Theater festival in Frederick

former McCrory's
Saturday I rode up with Ted and his team to tech in our shows at the Cultural Arts Center of Frederick County. (The Maryland one act festival performances will be there this weekend.) The Center is lightly converted from a McCrory’s five and dime store; the building wraps around other buildings on the northwest corner of Patrick and Market Streets. As a performance space, the black box theater is long on character. It seats 110 on three sides of a playing area (no stage) about the size of Silver Spring Stage’s, but with the advantage that I can make myself heard in the Frederick space. On the downside, the space is punctuated by load-bearing columns, and lighting designers have to find ways to throw light around them. (This means that if I’m not paying attention, I’ll be standing in the dark on Saturday.)

dressing room
The dressing area is where the luncheonette used to be, with even less soundproofing between it and the auditorium: nothing but a black curtain. But Cindy, Zeke, and Spence ran a tight ship technically, and we got everything done that we needed to get accomplished in our 80-minute time slot, and then some. We’re bringing The Gold Lunch as a showcase, which means that it is not eligible to advance to the regional competition. But that doesn’t mean that it won’t be adjudicated in open session, five minutes a piece from three judges. Leta and I did the math and figured that they will have to talk longer than I will. They’re theater people: they’ll find a way to fill the time.

street name signs and CD
I had a couple of hours to kill until Leta arrived and it was our turn to tech, so I walked around old town Frederick, Maryland. Frederick is undergoing several sorts of transition. I’ve flickr-tagged these images as suburbanMd, and in many ways the town is now a suburb of D.C.: it has its own branch of the MARC commuter service, for instance. But in many ways it’s still an ordinary American small city, a little grubby behind the ears.

old and new
While the Francis Scott Key Hotel is now an office building (you can just make out an old painted sign for it in this image), Carroll Creek Park consists of new and newish brick and stonework lining the channelized Carroll Creek through downtown, just south of Market Street.

footbridge 1
Just the sort of place for open-air arts and crafts festivals, like the one I visited here a few years ago. Very pleasant, with whimsical footbridges.

the back of things
But many of the shop spaces are still under construction and/or are looking for tenants, and new demolition can reveal the tattier backsides of buildings a block or two outside the gentrification zone.

footbridge 2
After our tech rehearsal, Leta and I got dinner at Griff’s, a local institution, and a pretty good dinner it was. Local merchants were observing a First Saturday late closing, the pavements marked with dubious luminaires, so we played with the wooden toys in the toy store and dropped some cash at the funky clothing store that did a side business in Grateful Dead stickers.

Paging Mr. Bernard Herrmann

Via Arts & Letters Daily, new book by Jack Sullivan catalogs all the music in the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

The 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much uses Arthur Benjamin’s Storm Clouds cantata, which was commissioned for the 1934 version of the film. In the remake an assassination is to take place at a climactic cymbal crash. The bad guys, here as elsewhere in Hitchcock’s works, are surprisingly musically literate. They play recordings for the assassin.

Security flaw in Adobe plug-in

News of a significant security vulnerability in earlier versions of Adobe Reader and Acrobat has come to light.

The vulnerability exists in nearly any browser with the Acrobat Reader plug-in installed and allows malicious Javascript code to be injected on the client side.

Possible attacks that could be delivered using the flaw include session riding, cross-site scripting attacks and, in the case of Internet Explorer, denial of service attacks.

An upgrade to Reader 8 is recommended.

Sing out, Louise

Andrew Lloyd Webber wrings his hands over an impending auction of wireless spectrum, according to a story reported by Stephen Beard. If a cell phone company were to win the bidding,

… he warns the sound in the seven West End theatres he owns could become inaudible. The wireless mics his productions rely on could get too expensive to run.

I suppose he could do something radical, like write music that doesn’t require mics to sound good. Maybe not.

Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge

Fighting off a case of the flu, I took an overnight trip with Leta to Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on the Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay to see the eagles. The weather was fine for our morning field trip. We got a quick look at a group of Delmarva Fox Squirrels (Sciurus niger cinereus) in the tall, sparse pines traversed by the Woods Trail. As for birds, we ticked 20+ species, including three species of raptors, a stock-still Hermit Thrush and, far out on the water, a cluster of about 15 American White Pelicans (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos). Alas, we were too late in the season for easy looks at Snow Geese. Since the last time that I visited, the refuge has added a second story to the visitor center, with spotting scopes trained on the eagles’ resting snags. This new space has good interpretative material and some nice mounted specimens of ducks and raptors.

Fox Farm-Snead Farm Loops

TrailsideI took a quick holiday hike on the Blue Ridge: Hike #1 in PATC’s Circuit Hikes in Shenandoah National Park: two loops joined at the middle, descending into Fox Hollow and climbing Dickey Hill. The air was chilly (although warm for the season), especially starting out, with a little wind behind it, so I took the 5.0 miles at a brisk 2-hour pace. My altimeter showed the elevation change to be an easy 750 feet, not the 1000 feet cited in the Guide. The footing was a little slick in places, due to recent rains on the autumn’s leaf litter. Nothing out of the ordinary for bird life: winter mixed flocks of chickadees, nuthatches, titmice, small woodpeckers, cardinals; a cluster of juncos taking the waters at an intermittent stream draining Snead Farm; and an occasionally-heard Pileated Woodpecker. And perhaps the best part of the trip: the trailhead is less than 90 minutes by car from my front door.

My notes from a September, 1999 field trip record a Ruffed Grouse along the power line cut that is Snead Farm Road.

