Okay, a play commissioned by NIH and performed before an auditorium of scientists doesn't set one's aesthetic expectations very high, but "From Orchids to Octopi: An Evolutionary Love Story" was inspired.
Performed at my beloved, beleaguered Art Deco landmark, The Bethesda Theatre (whose official Web site is apparently down right now), the play is in the late stages of early development (evolution!) before moving on to Boston. I didn't stay for the post-play discussion, though I probably could have benefited from it. I got most of the science content of the play, but not all. (But hey, I noticed I was the only one who laughed at the one line from "The Wizard of Oz" during one of the dream sequences - "People come and go so quickly here....")
Since the play was commissioned to celebrate the bicentennial (last year) of the birth of Charles Darwin, it's logical to include Darwin as a character in the play. What we see are two couples - Charles and Emma Darwin - and their modern parallel, the twenty-first-century Emma and Charlie, illustrating the evolution of relationships and love into a society of career conflicts and the demands and fears of bringing a new baby into the world.
21C Emma (played by Kortney Adams) is a painter commissioned to paint a mural honoring Darwin, so she throws herself into researching Darwinian theory and Darwin's life. Her impulse is first to find a design principle, but she is frustrated and confused by her dreams of the carnival freak-show that shows life and change as a game of chance.
Domestic scenes with the nineteenth-century Darwins (Wesley Savick and Debra Wise) entertwine and echo with those of 21C Charlie (Tom O'Keefe), an entrepreneurial chef, and wife Emma. There are equal parts tension and tenderness, and a surprisingly sweet treatment of the question, Is love an evolutionary imperative for survival because of the helplessness of the human infant?
The dialogue is smart not just in the science content, but in its playfulness. Stand-out for me was O'Keefe's depiction of the nasty, beligerent tuberculosis, an ever-evolving supermicrobe who demanded to be included in the mural tribute to evolution. (It is the vile TB bug who takes the life of 19C Darwins' young daughter Annie, played fetchingly by Kira McElhiney.)
The ideas bound across disciplines - not just the sciences, but also language and the arts, incorporating even what I will generously call "dance," though it is more accurately stage movement (the lithe and lovely Adams emulating the first species to grow a neck and stretch itself out to a form that is adaptable to new environments).
The set pieces comprised seven tall, multi-paneled columns that the actors switched around to create parlors, doctors' offices, freak-show attractions, scientific displays, and - evolving throughout the play - the beautiful mural of which Darwin himself becomes the centerpiece, integrated into the Tree of Life.
In the end, it is neither design nor chance that defines us, but inspiration.
Other Credits
Playwright: Melinda Lopez
Director: Diego Arciniegas
Set/Puppet Designer: David Fichter (Puppets? Didn't I mention the giraffe?!)
For more information about "From Orchids to Octopi: An Evolutionary Love Story," visit http://www.undergroundrailwaytheater.org/ or Central Square Theater.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Asher Lev, "Observant Jew"
Back from seeing the dramatization of Chaim Potok's novel, My Name Is Asher Lev, at the Round House Theatre in Bethesda. [N.B.: spoiler alert]
Round House's productions this season have touched a great deal on artists, the meaning of art, and the role that art and artists play in our lives. Just as in Permanent Collection, their previous production, "Asher Lev" deals with conflicting ideas about art.
"Asher" is the epitome of artistic and personal questioning. What does it mean to declare "My name is..." and to whom are you declaring it? We come to question who we are as we look in the mirror to study our own images, and we wonder what it is that we can express to the world through our own perceptions of ourselves--and the world.
Asher (played by Alexander Strain) stands between two worlds; as an "observant Jew" he must honor his heritage, his mysterious but palpable ancestors, as well as his parents and their ethic of devotion and duty to their people. But as an observant artist, he must reach beyond that experience to find his own truth. That Asher begins to explore the sensibilities and imagery of the Other--particularly the image of crucifixions pervading Christian art--horrifies and offends his parents just as much as his drawings of nudes do.
In one scene between Asher and his father (played by Adam Heller), Asher tries to explain the difference between "naked girls" and "nudes." The discussion pulls up short of comic absurdity, just at the point where Asher's father, hailing his own master's degree in political science, matches Asher intellectually: the son accuses the father of aesthetic blindness, and the father accuses the son of moral blindness.
The bridge I see between those blindnesses is the nude itself, so well presented by the same actress playing Asher's mother (Lise Bruneau). It is through our bodies that we sense the world, feel our emotions, express our feelings. Asher the artist sees the nude and begins to see, to feel, the emotions of woman; likewise, his exposure to Christian imagery of sacrifice (the crucifixions he studies) informs his understanding of his mother's suffering.
