Texan Progress

Greater than its sub-myths like Columbus and the Revolution, the Myth of Progress is the foundational American state of mind. Predicated on a clear division between Civilization and Savagery, the Myth of Progress tells the story of Civilization’s unstoppable progression into and conquest of the untamed wilderness. In the American version, Civilization is synonymous with “Democracy,” “Christianity,” and “America” itself. Native peoples fare poorly in this American myth, cast as the savages that must be overcome for America to fulfill her divine mission as the world’s shining light upon the hill.

Few American communities have as much invested in this myth as rural white Texas. Proud preservers of cowboy culture, the culture that “tamed the West,” Texas has historically celebrated Indian killers like those played by John Wayne. So it’s refreshing to see sensitive treatment of Native themes in the recent incarnation of the Texas Panhandle Heritage Foundation’s perennial melodrama Texas.

A celebration of the Panhandle’s colonization by white America, Texas could easily go down the same road as my least favorite movie, The Searchers. But instead of the Comanches being treated as murderers of white men and rapists of white women who need to be annihilated for civilization to progress across the continent, this new version of the 45 year old melodrama has added in celebrations of the Panhandle’s Comanche people. From introducing the first and only pan-Comanche Chief Quanah Parker as a peripheral character, to the inclusion of a Comanche hymn during a faux healing ceremony (enough to give whites an impression of what’s going on but not enough to be totally weird for Indians), David Yirak’s current adaptation of Paul Green’s script is commendable.

Of course, there’s still work to be done, especially with the character of Quanah Parker. First, it would be better if he was played by an Indian. Goodness knows there’s enough Indian actors out there hungry for work, and casting a non-Native is dangerously close to Henry Brandon’s Comanche travesty in The Searchers. Second, at one point Quanah Parker says, point blank, that the time of the Indian is over.

Still, it’s not as bad as it could have been, and, for Texas, it looks like representations of Indian people are heading in a positive direction. It plays through August in Palo Duro Canyon State Park, and tickets are available at http://www.texas-show.com/. It's worth going just to see how they utilize the space, which merits a review all of its own.

Discover AtlantASS

Interarts collaboration is all the rage these days, as well it should be. Our modern version of Richard Wagner’s Gesammtkunstwerk, cooperation between artists of different disciplines seems like it’s a driving force for contemporary theater. But the operative word here is “collaboration.” Painters, musicians, actors, etc. coming together to lend their expertise to a project that requires their expertise.

Talibam! and Sam Kulik’s Discover AtlantASS, now playing at Incubator Arts, requires expertise in both music and storytelling. This trio, consisting of solo artist Sam Kulik and the Talibam! duo Matt Motel and Kevin Shea, can handle the first of those two things, but they are woefully inadequate storytellers. The theatrical parts of their performance were badly under-rehearsed jokes about everything from child-abuse to the sexual assault of a 5th grader with smatterings of misogyny and racism that seemed to have been written while the trio were stoned and mad about the BP oil spill. Yeah, it didn’t make a ton of sense to anyone else either. At first we in the audience laughed – they weren’t taking themselves too seriously, so why should we? Then I started to sit through the scenes waiting for the songs, which were pretty decent. But after intermission it just dragged on and on – their shtick had gotten old, and their songs were all starting to sound the same.

If I could offer one piece of advice to Talibam! and Kulik, it would to be to stick to rock & roll. Theater isn’t for you guys. If I could offer a piece of advice to the Incubator Arts curators, it would be to watch the plays you pick before you pick them. And if I can offer one piece of advice to you, dear New York audiences, it would be to not go see Discover AtlantASS.  

3C

Rattlestick Playwrights Theater’s production of David Adjimi’s dark comedy 3C is disco-dancing proof that a strong cast can make even the weakest script soar.

The cast (including CSI: NY’s Eddie Cahill as Terry) was uniformly top-notch, but Hannah Cabell and Jake Silbermann stole the show, as Linda and Brad respectively. They played the script’s two most traumatized characters, and their skillful performances ironically emphasized the script’s weaknesses while selling the show well enough that I had to get on my phone right afterwards to recommend it to a friend.

Adjimi starts to tell multiple stories in 3C – Linda’s sexual assault, Brad adjusting to civilian life after Vietnam while confronting his homosexuality, Mrs. Wicker’s (Kate Buddeke) mental illness. But the only story that gets told with any depth is that of Brad’s homosexuality, and this struggle lacks definition until more than halfway through the play. Initially, it seems like the traumas that Adjimi will address are of sexual assault and returning from war, or even coping with mental illness like bipolar disorder. But the first two get lost in the preoccupation with Brad trying to come out of the closet, and the third is played for laughs.

That said, this cast sold it. Cabell and Silbermann told as strong a story in their pensive silences as they did (tellingly) with Adjimi’s dialogue. Anna Chlumsky and Cahill thoroughly entertained strutting their 70s stuff around the stage. Bill Buell terrified while tickling the audience’s funny-bone as the homophobic Mr. Wicker, and Buddeke pulled of what could have been a slap in the face to those who suffer from mental illness with aplomb.

Rattlestick’s production of 3C is worth every penny of the somewhat steep ticket price, but I don’t think Adjimi's script is something that I would want to pick up myself or recommend to somebody else’s theater.

It runs through July 15^th, and tickets are available at http://www.theatermania.com/off-off-broadway/shows/3c_184026/.

Storytelling Workshop at the Piggyback Fringe Festival

Yesterday, Chris and I did a workshop on telling family stories theatrically. We were in Wakefield/La Peche's brand new community center, and had a pretty substantial space. It was a smaller class with only four participants, but that meant we were able to give each group individual attention. But before we split them into groups, we did a warm-up for the whole class. It was one that Chris knows called "Wa", and it was fairly challenging with just six people (four students plus two teachers), but it did the job we needed it to do: got everybody into their bodies and playing around. Then we split them into pairs, and Chris and I each stuck with a pair to help them develop their skit. We called one partner "A" and the other partner "1" to get rid of any semblance of hierarchy - this was also a workshop in devising, after all. First A told a story from their family to 1, who told it back from the first person point of view. Then they switched. They selected one of the stories to develop into a skit to perform in front of the class. We got two very different, very good skits. I had the impression that it was a very empowering experience for the students: if they can accomplish that in an hour, just imagine what they can accomplish after three months of development and rehearsal!

"The Baskets" World Premiere

Last night The Baskets opened for the first time ever, anywhere. The audience wasn't has big as we would have hoped, but they were very appreciative. It was a great experience to gauge their reactions throughout the show. They loved the opening story - an old one about the Greedy Father and the creation of basket materials. When I finished it and jumped forward millenia to the 90s, it seemed like they were a little disappointed - they were just having so much fun in the world of the First People! But they really started to get into it when I began to hang pictures up on the network of clothes lines we rigged up above the stage. When I went back to an old-time story, I could feel them kind of sit up. Something's changed? What's happening? Then they got really curious - it was our Flood story, so it was a recognizable theme, and yet markedly different from the Bible version they're probably used to. After the show, Chris and the young woman up after me in the church told me that everybody was smiling as they left. Today we're going to hit the street (there's only one in Wakefield) advertising to see if we can't bring in a few more people for the Sunday show. Also, we're going to teach a class on devising theater based on family histories.

