Korbel IV, Korbel Before and Thoughts on Live Theatre

First, the before IV of Korbel:

 The saga of the Dugan family in the mythical North Coast town of Korbel began in 1994. So before describing the new play, here’s a primer on the story so far, based on Michael Fields’ recollections:

“Korbel I: The Funeral” was centered on the funeral of the Dugan clan’s matriarch, Dorothy, who in financial despair, had committed suicide. Flashbacks revealed the truth about her son Terry, a transsexual Lesbian. Her other son, Tommy, was a logger “who was missing many of his body parts due to logging accidents, and was incapable of doing certain things,” though evidently that didn’t include fathering a child, because…

In “Korbel II: The Wedding,” Tommy had to get married in order to keep his child, but elsewhere in the Court House the Southern Korbel Unorganized Militia (SKUM) was planning a disruption. Meanwhile there was a fight at the wedding, and agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms invaded (“We had people rappelling off the roof at Dell’Arte.”) “Where’s Tommy Dugan?” the ATF demanded, and in a response that Fields says was stolen from the Spanish Baroque playwright Lope de Vega, but which most of us remember from “Spartacus,” several members of the cast—beginning with a 7 year old boy—proclaimed: “I’m Tommy Dugan! I’m from Korbel!” Then, Fields recalls, members of the audience spontaneously repeated it themselves: “I’m Tommy Dugan! I’m from Korbel!”

In “Kobel III: The Birth” the only industry left in the town was a company that dug a deep hole in the ground, and dumped stuff into it. “Nobody knew what was going into the hole, but it was a business, and it was in Korbel” so it was accepted. Until people noticed that no babies had been born since the company came to town. But Dorothy Dugan returned from the dead (as she had in Korbel II), to miraculously cause people to give birth. “We gave little water balloons to people in the audience, and everybody was giving birth—including her son.”




Going for IV

That was nearly a decade ago, and the series seemed to have run its course with what Fields admits was its weakest script. But several factors converged to bring Korbel back this summer. For one thing, there were local events that begged to become part of the saga, like the ongoing drama of Blue Lake’s disgraced police chief, the continuing transformations associated with the Blue Lake casino, and the rise of the marijuana grow house economy. “Kevin Hoover wrote a long article about grow houses in the Arcata Eye awhile back, and suggested in it that Dell’Arte should do a play about it,” Fields said. “The last line of the article was: ‘Are you reading, Michael?’”

But another impetus came from an unlikely source: the Campaign for Love and Forgiveness by the Fetzer Institute, and a series of local forums on the subject sponsored by KEET. The Dell’Arte School was to be one of the locations, so Fields attended. Eventually he went to all of them, and realized there was dramatic material there. “It seemed fitting to do it as a Korbel piece, because it has a past, and forgiveness is a lot about holding onto something or letting it go. You can’t change what happened, but how do you move on? There’s a great quote—I think it was Confucius: ‘Forgiveness doesn’t change the past, but it enlarges the future.’”

(Actually, Dutch botanist Paul Boese said that, but Confucius does have a great quote on the subject: “Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it forgoes revenge and dares to forgive an injury.”)

The question now, as Fields recognizes is, “if comedy and the theme of forgiveness can exist at the same time” in the same play. We’ll all get a chance to find out, starting June 26, the premiere of “Korbel IV: The Accident”… The emergency room of Korbel’s new for-profit hospital and casino, St. Mo’s (she’s the patron saint of gamblers) is suddenly filled with victims of an accident, when a mysterious taco truck driven by the police chief and filled with machine guns runs over several people. But since every second home in Korbel is now a grow house and uses seven times the power a normal home uses, there’s a blackout—only enough power at St. Mo’s to run three life support systems (and of course the slot machines)—but there are four criticals: so somebody has to die!

There are plenty of local references, Dorothy’s obligatory return from the dead and especially, lots of songs by a trio of nurses played by three of the best-known singers around: Joyce Hough, Jayse Lecyour and Lila Nelson. The cast features original Dell’Arte ensemble members Joan Schirle, Michael Fields and Donald Forrest, and local all-stars Jackie Dandeneau and David Ferney, Bob and Lynne Wells, as well as Jane Hill, Lynnie Horrigan, Soren Olsen, Josh Salas and Calder Johnson. Fields promises a spectacular stage set, designed by HSU’s Jody Sekas: “It’s what Vegas would look like if it came to your hospital.”

What's This Review IV?

Opening night of Dell’Arte’s Korbel IV: The Accident saw an overflow crowd in the Rooney Amphitheatre, cheerfully engaged in the annual rites of family mini-picnics, adult wine-sipping and general bundling-up after sundown, gathered to witness the resumption of a hometown participatory soap opera with the Dell Arte brand of comedy, music and local satire. They weren’t disappointed.

Michael Fields anchors the story as ex-logger turned hospital janitor and apparent gun-runner, Tommy Dugan, growling like a North Coast Jack Nicholson (“It’s not a Ken and Barbie world.”) Much of the comic action is in the winsome and capable hands of Jacqueline Dandenau and David Ferney, Bob and Lynne Wells, Jane Hill and Lynnie Harrigan as hit and run victims with backstories, and the singing nurses of St. Mo’s Hospital and Casino: Lila Nelson, Joyce Hough and Jaese Lecuyer.

 In our conversation, Fields likened their musical interpolations to those in Dennis Potter’s breakthrough TV miniseries, “The Singing Detective,” though I was reminded of Potter’s “Pennies From Heaven,” which shares the song “Life is Just A Bowl of Cherries” with Korbel. Josh Salas, Soren Olsen and Calder Johnson are the dancing orderlies.

 The show typically veered from topical local humor and slapstick to the Potter-like poignancy of the world-weary refrain, “Is this all there is?” There were the usual flamboyant touches—a real ambulance arriving at the gate, life support hoses pulsing with neon lights—a spectacular 1950s Las Vegas style set by Jody Sekas, and upbeat tunes by Tim Gray and the Dell’Arte House Band.

What about the question the playwright Michael Fields asked—can this comic mayhem be combined with saying something about love and forgiveness? The answer is yes, thanks to some nice second act writing (the Emily Dickinson lines were perfect), Donald Forrest’s eloquence as Terry Dugan, and Joan Schirle’s brief but delightful appearance as Dorothy, the matriarch. A lot was resolved, but is the story over?

 There’s something about the opening show of the Mad River Festival that inspires ruminations—or pontifications—about theatre itself. Last summer I looked to theatrical origins in traditional festivals. This year had me thinking about the “live” in live theatre, and its relation to the local and community.

These thoughts were also inspired by a conversation with Charlie Myers, my movie-reviewing colleague in these pages, after the benefit concert for Deborah Clasquin last Saturday. (An impressive turnout, though the proceeds will apparently pay for at most one of the three experimental treatments Deborah requires, so donations are still being accepted at the HSU Music Department.)

Charlie and I chatted about the comparative advantages and disadvantages of our respective beats. Although I envy Charlie’s access to on-the-job popcorn, and I’ve noticed that he can critique the latest Spielberg film without much chance of running into Steven at Wildberries (nor of receiving the evil eye from the ticket-taker on his next visit to the theatre), on the whole I think I have the better gig. And that’s even apart from the fact that these days I would only review movies on a sliding scale. If my base rate were $100 say, I’d have to charge $500 just to sit through an Adam Sandler comedy, $400 for Mike Myers, etc.

