Bob Hicks

 

BodyVox tricks up the time machine

The Portland dance company's effervescent new show celebrates 15 years of all-American optimism

By:
Published May 4, 2013, in DANCE

 

Six is a crowd: boys meet girl. Photo: David Krebbs

Six is a crowd: boys meet girl. Photo: David Krebs

You can’t keep those BodyVoxers down: like a whack-a-mole or an inflatable punch-me clown, they just keep popping up. About an hour and 38 minutes after landing in Portland at the end of a European tour – all right, it was three full days – there they were again Thursday night on their home stage, ripping through 11 energetic pieces in about two dizzying hours.

And that was just the beginning. BodyVox‘s newest show, “Fifteen,” is a two-parter, with a second program set to open next Thursday. In all, the two programs will include 22 pieces and 13 dancers, all traveling at something close to warp speed. The title is a celebration of the number of years BodyVox has been around, and the organizing principle is retrospective: a fond frolic down memory lane. Except for one new piece – the dreamy, fluid, Razor-scootering “Café Blanco” – all of the pieces are repertory works, going back in Program A as far as 1998 and otherwise concentrating on the years up to 2005.

BodyVox is something of an anomaly in the dance world, quirky and contemporary but outside the mainstream of both the traditional and experimental wings. With a deep affection for circus, mime, vaudeville, and silent film in addition to training in ballet and contemporary-dance techniques, it’s really movement theater – less dancerly than many  companies but usually more dancerly than Momix, Pilobolus, and ISO Dance, the companies that artistic directors Ashley Roland and Jamey Hampton worked in before creating BodyVox. BodyVox dances can be serious, but they arrive with a buoyant and deeply American optimism that often bubbles over into outright comedy. The company mines old American pop culture for material, from classic songs and movies to social dances like the Lindy Hop. Costuming, usually designed by Roland, is a witty and extravagant rustle through the Goodwill aisles of a slyly imaginative mind. BodyVox performers are artists, but they’re also unabashed entertainers – they can milk a moment by the overflowing gallons – and while that might put off some serious-minded devotees of high art, it’s also built a legion of enthusiastic and not at all undiscerning fans.

Jackson: resident ingenue in a whirl. Photo: David Krebbs

Jackson: resident ingenue in a whirl. Photo: David Krebs

It’s a good thing for artists to look back now and again on what they’ve done in the past, and BodyVox audiences got a sneak peek at the deep past in March’s BodyVox-2 program, which included two ebullient pieces that Hampton and Roland created even before BodyVox was born: 1985’s “Scare Myself” and 1987’s “Psycho Killer.” The current program moves forward from there with 1998’s ebbing and flowing water piece “Rip/Tide” (it actually closes the evening) and includes such favorites as 2005’s diners-gone-wild “Hopper’s Dinner” – set to Tom Waits’ scratchily funny “Tabletop Joe,” and preceded by Jeff George’s solo rendition of Roland’s wall-kicking 2005 “Reservations” – and Eric Skinner’s 2001 “X-Axis,” a taut and lovely bright-red aerial piece for himself and Daniel Kirk, that is somehow tensile and languid at once. Hampton and Roland’s 2002 “Falling for Grace,” in which Hampton, Skinner, and Josh Murry upend a meeting between Kirk and Heather Jackson to a score by Danny Elfman, holds up nicely, while 2001’s “Reverie” seems a little overly cute in retrospect. Hampton is once again a miming virtuoso, riffling his hands through his elbows and fluttering through space, in his 2001 solo “Moto Perpetuo,” which suitably kicks off the program. Few companies are as comfortable with film as BodyVox, and some of the company’s best, including Mitchell Rose’s 2000 “Deere John,” with Hampton mooning and swooning over a giant earth digger, break up the live action.

The company’s continuing high energy and effervescence are all the more impressive considering that its four mainstays – Roland, Hampton, Skinner, Kirk – have been performing for so many years. They’re still working at a high level, and in the past few seasons the company’s reinvigorated itself by adding younger performers like Zachary Carroll, Jonathan Krebs, George, Murry with his yellow flop of young-Baryshnikov hair, and the sassy Jackson, who eagerly digs into many of the ingenue roles. Program A is boy-heavy, with only Roland and Jackson as woman performers. Program B will add several woman dancers to the mix.

On Thursday night I happened to be sitting in front of a longtime BodyVox fan who kept a running commentary going. “I don’t remember this one,” she’d say; “we must’ve missed that show.” Or, “Oh, yes! I love this piece!” Ordinarily I’d have been irritated, but I realized she was genuinely swept into the thing and felt completely at home, in her own way a part of the company. At the end she turned to one of her companions, a BodyVox newcomer, and asked, “Are you glad you came?” “Oh, yes!” her guest replied. “I absolutely loved it!” But no one got closer to the BodyVox spirit, I think, than the little girl, maybe 7 or 8 years old, a few seats to the side of me. What I heard from her, over and over, was giggling. Sometimes she was overtaken by giggles, cascading in a torrent of delight. Watch out. That sort of thing can be contagious.

NOTE:

Program A of “Fifteen” repeats on Friday, Saturday, May 16, and in a May 18 matinee. Program B opens on Thursday, May 9, and continues May 10, 11, 17 and in a May 18 evening performance. Performances are at the BodyVox Dance Center, 1201 Northwest 17th Avenue, Portland. Ticket information is here.

 

 

Opera: PSU springs a Puccini surprise

Lightness, froth, and a touch of tragedy in the melodic and little-known 'La Rondine'

By:
Published May 3, 2013, in MUSIC

Tonight and tomorrow night (Friday and Saturday, May 3 and 4) are your final chances to see “La Rondine,” this year’s production of the Portland State University opera program, and if you get the chance it’s worth the trip. Getting student opera right isn’t easy (getting ANY opera right isn’t easy) but PSU’s bright production of this bittersweet froth of a romantic comedy on the skids provides plenty of theatrical eye candy, and if the musical performances don’t always match the staging, they prove once again that the school’s program provides a consistently good launching pad for young singers. The blend of professional and student talent in the annual productions is usually an eye-opener.

La Rondine“La Rondine” is one of Puccini’s lesser-known operas despite its waterfall of lush melody – he himself was dissatisfied with the story, and kept tinkering with it after its premiere in 1917, altering the ending more than once and at one point even killing off his fallen heroine, though that’s not the ending used here, and thank goodness. The play’s an odd blend of light and dark, wanting to be almost an operetta but succumbing to a streak of odd moralizing and sadly separating two lovers who obviously are meant to be together: she has a soiled past, and cannot stain her young lover’s reputation. That decision comes a little late, considering that they’ve already run off together to a life of blissful sin in the countryside. Never mind. The music overcomes the moralizing, and if the “fallen woman” motif seems more like unintended self-parody than near-tragedy, well, times have changed.

“La Rondine” continues the student company’s adventurous programming, which in recent years has also included the likes of Kurt Weill’s “Street Scene” and Francis Poulenc’s “Dialogues of the Carmelites.” I imagine those choices have something to do with what roles are appropriate for developing voices. They might also reflect the tastes of program director Christine Meadows, who was a regular for several seasons during the heyday of New York City Opera, a company that revels in theatricality and accessibility to broader audiences. Having people like Meadows, Metropolitan Opera (and Portland Opera) regular Richard Zeller, Angela Niederloh and Pamela South available as vocal teachers testifies to the program’s high standards.

This production’s standout is unquestionably rising-star tenor Zach Borichevsky, a visiting teacher and guest artist this year, as Ruggero, the young man from the country who comes to Paris and falls under the spell of the enchanting sparrow, Magda de Civry. She holds court in the home of her jaded lover, Rambaldo, who on Tuesday night got a deft and dryly funny performance from master’s student Max Moreno. Once Magda and Ruggero eye each other … well, you can guess. Borichevsky, who’s improbably tall, has an engaging command of the stage and sings with warmth, power, and admirable precision. As Magda, recent PSU alum Anna Viemeister has a strong and warm voice but hasn’t yet developed the precise control that the role calls for. The makings are there, though, and that’s the point of the program. Among the supporting cast, Hannah Consenz is a bright-voiced comic knockout as Magda’s feisty maid Lisette.

