Critic on the Run

OSS: Nest of Spies.

2011-12-27T17:15:00.000-08:00

Attention auteurs! You want to make a spoof? Watch OSS #117. It’s like a film school course in cinematic satire. Watch it, see what it does, and don’t do it. It breaks all the rules of satire. I never knew satire had rules, until I saw this movie. Now I know. Here they are:

Rule #1. Know what you’re making fun of. If you draw a caricature of Jimmy Durante, it should look like Jimmy Durante. You have to know how his skull works before you distort it and make fun of it. This flick riffs on the surface elements of the Cold War spy genre -- and gets it all wrong.

Rule #2. Love what you’re making fun of. Check out Young Frankenstein. Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder clearly love old horror movies. Michel Hazanavicius, the politically correct director of this flick, clearly hates old spy movies.

Rule #3. An imitation of bad art, if it’s bad, is just bad art. The stuff you’re making fun of may be bad. Your stuff must be good. You can’t say, “Well, the scenes went on too long and the acting was bad in the original movies. Mine are too. It’s a satire.” No. You're just pretending to be bad. Your scenes have to work; your acting must be good.

Corollary to Rule #3: Art direction isn't comedy. Your sets and lighting may look exactly like what you're mocking. That doesn't make it funny.

Rule #4. Your story – even if it’s making fun of another story or genre – still has to work as a story. Consider Blazing Saddles. Mel Brooks is, basically, taking a dump on the Western genre. Even so, his movie has dramatic tension. Joke or not, it grips you. When the Cisco Kid is facing off against six dudes with revolvers trained on him; when Black Bart is about to drown in quicksand or get lynched. You give a shit. OSS #117 is 99.44% suspense-free. You don't give a shit.

Rule #5. For your story to work, we have to understand what’s at stake. I have no !@#$ idea why OSS #117 is in Cairo.

Rule #6. Your characters have to be real. They have to have an inner life. They have to make sense. The spy in this flick grins like an idiot. (OSS #117--aka Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath--if you want a name.) He does stuff that doesn't make sense. Maxwell Smart really was an idiot. He survived, thanks to the luck of fools. This spy knows too much to be an idiot but he acts like an idiot. He shouldn't survive. I don't want him to. Worse than that, I don't believe in him. There are no point-of-view shots. There's no hint of a reality inside the character's head.

Rule #7. You can’t violate story logic or character logic. A French spy trained in Arabic wouldn’t beat up a muezzin who woke him up at the call to prayer in Cairo. Never happen. No !@#$ way. Yeah, it’s a dig at French colonialism – who cares? It’s contrived. It’s false. It just wouldn’t happen.

Rule #8. Your movie is a joke. The characters within your movie don’t know that. Your characters should take themselves and the reality of the movie absolutely seriously. You should too. Play it straight -- in all your acting, editing and music choices. Never elbow the audience in the ribs. Isn’t this funny? The second you ask, it ain't. This flick is constantly reminding me of how wacky it is.

Rule #9. Make one, big satiric point, then stop. Jimmy Durante’s nose is big. Ha-ha. If you try to make lots of little points, you weaken the comedy. Hey, our spy is an arrogant French colonialist. Oh, he’s also probably a closet homosexual. So, is this gay bashing, or spy bashing, or colonialist bashing, or what? It’s not funny anymore.

Rule #10. Never make us care about characters and then kill them for no good reason. Never ever have the hero do it, even if he is a shithead. Death can be hilarious – if you set it up right. But throwing characters away is ugly, vicious, heartless and the opposite of comedy. OSS #117 kills Princess Al Tarouk, if you want to know--pointlessly, right in the middle of a girlfight. I liked her character. I hated him. My dislike of the movie turned to hate at that moment.

The Brothers Karamazov

2011-11-03T00:38:00.000-07:00

photo by Frank Atura

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Ignoring the glorious sun and sand, I spent one family vacation on Saint George Island cooped up inside a beach cottage reading big novels: Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, John Barth’s Giles Goat Boy, and Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, etc. Out on the sunny beach, my sister caught a Whiting and hollered with delight; inside the gloomy house, I crammed my head with literature. As to Karamazov, I made it at least as far as the Grand Inquisitor passage, though I don’t remember what happened after that. Fortunately, Roland Reed adapted the novel as a play; FSU/Asolo Conservatory just put it on stage. Finally, I know how the book ends.

Director Andrei Malaev-Babel holds the reins. It's a wild ride -- a disorienting, hallucinatory assault. (I mean that in a good way.) It's also no mean feat. Dostoevsky crammed most of human life in the pages of his original novel. This production crams the bones of his novel in a three-hour performance. Not too shabby.

There are three messed-up brothers and one lousy father. In Russian tradition, they all have several names, depending on context, so you have to pay attention. But family dynamics ain't the point. It's all about ideas. Lots of them. The kind tormented 16-years-olds obsess about.

If you hate ideas, don't see this play. It's a philosophical novel; the play is faithful to it. (I have a few quibbles, but Reed did a damn good job.) In Cliff Notes terms, the story is a study of good and evil. Dostoevsky, it seems to me, draws from the same dark well as Nietzche. Ivan (Jesse Dornan), the disaffected, intellectual Karamazov brother, says something to the effect, “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” The possibility terrifies him. So, leaving the question of truth on the table, religion is a great form of crowd control. Don’t kill children or practice cannibalism or you’ll burn in hell. Good to know. If not, why not? This slowly drives Ivan mad.

Minus the philosophy, the bare-bones story has a lurid, Jerry Springer quality. It's the study of dysfunctional family. Dirty dad fighting with one of his sons over the same woman.

Fyodor (Francisco Rodriguez) the father, in question, is a corrupt, lusty, son-of-a-bitch. He’s rotten. He’s a blowhard. Like Richard III and Alex in A Clockwork Orange, he’s the most interesting character in the story.

Dirty dad competes for the affections of Grushenka (Kelly Campbell) with his son Dmitri (Brendan Ragan), the ex-military brother. Alyosha, a repressed monk, tries to make peace in the family. But there is no peace.

There's more to it than that. There's a troika of minor characters; the subplots have subplots. I won't attempt a plot summary. It'd be like, well, summarizing a Russian novel. Let's not. I won't spoil the ending, but it all ends badly. Excellent performances. (More to come, as I have time.)

Malaev-Babel's direction is original and gutsy. He feints and throws you off balance like a good prize fighter. Characters bump into furniture and push it back into place -- or wander off the stage entirely. The staging implies the characters aren't at home in this world, don't quite fit in our reality. Beyond that, Malaev-Babel turns the collective consciousness of the village into a Greek chorus, offering commentary and judgement on the main action. Nice touch. There's also a weird, prophetic echo of the Soviet Union in the costume choices. This pays off when Dimitri shares his vision of a line of starving women and a dying child, begging for bread outside their burned-out homes in the snow. It could be a scene from the Nazi invasion of Russia or one of Stalin's purges. In a final vision, Dmitri strives for the light, despite the darkness. (There were tears in my eyes; and in the eyes of the actors at the curtain call.)

Dostoevsky saw the darkness coming. He saw Hitler, Stalin and Charlie Manson coming. But he decided to keep going.

The hint of light beyond the darkness was enough.

The Brothers Karamazov
Through Nov. 20
An FSU / Asolo Conservatory production
FSU Center for the Arts
5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
941-351-8000

Quibbles below jump ...

It strikes me that the Grand Inquisitor passage is the heart of the book. The heart of the passage is when the Grand Inquisitor -- who's interrogating Jesus in prison -- slams Jesus for not taking Satan's offer in the desert. (The Grand Inquisitor is a Catholic heavy -- but I think the Catholic Church stands for all religion -- Religion Inc., as Lenny Bruce once said.) This is from memory, but as I recall, the Grand Inquisitor accused Jesus of denying human nature and human needs. Hey, why not turn stones into bread? People need to eat. The devil wanted you to fly like Superman. That'd be cool. People need miracles. Mr. D. offered you the world and you said no. Kiss the devil's ass for one second, then the world is yours. You could've created utopia forever and ever. Who the hell do you think you are?
The passage isn't that long. There's no need to cut it.

2BRN02B

2011-10-14T23:38:00.000-07:00

Uh ... line?

Submitted, for your consideration, a production of Hamlet by the Wooster Group—a group famed for experimental theater. This production at the Ringling International Arts Festival was experimental indeed.

Imagine—in some scenario out of Rossum’s Universal Robots or Blade Runner, that scientists succeed in engineering synthetic people—androids, for want of a better term—and that, as predicted in a thousand SF books and movies, these synthetic servants erupt in a revolution and kill all the humans. Hundreds of years later, the androids look back on the creators they murdered with regret. They feel incomplete, you see. They want to be like us, but they’re not quite like us; their emotions don’t have the full range. So, the androids desperately read our literature and watch our movies and try to figure out what it means to be human. In one android project, they stumble on the record of John Gielgud’s 1964 production of Hamlet starring Richard Burton. They analyze the movie frame by frame. They chart its motions on a Cartesian axis. Then they imitate it. Religiously. Trying—through brute force analysis—to make some emotional connection to the world Shakespeare created. A connection to emotions they just don’t feel.

The Wooster Group's production of Hamlet is like that.

Very much like that.

A performance of Hamlet by androids, directed by Max Headroom.

MAX: Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you, trip -- trippingly--
t-t-t-trippingly on the tongue!

Android Shakespeare. That may sound glib, kids. I don't mean to be be glib. That's how it struck me at the time. I honestly felt like I was hundreds of years in the future watching synthetic humans performing Shakespeare.

Hey, that's entertainment, right?

Explaining the logic behind this production in merely human terms ain't easy, but I'll try. As far as I understand it, somebody filmed the original 1964 performance of Hamlet. This film (much like heavyweight boxing championships and opera today) was subsequently screened at theaters around the country. They called it "Theatrofilm" or sumpin. The Wooster Group took the original "Theatrofilm" record of this performance and reverse-engineered it. (This concept was director Elizabeth LeCompte's brainchild.) Somebody in the editing room chopped up the raw original film in Final Cut Pro; if he thought there was a leaden pause, out it went. Then (with Shepherd in Burton's role) the modern-day Wooster Group actors slavishly recreated the 1964 performance. More accurately: they slavishly recreated Shepherd's edited version of the performance. So, if there's a jump in the dialog or the actors fast-forward and backtrack, the real-life actors do exactly that. And that's what you see on stage.

You see the original film, in a big screen behind the performance. The Wooster Group actors perform, with a minimal set on wheels that stagehands roll around to mimic the set in the original film. On top of that, there are two widescreen computer displays revealing either live actors or dead ones. Occasionally, the big screen behind it all turns into a big Cartesian grid. Or a blue screen labelled with the phrase, "Not rendered."

Hamlet said "I know not seems," but this is all about seeming. The film behind the production has been doctored. The characters you see drop out of their scenes like ghosts. The final sword fight shows merely two disembodied swords--and two rectangles in place of the empty actors.

The real life actors on stage heroically imitate the doctored film. It's the dead opposite of method acting. It's acting nailed down to externals. There's not a drop of spontaneity. The real actors are slaves of the body position, timing and intonation of the actors in the doctored film.

This may seem like a gimmick. Nay, it is. It's a gimmick.

The gimmick slaps you in the face and makes you think about things you usually don't think about. The production is a box within a box within a box: The Wooster Group's recreation of Gielgud and Burton's interpretation of Shakespeare's original text of Hamlet. The Wooster Group rubs your face in the artificiality or it all. It literally shows you the Cartesian grid that Shakespeare's words have been graphed on.

The effect this had on me? I can't speak for the rest of the audience, but all this post-modern artificiality made my brain want to grab onto the PLAY. Throughout all the graphs and hip-hop stuttering, I clung to the rock of who the characters were, what happened and why it mattered. Bits of business aside, I came out of this experience with a deeper understanding of Hamlet.

Humans and androids alike will enjoy this play.

Tree of Life

2011-07-04T14:12:00.000-07:00

Wow. Amazing film. I'll get back to that. But, first, here's a chunk of film philosophy ...

Film is a visual art, like painting. Film is a narrative art, like novels and short stories. Filmmakers are torn between these impulses. Either paint with light, or tell stories with moving pictures, that is the question.

99.99% of all filmmakers tell stories. That's true, because 99.99% of all moviegoers are bored to tears by collages of imagery with no storyline. Me too. So, Kubrick, in his heart of hearts, wants to do an imagist collage in the tradition of Cocteau. He does "Eyes Wide Shut." I understand the impulse. But I wind up kicking the back of the seat in front of me and, like Ralph Kramden before me, growling WOULD YOU GET ON WITH IT? Call me a plebe, but I love storytelling. And I have a short attention span.

But I surrendered to this movie. And I'm glad for it.

Terrence Malick is one of the .01% of the filmmakers who want to paint with light. The Tree of Life is defiantly non-linear, fiercely imagistic. On one basic level, it functions as a series of wicked cool images on the screen. He's showing you stuff that looks good. He's painting with light.

That said, there really is a story behind it. Telling the story is not his main concern. But it's there.

Basically, a family grows up in Texas. Dad (Brad Pitt) is a frustrated artist (a masterful organist/pianist) who's sick of taking shit from the bastards he works for. He does his best, but he boils with frustration. He pressures his sons -- especially his oldest son, Jack -- to "be your own boss." He teaches Jack to fight, demands a fierce respect. Jack wrestles with hatred towards his father and Oedipal impulses towards his mother (Jessica Chastain). The middle child (and DAMN if I can find the name online) is sensitive and artistic; his father's musical DNA has passed to him. Jack grows into adolescence -- and takes a turn to the dark side, with acts of vandalism, break-ins and animal cruelty. He gets over it, but a certain joy is lost. Dad loses his job and has to move, and there's a long, painful look back at the family home. Years later -- when the sensitive, middle child is 19 -- he puts a shotgun to his head and kills himself. Jack wrestles with survivor's guilt for the rest of his life. Then, amidst the cold, modernist architecture of Dallas, he has an epiphany -- not necessarily standard-issue religious -- but a revelation, nonetheless. A glimpse of the communion of the saints, perhaps. Jack finds acceptance.

A bright first-year film student could cut out all Malick's mystical imagery, put the story in linear order, add a To Kill a Mockingbird first-person voiceover, and make a very conventional story out of it.

But Malick didn't want to do that. He wanted to say, "This is life! Look at it! Look how beautiful it is!"

Malick opens the doors of perception. He fragments the narrative with trippy images -- the scenes that fascinate a child's mind and bore an adult's; the scenes an adult mind edits out, because they're insignificant. Mommy's ankle against a sprinkler; the dance of wind chimes ...

