Author: David Gorsline

The Table

The Smith Center changes up from its usual high-minded puppetry programming into something that’s just rubbery good fun. Blind Summit presents, in bunraku style, the character of Moses. Moses is the collision of a gravelly working-class British accent, a stretchy cloth body out of Tex Avery, and a head made of corrugated cardboard with a craggy face that looks like it should be on some country’s currency.

With hints of Beckett (Moses’s world is limited by the featureless dining room table that he stands on), in a rambling, irreverent monologue of 75 minutes, he tells the story of the Biblical Moses’s last hours on earth—more or less. Acting out multiple parts (the Hebrews on the plains of Moab, God swimming in his firmament) in an improvisational style that sometimes wanders on to less-than-successful side tracks, Moses cracks up the audience, his three puppeteers, and even the techs working the board at the back of the Kogod’s intimate black box. Yet Blind Summit achieves stirring effects with simple means: the puppet’s head has no moving parts above the swivel of its neck, so all of its emotions flow through the tilt of the head, quiet shifts of focus, and the reactions of its manipulators (Mark Down, Sean Garratt, and the extra-bendy Irena Stratieva).

But it’s that super-bouncy body that drives the physical comedy. You’d think that we’d be over the gag of George Jetson bounding off a runaway treadmill. No, we’re not: it still does its magic.

  • The Table, by Blind Summit Theatre, directed by Mark Down, Clarice Smith Center Kogod Theatre, College Park, Md.

At the park: 63

almost doneI dropped by the park to check on the progress of the wetland restoration project. To my untrained eye, it looks like the builders are almost done with the new dam. New plantings are in place, and deadfall has been dragged into strategic positions. The scattering of Green-winged Teal and Northern Pintail in the main pond seemed unconcerned. The clashing of Common Grackles that would fly over from time to time likewise.

strugglingThe surprise for this trip was this spindly, feisty Common Persimmon (Diospyros virginiana), spotted in a wet spot near the “phoebe bridge” where the trail begins to cross the wetland via boardwalk. Despite the fact that it’s in the process of being strangled by a blue-berried climber (Japanese Honeysuckle, perhaps), it has managed to produce fruit: look at the extreme right edge of the image for ripening persimmons, as well as a cluster left where the branches are obscured by the much larger lichen-covered maple.

Appropriate

Fake cicada noises introduce Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Appropriate, a graceless drama of three Arkansas-raised siblings and their in-laws squabbling over the ruined estate of their recently-departed father. Fights with nasty words in the first act become physicalized in the second, a farcical battle royal of no import—stop me if you’ve heard this one.

This play’s Belle Rive is a plaster-shedding failed bed and breakfast; the legacy of the three children—Toni, Franz, Bo, and rebarbative every one—is a pile of debts and some quite disturbing Jim Crow-era artifacts. The only character who is in any way grounded is Franz’s fiancée River (Caitlin McColl), and even she is called upon to unnaturally overreact to her discovery of a nearby graveyard and to misunderstand her boyfriend’s past dalliances with minors—until a convenient turning point in the plot.

“Oh my God! What am I doing here?” one character cries in the course of the evening. Indeed.

  • Appropriate, by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Liesl Tommy, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Williams decoded

There seems to be some confusion about the significance of the phrase “Magnolia 9047,” as it appears in this passage from scene 8 of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), by Tennessee Williams:

BLANCHE [at the phone]: Hello. Mr. Mitchell, please…. Oh…. I would like to leave a number if I may. Magnolia 9047. And say it’s important to call….

MAgnolia is the telephone exchange, and 9047 the number within the exchange. The MAgnolia exchange was used from 1938 until 1960, when it was replaced with JAckson 3.

Some well-meaning souls have interpreted Magnolia 9047 as a street address, but it’s very clear that Blanche’s sister Stella and brother-in-law Stanley live in the French Quarter at 632 Elysian Fields Avenue, as this passage in scene 1 with upstairs neighbor Eunice exposits:

EUNICE [finally]: What’s the matter, honey? Are you lost?

BLANCHE [with faintly hysterical humor]: They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields!

EUNICE: That’s where you are now.

BLANCHE: At Elysian Fields?

EUNICE: This here is Elysian Fields.

BLANCHE: They mustn’t have—understood—what number I wanted…

EUNICE: What number you lookin’ for?

[Blanche wearily refers to the slip of paper.]

BLANCHE: Six thirty-two.

EUNICE: You don’t have to look no further.

However, Williams’ grasp of light rail routefinding is trumped by the poetics of Blanche traveling from desire to death to her celestial reward, as it is the Canal Street cars that are marked Cemeteries (for the terminus at Metairie Avenue), and this line does not intersect Elysian Fields Avenue.

This

Round House Theatre marks its return to more engaging, contemporary material with a balanced ensemble performance of Melissa James Gibson’s This, a romantic comedy-drama for grieving grownups. Todd Scofield brings a yearning strength to the role of Tom, new stay-at-home dad and craftsman, while Will Gartshore is charmant as Jean-Pierre, the hunky French physician. Michael Glenn wisely does not overplay the (many) annoying sides of the feckless Alan. James Kronzer’s double revolve keeps the play’s many changes of scene moving quickly and smoothly. Directory Ryan Rilette does well by keeping Lise Bruneau pinned to the floor for her late monologues as Jane; seated on a step, her grief and pain are the more powerful.

  • This, by Melissa James Gibson, directed by Ryan Rilette, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.

Acute

Another Words Words Words post, or more accurately, a Marks Marks Marks post: Jeff Z. Klein reports on the recent move by Montréal Canadiens equipment manager to include diacritics in players’ name bars on the backs of their sweaters. The explanation by Pierre Gervais as to why the marks hadn’t been rendered in the past is a bit weak, but no matter:

Gervais said the accents were made possible by technology. Until recently, the strip of cloth for name bars was too shallow.

“I would have had to sew the accent mark onto the uniform itself, above the name bar,” said Gervais, who started working as a Canadiens equipment manager in 1987. “Until a few years ago, we used to reuse the uniforms, so I couldn’t do it.”

Wakefield Park grasses

Alan Ford led a workshop on grass ID at Wakefield Park for the Potowmack Chapter of the Virginia Native Plant Society. Tips and reminders of some training that I took from Cris Fleming a couple of years ago. Grasses are sneaky hard to get into good focus with my happy snap camera, so most of my images remain on my hard drive.

Five gleanings:

  • Look for a bend in the awn to identify Indian Grass to species, Sorghastrum nutans.
  • When you see arundinacea or its derivatives in a species name, it’s a hint that the organism is large, with a reference to the large Bamboo Orchid, Arundina sp.
  • Broomsedge (Andropogon virginicus var. virginicus) is an early colonizer. When you see it give way to Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) (purple sheaths alternating with green internodes), you’re dealing with a well-established meadow.
  • Leersia virginica is a lookalike for the invasive Japanese Stilt-grass (Microstegium vimineum). The stilt-grass pulls up out of the ground easily, but Leersia does not.
  • Look and feel for stiff horizontal hairs on the sheath of Deer-tongue Grass (Dicanthelium clandestinum). Some of the panic grasses have recently been moved into the genera Coleataenia and Dicanthelium (twice-flowering [each year]).

not so purple nowI did get an acceptable image of the jizz of the delicate open panicles of Purple Love Grass (Eragrostis spectabilis), a species that many people love and that I have trouble recognizing.