theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
Amy Harmon profiles David Campbell, a contributor to new Florida state science education standards.
“Faith is not based on science,” Mr. Campbell said [to his class of 10th-grade biology students]. “And science is not based on faith. I don’t expect you to ‘believe’ the scientific explanation of evolution that we’re going to talk about over the next few weeks.”
“But I do,” he added, “expect you to understand it.”
…the Federal Transit Administration authorized project managers to begin major construction on the Orange Line extension [of Metro]…. The FTA letter does not guarantee full funding of the project…. But state and project officials interpreted the letter as an encouraging development, a further signal that the project’s near-demise earlier this year is behind them.
Christoph Niemann tiles the bathrooms of his renovated home with renderings of 20th-century icons of art and graphic design.
“I wanted a Titian and all I got was a lump of lard,” Lisa gasped.
Via kottke.org, Merlin Mann explains why my blogging will always be mediocre:
2. Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, their brain so overflows with curiosity about a family of topics that they can’t stop reading and writing about it. They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this person’s obsessions take them?
I’ve got just too many categories in my sidebar.
Longacre Lea’s new production is a lyrical brain tickler, a serio-comic mystery packed with erudition. Perhaps too well-packed: at a running time of three hours, the piece is on a par with much of the work of one of the playwright’s touchstones, Tom Stoppard.
In the fall of 1963, Elizabeth and Barbara Sweeny, ostensibly daughter and mother, travel to an obscure French pension to consult in discretion with Dr. Giraud (played with hilarious sniffy eccentricity by Jason Lott) to learn the cause of Elizabeth’s mysterious affliction. The only other guests in this small hotel are a CIA-ish American and two playwrights: Tennessee Williams drinking incognito and the yet unpublished Stoppard himself. While the opening scene suggests Stoppard’s Travesties, the hotel’s smugly efficient proprietor (nice work by Daniel Vito Siefring) speaks with an accent more in keeping with one of Sir Tom’s adaptations of Molnar.
Elizabeth soon meets the shadowy Mr. Asher (oh-so cool Michael John Casey), who explains that he is a collector of sun myths from cultures around the world. In his evening visits, Asher tells several of these to Elizabeth, and each is a lovely bit of writing, a set piece for the cast/ensemble to illustrate choreographically. Unfortunately, it’s only in the story told solo by Casey that the play’s solar fables really shine.
The play, premiering in this production, needs some tightening. There’s an awkward transition in the second act that reveals the facts of Elizabeth’s complaint to the rest of the guests. However, the arc of Elizabeth’s journey is compelling, and its resolution (with its whiff of another master of contemporary fantasy, Craig Lucas and his Prelude to a Kiss) is quite satisfying.
Susan Elliott gives recognition to another unsung contributor to the musical theater: the orchestrator. Orchestrators are needed even for revivals, perhaps moreso.
Downsizing is the norm these days, mostly because of space and economics. “We’re being asked to write for smaller and smaller bands all the time,” [Michael] Starobin [orchestrator of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins] said. “Everybody’s oohing and aahing about South Pacific, but nobody’s saying: ‘Hey! Let’s use big orchestras again.’ Producers don’t want to put money into the music; they’d rather spend $3 million on the scenery.”
Via I Love Typography, my first name transliterated.
It’s been about 10 days since we closed Incorruptible, the last show of the season. In the brief interval before the one acts festival opens the 2008-09 season, the Stage honored actors and designers for the just-closed season, and Leta picked up the directing award. Good on ya, mate.
Lessons learned from this project:
I also need to make sure that the Stage board gets these recommendations.
Via things magazine: the preparation of 100 Sol LeWitt wall drawings for his upcoming retrospective at MASS MoCA.
You too can present a retrospective of the great Wall Drawings of Sol LeWitt!
You’ll need a crew. Art students will do. Also recent art graduates, and artists- if they can follow instructions.
Latest spam over the transom. I’ve highlighted the most incomprehensible sentence, if you can call it that.
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Probably you can learn Russian woman. I hope you will not be
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Leta says that this would be a great cold reading exercise at auditions. It’s less intelligible than “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut.”
Maura Judkis profiles Dave Hall of Shorpy, my daily dose of photographic awesomeness.
The street name signs in Fairfax City constitute the most egregious mess of colors and styles in the metropolitan area.
The smaller intersections are marked with generic black on white signs, with or without block numbers. These simple, functional signs are similar to those used in Arlington County.
Up on the busier thoroughfares, the signs switch to white on blue. Most use a readable but pedestrian all-caps sans serif. Overhead signs use “Freeway Gothic” in mixed case.
