Barbara Barrie gives a strong, controlled performance in
the just-released Judy Berlin, an exploration of an
slightly-surreal day in Babylon, Long Island. The black and
white stock gives the film a quality that suggests still
photography. It's a posthumous valedictory for Madeleine
Kahn for which she could be proud. Edie Falco in the title
role doesn't make much of an impression.
Three Days of Rain, by Richard Greenberg, directed
by Jerry Whiddon, Round House Theatre, Silver Spring,
Maryland
Greenberg's play turns out to be a thoughtful
investigation into the nature of creativity and inspiration.
There are overtones of a theme from Stoppard's
Arcadia, the misreading of the past's documentation.
He even manages to get in some good writing about
architecture.
The monologues in the first act, set more or less in the
present, lend an appropriate immediacy; while the characters
in the second act, set in the past, have no such means of
expression. Unfortunately, after they've delivered their
revelations, both acts seem to end abruptly: they feel
truncated.
The set dressing (Jos. B. Musumeci, Jr. and Tommy Wang
are credited) for the second act is meticulous. The star is
an outdoor garbage can, tagged with graffiti in the first
act and simply demurely dented in the second.
Wake Up and Smell the Coffee, written and
performed by Eric Bogosian, directed by Jo Bonney, Wolf Trap
Farm Park for the Performing Arts, Vienna, Virginia
My evening was not beginning well: at a
favorite Chinese restaurant gone bad, the orange beef was
gristly; the white wine in the bar at the Barns was
astringent. Things improved when Eric Bogosian took the
stage, who can spin art from sarcastic, ironic hypocrisy.
Bogosian's familiar repertoire of reprobates is here, but
the character sketches are mixed with an equal measure of
self-consciousness and fourth-wall-breaking. He interrupts
his portrayal of a bemused audience member ("You have a lot
of negativity!") to say, "This is performance art: I could
do this for another 15 minutes." The line between Bogosian
and his characters has never been more blurred.
An organizing theme of this evening is the horrors of air
travel; EB's frazzled traveler, waiting on line to board a
make-up flight, bitching out line jumpers and wheedling with
his family by cell phone, pulls the evening together.
Bogosian also spews some well-deserved venom in the
direction of hack musicians Michael Bolton and Kenny G.
After the performance, I ran into a long-lost theatre
buddy in the lobby. But that orange beef was still horrid.
14 feb '00
Washington Ballet, Winter Program, Eisenhower Theatre,
Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington
The evening begins with Anthony Tudor's "The
Leaves are Fading," (1975) which is becoming one of my
favorite pieces. Guest artist Amanda McKerrow was utterly
weightless in the featured pas de deux. The entire
performance was not flawless, but quite beautiful
nevertheless.
Artistic Director Septime Webre's "Carmina Burana" (1999)
won a well-deserved standing ovation. The curtain rises on
the dancers, surrounded on three sides by the chorus,
mounted three-high on industrial-strength moveable scaffolds
and dressed in medieval robes. Fortune is suspended from the
flies, a dancer shackled to a great metal-framed wheel. The
wheel descends, the dancer Fortune steps to Earth, and the
song cycle begins.
Jason Hartley and Erin Mahoney have wonderful tormented,
wrenching solos, with breast-beating as part of the
vocabulary. Webre shows his wit variously with a
Pilobolus-inspired dance, a spectacle involving Marie
Antoinette on one of those moveable scaffolds, and an
interlude of broom-wielding dancers engaged in the most
manic confetti-sweeping since the intro to Jay Ward's
cartoon Mr. Peabody. Webre's signature dancers-and-chairs
appear here in a sextet for the men. Rosa Maria Barua and
Chip Coleman have an icy cool duet.
As the dancers have gone through 800 years of costume
changes, the piece charges for the finish in a joyful
celebration. It culminates when Fortune kisses her acolyte.
She is bound to the wheel, and he holds onto her for dear
life as she ascends once again.
A great piece. And it makes a little more sense when one
learns that Webre started out in life planning to be a
marching band leader.
Stop Kiss, by Diana Son, directed by Lee Mikeska
Gardner, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington
Funny, sexy, tender. A pair of my favorite
Washington actors: Holly Twyford and Rhea Seehorn. Two young
hetero women become attracted to one another, meet tragedy,
love through it. Natural-sounding elliptical dialog --
self-interruptions, stifles, yips of laughter, beating
around the bush. Subsidiary characters not well-developed.
Funky thrift-store set design by Tony Cisek: an
institutional chair covered in a leopardskin print works
both in Callie's apartment and in a police station. Callie
dressing Sara, preparing to take her home from the hospital
-- tender, funny, sexy. Good show.
![[]](../../images/graphics/5ways.gif)
Quick reads:
- The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, a novella
by A. S. Byatt: An elaborate version of Byatt's fairy
tale, story within a story format; it succeeds.
- Savage Night, a novel by Jim Thompson: One of
the best pulp noirs that I've seen from him.
- Bech: A Book, stories by John Updike: Updike's
libidinous alter ego, Henry Bech, "the author of one good
book and three others, the good one having come first."
- Plan of Occupancy, a novella by Jean Echenoz:
microscopic; the only book I've read start to finish
between the Bethesda platform on the Red Line and the
Woodley Park station.
