From a comment posted to Karren Alenier's blog at Scene4...
I've been rereading a number of The Dresser's postings and I'm ashamed I haven't written before not only to thank you but to say how marvelous it is what you've been doing over this time. I have no reason to flatter -- you've brought such a fine critical intelligence and in a writing style that keeps one (me) moving from one sentence to another. Ann and I haven't gone to all that much in D.C. this year, so The Dressing has been a vicarious way of doing that. A bit of hyperbole maybe but not all that much. We did get to the Joe Louis opera -- I've seen numbers of Leon Major's productions, all of which have been strikingly distinctive. The voicies espeically of Carmon Balthrop and Adrienne Webster, as you say, were compelling -- Webster had terrific dramatic presence. I loved the staging -- the modern Greek chorus, the movement with chairs, the masks, the lighting, Kirby Malone and his partner's projections. The structure of the storytelling might have been more adventurous -- I felt my attention flag at times, which could easily have been me and not the libretto. I only read the Washington Post review later on, not wanting to be prejudiced, and the criticism had some validity, though in truth I was caught up in the production. I'm not a great fan of so-called biopics and so when I say it might have been more adventurous, something different than the linear storytelling. Then your observations about the Terra Cotta warriors, the differences between seeing them in Xian and at the National Geographic -- first rate. When I first read your post on Split This Rock, your comment about Holly Bass didn't register with me -- I didn't know her work and so it passed over. But on Friday night, a bunch of us were at the Enoch Pratt for a reading for Kim's Full Moon -- Holly read and did her "In This District," which I loved.
Merrill Leffler