Stage director Jon Kretzu, for many years a mainstay at Artists Repertory Theatre until leaving recently to jump full-time into the freelance pool, brings a bright comic edge to the acting, resetting the action smoothly into the 1950s with a lush Douglas Sirk approach. And the designs, which fill the cozy Lincoln Performance Hall stage without overstuffing it, are first-rate: lighting by veteran Peter West, chic costumes by Jessica Bobillot, and a set by Carey Wong that cleverly adapts a large spiraling staircase to a different location for each of the three acts. I’ve always liked the way Wong, a resident designer for Portland Opera many years ago before setting out on an international career, approaches his projects: his sets invariably have a vivid, almost hyperrealistic clarity that revels in the artificiality of the theater and is also stage-smart, providing clear playing areas.

Not just the singers but also the orchestra members are students, and while you can tell it’s a student orchestra, it’s a good student orchestra, responding well under Ken Selden’s direction.

I was puzzled by one thing, particularly since the back section of the hall on Tuesday night was mostly empty: while reduced-price tickets were available for PSU students and faculty, there was no student rate for high school kids, who ended up paying full adult fare. The policy seems short-sighted. Younger students (I had a particularly discerning one in tow) are the future audiences and performers of the opera world, and a welcoming gesture might even be a good recruiting tool for the university. Besides, empty seats don’t help anyone. Better all of fifteen dollars than none of twenty-six.

NOTES:

  • Remaining performances are at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, May 3-4, at Lincoln Performance Hall on the PSU campus. Ticket information is here.
  •  Angela Allen wrote a good behind-the-scenes preview for ArtsWatch. Read it here.
  • James McQuillen wrote an insightful review for The Oregonian. Read it here.

 

 

 

 

Passing the torch: Signals from ‘Ten Chimneys’

Damaso Rodriguez makes a Chekhovian comedy about theatrical legends his first show for Artists Rep. What's it mean for the company's transition?

By:
Published May 2, 2013, in THEATER

Alper, Mendelson, Wilde: menage a teatre. Photo: Owen Carey

Alper, Mendelson, Wilde: menage a teatre. Photo: Owen Carey

One of the sweetest and most revealing moments in Jeffrey Hatcher’s rueful 2011 comedy “Ten Chimneys” at Artists Repertory Theatre comes when Abby Wilde, playing a very young Uta Hagen, tells Linda Alper, as the reigning stage royalty Lynn Fontanne, that her character’s face should be naked, with no makeup at all. Well then, Alper says, deftly pulling items from her makeup kit and smacking them down on the table, if you want to make it look like you’re not wearing any makeup you’ll need this … and this … and this.

As Fontanne deeply understands and Hagen is beginning to learn, in the theater even raw honesty is a façade. The two women are rivals of a sort, at least in Fontanne’s mind, but above all they’re conspirators in that magnificent little life-trick known as the theater. Hagen eventually will supplant Fontanne, because that’s what the young do to the old. But it is both an honor and a duty for one generation to pass on the tricks of the trade to the next, and for the new generation to accept with gratitude the gift that it receives. One of the theater’s great beauties is that, in spite of everything – ambition, jealousy, vanity, sheer cussedness – collaboration outweighs competition.

It would be taking things vastly too far to say that Fontanne and her husband/partner Alfred Lunt represent Allen Nause in “Ten Chimneys” and Hagen represents Damaso Rodriguez. But the temptation’s clear. After 25 years as Artists Rep’s artistic director, Nause is retiring and the younger Rodriguez is taking the reins. And Hatcher’s comedy is very much about another passing of the torch – this one from the champagne-and-evening-dress sophistication that Lunt and Fontanne embodied on Broadway to the earthier, more psychologically probing sort of modern theater that Hagen espoused.

The analogy fails partly because Nause has done plenty of deep wrestling in the psychological trenches, as his recent ferocious turn onstage opposite Vana O’Brien in “The Gin Game” attests, and partly because we don’t really know yet how radically Rodriguez, who comes to Portland after leadership stints at Furious Theatre and the Pasadena Playhouse in Southern California, will shift the company’s direction. He doesn’t officially take over until after the current season ends, and “Ten Chimneys” is the first show he’s directed for Artists Rep. But his choice of this play, about theater people and their mixed-up obsessions, suggests a belief that while styles may seem radically at odds, beneath the surface it’s all theater. In his program notes, Rodriguez tellingly quotes one line from the play: “Whenever we talk about the theater, we’re talking about love.”

“Ten Chimneys” takes its title from Lunt’s gentleman’s farm in Wisconsin, a property known, like Fallingwater or Downton Abbey, not by a number but a name. Alfred (Michael Mendelson) and Lynn spend two or three months a year there, in the summer, and his mother, Hattie (an imperiously dotty JoAnn Johnson, who in the final scene slides from eccentricity into dotage) lives there year-round, along with Alfred’s pool-hustling half-brother Carl (Chris Harder) and, although technically she has a husband and a house on a nearby farm, his half-sister Louise (Sarah Lucht), who is bafflingly treated more like a servant than a sibling.

On the occasion of the play, it is August of 1938 (a coda re-gathers the tribe in 1945) and the Lunts are assembling the cast for a new production of Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” a play that’s really more up Hagen’s alley than the Lunts’. Besides Hagen, who shows up unexpectedly a few days early, the Lunts’ New York sidekick Sydney Greenstreet (Todd Van Voris) is on hand, gasping and wheezing and fretting about his wife, who’s been living for several years in a nearby mental hospital.

They might as well be gathered in a late 19th century Russian dacha. Hatcher makes frequent allusions, subtly and overtly, to the characters and situations of “The Seagull,” and separating reality from fantasy becomes a matter of peeling onions: beneath each layer lies another that seems very much the same. Lynn and Hattie snipe endlessly at each other. Louise throws temper tantrums and decorative china. Carl holes up in a bed loft and eavesdrops on everything. Alfred and Uta lock lips in a long, soulful kiss that might be simply part of rehearsal and might be something else, and in this atmosphere who can tell if there’s a paper’s width of a difference?

I very much like the casting of this show, not just for the talent level but also for the weight and tone of the performances, which are calibrated for a dynamic and constantly shifting balance. Mendelson and Alper are marvelous together, all crackling surface until the surface cracks, held together by a love of gamesmanship that makes all of life a performance: one of the show’s pleasures is watching them rehearse short scenes over and over, shifting their approach each time, trying on the multitudes of possible variations on the theme. Wilde, the sole non-Portlander in the cast (she’s worked extensively in California) brings a deep presence that somehow suggests both the 18-year-old Hagen’s naivety and the formidable intelligence and determination that would distinguish her career: even in awe, her Uta is unafraid to challenge Lunt and Fontanne over matters of the theater.

I wish Hatcher’s script provided a better balance for what is, after all, a small ensemble. Lucht, a very good performer, is given little to do but act put-upon (which, in fact, her character is, but is there nothing more to Louise than that?). Harder is almost invisible through most of the play, then comes out of nowhere to nail a crucial passage in the final scene. Van Voris has some lovely and insightful moments as the supposedly carefree Greenstreet – entering with forced cheer in an overweight and out-of-shape sweat; more profoundly, reaching desperately for a heart pill, and scrambling on the floor after spilling the bottle, as he faces the lonely shape of his mortality. But without better integration they amount to splendid cameos. And the play’s 1945 coda – whoops, here’s Uta, back on the Lunt doorstep under the flimsiest of excuses after all these years – has all the internal logic of a deus ex machina. It’s true that Chekhov’s exceptionally caste-conscious play includes its share of minor and walk-on roles. But “Ten Chimneys” isn’t “The Seagull.” It’s a contemporary play about a pivotal period in American theatrical history that makes its own references to a Russian masterpiece from 1895, and it would be nice, considering its looping circles of time, if it either paid more attention to contemporary ensemble ideas or threw them utterly out the window and let the thing be a gloriously sprawling mess. As it stands, it just seems not to quite fit together.

That said, there’s plenty of laughter here, and not all of it of the Lunt/Fontanne/Noel Coward variety but some of the nervous, edgy, Hagen kind. The performances, if not the script itself, are beautifully balanced, and Rodriquez looks to be a director who knows how to bring out the best in actors. The production has a generous, celebratory feel: not a home run but a solid double, with the promise of more hits to come.

