Our Town

This is the 75^th anniversary of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Hence, everybody’s doing it: it’s playing at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, as well as three Portland theaters. It was the third most produced full-length play in high schools last year. And yet, Southern Oregon University’s auditorium was only about two thirds full, while the devised piece next door was sold out.

Director Paul Barnes cites an unnamed “many” who consider Our Town to be “the great American play.” Why, then, doesn’t it pack them in?

Our Town is the dream of American conservatism: to take the idolization of Main Street and the insularity it represents and cover the earth with it. It takes the mystique of the American small-town, the simplicity of a bygone era, and explodes this nostalgia to universal proportions. Wilder’s universalization of historicized white American culture smacks of Manifest Destiny. For example, Professor Willard’s historical prologue spans millions of years. His mention of the indigenous inhabitants of the area serves only to underpin Caucasian claim to the land: the Indians were not there that long; they have entirely disappeared; if anything’s left of them, it’s an implied secret in three families’ genealogy.

The paradox is that Our Town maintains an inordinate amount of American stage time by playing into fantasies of American universalism, and yet it can’t compete with the unknown devised piece White Fugue next door. Do I think Our Town should be abandoned? No, Wilder has something to say about white American conservatism, and he really says it beautifully. Should it be done less? Well, we’re not all white conservatives, are we?

Liquid Plain

I went to Naomi Wallace’s Liquid Plain with high hopes. After all, Wallace is one of today’s most famous American playwrights. I left disappointed – my hopes had been drowned in a sea of clumsy playwrighting. 

Plays about slavery in America are in vogue right now, and it felt like Wallace was trying to tap into that for her installment in OSF’s American History Cycle. Wallace seemed to be tackling every single story she felt hadn’t been told about slavery in America yet, and this made the play feel unfocused. She fell into the amateur playwright trap of too much exposition and too much concern for her own prose at the expense of the play’s actability. Otherwise capable actors struggled with Liquid Plain’s seemingly endless litany of expository walls of text.

The weight of failure rests mostly on Wallace’s shoulders – such a renowned playwright should be expected not to present something so unfinished. But, since the dramaturg’s work appeared with such clarity in the copious research that clearly went into Liquid Plain, dramaturg Julie Felise Dubiner also shares the blame. As a new play development dramaturg, her job wasn’t just to provide the playwright with a plethora of stories to write about. Her job was also to encourage Wallace to focus, to find the story that compelled her and then provide research to help her dig into that. Both playwright and dramaturg finished about half their job, and then put Liquid Plain on the boards. Another year in development and Liquid Plain might be ready for an audience, but it wasn’t this season.

The Tenth Muse

When I taught my class of undergrads at Stony Brook University, I infused my graduate research in Native theater into my syllabus. I taught plays by Lynn Riggs, Bruce King and Luis Valdez. The impact on my students, especially those of Native and/or Hispanic descent, was noticeable. Students are brought up on a scholastic diet of the Western Canon, which is made up almost exclusively of dead white male writers. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that – in my last review I wrote about the multiple points of access to King Lear. But there’s always a disconnect if the artist doesn’t come from a background similar to that of the audience. My students of Native and Hispanic descent were able to engage with Mummified Deer better than perhaps any of my students of whatever background could with A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

So imagine my delight when I opened up my program and found out that The Tenth Muse would feature Indian characters! And not the racist kind that are POC servants who give wise advice to the white protagonists. No, the protagonist in The Tenth Muse is a mestiza. Other characters occupy other positions on the colonial Mexican social ladder. The play itself represents an exploration of the social hierarchy in 17^th century Mexico. “Why, that’s irrelevant to us 21^st century Americans,” you may opine. “Not to me,” I might respond. My own family was colonized in the 19^th century by the United States. Granted, the structure of colonization between California in 1850 and Mexico in 1650 are markedly different: in Mexico, the Catholic Church was a major player and the goal was to enslave the indigenous population. In northern California, the goal was to kill us all, irrespective of anybody’s religion. That said, both Karuks and Nahuas (my tribe and the tribe represented in Tenth Muse respectively) suffered colonization. In both instances, people of mixed-race (like me) constituted a challenge to the racial hierarchy established in the Western hemisphere. So, yeah, this play resonated with me, and it’s not even about the kind of Indian I am. In a theatrical culture where Shakespeare is the bane of the working playwright, it’s a breath of fresh air to see a Shakespeare festival commissioning a new work. And its especially invigorating for that new work to be by a playwright outside of the Anglo mainstream. And that it’s a play with strong Native over-tones? I love it.  

King Lear

Shakespeare has been dead for about 400 years. He wrote for an audience that was just starting to get into colonialism and threw their poop out of windows. Why, then, do we still produce/watch/read/study his plays?

Because they’re stories a multiplicity of people can sink their teeth into. Because they have so many ways to access them. Because of productions like OSF’s close-to-closing King Lear.

