Their Chéri

I've mentioned before that my favorite pieces of theater incorporate choreography in the staging; two examples from Round House Theatre in past seasons were Around the World in 80 Days and (astonishingly) Lord of the Flies.

So the theater-as-dance model was turned on its head in Martha Clarke's brilliant Chéri staged at the Kennedy Center, giving audiences the opportunity to see brilliant artists from dance (Alessandra Ferri and Herman Cornejo) demonstrate their acting abilities. Normally at the ballet, acting extends only a millimeter or two beyond the pantomimes of silent films, with a stock of simple gestures and expressions to convey. But Ferri and Cornejo took their characters' emotional journey through a narrative of real and tactile emotions, spinning out the repeated gestures of passion from playful to bitter, through anguish and shame.

Alessandra Ferri as Lea, Herman Cornejo as Cheri. Unidentified photographer, via Kennedy Center

Rounding out the theatrical side of the production was the exquisite Amy Irving as the mother of young lover Cheri and friend of the aging femme Lea. Irving's star quality has never been so sparkling, yet there was no question of her stealing the stage from Ferri and Cornejo, who brought the dreamlike musical selections (Ravel, Debussy, Mompou, Poulenc, et al.), performed by Sarah Rothenberg on solo piano, to full-fleshed life.

Though she didn't dance, Irving moved eloquently and elegantly through the narrative to create an emotional pas de tois, creating tension between two loves: maternal and carnal. Irving was perfectly cast as the controlled and controlling matron, witty, wise, and tragic.

With such an unusual form of theatrical experience, mixing drama, ballet, and concert, the audience may feel a little uncertain about when to clap and when not to. After a brilliant piece of dancing in, say, Don Quixote, you know you're allowed to offer some thunderous appreciation. But this production was more of a chamber piece, and the presence of Rothenberg on stage served as a reminder to treat the production as one would a concert. The moments between movements were for breath catching, and the spell was unbroken for 65 minutes.

love, hosaa
mesmerized

Two Lights at Sea

This is the favorite anecdote of one of the World Future Society's longtime members, Marvin Cetron, who led off a speech or two with it:

Two battleships assigned to the training squadron had been at sea on maneuvers in heavy weather off the California coast for several days. As night fell, the captain noticed the patchy fog and decided to remain on the bridge.

Shortly after dark, the lookout on the wing of the bridge reported, "Light. Bearing on the starboard bow."

"Is it steady or moving astern?" the captain asked.

The lookout replied, "Steady, captain," which meant the battleship was on a collision course with the other ship.

The captain called to the signalman, "Signal that ship. You are on a collision course. Advise you alter course 20 degrees."

Back came the answering signal, "Advisable that you change course 20 degrees."

The captain said, "Send another message. I am a senior captain. Change course 20 degrees."

"I am a seaman second class," came the reply, "Change your course at once."

The officer was furious. He spat out, "We are a battleship squadron. Change your course 20 degrees."

The flashing light replied, "I am a lighthouse." The squadron changed course.

[Attributed to Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute, via Lighthouse Prose.]


Lesson: Know which light you are, and which light you're looking at. Be prepared to change course.

Middlemarchisms

"We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement." George Eliot

Now I really feel accomplished, having finished reading George Eliot's Middlemarch voluntarily and without benefit of BritLit professorial assistance. It's a slice of provincial life in the nineteenth century, much of the plot driven by money issues, so actually having also read Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century this summer helped.

dustjacket of the 1992 Book of the Month Club edition, to which my page references refer.

So for a Jane Austen fan to tackle the Eliot masterpiece, the first thing I had to get over was the hope that the heroine would end up marrying the right hero. As soon as Lydgate, the maverick doctor, entered the neighborhood, I figured he was the best match for the virtuous but clueless do-gooder Dorothea. But anyway, in a round about way, there were enough happily-ever-afters at the end of 800 pages to satisfy.