NOTES:

  • “Ten Chimneys” continues through May 26 at ArtistsRep. Ticket and schedule information here.
  • Aaron Scott, Portland Monthly’s Culturephile columnist, gives the show a rave. Read it here.
  • The Oregonian’s Marty Hughley also likes “Ten Chimneys” very much. Read his review here.
  • Broadway World’s Patrick Brassell likes the production better than the play. Read his review here.
  • Rebecca Jacobson gives a nuanced review for Willamette Week. Read it here.
  • The Mercury’s Alison Hallet calls the show “very much a for-theater-fans only affair.” Read her review here.

 

 

Through the woods darkly: kids’ shows turn tough

Lois Lowry's 'Gathering Blue' wraps an onstage adolescent adventure around a world of adult ideas

By:
Published May 1, 2013, in THEATER

Camille Cettina (left), Stephanie Roessler, "Gathering Blue." Photo: Owen Carey

Camille Cettina (left), Stephanie Roessler, “Gathering Blue.” Photo: Owen Carey

The sharp whooshing sound of 250 or so middle-school kids inhaling in shock together can fill a theater in a most exhilarating way. It’s a pretty good sign, even against a steady rustle of fidgeting in the seats, that the story’s got the audience hooked. An Important Revelation has taken place, and everyone in the room realizes that suddenly the entire balance of events has shifted.

Well, that’s the way stories work. In this case the story is young-adult legend Lois Lowry’s 2000 novel “Gathering Blue,” in a world-premiere stage adaptation by Eric Coble, at a Tuesday morning show by Oregon Children’s Theatre in the Dolores Winningstad Theatre. And the Important Revelation is – well, we’ll leave that unspoken. Certain things are better experienced first-hand.

Continues…

A catch in the throat: the storyteller’s story

Lawrence Howard kicks off the 'Singlehandly!' festival splendidly. But the tale is far from over.

By:
Published April 26, 2013, in THEATER

Howard, with unfamiliar apparatus. All photos: Scott Bump

Howard, with unfamiliar apparatus. All photos: Scott Bump

In an otherwise familiar scene last Friday night at inner Northeast Portland’s Hipbone Studio, something unusual happened. Veteran storyteller Lawrence Howard walked onstage wearing a little microphone clipped behind his ear. This was odd, because even in a whisper Howard’s easy baritone ordinarily reaches the farthest corners of a room. He fidgeted with the gadget a bit, clearly unaccustomed to the vagaries of artificial amplification. He’d had a little throat procedure, the crowd was told casually, and didn’t want to strain his voice.

Then he started talking, and any clumsiness faded away. “My mother’s name was Gloria Howard,” he said calmly but potently, “and she died in January, just a couple of months ago. She was 86 years old.”

With those simple words, Howard kicked off Portland’s fifth annual “Singlehandedly!” festival of long-form solo oral stories. A shaggy bear of a fellow who seduces listeners with his wry ramblings and then grips them with the incisive tension of his tales, Howard founded the festival’s producing company, Portland Story Theater, with his storytelling wife, Lynne Duddy. He’s one of the city’s most celebrated practitioners of this age-old craft, known in particular for “Shackleton’s Antarctic Nightmare” and other tales of endurance and deprivation on the southern fringes of the world.

On Friday night he was undergoing his own unfolding tale of endurance, a story beneath the story. And if he didn’t tell that story, it’s understandable, because he’s not sure yet how it comes out. But like so many good stories it’s an adventure, filled with obstacles and determination, and it’s dogged by a shadow of mortality.

Howard, 58, has a way of making his stories personal, even when they’re about a Shackleton or a John “Babbacombe” Lee, the Victorian manservant and possible murderer who astonishingly cheated the hangman’s noose three times. This new story he was telling began with his mother’s death and soon looped off into circles of family memory that rambled from a visit with his dad to a whaling museum on Long Island to a recitation of “Casey at the Bat” to camping trips in the Adirondacks and, quite hilariously, odes to the pleasures of unfettered flatulence and the manly art of dirty poems.

Lawrence2

“My dad was the limerick king of the Western Hemisphere,” Howard reminisced, and soon, astonishingly, he had Hipbone’s crowd of a hundred-plus laughing and clapping and reciting dirty rhymes along with him. The tale, “Legacy of Limericks,” was a rude and funny re-immersion into the liberating excesses of adolescence, tinged with the rueful shadings of age. His father had died 10 years ago, he noted, and that was a huge loss. His mother survived courageously for another decade, and when she died, the void was somehow different: Losing both parents, Howard noted, leaves you lonelier. Eventually he wound back to Brooklyn and his sister’s cramped apartment and the traditional community farewell to his mother, which ended up being not entirely traditional, after all. “It was pretty clear that no one had ever heard limericks sung at a shiva before,” Howard noted wryly. “But that’s the kind of family we are.”

A helluva story, all in all. And it had a poignant moment early on when Duddy walked through the crowd and gently readjusted Howard’s microphone – his voice was a little too boomy – then smiled and walked back to her seat. “Legacy of Limericks” lasts about an hour, which is an hour of being all alone onstage, speaking the entire time, and even if you’re speaking softly, which much of the time you’re not, it’s an exertion. Howard felt the exertion keenly, and no wonder: only four days before he’d been feeding through a long tube inserted in his nostril. And that’s where the backstory begins. Or rather, continues.

It began last summer, when Howard “started feeling a little burning, an itching in my throat whenever I ate anything sweet or spicy or acidic.” For Howard, who’s a fair hand in the kitchen and bottles his own hot sauce, this was an annoyance. He went to his doctor, who checked him out and didn’t see anything: no strep, no nothing. So he went home and pretty much forgot about it.

Then, in January, he began to notice the burning again. And the timing could hardly have been more complex. He was about to open his new Babbacombe show. As he was giving his first Saturday performance, his sister texted from Brooklyn: Their mom was doing poorly, and might be near the end. Lawrence and his sister talked later, and he decided to stay to complete the next weekend’s run. On the following Saturday morning, his mother died. He did his final show that night, then flew to New York.

2013-4-19 Singlehandedly 164Meanwhile, Portland Story Theater had a busy schedule. An Urban Tellers performance, the showcase that follows several weeks of workshops on personal stories with a handful of often novice storytellers, was set for February 9. A special Valentines Day show was in the works at the Alberta Rose Theatre. Finally Howard got back to his doctor, who this time sent him to see ear, nose, and throat specialist Dr. Michael Flaming, who also had operated on Howard’s nose in 2008 to correct a deviated septum from a long-ago injury. Flaming pulled out a laryngoscope, a long tube with a microcamera on the end used to examine a patient’s glottis – the vocal cords and the space between them – from the inside. He inserted the tube down Howard’s nasal passage. “And he says, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s something really ugly down there. Really gnarly. We have to do a biopsy.’”

The result: cancer. Squamous cell carcinoma of the throat. More specifically, the cancer was centered at the base of the tongue, where it attaches to the throat, and very close to the voice box, an essential biological instrument for a storyteller.

On March 28 Howard was wheeled in for surgery at Providence, where Dr. R. Bryan Bell, chief of the hospital’s head, neck and throat cancer clinic, undertook the complicated procedure. “The surgery was very long,” Howard said. “Like nine hours.” And it involved a procedure that not so very long ago might have seemed like science fiction. Bell operated using a Da Vinci Surgical Robot, an expensive apparatus – each machine costs about $2.5 million, in addition to steep maintenance costs – that has up to five arms, each with a separate instrument at the end, and which is capable of doing very tiny and delicate work while the surgeon directs it from a distance via computer screen and controls.

“It’s a crazy machine,” Howard said. But despite some criticism, in cases like Howard’s it has real advantages. The Da Vinci system allows for minimal invasion compared to traditional surgery: “In the old days, to get to the tumor, they would have to fillet your face. So of course nobody did that. They would go straight to radiation, and it’s not as effective.”

Still, Howard’s neck was slit from ear to ear: you can see the scar now, which looks like a thick welt running just below his beard. In a traditional part of the surgery not involving the Da Vinci system, Dr. Bell took out 65 lymph nodes. Three were cancerous. Howard spent four days in ICU, and another four days in a hospital room. He had “a million tubes,” for breathing and for feeding, and because his throat was raw, they had to be inserted through his nose. Nerve pain in his ears, neck, and upper chest was intense, and the drugs had him feeling “so loopy. So crazy.” In ICU he woke up disoriented and pulled out his feeding tube: “The nurses were very upset about that.” The surgery had cut into the connecting muscle of his tongue, which is what pushes food down the throat. “Of course I couldn’t eat; I couldn’t swallow. The whole geometry of my throat changed.”

