Author: David Gorsline

Philadelphia getaway

In the winter holiday break, I Amtraked up to Philadelphia to take in the Barnes Foundation (underwhelming: the pictures can’t breathe) and reacquaint myself with the Duchamp room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And to be a bit of a transit flâneur.

my ridemore ridesChanging plans at the last minute, I staked out a loop with the Market-Frankford line1 (heavy rail), the 102 line toward Sharon Hill (light rail/streetcar), and the Wawa line (commuter rail2). The interchange at Clifton-Aldan is apparently an afterthought, as there is no streetcar platform and the operator warned me to look out for cars passing the streetcar on the right. Here’s two shots of the 101/102 rolling stock at 69th Street.

finally cameTo get to the Museum of Art, I took my old beloved rattletrap subway-surface line3 to 22nd Street to catch a bus up to Fairmount Avenue.

mini machinetailor shop windowIn the vicinity of my hotel, I spotted a fun tailor shop window,

bays and stairsand a lovely fire escape.

first bodega catAnd I photographed my first bodega cat! This is Chaucer, mascot of Book Corner, for the benefit of Friends of the Free Library. I found a Joseph O’Neill that I’d been casually looking for.

1SEPTA is rebranding the subway and light rail lines, but apart from colors on the signage, nothing is carrying the new designations.

2Somewhat confusingly called “regional rail” by SEPTA. Philadelphia’s gonna Philadelphia.

3The subway-surface would drop me right at the corner of Chestnut Street for Grad Towers. It’s not as rattly as I remember.

Meterstones, 2024

Small accomplishments during the year, not otherwise accounted for. Not major milestones, but bigger than inchstones.

  • I took on new responsibilities for Virginia Native Plant Society.
  • I resumed working in community theater, stage managing Dance Nation for Silver Spring Stage and Kindertransport (in rehearsal) for Rockville Little Theatre. Much waiting in traffic to cross the Cabin John bridge.
  • After trips to three different shops and a returned online order, I found the right replacement halogen bulb for my bedside lamp. After multiple trips to local stores, I bought a $7 (+ shipping) threaded rod from McMaster-Carr and successfully repaired a chair from IKEA (model long discontinued) that I’ve had since I moved into this house.

New venues, 2024

  • Warner Brothers Theatre, National Museum of American History, Washington
  • Cadby Theatre, Chesapeake College, Wye Mills, Md.
  • Old Town Hall, Fairfax, Va.
  • Baltimore Theater Project, Baltimore, Md.
  • Milton Theatre, Studio Theatre, Washington
  • 1057 W. Broad St., Falls Church, Va.
  • Dance Studio, Clarice Smith Center, College Park, Md.
  • Memorial Chapel, University of Maryland, College Park, Md.

Plus multiple venues out-of-town in New York: five jazz clubs big and small, David Geffen Hall, and The Shed.

My year in cities, 2024

Moar travel!

Overnight stays in 2024:

My year in contributions, 2024

It’s a little late in the year for tax-deductible recommendations, but here’s my list anyway. I dropped off one organization that appears to be dormant, and added five new ones.

What organizations are worthy of support? Please give some consideration to this list.

These are the groups and projects to which I gave coin (generally tax-deductible), property, and/or effort in 2024.

The year in review, 2024

I did more than take field trips this year, honest!

The first sentence (more or less) of the first post for the last twelve months:

  • 4 January: And we’re back in the theater!
  • 8 February: I assisted at Elklick Woodlands Natural Area Preserve for a couple of work days.
  • 5 March: We are into the week of dress rehearsals after two 12-hour days of tech work over the weekend.
  • 3 April: Video of my presentation on the Federal Duck Stamp to the Holston Rivers Chapter of Virginia Master Naturalists.
  • 9 May: A very personal piece of metatheater, Amm(i)gone is an extended Moth-style confessional monologue about Adil’s efforts to reconnect with his devout Muslim mother (his ammi) by unconventional means: an (uncompleted) joint project to translate Sophocles’ Antigone into Urdu.
  • 5 June: Ken Rosenthal of Reston’s Walker Nature Center led a birding walk on the Limberlost Trail loop in Shenandoah National Park.
  • 3 July: The Clifton Institute held a second June bioblitz on private property in Rappahannock County, this time on a smaller site (about 50 acres).
  • 3 August: The action was a little slow: we suspect that butterfly numbers are down due to the drought.
  • 6 September: Genevieve Wall led a two-day foray to several sites along the James River in Richmond and environs.
  • 14 October: Another Friday, another butterfly/dragonfly/everything survey with Jim Waggener and his posse, this time to the Julie Metz Wetlands.
  • 6 November: EDGAR. O gods! Who is’t can say, “I am at the worst”?
  • 17 December: Full of stars: It’s only been 100 years since we learned that there are other galaxies out there.

The year in review:

Upcoming: 61

Adjudication assignments for WATCH for 2025 are out. Here’s what’s on my plate:

  • Simon, Rumors
  • Dahl/Minchin/Kelly, Matilda the Musical
  • Burnett/Simon/Norman, The Secret Garden
  • Shue, The Foreigner
  • Peter Shaffer, Black Comedy
  • Wilder, Our Town

And three TBDs.

