Love for Fools

Ah, so great to be back home in my little seat in the theater; this season I've moved up one day and over one seat with my new subscription for the Round House.

Also new at Round House is the digital version of the production program--e.g., Fool for Love now playing. Though I'm a known program collector, lots of people leave theirs behind in the recycle/reuse basket on the way out, and having the digital version available for reference is useful both before and after the show. (It's nice, for example, to know in advance that the play is performed without an intermission; it's also nice, after the show, when writing about it, to be able to look up spellings of people's names.)

It's also great to be back with "old friends" of my theater experience, including the ferociously fragile Katie deBuys ("May") and master of the hangdog drawl Marty Lodge ("Old Man"), previously paired in RHT's Seminar. Joining the cast of familiars is Tim Getman ("Martin"), who I'd just seen in Synetic's Three Men in a Boat, and new-to-me Thomas Keegan ("Eddie").

Playwright Sam Shepard is, of course, best known to me as the iconic actor portraying iconic test pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff. I hadn't seen any of his plays, so I was expecting tough, gritty realism. Instead, Fool for Love mixes fantasies and memories with the volatile, violent yearning that fools call love. (It isn't. Passion, yes. Lust, yes. Love? Not by my definition.)

The choice of this play is in line with the current "despicable people you don't want to spend time with" artistic direction at RHT, but the performances and production are so mesmerizing, I forgive the play. Katie's May, especially, pulls and pushes on the audience's sympathy even as she pulls and pushes at Keegan's Eddie, sometimes to comic effect.

Thomas Keegan, Katie deBuys, rehearsal photo via RHT Facebook

Fool for Love by Sam Shepard
Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Maryland, September 3-27, 2014
Directed by Ryan Rilette

Cast:
May: Katie deBuys
Eddie: Thomas Keegan
Martin: Tim Getman
Old Man: Marty Lodge

Production credits:
Scenic and costume designer: Meghan Raham
Lighting designer: Daniel MacLean Wagner
Composer/sound designer: Eric Shimelonis
Fight choreographer: Casey Kaleba
Props manager: Andrea Moore
Dramaturg: Brent Stansell

Stripped Productions and Big Blonde Vocals

Back from Ordinary Days last night at the Round House and will use this to catch up with one other previously unreported artistic experience, the concert version of A Midsummer Night's Dream by the Baltimore Symphony, performed at the Strathmore.

I'm not a fan of overproduced shows, and it's a problem in musicals, especially, when I can't hear the lyrics to the songs. In a show like Ordinary Days, which is sung through, I wouldn't have much of a chance of following the plot if it weren't for the stripped down production--in this case, a pianist (musical director William Yanesh) and the powerhouse vocals of the actors.

I was excited to see a couple of familiar names on the program: adorable Erin Weaver as quirky, neurotic graduate student Deb and the handsome Will Gartshore as man-in-love Jason. Will has been around the Round for quite a while, but I really took note of him in this season's This. And Erin was the fabulous Juliet at the Folger's R&J production earlier this season. That's a little bitty blonde with a great big voice, and she took over Ordinary, too.

Erin Weaver. Courtesy of RHT via Facebook

Will Gartshore. Courtesy of RHT via Facebook

Likewise, the stripped down production of Midsummer was a full concert with seven actors running in and out of the orchestra, changing costumes on stage, and speaking their Shakespearean lines whenever the orchestra put Mendelssohn on pause.

Again, one of the attractions for me is always a familiar name/face, in this case Katie deBuys, who played Shakespeare's Hermia and was last seen at RHT in Seminar. But in this case, the "blonde with the big vocal" and very comical presence was Kate Eastwood Norris as Helena.

Maybe they teach you this in Shakespeare Clown School, but Kate had a way of running hilariously, like Tom Story did in Winter's Tale back at Shakespeare Theatre Company. It involves the arms flapping and flailing over one's head or outstretched in front while exiting (whether chased by bear or not). Anyway, she cracked me up.

Kate Eastwood Norris, via KateEastwoodNorris.com

Levity, lightness, a deft touch and a powerful voice. That's all it takes, and it's what I go to the theater for.

That, and the confetti. ;)

ephemera collected from Ordinary Days at Round House Theatre

ephemera collected from Ordinary Days at Round House Theatre

Love, hosaa
prop stealer

Writers Get Schooled

Would-be writers have a lot to learn about the realities of writing and publishing and getting read, and a lot of those lessons are up for interpretation, as documented in the Round House Theatre's production of Theresa Rebeck's Seminar.

This is the kind of play that should either be right up my alley or too in-your-face close to home and off-putting. While I certainly could relate to the writing and editing and hoping to be published aspects of the story, I personally lack the ambition that put the would-be writers into the room with their well-paid but dismissive and abusive tutor. At my point in my career, I could relate best to the tutor (hopefully I'm not that dismissive and abusive!), whose promising writing career had been thwarted and redirected to editing and tutoring.

Anyway, it was relatively easy for me to create the distance I needed from my parallelling life and enjoy the language, the actors' interactions, the rhythms, and all that make productions worth producing. It's an adult comedy, hitting many of the same notes as RHT's This earlier this season.

