Author: David Gorsline

All My Sons: an update: 1

We did a stumble-through of Act I of All My Sons outdoors in the Saturday sun, which is appropriate as that act takes place on a hot weekend morning. Then we moved indoors to get through most of Act II. I/we haven’t worked much on the top of Act III, which is actually OK because I haven’t learned the words yet.

One of the advantages of working with Providence is that the company has generous access to the performance space in the James Lee Community Center for rehearsals and set building. Indeed, we start building set, in place, next weekend, five weeks in advance of opening. Every performance space has its good points and bad. The stage at the Lee is a conventional proscenium, I’m guessing twenty feet by fifteen; but the wing space is extremely shallow (about three to four feet) and there is no fly space: all the curtains only travel. Dressing and green rooms are off left; since the white cyc lies nearly flat against the upstage wall, I don’t yet know how actors get into place for stage right entrances. Something else I noticed: there’s no fire curtain.

At the park: 26

New cattail growth is ankle-high, and the understory in the forest is starting to green up. We had our first box hatch out on Friday (according to reports from a photographer), and the hen and thirteen ducklings put on a show skittering about the main pond this morning. Unfortunately, we’ve also had our first nest failure, as box #3 has been predated and the remaining two eggs abandoned. Common Yellowthroats and American Coots made their first appearance this week; Blue-Gray Gnatcatchers were numerous. Myra found a Meadow Vole (Microtus pennsylvanicus) feeding by the boardwalk.

In past weeks, at least one Virginia Rail (Rallus limicola) has been audible and fleetingly visible, and a passing-through Sora (Pozana carolina) was reported the week of March 29. Jennifer spotted a Beaver on that trip, too. Common Snipe and Great Egrets have also arrived.

No applicable category

Very nice profile of sui generis cartoonist Lynda Barry by Christopher Borrelli for the Chicago Tribune. The richest praise is from fellow cartoonist Chris Ware:

“…just as Charles Schultz created the first sympathetic cartoon character in Charlie Brown, Lynda was the first cartoonist to write fiction from the inside out—she trusted herself to close her eyes and dive down within herself and see what she came up with. We’d still be trying to find ways into stories with pictures if she hadn’t.”

I read with dismay that Barry has discontinued her weekly Ernie Pook’s Comeek, but then again the local free weekly stopped running decent cartoons before that.

Antebellum

A young and naive Jewish woman of Atlanta, looking forward to seeing the world premiere of Gone with the Wind with her husband, is accosted by a mysterious black woman; while the commandant of a mid-1930s German prison camp maintains a peculiar relationship with one of his black prisoners: the links between these two stories drive the action of Robert O’Hara’s play, one that is not altogether satisfying and at times overcome by didacticism. The connection that is eventually revealed between two of the characters is not backed up by some necessary physical and character choices. On the positive side of the ledger, each of the cast of five delivers committed performances in challenging roles that require, by turns, physical intimacy and vulnerability and raging power.

  • Antebellum, by Robert O’Hara, directed by Chay Yew, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

So, what’s your next show?

Board members and play selection committees, consider Terry Teachout’s Top 15 pre-1970 (pre-Company) American musical comedies.

As far as most theatergoers are concerned, modern musical comedy starts with Oklahoma! [Rogers and Hammerstein, 1943] It’s effective to the point of infallibility—even amateurs can make it work—though the 1955 wide-screen film version is more than a little bit overblown. If you know only the movie, you’ll be surprised by how much more touching Oklahoma! is on stage.

Midmost

Midmost of the black-soiled Iowa plain, watered only by a shallow and insignificant creek, the city of Nautilus bakes and rattles and glistens. For hundreds of miles the tall corn springs in a jungle of undeviating rows, and the stranger who sweatily trudges the corn-walled roads is lost and nervous with the sense of merciless growth.

Nautilus is to Zenith what Zenith is to Chicago.

With seventy thousand people, it is a smaller Zenith but no less brisk. There is one large hotel to compete with the dozen in Zenith, but that one is as busy and standardized and frenziedly modern as its owner can make it. The only authentic difference between Nautilus and Zenith is that in both cases all the streets look alike but in Nautilus they do not look alike for so many miles.

—Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith, chap. 19

An observation

So every evening I walk down New York Avenue to my subway station, and I see the queue of travelers with their rollage waiting for the BoltBus or the Megabus. These days the buses are using the parking lot that replaced the old convention center as a loading area. There is a cheap art space that the city set up on the site to try to relieve the double square block of pavement, with some inconsequential pavillions, and these provide a scrap of shelter for the waiting riders. And I thought, wouldn’t it be a great idea to provide a permanent structure, something like a bus depot, for these guys? And then I realized that the old Greyhound bus terminal is right across 11th Street N.W.

At the park: 24

When I was a kid, attending Saturday morning training to be confirmed in the faith as a Lutheran, we would take a break at mid-morning. The second year of this training was led by the pastor of this brassbound Missouri Synod congregation (someone else took the first year), and it was held on the site of the new church that was being built, farther out in the suburbs. (The new church building, which dwarfed the old building on Peach Orchard Avenue in Oakwood, was Orwellistically known as “the chapel.”) So pastor’s idea of taking a break was for us kids to scour the fields around the building site looking for small stones that would get in the way of groundskeeping. This was known, without euphemism, as “picking rock.”

I never finished confirmation, but how much this exercise had to do with my decision is hard to say.

Anyway, now I am an adult, and what do I do with my Sunday mornings, “for fun”? Pick trash out of the stream floodplain, and maybe look at some birds along the way.

20 minutes of workWe had a full team this morning, so I sent Myra and Jennifer on up to boxes #6 and #84 while I scrubbed the western bank of Barnyard Run as it opens up into the wetland. I pulled a small shopping bag of stuff out, mostly bottles and cans and broken bits of styrofoam, but also a very weary basketball. A lot of this is litter by thoughtless people, but much of it also is just escaped rubbish—an animal tears open a trash bag, for instance—from the housing subdivisions along South Kings Highway that finds its way downstream.

Not much new happening in the boxes yet: just #7, which is now incubating. Myra found a couple of Brown Thrashers and the first Tree Swallows of the season.

Maryland wetlands

Our second and final field trip for class took us to southern Maryland to two wetlands, one salt and one fresh.

First stop was at a saltmarsh on St. George Island in St. Mary’s County. As Gary demonstrated by digging a sample, there’s no true mineral soil layer here, just an O horizon in two layers of decomposition, the upper oxygenated and the lower a bluish anoxic layer (up to 5 feet thick). As many of us found to our pain, one’s usual instincts for walking through a marsh don’t apply here. Lesson learned: if you see water, don’t step there, even if you’re wearing wellies.

saltmarshThe island is squeezed between the Potomac River to the southwest and the St. Mary’s River to the northeast. The view of this drainage inlet is from the St. Mary’s side of the island. The mats of vegetation are Saltmeadow Cordgrass (Spartina patens) and Smooth Cordgrass (S. alterniflora).

A few Osprey were in attendance. At our staging area at Piney Point, I picked up my lifer Long-tailed Duck (Clangula hyemalis) in a group of about four, in various stages of plumage transition.

kneesiesWe then crossed over the Maryland peninsula to Calvert County and the Battle Creek Cypress Swamp, site of the only stand of Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum) in Maryland west of the Chesapeake Bay and the northernmost limit of this species’ natural range. This is a beautiful little preserve of only 100 acres.