On the ninth day after surgery, Howard came home, still trailing tubes. “Everything I ate or drank had to go through that nose tube. Medicine, we had to crush. It was terrible.” Salt water, at least, was soothing. Finally, he had a little close-to-solid food. “I made a pot of chicken soup and matzo balls,” he said. “The Jewish soul food.” He made sure, he added wryly, to make the matzos light and fluffy.

Post-surgical therapy has concentrated mainly on retraining his muscles for swallowing: His therapists were surprised that his speech seemed barely affected. Howard can tell small differences: “I’m still having a little trouble with my l’s and my r’s.” But to other ears he sounds normal. That’s important, because Howard needs his voice. His car carries a bumper sticker: STORYTELLERS DO IT ORALLY. And he’s not quite sure what he’d do if it stopped. “I love this. I live for this. This is my favorite thing.”

On Monday, April 15 – seventeen days after his surgery, and four days before his scheduled performance of “Legacy of Limericks” – he had a post-surgical checkup. “I all but begged them to take the nose tube out,” he said. “And they did.” Good thing. Otherwise, he’d have canceled his show: “There’s no way I could’ve subjected the audience to that nose tube.” It was, in more ways than one, a healing moment: “The doctors left the room, and Lynne and I were alone there, and we did the happy dance.”

Duddy and Howard made a little joke about the neck scar, which reminded them of the jaw bolts below the ears in movie depictions of Frankenstein’s monster. “My tumor’s name is Frankie,” Howard said, “and Frankie has left the building.”

2013-4-19 Singlehandedly 191If you’re looking for an immediate happy ending, you’re running ahead of the story. Because the cancer had spread to Howard’s lymph nodes, he still has to undergo radiation therapy. And that’s an intense, sometimes debilitating process: six weeks of treatments, five days a week, and sometimes it makes people too sick to get through the whole thing. “This is a little window,” Howard said. “Right now I feel good, and I can eat, and I’m talking well.”

Howard also works as a legal researcher and writer for the law firm of Gaylord Eyerman Bradley PC, which has been, he said, immensely supportive. Hospital costs alone have been $148,000 so far, with much more in related costs to come, and “my percentage of it is zero. Thank you, thank you, thank you for health insurance.” He’ll begin radiation treatment in a couple of weeks, and as anyone knows who’s gone through it or knows someone who has, it’s a nasty procedure.

“The radiation basically burns the inside of your throat,” Howard said. “People describe it as getting a very bad sunburn inside your throat on that tender flesh.” It also messes with your salivary glands. And if the radiation goes slightly astray, it can cause damage to the voice box. His chart will note prominently that he tells stories for a living, and he needs to keep his vocal cords unscathed. The danger’s still there. But the potential payoff is worth the risk. If he succeeds in finishing the six-week radiation program, he’ll join the group of people who have a 90 percent chance of living cancer-free long term. “I’m going to endure,” he said. “We’re made of good Russian peasant stock, and that’s what we do.”

All of this was on Howard’s mind last Friday as he prepared to tell a bunch of dirty limericks to a roomful of friends and strangers. “An hour before the show I thought, ‘Oh God, what am I doing? What was I thinking? I just want to go home and take my pain pills and go to bed,’” he said the following morning, after a long night’s sleep. “But then my friends started to show up.”

His friends, in fact, started to pack the place. “The whole time I was up there I was just high on the energy of the crowd. It was great.” Then came the standing ovation, mostly from people who didn’t know the backstory at all.

It’s been a long, perilous journey, and there’s a lot of slogging still to come. Keep listening, because the story isn’t over. But Lawrence Howard is home.

*

NOTES:

 

The Singlehandedly! Festival continues this weekend with performances Friday and Saturday nights.

Here’s what’s happened so far:

  •  Last Friday, Howard’s “Legacy of Limericks” was followed by “A Taste for the Abyss,” Kriya Kaping’s exuberant, funny, and sometimes harrowing tale of her misadventures in South America as an 18-year-old would-be do-gooder who learned much more from her hosts than she could begin to impart. Keep an eye out for Kaping: she’s worth following.
  •  Last Saturday, Duddy told her tale “Twice Born: A Story of Adoption,” and comedian Brad Fortier told “Improv Junkie,” his tale of “how a mild-mannered, gay, gaming geek learned how to live ‘out loud’ after becoming addicted to improv theater and performing internationally.”

And here’s what’s coming up:

  •  Friday, April 26: Musician/clown/yoga teacher Annie Rosen tells her story “Cosmic Friend,” and Eric Stern – leader of Portland’s Vagabond Opera – tells “To Catch a Thief,” about some less savory aspects of his pre-vaudevillian life.
  •  Saturday, April 27: Annie La Ganga tells “The Major Arcana,” a tale about her “long and sometimes troubling relationship with tarot cards”; and storytelling veteran Penny Walter tells “Con Mucho Gusto, With Pleasure,” about her life as a puppeteer.

Performances are at Hipbone Studio, Northeast 18th Avenue and East Burnside Street in Portland. Ticket information is here.

2013-4-19 Singlehandedly 178

 

Teens in heat: ‘Ablaze’ lights up the stage

Matthew Zrebski's musical thriller is like a YA novel in the flesh

By:
Published April 21, 2013, in THEATER

Reaching for the light. Photo: David Kinder

Reaching for the light. Photo: David Kinder

“Ablaze” has been doing a slow burn since 2004, when playwright and director Matthew B. Zrebski began gathering ideas for a new show from students at Lincoln High School. “The idea was to create a high-tension, terrifying situation – and in doing so, to lift the veil from difficult subject matter,” Zrebski writes in his production notes for the play’s most recent and perhaps ultimate incarnation, which attaches the words “an a cappella musical thriller” below the title.

The subtitle isn’t kidding. Other than a bit of percussive sound here and there, the entire play is sung in pop-operatic style, without instrumental accompaniment, by 24 young performers. Everything’s either song or recitative, except for some short and welcome breaks of spoken dialogue from the four actors playing “The Watchers,” a sort of high-school Greek chorus that frets over the play’s frenetic action. The original production wasn’t a musical. “Ablaze” became one later on, in a further development workshop with students from Wilson High School (some of them are in the current cast). Now, after a run in last year’s Fertile Grounds new-works festival that generated a lot of buzz, it’s reached the stage of the Brunish Theatre of the Portland Center for the Performing Arts, where Zrebski and the musical-theater production company Staged! have brought things to a spectacular boil. The kids in the cast – most are in high school; the oldest is a recent college grad ­– have the vocal chops, and they move like a single leaping flame through choreographer Jessica Wallenfel’s vivid and complex movement patterns. (The 12-member dance team, costumed in flame-like appendages, is referred to simply as “The Fire.”) Whatever you think of the music or plot, you might not see a more earnest and committed show all season.

But what’s “Ablaze” about? In the end, it seems more about a feeling, an intense group emotional passage, than anything particularly narrative, and that’s why turning it into an extended musical work makes good sense. “Ablaze” is more mood than story. A group of high-school kids is lured to the abandoned grounds of an old school, where somehow they’re trapped in the smoldering underground and held hostage for 19 days. Who’s holding them and watching them? Why? The answers burst out eventually, if a little confusingly, but they really aren’t the point. A little like the station in William Inge’s “Bus Stop,” the hidey hole in “Ablaze” exists mainly as a psychological and emotional testing ground for the people stuck there. If Inge’s sensitive American realism is amped up in “Ablaze” with a heavy dose of modern horror-movie paranoia – well, this is a play about teens and their hopes and fears, after all.

Watching and listening to this fresh-scrubbed production, it struck me that Zrebski has created a musical-theater version of a YA novel, and that could be a good thing: right now the young-adult market is the hottest thing on literary wheels. YA is where traditional kids-lit falls away and the urgent pump of estrogen and testosterone takes over. A lot of YA books read, almost literally, like a fever, and that’s what Zrebski’s injected into “Ablaze.” There’s the nominal thriller-mystery. Beyond that, there are urgent teen issues ranging from pregnancy to popularity to geekiness to being gay.

