THEATER

Tomorrow!: Micro-Theater, Macro-Theme

By:
Published April 16, 2013, in THEATER

tomorrow

Devon Wade Granmo, Noah Dunham, Tara Coen and Noelle Eaton bravely face the great unknown in their most trend- and weather-proof clothes.

Intimate black-box theater tends to traffic in “micro,” each flicker of gesture and nuance of phrase expressing something that is so true for one character in one moment in one place and time, that it draws the watcher into empathy for a distinct other. Meanwhile, the “macro” realm is more readily addressed by spectacular Broadway shows or even films, where sweeping scenic panoramas, massive catastrophes, and epic battles can fit in the frame. How else to encompass the world, the universe, or even the malleable constraints of space and time?

“Tomorrow!”, the brainchild of Working Theater Collective founder and RACC Grant recipient Ashley Hollingshead, attempts the near-impossible: fitting a macro theme into the constraints of a micro-show. Tackling “the future” in the same way her last title, “Something Epic/Everyday” addressed “the present,” she condenses the heady exploration of humanity’s trajectory into a four-person, 70-minute play wherein a quartet of young Everymen in timeless business-casual clothes* perform a series of parlor charades. It’s a tempest in a black-box, and in case you can’t picture it, here’s the trailer:

Tomorrow! from Noah Dunham on Vimeo.

Cute, vulnerable, ambitious and brave, Action/Adventure Theatre’s thesps employ a variety of techniques over a medley of found and original sound (Zagar & Evans “In the Year 2525″, songs by Kyle Acheson, a global-warming-themed redux of Nelly’s “Hot in Herre”, and much more). Like a Greek Chorus orating a film-lit textbook, they recite retro-futuristic clichés: “A Vision of the Future From [A Given Year]!” they periodically announce. 1963: robot maids. 1979: peak oil, Mad Max. 1989: hoverboards. And—as far forward as the play’s “retro” goes—1991: artificial intelligence and nuclear apocalypse.

Continues…

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.

Aliens found lurking in the human brain, heart

Third Rail Rep's "The Aliens" probes our dark matter...

By:
Published April 13, 2013, in THEATER

Chris Murray and Isaac Lamb in "The Aliens"/Third Rail Repertory Theatre

Chris Murray and Isaac Lamb in “The Aliens”/Owen Carey

Toward the end of Annie Baker’s “The Aliens,” Evan makes a call to Nicole, another counselor at music camp he met earlier that summer. She’s a violist, and Evan starts with a little chit-chat about her orchestra and blurts out that he’s smoking, then that a friend of his has died suddenly, and finally that he wants to come to visit her in Boston.

That little speech is why I like “The Aliens” so much. Its psychology is so acute, its understanding of our condition, whipsawed by loss and its close companion desire, mystified by the process of becoming, which seems to require so much dull and self-destructive time in between the flashes of insight.

Conventional theater offers conventional characters, and those characters are nearly always a little more integrated, symbolic, and predictable than people are. That doesn’t mean that they don’t offer a lot of important stuff to us. They do. But they are compressed, simplified, embroiled in problems that have solutions, resolutions. We can learn from them, laugh at them, feel deeply about those problems and even the characters themselves, such is the power of theater. But generally speaking (and I’m painting with a roller not even a broad brush), they don’t describe our lives at its most granular all that well. Maybe because that’s impossible for Observer Effect reasons…

But that’s why I have fallen so hard for “The Aliens.” It doesn’t feel compressed and simplified. It doesn’t offer typical psychological arcs or narrative lines. It begins to pick at our intermittence, our disjointedness, our impulses and our ennui, our memories and convenient fictions. And it makes a compelling play out of them, such is the power of theater.

****

Christopher Isherwood, reviewing for the New York Times, compared the two central characters of “The Aliens,” KJ and Jasper, to a slacker version of Beckett’s Didi and Gogo, and he loves it: “Ms. Baker may just have the subtlest way with exposition of anyone writing for the theater today.”

But we always know that Didi and Gogo are fictional characters, wonderful and fictional, governed by Beckett’s logic and imagination. “The Aliens” is both more specific than Isherwood suggests in the review—I don’t see KJ and Jasper as reducible to “slackers”—and through that specificity, paradoxically enough, makes a leap toward the biggest of generalizations about human consciousness.

I don’t think those specifics are the result of “compassionate, truthful observation,’’ as Isherwood writes, though the wonder of the play is that it seems that way. I don’t think Baker sat at a cafe in some little Vermont town and reported what she saw. I think she excavated a lot more deeply than that and created a world that seems so real, especially in the cozy confines of CoHo Theater, you can touch it.

****

Chris Murray and Bryce Earhart in "The Aliens"/Third Rail Rep

Chris Murray and Bryce Earhart in “The Aliens”/Owen Carey

Third Rail Repertory Theatre opened “The Aliens” at CoHo last night, and I liked so many things about the production, it’s hard to know where to begin. Just for starters, I liked Isaac Lamb’s singing and his finger tapping, Chris Murray’s long stares and swift shifts from self-possession to doubt, Bryce Earhart’s phone message and the slump and lean of his walk.

“The Aliens” is set in a little clearing behind a restaurant, the sort of place where employees might go and smoke, take some sun in the lawn chairs, or eat lunch at the picnic table, if it didn’t smell so much from the garbage cans. KJ (Lamb) and Jasper (Murray) hang out there, for reasons never explained. Maybe it’s the last best place.

KJ’s a college dropout, though he seems to know more than average about math, and he has some sort of psychological issue that makes it hard to get any traction in his life. He treats it with both traditional meds and mushrooms and sometimes with alcohol, though that seems to end badly. Jasper dropped out of high school, has girlfriends, reads Charles Bukowski and is nearly finished with his own first novel. Together, they formed a band that had a series of names, and although I personally would have voted for The Frogmen, Baker takes her title from another of the band’s identifiers, The Aliens, taken from the title of Bukowski poem. KJ is 30; I surmised that Jasper was a bit younger.

But these quick capsules of them? They aren’t that useful, because they lead to the very compression that the play undermines. They are an armature and a form of coloration. Baker doesn’t tell their stories; she shows the restless twitches of their minds, sublime and silly, and their efforts to understand what is happening to them, or, really, what is NOT happening to them.

A new employee at the restaurant enters this no man’s land to drop off the garbage and tell KJ and Jasper to scoot. Evan is still in high school, though he’s headed for Bates, a musician who is friendless and uncomfortable with himself and with that brittle self’s place in the world, the kind of kid you feel safe looking past because he seems so harmless. And they become friends of a sort, because despite their sparring and impulsiveness, both Jasper and KJ are warm-hearted, and their stories about themselves and the wisdom they’ve harvested from those stories amaze and inform Evan.

