The Dressing

Cross-genre arts creations are proliferating. So it was on January 6, 2012, that the Dresser heard composer-guitarist D. J. Sparr at Washington, DC's Atlas Performing Arts Center. Sparr mixes electric guitar with a contemporary classical base of music.

Sparr who has the looks and hair to be a rock star of the new music scene played his program of Steve Reich, Paul Lansky, Derek Bermel, and Sparr with such understatement that the Dresser wondered if he was too shy to be on stage or didn't care much that there was a sizeable audience eager to share his well-thought-out program.

What the Dresser loved best in this six-part program was Sparr's "Superstring Serenade," a composition that included CounterPoint, an ensemble of five string players whose credentials come from well known organizations such as the National Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, and Washington National Opera. "Superstring" opens passionately, moderates into a peaceful lullaby that breaks into grandeur and authority and ends whimsically in a fizzle. The strings enhance the riffs of the electric guitar in a confident marriage of sound.

Sparr's program began with two compositions played by the charming Levine Advanced Guitar Ensemble, a group of five 13-15 year-old acoustic guitarists under the guidance of the Risa Carlson, the Levine School of Music Guitar Department Chair. They played Sparr's "Mare arpeggi di Mauro," a difficult counterpoint composition that required careful counting, and Gilbert Clamens "Tango Amigo," a milonga piece which the group was more at ease with.

Showing a video interview with Steve Reich, Sparr introduced Reich's "Electric Counterpoint," a piece which features harmonic stasis or what the Dresser would call a "Gertrude Stein guitar composition" (very subtle changes that sound like repetition). As the piece was performed, it was historically interesting to think about what Reich explained to Sparr, and by extension the Atlas audience, that Reich drew on such influences as Ravi Shankar and Bob Dylan and without this rich environment there would not have been Terry Riley's "In C" or Reich's "Electric Counterpoint." The Dresser has actually heard Riley live taking credit for influencing Reich. Riley's "In C," said to be the first Minimalist composition, was composed in 1964. Reich's "Electric Counterpoint" was first recorded in 1987.

Paul Lansky's "Dance Tracks" was the piece in which the Dresser thought Sparr should have shaken loose. While playing in front of a psychedelic video where fragments floated and ribbons of color spiraled, Sparr's improvisation took on a Jimi Hendrix soundscape. It was a trance-inducing production where the light show-like video only served to make the Dresser zone out. Perhaps the Dresser is jaded because she saw an early light show in the fall of 1966 done by the Jefferson Airplane and Grace Slick at the unlikely place of Franklin & Marshall College. Nothing wrong with the video, Sparr just needed to move a little and connect with the audience.

Derek Bermel made a live introduction to Sparr's performance of Bermel's "Ritornello." The Dresser loved this composition that included the CounterPoint strings. Especially engaging was the counter play between strings and electric guitar in a passage that Bermel said was Corelli-Vivaldi meets King Crimson. This passage also made the Dresser think of the Argentine milonga--slow at points and moody.

Continue reading "D. J. Sparr on Guitar" »

Georgian-born Paata Tsikurishvili, artistic director of Synetic Theater, has a different way of looking at the world from most theater people. This was apparent to the Dresser when she saw Tsikurishvili and Nathan Weinberger's arousing 90-minute movement-and-dance interpretation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet on December 2, 2011, in Synetic's Speak No More: The Silent Shakespeare Festival. The festival included a remounting of their award-winning productions Macbeth, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet.

Synetic's retelling of Romeo and Juliet cuts out more than half of Shakespeare's cast and moves from dream sequence to the Capulet Family masked ball crashed by Romeo and his friend Mercutio. Romeo and Juliet meet, fall for each other, pledge their love in the moonlit balcony scene though Juliet is betrothed to Paris. Friar Laurence ties the knot on their secret marriage. Juliet's cousin Tybalt kills Mercutio and Romeo slays Tybalt to avenge his friend's death. Then things get messy when the Friar gives Juliet a sleeping potion that feigns her death. The Friar's letter telling Romeo about the plan to set them free of their familys' feud and Juliet's betrothal goes missing (the letter is stuck to the pendulum of time) and Romeo believe Juliet is dead so he drinks poison. When Juliet awakes, Romeo is dead beside her, so she kills herself with his knife.

The first thought in the Dresser's head about Synetic's Romeo and Juliet was steampunk based on Anastasia Simes' set of clock wheels and pendulum. Added to the physical set, the players spin their own clockwork wheels and become cogs in the system of time so that the audience sees only the wheels and not the people. In this day of digital clocks and watches, the analog clockworks of Synetic's set are the appropriate throwback in time for a Shakespearian play. Like steampunk, the Synetic interpretation suggests that people are trapped by man-made inventions and technology.

The Dresser doesn't think of Shakespearean characters as automatons obsessed by clocks, but an electronic search for the word time within the Elizabethan bard's script of Romeo and Juliet yielded 43 hits and the word hour yielded 26. Then toss in phrases like "The curfew-bell hath rung" and "this sight of death is as a bell," the alarm of time, punctuated by original music by Konstantine Lortkipanidze, is clearly present in Shakespeare's play about the young lovers who will meet untimely deaths.