 Unlike movies, theatre is live and local in various ways, as exemplified by these Dell’Arte summer shows. They’ve become community rituals, and the shows respond to the occasion, even in seemingly small gestures, like a character blowing bubbles for no apparent reason but to interest the children on the blankets near the stage.

That the community sees itself reflected or refracted on stage is part of the “Theatre of Place” enacted in this year’s play, which works because the theatre has the depth of experience and credibility that can come with being located in the community, and because the story on stage can respond to the latest news with the speed and spontaneity of live performance.

 There are prices to be paid in dramatic focus, structure and depth, and references that not everyone knows enough about to find funny. But sometimes revealing the local does more. The Dugan story reflects characteristics of the North Coast, but in doing so it reveals something about many other small towns, counter to media images.

 The kind of differences and diversity symbolized by transsexual Lesbian Terry Dugan (and based on a real story—see Donald Forrest’s moving explanation in the program) is almost always associated with big cities--and “San Francisco values.” But the truth is that they are present in these smaller places, though perhaps less obviously than here on the North Coast. So the shame, guilt and conflict portrayed in this story may exist even more strongly there, and extends to all kinds of differences, not just this one. And the process of forgiveness—including self-forgiveness—or the failure to find it, is a more universal drama of real life.

 In locating an essential drama in the local, there is usually an element of the universal. Being human, the drama is shared, and the community is partly created by seeing it enacted. You can get that universality at the movies sometimes, too. But what you can’t get is the same kind of intimacy when the people on stage and the people in the audience face each other.

 An aspect of this was imprinted on my consciousness some years ago at a small theatre production in Pittsburgh of Arthur Miller’s play, “The Creation of the World and Other Business.” Though it’s comedic, the play deals with weighty themes of good and evil, individuality and community, fate and freedom. The audience was very close to the action, and I had my Satori moment when I saw right in front of me God’s bare feet. That is, the bare feet of the actress playing God. Somehow that made the play real and present.

 These were real people struggling with these big questions, as the human author did, and as we in the audience do. There is something about real bodies on the stage—at times uncomfortable, and yet vitally human. Audiences and actors breathing the same air demonstrates that apparently abstract questions may really be the most basic concerns of the human community. So how do you combine life and art, the everyday with its meaning? Create art. Present it live.

Deborah Clasquin Benefit Saturday

This North Coast Weekend: Deborah Clasquin Celebration

I don't usually do music events here, but maybe I should. Anyway, there's an important one this weekend, and since the story in Northern Lights unfortunately provides the wrong date, here it is: a benefit concert for pianist Deborah Clasquin begins at 7 PM on SATURDAY, June 21 in the Fulkerson Recital Hall on the HSU campus.

“The main theme of this event will be to rally around Deborah, to make sure she knows how important she is to so many people in our community and the music world, and to give everyone a chance to celebrate herrole in our lives,” said Linda Anderson, one of the organizers of the event. “The other priority will be to try and raise money for her expensive treatments which are not being reimbursed by her insurance.”

As a concert pianist, Deborah is a well-known performer on North Coast stages as well as in prestigious venues around the world, and on television, radio and recordings. As a teacher at Humboldt State, she has trained prize-winning keyboard artists. She has been an activist and advocate for music education. Now some of her North Coast friends have organized a celebration of Deborah Clasquin’s achievements and a benefit concert to help her defray medical costs as she continues treatments for cancer.

Performers for the concert include pianists Ryan MacEvoy McCullough and Emily Loeffler, clarinetist Armand Ambrosini, and violinists Terrie Baune and Signe Nicklas, who is Deborah Clasquin’s daughter. Also featured are The Babes Women’s Chorus directed by Carol Ryder, a quintet of Sequoia faculty members, and Barbara Davenport, Jill Petricca and Shao Way Wu playing a movement from the Claude Bolling Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano.

Tickets for the benefit concert beginning at 7 PM are $20, from the HSU Ticket Office (826-3928) or at the door. The reception with Deborah Clasquin, family and friends will be held in the lobby outside Fulkerson Hall at approximately 8 PM, and is a free event. Refreshments will be served.

Those who cannot attend or wish to make an additional contribution can send checks to the HSU Music Department, payable to Deborah Clasquin. Additional information at HSUMusic.

Update: This turned out to be a very successful event, with lots of good music and a full house, despite the absence of students and vacationing faculty members. I'm told however that the proceeds will probably pay for most of one of the three treatments Deborah will require. So contributions will continue to be needed, and will be accepted by the HSU Music Department.

This North Coast Weekend: Tim Robbins and More

Also on Saturday, Dell'Arte's Mad River Festival gets started with an appearance by Hollywood’s Tim Robbins and several other members of The Actors’ Gang, an LA-based theatre group, to receive the international Prize of Hope. Denmark’s Institute of Popular Theatre has been giving this award since 1987, mostly to European ensembles, but in 2005 it was presented to Dell’Arte. This year the Denmark organization asked Dell’Arte to select another U.S. winner and present the award here.

The award recognizes a person or theatre working “for human hope in a daring, loving, vulgar, serious, poetic manner with sparkling energy. It is given to those who encourage people to use their own eyes, ears and voice.” Dell’Arte selected The Actors’ Gang for its “powerful combination of contemporary immediacy, public engagement and great theatrical craft,” (said Dell’Arte’s Producing Artistic Director Michael Fields in a formal statement.) Plans are for the award to alternate annually between Denmark and Blue Lake.

The event Saturday begins at 6 pm with a catered dinner in the street and a speech by Tim Robbins in the Carlo Theatre. Seats are limited and admission is pricey ($75 to $150, since it partly a fundraiser.) But beginning at 8:30 pm, the event moves out back to the amphitheatre where the Joyce Hough band will perform and the award will actually be presented. Admission to the outdoor component is $15.

Most of us know Tim Robbins as an actor in such popular films as The Shawshank Redemption and Bull Durham, but he’s also directed two of the more intriguing political films to come out of Hollywood in the 90s or since: the all-too-prophetic Bob Roberts (1992) and The Cradle Will Rock, (1999) about a forgotten moment in 1930s America when art and social awareness came together, and were quickly forced to go their separate ways.

Robbins and friends started The Actors’ Gang in 1981, and have adapted, created and performed some 70 plays since, including their current production based on George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Let’s hope they enjoy their visit enough to bring a production up here.

Also this weekend: Humboldt Pride presents The Laramie Project as a benefit for the 2008 Pride Parade and Festival, at the Arcata Playhouse June 18th-21st and again next weekend, the 25th through the 28th. Benefit tickets are sliding scale from $20-$30, students $15, from the Arcata Playhouse at 822-1575.

Limitations of Tragedy Continued

The Clay Cart suggests limitations of western drama

Recently I reviewed a Dell' Arte School's MFA Ensemble production, Between Two Winters, which was the outcome of their study of classic tragedy.  I also reviewed a production currently at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, called The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler. While it isn't itself a tragedy, it had a lot to say about tragedy as a necessary reflection of the human condition. I also referred back to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of the Sanskrit play, The Clay Cart.  I ended it suggesting that tragedy might be less a category based on human nature than on the view of a particular culture in a particular time and place, though expressed so well in a form of drama.

I quoted a literary scholar on this, but I might also mention historian of religion Karen Armstrong who also suggests that this era of Greek drama came after a long period of awful times in that part of the world.