Oh, and when I asked if anybody had ever heard of the Hoopa Tribe during the play, about three people raised their hands. So right on, Hoopas.

Our venue.

Labapalooza!

St. Ann’s Warehouse’s Labapalooza! puppet theatre is off to a touch-and-go start – but that’s as it should be with works in progress. Program A, which played last night, indicates how the puppetry rises or falls.

The high point was Adam Schechter’s Event Erasers, a mesmerizing live animation piece. Using two monitors, a projector and projection screen, and an assortment of objects to silhouette, Schechter and his collaborator Alan Calpe created a dreamy montage of sunrises and moonrises, the Manhattan Bridge and driving in the rain. When the images weren’t yet up on the big screen, watching Schechter and Calpe manipulate the small screens was a show in itself. The effect was, however, audio as well as visual. Without the ambient background music, the main event wouldn’t have had the same magic.

The low point was Elizabeth Ostler’s The Yellow Wallpaper. A puppetry adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s book of the same name, The Yellow Wallpaper tried to create a narrative about a summer-long shut-in. This attempt precluded created an atmosphere that would emanate, in part, from the puppets. Not that Ostler and her collaborators’ show needed to create pure atmosphere like Schechter’s – they could have gone for laughs like the final show, Lindsay Abromaitis-Smith’s Mental Hygiene. The audience wanted to laugh at first – the overbearing husband seeking to cure his depressed wife with the rest cure could have been a one-sided comic figure. But Ostler opted instead for seriousness. A somber atmospheric piece could have worked, as could have a light narrative piece, but a somber narrative piece about being bed-ridden all summer doesn’t.

So what did I, the non-puppeteer, learn? That in a puppet show the focus has to be so clearly on the figures that everything else melts into the background. Event Erasers did that – the piece was entirely about manipulating objects on a stage. Yellow Wallpaper didn’t because the attempt at a narrative clouded the focus on the material objects dancing before us.

Program B premieres this evening, June 1^st, at 8PM. Both programs play on Saturday and close on Sunday. Tickets are available at http://stannswarehouse.org/ or at the door.

I Am A Tree

Dulcy Rogers’ “unstable new comedy,” I Am A Tree, opened this week at the Theatre at St. Clements. A polished one-woman show about confronting a family history of mental illness, I Am A Tree is a recent transplant from Los Angeles. The practice shows – everything is deliberate and well-rehearsed, from the formulaic script to Rogers’ fluidity changing between distinct characters.

Dramaturgically, I Am A Tree is a fairy-tale: the protagonist visits three wise old women who help her on her quest before finally confronting the object of that quest. That object brings it out of the realm of Grimm or Andersen and into the realm of today: confronting a family history of mental illness.

It played well, for me, until the end. Once I’d figured out the formula, I knew what was going to happen next and how it was going to end. The mystery gone, my thoughts started to drift. I noticed Rogers’ performing tick (every actor has one – mine’s playing with my jean pockets, hers is shifting weight from foot to foot.), and before long I was hypnotized and ready to go home.

Intriguing until you figure out how it’s going to end,  I Am A Tree is worth a look if you’re interested in one-person shows or storytelling, but if not, your forty bucks would probably be better spent elsewhere.

I Am A Tree is playing at the Theatre at St. Clements until June 30^th.

Disrupting the 1% or Inconveniencing the 99%? #OWSDS May 26, 2012

Saturday, May 26 marked the kick-off of OWS’ Disobedience Summer School, weekly trainings in preparation for Black Monday – the one year anniversary of the Occupy Movement. On the syllabus for the 26^th was “invisible theater,” based on Boal’s “Theater of the Oppressed.” A theatrical form of sabotage, invisible theater hopes to convey its message by slowing down the operation of the antagonist’s machine with low-key disruption. Examples that came up during the introduction at Bryant Park were asking for a large sum of money at the bank window in nickels and dimes (because the banks are “nickel and diming” us); wiping the walls, windows, and counters with a rag (because the bank is dirty); and so on and so forth. Good in theory, but the proof is in the pudding. While Saturday may have been effective as training (and this is summer school), the immediate effect was perhaps counter to Occupy’s goals.

We walked to the Citibank on 42^nd and 9^th in “civilian mode,” or without chants, banners and the usual accoutrements of a march. The police kept us company along the way, but across the street from the bank, the group dissolved, and the police soon left to do whatever police do when they’re not marshalling protesters. About five or ten minutes later, the protesters started to filter into the bank and form a long line. This was at about 1:30 in the afternoon. Not many people, apparently, do their banking on beautiful Saturday afternoons. There were only a handful of customers and bank employees there, well outnumbered by the 20 or so Occupiers. Most of the theater that they did was so low-key that I couldn’t pick it up with my camera from across the room. Mostly it was for the benefit of the people around them – other Occupiers and the increasingly frustrated employees and customers, all of whom are part of the 99%. All the action seemed to accomplish immediately was to throw up a barrier between Occupy and the rest of the Commons. Hopefully it was at least educational for the protesters, and next week’s theater will be more effective.

You can check out my footage of the events here:

Eagle Project's "America Unveiled"

The Eagle Project’s third event, a spoken-word and stand-up revue at the Three of Cups, seems in keeping with founder Ryan Victor Pierce’s mission to “explore American identity through performing arts and our Native American heritage.” At the same time, however, it highlights the vagueness of that very mission. Their two previous projects, Wood Bones and Broken Heart Land, were play readings, giving the evening to one narrative about American identity with special focus on Native perspectives. A revue gives forum to a multiplicity of voices.

Ethnically and topically, America Unveiled was highlighted by its diversity. Ethnically, it was mostly Indian and black. Topically, it was a fairly even split between spoken-word and stand-up. The spoken-word was uniformly serious, ranging from topics of growing up black in Brooklyn (Dominique Fishback) to being a Latina in America (Erica R. DeLaRosa). The comedy went for a lot of cheap racist and genital jokes. Notable exceptions of Brian Jian and emcee Margaret Champagne, who told funny true-to-life stories without needing to rely on shock-value for their laughs.

America Unveiled was a step away from what I’ve seen Pierce and his Project doing: developing Indian theater in New York. This revue shifted towards a look at the stories of American racial minorities. If that’s what Pierce is going for, then that’s great. But if he’s going to focus on Indian stories, he’s going to have to focus more on getting Indian artists. He also might want to reconsider having his events in bars or letting the emcee give the artists “Native American” animal symbols before they get up to perform.

Sophie Gets the Horns

Riot Group’s new play Sophie Gets the Horns was almost, in the words of Winston Churchill, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” But, unlike a swelling super-power breathing huskily down the neck of a continent breaking out in war, Sophie Gets the Horns lacks any necessarily compelling quality, unless it’s the force of the acting. But good actors, committed to the play, can make even the most earth-bound story take wings. They were the only ones standing between the audience and the piece’s infectious solipsism.