Lamb’s eyes are soft and safe. Murray’s moments of ease and kindness are punctuated with something more definite and pointed. And Evan becomes one of the gang, because with these two, awkwardness isn’t a problem. The only thing that’s important is honest reflection, maybe the only utopian aspect of “The Aliens.” Jasper reads from his novel; Lamb sings an old song of the Frogmen; they share and they enjoy the sharing.

****

Chris Murray and Isaac Lamb in "The Aliens"/Third Rail Rep

Chris Murray and Isaac Lamb in “The Aliens”/Owen Carey

Portland has had a couple of fine productions of Baker plays, Artists Rep’s “Circle Mirror Transformation” and Portland Playhouse’s “Body Awareness.” She’s a young playwright, born in 1981, who grew up in Amherst, Mass., graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and earned an MFA from Brooklyn College. Since graduating she’s been on a steep trajectory, winning various fellowships and getting the kind of early reviews for her plays that a playwright could only dream about.

Both “Body Awareness” and “Circle Mirror Transformation” dealt with “issues”—compassion, love, desire, the place of women, relationships—but they did so deftly, almost gently, with a lot of humor that managed to add to our understanding of what she was exploring not simply to divert us. They were also more conventional than “The Aliens,” in the style of the contemporary American play, with its short, sharp, occasionally oblique episodes.

They weren’t as crunchy as “The Aliens” or as risky. At one point in the second act, which takes a disturbing turn that I won’t go into here, at the beginning of the run, KJ talks to Evan about how, when he was five, he used to say the word “ladder” all day. He couldn’t stop. And one night, his mother (the only mention of his family in the play) came to his bed and held him. She told him he could say “ladder” all he wanted as loud as he wanted, and KJ re-enacts that moment, all the pain in it and all the pain since, maybe the best song of The Frogmen.

Lamb is transcendent in this moment, pushing himself and us many beats and decibels past what we’d consider appropriate. I wanted him to stop. I didn’t want him to stop. Director Tim True has a sense about these risky moments, and it will come as no surprise to those who’ve seen him perform himself to hear that he never underplays them, never glides past them, encourages the actors to take the leap.

The silences are long in “The Aliens,” too, as long as Pinter or Beckett, not that I’m making any direct comparisons. And I have no idea if this is just another experiment by a young playwright or something more programmatic, the attempt to bring our current insight into our psychology and its fragmentary nature, to the stage.

****

Do real young men talk this way, think this way, joke this way, grieve this way, dream this way? The implication of Isherwood’s review three years ago (which, by the way, I think is really a good one) is that they do, and that Baker caught them in the act somehow.

I have no idea. Which young men? Pressed, I’d say that I don’t think any particular three young men would manifest this particular set of neuronal responses, I guess. But that’s not the point. What I recognize is the pattern (or maybe the lack of a pattern). How Murray’s Jasper can brood in the most profound way about his lost girlfriend one moment and flip into another mode the next, charming and dry and engaging. How we can almost see the wheels spinning inside Earhart’s head as his Evan contemplates the information he’s receiving, the behavior he is observing.

Recognizing the pattern, I’m willing to follow the particulars wherever they might lead, such is the power of theater.

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Shakespeare’s ‘Winter’s Tale’: The mini-series

What if Northwest Classical Theatre Company's production lasted a LOT longer?

By:
Published April 9, 2013, in THEATER

 

Matt Smith (Polixines), Grant Turner (Leontes), and Anne Sorce (Hermione) In Northwest Classical Theatre Company’s production of

Matt Smith (Polixines), Grant Turner (Leontes), and Anne Sorce (Hermione) In Northwest Classical Theatre Company’s production of “The Winter’s Tale”/Photo: Jason Maniccia

Northwest Classical Theatre Company is staging a solid version of “The Winter’s Tale” right now at the Shoebox Theater, which true to its name is about as intimate an environment for theater as you can find in Portland. Solid is actually high praise for productions of “A Winter’s Tale,” about as difficult a play to embrace as Shakespeare offers. I simply mean that it is well-considered by the director, John Steinkamp, and well-acted by the cast, who dive into its crazy plot (which Shakespeare lifted from Robert Greene’s “Pondosto”) with gusto and good cheer.

This version of “The Winter’s Tale” moves along swiftly, though it lasts around three hours (including intermission). The plot is that snakey. And it squeezes both court dancing and country revels onto the tiny stage, along with some clowning. Clearing up all the loose ends of the plot leads to a lengthy last act, but even that doesn’t seem too long in this production.

Before I finish, though, I’m going to argue (gulp) that three hours isn’t long enough, but first a little exposition.

Continues…

Arabian Nights: Post5′s Ensemble Talent Show

Grooming a mutant strain of super-actor.

By:
Published March 31, 2013, in CULTURE, THEATER

Don't let this image fool you; PostFive's latest features 16 stars, not 2.

Don’t let this image fool you; PostFive’s latest features 16 stars, not 2.

“Are the girls here for killing?” bellows PostFive fight captain Sam Dinkowitz as actresses tumble onstage for a last-minute run-through of their opening scene. It’s a lurid shadow play behind a red curtain, and Sharyar (Gilberto Martin del Campo) briefly mimes sex and murder with each woman, tossing them all under a curtain where they roll into an expendable heap. Even this intense introduction to “Arabian Nights,” Mary Zimmerman’s redux of the Persian legend of Scheherazade (Nicole Virginia Accuardi) is a little tongue-in-cheek. It would have to be, with a cast that—besides its leads—looks about as Persian as Barbara Eden.

Though the material is relatively frivolous (especially compared to Portland Playhouse’s concurrent Eastern-gazing “Mother Theresa is Dead”) for PostFive’s purposes, the two-hour, 16-actor show that contains multiple stories-within-a-story becomes the perfect vehicle for a young ensemble to trade off SHOWING off. Easy enough to follow, and egalitarian enough with its spotlight, this play gives the troupe as a whole more opportunities than earlier-season offerings “Macbeth” (which revolved around lead actor/artistic director Ty Boice) and “Spectravagasm 2” (which slightly obscured the actors’ talents in a wash of psychedelia, absurdism, and inside humor). Having labored under little scrutiny these past two years, PostFive emerges from its 82nd-Avenue cocoon ripe for acclaim, and “Nights” is its debutante ball.