Here's a little more of what I was thinking... Tragedy is often considered the apex and greatest form of our drama, and in a sense of our culture. The idea of the hero with a tragic flaw, undone by hubris, fated to fall from the heights, does seem to express or at least fit well with many other central notions of western culture. The fatal flaw is like original sin, hubris is offending the jealous God. There's perhaps a bit of Social Darwinism--even the mighty fall because the fatal flaw makes them unfit in the continual struggle for survival.

But what if--as van Buitenen suggests--Greek tragedy is not the consummate form against which every other theatrical form from every other culture is measured? What if it really expressed a particular culture--western culture--or even more particularly, the cultural beliefs of ancient Greece? And so it may not be humanity's best expression of the universal human condition: the way things are. Maybe just the way the Greeks thought things are. Maybe just one way things can be. And maybe the ideas that seem to fit so comfortably with tragedy--like humanity as innately sinful (as some western religions say) or humanity as predominantly selfish (dominated by selfish genes) as some western science emphasizes--maybe they are culture-bound as well, and not the whole human story?

Because we do get the sense from our culture that human nature is either damned by Divine design or evolution to accentuate cruelty, ambition, selfishness and violence. Of which humankind certainly provides many examples, which our dramas emphasize in form and content.

But Sanskrit drama doesn't do Greek tragedy, nor does it emphasize the survival of the most selfish, nor does it find drama only in people being cruel to each other. As I wrote in the earlier review: "The Clay Cart is not a religious play; the OSF program describes it as a social comedy. But comparing this play to western dramas and comedies, the most revealing and ultimately inspiring difference to me was the kind of conflict that creates the dramatic action. Yes, there is a villain (though he’s played as a ridiculous figure from the start) and human foibles that lead to complications, but the overall motives are most often generosity, loyalty, empathy and love."

I am certainly no expert on Sanskrit drama, but I wrote about my experience of that play, and found scholarly support. The (Little) Clay Cart, wrote one of its translators, is about "a man of heart" representing India's "classical aesthetic culture." The essence of his character is in how he expresses "moral duty" and "sympathetic generosity." The outcome: "The righteous man may suffer, but in the end he is stronger than the wicked, who is really a fool." He represents virtue, because "he loves his friends and forgives his enemies."

In this sense, it is exemplary drama, which can be soporific, and is certainly not the whole human story. But then, neither is tragedy. Wouldn't we be better off with a little more balance in our drama-- new interpretations of what how virtue is expressed, what it means, what it costs but what its rewards can be--in our own culture?

For after all, our science is showing that altruism is just as natural as selfishness, that animals exhibit cooperation and sharing as well as competition--if we only allow ourselves to see it. And at least in practice, our religious traditions include encouraging compassion, and modelling it. So can't our theatre produce drama (and not just the bipolar of tragedy and comedy) to reflect this? Because we're going to have to achieve a balance--to face our flaws but emphasize our ability to get beyond them, to keep trying--if we're going to be up to the challenges of the future.

To be fair, this is not precisely van Buitenen's point, in his introduction to the translation that OSF uses of The Little Clay Cart. For example, he sets the Greek idea of fate against the Hindu idea of transmigration of the soul into the next generation, making "any single life an episode in a far longer chain. No single life makes ultimate sense in itself; the chain of life does."

Still, his basic point about the culture-bound concept of tragedy allows for mine. Here's more of that passage: "This 'absense of tragedy' [in Sanskrit drama] is sometimes pointed to with a mildly accusing finger, as though any theatre worth the name should have it. Apologists then point out that India was 'prevented' from developing true tragedy by the underlying climate of its thought. This argument takes for granted that tragedy is an almost natural expression of any culture. But why not argue that Greek tragedy constitutes the exception, not the rule, and that it presupposes a very specific notion of moira (fate) that was peculiarly Greek?"

I also must confess that my point was also influenced by Daniel Mendelsohn's lovely essay in the New York Review of Books on the revival of the Philip Glass opera Satyagraha, which not entirely coincidentally, is largely about the hero of 20th century India, Gandhi (although it covers mostly his earlier years in South Africa, where he developed his methods of passive resistance.) The essay begins:

Good people do not, generally speaking, make good subjects for operas. Like the Greek tragedies that the sixteenth-century Venetian inventors of opera sought to recreate, Western musical drama has tended to be preoccupied with the darker extremes of human emotions: excessive passion and wild jealousy, smoldering resentment and implacable rage. These, after all, are the emotions that spark the kinds of actions—adultery, betrayal, revenge, murder—that make for gripping drama. Unpleasant as they may be in real life, such actions are essential to the Western idea of theater itself, in which the very notion of plot is deeply connected to difficulties, problems, disasters...[So] When we go to the theater, we want to see characters doing things. Bad things, preferably."

He finds in the work of Philip Glass another approach, which is not tragedy and probably to many people isn't even drama, or opera. But it is drama of a sort, it is theatre, and Mendelsohn finds it beautiful. And in beauty, is there not something of truth? In the end, tragedy may cause pity and terror. But it doesn't exactly inspire hope. Not only do we need that, but there is plenty in the world and in human nature that's good. To show how people can accentuate that, to show those possibilities, is as human and can be as artful as pushing the easier buttons of fight-or-flight--the reactions that could well be the fatal flaw of tragedy.

The Clay Cart at OSF

Vasantasenā, (Miriam A. Laube, left) dances for Chārudatta (Cristofer Jean, right) as Maitreya (Michael J. Hume) looks on, in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of The Clay Cart. Photo: David Cooper.

The Clay Cart Review

With clouds of incense rising above them, the large cast in colorful costumes is arrayed in a circle. They sit on cushions and stand under lanterns, chanting and singing in a golden light. The opening of The Clay Cart, now in repertory at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, promises an exotic experience from ancient India.

But once the play begins, and those long difficult character names in the program are transformed into recognizable musical sound, audiences are quickly caught up in a story filled with elements familiar from western drama, particularly Shakespeare: star-crossed lovers, a hero down on his luck, political intrigue and revolution, a sardonic fool, a dangerous villain, high-born hypocrites and noble-spirited scamps, an articulate criminal with professional pride. There are mistaken identities, sudden transformations, reversals of fortune, coincidence, violence, melodrama and farce. The plot involves stolen jewels, a pearl necklace, gamblers, a murder trial, and incidentally, a little clay cart.

There’s wit that contemporary Americans can appreciate in this 1960s translation and abridgement of a play that’s something like two thousand year old. The audience I saw it with particularly liked this one: “Wisdom comes naturally to women, but men have to be taught with books.”

The OSF production emphasizes these shared elements. Though Miriam Laube in the major role of the courtesan Vastantasena incorporates some ritual movements from Sanskrit theatre, the acting styles are largely familiar, and delightfully accomplished. Fluid staging, a simple but impressive set (built around and within that circle), gorgeous lighting—from that symbolic golden glow to the pale dawn and the turquoise sky before a storm—all have the signature OSF quality. If the show errs, it’s towards a little too much Broadway gloss. Still, this play comes from a theatrical tradition that is largely unknown today, even in India.

On April 5, 1965 the Beatles were filming an Indian restaurant scene for their second feature film, Help! Between takes, George Harrison picked up a strange stringed instrument used by one of the musicians supposedly playing for customers. It was a sitar. Within a few years, Harrison’s relationship with Ravi Shankar, and the Beatles’ trip to learn meditation in India brought traditional Indian music and ideas into western popular culture in a very big way. After many more inroads since, American audiences can more comfortably explore the cultural differences and similarities.

