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BOSTON   Michael Bettencourt

Except for the truck-and-bus tours (The Scarlet Pimpernel, at the moment), the eternal Blue Man Group, and some action at the two outdoor venues in the city, theatrical energy pretty much shifts from Boston to western Massachusetts and the Cape.

Out the wilds of the Berkshires and Tanglewood country, four big festivals opened as usual: Williamstown Theatre Festival, Berkshire Theatre Festival, Barrington Stage Festival, and Tina Packer's Shakespeare & Co.  Reviews of each festival's shows would take up too much space and tax one's vocabulary, so here's a brief run-down of what they offered:

Williamstown Theatre Festival Mainstage: TONIGHT AT 8:30 (six one-acts written by Noel Coward) THE HOT L BALTIMORE (Lanford Wilson), HEDDA GABLER (Henrik Ibsen), THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH (Thornton Wilder), and LIGHT UP THE SKY (Moss Hart)

2000 Nikos Stage Season (new or more experimental works):  ORSON'S SHADOW (Austin Pendleton), HOW I FELL IN LOVE (Joel Fields), THE TALK (Frank Pugliese), THE LATE MIDDLE CLASSES (Simon Gray), and CHRISTMAS IN NAPLES (Eduardo de Filippo)

Berkshire Theatre Festival Mainstage: CAMELOT (Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe), TOYS IN THE ATTIC (Lillian Hellman), THE SHADOW OF GREATNESS (Gary Socol), SAY YES! (Wally Harper and Sherman Yellen)

The Unicorn Theatre: (new or more experimental works): BEST KEPT SECRET, A DANGEROUS LIAISON IN THE COLD WAR (Katharine Houghton), COYOTE ON A FENCE (Bruce Graham), and THE EINSTEIN PROJECT (Paul D'Andrea and Jon Klein)

Barrington Stage Company Mainstage: COMPANY (George Furth and Stephen Sondheim), FULL BLOOM (Suzanne Bradbeer), NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY (Douglas J. Cohen)

Stage II Productions: (new or more experimental works): SUBURBIA (Eric Bogosian), THE ACTOR'S NIGHTMARE (Christopher Durang), WRITER'S BLOCK (Luke J. Taylor), NEW WORKS FESTIVAL (Staged readings of four new plays).

Shakespeare & Co. (most of the pieces run in rep) Duffin Theatre:  TWELFTH NIGHT (William Shakespeare) and THE COMPLEAT WORKS OF WLLM SHKSPR (abridged) (Jess Borgeson, Adam Long, and Daniel Singer)

Mainstage: ROMEO & JULIET (William Shakespeare) and DIBBLEDANCE: 2000 (An evening of dances choreographed by Susan Dibble)

Stables Theatre: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING (William Shakespeare), JACK & JILL (Jane Martin), CORIOLANUS (William Shakespeare), STUDIO FESTIVAL OF PLAYS (The testing ground for new works by company artists)

Wharton Theatre: WHARTON ONE-ACTS (adapted by Richard S. Burdick) and OH! MR. CHEKHOV! (Peter Considine)

Oxford Court: THE WINTER'S TALE (William Shakespeare)

There were also summer productions at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley and workshops, experimental theatre at New WORLD Theatre at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and (moving eastward to the Cape) excellent programs at Vineyard Playhouse on Martha's Vineyard, Wellfleet Harbor Theatre, and Gloucester Stage Company.

Back in Town: The Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue However, the Boston theatre scene was not entirely without interest during our mild monsoon season.

The hottest theatre ticket in town this summer was, ironically (luckily), free.  For the third year running, the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue (IACD), based at Harvard University, offered a summer slate of works-in-progress, heady dialogues and panel discussions, and performances that brought together artists from as far away as Rwanda and as close as a block outside Harvard Yard.

The IACD began three years ago (with funding from the Ford Foundation and Harvard) under the guidance of Anna Deveare Smith, the creator/performer of such works as Twilight: Los Angeles and the recent House Arrest (a dissection of the cross-hatchings between the press, Washington D.C., the Presidency, and American history). Continuously billed as an "experiment," the IACD's mission, as Ms. Smith intoned at every event, was to find out what was "gained and lost" when artists came out of their protected studios to present unfinished work to a public that, in turn, had trusted them, "the fools, the clowns," to carry the important work of insight, observation, articulation, and presentation.  (One can argue, as we did, about every term in this mission statement, but at bottom what Ms. Smith was trying to do was admirable: to have art be a public forum, a safe space, where people can meet to share what is both bright and dark in their hearts.)

Let Ms. Smith say it herself: "How does the artist meet the challenge of mirroring society?  Does the artist have something to offer society in terms of civic leadership?  Does civic space have something to offer the artist?  What happens if an artist determines both to absorb and be absorbed by this or her society? Could the artist, in fact, become an unexpected voice of reason?...The Institute on the Arts & Civic Dialogue will explore such questions by workshopping new works in an atmosphere that is conducive to the discussion of civic issues."

The 14 events that ran through July were free and open to the public.  The IACD also tapped a "core audience" (about 100 people) which it asked to come to every event, participate fully, and keep a journal of reflections and recommendations.  This year, the events, like Gaul, divided into three parts. One, called "Grey Matters," paired an artist and an academic to discuss whatever came into their heads that was loosely connected to the IACD's mission, then opened the floor for questions and comments from the audience.  The second grouping involved works-in-progress, pieces that needed the three dimensions of an audience's response to find their own third dimension. The third comprised a congery of songs, theatre games, screenings, presentations, and movement pieces less intellectual and more relaxing.

