Sinner update

after the renovationsWe move rehearsals on to the stage later this week, out of the newly tiled and cleaned-up karate studio, and I am really looking forward to seeing the set that Bruce has designed and John built—the renderings look fabulous.

John Logan, the playwright, has selected lots of repetitions from the source material (court transcripts, newspaper and radio accounts) of this play. For instance, his Robert Crowe says, in his five-minute closing summation, “…there is but one penalty that is proportional to the turpitude of this crime, only one penalty that applies to a crime of this sort, and that is death.” Director Michael has been relentless in making me emphasize, depend on, trust in those repetitions. Though this play depicts a bloody crime, it’s ultimately a very talky courtroom drama, and Michael’s vision, as I understand it, is to throw key ideas into precise, high relief: judgment by a jury of peers, mercy, justice, the rule of law. Logan also retains the declamatory conventions of the pre-television age: alliteration, direct quotations from the Pentateuch.

Michael asked me to do something else that no director has ever needed to ask me before: to stop gesturing. In scene 18, Crowe and Clarence Darrow have their one duet scene, a meeting just outside the courtroom. The normally intellectual Crowe, who begins by saying, “I really don’t have to justify anything to you,” in fact spends most of the scene trying to do just that to Darrow, explaining his hardball tactics in pursuit of the death sentence. In the midst of a flailing emotional outburst, Crowe takes the personal tack with Darrow:

You know what’s happening in Chicago. You know about the gangs and corruption. It’s just creeping in. Everywhere. All because the laws are not being enforced! You like that? I want my children to grow up in a city where they can depend on the law to protect them.

And it is Michael’s wisdom to direct me to keep this passage intimate, personal, not stagey. Early on, he walked over to me during a rehearsal of this bit and took my hands in his and placed them at my sides. So I’m forced to use my eyes, my face, my voice to convince Darrow that I’m right.

Claire, who is responsible for hair, took the clippers to us last week. Most of the younger cast members are growing theirs out. I, on the other hand, am still stuck in the 1970s when it comes to the back of my head, so Claire had lots of hair to hack off back there. Crowe had a lush head of hair on his crown, however, and we’re looking for ways to train my baby-fine locks into a bushy fighting Irish do.

Sam and Ryan, playing the teenaged killers Dick Loeb and Nathan “Babe” Leopold, are scary-creepy good at what they do.

Dead Man’s Cell Phone

I know someone who once found himself in the awkward situation of having to tell our mutual friends that one of our number had died unexpectedly. That’s sort of the situation that Jean (sad sack Polly Noonan) finds herself in at the top of Sarah Ruhl’s new black comedy. Jean, annoyed by the ringing phone of a neighbor in a cafe, accosts him, only to find that he has expired in the midst of eating his lentil soup. Impulsively, she takes his phone and takes on the responsibility of explaining to Gordon’s callers—for she eventually learns his name—what has happened to him.

There’s some comedy to be found here: we learn that there wasn’t much love in the businessman Gordon (a dyspeptic Rick Foucheux), but yet Jean lies to each of his loved ones that Gordon thought well of each one in his final moments. But that’s not what Ruhl is after. Rather, she’s interested in exploring the alienating effects of technology, as she explains in a program note:

I don’t think we’ve caught up, emotionally, culturally, or physically, to the digital age. We live in an instant culture. But we don’t have instantaneous bodies.

And one of her characters in the play says, more poetically, “We’re all disappearing, the more we’re there.” The sort of business Gordon deals in is a commoditization of the body.

While the first act closes with a beautiful stage picture of paper houses descending from the flies while Polly finds a moment of connectedness, the second act plotting, with its necessity to introduce Jean to Gordon face-to-face, feels forced.

The multiple scene shifts required by this production are managed neatly by Production Stage Manager Taryn Colberg’s crew, who are dressed in suits to match Gordon’s smart three-piece number.

  • Dead Man’s Cell Phone, by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Rebecca Bayla Taichman, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Friday night fun

—Number 5, please.

—My name is David Gorsline, and this is from State Fair.

After years of protesting, “I don’t do musicals, if you heard me sing, you would understand,” I walked into RCP’s auditons for Guys and Dolls armed with nothing but my water bottle and the sheet music for “Isn’t It Kinda Fun.” It’s an uptempo showtune, which is what was called for in the casting announcement, and the music is by Richard Rodgers, who makes everyone sound good (this on my authority for all things musical, Leta).

At least Sue, the director, looked pleased to see me, as we have worked on one or two straight-play projects before. And Brian, the music director, had accompanied us for Seussical rehearsals, so he knew what he was getting. Elisa, one of RCP’s sweethearts, was at the piano.