Malick takes this fragmented, trippy collage, and throws it up against the background of a long 2001-style creation narrative. (And hired some top-flight CGI people to do it, I assume.) Basically, he takes you from the beginning of creation, to the origin of life, to the rise and fall of the dinosaurs, to the death of life on earth. No lie. The impulse is part artistic, part scientific. He loves life -- but life specifically -- with the eye of a botanist or paleontologist.

On top of THAT, Malick punctuates his interpenetrating collage of evolution and a suffering Texas family with enigmatic images of a light sculpture.

So what's it about?

It's about grace, God and glory. And sunflowers. Malick is shouting, "Wake up. We already live in a world of grace and beauty! See it, or you're going to lose it! You're squandering it!" It's a tone poem and an opera. It has movements and elaborate motifs like a visual symphony. It's seductive and hypnotic. And, as a bonus, if you grew up in the 1950s or 60s, it's an addictive shot of nostalgia. There's a quiet beauty and sorrow to this film. And a deeper joy. (Thanx to my friend Su Byron for various stolen insights.)

Don't believe what people tell you.

See this film. It's a long journey. But it's worth it.

Marilyn: Forever Blonde

2011-06-18T23:54:00.000-07:00

In Tommy, the ever-naughty director Ken Russell postulated a religion worshiping Marilyn Monroe — Eric Clapton (who was God, after all) leading a procession of devotees in pouty Marilyn masks, obligingly wheeling a massive icon of Marilyn from that scene in The Seven Year Itch, her skirt now blown up for all eternity. Over the top, yeah, but not far from the truth. Like Elvis in years to come, Marilyn's death made her larger than life.

Sunny Thompson does her best to make Marilyn life-sized in Marilyn: Forever Blonde, her one-woman show at the Asolo Rep.

The script behind the play was written by her husband, Greg Thompson, who put the words on paper before he knew her — and saw Sunny as the perfect Marilyn the second he met her.

All the words in Thompson's script are Marilyn's own, sifted from press releases, interviews, and tapes given to psychiatrists.

What emerges is what we'd expect but might not want to face. Marilyn (aka Norma Jean) invented blonde ambition. An orphan and an outsider, she climbed the Hollywood ladder against the odds. For women in the 50s and 60s, the rungs of that ladder were a series of casting couches. Marilyn obliged, because she knew she was good. She wasn't alone. She made it to the top, because she really was good. Then she fell apart.

And it seems to me, you lived your life like a candle in the wind ...

Ah, shut up, Elton. We all know how Marilyn's story ends — dead at age 36 from too many pills. Though the jury's still out on whether her overdose was suicide.

Sunny Thompson makes you want to cry at Marilyn's tragically wasted potential. She gets into Marilyn's sexy, seductive skin and makes the audience itch. From the breathless delivery to the undulating walk, she's got Marilyn's surface mannerisms down — and the beating heart behind it all.

It's a fine performance — and a performance from the heart.

Still, there’s something missing. The script behind her performance doesn’t capture Marilyn’s mind. Blame her husband for that — though I’m sure he had the best intentions. Greg Thompson boiled down his script from the words Marilyn said or printed in public. He didn’t put any words in Marilyn’s mouth or try to read her mind. Oddly, that “honesty” created a subtle dishonesty. Marilyn’s public words were part of her deliberately crafted public face. But the playwright took them at face value.

Bad move. Obviously, there’s a difference between the person and the persona — even if it draws on elements of an actor’s real personality. Jackie Gleason was not Ralph Kramden. The real Marilyn Monroe wasn’t the naïve sex bomb we saw on screen.

But Thompson’s play doesn’t separate “Marilyn” the character from the real-world Marilyn who invented her. That breathless, vulnerable, naïve sex bomb was Marilyn’s creation. That character is both drop-dead sexy — and a parody of male notions of an all-American sex goddess. It’s a brilliant creation – and a brilliant fiction. Thompson doesn’t look past the fiction to the intelligence behind it.

Marilyn Monroe was a comic genius. That’s what I wanted to see — and that's what's missing.

I'm tired of feeling sorry for Marilyn. I want to applaud her for the genius that she was, damn it — right up there with Jackie Gleason, Groucho Marx and all the rest of them.

This is not to trash Sunny Thompson's performance. She channels Marilyn onstage in an uncanny way. But I wanted to see the mask drop — if just for a second. It's a lifetime performance. I'm still haunted by it. What I saw was great. But it's what I've seen before — in the standard liturgy of the Eternal Church of the Blessed Marilyn. Sunny, with respect, tell the playwright to do a rewrite. Break the idol. Reveal the mind.

Next time, show me something I didn't see.

Marilyn: Forever Blonde
Through July 10
FSU Center for the Arts
5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
351-8000

No blues for these ‘Cowgirls’

2011-06-10T08:14:00.000-07:00

Tom Robbins to the contrary, not all "Cowgirls" get the blues. Some get country ...

Case in point, the eponymous Cowgirls of "Cowgirls," now kicking up their heels at Florida Studio Theatre, in a production directed by Mary Murfitt. (Murfitt played in the musical's FST premiere back in 1995. She also wrote the music and lyrics. Betsy Howie wrote the script.)

The story behind the musical is as tangled as the World's Largest Ball of Twine. But I'll try to straighten it out.

After a disastrous summer tour, The Cog Hill Trio, an ensemble of female classical musicians, head off to Hiram Hall for their final concert. They're expecting the Kansas cousin of Carnegie Hall. Thanks to a bad phone connection, the owner, Jo Carlson (Angela C. Howell), is expecting the thoroughly countrified, cornpone Cowgirl Trio. When they finally show up, Jo's shocked to discover that she's booked a snooty classical musical group. They're appalled to find out that Hiram Hall is a redneck roadhouse resembling Bob's Country Bunker in The Blues Brothers.

The trio takes the gig anyway, because it's either that or come home broke and disgraced. Their Saturday night concert is a make-or-break night for Jo as well. If it isn't a smash hit, the bank forecloses on her place first thing Monday morning. Against her better judgement, Jo gives the uptight trio a two-day crash course in country music. Comedy ensues. And, just to state the obvious, country music does, too.

Great tunes. But Howie's strong character study is the glue that holds this musical together.

The Cog Hill Trio, for example, is a true band of misfits: Lee (Joanna Parson), a New Age, lesbian cellist; Rita (Franca Vercelloni), a pregnant pianist whose husband wants her to stay home; Mary Lou (Sarah Hund), a high-strung violinist. Jo, the roadhouse owner, is a true force of nature — a no-nonsense Alpha Woman dealing with her father's dual inheritance: Hiram Hall and a mountain of debt. Jo's faithful waitresses, big-haired Mickey (Chelsea Costa) and math whiz Mo (Emily Grosland), are also wannabe country singers; they're pissed-off that Jo won't them take the stage for the big concert. By the end of the play, they all have a shootout, everyone dies and Hiram Hall burns down.

Nah. Just kidding, folks. That's not the way these things work and you know it. The concert is a raging success. Everybody takes the stage and Hiram Hall is saved.

While the musical's upbeat conclusion is never in doubt, getting there is all the fun. Cowgirls is a warmhearted, feel-good, tug-on-your-heartstrings experience from start to finish. It’s so much fun, it’s easy to overlook what a tour de force performance the actor/musicians put in. Leaping from genre to genre takes amazing versatility, and they’ve got it.

Behind the performance, Howie's script introduces you to some sharply defined, quirky individuals (who all happen to have XX chromosomes) and makes you care about them. It's easy to be warmhearted, manipulative and fake — that's called corn. Being warmhearted and honest is tough, but she pulls it off.

Murfitt's a great director — and a great songwriter, to boot. Her original songs are fantastic on many levels. They're a love letter to country music standards but never derivative. They're character-driven and support the story. They're damn good tunes that take you all over the emotional map. They're pure country — and ignore the ghettos of musical genre, at the same time. The "country" of country music is the country of the human heart, after all. Murfitt's songs gently make the point that all great music comes from the heart.

Which is another way of saying all great music is a little bit country.

Cowgirls
Through July 3
Florida Studio Theatre
1241 North Palm Ave., Sarasota
941-366-9000
www.floridastudiotheatre.org.

Maestro: The Art of Leonard Bernstein

2011-06-09T23:44:00.000-07:00

If a contemporary performer imitates, say, 19th-century composer Franz Liszt, who's to say they got it wrong? Recording technology didn't exist back then. For all we know, Liszt really did sound like Roger Daltry.

That doesn't apply to 20th-century composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. The maestro may be gone, but he left behind miles of film, audio recordings and videotapes. We know exactly what Bernstein sounded like -- and we'll know if a living performer portraying him misses the mark.

Hershey Felder is both the star and author of Maestro: The Art of Leonard Bernstein, a one-man show depicting Bernstein's life and work, now playing at the Asolo Rep. With a display of chutzpah Bernstein might approve of, Felder plays a clip from one of Bernstein's Young People's Concerts before he takes the stage. He's daring the audience to compare. Well, Felder meets and exceeds his self-made Pepsi challenge. His performance goes beyond great imitation to the realm of Shirley McClaine. He seems to be channeling the man.

Felder's performance takes the form of one of Bernstein's broadcasts -- in this case, presumably his final one. Playing and singing at a grand piano, Felder opens with one of Bernstein's burned-in-your-brain compositions from West Side Story -- namely, "Somewhere." From there, Felder's performance continues, alternating between snippets of Barnstein's compositions and his first-person autobiographical narrative -- lifted, I assume, from journal entries, magazine and TV interviews and stitched together with inference.

We learn that Bernstein came from an immigrant family of deeply religious Jews. That he was a musical prodigy. That his father didn't want his son to grow up to be a professional musician. That he did anyway. That Bernstein's protegés included Aaron Copland, Dimitri Mitropoulos and Fritz Reiner. That some of his protegés were also lovers. That his nearly overnight success was basically good luck. (And sounds like a Broadway musical premise -- he got his big break at a major concert because the other conductor was sick.) That Bernstein deeply resented a "two-bit reporter's hatchet job" about a benefit party he threw for the Black Panthers. (Referring to Tom Wolfe, actually.) That he admired Wagner's music, hated his anti-Semitic philosophy, but admired his honesty. That -- in defiance of the atonal fad of most serious composers and music critics of the time -- he loved melody. That he loved his wife Felicia. That -- in his own act of honesty -- Bernstein walked away from his wife and family to pursue openly gay relationships. That, tireless music educator and beloved conductor that he was, Bernstein wanted to be remembered as a composer -- and felt like a failure because the only Bernstein tunes anyone could remember were from West Side Story.

"Lives of the artists" dramas tend to take the same form. Basically, the artist is on a mission from God to create -- and they do. Felder's drama is more unconventional -- and mostly takes place in the brilliant, self-contradictory mind of the composer. Bernstein may be on a mission from God -- or actually be the God of modern music, as he claims at one point. But when the last note sounds, he's not sure if his mission succeeded.

The jury is still out. (I plan to listen to Bernstein's compositions the next chance I get.)

But Felder's mission clearly did.

It's a brilliant, unforgettable performance.

Maestro: The Art of Leonard Bernstein
June 8-12
An Asolo Rep production
FSU Center for the Arts
5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
351-8000

Just for laughs, here's a link to Tom Wolfe's piece:

Radical Chic

Two Jews Walk Into a War: Preview

2011-04-29T14:55:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to my preview of Two Jews Walk into a War in this week's Ticket in the Sarasota Herald Tribune: Two Jews Walk into a War. Text posted below:

Two Jews take a leap of faith in Kabul in new play

The title of Seth Rozin’s play sounds like the set-up for a joke – “Two Jews Walk Into a War …”
It really is a joke, Rozin says, an existential one.

The play, which opens May 5 at Florida Studio Theatre’s Gompertz Theatre, is about the only two surviving Jews in Kabul, Afghanistan, who are hiding in a bombed-out synagogue at the end of the Taliban’s regime.

“Ishaq and Zeblyan should support each other,” Rozin says. “They’re the last Jews left, and they hate each other! It’s one of history’s grim jokes — and the joke is on them.”

Not all the play’s jokes are grim. Rozin uses his unlikely duo to create a kind of vaudeville of the absurd. Bickering, mismatched characters are a comic staple, after all. But expect more than “The Odd Couple” in Kabul.

“Although they despise each other, they force themselves to work together,” he says. “Ishaq and Zeblyan plan to rebuild the Jewish community by re-creating a Torah scroll to attract a rabbi.” Rozin explains that the Taliban burned the synagogue’s original scroll. “Fortunately, Ishaq knows the Torah by heart. He speaks and Zeblyan writes.”

But would a new Torah scroll actually attract a rabbi?

“Probably not,” he says. “Their project may seem foolish, even crazy. But they feel compelled. You can call it a leap of faith.”

Their faith compels them to write, he says. But writing a new Torah makes them question their faith. Zeblyan asks most of the questions. Ishaq hates the constant interruptions and sees it as a lack of faith.

“Zeblyan starts by questioning religious minutia,” Rozin explains. “‘Why can we eat elephants but not rock badgers?’ He winds up asking bigger questions that anyone can relate to, whatever their faith.”
Rozin didn’t plan to write a parable of faith.

“I’m an atheist from a long line of non-observing Jews,” he says. “The seed was a news item that struck me as existentially funny. As I got to know my characters, they started telling me what they wanted, and the story veered off from the facts. Rewriting the Torah was their idea, and it surprised me.”

Rozin adds that his play is not a theology lesson, or any kind of lesson.

“The questions are more important than the answers,” he says. “It’s mostly a comic journey, but I’m not locked into that. I don’t impose a tone or a message. I want a sense of life as it happens — what emerges from these two characters in this place and time.”

Director Kate Alexander loves that raw spontaneity.

“Rozin’s comedy flows out of his flesh-and-blood characters,” she says. “We’ve got two great comic actors: Warren Kelley as Zeblyan and George Crowley as Ishaq. They’re brilliant improvisers and wonderful physical comedians, and they really sink their teeth into his visceral, gutsy dialogue. As a director, my job is to create a playground and say, ‘Go to town, guys.’ They did! They made me laugh so hard I was forced to leave the rehearsal many times.”

Both actors have appeared at FST before. Kelly played the husband in “Sylvia” last summer, and Crowley has been seen in “Dinner With Friends,” “Gross Indecency,” “Ten Unknowns” and “Proof.”
Rozin is the author of several plays that have been presented in regional theaters across the country. He also is the founder and producing artistic director of InterAct Theatre Company in Philadelphia.

Alexander notes that scenic and costume designer Marcella Beckwith and lighting designer Robert Perry spent weeks to get a “very specific look and feel” for Afghanistan. “Our set is evocative, but there’s a lot of research behind it.”

