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30 july '99
26 july '99
19 july '99
1 july '99
22 june '99
6 june '99

30 july '99

Things You Shouldn't Say Past Midnight, by Peter Ackerman, directed by John Rando, Promenade Theatre, New York

A play that capitalizes on the fact that in many relationships, the sex is great, but the trouble starts when people start talking. In this cases, the talk is what starts the comedy, too.

Clea Lewis sparkles as the helium-voiced,overeducated, hypersexed Grace, and Nicholas Kepros does good work as the bemused Mr. Abramson.

The play slows down a bit in its reconciliation and in its run-up to the last punch line, but all in all there are some very, very funny bits.

There is a fresh print of Harold and Maude in distribution, so I took another look at it after nearly thirty years. It's not quite so silly as time's passage makes it seem. Giddy Ruth Gordon is wonderful, and Bud Cort's anhedonia shows why he is remembered for this movie, and this movie alone. Cat Stevens' songs are a little cloying, but there are some subtleties that I missed the last time around. Most notably, the revelation that Maude is a Holocaust survivor comes quickly, almost as a throwaway.

26 july '99

The Cunning Man, a novel by Robertson Davies

This was the last novel that Davies completed before his death. On the one hand, it has the firm feel of a summing-up. Some of Davies' familiar themes are revisited -- Western knowledge vs. unconventional wisdom, morality and modernism, the Old World and the New, spiritualities of various stripes, the theatre. Two ambiguous characters are laid to rest in the last section.

On the other, Davies has lost some of his satiric bite. An expository section with Esme is awkward, and much of the second section has the feel of college students sitting around talking. A trope introduced early on is not consistently spelled, and doesn't figure in the story for long. The book could do with more rigorous editing. A throwaway reference to the work of Julian Jaynes late in the book is gratuitous. And I was puzzled by the offstage presence of the historical figure Barbara Hepworth, the British sculptor.

The story kicks into gear in the third section, however, with the introduction of new characters in epistolary material. And there the characteristic Davies ghastly incidents. This time is the narrator's tale of being trapped in a cold tub of water, naked for four days, during the Battle of Britain. And there is Davies' usual glee at exposing the smelly political underside of respected institutions, in this case, the Anglican Church.

I'm so far away from the other linked novels that I miss the significance of some of the characters who play only a minor role in this one. On the whole, this is Davies typing up some loose ends.

Like all good Kubrickians, I made my pilgrimage to Eyes Wide Shut. Like The Cunning Man, this is a weak piece to be one's last; I think the word to sum up my experience of the movie is "deflated." Nicole Kidman has some good moments, while Tom Cruise is his reliable wooden self. The interiors are glowingly lit, but the exteriors are an improbably well-kept-looking New York: I followed one distinctively graffiti-covered mailbox from scene to scene. The bones of Schnitzler's novella from the 20's poke through this stodgy film. What was so dreamlike about it, anyway?

Side Man, by Warren Leight, directed by Michael Mayer, Golden Theatre, New York

Andrew McCarthy keeps his stage credentials up to date as the narrator of a finely-done memory play for two: a son and his mother remember Gene, a journeyman jazz trumpeter from the 50's.

Frank Wood is quite good as diffident, blinkered Gene: a scene in which he channels the dead jazz great Clifford Brown, listening to a tape-recorded performance, is a little bit of theatre magic. His acting is a gradual build: Gene's apartment accumulates the physical junk of nostalgia as he ever so slowly declines into defeated, self-deceived obscurity.

Kevin Geer stands out as heroin addict and trombone player Jonesy. He is a figure of comic relief with a voice like a badly mufflered taxicab, and he is a figure of grief.

The scenelets of Leight's script suggest the work of Paula Vogel; both of them tweak the conventions of the memory play. At one point, after a lengthy passage in which the narrator breaks the fourth wall, another character asks, "Who are you talking to?"

