Author: David Gorsline

Clybourne Park: an update: 2

So we closed the show yesterday afternoon, and I’m pleased, overall, with the way it went. (There’s always something that you wish could have been better. Like I wish that I’d had a coach to help me fine-tune the brief bit of stage combat.)

Every so often I use music as a way to get into the world of a character. (My friend Lisa suggested this trick a long time ago.) Now, the little Bobby McFerrin riff that Roger used as transition music at the top of Act 2 was all I needed to help me find Tom Driscoll. But for the well-meaning, somewhat feckless, gentle parish priest Rev. Jim in Act 1, I needed a complete playlist. Some of this music I already had on hand, and some was newly-purchased. Here it is, Jim’s Jam, all songs pre-1959 as far as I can tell:

  • Perry Como, “Accentuate the Positive”
  • Lawrence Welk orchestra, “Bubbles in the Wine”
  • Patsy Cline, “Walkin’ after Midnight”
  • Glenn Miller orchestra, “(I’ve Got a Gal in) Kalamazoo”
  • Mel Tormé, “Moonlight in Vermont”
  • Lawrence Welk orchestra, “Beer Barrel Polka”
  • Perry Como, “May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You”
  • Mantovani orchestra, “Charmaine”
  • Patti Page, “Old Cape Cod”
  • Glenn Miller orchestra, “A String of Pearls”
  • Perry Como, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands”
  • Lawrence Welk orchestra, “Village Tavern Polka”

Mantovani’s version of a 1926 waltz by Rapée and Pollack is most everyone’s idea of soul-evacuating elevator music. (I remember an ironic modern dance troupe performance from about 20 years ago, set on this song, that consisted of the entire company queueing up as if at the DMV.) But for Jim, the lush, pillowy arrangement is pure bliss, his idea of what God’s grace must feel like. Is that a zither in the mix in the last chords? Plus, you can do t’ai chi stretches to it.

Jim and Judy danced to Glenn Miller when they were courting.

The Lawrence Welk recordings, all from the pre-TV days, are astonishing. Joyful, energetic, inventive, not slick at all—nothing like the bland music I heard when I was a kid in my grandfather’s living room watching the TV show. I used to worry that I was turning into my mother. Now I should worry that I’m turning into her father.

Blue Mountain summer walk

outstanding in her fieldStephanie Mason led members of her posse on a summer walk in the Blue Mountain area of G. Richard Thompson WMA. This patch is well-known in spring for its ephemerals, trilliums, and orchids, but there’s plenty to see once the trees have leafed out, too. The weather was cool for July, generally overcast, with a bit of a shower towards the end of the day. Not much happening on the butterfly charts.

jewelnot so odoratusSummer wildflowers go for broke in the color department. Pale Jewelweed (Impatiens pallida) on the left and Purple-flowering Raspberry (Rubus odoratus) on the right.

flower and fruitextravagantThimbleweed (Anemone virginiana) on the left, in flower and fruit. And the extravagantly-colored Canada Lily (Lilium canadense) on the right.

The bird checklist for the trip was short, but we had some goodies. Heard and seen Common Raven (Corvus corax), Red-eyed Vireo (Vireo olivaceus), and Acadian Flycatcher (Empidonax virescens). And brief glimpses of Kentucky Warbler (Oporornis formusus) and Cerulean Warbler (Dendroica cerulea).

only to genuslargerBut the theme of this walk turned out to be beetles. Perhaps the cool temps slowed these crawlies down so that we could get good looks. At left, trying to convince you he’s a Milkweed Bug or firefly is a net-winged beetle (Calopteron sp.). We have three species here in the mid-Atlantic. Distinguishing them calls for looking at features like antennomere colors—beyond the quality scope of my image. At right, creeping over my knuckles and trying to stay out of focus, a Larger Elm Leaf Beetle (Moncesta coryli); according to Evans, this is the largest leaf beetle species in North America.

first stopAnd, at the start of the walk, a patch of dogbane with numerous Dogbane Beetles (Chrysochus auratus)—even flashier than Japanese Beetles.

Happy decade

10 years, 2100+ posts. Here’s a random slice: I picked every 80th post from my dashboard.

