Tag Archives: Theater

Comedy of Errors

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Dandelion

Friday night, Anne and I went to see the Rep’s final production of the season. “The Comedy of Errors” started off as usual Shakespeare fare. There is a setting shift from the 16th century Aegean to the environs of New Orleans, or rather “Nawlins”, but this is not unusual. Modern Shakespeare productions update The Bard this way, all of the time. The time is Mardi Gras, in 1936. In the first act, a few local flourishes sneak-in to provide Cajun acculturation, but his written words are otherwise unadulterated. Intermission, the second act begins and then all hell breaks loose.

“Errors” is supposed to be a farce. It comes equipped with two sets of identical twins. The opportunity for mistaken identity comedy is doubled, doubling our pleasure. The audience is treated to Nawlins music, from a jazz funeral march, to a Gospel revival of “The Saints Come Marching In”. Dr. John’s “Going Back to New Orleans”, and “House of the Rising Sun” are also featured. Who knew that “House” was so funny? In one comic medley, both Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski are channeled, along with Janis Joplin, “Busted flat in New Orleans, …”, Elvis, “You’ll never know, What heaven means, Until you’ve been down to New Orleans”, and many other Nawlins tropes. By the time the play is done we’ve seen just about every Southern theatrical cliché and laughed at them. The show is filled with “Amazing Grace”.

The Rep will go dark now, until next season. As is customary, Steven Woolf, Artistic Director for The Rep, comes out before the last show and announces the next season’s productions. He always closes this speech with an invocation to season subscribers, “If you did not bring your subscription form, you know that we have the duplicate.” We know. We had already re-upped by then.

Happy Birthday Bubs!

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Gene and Betty

First off, happy birthday, Gene! Technically, Thursday is your birthday, but I am posting this late enough that I don’t feel like I’ve jumped the gun. The photos are from our wedding. Our wedding photographer, was my Bro, Chris, but these pictures were taken by Peter, one of my groom’s men. Peter or Evelyn put them in a book, where they have been sitting lo these many years. Among the family members pictured, Betty, Katie and Jackie, have passed. It may seem strange, to invite so many dead people to a birthday, but I had to capture the duality of these two sisters, and these were the people who were there. I love seeing Gene and Betty, with the same laugh. Memories of happier times, and this day was certainly a happy one. Bubs, you are entitled to say, “Oh, Gawd!”, at the sight of these photos. Afterall, it is your birthday. Happy Birthday!

Betty, Katie, John and Jackie

Wednesday night, a work night, was also another night at the theater. We attended The Rep’s third offering in their, new this year, Ignite! theater festival. This evening’s offering was a reading of the play, “Bicycle Girl”. Below is The Rep’s synopsis:

In 1939 two girls from very different backgrounds travel across America by bicycle. Their destination is New York and the World’s Fair with its promise of revealing the World of Tomorrow. A lovingly told play about one world giving way to a new one, and two girls changing along with it.

Like the previous evening’s offering, this was essentially a two actress play. Although, there was a third character, “Man”, who played multiple parts. Unlike the previous evening, this was not an exercise in cringe theater. Speaking with playwright, Rogelio Martinez, the inspiration for his play came from the life of photographer, Ruth Orkin. He mentioned her iconic photo, “American Girl“. He originally thought about chronicling her post-war tour of Europe. Then he learned of her 17-year-old bicycle ride from LA to NYC.

Steven Woolf (The Rep Artistic Director) explained, it takes a written play seven years to make it to Broadway. These readings represent only one step in this process. I asked him if any of the three would likely show up at The Rep. He said that the one we missed, “Stagger Lee”, was the best candidate. It is a musical, and as part of this series, they only performed its first act. Again, here is the synopsis:

On Christmas Eve 1895, shots rang out in a St. Louis bar. A hundred years and a thousand songs later, this ordinary murder has become a legend. This is the true story of what happened after Stagger Lee shot Billy Lyons.

I was very impressed by Ignite! I thought that the two plays read (that I saw) were both worthy of further consideration. The $8 a seat cost made this a no miss opportunity for a Rep patron. According to Associate Artistic Director, Seth Gordon, The Rep plans on repeating this festival. 

Gidion’s Knot

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Painted Toes

This Spring, The Rep has launched a new initiative, Ignite!, a festival, that features commissions of nationally recognized playwrights. It culminates in three public readings. We missed the first one, “Stagger Lee”, which was last week, but caught the second one. Tonight’s offering was “Gidion’s Knot”. Here is The Rep’s synopsis:

Over the course of what is not your ordinary parent/teacher conference, Gidion’s mother and his emotionally overwhelmed teacher have a fraught conversation about Gidion. As his story is slowly uncovered, these two caring women come to terms with their excruciating feelings of culpability. An emotionally charged play by this year’s Princess Grace Award winner, Johnna Adams.