Of course, steampunk is not the source of Tsikurishvili's inspiration. Georgians have an exoticism that might come from Byzantine, Persian, and Romani (gypsy) influence. However, the Dresser guesses, based on her brief look at Huntly Carter's ‪The new spirit in the Russian theatre, 1917-1928, that much of Synetic's large world vision and physical theater stems from Russian theatrical influences, including Constantin Stanislavski, that emphasize how the Industrial Revolution changed culture and mankind. But that change was not accomplished in the same way it changed Europe, because Russia missed out on the Renaissance and went from the oppression of medieval serfdom to the oppression of factory life during the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. Therefore in Synetic's world, the characters and the actors creating these rough-and-ready characters are not as burdened by the societal limitations on behavior as those created by in European theater. Two Synetic characters that stand out in this way are Romeo's friend Mercutio (played by Philip Fletcher) and Juliet's Nurse (Irina Tsikurishvili).

The Dresser continues to walk around with two scenes in her head, one involving Mercutio rolling up from the floor to stand face-to-face in uncomfortable close proximity to Juliet's hostile cousin Tybalt (Ryan Sellers) and the other when Nurse has a bawdy encounter with the lascivious Mercutio and she ends up shoving him and then riding him like a horse. In both scenes, these characters seem more sprung from a wild circus environment versus a sophisticated society where rules of etiquette and politics prevail. Still, both of these characters participate in social graces. Nurse, especially, as she grooms Juliet to look her best and helps her with politically fraught issues involving Juliet's parents and Paris, the man the Capulets want their daughter to marry. Mercutio knows the consequences of brawling and Montegues treading on Capulet territory, but he wants his best friend Romeo to be happy.

Particularly appealing are the interactions between Romeo (Alex Mills) and Juliet (Natalie Berk). They make it clear that this is an unusual attraction between them in that they are both scared in what seems a very innocent way having nothing to do with the feuding of their families. Their hands become birds or butterflies in expressing the airiness of how they feel toward one another.

In a stream of action completed without intermission, Synetic's Romeo and Juliet is a great way to see Shakespeare pared down to its essence. The Dresser would go out of her way to see this show again.

In "The Verbs of Desiring," Renée Ashley talks about a "tongue that speaks body," the "kettle-of-fish-that-turned-your-heart," the "body's dead-end," and the "noun of circumstance" illustrated as "where-is-she-now." These phrases catch the essence of Synetic's Romeo and Juliet, which is about what the heart desires--the action of love.

THE VERBS OF DESIRING

How tired the self is of self, its earth twirling in the air and
not-air and I know a woman who ate only bread until
..........................................................................................she died
of bread. Oh the where-is-she-now. Which is not a question.
Which is a noun of circumstance.
.........................................................And disquietude: lovely
word. And hairsbreadth. Stupor mundi. Kettle-of-fish-that-
turned-your-heart.
.................................You are returning from an alphabet ran-
sacked by thirst, by the gamut of implication neatly sung:
a tongue that speaks
.......................................body. A punctuated earth. You who are
resolute of hungry brutes and fooled by the beggar's bowl of
moon, tide of scat, of pellet and flop
..............................................................and the body's dead-
end is an assured apostrophe.
....................................................There are more ways to mean
than you can make note of.
.................................................Look! Something is pretty in the sky
-- it might just be the sky -- though installation's been askant.
Or what it sits upon is opposed to the level eye.
.................................................................................A panoply of
possibilities --
.............................all those bears pirouetting in your penthouse!
Oh if it or they were only.
...............................................Or if you. And, or if I.

Renée Ashley
from The Verbs of Desiring

Copyright © 2010 Renée Ashley

Photo credit: Graeme B. Shaw

Leave it to Marin Alsop of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra to pick and produce the most compelling concerts of our times. November 18, 2011, the Dresser and her friend composer Janet Peachey made their way through the two-hour gridlock DC-to-Baltimore traffic, no opportunity for dinner, to successfully arrive into the embrace of a packed Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in time to hear Arthur Honegger and Paul Claudel's Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher (Joan of Arc at the Stake). This rarely performed dramatic work with elements of oratorio and opera is a feast of musical styles that bring to mind Bach chorales, plainchant, folk music, and jazz. The production kicks off the 2012 celebration of the legendary Joan of Arc--heroine, soldier, and martyr--on her 600th birthday anniversary.

The assembly of musicians and singers for this work was awesome, a huge job for any conductor and stage director (James Robinson) to manage. However, it was apparent that Maestro Alsop loved the challenge and conducted an orderly and exciting concert. To understand the richness of musical texture, have a look at the orchestral makeup. The composition calls for an orchestra consisting of two flutes (one doubling piccolo), two oboes, E flat clarinet, B flat clarinet, bass clarinet, three E flat saxophones, three bassoons, contrabassoon, D trumpet, three B flat trumpets, three trombones, bass trombone or tuba, two pianos, celesta, timpani, two percussion players (bass drum, cymbals, rattle, side drum, tamtam, tenor drum, triangle, woodblock), ondes Martenot (played by guest artist Cynthia Millar) and strings. Add to this array of exotic sound the Morgan State University Choir, the Peabody-Hopkins Chorus, the Peabody Children's Chorus, and the Concert Artists of Baltimore. The finishing figures were actors Caroline Dhavernas (as Jeanne d'Arc--Joan of Arc) and Ronald Guttman (Brother Dominic) and featured singers soprano Tamara Wilson (The Virgin), soprano Hae Ji Chang (Marguerite), mezzo-soprano Kelley O'Connor (Catherine), tenor Timothy Fallon (Porcus), and bass Morris Robinson.

