Eternal Equinox of A Midsummer Dream

This will have to be a two-parter.

Chapter 1, Wherein I Meetup with Shakespeare Explorers

... for a Kennedy Center performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream by Bristol Old Vic and the Handspring Puppet Company (who previously collaborated on War Horse).

This was the second Midsummer I've seen with the Explorers, and the two productions really only shared Mr. Shakespeare's text. That's the thing about dreams--always open to interpretation, reinterpretation, new visions, and new magic. While much of the success of any Midsummer begins and ends with the antics of Bottom the Ass (and BOV's Miltos Yerolemou displayed a wondrously versatile ass), so many aspects of this production were so extraordinary that it was impossible to refrain from standing up and cheering.

Via Kennedy Center

My favorite innovation here was the multi-actor/appliance casting of Puck. As a sprite, Puck was depicted coming and going in a most ephemeral way--with each of three actors bearing pieces of his being (assorted gardening tools) coming together and flying apart.

A wonderful time at the theater with some great folks to talk to, before and after. And that wasn't even the most exciting part of the night for me.


Chapter 2, Wherein I Make another Connection to Edward Duke

So this is also the second time in recent months I got to meet someone who once worked with Edward. (For the story of the first, which happened last December, go here and scroll to my brief encounter with Keith Baxter.)

During the intermission of last night's show, I was chatting with one of my Meetuppers about the musical she is writing--not a professional work, she caveated, but something that captured her imagination to the extent of having completed the lyrics for five songs.

As sometimes happens in theaters with awkward sightlines and a few available seats closer to the action, a gentleman from farther back asked to take a space next to my friend. So we continued our conversation, including our new neighbor. He volunteered that he, too, was a playwright.

Oh, anything we would have seen around here?

Um, a few ... and on Broadway. (Our amateur eyes lit up.) ... "Crazy for You"...

I literally gasped. I LOVED that!!  It took me a moment to summon the name. KEN???

The gentleman then introduced himself while I was heartily shaking his hand: Ken Ludwig.

Ken Ludwig, photo by Leslie Cashen

As Midsummer's second act began, I couldn't stop searching my memory banks to confirm that this was the playwright of Sullivan and Gilbert, which featured Edward Duke in the role of the stagestruck Alfred, son of Victoria.

So after the performance was over, our standing ovation segueing into heading for the exits, I asked Ken to confirm my memory, which he did. And I got to remind him that it was in fact in this very same theater (the Eisenhower) that his Sullivan and Gilbert was performed. It was the first time I met Edward, who had actually called me up at my office to invite me! (My recap of meeting Edward is here.)

Ken smiled and told me what a sweet man Edward was. They spent a lot of fun times together when the show opened in Toronto. "Very sweet man."

All of this made me very happy. But as it happens, Ken has a further connection with us: Shakespeare!

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Love, hosaa

Always connecting

March (haiku)

March

 Fog shimmers agog
reveals baby blues and pinks
swaddling morning's birth

It Happens When You Make Plans

"What is Life, Alex?"

Sadly, the Michael Bolton concert was canceled due to illness, but I'm not as inconvenienced as probably a lot of concert goers are since I only live 15 minutes (or three and a half Clay Aiken songs) from the venue.

Get well, Michael. Now I get to see the Oscars in my pajamas. (How they'll all fit in my pajamas, I don't know.)

I should take this opportunity to catch up, but the shows are over or ending soon, so there doesn't seem much point. But for the record, what I haven't caught up on are the following:

Chaplin's Back--a screening of The Idle Class and The Kid with Chaplin's original scores performed by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Marin Alsop conducting. 

An Evening with Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin--two old pros, old friends, telling the story of a relationship through concert versions of show songs.

Violet--musical journey of a young woman hoping a televangelist will heal her scarred face, and of her awakening to love without prejudice.

The Importance of Being Earnest--where the wit of Wilde is the star of the show, but the sets were gorgeous, too.

I'm a sucker for simplicity in stagecraft, but both Violet and Earnest were stunning. In the case of Violet at Ford's, the sets were evolving constantly with the journey, both geographically and temporally.

With Earnest at STC's Lansburgh venue, the stunningly beautiful works of art that were Algie's London flat (Act I) and the garden behind Jack's country house (Acts II and III) were by necessity static. Too elaborate to move, for one thing, but also it would be terribly distracting from the dialogue if there were a lot of movement on stage. The whole point of the play is to hear the aphorisms that Wilde so masterfully crafted. Put the actors on their spots and let them say the lines clearly so the audience can pay attention.

I've argued this point whenever I see dance movies that have a lot of camera movement. Drives me crazy. When the subject is in motion, keep the camera still.

The same strategy worked for the Patti and Mandy show. It was about their relationship, and what they brought out of the music to tell that story. They were accompanied by Paul Ford, Mandy's pianist/musical director, and a bass (didn't catch the name and it's not in the program. Sorry). The simplicity of this arrangement kept the focus squarely on Patti and Mandy. My favorite part was when Mandy introduced the Evita section by telling the story of their both auditioning for what would become their iconic and career-making roles and how nervous they were before the first preview performance. Mandy reassured Patti then that he would be her friend--and they still are. Definitely an awww moment, and very touching, no matter how often they tell the exact same story to other audiences.

Working backwards to the Chaplin show--what a great way to see a movie. The music is often my favorite thing about a film (see, for instance, my comments about The Right Stuff), and if it's done right, it doesn't draw attention to itself. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra gorgeously played this music, which Chaplin, astonishingly, composed 50 years after the films were made.