My grandpa just died. I loved the guy, and he was the grandpa I was closest to. And grief is a funny thing for me, because I tend to analyze it and over-think it and rob it of its emotional effect by putting it all in my head. Watching Lear and Gloucester get old and die in horribly dramatic ways helped me shed my tears. As an audience member, the play effected me in a way Lear never has before. But as a dramaturg, I have to understand why.

To do that, I want to go back to Aristotle. He holds (and I quote Ingram Bywater’s translation of Poetics) that the “tragic pleasure is that of pity and fear…” (1453b 12) What does that mean? According to Aristotle “…pity is occasioned by undeserved misfortune, and fear by that of one like ourselves…” (1453a 5-6) Lear and Gloucester make mistakes, but do they deserve the extent of their misfortunes? Does the old Lear really deserve to be cast out by his daughters and wander half-naked and mentally unhinged? Does Gloucester deserve to have his eyes ripped out? They aren’t villains, who knowingly sow discord and destruction like Iago. Nor are they heroes who save kin and country like Henry V. No, Lear and Gloucester are “…the intermediate kind of personage, [men] not preeminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon [them] not by vice and depravity but by some error of judgment…” (1453a 6-8) So that’s pity. What about fear, the recognition of one like yourself. King Lear needs to have his train of one hundred knights. “Oh, reason not the need. Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest things superfluous. / Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s.” (King Lear II.4 vs.267-270) Sometimes old men struggle with the need to give up those things that they’re accustomed to, that give them a sense of independence. “And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind.” (IV.7 vs.62-63) It’s normal for people, when they get older, to feel their minds start to slip. And the humiliation that can come from admitting it was clear in Michael Winters’ performance as the titular king.

That brings us to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Any play with as many access points as Lear is easy to do poorly. So how did Bill Rauch and Company do it well? By trusting the story, and not getting in the way of it. The Aristotelian pity is present in the text, but the Aristotelian fear comes from finding the truth in the text. And there’s no recognition of truth without trust. Rauch enunciated it finely in his program note:

“We have chosen a simple, contemporary approach for this production in our most intimate space to minimize any distance between you and the play’s bracing truths. The designers and I are here to serve the actors, and our entire cast is awash in skill and courage.”

It’s easy, as an artist, to get caught up in your own creativity. It’s much harder to let go and trust your collaborators. And Shakespeare, in spite of being dead and not having had a conception of basic bathroom hygiene, is one of the best collaborators a theater artist can work with. There’s a reason his plays remain popular after 400 years.   

My Fair Lady

All three of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival plays I’ve seen this year (Cymbeline, Heart of Robin Hood, and now My Fair Lady) not only feature dynamic female protagonists, but the women playing the protagonists find depth in the most light-hearted plays and humor in the heaviest. 

Everyone knows Lerner & Loewe’s musical adaptation of Shaw’s Pygmalion. It’s standard fair for community and high school theaters across the country, not to mention a delightful film starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. So one can imagine how it could become over-wrought and boring. That makes it up to the artists retelling this classic to do it in a way that makes it worth going to the theater instead of just popping in the DVD. Rachel Warren, under the direction of Amanda Dehnert, tells the story of Eliza Doolittle in a way that I’ve never considered, and yet perfectly explains my single greatest problem with the script.

Why does Eliza go back to Higgins? He’s clearly an awful, abusive man. For years and years I thought it was just the American happy-ending pastiche – the guy gets the girl, consequences be damned. But Warren found a part of Eliza that I’d never seen before. The simple body gesture of flinching when Alfred P. Doolittle (Anthony Heald) or Higgins (Jonathan Haugen) makes a sudden movement in her direction tells a story of a girl who was beat by her alcoholic father. Her relationship with him, being scared of him and oh so easy for him to manipulate carries over into all her other relationships with men in the play. This is especially true of that with Higgins, but also with Freddy (Ken Robinson) and Pickering (David Kelly). When she leaves Higgins, she jumps right into the arms of the first man who will have her, even though Freddy clearly has nothing going for him – he’s spent weeks literally rolling around on the street where she lives. Why? In the scene after the break-up in Mrs. Higgins’ house (played by Kate Mulligan) she tells Higgins that the difference between a lady and a flower-girl is not in how she acts or speaks but in how she is treated. She denies herself any agency, and puts it all into the hands of Higgins who treats all women like flower-girls and Pickering who treats them all like ladies.

So when she told Higgins goodbye forever and slammed the door behind her, I was happy for her, like I always am. And that slamming door was so final! Director Dehnert approached the story wanting to find the messiness in it, and to that end put the chorus in seats on stage, let the wires hang out, and put all her actors on stage for their warm-ups before the show started. All of this paid off when the huge shop door up stage opened at the end of the “good-bye forever” scene and slammed in Henry Higgins’ face. It felt very Ibsenesque. But where the power of the slamming door in A Doll House is that that’s the end, its power of OSF’s My Fair Lady is that it isn’t. It’s irony that A Doll House, by a playwright who reveled in the messiness of life, has a clean happy ending – Nora gets agency over her own life. But My Fair Lady, a light-hearted musical by the American fantasy-makers Lerner & Loewe, has an untidy heart-breaking ending – Eliza is trapped in a cycle of abusive relationships and this story will repeat itself until she’s dead or becomes Nora Helmer.