What I was looking forward to most was seeing three of my favorite local actors playing together: The adorably goofy Tom Story (as Douglas), of course, plus Marty Lodge (Leonard), who first captured my attention in the old RHT's round space as the ghetto hotel manager in Problem Child, and the breathtakingly versatile Katie deBuys (Kate), whose previous Shakespearean work (Henry V at Folger and Measure for Measure at STC) I have noted as chameleon-like. It was great to see more of her in a contemporary role.

Marty Lodge and Katie deBuys. Photo by Danisha Crosby for Round House Theatre 

(L-R): Laura C. Harris, Tom Story, Katie deBuys, Alexander Strain. Round House Theatre via Facebook

A play about writing that doesn't show much of the writing under review--just the characters' reactions to the writing and to each other's reactions--is naturally going to be (as my companion noted, without irony) talky. In the care of such good actors, though, the talk has its own musicality. As the cynical, misogynistic tutor, Marty Lodge tears down the student work in monologues that are positively Homerian.

I've also seen Alexander Strain (Martin) and Laura C. Harris (Izzy) in other productions--Strain was RHT's Asher Lev, for instance, and one of the highlights of Glengarry Glen Ross, and Harris was a delightfully feisty Marian in RHT's Young Robin Hood--so it was nice to see them shine in this tight ensemble.

Speaking of careers evolving from writing to something less glamorous (but no less honorable), I see Lloyd Rose, a former drama critic for the Washington Post, served as dramaturg for this production. She's apparently been doing this sort of thing for a while. I still don't know what dramaturgs do, but I think, like editors, they make other writers' writing better. Well done.

Seminar

Written by Theresa Rebeck

Directed by Jerry Whiddon

Round House Theatre, Bethesda, MD ~ February 5 – March 2, 2014

Cast

Leonard: Marty Lodge

Kate: Katie deBuys

Martin: Alexander Strain

Douglas: Tom Story

Izzy: Laura C. Harris

scenic designer: James Kronzer 

costume designer: Ivania Stack

lighting designer: Daniel MacLean Wagner 

original score/arrangements/sound design: Eric Shimelonis

Women to Watch: Ringgold, Niffenegger, Hall, DeBuys

Another full arts day yesterday, courtesy of National Museum of Women in the Arts's current exhibitions (closing November 10) and the Shakespeare Theatre Company's Measure for Measure (closing today - sorry).

At NMWA, the juxtaposition of Faith Ringgold's stark, political work against the tumultuous dreams uncovered by Audrey Niffenegger (best known as the author of The Time Traveler's Wife) was startling and fresh.

detail: Faith Ringgold, American People Series #1: Between Friends, 1963; Collection Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York - See more at: NMWA

The Time Traveler's Wife, original cover art by Audrey Niffenegger, via Tower Books

We see two different female points of view - one outer directed but filtered through an individual's journey into the world. A quote by Ringgold on her early portraits was shaking: She said that, in art school, no one could teach her how to paint black skin, so she had to invent a process of mixing black into colors, creating a rich, graphic style.

In Niffenegger's self-portraits, there are unsettling images and ideas of a woman being defined and controlled by a man, a lover who chops her hair off because it displeases him. It is little wonder that her dreamscapes become intertwined with what look like death wishes, skeletons lurking within and among the female forms.

Audrey Niffenegger, Observation (detail), 2010; Collection of Larry and Laura Gerber, Highland Park, Illinois - See more at: NMWA

Niffenegger's lighter dreamscapes are epitomized in the delightful fantasy book, Raven Girl, which was not available as promised in the museum shop.

Raven Girl, original cover art by Audrey Niffenegger, via Amazon.com

And so on over to STC for Measure for Measure, for a Meetup event with a few of the same folks I got to share Henry V with over at Folger last season.

Just as Ringgold and Niffenegger demonstrate two approaches to art--external, loud, in your face versus internal, solemnly despairing, reflective--we find in Measure two different approaches to being a successful actress on stage in the work.

This Measure gives us, in the lead, Gretchen Hall as Isabella, the strong, wise, moral heroine, and Katie deBuys, melting unrecognizably into a minor part (Juliet, the beloved of Isabella's brother).

Gretchen Hall, via About the Artists

Katie deBuys, via About the Artists

You may notice right away that this Isabella is not the one portrayed in the poster art, nor included in the rehearsal photos on Facebook. Gretchen lists "standby" for this production as her most recent credit. But this 5'10" stunning redhead (a lookalike for a young Rebecca de Mornay), made her mark for me in the recent ReDiscovery Series reading of Rutherford and Son. Her character was the strong, moral woman standing up against dominating, immoral man. Both Gretchen and her characters are memorable in every way.

Katie is different. The fact that our Meetup gang did NOT recognize her in what is a tertiary role is a testament to her craft. Just as astonished as we all were that the same actress could be both the mesmerizing and playful Katherine of France and the young boy, just a soldier under Henry, here again, she astonishes, turning herself inside out to be who she needs to be.

"Meeting" these four women artists at once validates all our points of view, our approaches to life. Some of us speak out, shout, get noticed, seen, heard. Some of us reflect and project, melt meaningfully into our worlds, work with the tools we are given--our spirits, minds, and souls.

Love, hosaa

just juxtaposing