The libretto, which is in French but included English surtitles, is organized in eleven scenes. It follows a cinematic flashback path that includes a fantastic trial conducted by barnyard animals and a royal card game for the possession of Joan. Although the audience knows the terrible outcome of the story--that Joan will be burned at the stake, the tension builds throughout the scenes. Poetic lines that caught the Dresser's attention: "I myself will be a pretty candle." "This great flame is to be my bridal gown." "Is not Joan a great flame?" Lighting effects add to Joan's final scenes where she seems to be on fire and a transcendent spirit.

This program, which only had two performances in Baltimore, was also performed once at New York City's Carnegie Hall on November 19. Because of the successful blend of musical styles, poetry, and storytelling, the Dresser pronounces this concert the most compelling voice and music production she has seen in 2011.

In Yoko Danno's book trilogy & Hagoromo: A Celestial Robe, the emphasis is on a captured female figure who, unlike Joan of Arc, is not human, but forced to dwell among humans on earth. These fragmentary excerpts resonate with the emotional load delivered by the music of Arthur Honegger and the poetry of Paul Claudel in Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher.

SCENE SIX: A STONE

through
the
tight

air,

burning
and
glowing,

a stone falls

to
the
earth

at
rending

speed

SCENE SEVEN: A TREMBLING SHADOW

the wind
tears

the willow's
slender branches off

its trunk:

the ruffled
lake

reflects

a trembling
shadow
of

fear

SCENE EIGHT: A FLASH OF LIGHTNING

pregnant

clouds
gather round

the sun:

the darkening
sky

is split

by
a flash
of lightning

at birth

of
a bird

Yoko Danno
from trilogy & Hagoromo: A Celestial Robe

Copyright © 2010 Yoko Danno

Apparently the Dresser has not been to enough opera in Europe. Never has she experienced an opera production where the audience rose to their feet with thunderous applause but also booed. This is what happened for Washington National Opera's opening night November 10, 2011, at the Kennedy Center for David Alden's production of Lucia di Lammermoor sung in Italian with English surtitles.

What pleased? What displeased the Washington, DC audience that is usually too eager to show their appreciation? The cast pleased, especially and rightly so, the singing of Albanian tenor Saimir Pirgu playing Lucia's lover Edgardo and American soprano Sarah Coburn playing Lucia, but apparently the director's interpretation, which made Lucia a girl toy to her cruel, maybe incestuously attracted, brother Enrico played by American baritone Michael Chioldi, angered a large portion of the audience.

For the Dresser's part, since her preference is for contemporary opera, everything about this Donizetti opera originally premiered in 1835 drew her in. The cast was outstanding. Take note that this casts sings only three more times November 13 matinee, 15, and 18. The black and white sets and costumes make an impressive metaphoric statement--something is horribly wrong with the landscape and people who populate it. Most importantly the direction added a new layer of attention.

Librettist Salvadore Cammarano based his libretto on Sir Walter Scott's novel The Bride of Lammermoor that depicts a brother in debt forcing his sister to forsake her true love to marry for money but she loses her mind and kills the unwanted groom with a knife. To the foundation story, Alden magnifies the brother-sister relationship. The most telling scene is where the brother, in her bedroom--a room stilled filled with toys, sits on her bed stroking a doll and says to his sister she must marry Lord Arturo Buklaw (American tenor Corey Evan Rotz). What cinches the concept of the brother-as-predator is that he helps put Lucia in her wedding dress and he does this with another man.

How Alden frames the story is masterful. As the curtain goes up and the overture plays under the baton of Philippe Auguin, Lucia sleeps fitfully in a narrow bed whose railed head- and footboards look like a prison. Pretty soon the huge windows of her sleeping chamber are framed with men peering in and eventually prying open the windows and entering in this unorthodox fashion. Alden uses framing in another way too. He puts Lucia on a curtained stage high above the floor where initially she dangles her feet as she sits on the edge talking to her companion Alisa (American mezzo-soprano Sarah Mesko) and waiting for Edgardo to appear for a late night secret meeting. When she jumps down from the stage landing on all four limbs, one notices she is dressed as a child. Her skirt does not cover her ankles like Alisa's. Later this stage, with curtains pulled aside, becomes the matrimonial bedroom where Lucia has murdered Arturo.

Did Alden get this angry reception when he premiered this production in London for the English National Opera? The Dresser wasn't in London in 2008 to know.

The bottom line for the Dresser is anything David Alden directs would be worth experiencing, because she is bound not to like what those booing in the Kennedy Center's opera house prefer.

Like Alden's Lucia, the woman in B. K. Fischer's poem "Paperweight Museum" is a sex toy who lives in a world she does not seem able to escape.

PAPERWEIGHT MUSEUM

The girl goes walking in the city
and the storm begins, snow settling
on garlanded façades, taxicabs,
her coat. A world full of water
with a teaspoon of air at the top.
Bubbles blown in with syringes
while glass is still molten, a knife
plunged into multi-colored sand.

She has a bunny tail and bustier,
Tweety Bird eyes. If you shake her,
she disrobes; when the sediment
settles, the catsuit's on again. She
lives in a place where there are no
cypress trees, no Roman ramparts.
Interior figures are acrylic, lit
from a bulb in the melamine base.