I’m not ordinarily a big fan of through-sung musicals – I prefer a little breathing space, and a little interplay between plot and music – but these days they’re the way of the musical-theater world. To my mind it’s a rare pop score that can manage the weight and sophistication that allows opera to be sung through successfully, and besides, good dialogue can provide both cleverness and insight to a play. Something gets lost when everything’s told through music, especially when overamplification so often drowns out the lyrics that are supposed to be telling the tale. Partly because there is no band, that’s not a problem in “Ablaze.” Zrebski’s lyrics can sometimes feel a little forced, as if they’re searching desperately for the right rhyme and not quite finding it, but they come across crisply and clearly, and in the main they do the job well. And his songs have a nice pop lyricism and a natural-sounding way with a hook: this is a legitimate musical-theater score. Musical director Eric Nordin has done an excellent job of keeping all of it focused and pushing forward.

It’s a little tough to pick standouts in what’s truly an ensemble show, but Christopher James as sensitive Saul, Jessica Tidd as tough Tess, Austin Mahar as Chaz, and Charlotte Karlsen as Cassie do a fair amount of burning. “Ablaze” isn’t really meant for me, and may or may not be meant for you, and that’s perfectly all right. It’s not a grown-up play: that is, it lacks subtlety and analytic detachment. But that can just as easily be an advantage for an audience looking to immerse itself in pure feeling. “Ablaze” obviously connects deeply – enthrallingly, on the evidence of the night I saw it – with its intended audience, which experienced something fresh and personal and appealing. I tip my geezerly hat to that.

NOTES:

  • “Ablaze” continues Thursdays-Sundays through May 5 in the Brunish Theatre of the Portland Center for the Performing Arts, 1111 S.W. Broadway. Ticket information here.
  • Kaitie Todd’s review for Willamette Week is here.
  • Holly Johnson’s review for The Oregonian is here.

 

Guitar gods and circus scores: an afternoon at the symphony

Stravinsky, Piston, and the L.A. Guitar Quartet keep things light and lively at the Schnitz

By:
Published April 15, 2013, in MUSIC

Los Angeles Guitar Quartet

Los Angeles Guitar Quartet

While Eric Clapton’s pantheon of guitar gods was shredding Madison Square Garden over the weekend (old pals like Keith Richards, Buddy Guy, Robert Cray, B.B. King, Vince Gill, and Los Lobos dropped by to peel a little paint) a very different but no less rewarding form of guitar worship was going on in Portland’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall: the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, backed by the Oregon Symphony, was getting down and cleanly with a little Joaquin Rodrigo.

In certain quarters the members of the quartet – John Dearman, Matthew Greif, William Kanengiser, Scott Tennant – are guitar gods themselves, though more Apollonian than Dionysian. Not that they can’t get deep inside the emotions of a piece of music. They can, and do. But they come from a different tradition of acoustic and composed music that embraces the present but also circles back to the guitar’s medieval and renaissance predecessors. And while the trademark of Clapton and friends might be to take things higher, faster, and louder, the LAGQ’s virtuosity is rooted in restraint.

The guitar quartet was the guest-star part of a program that conductor and music director Carlos Kalmar called circus music – “except for the Concierto Andaluz, but it’s played by four guitarists, which is kind of a circus by itself.” And so it was – the concert, that is: Igor Stravinsky’s quick and galumphing “Circus Polka” (1942) and the 1947 version of his ballet score “Petrouchka” (originally composed 1910-11) in the first half; Walter Piston’s sly and bouncy 1940 suite from the ballet “The Incredible Flutist” following the guitarists after intermission. It was an all 20th century program, if mostly early 20th century (Joaquin Rodrigo’s “Concierto Andaluz” premiered in 1967, and the guitar quartet’s encore, Manuel de Falla’s bumblebee-quick and ever-popular “Ritual Fire Dance,” in 1915), and there was a time when it might have been considered a first-rate pops program: it made me think of Arthur Fiedler and his emphasis on “light classics” with the old Boston Pops. No matter. On an alternatingly sunny and blustery Sunday afternoon that felt both light and breezy, so did this entertaining and deceptively challenging concert.

The best musical quartets are made up of players who are virtuosic individually but even better as an ensemble, and the LAGQ fills that bill, playing with the speed and synchronicity of a great passing basketball team: sometimes it’s tough to tell who scored the basket and who got the assist. “Concierto Andaluz” moves in ebbs and flows, quick in its fingering (it has complex meters and more than a nod to the primal rhythms of flamenco) but leisurely in its structure; and the quartet, playing a deft little passing game with the scaled-down orchestra, shows off without showing off. It was tough not to smile at this display of easy-sounding but technically difficult dexterity.

“I think ‘Petrouchka’ is my favorite Stravinsky ballet score,” my classical/opera/ballet buff younger son remarked as we settled into our seats. Not “Firebird” or “Rite of Spring”? No, he replied: “Petrouchka” seems more contemporary. Then, in his casual opening chat that is one of the advantages of attending the symphony’s Sunday afternoon concerts, Kalmar noted that “Petrouchka” is also the least popular of the three. Why? Well, the other two wind up mightily and close with a satisfying bang. “Petrouchka,” which tells the odd little tale of a lovesick puppet who is murdered by his loutish rival for the ballerina’s affections, ends not in a whimper but a quiet, caustic jeer: Petrouchka’s ghost appears on a roof above the public square, thumbing his nose at the crowd. It’s a sly, sophisticated ending, precise in its demands, and the orchestra pulled it off deftly. Stravinsky’s score is also very brassy, both in the lower and upper registers (that’s principal trumpeter Jeffrey Work expressing himself so forthrightly) and extraordinarily complex rhythmically, giving the percussionists a healthy workout. In that sense it’s definitely modernist, and it reminded me that later in his career, after he’d left Russia and Europe and moved to the United States, Stravinsky sometimes wrote scores specifically for jazz musicians.

“It seems like only the best conductors record Piston’s ‘Incredible Flutist’ suite,” the younger son said, implying that it takes a brilliant musical mind to realize that this light and impish romp of a ballet score is also a very good piece of music. Kalmar and the orchestra alike seemed convinced. They ripped engagingly and precisely through the passages of this (also) odd little tale, this one about a wandering flutist ­– principal flutist Jessica Sindell is sterling – who charms the pants off the people in a sleepy village. Again, the piece is breezy and blatty and percussive, and you could tell the players were having at least as much fun as the audience. I saw heads a-bobbin’ in the cello section, and when the orchestra got to the Circus March section where the players are called on to burst out in cheers and whistles, there was no holdin’ ’em back. Make a joyful noise, all ye lands.

At intermission the son rushed out to the lobby, took a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet (all the cash he had) and bought a copy of an L.A. Guitar Quartet CD. “Bring it back after the show,” Michael Parsons, who was manning the sales table, told him. “They’ll be here to sign copies.” So we did, and struggled to get the damnable plastic wrapper off so it could be signed: as it happened, we’d both recently clipped our fingernails short. Eventually we managed. The woman in front of us had the same problem. “I want to get this signed,” she told the quartet’s Greif, who was sitting in the first of the assembly-line chairs, “but I just can’t seem to get this wrapping off!” He took the CD from her, displaying those impressive long and tapered fingernails that guitarists maintain for precise picking. “I can do that.” And … zip.

No doubt Clapton and Richards could do the same. But I ask you: would they stick around after a concert to autograph fans’ CDs?

NOTES:

  • The program repeats at 8 p.m. Monday, April 15. Ticket information 503-228-1353.
  • James McQuillen’s concert review for The Oregonian is here.

 

 

 

 

Big fights, little fights, all around the town

'Clybourne Park,' 'Gin Game,' and a battle over the shape of culture and art

By:
Published April 14, 2013, in THEATER

Sharonlee McLean, Gavin Hoffman, Kelley Curran, Brianna Horne and Kevin R. Free in "Clybourne Park." Photo: Patrick Weishampel.

Sharonlee McLean, Gavin Hoffman, Kelley Curran, Brianna Horne and Kevin R. Free in “Clybourne Park.” Photo: Patrick Weishampel.

As the lights dropped Friday night and the crowd leapt to its feet at the end of Portland Center Stage’s rousing opening-night performance of “Clybourne Park” it seemed not really an ending at all, just a quick pause before the next chapter in a continuing saga. And oddly, that felt good. The play’s two acts are set 50 years apart, with a lot of surface progress but the same old bugaboos of race and privilege lurking in the background, and if the ending feels a bit un-finalized, that’s really only a reflection of the reality behind the story. Things begin and end for specific characters, but the conditions under which they live their lives just keep rolling along. It’s not a bad thing at all to walk out of a theater thinking, “I wonder what happens next?”

