What should I read next?

Leta mentioned that our friend Amy was looking for scripts to read, just for general background. Everyone else has an idea about what’s important theater to be familiar with, so I figure that I’m entitled to post my own list. Herewith a shortlist of important, entertaining, challenging straight plays (no musicals) from the period 1945 (or thereabouts) to the present. Most were published originally in English. They are marked by psychological complexity and offer staging challenges that can be met in many different ways, depending on the creativity of the team and the resources offered by the performance space. These are in no particular order, just the order that I transcribed them from my scribbled notes.

  • Sarah Ruhl: The Clean House; Dead Man’s Cell Phone
  • Marsha Norman: ‘night, Mother
  • Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
  • Craig Wright: The Pavilion
  • Christopher Durang: Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You
  • Mary Zimmerman: Metamorphoses
  • Lanford Wilson: The Hot L Baltimore; Book of Days
  • Lynn Nottage: Intimate Apparel
  • Jean Anouilh: Antigone (trans. Lewis Galantière)
  • Tony Kushner: Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika
  • Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman
  • Neil Simon: Barefoot in the Park
  • Nicky Silver: The Food Chain; Fat Men in Skirts
  • Harold Pinter: Betrayal
  • Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
  • Alan Ayckbourn: “The Norman Conquests:” Table Manners; Living Together; and Round and Round the Garden: I would love to persuade three local community theaters to produce this trilogy in simultaneous or sequential rep
  • Caryl Churchill: Top Girls: fabulous parts for women, something always in short supply in community theater
  • John Pielmeier: Agnes of God
  • Bertold Brecht: The Good Person of Szechwan
  • Richard Greenberg: The Violet Hour

I made my case for a few of these titles and playwrights for inclusion in Silver Spring Stage’s upcoming season. Decisions have not yet been made. We’ll see.

To be free

A slightly belated tribute to Billy Taylor, who passed away this week after a long long career, as reported by A Blog Supreme. Several years ago, I attended a series of “jazz appreciation 101” talks by Dr. Taylor, given in Kennedy Center rehearsal space. He was a welcoming, generous teacher. One of the things I remember is his observation that you can learn a lot about jazz harmony just by mastering Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life.”

My year in hikes and field trips, 2010

Lots of botanizing on these various trips, but I did pick up two life birds in the field this year.

2009’s list. 2008’s list.

The year in review, 2010

The first sentence (more or less) of the first post of each month from this blog:

  • 1 January: 11D points to a round-up of recommendations on the whats and the hows of purging books from your library.
  • 6 February: The Birding Community E-Bulletin points to two reports: first, a recent summary by Robert Rice of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center on the supply of and market for the SMBC’s branded Bird Friendly® Coffee.
  • 2 March: Language Log contributor Geoff Nunberg explores new crannies of curmudgeonliness.
  • 1 April: 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.
  • 1 May: A local nonprofit company works to bring together two (seemingly incompatible) interests of mine: theater and nature.
  • 5 June: 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.
  • 2 July: Just a quick snap to mark my completion of the Fairfax Cross County Trail.
  • 6 August: WordPress 3 and it’s time for a theme change.
  • 2 September: Sweet profile by Lydia DePillis of Greater Greater Washington’s David Alpert.
  • 2 October: The concrete and support columns are beginning to resemble a station platform; conveniently, it’s right where the Wiehle Avenue stop will be.
  • 2 November: My term project for my meteorology class is fairly simple: photograph and identify as many cloud types as possible.
  • 2 December: Wikipedia’s Silver Line entry recently achieved good article status.

The year in review, 2009, 2008, and 2007.

Superior Donuts

Tracy Letts returns to the trope of onstage violence with Superior Donuts, set in a seedy Uptown Chicago neighborhood. And the impressive fight, choreographed by Robb Hunter, is well executed by Richard Cotovsky (as donut shop proprietor Arthur) and Chris Genebach (as small-time criminal Luther). But the acting laurels go to Johnny Ramey in an endearing performance as Franco Wicks, an African-American youth with issues; in the course of working through them, he helps Arthur to master some of his own.

Arthur, a Vietnam-era draft evader who still hasn’t given up his beard and pony tail, has made it his life’s work to keep other people at arm’s length. So perhaps it’s a character choice, or perhaps just the length of the show’s run (it opened 10 November), that Cotovsky in his monologues of remembrance doesn’t take his time and make a connection to us in the audience.

Gregor Paslawsky does well with the character of Max, a neighboring merchant with designs on Arthur’s real estate, shifting from menace to exasperated comedy with ease.

The ground plan of Russell Metheny’s set excellently solves the familiar problem of actors being trapped behind a store counter by turning around the U of display case and seating so that its open section is downstage, placing the street entrance door directly upstage. The scene transition that calls for Arthur’s shop window to be boarded up is also smoothly handled.

  • Superior Donuts, by Tracy Letts, directed by Serge Seiden, The Studio Theatre’s Metheny Theatre, Washington

An alternative

They are the worlds that obey me, kinder and finer worlds: in many of them, for example, I’d have no teeth.

Because I believe I’d do better with a beak. So why not have one? That shouldn’t be impossible. I feel a beak could make me happy, quite extraordinarily content: sporting something dapper and useful in that line—handy for cracking walnuts, nipping fingers, tweezing seeds. Not that I’ve ever fancied eating seeds, but one can’t predict the path of appetite.

And beaks come in different sizes: that’s a plus, along with the range of designs. The toucan would be good for parties, shouting, grievous bodily harm. Ibis: mainly funerals and plumbing. Sparrow: best for online dating and eating crisps.

—A. L. Kennedy, “Story of My Life”

Bits are cheap

And clicking a Like button is too easy.

These are the organizations to which I gave coin, property, and/or effort in 2010. (Some of these were Christmas gifts to family members.)

A Girl’s Guide to Washington Politics

For the holiday break, this is an entertaining evening of blackout comedy, mixing political caricature and straight-up social satire, with a good salting of silly cabaret songs. Although our audience dotes most on the monologues by Todd Palin and Nancy (“I’m not bitter”) Pelosi, the strongest material includes sketches like Joey Bland and Lili-Brown’s study in race relations reversal. Klyph Stanford’s minimal Metro-inspired set is clever (and up-to-date, with red platform lights). Of the five-member ensemble, Brooke Breit stands out with the widest spectrum of sharply realized characters, ranging from a twelve-year-old with an overactive sense of entitlement to an apoplectic consumer finance adviser. The bits, 30 seconds or five minutes long, transition swiftly with no more set or prop requirements than a couple of black IKEA chairs. There are some genuine good laughs on offer here.

  • A Girl’s Guide to Washington Politics, written and performed by Chicago’s The Second City, directed by Billy Bungeroth, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Yes, somehow, we are related

Kate Gosselin guests on Sarah Palin’s Alaska: Kirkland Hamill has the recap.

“I’m standing in the ‘not rain,’ that’s what I’m doing.”

* * *

Meanwhile, Sarah is becoming perkier the more Kate comes unglued. It has grown increasingly apparent as the show has progressed that her appreciation for Alaska is based partly on how miserable it makes non-Alaskans.