Some links: 105

  • Full of stars: It’s only been 100 years since we learned that there are other galaxies out there.
  • Ooh, I’ll have to root around in my botany glossary: “You scalar implicature!”
  • MLM mind games:

    They will often try to get you to accompany them to a conference or other gathering where you will be surrounded by people who are just as eager to tell you how successful and happy they are while complimenting you for being smart enough to sense the opportunity.

    I can confirm, from personal experience, a version of this practice.

And for the DOGEs in the back:

Summer, 1976

David Auburn’s Summer, 1976 is a gleaming little gem of a two-hander for D.C. fan favorites Kate Eastwood Norris (as Diana) and Holly Twyford (as Alice). Auburn returns to life in the academic sphere, as explored by his Proof, this time with Alice as a visibly bored faculty wife and Diana as an artist, visibly blocked but not so visibly frustrated and self-defeating. These two unhappy women connect, through their six-year-old daughters, for a life’s moment in the titular summer.

The story unfolds largely in narration directly to the audience, Alice and Diana speaking in turn (and also jumping into the roles of their daughters and Alice’s husband from time to time). The effect is that the speaker gives us a window into what she’s thinking without the need to unspool a full dialogue scene—at least when she’s not describing a dream or fantasy to be abruptly yanked out from under us, or when she hasn’t deceived herself. And it allows her to speculate/presume what her partner is thinking and feeling—likewise not always a reliable read.

All that said, the play is a comedy, with betrayals and reversals and reveals—and a reunion with a wasp’s stinger of a coda.

  • Summer, 1976, by David Auburn, directed by Vivienne Benesch, Studio Theatre Milton Theatre, Washington

A meditation for November

Whenever a person’s lack of shame offends you, you should immediately ask yourself: “So is it possible for there to be no shameless people in the world?” It isn’t, and you should therefore stop demanding the impossible. He’s just one of those shameless people who must necessarily exist in the world. You should keep the same thought readily available also for when you’re faced with devious and untrustworthy people, and people who are flawed in any way. As soon as you remind yourself that it’s impossible for such people not to exist, you’ll be kinder toward each and every one of them. It’s also helpful immediately to consider what virtue nature has granted us human beings to deal with any offense—gentleness, for instance, to counter discourteous people, and other ways to counter others. Generally speaking, you can get someone who’s gone astray to mend his ways—and whatever his wrong, a wrongdoer is missing his mark and has gone astray. Besides, have you been harmed in any way? You’ll find that none of the people who make you lose your temper has done anything that might affect your mind for the worse; and outside of the mind there’s nothing that is truly detrimental or harmful for you. Moreover, what is unusual or surprising about an uneducated man doing uneducated things? It’s worth considering whether you ought rather to blame yourself for failing to foresee that he would transgress in this way.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 9.42, trans. Robin Waterfield

Babbitt

Matthew Broderick leads a successful, if not always faithful, adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s Jazz age satire. The framing device of ensemble members reading The Very Book in a public library of today, backed up by the dramaturg’s note, encourages audiences to engage with this hundred-year-old masterpiece, and that’s to the good.

While George Babbitt’s journey—from Republican conformity to soft-core rebellion, returning to the arms of the Good Citizens League (strong hints of It Can’t Happen Here in this adaptation)—is preserved, the dialogue is modernized, stripping out nearly all of the jargon and colloquialisms of the 1920s. This sweetening is probably also a good idea, as some of Lewis’s passages would be incomprehensible as spoken word today.1 Babbitt does retain an occasional “Zowie!” or “That’s the stuff!”

Any adaptation must condense, consolidate, and excise, but I do miss the excursion to the realtors’ (S.A.R.E.B.) convention in Monarch. The unmitigated, vacant boosterism of George Babbitt and his clan is what makes him so endearing, or insufferable, as you will.

In the final break with Tanis, the roles are reversed from the book to the stage, for some reason.

Broderick brings a nice physicality to the role. In the first act, his George is so buttoned-up that his wildest gestures wouldn’t collide with the walls of a telephone booth.2 Encouraged to sit on a floor cushion in Tanis’s flat, George makes heavy weather of getting down. Don’t worry, George loosens up and even cuts a rug in the second act. Vocally, Broderick has chosen a dweeby squeak somewhere in the neighborhood of Wally Cox. It’s funny, but blustering George needs a rumbly baritone.

First among the ensemble of seven is Matt McGrath, handling the equally odious Charley McKelvey and his antagonist Seneca Doane.

1Check out the parody (?) Prince Albert Tobacco ad from Chapter VIII, spoken of with reverence by poetaster Chum Frink.

2Remember those?

  • Babbitt, by Joe DiPietro, adapted from the novel by Sinclair Lewis, directed by Christopher Ashley, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Harman Hall, Washington

File this note under ICYMI, as the show closed last weekend.