They were mesmerizing – and the story (a play about Sylvia Plath within a coming-of-age tale set at a small liberal arts college in the 90s) did take me on a trip down memory lane. I graduated from Lewis & Clark College in 2008, but, in Portland, it might as well have been the 90s. But as it progressed away from the gentle marijuana use and sexual experimentation into the feverish Plath-esque world of Alice’s (Mary Tuomanen) mind, it became more foreign, more alien, more like Reed College.

While the stellar acting and initially reminiscent setting let me ignore the play’s faults at first, I left Incubator Arts Project wondering what Riot Group was trying to get at. Was it supposed to be about Sylvia Plath? If that was the case they could have stuck with the play-within-a-play and dispensed with the intricate framing devise. Was it a celebration of being a privileged white girl in the 90s? And is that really play-worthy?

Obviously it is, at least in playwright Adriano Shaplin’s (who also played Bernardo and did sound) mind. But a theme drivingly interesting to the artists but not necessarily to the audience smacks of solipsism. It wasn’t just limited to Alice’s poetic brain-child “Sylvia Plath Fucks the Minotaur”, but extended to the incomprehensible lines and circles drawn on the floor to Professor Shallembarger (Drew Friedman) going to “Sylvia Plath Fucks the Minotaur” without any apparent motivation for doing so.

But I could be wrong about all this. It seemed like Sophie Gets the Horns really mattered to the Riot Group, and the trip down memory lane to the liberal arts college experience I was fortunate enough to have was nice for me. When I imply that nobody is particularly interested in the stories of privileged white women who came of age in the 90s, I omit one important group: privileged white women who came of age in the 90s. It seems that the Riot Group and Incubator Arts’ main audience are hipsters, probably the best audience for this sort of play. If it is to succeed, it will be with them.

Sophie Gets the Horns is playing at Incubator Arts Project until May 20^th. Tickets are available at the door or online at http://incubatorarts.org/riotgroup2012.html.

You are in an open field

Playing through May 19^th at HERE, You are in an open field is a fun romp with free-style rapping, game-play as a coping mechanism, and awesome old-school video-game imagery – you know, the kind where you can count the pixels if you aren’t paying attention to the show. Not that that’s an issue: You are in an open field is a Neo-Futurist shout-out to the nerdcore sub-culture that has you toe-tapping along, nerd or not. The subject matter was of secondary importance to me – of greater weight was how that subject matter fit into a visualization of game-play as a coping mechanism.

Robert N. Bellah sets up his book Religion in Human Evolution with a description of Abraham Maslow’s Being and Deficiency cognition, or B- and D-cognition. D-cognition is the anxious world of daily life – afraid of getting hit by kickballs on the playground, feeling hustled on the subway, a sense of artistic malaise. It’s “the recognition of what is lacking and what must be made up for through striving.” (5) B-cognition, on the other hand, is more transcendent: “When we are propelled by B-motives, we relate to the world by participation, not manipulation; we experience a union of subject and object, a wholeness that overcomes all partiality. The B-cognition is an end in itself…and it tends to transcend our ordinary experience of time and space.” One sphere in which B-cognition reigns supreme is game-play, from video-games to free-style rap competitions, from treasure hunts to making forts out of the sofa cushions. Play, then, exists in a clean break from the world of daily concerns. (Huizenga 3) In his ground-breaking Homo Ludens, Huizenga lists a pair of descriptors as to what constitutes play: it is a voluntary activity (7), and it is “a stepping of out ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own.” (8) The temporality and separateness of play lends itself to the manufacture of inviolable rules, since “they determine what ‘holds’ in the temporary world circumscribed by play.” (11)

All of this holds within the world of You are in an open field. The different kinds of game-play are figured as escapes from the anxieties of ordinary life, and they all adhere to strict rules. For example, if you can’t follow the rules of a free-styling competition, then you are out and you lose. If somebody calls you on the “no food in the fort” rule, then you respond by trying to establish that it is not, in fact, a legitimate rule. The performance itself is a kind of super-game that encompasses all the other games. It is separate from the anxieties associated with space outside the theater, and it adheres to its own rules. First, the world constructed within the piece must be consistent (and it is). Second, the Neo-Futurists have their own code of rules that define their performance, and so You are in an open field needs to be consistent with those aims (and it is).

The flaw in analyzing game-play, however, is that it tries to reduce B-cognition to D-cognition. (Huizenga 3) The point is that the game is fun, and effectively takes you out of D-cognition. And, except for a few places where they slipped into didacticism, the Neo-Futurists in their You are in an open field did that for me.

If you want to see if they do that for you, you can check them out now through May 19^th at HERE on 6^th Avenue. You can buy tickets at the door or online at http://here.org/shows/detail/898/.

To learn more about the New York Neo-Futurists and their rules, please visit http://www.nyneofuturists.org/site/index.php?/site/whats_the_whatism/

And if you want to read the books that I cite in this review, here’s their full publication info:

Bellah, Robert N. Religion in Human Evolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Huizenga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Amazon eBook, 1971.

Fathom

Amy Jensen is a storyteller. By which I mean I see her doing exactly the same sort of thing with her ancestral Danish stories as I’m doing with my ancestral Karuk ones. At its most basic state, traditional storytelling is sitting around the fireplace or kitchen table telling tales of yore. But Jensen isn’t just a storyteller – she’s also a dramaturg. And an artist who is both of those things will bring a whole portfolio of theatrical tools to the old stories augmenting them, making them come alive.

Jensen’s work-in-progress Fathom is her telling of Hans Christian Andersen’s Wild Swans. Like any good teller of folk-tales, she uses the story not as a literal script, but as a guideline to which she can bring herself into the story, and the story into herself. And she does this quite literally. She weaves Wild Swans together with her own experiences with loss and depression, and with beautiful oral imagery of a museum exhibit filled with all kinds of weights and measures. Her storytelling also incorporates the choreography and dance of Heather Heiner and the composition and percussion of Levy Lorenzo. But the crux of Fathom is the juxtaposition of Wild Swans with Jensen’s deeply personal experiences. At times, this crux threatens to overwhelm the dance and music, and it’s not until Jensen steps back, or else incorporates herself into the choreography, that those other elements are able to come to the fore.

On the other hand, Fathom is yearning to become an immersive piece of performance. From the dance and music, to Jensen’s evocative oral descriptions of the setting, to her and Heiner’s bringing suds in their hands to incorporate the sense of smell, this piece is bursting at the seams, ready to explode into a quietly passionate experience. But for this to happen, it seems to me that the choreography, music, and set will have to flourish in the same way the storytelling already is.

