HAMLET. Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. ‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be play’d on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.
Act III, sc. ii
Author: David Gorsline
At the park: 31
Last weekend, I did a spot check of the last two nest boxes, and was gratified that both were successful. Box #2 (at left) hatched out eight Hooded Merganser eggs, and box #68 (at right) hatched eight Wood Duck eggs, with one unhatched. For the season, our totals are down a little bit from last year, which had seen a big spike in Wood Duck activity. In 2009, we had four Hooded Merganser nests, three of which hatched out: 39 eggs laid, 29 hatched. We had five Wood Duck nests, all of which hatched out: 61 eggs laid, 59 hatched. Park staffer Dave Lawlor reports one successful nest in the boxes he is monitoring, with nine baby mergs.
The park is a green blast of primary production. Bird activity is subsiding, with only one lazy egret to accent the landscape. I saw a family of Mallards; a Red-shouldered Hawk was screaming an important message to someone. Chris IDs the large-leaved plants in the right image as Spatterdock (Nuphar lutea).
Set off by the green is the bright orange of a drift of Dodder (Cuscuta spp.), a parasitic vine that I find absolutely fascinating.
Some links: 38
Siteworx is co-sponsoring one of the D.C. events in support of the U.N. children’s health initiative against malaria, Nothing But Nets.
All My Sons: a coda
From the TMN archives: Kevin Guilfoyle’s “Surrey with the Syringe on Top,” concerning the scandal in the swirl of disclosures that Great American playwrights had been doping:
[Arthur] Miller is quick to point out that it wasn’t always this way, and when the conversation turns to his early days, he becomes nostalgic. You should have seen me when I was writing Death of a Salesman. I had pecs the size of Iroquois saddlebags and my glutes were so rock-hard I could have sat on Joe McCarthy’s head and popped it like a rotten beet.’
All My Sons: a mystery
My third-act scene regularly generated chuckles, and I’m not sure why. I did take the scene rather briskly, and since it comes on the heels of the wrenching fight scene between Chris and Joe, perhaps some of the audience were looking for a release. Leta says that we’re willing to find humor in one’s admitted hypocrisy, but I’m not quite buying it. Here’s the passage (w/o stage directions) that almost always got a laugh:
JIM. What’d Joe do, tell him?
MOTHER. Tell him what?
JIM. Don’t be afraid, Kate, I know. I’ve always known.
MOTHER. How?
JIM. It occurred to me a long time ago.
MOTHER. I always had the feeling that in the back of his head, Chris… almost knew. I didn’t think it would be such a shock.
JIM. Chris would never know how to live with a thing like that. It takes a certain talent… for lying. You have it, and I do. But not him.
—Arthur Miller, All My Sons, Act III
Maybe it’s because I mislearned the penultimate sentence as “You have it, and I have it.”?
Fever/Dream
Fever/Dream is a manic comedy of ups and downs on the corporate ladder. In a way, the fortunes of its protagonist Segis (Daniel Eichner) reflect the wild swings of stock market prices and corporate health, as we say, In This Economy.
Segis, a customer service drudge literally chained to his desk (yes), one day is lifted by his hitherto unacknowledged father to a different desk, one in the executive suite. How he squanders that opportunity and falls back into his previous life (as if the changes were nothing but a dream), then finds a new way to the top is the engine of the play’s narrative. Playwright Sheila Callaghan has brought forward a four-century-old classic by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La Vida es Sueño (Life is a Dream) and given it new life, while retaining most of its structure and themes—suppression of a child, succession to empire. The current play works as a corporate spoof, eager to let us see its own artifice, and as such brings to mind a meld of Urinetown, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, and classical soliloquizing drama.
An ensemble of cubicle drones and bean counters, choreographed by Meisha Bosma, keep the scene transitions snappy. A massive set piece, running down right to up left, looking like a Madison Avenue skyscraper lying on its side, serves as projection screen for the vlogging chorus, and with its five doors, it provides the requisite insides and outsides. This high-rise screen also backdrops a juddering Bloomberg ticker and an early expository text message exchange between corporate plotters Stella Strong and Aston Marton (the always welcome Kate Eastwood Norris and KenYatta Rogers). Scenes set in Segis’s call center dungeon are less successful, as the lowering of the stage floor creates sightline problems for us in the orchestra.
In a parallel plot, Kimberly Gilbert’s Rose seeks the lover who has forsaken her, and she is accompanied in her quest by the dweeby figure of Claire, played by Jessica Francis Dukes. Known to us for her straight roles, Dukes’s superb turn as a comic dork is a revelation.
- Fever/Dream, by Sheila Callaghan, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington
Treasure
Thomas Kinkade does a Tsukahara over the carcharhinid.
Rock ‘n’ Roll
Headbanging intellectuals! Joy Zinoman and her team bring to life Stoppard’s retrospective look at the last decades of Communism in Czechoslovakia, filtered through a haze of pot smoke and scored by the popular music of the time. Her coup is the casting of Stafford Clark-Price as the Czech dissident Jan, a stand-in for the playwright; Clark-Price’s uncanny resemblance to Sir Tom is matched by a nuanced performance, especially touching when emotions force a choked cry out of Jan. Also noteworthy is Lawrence Redmond’s scene as the flinty interior minister of this once-satellite of the Soviets.
