Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" and images of the American flag unite the productions of Shepard's 2004 work and Stryk's premiere. The God of Hell, Shepard's parable about government skunkworks and the loss of liberties, is short on subtlety, but finishes with a winning moment of an alarm bell ringing out across the farmlands of Wisconsin.

Elaine Krombacher (played skillfully by Bonnie Black), military wife and mother, is the dissociated center of Lydia Stryk's American Tet. Chirpy and chipper in her volunteer job serving to orient new Army families, she is rigid and stilted when lounging with her husband Jim in the back yard—it's as if the two of them were lying at attention in their lawn chairs. She meets Nhu, a Vietnamese woman waiting tables at the base Chinese restaurant (and who has a shadowy past connection with Jim), who explains to her the Buddhist view of life as suffering and who receives Elaine's shattered, tearful confidences.

Stryk achieves a matter-of-fact lyricism in a monologue she writes for Jim, now retired and master of a suspiciously barren home garden. However, the characters of Amy and Danny, Elaine and Jim's children, lack depth. But Elaine is the key to this drama: at the end of her emotional journey, when asked if she knows the Buddha, she replies, "Maybe. Maybe," and commences her own meditative stillness in her lawn chair.

Set designer Markas Henry has fashioned a stunning backdrop for the set, an American flag with stripes of unpainted clapboard siding, the field of the union made of wire mesh, and the stars of wooden pentagons.

Henry also designed the set for the other production in the CATF's studio theater, Sheri Wilner's Father Joy, a passionate comic fantasy about parental love. Avuncular and sexy Michael Goodwin plays Paul, who is teacher and lover to art graduate student Abigail (Kaci Gober). Paul catalyzes the fantastical gift that Abigail receives from her father Harry (the pixilated Jonathan Bustle), and thus inaugurates her career as an artist. Paul (modelled on the earth artist Andy Goldsworthy) says, "When you touch something, you become part of its history," and this theme of impermanence provides a link back to Stryk's play.

The play has a a magical soundscape designed by Jamie Whoolery, a simple rehearsal-block set that is shifted between scenes by the actors in blue light (there's a special moment when the severely geometric units are reformed by Goodwin and Gober into the organic forms of a park), and a live vacuum sweeper. What more could you ask for?

posted: 8:47:44 PM  

Phil Patton researches plastic coffee cup lids.

It's been so long ago that I'd forgotten the paper lids.

(Thanks to things magazine.)

posted: 2:07:42 PM  

London's Globe is rehearsing a production of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida that will be performed with 16th-century pronunciation, as best as David Crystal can reconstruct.

(Thanks to robot wisdom.)

posted: 1:07:32 PM