Hazards

The special hazard on this show is confetti. In the Act 1 sequence where Horton sits on the egg through storm and changing seasons, the Cat pelts him with water from a super soaker, a bucket of autumn leaves, and a big batch of confetti. Half of the crew’s intermission cleanup consists of sweeping up little white dots of paper—from the deck, from the steps of the tree unit that Horton is perched on—and still the confetti goes everywhere. It may be worse than glitter. We find bits backstage in the green room, we find chips of it in the auditiorium, I find it in my slippers. There is show confetti in my back bedroom at home where I’m typing this.

This past Sunday was the day for more than one little thing to go wrong. In the Act 1 finale, Gertrude’s lengthy tail, made of feather boas glued end to end, parted in two. Suddenly Alexa found herself tugging against no resistance (from offstage, I’m usually holding the other end while Gertrude struggles in vain to get airborne). Alexa’s a trouper, she covered, and she yanked with all her might against nothing.

Then, late in the second Act, the Bird Girl who usually has the Who-bearing clover so that she can hand it off to Gertrude to restore it to Horton, didn’t have it. As they came offstage, there was a lot of muttering, “I forgot the clover!” and Kevin (the Cat) scampered back to find a substitute. He slipped to Horton during the next scene, and I wonder how many people noticed.

Probably the WATCH judges did. If something goes wrong in a matinee performance, 95% of the (traditionally less sophisticated) audience won’t spot it, but matinees are also peppered with adjudicators. They’re there on Sunday because they often have their own evening performances to deal with.

Sunday was also designated as an autographs in the lobby day. Don’t ask me why, but I just loathe autographs in the lobby in costume. So I got to show my “I’m crew” card, and I cleaned myself up while the rest of the cast Met Their Public. Which meant that I had to do some crew work. Now I don’t mind wet-mopping the deck, and with all that confetti (vide supra), mopping is always in order, and in fact I can Tom Sawyer myself into enjoying it a little bit. Water + swab, swab = things are cleaner.

I’m working on building up that same “hooah” attitude towards the orchestra pit cover. At CenterStage, there are two sections of the deck that you remove to make an opening for the orchestra pit. (This opening is only so that the conductor can be seen by the cast.) The first section is composed of several layers of hardwood, altogether making a slab 20 inches by 70 inches by 5 1/2 inches thick, and the other section (which forms the lip of the stage) is somewhat smaller.

To open the pit, what you do is this: walk downstairs with a buddy into the pit area; unbolt the first section from the girders that hold everything in place; on a count of three, with your buddy, push the section straight up until it clears, then slide it back (upstage) (it has casters to make this part a little easier, and usually there is crew above to help with this step); get a stance on the top of the railing that forms the conductor’s platform and push the smaller section up and out; climb out of the pit; lay the small section on top of the first section and roll them out of the way far upstage.

I don’t have a lot of upper-body strength, so I’m not one of those people that you look to first for jobs that require doing something on three. Usually Chris, Rick and Steve take this detail.

Okay, now that I’ve popped the pit cover a couple of times I can figure out how much it weighs. Figure generously on a specific gravity of 0.6 for the composition of the cover. Eurgh: 170 pounds.

At the park: 4

Paul has done a good job of recruiting new volunteers for the nest box program this year. Christine joined us last week, and Warren and Lisa yesterday. They were rewarded, so to speak, with the job of chopping through quarter-inch ice on Barnyard Run in order to get to the midstream boxes. They also scratched through the brambles surrounding the site of old box 79, which we replaced.

We’ve found eggs in five boxed so far, but one or two of these nests may be stalled (due to the cold snap) or already abandoned.

Billion-dollar legacy

Steven Henry Madoff visits the trove of more than 2000 works by abstract expressionist Clyfford Still, until now in storage as part of his estate, and planned for a new museum to open in Denver in 2010.

[Clyfford] Still once wrote that painting was a way to find revelation and to “exalt the spirit of man.” Yet it is clear how personal the struggle was. [Henry T. Hopkins, a former director of what is now the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art], recalled an anecdote the painter once told him. “When Still was a small child in Canada, they were digging a well, and they needed someone to go down into it to see the condition of the pit,” he said. “They put a rope around his ankle and dropped him down head first.

