Stunning

David Adjmi’s new play, set in the enclave of Syrian Jews of Brooklyn’s Midwood neighborhood, gives us a look into that prosperous but highly isolated community in which he himself grew up. It opens with a bang-up scene to introduce us to Lily, one of our two protagonists; in rapid-fire comic dialogue of a brevity suggests Beckett or Mamet, the not-quite-seventeen-year-old Lily (the flexible Laura Heisler) recounts her Caribbean honeymoon with Ike, whom she wed by arrangement, to her older sister Shelly and friend Claudine. Flighty Lily, who insists on telling us how mature she is, seems obsessed by her peeling sunburn.

Back in Brooklyn and setting up housekeeping, she hires Blanche as a live-in maid. Even though Blanche is African-American, Lily insists on speaking Spanish to her because she’s always had Puerto Rican servants before. Blanche (the charming Quincy Tyler Bernstine) is apparently down on her luck temporarily but waiting for it to turn with an expected job in academia. Blanche is biding her time, and she can be ingratiating or firm, as need be.

Blanche catalyzes Lily’s attempt to break out of her own ivory tower, the stultifying environment of this hidebound community where she is encouraged to do nothing but go shopping, symbolized by a two-level set by Daniel Conway painted (and repainted in the course of the evening) in nothing but white. Unfortunately, the set (which owes something to Woolly’s recent set for The Clean House) at times is too much a character, with mirrors that offer intended and unintended looks into the house and backstage, and balky sliding panels.

Lily’s community is nevertheless childishly naive at times, as when Shelly uses Pig Latin to tell something to Lily in Blanche’s presence, assuming that she won’t understand.

Alas, neither Lily’s effort to fly free nor Blanche’s attempts to find security (Ike is her brutal Stanley Kowalski antagonist, played as a nasty piece of work by Michael Gabriel Goodfriend) come to a good end, and one that doesn’t feel fully earned. Adjmi shows us that the cruelty of this culture is something it shares with the rest of the world without achieving a universality.

  • Stunning, by David Adjmi, directed by Anne Kauffmann, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

A more perfect union

Taking as his text the Preamble to the Constitution, and quoting the Gospels and William Faulkner, Barack Obama delivers a moving, thoughtful, and genuinely inspiring speech on race relations.

Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience—as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.

Missing middle

James Surowiecki sounds a contrary note in the chorus of appreciation for microfinance:

What poor countries need most, then, is not more microbusinesses. They need more small-to-medium-sized enterprises, the kind that are bigger than a fruit stand but smaller than a Fortune 1000 corporation. In high-income countries, these companies create more than sixty per cent of all jobs, but in the developing world they’re relatively rare, thanks to a lack of institutions able to provide them with the capital they need. It’s easy for really big companies in poor countries to tap the markets for funding, and now, because of microfinance, it’s possible for really small enterprises to get money, too. But the companies in between find it hard.

He cites a paper by Karol Boudreaux and Tyler Cowen, “The Micromagic of Microcredit.” Boudreaux and Cowen speak more highly of microcredit, but still their praise is muted. They point out that microcredit benefits more women than men (3:1, according to one U.N. statistic) and that often the loans go for a blend of consumption and investment, like school fees for a child. Perhaps paradoxically, livestock can be a better store of wealth for poor people than cash. Whatever its weaknesses, institutional microcredit is a better deal for the world’s poor than the alternative, freelancing moneylenders (what we call “loan sharks” in this country).

Microcredit is making people’s lives better around the world. But for the most part, it is not pulling them out of poverty. It is hard to find entrepreneurs who start with these tiny loans and graduate to run commercial empires…. The more modest truth is that microcredit may help some people, perhaps earning $2 a day, to earn something like $2.50 a day. That may not sound dramatic, but when you are earning $2 a day it is a big step forward.

So my hundred bucks a year to FINCA isn’t going to solve all the problems of the world, hunh? Not surprising.

Some snaps: 2

Clearview in LoudounHighway signs using Clearview, a more legible alternative to so-called Freeway Gothic, are starting to make their appearance in Virginia. Here’s an example, this one particularly easy to photograph, at the end of the parking lot for the W&OD Trail where it crosses Route 28. How to distinguish Clearview? Notice the tails on the lowercase L’s, the large x-height, and the springy-looking lowercase A’s. Leta says, “it just looks bigger.”

crocus '08A sign of spring: crocus (in Northwestern University colors) in my front yard, peeping through last year’s St. John’s wort.