She adds that the bombed-out synagogue suggests the relentless history outside.

“It’s a place of ancient stones, except for one electric blue plastic chair,” she says. “Western civilization is encroaching and you know it.”

Tartuffery

2011-04-13T16:36:00.000-07:00

Before Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker, there was Tartuffe -- the title character of Moliere's play, and the latest FSU/Asolo Conservatory production.

Le plot summary ...

Tartuffe (Geoff Knox) is an itinerant street preacher in 17th-century France. Like Bakker and Swaggart in centuries to come, Tartuffe is saintly on the outside and oversexed within. Beneath Tartuffe's hard candy shell of religiosity, there lurks a soft, gooey core of lust. Slick, manipulative bastard that he is, Tartuffe keeps it well-hidden.

In the course of Moliere's play, Tartuffe latches onto Orgon (Tony Stopperan), a dull man of means in 17th-century France who seems to think that Tartuffe is Jesus' kid brother. After insinuating himself as Orgon's perpetual house guest, Tartuffe gets Orgon to promise him his daughter's hand in marriage (Ashley Scallon), thus voiding Orgon's original consent to her true love (Benjamin Boucvalt); Orgon also gives Tartuffe a claim to his estate. Creep that he is, Tartuffe remains dissatisfied. He still wants to get into the pants (or patalons) of Orgon's wife (Summer Dawn Wallace). After Orgon hides under a table, Tartuffe's scheme is exposed. Happily, Orgon's wife isn't screwed. Sadly, Tartuffe has the deed to Orgon's estate. Orgon is screwed -- along with everyone else. Mais bien sur, Louis XIV appears like a deus ex machina from above and sets things straight. Moral order is restored and the charlatan punished. The music of Lady Gaga's Poker Face plays.

It's a fun ride. Beneath the pomp and ceremony, Richard Wilbur's rhymed couplet translation is smart -- though it can't disguise the artificiality of Moliere's original. (Basically, the characters make speeches, one at a time.) But that's OK. Director Wes Grantom's production zips along with the speed of a screwball comedy. (In a recent radio interview, Grantom said this pace is true to the productions of the time. Audiences were sharp back then.) The performances are great -- especially Megan DeLay as Dorine, the family maid, who functions as a human reality principle. She stands for common sense. Not heresy. The same can be said of the playwright, Moliere. His play makes that clear. Very clear.

Moliere seems to spend half his time saying, "My target is religious hypocrisy. Not religion. I love religion, especially Catholic religion. Let's be very clear on that point." The playwright spends the rest of his time kissing King Louis XIV's ass. It didn't help. Moliere got in trouble anyway. I can't help but think Moliere saw it coming -- but he wrote the play anyway. Why?

Because it mattered to him.

Moliere stuck his neck out to write this play. He took the risk of pissing the king off -- a king with absolute power. He knew the risks.

But he wrote it anyway.

I can't help but think that it was personal to Moliere. That he'd seen people burned by pseudo-saintly charlatans speaking in the name of God. His friends, people he cared about. Beneath Moliere's fine language, there's a white-hot anger. And a truth.

Tartuffe may be a fictional character. But Tartuffery is very real.

And bullshit is eternal.

In 1664, 1912 or 2011, the principle holds true: If someone tells you, "God commands you to give me money," that's the time to run for the hills.

Or hit them.

'Tartuffe'
Through May 1
FSU/Asolo Conservatory production
Historic Asolo Theatre
5401 Bay Shore Road, Sarasota
351-8000

I ain't afraid of no 'Ghost-Writer'

2011-04-08T23:28:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time in the early 20th century, Franklin Woolsey (Colin Lane), a celebrated writer in the prolix Henry James mode, started dictating his novels to a typist. As in: a cute, young, female typist named Myra (Amy Tribbey). Franklin's pushy wife Vivian (Hollis McCarthy) wasn’t thrilled, but his literary output exploded. Over time, Myra became more of a collaborator than a passive secretary. Then, one day, Woolsey had a fatal heart attack in mid-sentence. Eventually, Myra heard his voice again and resumed typing, determined to finish his last novel.

OK. Such are the bare facts of Michael Hollinger's play, now hitting the stage at Florida Studio Theatre. Beyond these facts, the play poses a multiple choice question: Is Myra (A) nuts (B) committing a conscious fraud (C) continuing her collaboration (D) actually hearing his voice or (E) all of the above …?

For most of the play, an unseen investigator challenges Myra with these questions. That investigator (who represents Woolsey’s unhappy widow who’s trying to quash Myra's posthumous collaboration) seems to lean toward either the nuts or fraud theories. I have my own theory — but damned if Hollinger's play spells it out.

Whose authorial voice is it anyway?

That isn't the point — or the point that Hollinger cares about. Ghost-Writer isn’t a ghost story — or an anti-ghost story. It’s a love story — and an obvious metaphor for the writing process. Myra and Franklin romance the blank page. Their collaboration is better than sex. Granted the reticence of these Ragtime-era characters, it's a slow burn. That smoldering sensibility is what he cares about.

Like James Joyce, Hollinger loves the music of writing — not the words on the page, but the physical act of writing. Ghost-Writer jumps into that music with both feet: the back-and-forth rhythm of dictation and typing; the counterpoint of voice and typewriter. It's a love affair. Maybe with words, maybe between two people, alive or dead, creating words together. The boundary remains fuzzy, but the music is compelling.

Director Kate Alexander gets the music right — the slow, hypnotic, seductive pace Hollinger was going for. Tribbey is fine as the emotional center of the whirlwind: a woman desperately in love with a man who isn't there; the voice of sanity who knows her words sound crazy. Fine performances also from Lane and McCarthy. His dead author character is more like an open question: Is he there or not? Her wounded widow character is an accusation: Are you for real?

A thousand puns rise up like shades. A haunting production. A spirited performance. But let's run like hell past the graveyard and speak plainly ...

Great theater.

See it.

Ghost-Writer
Through June 4
Florida Studio Theatre
1241 North Palm Ave., Sarasota
366-9000
floridastudiotheatre.org.

Ride the "Death Trap"!!!!

2011-04-01T14:47:00.000-07:00

OK, a few words about the Asolo Rep production of Death Trap. But first, a few words about the thriller genre ...

As a dramatic genre, thrillers have the staying power of, say, Jacobean revenge tragedy. Which is to say, the genre isn't dead, but it's been eaten by other genres. A contemporary play may have thriller elements, but we want more psychological depth. A contemporary movie may have thriller elements, but we want more stuff blowing up. There are very few pure thrillers anymore.

Which is another way of saying: Ira Lavin's Death Trap is of its time. Lavin was a brilliant novelist and screenwriter -- at his best, on a par with William Goldman. Lavin wrote "Rosemary's Baby," "The Boys from Brazil" and a few other things. He knew what he was doing.

So, on the subject of thrillers, Lavin saw the bloody handwriting on the wall. He knew the thriller genre was dying. "Death Trap" is as much an epitaph as a love letter as a parody. I could tell you the plot, but thrillers don't work if you know what happens. So let's put it this way.

Lavin made a great roller coaster ride, full of exciting twists and turns. It's a fun ride. For contemporary writers, that ride is pretty much closed -- except as a technical exercise. For contemporary audiences, the ride is still a hoot.

Death Trap
Through May 14
An Asolo Rep production
FSU Center for the Arts
5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
351-8000

Medea, I just met a girl named Medea

2011-03-31T15:31:00.000-07:00

King Creon asked me a question tonight. He looks me in the eye and says, “Maybe I’m not being tyrannical enough.” I hold his glance, nod and shrug my shoulders as if to say maybe not. This lady is bad news.

King Creon’s referring to Medea of course — the title character in director Stinespring’s current production at Home Resource — a hip furniture showroom that turned into the setting of a stomach-churning tragedy.

Once again, Stinespring changed the code. Instead of being part of an audience watching the action through the proscenium frame, you're in the action. No division between spectator and spectacle: you're there. Call it unmediated theater. Stinespring didn't invent it. But it's a nice trick.

For the script, I assumed Stinespring found some public domain translation of Euripides' tragedy and cut it to the bone. Basically, Jason rejects Medea for a new wife. She kills their two sons and Jason's entire family as an act of revenge. The Styrofoam packing peanuts are gone; what's left is just the action line — a clean electric circuit sparking from decision to deed. The actors are in modern dress, which removes another barrier. Or tricks you into removing your barriers. Modern dress works like a boxer's feint. You think: "Ah, these characters are wearing suits and ties and evening dresses. They're just like us"— and you drop your guard.

But the ancients are not like us. This isn't my area of literary expertise — but I agree with Gregory Bateson on this score. The inhabitants of this particular Greek tragedy (and most of them) are more like a brood of Charlie Mansons. Their minds are wired differently.

The horror of the play isn't simply Medea's deed. It's Medea's world and the people who live here. Infanticide happens every day, but not for these cold reasons. (We have more in common with Shakespeare's Macbeth. Macbeth may be a monster, but he's a human monster. His motives — and self-consciousness about those motives — aren't that far from Tony Soprano.) Medea's not exactly human. But none of the characters are. Biologically, they're like us. But in their minds and souls, they're not. Medea and the rest are something Other.

Kudos to the actors for some excellent performances. Kudos to Stinespring for excellent scene blocking and pace. The action flows naturally — and draws you in to the play's unnatural, disturbing conclusion.

‘Medea'
March 31
Home Resources
741 Central Ave # A, Sarasota,
366-6690

Laughing Matters Interview

2011-03-28T05:28:00.000-07:00

"Monkeys is the craziest people” was the famous catch phrase of 1940s comedian Lew Lehr. Eventually, he turned that around to, “People is the craziest monkeys.” This nugget of comedy trivia has more than a grain of truth—as the daily news cycle proves. Us naked apes are the craziest monkeys of the whole bunch. Florida Studio Theatre’s Laughing Matters: Unconditional Surrender shamelessly turns humanity's craziness into comedy. This year’s production marks the fourth installment of the popular comedic review at the Goldstein Cabaret. The current cast includes past performers Jamie Day, and Stephen Hope and Richie McCall and newcomer Gavin Esham. Langford wrote the sketches and song parodies, along with Stephen deGhelder, W. Joseph Matheson, Jim “the Piano Man” Prosser and Adam Ratner. Richard Hopkins, FST’s artistic director, will direct the monkey business. In the following interview, Langford and Hopkins share some thoughts about the production:

How would you describe Laughing Matters to a Man from Mars who’s never heard of it?

Hopkins: I’d say that it’s like Saturday Night Live put to music. Assuming the Man from Mars had heard of Saturday Night Live …

Langford: You could also compare it to The Capitol Steps. It’s satire to the tune of Broadway melodies in that tradition. The difference is, we tackle both social and political subjects on a local and national level. It’s all up for grabs.

Do you have to be up on the news to get the jokes?

Langford: If you get the jokes on The Daily Show, you’ll get the jokes in Laughing Matters. You don’t have to be a news junkie to have a good time. And it’s not just news. It’s the whole human comedy.

Hopkins: Exactly. Humor is our starting point. It’s not a political science class, it’s a comedy, and we play it pretty broad. As a director, I send the actors in different directions. A Man from Mars might miss the political references. But there’s plenty of physical comedy and universal human comedy to laugh at.

Langford: And we’re laughing with people more than we’re laughing at them. It’s satire without a mean streak. We don’t want to lay into anyone.

Hopkins: It’s never been mean-spirited.

Who are the targets?

Langford: Everybody and everything. Health care. President Obama …

Hopkins: Local issues like high speed rail and roundabouts.

Charlie Sheen?

Langford: He might make an appearance.

Is there a political slant? A theory?

Langford: No. Just the theory that people are essentially crazy. We try to stay evenhanded. We have no political axe to grind.

OK, but just to clarify—people are crazy?

Langford: Yeah. But that’s great! We’re not attacking the crazy side of human nature. We love it—because we know we’ll never run out of material. That’s what keeps us in the comedy business.

And that’s not a left wing or right wing business?

Hopkins: No. Comedy’s comedy.

You don’t want to preach to the choir?

Langford: Preaching to the choir is pretty much impossible at FST. Our audience is 50% Republican, 50% Democrat. We wind up making fun of everybody.

How would you describe the creative process?

Hopkins: It’s no laughing matter.

That’s funny.

Langford: Seriously, comedy isn’t a cakewalk. I write a lot of the sketches, but I can’t do it alone. The great thing about this show is it’s very collaborative. I’m blessed to be working with a team of good writers, but it’s still hard work.

How does the collaboration work?

Langford: We start with a ton of song parody ideas and winnow it down. The material is always topical and we’re constantly changing it right up to the last minute. We all push each other to make the show better. And that makes us better. We all grow creatively—and it all pours into the show.

I assume the writers’ words aren’t written in stone?

Hopkins: No. The actors are free to change their lines. They can shape the speech to their own tongue and make the words their own. We encourage them to come up with their own material, to bring things to the table. They have to be on their A-game. That can be very liberating. And a little intimidating, if the actor isn’t used to it.

And the writers don’t object? No bruised egos?

Hopkins: No. Comedy comes first, and ego comes last. Our prime directive is: “Let’s make it funny.” As Rebecca said, it’s a team effort.

Langford: Yeah. And I really want to say, I love the team approach. That’s the fun part, and that’s what I love about this show. We’re all on the same page. We just want to make it funnier and funnier. If somebody has a better idea, we go for it. That’s what makes it one of the more fun shows to work on.

Hopkins: And the hardest. We’re constantly refining, right up to the last minute.

So you’re adjusting the timing, seeing what works on stage?

Hopkins: We’re shaping as we go, you bet. Rebecca will look over my shoulder and say, ‘Hey you missed that laugh,’ and I’ll go back and pick it up. Every good musical revue, comedic or not, has a structure, a shape and its own emotional intelligence. As a director, my job is akin to sculpting an image out a block of material. I carve away until I’m left with the essence.

So, some comedy gets left on the cutting room floor?

Langford: Yeah. Some of my favorite pieces didn’t make it. They’re too extreme; they’re duplicates; they’re not timely anymore. That always happens. We really have to boil it down.

Are the actors free to improvise?

Langford: Absolutely. Every performance is different. The actors stick to the script on the song parodies. They’re free to get creative with their spoken dialogue. It’s not a canned thing. We want it fresh every night—and I can promise you it will be.

Hopkins: It’s never the same show twice. That’s why our audience looks forward to it.

Do people collar you in supermarkets and say, “When’s the next Laughing Matters coming out?”

Hopkins: Yeah. And that’s a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing is there’s a dedicated fan base. That bad thing is we always have to be better than last time.

Langford: And it always is.