Of course there had been forays before. Writers like Somerset Maugham described Hindu ideas, and Sanskrit drama influenced western playwrights like Brecht and Thorton Wilder. Probably the first U.S. production of The Little Clay Cart (as this play is usually called) was the 1924 season-opener at the famed Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. That production, and most of the few since, tried to honor the strictures of Sanskrit drama, including the 1994 staging at Pomona College in southern California. Around that time, Bill Rauch created a looser adaptation with his Cornerstone Theatre Company in Los Angeles (called The Toy Truck.) Now OSF’s new Artistic Director, Rauch has directed a production that’s somewhere in between: pretty faithful to the text, and arguably to the spirit of Sanskrit drama, as well as to at least some of the style.

That style is codified in one of the holy books of the Hindu religion and philosophy: the fifth Veda, devoted entirely to all aspects of drama. That’s how important drama was, to all segments of society. Vocabularies of movement and expression, types of dramas and how plays were to unfold, etc. were all proscribed, though as a living art, Sanskrit theatre continued to invent and change. But remnants in Bollywood films are mostly what remains in Indian popular culture.

The OSF production uses music, dance, masks and movement, and the staging suggests the settings rather than depicting them—all consistent with Sanskrit styles. The story reveals some social structures ostensibly different from ours, notably concerning marriage (but that’s also true of Shakespeare to some extent.) Still, audiences will find relevance to our current class divides, political struggles, and even relationship complications.

The Clay Cart is not a religious play; the OSF program describes it as a social comedy. But comparing this play to western dramas and comedies, the most revealing and ultimately inspiring difference to me was the kind of conflict that creates the dramatic action. Yes, there is a villain (though he’s played as a ridiculous figure from the start) and human foibles that lead to complications, but the overall motives are most often generosity, loyalty, empathy and love. As one character proclaims: “If a man sets his mind on virtue,/There is nothing he may not dare.”

It was an inspired idea to bring The Clay Cart to OSF, and this funny, moving, vibrant production has to be among the highlights of the season.

Nature of Tragedy: Between Two Winters, Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler

Between Two Winters returned to the Carlo Theatre stage last weekend not as an encore so much as an iteration—a tryout of changes before its upcoming weekend at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco.

Tasked with creating and performing a Aristotelian tragedy by adapting a story from the news, the Dell’Arte School’s MFA Ensemble of second-year students continued to refine this piece beyond its April premiere. Though they did some rewriting, added a character (and their teacher, Ronlin Foreman, is now directing) the play’s basic story is the same: After the first Gulf War in 1991, the mayor of a small Montana town goes to Kuwait ostensibly to honor a soldier from her town for his heroics in saving lives during the attempts to put out the oil fires set by retreating Iraqis, but really to use the photo op with a TV crew filming it to advance her campaign for the Senate.

 It turns out that the soldier had raped her 20 years before, and her daughter—who is also there—is the child resulting from that rape. The news story that was the starting point involved a man confessing to a rape some 20 years later, and asking forgiveness of the woman he raped. But she refused, and insisted he be prosecuted.

 The situation in Between Two Winters is somewhat different: the soldier (Sergeant Mulligan) was Mayor Catherine Tuttle’s neighbor in their childhoods, and it was a “date rape,” when he returned from Vietnam. That the audience doesn’t question that an ambitious politician wouldn’t bother learning in advance the name of the soldier she was there to honor is the key to the conceit, and once past that, the confrontations take over.

 Besides Mayor Tuttle (played by Norah Sadavd), her daughter Naomi (Liza Bielby) and Sgt. Mulligan (Matt Walley), also present are the TV news team and a campaign consultant (Ida Fugli, Barney Baggett, Jamie Van Camp, Adam Curvin and Brian Moore).  The news crew is a kind of Greek chorus, at first witnessing but as the story unfolding before them trumps the fairly boring story they are there to cover, their role becomes more probing, more questioning.

 The final character is Qazi (Deepal Doshi), a kind of Kuwaiti Tiresias who also represents the war’s victims where it was fought. Stylistically, the movie-of-the-week potential of the story is deflected by some movement and singing, but mostly by this aspect of the media becoming the chorus, and the ritualistic action and language.

 The first part of the play is diffuse and confusing: overlapping dialogue may indicate the chaos of a TV shoot, but it doesn’t help define role and character, especially when the student cast is all of a similar age. But the rest is pretty powerful, as it explores the wounds of war, the chain of brutalities, the sometimes difficult line between justice and revenge. Even the oil fires are explored for metaphor, the explosive secrets surfacing from underground.

Violence and death as well as heroes, flaws and fate appear—the constituents of tragedy—and their ambiguities are offered. There’s too much asserted and suggested in an hour for this to be a fully formed play, but Between Two Winters could be described as a poetic dance of ideas that suggests contemporary tragedy with provocative depth—with more depth than some more elaborate plays with the same general intent even attempt.

 
Five years ago at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Robin Goodrin Nordi as Hedda Gabler shot herself, and the play ended. This season, Robin Goodrin Nordi as Hedda Gabler shoots herself, and the play begins.

 Though both plays were directed by OSF’s new artistic director Bill Rauch, the earlier one was the modern classic by Ibsen, and the play this year is The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, by Oregon playwright Jeff Whitty. I wonder how many times he’s been told he’s a whitty guy? (Now watch the spell-check spoil the pun.) But his play is full of wit and invention, and even if the postmodern jumble sale through time, space and pop culture technique is getting a bit familiar, this show is delightfully theatrical and surprisingly provocative in challenging the whole art-and-audience enterprise.

 Hedda revives to learn that as the heroine of a cherished tragedy, she’s required to stay in character. But in trying to escape the “cul de sac of tragic women,” she sets out on a quest with her faithful companion, Mammy (from Gone With the Wind.)

 Among the other characters she encounters are Medea from Greek mythology and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Also two versions of Jesus. But even more than Mammy (Kimberly Scott) and Hedda’s husband George (Christopher DuVal), the ones who actually become human characters are Patrick (Anthony Heald) and Steven (Jonathan Haugen), living fossils from The Boys in the Band era of flamboyant gay culture.

 Hedda’s odd hero’s journey finally takes her to the Furnace of creation, where fictional characters like her are born, either to become trapped in immortality or to die at some point from lack of popularity, victims of the “genocide of indifference.”

 It’s unusual for a new play to appear on the main stage of the Bowmer Theatre rather than the smaller New Theatre, but this show takes full advantage of the space and its facilities, including the revolving stage. It’s a delightful moment-by-moment ride, that keeps on surprising on one level or another.

 In the end, this play also seems to come down on the side of tragedy as an essential expression and reflection of the human condition. But at other times on this same stage, The Clay Cart and the Sanskrit Theatre’s aim of dramatizing virtue offers a different reading of both art and human potential.

 As editor and scholar van Buitenen suggests, “Why not argue that Greek tragedy constitutes the exception, not the rule, and that it presupposes a very specific notion of moira (fate)…?” And perhaps our arts as well as our science and politics have ignored other possibilities, including those qualities in the world and in ourselves that contribute to more fully accurate images and assessments? Which might provide a balance, even an emphasis necessary for the future of the human enterprise, and the world we tragically threaten? Something to think about, on the way home.

This North Coast Weekend

An encore performance of the Dell'Arte MFA Ensemble's Between Two Winters at the Carlo Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., before its run the following weekend at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. The puppets of the Shoe Box Variety Show perform at the Arcata Playhouse Friday at 7 p.m., and Saturday at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Ferndale Rep performs a staged reading of Shaw's Don Juan in Hell on Sunday afternoon only, at 2 p.m. Little Shop of Horrors continues at North Coast Rep.