The Heart of Robin Hood

I’ve been reading Michael Shurtleff’s Audition this past week. It was a book I was assigned in undergrad but never read. I found it in my parents’ house this summer and, since I’m doing a bunch of auditions again, I thought I might as well do my homework. 

I wonder if I could still get credit for it…

Anyway, one of the tips that Shurtleff has is to play opposites. For example, let’s pretend your character is trying to get Hamlet to stop swinging his sword around Polonius’ tapestry, because, hey, you don’t really want your son to become guilty on manslaughter. What’s the opposite of that? Maybe that you really would like him to kill Polonius because the old creep is basically your homicidal husband’s canary, and it would make sure that Hamlet no longer came near you with his theatrical mousetraps and visions of the dead. If you keep both of those opposites in play, it makes your performance much more dynamic and gives you as an actor much more to work with.

And how does this ties into OSF’s The Heart of Robin Hood? That play is a good example of playing opposites in an entire production. On its surface, it’s a silly play. Almost Monty Python silly. Eduardo Placer’s Bishop of York called Eric Idle’s performance as Pontius Pilate in The Life of Bryan vividly to mind. But what made this play really good was the pervading rot of violence and injustice that the silliness was in constant conflict with. Playwright David Farr wrote a villain with no redeeming qualities: Prince John thinks nothing of rape, infanticide, or using religion to legitimize his misdeeds. Michael Elich sells the role by, once again playing opposites. He does all these awful things, but he does them with a sense of playfulness and glee that makes his character all the more disgusting, and thus the conflict in the play so much more dire.

So opposites. They’re a part of the craft that I never gave any thought to, but now that I do, I see how they can not only exponentially increase the quality of a single actor’s performance, but that of an entire production as well.

I really should try to remember who assigned me that book.

The Blacklist

Judging from the pilot, NBC’s new crime show The Blacklist has the potential to be a well-crafted thriller, but will contribute very little to the genre. I’ll start with the negatives first. I watched the pilot with my dad, and we could tell in the first five minutes what would happen in the last five minutes: the innocent child would be saved, the bad guy would die a dramatic death, and the criminal mastermind and gorgeous rookie would continue as tenuous team to episode two. We even predicted the twist that creator Jon Bokenkamp is probably saving for the later in the season: that cunning criminal mastermind Raymond “Red” Reddington (James Spader) is really the long-lost father of the beautiful and driven young FBI agent Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone). But we may not be 100 percent on target: the cliffhanger at the end of the pilot caught us both off-guard. 

What’s really striking, though, is the staging. And I am going to call it that even though this is TV because the way that episode director Joe Carnahan blocked it was very similar to how a stage director would set his characters to establish positions of dominance. Of particular note was the central position that Red occupied, such as kneeling on the seal in the center of the FBI foyer with the entire focus of the rest of the ensemble on him, or sitting in the board room centered once again by the FBI seal on the projector behind him as well as by the other characters in the scene. I also loved the staging of episode antagonist Ranko Zamani’s (Jamie Jackson) inevitable death.

Long story short, the writing and acting is compelling and entertaining, but doesn’t break in barriers or contribute anything new to the genre. Carnahan’s directing was intriguing in its use of theatrical techniques, but that seemed to be a one-off gig for him. What will define this show are entertaining formulas that have been tried and true since at least the early 90s with Silence of the Lambs. I think it’ll be a fun but forgettable show.

The Revenants

I’ve found love in Portland. In a basement. Oh, it’s not for me. It’s two other people  There’s a man and a woman. They have chemistry. Their undead spouses are chained to the wall.

The Reformers’ new production The Revenants is about love. There may be zombies inside, and there may be zombies outside, but the story is about the conflicted love that Gary (Chris Murray) and Karen (Christy Bigelow) have for each other and their spouses (Jennifer Elkington and Sean Doran). Murray and Bigelow are riveting. Not to say they’re perfect – some of their lines (on Thursday the 3^rd) sounded learned. But the majority of their performances stuck me to my seat, even with the zombified Elkington looming over me.

The horror genre’s easy to do campy, which sometimes works. And the Reformers could have taken that route and potentially still had an entertaining play. But Murray and Bigelow’s choices – made honestly from a place of love, loss and feeling lost – make the difference between entertaining and enchanting. They treat the play as serious drama, rather than a theatrical homage to a popular genre. Not to say there isn’t humor or gore – there are zombies chained to the wall, close enough to touch me in my aisle seat. A couple times I almost fell into the lap of the guy next to me. But the bulk of the humor comes from the Murray and Bigelow’s attempt to cope with their impossible situation. The rest comes from Caitlin Fisher-Draeger’s awesome effects and movement work with Elkington and Doran.

