The first of these short plays, The Ryan
Interview (1995), is little more than a New England
version of the old Mel Brooks/Carl Reiner 2000-year-old man
routine. The company brings a stylized, Beckettian touch to
1986's I Can't Remember Anything, another two-person
sketch, this time involving elderly radicals. The strongest
piece, by far is The Last Yankee, from 1993. It is a
hopeful, fearful story of a bull-headed Yankee carpenter and
his clinically-depressed wife. It takes place in various
rooms of a state-run clinic; characters who are not "in the
room" continue to play silently in the upstage background,
and this makes for seamless transitions between scenes.
The highlight of this production is the set, designed by
Danila Korogodsky. It features a deck covered in autumn
leaves: these are naturalistic only in the first play.
Otherwise, they serve to physicalize the detritus of memory.
In Yankee, a hospital bed is lowered from the flies
to hang about two feet off the stage. As actors work with
it, it swings to and fro, suggesting a baby's cradle. There
is an unidentified shape in the bed, and the whole thing has
a hint of Edward Kienholz's construction from the sixties,
State Hospital.
Communicating Doors, by Alan Ayckbourn, directed
by Nick Olcott, Round House Theatre, Silver Spring, Maryland
Ayckbourn's latest four-dimensional jigsaw
puzzle, satisfactory but rather clunky in spots. Well into
the run, actors seemed to be having difficulty with some of
the physical business in this show.
I also recently saw an high school production of A
Midsummer Night's Dream. Set more or less in the 1950's,
this show's fairies arrive as a pack of traveling carnival
players. This sets up a striking chase sequence (Puck's "Up
and down, up and down/I will lead them up and down...")
through a fun house, with mirrors mounted on periactoids
spun around by the crew, as Demetrius and Lysander
continually miss one another.
A few hot spots from "Regarding Beauty" at the Hirshhorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden:
- a collection of Gerhard Richter's buttery
abstractions paired with his representational work;
- three magnificent, sensual, fearful portraits by
Lucian Freud;
- an astonishing illusion in fiberglass by Anish
Kapoor;
- a rose-washed whisper of a painting by Agnes Martin.
On the downside, the show is over-interpreted, and many
of the pieces make a simple, facile point. There are two
Andy Warhol paint-by-number parodies where one would do.
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Ride with the Devil turns out to be a unrewarding
Civil War saga. The Bone Collector is a competent
thriller, with a climax that avoids the girl-in-distress
cliche. It scores high on the eeeuww scale.
The Insider begins with a forced termination and
ends with a resignation. Director Michael Mann brings a
jittery, hand-held, rack-focussed MTV esthetic to this
fact-based story, which nevertheless proceeds at a rather
stately pace as its train of events passes by. The balance
between the stories of Russell Crowe's whistleblowing
tobacco executive and Al Pacino's betrayed television
journalist leaves you asking, which one was the insider?
Atom Egoyan accomplishes satanic mills in Felicia's
Journey more ominous than those of Princess
Mononoke. And his invented backstory for Hilditch, told
in black and white kinescopes and technicolor flashbacks, is
great. The ending is a shade more upbeat than the original
novel by William Trevor. There was more extraneous noise
than usual filtering in from the lobby of the crummy
Cineplex Odeon Janus.
17 nov '99
Mansfield Park is the latest entry in the roster
of adaptations of the Empire-waisted works of Jane Austen.
Though this picture stresses the theme of slavery in the New
World, on which the luxuries of the Old World were balanced,
the movie remains a trifle. I liked its emphasis on the
sensual -- the physical pleasures of writing, the scrape of
a boot heel on pavement, the sound of a glass harmonica.
Janeites in the preview-screening audience were unanimously
annoyed by the film.
Princess Mononoke lurches from sections of talky
exposition through to genuinely beautiful passages: a case
in point is the scene in which San feeds the exhausted
Ashitaki, passing his food to him mouth-to-mouth. There's a
lot of stuff in this 2 hour-plus animated feature: the
history of Japanese feudalism and its ambivalence about
firearms, lots of martial arts on display, warnings about
destruction of the environment. The ambiguity of the film,
with its principal characters filled with impure motives, is
a breath of fresh air. Can you imagine a Disney picture in
which the chief evildoer befriends lepers and empowers
women? And the tree spirits are everything the ewoks should
have been.
Kevin Smith's Dogma is a stirring, thoughtful
comedy of faith inside a blizzard of pop culture riffs. The
twin double teams of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and Jason
Mewes and Smith (as the oh-so-articulate Silent Bob) are
marvelous. Alan Rickman is en fuego as the voice of God. The
Catholic Church ought to be offended by this film,
for I think it is Smith's purpose to disrupt the stultified,
hypocritical, and humorless, wherever it appears in
organized religion.