  • 2 July 2006: We drove out to the Eastern Shore yesterday to say goodbye to Marlie…
  • 5 August 2006: If you’ve ever wondered why all the underground stations of Metro look so much alike, and why you can’t just glance out the window and find where you are from the color of the posts (as in Chicago, for instance), you have the Commission of Fine Arts to thank, in part.
  • 10 November 2006: Daniel Mosquin photographs Mammillaria compressa at the Botanical Gardens of The Huntington.
  • 15 March 2007: Another very complimentary review of the show: this one is from Michael Toscano.
  • 19 June 2007: Thomas the NJ Transit train.
  • 8 October 2007: My entry for Lifehacker’s Show Us What’s in Your Pockets gallery.
  • 21 February 2008: Your vegetable fun fact of the day: tasty Brussels sprouts (Brassica oleracea var. gemmifera) are cultivars of the same species that give us broccoli, cauliflower, collard greens, kohlrabi, kale, and cabbage.
  • 6 June 2008: The last time I was in a museum bookstore, I noticed a DVD series called Art:21.
  • 28 September 2008: As we parked at the Kensington Armory this evening to see a show—it was early dusk, about 7:15—we saw a sizable flock of Chimney Swifts (Chaetura pelagica) swirling about, ready to come into to roost for the evening.
  • 16 January 2009: Potomac Stages and Alyse Kraus report the launch of a new shuttle service along the H Street performing arts corridor.
  • 27 June 2009: Artomatic 2009 once again takes place in an unbuilt-out office building, this time a new structure atop the enlarged Navy Yard Metro station.
  • 9 November 2009: Forum Theatre, recently relocated to Round House Theater’s Silver Spring black box, delivers a commendable production of Tony Kushner’s huge, seven-hour two-part play.
  • 11 March 2010: John Brunner anticipates comment-driven media.
  • 3 July 2010: A recent Earthtalk column summarizes research by Aiello et al. that calls into question the practice of adding triclosan as an antibacterial ingredient to consumer products.
  • 13 November 2010: “MAX TARASOV. Arthur, no one come!”
  • 20 March 2011: Via Via Negativa, a new botanical-entomological citizen science project pops up from U. C. Davis and the U. of Toronto: monitoring of pollinators of Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica and C. caroliniana).
  • 27 July 2011: On my way up and down J Street (so you know I wasn’t in downtown D.C.) to visit Mom I passed this charming brick and terra cotta edifice, which turns out to be the Sacramento Turn Verein, now a German language and culture society.
  • 5 December 2011: I know that it’s nothing fancy, but this neon sign that marks the entrance to a Doggett’s parking garage on 11th Street, N.W., with its helpful/hopeful HERE and jaunty arrow, just makes me happy.
  • 14 April 2012: Mark Z. Danielewski looks for love on OkCupid.
  • 17 September 2012: Mitt Romney and Barack Obama respond to the 14-point questionnaire from ScienceDebate.org and Scientific American.
  • 28 February 2013: Martin Austermuhle updates us on the District’s gradual replacement of its street name signs with new ones that are set in mixed case.
  • 8 September 2013: Alexis Hauk profiles Robb Hunter, armorer and fight choreographer.
  • 21 February 2014: Amanda Rodewald, director of the Conservation Science program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, gives a 10-minute preso on bird-friendly coffee, in a video introduced by Gustave Axelson.
  • 4 August 2014: Allan Savory gives a rubbish science TED talk and gets 2M page views.
  • 26 December 2014: I visited several new spots, without making a big deal of it this year.
  • 13 July 2015: A Festival that gives the design departments an opportunity to shine.
  • 27 December 2015: Birds, habitat, coffee agriculture—and 10 ways of looking at Northern Virginia.

Riverbend Park ferns

stop and talkKit Sheffield led a ferns workshop last Sunday (yes, it’s been a busy week). We looked at a lot of ferns, some plants that don’t look like ferns but are, and of course some plants that aren’t ferns. We started at the Visitor Center, followed the river trail as far as Gladys Island and Carper’s Pond, then looped back via the Nature Center.


fragilebeechySome new ferns for me were Lowland Fragile Fern (Cystopteris protrusa) (left) and Broad Beech Fern (Phegopteris hexagonopera) (very handsome).


A few fern ID tips:

  • The first thing to look for is growth pattern: does this fern grow in a clump, or singly?
  • Look at the bottom pair of leaflets, for instance to distinguish Lady Fern from Hay-scented Fern. This is also useful for applying my “opposite Onoclea” rule.
  • Look for hairs in the axils (armpits) of Cinnamon Fern.

scourSomething that didn’t look like a fern for centuries, but is now considered to be one, based on fossil evidence: Scouringrush (Equisetum hyemale). Unfortunately for the quality of the image, the growth tips of this specimen have been deer-browsed.


rockyOne more fern, Rock Polypody (Polypodium virginianum). Cute name, cute fern!


rampscallionsAnd a not-a-fern: Ramps (Allium tricoccum) are in flower.

Uber

          And yes, sure Shnorhk could
offer bottled water. And yes, more
is under pedal, but this makes little
difference here. Waste of fuel only.
Even if for customer Shnorhk still
pass car ahead.

          Faster is meaning always out-
running time to keep from running
out of time. This passing, though, is
just passing time.

—Mark Z. Danielewski, The Familiar, Volume 2, “Into the Forest,” p. 675

R. Mutt

How else can we explain the fact that there is no physical unity to the work of art? What does a urinal have in common with a work on canvas, or a song, or a building, or an altarpiece? Artworks are dead in themselves, like mere noise or useless stuff. We bring them to life by putting them to work in thought, conversation, and appreciation. They have power in the way that jokes have power, as moves in a game of communication and reflection. Maker and public jointly undertake the work that makes art possible.

—Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, p. 137

Clybourne Park: an update

Dry tech today, so I was off seeing other shows and catching up on the e-mail pile. Our company publicist circulated a questionnaire that she will use to write a preview piece for one of the local online theater mags. Some of Lennie’s questions and my answers:

1. What drew you to Clybourne Park as a director/actor?

When I first saw this show at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company six years ago, I wrote : ‘Have you ever had this experience? A play finishes its first act, and as the house lights come up for intermission, you think, “that act was so polished and well-constructed that it could stand by itself; I could go home now and be happy.” That’s how we felt at the act break…’ That’s how strong this material is.

3. In his 2011 review of Woolly Mammoth’s second production of Clybourne, Peter Marks of the Washington Post said that “the play rummages, if you will, in the eternally unfinished basement of American race relations. It is a play about people thinking they don’t sound exactly the way they do.” Your thoughts on that? Actors, how does his second sentence apply to your character(s)?

It is ever a challenge (probably greater than the one I describe in my answer to #6 below) to separate what you know, as a person, that your character sounds like from what you know and feel is going on inside that character. It is a tempting trap to put quotation marks around what your character says and does, to telegraph to the audience, “I, the actor, am not this uninformed/foolish/nasty/hateful person that I am playing.” And I think that everyone in our cast has done a good job of stepping around that trap.

4. Another review quote — when Clybourne opened on Broadway in 2012, Ben Brantley of the New York Times said, “This play probably will be topical for many years to come. That’s bad news for America, but good news for theatergoers, as ‘Clybourne Park’ proves itself more vital and relevant than ever on a big Broadway stage.” That was two years after its Off Broadway premiere. Flash forward to now, four years after the Broadway premiere. Is Clybourne again — or still — “more vital and relevant than ever”? Why?

You betcha. One of the smart things that Bruce Norris does, via the echoes down the half century from 1959 to 2009, is to call out our propensity to slap a label on something (or someone) and think that we have understood it. The character Bev, in 1959, refers with some discomfort to a young man in her community; he has what today we would call Down Syndrome, but Bev has only the word “mongoloid.” In the second act, Kathy (played by the same actor), speaks briefly, thoughtfully about a niece with Asperger’s Syndrome. Will not audiences of 2059 hear Kathy’s words and find her just as benighted?

5. What’s the importance of the specific link to A Raisin in the Sun?

Well, perhaps it is a recognition of the potency of Langston Hughes’s poem, “Harlem,” from which the image is drawn: “What happens to a dream deferred?/Does it dry up/like a raisin in the sun?” That such a simple eleven-line poem could spark Lorraine Hansberry’s full-length stage play, a musical adaptation, and now Bruce Norris’s answer play, is astonishing.

6. As an actor or director, what’s been your biggest challenge with this show? Creating two characters? Recreating the house during
intermission? Something else?

Simple mechanics: falling down, safely, in such a way that I can fall down again the next night.

An Octoroon

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins brings us An Octoroon, his very strong post-modern and post-theatrical adaptation of an 1859 melodrama by Dionysius Boucicault (in turn, a version of a novel by Thomas Maine Reid). It’s genuinely provocative, on several levels, from the visceral (an historical image projected on the stage at a key point hits its mark) to the intellectual to the spectacular; Boucicault was writing and producing in the genre that demanded big theatrical effects, and this production both comments on that genre and makes good on its promise, with a outsized KABOOM!

Jacobs-Jenkins helps us out by framing his adaptation with direct address by two different versions of the playwright (one played by an African American and one by a European American [James Konicek, with the voice of an angelic bassoon]) in which he explains the creative and production challenges of reconstructing a pre-Civil War potboiler that calls for a cast of 21. In this way, he prepares us for an distanced approach to the material that he has reworked and appropriated for his own means—in a way that his misbegotten Appropriate does not. (Perhaps one’s reactions to that other play depend on whether one takes the title as an adjective or a verb.) Jacobs-Jenkins thus calls to mind another master and occasional mishandler of irony, surfaces, and the reality beneath, Herman Melville.

Suffice it to say that this is a show that benefits from program notes by the dramaturg and two company staffers concerned with things literary.

The script—and this production—attacks the question of appearance vs. reality by employing a black actor in whiteface, a white actor in redface, and another actor in the crudest of minstrelsy’s blackface (and “lawsa-lawsa” dialect). Certain characters act and speak as if they were on a stage in the 1800s, ready for their turn at Ford’s on 10th Street, while others (the entertaining Shannon Dorsey as Minnie) speak in the most contemporary of hip-hop vernacular. Pre-recorded underscoring accompanies expressive live cello work by Katie Chambers. A character eats a real banana, seated on a stage whose floor is covered in bits of cotton… representing, what exactly? A disaster effect is a blatant borrowing of a sight gag perfected by Buster Keaton nearly a century ago.

This is not to take away from the stage chops on display by Jon Hudson Odom in the triple roles of BJJ (one of Jacobs-Jenkins’s standins), George (the hero), and M’Closky (the mustache-twirling villain). The third-act cliffhanger calls for Odom to execute a knife fight with himself: smartly done!

  • An Octoroon, by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Nataki Garrett, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

At the top of show, BJJ drinks off half of bottle of what looks to be whiskey. Woolly hasn’t seen such an interesting draught since Rob Leo Roy nightly chugged an bottle of Yoo-Hoo in The Food Chain.