Hirshhorn Museum staff were still calibrating proximity alarms and no-go zones for the newly opened "Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth," or at least let us hope so. At times I heard three different alarms shrilling in my ears.

Kiefer is, for me, a fascination and a puzzle I might never solve. I fall back on echoes and comparisons: born in the last months of the Second World War, Kiefer's work suggests to me the cartoony visual play of fellow German Sigmar Polke and the smudged squeegee colors of Gerhard Richter, especially in Landscape with Head (1973), with its drawn-in sightlines and deliberate violations of pictorial conventions.

Kiefer's later canvasses, heavily impastoed and bearing attached contraptions, bring to mind Robert Rauschenberg's combines projected through Mark Rothko's gloom. And the turbulent, frothing power of his paint surface is the match for any 19th-century Romantic seascape.

A sculpture like The Secret Life of Plants (2001), which consists of lead plates assembled into something very like a gigantic book and painted with star charts, at once reminds us of Richard Serra's toxic, heavy, dangerous slabs; Joseph Cornell's maps of the stars; and any number of catalog-obsessed cataloging outsider artists. This same piece is painted with dots of black, each surrounded by a faded smudge of orange; these read as bullet holes to one reviewer, but look to me like poppies, offering both oblivion and remembrance of war dead.

The most enigmatic piece is the stunning Meteorites (1998/2005), also sculpture: a rain of boulders has smashed through a towering bookcase holding massive codices with leaves of lead, and the heavenly hail lies scattered across the gallery floor. The piece inspires more shock and awe than any simple maneuvering of troops.

For pieces like The Hierarchy of Angels (1985-87), the screws that hold the piece together are plainly visible; some bits of rigging are attached, others seem to be tying stones to the sky. It's as if Kiefer had read Tony Kusher's staging notes for another work that trades in the mystical, brutal realm of monumental eternity, Angels in America. Kushner writes, "The moments of magic... are to be fully realized, as bits of wonderful theatrical illusion—which means it's OK if the wires show, and maybe it's good that they do, but the magic should at the same time be thoroughly amazing."

posted: 5:16:56 PM  

Woolly showcases stories by community residents and a spiffy new performance space in D.C.'s 8th Ward. Songs and linked sketches draw a picture of life in the neighborhoods south of the Anacostia River, of a people with limited resources but deep reserves of pride.

Production values are modest (the show gets a lot of mileage out of a front door-stoop unit and a section of chain link fence with a hole torn in it). Scene transitions could do with some tightening. Some oversized masks do great job of representing the changing racial makeup of Metro ridership as one travels through the system. The a cappella voices, music directed by James Foster Jr., sound great.

The stories' resolutions may seem uniformly upbeat to more jaded viewers, but this is the show the community wants to tell itself; this is a community weary of cynicism, one that cannot afford the luxury of irony.

The cast is built from Equity actors, students at the SEED school, and other community residents and professonal actors. Standouts include Vaughn Michael as Mr. Rucker, a local sparkplug who opens an organic grocery, and Maya Lynne Robinson as Latarsha, a trash-talking youngster with all the scene-stealing lines. She works at Benetton because "I speak fluent White Girl."

posted: 4:16:50 PM