Cabaret Collective, or, Yes, The Police Did Come And Take All Our Beer

Let’s address the elephant in the room first. Halfway through Kelley Sweeney’s rendition of an old Joni Mitchell tune, the Stony Brook University police came, knocked on the door, took all our beer and checked IDs. The Cabaret Collective has always had a spoken policy that it’s okay to discretely bring your own beverages. From what I understand, some people were coming to the Collective with open bottles in hand and mistakenly went into another performance in the same building, who thereupon called the police. I don’t know how disruptive these individuals were being, if at all. So the police came, stopped the show, and did their police thing. What I’ve heard is that Stony Brook has a wet campus, so our understanding was that there shouldn’t have been a problem. We were, obviously, wrong. According to the “State University of New York at Stony Brook Alcoholic Beverages on State Property Policies and Procedures,” (http://studentaffairs.stonybrook.edu/jud/docs/Alcohol_Policy.pdf):

“Unless a permit has been obtained from the State Liquor Authority, Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control (“SLA Permit”) by the sponsoring individual or organization, the consumption of alcohol or possession of an open container of alcohol anywhere on campus is prohibited. This includes, by way of example only, classrooms, grounds, parking lots, student lounges and bathrooms.”

So the cops were in the right, unfortunately, to take all our booze. However, I’m not convinced they had any right to ask for people’s phone numbers:

“Standard identification procedures are required at all campus functions and at establishments where alcoholic beverages are available. Acceptable forms of identification include:

U.S. or international passport

Valid driver’s license

NYS non-driver’s ID

Selective service registration card

Resident Alien identification card

An individual must be proofed each time s/he requests an alcoholic beverage or enters the alcohol service area. Alpha lists will be used to verify student dates of birth. University staff may spot check the legal age of any persons in the area of consumption. The use of false ID is prohibited. All false IDs will be confiscated and a disciplinary referral will be made.”

That aside, let’s talk about the art!

In spite of Becky Goldberg’s clarification of my last response to a Cabaret Collective (http://waylonlenk.blogspot.com/2011/12/inter-arts-collaboration-at-sbu-cabaret.html), I’m still seeing a substantial lack of interarts collaboration. I’m not saying there isn’t any. Lukas Kürten and Karl Hinze both foray outside of their own departments (Physics and Music, respectively) to participate in theatrical endeavors. In Kürten’s case, he was the originating artist of a bilingual reading of Goethe’s Zauberlehrling with Theatre’s Nancee Moes.

But those are only individuals. To all extents and purposes, this Cabaret Collective was a concert by the Music Department, with a couple theatrical acts and some art in the hallway. And the format of the Collective seems most conducive to music. Nearly all of the acts (this includes both of the theatre acts) read their pieces off music stands. The ten minute spots are perfect for musicians whose songs range on average from three to four minutes, and a dominate venue for singer-songwriters are bars anyway. As for us in theatre, especially dramaturgs, I think we’re a little used to having a little bit more time in our individual events to hold forth on some theoretical theatrical concept. Not to say we can’t get the audience up a tree and back down in ten minutes – both of the acts I saw last night, as have many others that I’ve seen at previous Collectives. All I’m saying is that it seems like a musician’s natural habitat, not necessarily a dramaturg’s.

And a performance-based venue is the opposite of a plastic artist’s natural habitat! Especially if you’re going to get sequestered to the hallway. Maybe a better idea, if the Cabaret Collective is really about fostering interarts collaboration, is to put the art in the room with the performances, and perhaps even have the artists there to say a few words about their work to associate their face more strongly with it.

I’m still very dubious about the overall effectiveness of the Cabaret Collectives. Yes, they have inspired a few individuals to cross over out of their departments, but I’m not seeing anything that brings the arts together in a way that blurs the boundaries between disciplines. If anything, it’s become a fun way for a bunch of Theatre and Music grad students (and I’m purposely excluding Art here, because they seem excluded by the very structure of the event), have a few beers, maybe get busted up by the cops, and play music and do skits for each other. Which is all very nice, if that’s what the Cabaret Collective wants to be.

Staller [Off] Center

Last night was the inaugural Staller [Off] Center – a joint endeavor by the Staller Center and Stony Brook’s Theatre Department to bring new work to Stony Brook. While the double-bill of Jake Hooker and lumberob was a miss and a hit in terms of performance, Staller [Off] Center as a whole successfully brought one-man shows that you’d expect to find Downtown or in Brooklyn to the beautiful North Shore of Long Island.

Jake Hooker

Hooker’s show, thisisitisthisit (Shit Shit Shit): A Map of the Known World or thatwasitwasthatit (Shit Shat Shot): A Rememberance, was indeed a rememberance of another show that looked to be visually and theoretically rich and compelling. I would have loved to have seen it. Instead, I saw its shadow. Derivative of the original, thisisitisthisit left me feeling cheated that I all I got was a telling of what seemed to be a very good show.

lumberob

Rob Erickson (lumberob)’s method of playwrighting/storytelling fascinates me, and so for my little review for his piece Rocky Point, I’m going to try something like it. When I got home last night, I wrote a bit about Staller [Off] Center in my journal. Today I’m going to do an audio recording of me critiquing Rocky Point. You’ll never get to hear it. I will though – I’m going to listen to it and let it prompt me in saying it again to the video camera. You will have access to this recording: I’m going to put it on my YouTube channel and link it to this post. Then I’m going to write a review to post below that video off of what I say in it. It probably won’t be word-for-word, though, because I’m not going to pause the video while I write. Here we go…

So while I wasn’t as big a fan of Jake’s piece, I was of lumberob’s. So I’m doing a review like he did his piece. He’s manically impressive. He’s just sweating and sweating halfway through the performance. He records his stories, then listens to them while he does the performance. He swiftly and sweatily leapt between beatboxing and storytelling. He tells stories like this in comedy clubs, but he started to loose me in the middle. He did a mashup of disparate elements from different texts and he started to loose me. It can really work and keep you on your toes but you have to be able to follow the narratives. They can leap between manically but it can’t be a mash-up between “I Am a Woman” and a sailor story. Each unit has to be complete in itself. If you do that you can get away with what he does. And he does in the beginning and end. It was manically impressive, but he started to lose me in the middle.

Workshop with lumberob

“I really like broken things.” ~lumberob

This afternoon, Rob Erickson (aka lumberob) gave a workshop of sorts in the Staller Center Cabaret about his unique storytelling aesthetic in preparation for his show this evening at Staller [Off] Center. More than a workshop, he monologued about his varied influence and how he likes to create tension by challenging himself and the audience. He eschews the well-made play as “predictable” and “tedious” and opts instead for a style that switches between genres, creates confusion in terms of who’s in charge of the show, and uses exhaustion as an element, among other things.

What all that means, I’m not sure.

I got the most from watching and listening to how he told his stories. You know how sometimes you tell a story to a friend, and it’s unrehearsed so you’re thinking about it as you tell it? Sometimes you repeat yourself, sometimes you backtrack, sometimes you may even contradict yourself. lumberob tells his story like that, except it’s clear that it’s deliberate. To add an extra layer of tension, he listens to himself tell the story on his smartphone while he tells it. It’ll be interesting to see him go for a longer set tonight.