“He told me he was terrified, but there was the rope. And I always wondered if those streaks in his paintings, which he called his lifelines, had something to do with that experience. The line there to pull him back up.”

Yay, us!

Another very complimentary review of the show: this one is from Michael Toscano.

June [Schreiner] is a seventh-grader at Reston’s Langston Hughes Middle School, but she seems to be one of those kids with outsize talent who eventually could end up on Broadway. With a crystal-clear voice and lungs of steel, she radiates charisma that reaches to the back of the good-sized theater.

Doubt: A Parable

A powerful, compact, thought-provoking piece of theater: at St. Nicholas Church School in the Bronx, academic principal Sister Aloysius (the heralded Cherry Jones) becomes convinced that the parish priest Father Flynn (genial, robust Chris McGarry) has made inappropriate contact with one of her students. The time is the early 1960s, when the Catholic Church was undergoing the reforms accompanying the Second Vatican Council, taking steps towards accessibility, tolerance, and openness.

Yet flinty Sr. Aloysius, for whom even “satisfaction is a vice,” remains committed to the severities and regimen of the past. She gave up sugar for Lent one year, and when the season was over, forgot to resume the indulgence. She is convinced of Fr. Flynn’s misconduct on the merest shreds of evidence—and yet, she would ask, how much proof is needed when the exploitation of a twelve-year-old boy is at stake?

Fr. Flynn, for his part, answers her from the pulpit with a homily about accusations: as impossible as it is to catch the feathers of a torn pillow scattered to the wind, just so is it impossible to unsay a word of unsupported suspicion. As solid as Aloysius is in her certainly, Flynn finds comfort and a reminder of his own humanity in doubt. Of himself and his blamelessness? Perhaps.

Between the two stands Sister James, a young teacher at the school, played particularly effectively by Lisa Joyce. This is a role that in lesser hands would reveal its structural nature of providing exposition and comic relief, but Joyce gives the role reality. Despite her stated convictions, first on one side and then the other, it’s clear that she remans troubled with her own doubts.

As directed by Doug Hughes, there is a certain judiciousness in the early scenes, which play out for the most part in Aloysius’s cinderblock office and in the plain flower garden that separates the school from the priest’s quarters. Blocking is minimal. Jones keeps her hands bundled inside her habit, so that when she reveals them to ask for support or to make a point, the simple gesture has a lot of punch.

So it feels a little too much when emotions get the better of Flynn and Aloysius and the proceedings culminate in a shouting match between the two.

All around, dialects were sometimes difficult to place, sounding more Boston than Bronx.

But the closing moments of the play are perfectly modulated and genuine.

John Patrick Shanley’s notes to the play include an epigraph from Ecclesiastes 1:18: “…in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”

  • Doubt: A Parable, by John Patrick Shanley, directed by Doug Hughes, The National Theatre, Washington

At the park: 3

We replaced box 67, and since we had another box made, we decided to work next week to replace box 79, which we had abandoned to the field mice a few seasons ago. (This despite my opinion that the box will not be used, and is too difficult to get to through the vegetation and mucky marsh bottom.) Lots of ducks stopping by on their way through: shovelers, two kinds of teal, pintails. Red-Winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) and Eastern Phoebes (Sayornis phoebe) have arrived for the breeding season.

Short bits of string: 5

O tempora!
Three things that I learned recently:

  1. Cardboard file boxes (“banker’s boxes”) work very well for costume storage, especially if you have a lot of small pieces that don’t easily hang and that you don’t want to get crushed. We’re storing costumes for 26 cast members in a 3′ x 6′ footprint.
  2. You can drag and drop tabs in an Excel workbook to reorder your worksheets. I’ve been using the right-click context menu to do that for years. I wonder how many clicks and scrolls I’ve wasted.
  3. A good articulation warmup is to play Tongue Jeopardy: Sing the “Jeopardy!” theme song, but with your tongue sticking out. On each successive syllable, point your tongue up, left, down, and right. (So you’re actually singing “Anh-anh-anh-anh-anh-anh-annnh…”) It gets really tricky when you get to the eighth notes.