Little Shop of Horrors

The Little Shop of Horrors musical has do-wopped its way onto the North Coast Repertory Theatre stage. With fine singing, comic performances, clever set and costumes, and an impressive puppet-monster, it’s a diverting evening of live entertainment.

 With music tied to its early sixties origins in a cult Roger Corman film, a combination Motown trio/Greek chorus (Kathleen Marshall, Jenner Cohune and Chyna Dale) sets the scene: a failing flower shop on Skid Row, where the owner, Mr. Mushnik (Gene Cole) is about to go out of business. But Seymour, the shy but smart shop assistant with a crush on Audrey, the shy but beautiful receptionist, comes up with a solution: an unusual plant to attract customers. He just has to figure out what will make it grow.

 The answer provides the creepy comedy that moves the story forward. Christopher Hatcher as Seymour and Brandy Rose as Audrey are the charming stars, and Erik Rhea steals the show as the sadistic dentist who rides a motorcycle, affects an Elvis image and causes his girlfriend Audrey to show up at work with various injuries. Exactly how he sings through a gas mask has to be one of the show’s technical wonders.

There are a number of supporting players, several of whom double as puppeteers when the plant (dubbed Audrey II) grows to major proportions, including Silas Knight, Rigel Schmitt, Alison Ehrstrom and Monica Schallert. Anders Carlson does a tour de force series of bit characters, one after the other.

 Emily Blanche created the monster (with John Blanche and Delayne Medoff), and NCRT Technical Director Calder Johnson designed the appropriately tawdry flower shop set. Darcy Daughtry designed a witty array of costumes. My favorite little touches were Audrey’s matching skirt and arm sling, and the auto detailing flames on the dentist’s smock.

 Xande Zublin-Meyer directed the show, with Dianne Zuleger as music director, and a live back-up band. In characterizations and style, the production tends to mimic the 1986 film version of the musical, including some half-hearted “ethnic” humor that has grown creepier over the years.

 The Corman non-musical original was partly playing off a decade of creature features which included the ambiguous political message and genuine horror of the 1956 classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (its 1978 remake was also pretty scary.) This musical’s Broadway production tried to inject some of the residual horror of that film’s ending, but even that was a kind of joke.

By now there’s not much left of either horror or a message, although there is an undercurrent of “greed doesn’t pay” in this story’s sentimental shuffling of stereotypes. It’s best to just go along for the romp and the tunes.

 NCRT’s Artistic Director Michael Thomas tells me that an HSU technical theatre class built this set as a special project, under the direction of stage design teacher Jody Sekas. This is one example of cooperation among local theatres and institutions that seems to be increasing. It’s a good idea: sharing resources so each can concentrate on its particular contribution to the life of North Coast theatre.

NCRT is also just $10,000 shy of its goal for funding renovations that could begin this month, and perhaps even be completed to celebrate its 25th anniversary season in September. Including a new restroom, and a real marquee! The theatre is eagerly accepting donations to make it happen.

QED: A One Genius Show About Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman was one of the foremost physicists of recent decades. His biography by James Gleick is simply titled, Genius.

He was also an eccentric individualist in various theatrical ways. British writer C. P. Snow said it was “as though Groucho Marx was suddenly standing in for a great scientist.”

 Feynman played a role in developing the atomic bomb during World War II, and in discovering why the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up in 1986. He became a public figure through television interviews and popular books which expressed his unique approach to science, and to life.

Several of those books were the basis for a (mostly) one-genius play, QED, written by Peter Parnell with the active participation of actor Alan Alda, who came up with the idea and played Feynman in its Broadway run in 2001 and 2002.

 Randy Wayne is playing the fascinating Feynman, directed by James Read in the Redwood Curtain production, on stage at the Arcata Playhouse Thursday through Saturday for its second and final weekend.

Wayne, featured in many Redwood Curtain productions as well as other local theatres, holds the stage alone, as we see Feynman in his Cal Tech office, dealing with a physics lecture he has to write, taking phone calls concerning some visiting Russians and crucial personal matters, on an evening he plays a drumming Polynesian in a local production of South Pacific. The only other person to appear is a pretty physics student, played by Melanie A. Quillen.

 Wayne confidently explains and even illustrates a few physics concepts, while hitting the emotional notes that suggest other colors in this character. Though he doesn’t look or sound like Feynman, he does reproduce Feynman’s four-syllable pronunciation of his signature word: “interesting.”

 In my view the play tries to do too much, but audiences are in for an entertaining and thought-provoking experience, thanks to the clarity of Wayne’s performance. For those inspired to learn more about Feynman, several of the play’s anecdotes are even better in the fuller versions contained in his in-ter-est-ing book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, and in the TV interviews in “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out,” which can be found on YouTube, along with other Feynman appearances.

This North Coast Weekend

North Coast Rep continues the musical Little Shop of Horrors, and Redwood Curtain's production of QED has its final performances Thursday through Saturday at the Arcata Playhouse. I reviewed both in my Journal column. "Horrors" is a well-done confection and QED seems directionless but its subject, Richard Feynman ("as though Groucho Marx was suddenly standing in for a great scientist") is a fascinating figure whose point of view on science and life is well worth knowing. This play offers only a taste, dressed up in a dramatic moment, but if it introduces Feynman to those who haven't read his books (especially Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman) or seen him on video, then it's well worth it. Plus Randy Wayne holds the stage impressively. Barry Blake reviews "Horrors" at the T-S, a good complement to my review. Betti Trauth reviews QED there, too.

Also up this weekend, the annual "The Finals" at Dell'Arte: this year, five ten minute plays by D.A. students, Thursday through Saturday at 8 PM in the Carlo Theatre.

This North Coast Weekend

North Coast Repertory opens Little Shop of Horrors tonight (Thursday, May 15) at 8PM.

Redwood Curtain presents QED, a mostly one-genius play about the brilliant and eccentric physicist Richard Feynman at the Arcata Playhouse for two weekends, Thursday through Saturday, beginning tonight at 8 PM.

I'll be writing about both shows in the Journal next week.

Fences at OSF

Even before Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom made his name on Broadway, playwright August Wilson was intent on avoiding the all-too-common fate of a one-play career. For that second play he also gave himself a specific challenge: to follow the eccentric structure and multiple focus of “Ma Rainey” with a more conventional narrative centered on a single complex character.

 So from experiences and characteristics of his step-father and a near neighbor, and from his own home-run-hitting prowess as a teenager, Wilson created Troy Maxson, a baseball legend in the Negro League kept out of the segregated major leagues until he was too old, so that at the age of 53 in 1957, he works for the city of Pittsburgh collecting garbage.

 The resulting play is Fences, which earned Wilson his first Pulitzer, Tony award and other prizes in 1987, and has been his most popular play ever since (though it was never his favorite.) It’s scheduled for a Broadway revival in the fall, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production is on stage in Ashland now.

 From that first production, this story of a husband and father, his wife, his sons and brother, and their relationships to each other and to their own individuality, was recognized for its universal themes. But the universal is best expressed in the particular—which is one of those truisms that’s often true.

 Certainly Troy Maxson’s story as it is gradually revealed expresses aspects of the African American experience. Yet there are other specifics that resonated for me when I saw the OSF production. I recognized the 1950s, especially among the working/lower middle class, and specifically in Pittsburgh. I grew up some 30 miles from where August Wilson did, at about the same time (we were both pre-teens in 1957.) So when Troy talks about hitting a home run and says, “you can kiss it goodbye,” I recognized the locution of a particular Pittsburgh Pirates broadcaster of that era.