Long story short, the Reformers chose to tell a love story that takes place during a zombie apocalypse, instead of a zombie story with a love-interest in it. That choice, to ground the fantastic in reality, makes The Revenants an exciting play, and is helping make the Reformers one of my favorite theater troupes in Portland. 

My Introduction to "America's Next Top Model"

I watched America’s Next Top Model for the first time this week. I will never get that hour of my life back. It was one of the most superficial things I’ve ever seen. The overall structure was very internet-y: the cuts between shots gave it an epileptic pace, and the countdown format was like something you would see on Cracked.com (they were counting down the “top ten flirty moments” of their twentieth cycle). The overall theme was not fashion, but cattiness and superfluous drama. It’s appeal is not so much industry like TheSartorialist.com, but rather gossip like TMZ. The stereotyped characters – the flamboyant yet incisive gay, the manic pixie dream boy, the slightly mannish trans woman – also made the show thoughtless noise that stimulates the senses but deadens the mind. I would have had a more fulfilling evening looking at pictures in a magazine.

"Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." Pilot

And it’s out. The much-anticipated Joss Whedon project that gives us weekly doses of live-action Marvel adventure. And, I have to say, I’m underwhelmed. Pilots are not necessarily an indication of a good or bad season, but this one felt clichéd and uninspired. I came to it with high hopes – I’m a big fan of Whedon’s Firefly/Serenity and Much Ado About Nothing, and I can’t ever seem to get enough superhero action. The opening sequences were exciting. They combined a made-for-television superhero world like Alphas with the espionage panache of Covert Affairs. But as the episode progressed, the spy genre was dropped in favor of developing the superhero-y world. And that might have been a good choice, if Whedon had anything interesting or new to say about the genre. Instead, he siphons off The Avengers’ mythos in an attempt that feels like trying to channel that film’s success into a TV format. And it doesn’t work. The Avengers’ main appeal, to me at least, was the eye-candy. It had exciting fight sequences that spanned the front wall of a movie theater, not to mention gorgeous people in form-fitting costumes. But even nerd auteur Whedon can’t reproduce that very cinematic experience on TV. What I think he can do, based on his previous projects, is develop an interesting narrative arc. And when he finishes off-loading exposition and allows himself to create an artistic boundary between Agents and Avengers, I think that this could become a compelling new show.

Cymbeline

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, for as long as I can remember, has had hits and misses just like any other theater. Sometimes they even happen in the same show, and sometimes they’re distinct enough that they can be attributed to specific jobs within the production. Cymbeline is just such a show. 

Image from the Eureka Times-Standard

OSF has always attracted the cream of the crop in terms of actors. This cast is mostly superb, with stand-out performances by Dawn-Lyen Gardner as (the play’s real lead) Imogen, Daniel José Molina as the impetuously fatalistic Posthumus, Kenajuan Bentley as the ever-suave creep Iachimo, and Donovan Mitchell as the adorable little brother Arviragus aka Cadwal. These four actors ground Shakespeare’s ridiculously involved soap-opera of a plot with honest and often playful interactions with the convoluted world in which they find themselves.

Cymbeline loses its grounding in its direction. Director Bill Rauch and costume designer David C. Woolard chose to add “a few mythical creatures to populate a landscape in which miraculous surprise lies beyond every bend in the story” (from Rauch’s program note). The goat-men and pig-men and people with pointy ears confused an already confusing story. That’s not to say it was a bad choice – in fact, I feel it was a good choice used sloppily. Kate McConnell writes in OSF’s Illuminations: A Guide to the 2013 Plays about Shakespeare’s “green worlds”:

“This ‘green world’ (a term coined by literary critic Northrop Frye), separated from the rules and organization of urbanity, gives the characters space to transform (sometimes literally), fall in and out of love, and discover who they truly are. In Cymbeline, the wilds of Wales perform this function….For the characters who travel to this place, transformation and revelation await.”

Rauch could have used his mythological creatures to emphasize Wales as a place of transformation and lent clarity to the story. Instead, this choice read as superfluous at best, and at worst, confusing.

Rauch’s casting Howie Seago as the titular king was also ill-advised. Seago is deaf and communicates via ASL. The way this plays on stage is that he delivers his lines in ASL and another actor interprets for those of us not schooled enough to understand sign-language. The effect is that Cymbeline’s tempestuousity is scattered across the stage, diluting its power and weakening the impact of the play’s main power-broker. Not that Seago is a bad actor – in fact, from what I can see, he is very accomplished in his craft. It’s just that, unfortunately, his lack of hearing is very much a handicap when it comes to acting Shakespeare.