Cuomo The Clown

My first memory of the show’s director Philip Cuomo was as an actor in Shaking The Tree’s “Little Prince“. Opposite a young actress as the Prince, Cuomo took on most of the show’s supporting roles, including the Prince’s friend the fox and the story’s various planetary inhabitants (each absurdly personifying a school of human philosophy). Seasoned by Imago Theater’s signature movement arts, Cuomo threw himself into each cartoonish caricature, batting at imaginary ear-fleas, wafting around gracefully in a spherical “planet suit,” and switching with ease between exaggerated, comical dialects. “He’s such a CLOWN,” his Portland Actors’ Conservatory protegee Boice has noted—not condescendingly, but reverently. Since that stint in “Prince,” Cuomo has apparently proliferated his gifts to a host of PostFive company members and PAC alums. In “Arabian Nights,” we get a whole roomful of clever clowns, a la Cuomo.

“Auteur Anne Bogart has a saying:’become the editor’. That’s what I tried to do with these guys,” the director explains, recalling how he challenged the cast to break into small groups and “make their own” camel, boat, and even elephant through acrobatic collaboration. The best innovations went into the show, eliminating the need for some cumbersome props. Other personal PostFive touches include an original score (part Arabesque, part vaudevillian) written and performed by Chris Beatty and Sarah Peters with some ensemble sing-alongs.”The script didn’t come with a score, so we figured ‘Why not make one?’” says Cuomo.

The Young Bloods Are Coming

A few weeks ago, a short Mercury profile of PostFive artistic director Ty Boice met an angry snapback from Mercury reader “Juliette,” who decried the rise of “new theater companies” in Portland when perfectly good ones had existed already. She suggested “an exposé” of the movement (implying that it might unearth a New Theater Company Conspiracy). At the time, I laughed and dismissed her fear. But in light of new collectives’ latest efforts, a few more “Juliettes” may go on metaphorical suicide watch.

Between PostFive and Action/Adventure (who tend to share some personnel), I perceive, if not a conspiracy, at least a renaissance. Shoebox-sized spaces filling up with audience that’s over 10 and under 50. Tireless physicality and an ebullient sense of humor. These two newish companies are reminding me (in a way their PDX predecessors didn’t) of Victoria, BC in the early 90′s, where I first learned what small theater was supposed to be: meritocratic, accessible, adventurous and tireless. There’s a sense (especially among the somewhat rent-relieved denizens of Milepost5) that these actors live lean enough to transcend workaday concerns and commit completely to their disorienting artistic processes. I would not be surprised if they literally roll around in a pile all night until a scene’s pieces fall into place. These guys don’t seem like baristas reading a role; they’re actors who eat and sleep on their theater floor.

Subcultures, Converge!

If there IS a small theater renaissance—and you’re welcome to debate it— it was most likely fed by a network of tributaries from other peaking performance subcultures. Around PDX Pop, indie rock’s gradually crested. At Helium, Curious, and Bridgetown, comedy has burgeoned. With Wanderlust, burlesque, and to a certain extent Imago Theatre, vaudeville and mime/movement have boomed. And over at Portland Playhouse, small theater finally forged past-due inroads into cultural diversity. It was only a matter of time before upstart theaters reaped some spillover from these eclectic and overflowing talent wells—and PostFive courts just such an interdisciplinary infusion.
Jessica Anselmo, Cassandra Schwanke, Beth Summers and Sascha Blocker do a few bellydance moves. Choreographer Chip Sherman leads a series of elegant, mysterious mudras. The group sings along competently to much of the score, Glenn McCumber’s ululating tenor especially transcends. The cast’s general mastery of dialect outshines Portland Playhouse, and their stage-fighting is tighter and angrier than Artist Rep’s. Seemingly eager to expand their comedy chops, too, the theater’s even hosting a post-play standup showcase. Under the dual vision of young buck Boice and old pro Cuomo, and breathing deep draughts of Portland’s performative air, PostFive may be germinating a new hybrid super-strain of mutant actors who sing, joke, prat-fall, guitar-play, bellydance, and can subsist with a shared kitchen out on 82nd. They’re as hearty and apocalypse-ready as cockroaches. Look out.

As theater companies that multi-task are growing, the ones that have long stuck to their guns (with all due respect, Profile, Vertigo, CoHo) are forced to re-tool and compete in a suddenly fuller pool. Juliettes, don’t fret. It’s nobody’s fault, just a natural adaptation. With our town’s Portlandia tourist influx, eventually everyone will get a bigger audience.

A room for improvement.

PostFive’s actors shine so brightly, they ALMOST blur out their surroundings: a bright turquoise Disney’s-Aladdin-ish stage dressing that’s less Bedouiun than bedroom-set. The backdrop, when dimly lit, is passable, but the teal pillars in the foreground and the bulgy draping of silken saris (a dorm-roomish attempt to hide exposed venting and drainpipes) are, forgive the term, “fugly.” Less would be more. Better would be more. But this level of craft does a discredit. Hopefully some pinch-hitting set-subduers will jump in and release this play from its tacky trappings mid-run.

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Theater and music under a big, fat Chagall moon

Springtime with "St. Nicholas" at Kell's then 45th Parallel and 3 Leg Torso at Alberta Rose

By:
Published March 28, 2013, in CULTURE, THEATER

It drives the ArtsWatch SEO people wild when I combine two separate art “experiences” in one post. Wild I tell you, wild. But I’m determined to smush them together, I’m afraid, just because in my mind they are smushed…

First, I went to Corrib Theatre’s “St. Nicholas,” the new Irish theater company’s first full production. And yes, Kells was a fine spot for a play that has its share of pints. then last night, I went to Alberta Rose to hear 45th Parallel and 3 Leg Torso make a little music in “To Hungary and Beyond.” As 45th Parallel’s Greg Ewer said, his group was taking care of Hungary and 3 Leg was charged with “Beyond.” Which seemed fair enough.

So, nothing in common these two…

“St. Nicholas” by Conor McPherson/Corrib Theatre/Kells Irish Pub

Ted Roisum in "St. Nicholas"/Photo: Win Goodbody for Corrib Theatre

Ted Roisum in “St. Nicholas”/Photo: Win Goodbody for Corrib Theatre

So Tuesday night, I was sitting in the front row for the second night of Corrib Theatre’s production of “St. Nicholas,” my notebook in hand, in case I wanted to dash down an idle thought or two about the show, just for you, dear reader, just for you.

But then, Ted Roisum walked past from the back of the upstairs meeting room at Kell’s Irish Pub, the staging ground for Conor McPherson’s Irish ghost story, and I realized: Oh, THAT play.
Because I’d seen it before, back in 1999, when Roisum had dazzled us the first time with a plunge into McPherson’s spooky script.

And suddenly that dang notebooks became a big red “A”: “St. Nicholas” is not kind to critics. Roisum plays the worst of us in this one-man storytelling excursion, and his saw-toothed attack on himself and his kind, the Dublin journalist, critic or no, is going to draw a little blood, even among the least self-conscious of us, we who don’t have time to shape opinions, just time to have them.

