theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
Elizabeth Blair previews this year’s Contemportary American Theater Festival and talks to founder Ed Herendeen:
This year the festival is doing two world premieres. One of them could almost be called a musical.
“I cannot tell you the excitement and the buzz and the fear that we have — it’s good fear — producing the Eelwax Jesus 3-D Pop Music Show,” Herendeen says.
Another option for DIY sound designers looking for scene transition music: Rumblefish’s Music Licensing Store. I haven’t priced the fees, but the prospect of pre-cleared music “for any project” would benefit community theater directors looking to take a play into the competitive festival circuit.
Leta gets her first press as a playwright for her adaptation of the collectivist folk tale.
Stone Soup is a very funny and entertaining theatre experience for young viewers that is laid back and professional at the same time.
We might be forgiven for wondering why Woolly Mammoth, having built its fabulous proscenium-styled performance space, enables its directors and designers to reconfigure it variously, as in the recent Full Circle and Clybourne Park. Nonetheless, the seating shifts are worth it. For the current production, the interesting two-hander Gruesome Playground Injuries, the audience is arranged arena style around the remains of a hockey rink. Scenes skip forward and backward at five-year intervals in the lives of Doug and Kayleen, as they age from 8 to 38; a relationship evolves between them that perhaps is never sexual (a particular scene ends ambiguously) but is often more intimate. The exchange of (other) body fluids, as well as scars (visible and otherwise), become their emotional currency. The excellent Tim Getman plays accident-prone Doug as one long goofy lope through life, while Gabriela Fernandez-Coffey’s Kayleen always holds something mysteriously in reserve.
Fortunately, Leta and her team didn’t hear anything like these after their lovely presentation of Clean, by Audrey Cefaly, at ESTA in Newark, Del., but rather a few constructive suggestions (“maybe a puddle of water at the opening”) and lots of compliments like “detailed,” “believable,” and “specific.”
Patrick Healy reports on the traffic jam around Times Square: despite shows closing early, there are few slots available for new productions seeking a Broadway-sized venue (500+ seats). An accompanying infographic plots the locations and capacities of the 40 houses, although the bubbles that represent foot traffic on the various streets don’t really tell the story they were meant to. (The print edition of the graphic uses bubbles to represent the theaters as well: online, the building footprint graphics work better, perhaps because of finer resolution.)
A local nonprofit company works to bring together two (seemingly incompatible) interests of mine: theater and nature. Toby Mulford introduced me by e-mail to the Traveling Players Ensemble, a summer theatre camp for middle and high schoolers based in Great Falls:
Our mission is to bring great theatre into the great outdoors. In achieving this mission, TPE is guided by several beliefs:
- an appreciation of nature. TPE strives to link theatrical work to nature by rehearsing and performing outdoors and by producing plays in which nature is a dominant theme;
- an ensemble is an ideal structure in which to foster creativity and a sense of community. TPE’s educational programs work intensively with small ensembles, thereby ensuring personalized attention and significant growth as an artist;
- artistic creation is fundamental to forming one’s identity, especially for teens in their unique and complex transition between childhood and adulthood.
American Theatre magazine, in its back page interview, usually puts the question, “It’s not theater unless…” And I just realized that my answer to the question is “… you can make it work outside.” (This is why I love what Hard Bargain Players does.)
Mulford’s note to me says that the company has these festivals scheduled for the summer:
I think I might have to collect Leta and check them out.
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 for Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park, an dark comedy that responds to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun by telling the story of the Chicago house to which Hansberry’s Younger family aspires. Norris’s play probes the relations between America’s classes and races in the second half of the past century, relations where so much hangs on the nuanced meanings of the phrase, “thank you, but no.”