Of particular interest to me is the way he writes. He, like me, works between audio recording and text. But, for him, the audio is the (semi) final script. For me, at this point in my artistic development, it can be either/or depending on the show.

hereandnow theatre at Stony Brook University

hereandnow theatre company is an Asian-American group based in L.A. that tours the country telling stories of Asian-America. Their purpose seems to be to promote the autonomy of Asian-American storytelling (especially Asian-Americans whose families come from the Pacific Rim). Most of the stories they told are sourced from their company members, who are younger, so they deal with very modern issues. The Japanese-American internment camps and the brutality of Japanese colonialism in the Far East did make brief appearances, as did exodus from Laos and a Native Hawaiian myth, but the stories generally seemed geared towards a college age demographic. Sex was a major theme (including one encounter that went on long past the audience getting the point – I was surprised they didn’t end up taking their clothes off), as was identifying themselves in their own words.

It’s interesting to note the degree to which these two things go together – autonomy of body and autonomy of narrative. The dominant culture constructs narratives regarding Asian bodies, particularly Asian woman bodies – the geisha girl, the Japanese school-girl. Some American men have an “Asian fetish”, which presupposes a severely limited view of Asian sexuality. By pushing for a broader range of narratives regarding what it means to be Asian, hereandnow theatre actively promotes a level of autonomy in the Asian-American community from stereotypes that the mainstream (read “white”) community would impose upon them, especially in the Hollywood film industry.

thingNY's Three Experimental Operas

This weekend, thingNY put on three experimental operas in three nights in Moe’s Taxi Garage in Long Island City, Queens. They played on a rotating double bill, so I got to see all three operas in just two nights! But after seeing one of them twice, I wished I’d gone to all three nights and seen them all twice. But hindsight’s twenty-twenty, and I’m glad I saw the shows I did. One of the great perks of living in New York is that I’ve got the opportunity to see things like operas in abandoned taxi garages, and I’d be a fool not to take advantage.

Jeff Young and Paul Pinto, Patriots, Run for Public Office on a Platform of Swift and Righteous Immigration Reform, Lots of Jobs, and a Healthy Environment: an Opera by Paul Pinto and Jeffrey Young

This is the opera I saw both nights that, and it made me wish that I’d gone all three nights! An intersection of music and political oratory, this copiously titled little gem created an aural collage of violin (played by Young) and xylophone (played by Pinto) tones, lyrical song, and the hyperbolically shallow speeches that we’re used to politicians defecating from their mouths. The first night I walked away with the sense that, while what they were saying was nothing new, the way they said it was fresh and engaging. The second night I got to see just how fresh! It turns out that, in addition to glad-handing and working the audience, they were improvising with each other, creating some of the answers to their opponent’s questions on the spot. In this context of this vibrant fluidity, I got to see a deeper level of their politico personas – while coated in copious layers of slime, and totally ignorant or indifferent to some issues, in regards to others they were really quite sincere. I’m sure it’s an ambivalently complimentary look at real-life politicians – while they may be dirtbags, they initially got into public office to make their communities better places. No matter how much they degrade their integrity to win the next election, a bit of that altruism still exists.

ADDDDDDDDD

It’s pronounced like the psychological condition, not the mathematical process. This piece was hit and miss: where Young and Pinto’s piece was engaging in its extroversion, ADDDDDDDDD was alienating in its introversion. Ostensibly to show the way an ADD mind works, it began with the discontinuous ramblings of four performers, later to be joined by a fifth. It seems intent was to frustrate the audience with the jarring lack of continuity, but my personal reaction was to check out. They were more successful, in my case, later in the show when they incorporated music into their monologing: then it felt as though they were pushing this frustration right into my lap. It made me sit up; snap out of my daydream. When they were demonstrating something that takes place exclusively in another’s head, my reaction was to go into my own. It took a rhythm to bridge the gap between minds. As long as the rhythm was there, but the melody discordant, I was uncomfortable – I felt the frustration I was only shown in the beginning. When the melody and rhythm slipped into the rollicking familiarity of a drinking song, I became comfortable. By nature or nurture, my brain is wired to respond favorably to that kind of traditional composition. How it aligned with the disjointed parts of the play, I’m not entirely sure. But if “disjointed” is to be the operative word, then that’s probably it. It fit by not fitting.

Un Jour Comme Un Autre

This one’s a classic. A 1975 composition by Vinko Globokar, this tells the story of a young female dissident’s arrest and torture. I knew that going into the opera, but for maybe the first half I couldn’t tell very clearly from the context of the performance that that was what was happening. At fault, I believe, was a weak use of visuals. Besides dramatic lighting, and a close-up feed of the soprano’s (Gelsey Bell) face played on a small screen in front of her, I felt like I was at a recital. A very good recital, perhaps, but certainly not a theatrical event like an opera. It started to become more alive when Pinto (who was the music director and percussionist for this) rolled the cellist (Isabel Castellvi) up under a tarp, and she began to play with one hand. Bell fell to the floor and sang into the floor, the feed still on her face. Pinto thrashed the ground with heavy chains. The abandoned taxi garage, with its cavernous white cinderblocks, took on the austere immobility of a torture chamber. It was all a move in the right direction, but I couldn’t help feeling that there could have been more. I don’t mean anything graphic – the representative nature of the performance really augmented the harrowing aesthetic of the piece. The more you show, the less the audience has to imagine, and imagining torture is so much more horrifying than having it drawn out for you in gory detail. But any kind of movement, even to the extent of hiring on a dancer, would have made Un Jour Comme Un Autre so much more alive.

Hoi Polloi's "All Hands"

Hoi Polloi’s latest piece, All Hands, is an allegorical description of societies in terms of religious cults. Now premiering at the Incubator Arts Project, All Hands, presents an intelligent critique of human interactions. But, like many smart plays, it gets too smart for its own good and lags in the middle due to an excess of examples.

Conceived and directed by Alec Duffy, and written by Robert Quillen Camp, All Hands uses a fictional, nameless religious cult to demonstrate the ways in which societies operate in terms of inclusion and, more dramatically, exclusion. The space was set up with tennis-court seating, with the audience on either side of the playing space. At the bottom of each steep wall of seats were a bench and four wooden chairs. Here the performers not in the immediate action sat during the opening scene. The effect was to incorporate the audience spatially with the performers, making us all part of the cult. This association disintegrated somewhat before reintegrating in the second sequence. A stranger comes to their door, soaked from the rain, needing a place to dry off. She doesn’t speak much English, and she obviously has nowhere to turn, because she submits to initiation into the cult in order to be allowed to stay. The audience found the initiation pretty funny – the antics of the cult were strange and silly to us. This continued until another character, part of the cult, entered and told the stranger that “This is fake. This is a play.”