For personal comfort, the Golden passes the knees test. But the big Broadway house sometimes swallowed up this intimate play. A trivial point: the crew doesn't wear blacks for the scene change at intermission.

19 july '99

Hints of His Mortality, stories by David Borofka

Stories with a clear, direct narrative voice, usually involving the concerns of fathers of a certain age: sex, death, and grace. "The Children's Crusade" presents bemused Freddy with the mysteries of women (his wife and daughter) who can't be explained with a simple sports metaphor. "Strays" draws its characters in deft, quick strokes: its story would make an interesting independent movie. "The Sisters" is rich in character and incident. I fault "The Summers of My Sex" for allowing its child narrator access to his parents' thoughts. "The Blue Cloak" has a folk-tale quality, with its three-part structure and allusion to Breughel.

An Ideal Husband is pleasant enough, and doesn't skimp on the Wildean wit.

Lola (Franka Potente) is the supersonic superhero of Tom Tykwer's film Lola rennt (Run Lola Run). With her cropped crimson hair, piercing scream, and ability to bound across the cityscape in her Doc Martens, she is the Flash for the post-MTV generation. As she runs to save her boyfriend, she nearly outruns an ambulance, a subway train, and Tykwer's swoopy camera. I liked his mixed-media approach to film making, employing video, animation, and freeze-frame photos for the miniature flash-forwards. Listen for Charles Ives on the otherwise industrial music soundtrack, which also features Potente.

For my most recent viewing of The Third Man, I was engaged by the numerous exquisite details: the accusing little boy with a ball, the carnivorous cockatoo, the betraying calico cat. Director Carol Reed's picture is a teasing sonnet of shadows, with dizzy camera angles that rhyme with the broken steps of 1940's bombed-out Vienna. A hospital scene with a group of nuns -- at first, seemingly gratuitous -- sets up a shot in which the light on a gangster's hat echoes the nuns' headpieces. Ah, and the famous last shot, a much longer take in this new cut, is a poem of postwar disaffection and faithlessness. Advice to the noir protagonist: don't walk under a ladder in your first exterior scene.

I'm on a project in New York, so I took myself down to the friendly confines of Film Forum for a personalized double feature: Léos Carax's Les amants du Pont-Neuf (The Lovers on the Bridge) followed by Douglas Sirk's Technicolor weepie, Imitation of Life. Juliette Binoche and Denis Lavant are fearless as Carax's Lovers in a cryptic narrative that is sometimes fairy tale, sometimes urban slice-of-life. Michelle suffers from degenerative blindness, and Carax summons painterly film images to evoke her degenerating sight. The plot of the movies gets rickety in the second half (one character literally drops out of sight), but this picture is a worthy item in the literature of the Paris love story.

At Imitation, the downtown New York audience often got the giggles when asked to believe in Lana Turner's character, a climbing Broadway actress in the Fifties, but they sat still for the film's second plot, an exploration of racial identity and prejudice. Thankfully, the word "nigger" still has the power to shock today's jaded crowd. But the truth must be told: more than one scene in this melodrama was about what Lana was wearing.

1 july '99

On its closing day, I got myself up to north of U Street to the Washington Art-O-Matic at the Manhattan Laundry. This turned out to be a wonderful collaboration among 350 area artists, a month-long show that was held in 90,000 square feet of defunct industrial space. There were painters, photographers, performers, film-makers, installation artists -- someone called it an "arts rave."

Some of the work was mediocre, some was stridently political, some was magnificent. All of it was very personal. The hangings ranged from elaborate, commercially executed promotions to casual settings, like a group of photographs simply tacked to the wall. I was taken by an installation that used a series of bifold-door closets. The temporary nature of the space smudged the distinction between mounts and installations: I saw a guestbook improvised from a marker and the gallery wall.

The exhibition space itself was smashing: three buildings connected by walkways, several rooms with soaring ceilings. The patina of flaking paint on the walls of one corridor was fascinating, and the views out the second-story windows onto nearby alley space sometimes upstaged the works on display.