The first act, set in 1959, introduces us to the Arts and Crafts-influenced house, home to Russ and Bev (company bulwarks Mitchell Hébert and Jennifer Mendenhall). Russ is not immune to the charms of the National Geographic Society’s magazine and neapolitan ice cream eaten from the carton. The meticulous production design is realized by Properties Master Jennifer Sheetz and other Woolly Mammoth production staff. Russ and Bev are ready for the jump to the suburbs, and they have (unintentionally?) sold their home to a black family. It’s up to neighborhood association rep and general pain in the ass Karl Lindner (the exceptional Cody Nickell) to spell things out to them.
After the break, it’s now 2009, and the house has seen a lot of living. Lindsey (Kimberly Gilbert) and Steve (Nickell, again), a young white couple, have bought the house from the (unnamed) Youngers, and hope to build a new, architecturally engaging yet tasteful (?), home on the site. Another confrontation with neighborhood association reps ensues, this time sparked by Lena (the astonishing Dawn Ursula), who wants her family’s urban homesteading to be respectfully remembered. While Nickell’s Steve proceeds to offend everyone in the room (was there ever a man so gormless that he didn’t know to stop talking?), Ursula’s Lena delivers zingers serenely, sweetly. She’s a stealth bomber of black comedy.
By my reckoning, the play’s third act comes at intermission, when the stage crew tear down Russ and Bev’s cozy home and transform it into Steve and Lindsey’s work site. Velcro is a stage carpenter’s best friend.
Not to be outdone by The Flibbertigibbet in documentary comprehensiveness (although I yield in the area of single-minded devotion to the craft), herewith my theater viewing statistics for the past twelvemonth. The plus-ones are shows that I called or was in.
44 (+4) isn’t anywhere close to 121.
In their temporary digs in Crystal City, Arena delivers an effective, if modest, production of Guettel’s small-scale musical of an American mother and daughter on tour in post-war Italy, an abbreviated family unit in which daughter Clara may be less than she seems. The simple set is lit well by Michael Gilliam: moving instruments allow us to move adagio with Clara and her mother Margaret through the streets of Florence,—although elsewhere in the show, the projections of famous Florentine paintings against the set are sometimes a distraction.
Clara falls in (as American girls will do) with a charming, handsome Italian, one Fabrizio, who has an endearing partial command of English as well as the first act “Il Mondo Era Vuoto,” sung by Nicholas Rodriguez with muscular brio. Indeed, some of the best music in the show is sung in Italian, especially the spiky second act opening quintet, “Aiutami.”
But the story, and the evening, belong to Hollis Resnik’s Margaret, who brings a mature clarity to “Dividing Day.” In the second act, when she cuts short a long-distance phone call to her husband Roy, she gives a little yelp, as if startled by her own determination to carry out her plans.
CATF’s 2010 season is available for early-bird subscribers from previous seasons. No Blessing nor Dresser, but Lee Sellars!
Fourth wall-breaking opens this production of Charles Mee’s one act on the life and works of assemblage artist Joseph Cornell, a man who found both sides of the picture post card equally interesting. Preceding Wilderesque self-introductions, the cast solicits donations from the audience of found objects to be arranged into a box construction in the course of the play. (Can it be called a fourth wall when the stage in the black box Kogod is configured galley style?) In any event, it’s a nice touch to open this 70-minute fantasia, a co-production of the University of Maryland theater department and Round House Theatre. Scheduled for presentation at Round House’s space later in the year, let us hope that certain aspects of the production settle into more of a performance groove by then.
Mee’s intriguing, deceptively challenging, script effectively conjures the dream-like world of Cornell, one of infatuations with shop girls, devotional consumption of sweet treats, obsessions with movie stars, and tender caring for his infirm brother Robert. It’s a universe where a ballerina can drop by with a chocolate cake, or a lonely artist working in a basement can burst into song. The text enters Cornell (Equity member Scott Sedar, who approaches the role with bemused gravitas) into dialogues with his contemporary artists (Gorky, Duchamp, Matta) as well as a chorus of three men (coached by Leslie Felbain) who flounce like twittering birds—and in each case. we’re not sure how much of each dialogue is projection by Mee’s Cornell onto the other speakers. There are longish passages where Cornell watches Hedy Lamarr and Lauren Bacall in Algiers and To Have and Have Not, and he recites the dialogue along with—but to Sedar’s credit, not mechanically like a Rocky Horror Show fan, but rather a beat before or after the sound track, as one who is remembering in real time.