So far we have theater described as a cult. Hoi Polloi went on to give examples of other social groups in the context of the cult’s rituals. They gave examples of inclusive groups and actions such as AA, corporations, and Occupy; and examples of exclusive social acts such as a member of the cult spouting violently extreme perversions of things that bore relation to the cult’s beliefs, labor organizing on advice from outside, and human sacrifice. I say that Duffy and Camp may have been too smart for their own good because, while all of these numerous examples are good and bear thinking about, after a while I’d figured out the allegory and was wondering where they were going with it. My attention started to slip until they managed to bring it all together in the end with a tongue-in-cheek explanation of the allegory.

Hoi Polloi’s All Hands plays at the Incubator Arts Project at 131 E. 10^th St. in Manhattan through March 31^st. Tickets are $18, and can be bought at the door or online at incubatorarts.org.

Liz Sager's Spring Awakening

The cream rises to the top, and Liz Sager’s production of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening in the Staller Center Cabaret is an excellent showcase for some of the best acting talent the Theatre Department at SBU has to offer. Caitlin Bartow and Eric Michael Klouda stole the show as Melchior and Moritz, respectively. Bartow was especially engaging with her adolescent boy bluster, and brought a good deal of depth to her character. From pretending to know more about sex than he did, to freaking out when Wendla (Molly Walsh Warren) had him beat her, to insisting on taking himself seriously in the graveyard, Bartow’s Melchior was the star of the play. Klouda (although he was a little hard to understand at first due to diction and delivering his lines at the floor) was the perfect opposite and scene partner to Bartow. Nervous and high-strung, he created a convincing character arch that culminated in a theatric tour de force in his suicide scene. They were perfectly cast as the two male points in the core Spring Awakening triangle. Unfortunately, I found the third point Wendla wanting. Warren seemed unable to deliver much beyond sighing innocence. She almost broke through into something incredible in the scene when she gets Moritz to beat her, and I was on the edge of my seat waiting for her to commit and meet Bartow’s energy, but she never did. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast was also split between those who owned the stage and those who seemed tentative, sometimes to the point where I thought they were grasping for their lines. I hate to say it, because it seems like Sager has been working hard on this for the past six weeks, but it read as under-rehearsed.

I would like to say a word about Sager’s directorial concept – this is her Spring Awakening and MFA project after all. From her program note, she is obviously interested in deconstructing the gender binary, and she approached this with gender-blind casting and costuming. The casting worked in part, and didn’t work in part. In a cast of twelve, she had nine women and three men. This meant that the preponderance of male parts was played by women, which audiences are used to in academic theater where we have more women than men. From the other direction, both Andrew Breslin and Chris Petty played women during the course of play. Breslin can be taken seriously as a concerned mother, and this is not the first time he’s been cast as such. It’s hard, though, to take the heavily bearded Petty seriously as a giddy school-girl. That choice seemed forced and heavy handed, as did Herr Gabor (again played by Petty) undressing Frau Gabor (Becky Goldberg) from her men’s clothing and re-dressing her as a woman when they decided to send the recalcitrant Melchior to reform school.

I left the theater feeling that a good idea was undermined by being under-resourced. With such a large dramatis personae, it seems that Sager was forced to cast actors who couldn’t meet Bartow and Klouda’s (among others) energy, and to cast a preponderance of women which I feel undermined the point of her gender-blind casting. And that's not even mentioning that a dozen actors is a lot of people to coordinate! Even half that would have been a handful. I left wishing that instead of attempting to do a translation of Wedekind’s entire play and super-impose a critique of the gender binary on it, Sager had instead adapted Spring Awakening to focus on those parts of Wedekind's story that best supported her critique.

Spring Awakening plays tonight (March 10^th) at 8PM and tomorrow (March 11^th) at 2PM in the Staller Center Cabaret. Last night was a full house, so reservations are recommended: http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/events/284882374915297/

And God Created Great Whales

“met’a·phor” (met’ə-fôr”) n. a figure of speech, based on some resemblance of a literal to an implied subject.” ~Webster’s Dictionary

“metaphor

1530s, from M.Fr. metaphore, from L. metaphora, from Gk. metaphora "a transfer," especially of the sense of one word to a different word, lit. "a carrying over," from metapherein "transfer, carry over," from meta- "over, across" (see meta-) + pherein "to carry, bear"” ~www.etymonline.com

Rinde Eckert’s And God Created Great Whales, now showing at the Culture Project through March 25^th, is the tale of an elderly piano tuner, Nathan (played by Eckert), who is rapidly losing his mind to dementia. The only thing (temporarily) keeping him from floating adrift is his opera “Moby Dick,” personified by his Muse Olivia (Nora Cole). The play is laden with imagery of the ocean: it symbolizes the mind, Nathan and Olivia tell Melville’s story over the course of the play, the set (original design by Kevin Adams) is held together by hemp ropes, the color coded tape recorders that hold Nathan’s memories hang around his neck like an albatross at the end when his mind finally goes and he is, in the words of the play, “adrift.” The ocean is a metaphor for the mind, just like the tape recorders are functional metaphors for Nathan’s memory.

The above quotations indicate that “metaphor” is specifically a linguistic device. Eckert’s Whales makes an element of speech or writing into living, four-dimensional process. The central metaphors are Moby Dick and the tape recorders. “Moby Dick”, in this play, has three referents, all of which blend together over the course of the eighty minute play: the story by Melville, the opera that Nathan’s writing, and Nathan’s journey. In telling the story, Nathan and Olivia take on the roles of Ishmael, Queequeg, Ahab and Starbuck. They are acting. They are representing someone they are not. In so doing, they explode the four-dimensional definition of “metaphor” to all role-playing. The opera becomes Nathan’s “white whale” (a metaphorical turn-of-phrase inspired by Melville’s novel): his quest to complete it before his mind is finally gone gives him the life-purpose to create the external memories in the tapes, and to create (in his mind) his infallible Muse Olivia to keep him focused on his project. But just as Moby Dick is Ahab’s elusive prey in the literal ocean, “Moby Dick” is always tantalizingly out of Nathan’s reach in the ocean of his mind.

Early in the play, Nathan goes of on a rant, or “marginal note,” trying to find a way to preserve his memory outside of his failing brain in such a way that it would preserve the essence of his self. He evokes the Egyptian hieroglyphics – they preserve the Pharaohs’ humanity while their bodies mummify beneath the desert. “Moby Dick” is his pyramid, his monument for those he leaves behind. He is creating the metaphor for himself. And yet he must create smaller, more personal monuments – the tapes that metaphorize what he did the day before. Because the hieroglyphs are not in fact the Pharaohs and Nathan is not his opera. They are simply objects that stand for the people. And the tapes are not actually what happened the day before, but they memorialize it – they preserve the highlights for future Nathan so that he won’t forget past Nathan.

Metaphors as a mnemonic devise – they flow throughout And God Created Great Whales with such persistency that they are the play, because, as far as most people are concerned today, the Pharaohs are what they left behind. And as far as Nathan of today is concerned, Nathan of the past is only what he’s left him on the tapes.