Blood’s good in this case, because after Roisum has eviscerated himself, his profession, his family, the theater, and perhaps humankind itself, he heads for London, ostensibly in pursuit of a particularly fetching actress named Helen to whom he hopes to… apologize? And leave it at that? But first there’s the little matter of William, who just happens to have a taste for blood.

Roisum knows his way around this script (he did it for Cygnet Productions in 2002, also), and he and director Gemma Whelan, Corrib’s artistic director, have kept things simple in the playing area: a mirror (yes, he can see himself: he isn’t THAT far gone), a table and chair that Roisum adjusts from time to time, and Roisum himself, leveling his eyes on us from time to time, an edge of self-contempt in his baritone and a tale to keep moving along.

Bob Hicks, my estimable colleague at The Oregonian, Art Scatter and now ArtsWatch, wrote in 2002 that “St. Nicholas” (in addition to showing off the very fine acting of Roisum) was, among other things, “an astonishingly insightful, surprisingly sympathetic look by a young writer into the spiritual exhaustions of middle age.” The young writer being McPherson himself. I would add that maybe it’s the young writer getting used to the idea that human awareness itself leads to a certain amount of unhappiness, but that unhappiness is a happier condition than the absence of awareness. For a writer of plays that explore the dark side of things (“The Weir,” “The Seafarer”) this was an important thought, when McPherson had it in 1997, when he was in his mid-20s.

But before I reduce it all to a syllogism or something, I’ll just point out that “St. Nicholas” is hilarious, in a dark way, and that Roisum can still make you squirm.

45th Parallell/3 Leg Torso/Alberta Rose

Gregory Ewer and Courtney Von Drehle/Photo: Jim Leisy

Gregory Ewer and Courtney Von Drehle/Photo: Jim Leisy

The Wednesday night pairing of the contemporary classical ensemble 45th Parallel and the wry humor, musically and otherwise, of 3 Leg Torso was auspicious for lots of reasons, but mostly, I like the idea of merging the fragmented art music audience whenever possible. I sat next to a woman familiar with 45th Parallel who had never heard 3 Leg, though she knew about them, and while I didn’t interview her afterwards, I bet Bela Balogh, Courtney Von Drehle and company converted her to the middle European sound embedded, as Von Drehle suggested, deep in the heart of Southeast Portland.

And I’m pretty sure that the 3 Leg audience found itself in an agreeable place after hearing 45th Parallel’s pulsating, delicious account of Erno Dohnanyi’s Sextet in C Major, which gathered musical thread from the tumultuous middle European soundscape of 1935. Dohnanyi was a Hungary-born pianist, conductor and composer, who shielded his Jewish colleagues from Nazi Hungary (one of his sons was executed by the Nazis for his part in an assassination attempt on Hitler), but who found himself at odds with the Communists who replaced them, emigrating to the U.S. finally in 1948.

The sextet (played by Adam Neiman piano, Sean Osborn clarinet, Joseph Berger horn, Gregory Ewer violin, Adam LaMotte viola, Justin Kagan cello) wanders all over the place musically, from waltzes to jazz, dark to triumphant, with traces faintly Middle Eastern to distinctly High German Classical, a flow of musical ideas that is incredibly demanding on the musicians, much to our delight.

Does the last movement actually sound like a drunken hotel house band trying to play Gershwin, as one critic described it, according to Ewer in his prefatory remarks? Well, maybe so. It certainly changes directions quickly enough, invites the horn and clarinet in at surprising moments, and concludes rather peremptorily. Like that.

Anyway, 45th Parallel wants to record the Dohnanyi along with Beethoven’s septet for its first CD, and they sounded brilliant on Tuesday night, turning and shaping and finding the natural contractions in the music. So, if you want to help them get this rarely recorded music out there, you can jump to their Kickstarter page and make a donation. We’ll wait for you here.

Bela R. Balogh and Gregory Ewer/Jim Leisy

Bela R. Balogh and Gregory Ewer/Jim Leisy

After a bit of stage clearing and set-up (at least three members of the xylophone family, various drums, etc.), 3 Leg charged into its goulash of Romany-tango-klezmer sounds. Balogh’s supercharged violin takes care of the emotional upper registers and Von Drehle’s accordion supplies the coloration, but percussionists Gary Irvine and T.J. Arko keep the xylophone family happy and bouncing and fluid bassist Mike Murphy is an adept soloist as well as indicating the darker side of the universe.

The 3 Leg crowd loves the uptempo numbers best, it seems, but I was drawn to the slowest piece on the program, “According to Chagall,” which made me imagine a 3 Leg suite based on specific Chagall paintings, which might be projected behind the band. Frankly, though I’m sure I’d enjoy the music a lot, I’m sure the stories Balogh and Von Drehle concocted around those paintings would be just as entertaining. The run-up to each song 3 Leg performs includes humorous stories, asides, fiction masquerading as memoir, after all. The music by itself makes you smile, but the stories are most excellent, too.

Ewer joined 3 Leg for a couple of numbers, too, first playing with Balogh and then doing a duet with Von Drehle, Fritz Kreisler’s Praeludium and Allegro in the style of Pugnani, and the peripatetic nature of 45th Parallel’s musical choices is paying off, because he sounded perfectly at home with the pyrotechnical demands on the violin in 3 Leg’s scheme of things. Balogh, after all, makes the instrument practically writhe in his hands.

Oh, and man the moon was big when I left Alberta Rose. A Chagall moon…

Mother Teresa is Dead: A Whodunit

The moral ambiguity of world inequality warrants a mystery-style plot.

By:
Published March 26, 2013, in THEATER

Nikki/Luke

Jane (Nikki Weaver) freezes like a deer in a tractor beam as Srinivas (Luke Bartholemew) tries to convince her to continue abandoning her family to work with him in humanitarian aid.

A week into its run, much has been said about Portland Playhouse’s “Mother Teresa is Dead.” The Oregonian lauded Nikki Weaver’s nuanced acting even as The Mercury decried it. (Like it or not, the Playhouse co-founder tends toward fragile madwoman typecasting.) Both publications complimented Gretchen Corbett and Luke Bartholemew, and kindly overlooked Chris Harder’s spotty cockney accent in favor of his competent emotional performance. But neither fully processed the story’s overarching moral imperatives—nor did Playhouse: “Do I think Mother Teresa had an answer to the question of responsibility?” wrote director Isaac Lamb in the production’s playbill. “No. And I’m fairly certain [playwright] Helen Edmundson doesn’t either. But I think the mark of a truly skilled playwright is one who can raise a difficult question and then bring to life complex, imperfect, and sympathetic human characters to wrestle with it.”

Q’s…with no definitive A’s.

