Billion-dollar legacy

Steven Henry Madoff visits the trove of more than 2000 works by abstract expressionist Clyfford Still, until now in storage as part of his estate, and planned for a new museum to open in Denver in 2010.

[Clyfford] Still once wrote that painting was a way to find revelation and to “exalt the spirit of man.” Yet it is clear how personal the struggle was. [Henry T. Hopkins, a former director of what is now the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art], recalled an anecdote the painter once told him. “When Still was a small child in Canada, they were digging a well, and they needed someone to go down into it to see the condition of the pit,” he said. “They put a rope around his ankle and dropped him down head first.

“He told me he was terrified, but there was the rope. And I always wondered if those streaks in his paintings, which he called his lifelines, had something to do with that experience. The line there to pull him back up.”

Yay, us!

Another very complimentary review of the show: this one is from Michael Toscano.

June [Schreiner] is a seventh-grader at Reston’s Langston Hughes Middle School, but she seems to be one of those kids with outsize talent who eventually could end up on Broadway. With a crystal-clear voice and lungs of steel, she radiates charisma that reaches to the back of the good-sized theater.

Doubt: A Parable

A powerful, compact, thought-provoking piece of theater: at St. Nicholas Church School in the Bronx, academic principal Sister Aloysius (the heralded Cherry Jones) becomes convinced that the parish priest Father Flynn (genial, robust Chris McGarry) has made inappropriate contact with one of her students. The time is the early 1960s, when the Catholic Church was undergoing the reforms accompanying the Second Vatican Council, taking steps towards accessibility, tolerance, and openness.

Yet flinty Sr. Aloysius, for whom even “satisfaction is a vice,” remains committed to the severities and regimen of the past. She gave up sugar for Lent one year, and when the season was over, forgot to resume the indulgence. She is convinced of Fr. Flynn’s misconduct on the merest shreds of evidence—and yet, she would ask, how much proof is needed when the exploitation of a twelve-year-old boy is at stake?

Fr. Flynn, for his part, answers her from the pulpit with a homily about accusations: as impossible as it is to catch the feathers of a torn pillow scattered to the wind, just so is it impossible to unsay a word of unsupported suspicion. As solid as Aloysius is in her certainly, Flynn finds comfort and a reminder of his own humanity in doubt. Of himself and his blamelessness? Perhaps.

Between the two stands Sister James, a young teacher at the school, played particularly effectively by Lisa Joyce. This is a role that in lesser hands would reveal its structural nature of providing exposition and comic relief, but Joyce gives the role reality. Despite her stated convictions, first on one side and then the other, it’s clear that she remans troubled with her own doubts.

As directed by Doug Hughes, there is a certain judiciousness in the early scenes, which play out for the most part in Aloysius’s cinderblock office and in the plain flower garden that separates the school from the priest’s quarters. Blocking is minimal. Jones keeps her hands bundled inside her habit, so that when she reveals them to ask for support or to make a point, the simple gesture has a lot of punch.

So it feels a little too much when emotions get the better of Flynn and Aloysius and the proceedings culminate in a shouting match between the two.

All around, dialects were sometimes difficult to place, sounding more Boston than Bronx.

But the closing moments of the play are perfectly modulated and genuine.

John Patrick Shanley’s notes to the play include an epigraph from Ecclesiastes 1:18: “…in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”

  • Doubt: A Parable, by John Patrick Shanley, directed by Doug Hughes, The National Theatre, Washington

At the park: 3

We replaced box 67, and since we had another box made, we decided to work next week to replace box 79, which we had abandoned to the field mice a few seasons ago. (This despite my opinion that the box will not be used, and is too difficult to get to through the vegetation and mucky marsh bottom.) Lots of ducks stopping by on their way through: shovelers, two kinds of teal, pintails. Red-Winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) and Eastern Phoebes (Sayornis phoebe) have arrived for the breeding season.

Short bits of string: 5

O tempora!
Three things that I learned recently:

  1. Cardboard file boxes (“banker’s boxes”) work very well for costume storage, especially if you have a lot of small pieces that don’t easily hang and that you don’t want to get crushed. We’re storing costumes for 26 cast members in a 3′ x 6′ footprint.
  2. You can drag and drop tabs in an Excel workbook to reorder your worksheets. I’ve been using the right-click context menu to do that for years. I wonder how many clicks and scrolls I’ve wasted.
  3. A good articulation warmup is to play Tongue Jeopardy: Sing the “Jeopardy!” theme song, but with your tongue sticking out. On each successive syllable, point your tongue up, left, down, and right. (So you’re actually singing “Anh-anh-anh-anh-anh-anh-annnh…”) It gets really tricky when you get to the eighth notes.


Thanks and spanks

Leta at WATCH
Leta reprised her role as Vanna White at WATCH this year, handing envelopes to presenters and lucite trophies to award winners, standing on stage all shiny-bright, and wearing possibly the best dress in the place. Bridget thanked her from the stage for her contributions to the award-winning production of Coyote on a Fence by Silver Spring Stage, which was one damn fine piece of theater.

236 words

Theodor Geisel built The Cat in the Hat from a word list for 6- and 7-year-olds, as Lynn Neary reports. The book is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and it’s Dr. Seuss’s birthday too.

“Seuss was used to inventing words when he needed them, so to stick to a word list was a huge challenge for him,” [Philip] Nel [author of The Annotated Cat] says. “And, in fact, his favorite story about the creation of The Cat in the Hat is that it was born out of his frustration with the word list. He said he would come up with an idea, but then he would have no way to express that idea. So he said…: ‘I read the list three times and almost went out of my head. I said I’ll read it once more and if I can find two words that rhyme, that will be my book. I found cat and hat and I said the title will be The Cat in the Hat.'”