The Skriker

Nanna Ingvarsson executes a star turn in the title role of one of Caryl Churchill’s more demanding texts, The Skriker. The Skriker is “a shapeshifter and death portent, ancient and damaged,” and she is accompanied by all manner of denizens from the underworld of British folk tales—spriggans, kelpies, brownies—in this story set in modern England, originally produced in 1994. The Skriker carries off one, perhaps two, young working-class women (the effective Katie Atkinson and Lindsay Haynes) to the deeps below a no-longer green and pleasant Britain. The narrative, although ultimately unsatisfying in its perfunctory conclusion, carries echoes of the Persephone myth as well.

The Skriker speaks a slippery, allusive, punning speech with a logic of its own that brings to mind Monty Python’s Word Association Football sketch rewritten by James Joyce, and Ingvarsson and director Kathleen Akerley deserve high marks for making the words, at times impenetrable on the page, meaningful and accessible. Here’s a fragment from the punishing opening monologue:

Out of her pinkle lippety loppety, out of her mouthtrap, out came my secreted garden flower of my youth and beauty and the beast is six six six o’clock in the morning becomes electric stormy petrel bomb.

If the no-frills production doesn’t always manage the scene transitions well, it should be credited with finding a use for the Warehouse’s door to the back parking lot (a kind of Hades itself) that opens directly into the auditorium. Many of the folklore characters will be unknown to American audiences (who, at best, might know who the Green Man is), so it’s too bad that Churchill doesn’t give us more time and text to get to know the excellently-named demon Rawheadandbloodybones.

  • The Skriker, by Caryl Churchill, directed by Kathleen Akerley, Forum Theatre & Dance, Warehouse Theater, Washington

All that is left is the schlepping

One of the items on my checklist for the break was to clean up some of the piles of useless crap in the basement and generally make room for more crap. My goal is to end up with marginally less stuff than when the gift-exchanging season began, and I think I’m gonna make it.

My company had a toys for tots box in the lobby, so the bag of leftover toys and party favors that I bought as cast and crew gifts for Goodnight Desdemona eight years ago finally got disposed of. There were a couple of nice (albeit vintage) items in there, like a Wishbone as Romeo and Juliet play set. I also let go of the plastic shopping bags from the Hy-Vee supermark chain that a friend of Leta’s (Clive? Colin?) brought back from Iowa to use as props for Independence. Somehow I was convinced that we were going to revive the show and that the bags would be needed.

I sifted through three boxes overflowing with theater memorabilia, possibly reusable props and costume pieces (you never know when a pair of those geezer sunglasses that look useful only to Geordi will come in handy), desk toys, and miscellaneous junk and reduced the storage footprint to two boxes. I filled a small container with trash, but my super-secret plan is to bring a box of the white elephants to the office and leave it in the break room with a “free to a good home” sign on it. Somebody will want the Harry Potter toothbrush and the transistor radio in the shape of a cartoon pig.

I pulled out one boxful of novels from the shelf to be donated to the library. Leta got first dibs and scored herself paperbacks of Rose Macaulay and Cold Comfort Farm. Except for the Anne Rice, perhaps, no used bookstore will take what’s left. There’s also a couple of books that I in turn bought from a library table to be used as props when I played the psychiatrist in Nuts. One of the titles is rather alarming: a translation from the Russian of a 1959 monograph by G. Y. Malis on mental illness. Chapter Two is titled, “The Effect of the Blood of Patients with Schizophrenia on the Development of the Larvae of Rana temporaria.”

The job that took the longest, surprisingly, was wading through seven years of Interview to clip the passing “what’s up with Laurie Anderson this month?” story or Robin Tunney profile and to pulp the rest. There’s nothing better for re-establishing perspective than to flip through a 90s-era Rose McGowan piece and then drop it into the recycle bin.

Paul Taylor Dance Company

The company presents two new, quite disparate works, framed by two older pieces set on music by G. F. Handel.

If Taylor’s Promethean Fire (2002) is read as a bold, optimistic response to the events of 9/11, his Banquet of Vultures (2005) is a grim, darkly pessimistic reaction to the prosecution of hostilities ever since those attacks. In murky, just-liminal light provided by Jennifer Tipton, dancers in olive drab jumpsuits cross the stage in headlong runs that suggest the Hoarders and Wasters of Dante’s Inferno. Three men struggle in a pool of light, with ever-shifting support, while another writhes in another pool of light stippled with blackness. MIchael Trusnovec, dressed in a black suit and red tie, hunches his shoulders like Tricky Dick and jerks about, barely in control of the situation: he’s Death in a power suit. This piece showcases the Taylor men with steps that remind one of Cloven Kingdom.

Offsetting this dance is the brief, comic Troilus and Cressida (reduced) (2006), featuring Taylor’s go-to girl for clowning, Lisa Viola. A travesty of classical conventions, set on Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours (yes, the one with the dancing pachyderms), the piece gets mileage out of Viola’s big visible effort in her jumps that lifts her at most three inches off the deck. She is matched by Robert Kleinendorst, who has to partner her while she climbs over his shoulder and back down his back, all the while his harem pants having fallen to his ankles. Subtle is not the word for it.

Rounding out the evening are the measured, stately Airs from 1978 and the very early Aureole (1962), featuring big straight arms that whirl like pinwheels. It’s a light, lovely piece, like spring clouds scudding about.

  • Paul Taylor Dance Company, Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater, Washington

One of the simple joys of visiting the Kennedy Center is the coconut-scented liquid soap in the washrooms.

AI = audience interface

Ten more things computers (and their users) do in the movies that they don’t in real life.

9. You’ve Got Mail is Always Good News

In the movies, checking your mail is a matter of picking out the one or two messages that are important to the plot. No information pollution or swamp of spam. No ever-changing client requests in the face of impending deadlines. And you never overlook information because a message’s subject line violated the email usability guidelines.