And God Created Great Whales is playing at The Culture Project on 45 Bleeker St, and runs through March 25. Tickets are $55, or $20 for student rush. http://cultureproject.org/

Wood Bones

William S. Yellow Robe, Jr.’s Wood Bones, as heard in a staged reading by the Eagle Project on March 7^th, is intriguingly problematic. It’s about the spirit of a dying house who is bound to her burnt-out husk by the memory of a little girl who was molested inside. While a clearly fascinating concept and one with a lot of potential, Yellow Robe’s attempt to fuse Western dramaturgy and Native storytelling structure makes the play seem unfocused and unfinished. I would go one step further and submit that it is, in fact, unfocused and unfinished.

The central conflict is between the house, 121, and her awful memory of the little girl’s trauma. Yet Yellow Robe adds two other memories in dramatic action, and several “I remember” monologues on the part of 121. The monologues bear little discussion – either because of an underwhelming reading on the part of Madeline Sayet, or because “I remember” monologues are inherently undramatic, they took the wind right out of the play’s sails. The two enacted memories – one of a couple who moved in only to be evicted for being Indian, and another of the construction workers who caused a gas explosion – contribute nothing to the central conflict. As Yellow Robe said at the talk-back, “I could have written a play about each of these things – and I have.” Normally, I would immediately recommend cutting these extraneous episodes, but Yellow Robe’s intentions give me pause. He’s trying to fuse Western and Native dramaturgies, an endeavor I have a lot of professional sympathy with. However, Wood Bones makes me question the viability of such a project.

The Native dramaturgy appears in this play as the non-chronological structure and juxtaposition of thematically linked stories. It is superimposed on a Euro-American structured play, complete with its fourth wall and script. This two elements mix just like oil and water. Classic Native storytellers like Lame Billy of Weitspus and Skaay of Haida Gwaii who employed Native elements like those in Wood Bones with aplomb told their stories to an audience already familiar with them face to face and without a script. The audience’s intense association with the stories allowed the storytellers to combine them in unique ways without loosing the audience’s attention. The lack of a fourth wall or scripts also helped to keep the audience engaged. Bringing the fourth wall and scripts into Native dramaturgy lessens that engagement, and bringing the Native dramaturgy into a Western play muddles the storyline, which in turn lessens audience engagement.

Wood Bones is a play with a lot of potential, but will never be able to reach that potential until Yellow Robe really treats it for what it is: a structurally Western drama about healing from trauma. He has everything he needs to tell this story already: a great feel for Western dramaturgy, a compelling story about a young girl’s horror, and the seeds for great chemistry between 121 and Leroy. But as long as he superimposes elements foreign to this story on Wood Bones, it will never reach that potential.

The Bloody Butcher of Wall St and the Bull

On February 27, Occupy had a National Day of Action – Occupy Our Food Supply – to protest growing corporate control of the world’s food. The action in New York City included a march, a seed exchange, street performance, and guerilla planting. I’d like to focus solely on the performance, which I’m calling “The Bloody Butcher of Wall Street and the Bull,” for the purposes of this blog.

Pure agit-prop, “The Bloody Butcher” relied on pure symbolism and didactic dialogue. The symbolism rested in the characters and the three places where the play was performed: Liberty Square, in front of the New York Stock Exchange, and in front of the bronze Wall Street Bull. The symbolism of the Butcher figure and the NYSE were clear – they represented the malevolent influence of Wall Street on us the 99%. Liberty Square is the symbolic home and birthplace of the Movement that counters this influence. The Bull, however, has taken on a new complexity of symbolism. It has been used by the Movement since before the beginning in its role as the symbol of Wall Street, but now it is also used to represent stock animals in reference to the way they are abused by agribusiness.  

You can watch the day's proceedings at http://www.lenk.tv/. This particular performance is saved in the Lenk-Atlantic channel at the end of "1-Occupy Our Food Supply" and the beginning of "2-Occupy Our Food Supply".

Hurt Village

One of my major frustrations with the dominate culture is the way it lumps all ethnic minorities into one simple category. While the Greeks had their barbarians, and the Jews their Gentiles, white America has its People of Color.

That said, Katori Hall’s depiction of the social disintegration in the Hurt Village district of Memphis in her play of the same name was uncomfortably familiar to me. The drug use, broken families, dislocation, and men from poor communities used as military cannon fodder is as much a part of Indian country as it is the indigent black community in Hall’s story.

Eerily, the similarities don’t stop there. In the first act, Hall tells the story with her tongue in her cheek. I’m familiar with this kind of humor being used as a coping mechanism in Indian country, so I was surprisingly at home with its use in Hurt Village.

But the humor went away after the first act, and all I was left with were images of absentee fathers and people screwing their lives up with drugs. I see too much of that in real life, and it breaks my heart every time. I don’t need to see it when I go to the theater. But I wasn’t the only person in the audience. Maybe others there did need to see that kind of hopelessness and destruction? But I’m not so sure. I was the only Indian I was aware of there, and there were a few African Americans and Asians, but the audience was primarily affluent whites.

So my question is what is Hall trying to accomplish parading stories about poor blacks who have to sell crack to survive in Memphis in front of well-to-do white New Yorkers? The answer that seems most likely to me is that this is a therapy play – a piece to help the playwright work through some hurt that is setting on her. Once a playwright gets that out of her or his system, she or he can continue to tell all the other stories that need to be told. I’ve seen this sort of thing happen before, the only difference is that the other therapy plays I’m aware of have an element of healing, something Hurt Village lacks. To further argue against my theory, this is not Hall’s first play. It could be that it takes her more than one play to work through her hurt, but based on my previous experience with this sort of theater, I’m left questioning her commitment to her community. Is Hurt Village really a constructive piece of art, that helps a traumatized community and/or person heal, or is it simply a playwright capitalizing on that trauma by selling it to the highest bidder?

That’s my question, but you can see for yourself and make up your own mind. Hurt Village plays at the Signature Theatre on 42^nd Street until March 18^th. Tickets are $25 at http://www.signaturetheatre.org/tickets/production.aspx?pid=1940.

Stopped Bridge of Dreams

Walking into La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre for John Jesurun’s Stopped Bridge of Dreams, one is struck by the compelling stage design. The seats are arranged across from each other on either side of the room with projection screens hanging and sitting in the space between them. A video swirls pinkish red above on two of the screens – is it blood or is it fire? The play even begins floating above the audience’s heads. The action drops to the ground with Black-Eyed Susan and Preston Martin playing Mrs. X and Hiroshi – the Madame of the flying brothel and one of her whores - respectively. Video and performance and a multiplicity of stories swirl between the audience until pouring into the core story of a flying whore-house, an embodiment of disincorporation and groundlessness. Even sex, normally so earthy, is uprooted in the frank and business-like manner with which the characters treat it. All emotion, in fact, was pulled from its normal human-centricity, and an atmosphere of flight supplanted it. Instead of emanating from the humans, it incorporated from the composition – the juxtaposition of dialogue and narration, human flesh on the floor and their video images projected from multiple angles above. The groundless atmosphere and lack of sentiment are a response, according to Donald Keene’s program note, to the work of Japanese novelist Saikaku Ihara, “whose books are called ukiyo-zoshi or tales of the floating world.” The broader genre of Saikaku’s ukiyo-zoshi or Jesurun’s Stopped Bridge of Dreams – fiction – is one uprooted from reality. What Jesurun does is radicalize that core element of fiction, and he does it in a smooth and seamlessly constructed way. It closes this February 5^th, but if he brings it back in your area, I highly recommend seeing it, especially if you’re interested in seeing the art of fiction exploded spatially before you.