Some of the best that I saw, in the order that I saw it as I rushed through the space on my way to another commitment:

• Steven Johng's boldly stroked and zipped acrylics, combining Asian calligraphy and Western abstract expressionism, with a strong influence from the hexagrams of the I Ching.
• A dangerous-looking installation by Barbara Josephs Liotta, featuring a ringing curtain made from hunks of broken plate glass hung from the ceiling with monofilament, and four columns of barbed wire wrapped around a pipe and leaned against the wall. The piece benefited from its unique trapezoidal exhibition space.
• Di- and triptychs of old automobiles rusting away like rotting carcasses, by David Vickers.

An installation by Ann Stoddard also shows up in my notes. There was a good selection of gritty street photography, too. I'm very glad that I saw this show.

White Bird in a Blizzard, a novel by Laura Kasischke

This is a coming-of-age sexual-awakening story that also succeeds as a psychological thriller. It concerns itself with 16-year-old Kat and the disappearance of her mother, with whom she has a relationship of ambivalence.

Kat's narrative is fractured into slippery slivered time frames, like cracked ice, as she interrupts a story with an extended memory, doubling back on herself. The effect is dreamlike.

Kasischke's writing is highly imagistic, at times synaesthetic. Waking from a nap, Kat's mother

rolled to her side and swung her feet off the bed, and perhaps the numbness of them surprised her on the bedroom rug. There was a mossy taste, lush and sun warmed, on her tongue -- as if, in her dream, she'd eaten a butterfly.

Images of feathers, of insects, of snow and ice and water in all its forms, are abundant. Minor characters introduced later in the book, like Kat's father's new girlfriend May, are vivid: "a petite container of spring that could explode any moment in a frenzy of petals and baby birds, screaming." A delicious book.

Perhaps the key to John Sayles's Limbo is the passing reference to characters from J. D. Salinger stories in the first half of the film. Though the second half of the picture seems to be a story about physical survival, we eventually perceive that it's a story about emotional survival, and we think of Salinger's doomed Franny. David Strathairn is just terrific as Joe: he is the revival of one of minimalist Gary Cooper's tormented heroes.

22 june '99

Writing in Restaurants, essays by David Mamet

Fragments of polemic: although most of these pieces were published previously the collection reads like a notebook. In two separate essays Mamet nails what's right and what's wrong with the Hollywood way of making movies. Valuable for fans of the Man.

I saw a community theatre production of Laura, by Vera Caspary. The stage version is more interesting than the well-known film in some respects. The relationship between Mark (the detective) and Laura is more ambiguous, more cat-and-mouse, with each playing the cat by turns. Also, the time frame is tighter, condensed to a mere 24 hours.

I also heard a staged reading of new one-act under development by Barbara McConagha, Life Support. The play shows great promise; the post mortem discussion, excellently moderated by Nick Olcott, was particularly delightful because of McConagha's upbeat, crusty attitude.

The Art Room, by Billy Aronson, directed by Sara Chazen, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

The mainstage Woolly show is a brief boulevard sex farce set in a mental hospital. It features some well-turned dialogue. However, with only six characters, some of whom never meet, it lacks the spiderweb of interrelationships that keep a farce perking for a whole evening. Thus, it clocks in at 1:45, and if the set changes could be instantaneous it could be done more intensely without an intermission.

Good physical work from Maia DeSanti, and funny stuff form Delaney Williams. And there is a clever common set design element with The Chinese Art of Placement: the breakaway chair.

Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me is just plain preposterously silly. The brilliance is in the kitchen-sink mix of styles: if you wince at the fart jokes, five minutes later there is a reference to obscure 80's pop music that sails over the heads of the adolescents in the audience. Or the painfully true morning-after scene between Dr. Evil and his paramour. Seth Green is money as Scott Evil, and Heather Graham's costumer deserves a special award. This flick is the only circumstance under which I would pay to watch Jerry Springer.

Is there enough Austin for a second sequel? Ask George Lucas.

