Americana Passé

How can we open galleries up to people of color to make them more than simply white man's land? Not by focusing on Caucasian nostalgia, like Royal Nebeker does at his ongoing exhibit at the Schneider Museum of Art at Southern Oregon University.

America's demographics are changing. We are increasingly becoming a brown nation, but we wouldn't know that by going to look at the art at Schneider. If we want our cultural resources to represent our whole community, then we need to exhibit work that doesn't present such a narrow view of American culture.

Nebeker is a neo-Expressionist who utilizes collage in nearly all of his work by juxtaposing text with his images. His painting is rich in texture, and vibrant in color from the sylvan blues of The Blue Bike to the oppressive shadow of Hands of Healing to the lonely maroon of Til Østbon. Twilight, in fact, is a favorite theme. It infuses everything in The Blue Bike and Til Østbon, and it approaches just off frame in Marbles at Twilight. Americana also weaves throughout his oeuvre. It's passive in his 1971 piece Mrs. Senior and Fern, but dances with twilight and violence in The Blue Bike, Marbles at Twilight and War Cry. The latter juxtaposes silhouettes of Indians and Arabs with a placard for Gene Autry's The Cowboy and the Indians which reads "war whoops ring.. war paths flame."

His Americana demonstrate exhibits nostalgia for a time of innocence, untouched by the brutality of racism and xenophobia. It negates the American-ness of experiences that have always been fraught by one race's ongoing oppression of the others. It's a comfortable fit for a venue as rooted in white privilege as an art gallery. It's a great fit for the America of the 1950s, but not for the America of 2014.

Cultural resources ought to be for everybody in the community, not just the white and/or privileged. To exist for the whole community, they need to exhibit work by and about more than just the white and/or privileged.

Considering the Canon: The Lion King

For the past 77 years, American kids have grown up watching Disney movies, having their worldviews shaped by the cartoon narratives. This is why the old "damsel in distress" trope has received its fair share of deserved criticism. The Lion King demonstrates this chauvinistic weakness, although perhaps less ostentatiously than Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or Sleeping Beauty.

Like those traditional princess movies, though, Lion King devalues female agency. Every change, besides one, that occurs in this story is the result of male action. The one exception is when Nala encourages Simba to return home. This barely counts, though, since what she's doing is getting a man to come fix things.

Irene Mecchi, Jonathan Roberts and Linda Woolverton's iconic story paints a picture of a simple moral dichotomy in which good is represented by responsibility to one's community and connection to one's ancestors, and evil by greed and familial estrangement. Directors Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff emphasize the point by drawing the Cain figure Scar as the leader of a Nazi rally in a hellish elephant graveyard, and the Abel figure Mufasa as a divine presence at the edge of the savannah. These two males in relationship to protagonist Simba, constitute the core of the plot.

For American boys and girls who became cognizant of stories in the early 90s, The Lion King was universal fare. Why shouldn't it have been? It taught us to value our families and communities, and to respect our ancestors. By phrasing the narrative so entirely in masculine terms, however, The Lion King also taught us that only males had the agency to change things for good or ill in the world. The movie's central crisis is created by one male, and solved by another male, while females are relegated to the role of dependent deuteragonists. The Lion King teaches us family values that disempower an entire gender.

It is unfortunate that such a beloved classic reflects such chauvinism on the part of American society. Moving forward, we need to work to create a canon that empowers all members of our society equally.

Five Best Friends

Friendship is the most powerful force in the galaxy.

That's the raison d'être of Disney's Guardians of the Galaxy. Sure, it's a movie about space pirates and gun-toting raccoons, and it has an obligatory supervillain, but the real story is about alienation and friendship.

After a bleak and all-to-everyday prologue, young Peter Quill (Wyatt Oleff) is abducted by aliens. Flash-forward 20 odd years, and grown Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) is an intrepid space thief stealing an Orb that contains one of the Marvel's all-powerful substances that can destroy the universe. Little does he know that Kree terrorist/revolutionary Ronan (Lee Pace) and creepily eccentric Collector (Benicio Del Toro) have both sent orphan assassin Gamora (Zoe Saldana) after the Orb. After Quill eludes Ronan's henchmen, the brutal warlord puts an astronomical price on his head. Rocket (Bradley Cooper), a genetic experiment gone awry, and his side-kick ent Groot (Vin Diesel) get into a fight with Gamora over Quill in a crowded city center, and the four of them find themselves in a maximum security prison where they meet Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista), a muscle-bound ward of the Xandarian state who has a vendetta against Ronan for the death of his family. After a relatively easy jail break, the ragtag quintet find themselves the only ones able to protect the galaxy from Ronan and the Orb.