Which is another point I've argued before: that art evolves and lives to inspire other artists.

Love, hosaa
stuffing Oscars into my pajamas.... or something

Haiku: The dimmer switch

Panic attacking 

short term memory archive 

and I forgot to

Behind the Snowball

Sometimes I feel like Edwin the Boy Scout, who was perpetually a week behind in his daily "acts of kindness," to the point of polishing Bertie Wooster's black shoes with brown polish. Maybe my behindedness won't go so far as to inconvenience anyone.

I'm already behind on at least one event, the Patti and Mandy concert at KenCen, and by tonight I'll be behind by two more: Violet at Ford's, which closes after my matinee, and Importance/Earnest at STC, which I see has been extended to March 16. I blame a combination of the weather, work, the Olympics, and illness.

Is there a personality test that will illustrate my propensity only to get sick on snow days and holidays? Bleh.

Plus, a dog ate my homework. And it's getting harder to find a dog who's up to the task.

Never mind that I'm going through my dreamy season, both in the real sense of having an unusual bout of mysterious boyfriend dreams (who are these guys? And more to the point, where are they?) and in the literary sense, thanks to the reemergence lately of my dear old friends, Perry and Joy.

Someday I'll introduce you. I think they're reaching public domain status, having reached some 28 years since their conception. Dear old friends, they, still chattering on. Heh.

Fictional characters, imaginary friends
Potatoes, potahtoes.

Love, hosaa
remembering Joy (and Perry)

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

Slavery, Identity, Faith, and Redemption

I hadn't planned on seeing 12 Years a Slave, simply because I knew it would be tough to watch. However, since I had just finished reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, I wanted to see how the same subject matter was handled.

[NOTE: Spoilers within.]

Before I go any farther, let me defend the character of Uncle Tom. The name is now commonly used as a racial epithet, but upon reading the book I couldn't understand why. Tom was good, almost too good, and he did defy Simon Legree. He wasn't servile; he survived the situation he was in without compromising his principles. It was apparently after the original Uncle Tom's Cabin was published that subsequent depictions layered demeaning stereotypes onto the character.

Uncle Tom and Simon Legree, in c1885 illustration - via Wikipedia

Critics have said that Uncle Tom was too good, even "foolishly good," while other characters--notably women in the story, like Cassy--believed that being forced to sin would not count against them in the eyes of God.

Back to 12 Years: There were plenty of similarities to Uncle Tom's Cabin in construction and character. Free black man Solomon Northup, reassigned the identity of Platt after his kidnapping into slavery, is the parallel to Uncle Tom. The young girl Patsey is a combination of Emmeline and Cassy on the Legree plantation (with Alfre Woodard as Mistress Shaw playing another side of the "sin to survive" Cassy role), and the two principal slaveholders--merciful Ford and merciless Epps--correlate to Augustine St. Clare and Simon Legree respectively. The wife of Epps is a cross between St. Clare's self-centered wife Marie and Lady Macbeth.

12 Years a Slave movie poster via IMDb.

As it turns out, Stowe was indeed influenced by Northup's story, as told in the newspaper accounts preceding the publication of his book. Her last chapter, "Concluding Remarks," is full of nonspecific references to personal experiences and reliable accounts that authenticate her story and characters, even though they are fictional.

What I wanted to see in the movie was whether Northup made the same choice that Tom did when faced with the same dilemma: whether to abandon their goodness for the sake of survival. And if he did not, if he defied the "Legree" character, what was his motive?

The character of Little Eva does not exist in 12 Years, perhaps because she was an impossible fiction, useful for Stowe's moral message to her audience. Eva, the daughter of merciful slaveholder St. Clare, befriends not only Uncle Tom, but also the untouchable Topsy. Eva was the morsel of Christian perfection that helped to feed Tom's soul.

In his defiance of Legree, refusing to whip another slave, Tom drew on his religious faith that forbade him from doing this evil thing. I guess we can argue that this didn't really save him, since he is ultimately beaten to death. But in a sense, he was saved because of his faith in the glory that his soul was being delivered to. His goodness was uncompromised.

There was little in the way of a Christian redemption for Northup, but he was a good and honorable man. His situation was different from Tom's because he had been kidnapped from freedom and denied his true identity. Northup would remain good and moral as much as he could as long as he could keep hold of his identity and the hope that it would be restored to him.

As Northup is continually betrayed, he loses sight of this true identity: He unthinkingly joins other slaves singing the empty promises of the spiritual "Roll, Jordan, Roll." He breaks apart his violin, in which he had inscribed the names of his family. In a climactic scene, when he is lost in his slave identity, he does the unthinkably evil thing that Tom would not: When so ordered, he whips the slave Patsey. He just doesn't do it with enough gusto to satisfy Epps, and so is relieved from the immoral duty.

What little reference there is to Christianity in this film (and I can't speak to Northup's book, only this adaptation) is ironic and hollow. We hear the Sunday sermons that the more merciful slaveholder Ford delivers to his audience of slaves, but they are underscored first by the taunts of one of his overseers and then by the heartbroken wails of a woman forever separated from her children.

If I posit that, though lacking Tom's Christian faith, Northup was equally noble, what was his salvation? Alike in dignity but dissimilar in education and background, Northup held onto the truth of his identity and was, to his own self, true.