theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
Via scribble, scribble, scribble…, Steve Gimbel deflates the proponents of a certain Objectivist:
If you take the writings of Nietzsche and remove everything insightful, interesting, and funny, what’s left are the writings of Ayn Rand. These works are a narcotic to the upper-middle class white male of above average means and intelligence because it simultaneously meets two needs…
This year’s festival in Shepherdstown engages with the world in a big way—questioning the American Dream, taking two different trips to Gaza, and challenging current trends in criminal justice and social policy. Certain parties felt sufficiently threatened by certain of the material as to withdraw support, and worse. Advocacy groups taking out program ads to present their side of the story, and police in the lobby! Exciting stuff.
Jason Grote‘s 1001 is an enchanting theatrical palimpsest of Tales from the Arabian Nights and Scheherazade, ethnic New Yorkers in the aftermath of 9/11, the centuries-old clash of East and West in the Holy Land, and a little bit of Alfred Hitchcock and the video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” The play’s various Borgesian stories interlock and overlap one another, so that following a particular narrative thread becomes as difficult as following the decorative ceramic tracery on a Persian mosque, and a couple of them simply leave us hanging with no satisfying conclusion. Something like Life, which (as one character aphoristically has it) “is suffering: to be released from it a kindness.”
The piece is deftly executed by an ensemble cast of six, plus two supernumeraries. The multi-flexible Ariel Shafir’s eyebrow-rolling schtick as The One-Eyed Arab is noteworthy, as is Reshma Shetty’s skillful juggling of multiple voices, among them a London-educated girl of the Emirates and a lisping princess in a Vertigo sendup.
Intriguing design elements include sparkly costume decorations made from fragments of compact disks; everything is unified by the reappearance of silks and banners of Della Robbia blue.
Lee Blessing premieres a dystopian parable, set sometime in the near future, about current society’s twin tendencies toward constant monitoring of deviant behavior, and toward devolution of government prerogatives to private, corporate interests. The Lonesome Hollow of the play’s title is a minimum-security enclave where sexual deviants are incarcerated indefinitely; both predators and lesser offenders (like pornographers) are shunned by a country grown markedly theocratic, encapsulated by an archipelago of numberless similar facilities, each one less pleasant than the one before. Sharing themes with The Handmaid’s Tale and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the play’s warning is that things are likely to get worse, and then get worse again.
Lou Sumrall does good work as Nye, a hard-bitten predator of young boys; paradoxically, his character provides much of the play’s humor, while his chemical and electrical emasculation by the staff at Lonesome Hollow provides much of the pathos. He is matched by Frank Deal as Glover, a supercilious senior staffer at the site. Deal’s commitment to the demands of the role is compelling, playing as he does a subcontracting pseudo-head shrinker with a streak of sadism. The John Proctor of this tale is Tuck, played by Sheffield Chastain, a photographer-artist of the David Hamilton or Larry Clark stripe; his self-imposed occupational therapy is to build a meditation labyrinth of bricks set into the lawn.
The rings of security that surround the prison echo the ringed pattern of bricks in Tuck’s labyrinth. Ultimately, the degree to which they provide a barrier is equally illusory. As Glover points out that one need not follow the bricks to reach the center of the labyrinth, just so he also notes that the system of Lonesome Hollows does not provide a solution. “Even now we don’t feel safe,” he says. Oddly, perhaps this is the only note of hope that Blessing’s play offers.
Robert Klingelhoefer’s off-kilter set, panelled in fragrant cedar, greets us as we enter the Frank Center auditorium for Richard Dresser’s darkish comedy, The Pursuit of Happiness. Part of a trilogy of plays on the titular theme that Dresser is developing, Pursuit looks in on Annie and Neil, grasping but surviving professional-class parents who are faced with the prospect that their own child, Jodi, will not or cannot go to college. Jodi (Carter Niles), resists the pressure from her parents to recapitulate their own struggles for happiness, and at least for a time, doesn’t buy into the idea of happiness at all. She suspects, in a college application essay that goes astray, “If you see someone walking down the street smiling, don’t you assume that they’re insane?”
Andrea Cirie stands out as the driven, overwound Annie, a woman who will do anything to get her daughter into her alma mater. And Sheffield Chastain also shines as Tucker, Neil’s nebbishy office mate. His put-upon head-cock is a winner. The narrative seems to drag a bit getting us to the first-act closer, but otherwise there are good moments for all the cast to enjoy. Scene changes are framed by music from the Beatles, especially the gloomier bits of Abbey Road, under Sharath Patel’s design.