The girl stays in bed long after
the lover has left. Props herself
against the cheap veneer. Lamps
are brass and bolted down, curtains
drawn with a cord on a pulley
that swings free. In the last gasp,
the lover looked away from her
flesh, as from a needle stick.

The girl is getting up now, opens
the window. Papers blow across
the bureau--map, take-out menu,
missive to herself on waking. Heavy
odor of workshirt, menthol cigarettes.
She looks around for something to
hold it all down--lead-crystal apple,
bronzed baby shoes, a rock from

the grave of Elvis. Just not a globe,
please not a globe, a little world.

B. K. Fischer
from Mutiny Gallery

Copyright © 2011 B. K. Fischer

"The Unanswered Question," a chamber orchestra composition, framed the "Charles Ives: A Life in Music" opening concert November 3, 2011, in the Strathmore and PostClassical Ensemble series of programs entitled The Ives Project. The three-day Project as conceived by Joseph Horowitz, PostClassical Ensemble artistic director, offered a master class with Ives specialist, pianist Jeremy Denk; panel and lectures discussions illustrated by live piano music and rare recordings of Ives playing and singing his original work; and three nights of concerts culminating in the intimate Music Room of the Strathmore Mansion with the JACK Quartet mixing contemporary composers and Ives. The Dresser was pleased to attend the opening concert and the panel discussion "Ives Plays Ives" that featured Denk and Horowitz with a surprise appearance of founding PostClassical music director Angel Gil-Ordóñez.

From these panelists, the Dresser gathered these words and phrases to define the musical predilections of Ives: fixed on textures and tempos, obsessed with improvisation and revision, love of fragments and unfinished music, liking massive chords and complex sonorities, inspired by literature (e.g. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau), dealing with subliminal music. The Dresser believes the reference to subliminal music is wrapped up with the term sonic exuvation, an expression Nicolas Slonimsky, an early interpreter of Ives, used to describe how Ives overlays a tranquil passage of music with a temporary outburst of sound that may be dissonant and unexpected. Ives used this technique in "The Unanswered Question."

What continues to surprise audiences about "The Unanswered Question" is the separation of the four flutes and trumpet from the orchestra on stage, which plays a lyrical passage. In the Strathmore concert hall and in keeping with what Ives intended, the flutes played their shrill lines from the balcony positioned close to the orchestra while the trumpet, adding another layer of dissonance, played from a balcony at the back of the auditorium. A possible interpretation of the instrument separation is the voice of nature in the lyric lines of the instruments on stage, the questioning voices of mankind in the flutes, and the voice of God in the trumpet. Ives called this work a "cosmic drama."

To the Dresser's mind, the point of the Project was to answer as many questions as possible about Charles Ives (1874-1954), a composer whose work speaks to contemporary classical music, but was under appreciated in its time and still is. Before the Dresser loses sight of this comparison, Ives to classical music seems to beg comparison with Gertrude Stein to literature. Both born in the Northeast United Sates in 1874 and schooled in New England (she studied with Harvard professors and he with Yale), they each broke significant ground with experimentation that combined elements of high and low art and each were marginalized by their critics. Both had to self promote but both have come into the 21st century as major influencers on 20th century and contemporary experimental artists. Undoubtedly, Stein was better at getting the public to pay attention to her, though what she got was notoriety and not appreciation. Joseph Horowitz, inspired by a letter written by the composer's daughter Edith Ives, realized that it was important to present "Ives the man and Ives the composer," which Horowitz accomplished by putting actors on stage during his Ives Project. During the "Life in Music" concert, actors Carolyn Goetzer and Floyd King both narrated and assumed the voices of the composer and his beloved wife Harmony Twitchell. The audience heard their voices through these actors--Harmony addressing Charles as "My Dearest Anything-Everything" and Charles calling her his "Best Beloved."

Ives wrote over 175 songs and so the introductory Project concert offered songs that were both accessible and challenging. Some of the songs sport words by the composer and seem like compositions typical of the early American musical except the music often follows a complicated rhythmic pattern or some other quirkiness. For example is his text to "The Circus Band," which seems to offer contemporary turns of phrase in the last two lines.

THE CIRCUS BAND (1894)

All summer long, we boys
Dreamed 'bout big circus joys!
Down Main Street, comes the band,

Oh! Ain't it a grand and glorious noise!


Horses are prancing, knights advancing,
Helmets gleaming, pennants streaming,

Cleopatra's on her throne! 

That golden hair is all her own. 


Where is the lady all in pink? 

Last year she waved to me I think, 

Can she have died? Can that rot! 

She is passing but she sees me not.

With the confident piano accompaniment of Jeremy Denk, Baritone William Sharp was fun to hear and watch as he gave musical and dramatic interpretation to such songs as "The Circus Band" and "Memories," a composition that includes whistling and quickly delivered and repeated tongue-twisting words as "expectancy and ecstasy." Included in these accessible songs was "Feldeinsamkeit," (1897) a rather Romantically-inspired song with exuberant arpeggios where the young Ives was trying to best Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) who also wrote a song of this title based on the words of Herman Almers. The programming included the Brahms version (1878) allowing the Strathmore audience to compare the two compositions. The Dresser was surprised at how conservative the Brahms song sounded relative to the free flowing emotionality of the Ives version. However, the Dresser assumes that the difference in their ages (Brahms was 45 to Ives' 26 years) at the time of composing these songs played heavily into their respective approaches.

