Author: David Gorsline

Halfway down the block before realizing that you’re headed the wrong way

A simple, analog solution to SOSED (Sudden-Onset Subway Exit Disorientation): low-profile wayfinding signs on the stairway risers, designed by Ryan Murphy and documented by Vicky Gan. Much more useful than smartphone beacons, also discussed in the post: who wants to be staring at a screen when you and 1,000 of your new best friends are trying to get off the platform and into the light?

Zombie: The American

Robert O’Hara’s Zombie: The American makes an interesting bookend to Woolly’s season with its opener, David Adjmi’s Marie Antoinette, in that both imagine the courtly intrigues in the centers of power—as Adjmi looks at late 18th-century France, O’Hara fancies a mid-21st-century USA in profound eclipse. But where Adjmi’s theatricality revealed a tender heart, the present work is a Grand Guignol melodrama of mashed-up metaphors. O’Hara’s heavy-handed message is that our culture has done some brutal things to get where it is today, and we should just own up to that. OK, there are zombies in the basement.

The future setting allows the imagination of costume designer Ivania Stack, who produces some trippy suits for the American President and his First Gentleman: exaggerated, but following a believable trend line. Sarah Marshall’s Lady Secretary of State Jessica Bloom resembles one of Ian Falconer’s ladies of a certain age, grimly leaning into the wind. The hidden treat of this show is Luigi Sottile, who plays three different factotums of the Presidential Court, all of them biological clones equipped with some sort of bionic artificial intelligence. His supercilious, sexy Royal Butler is worth the trip to D Street, N.W.

  • Zombie: The American, by Robert O’Hara, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Backstory

In his notebooks, [Paddy] Chayefsky wrote year-by-year biographies for his characters. [Max] Schumacher doggedly worked his way up through the army’s Stars and Stripes newspaper, local papers, radio, NBC morning news, See It Now, CBS Reports, and network documentary and news departments to become the president of his division. Diana [Christensen], by contrast, had just five previous television credits—at a children’s show, in audience research, and in daytime programming—before she reached her own vice president post. He drafted for himself a twenty-three-person roster of nonexistent executives at the fictional network he called UBS…, from its chairman of the board down to its vice presidents of programming, legal affairs, public relations for the news, and public relations for the network. He drew up a seven-night programming grid for UBS, inventing every show that aired from Monday through Sunday, 6:00 P.M. to 1:00 A.M., with such evocative and snidely reductive titles as Surgeon’s Hospital, Pedro and the Putz, Celebrity Canasta (paired on Wednesday evenings with Celebrity Mah-jongg), Lady Cop, and Death Squad. None of this information would make it into the screenplay [of Network].

—Dave Itzkoff, Mad As Hell:The Making of ‘Network’ and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies, p. 49

Upcoming: 42

I am generally burned out on plays that take place backstage, but I might make an exception for Anne Washburn’s new 10 out of 12, previewed by Alexis Soloski. Washburn wrote the mind-bending Mr. Burns, a post-electric play that I was just crazy about. (And crazy.)

10 out of 12 takes place during the technical rehearsals of a new play.

Ms. Washburn said she first began taking notes at rehearsals, because “a playwright is useless at tech, and it’s too dark to read.” She wanted to capture how a technical rehearsal is “immensely boring, but then immensely sort of interesting and weird.” … She joked that there’s a version of this script that “takes five days and is completely immersive.”

Here’s hoping I can make a run to New York or that the script will travel to D.C.

Two artifacts

… one small, one large.

nice packageSince I’ve started serving with Friends of the Migratory Bird/Duck Stamp, I am more attentive to equivalent efforts at the state level. The state of Ohio promotes a Wildlife Legacy Stamp. I bought one when I was in the Toledo area for the Biggest Week in American Birding. For $15, you get a stamp, of course, but you also get package of collateral: stickers, a thank you card, and a very fine pin that you can attach to the back of your favorite birding cap. Funds are collected by the Department of Natural Resources and support

  • habitat restoration, land purchases and conservation easements
  • keeping common species common
  • endangered & threatened native species
  • educational products for students and wildlife enthusiasts
  • wildlife and habitat research projects

“Keeping common species common:” I like that.

big bookLast year, when I was working onsite, I got a message from my colleague Erin, who was prepping a move to the Pacific Northwest. She wrote something to the effect of “I have this book about birds that’s too big for me to pack; would you like it?” Figuring it was some inconsequential coffee table book but to be gracious about a gift, I replied, “sure, thanks.” It turns out that the volume in question was a copy of the National Audubon Society/Peterson and Peterson reprint of John James Audubon’s Birds of America. This book is gorgeous. It’s also huge: it weighs 18 pounds. It’s a good thing that my own coffee table has a top made of two inches of solid walnut. Thank you, Erin!