Major Barbara

Would that everyone in the world were as amiably self-aware as the characters in a play by George Bernard Shaw! Or at least our adversaries. Of this much reconciliation would come. Andrew Undershaft (the majestic Ted van Griethuysen), weapons dealer who is described by one character as “the Prince of Darkness,” returns to his petit-aristocratic family in Wilton Crescent with its hothouse niceties:

UNDERSHAFT. …consider for a moment. Here I am, a manufacturer of mutilation and murder. I find myself in a specially amiable humor just now because, this morning, down at the foundry, we blew twenty-seven dummy soldiers into fragments with a gun which formerly destroyed only thirteen.

Who can quarrel with this argument? Perhaps only his daughter, the titular Barbara (the plucky proto-suffragette Vivienne Benesch) of this play from 1905, who has volunteered in the Salvation Army and risen to the rank of major. Will Barbara—disillusioned by the moral compromises that even her Army must make to remain viable—and her betrothed, former Greek professor Adophus Cusins (played with giddy fervor and wild hair by Karl Kenzler), assume the legacy of the family arms business? Well, this is a comedy, after all.

Director Ethan McSweeny keeps the proceedings fizzing along quickly and delivers a running time for the evening less than three hours. We particularly liked the scrim-projected titles that establish scenes reproducing morsels of Shaw’s stage directions—considered by many to be the best part of the plays. A tossed-off bit about a cushion turns into a running gag for Lady Britomart (Undershaft’s wife and Barbara’s mother) (Wildean Helen Carey) and her son Stephen (Tom Story, in fine squeaky, feckless fettle). McSweeny’s players keep their physicality in Edwardian-era check until the final scene at Undershaft’s munitions plant, when most of the explosions are emotional. Barbara and Adolphus have a good closing scene twirling about a Germanic-looking monument topped with an Iron Cross, and Undershaft comes positively undone in this speech:

UNDERSHAFT. Ought, ought, ought, ought, ought! Are you going to spend your life saying ought, like the rest of our moralists? Turn your oughts into shalls, man. Come and make explosives with me. Whatever can blow men up can blow society up. The history of the world is the history of those who had courage enough to embrace this truth. Have you the courage to embrace it, Barbara?

Also noteworthy are the sets by James Noone, from the highly polished steamship of the Wilton Crescent library to the gunpowder sheds of Undershaft’s factory. The red and black color scheme for the sheds is evocative of events later to come in the century, and the decision to leave their sheetrock walls (anachronistic? no matter) untaped and unpainted is inspired.

  • Major Barbara, by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Ethan McSweeny, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington

Tap

Tap is an otherwise ordinary dance movie from the late 1980s, with just enough plot and characterization to string together the dance numbers. But there’s a gesture about 13 minutes in that’s worth the rental; it tells us a lot about our protagonist Max (Geoffrey Hines), and about what it is to do creative work.

Max is just getting back on his feet; he’s just out of prison. He walks into a tap dance studio, it’s a little grungy, but he knows his way around. He walks three flights up to a private studio. He’s got his shoes in a brown paper bag. He dumps the shoes out of the bag onto the floor, slips off his jacket, strokes the wood of the floor briefly, and then he begins to practice.

It’s not about the best equipment, it’s not about the bright lights, it may not even be about having heat in the building: it’s about the work.

Mr. Brightside

there is always
something to be thankful
for you would not
think that a cockroach
had much ground
for optimism
but as the fishing season
opens up i grow
more and more
cheerful at the thought
that nobody ever got
the notion of using
cockroaches for bait

—Don Marquis, the Archy and Mehitabel poems, 19 April 1922

At the park: 12

Our gang of four nest box monitors got started early again this year, but a Hooded Merganser hen was ahead of us, with 6 eggs already on box #7.

The water had a good crust of ice, but it was easily breakable. A good number of teal and pintail on the ponds of the wetland. Red maples in bud. As we stowed excess wood chips in the shed at the visitors center at the end of the morning, a large flock of grackles blew in, to be snagged by the trees above.

Yay, us! 2

Last spring’s production of Never the Sinner, directed by Michael Kharfen, received three awards for outstanding achievement at yesterday evening’s WATCH awards, including Outstanding Play. The candidate pool was 79 productions by 29 member companies, so, yeah, this is kind of a big deal.

Ordinarily, I don’t get worked up about things like this, but as Ted says, awards programs are bunk until you win one. I was definitely tingly when I came over to congratulate Michael and the rest of the team. I am honored to have been a part of this fine show.