Continue reading "Answering Questions about Charles Ives" »

October 24, 2011, the Dresser went out on a rainy night in Washington, DC, to see Rorschach Theatre's production of Frank Galati's play adaption of two short stories by Haruki Murakami entitled after the quake and fell in love with a super frog that did not turn into a prince. What the Dresser loved about Frog (played with agile style by Dylan Myers) were such lines as, "A real frog is exactly what I am. A product neither of metaphor nor allusion nor deconstruction nor sampling nor any other such complex process. I am a genuine frog. Shall I croak for you?" However, she also adored, and what made her a believer was, the way this Frog moved--Myers really had the plié and frogsteps down. His croaking was pretty amusing too.

So how is a frog in goggles, never mind a super frog, involved in a play called after the quake. The quick answer is that Frog has broken into the apartment of a banker named Katagiri (played by Maboud Ebrahimzadeh) to enlist his help in stopping an earthquake in Tokyo that will be bigger than the one that has already occurred in Kobe. Frog's story is based on Murakami's short story "super-frog saves tokyo." The Dresser assures you, Dear Reader, that Murakami does not use capitalization for his titles.

Where does Frog fit into the other story, "honey pie"? Actually, "honey pie" is the anchoring story. It revolves around Junpei (Daniel J. Corey), a man with two dominant loves: writing fictional stories and Sayoko (Jennifer Ayn Knight), the woman with whom he and Takatsuki, his best friend from college became inseparable college buds. Much to Junpei's silent dismay, Takatsuki makes the first move on Sayoko. She becomes his wife and the mother their child Sala (Megan Graves). The play opens with Junpei telling Sala a bedtime story about a honey bear that makes pies. Four years old, Sala has problems getting to sleep and she is often visited by an imaginary character she calls the Earthquake Man. Earthquake Man in the Dresser's mind is the opposite of save-Tokyo Frog. Sala says Earthquake Man has a small box for everyone and he is waiting with the lid open.

Cleverly, Galati has one actor play Takatsuki and Katagiri. Both of these characters are at heart loners with tough-as-nails emotional hides. In the Rorschach Theatre production, director Randy Baker emphasizes this dual role-playing in the list of Cast and Characters written in the theater's printed program. He omits noting that Frog also plays Narrator and Sayoko also plays Nurse, the nurse who attends Katagiri at the end of the super frog story.

By this time, you might have guessed that Takatsuki is not around when Sayoko and Sala need him so Sayoko calls on Junpei, who is willing to put aside his writing and help out the only woman he really loves. Another thing you might have guessed is that the super frog story is one that Junpei is writing.

What doesn't always work so well with Galati's tight-to-the-original-texts adaption is that there is a bit too much narration. This slows down the action. A challenge for this story-within-a story play is how to effectively stage the stories so that the audience knows when the stories are alternating. It seems right that Baker uses a theater-in-the-round setup so that Frog and Katagiri don't get mixed up with Narrator and Takatsuki. However, the Dresser kept falling out of the story magic because of the bright lighting that kept her aware of the audience surrounding the players.

Nonetheless, the Dresser was pleased to be introduced to Rorschach Theatre housed at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, the work of Rorschach's artistic director Randy Baker (his hanging props were an inspired way to bring new interest to ordinary things like making tea), and the writing of Haruki Murakami. After the play, the Dresser read Murakami's short story collection of the same name. These thematically linked stories (all are set after the 1995 Kobe earthquake) with recurring things like bears, frogs, odd trios of friends, and people and boxes with empty centers enhanced the experience of Galati's adaption.

While still attending to the things of this world, Margo Stever's poem "Entering the Box" magnifies the terror little Sala has over Earthquake Man's box.

ENTERING THE BOX

The mind can fill a dank
four-sided darkness
with ticks and sighs.
Nothing turns to something.
Breath knocks against hollow walls
like the hunched unveiled women
who gossip at the open market
and bat their canes at flies.

All my life I've worked
to rid this box of heat,
cold, light, sound,
to have no sense
but bacteria multiply
and anoint dark bread.
Green spores spread
an infected kingdom
over the floorboards.

Even with nothing here,
the telephone next door
rings on and on.
Tennis balls chop
on an asphalt court.
Hammers strike wood
again and again.
An electric saw
alarms mockingbirds into silence.

Margo Stever
from Frozen Spring

Copyright © 2002 Margo Stever

Photo of Sala: C. Stanley Photography

The Dresser loves to look at process so she sampled two plays heavy on how story was told. On October 20, 2011 at the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater, she experienced Mabou Mines DollHouse--yes, that is the official title for the adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's play Et dukkehjem, which the English-speaking world knows as A Doll's House--and the next night, on October 21 at DC's Studio Theatre, she partook of Alan Bennett's most recent play The Habit of Art. Both are comedies built on emotionally serious loads.

The quick profile: Mabou Mines DollHouse, complete with an oversized piano keyboard and live pianist at the front of the stage, is like avant-gardist Laurie Anderson meets Harriet Beecher Stowe's Simon Legree whipping Uncle Tom. The Habit of Art is Alan Bennett meets Monty Python.