How do we help a suffering world? And even when we manage to—do we do it for the right reasons? How do you balance “saving the world” against “looking out for your own”?  Would you sacrifice your nuclear family for your universal brethren, or vice versa?

Sunday’s talkback: as light (and savory) as a poppadom.

Yesterday’s talk-back, complete with testimonials from two Peace Corps alums, chewed over one or two issues, but offered no resolution. Almost too quickly, the matinee disbanded into a delicious Indian food potluck and a Bollywood dance lesson from Indian standard-bearer (and Peace Corps progeny) Anjali Hursh. “Hey,” the fundraising event seemed to conclude, “when we can’t fix other countries’ problems, we can at least appreciate their unique cultural splendors.” While the question of whether such an exercise by Westerners does the world substantive good is just one more for the pile, suffice to say it made for a nice afternoon. To be fair, Playhouse may be soft-selling the dialogue for now to entice more participants into their upcoming April 3 Mercy Corps Action Center field trip (RSVP to ruth@portlandplayhouse.org).

A NOVEL APPROACH: WORLD CONCERNS MEET MYSTERY TROPES

The Plot

“Mother Teresa is Dead” opens as baffled Englishman Mark arrives in India to reunite with Jane, his wife who went missing seven weeks prior. Jane greets his disbelief with a strange explanation: her sudden departure for India was spurred by mass-mailings she received from charity orgs that urged her to help the less fortunate. But her frayed demeanor, the reported timing of her first onset of altruism (post-partum), and her seeming detachment from her own son are earmarks of mental decline, not moral awakening. Ironically, she’s become a charity case herself, relying on older Englishwoman, Frances (a holdover from Brit imperialism), for shelter and emotional support as she debates whether to continue teaching kids in a nearby community center under the mentorship of (handsome) local caseworker Srinivas.

The Treatment

Raising heavy questions indeed, playwright Hellen Edmundson risks the pitfall of preachiness, but veers clear of it by framing the plot less like a human-interest documentary than a murder mystery. Mother Teresa (aka the spirit of selfless charity) is dead. Who killed her? Edmundson and Playhouse play detective with devices lifted straight from Hitchcock and Christie.

The Locked Room

We’re only exposed to four characters: English husband Mark and wife Jane, older English divorcee and artist Frances, and Indian (but English-educated) humanitarian aid organizer Shrinivas, who comes and goes. If this were Agatha Christie, these four would’ve been locked into a room as the crime suspects, but here, they share a large estate, somewhat besieged by an impoverished local population. Standing in for a more conventional “crime” are two more nebulous and giant crimes (worldwide human inequity and failed personal lives). The plot, like an impartial detective, shifts the two burdens of blame onto each of its characters—and every time, more or less, the yoke fits.

The Discredited Witness(es)

Egalitarian in its distribution of doubt, this play casts a shadow over the supposed motives of each character it profiles. Jane poses as a bleeding heart, but we’re led to suspect her of a blighted brain—but she’s only the first of the four to crumble under questioning.

Her husband Mark fancies himself a simple, upstanding family man concerned for his wife’s well-being, but the audience sees a domineering husband and a xenophobic tourist. Frances, a seemingly austere, balanced, wise elder and voice of reason, gradually reveals that India for her is less a spiritual sanctuary than a hedonist escape from her failed marriage. Srinivas, who starts out with the moral high ground, is the slowest to reveal his own turpitude: vengeful fantasies against the West, a disdain for interpersonal commitments, and a slyer but no less destructive variation of Mark’s desire to control women. None of these people, the play proposes, is doing all the right things for the right reasons. And maybe, the text suggests, such a stance would be humanly impossible.

The MacGuffin

Have you ever heard of a “MacGuffin?” I hadn’t. But I figured where we have achingly specific terms for devices like the Red Herring or Deus et Machina, there MUST be one for the all-too-common dramatic scenario where we’re shown a box or bag and told that it contains something important, but we don’t get to glimpse within until climax time. Sure enough, such a thing is a “MacGuffin,” as coined by Alfred Hitchcock.

Those who might otherwise be bored or flummoxed by complex moral dilemmas, can instead hang suspenseful speculation on “Teresa”‘s conspicuous MacGuffin: a white plastic bag that Jane clutches to her body and refuses to let out of her sight, hysterically (and implausibly) muttering something about “a baby.” What the hell is in there? We don’t get to find out for a long, long time.

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Hard times and rumors of a pleasurable buzz

A trio of shows moves from farce to Depression fervor to the medical wonders of the vibrator

By:
Published March 15, 2013, in THEATER

Alex Fox and Andrea White, in the next room. Photo: Triangle Productions

Alex Fox and Andrea White, in the next room. Photo: Triangle Productions

A vibrator, a union organizer, and Neil Simon walked into a bar.

OK, maybe not. But last weekend I walked into three theaters presenting plays about (in order) Victorian genital stimulation, a Depression era strike, and a houseful of cocktail comedians. And if I can’t come up with a single punch line to pull the three together, well, maybe that’s because the world of theater covers a lot of human territory. Before this weekend’s openings hit the boards (Brendan Behan’s “Moving Out” and “A Garden Party” at Readers Theatre Rep, “Mother Teresa Is Dead” at Portland Playhouse) let’s speculate a bit about last weekend’s mixed drinks, all of which are still happy to run up your theatrical bar tab.

These three – Sarah Ruhl’s “In the Next Room, or, The Vibrator Play” at Triangle Productions, Martha Boesing’s “Hard Times Come Again No More” at Sowelu, Simon’s “Rumors” at Lakewood Theatre – might never set foot in the same saloon, let alone order the same drink. Still, as the good doctor in Ruhl’s yearning comedy probably wouldn’t say, bottoms up: there’s a little bit of kick in all three.

 

“RUMORS”

Simon’s comedy, in a taut and lively production at Lakewood Theatre in Lake Oswego, is the most purely entertaining of this trio of shows. “Rumors” is more classically farcical in structure than most of Simon’s plays, harking back to the likes of Feydeau and Moliere, and it retains Simon’s Broadway-gold ability to graft vivid personalities onto stock characters. Sure, the plot stretches credibility more than once (this bothered my good friend Marty Hughley in his review for The Oregonian), but that’s the nature of farce: you take a personality or situational foible and see how far you can stretch it before it snaps. Television situation comedy is a child of farce, and the best ones, such as “I Love Lucy” and “Frasier,” can be painful to watch when their protagonists stumble even farther than usual beyond the norm. For most of us, it’s a wince of recognition: they remind us of our own misadventures in stubborn stupidity. The beauty of a good farce is that it’s at once an exploration of human weakness (often of the self-deceiving variety) and an exercise in sheer escapist entertainment.

Farce descending a staircase: from top, Pierce, Calcagno, Gorham, Mahon. Photo: Lakewood Theatre.

