The Good Woman of Setzuan

What an apt commodity has Bertolt Brecht charged his character Wong with selling, for Wong is a seller of water, a commodity as free as the falling rain yet one of the most precious economic commodities. Wong (or Wang, in my editions) (nimbly played by Ashley Ivey) serves as narrator for this parable of Shen Te, a lowly prostitute who receives a gift from the gods because she is the one good person they can find. But alack, Shen Te must invent an alter ego for herself, a ruthless businessman named Shui Ta, in order to hold on to her gifts so that she can remain good.

Constellation Theatre Company puts its stamp on the play with music and dance interludes. The play is designed to be interrupted by fourth-wall-breaking monologues and other bits of presentational, anti-realistic theater. Costumes (designed by Yvette M. Ryan) and makeup are particularly effective, especially for the three gods (Catherine Deadman, John Geoffrion, and Kenny Littlejohn) who descend to earth in search of a good person. Katie Atkinson, as Shen Te/Shui Ta, does not give us two characters that are completely physically distinct from one another, but she shines in a passage that calls for her to change her costume and makeup before our eyes: Das Lied von der Wehrlosigkeit der Götter und Guten (“The Song of the Defenselessness of the Gods and the Good People” in the Manheim translation), which repeats the haunting line, “Why don’t the gods do the buying and selling?” (in the Bentley translation). The final ascension of the gods, returning to heaven having been defeated by the world’s exigencies, in a swirl of smoke and clangor of gongs, is also very fine.

Upcoming: 10

My favorite band of the late 90s, Portishead, has reformed and has a CD to be released later this month. Jon Pareles gives a preview:

Third is more polymorphous, more extreme, more propulsive and often harsher than previous Portishead albums. Instead of mellowing with age or returning to a signature sound, the band has fractured and splintered that sound, plunging even deeper into loneliness and anxiety.

And lest you think this note betokens any particular musical sophistication on my part, let it be known that I finally tracked down a bit of high school era power-pop that’s been rattling in my head for months. It turns out to be “Go All the Way,” by Raspberries, an early 70s band from Cleveland fronted by Eric Carmen.

Summer thunder

The boys I went to school with used to be able to identify every car as it passed by: Thomas Flyer, Firestone-Columbus, Stevens Duryea, Rambler, Winton, White Steamer, etc. I never could. The only car I was really interested in was one that the Get-Ready Man, as we called him, rode around town in: a big Red Devil with a door in the back. The Get-Ready Man was a lank unkempt elderly gentleman with wild eyes and a deep voice who used to go about shouting at people through a megaphone to prepare for the end of the world. “GET READY! GET READ-Y!” he would bellow. “THE WORLLLD IS COMING TO AN END!” His startling exhortations would come up, like summer thunder, at the most unexpected times and in the most surprising places. I remember once during Mantell’s production of “King Lear” at the Colonial Theatre, that the Get-Ready Man added his bawlings to the squealing of Edgar and the ranting of the King and the mouthing of the Fool, rising from somewhere in the balcony to join in. The theatre was in absolute darkness and there were rumblings of thunder and flashes of lightning offstage. Neither father nor I, who were there, ever completely got over the scene [III.iv], which went something like this:

Edgar: Tom’s a-cold.—O, do de, do de, do de!—Bless thee from whirlwinds, star-blasting, and taking… the foul fiend vexes!

(Thunder off.

Lear: What! Have his daughters brought him to this pass?—
Get-Ready Man: Get ready! Get ready!
Edgar: Pillicock sat on Pillicock-hill:—Halloo, halloo, loo, loo!

(Lightning flashes.

Get-Ready Man: The Worllld is com-ing to an End!
Fool: This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen!
Edgar: Take heed o’ the foul fiend: obey thy paren—
Get-Ready Man: Get Rea-dy!
Edgar: Tom’s a-cold!
Get-Ready Man: The Worr-uld is coming to an end!…

They found him finally, and ejected him, still shouting. The Theatre, in our time, has known few such moments.

—James Thurber, “The Car We Had to Push”

Tell me another

Via ArtsJournal: Laurie Anderson talks to John O’Mahony about her new piece, Homeland:

[Anderson] insists there couldn’t be a better time to be a storyteller. “We have an extremely story-savvy government here,” she says. “Take the way George Bush recently retold his Iraq story about the evil dictator and weapons of mass destruction. It went over just fine because it really doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s a true story. It matters whether it’s a good story, with evil people and a plot. And then, with Hillary and Barack Obama, you have another wonderful story. It doesn’t matter who wins, because kids and young people have gotten interested in the story and they will be different as a result. And, given that it’s an election year and Bush will be leaving, we’ll soon move on to an entirely new story. America is a good place for stories”.

Comma chameleon

We’re doing our first complete run of the show off book this evening. Ordinarily, eleven days before opening, the books would be long gone, but there are a lot of words in this show, and despite early cuts (disposing of the expository bits between Kent and the Gentleman that I call the “Previously on Hill Street Blues…” scenes) we’re still making small trims in an effort to keep the running time under three hours.

I have a nice little scene nearly at the top of the show, where France is betrothed to Cordelia because Burgundy won’t have her now that Lear has disinherited her. And then I get to hang out and finish reading the last two Lemony Snickets until well into the second half, where I am responsible for carrying off maimed or dead bodies and bringing in bad news (the British armies are moving against France, Goneril has poisoned her sister and then stabbed herself—did I need to preface this with a spoiler alert?)