This presentation was only a reading of the play. The world premiere of “Gidion’s Knot”, is scheduled for this summer, near DC. “Knot” is an adult themed play about children. Gideon’s mom and teacher wrestle with each other and with his suicide. A two actress play, it devolves into pin the blame on the donkey. Gidion is portrayed as a poet. Real world student suicide is more prosaic. Unsuccessful attempts allow for meaningful retrospection. Success leaves nothing but questions. This is what ”Knot” leaves us with.

In other news, Anne’s regular rotation as substitute teacher/utility player, or everybody’s favorite sub, has skidded to an abrupt stop. She was called in on Monday, the day after Spring Break, to cover for a teacher that had jury duty. Today, Anne learned that this teacher could be out of school, 4-6 weeks. Anne will cover her high school math classes for the time being. Tonight she is grading papers. No telling how long this could last, either side could settle, but until then, Anne has a new challenge.

In case you were wondering, those are her toes. When she was feeling low last week, she gave me a shopping list of things to buy at the grocery store, mostly just drugs. Also, on her list, was pink nail polish. When your down with a cold and feeling low, sometimes NyQuil and your husband’s “Poor Babies” don’t cut it. I painted the big toes. Maybe I should have put on “Sixty Minute Man” and finished them?

Race

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The Mississippi by John Steuart Curry, 1935

The comedian, Chris Rock, once joked about Black History Month. He complained that the shortest month of year had been picked, February. Weather-wise, February was also the worst month of the year. Rock’s complaint was that with twelve months to choose from, why did black people end up with the shortest and most dismal one. This year at least, Black History Month was granted an extra day. If Black History Month was allotted the maximum thirty-one day, then yesterday would have been February, 31st, instead of March 2nd. For the sake of discussion, let’s assume the former, and grant this amateur blogger one more day of grace to write this up. Last night, we went to see The Rep’s production of David Mamet’s play, “Race”.

Mamet is a connoisseur of four-letter words, but when it comes to the four-letter word, race, I prefer another David, David Blight. He is a Yale professor and author, and is on an iTunes U lecture series about the Civil War; he is my preferred instructor on the subject of race. Mamet’s white lead states that there is nothing that a white person can say to a black person about race. According to Blight that hasn’t stopped white people for the last 150 plus years from trying. Blight leavens these white voices, with black voices and composes a symphony, on this pivotal period in American history and in American race relations.

Returning to Mametland, “Race” is set in the present. It is a four actor play. There are Lawson and Brown, the white and black male law partners. There is Strickland, the rich, white defendant, accused of raping a younger black woman. Then there is Susan, also young black woman, and recent addition to the firm. Only Susan’s character has no last name. Mamet’s stacatto dialog spans two acts, and multiple aspects of jurisprudence. The subject of race is intertwined throughout these discussions. Lawson argues the law, but the crux of his argument always returns to race.

The Civil War was this nation’s struggle to expunge the stain of slavery. Read about the 13th Amendment. This war’s death rolls dwarfed all other American wars, both before and since. Even with this sacrifice, it took another hundred years before Civil Rights gained any traction. We are now sitting fifty years beyond that point. This is also the timeframe of Mamet’s play, except that all of the characters, save maybe Susan, are too old to successfully digest this last half century in race relations. This gives Mamet’s play a stale, dated feel. Its opening joke about OJ only underscores this sense. Only the recent DSK scandal, offers this play any touchstone to the present. That event dealt more with relations between the sexes rather than the races. Mamet confronts similar sexual issues, but always returns to race.

John Steuart Curry’s painting, “The Mississippi” has little to do with race, save that the family that is stranded, is black. Curry also painted farm animals, caught in similar predicaments. These paintings depict the 1927 flood, a scourge visited upon man by God. Race is a scourge that man alone devised and someday, we shall overcome.

Sunday in the Park With George

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Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte - Photo by UGArdener, Flickr Creative Commons

Date night! Dinner and a show with my Honey, dinner at CJ Muggs and a show at The Rep, Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George”. The point of departure for this Sondheim musical is Georges Seurat’s most famous painting, “A Sunday Afternoon the Island of La Grande Jatte”, pictured above.

A 19th century, French painter, Seurat, pioneered the painting technique called Pointillism. He created his paintings by dabbing just the tip of his paintbrush onto the canvas. You might call this a quiet, but absorbing painting technique. Up close Seurat’s painting looks abstract, atomized color into thousands of dots. Step back though and the painting resolves itself into a picture of the artist’s vision. The engineer in me likens this technique to an early analog version of digitization. Unfortunately, Seurat never sold a painting in his lifetime and died at the age of 31.

Seurat, a modernist artist, is the perfect inspiration for this contemplative modernist musical. George, like his play, which thinks as much about itself as the rest of the world is too self-absorbed to even see his female lead, the aptly named Dot. His art is more important and if she cannot realize this, well then. The first act ends with a tour-de-theater on-stage recreation of Seurat’s famous painting.