 Yet despite our proximities, the worlds of Wilson’s plays were mostly foreign to me—except this one. The terms of the respect Troy demands from his son are specifically familiar from the black family next door, and a boy I grew up with. I heard Troy’s speeches about not wasting time on anything other than preparing to make a living from fathers of many ethnicities, including my own.

 Charles Robinson as Troy Maxson accentuated this familiarity. His relentless insistence on dominating by having the answer for everything, combined with his compact, wiry frame, reminded me of many 1950s fathers. Yet casting him as Troy was risky. Wilson describes the character as “a large man,” and from James Earl Jones on, large men have played him in the first generation of productions while Wilson was alive. This can be important to Troy’s character and the play’s most dramatic moments: the contrast between Troy’s largeness of body and need, and the constrictions he rebels against, while in other ways he continues to bear the fate and the heavy responsibilities that define him.

 It’s also important to the white societal fear and other images associated with big black men. So some of those dramatic moments and motivations seem less than they could be, and while the efficient naturalism of this production has its virtues, there are mythic qualities of Troy that go missing.

 Still, it’s certainly worth taking some trouble to see. Director Leah Gardiner makes full use of the stage to keep the eye involved, as the ear is entranced by Wilson’s trademark stage poetry. Robinson performs very well, as do the other actors (Shona Tucker as his wife, Rose; Josiah Phillips as his friend, Bono; Kevin Kenerly and Cameron Knight as his sons, Lyons and Cory; G. Valmont Thomas as his brother, Gabriel; and Catiana Graham and Dominique Moore alternating as his daughter, Raynell.)

 They speak the rhythms of Wilson’s words, which together with the backyard set by Scott Bradley and lighting by Dawn Chiang—naturalistic and mythic at the same time—create stage magic.

More on "Fences"

Before I saw August Wilson's play, Fences at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival earlier this month, I hadn't seen a production of it nor read it for around a decade. So with other Wilson plays I'd seen and read in recent years more in the forefront of my mind, I experienced this production with a certain innocence. I remembered some parts of the story, but not others. But in most ways, it was a first-time kind of experience. That turned out to be a big part of the experience for me.

So in my review I wrote about it without giving away much of the story, so others could also experience it that way. Deciding how much of the play's story to tell is always a problem. Some people read reviews before they see a play--perhaps to help them decide whether to see it or not. But a lot of people who won't see the play (or at least this production) read the review anyway. So how do you not spoil the story for those who are going, while telling enough of the story to make it an interesting reading experience for those who aren't going? The answer varies according to circumstances, but it's almost always a problem.

A couple of other comments about that column. Doing a cost-benefit analysis on writing columns and reviews is always depressing, but sometimes more than others. Getting review tickets for Oregon Shakespeare Festival productions is one of the perks of this job, and a necessary one, because it offers some perspective on the North Coast theatre I usually see. But otherwise, it's a long (and increasingly costly) drive, it's a couple of nights in a motel, meals and four plays in three days (we usually arrive Thursday for the evening show, see two on Friday and one on Saturday before driving back.) And for all that, the paper pays zilch.

For many columns (which may include reviews/previews of two plays or more) there's time-consuming research. And then of course the job of writing, which often involves being as concise as possible. I thought of all this when I re-read the first paragraph of the Fences review, and realized that it alone represented at least eight hours of reading. There were three facts from three separate sources in one sentence.

In that review, I write about the muscular but not physically large lead actor, and how Wilson noted that Troy Maxson (the lead character) is a large man, and then I speculate on the importance of that largeness. But it was only after I wrote that, that this piece from NPR was brought to my attention. It makes a big point out of the character's largeness. It also contains the one video clip of James Earl Jones' performance that I recall seeing before.

I wish I'd seen him do this play, as well as a subsequent touring production with John Henry Redwood as Troy Maxson. I met John Henry and saw him in other roles (and he was a big man, and a very generous and lovely man, who, like August, died way before his time), as I saw the great Mary Alice, who originated the role of Rose in Fences, in a different play with John Henry. (Courtney Vance, who was the first Cory, is now familiar to just about everybody from his television roles, particularly as the D.A. on Law and Order: Criminal Intent.)

I suppose it's not too much of a tip-off to say that this play is about "love, honor, duty, betrayal," especially since August Wilson said that's what all his plays are about. But from here on, there are SPOILERS, so if you haven't seen Fences and you intend to, maybe this is the place to stop reading.

Troy Maxson reveals a major element of his biography late in the first act, including a crime he committed and the fact that he was imprisoned for it. It's said that August Wilson based this character partly on his stepfather, David Bedford, who married his mother in 1957, the year this play takes place.

It was only after Bedford's death that Wilson learned he had been a high school football star, but black players didn't get scholarships in 1930s Pittsburgh, so he tried to rob a store to get money to go to school. But during the robbery he killed a man, and spent 23 years in prison. The only job he could get when he got out was with the Pittsburgh sewage department. Troy Maxson's story is similar.

August Wilson's relationship with Bedford was difficult, and one area of conflict, as in the play, was over high school football. But while in the play, Troy's conflict with his son Cory is over Cory playing football (and being recruited by a North Carolina college), Wilson's was that he quit his high school team. (I'm not sure his Pittsburgh Central Catholic High School team played my Greensburg Central Catholic High School team when we were both in high school, but if so we might have passed in the night way back then.)

Troy Maxson goes off on the Pittsburgh Pirates for not playing Roberto Clemente because he was Puerto Rican, and this was August's view as well, as he expressed it when we talked about the Pirates of that era. It's true that the now revered Clemente had a tough time his first several years in the 1950s. He complained of various injuries and got a reputation as lazy, which was clearly a racial byproduct. Ironically or not, the Pittsburgh Pirates--in a city that always had a complex attitude towards its black athletes--in 1971 became the first to field an all-black team (including the pitcher) in a World Series. The star of that team and that Series was Roberto Clemente.

Troy Maxson was a Negro League player, and Pittsburgh had two of the best Negro League teams, the Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords, with Satchel Paige pitching.

Wilson said this play began with an image, of a black man holding a baby, in a collage by the black Pittsburgh artist whose work inspired several of his plays, Romare Bearden. Wilson wanted to portray a black man who felt the responsibility to stay with his family, and who did. He wanted to provide a counter-image to the prevalent stereotype of black men who are absent from their families, and black families without fathers.

The play demonstrates the cost of that, and the personal cost of thwarted ambition and self-expression, not only in Troy but in his wife, Rose, and both of his sons. Troy attributes his infidelity to the need to get beyond his fences of family and failure, though he is otherwise clueless about his projections onto his sons and the costs of thwarting the sports and college ambitions of Cory, or not supporting the musical ambitions of his eldest son, Lyons.

When he began writing Fences, Wilson hadn't quite conceived the idea of writing a cycle of plays set in all the decades of the 20th century. But in what is probably his most personal play in that it reflects his own childhood, he was already being true to the history of the African American family. Troy Maxson stands at the midpoint of the century, and in the middle of so much else.

But though this was August Wilson's most popular play--and the one that assured his career as a playwright--it was not his favorite. As he said in interviews and as he told me, his favorite was the next one he wrote, Joe Turner's Come and Gone. I'm still searching for the interview later in his life when he talked about all his plays. I seem to recall he ranked Gem of the Ocean pretty highly, too.