The standout among the ensemble cast of student actors is James Waters, as a member of the flittering birds chorus and as a character called the Astronomer: he delivers his monologues with a cool economy of means.
Mee himself constructs plays as a collagist. He writes:
…I try in my work to get past traditional forms of psychological realism, to bring into the frame of the plays material from history, philosophy, insanity, inattention, distractedness, judicial theory, sudden violent passion, lyricism, the National Enquirer, nostalgia, longing, aspiration, literary criticism, anguish, confusion, inability.
I like plays that are not too neat, too finished, too presentable.
Two good theater pieces in the Gray Lady this morning: first, Patrick Healy interviews the cast of the Ethan Hawke-directed revival of Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind (which absence from my library I should rectify):
MARIN IRELAND: One trap with any iconic writer is that you think you know the tone of the play and motives of the characters. Part of our job is to look for the opposite in any moment.
(Completely irrelevant and inappropriately snarky, but doesn’t Ethan Hawke always look like he’s three-quarters stoned?)
Second, Charles Isherwood has some uncomfortable reservations about the Jones-Lewis-Hendel bio-revue Fela!:
As much as I enjoyed the show, directed and choreographed by Bill T. Jones, it left me with lingering questions about the depiction of the African milieu it evoked. In short, the emphasis in Fela! on the spectacle of African culture tilted the show a little too closely toward minstrelsy….
It’s vibrant, exciting and fabulously performed.
But there really are no characters, aside from Fela Kuti himself.
Via Arts & Letters Daily, Lucie Skeaping recaps what we know of 17th century jigs, bawdy theatrical afterpieces.
Were jigs recited over the tunes, did they contain song interludes, were they through-sung like mini-operas, or did all three of these at various times apply? Of the 12 surviving English jig texts roughly half contain specific tune titles printed at various points alongside the text, that is, the names of popular ballads or dance tunes of the day.
For a man who spends two hours sitting behind a desk and talking, Mike Daisey reveals an energy and grace in his movement worthy of a tai chi chuan master. Steepling his fingers to make a point, then softly melting them to the side, storyteller Daisey explores in his current offering at Woolly Mammoth the peculiarities of the natives in the islands called Vanuatu and the big island called Long, and shows them to be hilariously ridiculous in equal measures.
If his analysis of the past years’ financial embarrassments is rather glib, bad economics, Daisey’s perception that we experience the spongy bottom of the current recession to be disappointingly mild—in his word, “AWK-ward,”—is acute. And his parsing of the false egalitarianism at a New England liberal arts college into the contents of the boxes unloaded by each arriving freshman, some of them with technological riches that inspire him to say, “our shit is AWESOME,” is well executed.
He is better off on his trip to a speck of land in the South Pacific, the island of Tanna, to observe the playing out of an annual rite, part village festival, part perverse appropriation of Western culture. At one point in the spectacle, a man is chased in circles by another man, the pursuer wearing a fright mask from the movie Scream: this is explained to Daisey by an interpreter as “President Obama being chased by a dragon.” Oh-kayy. Daisey, a generously proportioned man, figures that he is a match for anything unusual or unpleasant on offer by Tanna’s cuisine. But, as he comically bellows in a richly modulated voice, “the fermented yam paste proved me wrong.”
It’s Daisey’s control of his polychrome voice, which can range from the avuncularity of Garrison Keillor to the manic jeremiads of Chris Farley, often in the same paragraph, sometimes in the same sentence, that makes for such an entertaining evening.