Flash forward a hundred years and through intermission to the second act. George is now Seurat’s great-grandson. His grandmother, Seurat’s and Dot’s daughter is still on hand. George is still wrestling with the complexities of art and love, but this time around his art is just all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

This play about an artist that failed in love, in life, struck close to home. Our son, Dan is an artist and we worry about him. Art is a tough profession, as Seurat’s life testifies.

Pointillism is art composed of a thousand dots, nay a million, anyway quiet and absorbing work. So is making a thousand squirrels. Is making a thousand squirrels as lucky as making a thousand origami cranes? Only time will tell. No one, save Seurat, realized the greatness of his work, at the time. Dot realized the greatness of Seurat, the man, but her love was unrequited. His love of art, love of self, overshadowed her love, but, at least in the play, they both endured. I wonder it there will be any black squirrels?

Tom Sawyer

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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Recently someone in Missouri sent me a picture of the house I was born in. Heretofore I have always stated it was a palace, but I shall be more guarded now. – Mark Twain

Anne and I went to go see The Reps Christmas production, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”. We went on the last night of the production. Tomorrow, now today, the theater goes dark until next year. It seems oxymoronic to try to write a review of a show that has already closed, but here goes anyway. “It was awesome”, said the ten-year-old exiting before us, “But scary too!” She ought to know, because Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer” is all about tweens like her. In the story, Tom, Huck and Becky were all in the prime of their childhood, on the cusp of adolescence and then only adulthood ahead of them. Is it all that strange that a well written story about children from the past would appeal to them in the prescient?

Most Americans are familiar with Twain’s “Sawyer” and also his “Huckleberry Finn”. In Missouri, Samuel Clemens’s birth state, this is almost required reading. You can’t say much about culture in Missouri, except that it is home to the most beloved and also the greatest American novel. Twain’s first published story was, “Advice to Little Girls”. Anne quipped, “lookout for Maurice Chevalier”. I countered that Chevalier lived over a hundred years after Twain. She countered that he was just that present.

…the cave was but a labyrinth of crooked aisles that ran into each other and out again an led nowhere. It was said that one might wander days and nights together through its intricate tangle of rifts and chasms and never find the end of the cave. – Tom Sawyer

“Sawyer” made for great theater. While not a musical per say, there was plenty of choreography in the play and the background music helped to set the mood for each scene. We had a good time and enjoyed the play. There is a chance that one might still be able to see this play. Like last year’s hit, starring Kathleen Turner, “High”, this play started in Hartford, and played in Cincinnati, before coming to Saint Louis. “Heat” then opened on Broadway, so maybe “Sawyer” is headed there too?

We had dinner before the play at Cyano’s, home of extra whipped cream. (Sorry, Alice) I felt bad about leaving the boys home to fend for themselves, but they managed. They had dinner together with friends, Annie and Jessica. Like Dan, Annie is in art school, in LA. Jessica is a high school friend of Dave’s and now substitutes with Anne.  

Ten Thousand River Commissions…cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over and laugh at. – Life on the Mississippi

Autumn Blaze

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For the last month, every morning, I have taken a single photo, from our front, upstairs window. Anne covered for me, when I went to Dayton. I wanted to capture the changing colors of our new red maple tree, an Autumn Blaze, through the magic of time lapsed photography. The maple’s leaves gradually turn from green to crimson red. A storm came through and blew off all the leaves in one night. While the movie does capture the changing seasons, what quickly draws the eye is the daily change in the parked vehicles. Anne’s is the red car, the one with the bicycle rack on top. Our neighbor’s white car across the street appears to move up and down the driveway from frame to frame. At the end of the movie the juxtaposition of the automated soundtrack music and the disappearance of the white SUV make for a nice, if accidental, special effect.

Friday night, Anne and Joanie went to go see “Billy Elliot”. Anne thought that the show was pretty good. They got tickets as part of their dance concert series. The musical follows the plot of the movie. Music by Sir Elton John was great, but sometimes loud. Being a musical and not a dance concert, it lasted much longer than most of the series’ shows do. I was asleep when Anne returned home at midnight.

While Night Girl was still snoozing, I got up and out early on Saturday morning. I drove up to the Riverlands, with hopes of catching the last of the pelicans as they migrate south. Alas, I was too late. I did find Bill Coatney, who was kind enough to give me the lay of the land. He has a nice website, check it out. I did manage to get a few blog-worthy pictures. Returning home, I mowed and bagged the lawn. You might notice the disappeared leaves in addition to the white SUV in the last frame of the movie. In the afternoon, Anne and I went to go see the new Civil War exhibit at the History Museum. Pictures from both the Riverlands and the Civil War exhibit to follow later.