I haven't mentioned Troy's brother, Gabriel, and I don't say much about him in my review. He is certainly a key figure in the play, as the wounded and addled often are in Wilson's plays. G. Valmont Thomas does a fine job portraying him. But his size and big voice make me wonder what this production might have been like if he had played Troy and Robinson had played Gabriel. That might not have fit the director's vision (or the actors' schedules), but I would have liked to see it.

Robinson was quite compelling in the role, and he fit with other stylistic elements of this production. His interactions with Cory in particular felt real and nuanced, though contemporary audiences might have been more disturbed by the way that James Earl Jones seemed to deliberately humiliate Cory. But his key speech explaining his infidelity didn't have the visceral power it might have had. Nor really did the scene announcing the death of his mistress, or his bringing the baby to Rose. They worked for that audience--including me--mostly because of Wilson's words, I think. But as I wrote in my review, it was an emotional theatrical experience anyway, and I certainly recommend it.

"Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter" at OSF

Gwendolyn Mulamba as Jenny Sutter at OSF

Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter Reviewed

My Journal column this week contains a review written by playwright, director, teacher and now drama critic (and also my partner) Margaret Thomas Kelso, of the current Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter. I had to edit it for space in print, but not for cyberspace. So here is her full review:

Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter, written by Julie Marie Myatt and directed by Jessica Thebus, joins a long line of stories about soldiers returning from war that date back to Homer’s Odyssey. And like Ulysses, Jenny Sutter does not take a direct path home. But instead of Calypso’s island, Iraq war veteran Jenny detours by way of Slab City, California, in her own odyssey to find herself before reconnecting with her family. Unlike Ulysses, she is coming home injured: she suffers from PTSD, survivor’s guilt and an amputated leg. And as a woman, she faces greater expectations to emotionally reunite with her children. The play asks can she heal herself enough to be able to face the rest of the journey home?

Approximately 200,000 women have served in the Iraq so far and more of them have faced hostile fire and resulting injuries than women in the military ever before. How the ravages of war will impact servicewomen (in contrast to civilian women who suffer collateral damage) is still unknown.

The director Jessica Thebus has discovered the perfect tone for the piece: amusing, gritty and without a trace of sentimentality. The performances are all strong with Gwendolyn Mulamba playing an acerbic and ironic Jenny, who grounds the play with her pain and dignity. The rest of the cast are mostly odd ball inhabitants of Slab City, a real location, the remnants of a WWII Marine base at the foot of the Chocolate Mountains where a community of retirees and misfits squat in domiciles ranging from tarps to classic Airstreams. It’s a perfect location for the likes of Jenny and offers the playwright plenty of material for a supporting cast of quirky characters who infuse humor and warmth into the play and Jenny’s life.

Lou, a professional itinerant trying to give up her many addictions , calls Slab City her home base. Kate Mulligan plays Lou with energy and sizzle, becoming an upbeat foil for the laconic Jenny. Other residents of the slabs are Buddy, Lou’s sometimes boyfriend/preacher, skillfully played by David Kelly; Cheryl, Lou’s hairdresser/therapist, believably performed by K.T. Vogt; and Donald, an emotionally damaged cipher whose deft performance by Gregory Linington prevents these characters from sliding into romanticism. Cameron Knight plays Hugo, the bus station’s night shift employee who is the first civilian Jenny meets after discharge.

Richard Hay created a simple set that serves flawlessly while maintaining a bit of magic in the scene transitions that Oregon Shakespeare does so well.. Lynn Jeffries designed costumes that anchor the realistic tone of the play while supporting the character development of the actors. Allen Lee Hughes’s lighting not only supports the action and mood of the play but creates locales, especially the hospital setting at the opening of the play.

The only shortcoming of the production were several extended lifeless scenes. The first was very early in the play when Jenny changes from her marine fatigues into civilian clothes, an important sequence which reveals to the audience not only her transition out of military life, but also her struggle with her artificial leg. Important but lasting far too long without suspense or other drama. Another lifeless scene is when Jenny collapses and “Oh, Happy Days,” plays ironically in the background for many minutes too long.

Other than these moments, the direction was skillful and sensitive, honoring the pain, celebrating survival, and finding the humor in a challenging situation. The performance tells a story we all need to consider in an engaging hour thirty-five minutes (without intermission.)

Note: This play runs at OSF in Ashland, Oregon through June 20.

Age Matters

The March/April issue of the Dramatist (publication of the Dramatists Guild) begins with letters that refer back to a column that argues that older playwrights, and not just young ones, might write worthwhile plays. That column said: "Look, no one likes to age, especially the artistic child within you. But with that glorious aging comes more wisdom, more experience with craft, more experience with relationships" etc. Letters responding to it came from people in their forties and even seventies who don't have established playwriting careers but who are writing plays and trying to get them produced anyway.

The editors called the response "overwhelming," which generally means it is responding to a point of view unheard of before. The idea has apparently become gospel that at least among the non-famous (but possibly extending to the formerly famous as well), only the young can write plays. Anyone not young is illegitimate, foolish and should be ashamed of themselves, which probably they are. So a bunch of people wrote in to say, not so fast.

I come at this issue from an older perspective, but also from my own youth in an apparently different time. While I had terrible panics and despair over the possibility that I wouldn't "make it" as a writer until, could it be possible, my 30s, and I believed that my youth gave me a particular perspective on my times, I would still have easily accepted the idea that older writers were legitimate, and could have greater perspective based on experience as people and as writers. It stands to reason.

But apparently it is now a minority argument, because doors are largely closed to older playwrights--meaning 40 and up. There are contests, fellowships, opportunties for young writers. Even if it isn't made explicit by rule, new means under 30 or maybe 35. It's not just in the theatre--I remember a San Francisco Chronicle book critic who shocked the literary world by countering the many annual"best writers under 35" lists with his "best new writers over 50." But he only did it once.

There are reasons why the new stage is dominated by young playwrights. University students are virtually the only subsidized playwrights in America, although they are often subsidizing themselves by means of student loans. They are instructed, coached, mentored and produced. In a community like this one, they are pretty much the only new original plays anyone sees. This happens because the university has turned the arts (and related fields, like journalism) into profit centers, and the university has become the chief employer of writers, including those playwrights who aren't writing movies or TV shows.

Once out of their undergrad and graduate programs, young playwrights have a certain amount of time to devote to the theatre, during which years they either get produced and noticed and become part of the theatre-Hollywood-university system, or they don't, and get on with not being poor anymore.

These days, with many in the huge baby boomer generation retiring on possibly the last dependable pensions there will be for awhile, there are likely to be more writers and playwrights in their 50s, 60s, etc. who can subsidize themselves. Presumably institutions will respond to that, although so far they aren't. The only allowable topic for older writers is being old. As long as they make fun of it.

There is the additional question of audience for theatre, which is generally older, and whether a predominantly young perspective serves them all that well.

But what is really shocking about this debate is that there is a question involved as to the legitimacy of the non-young playwright's perspective. All you have to do is go to student plays and however charming and even insightful they are, it's clear the writers don't have very much to write about, or much perspective on it. The argument for craft is more complicated, but it seems obvious that while young writers can excel by instinct, talent, originality and enthusiasm--as well as the "first thought, best thought" phenomenon--there is something to be said for craft gained by experience crafting.

Of course the theatre needs youth to replenish itself (and to move the sets.) Still, there's institutional prejudice against the not-young in the theatre as well as most everywhere else. But you know, the theatre--and most everything else--is missing something, something important, something it needs.

This North Coast Weekend

HSU Ten Minute Play Festival begins this weekend.