In a way, that question is what “Clybourne Park” is all about. Written by Chicago actor/playwright Bruce Norris, it’s become a huge hit since it opened three years ago at Playwrights Horizons in New York. It won a Pulitzer in 2011 and followed with the Tony Award for best play in 2012. The big “what next?” in Norris’s play arises from the ending of Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark 1959 drama “A Raisin in the Sun,” when Lena Younger, a housemaid and the core of a struggling black family on Chicago’s South Side, decides to spend a small insurance settlement to make a down payment on a house in a nicer neighborhood – Clybourne Park, which has no black families.

Norris flips “Raisin” on its edge and begins “Clybourne Park” in the house where Lena is about to move, a rambling family home now cluttered with boxes for the previous family’s move to the suburbs. And he dips right into the other side of the story: What Lena sees as opportunity, the all-white residents of her new neighborhood see as a threat. The neighborhood association tries to buy Lena out at a higher price. Friendships break up. And the trickle of white flight to the suburbs is soon to become a stampede, leaving tumbling real-estate prices and a shift of Clybourne Park from an all-white to a mostly black neighborhood. Fifty years later, in Act Two, the tables are turned again. A young white couple have bought the old house, planning to tear it down and build an oversized replacement. This time, the black neighbors have concerns. Gentrification has begun.

Whew. Got all that setup? It’s much easier to follow on the stage, where director Chris Coleman’s assured and cracklingly paced production seduces you with alternating laughter and sorrow. For all of its contentious subject matter, “Clybourne Park” moves with a swift and entertaining energy, and Coleman’s production, which is impeccably designed and beautifully cast, works it to the max. With this production Center Stage does precisely what a flagship theater company is supposed to do. It takes an interesting play and gives it a top-notch professional production that brings out its nuances. It delights the crowd from moment to moment, and gives it something important to think about afterwards. And it sets a high standard not just for audiences, but also for other companies in town.

If I find the first act of what’s essentially two linked short plays more involving, it may be because of the remarkable performances by Sal Viscuso as the morose businessman who’s selling the house and Sharonlee McLean as his stay-at-home wife. Something horrible has happened in the house involving their war-veteran son, and Viscuso is absolutely compelling as Russ, a man who’s gone quietly bitter, and caustically hilarious, on the world. He lives a step to the side of things, observing and judging, buried in pain, and it’s astonishing to see him gradually grow in what might be moral stature, or simply disgust over awkward attempts to manipulate him, as the people around him reveal their baser intentions. McLean is a gifted comedian, as she displays amply in the role of a wisecracking lawyer in the second act, and she has some wonderful ditzy moments as Russ’s not-so-bright wife Bev, too. But gradually we realize that even if she can misread situations astonishingly, especially in relating to her longtime African-American maid, Bev has more empathy and emotional wisdom than anyone around her. Her fragility and determined optimism, which McLean reveals with extraordinary vulnerability, go together as a way of dealing with an impossible situation. The supporting roles are beautifully played, too: Brianna Horne as Bev’s eternally cautious and necessarily diplomatic maid, Francine, and Kevin R. Free as Albert, Francine’s sometimes overly helpful husband; Andy Lee-Hillstrom as a fatuous and comically ineffective clergyman; Gavin Hoffman, who is strikingly good as Karl, the glad-handing neighborhood activist (and a bit character in Hansberry’s “Raisin”) who’s appalled by the sale of the house to a black family and leads the protest against it; and Kelley Curran as Karl’s pregnant and deaf wife, Betsy, who doesn’t quite understand what’s going on around her. The switchbacks in belief and motivation among this provocative cast of characters are as endless as the country’s complex and contradictory beliefs and actions about race and privilege, and no one here is entirely wrong or entirely right. For all its compensating humor this first act contains a series of smaller and larger personal tragedies, and an economic and cultural shift that echoes down the decades.

Viscuso and McLean recede toward the background in the second act, which is set in a more run-down version of the first act’s interior (the handsomely playable design is by the savvy vet Michael Olich; costumes are by resident designer Jeff Cone). Coming to the fore are the clashing couples played by Hoffman and Curran (the newbie white owners) and Horne and Free (the neighborhood old guard). Curran is once again pregnant but this time not deaf, and her intentions are both innocent and good: she wants to love this place. Free is once again genial, but with a sharp sense of irony and a line that won’t be crossed; and Horne adeptly maintains a steadily simmering anger beneath a veneer of almost courtly patience. Hoffman once again plays the blunt force who brings race into the open while the others tiptoe around it, and once again does so without coming across as entirely a villain. He is, from his perspective, simply a realist. Norris gets impressive mileage out of a series of crude jokes – racial, sexual, you name it – that zip across the stage and heighten the tension among the characters even as they release the tension in the audience.

What’s going to happen after the final blowup? Who knows? Norris doesn’t answer the questions he raises, and it’s really not the play’s job to do so. It’s enough to set the questions in motion. Why does power always seem to tilt to white people? What’s good and what’s bad about gentrification? What’s the line between social cohesion and a free and open society? When is race the most important card on the table, and how does it play when the deck is stacked economically? When does a corrosive social outcome outweigh a good personal decision? Are we ever going to get this race thing right? “Clybourne Park” is only the latest chapter in Center Stage’s continuing examination of race in America, an exploration that’s included, among others, its African-American version of “Oklahoma!,” “Black Pearl Sings,” and the recently completed “The Whipping Man.” It’s a never-ending story.

And what happens next?

*

O'Brien and Nause in "The Gin Game." Photo: Owen Carey

O’Brien and Nause in “The Gin Game.” Photo: Owen Carey

Battles, battles, everywhere. Big and cultural at Portland Center Stage. Small and grotesquely personal at Artists Repertory Theatre. And sometimes, where you least expect them. Watching Vana O’Brien and Allen Nause duke it out so vigorously a while back in D.L. Coburn’s little fight club of a play “The Gin Game” at Artists Rep, I found myself thinking waywardly of Rocco Landesman and the sort of friends who come with, shall we put it, baggage.

Landesman, President Obama’s pick in 2008 to chair the National Endowment for the Arts, hung up his gloves at the end of last year, satisfied that one term of doing battle in the moral and strategic swamp of Washington, D.C., was quite enough. He was in many ways an able administrator, fighting to maintain federal arts funding in the face of a relentless reactionary insurrection. In divisive times it’s good to have a seasoned scrapper on your side. But sometimes it seemed like Landesman was landing punches on the people he was supposed to be protecting – or at least, like Nause’s character, bashing the bejeebers out of the table very close to his one and only friend.

So it is with Weller Martin and Fonsia Dorsey, the two aged outcasts in the retirement home that is the setting for “The Gin Game.” Like Landesman and the arts – he was a successful Broadway producer; the arts were, well, the arts – Weller and Fonsia seem naturally attracted to each other. “Made for each other” might be another question altogether, because beneath their affinity runs an unbridled competitiveness that eventually undoes them both: in the end they’d rather make war than love, and too late they realize they’ve spoiled the game.

Coburn’s play began life in 1977 as a vehicle for Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, and it’s been a smashing success in Portland as a vehicle for O’Brien and Nause, who surprisingly, given their long histories with Artists Rep – she was a founder in 1981, he is retiring after 25 years as artistic director – had never performed together before. The pairing, like Weller and Fonsia’s, seems a delayed inevitability, and under JoAnn Johnson’s precise direction these two fine veterans make the most of it. Nause’s rumpled feints and nervous twitches erupt into explosive and destructive temper tantrums; O’Brien’s stolid geniality hardens into a bitter thirst for vengeance and victory at whatever cost. In a smaller and less poetic way, Weller and Fonsia play something like the George and Martha game in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”: better to kill the baby than compromise.

Or, to put it another way: isn’t this the way national politics looks right now?

As rabble-rousing as his approach sometimes was, Landesman didn’t go for the jugular the way Weller and Fonsia do. A lot of people in the arts, noting his brashness and eagerness to speak his mind, welcomed his appointment to the NEA, figuring he could shake up an overly cautious bureaucracy. But Landesman came from the for-profit side of the industry (Broadway shows exist in the hope that they’ll make money for their backers) and it often seemed he didn’t understand the very different place his new not-for-profit playmates were coming from. The bottom line is very important in government, especially in an area like the arts, which a lot of people feel has no business getting taxpayer money at all. And Landesman made it very clear, over and over, that if the government was going to be in the arts-funding business, it should be underwriting the very best. That caused a ripple of unease across the nation among arts people who suspected that by “the very best,” he meant “the stuff that’s in New York.”