7×7: Love Duets

The WB brings us seven sketches on the theme of love, some of them duets, others with more complex groupings. In the leadoff pair, Elizabeth Gaither reminds us that a dancer’s hands are an important expressive part of her instrument in Stephen Mills’s “Desire.” Adam Houghland’s “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” is a flirtatious punk-inspired piece for two couples, set on music of the same name by Soft Cell. The groupings in Nicolo Fonte’s “Aria 1&2” (music by Handel) are more complex: one woman and three men, arranged into a two-man pair with the other man and woman providing an ostinato behind, followed by a reversal of figure and ground. After the break comes the Philip Glass-scored “2 Long 2 Love,” a lush, dangerous piece by Nejla Y. Yatkin danced in soft slippers on a deck strewn with red paper rose petals: a man, a woman loved, and a woman spurned. After this piece, the company appears with dust mops to Zamboni the dancing surface in preparation for “Falling Away with You,” choreographed by company member Jared Nelson. This is a sharp, fast, go-for-broke piece for two pairs, well-executed by Runqiao Du, Aurora Dickie, Corey Landolt, and Giselle Alvarez.

  • 7×7: Love Duets, Washington Ballet, England Studio Theater, Washington

More conservation tradeoffs

Emma Marris reviews the range of schemes for making choices in conservation biology and even uses the charged word “triage” for Nature‘s 8 November 2007 issue (paywall-protected link).

The EDGE program (Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered) of the Zoological Society of London gives priority to species that are taxonomically distinct, “far out on their own on the tree of life,” if you will. The reasoning is that a distinct taxon, now endangered, one that branched tens of millions of years ago from the tree, represents a unique chapter of evolutionary history that can’t be rewritten once lost. Priority amphibians include Chinese Giant Salamander (Andrias davidianus) (up to 1.8 meters long!), Sagalla Caecilian (Boulengerula niedeni), a worm-like burrower with an extremely restricted range in Kenya, and Purple Frog (Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis), only described in 2003; top mammals are Yangtze River dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer) (perhaps already extinct), Long-beaked Echidna (Zaglossus bruijni), and Riverine Rabbit (Bunolagus monticularis) of South Africa. The system doesn’t appear to have been applied to other orders. A paper by Isaac et al., “Mammals on the EDGE: Conservation Priorities Based on Threat and Phylogeny” documents the EDGE metrics as applied to mammals.

The majority opinion among conservation biologists today is that they still understand too little about ecosystem functions to say for sure which species are the ‘load-bearing’ ones whose presence keeps a complex, multi-tiered ecosystem from collapsing into some worst case dull scenario of rats, roaches and invasive grass. “We are so fundamentally ignorant,” says Norman Myers, a fellow of the University of Oxford, UK, and adjunct professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. “We cannot afford, by a long, long way, to say which species are dispensable.”

Thus Myers pioneered the concept of habitat hotspots, and a number of overlapping hotspot maps have proliferated. Birders may be familiar with catalogues of Important Bird Areas, Birdlife International’s Endemic Bird Areas, or Conservation International’s biodiversity hotspots. The problem for conservation biology is that each hotspot schema starts with different assumptions, chief among them the metric that is to be optimized. Do we seek to minimize extinctions of species or taxa, maximize land area preserved, maximize taxonomic diversity, or optimize some other measure? Marris writes that the work of Hugh Possingham of the University of Queensland in this area is getting a lot of attention: Possingham seeks to maximize the number of species conserved (vascular plants and vertebrates, in the paper cited below), trading off against the real-world costs of conservation efforts—land acquisition, invasive predator extirpation on islands, fire management, replanting, what have you. A paper by Kerrie A. Wilson et al., “Conserving Biodiversity Efficiently: What to Do, Where, and When,” explains the methodology and applies it as an example to 17 of the world’s 39 Mediterranean ecoregions.

What I find notable about the paper’s approach are the tools of economic analysis that are brought to bear on the problem. An expenditure in conservation activity is modelled as a financial investment. Different activities (“ecoactions”) show different expenditure streams: compare the one-time cost of land acquisition, for example, to the ongoing cost of fire management. The paper uses standard discounting methods and Net Present Value calculations to make investment choices comparable. The model reflects that the impact on species preservation will show diminishing marginal returns as investment is increased. The investment allocation algorithm is dynamic over time: it accounts for positive effects in the ecosystem as investments are made, and adjusts allocations year by year in response.

Wilson et al. acknowledge that the methodology does not yet account for uncertainty, a keystone of modern financial analysis. Also, it would be fruitful—albeit computationally more complicated—to consider the interaction effects of various conservation activities, rather than assuming that each activity acts independently of others.

A worked example chooses between three ecoactions in the Swan Coastal Plain region of Australia: revegetation to counteract habitat fragmentation, invasive predator control, and management of a soil-borne pseudo-fungus, Phytophthora cinnamomi). Even though Phytophthora management is the most expensive per square kilometer ($514K versus $301K for replanting and $7K for predator control), it is nevertheless the most cost-effective: a marginal $2 million spent controlling the pseudo-fungus, in this computation, will protect 49 species, versus 4 for predator management and effectively zero for revegetation.