The pivotal image in the play is one we do not see except through Asher's vivid narration and the stunningly effective lighting design's (Dan Covey) sculptural renderings of the actors. Asher's masterpiece paintings to be displayed in a Manhattan gallery, unbeknownst to his Brooklyn parents, depict his Jewish mother on a cross; the audience sees only Asher's parents' horrified response to the paintings as the mother raises her arms and twists her body in a silhouetted reflection of what she sees.
Asher Lev narrates the story throughout the play, facing the audience more than his fellow characters; this bothered me at the beginning because of our old creative-writing-class dictum, "show don't tell." Yet, as an adaptation of a novel told in the first person, the play honors the ancient art of story telling. It is Asher's story, after all. And the staging kept the narration moving.
The actor playing Asher's father also plays his mentor, the father's antithesis, paralleling the opposites-casting of the same actress playing Asher's mother and nude model. (The roles are listed in the program simply as "Man" and "Woman.") The actors thus become our bridges of understanding the two moral worlds, illustrating that it is never so simple as good versus evil.
And that is what art does. We feel the world and express it through our bodies and souls. But we cannot afford to simply be observant Jews; we must also be listening Jews (and gentiles and all else).
The Thursday night preview audience, traditionally a sparse and low-key group, gave the performance a standing ovation. My neighboring fellow subscriber said it was the best thing she'd seen at Round House. I would certainly put it up there with "Drawer Boy" and "Lord of the Flies," two of my favorites since the company moved to Bethesda. I thought I might dig out the book again (it's been on my own shelf since I retrieved it from my mom's collection nearly 30 years ago), but I think I want to let this moving rendition live with me awhile longer.
Other credits:
Aaron Posner, playwright
Jeremy Skidmore, director
Tony Cisek, scenic designer
Ren Ladassor, costume designer
Matthew M. Nielson, sound designer
Co-produced by the Delaware Theatre Company
Addendum: 27 March 2010
A little disappointed that the Post couldn't send a staff theater critic and didn't run a review until the weekend. Round House Theater reviews typically come out on Wednesday (Thursday at the latest). This is Saturday, when people have already made their plans for the weekend. Oh well. There's still time. Go see this play!
Washington Post review by a freelancer: Nelson Pressley reviews 'My Name Is Asher Lev' at Round House Theatre
(production photo by Matt Urban)
Video preview (on WaPo - embedding seems not to work for me)
Round House's productions this season have touched a great deal on artists, the meaning of art, and the role that art and artists play in our lives. Just as in Permanent Collection, their previous production, "Asher Lev" deals with conflicting ideas about art.
"Asher" is the epitome of artistic and personal questioning. What does it mean to declare "My name is..." and to whom are you declaring it? We come to question who we are as we look in the mirror to study our own images, and we wonder what it is that we can express to the world through our own perceptions of ourselves--and the world.
Asher (played by Alexander Strain) stands between two worlds; as an "observant Jew" he must honor his heritage, his mysterious but palpable ancestors, as well as his parents and their ethic of devotion and duty to their people. But as an observant artist, he must reach beyond that experience to find his own truth. That Asher begins to explore the sensibilities and imagery of the Other--particularly the image of crucifixions pervading Christian art--horrifies and offends his parents just as much as his drawings of nudes do.
In one scene between Asher and his father (played by Adam Heller), Asher tries to explain the difference between "naked girls" and "nudes." The discussion pulls up short of comic absurdity, just at the point where Asher's father, hailing his own master's degree in political science, matches Asher intellectually: the son accuses the father of aesthetic blindness, and the father accuses the son of moral blindness.
The bridge I see between those blindnesses is the nude itself, so well presented by the same actress playing Asher's mother (Lise Bruneau). It is through our bodies that we sense the world, feel our emotions, express our feelings. Asher the artist sees the nude and begins to see, to feel, the emotions of woman; likewise, his exposure to Christian imagery of sacrifice (the crucifixions he studies) informs his understanding of his mother's suffering.
The pivotal image in the play is one we do not see except through Asher's vivid narration and the stunningly effective lighting design's (Dan Covey) sculptural renderings of the actors. Asher's masterpiece paintings to be displayed in a Manhattan gallery, unbeknownst to his Brooklyn parents, depict his Jewish mother on a cross; the audience sees only Asher's parents' horrified response to the paintings as the mother raises her arms and twists her body in a silhouetted reflection of what she sees.
Asher Lev narrates the story throughout the play, facing the audience more than his fellow characters; this bothered me at the beginning because of our old creative-writing-class dictum, "show don't tell." Yet, as an adaptation of a novel told in the first person, the play honors the ancient art of story telling. It is Asher's story, after all. And the staging kept the narration moving.
The actor playing Asher's father also plays his mentor, the father's antithesis, paralleling the opposites-casting of the same actress playing Asher's mother and nude model. (The roles are listed in the program simply as "Man" and "Woman.") The actors thus become our bridges of understanding the two moral worlds, illustrating that it is never so simple as good versus evil.