Farce descending a staircase: from top, Pierce, Calcagno, Gorham, Mahon. Photo: Lakewood Theatre.

The flea in this particular comedy’s ear is that the deputy mayor of New York City has shot himself through the earlobe just as the guests to his 10th wedding-anniversary party are to arrive, and his wife is nowhere to be found. For reasons that made as much or little sense in 1988, when the play was new, as they do now, several successions of guests either attempt to hide the tawdry truth from the next guests or pull them in on a conspiracy of silence, until the end, when it’s everyone against the two investigating cops. As far as plot goes, that’s all you really need to know. The rest is style, percolated by Simon’s gift of gag.

Yes, this is a period piece. But like so many good period pieces, it has its cake and eats it, too, transporting its audience to a place of familiar and nostalgic pleasure, with a little sly exposure of human nature thrown in as a bonus. Director Joe Thiessen might push the panic button a little too fiercely here and there, but in the main the action proceeds tick-tock terrifically, with crack timing and brittle but piercing revelations of human folly. Farce is for people who appreciate the complex workings of an intricately assembled clock, and Thiessen’s an excellent craftsman. The cool, uncalm and carefully uncollected cast, all of them adept at giving a nod to the days when Barrymores roamed the earth, include (I name them as couples, because that’s how they arrive) Darius Pierce and Brooke Lynn Calcagno, Jeff Gorham and Pam Mahon, Garland Lyons and Rani Lightle (he shrinks heads, she’s a celebrity chef) and Brian Williams and Kelly Godell. Bud Reece and Ollie Bergh crash the party as a couple of cops.

A good farce also looks good, and Lakewood’s “Rumors” is as smooth as the Scotch that freely flows: deco-hinting two-level set by the reliably talented Jeff seats, cocktail-party costumes by Allison Dawe, props plenty by Felix Kelsey, lights by Kurt Herman. And, yes: doors do slam. “Rumors” won’t change your life or challenge your assumptions. But it’s got the “play” part of the theatrical equation down pat.

 

“HARD TIMES COME AGAIN NO MORE”

Performance Works NW, where Sowelu Theater’s production of Boesing’s social drama is taking place, is little more than an oversized garage off of Foster Road in Southeast Portland, and its makeshift starkness seems just right for the play. You can squeeze maybe 45 audience members into the place, and the crowd’s almost sitting in the faded upholstery of the Minneapolis boarding house where most of the action occurs. We’re invited to eavesdrop, be outraged, and deeply sympathize during the harsh labor strike that has ground the city to a halt in July of 1934 and pitted desperate workers against the fat cats, pols and cops who threaten to shove them even farther into the Depression dust.

Down but not quite out: the cast of "Hard Times." Photo: Sowelu Theater.

Down but not quite out: the cast of “Hard Times.” Photo: Sowelu Theater.

We’re in political-action drama land here, and subtlety is very far from the point. The residents of Mrs. Mason’s boarding house are salt-of-the-earth types forced by circumstance into alternately brave and humiliating acts – yes, one sweet girl takes to the streets to sell the only thing she has remaining with any monetary worth – and, yes, they discover that in unity lies strength.

In many ways “Hard Times,” based on stories and essays from the 1930s by the leftist writer Meridel LeSueur, feels more dated than either “Rumors,” from the go-go 1980s, or “In the Next Room,” which takes place in the late 19th century. But in other ways it’s timely. The parallels between the Great Depression and today’s Great Recession are far from neat and simple – the Depression occurred when there was virtually no social safety net; now there is one, though it’s incomplete and under constant attack – but the altered American working class of today is still getting battered, and forces are still conspiring to reward the wealthy at its expense. The distant mirror may be partly cracked, but it still reflects a rough resemblance.

This is an earnest show, with its sympathies tattooed large upon its chest, and it seems pitched mostly at true believers. But if it’s something of a historical curiosity, I’m glad it’s here and still willing to shake a few complacent shirts at the collar: yes, there are things the plugged-in 2010s can learn from the rock-hard 1930s. Directors Lorraine Bahr and Jim Davis have shaped the show surely and with telling compassion, and the eight cast members invest it with conviction. The play is peppered with songs from the era (like the underappreciated Steve Martin Depression-days 1981 movie musical “Pennies from Heaven,” also set in 1934), and the music rises simply and naturally from the action, always appropriate and never calling undue attention to itself. Among the cast, I’m particularly taken with the performances of Stephanie Woods as a young pregnant wife and Del Lewis as an old Russian-émigré factory worker for getting beneath the sloganeering to the human heart of the thing. Hard times always come again. Seems high time to say “no more.”

 

“IN THE NEXT ROOM”

Any play about the apparently rampant use by 19th century physicians of electric vibrators to induce “hysterical paroxysm” in their female patients is in peril of becoming little more than a burlesque. But Ruhl (“The Clean House,” “Dead Man’s Cell Phone,” “Passion Play”) is a much better writer than that, and “In the Next Room” turns out to be quite funny but also sweet and perceptive and even moving. One company member compared it to Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” and it has at least surface similarities: a traditional doctor’s wife feeling caged in and daring to defy propriety in search of something more.

Any fan of Meg Ryan’s fake-orgasm scene in “When Harry Met Sally” (and who isn’t?) will find comic gold in “In the Next Room,” which advances the joke because the women apparently don’t know exactly what’s happening to them and the doctors who apply this radical therapy don’t seem to understand that it has anything to do with sex. I can’t speak to the veracity of this chasm of comprehension, and yet it seems to be not just Ruhl’s invention that in the 1880s, when her play takes place, doctors saw no link between their therapy and the idea of pleasuring their patients: doctors were enthusiastic about the invention of the electric vibrator because it freed them from the drudgery of digital manipulation. The dam was about to burst: Freud was just around the corner, waiting to connect any and everything with sexual urges, and a certain kind of innocence would be lost forever.

So, yes. “In the Next Room” is partly about the comical implications of what’s happening behind that closed door to the doctor’s examination room (and the patients’ eagerness for daily sessions). But on a deeper and more moving level it’s about the breakdown of Victorian conventions and the gradual emotional liberation of women (these are mostly upper-middle-class characters) trapped in restrictive roles. And no one unleashes the shackles more fully than Mrs. Catherine Givings  (Jami Chatalas-Blanchard) the young wife of Dr. Givings (Peter Schuyler) and a comfortable but troubled woman: she’s a new mother but her milk won’t come in, and she has to resort to hiring a wet nurse.

There’s more to this play than Triangle’s production unfolds. I wish director Don Horn had pushed a little harder and shaped it a little more: a crisper, tighter show would be quicker, smoother, and richer in implication. It’d be great to see it with the sort of sharp execution that Simon’s “Rumors” receives at Lakewood. But the emotional and comic balance is good, the actors are appealing, and Horn and his actors understand the deeper emotional and social journey that Ruhl’s characters take.