Seeing the show late in the run, we noted an uncharacteristically squeaky floor on the set, as well as some perplexing costume and makeup choices. But the key challenges of this script rich in language (think of how many of Stoppard’s stories begin with a language lesson, often a translation) and steeped in Socialist history are met by this production, and the text’s burdens borne lightly.
- Rock ‘n’ Roll, by Tom Stoppard, directed by Joy Zinoman, The Studio Theatre, Washington
All My Sons: a gloss
MOTHER [KATE]. And now you’re going to listen to me, George. You had big principles, Eagle Scouts the three of you; so now I got a tree, and this one (Indicating CHRIS) when the weather gets bad he can’t stand on his feet; and that big dope, (Pointing to LYDIA’s [and FRANK’s] house) next door who never reads anything but Andy Gump has three children and his house paid off. Stop being a philosopher, and look after yourself.
—Arthur Miller, All My Sons, Act II
Pretty cool
Lawrence M. Hanks et al. have captured on video a Common Raven (Corvus corax) in Death Valley NP that has learned how to turn on a campground water spigot to get a drink.
On deck: 2
I rotated a couple of volumes to a backlog shelf to make room for some new fiction coming in. I’m reading my way through the Updike Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy about as fast as he published them. The Queneau is a re-read: someone pointed out that even though it’s published as a novel, it’s laid out like a play, or perhaps a screenplay, so I’m wondering whether it’s actually stageworthy.
All My Sons: an update: 3
So we had a solid opening weekend and now is the time of cleaning costumes. Although I have to deal with my own socks, we otherwise have the luxury with the Players of a team responsible for laundering and dry cleaning everything else. (Though I don’t know how Tina is going to deal with the suspenders that are sewn onto my suit pants.)
I’ve been sleeping well, but I felt the need for a power doze offstage during the end of Act I. My blood sugar just falls off the table mid-afternoon, I guess. In the James Lee, there are two more or less comfortable places to hang out between scenes: the interior loading dock area, just offstage left, furnished with a few chairs and a scary second-hand couch; and the makeup room downstairs, which usually has the outside door open for a breeze. Where you don’t want to be, at least in the summer, is stage right, in the shallow wing space with hardly anything to sit on; or downstairs in “the hole,” the combination lumber storage and dressing area. The hole is also where the dimmer packs for the lighting equipment are. The very hot dimmer packs.
The rest of this character’s accoutrements are fun, too. I have a tight-fitting pair of Harry Truman spectacles scrounged from somewhere: good thing that I don’t have to read anything through them, because they’re bifocals with a strong reading correction. And Beth has become my bow tie wrangler—just one of her jobs along with hair and makeup.
Soldiers Delight
For the holiday, I took a run up I-95 to Soldiers Delight Natural Environment Area, northwest of Baltimore, for a nature stroll.
Stepping on to the trail at the visitors center, in a trice I lost the trail and wandered on to an interpretive trail still under development. The downed trees across the trail and the ticks that tried to hitch a ride on my legs should have been a clue. I had to double back and walk back on the verge of Deer Park Road, and I was caught in a passing rain shower, for my sins.
I had better luck following the trails on the east side of Deer Park Road. Nevertheless, had I brought my hiking boots instead of my birding shoes, I would have been glad of the added support. Birdlife included lots of Field Sparrows and Eastern Towhees and a plus-sized Blue-gray Gnatcatcher; best sighting for the trip was a small group of Cedar Waxings (Bombycilla cedrorum). Heard a possible chat and Pine Warbler.
Soldiers Delight is underlaid by serpentine rock, which yields thin soils short on nutrients and long on toxic metals like chromium, so the plant communities are distinctive, as well as the animals that depend on them. Most of the wildflowers will have to wait until my ID skills improve, but here I’m pretty sure that we are looking at Serpentine Chickweed, a subspecies of Cerastium arvense, found in one of the grassland areas.
In the woods, I found a Little Wood-Satyr (Megisto cymela), described as abundant in my field guides but nevertheless new for me.
All My Sons: an update: 2
Yesterday evening we did our first full tech run with all elements present—well, nearly so, since we didn’t have either of the two boys who are doubling Bert. I have a rather natty seersucker suit for a costume (and it’s apparently a venerable piece among the Players); my project for the weekend is learning how to tie my bow tie. I need to get my hair trimmed: I will run up to my salon in Bethesda on Tuesday at lunch, a day when I really don’t have the slack to spare. Every tech week has its special challenge, and this one’s turns out to be dealing with Chip and his dancing all over the deck taking publicity pictures while the scene is running. Beth is pushing against my instincts for what sort of colors my scene in Act 3 should have. The principals are doing great work. It’ll be a pretty good show.
Curling flower spaces
Via kottke.org, a surprisingly hard book quiz: identify the title from its Amazon.com Statistically Improbable Phrases. I scored only 12 (plus one near miss) out of 69 books (20th century, mostly originally in English, everything from high art to genre fiction), and I’m not telling you the ones I missed that I should have recognized. Here’s one of the easier ones: “inner party, three superstates, chinless man, chocolate ration, varicose ulcer.” I should have remembered this one, but it’s been a while since I read the book: “plait round, plaited cord, extra button.”