Hopkins: But that puts us under a unique pressure. The energy and effort that goes into it is amazing.

Now the pressure’s off?
Langford: We’re already working on the next show.

Well, hopefully you’ll have some fresh craziness to work with.

Langford: I don’t think I’m worried about it.

Hopkins: Yeah. That’s never been a problem.

Laughing Matters: Unconditional Surrender
April 1 through June 19
Florida Studio Theatre
Goldstein Cabaret
1241 N. Palm Ave., Sarasota
941-366-9000

www.floridastudiotheatre.org.

Here comes the Sun King

2011-03-18T18:52:00.000-07:00

In 1984, George Orwell wrote about an elite society of bastards who've taken control of the human mind for all time. This may seem to have little connection to Lynn Nottage's Las Meninas, but bear with me.

Nottage's play — Las Meninas — takes its title from a Velasquez painting of the Spanish court in the 16th century. (Literal English translation: Ladies in Waiting). The painter is visible in the background. In the foreground, there's a cute little blonde girl in a circle of dwarves.

That little blonde-haired girl, it turns out, was a Spanish princess who's destined to marry the king of France — Louis 14 — aka the Sun King. (Not my favorite person. He killed my ancestors. Don't get me started.) Destiny aside, their marriage was one of political convenience. Nottage shows you how inconvenient it turned out to be ...

Hitching the Spanish Princess up to the French Sun King ends the war between Spain and France. C'est bonne. C'est fini. That settled, Louis Quatorze sets his sights on his mistresses and doesn't touch his legitimate wife. The Spanish princess seethes with frustration. Merde! Caca! To placate her, Louis gives her a present: a pygmy in a box, freshly captured in Africa. AKA, Nabo Sensugali.

In Nottage's play, it's just a matter of time before the pygmy and the sexually-frustrated Ibernian princess start doing the nasty. Is that a historical fact? I dunno. Wikipedia doesn't confirm it, so what can I say?

History aside, there's no easy one-liner to explain the irrational hatred of white people to black people. The Spanish princess screwed the pygmy. Sensugali was buff; Louis XIV was a lardass; she screwed the cute African. Why the hell not? Who cares? Who knows?

I don't know. History (at least on Wikipedia) doesn't say. The elite French bastards of the 16th century did their best to erase this story from history — they stuffed Sensugali and his daughter in some Orwellian memory hole. Nottage was determined to pull the story out. So did she? Are they facts? Did they do it? I dunno. It seems plausible enough. But Nottage pulled the narrative out of the fire. (I can't fact-check it. But I'm willing to bet she did.) Her story feels like truth.

The result is a memory play — a narrative told by the daughter of the pygmy and the Princess. Simply put? Sensugali and the Spanish princess share a private history and eventually share a bed. Their love is doomed. She gets pregnant; she gives birth; they get caught. The King sends the obviously African baby to a nunnery. Then he lops off Sensugali's head.

That's the story.

Aristotle might say, Hey, I know what's going to happen. There's no suspense anymore.

Nottage might say, Hey, this is what happened. I have to tell the story.

The story is damned sad. There's no suspense. You know where it's going. You know how it's going to end.

Fair enough. But the story's true. As horrible as it is — as inevitable as it is — the story is true. It had to be told. And Nottage told it.

As to the performance itself ...

Michael Donald Edwards' direction has no false notes. And that's no false compliment. From a director's standpoint, this play is a minefield. It'd be dead easy to turn it into an editorial cartoon about how rotten white people were to black people. Edwards plays the scenes naturalistically and never elbows you in the ribs. (Which, of course, drives the point home that white folks have some heavy karma on their heads.) And the staging is amazingly inventive. Set designer Lee Savage's sliding walls and Dan Scully's trippy lighting effects combine to create a hallucinatory space that draws you into the reality and irreality of the play's situation. (Which would have been the experience of Sensugali and the Queen.)

Jud Williford’s placid Sun King is no ranting, raving, narcissistic tyrant. He has nothing to prove. He blandly assumes his superiority; there’s not a drop of insecurity in him. Lindsay Marie Tierce is excellent as the Queen-in-a-Gilded-Cage, a seething mass of sexual and personal frustration. Will Little puts in a strong performance as an African captive in a bizarre alien environment in which, essentially, he’s humoring the pale-skinned lunatics and trying to preserve his own sanity and self-respect. Devereau Chumrau is passionate in the role of the doomed daughter of their illicit union. Dropped in a nunnery, she's supposed to disappear. She’s not supposed to exist; erasing her from history was the goal.

Thanks to Nottage's play, the erasure didn’t work. The elite bastards lost.

George Orwell would be proud.

Las Meninas
Through May 15
An Asolo Repertory production
FSU Center for the Arts
5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
351-8000

An interview with Yoko Ono

2011-03-10T08:08:00.000-08:00

John Lennon's "Imagine All the People"

John Lennon would’ve turned 70 this year. The world still remembers him as a game-changing composer and musician — and often forgets his work as a visual artist.

“Imagine—The Artwork of John Lennon” helps re-imagine his creative legacy. Lennon’s drawings are the star of this traveling exhibit, which opens Friday at St. Armands Circle Park.

We recently spoke to Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, about John’s life and art. Unlike other celebrities I’ve encountered, she was gracious and warm and put me immediately at ease. Thanks to her openness, I came away from the conversation with new insights into the lives of two of the leading artists of our time. I feel privileged to share these insights with you.

Marty Fugate: First of all, it’s an honor to speak with you.
Yoko Ono: Well, it’s exciting for me too, Marty.

Thanks. Before we start, I have to say, I admire John’s art very much. He has an amazing ability to define an iconic image and create an emotion with a clean, simple line.
I know — it’s incredible! Some people probably think “It’s a simple thing. I can do it.”

I’m a humble cartoonist, and I know I couldn’t do it!
Then you understand.

I admire. Do you think this exhibit will help people rediscover John as a visual artist?
Yes, I hope so. It’s a very popular show. When you really look into John’s work you see this is an incredible sort of warmth and feeling; a little sense of humor; a twinkling in the eye. Also, the drawings are just filled with John’s warmth and love for people. I think people tend to forget that about him, so it’s good to remind them of that, you know?

And people respond to that goodheartedness, especially children. I remember the previous exhibit of John’s artwork we had here — "When I’m 64,” back in 2003. Toddlers who had no idea who John Lennon was were totally fascinated and drawn to his images.
Children are still not damaged, you know? They’re very pure and they understand it right away.

When did John create these images?
All the time, over many years. John was constantly drawing! He just did it whenever he felt like it. It was his security blanket in a way. And strumming a guitar was a security blanket for him, too.

But he couldn’t always play.
Right! (laughs) Art doesn’t make so much noise! You know, he’d always have a pencil and some paper, so he could just keep drawing. If John wound up in a boring business meeting, he’d start drawing. All the lawyers were saying, “What are you doing? What are you doing?” Then they’d look at what John was drawing and they’d say “Wow, can I have that?” and he’d say, “Sure, why don’t you take it?”

Do you have any favorite pieces in the show?
No. I’m hands-on about selecting which ones to be there. Unless the drawing is really good, I wouldn’t put it out. I love them all. They are all my favorites.

I’m sure you remember the time you fell in love with John. Do you remember the time you fell in love with his drawings?
(laughs) Yes, I think so. It started to happen when I first saw his work in London in a bookshop. I thought, “Wow, this art, it’s incredible.” And every page was incredible. That’s how I feel now.

Is it true that “respectable” art galleries didn’t always take John seriously as a visual artist?
No, they didn’t. They were often so insulting to him. The owners thought, “These are the dabblings of a rocker; why don’t you play your guitar? We’re doing a show of very, very good new artists, John. Maybe you want to come to the opening with your guitar and play something for us.”

In other words, “Here’s your artistic category; stay in it.”
Just terrible.

But that started to change?
Yes. When John was here alive, he had a show in London and in New York City. In the London gallery, all the lithographs were confiscated because they were obscene. I thought, “Wow, imagine that! Nobody would seize Picasso’s art, would they?”

It took courage to show his art back then.
Yes. And John was constantly looking for a gallery like that.

This is a little off the subject, but I was recently in New York City with my friend, Su Byron. I had a great time participating in your “Voice Piece for Soprano” at the Museum of Modern Art — the piece where you’re invited to scream into a microphone.
You didn’t, did you?

Yes I did! Screaming my head off in a major art museum was big fun.
The Museum of Modern Art, are you kidding? Usually, they don’t want people to make a pin drop noise. I think they were very courageous to do that. I think this is a first for them.

I’m impressed by the many peace initiatives your Imagine Peace project is supporting. I was particularly moved by your “Imagine Peace Tower” in Reykjavik Iceland — a tower of light you created as a monument to John Lennon.
Thank you.

Did the reality match the vision you had in mind?
It was really more than my vision! I didn’t think it was going to be like that. Before I built it, people asked “How high is it going to be?” I said, “Maybe seven floors high, hopefully.” But I worried about it. I thought to myself, “What will I say if it isn’t even that high?” Then we turned on the power and the light went zhhipp — and shot up right in the sky. The light was really, really very high, so high it seemed to curve across the sky.

I’ve only seen video, but what I’ve seen is impressive and beautiful.
Thank you.

You’re welcome. What are some of your recent music projects?
Oh, there are so many. In 2009, I made an album with my son, Sean, “Between My Head and the Sky” — my first new Plastic Ono Band album since 1975. Sean produced the album and also performed with me. There were also many great musicians, Yuka Honda and Cornelius and many others. I did a few concerts for that, as you probably also know. I was very, very impressed and honored that Lady Gaga came to our concert in Los Angeles. Just about a week ago, I completed an album with some friends of mine. I hope this is going to be a good one too!

I’m sure it will be.
Thank you.

Any concluding statements?
Well, I enjoy talking to you, Marty. I just want to say, John’s art had a message of peace and love. This show keeps the message alive and says “I love you” to the people of Sarasota. I hope you come and enjoy the show. We hope everyone enjoys the show.

"Power to the People"

"Imagine: The Artwork of John Lennon" runs from noon to 9 p.m. March 11, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. March 12 and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. March 13 at St. Armand's Circle Park. Donations collected at the door will help benefit Take Stock in Children. (561) 651-1156.

Published in the current issue of "Ticket" in the "Sarasota Herald Tribune." Reprinted by Permission.

'Boeing Boeing' takes off

2011-01-21T17:36:00.000-08:00

I love farce — in a weird kind of way. For me, it’s like a sustained anxiety attack punctuated by bursts of hyena laughter. I wait for the wrong babe to come out of the wrong door at the wrong time and sorta cover my face with my hands and fold up like a jackknife. Then, when the suspense is relieved, I howl. Perhaps this has something to do with early childhood traumas, I dunno. But I love the emotional roller coaster.

When it’s done right, of course.

The Asolo Rep’s current production of Boeing Boeing does it right. Greg Leaming directs and really gets the rhythms of the comic music down.

The play is from the swinging '60s — a French farce by Marc Camoletti the Brits translated and took to heart and Americans never got into. (A shitty Jerry Lewis movie may have had something to do with it. Not sure what the French thought about that.) Like Austin Powers, it’s been unfrozen and reheated and works just fine today.

The plot: there’s a cad of a Frenchman (Bernard, played by Bryan Torfeh) who’s simultaneously engaged to three stewardesses on different airlines and routes. Thanks to a long-suffering maid (Mercedes Herrero), a book of air flight schedules, a day planner and rotating photographs, Bernard romances them all in sequence in a juggling act of serial polygamy. They’re none the wiser; nothing could possibly go wrong. Yeah, right. The Boeing company invents a faster plane engine and his scheme is shot to hell. This happens when Robert (Jason Bradley) his naïve friend from Aix (don’t axe me how to pronounce it) shows up. Comedy ensues.

Bryan Torfeh is very funny. If a mad scientist mixed the DNA of John Cleese and Nathan Lane, he might be the result. His character starts out cool and smug and ends up a puddle of fear. Robert, his nerdy pal, starts out insecure and ends up confident — another great performance from Bradley. The stewardesses steal the show — all nicely individualized on page and stage, unapologetically, truly, deeply sexy. (Body language is, after all, a weapon. Bernard thinks he’s in charge, but he’s putty in their hands.) Kim Hausler is a hoot as the American stewardess — a Minnesota accent straight out of Prairie Home Companion but hardly a Lutheran attitude. She has a hilarious speech to the effect that American men are babies. Angela Sauer is drop-dead gorgeous as Gabriella, the Italian stewardess in an Op-Art dress (and stockings) you'd best put on sunglasses to look at. Fine comic timing. Kate Hampton plays the German stewardess — who quotes the Nibelungen and cracks the whip of dominance in a Lili Von Shtupp/Marlena Deitrich sense. (I suspect this reflects the deep trauma the French endured in W.W. II) Herrero is excellent as the maid — the eye at the center of the hurricane — the sane person holding all the insanity together and getting sick of it.

As said, I love farce. Perhaps it's the lack of judgment. Farce is ultimately forgiving. People are dirty rotten scoundrels. (Coincidentally, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels stole much of its tone from this play.) Farce laughs, but ultimately doesn’t want to see punishment. It just wants laughs. This production delivers.

Big fun.

Don’t miss the flight.

Boeing Boeing
Through April 23
An Asolo Rep production
FSU Center for the Arts
5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
351-8000

True Grit

2011-01-15T12:26:00.000-08:00

Now this is a fun movie. It's the kind of movie that only filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen could do.

Ultimately, this is a movie about virtue. Virtue in the moral sense. Virtue also in the original sense — efficacy, courage, guts, true grit — virtu.

The Brothers Coen have always had a heart for the tough-minded cynicism of film noir — that and screwball comedy, along with their signature weird touches. This comes across as nihilism to some, but that's a misreading. Noir explores the war of good and evil. It's inherently moral, but it concentrates on what happens to folks who listen to the advice of the devil on their shoulder.

The Coens have looked unflinchingly at evil for years. There's not an ounce of sentimentality in them. They've earned the right to do a real Western that's not revisionist in any way. (The flick is a faithful treatment of Charles Portis' original novel that forgets the John Wayne adaptation ever existed.) They've earned the right to explore the hearts of good guys — and one very good girl.

Excellent cinematography and editing. No nervous jump cuts — a sense of pace (and an awareness of physical space) appropriate to the time. Great dialogue — but it's a Coen Brothers movie, what else could it be? Great acting, too.