Cymbeline is a play in which Shakespeare revels in his accomplishments as a storyteller by creating a labyrinthine plot that ranges from the improbable to the confusing. With such a play, it’s the artistic team’s job to clarify and ground the plot. OSF’s actors for the most part are successful in this. Unfortunately, they receive no help from their director, whose choices add further layers to an already excessively layered play. 

From the Ground UP's "To Be"

Last night From the Ground UP, a new theater education non-profit in Portland, debuted their first show, To Be. A piece devised by twelve local high school students under the direction of Anna Crandall, Chantal DeGroat and Katherine Murphy Lewis, From the Ground UP seems to be providing an essential service in the personal development of these young people. 

As teenagers, they are in the process of finding their own independence and individual self-hood, all while trying to be part of a community. With that in mind, I was particularly interested in their use of archetypes to define themselves. Each of the twelve played a god of something like courage, comedy or expression by working towards embodying a trait prominent in their own personality. It seems like an important step in the process towards self-identifying. I was even more interested to learn in the talk-back that the directors had assigned the archetypes to the performers, but did so in such a way that the kids could identify with and embrace their characters. I’d like to learn more about the role that archetypes figure into notions of self-hood, but it seems like From the Ground UP facilitated an important step in the development of these teenagers’ development. 

Mike Daisey's "Journalism"

Ladies and gentlemen, Mike Daisey!

Last year I missed Mike Daisey’s The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs when it was playing at the Public. Being a storyteller myself, I was excited to see a master at work, but at the last moment I decided to skip the two hour train ride into Manhattan and instead work on my M.F.A. thesis, which was due in a month.

And then I lost track of him until a week ago when a friend posted on Facebook “Hey, who wants to go see Mike Daisey’s new show Journalism!” I practically leaped out of my chair, right arm thrust in the air with my left arm contorted over my head to support it and squealed “Me me me!”

Ladies and gentlemen, Waylon Lenk!

The next day I read an interview with Daisey in the  Willamette Week, from which I gleaned two important observations. First, he had been mired in scandal since it came out quite publicly that he had fabricated several events in his Agony/Ecstasy, a piece that had lit a fire under Apple’s belly concerning working conditions in a subcontractor’sChinese factories. Second, I observed that Daisey must have tremendous balls. He quite belligerently tried to focus the interview on how journalists (like the ones who had shamed him) are not objective, even as interviewer Rebecca Jacobson tried to strong-arm him into admitting that fabrication is bad. He got into a flame war in the comments section of a fairly blasé Portland Mercury press release about his new show, which seemed like it was going to stick it to those mean ol’ journalists.

But luck wasn’t on my side Tuesday evening, the night of Journalism’s premiere. I got lost twice on my way to the theater, and arrived late. I snuck into the balcony, and looked down upon Daisey sitting behind a wooden table talking about the Willamette Week interview, trying to set the record straight. It was a bad sign. Or rather two bad signs. First, sitting behind a table for the whole show is a terrible staging choice, especially when that show is based in direct address. It establishes a barrier between you and the audience. Second, it felt lazy, like his battle cry against the journalists who raked him over the coals was written the week before.

That sense of laziness pervaded the entire dramaturgy of the piece. Besides hiding behind a table, Daisey allowed himself to ramble through subjects related to and not related to the field of journalism. I was disappointed. Here’s one of the biggest names in American storytelling with an incredible opportunity to use theater to deconstruct a field and viewpoint that has humiliated him, and all he can bring himself to is rant and ramble. But moments of honesty did manage to slip through, like sunlight through the clouds of insecurity. The most compelling moments in the show were when he allowed himself to show the audience his hurt. But those moments were few and far between. In general, he succumbed to the bravado of “I don’t give a shit what you think of me,” which of course means “I desperately give a shit.” Unfortunately I don’t. I've seen my fair share of storytelling, but I've never seen something this lazy and insincere. I had such high hopes, and I was willing to forgive anything as long as he committed to a choice. But he couldn't seem to decide between battle cry and confession. The result of his indecision was just one big hot mess.

There is a Place in the Throat that Has No Voice 8:0:8

In his new science fiction/fantasy novel, There is a Place in the Throat that Has No Voice 8:0:8, Jacob Young creates a compelling world, but struggles with giving his characters depth. As such, 8:0:8 starts slow and is hard to get into, but once Young settles upon a protagonist, it becomes a real page turner. Following the Compass family through a series of apocalypses, 8:0:8 (and the “puppet” show that Young performed at his book reading at Backspace in Portland) shows a fascination with reaching the spiritual through science. In this way he blends sci-fi and fantasy: the book begins with a Kunstmärchen before becoming sci-fi with (SPOILER ALERT) gladiator robots that run amuck and destroy the world. From there the two genres blend in ways that give the story a fascinating unpredictability that makes up for Young’s thin grasp on character. The mystery of the new species born of science and destruction was enough to keep me plowing through till the end. However, Young doesn’t spend enough time with his first three protagonists to flesh them out and explore what makes them tick beyond telling us point-blank: “Jackal doesn’t like books” or “Nell is a nature writer.” When he does settle upon a protagonist, Young ignores his motivations and the reasons behind the decisions he makes in the interest of fleshing out the world of the story. The world works, but I would like Young to take as much an interest in his characters as he does in his exploration of how spirituality can manifest in our world through science and destruction.