This was a typical evening of wham-bam screening: with 40-plus actors to see, there’s only time to sing your song, crash through the dance combination, and be released. I made sure that I was there early (something I do anyway), so I was in the first group of twelve to sing and dance, and I was back in the car by 8.

I’m not really sure how the song went, but I got a clue from the more experienced singers on the bench next to me. One said, sympathetically, “It’s hard to go first.” This was the first time that I’ve sung this song with piano accompaniment EVER, so I’m not sure that I started on the C that I intended, but rather I may have wandered down to the G, which is the root of the chords in the intro. I got the ship righted in the second 8 bars, and Sue was bopping along with me, but Brian mercifully cut me off after the bridge.

Not everyone followed Sue’s request for “upbeat.” In my group of twelve, I heard some nice Lerner and Loewe, a couple of showcase pieces for good soprano voices, a G&S patter song, and (THANK GOD) since this was a show for adults, only one version of “Popular.” Mike (Horton from Seussical) was in the house, but not in my group, which is too bad, ’cause I wanted to hear him sing.

Choreographer Ivan then ran us through the dance combination, sort of a mashup of the steps he planned to use in the show from various songs. I unabashedly smudged my way through the bourrée that Ivan gave us, but he said he was looking for manly attitude, and I tried to focus on that.

All in all, no one fell down, no one threw up, so I’m calling it a win. Callbacks and casting decisions are this weekend. I’m only trying to get into the chorus, and maybe to do one of the character bits. This is all about pushing against the envelope.

Very like a whale

Rebecca Stott praises the great 19th-century pre-post-modernist novel Moby-Dick:

It is a creature quite unto itself: a great library of learning contained within the belly of a whale, a key to all mythologies, a joke, a quest, a witch-hunt, a parable, a water eclogue and a warning against the dangers of monomania and what we might call fundamentalism.

Stott compares Melville’s book to an earlier gallimaufry of a novel, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.

So long, Don

Don Herbert, Mr. Wizard of my childhood, has passed away. When I was about nine years old, my hometown television station replaced Herbert’s show with some humdrum public affairs program: I fired off a snarky note to the editor of the TV section of the Dayton Daily News, and got it published. (My first and last effort at grassroots activism, and of course it didn’t have any effect.) Here’s hoping that there’s a Van de Graaff generator wherever you are, Mr. Wizard.

(Link via Boing Boing.)

At the park: 9

It’s time to hang up my waders for the season, although we have one nest still active to be checked in the next week or so. This morning was a day for surprises, not all of them happy.

When I opened one of our newly-placed boxes, which had had an active nest with 12 eggs last month, I found a bird-shaped bowl in the down and wood chips, but no eggs and no shells. My best explanation so far is that the nest has been clean-picked predated over several days by one or more snakes.

As Myra and I worked our way down lower Barnyard Run, we heard our happiest surprise: a Wood Thrush (Hylocichla mustelina) singing full-voiced in the woods.

New Box 67, which had seen some dumping activity (our last count for the box was 22 eggs), hatched out all but three. But unfortunately, the nest in Box 77 was a near-complete failure, with numerous half-hatched chicks. Unlucky Myra had to clean that one out.

drying outBut the big surprise was the abrupt drop in water level along lower Barnyard Run. The dry conditions in the main wetland we expected: at this time of year the mud flats are giving over to grasses. But we expected the substantial beaver dam across the run to be holding back much more water than this. (The green vegetation running horizontally in this image marks the top of the dam.)

beaver lodge and dry boxBox 60 is usually sitting in about two feet of water (you can see the rust marks on the support pole), but at the moment it’s high and dry. Well, mucky, at least.

The dry conditions made for good viewing of snapping turtles. We found three of the these critters, half-covered in mud, as we walked back. Ours is the Common Snapping Turtle (Chelydra serpentina), ranging from Nova Scotia to the Rio Grande, according to Roger Conant and Joseph T. Collins’s Peterson field guide. They describe the family Chelydridae as “Large freshwater turtles with short tempers and long tails…”

Summer of ’42

Theater patrons of a certain age will remember Herman Raucher’s slightly scandalous film from 1971, a memoir of sexual awakening and the loss of of a certain kind of innocence. On a New England summer resort island, a stripling teenager (Hermie) becomes infatuated with a young woman (Dorothy) whose new husband has just been called away to war service in the Pacific. In the end, Hermie gets what he wants, but not at all in the way that he imagined it.

Raucher’s sea-breezed bit of sentimentality transfers to the Bethesda stage, and picks up a musical score along the way. Hermie (Ryan Nealy) is appropriately gawky, and Dorothy (Nancy Snow) is bemused, but the play gets its oomph from Michael Vitaly Sazonov’s spring-loaded portrayal of Hermie’s friend Oscy, a hormone-charged adolescent with his older brother’s sex manual.