Hailee Steinfeld hits it out of the park as Mattie Ross — a 14-year-old girl going on 49. She has a high IQ, a rigid moral code (hardass Protestanism), a clear-eyed view of the world, deep insight into human character, knows exactly what she wants, won't stop, won't back down from a fight. (She's the real star of the show.) Matt Damon (unfairly slammed in Team America: World Police) is excellent as a cocky Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf (pronounced LaBeef, like a slab of meat) who may be full of himself but isn't entirely full of crap. Jeff Bridges kicks as as Rooster Cogburn — who isn't really the Dude character at all, but a mean sumbitch. Both Rooster and the Ranger have their own code of honor. Tom Chaney, the sidewinder who shot Mattie's father, doesn't. Wickedly played by Josh Brolin.

The plot is as simple as the track of a bullet. Mattie wants to track down her father's killer and see him hanged in Arkansas — or kill him if he objects. A quest for justice, not revenge. She pays badass Rooster Cogburn $50 to track Chaney down, but insists on coming along. LaBoeuf is hunting the same guy. After a long hunt, justice is served. Mattie pays a price — the loss of an arm thanks to a snakebite. Rooster carries her for miles and saves her life. Years later, she honors him with a grave in her family plot.

The film takes the West seriously — the language, the religion, the hard life — it really gave me the feeling I was looking through a window in time. No anachronisms. All the little details seemed right. It ends with a heartfelt rendition of "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms." That seemed right too.

“La Bête"

2011-01-07T13:47:00.000-08:00

As George Carlin once said, every comedian has the same message: “Dig me.” The same applies to every comic playwright. David Hirson, for example. His comedy, “La Bête,” is a long exercise in showing off. Fine with me—if you’ve got it, flaunt it. Hirson’s got it. The whole thing’s done in rhymed couplets — and that’s just for starters.

The Asolo Rep is currently showing off Hirson’s brainy brainchild in a smart production directed by Michael Edwards.

The plot? In a nutshell, it’s a war of wits (or a war of a wit and a half-wit) in 17th-century France. Elomire (Bryan Torfeh), a playwright with standards, goes toe-to-toe with Valere (Danny Scheie), a crowd-pleasing street jester who’s a hack with no standards. For some reason, the Prince can’t get enough of the guy — and wants to shoehorn him into Elomire’s theater troupe. Kinda hard for Elomire to say no — because the Prince is bankrolling the whole operation. And you know, he’s got that whole Prince thing going for him.

We hear about the new jerk before we see him. Elmoire bitches about “the Beast” to his buddy Bejart (Douglas Jones). Bejart agrees that the guy is a jerk — but doesn’t want to piss off the patron. Elomire (an anagram for Moliere) screws his courage up, ready to throw his artistic life away rather than compromise his high standards.

Then the Beast himself bursts on stage—and into a 25-minute machinegun monologue. The theme: “Dig me.” But he ain’t got nothing to dig. He’s full of himself. But he’s an idiot and a bore. Hirson cleverly makes the boredom interesting – and Scheie puts in a killer performance. Act I is some of the best comic theater I’ve ever seen.

In Act II, the Prince (Jud Williford) makes the scene. Like Hamlet before him, Elomire stages a play as a mousetrap for his enemy. The troupe performs one of Valere's beastly plays — which turns out to be a vile exercise in special pleading about the sacrifice of a Christlike suffering artist with an implied insult to the king, the prince and the honor of France. It’s fart-in-your-face low farce with a bullshit high-minded message. The mousetrap backfires. The prince commends Valere’s fearless integrity; the troupe thinks the audience will eat this material up; Elmoire resigns. Another Christlike, suffering artist.

Good stuff. But after the high of the first act, it’s a letdown. To entertain us, Hirson is forced to make his bore interesting. This makes his Moliere stand-in seem preachy and boring. The point is made that good art is good and bad art is bad. Using Elomire as a mouthpiece, Hirson cleverly explains why — but it’s academic, anti-dramatic and anti-comic. The playwright is smart — he plays the games James Joyce once played. But he makes a few mistakes.

The play is an argument — but Hirson undercuts his argument by making his bore the most interesting character in the play. Valere's entertaining; Elmoire isn't. Why shouldn't Elomire collaborate?

The play’s a war of wits – but the enemies never really go to war. Valere and Elomire talk at each other — but never to each other. There’s no sparring, no direct confrontation. That’s what I wanted. Or a surprise. Elomire says, “To hell with it. Give the people what they want” and sells out. He doesn’t. But Elomire doesn’t show us what makes him great either. Elomire never says “Dig me.” He sacrifices himself for art. But one Jesus is enough.

If there’s a beast out there, you need to fight it.

Downer ending aside, the play’s a lot of fun. Great directing by Michael Edwards. Great acting all around – and Scheie puts in a gut-busting, once-in-a-lifetime performance. Dig me?

He’s got a right to say it.

La Bête
Through Feb. 20
An Asolo Rep production
FSU Center for the Arts
5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
351-8000

Nitpicky analysis:

Another surprise ending. Valere, like some 17th-century Andy Kauffman, says, "Let's cut the crap. This 'Beast' is just a character I created. You're the only one who didn't buy it. I bow to you, monsieur." -- and then bows to Elomire.

Speaking of Joyce -- he had the same problem in Ulysees. Buck Mulligan was supposed to be the ultimate goat-like Philistine. But he was funny. As Burgess once said, you were always glad to see him show up after hanging out with that nattering prig, Stephen Dedalus.

I agree with Hirson's definition of bad art.

In Treatment

2010-12-10T19:53:00.000-08:00

What do you mean they canceled my !@# show?

By an improbable sequence of events, I caught the final episode of In Treatment. Now I need treatment. How can I put this ...

In storytelling, there's always a conflict between logic-logic and dramatic logic. In real life, actions have consequences. If A, then B. If B, then C. There are no non sequiturs in reality. Nothing happens that can't happen. That doesn't apply to fiction.

Stories are only as logical as the writer wants them to be.

A writer can ignore a character's history. A writer can make a character do something COMPLETELY out of character. It's easy. Just type ...

Gandhi smiled, then picked up the machine gun. He began to fire, spraying a rain of death on the British troops. "How does it feel you bastards?" he screamed. "I have, most seriously, taken all the shit I can take!"

There's a term for this violation of logic. Bad writing.

But the term doesn't exactly apply to all illogical writing.

Like, say, the kind you see on HBO. The kind of writing that earns big checks.

When creating this kind of drama, a writer is in the position of the dude designing a carnival spook house ride. Every so often, a skeleton pops out with glowing red eyes and a buzzer goes EGNNNNNGHHH! Every so often, the cart suddenly dips down. The ride is punctuated with loud noises, blasts of airs, recorded screams ...

The creator of the ride doesn't ask, "What is the motivation of the skeleton?" He just makes the !!@# skeleton pop out. Writers who are very very good at creating rides like that in fiction get paid a lot money. They look at writers like me and say, "You !@#$$ asshole. @@##E$ logic! How much money did they pay you for your fiction?"

So, OK. I dig. Screw logic. It's all about the ride. Fine.

But I can't stand bad logic. I'm sorry. It's a thing with me.

Carnival house violations of causation and probability are easy to see in thrillers, Sci-fi and horror movies, not so easy to see in weepy, intelligent drama.

Like, say, "In Treatment."

There's a vast intelligence behind the show. And just a hint of dishonesty. As subtle as a fart in church. But you can smell it.

Paul, the tormented but brilliant therapist, says stuff his character just wouldn't say. In their zeal to push him to soap-opera story points, the writers ignore his history.

So, for example, in the first season, Paul ignores the suicidal tendencies of a fighter pilot who may or may not be in deep denial about his repressed homosexuality due to an overbearing father. The pilot crashes his plane in an improbable pilot error. The dead pilot's repressive father blames Paul for ignoring his son's intimations of self-destruction and sues Paul's ass in the second season. Paul escapes by the skin of his teeth.

In the third season, an Indian emigrant named Sunil (who's living in a humiliating situation with his son and daughter-in-law, Julia) tells Paul about his violent fantasies about bashing his Julia's head in with a cricket bat. Paul, taking the advice of his therapist, warns Julia. Sunil gets deported. It turns out, that's what he secretly wanted. He'd been manipulating Paul all the time.

The connection between the pilot (a threat Paul ignored that resulted in a tragic death) and Sunil (a threat he didn't ignore) is never made. Why not?

Because the writers wanted to push Paul to a soap opera-style romantic tease with Adele, his blonde, 30-something therapist. They wanted to end the final episode on a cliffhanger. Is Paul quitting therapy? Will Paul and the cute, blonde therapist get together? Tune in next season and find out!

Bringing up the dead pilot would have muddied that story point. So the writers ignored it.

They took the series to the place they wanted it to go.

And it's about as believable as Gandhi picking up a machine gun.

'The 39 Steps' -- fear, repeated as farce

2010-12-06T18:00:00.000-08:00

Some thoughts on The 39 Steps, opening this Friday at Florida Studio Theatre. It's a comedy, based on Hitchcock's recipe of fear. This got me to thinking on the connection between "Ha-ha" and "Ahhhhhhh!" So here goes...

As Karl Marx once said, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce.” His words apply equally to movies and plays. If you put something weepy, serious or scary on the stage or screen, somebody's going to turn it into a joke. If you create a formula for tears and fears, you can count on it. When you're not supposed to laugh, it's hard not to laugh. Satire depends on taking a serious formula and making a joke out of it.

When it came to creating serious formulas, director Alfred Hitchcock was the master. More precisely: Hitchcock was the master at scaring the daylights out of you. He attained that mastery early in his career.

The 39 Steps was Hitchcock’s archetypal spy thriller, a 1935 film freely adapted from a 1915 novel by John Buchan. Charles Bennett wrote the screenplay, but it was clearly Hitchcock’s twisted vision. He made it a contemporary tale, set in the days of Britain’s prewar paranoia when Hitler’s agents were hatching their schemes across Europe. (This is one of those cases when the suspicions of paranoiacs were actually true.) In a nutshell, some of those agents frame an innocent British man (Richard Hannay) for murder. He runs, simultaneously chased by the police and a conspiracy of spies (who sometimes dress like police) who want to kill him. Throughout his flight, Hannay is stuck with (and occasionally handcuffed to) Pamela, an icy blonde who thinks he probably is guilty. If you’ve seen any Hitchcock movie, you probably know what he’s in for: a desperate warning from a dying woman, bits of business with maps, cross-country flight by train, public embarrassment at a political rally and a conspiracy unmasked in a music hall. In true Hitchcockian form, the big secret at the heart of it all is a MacGuffin — an excuse to keep the suspense going.

Even as a young director, Hitchcock knew nobody really cared about silent aircraft engines. He knew what audiences really cared about: fear. He’d found the perfect formula for creating it in The 39 Steps.

An innocent man hunted down by both the bad guys and the good guys? An innocent man trying to clear his name while running for his life? The formula worked in The 39 Steps. It worked again in Saboteur (1942) and North by Northwest (1959) To Catch a Thief (1955), and Frenzy (1972).

But calling Hitchcock’s magic a “formula” doesn’t do it justice. Hitchcock tapped into primal paranoia, hard-wired in the human mind. Being wrongfully accused of a crime that you didn’t commit. Running for your life. Not knowing who your friends and enemies are. Fumbling with maps, frantically trying to catch a train. Being exposed in public and explaining it away with a desperate gambit. This is what our nightmares look like. Hitchcock’s brilliance was to put them on celluloid.

Playwright Patrick Barlow’s brilliance was to adapt Hitchcock’s archetypal fear-fest as a comedy. Barlow’s script is somewhere between homage, satire and magic trick. Surprisingly, it doesn’t read like a comedy. Most of the lines from the original 1935 movie survive intact. Barlow doesn’t take the comic strategy of, say, Mel Brooks’ High Anxiety — another Hitchcock spoof that mocked the master with broad references and exaggerated situations. Barlow plays the material relatively straight. Aside from having four actors play the roles of scores of characters in a quick-change frenzy, not much has changed. But it’s still laugh-out-loud funny. How does he do it?

Barlow’s comedy is more than Velcro costumes and good timing. His hilarity depends on a simple, brilliant insight: The formula for fear and the formula for laughs are basically the same. (Ahhh! and Haa-haa! aren't that different, after all) As any good comic knows, anxiety is the wellspring of comedy. Public exposure? A conspiracy out to get you? Now that’s comedy. Why reinvent the formula? Why not steal from the master?

In The 39 Steps, Hitchcock created the perfect formula for fear. Repeated as farce, Hitchcock’s formula works just as well.

What exactly is the formula for fear?

Ah. The formula for fear is —

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m terribly sorry. Our writer has been shot. No need for panic. Stay calm. We will bring on the dancing girls, momentarily.

The Bush Identity

2010-11-30T18:41:00.000-08:00

OK, here's my review of Doug Limon's Fair Game.

Before I speak, here's credit where it's due. Limon, among other things, directed The Bourne Identity and produced its two sequels. Those films took the spy movie genre apart and put it back together — gave us cinema spies who were dirtier, grittier and faster, but also more realistic — creatures of flesh and blood with history, psychology, vulnerability and nerve endings. Bourne gave birth to the Daniel Craig Bond. After Bourne, no spy movie will ever be the same. Limon changed an entire category of filmmaking.

His latest effort is Fair Game — a political thriller based on the real life Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson incident.

A different genre. With a different set of rules.

Say you’re a filmmaker. You want to make a political thriller based on real life events. You want it to work? All The President’s Men remains the gold standard.

The recipe? Pretend your film is a fictionalized documentary and you’re totally objective. (Hey, you’re not, or you wouldn’t be making a political film in the first place.) But fake it. Pretend you’ve got nothing to sell and the audience will buy what you’re selling. Keep your political cards close to your chest.

But Limon tips his hand. To start with, casting leftwing poster boy Sean Penn as Ambassador Joe Wilson is a dead giveaway. The opening montage — to the sneering tune of the Gorillaz' Sunshine in a Bag — telegraphs: GEORGE W. BUSH IS A TOOL OF NEO-CON LIARS AND CROOKS. THE IRAQ WAR IS A SCAM. In case you miss the implication, Wilson cusses out a guest at a dinner party who admits to being nervous at the sight of two desperate-looking, praying Arabs in religious grab on a plane flight. This is 18 months or so after 9-11 — but that’s no excuse for racial profiling!

This scene establishes Wilson as a hothead loudmouth. But it also tells us where the movie stands. On the side of the PC angels, natch.

After these initial false moves, Limon's movie picks up. The first act is a detective story — and it's the best part of the movie. Wilson checks out intelligence reports that Saddam Hussein is buying Uranium from Niger; he discovers the reports are not true. Wilson makes his report to the CIA; then the White House strongarms the CIA into reaching a different conclusion. Saddam did buy Uranium from Africa! We know! Bush and friends make public statements to that effect—and we invade Iraq. Enraged, Wilson blows the whistle in the NYT, writing an editorial saying the war’s pretext was a lie. In retaliation, the White House blows the cover of Wilson's wife — CIA agent, Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts) — implying she's a low-level secretary who sent her loser husband on a fact-finding mission for nepotistic motives. Bush and his cronies destroy Wilson's credibility, Plame's career, and the lives of several of her intelligence assets. The detective story becomes a story of betrayal. And then it becomes a relationship story.