The Big Oh!

Who knew choral music could be sexy? I sure didn’t, and I’m not entirely sure that the Resonance Ensemble, who explores sexuality in classical choral music with their current program The Big Oh!, are convinced that it can be.

They began the evening with an arrangement juxtaposing choral music with 20^th century pop songs, and their third number was Yngve Gamlin’s The Paper Bag Cantata was a heavy handed demonstration of finger-banging and premature ejaculation. By not embracing classical music’s strength in subtlety, the Ensemble belied a sense of inadequacy in their ability to communicate sexuality. While this tendency towards the literal and demonstrative pervaded the program, moments of passion and sensuality did manage to rise to the surface.

A good part of the first half of the evening was devoted to nineteenth century climactic musical structure and how it mimics the male sexual experience. At first it was exciting, but when I realized that’s all there was to it – the music swelled in intensity only to fall off into release, I didn’t need to hear any more. Not that the music itself wasn’t beautiful, but calling my attention to one specific element limited my experience.

After intermission, the program was better for me. Natalie Gunn and Maria Karlin’s duet from Léo Delibes Lakmé felt like sitting in a jasmine scented garden enjoying a lover’s body – never mind that’s what the words said, that’s what the music felt like. Artistic Director Katherine FitzGibbon could stand to learn from this. Sexy doesn’t come from saying “this is sexy” or “these two notes grind together” or from singers making cutesy faces of what they thing sexy looks like. No, sexy is a feeling, and it’s a feeling that works on everyone differently. And that, again may be a weakness of the program. Since a major strength of classical music is its subtlety and its power of suggestion, and everyone finds different things to be sexy, all this program could aspire to be is a selection of music that FitzGibbon finds sexy. Not to say that I couldn’t feel a sense of elation surrounded by the rich harmonies of Edwin London’s Bach Again or appreciate the passionate abandon of Orff’s Carmina Burana, but those were only moments that worked. Unfortunately, the evening as a whole doesn’t.

But if you’re feeling experimental, The Big Oh! is playing again tonight at The Alberta Rose Theatre at 7:00.

The Eternally Present Past

For two nights (last night and tonight) Melanya Helene and Marc Otto are performing their therapeutic play The Eternally Present Past at The Brooklyn Bay on SE Franklin.

This has to be the best play I've seen since I returned to Portland this winter. Most of the plays I've seen, while fun, are ultimately forgettable. They may scratch the surface of profundity, but shy away from something that plumbs the core of the audience’s being in favor of pop culture homage. Helene and Otto are performance-psychologists who use performance to help people heal in the way they relate to others. Eternally Present Past is one step away from a workshop where the participants explore their own explicit and implicit memories. They began evening by inviting us to access a memory of feeling connected and to take note of how that memory effected our bodies. This helped me to reflect on myself and my own memories and state of being throughout the performance, trying to find parallels between myself and the stories they demonstrated on stage with language, music and movement. In fact, my only criticism is that they didn't go far enough in including the audience in their performance. 

People's Republic of Portland

Last night I watched a comedian from a major American metropolis tell amusing anecdotes about our Cascadian paradise. Was I sucking back PBR with my Umpqua ice-cream in a dimly-lit room going on a Portlandia marathon? Of course not! Everyone who’s anyone knows to pair an Old Rasputin with dairy desserts. And I wasn’t watching Portlandia anyways. I put on my second favorite black tie and headed downtown to Lauren Weedman’s People’s Republic of Portland at Portland Center Stage. And no, it wasn’t just a theatrical staging of Fred and Carrie’s TV hit. Those New Yorkers go for sketch comedy, but L.A. Lauren’s show is stand-up/storytelling. And that gal can spin a yarn! She regaled us with her misadventures visiting Portland for the first time. A seasoned solo performer, she kept the audience entranced with her vivid depictions Portland types that we all know and love, or at least know and tolerate. Whereas Fred and Carrie have the luxury of costumes and actual locations, Lauren didn’t need any of those. For the most part, in fact, whenever she tried to stray away from telling the story with just her voice and body and tried to bring in lights and music, the choice felt forced. It disrupted the flow of her narrative and didn’t contribute anything. But the standing ovation she got at the end excuses any misguided theatricality. All told, People’s Republic panders to Portandian egos in the same way as the TV show: we love it when representatives from our big city sisters New York and L.A. come here and tell us how quirky and awesome we are.