The other difference between Austen and Eliot is the complexity of the latter's sentences. It's not a fast read, but once I got used to it, there were many rewards and a lot of great thoughts. Here are a few of my favorite Middlemarchisms:

"Among all forms of mistakes, prophecy is the most gratuitous." (p. 83)

"O Mrs. Cadwallader, I don't think it can be nice to marry a man with a great soul." (p. 56)

"Miserliness is a capital quality to run in families; it's the safe side for madness to dip on." (p. 57)

"... and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts--not to hurt others." (p. 62)

"... the requisite things must be bought, and it would be bad economy to buy them of a poor quality." (p. 341)*

"'What is your religion?' said Dorothea. 'I mean--not what you know about religion, but the belief that helps you most?'
'To love what is good and beautiful when I see it,' said Will." (p. 377)

"Good meat should have good drink." (p. 379)

"Worship is usually a matter of theory rather than practice." (p. 416)

"Why, what can a man do when he takes to adoring one of you mermaids? He only neglects his work and runs up bills." (p. 417)

"Oppositions have illimitable range of objections at command, which need never stop short at the boundary of knowledge, but can draw for ever on the vasts of ignorance." (p. 422)

"... and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust?" (p. 421)

"... it is a little too trying to human flesh to be conscious of expressing one's self better than others and never to have it noticed...." (p. 440)

"It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much." (p. 475)

"It had seemed to him as if they were like two creatures slowly turning to marble in each other's presence, while their hearts were conscious and their eyes were yearning." (p. 518)

"... to most mortals there is a stupidity which is unendurable and a stupidity which is altogether acceptable--else, indeed, what would become of social bonds?" (p. 555)

"... and, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better." (p. 700)

"Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a character to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive." (p. 703)

"... a robust candour never waited to be asked for its opinion." (p. 705)

"Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love." (p. 716)

"We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement." (p. 744)

"... husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order." (p. 787)

"... there was no need to praise anybody for writing a book, since it was always done by somebody else." (p. 790).


love, hosaa
standing on a perilous margin, but loving what is good and beautiful...

*ETA: In context, the quote about poor quality being bad economy was used to justify Lydgate's spending beyond his means to prepare his new household for his spoiled bride. But shortly following that episode was the discussion about making improvements to the farms and households in the villages as long-term investments (think of the copper plumbing rationale that Cosmo used with his customers in Moonstruck). So I still think the principle is sound: Poor quality is bad economy.

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

Three Men in a Book

... not to mention the boat, the dog, and an aggressively polite cat.

I fell a little behind in my recaps, what with work and life and all.

Step into the not-very-way-back machine to June 8: On the final day of the production, I got to see Synetic Theater's nifty little rendition of one of my favorite Wodehouse precursors, Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat (subtitled To say nothing of the Dog!). As you can see from searching Amazon, there a few different editions of the 1889 classic; the one I have features a cover illustration by Alan Aldridge (who also seems to have designed the Hard Rock Cafe logo, among other achievements):

But I digress. Of course, the point of the story is digression. The narrator, "J," tells of the dire need he and his friends have to take a vacation from their hard working Victorian lives in the city. They take a boat trip on the Thames, a few days' adventure, the telling of which wouldn't normally last the 184 pages allowed in this Penguin edition with small type and narrow margins. So the narrator casts a line out and fishes in a number of tales from similar adventures in his and his friends' past experience.

It's a wonderful parlor story, told in a parlor; in the Synetic version (with a cast led by my favorite local farcemeister, Tom Story), the parlor furniture served amiably as boat and landscape, with a hint of the outdoors projected delicately onto a screen background. And when the story lay down for the night, the stage darkened under the glow of stars covering the entire audience.

My friend who is a Synetic subscriber and enthusiast was a little put off by all the dialogue of our three men and their dog. Synetic is known as the dance-and-movement company, and even Shakespeare's immortal text is lovingly elbowed aside for the alternative language of gesture. Why was Jerome's language so necessary when Shakespeare's could be abandoned?

It's probably because there wasn't much else to recommend the story itself. It's a series of amusing anecdotes without much in the way of higher passions and tragedies beyond the legends of the transporting of cheese, a prize fish caught by innumerable local fishermen, and of course the good dog Montmorency's encounter with a tom cat.

I was very happy that this latter anecdote was not excised from Synetic's production and that it was our Tom who enacted the part of the tom cat. Here is but a brief excerpt from the book:

I never saw a larger cat, nor a more disreputable-looking cat. It had lost half its tail, one of its ears, and a fairly appreciable proportion of its nose. It was a long, sinewy-looking animal. It had a calm, contended air about it.

