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.