Then, early in 2011, he really shook things up: he said the nation had too many not-for-profit arts organizations, and maybe some of them should go out of business. It was a matter of supply and demand, he added. At the same time that groups were proliferating, audiences were shrinking.

A little tussle is good for most relationships: it keeps the blood pulsing and the sparks flying. And underneath the gamesmanship there are often real issues that need to be worked out. Landesman wasn’t entirely wrong in his assessment (he was also far from entirely right), and like Norris with the effects of urban gentrification in “Clybourne Park,” he was bringing up issues that had been conveniently ignored for a long time. But politically, his timing was curious: at roughly the same time, a group of about 165 House Republicans was calling for the abolishment of the NEA, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting – in other words, getting the government out of the culture business. Landesman was hardly in collusion with the hard-liners. He wanted to focus arts spending, not kill it off. But the resulting outcry in arts circles was predictable: with friends like this, who needs enemies?

The NEA survived, and no doubt will stumble on, because unlike Weller and Fonsia, a majority of the members of Congress still think a little compromising is a worthwhile thing – at least on the fringes of the battlefield, where the matter of national funding for the arts is most frequently to be found. And Landesman’s tough-headed look at the role of government in the arts was not a bad thing at all: “We love everything and everything should get money” is not a responsible policy statement. Further, there are inbred problems with government underwriting of the arts that rarely get discussed. How do you sincerely oppose your benefactor? (Somehow the best court jesters in European history managed to speak uncomfortable truths without losing their heads.) What’s the role of entertainment in art? (I sometimes think the nonprofit theater’s constant need to prove its seriousness and social relevance has led to a crippling undervaluing of comedy.) But what will Landesman’s legacy be? It could be that he set the agency on the wrong side of the divide.

His concept of a leaner, meaner, and smaller arts scene doesn’t fit the reality of what’s happening in Portland and other cities across the country. Leaving aside the issue of government backing, the cultural scene here is vastly broader and more diverse than it was 20 or even 10 years ago. It seems like a movement that can’t be stopped, even if you pull the plug on funding. The central arts groups – opera, symphony, art museum, ballet, LORT theater company – simply can’t count on the primacy they once enjoyed. It isn’t that they aren’t still important: they are, as the theatrical flagships Center Stage and Artists Rep have proven over and over again, and it’s quite important that they strive for excellence. But the arts world has become a mosaic, just as the culture itself has: a reflection of many different worlds, many different points of view. We are, as a multiculture, remaking ourselves, and artists are the reporters of what hasn’t quite been realized and explorers of what’s to come. Maybe that’s why power elites sometimes don’t like them very much. And maybe that’s why they’re worth the fight.

*

NOTES:

“Clybourne Park” continues through May 5. Ticket information here.

“The Gin Game” continues through April 28. Ticket information here.

Marty Hughley has a wonderful piece about the making of “Clybourne Park” in The Oregonian. See it on OregonLive, here.

Hughley’s review for The Oregonian of “The Gin Game” elegantly sums up the critical consensus.

It’s a print: PAM peeks inside the studio

The art museum takes a fresh and lively look at printmaking and the artistic life

By:
Published April 10, 2013, in VISUAL ART

 

Roy Lichtenstein, "Brushstrokes," 1967, screenprint, Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer, Estate of Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein, “Brushstrokes,” 1967, screenprint, Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer, Estate of Roy Lichtenstein

Over a lot of years of dropping in regularly at the Portland Art Museum I’ve learned always to sneak a peek down the stairwell just past the entrance lobby of the main Belluschi building, at least to see what’s behind the glass shelf on the landing halfway down. Three or four pieces are usually on display there, teasing to whatever show happens to be in the lowslung galleries below, and they seem to know a sucker when they see one: they almost always lure me down. There’s something just a little secret about these galleries, which many visitors never even notice as they stride past on their way to the “big” shows in the special-exhibition galleries above. Yet some of my most rewarding moments at the museum have been down these stairs, in the calm of these intimately scaled spaces, which feel more domestic than grand: move in a few pieces of furniture, carve out a kitchen corner and a little bathroom, and you could call it home.

Chances are good that the exhibits you find down here will consist of prints or drawings, often but not always gathered from the museum’s Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Graphic Arts Collection, which is one of the museum’s best. That’s the case with the current show, through May 19. “In the Studio: Reflections on Artistic Life” is a selection of 66 prints drawn mostly from the Gilkey collection but also from private collectors including Jordan D. Schnitzer and Hannah Mangold, and in a few cases, loans from commercial galleries. All 66 deal with the intimacies of artmaking, from a quartet of Picasso artist-and-model pieces to a liberal selection of satiric works by the likes of Honore Daumier, Warrington Colescott, and the ever-puckish Red Grooms. The oldest work, a Daumier litho, is from 1846, and the exhibit works its way up in time to a handful of still-active artists, from Jasper Johns and Claes Oldenburg to Oregon veterans Jennifer Guske and Frank Boyden.

Raphael Soyer, "Young Model," 1940, lithograph, unnumbered edition of 250. The Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Graphic Arts Collection.

Raphael Soyer, “Young Model,” 1940, lithograph, unnumbered edition of 250. The Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Graphic Arts Collection.

The trio of self-portraits on the stair landing do an excellent job of forecasting the pleasures to be found downstairs. Rene Georges Hermann-Paul’s 1895 litho “L’Artiste” is almost like a carnival barker drawing in the crowds: red hair and beard, clown-like, strutting, full of vim and vigor and maybe just a little snake oil. Imagine Toulouse-Lautrec doing a circus poster. George Grosz’ 1919 etching “Selbstportrait (fur Charlie Chaplin)” is as busy as a theater boulevard yet intriguingly more discreet than the swaggering Hermann-Paul. And William H. Berkeley’s 1950 “Engraver Engraving (Self-portrait)” is compact and flowingly efficient, a few quick curving lines suggesting a figure hunched intently over a table.

I’ve been attracted to prints (and good posters, for that matter) for as long as I can recall, partly because of my fascination with the look and feel of paper and partly for democratic reasons: I like the whole concept of multiples, the idea of a lot of people experiencing or even owning a single work of art. I like that in spite of their multiplicity, prints tend to be part of a private conversation, modest in size, just right for personal contemplation. I like that a print can subtly change during its press run, and I’m intrigued by the complex dance that artistic quality, edition size, and economic worth do around one another. I like that printmaking requires both artistic impulse and meticulous craftsmanship, and that printmakers think in reverse. I even like that artists can decide, by creating monotypes, to follow through on all of the demands of the craft and yet subvert its intention by creating a singular work. Mostly, though, I like that printmaking tends to be built on the practiced magic of the line, which through most of history has been the fundamental first step in making art. A drawing is often provisional: it can be a study or a quick idea or a completed work of art. A print, in a weird way, is a more fully committed drawing. It requires a complex mechanical process, and if you’re going to go to all that trouble a line had better mean what it says.

“In the Studio,” which is chosen and shaped by Mary Weaver Chapin, the Portland museum’s curator of graphic arts, swings easily between subject and technique. Working in rigorous and realistic but definitely not photographic detail, Erik Desmazieres celebrates the machinery of printmaking in a pair of prints from 1992 and ’93: they’re almost steampunk in their caress of gear and metal. And Arshile Gorky’s 1931 litho “Painter and Model (The Creation Chamber)” – one of a very few print editions he created – mixes muse and artist so completely that you can’t really tell which is which. It seems a paean to the intimacy that binds artist and sitter in the studio, both essential to the creation of the art.

Frank Boyden, "Uncle Skulky is overcome as he leers at an exquisite exhibition of an old friend," color drypoint and spitbite with graphite, pencil, and watercolor; artist's proof aside from the edition of 14; gift of the artist to the Portland Art Museum in honor of Jean Vollum.

Frank Boyden, “Uncle Skulky is overcome as he leers at an exquisite exhibition of an old friend,” color drypoint and spitbite with graphite, pencil, and watercolor; artist’s proof aside from the edition of 14; gift of the artist to the Portland Art Museum in honor of Jean Vollum.