Montmorency went for that poor cat at the rate of twenty miles an hour; but the cat did not hurry up--did not seem to have grasped the idea that its life was in danger. It trotted quietly on until its would-be assassin was within a yard of it, and then it turned round and sat down in the middle of the road, and looked at Montmorency with a gentle, inquiring expression that said:

"Yes! You want me?"

Montmorency does not lack pluck; but there was something about the look of that cat that might have chilled the heart of the boldest dog. He stopped abruptly, and looked back at Tom.

Neither spoke; but the conversation that one could imagine was clearly as follows:

The Cat: "Can I do anything for you?"

Montmorency: "No--no, thanks."

The Cat: "Don't you mind speaking, if you really want anything, you know."

Montmorency (backing down the High Street): "Oh, no--not at all--certainly--don't trouble. I--I am afraid I've made a mistake. I thought I knew you. Sorry I disturbed you."

The Cat: "Not at all--quite a pleasure. Sure you don't want anything, now?"

Montmorency (still backing): "Not at all, thanks--not at all--very kind of you. Good morning."

The Cat: "Good morning."

Then the cat rose, and continued his trot; and Montmorency, fitting what he calls his tail carefully into its groove, came back to us, and took up an unimportant position in the rear.

To this day, if you say the word "Cats!" to Montmorency, he will visibly shrink and look up piteously at you, as if to say:

"Please, don't."

Tom Story as Jerome (and the Cat); Alex Mills as Montmorency. Photo by Koko Lanham, ShowBizRadio.com

Sweet gallery of photos from this production by Koko Lanham at ShowBizRadio.com.

Saving Mr. Barrett

Speaking of Father's Day (not that we were), one of my favorite movies about fathers and sons is Love Story.

Right, you didn't know it was about fathers and sons because you probably didn't read the novel by Erich Segal - or, more specifically, the novelization that he wrote after the screenplay was accepted and undergoing the lengthy process of being developed into a major motion picture.

Basic story is this: Rich boy who resents his successful but elitist father falls in love with a poor girl whose relationship with her own father is warm, open, and nurturing. Misunderstandings ensue.

The problem with the WASP elitist father, Oliver Barrett III, is that he wants his son to be equally successful in all aspects of his life--sports, academics, love. (Success is, by man's definition, what happiness is.) Oliver IV is particularly resentful of his father's rejection of Jenny, who is not only poor, but also Catholic.

Though the audience is pretty certain of Ollie 4's love of Jenny, Mr. Barrett suspects that his son is merely rebelling against him by marrying this non-Abigail Adams ("or Wendy WASP").

Jenny tries unsuccessfully to help Ollies 3 and 4 better understand each other, and --- SPOILER ALERT ---

... she dies having failed in the attempt. Meanwhile, Jenny's dad bonds with Ollie 4 over Jenny's deathbed.

In truth, Mr. Barrett was quite charmed by the lovely Jenny and, if Ollie 4 hadn't been so antagonistic, might have put his prejudices aside eventually. When he learns Jenny is dying, he rushes to the hospital to be at her (and his son's) side.

"I'm sorry," says Mr. Barrett to Ollie 4.

"Love means never having to say you're sorry," Ollie 4 retorts.

Here's where the movie is different from the novelization. In the movie, actor Ryan O'Neal retains his frosty demeanor, stalking off to start his flashback about the girl who loved Mozart, Bach, and the Beatles. The "Love means never having to say you're sorry" lesson that he learned from his beautiful and brilliant wife turns into a rebuke to his father, a slap in the face.

Ollie 3 deserved better, and he got better in the novelization. Here:

MUCH better ending, in my opinion. Which is why it's one of my favorite Father's Day stories. If only Ryan O'Neal had let himself cry....

Update June 28: I see by my Yahoo News that Love Story stars Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal have had another reunion. In this interview with Hollywood Reporter, Ali calls her famous line "a crock." Whatever, dude. (Didn't Candice Bergen say pretty much the same thing in the sequel, Oliver's Story? Maybe it was some other parody I'm thinking of.)

Ali: "It's a crock." Ryan: "You'd better say you're sorry." Via The Hollywood Reporter.

I've spent years (decades) trying to understand the line, but I think Segal's ending in the novelization illustrates it well: Love is compassion. Love is understanding. When it's mutual and complete, love encompasses an unspoken forgiveness that doesn't require or demand a statement of contrition.

Love, hosaa
sobbing

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