And that is what art does. We feel the world and express it through our bodies and souls. But we cannot afford to simply be observant Jews; we must also be listening Jews (and gentiles and all else).
The Thursday night preview audience, traditionally a sparse and low-key group, gave the performance a standing ovation. My neighboring fellow subscriber said it was the best thing she'd seen at Round House. I would certainly put it up there with "Drawer Boy" and "Lord of the Flies," two of my favorites since the company moved to Bethesda. I thought I might dig out the book again (it's been on my own shelf since I retrieved it from my mom's collection nearly 30 years ago), but I think I want to let this moving rendition live with me awhile longer.
Other credits:
Aaron Posner, playwright
Jeremy Skidmore, director
Tony Cisek, scenic designer
Ren Ladassor, costume designer
Matthew M. Nielson, sound designer
Co-produced by the Delaware Theatre Company
Addendum: 27 March 2010
A little disappointed that the Post couldn't send a staff theater critic and didn't run a review until the weekend. Round House Theater reviews typically come out on Wednesday (Thursday at the latest). This is Saturday, when people have already made their plans for the weekend. Oh well. There's still time. Go see this play!
Washington Post review by a freelancer: Nelson Pressley reviews 'My Name Is Asher Lev' at Round House Theatre
(production photo by Matt Urban)
Video preview (on WaPo - embedding seems not to work for me)
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Back-up Plans, aka Alternative Scenarios
Thanks to the comments recently added to my previous blog, the snow pictures, I realize I didn't quite lose everything when I crashed my laptop's hard drive.
Note the use of the active voice in that statement. Heh. Laptops don't take kindly to being "jostled," I suppose. The friend of a friend who was believed to be capable of recovering files from dead drives proved not so able.
Other than a few new Clay Aiken videos from the Golfing for Inclusion event earlier this year, which are replaceable from the massive vaults of my fellow fans (oh what a cloud they've built!), the most critical files I lost were the videos of our org's president and board chairman, which I was in the process of splicing together for promoting our conference in July.
As my brother would say, gum wouge (bum gouge).
The other files I thought I lost were my personal photos and videos from 2010, including the above-mentioned, below-posted snow pictures. There were also the snaps of the pretty tulips I bought from the grocery store to brighten my spirits earlier in this horrible winter. All my other files, from 2009 back, were either on the external hard drive or on data DVDs (which are unfortunately horribly unorganized, but that's a different problem).
The back-up "clouds" of Photobucket and Blogger and Snapfish and the like are not quite satisfactory, since they automatically resize the images. To make my calendars for next year, I need my high-res originals. But aha! I found that I'd actually uploaded those latest pictures to my office computer, so the originals were safe.
Anyway, since my crashing of the drive, my brain has been in quite a bit of a muddle. A couple of weekends ago, I misplaced a thousand-dollar check and my car. (Both turned up eventually, thank goodness.) I can blame all the distractions I want, but unless I start dealing with the clutter in my life and mind, the Crashing of the Drive could turn ugly. Literally. It makes me a little worried about this upcoming road trip to Raleigh. I don't have a back-up plan for her own self.
love, hosaa,
head in clouds
Note the use of the active voice in that statement. Heh. Laptops don't take kindly to being "jostled," I suppose. The friend of a friend who was believed to be capable of recovering files from dead drives proved not so able.
Other than a few new Clay Aiken videos from the Golfing for Inclusion event earlier this year, which are replaceable from the massive vaults of my fellow fans (oh what a cloud they've built!), the most critical files I lost were the videos of our org's president and board chairman, which I was in the process of splicing together for promoting our conference in July.
As my brother would say, gum wouge (bum gouge).
The other files I thought I lost were my personal photos and videos from 2010, including the above-mentioned, below-posted snow pictures. There were also the snaps of the pretty tulips I bought from the grocery store to brighten my spirits earlier in this horrible winter. All my other files, from 2009 back, were either on the external hard drive or on data DVDs (which are unfortunately horribly unorganized, but that's a different problem).
The back-up "clouds" of Photobucket and Blogger and Snapfish and the like are not quite satisfactory, since they automatically resize the images. To make my calendars for next year, I need my high-res originals. But aha! I found that I'd actually uploaded those latest pictures to my office computer, so the originals were safe.
Anyway, since my crashing of the drive, my brain has been in quite a bit of a muddle. A couple of weekends ago, I misplaced a thousand-dollar check and my car. (Both turned up eventually, thank goodness.) I can blame all the distractions I want, but unless I start dealing with the clutter in my life and mind, the Crashing of the Drive could turn ugly. Literally. It makes me a little worried about this upcoming road trip to Raleigh. I don't have a back-up plan for her own self.
love, hosaa,
head in clouds
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