theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
Alex Vadukul limns Sir Shadow, artist of the Bowery’s Whitehouse Hotel.
“A man with a million dollars doesn’t have what I have.
“All that matters to me is the next poem,” he added. “The next drawing. And I have to be ready to receive it. All the other stuff? That’s someone else’s problem.”
Timothy Semon, stage manager for the current production of Network, is onstage in a glass box.
Ten more shows to see this coming year! A new WATCH member company to visit (Annapolis Summer Garden Theatre) and some old standbys to judge. And four TBD’s.
Much more traveling this year than usual! Overnight stays in 2018:
To my surprise, I visited many new performance spaces the year.
2017’s list. 2016’s list. 2015’s list. 2014’s list. 2013’s list. 2012’s list. 2011’s list.
Woolly’s partnership with The Second City again disappoints. From the opening sketch, presenting white privilege as a board game, She the People is preachy (hey, the choir’s out here) and only intermittently funny. A talk show segment, spiced with a bit of improv; a business meeting led by an executive in an outlandish T. Rex suit; and Maggie Wilder’s “I’m quirky” girl-child bit (one of the few pieces that doesn’t directly rail against the patriarchy) are the high points.
Did you have a good year this year? Great! Please consider sharing some of that good fortune with one of these organizations. (If you had a bad year, I’m sorry.)
These are the groups and projects to which I gave coin (generally tax-deductible), property, and/or effort in 2018.
I joined the group making a solstice celebration walk at Maryland’s Chapman State Park—more of a bushwhack, truth be told, with Rod Simmons at the head of the line. Although I can’t recommend him as a trip leader based on this experience, he did point out some huge individuals of familiar tree species in this old-growth woods. For instance, Pawpaw (Asimina triloba) at left, with a trunk as wide as my hand, and an oak-sized Sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua) at right.
Cherrybark Oak (Quercus pagoda) was a target species, and Rod delivered.
One of the most difficult things of all is not to have the painting be a depiction of the event but the event itself. That is the difference between great art and mediocre art. Most art looks like it is talking about something that happened some other place.
—Grace Hartigan, quoted in Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women (2018), p. 487
In 2004, after a four-year investigation that focused on backdated contracts and whether they artificially inflated profits, [Wang’s] Computer Associates reached an agreement with the Justice Department to avoid prosecution, which included paying $225 million in restitution to shareholders.
In 2006, [CEO Sanjay] Kumar was sentenced to 12 years in prison for orchestrating a $2.2 billion accounting fraud, mainly in 1999 and 2000. Mr. Wang was never charged with wrongdoing in the case.
But a year later, a 390-page report by the Computer Associates board, assisted by an outside law firm, found Mr. Wang culpable as well. “No significant decisions were made without his participation and approval,” the report said.
Sarah Ruhl remembers Max Ritvo.
When we find the right friend at the right time in our life, or the right teacher, or the right student, our lives are changed forever. Max was the voice that answered back. And he still is.
Eric Rosen directs an effective production of Paula Vogel’s confidently theatrical, ensemble-driven meta-play, telling us the story of Sholem Asch’s play The God of Vengeance, from its early productions in Yiddish-speaking Europe after the turn of the century to its suppressed Broadway production of 1923. Vogel’s script finds a way to feed us the key snippets of Asch’s play, while keeping the action skipping along. In the cast, Ethan Watermeier stands out, having drawn most of the cards for playing heavies: an Irish policeman assigned to close down the production, a rabbi speaking against the “indecent” material of the play. A scene of the play’s production in a 1943 Warsaw ghetto, using found space and all the actors wearing Jewish stars, is particularly powerful, a testament to the resilience of art in the face of repression.
75 dancers, 300 solos of work by Merce Cunningham on his 100th birthday, livestreamed.
Jim McGlone and Rita Urbanski led walks on Mason Neck for Fairfax Master Naturalists. Rita focused on wetland adaptations, while Jim workshopped basic tree ID with the class. He mentioned the economic value of Quercus alba in cooperage, particularly with respect to aging wines and whiskeys. Planks made from red oaks can’t be made watertight, unlike white oak lumber.
He pointed out a winterberry in fruit, Ilex verticillata (we’re out of range for I. laevigata),
as well as a jinx plant that I cannot form a good search image for, serviceberry (Amelanchier sp.). I’ll keep trying.
Jim also noted a native Euonymus that had already burst.