Pearson Metropark

I did a little birding and naturalizing in this municipal park, a square of suburban woods and swamp. A few takeways:

driftsWild Geranium (Geranium maculatum) does very well in this sandy soil that was once a lake bed. Great drifts of these flowers line both sides of the trail.

not grayAnother species that’s quite common, but one that’s unseen in the mid-Atlantic, is Eastern Fox Squirrel (Sciurus niger). One day I’ll get a tack-sharp image of this critter.

not Chestnut OakThat big tree with the blocky bark? It’s not a Chestnut Oak, but good old Eastern Cottonwood (Populus deltoides), dominant in habitats like the lake shore. And often growing straight up, just to confuse visitors from the east and west.

I also spotted a Question Mark butterfly (Polygonia interrogationis) and a couple species of mystery mushrooms.

Pipe Creek Wildlife Area/Sheldon Marsh State Nature Preserve

across from the egretsMy final van trip was led by Greg Miller and Drew Weber: we visited two sites in Erie County, with a side trip to a field across the road from the J. H. Routh Packing Co. to check out two Cattle Egrets (Bubulcus ibis) doing what they should be: hanging out with cows.

Conditions at Pipe Creek were very drippy, swinging from light drizzle to a steady rain, but we nevertheless had A+ looks at a Lincoln’s Sparrow (Melospiza lincolnii) (named neither for Abraham nor Frederick Charles, but for Audubon’s travel companion Thomas).

The weather cleared by the time we arrived at Sheldon Marsh, and the birding was quite fine here. I picked up my eighth lifer for the trip, Philadelphia Vireo (Vireo philadelphicus).

All told, I had great numbers for the Biggest Week in American Birding festival. My cumulative species count came to 113, give or take the odd Rock Pigeon, and my warbler count was 21. I’ll need to come back for Connecticut and Mourning.

Oak Openings Preserve Metropark

Spring is a few weeks behind us in D.C.: Spring Beauty is still in full bloom here in northwest Ohio. Ethan Kistler led the walk-drive through this park (which apparently came about because property values crashed when the nearby airport expanded). No matter how the park came to be, it was good for two lifers (Blue-winged Warbler [Vermivora cyanoptera] and Henslow’s Sparrow [Ammodramus henslowii)]) and a second-look bird (Grasshopper Sparrow [A. savannarum]). As well, the park was filled with Baltimore Orioles (Icterus galbula) and Red-headed Woodpeckers (Melanerpes erythrocephalus).

ruggedIn this board-flat province, the Girdham sand dunes are some of the most rugged topography I’ve seen all week.

Decoy Marsh and Adam Grimm Prairie

nice spotWe returned to the same wetland complex in Sandusky County that we visited Monday, this time circumambulating the Decoy Marsh restoration project with Ray Stewart and Drew Weber. Drew coached me through my lifer Willow Flycatcher (Empidonax traillii). We got a look at a pair of Blue-winged Teal (Anas discors)—it’s easy to focus on the crescent on the face as a field mark, but as I was showing a California birder the Peterson guide for this bird, we both realized (and observed) that the bird does indeed show a sky-blue wing. What a nice walk: full sun on the forest edge rimming the wetland, and enough twists and turns to the path that we could adjust our views of shorebirds and ducks to compensate for the sun.

We heard Trumpeter Swans (Cygnus buccinator) calling in the distance, and on the drive back to the meeting point, we found a nesting pair on a unnamed pond for an A+ look for the trip.

Man oh man, some of the robins in this part of the country have a brick-red breast; very confusing. And the Song Sparrows sing a different dialect.

trying to help outOn my own in the afternoon, I walked the Adam Grimm Prairie at Ottawa NWR. I did not detect the target bird for this stop (Henslow’s Sparrow [Ammodramus henslowii], which has been reported recently here), but the stop was worth it. After the crush of the Magee Marsh boardwalk, for almost two hours, I had. The. Grassland. To. Myself. At the end of my quiet walk, after working through a different sparrow ID, I was treated to the sight and sound of at least two Eastern Meadowlarks (Sturnella magna).