“Everyone must feel safe,” read Rachel Corrie on the wall of her grade-school classroom, and she took it as a motto for her life. Corrie went on to practice this thought to the fullest: as a young woman she travelled to Israel-occupied Gaza to serve as an anti-violence activist, or to use the more polemical term, a human shield. She met her untimely death in an incident with an Israeli bulldozer in 2003. Her journals and other papers have been assembled by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner into the 85-minute monologue My Name Is Rachel Corrie, a piece mastered by CATF veteran Anne Marie Nest. In the first half of the play, largely taking place in Corrie’s home in Olympia, Wash., during her college years, Nest works the confines of the Studio Theater (configured arena-style), flirting with the audience and often making direct eye contact. Corrie at this point in her life is a bit of a post-modern tree-hugger, albeit one who admits her imperfect grasp of the geopolitical situation.
The impassioned speechifying and tears are reserved for the closing moments of the second half, set in Gaza during the last two months of Corrie’s life. The heaviest moments (perhaps too heavy) are spoken on tape, in which a fellow activist gives his account of Corrie’s death. The passages of the play where Nest is called on to speak the words of others in her life—her mother, an ex-boyfriend—are less effective.
Perhaps we’re left with the feeling that Corrie’s life and death was the stuff of theater, that no one could be this intense. But in a coda, we see a 10-year-old Corrie captured on video, speaking before a school assembly against poverty and violence with the eloquence and assuredness of any adult.
Far from sermonizing, the monologue is an inspiring, challenging work. Of her own death, Rickman and Viner have selected a set-piece from Corrie’s writings that suggest she is stoic, perhaps even mystical, about her passing. The passage from life to death, she writes, is “just a shrug.”
In a program interview, Lee Blessing says,
What’s great about CATF is that they’re absolutely unafraid of subject matter. They seek out plays that challenge us as a society…. This play is not meant to move to completion of what to do. My hope is that it will trouble people and make them want to discuss the issues. I want them to feel that the play has credibility, that there is something troublingly believable about it.
A recent article in Scientific American caught my eye. It’s by Jerry Glover et al. of The Land Institute, a Kansas-based organization that is working to establish agriculture on the Great Plains that has both the stability of the prairie and the yields of annual crops. Food from perennial grains, in other words.
Perennial crops with their deeper roots, so the argument goes, do a better job of sequestering carbon, and have favorable impacts on other wildlife. Land planted in annuals, by contrast, is more dependent on chemical inputs to maintain its productivity. To me, the affinity with agroforestry issues in the tropics is clear.
Terrence Rafferty previews Film Forum’s N.Y.C. Noir series, which kicks off with Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success:
…the way [J.J.] Hunsecker drags the movie’s protagonist, an overeager press agent named Sidney Falco…, down into the ethical sewer with him is as brutal as what Richard Widmark does to the old lady in Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death (1947)….
It’s the nakedness of the newspaperman’s exercise of power, and the inability of the other, less monomaniacal characters to fight it, that make the picture unmistakably noir, even without gunplay. A sense of powerlessness — often disguised by tough-guy bravado — is a common trait in the heroes and heroines of film noir, and this is a feeling that New Yorkers know a thing or two about. We know too that the threat of physical violence is far from the only means the masters of our fates employ when they want us to know there’s no way out. In this dirty town, where people come to Make It, our desire to succeed and our terror of failure are usually all the ammunition the powerful require to keep us right where they want us.
…traveling about 65mph, riding on the back of a Toyota. It turns out that the state of Arkansas has issued a license plate with a design that features the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.
Hmm. Virginia has plate designs that feature Mallard and Northern Cardinal, and West Virginia has a nice Rose-breasted Grosbeak plate. It’s not entirely clear what sort of heron Maryland was going for with its Chesapeake Bay plate. I wonder how long a list one could compile from plates of the 50-plus states, districts, and territories. Here’s the place to start looking.
Via Lifehacker, Steve Pavlina explains scaffolding as a means to establishing productivity habits.
A personal productivity scaffold is like wearing braces. It’s a way to redirect your time and energy back onto the “straight” course and away from the crooked one. Once you’ve set it up, it’s fairly easy to maintain, although you may still regard it as a small sacrifice.
Perhaps the most important function your scaffolding must perform is keeping your attention focused on what you want and off of what you don’t want.
Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime sorts out the difference between “noir” and “hardboiled” for Matthew Baldwin.
A noir story can be grim and suspenseful or grim and melancholy or grim and paranoid or grim and fatalistic—but it’s pretty much always grim. Its antecedents in literature include Oedipus, King Lear, and the work of Thomas Hardy; ‘noir’ posits a world in which either there is no god and men are left to make their way in a universe that’s indifferent to justice and to their suffering or else a universe that is actively malign…
The playing space at Silver Spring Stage is much more intimate than the CenterStage, where RCP performs. The first row of seats is only a few feet away, at eye level, and is usually well-lit by the spill from the stage lights. So we usually get a good look at all the humanity who come to see the show, and we’ve seen a number of specimens at Never the Sinner. There was the homeless guy who wandered in after the box office manager had closed up for the night. We wouldn’t have minded him at all, except that he started sorting through his shopping bags of bottles to be recycled, rattling the plastic bags and dropping the bottles on the floor. There was the community theater denizen who always rocks back and forth in his seat through the complete proceedings. The woman who brought her service dog with her wasn’t a problem, but the pooch got a little upset in scene 4 when Ryan and Sam start waltzing with each other, and started to bark. Everyone’s a dance critic. She got the dog calmed down for the rest of the show, but the curtain call—60 people banging their hands together—was too much, and the dog howled through it. There was the woman who seemed to be following along with a script. Maybe a WATCH judge who knocks off points for textual inaccuracies? Oh, and lest we forget, the helpful fellow at our preview performance who announced, as the lights and video projector finally went down after the announcement of the verdict, “That’s the end.”