Royal Swedish Ballet, Opera House, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington

The evening proved to be a wonderful opportunity to see four reconstructed pieces by Jean Börlin from the 20's.

"Within the Quota" is a comic immigrant's story, set in a New York populated by Hollywood stereotypes. It is dominated by a Gerald Murphy-designed backdrop of an enormous newspaper front page: UNKNOWN BANKER BUYS ATLANTIC screams the 6-foot high headline. Carl Inger's gymnastic lead is notable.

"El Greco," "freely interpreted by Ivo Cramér," is a somewhat repellent tableau vivant of images from the paintings.

"Dervishes" is much richer than a similarly-inspired dance by Ted Shawn. Set to Western music (Glazunov), it impressed me with its fluidity.

Even though it demonstrates that there's only so much you can say in a dance about falling down in skates, "Skating Rink" wins the evening. Scored by Arthur Honegger, it is a cubist dance in that the figure merges with the ground, and the focus shimmers from one group of dancers to another. The scenario is low melodrama, but the gorgeous look of the piece, designed by Ferdinand Léger, its particolored Popeye and Olive Oyl dancers, is quite wonderful.

6 june '99

Having missed its brief theatrical re-release in D.C., I was very pleased to get the chance to see Les demoiselles de Rochefort (1967), aka The Young Girls of Rochefort, at a screening at Le Maison Française, the cultural center of the French Embassy. "The French House" is a new place for me; if I keep finding nifty resources like this in town, I'll keep living here.

I have a dim memory of seeing the film in black and white on television; seeing the well-restored print of this candy-colored confection of a film is a completely different experience. To the movie's detractors who say it's preposterously over the top, I respond, "It's a musical, dammit!"

The picture reunites director Jacques Demy and composer Michel Legrand. Legrand's jazzy score features a lot of the vocalese style made popular in the 60's by the Swingle Singers, who make an appearance on a album cover in the music shop. In a movie where everything is expertly choreographed by Demy, even the unloading of a truck, one wonders what's going on when he allows lamp fixtures to dangle into the frame.

Seen with the perspective of years, the dancing looks a little tame, but a solo by Gene Kelly livens things up; instead of his backup dancers making him look good, Kelly makes everyone around him look great, including a gang of street urchins.

The story turns on people not meeting when and where they should; it's a jigsaw puzzle whose very last piece falls into place in the last scene.

The English translations in the subtitles are excellent: sung or spoken rhymed dialogue is not literally rendered, but rather rhyming approximations are given.

There is good father-daughter chemistry between Nigel Hawthorne and Rebecca Pidgeon in The Winslow Boy. Some of adapter/director David Mamet's signature verbal double-backs make it into this script, and I'm not sure that they work.

Of the people in Washington who actually saw Central Station, I must have been the last. It's good for some interesting, funky locations in the rural Sertão region of Brazil.

Spurred by successful movie adaptations of two of his other books, I read portions of Russell Banks' Continental Drift (1985), but I just didn't connect with it.

Out of the Woods, stories by Chris Offutt

I much preferred this brief collection of spare, hard-bitten stories of Kentucky and its hill people. Here, they often find themselves displaced in the Great Plains, in the mountains of the West, or simply on the road. I think there's a sympathy among these places that goes back to the days when Kentucky was on the frontier.

The humor in these stories is sardonic. This is from "High Water Everywhere:"

He drove to Crawfordsville, got a room, and reported his abandoned trailer to the county sheriff. Zules was so tired he was wide awake. At the motel lounge he ordered bourbon and branch. The only customer was a woman slumped at the bar with her eyes closed, both hands around an empty glass. She lifted her head.

"Don't mean to bother you," Zules said.

"You didn't," she said. "I was just testing my eyelids for light leaks."

I also liked the abrupt, left-turn ending of "Two-Eleven All Around." Picking up the book again, I see that Offutt has chosen a highly appropriate epigraph from Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood.

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