Beer McMennamin’s Ruby Ale. It’s a fun Portland beer, and People’s Republic is a fun Portland play.

Tomorrow

Yesterday I went to Tomorrow. But I didn’t drive a DeLorean. No, my Ford Taurus and I went to Action/Adventure’s new play, where we were informed before the show started that we would be seeing Tomorrow today. I might go back and see it later, maybe next week, but I don’t think it will be finished (bet you thought I was going to make the “tomorrow” pun again, didn’t you? No, I know when to stop.) It wasn’t yesterday, that’s for sure. 

Action/Adventure structured their play like the Zager & Evans standard “In the Year 2525” by creating a trope where they would cite a pop culture reference from each decade, 60s through 90s, envisioning the future, and then explore other stories about what the future might be like. However, the drama in Zager & Evans’ story comes from humanity’s increasing depravity in each century. Tomorrow lacks such a build. However, they do touch upon and develop the theme of cultural pessimism about the future. At least, I think they did, but this could just be a narrative that I'm imposing: Tomorrow lacks a clear focus and instead draws together a potpourri of stories, dance and song without anything more precise than “the future” to hold it all together. But this is what I think they were driving at:

Our visions of the future are based in our visions of the past and present. They need to be: the future is unknown, so all we have to go on is what is already familiar. Action/Adventure develops this by citing (past) cultural edifices looking at the future: Zager & Evans, Mad Max, Terminator, Ray Bradbury. But these stories all describe a future where humans have lost control and the only law is violence. When you put two and two together, this shows us that, at least since the 60s, our vision of our past and present is also one in which humanity has no control over its own fate and in the absence of that control are reverting to our default position of rampant violence. The word “apocalypse,” originally the “revelation” to St. John about God’s coming kingdomon earth, now indicates hell on earth. Even positive futures are seen with little hope: “utopia” literally isn’t any place. In fact, the most compelling moment in Tomorrow was when the ensemble juxtaposed “the sun will come out tomorrow” with global warming.

But, just like Action/Adventure started in a good direction with the Zager & Evans structure but didn’t follow through, they hampered the impact of our culture pessimism by preaching (like in church) optimism. While I could have forgiven the structural corruption brought on by a light focus on that pessimism, the force optimism took me out of it. Because of that, I just didn’t buy the story they were telling. The promise without delivery makes this play feel unfinished.

And what beer goes best with Tomorrow?

Well, this one’s a little harder. The easy answer would be Lagunita’s Pale Ale, since that’s what they were selling and that’s what I drank. But what self-respecting dramaturg takes the easy route and shirks research? Not this one, that’s for sure. So, just like Action/Adventure goes back in time for their source material and finds hardly anything but devastation and hopelessness yet inexplicably tries to end on a high note, I’m going go back to vintage beer advertisements and recommend that you grab a couple buds and head on down to 1050 SE Clinton next weekend. Tomorrow is problematic but not without promise. Where there's life, there's hope Bud.

http://vintage-ads.dreamwidth.org/tag/budweiser

The Possessions of La Boîte

This weekend The Reformers open their flagship piece, The Possessions of La Boîte at Zoomtopia on SE Belmont. The only thing I knew about the piece when I parked down the street on a rainy Friday night is what I’d read on The Reformers’ website:

“The Possessions of la boîte is an ensemble devised work taken from actual family letters and group improvisation.”

If that description makes you think of something that would be performed off-off-Broadway by the New York Neo-Futurists or at the Incubator Arts Project then you are in the same boat I was. And you would be just as wrong. Possessions is less a play than it is an orchestral piece, where actors replace the violins, Richard E. Moore’s soundscapes stand the cellos, and the timpani is the click click click of a typewriter.

Conceived by Charmian Creagle and then created by an ensemble of defunkt Theatre alum, Possessions uses Creagle’s old family letters to create a theatrical poem. Everything is subsumed by the mellow, sleepy rhythm of cycling repetitions of tropes from the source material. This rhythm is augmented by the Moore’s tonal moodscape and the gray costumes designed by Kimberly Smay. These legato elements are punctuated by an staccato that threatens to intrude into the meditative qualities of the piece, only to once again be repressed by their twilight grays. They begin small: a sneeze, the snap of a sheet, the rattle of a typewriter. By the end, they have grown into Kubrickian projections by Ben Purdy and Carrie Solomon: rapid-fire montages of found video accompanied by a piercing industrial music. But even these more dramatic intrusions lack the potency to speed or permanently alter the driving legato.

These rhythmic tension provide a kind of drama, but not the kind I was expecting. Possessions works well as a piece of classical music, and I feel that if I’d gone expecting Dvorak instead of Neo-Futurism, I would have gotten a lot more out of the experience.

The Possessions of La Boîte plays Fridays through Sundays at 810 SE Belmont at 8PM. The price is $15.