Chatalas-Blanchard brings a sweetly yearning bravado to the action, and Schuyler’s carefully understated doctor is astonishingly self-satisfied and dense: he’s a man of science with hardly any understanding of the life swirling around him. Joe Healy and especially Louise Stinson are comically deft as the Daltrys, a couple with their own conflicting reasons for seeking the doctor’s ministrations; Michelle Maida is a rock of good sense as the doctor’s nurse and assistant; Alex Fox gives a slyly funny performance as one of the doctor’s few male patients; and Andrea White is quite touching as Elizabeth, the wet nurse, who’s lost her own baby and doesn’t really want to suckle someone else’s but has compelling economic reasons to do so.

I wonder about the only black person in the play also being the only one who gets the sexual implications of the pelvic massage: that skirts pretty close to racial or cultural stereotyping. But White gives Elizabeth both complexity and dignity. And ultimately, “In the Next Room” is much more about emerging compassion and dignity than sex jokes. Even if the sex jokes are pretty funny.

NOTES:

  • “Rumors” contnues at Lakewood Theatre through April 14. Ticket and schedule information is here.
  • “Hard Times Come Again No More” continues through March 23 at Sowelu. Tickey and schedule information is here.
  • “In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play” continues through March 31 at Triangle Productions. Ticket and schedule information is here.

 

 

Whipping Man, Blood Knot: race to the top

A Fugard classic and a post-Civil War drama tell a thorny tale in black & white

By:
Published March 4, 2013, in THEATER

Don Kenneth Mason, Ben Newman in "Blood Knot." Photo: Jamie Bosworth

Don Kenneth Mason, Ben Newman in “Blood Knot.” Photo: Jamie Bosworth

 

“White people are always like, ‘Come on! It wasn’t us!’ Like they want black people to forget everything. Like every year, white people add 100 years to how long ago slavery was. I’ve heard educated white people say, ‘Slavery was 400 years ago!’ No, it really wasn’t. It was 140 years ago. That’s two 70-year-old ladies living and dying back to back.”

**

Today a friend passed along that quote from the comedian Louis C.K., and the timing was copacetic: I’d spent the previous two evenings at the openings of Matthew Lopez’s “The Whipping Man” at Portland Center Stage and Athol Fugard’s “Blood Knot” at Profile Theatre. Talk about a soaking in the tricky pools of time! Both plays simmer their audiences in the boiling pot of a past that’s all too recent, and both deal with race as a social invention – we are “white” or “black” partly because we think we are – and also as a blood kinship. It’s tough to view these two plays without seriously disputing the popular notion that we’re living in a postracial society. Without getting too high on a soapbox, both delve into how intensely personal and fiendishly slippery racial attitudes continue to be: they can still jump out and shock us from behind almost any corner.

**

“The Whipping Man” raises fascinating questions and creates some sharp dramatic conflicts. But Fugard is one of the theater’s modern masters, and “Blood Knot” is a genuine contemporary masterpiece, a gorgeous literary accomplishment with huge social implications. It has the intensity of a frontline battlefield report: Fugard, a white South African, wrote it in 1961, when staging such a play was in full and open defiance of his country’s apartheid laws, and when the civil rights movement was starting to kick up a bone-rattling ruckus in the United States. Fugard (who’s lived in San Diego for many years) plays well in the U.S. not just because he’s a terrific playwright but also because the racial histories of the two countries mirror each other, imperfectly yet revealingly.

A good production of a good Fugard play makes me squirm. Not out of guilt or dislike, but in a very personal way: Fugard makes me like his characters, and then I get antsy as I watch them make boneheaded (though sometimes admirably boneheaded) decisions. No! I think. Don’t do that. It’s trouble! Can’t you see? The characters make me itchy and impatient and fill me with dread, and stranger still, they make me like it like that. In this and pretty much every other way Profile’s “Blood Knot” is very good Fugard, indeed – brilliant Fugard, I’m tempted to say. It’s scary, funny, and sometimes shockingly raw, and director Kevin Jones navigates its swiftly shifting currents expertly. The two stars, Don Kenneth Mason as dark-skinned Zach and Ben Newman as his light-skinned brother Morris, seem ideally matched: Morris soft and insinuating, a “handler” of things; Mason hard and toughened, a doer. The way these two skillful actors pay deep attention to each other, even when their characters are ignoring each other, is really what acting’s all about. Especially in Profile’s intimate quarters, which the company can hope to match next season when it moves its digs to Artists Rep, “Blood Knot” is at once an intensely personal story and a very big cultural metaphor, and part of its thrill is to follow along as it traverses the borderlands between.

People don’t like to talk about shades of darkness, but the issue’s real, and in a way, President Obama exemplifies it. For a lot of Americans he’s too black simply by being black at all. For others he looks and acts too “white” to be legitimately “black.” It’s not just about blood, it’s about degrees of blood, and attitudes, and staking a claim in one camp or the other. As Fugard’s title suggests, it’s all knotted up: white or black, to a greater or lesser degree, we’re related biologically and culturally, and we can love it or hate it, but here we are, in the same bed, and now what are we going to do about it?

Morris is so light-skinned that he can pass for white (Fugard himself played him, opposite Zakes Mokae, in the original South African production, and the two repeated their roles years later on Broadway) and he’s the brother who has plans: they’ll save their money, get away, become farmers in a remote part of the country. Almost unconsciously, he manages Zach’s life, and almost unconsciously, if sometimes reluctantly, Zach lets him. Eventually he manages Zach into a potentially disastrous mistake: hoping to satisfy Zach’s itch for a woman, Morris steers him toward striking up a long-distance friendship with a pen pal – but she turns out to be white. And then things get interesting, and dangerous, and all knotted up. The drama builds to an astonishing climax of racial role-playing and unfettered violence, and it’s hard not to think about Cain and Abel and how they got to where they got. My brother, my enemy. Director Jones comments in his program notes on the question of hope at the end of the story: “In this case, I can’t find it.” But he adds: “(T)here is truth. And no progress happens without truth.” That pretty well sums it up.

Profile’s Fugard season has been well-produced in general, but technical credits for “Blood Knot” stand out even in good company. Kristeen Willis Crosser’s set is shorn down and immensely playable, and costumer Jessica Bobillot helps the actors achieve a brilliant transformation that lifts the play, with the donning of a suit, into a crucial and frightening passage of almost magical realism. Ruth Nardecchia’s subtle lighting is especially effective in scene changes. And Sharath Patel’s sound design is absolutely brilliant, never overreaching and usually barely noticed yet underscoring the action and laying down currents of tension that draw the mood taut almost to a breaking point. This is intimate, total theater.