The relationship between artist and model is very different in a trio of nudes by Philip Pearlstein, from 1976 and 1978, that seem both the most and least intimate of the show’s studio pieces. Pearlstein and his models hide nothing, but the effect is almost clinical: these are morose nudes, frank yet demystified and desexualized. They’re a far cry from the subject of Raphael Soyer’s small and lovely 1940 lithograph “Young Model,” a scene from the back in which she sits straight-shouldered on a chair and begins to undress. The captured moment crackles quietly with anticipation and sensuality.

Few artists have ever mastered the line as well as Picasso, and the four prints here, completed between 1927 and 1968 and all showing artists and models colluding in the studio, are notable for both their economy and their quietude. They’re the antithesis of action painting, and yet embedded in their stillness is an almost bursting desire to move. Best leave the action, then, to Grooms, the rambunctious pop artist represented by five works from the Schnitzer collection, and to Action Jackson Pollock himself. Three of the pieces are Grooms’ 3-D lithos, like canny overgrown pop-up-books, depicting artists at work, including 1997’s “Jackson in Action,” based on one of Rudy Burckhardt’s 1950 studio photos for Time magazine that firmly planted abstract expressionism in the public mind. In it, Pollock, looking a little like a sailor in the chorus of “On the Town,” bends over the canvas dripping paint while a photographer stands atop a stool snapping pictures. Jackson’s a blur, moving so fast he seems to have two heads and six arms. The details are terrific, from a little skull on a shelf in the background to a Maxwell House Coffee can jammed with paint brushes in the foreground.

Charles-Francois Daubigny, "Le Bateau-Atelier" ("The Studio Boat"), 1861, etching. The Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Graphic Arts Collection.

Charles-Francois Daubigny, “Le Bateau-Atelier” (“The Studio Boat”), 1861, etching. The Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Graphic Arts Collection.

Grooms’ pieces are part of an invigorating subcategory of satiric and parody works on the artistic process, including a full corner with half a dozen masterful caricatures by Daumier. In one, critics and viewers at the Salon appear to be viewing with alarm Manet’s scandalous nude “Olympia,” which Daumier doesn’t show: It’s reflected only in the shocked looks on the visitors’ faces. The exhibit includes nine comic pieces by Warrington Colescott (Robert’s older brother), several of which provide a wry overview of the history of printmaking (Wagnerian gods and lightning bolts seem to have something to do with it), and one of which – 1991’s “Judgment Day at NEA,” an expansive caricature of selectors at the National Endowment for the Arts viewing projected slides of artworks – suggests that the days of the Salon making and breaking careers just keep on keeping on.

It’s good, too, to see a pair of Oregon artist Boyden’s prints of “Uncle Skulky,” his unleashed and thoroughly impolitic skeleton alter ego, who inevitably yields to his most venal of impulses. In one, “Uncle Skulky is overcome as he leers at an exquisite exhibition of an old friend” (2003), a jealous Skulky sees red over the profusion of “sold” dots on the gallery walls.

Still, “In the Studio” strikes me mostly as a reflection of the fusion of art and craft in the making of an industrious and personal way of life. And from that point of view the most telling work may be Charles-Francois Daubigny’s hushed and exquisite 1861 “Le Bateau-Atelier (The Studio Boat).” A small and private etching, its image just a little more than 4 by 5 inches, it depicts with great detail an intimate and cozy interior space carefully ordered with necessities from stretched canvases to a lantern and a frying pan. The river is suggested softly beyond the window, from which a suffusing light breaks through. The artist, alone in his studio, leans forward, brush in hand. He is intently at work.

Warrington Colescott, "Judgment Day at NEA," 1991, soft-ground etching, etching, aquatint and marbling, a la poupee inking and relief rolls through stencils; edition 13/20. Gift of the artists to Portland Art Museum.

Warrington Colescott, “Judgment Day at NEA,” 1991, soft-ground etching, etching, aquatint and marbling, a la poupee inking and relief rolls through stencils; edition 13/20. Gift of the artist to Portland Art Museum.

 

 

 

 

The truth about torsos: NW Dance Project does the twist

Two new dances and a revival create a sleek new show

By:
Published March 30, 2013, in DANCE

 

Franco Nieto and Ching Ching Wong in "Drifting Thoughts"; Lindsey McGill and Elijah Labay in background. Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert

Franco Nieto and Ching Ching Wong in “Drifting Thoughts”; Lindsey McGill and Elijah Labay in background. Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert

“I think what ballet dancers don’t understand is how much they can use their torsos,” choreographer Sarah Slipper told me in October 2009. “That’s something that contemporary choreographers are really discovering. Ballet concentrates on the extremities.”

Watching the performers of the Northwest Dance Project go through the twists and rapid recoveries of Wen Wei Wang’s “Chi” on Thursday night, I could see clearly what she meant. It’s not as if the nine dancers of this exciting young company, for which Slipper is founding artistic director, don’t know what to do with their arms and legs. And it’s not as if traditional ballet dancers don’t balance from the core of their bodies. But if classical and neoclassical ballet are about extension – about reaching for the sky – contemporary ballet and dance are often about compression: moving from the belly, earthlike, like a ball, and seeing where and how you can roll.

“Chi” is the opener in Northwest Dance Project’s spring program, which continues with 7:30 p.m. performances Friday and Saturday, March 29 and 30, in downtown Portland’s Newmark Theatre. Unusually for NDP, which has made new works its calling card, “Chi” is a remounting of a dance created a few years ago for the company. It’s joined by two premieres: Slipper’s “Casual Act” and Patrick Delcroix’s “Drifting Thoughts.” The same three choreographers debuted pieces in last year’s NDP spring program.

The word “chi,” in Chinese, has to do with the permutations of energy, and “Chi” is very much about rolling connections: twists and flips that lead to what seem like landings but instead become springboards to a new series of movements, which lead to another landing/springboard, and another, and another, like electrical currents sizzling through switches that can’t turn the energy off. The piece uses all eight dancers who are performing in this program – Samantha Campbell, Patrick Kilbane, Elijah Labay, Lindsey Matheis, Lindsey McGill, Franco Nieto, Andrea Parson, Ching Ching Wong –  and watching them move to Giorgio Magnanensi’s melodically restless score is a bit like watching the wiggles and squirms of microbial creatures beneath a microscope. Throughout, the dancers turn movements that traditional ballet might consider inelegant into moments of odd beauty: shoulder-tilts and torso-turns that emphasize the sheer physicality rather than the metaphoric possibilities of the human form. Dance is often at its best when its “meaning” is simply what it is: a particular movement through time and space, like the soundwaves of music.

Then again, dance is theater, and theater tells, or at least suggests, stories. Slipper is an innately dramatic dancemaker, and her new piece, “Casual Act,” is an intense and beguiling abstraction from Harold Pinter’s play “Betrayal,” which tells the story of infidelities both physical and emotional among friends. The men Labay and Nieto and the women Parson, McGill and Campbell bring furtive heat to the cool movements of the hidden trysts, which are never quite hidden: Jon Plueard’s rotating set reveals a blank wall, a wall with a window, and a wall with a door. Someone’s always walking or climbing or peering through the window or door, sometimes eagerly, sometimes furtively. Oddly, the thing feels more American-realist and loamy – like Stanley Kowalski, or the rural-turmoil visual imaginings of Thomas Hart Benton – then repressed button-down British upper-middle class. Pinter’s play moves backward in time through a seven-year affair, and “Casual Act” sometimes nods to that, the dancers backing away from the wall in a group, or individual dancers scuttling backwards through space. It’s a long piece, and at one point it came to a kiss that seemed a culmination. But there was more very good movement to come, and I was glad it was there even if I wasn’t sure the piece couldn’t have ended earlier.

“Drifting Thoughts” marks the third go-around with NDP for Delcroix, who’s set works on companies worldwide and maintains a close relationship with European star choreographer Jiri Kylian. He’s a deft dancemaker, and it’s obvious that the company’s performers – once again, all eight on the program – enjoy working with him. The piece has a bit of a gone-native, science-fiction feel to it, like an eqinoxial revel interrupted here and there by a brilliant Bikini Atoll flash of destruction.  What it all means or doesn’t mean, I’m not sure – after all, the thoughts (like atomic fallout?) are drifting – but it can be mesmerizing to watch.

All three pieces are helped immeasurably by Jeff Forbes’ lighting, which moves from Rembrandt murkiness to intense Hopper clarity, and by the design work in general, which includes costumes by Rachelle Waldie for the Delcroix and Slipper pieces and by Kathy Scoggins for “Chi.”

 

 

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