"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.