Perlman's Ordeal, a novel by Brooks Hansen
There is much of interest in this story of
hypnosis therapist August Perlman. At the opening of this
century, at the time when modern psychoanalysis was being
developed by Freud, Perlman contends with a mysterious,
seductive practitioner of nineteenth-century spiritualism
(Mme Blavatsky and all that) for the soul of a disturbed
13-year old girl. While some of the narrative devices are
clever (footnotes provide a cultural context, while the
omniscient narrator can maintain Perlman's point of view),
the second half of the story -- a seance mixed with
Gestalt-style acting-out therapy -- left me unsatisfied.
Perlman is certainly an interesting character, a likable yet
insufferable snob, especially when it comes to music.
Perlman shoved the page away. It dampened the
spirit of his own misgivings about Mahler that he should
find himself allied with such a provincial nincompoop as the
Times critic.
1 nov '99
The Australian Ballet, George Mason University Center for
the Arts, Fairfax, Virginia
This mixed-bill program begins with William
Forsythe's "In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated," a relentless,
explosive dance set to an equally explosive score by Thom
Willens. The company establish some street cred with this
enjoyable piece. There is virtually no set at all, with the
curtain legs taken out as well as all backing curtains, so
that the back wall is exposed. As for lighting, it's harsh
and down-focused, and some of the dance takes place at the
very edge of the lighted area. While the women dancers wear
pointe shoes, they're otherwise clad in semi-sheer, backless
teal green leotards. Soloist Nicole Rhodes is a stunner.
Next is "At the Edge of Night," with choreography by
Stephen Baynes; Rachmaninoff preludes provide the music.
This is a memory piece of lost love and spiritual longing,
with repeated images of closing doors. It's as lyrical and
quiet as an Edward Hopper painting. However, it's scratched
by a stagy bit of business with a chair that seems more
appropriate to a Marx Brothers routine.
The evening closes with "Rites," choreographed by Stephen
Page to Stravinsky's chthonic masterpiece, "The Rite of
Spring." Bangarra Dance Theatre, a rising company that
promotes the dance of Australia's indigenous populations,
joins the Ballet for this dance. This Rite is structured
into four sections, dedicated to the four elements Earth,
Air, Fire, and Water, framed by introductory and closing
material. While the Air section features some bravura lifts,
the four elemental sections don't match the music all that
well, so some sections feel underdeveloped and others feel
padded. And the Rosco fog in the Fire section is excessive.
Vers la Flamme, conceived and directed by Martha
Clarke, Eisenhower Theatre, Kennedy Center for the
Performing Arts, Washington
This is an 80-minute dance theatre piece
constructed around five stories by Anton Chekhov, scored by
a number of Alexander Scriabin piano pieces. The set for
this piece looks promising, a pattern of clouds in a
Magritte-blue sky, painted onto wallpaper that peels from
the dutching like unfulfilled dreams. Clarke tells her
stories with strong, sumptuous, almost static images, and
her cast includes three towering women. And she knows to
inject some slapstick into Chekhov, who is taken all too
seriously by most directors. However, her movement is based
on a very limited dance vocabulary, and one loses interest.
In the end, the piece rings hollow.
Dawn Upshaw, in recital, George Mason University Center
for the Arts, Fairfax, Virginia
After some introductory Schumann lieder
(crisply enunciated), the program consists of songs by
20th-century composers, some well-known (Ravel, Bernstein)
and some not-so-well-known. What impresses me most about
Upshaw is her respect for the text of her songs. With little
of the diva about her, she introduces each group of songs
with an English paraphrase or a spoken recitation of the
lyrics.
I found the selections by Ruth Crawford Seeger rather
derivative. But I was moved by Osvaldo Golijov's "Lúa
Descolorida" ("Moon Colorless"), a lament set on a poem by
Rosalia de Castro. And Upshaw's whispered ppp at the
end of Laura Elise Schwendinger's "in Just-spring" (poem by
e. e. cummings) is breathtaking.
I also heard the Moscow State Radio Symphony Orchestra
and Chorus perform Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem at George
Mason University. I heard a few things to like, especially
the Sanctus.
Don McKellar's Last Night impresses: citizens of
Toronto spend the last six hours of their lives preparing
midnight and the end of the world. Although the means and
nature of the catastrophe are never specified, the end is
assured, and it approaches with inevitability but without
urgency. There are darkly comic, satiric moments; there are
moments of creepy sexual compulsion; and there are moments
of human connection. As each character provisions his own
spiritual lifeboat, there is a sense of closure, and the
closing moments are filled with radiant light. Perhaps the
end will indeed be a rapture.
Two scenes may help to characterize this movie. First, a
ruly mob tips over a tramcar while a mother and daughter
resignedly sit inside it. As if cow tipping weren't sport
enough. Second, a young architect explains in broken
schoolboy French to his former teacher how he has designed
many projects, yet none have been built yet. You feel the
futility, the incompletion of his work. And then his teacher
waves off his exasperation, explaining that what is
important is the dream.
A genuinely thought-provoking film.
the chorister's c ||| pedantic nuthatch
©1999
David L. Gorsline.
All rights reserved.