There is a pinched condensed font that suggests credits on a movie poster. (Unfortunately, an example or two of this developer-friendly sign can be found in Reston, too.) The contrast with the white on green is particularly ugly.
Intersections in the old town center use signs with a scrolled border and a decorated serif, but recent traffic re-engineering is replacing these with the ordinary overheads.
This example, missing the street type and the block numbers, appears to be a one-off. Notice the brackets for the crossing sign for University Drive, which is missing.
You can even find a few examples of this jaunty mixed-case sans serif, shown here with an afterthought black and white locator.
This blue-bronze sign for a new subdivision of starter McMansions is especially galling.
But the worst specimens accrue to the recent dual-designation within the city of U.S. Route 50, which follows Arlington Boulevard, Lee Highway, and Main Street, as “Fairfax Boulevard.” This led to the creation of these red-white-and-blue decorative contraptions. Notice the oops-addition of a sign for Blake Lane, which was extended to this intersection about 20 years ago.
Minor intersections were fitted with smaller versions of the ungainly, squareish Fairfax Boulevard signs.
Related: My pedantic nuthatch posts from ’05 and ’06 on street name signs in Reston, Fairfax County, Lake Barcroft, Alexandria, Arlington, Bethesda, and the District.
Mark Liberman riffs on a word that I like to beat people up with.
In a proper name that includes a numerical designation, when do we (or most of us) pronounce the name as a cardinal and when do we use an ordinal? For instance, we read Elizabeth II as “Elizabeth the second” but Super Bowl II as “Super Bowl two.” Is the distinction just people vs. everything else? Don’t names of ships sometimes use ordinals and sometimes cardinals? How about horses, like Canonero II?
(Prompted by a momentary misreading of Discoverer I as “Discoverer the first” [Only Revolutions, p. 291S.] Conversely, our friend David refers to Shakepeare’s best-known history play as “Henry five.”)
The completion of Richard Dresser’s Happiness trilogy, A View of the Harbor, comes as somewhat of a surprise. The first two parts of the cycle, Augusta and The Pursuit of Happiness explored the worlds of the working and middle classes, respectively, while the new play completes the plan by moving on to the upper classes. But rather than the caustic comedy and steely satire that is Dresser’s wont, this play is a drama about the decline of an old family of power and wealth and the establishment of a new order. The result is a crepuscular piece that suggests Eugene O’Neill more than A.R. Gurney.
The festival’s centerpiece production, in the expansive Frank Center Stage, is The Overwhelming by J.T. Rogers. Viewers of the film Hotel Rwanda or readers of Jared Diamond’s Collapse will be familiar with the events of April, 1994 in this small alpine African country of 10 million souls, but many Americans remain unacquainted with the horrific killings that took place then. Tensions between the two major ethno-political groups of the country and surrounding region, the Hutu and the Tutsi, boiled over into assassination and then genocidal violence, with the massacre of 800,000 people, primarily Tutsi.
The play takes place in the run-up to the killings. Our lens on this world is the American family of Jack Exley (a struggling academic), his second wife Linda White-Keeler (a magazine journalist), and Jack’s disaffected son Geoffrey. Perhaps too conveniently, each of them develops friendships with Rwandans from different sides of the conflict: Jack with a doctor with ties to Tutsi-associated RPF rebels, Linda with a hardline Hutu government minister (the frightening David Emerson Toney), and Geoffrey with average-Joe Gérard (the strong Maduka Steady). Also too pat, the publish-or-perish tenure decision hanging over Jack’s head is a weak reason for him to stay in the country when it becomes clear that something dangerous is going to happen.
Upon hearing the rumbles of forthcoming violence, Jack demands action from the U.S. embassy staff. He is met with pragmatic indifference from Woolsey (Michael Goodwin), who points out how few Americans there are in the country and how unimportant this small country “at the edge of the world” is to U.S. interests. He asserts that effective foreign policy is never based on “doing the right thing.”
The theme of individual action in the face of seemingly overwhelming historical forces is elaborated upon in the person of Jack. In an climax that, unfortunately, feels forced and rushed, Jack must choose which one of two people to protect against the killings. However, the ultimate bloodshed that pulls the play’s narrative toward its conclusion is more alluded to and suggested than actually depicted (and, as in the case of the film, this may be the more powerful choice).
Technically, the play is a masterful sprawl of language and sound, with a cast of more than a dozen speaking four languages on stage (including Kinyarwanda) along with several English dialects. Kudos to dialects coach Kirsten Trump and sound designer Todd Campbell, who provides energetic, sometimes frightening, drumming as transition material across scenes.