As to the serious--the living doll of DollHouse--Nora (Maude Mitchell)--throws off the shackles of a husband (Kristopher Medina as Torvald Helmer) who has minimized her (the last scene is a whopper opera spectacle that makes Nora's rejection of her husband nakedly literal) while the known and unknown artists of Bennett's play, poet W. H. Auden and composer Benjamin Britten and the thespians who play these roles, confront end-of-life issues as they try to continue to do their creative work.

Both plays live in the Post-Modern consciousness--or should the Dresser say self-consciousness--of plays that keep reminding the audience that they are watching a play. DollHouse works on a fantastic (as in fantasia) version of the 19th century melodrama where characters lack psychological depth. For director-playwright Lee Breuer, the brains behind this masterful adaptation of Ibsen, the two-dimensional landscape of this storytelling is ratcheted up by the women being twice the height of the men who are real life dwarves (the preferred term is little people) and by pervasive traditional and non-traditional puppetry. Nontraditional puppetry included the lowering of beautifully sculpted curtains set to a musical score, the lowering and release of large white panels with written messages, a cuckoo in a clock, the balletic lifting of little people and children by stage hands dressed in black.

The Habit of Art is a play within a play where the lines blur between the old actor Fitz (Ted van Griethuysen) and his part as the elderly poet Auden in a play entitled Caliban's Day. Separate stage realities show Fitz rehearsing the role of Auden versus Henry (Paxton Whitehead) as an initially unintroduced, still youthful Britten working with a boy soprano (Sam O'Brien) on the composer's last opera Death in Venice. On top of this are the visits of Auden's biographer (Cameron Folmar as Donald who plays Humphrey Carpenter) and Auden's rent boy (Randy Harrison) as well as the struggles going on between the stage manager Kay (Margaret Daly), the assistant stage Manager George (Matt Dewberry), the playwright of Caliban's Day and the actors, who have gathered in a rehearsal room of London's National Theatre.

Both plays present their challenges for American audiences in understanding the lines that are being delivered. DollHouse goes for a patois that mixes in a few simple Norwegian words: takk (thank you), nei (no), and ja (yes) along with broken English with a Norwegian inflection. Also, Nora effects high and low voices (reminiscent of what Laurie Anderson does with her electronically altered voices). Nora's voices indicate her submissive wife personality versus her awakened self. Although a subtitles marquee was operating on one side of the stage, the Dresser could not make out the words from her rear orchestra seat and was happy enough with her own ability to hear and understand the words. The Habit of Art, being a drawing room comedy suitable for a small theater like Studio's Metheny Theatre, indulges in that British repartee that goes by fast and includes references that are unfortunately unfamiliar to most Americans. Take, for example, the mention of Spitting Images, a British television show running 1984 to 1996 that used puppets to satirize British and American politics. The Dresser would have missed this reference had not her seatmate brought it to her attention. However, these kind of references inhibited understanding and while there were people laughing at what the Dresser's seatmate called secret code for the in-crowd, there were those who tipped-toed out of the theater or did not return after the intermission. And by the way, this happened in the Eisenhower Theater too where many seats previously occupied for DollHouse were empty after the intermission.

Continue reading "Lost in Translation: Plays by Lee Breuer and by Alan Bennett " »

Americans, who love their movies, and therefore favor image over text, and action over talk, should pay attention to the Washington, DC area company Synetic Theater. Founded in 2002 by Paata and Irina Tsikurishvili, Georgian artists who moved to the United States in the 1990s, Synetic Theater's goal is to be the premier American physical theater company. Their brand of physical theater includes: text, drama, movement, acrobatics, dance, music, as well as colorful and clever sets, costumes, and props. While there are at least a half dozen physical theater companies operating in the United States, Synetic distinguishes itself with its silent interpretations of Shakespearean plays.

Having accrued 79 Helen Hayes nominations and received 21 Helen Hayes awards, Synetic has forged alliances with the Kennedy Center (in 2006, Synetic began its five-year partnership with The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to produce one show per season) and The Shakespeare Theatre Company (producing an adaptation of Antony and Cleopatra at STC's Lansburgh Theatre). It also offers a number of its productions for touring engagements. In 2010, Synetic secured permanent space in Crystal City, Virginia.

So far, the Dresser has seen Synetic's productions of The Master and Margarita, King Lear, and on October 2, 2011, Macbeth, which is part of Synetic's Speak No More Silent Shakespeare Festival. Macbeth ran September 14 to October 2, Othello runs October 19 to November 6, and Romeo and Juliet runs November 25 to December 23.

Synetic's Macbeth, which premiered in January 2007, was nominated for 11 Helen Hayes awards and received 5 in 2008 including:
Outstanding Resident Play

Outstanding Director, Paata Tsikurishvili

Outstanding Choreography, Irina Tsikurishvili

Outstanding Sound Design, Irakli Kavsadze and Paata Tsikurishvili

Outstanding Supporting Actor, Philip Fletcher













This current production, which just closed, featured Irakli Kavsadze as Macbeth, Irina Tsikurishvili as Lady Macbeth, and Philip Fletcher as the male witch. Each brought tremendous energy and power to their performances. What's interesting about Synetic's interpretation of Macbeth is that you did not have to know Shakespeare's extensive list of players (Macduff, his lady, their children, Banquo, Duncan, Malcolm, Ross -and Tsikurishvili and his writing partner Nathan Weinberger have cut out some of the more minor characters) to enjoy this ninety-minute show. The five acts, without intermission, go by seamlessly in one remarkable scenario after the other.