Guardians of the Galaxy succeeds by telling an uplifting, universal story about the power of friendship. Director James Gunn accomplishes this by establishing that the real obstacle is not the run-of-the-mill supervillain Ronan, but instead the protagonists' social alienation. Quill is the only "Terran" in this galaxy. Gamora is an orphan raised in a loveless and exploitive family like an extraterrestrial Oliver Twist. Rocket "didn't ask to get made," and masks his misery with a vicious sense of humor. His only real tenderness is reserved for Groot. The look in the raccoon's eyes when he realizes that he might lose his best friend is an coup of animation. The look in Drax's eyes when Ronan laughs him off is a coup of acting. Since his family's death, Drax's only purpose has been to fight and kill the man he holds responsible. Instead of taking the macho route, Bautista and Gunn let us see Drax's vulnerability. It's the quintet's shared social alienation that brings them together, as Quill makes explicit: "We're all losers. We've all lost something." Only by establishing bonds of friendship can the Guardians overcome either the intangible or tangible antagonists. The final showdown on Xandar is weak by action movie standards, but that doesn't matter. It's not a story about action and violence. It's a story about friendship. It's the kind of story that withstands the test of time. This critic expects audiences to return to over and over again.

Disney trades in uplifting, accessible stories, and Guardians is no exception. Sure, good Disney movies have brilliant animation and wacky characters, but so do many others that have not become cultural landmarks. Disney movies, by and large, succeed so well because they have heart. Guardians of the Galaxy, from story to acting to design, has as much heart as the best of them.

 

 

Terpening-Romeo's Vanity Project

The proliferation of small theater companies in Portland is creating fertile ground for vanity projects like Anon It Moves and String House's current production of Hamlet.

Driving this production is early career director and Anon It Moves co-founder Erica Terpening-Romeo's desire to play Hamlet and not a lot else. This might be excusable if Terpening-Romeo had the chops for Shakespeare's iconic character, but, more's the woe, she hasn't.

This Hamlet opens with a dumb-show presentation of a loving family, until the King disappears leaving his crown floating mid-air. The cast continues to explore the relationships established in this scene through the duration of the play: Hamlet and Ophelia's (Crystal Ann Muñoz) decaying love, Hamlet's sacrificial relationship with her dead father (played by a masked chorus), and her fraught relationship with her mother (Ethelyn Friend) and uncle/step-father (Jamie Peck). Director Elizabeth Watt elevates Ophelia's importance by staging a relationship between her and her spectral father (Chris Porter), and of course her importance to Laertes (Heath Hyun Houghton) is given in the text.

These relationships constitute the framework for Watt's directorial premises: "before the murderous act that began an irreversible unraveling, this was a love-filled world." Watt's program note continues, "The project was seeded with Erica [Terpening-Romeo]'s image of a strong female Hamlet." This could be a great idea to call attention to the patriarchal world out of which Shakespeare's canon springs, or about the gender neutrality of emotional malaise, or any number of intriguing things. It might even work as a platform for a great actor, although we just saw that formula crash and burn with Portland Shakespeare Project's Tempest. Unfortunately, Terpening-Romeo's not a strong enough actor to carry this particularly challenging play in that even more challenging role. She seems to be out of her depth and played a superficial Hamlet, breathy and fast. She got lost in the pedigree of the role, and, except for one brilliantly genuine moment in the fifth act, bombed. Since her desire for the role dominated everything and everybody else, there was hardly an opportunity for any one else's contributions to redeem the play.

It's to be expected, however, that we will be getting uninteresting vanity projects like this one in Portland's ballooning fringe theater scene. Small groups of friends banding together and performing for their friends create the perfect condition for work done for the artists not the audience or community. Why would anybody else be interested in seeing an early-career director play Hamlet just because she can?

Music for a Thinking Public

When was the last time you listened to challenging, thought-provoking music in a public space? On the radio dial, only classical and jazz stations elevate the art form above mesmerizing lyricism. On the street you might meet the occasional virtuoso busker, but that's if you're lucky.