Ashland, Oregon's 24th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day Celebration

Ashland, Oregon’s 24^th annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was cleanly divided into two events: the official, city sponsored event, and the Occupy teach-in afterwards.

The first event was hosted by the Historic Ashland Armory. It was a potpourri of art and speeches geared around King and his legacy. There were three kinds of things that happened. The first consisted of specific references to the historic Civil Rights Movement, the second of work that people are doing in Southern Oregon today that continue that legacy, and the third was DeLanna Studi’s recitation of an old Tecumseh speech. The benefit of the references to the Civil Rights Movement was to give young and emerging artists a venue to perform: from Crater High School’s Flag Team and Teen Theater that began with an allegory of segregation to Ben Badden’s rap about MLK, this event was a great showcase for some of the best young artists the Rogue Valley has to offer. The continuing of King’s legacy was represented Mary Farrell, founder of the Maslow Project that helps homeless kids living in the Rogue Valley, and the Ashland Food Project, which organizes long-term food donations for the Valley’s hungry. DeLanna Studi, a Cherokee actor with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, read a speech by Tecumseh. I feel it’s important for Native folks to get their voices heard, especially in events with a focus on racial justice.

I’m not sure how you can talk about one of the most prominent social activists of modern times and not address the waves of activism that are currently sweeping the globe, from Arab Spring to the Tea Party to Occupy. But Ashland’s MLK event said nary a word about any of these things. From where I was sitting, I wouldn’t have even known Occupy was in the area until I got to the plaza to hear King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and saw a few signs and an “Occupy” banner. In admittedly critical terms, it highlights the way that activism can be incorporated into the establishment and historicized, even while this establishment struggles with living activism. Occupy’s event didn’t retain as many people as the City’s. In fact, it seems that many of the folks at their teach-in were in one way or another associated with Occupy. It’s something that I noticed at Occupy Medford’s teach-in on January 11^th – the only people they were teaching were people who already agreed with them. Democracy can’t exist if the only people you talk about our common issues with are those who feel the same way you do. But the fault doesn’t simply lie with the Occupiers of the Rogue Valley. The general citizenry of the Valley seem to have time for activism that can be historicized and is safe, but not for living activism that threatens to change the status quo.

I might even say the same about Occupy Ashland. According to the conversations I had with Ashland’s Occupiers, which are now archived at Lenk.TV, attendance at their General Assemblies surpasses that of either Oakland or New York. So the democracy that I’m not seeing in their direct actions may exist in their GAs. The actions they are putting their hopes in, though, seem in keeping with Ashland’s relative conservatism that became apparent to me at the Martin Luther King event: they are working within the current system to create change in terms of homelessness and City banking practices in the Valley.

Spotlight on the USO

This Thursday, Camelot Theatre premiered its new show, Spotlight on the USO. Camelot’s Spotlights are a recent innovation that, to paraphrase Artistic Director Livia Genise, feature “a little story and a lot of music.” This particular show is a deviation from previous Spotlights in that it doesn’t present the biography of an individual artist through music, but rather that of an artistic organization – the USO.

But I’ll come to all that later, because really the show Thursday night was a captivating 40s and 50s jazz concert by the Southern Oregon Jazz Orchestra. They played two sets of songs that I suppose were played for the service people overseas during the 40s and 50s, but that story was only secondary to what they were doing. They did branch out from their usual fare twice, both in the second set after intermission – once to give an example of the country music that started to appear in USO tours in the second half of last century with “Route 66”, and their final number was a medley of songs from the branches of the armed forces during which narrator Shirley Patton invited veterans of each branch to stand and be recognized during their song.

The meat and bones of the concert, though, were 40s and 50s jazz standards, and were they ever a hit! They had the audience singing along with “Minnie the Moocher” and others, and nearly every soloist got a rousing applause when they sat back down. Dianne Strong, a singer, was the featured soloist of the evening. An alto, she has a powerful focal and stage presence while she stays within her range. And when she takes short-note forays above her comfortable range, she’s riveting! But she certainly should not try to hold those higher notes – her attempt in “I’ve Got You under My Skin” was acoustically uncomfortable. While I’m pointing out weaknesses, the trumpet and saxophone sections could probably use a tune-up for “American Patrol,” but besides those two mistakes the concert was certainly a good night out.

Now let’s move on to the story part of the “little bit of story and a lot of music” equation. Peter Wyckliffe wrote the script, and Shirley Patton said it. Wyckliffe has certainly done his homework and has written a feast of information. This feast, however, lacks consistency: it ranges from history lesson with facts and figures to penetrating insights into what the USO was all about. The USO was and is meant to help the troops stay connected to home, and Wyckliffe illustrates that beautifully with a verbal illustration of the phones and letters and how they were and are often the only way the troops have to connect back to their families and loved ones.

The result of the inconsistent nature of Wyckliffe’s script is that it sinks or swims with the actor saying it, and it did both with narrator Shirley Patton. She got off to a slow start, and it definitely came off as a fairly dry history lesson. After she got into her groove, she came across as more grandmotherly and inviting. But she was always reading the script, and that was always a distraction. I suggest that a script is not necessary: the role of the narrator in this particular Spotlight was that of an MC. Some kind of structural outline that the performer can do from memory is what this part called for, but a word-for-word script is a death-trap. It makes the storytelling seem artificial, and Patton’s mixing up the U.S. Navy and Air Force songs when asking veterans from the different branches to stand at the end didn’t help.

While I’m on about inconsistencies, I have to take issue with the use of projections and backlighting. Designers Bart Grady and Brian O’Connor had three different things going on: pictures of the USO from the 40s and 50s up through the 80s and 90s, cool blue and purple washes, and a warm orange wash. The pictures were my favorite – they set the location for the story that Wyckliffe and Patton were telling. The cool washes gave an atmosphere of a smoky jazz bar and fit in a more general way for the orchestra, but not for the story. Orange is jarring color, but I probably would have forgotten about it if it had remained there the whole time. But the seemingly arbitrary shifts between images, cool washes and orange were, frankly, distracting.

That said, these weak points fall outside the crux of the show: the Southern Oregon Jazz Orchestra and their 40s and 50s jazz standards. If that’s your kind of music (and even if it’s not) it’s worth a listen. But if you’re going for the story of the USO, that part of the show has a few wrinkles it needs to iron out before I can walk away satisfied.

Spotlight on the USO is playing at Camelot Theatre, 101 Talent Ave., Talent, Oregon 97540 from January 12-22. Their box office can be reached at 541-535-5250. Tickets are $22, plus $2 for reserved seating.