Perhaps, one could argue that the first scene with three clerics--Jewish, Muslim, and Christian--holding aloft a large globe of our planet sets the bar of excellence for the entire production. Of course it helps if you know Shakespeare's play, especially if one knows the witches chant, which reveals why the clerics preside in the opening scene.

Otherwise what you, Dear Reader missed, was the breath-taking entrances and exits of the witches from their manholes, an army with flashlights that the Dresser associates with the Gestapo in WWII (this must be some film or nightmare influence), the crown tango between Macbeth and his Lady, Lady Macbeth and the long knives she hid in her boots, the fluid but brutal fight scenes and murders, the puppet banquet that Macbeth as king conducts, Lady Macbeth gone mad. The photos say it best.

WITCHES CHANT

Round about the cauldron go:
In the poison'd entrails throw.
Toad, that under cold stone
Days and nights has thirty-one
Swelter'd venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first I' the charmed pot.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork, and blindworm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing.
For charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witches' mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digg'd I' the dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Sliver'd in the moon's eclipse,
Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips,
Finger of birth-strangl'd babe,
Ditch-deliver'd by the drab,--
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger's chaudron,
For ingrediants of our cauldron.
Double, double toil and trouble,
Fire burn and cauldron, bubble.

William Shakespeare
from Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 1

Two contemporary American songwriters--Nellie McKay and Madeleine Peyroux--on the same bill at the acoustically fabulous Strathmore Music Center in Bethesda, Maryland September 30, 2011. The Dresser was psyched for this concert.

Nellie McKay opened. Thirty minutes, eight and a quarter songs mixing her originals (e.g. "I Wanna Get Married" and "Adios") with oldies like "Don't Fence Me In" and "If I Had You." She entered, curtsied in a dimly lit corner of the stage, and seated herself between an organ and piano with her back to the audience--this keyboard arrangement was set up for Peyroux's keyboard man Gary Versace. Before she started to set the keys on fire with "Toto Dies"--she's a remarkably outstanding pianist, she turned to the audience and said deadpan, "I hope the back of my hair looks OK." By the second song, it was clear when the audience laughed at her Danielle Steele line from satiric "I Wanna Get Married" in Get Away from Me, a standout double album released in 2004 as her first album

I wanna get married
Yes, I need a spouse
I want a nice Leave it to Beaverish
Golden retriever and a little white house
I wanna get married
I need to cook meals
I wanna pack you cute little lunches
For my Brady bunches
Then read Danielle Steele

that this audience had never paid attention to her lyrics before or possibly did not know her work.

At song three, "Mother of Pearl," she emerged from the shadows to stand in a spot at a mic. She played her ukulele. Then the Dresser could see her bouffant black skirt and greenish sparkly top, but also her dance antics, which she has honed for this particular song of social criticism. Here's a video of this song done live at the 92nd Street in New York City.

Most folks who have heard her music--and maybe unaware that they did so on such TV shows as Weeds, Grey's Anatomy, NCIS, and Nurse Jackie--probably don't know she is or has been a sometimes actor and stand-up comedian. In 2006, McKay played Polly Peachum in the Broadway production of Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera and she won a Theatre World Award for that role.

In song four "Adios" from her latest album Home Sweet Mobile Home, she turned serious, but how she delivers serious borders on hysterics in her giddy language of "hypocrite heathens," "rinky-dink Eden," and "Frankenstein lady," an allusion the Dresser guesses to be the gothic novel's author Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley.

If time runs like a river
I saw my people bathed in blood
And if the faithful find the sinners
I'll have to leave all I loved

(Adios)
Goodbye, O hypocrite heathens
(Adios)
Goodbye, O false paradise
(Adios)
Goodbye, O rinky-dink Eden
And may you lie yourselves to sleep
Tonight

We're marching through the madness
With not a soul about to see
We're moving through the fortress
Chasing the ghosts of anarchy

(Adios)
Goodbye, my Frankenstein lady
(Adios)
Goodbye, O pagan delights
(Adios)
Goodbye, and good riddance, baby
And may you lie yourselves to sleep
Tonight

She also performed "Beneath the Underdog," (also from Home Sweet Mobile Home) which is dedicated to Troy Davis, the convicted killer of a police officer and the man recently executed by the state of Georgia. The song, which includes the lines "I found a kind of friend in you/It wasn't pleasant all the time," seems to refer not to the man who was on death row, but to her interest in animals, especially her own dog. "So settin' off from this hill camp / I'd rather be her little tramp / My own companion / Or maybe with one whose tail is waggin' "

In ending her concert with "The Dog Song," she reaffirmed how her pet gives stability to her life. However, she also did something else to cap her performance and that was to answer a request for "Happy Flower" from an audience member (presumably not a ringer). Her first reaction was to say comically, that she didn't know her own music and therefore couldn't do the song spontaneously, but she rethought the request and worked in a couple of stanzas as an impromptu introduction to "The Dog Song."

Then without fanfare and taking a little bow, again in the same dimly lit corner of the stage without any spotlight, she left the stage. Had the Dresser not heard Nellie McKay at the Birchmere in Alexandria, Virginia, January 23, 2006, the Dresser would suspect the authenticity of this performance. The Dresser would also be furious with Madeleine Peyroux for trying to diminish her warm up act who should have been given more time on stage. However, McKay knew what she was doing and most of what she does is part of her act.