This is my first work with Cedar Lane Stage, which rehearses and performs at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church in Chevy Chase, Md. The CLUUC campus is a lovely, leafy collection of buildings on a hillside sloping down to Rock Creek, with the Beltway just beyond. As with most church buildings, there are a number of other groups using the space at the same time—a woodwind choir rehearsal, an AA meeting. All last week it was a little tricky to stay focused because someone was rehearsing selections from Carmina Burana. Lear is howling at the thunderstorm while the organ upstairs is blasting out the reprise of “O Fortuna.” It kinda fits.

(Actually, King Lear‘s familiarity makes for lots of mashups. There is a short story by James Thurber that I will have to track down that puts together a radio evangelist with one of Edgar’s “mad Tom” scenes, and the killing of Oswald swirls into the mix at the end of the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus.”)

We perform in the church auditorium. There is a set of steps leading up to a shallow stage, but in this production, as in most CLS shows, most of the action is on the floor of the auditorium, with audience seating on three sides. By far the most distinctive feature of the space are the floor-to-ceiling windows on two walls. Nice views of the surrounding woods, but it means that any lighting effects are completely lost on matinee performances, and we’re doing two of them.

I’m working again with Tom (Gloucester) and Dan (Kent). I’ve seen good work in the past from David (Fool) and Kelli (Regan), and I’m seeing more of it here. Everyone else is new to me, including our Lou (Lear). This is my first time working with director Ed. Ed is a stickler for punctuation (and what Shakespearean isn’t?), hence his nickname and the title of this post, thanks to Brett (Albany).

On behalf of H.M. Government

Noël Coward acted covertly on behalf of the British government in the early years of World War II. Coward kept mum about his involvement, but the recent publication of his letters, with commentary by Barry Day, has “pulled a fair amount of the covert nitty-gritty out of the archival murk,” as Stephen Koch writes.

Being Noël Coward, he also partied—notably with the recently abdicated pro-Nazi Duke of Windsor and his more intelligent and even more pro-Nazi wife. The Windsors may have looked like Coward’s type, but Coward had always privately despised the former king. In 1936, he wrote, “I’ve known for years that he had a common mind and liked second-rate people, and I am sure it is a good thing for England that he abdicated.”

By 1940, the Windsors had graduated from mediocrity into real menace. One factor in the abdication had been that the prime minister had been told, reliably, that the woman inflaming the king’s already fascistic sentiments was a friend of Ribbentrop and the next thing to a Nazi agent. After the abdication, the Windsors were married in the residence of a Nazi collaborator. As the Battle of Britain approached, British intelligence believed—correctly—that Hitler, assisted by Ribbentrop, planned to restore the duke to the throne as a quisling monarch. Worst of all, intelligence suspected that the couple may have been complicit in this treachery….

We can only speculate whether Coward was keeping unofficial tabs on the couple.

At the park: 14

Eight nests active, but no hatch activity yet. A couple of the boxes are due. Along with my pollen allergy, swallows have arrived in the area: we saw all three common species. Common Yellowthroat (Geothlypis trichas) and Blue-gray Gnatcatcher (Polioptila caerulea) were audible, Paul ID’d a Pine Warbler (Dendroica pinus), and Myra saw a lifer Winter Wren (Troglodytes troglodytes).

under the surfaceThis Common Snapping Turtle (Chelydra serpentina) popped an eye out of the water to check me out while I was pulling out my point-and-shoot, then dropped back down below the surface when he’d decided that I wasn’t worth bothering with. The shell is about 10 inches across the long dimension.

High Lonesome

The afternoon’s two pieces from the company repertory, George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments and Choo-San Goh’s Fives serve as reminders that some rules are to be broken. In Fives, it’s the rule that dancing must be set to music, for some of the most interesting passages come early in the piece when the ten ballerinas have nothing to sync with but themselves and their own breathing. Similarly, Balanchine achieves some stunning effects even when his dancers are motionless, in preparation. Jason Hartley’s dives to the floor in the “Melancholic” variation belie the truism that ballet is about pretending that gravity doesn’t exist, and Jared Nelson gives us a buttery-smooth “Phlegmatic” variation.

Hartley’s floor-tumbling prowess also works well for him in Trey McIntyre’s semi-autobiographical High Lonesome, set to music by Beck, a series of sketches of family dysfunction. Jade Payette, in the kid sister role, catches some serious air.

  • High Lonesome, Washington Ballet, Washington

I knew her when

60s spandex stunner Yvonne Craig—Batgirl, alter ego of Barbara Gordon, daughter to Police Commissioner Gordon—played by Neil Hamilton: Craig and Hamilton appeared as father and stepdaughter in a 1958 episode of Perry Mason titled “The Case of the Lazy Lover.” And according to the IMDB, while Hamiliton played seven different roles in Perry Mason eps across eight seasons, Craig played five characters (Linda Sue, Aphrodite, Myrna, Hazel, and Elspeth) in six installments of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis across four seasons.

Spring green

Good botany links this past couple of weeks.

First, Anne-Marie at Pondering Pikaia explains the difference between two families of succulents in You Can’t Milk a Cactus.

Second, at Botany Photo of the Day, guest bloggers Connor Fitzpatrick, Hannes Dempewolf, and Paul Bordoni promote the Global Facilitation Unit for Underutilized Species with reports on four examples: emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccon), laurel (Laurus nobilis), maya nut (Brosimum alicastrum), and sea buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides). The GFU’s mission is to “Promote and facilitate the sustainable deployment of underutilized plant species to increase food security and alleviate poverty among the rural and urban poor.”