I caught up with the current version of Spike and Mike's
Festival of Animation, which features a lovely array of
well-executed media -- a painterly pencil and marker study
of a little girl's tantrum, "Sientje;" expressionistic
frame-by-frame watercolors; shadows against a plaster wall
in "Humdrum;" digitally cloned an manipulated images of
hands that become a June Taylor pinwheel in "Busby." If the
worst of the selections was a dismal digital sequel to the
sublime "Bambi Meets Godzilla," one of the best was the
digital "Bunny," which shows technical and emotional
accomplishment. Chris Wedge manages complicated light
sources and textures within his digital domain.
For the most part, the strongest
parts of Julie Taymor's Titus depend on the simplest
effects: Tamora's bitten aside that she will be avenged,
Marcus discovering the mutilated Lavinia, the unfurled black
banners at Caesar's death. Sometimes the over-the-top
spectacle for which Taymor is known gets in the way of the
language, and sometimes the special effects just look
cheesy. But the transition from the banquet scene (call it
Roman Pie) to the coda before an audience (of Romans?
of moviegoers?) is a well-deserved jaw-dropper. "Ye alehouse
painted signs!" -- good insult.
6 feb '00
East is East is a story of the Pakistani immigrant
community 1970's Manchester, and the tensions between family
ties and assimilationism. Unfortunately, it doesn't rise
above a (sometimes funny) South Park-crude approach to its
material -- right down to hapless Sajid, a parka-clad Kenny
stand-in.
Chris Marker's 1962 La jetée (The Jetty) is
an fascinating miniature. It's the basis for Terry Gilliam's
Twelve Monkeys. Marker's film is more subtle, and
more focussed. Told completely in grainy, evocative black
and white stills, narrated by voiceover, the film conveys
the tension and uncertainty of the time travel experiments
by use of soundtrack whispering, just below the level of
intelligibility.
The Handmaid's Tale, a novel by Margaret Atwood
In the not-distant future, a fundamentalist
Christian oligarchy overthrows the United States government.
The poisoned environment of radiation spills and toxic waste
no longer assures reproductive success, so in a mockery of
feminist principles, women who have proven their ability to
bear children are forced into the Handmaid caste, a fortune
little better than slavery. This book is the Handmaid
Offred's diary, and it bears comparison to Anne Frank's
factual account.
Atwood's novel follows in the dystopian tradition of
1984 and Brave New World, and finds new means
of expression within that genre. Offred slips in and out of
flashbacks without disrupting her compelling narrative; at
times, she even retells the same story, trying to
reconstruct it from her memories, which are fractured like
her soul.
There is black humor: Offred sees an executed religious
heretic on public display, hung on the wall of a former
university, marked with a scarlet letter. She considers his
crime, and concludes:
...the J isn't for Jew. What could it be?
Jehovah's Witness? Jesuit? Whatever it meant, he's just as
dead.
There is a lovely meditation on pleasure that begins with
looking at the shell of a soft-boiled egg; there is a
meditation on the implications of the word "undone."
In a brilliant coda, which takes place 200 years into
Offred's own future, we learn that she is saved. Yet the
fiction's history has reduced her to a dot. We can't even be
certain that her story has been assembled correctly from its
obsolete recording materials.
Sidewalk, street sociology by Mitchell Duneier
This is a clear-eyed, streetwise, personal
portrait of a specific community: a group of street vendors,
panhandlers, and associates in Greenwich Village, New York,
in the mid-1990's. These people (almost all black)
stubbornly scratch out a subsistence living in the
"sustaining habitat" of Sixth Avenue and West 8th Street;
many (but not all) are homeless, and they often have
substance abuse problems.
Duneier, on the sociology faculty of Wisconsin and U.C.
Santa Barbara, performed extensive fieldwork with these
individuals, and his report is deeply enhanced by numerous
photographs by Ovie Carter. Duneier interviewed, went on
scavenging trips, and even sold used magazines from a table
himself in the course of his work. He chooses to tell much
of his story by direct transcript of his interview tapes,
including this fearsome account by Grady, who sleeps in the
tunnels of the subway:
I used to think about rats and stuff like
that, but it's not that bad. The main thing you think about
is a derailing, but that would be the end anyway. So you
wouldn't have to think too long about that! The trains come
about two feet from you. You hear the train come by
constantly. But you put your body in a position like
listening to music. You tune yourself to the roar of the
tracks and the making of the noise and you go right to
sleep. You sleep right through it. You wake up during rush
hour, because you hear so many trains coming so close
together. That gives you an idea of what time it is.
Duneier's hands-on approach owes something to the work of
journalist David Simon and his studies of the Baltimore
streets, like The Corner. The book is also an answer
to Jane Jacobs' The
Death and Life of Great American Cities, a
no-nonsense study from the 1960's. He relies on Jacobs, yet
challenges or updates many of her findings. But Duneier
directs most of his attack at the "broken windows" theories
of Kelling and Coles and others, asserting that community
cleanup operations tend to objectify destitute individuals,
treating them as just an unsightly piece of property.
Arbitrary law enforcement is also documented.
Duneier does not beatify his subjects, however, as the
chapter on verbal harassment of women make clear. But the
strongest theme of the book is the human will to survive, as
evidenced by these hopeful men and women.
the chorister's c ||| pedantic nuthatch
©2000
David L. Gorsline.
All rights reserved.