Thanks to the White House disinformation campaign, press and public turn against Plame and Wilson. The stress almost cracks their marriage. It's an interesting, touching exploration of character under fire, but Limon drags it out. It’s the obligatory all-is-lost segment. We know where the film is going — but it takes too long to get there. Eventually, the couple will take a stand and fight. It takes about 45 minutes before they do.

At the end of the flick, Scooter Libby (a low level player in the character assassination campaign) is convicted of perjury, then commuted by George W. Bush. The investigation dead-ends there; nobody else is tried or convicted. Wilson makes an obligatory patriotic speech quoting Ben Franklin. "We’ve got a republic — if we can keep it." The effect is less than rousing.

Here again, All the President's Men show you how it's done.

Fair Game intercuts Wilson and Plame's reaction to the hatchet job against them with shots of the White House plotters responsible. (Who might as well be Darth Vader and the Emperor on the Death Star.) All the President's Men kept Nixon and his crew out of sight — an unknown threat. Like "Jaws," Nixon is scarier when you don't see him. Fair Game shows you the threat. Fat, balding white guys behind desks. Oooh, scary. More importantly ...

When All the President's Men came out in 1975, everybody already knew that Nixon would fall like Humpty Dumpty, taking his cronies with him. Reporters Woodward and Bernstein would emerge as heroes and talk show and lecture circuit darlings and make fat book sales. America knew that, too. But the movie played the events of Watergate as if we didn't know — and anything could happen. It was a suspense flick where the reporters could get shot in a parking garage at any time. The hell of it is, it worked.

In the hindsight of 2010, America also knows that Bush & Co. were wrong. We know that now. But it wasn't so clear in 2002.

Limon's flick would’ve worked better if he had confined itself to the mindset of the post-9-11 era. Anything could happen; nobody knew the score. Maybe Saddam was building a bomb. Nah. We know the score now; Limon’s characters know the score in 2002. There’s no suspense — for them.

Or the audience either.

Revenge of the Nerd

2010-10-17T23:36:00.000-07:00

Director David Fincher’s The Social Network takes a not-so-promising premise — the story of Facebook — and turns it into an amazing movie. Compare it to, say, The Pirates of Silicon Valley. Good movie, but not great. This was great. And I knew it in the first few minutes.

In the opening scene, Mark Zuckerberg’s intellect rolls over his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend like a tank. He doesn’t even know he’s doing it. He stomps her; she dumps him. “Sorry” doesn’t cut it.

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue perfectly captures the way nerds talk and think. Nerdspeak. Sorkin speaks it like a native speaker.

Nerds have more short term memory (a larger RAM buffer) and will refer to earlier conversational threads assumed dropped. Nerds are both anti-social and anti-Machiavellian. In the nerd ethos, thought is code; you follow the argument where it leads; you put all your assumptions on the table — including assumptions about social status, motives and intelligence. Sparing people’s feelings doesn’t enter into it. This sounds like insensitivity, but it really isn’t. If you’ve got an IQ of 170 or so, you insult people without even trying. So you stop trying not to.

To write this smart, you've got to be that smart. Props to Mr. Sorkin.

In the opening scene, you see exactly what kind of brain Zuckerberg has — and exactly what kind of character. The scene is the whole movie in embryo, a logic bomb waiting to explode. Everything flows from there ...

As a result of social rejection, Zuckerberg creates the greatest social network in history.

A college prank to get back at his ex-girlfriend evolves, step by step, into Facebook. We trace this evolution looking back in time from the vantage point of depositions and legal hearings. Zuckerberg’s ex-best friend and two twin, upper class jocks are suing him over the intellectual property rights issues. I.e.; the jocks claim Zuckerberg stole their idea; his best friend claims he cheated him out of partnership in the company. From one perspective, Zuckerberg stabbed them all in the back. From another perspective, he didn’t. Facebook evolved, ineluctably, like so many lines of elegant code.

Zuckerberg may be great with computer code — but he's not so great at moral code. The movie doesn’t dismiss him — or excuse him — as a human computer or autistic savant with a low social IQ. Zuckerberg's not socially unaware. He’s socially indifferent. And proud. His giant, pulsating brain remembers every social slight, every patronizing implication, every sneer. He balances the equation. He gets his payback.

Facebook is the revenge of the nerd.

This film has great performances by Jessie Eisenberg (Zuckerberg), Armie Hammer (playing both twins), Andrew Garfield (as Zuckerberg's dumped partner) and — believe it or not — Justin Timberlake (as Sean Parker, Napster's crash-and-burn founder). Acting that doesn't feel like acting — no milking the scene, no going for the big moment. Director Fincher makes you feel like a voyeur spying in on real people — pretty rare, for a big budget movie these days.

What this film doesn’t have is any detailed investigation of Facebook itself. There a few throwaway scenes — but nothing like those 1960s movies explaining the growth of rock and roll with a montage of teens listening to portable radios on the beach. Facebook is a phenomenon. The movie assumes you know about it — and gets on with the story.

That story is largely fiction. The filmmakers had access to the broad outlines of the story — and no access to the actual details or characters, wrapped in layers of nondisclosure agreements as they were. The Mark Zuckerberg of this movie has about as much reality as Prince Hamlet or Leopold Bloom, which is just fine with me. That’s probably why this film is so much more than a mere bio-pic. It’s the bio-pic of an idea — an idea that stands for all ideas. It’s a universal story.

Fincher’s movie and Sorkin’s script brilliantly shoehorns two plot threads together: (A) the exciting birth of an idea — as in the discovery of Radium or penicillin (B) the human cost and betrayal associated with the ownership of that idea. Facebook was a brilliant idea. The filmmakers are absolutely clear about that.

Whether the kudzu-like social network Zuckerberg created is such a good idea for society is different question — and a question for a different movie.

Facebook musings:

Coming on like a "Hurricane"

2010-10-16T16:25:00.001-07:00

Nilo Cruz's new play, "Hurricane," premiered at the Ringling International Art Festival. The festival commissioned the work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. Michael Donald Edwards directs.

The setting: a Caribbean island in the path of a killer storm. The characters: Forrest (Paul Whitworth), an old-school Christian missionary; Ria (Kim Brockington), his island-born wife; Aparicio (Carlo Albán), their adopted son -- a gift from the sea who magically appeared one day, floating in a basket like baby Moses.

Cruz' play opens in discordant stereo. The storm's a-coming. Forrest declaims from the Bible in Shakespearean tones; Ria makes an incantation to an Afro-Caribbean sea goddess; Aparicio climbs a tree in a rite-of-passage ritual to get a zap of spiritual energy from the Hurricane. (Which seems to reflect Mom's religion more than Dad's.) Dad goes looking for Aparicio. When the storm hits, Dad gets conked on the head. And it's amnesia time for Reverend Forrest.

Forrest comes back to consciousness but not to himself. He's lost his history, his personality and his religion. He thinks he's possessed by the spirit of a woman: Andrea. Like Goethe's Faust, two souls cohabit within his breast.

Aparicio blames himself for his father's blasted brain. Ria makes agonizing attempts to reconnect with Forrest's lost identity. At the end of it all, there's a redemption -- and happy ending -- of sorts.

Great acting on all counts. Whitworth has a powerful, Shakespearean delivery; Brockington conveys a sweet agony as Ria; Albán is touching as a teenager wrestling with guilt.

Edwards bookends the play with two striking visual images; a frozen tableaux of debris, and Aparicio swimming through the air. (No magic. Just Peter Pan-style wire works.)

Great stuff. But the stuff in-between the two images doesn't quite add up.

Cruz' play is an interesting meditation on the loss of identity -- and the foundational role memory has in creating identity. But a meditation isn't a play. Aside from a concussion and its aftermath, there's no real conflict or tension. Father, Mother and Son are all wonderful people. Dad got bonked on the head. They went through some bad times. But they're OK now.

It's not enough. I get the sense the playwright feels the same way. Cruz' play is a sketch; an hour-long slide show of high points -- which it had to be to fit the festival format. Cruz hints at the tension between Christianity and Afro-Caribbean religion but never explores it. He informs us that Forrest rescued his wife from sexual slavery -- and drops the subject. There's a big story here -- too big to shoehorn into sixty minutes.

My hunch is, Cruz will expand the play and dig into the subtext. Dad's loss of memory will have a larger resonance to -- say -- the white man's willful amnesia to his patronizing exploitation of Afro-Caribbean people. An amnesia which applies, even to "heroic" white missionaries.

That's just a guess. As it stands now, the play is a sketch.

It's fascinating now for the complete image that it promises.

If it ain't Baroque, don't fix it

2010-10-13T15:11:00.000-07:00

"Opera Baroque" -- one of the offerings at this year's Ringling International Art Festival -- is adapted from the 18th-century “Czech Opera About a Comically Small Crooked-Looking Chimney Built by Masons, or the Quarrel Between the Landlords and Its Masons.” It's a puppet show. But that's kinda like saying Jimi Hendrix was a guy who played the guitar.

The Forman brothers are pulling the strings. (Actually only two are brothers: Matej and Petr Forman. Milan Forman, in synchronistic coincidence, has the same last name.) The Formans are determinedly working class. They remind me of the Three Stooges or the Marx Brothers. They come out -- in blue striped shirts and big smiles -- in a parody of desperate audience ingratiation.

Before the show opens, the "brothers" get into some bits of business with the audience. Making a big production out of it, they polish the glasses of the folks in the front row. One brother emerges as the spokesman. He discusses the translation problem. (It's too much of a problem, so they won't translate.) He advises you to lower your expectations. "This is a puppet show. Many people find this boring."

He explains the opera's plot. Two workers put up a chimney. It falls down. The husband yells at them. Then the wife yells at them. That's it. That's the whole opera.

The dude gets apologetic again. "In Czechoslovakia, wives do a lot of yelling. It is only our country. We're not saying anything about American wives."

A dude in a powdered wig (Vitezslav Janda) sits down at the keyboard.(A synthesizer pretending to be a harpsichord.) The audience forgets to applaud, so the spokesbrother reminds them.

And so, the opera begins. As foretold, the two masons screw up the job. Building a chimney. You'd think it'd be simple, but no. The brothers Forman have added a trio of three demonically bratty brothers to the original opera, along with a Mozart-like piano tutor. The kids can't play "Frere Jacques" ...? The tutor solves the problem by hitting them. The brats annoy the masons? The masons hit them with shovels. Along the way, the puppeteers' hands reach down from the sky like the hands of God himself.

Later on, they stop the action. One brother has artistic differences. He's shouting in Czechoslovakian and ready to walk out. The spokesman explains, "My brother's not happy with the way we did that scene. He thinks it's too rushed. We can either start the opera from the beginning or do the scene in slow motion." So they do the scene in slow motion. After they make such a big deal out of it, here's what you get: The bratty little kid dances around. The scowling mason takes the shovel and whacks him into the stratosphere.

The comic timing is nothing less than brilliant. It reminds me of the classic Warner Brothers cartoon greats -- McKimson, Clampett, Avery and Jones. The brothers are constantly interrupting the action and making you think about the elaborate machinery of the show. I'd call it post-modern, but I suspect they're not operating from an academic playbook. It's just funny, that's all.

The slapstick is gut-bustingly funny in its own right. Of course, there's a satiric target, too: Opera. The stage is a dinky little puppet theater stage. It’s not impressive in any way shape or form, but it’s done up like a grandiose opera hall.

This is an opera about two schleps who can't put up a chimney. The stars of the opera are puppets. It's anything but grandiose. But they play it that way.

It's perfectly hilarious.

And the perfect anecdote to artistic pretension.

Positively Bob Dylan

2010-10-06T23:57:00.000-07:00

Last time I saw Bob Dylan was back in the 1992 at the Van Wezel. He was too cool for school, ignoring the audience and playing half-heartedly in sloppy, idiosyncratic arrangements that were all over the place. (Think The Imagination Song from South Park's Imaginationland.)

By comparison, Dylan's concert at the USF Sun Dome was a shot of love. Surprise, surprise.

I didn't expect that much. The Sun Dome is a uniquely ugly example of brutalist concrete architecture. Brutal crowd control, too. Security was ridiculously tight; your freaking ticket was basically an internal passport you had to show every time you used the stairs. May I see your papers please? There will be no flashing of the chimes of freedom here!

Before the concert, I noticed that Dylan had branded his current tour with a weird lightning bolt eye under a crown logo. The Zimmermania booth was selling Bob Dylan t-shirts and Bob Dylan Harmonicas. The dude should branch out into Bob Dylan Leopard Skin Pillbox Hats and Bob Dylan Big Brass Beds. But I digress.

After diverting the audience with a clip from D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, Dylan opened with, well, Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat, and right away I knew I was in for a treat.

His latest band ain't The Band, but it's a damn good band. Lead guitarist Charlie Sexton cooked on steel guitar. The drummer was a machine. Loved the band. (Though, as noted, they're not The Band.) Now that Dylan sounds like Tom Waits after gargling with rock salt, it's wise to wrap that voice in a powerhouse band with a distinct identity.

The new band's identity is strictly R&B. They'd be right at home in the Blues Fest.

Dylan didn't spend the whole concert noodling the keyboard. At times, he actually sang to the audience. Damned if I understood a word. Dylan of 2010 today makes the Dylan of the 1960s sound like Frank Sinatra. He could be singing in Esperanto for all I know. But he sang from his heart and that's what counts.

The Folk-Rock Poet of the Youth Generation also seemed to click with the band -- as opposed to pissing on their heads, cracking the whip, dominating or ignoring them. Hell, at times, I think they're were jamming, improvising and fooling around like a real cohesive group.

Dylan didn't serve up the half-hearted meanderings I remember from 1992. Or the weird, sprung rhythms of his early electric period, either. The arrangements were stripped-down: roadhouse rhythm and blues with a dash of rockabilly. No frills, no kazoos, just driving rhythm like a runaway train. It's what the people wanted. (And what hardcore Dylanites probably didn't want.) Call it: The Give The People What They Want Tour.

The set list offered a grab-bag of audience faves, Lay Lady Lay, Highway 61 Revisited, A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, Tangled Up in Blue, etc. He put in a few relatively new pieces -- Tweedleedum and Tweedleedee, It's All Good, etc. But they fit in seamlessly with the hard-charging arrangements of Dylan's mainstream classics.