This North Coast Weekend

The Dell'Arte scholars go from the tragic to the ridiculous with first-year students in Flops Popping, the popular spring clown show. Twenty-four students in various combinations cavort on the Carlo stage, Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.

Another popular annual spring event is the HSU Ten Minute Play Festival, which this year celebrates its 10th birthday. Coordinator Margaret Thomas Kelso (who began the festival in 1998) says there are an unusual number of plays this year with social and political themes, including terrorism and interrogation, war and genocide. (Plus the usual comedies and fantasies, of course.) The Festival begins this weekend, Thursday through Saturday at 7:30 in Gist Hall Theatre, and continues next weekend, May 1-3. A lineup of the plays and other info at HSU Stage.

Auditions announcement by Ferndale Rep:

Hey Seniors - ages 55 plus! The Ferndale Repertory Theatre is holding auditions for our second annual all senior show. This season we are auditioning Dave Silverbrand’s original script, Make Mine Metamucil on MONDAY, April 28th and TUESDAY, April 29 from 7pm -9pm at the Carson Block Building, the third floor, 517 Third Street, Old Town, Eureka. Director Denise Ryles is seeking eight ensemble players – four men and four women, age 55 plus.

The theatre is also looking for seniors interested in the technical and backstage positions. Please call the theatre (707) 786-5483 with your contact information and we will get back to you.

PRODUCTION DATES are July 13, 14 & 15 at the Rep and three shows in other venues still to be arranged. – for a total of six shows. Rehearsals will start in May. Actors - Be prepared to read cold from the script; wear comfortable clothes and shoes. Monologues are not required but appreciated. Scripts are available for perusal at the theatre. Note that scripts from the theatre may not be taken home. For more information, please call the Ferndale Rep at (707) 786-5483 and ask for Marilyn.

This North Coast Weekend

Pure Abstractions HSU spring dance concert
Thurs-Saturday at 7:30 at the Van Duzer.
For the Dell'Arte School performances and
Jeff DeMark at the Arcata Playhouse Saturday,
see the column below.

We Live On a Political Stage

This is my Stage Matters column I sent in for the North Coast Journal published today. Apparently the email went awry...we're still sorting this out. Apologies are due to the folks at Dell'Arte I interviewed, and to Jeff DeMark, because their shows I write about here are this weekend.

So I'm posting the column in full here today.

The theatre of politics is pretty obvious in this presidential campaign year, but politics in theatre—that is, political and social issues of current concern as subject matter--is also especially evident on North Coast stages in 2008.

Several plays written in another time encouraged reflection on pertinent issues of today—and were likely chosen with that in mind. The year began with “Marat/Sade” at NCRT, which dealt with political violence, totalitarian repression and the gap between rich and poor. “Twelve Angry Men” at Ferndale Rep reminded us of fragile principles in our justice system, and the folly of discarding them. Dell’Arte revived “The Golden State,” which also touches upon economic disparities as well as perennial cultural issues, and North Coast Prep presented “The Crucible,” reminding us of the contagion of fear, especially when it is manipulated for political and economic gain.

Now Ferndale Rep is doing a musical that has the distinction of leading to several Supreme Court decisions concerning censorship and political speech. Today’s younger audiences for “Hair” may be a little baffled by some of the issues of central importance in the story, such as the major plot point of burning a draft card, and all the fuss about…hair. Both had immense symbolic importance in the 1960s, and caused of outrage and violence in the public sphere, and within families. Still, this play’s relevance to current issues of war, protest and repression are obvious, unfortunately.

Other current social and political issues seem clearly on the minds of second year students of the Dell’Arte International School’s MFA Ensemble in the piece they’re creating and presenting for the first time this coming weekend.

Between Two Winters on the Carlo Theatre stage Thursday through Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 2, is the result of an eight week process that began with students studying the nature of tragedy (Aristotle’s “Poetics” applied to Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”) But when it came time to create a theatre piece, students were directed to find a subject in the newspaper.

According to Brian Moore, the student directing the piece, the story they selected was about a woman who was approached by the man who had raped her 20 years before. He asked her forgiveness, and she refused. Instead she initiated a prosecution, which caused controversy and criticism.

But in the process of writing the script, “it’s taken on a much different life of its own,” Moore said. “From that starting point, we’ve ended up in a much different place.”

Now the story takes place in Kuwait in the early 1990s, where the mayor of a city in Montana goes to honor the hero who saved lives during the oil field fires set by the retreating Iraqi forces in Gulf War I. The mayor is the woman who was raped 20 years before, the hero was her rapist, who has been in hiding ever since.

There are more moral and plot complications. The mayor is “a pretty notorious figure,” said Ronlin Foreman, the school’s director of pedagogical studies, who supervises the project. “She is a hyper politician with aspirations to the Senate, and has a real quality of vengeance in her life.” She also has a daughter for whom she also has political ambitions—who is the child resulting from that rape.

Where all this leads was still taking shape when I spoke with Moore and Foreman this past weekend. But for Foreman, the rationale for applying the tragic form to contemporary events is clear. “We have a surfeit of tragic occurrences,” he said “but tragedy in our day and age is a hard thing to come by. We think that we’re coming into a time when an admission of tragedy, of tragic flaw, is important.”

“Tragedy is a form that at its root pits the rational and ordered world against the world of terror and chaos,” according to a text these students use. “It deals with the human drive to step out of the chorus, to stand for and proceed into the hero’s journey…”

For this project, the chorus—which in Greek tragedy is the voice of the community that narrates and comments on the story—is represented by the media. “We’re planning to have a television camera onstage, broadcasting to monitors,” Moore said, “because we’re exploring how the media can make one of the characters the protagonist one moment, but suddenly shift to side with a different character.”

But the shifting chorus as well as the moral complexities of the situation challenges the classical definition of tragedy. “It’s hard a lot of the time to see the actions of these characters as sins, in the way that the Greeks did,” Moore explained. “We have a much different understanding of morality. We don’t bend to the will of the gods the same way the ancient Greeks did.”

So when I asked “Who is the tragic hero? What is the tragic flaw?” they both laughed a little uncomfortably. “Well, that’s what we’re working on right now,” Moore said.

Applying the tragic sense to these contemporary events remains an essential part of this exploration. “It’s a time when we say that it is important for someone to step out of the chorus—out of the people,” Foreman said, “as leaders—as people who expect to do something to change things.”

Foreman’s goal is to get the script right, so this weekend’s performances may turn out to be more like staged readings, he said. But the exploration will continue to a scheduled mid-May run of “Between Two Winters” at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco.

There are even some contemporary issues explored in the annual HSU dance concert this weekend (“Pure Abstractions,” Thursday through Saturday at 7:30 in the Van Duzer.) Then beginning next weekend, the 10th annual HSU Ten Minute Play Festival will include an unusual number of plays on social and political themes, including terrorism and interrogation, war and genocide. (Plus the usual comedies and fantasies, of course.) The festival runs April 24-26 and May 1-3.

This Saturday at 8 PM in the Arcata Playhouse, Jeff DeMark reprises his newest show, “They Ate Everything But Their Boots,” about the trials and tribulations of finding and renovating a Humboldt home. This will be only the third time DeMark has done this show since its premiere at the Bayside Grange in late 2006, and he promises some new material as well as an expanded musical presence by the Tiny Tims. Thanks to the mortgage crisis, there’s a new topicality as well to this typically funny, smart and generous DeMark show.

La Bete is on

La Bete at CR this weekend.