As the featured artist taking 90 minutes, Madeleine Peyroux performed something over a dozen songs with Gary Versace on keyboards, Barak Mori on bass, and Darren Beckett on drums. She said upfront that she intended to have fun with this group of musicians and intimated that she would be jamming with them. Like McKay, she sang a mix of original songs new and old but also a couple of songs in French. She opened with a signature Bessie Smith song "Don't Cry Baby" and closed with Alfred Newman's "Smile though your heart is aching." Her encore was Josephine Baker's "J'ai Deux Amours." For the Dresser, Peyroux hit the arc of her performance when Gary Versace with a melodica and the other musicians formed a semi-circle with her to do a song one could imagine hearing on a corner in France (singing on street corners in Paris is how she started) followed by "Don't Pick a Fight with Poet," a catchy song with a Latin beat from her latest album Standing on the Rooftop.

Continue reading "Nellie McKay & Madeleine Peyroux: Don't Pick Fights with Poets" »

The Dresser loves going to the movies, but she has to admit that DC Shorts Film Festival Showcase 3 created a short circuit that literally made her uncomfortable in her own skin. Starting with the six-minute Australian comedy Squeeze by Will Goodfellow, the Dresser fully expected that the convict trying to escape his prison through a tight sludge-filled sewer pipe would meet a rat but not a mate in a penguin suit. OMG, that light at the end of the tunnel was a new kind of hell that actually needed no words to go with the disgusting action. And besides, the Dresser could barely hear and understand the Aussie patter.

WHEN COMEDY IS FRAUGHT

This particular short makes the Dresser think of a story her friend Madam Mayo tells about Paul Bowles who wanted her to understand that he got the meaning of her expletive use of the word gross! Oh, he said, would gross be like the time I was eating in some dark hut only to find I had maggots crawling off the food onto my face? The Dresser thinks there should be a new film category called grossmedy, which might warn people like the Dresser to forego this so-called comic opportunity.

Of the eight films making up the DCS Showcase 3, there were two other comedies--first-time director Heather Scobie's Twisted Proverbs: Candle and Marc Carlini's Worn. Though carefully placed in the lineup of films to neutralize the horror of two particularly heavy stories--Leonids Geshichte and Tattoo (more on these two film soon), these comic shorts are what the Dresser would call fraught. Both films are loaded against a female player, which cranks up the emotional payload of the seventh Showcase 3 film Tattoo.

Probably if the two-minute Twisted Proverbs was played by itself, the Dresser would not give much thought to this tiny film where the punch line about the face of a Chinese man's wife looking like "the south end of a north-bound donkey" had more staying power than her actual face. On the other hand, the sixteen-minute Worn is the last film and in it a young woman agonizes over her promiscuous encounters with men as she stands in her closet trying to find a party dress that does not remind her what a wanton she is. Although the Dresser found the conceit of Worn interesting and realistic--women often have emotional behaviors about their clothing and shoes, the end of film was confusing. Wearing every day clothes, Emma tries to redeem the one good relationship she had only to find out that the ex-BF has moved on. He tells her to do what he did after she left him and that was to get in the car and drive away from the life in L.A. As the credits roll, Emma, all dressed up, is at the party her friend urged her to come to as a way to forget her bad feelings about herself. Or at least that's what the Dresser assumes, meaning the protagonist had not changed, that if she can't hook up again with the good boy friend, she'll continue to be a bad girl.

While labeled a drama, TGIF by Australian Brian Lien borders on comedy and seems companionable with Carlini's Worn. The story is about a young woman, out with her women friends, who is made aware that her new flame is in the same bar with her, but she is reluctant to let him know that. The Dresser sees this story as a reverse stalking tale. The young woman doesn't want the new BF to think she is stalking him, but as she leaves he starts texting her until she realizes he sees her. At ten minutes, the Dresser thought this pretty effective short not quite short enough.

OF RADIATION & ANGEL MONSTERS

Leonids Geshichte (Leonid's Story) by German directors Rainer Ludwigs and Tetyana Chernyavska and Os anjos do meio da praça (The Angels in the Middle of the Square) by Brazilian directors Alé Camargo and Camila Carrossine are animations. However Leonids Geshichte mixes real people and scenery with drawings that shimmer the characters into action. Leonid's story concerns the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. While the nineteen-minute film starts like a happily-ever-after story about a man and wife who want a better life for themselves and their family, it becomes a painful account of what happens to their health as they were exposed to the radiation. The Dresser found the animation format an effective way to tell this modern-day calamity.

Os anjos do meio da praça is a colorful fairy tale that has a Harry Potter feel to it. Three angels in one, or one angel with three faces, (take your pick) fights with a fiery flying dragon and is wounded. The angel falls to earth and splits into three beings. The people of the town where the trinity angel falls build a cage over this set of creatures. On the sideline is a little boy with a conscience who watches all of this. While the angels won't eat human food, they accept boxes of the townspeople's unrealized dreams and in consuming these festering wants and desires, the angels become monsters. The boy grows up and bravely frees the trinity. Magically he becomes a boy again. This film feeds the stories of Tattoo and La Dernière Rondelle.

Continue reading "Feeling Exposed: DC Shorts Dark Side" »