Author: David Gorsline

Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play (New York premiere)

Why is it that I am so drawn to this powerful, murderously funny play? Maybe it is the third act, a capsule salmagundi of 250 years of musical theater and Greek tragedy, heavily salted by American pop culture.

Or perhaps it is the heart-breaking passage in the first act, in which survivors of an apocalypse (one that has disabled the electrical grid and scrambled nuclear power plants) exchange information about missing loved ones, paging through address books in ritualistic alphabetical order. As playwright Anne Washburn says in an interview with Tim Sanford,

I don’t think I thought about this directly when I was writing that scene but I was in New York on 9/11, and I was fascinated by the group-mind which followed the event…. People were desperate to seize on an order, and a way of doing things. I think I was also thinking of the fliers which went up, with the names and photos of the missing—for the first day or so they seemed like a practical idea, and they proliferated like mad. After the first day they continued to go up, but they felt like an increasingly desperate gesture, and like memorials, rather than a real way to find someone.

By comparison with the Washington version last year, in this production the characters feel a bit less actorly, more like the ordinary schlubs they are, who find themselves amid the broken shards of civilization, compelled to continue telling stories. Sam Breslin Wright, as the taciturn Sam of the first act, gives us a wonderful Mr. Burns in the third, with an evil whine that seems to come out of Jack Nicholson on meth. Matthew Maher is dead-on as Homer Simpson in the “How are you, Mr. Thompson?” scene, mastering Homer’s gormless eye take. And I hope someone finds a Diet Coke for Susannah Flood’s wired-up Susannah: she deserves it.

The orchestration for act 3 is more elaborate, to the best of my recollection. We hear a nice combo of piano, percussion, guitar, accordion, and (the too often overlooked) toy piano. But one wonders how the play’s survivors have keep all these instruments in good working order for 75 years.

Set designer Neil Patel fashions the “Cape Feare” houseboat out of a flat and some repurposed safety railing. The paint on the walls of the second act warehouse, seven years disused, is great: somewhat like Oscar Madison’s sandwiches, we can’t tell whether it’s green paint peeling to battleship gray and brown, or gray oxidizing to green. And the closing lighting effect, designed by Justin Townsend, is astonishing.

  • Mr. Burns, a Post-electric Play, by Anne Washburn, music by Michael Friedman, directed by Steve Cosson, Playwrights Horizons, New York

Virginia Native Plant Society 2013

Three very satisfying field trips at the Virginia Native Plant Society annual meeting, hosted by the Jefferson chapter (Charlottesville).

heterotroph? me?a bit raggedSaturday morning we looked mostly at mushrooms with Mary Jane Epps at Preddy Creek Trail Park. Notice the word “trail” in the property’s name: we often found ourselves making way for mountain bikes, as well as one rider mounted on a horse. We found Old Man of the Woods (Strobilomyces floccopus) mushrooms, an nondescript and unidentified slime mold, a tiny rove beetle on a Lactaria mushroom, some fine examples of Pinesap (Monotropa hypopithys) (at left), and Polyporus mori (at right).

N.A. championIn their walks, both Devin Floyd and Tom Dierauf emphasized the subtle shifts in species composition that can be attributed to aspect and drainage, as when an oak-hickory forest on one side of a slope gives way to an ash-tuliptree forest on the facing side. Devin (co-founder of the Blue Ridge Discovery Center) took us through the Secluded Farm tract of the Monticello property. Bonus champion tree for this walk: the North American champion Blackhaw Viburnum (Viburnum prunifolium), mistaken for many years for an apple tree. Counterintuitive fun fact: Slippery Elm (Ulmus rubra) leaves are not slippery, but rough as sandpaper.

Back to the north side of Albemarle (a two-syllable word in the local parlance) County for a visit to Ivy Creek Natural Area with Tom. Tom’s looks at the woods with a forester’s eyes, so we looked at a lot of trees in various stages of growth and decay, and we forgave his references to “Yellow Poplar.” He pointed out several examples of Red Hickory (a/k/a Oval Pignut Hickory) (Carya ovalis), a tree that he describes as very common in Virginia, and often overlooked. It’s certainly been overlooked in my prior field instruction, as we only had learned C. tomentosa, C. cordiformis, and the closely related Pignut Hickory (C. glabra). He gave me the idea for a little field experiment to perform in my weedy back yard: an oak cut back to the ground can resprout from its root underground, but a maple can’t. Tom showed us a single Paulownia tomentosa tree, in the process of being shaded out by taller trees, and spoke of the tree’s economic value rather than its potential invasiveness. He’s much more concerned about the depredations of Oriental Bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) at Ivy Creek.

bark detailAn atmospheric image of the bark of an older Black Birch (Betula lenta) beginning to peel. Tom took a small scraping from a younger tree: the inner bark smells intensely, wonderfully like Clark’s Teaberry gum.

cutWe did take a look at the herbaceous layer. This Cut-leaved Grape Fern (Botrychium dissectum) was quite nice.

Doyles River loop

one more to make Brett enviousFriday, on my way down to the Charlottesville area for the Virginia Native Plant Society annual get-together, I took a side trip to Shenandoah NP and a loop hike from the Doyles River parking area to Browns Gap and back. The Appalachian Trail in certain sections was almost completely overrun by smartweed.

I hadn’t planned on looking at butterflies, so I did not bring my field guides—and so I had some interesting (if common) lepids to look at. Making field notes and taking photos of what turn out to be Cabbage Whites and Eastern Commas is a character-building experience. What there was to see I did get good looks at, however, thanks to some new gear. I’m not given to fanboying about optics, but the close focus (50 cm!) on my new Pentax Papilio 6.5x21s is just awesome, and ideal for butterflies. These binoculars work fairly well over my eyeglasses, and I’m tempted to use these inexpensive field glasses as my all-around birding optics.

Doyles River itself was just a trickle, so I passed up a side trip to the falls. The PATC-mapped short circuit took me 2:40. The altimeter in my watch pooped out (low battery), so I’ll have to use the PATC’s estimate of a 900-foot elevation change; my sore muscles today will confirm that.

I like the bubbly Canvasback, too

Rick Wright offers some of his unconventional picks for this season’s art competition for the Federal Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamp.

This is not a decoy, not a duck, but the self-conscious simulacrum of a duck/decoy, and in its grotesque combination of the organic and the artificial, the living and the not, this figure brings together eloquently the concerns, shared and conflicting, of hunters and birders, reminding us all of where the duck stamp comes from and all the fine things it has led to over the years.

It might win, but it won’t. I predict that next year’s stamp will be pedestrian and placative, like all its predecessors. I’m still buying it, though.

Only the weapons are fake

Alexis Hauk profiles Robb Hunter, armorer and fight choreographer. Hunter worked on the epic fight in act 2 of Superior Donuts for Studio Theatre’s production.

Weapons alone don’t transform a decent fight scene into a meaningful one, though, and Hunter believes that each piece should say something about a character—or at least it should emerge from its environment. “I get a little sad when people are like, ‘We’re doing Macbeth. I need 12 swords and a few shields,” he says. “The audience doesn’t know what they’re missing—until you do it for them differently.”

Bocce balls

Brian Hayes meets Stanley Crawford and gets to know the New Mexico acequia system.

The water in an irrigation ditch is a shared resource, like the unfenced common pastures that so famously became so tragic in early-modern England. In fact, the irrigation ditch is even more vulnerable to selfish exploitation than a pasture that’s equally available to all: Those on the upper reaches of the ditch have it within their power to divert all the flow into their own fields, depriving those below. Yet they choose not to do so. What explains their forbearance?