The Unwashed Phenomenon closed with Just Like a Woman and did All Along the Watchtower as an encore. I jumped to my feet, pumped my fist and shouted "Yes!" like a true fan boy.

The audience loved it, too. Whole lotta shaking going on down in the crowd. College kids getting into it.

It occurred to me both songs are statements of judgment and doom. All the Talmudic scholars who picked Dylan's lyrics apart back in the day figured the spoiled brat of Just Like a Woman stood for narcissistic, power-tripping America and the dues we're going to pay; All Along the Watchtower is clearly pre-Apocalyptic. Two dudes strolling the fortress perimeter and waiting for Sauron's forces to ride in.

These words of warning are lost on anyone who doesn't already know 'em.

A Taste of Ibsen

2010-09-30T08:29:00.000-07:00

OK, here's my take on A Taste of Ibsen, a series of Ibsen vignettes hosted by Home Resource -- a defiantly modern furniture showroom in downtown Sarasota. Six segments in modern dress. Movable feast theater that shifted from showroom to showroom. Loved it. Before I get into it -- here's a quick disclaimer about Ibsen.

Ibsen was a great playwright, no doubt. But he tends to be didactic. He has points to make. His plays are clockwork machinery designed to make those points. Ibsen's machinery gets on my nerves. Sorry.

But director Dr. Louise Stinespring's production neatly sidesteps the clockwork. Brilliant strategy. By taking key scenes out of context, she makes the scenes stand alone. She rubs out the captions on Ibsen's editorial cartoons. What's left is the art -- and you're free to appreciate it.

Stinespring cuts are prime cuts: two from A Doll House (Amanda Schlacter and Kevin Rose), a slice from An Enemy of the People (Mark Konrad and Jeremy Heideman), two from Hedda Gabler (Jeremy Heideman, Schlachter, Heather O'Dea) and one from The Lady from the Sea (Konrad, O'Dea).

The selections share a theme of transformation.

The soulless little Christmas from A Doll House nicely time-shifted the scene to a modern context. To our eyes, Nora's husband is a passive-aggressive jerk. He drowns his wife in the sugary maple syrup of his sickly sweet, lovey-dovey talk. She's a squirrel, a wren -- but she's also a spendthrift and a mindless fool. Torvald's endearments put Nora in her place; create the walls of her Doll House prison. His love is a power trip in disguise. It's horrifying to watch. We catch on as Nora catches on. And we realize this can't go on. We realize the transformation she's going through.

In the first scene, Nora's waking up to her rotten reality, but still not facing it. In the last scene, she breaks free of that reality. She ain't gonna work on Torvald's Doll House no more. Nora's transformed into a new being -- a new woman -- the progenitor of many New Women to come.

In Hedda Gabler, the writer and the young woman begin an awakening -- a possibility Hedda viciously aborts.

The dude in An Enemy of the People transforms into a whistle-blower. Another new kind of being.

Stinespring's timing is damn near perfect. No dead moments, a smart use of the unconventional space. The performance flowed. The actors moved with streamlined grace. They effortlessly transformed the showrooms into ad hoc sets. (At least they made it seem effortless.) The audience was relaxed too. It's nice to get up in middle of a performance and move around. Really cuts down on leg cramps.

The acting is some of the best I've seen. Schlacter's characterizations were standouts--a heartbreaking Nora and a bone-chilling Hedda. Rose nailed the ick factor as Nora's patronizing husband. As the writer's doomed mistress, O'Dea offered a pitiable naivete. She doesn't know the score, and she's going to pay. Konrad brought a Jonathan Winters vibe to his two blowhard authority figures. He had the audience laughing at several points. I imagine Ibsen up in the clouds somewhere shouting No! Those scenes weren't meant to be funny!) But I like Konrad's choices.

While we're on the subject, I like the director's choices to. Speaking of transformations, she transformed my opinion of Ibsen. There's more to his plays than clockwork, go figure.

These excerpts show what Ibsen's good at. He was brilliant at showing how character transforms. He was also a proto-feminist, and made many strong feminist statements – mostly saying stop treating women like crap. Those statements are clear to modern audiences, though I suspect dudes in the 1880s were egging Torvald on (Yes! Put that spendthrift in her place!). Ibsen clearly took risks.

Aside from the performance itself, I liked the clever, non-traditional setting of the performance. (I wasn't alone. The people who filled the space had a nice camaraderie.) In a weird way, seeing a play in a cool furniture shop changes your appreciation of the material. It ducks the whole sitting-in-church, suffering-for-art thing. You're not sitting in a stiff theater seat. It’s some cutting-edge, ergonomic furniture, man. Couches, settees. Some woman was even lounging on a bed.

When the last scene ended, I didn’t want to leave the theater. I was actually comfy. When does that happen?

A great night of theater -- that wasn't in the theater.

More, please.

‘A Taste of Ibsen
Sept. 30 - Oct. 2
Home Resources
741 Central Ave # A, Sarasota,
366-6690
www.homeresource.com

Irish Play Reading Series

2010-09-12T13:51:00.000-07:00

Here's a coming attraction y'all might be interested in --

Irish Play Reading Series at Sarasota's Irish Rover

Irish Rover Pub, 6518 Gateway Avenue in Sarasota announces a reading series of Irish and Irish-American plays rehearsed and performed by some of the area's leading actors. The initial offering will be Brian Friel's MOLLY SWEENEY on Tuesday, September 28 at 7:30. The actors will be Annette Breazeale as Molly, the woman whose sight is miraculously restored, Marc Konrad as her loving husband and Don Walker as the daring surgeon.

Brain Friel is one of the world's great playwrights, the author of DANCING AT LUGHNASA, PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME, and FREEDOM OF THE CITY. Of MOLLY SWEENEY, the NY Post has said, "What a marvelous play this is! See it -- wander in it and wonder at it." The London Times has cited the play's "...vitality and warmth, such kindly accuracy of observation."

The series -- organized and directed by celebrated area playwright, Jack Gilhooley -- will continue on various Tuesday nights throughout 2010-11. Some of the Irish and Irish-American plays under consideration are Synge's THE TINKER'S WEDDING and IN THE SHADOW OF THE GLEN, Hugh Leonard's DA, Marie Jones' STONES IN HIS POCKET, Friel's LOVERS and THE FAITH HEALER, Tom Murphy's WHISTLE IN THE DARK, Edna O'Brien's TRIPTYCH, Frank Gilroy's THE SUBJECT WAS ROSES and Samuel Beckett's KRAPP'S LAST TAPE and ENDGAME. Gilhooley -- who has dual citizenship and was recently a Fulbright guest artist at National U of Ireland -- states "We have to educate the audience before we present some of the new 'Roaring Boys' like Martin McDonough and Colin McPherson and a 'Roaring Girl' like Marina Carr. They are exciting talents but the language will melt the paint off the walls". His own Joycean dark comedy, EX-ISLES, recently produced in Co. Limerick is also a candidate.

There will be a Tuesday reading in October and about one every month afterwards. Admission is by contribution (suggested $10 each) since royalty and manuscripts must be paid for. Of course, dinner and drinks will be served. The performances will always begin at 7:30 and the Irish Rover phone is 926-1060

Bertha Palmer Then & Now

2010-09-01T14:13:00.000-07:00

Here's another cool coming attraction for area history buffs. The talented actress and director Amanda Schlachter is doing a one-woman portrayal of Bertha Palmer presenting a famous speech at the Chicago World's Fair.

Here's the info:

Ahead of her time: Bertha Palmer Then & Now

The Institute for Public Policy and Leadership at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee presents

Ahead of her time:
Bertha Palmer Then & Now

Thursday, September 23, 2010
7:00 - 8:30pm
Jane B. Cook Theater at the FSU for the Performing Arts
5555 North Tamiami Trail, Sarasota

About the Event
Please join us as local actress, Amanda Schlachter, delivers Bertha Palmer's groundbreaking speech on the occasion of the opening of the women's Pavilion at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. Following the speech, we will discuss Bertha Palmer's impact on women in her own era and assess the state of women today. How much have we evolved in more than a century and how many of the issues Mrs. Palmer addressed continue to exist today?

Moderator: Bonnie Beth Greenball, JD, Associate Director, Institute for Public Policy & Leadership, USF Sarasota-Manatee
About the Actress

Amanda Schlachter has directed with multiple companies in the Sarasota area and has performed with the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Florida Studio Theatre, Sarasota Actor's Workshop, Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe and numerous others. She is a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and holds a BFA from the University of Central Florida.
IPPL logo new

S/ART/Q “Print Party” - preview

2010-08-29T13:01:00.000-07:00

The S/ART/Q artist’s collective is throwing a party—a “Print Party” that is. Taking place on Sept. 11 at the Hub in Sarasota’s Rosemary District, it’s a chance for area art lovers to walk away with a screen-printing of original art by one of the ten members of the grass roots area art group. What do the artists print on? According to organizer Tim Jaeger, that’s up to you.

“Bring your own clothing and we’ll take it from there,” he says. “T-shirts are always great, but you don’t have to stop there. Anything that can lie flat and accept ink will work. Last year, we printed on skirts, placemats cute dog clothes, baby t-shirts and handbags . Be creative!” He adds that blank t-shirts will be available for purchase. The family event is free and open to everybody; there’s a nominal $5 printing charge. Jaeger adds that, “The artists do the screening live, while you watch,” he says. “It’s instant gratification—no waiting.”

What’s the purpose behind the family friendly event? “The same purpose behind our organization,” says Jaeger. “It’s a way to support the community, and at the same time give the community a chance to support the arts.”

According to Jaeger, it goes back to the reasons that gave birth to the group. In 2008, many area art galleries had closed—collateral damage of the economic downturn. In response, ten visual artists formed SARTQ to create exhibition space and generate community support. Joseph Arnegger, Brian Haverlock, Tim Jaeger, Daniel Miller, Daniel Perales, David Piurek, Jeff Schwartz, Nathan Skiles, Sabrina Small and Tom Stephens are the artists who comprise the group today. Each has created a new design for the event.

Last year’s event drew nearly 1,000 people. Jaeger hopes to beat that record. “The Print Party is the opposite of exclusive,” he says. “This is art for everybody, young and old, whatever your background. We’re going to have a fun evening for art lovers of all ages. If you want to meet some great area artists or build your art collection, this is a great way to do it.”

ART PREVIEW
“S/ART/Q Print Party” happens 5 to 10 p.m. Sept. 11 at the HuB, 1421 Blvd. of the Arts, Sarasota.. (941) 330-4838; sartq.com.

Requiem for a jazzman

2010-08-05T11:41:00.000-07:00

The Banyan Theater's latest summer offering is Warren Leight's "Side Man." Basically, it's a play about a man who makes art and can't make a living at it.

The title character, Gene (Steve DuMouchel), is a very specific kind of artist creating a very specific kind of art -- he's a mid-20th century trumpet player; a pre-Bebop, pre-Rock, American jazzman; a sideman. The guy is a brilliant talent, but he has the practical sense of Rain Man. That hint of autism may be more than just a hint. Gene lives in the now. He writes himself notes to function. (Or his son writes them.) He won't fight to get credit for a solo he did on a critically acclaimed album because that's against the jazzman's code. He doesn't dig that the straight world cashes its checks on Friday. He doesn't dig the signals from his neglected wife, Terry (Roxanne Fay),that she's sliding from hurt to bitterness to suicidal madness. He just wants to play his horn.

Said facts are presented in flashbacks and first-person narrative by Gene's son, Clifford (Juan Javier Cardenas). There's a lot of inside baseball about the jazz scene back in the day. I figured it was either the playwright's direct experience or a ton of research. Turns out, it's experience. A memory dump. "Look Homeward, Jazz Angel" or "My Shitty Childhood and Welcome to It."

In plain English, Leight based his play on the memory of his own father -- trumpeter Donald Leight. If the story seems close to home, it is. Leight lived it.

Basically, the son recounts the slow, inevitable crack-up of his parents' marriage -- a living sacrifice on the holy altar of Jazz. Clifford's one of those good-natured kids who turn into the family psychotherapist, counselor, enabler and referee -- deprived of his own childhood because he's constantly trying to short-circuit the inevitable knock-down, drag-out fights of the two adults called mom and dad. In the end, Clifford can't hold it together. He winds up kicking his dad out of his house -- because it's either that, or send mom to the nuthouse.

All of which sounds like 200-proof misery. Surprisingly, the play keeps you laughing. But don't expect a comedy. The source of the play's music is love, loss and pain: the collateral damage that jazz (or the slow death of a certain kind of jazz) inflicted on the playwright's family. You may laugh. But you know you're laughing at a train wreck.

Leight's a good writer with an excellent ear for dialog. He's structured his play with the associational, contrapuntal rhythms of jazz. Present tense narrative turns into past tense scene; characters in the past interrupt the narrator; characters in different time frames finish each other's sentences. It be-bops along.

Director Jim Wise wisely goes with the flow. The scenes are crisp; the emotional core of each scene comes through loud and clear. He never milks the audience for sympathy. Like Altman, he gives you a sense of being a voyeur looking in on other people's lives.

Great performances from the supporting actors -- playing a pack of junkies, lost souls and freaks losing pieces of themselves in their eternal jazz pilgrimage. Cardenas finds just the right note for Clifford -- who could seem like an self-destructive Shmoo if not played right. Clifford's not Mr. Victim -- he has a good heart, is all -- and Cardenas successfully gets that across. Gene is basically an absent father even when he's there. He lives in the abstract, associational flow of the music in his mind, not the real world. DuMouchel (who occasionally reminded me of DeNiro) got that across as well. Fay had a particularly difficult role -- the mom who's constantly busting dad's balls. The deck of our sympathies is usually stacked in favor of the artist. It'd be easy to see Terry as a shrew -- and easy to hate her. Fay makes you sympathize with her character.

The playwright walks on cracked eggshells to never judge any of the characters -- especially Fay or Gene. He's as even-handed as Clifford; he never takes sides. But he never airbrushes the picture to make it pretty, either.

It's a poignant play with a narrow focus on a particular subculture -- the American jazz scene, 1940-1960 -- its mores, slang, attitudes and code. It's easy to map that culture to other kinds of art and artists. Leight himself never spells out those connections. That's not where his heart is.

His play is a requiem for his father and mother. It's a Proustian trip to a lost scene. Liner notes on a lost species: the post WWII American jazzman.

Like any good tune, the play keeps playing in your head long after the performance is over.

Dig it.