"Grey Matters" was both hit and miss, as can be imagined.  The discussants had little or no beforehand preparation, purposefully, in order to keep the exchange fresh. When it sparked, as jazz riffs can sometimes do, it sparkled, with such gems as Vishay Prashad's characterization of Asians in America as "probationary whites" and Ping Chong's story of how he consciously changed his culture the day he decided, in response to an art teacher's praise for his painting, to accept the compliment, American-style, rather than self-deprecate, Chinese-style. But even when the talk veered into lead or gas, nuggets with surprise and edge always came to hand, and overall it was exciting to sit surrounded by so much caloric brain-power and plug into the surge. (The pairings includes Vishay Prashad/Marc Levin, Daniel Lazare/Holly Hughes, Beth Coleman/Paul Gilroy, Beverly Daniel Tatum/Ping Chong, and Tim Mitchell/Lani Guinier.)

Other events pleased and diverted, such as songs written by Suzzy and Maggie Roche to personal prayers the core audience had presented to them.  Ysaye Barnwell, of Sweet Honey in the Rock, gave a two-hour class on gospel choral singing. Bill Bowers, who played Zazu in The Lion King on Broadway and is a world-famous mime in the Marceau tradition, showed the power of silence and image. Sheila Kennedy, from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, presented a low-key but engaging look at the space inside walls, which, surprisingly, is the arena for a hot contest right now between public and private interests. Tim Mitchell, a director for theatre programs for youth in prison, and Lani Guinier, a professor at Harvard Law School, collaborated to engage the core audience in "social change": theatre games of Augusto Boal focused on "Lockdown," a photographic exhibit by Dread Scott, a prison activist working to reform the prison system.

Half a dozen events were more formal presentations of work "in media res." Rubén Martinez, a poet and journalist, performed Border Ballad, which came out of investigations he has been doing about the "frontera" between the United States and Mexico.  Border Ballad is a story-song cycle that follows the paths of three immigrants who died trying to cross the "broken line." Dancer Francesca Harper and cultural critic Margo Jefferson teamed up in Unfinished Stories, which used dance, satire, slides, reminisces, faux talk shows and games shows to examine the fault-ridden path a person of color follows growing up in the United States.  Hope Azeda, a young playwright from Rwanda, presented her Firestones, a clear and poignant effort to use theatre to mend the wounds racking her country. Ms. Smith had a presentation of Piano, a script started in 1989 set in the Cuba of 1898 just as the Americans and their corporations are poised to begin their dark foray into empire.

The IACD has been a simultaneously bold and enraging experiment. Steeped in, and to some degree cosseted, by the academic buffer of Harvard University, the "public" that the IACD opened itself up to was, as can be expected, largely college-educated and Cantabrigian in attitude.  The presentation formats often borrowed from the academic world of lecture and panel discussions by "experts," where the audience got to eavesdrop and then, after the wise nuggets had been dispensed, were allowed to parade to the microphones and ask their humble questions.  And everything was oh-so-safe: captured in a musical image, the mood was more like corporatized hip-hop than wound-too-tight punk.  Even though the choir, every once in a while, needs to be preached to for comfort and inspiration, there was far too much polite concurrence in the choir for any chance of real (that is, uncomfortable) honesty.

Thus, the "civic dialogue" became both rich and constricted, rich because the crowds the IACD drew had hefty resumes, and constricted because of the narrow class cross-section represented by those resumes.  Many of us felt that the "civic" to be included in the "dialogue" should have been broader, spikier, less controllable, with people whose addresses lie next to the cultural fault-lines, who come from the barrios and the 'hoods just a few blocks away from the brightly lighted lecture halls.

But the "experiment: Ms. Smith has orchestrated, regardless (to some degree) of its form, (re )raises the question with which Americans always struggle about the intersection/collusion of art and politics, a struggle embodied, above the radar, in NEA clashes and Giuliani assaults, and, below the radar, in communities like the one where I work, where hip-hop and rap echo the deprivations and hungers of the residents.  The IACD posts these kinds of questions: What is our American art to be for? Can American art play any useful role in helping citizens engage more fully in their own self-governance? Can American art be a civic forum for engagement with what most ails us and enlightens us? In fact, a core assumption of the IACD is that American citizens already struggle to answer these questions. What the IACD can do is to bring the struggle into an arena less crazed by governmental politics and less polarized between "the Indians and the palefaces," where a geniunely new vocabulary can be forged (out of honest, gut-deep disagreement) for an art that runs concurrent with what weighs importantly in our collective (rather than in our "racial/cultural identity") lives.

Plans are afoot to raise funds to bring the IACD back to Harvard next summer.

Bits & Pieces The Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, a five-year old effort, with immense corporate backing, to create free outdoor summer productions of Shakespeare, presented The Tempest. In the past it has done Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, and Julius Caesar.  The performances took place in the Boston Common and ran through the latter part of July and part of August.

The Huntington Theatre (affiliated with Boston University) has a new artistic director.  Nicholas Martin replaces Peter Altman, who had been at the Huntington for 18 years.  Martin travels to Boston from the western part of the state, where he helmed the Williamstown Theatre Festival. The first production of the season will be Sydney Kingsley's Dead End, which Martin had directed to great critical review at the Williamstown.

Vandals destroyed $1000 worth of staging and equipment at the Boston Publick Theatre, a twenty-five year old company that presents summer theatre productions. Helping hands from many theatre people plus some foundation support helped restore the stage in time for the opening of the final production, Gypsy. Spiro Veloudos, the Publick's artistic director, will be stepping down after this season to focus on his duties at the Lyric Stage Company.

The SAG/AFTRA strike has its local battlefield in Boston.  The union actors have kept up a steady leaf-letting and picket campaign at the area's casting agencies and shooting sites. A readable piece on the strike effort can be found at http://actors.about .com/musicperform/actors/library/weekly/aa060500a.htm

 

© 2000 Michael Bettencourt ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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AUGUST 2000

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