Or, you might go to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Green Show, where Ghosts & Strings are playing a few gigs this season. "Ghosts & Strings" is the nome de musique of David Molina, joined for the Green Show by Idris Ackamoor. Molina is a sound designer whose music is informed by his interdisciplinary work in theater, film and installation art. Ackamoor is a jazz man. The complicated interaction of their two musical practices forces the public to listen, and to think about what we're listening to. 

The Green Show happens on a small stage between OSF's three theaters, and acts play to an audience seated on the lawn, or standing on the brick walkways to the Elizabethan and Bowmer theaters. At least, they usually do. Ghosts & Strings use the whole space - entering and exiting through the middle of the lawn, Ackamoor walking between audience members blowing his sax. The pair play an eclectic mix of instruments: Molina creates digital beats, plays a banjo with a bow, strums rock and classical riffs on the guitar, and picks the bow back up to play the cello. Ackamoor wails on his sax, and on his Native flute, and plucks a harp, and tap dances with a washboard on his chest and a harmonica on his lips.

The core of the music, though is the jazz: Molina's digital beats, and Ackamoor improvising melodies over the top. The rest of Ghosts & Strings' show distracted from that core. That sounds like a bad thing, but it isn't necessarily. Jazz is a cerebral music: unlike genres that lull the audience into a viscerally thoughtless haze with their lyrical narratives, audiences have to really pay attention to jazz to enjoy it. That goes doubly for Ghosts & Strings' jazz, where we have to listen to the whole spectrum of what they're playing, identify the core of their music, and then listen through everything else to that core. And "we", in this case, means "we the public." The Green Show is free, easily accessible and open to everyone.

As a non-narrative art form, instrumental jazz engages us in a more thought provoking way than the narrative, lyrical music that we are usually exposed to in public spaces. In Oregon, we have very few organizations that promote that deeper appreciate for music by providing instrumental jazz for free to the public. One of those is the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Of course, it's up to the public to take advantage of the resources that are freely available to us, whether that means tuning into the jazz station on 89.1FM if you're in Portland, or coming to see and listen to Ghosts and Strings next time they play at the Green Show on October 12th if you're in the Rogue Valley.

Humor of "Horrors"

Ashman and Menken created their iteration of Little Shop of Horrors during a moment of cultural pessimism. It's current popularity belies a certain amount of anxiety in our modern society.

Howard Ashman and Alan Menken created their musical adaptation of the 1960 horror comedy during the beginning of the Reagan administration, when the former Hollywood B movie actor was ramping up the arms race with his "Star Wars" program and cutting funding to public goods like art and education. This poppy musical about the extinction of the human race is currently playing in two TCG member theaters (the Bristol Riverside Theatre in Pennsylvania and A.C.T. in Seattle), and at least one university theater (Southern Oregon).

Loveable loser Seymour Krelbourn (played by Andrew McNath at Bristol, Joshua Carter at A.C.T. and Ethan Niven at Southern Oregon) works at a flower shop whose cash flow is drying up. He's in love with the beautiful Audrey (Laura Giknis at Bristol, Jessica Skerritt at A.C.T. and Alyssa Birrer at Southern Oregon), who's in an abusive relationship with a sadistic dentist (Danna Vaccaro - Bristol, David Anthony Lewis - A.C.T., Cameron Gray - SOU). Seymour's luck turns around when he discovers a mysterious flytrap (voiced by Carl Clemons Drake and puppeteered by Nate Golden at Bristol, by Ekello Harrid, Jr. and Eric Estebb at A.C.T., and Karen Fox and Michael Hays at SOU). People flock into the flower shop to see the curiosity, unaware that Seymour is keeping it alive by feeding it his own blood. As the flytrap Seymour realizes he doesn't have enough blood to keep her alive. And thus he sets out on a path of serial killing in exchange for fame, fortune and the girl of his dreams.