For all the stem-winding bluster of the second act—the dueling counselors monologues—this is a show about sharp, tiny effects. Sam (Loeb) opens up his heart just a crack with a mournful, “I miss my mom,” and then he slams it shut again with, “Not that she deserves it, the stupid old cow.” Kevin, the sound designer, has built a sound plot that underscores nearly the entire play, but he drops it out to highlight Ryan’s (Leopold’s) killer speech, “to me he is like a hard, perfect gem.” Craig’s (Darrow’s) best moment is just one bitten-off word, and it comes in a passage where he tells us how horrible it will be to hang the killers: “I can see them falling through space and stopped by the rope around their necks.” Maybe the best thing about the role I’m portraying is the fabulous double-breasted suit that Eric found for me through his Washington Opera connections. Or perhaps the eye-roll and cheek-puff that I do when Robin (Germaine) goes off message for the third time during her testimony. But seriously, I think I’m doing a good job technically and using my instrument well, especially when I remember to breathe.
Candidates for a revised edition of Mondo DC, especially since the Squished Penny Museum has closed: Clay Risen visits ten of D.C.’s more obscure monuments.
Needless to say, the Cuban American Friendship Urn is not of recent vintage. Originally located in Havana in commemoration of the 266 U.S. sailors killed in the 1898 USS Maine explosion, a precipitating factor in the Spanish-American War, the marble urn (contents unknown) was moved to Washington after it was knocked over in a 1926 hurricane. At first it was placed in front of the Cuban embassy, but after Castro came to power—and the embassy was shut down—it was moved to its present location, an obscure corner of East Potomac Park, itself a relatively obscure spit of land running south from the Mall.
Dan Charles visits Iowa farmland with soil scientist Lee Burras of Iowa State University. They discuss no-till farming, cover crops, and other organic farming practices as means of carbon sequestration—all of them ways that farmers can have a positive effect on global climate change.
Phil Patton previews new designs for hybrid and electric cars. Toyota is showing a spiffy 2-door concept car called the X that features a lot of glass.
Wow. I reset the background color in my browser to something other than white, so that I could check that a GIF that a graphic artist had sent me actually had a transparent background. And now I find that at least two sites on my blogroll, as well as my bookmarking service Connotea, don’t bother to set white as the background color for their pages. Yuck!
Today’s biology term is mycoheterotrophy, used to describe parasitic organisms, like this orchid, that rely on a fungus as intermediary to extract nutrients from a photosynthesizing plant. There is no direct connection between the epiphyte and the host plant.
Scott Rosenberg points out that Facebook’s categories of friendship are useful if you’re nineteen years old, but not so much if you’re a grownup. Here are the possible answers to “How do you know [this friend]?”
- Lived together
- Worked together
- From an organization or team
- Took a course together
- From a summer / study abroad program
- Went to school together
- Traveled together
- In my family
- Through a friend
- Through Facebook
- Met randomly
- We hooked up
- We dated
- I don’t even know this person
He’s absolutely right: a minute or two of doodling on my desk pad, and I came up with the following additional choices:
And to be really useful, the information has to be even more specific than that. In my PDA Contacts app, I use one of the user-defined fields to keep track of what theater project I know somebody from. So that if I forget that I know Lori K. because she was the producer for Forum in 2001, my organizer won’t.
Luís Gil explains why cork is a better choice for stoppering wine bottles than its synthetic alternatives. Some of his arguments are not persuasive, and amount to “we’ve always done it this way,” but consider:
6) Cork is a renewable resource and cork oak forests are one of the most sustainable natural systems, providing the habitat of several endangered species and supporting one of the highest levels of biodiversity among European forests. Cork comes from the bark of the cork oak [Quercus suber], and is harvested only once every nine or ten years, without detriment to the tree.
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10) Cork production is based in poor rural areas where it provides much needed jobs. About 150,000 people around the world work with cork, and it is an important part of Southern Europe and North African economies.
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13) Cork sequesters carbon from the atmosphere; a cork stopper sequesters about twice is weight of CO2; all the cork stoppers produced in one year represent the CO2 pollution of about 49,000 automobiles each year.