presented the first act of Brian Friel’s Lovers, subtitled Winners, as well as Audrey Cefaly’s original work Stuck at the 2012 Maryland one-act festival, under the auspices of MCTFA.

ready for tech-inThe festival was held at the home of The Newtowne Players, the Three Notch Theatre in Lexington Park. It’s an interesting repurposed space, formerly a public library, in service as a theater for only the past half dozen years. There’s no enclosed tech booth, so you’re really better off calling the show from the deck (unless you want everyone to hear that a cue is coming up). I’ll know better next time. The playing space is a two-sided thrust with audience seating in a nice arc around it.

Over the course of Saturday, we had to contend with noise for the nearby naval air station only once. Jet flyers screaming overhead, scaring the terrapins, as my late navigator friend Jim might say.

The adjudicators were quite generous to the Stage, tapping both shows (along with two others) to move on to the combined festival for and new and published works to be held in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in April.

Funniest light cue ever: Montgomery Playhouse’s Pillow Talk.

(Not me)

Oh. My.

Geoffrey K. Pullum has had enough.

No, what I discovered a year ago was that what displeased me the most was dopiness. Asininity, dim-wittedness, doltishness, dullness, dumbness, foolishness, idiocy, nescience, witlessness, pig-ignorance, senselessness, stupidity, — to capture it in a word, the kind of sheer knuckle-dragging moronic lack-wittedness that makes you think you would rather be listening to Vogon poetry.

What I discovered about myself was that the pain of seeing the dopey things posted by some commenters (not you) outweighed all the pleasure of doing the blogging.

Equivocation

Bill Cain’s play is an accomplished piece of, shall we call it, imagined history. We know that William Shakespeare (however he really spelled his name) spun his plays (especially this histories) to suit the times: the last of the Tudors, the first of the English Stuarts, the unresolved religious conflicts. Cain asks, what if Shakespeare were more directly involved in contemporary political events than the annals of 400 years have revealed? What if a royal commission, objectified on stage by a red sack of money that is tossed from player to player like someone’s still-beating heart, overlay a complex political conspiracy and counter-conspiracy? His answer is an intriguing piece of theater with a wide sweep of echoes and allusions, ranging from The Parallax View by Alan Pakula, to The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard, to Shakespeare’s own Murder of Gonzago and Porter scene.

Indeed, the script is full of nuggets that tickle the fancies of the Shakespearean aficionados among us. It’s a little surprising that this production, a remount of the 2009 Oregon Shakespeare Festival premiere, is presented on Maine Avenue rather than father north along Seventh Street. The ensemble cast has had the time to fine-tune some wonderful characterizations, first among them Jonathan Haugen’s gimpy-legged government official, Robert Cecil. A powerful man, used to getting his way, Cecil can silence objections with nothing more than a “sst.” Richard Elmore’s irascible Richard Burbage and John Tufts’ comic turn as James VI/I are also quite fine.

As the play slips back and forth through flashback and theatrical “reconstruction” of the same events, one of the characters directly asks us, “A ‘true history.’ How could there be anything true about a play?” Cain’s answer may lie in my favorite definition of a myth: not a word of it is true, and every word of it is true. Perhaps the same can be said both of Cain’s piece and the historical record of the events that sparked it, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

  • Equivocation, by Bill Cain, directed by Bill Rauch, Arena Stage Kreeger Theatre, Washington