Harmonies of the period make their appearance in the unmemorable songs, which are not well served by aggressive micing of the vocalists.

  • Summer of ’42, book by Hunter Foster, music and lyrics by David Kirshenbaum, based on the novel and screenplay by Herman Raucher, directed by Meredith McDonough, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.

Bring it up again

A leader from the traditionally eco-skeptic Economist admits that recycling is “mostly worthwhile,” and proposes three steps to encourage the practice. Relying on mechanisms technological, political, and economic, the magazine recommends

  1. a single stream from the consumer, with automated conveyor belts at the processing facility to separate items;
  2. selling recycled waste to emerging markets; and
  3. monetary rewards to consumers based on how much they recycle.

I haven’t yet read the magazine’s current Technology Quarterly, which features recycling and other environmental issues; I’m interested in how the writers handle the question of streaming recyclables into the third world.

Some links: 17

Via kottke.org, Wikigroaning is the dubious pastime of comparing the length and quality of a Wikipedia article on a general-interest topic (say, Knight) to a similarly-titled one on some wisp of useless fanfluff (Jedi Knight). For instance, while the article on Trail of Tears runs to 7 screens, the one for Tears for Fears runs to 13.

Extra points, I suppose, if you’ve never even heard of the pop-culture half of your article pair.

A wish list item: 1

I recorded Stuart Hart’s 1997 paper for Harvard Business Review, “Beyond Greening,” at the the studio yesterday, as part of a collection of articles on organization development. As is typical for papers in that publication, it’s a mousse of hard-nosed analysis whipped together with long-term vision and topped with blue-sky dreams, but the central point may turn out to be sound: the smart businessman will find a way to cash in by solving environmental problems instead of creating them. He has elaborated his position in the book-length Capitalism at the Crossroads. Hart is unique, in my limited reading, in that he treats poverty issues and environmental concerns as being of a piece.

Upcoming: 2

Turner Classic Movies has two really interesting themes for June: films featuring or directed by the sultry Ida Lupino, and Screened Out: Gay Images in Film. Some of the titles, like The Killing of Sister George and The Boys in the Band, I recognize as causing a stir at of the 1970s. They are largely forgotten now, but I remember them as being judged too mature for my adolescent sensibilities at the time.

Ooh shiny shiny

ooh shiny shinySo I bought a new car.

And I can hear what you’re thinking, David, what happened to the perfectly good car you bought in 1993? Three new cars in 24 years: where did this profligacy come from? And you paid cash? Yes, you’re right, but there it is.

Leta and I picked up the as-yet-unchristened vehicle—a 2007 Accord Coupe LX—from Bill Page Honda on Saturday. The dealer did an excellent job of responding to my online request-for-quote with a good price and without a lot haggling and games about extended warranties and extraneous add-ons. As Accords go, it’s the bottom-of-the-line model: the only extra accessory on the car is the mud guards in the rear wheelwells. But it’s one of the scarcer colors, a pearlized graphite gray with some overtones of blue, and it has the nice quality of shining differently in varying lights. It took some persistent questioning on my part to get the dealer to agree to schlep out of the Eastern Shore of Maryland to find one of the right color. Yes, I understand the quote. How much for one in graphite? No, I don’t have a second color choice.

As I said, as-yet-unchristened; the car doesn’t have any mojo yet, let alone any scratches. At least it picked up some road dust during Sunday’s thunderstorms. I’m not even sure yet whether it’s a boy or a girl.

I”m keeping Alberta, the ’93 Explorer, in service for the muddy jobs, the cargo hauling, and the three days of each D.C. winter when 4WD is a really good idea. (Alberta just turned over the double-century on her odometer.) The Accord will be taking over the daily commuting duties and the Beltway crawls to rehearsal, saving a reasonable quantity of gas in the process. It’ll be so nice to stop and go on I-495 with air conditioning that works full-time. Any commute can be fun for a while when you have a new machine to figure out, to find out how it responds.

I gave of lot of thought to buying a Toyota Prius, and I drove my friend Richard’s around the block once, but in the end, a conventional drivetrain, conventional styling, and the right number of doors (two) prevailed. So my driving will not be as squeaky-clean green as it could be, and I’m okay with that. Nor is it one of the luxury rockets that most of the guys I work with drive.

I can’t get over how quiet the car is inside, and I have more legroom that in the Explorer. But, as you might expect, the throw of the stickshift is a lot different. I’m still trying to start from a stop in third and to downshift from fifth to second. I haven’t yet established the TSA policy on liquids in the car: this morning I carefully sipped my coffee from the travel mug only at red lights, and closed it up again before getting underway.