And, just for fun, let’s try pairing plays with beer:

Black Butte Porter is the perfect beer for Possessions. The rich dark flavor interrupted but not overwhelmed by the prominent hops matches The Reformers’ legatos and staccatos.

Whipped Cream - Oh Fuck!

As part of Portland’s Fertile Ground Festival this year, I got to see a double-billing of two new plays – Kate Horn’s Whipped Cream and Freudian Dreams and Sam Dinkowitz and Chris Beatty’s Oh Fuck! Oh Shit! It’s Love! The Musical at Hipbone Studio on Burnside. A grossly uneven pairing, it did illustrate two points my friend Amy Jensen made on her blog: double bills like this are really only done in festivals, and “invites the audience to be curious and interested what has been put together.” And really, Fertile Ground’s curators did a nice job pairing these two plays – they both entail explorations of relationships amongst the 20s and 30s crowd. Oh Fuck!  provided a poignantly funny journey through one couple’s relationship arch, beautifully executed by a strong cast. Whipped Cream, on the other hand, didn’t.

Whipped Cream and Freudian Dreams

Have you ever sat in a coffee shop and pretended to work on your novel about a well-dressed Northwesterner who solves vampire and werewolf related crimes with his Apple computer and six-pack of PBR, but really you were watching and judging the other café patrons and feeling secretly superior?

PBR - the hipster's spinach.

Kate Horn sure has (except for the novel plot – that’s my idea), and, like a modern day Sigmund Freud or Jane Goodall, she’s communicated her findings to us in dramatic form (using Freud and Goodall as characters, no less). The result reads like a thought popped into her head one day at the café and she promptly wrote a play about it, featuring an analysis by Freud of the way boys flirt with baristas. If that seems like a limited and contrived idea for a play, that’s because it is. It was cute for the first five minutes, but by then I was used to the gimmick and bored. Even when Horn tried to spice things up by bringing Goodall on stage to analyze the characters, it was all still the same schtick, just with a different vocabulary.

But it would be unfair to say that Whipped Cream only had one level, or that Horn can only do one thing. During the first nine minutes of the ten minute play, the psychoanalyst was the only one who broke the fourth wall, and he did it gently, always in the analytic third person, never addressing the audience directly. But Horn finished her play, quite jarringly, by having her baristas directly address the audience and telling us that we could take our chuckles and $12 tickets and shove them up our voyeuristic asses.

Oh Fuck! Oh Shit! It’s Love! The Musical

A product of Milepost 5 in the heart of Portland’s sordid Jade District, Oh Fuck! seems to think itself alarmingly randy. So I went expecting dildos and Vaseline, and instead got roses, doves and a charmingly poignant yet funny story of one couple’s journey in and out of love.

Sorry. None of these.

I got to see an earlier incarnation of Oh Fuck! at Milepost 5 this fall, which was only their key “falling in love” scene as part of a variety show of other work coming out of their artists’ commune. So it was fun for me to get to see a full-length development of the piece.

This incarnation was just a reading, so it was pretty rough around the edges. It also started slow. Dinkowitz seems to think he needs a prologue with the two main characters, Tim and Molly (Phillip J. Berns and Jessica Anselmo), writing in their diaries about how they feel about their upcoming first date. What Dinkowitz doesn’t realize is that this show absolutely rides on the chemistry between the performers. Tim and Molly’s relationship arch is adorable and rings true in a way that makes me joyful of the fun that I’ve had falling in love, and sad about the, well, sadness that I’ve had falling out of it. This magic isn’t limited to Berns and Anselmo’s chemistry together. The rest of the cast and pit are equally responsible for this show’s success. Juliana Wheeler and Orion Bradshaw are side-splitters as the main couple’s foils. Wheeler plays the sad sad ditzy cokehead Ashleigh, and Bradshaw is endearingly aggravating as the meathead Brad. Their interactions with each other, as well as with Berns and Anselmo, kept the audience hunched forward in laughter. But it wasn’t cheap laughs, like what I felt Horn was going for. Instead the humor came from the very real situations and the actors’ absolute investment in them, just as it should. The actors’ chemistry and the urgency of the story they found themselves in actually overflowed the stage, incorporating the musicians into their struggle to negotiate the rocky shores of love.

Happy Valentine's Day everybody!

Oh, it was a musical by the way. While most of Chris Beatty’s songs were still too rough to really tell anything about, I was impressed by the “Pre-Coitus Song” with its fusion of hip-hop and slow love ballad, and with the “Break-Up Song,” with its angsty minor tonality.

So, double bills. Just like Amy says, their still done but usually only in the festival setting. But what Amy doesn’t say is that an uneven bill like Whipped Cream and Freudian Dreams – Oh Fuck! Oh Shit! It’s Love! The Musical can either be remarkably unfair to the weaker piece (if Whipped Cream had gone second) or make up for a subpar and mean-spirited first piece with a truly inspired and moving second piece (like they did – good call Fertile Ground curators!)