 

When Little Shop of Horrors premiered off-Broadway in 1982, our country was facing the possibility of another World War, except this time with more nuclear weapons. Reagan's emphasis on military build-up only exacerbated anxieties. Between the two of them, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had enough fire power, anecdotally, to obliterate human life several times over. Little Shop's humor comes from a place of powerlessness: if we can't stop human extinction, we might as well make a joke about it. While he was moving money into defense, Reagan was taking money from the arts. If arts were to succeed, they would have to adapt to the capitalist model that the nation was pushing them into. Hence, Little Shop of Horrors needed to be a poppy musical with a laugh a minute and songs the audience would hum in the lobby. Its continued popularity is a statement on our national mood. All the defense and public safety infrastructure we've accumulated couldn't stop the 9-11 attacks, or the Boston Marathon bombing. We can't even stop non-political violence like the Isla Vista killings. And even if we don't die in some awful instance of mass violence that all our defense spending apparently can't protect us from, how's our quality of life? The students at and in SOU's Little Shop of Horrors will earn their bachelors hopelessly in debt, and then they'll have thin opportunities to get the kind of employment that will dig them out of that debt. For all it's frolicking, Little Shop of Horrors opines that, if the earth is going to hell with all of us on it anyways, then we might as well just sing.

The Little Shop of Horror's perennial popularity tells us something about our relationship with the 80s, specifically, that we're not a whole lot happier or more secure than we were then. As such, it's an enduring indictment of Reagan's presidency. Sure, he thought he was helping the country by building up our defense infrastructure and pushing his brand of capitalist ideology on us, but look where we are now. If all theater's political, and every artistic choice is a social statement, then surely Little Shop of Horrors is one of the most nihilistically leftist plays there is. Bristol, A.C.T. and SOU's choice of Little Shop belies an unhappy acquiescence to unpredictable violence and the economic blight of neo-liberalism.

The Miracle of Theater

www.milagro.org

If you want ethnic authenticity, turn off the radio. Instead, go to the theater and you'll see in-depth yet entertaining discussions of the complicated American ethnic landscape in plays like Enrique Urueta's Learn to Be Latina.

Currently playing at Milagro Teatro under the direction of Antonio Sonera and starring Olga Sanchez and Nicole Accuardi, Learn to Be Latina is a satirical take on the pop music industry's treatment of ethnicity as part and parcel of their corporate package. It's a good example of how, in the family of entertainment genres, theater's the only place you can get this kind of authenticity.

Hanan (Accuardi) is a Lebanese-American singer with dreams of stardom interviewing for a trio of robotic auditors (Orion Bradshaw, Kelly Godell and Matthew Kerrigan). They love her voice, and they love her body, but she's just a little too ethnic in a - how do they put it? - "shawarma-eating, suicide-bomber kind of way." Hanan's about to walk out the door in righteous indignation when the auditors' boss, the Irish-accented Mary O'Malley (Sanchez) makes her an offer she can't refuse: learn to be "Latiner" and you can be a star. Hanan's Faustian bargain just gets worse and worse as her sense of identity becomes fragmented by the parts she has to play. She's Lebanese-American, but she's pretending to be from Buenos Aires. She's discovering that she's gay, but she "needs to be impaled on star cock by Saturday" if she's going to retain her credibility as a Latina pop star. After all, "Good Latinas don't eat cunt."

Those lines are meant to be rude and unappealing. Urueta alienates us from the characters representing the recording industry by putting abhorrent language in their mouths. Sonera accentuates this effect by giving them cartoonish physicality, most notably the auditors' mechanical movement in the opening scene. The satire demonstrates the ways in which popular music harms us by oversimplifying our ethnic identities. The truth is more nuanced than you hear about on the radio.

Learn to Be Latina is not alone in discussing the complicated reality of ethnicity in America, but theater might be. Playwrights today are writing about their ethnicity in ways that defy stereotypes. And they're getting noticed: Quiara Alegría Hudes won a Pulitzer for Water by the Spoonful. Eliza Bent published a five-page interview with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins in the latest issue of American Theatre about his plays like N(E)IG(H)G(BO)ERS. Stories with recognition in the theater community like these are not being told by theater's rich siblings, cinema/TV and pop music. Those media are notorious for their heavy-handed use of stereotypes. Hipster headdresses at Coachella and George Lucas' anti-Semitic aliens make theater a refreshing venue where we can talk honestly and within a supportive environment about race and ethnicity in America.

So if you struggle with issues of ethnicity, or are simply curious about them, turn off the radio and get to the theater. In spite of the Urueta's auditor's quip that "Whites aren't anything, except for Italians, because Italians are wops and wops aren't white," we're all of us something. And all of those somethings are living in closer proximity than perhaps any other time in America's history. If we want to have any kind of chance living well together, then we need stories like Learn to Be Latina.