**

In a sense “The Whipping Man,” which premiered in 2006, takes up the American racial story where Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner left off in the movie “Lincoln.” “Father Abraham” even makes an unseen appearance in the play, when news reaches the burned-out manse in Richmond that the president’s been killed and the actor-assassin is believed to have taken refuge somewhere in Richmond. Yet unlike “Lincoln,” in which race was central to the drama yet black people were largely tangential to the action, Lopez’s “Whipping Man” puts black and white characters squarely on the wrestling match and lets them go at it freestyle. Notions of Cain and Abel raise their impertinent heads here, too, what with intimations of unknown fathers and interracial dalliances and – here we go again – differences in skin tone. If Fugard hadn’t already used the title, “Blood Knot” would have worked quite nicely for this play.

Carter Hudson, Christopher Livingston, "Whipping Man." Photo: Patrick Weishampel

Carter Hudson, Christopher Livingston, “Whipping Man.” Photo: Patrick Weishampel

The whipping man of the title is an idea rather than a presence in the play, a distillation of a certain casual brutality of body and soul. Sometimes in the antebellum South, overseers or owners couldn’t be bothered to punish their slaves themselves, so they hired out the job to professional whippers. You can imagine, given the American history of racial violence and institutional “just business” decisions, where you can go with a metaphor like that. It’s as clear yet as hidden as the lashes on a black man’s back.

Like “Blood Knot,” “The Whipping Man” keeps its bigger issues within a personal, family frame. The war’s ended, Lee has surrendered at Appomattox, and a badly wounded Caleb (Carter Hudson), scion of a once prosperous white family, comes crawling back to the family home, which has been gutted and looted and is now guarded only by an aging but still powerful former family slave, Simon (Gavin Gregory), who keeps his shotgun handy and his lanterns ready to snuff out. They’re soon joined by another, younger, former family slave, sharpster John (a comically astute Christopher Livingston, who seems part larcenous lost kid and part Sportin’ Life). Lopez’s twist to a familiar historical tale is that all three identify themselves as Jews. Their religion gives them a kinship that seems to go beyond race and blood, but that also raises disturbing questions: don’t the scriptures forbid a Jew from enslaving another Jew? As it turns out, Simon seems to be the most observant of the three, the one who understands the connection between ritual and reality – and what does that mean?

The big question that all three characters face is: what now? The war’s over. No one can own or be owned by another person. But how, on a personal level, will old ways disappear and new relationships be created? The way isn’t easy, and it’s fraught with switchbacks and uncomfortable surprises. The three actors, under Center Stage vet Rose Riordan’s direction, make it an interesting, sometimes gripping, journey.

Scenic designer Tony Cisek’s towering hulk of a house in ruins sets a wonderful visual scene for the story, and its sense of doom is augmented by Diane Ferry Williams’ dim lighting, as dark and shadowed as a Rembrandt painting. But on opening night the volume control on the sound effects was off, and in some crucial scenes – the opening, played out to an insistent hiss of rain from outside the mansion, and the conclusion, which seemed all in a rush to wrap things up in a tidy dramatic knot – vital dialogue was lost. The effect was especially acute at the play’s end, which I knew was the end mostly because the lights went down. I’m hoping a little fiddling with the dials will solve the problem.

Together, “Blood Knot” and “The Whipping Man” offer a rare and welcome package, an enlightening, sometimes piercing, look at where we’ve been and what in certain ways we continue to be. No, slavery didn’t end 400 years ago. And if we stand on the shoulders of giants, we also stand on the shoulders of their mistakes.

NOTES:

“The Whipping Man” plays Tuesdays-Sundays through March 23 at Portland Center Stage. Ticket information here.

“Blood Knot” plays Wednesdays-Sundays through March 17 at Profile Theatre. Ticket information here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A new Profile for ART; Vertigo on the verge

Kicked out of their home on Belmont, two anchor theater companies quickly find new homes

By:
Published March 3, 2013, in THEATER

Eileen DeSandre in "The Road to Mecca" at Profile earlier this season.

Eileen DeSandre in “The Road to Mecca” at Profile earlier this season.

One down, one to go.

Profile Theatre, one of two companies losing their leases in Southeast Portland’s Theater! Theatre! building, has struck a deal to become a resident company at the Artists Repertory Theatre space in the west end section of downtown. The Oregonian’s Marty Hughley has the story here.

That leaves Theatre Vertigo, the other company in residence in Belmont Street’s Theater! Theatre! space, still looking for a place to land. Or maybe not. Vertigo’s Brooke Calcagno said on Saturday that the company will announce its own relocation plan on March 19 at its season announcement party and auction at the Blue Monk cafe and bar on Belmont. Some theater insiders have speculated that Vertigo will land at CoHo Theatre, a sweet small space in Northwest Portland that could use a regular tenant. Come the 19th, we’ll see whether the speculation is right.

The swift regroupings by Profile and Vertigo have forestalled what just last month looked like a genuine crisis after the building’s owner, who also owns the Tao of Tea, announced he needed the whole space to expand his own business. Both theater companies might actually have found better homes than the one they’re leaving. Profile’s move into part of Artists Rep’s large space in two connected buildings further stamps Artists Rep as a genuine performing arts center. Portland Shakespeare Project is already in residence as a summer performing group, and Profile’s addition will ensure that the buildings’ two performing spaces are in full play year ’round. Profile had already announced it planned to switch from a fall-through-spring season to a calendar-year season. Scheduling the three companies will require some flexibility, but the payoff will be that something will almost always be onstage. Profile will move its offices to space at Artists Rep in June, and should be able to move its technical operations there, too.

If Vertigo does move to the west side, the big loser in the theater shuffle will be east Portland. Theater! Theatre! is at the heart of a bustling eastside urban scene, and it’s been the core of the growing theater movement on the east side of the Willamette River. There are other eastside spaces, from Headwaters on the far north end to Imago, Shoebox, Shaking the Tree, Hipbone, Defunkt’s Back Door Theatre in Southeast and Triangle Productions’ Sanctuary building on Northeast Sandy Boulevard. But Theater! Theatre! has been the center of the east side scene.

Will something eventually replace it, or will theater fall behind the east side’s vibrant club, art, dance, food, bar, shopping, and live/work cultures? We won’t get the answer to that on March 19. There are no big ready-made theater spaces on the east side for quick turnaround. But there are plenty of intriguing buildings that could be retrofitted. But what existing companies can afford the cost of that? We could be waiting a lot longer for the answer. In the meantime, a toast to Profile, Vertigo, Artists Rep, and the city’s audiences. Crisis averted. Things are looking up.

 

 

 

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