Side Man
A Banyan Theater Company production
Aug. 5-22
FSU Center for the Performing Arts
5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
552-1032
banyantheatercompany.com

It's a dog's life

2010-07-30T13:34:00.000-07:00

A.R. Gurney's Sylvia -- now playing at Florida Studio Theatre -- reminds me of that gimmick in the animated movie Up -- a dog-collar device that instantly translated canine thoughts into speech. "Squirrel. I like you!" The playwright does the same thing with Sylvia's thoughts. Except that Sylvia speaks for herself.

In case you haven't heard, the title character is a dog. Not a talking dog. Sylvia is played by a young woman, (Katharine Abbruzzese). That's the gimmick.

Abbruzzese doesn't actually wearing a dog suit. She just acts like a dog. Instead of barking, her character shouts "Hay hey hey." When something threatens her, Sylvia says, "I might bite." Everything she says is at the level of instinct: "I like you; I'm scared; I'm hungry." On top of that, the playwright puts words in a dog's mouth that obviously wouldn't enter a dog's mind. Strictly for laughs. It's anthropomorphic, what can you do?

The plot: Greg (Warren Kelley) a man (in the middle of a mid-life crisis) picks up a stray dog (AKA Sylvia) at Central Park. He brings Sylvia back home to his empty-nest apartment. His wife, Kate, (Rita Rehn) doesn't want a dog. They fight. Decision: Sylvia gets to stay on a trial basis. Should she stay or should she go? The clock is ticking. Various friends and therapists are dragged into the argument. Then Greg and Kate finally decide.

Needless to say, apart from the few odd dog-haters and rogue vivesectionists in the audience, most people sympathize with the dog, root for the dog, worry about the dog. That's the dramatic tension. The play has a shameless pro-dog bias.

Along the way, the dog gimmick allows Gurney to poke fun at the eternal romantic triangle. Structurally, Sylvia resembles a play about a wife's battle with the other woman -- she just happens to be a pooch. (We're talking competition for affection, folks. This is strictly clean material.) Sylvia also takes a few playful nips at psychobabble and trendy notions about gender. Mostly, it's a play about either keeping or kicking out a cute dog.

It's warm, funny stuff. The audience was laughing its head off much of the time. Abbruzzese is a great physical comedian. Kelley, coincidentally or not, plays his character as a vulnerable puppy dog; Rehn, who's basically the villain in the piece, manages to avoid seeming like Cruella de Ville; the Harvey Korman-esque Jeffrey Plunkett plays a trio characters along a spectrum of genre. Hilarious as well. Director Kate Alexander plays it all for laughs.

As she should. Sylvia is an entertainment. It makes no big statements about man and the universe. It makes a few small statements. Some people like critters, some don't. If you let a dog into your life, your life gets better.

Aside from Cruella de Ville, who's going to argue?

‘Sylvia'
Through Aug. 29
Florida Studio Theatre
1241 North Palm Ave., Sarasota
366-9000
www.floridastudiotheatre.org.

The Drawer Boy

2010-07-16T10:22:00.000-07:00

The truth will set you free. Beautiful sentiment, but is it true? Our lives are held together with stories. Some are lies. It that bad?

Michael Healey’s "The Drawer Boy" poses these questions. It's the latest Banyan Theater Company play--basically a comedy with a few weepy, tragic elements. Carole Kleinberg directs.

The time: 1972. The place: a farm. The play's stars are what Garrison Keilor calls "bachelor farmers." They're Canadian, not Minnesotan. It's your basic "Mice and Men" arrangement. Angus (Kenneth Tigar) is brain damaged, thanks to a door that intersected with his skull in the London blitz of World War II. (He's the titular "drawer boy"--a bright architect/artist before the accident.) Now, he has basically no short term memory. Morgan (Don Morgan)takes care of him, and keeps him at peace with a bedtime story explaining the accident. And others. Then Miles(Ken Ferrigni)shows up. He's a young actor taking notes about life on the farm so he can write a play about it. Or at least a scene. Morgan obliges him -- and gigs him with various, stupid, humiliating tasks. (Washing rocks, digging corn out of cow crap, etc.)

Miles overhears Angus' bedtime story and weaves it into his play. Angus overhears, and it triggers a cascade effect in his brain. Good news: he gets a partial recovery of his short term memory. (And the inexplicable ability to quote Shakespeare.) Bad news: the false memory of Morgan's bedtime story starts unraveling. The painful, real truth is bubbling to the surface.

Kleinberg's direction is easygoing and naturalistic. She draws out the comedy without falling into sitcom territory. Ferrigni and Higgs create a nice, comic antagonism. Tigar is great in the thankless task of playing a simpleton -- a role which tends to cloyingly milk the audience for sympathy. (See "Tropic Thunder," Simple Jack.) Tigar underplays it and pulls it off.

Without spoiling the ending, the play offers a powerful look at the two-edged razor of lies, truth and storytelling. Razor image aside, it's a warm-hearted, gentle play. Don't expect a bloody, Flannery O'Conner-style epiphany. Nobody dies. There's no fight. There's no big statement.

The playwright doesn't presume to settle the question of harsh truth vs. necessary fiction. He offers his own truth: an honest, sympathetic look at decent people making hard choices.

The Drawer Boy
A Banyan Theater Company production
July 5-Aug. 1
FSU Center for the Performing Arts
5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
552-1032
banyantheatercompany.com

Family Secrets Preview

2010-06-25T07:54:00.000-07:00

Carolyn Michel takes the stage this week in Florida Studio Theatre’s production of “Family Secrets,” a one-woman show by Sherry Glaser and Gregory Howells. Michel portrays all five members of a Jewish family who have moved from the Bronx to Southern California. It’s a family affair in more ways than one. Michel’s husband, Howard Millman, is directing.

“It’s a relief to know I’m in good hands,” says Michel. “This play is a high-wire act without a net. I transform in plain sight and never leave the stage. I do all my costume and wig changes in front of the audience.”

Michel’s characters include: Bev (“a mom with her own story to tell”); Mort, the father (“a straightforward guy in a complex family”); their rebellious 16-year-old daughter, Fern; their 20-something daughter (“who’s still finding herself”); and Grandma Rose (“an octogenarian who never lost herself”).

According to Millman, the characters are loosely based on Glaser’s own family members. “The play’s family is very specific. At the same time, it’s every family. You’ll laugh, but it’s the laughter of recognition and unflinching honesty.” He adds that the playwright has known her share of personal tragedy, and isn’t interested in saccharine stereotypes. “Glaser is gritty and fearless as a writer,” he says. “She makes us laugh through the pain of real life and real relationships. She never denies the heartbreak.”
Doing justice to Glaser’s edgy material was anything but a heartbreak. “It’s what we live for,” laughs Michel. “This really is as good as it gets.”

Millman’s and Michel’s creative collaboration dates back to their years at the Asolo Repertory Theatre. Millman held dual tenures as the Asolo’s former producing artistic director; Michel is a longstanding Asolo Rep actress.

Millman understands Michel’s process. “Before she walks into rehearsal, she has the role down,” he says. “She’s memorized her lines and plotted it all out in her mind.”
Michel says, “Howard is my mirror. I can’t see myself, but I can see myself through his eyes. I may think something works. He can look at me and say, ‘That doesn’t work; try this.’ And I’ll try it.”
“Family Secrets” marks Michel’s fifth one-woman play. It’s a form she is drawn to. “There’s an intimacy in any solo production,” she says. “You’re speaking directly to the audience, drawing them in, getting them on your side.”

She adds that it’s really the play speaking to the audience—and that the play deeply spoke to her. Michel says she was surprised by the play’s warmth and humanity. “Sherry Glaser is a legendary comic talent,” she says. “I expected belly laughs. But I didn’t expect it to touch me the way it did.”

“We can all relate to the Fishers,” says Millman. “They’ve been called a dysfunctional family. I think that’s a mistake. Families function by being dysfunctional! We all have skeletons in our closets.”

“Family Secrets” runs June 30-July 25, at Florida Studio Theatre’s Gompertz Theatre, 1247 First St., Sarasota; Tickets: $19-$34. For information, call (941) 366-9000 or go to www.floridastudiotheatre.org.

I ain't afraid of no "Ghosts"

2010-06-24T08:48:00.000-07:00

Ibsen had his axes to grind. Religious hypocrisy, the fear of social disapproval and blind conventionality were at the top of his list. What will people think? It's a deadly thought. People ruined their lives to keep up appearances. Evidently Norway in the 1880s was not a swinging place.

In Ghosts -- the Banyan Theater's latest offering -- Ibsen swings all of his axes. Well, let's switch metaphors. The play reminds me of Mousetrap -- that classic Rube Goldberg-esque toy game where boots kick balls, gears turns and ultimately a cage traps a plastic mouse. Here, the wheels turn, and at the end, a charity asylum burns down, rotten secrets emerge, and the machinery crashes down on a young painter. (He's been running with the early free love crowd, but forced to return home to mom.) The family maid he's fallen in love with is his sister. His saintly father was actually a randy bastard. (Mom covered it up and faked dad's sainthood. What will people think?) Dad passed his brain pox on to sonny boy. Now, he's going mad with syphilis. Blind too. OK, that's the bad news. There's no good news. He begs for death. Mom, be my Mother Morphine. Please kill me. It's living damnation; hell on earth. This play is so grim you expect the playwright to add "The dog died" as a postscript.

Letting the horror of the past touch you takes an imaginative leap. If the 1800s was the age of hide-it-all, ours is the age of tell-it-all. The free-to-be-you-and-me crowd won out a long time ago. Lady Gaga and Howard Stern can be a pain in the ass. But a cult of self-immolation at the altar of the ghosts of the mind seems worse.

As someone once said, the past is another country. Based on this play, I sure as hell wouldn't want to live there.

OK, now a quick take on the Banyan performance itself.

Contemporary translators Rick Davis and Brian Johnston put Ibsen through the Pinter blender. Gil Lazier follows their lead and turns the flame down on Ibsen’s histrionics. Peter Thomasson plays Pastor Manders as a prick. Jessica Peterson plays Helene (the mom) as a tower of strength with cracks in it. (There are cracks of self-contradiction in Ibsen’s original characterization. Somebody that strong wouldn’t be a coward. I don’t buy it, but let it pass.) Steven Clark Pachosa plays the smarmy, gimpy con artist and gets most of the laughs in the play. Gretchen Porro plays Regina, the maid who’s really the sister. She plays it straight. Not oversexed—just sexed. A typical teenager in a bad time and place to be a teenager. As the doomed son Osvald, Gordon Myles Woods kicks ass. A damn tough role, but he totally lives it and makes you buy his character.

These characters go through hell. The actors put in a hell of a performance.

Ghosts
A Banyan Theater Company production
Through July 11
FSU Center for the Performing Arts
5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
552-1032
banyantheatercompany.com

Welcome to the Machine

2010-03-03T16:46:00.000-08:00

Sophie Treadwell's Machinal is a scary artifact of a lost era. Her play (based on a true story!) is an expressionistic bad trip from the 1920s about a secretary who married her boss and then killed him for true love. I figure the playwright asked herself "Why would somebody do that?" and then answered the question with this play. Her central character is defined as a character without choices. She's trapped in a machine. That machine is society. Patriarchal, oppressive, hierarchial and deadly.

OK. Nightmarish. But that was then and this is now. A director staging this play in 2010 has the choice of serving up a historical artifact or twisting the material around in a new, subversive context. Director Dmitry Troyanovsky took the latter approach. And a gusty approach it is.

Troyanovsky set the play in the present. By doing that, he shifts the spotlight. Instead of looking at the mad world, we're looking at a mad character. The protagonist marries someone she hates, finds someone she loves, won't leave the man she hates -- and then kills him in an act that's inevitably self-destructive.

It's a different nightmare -- and more frightening. The character's not trapped, but she thinks she's trapped. She's a victim of her own choices, not a victim of circumstance. But she doesn't think she has any choice. That's terrifying. You feel echoes of Susan Smith and all the other tabloid prodigies of our brave new world.

The source material sometimes fights with the new spin. In a weird way, that only adds to the nightmare. The character, in her head, is living in the 1920s. It's all the more creepy.

This is a white hot production. The young actors bled their lives, souls and hearts into this thing. It's a nightmare, yeah. But it's a dream of a play.

'Machinal'
Short version: We have met the machine and it is us.

Through March 21
FSU/Asolo Conservatory production
Cook Theatre, FSU Center for the Arts
5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
351-8000

The good, the bad and the ruined

2010-02-05T10:25:00.000-08:00

Just caught the open of Lynn Nottage's Ruined at Florida Studio Theatre. A light-hearted romp it's not. At the same time, it doesn't grab you by the lapels and shout a message in your face. The play inches its way along before announcing its heavy issues. It's more of a slap in the face when the truth finally comes out.

The setting seems offbeat and lighthearted at first -- Mama Nadi's whorehouse, the best little whorehouse in the Congo. Patrons check their guns, bullets and violence at the door. That’s the theory, anyway. Of course it doesn’t work out that way. The violent world outside makes its presence known. Mama's main attraction is a gifted singer. She’s been “ruined.” Readers of Nicholas Kristoff’s gut-wrenching editorials will know what that means. If you skip his editorials, I’ll spell it out.

She’s a woman who’s been raped so repeatedly (and often with foreign objects) that her insides are torn up and festering. Like the Little Mermaid, she walks in perpetual pain. But the pain is not redemptive. It’s just pain. The kind of pain we don’t want to think about.

Without slapping you in the face, this play makes you think about it. It promises you a sweet redemption—then pulls the rug out from under you. The characters in the play remain ruined. We, of course, know they’re not just characters in a play.

Like it or not, the playwright leaves the ball in the audience’s court.

Ruined
Through April 3
Florida Studio Theatre
1241 North Palm Ave., Sarasota
366-9000
floridastudiotheatre.org.

The magical "Mystery Plays" are waiting to take you away ...

2009-10-31T11:19:00.000-07:00

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's The Mystery Plays is really two plays. Both are genuinely disturbing. Greg Leaming directed the recent FSU/Asolo Conservatory performance. Great theater -- but I didn't expect it to get under my skin the way it did. If spoilers disturb you, read no more.

In The Filmmaker's Mystery, a gay filmmaker (Dane Dandridge Clark) survives a train wreck and discovers, hello, he's really a sin eater. This is sort of like a Jr. Jesus Christ, without the job perks. He gets to take the sin and guilt of various victims of various calamities. On himself. To allow the victims to go on to heaven. He gets to go blind and become an outcast from society. But one dead guy (Kenneth Stellingwerf) proves to be indigestible.

Ghost Children reveals a young lawyer (Kim Hausler) who confronts the man (Ron Kagan) who brutally murdered her parents and younger sister 15 years ago. Along with being the killer, he's also her brother. The supernatural doesn't enter into it. The horror here is Sacasa's precise imagination -- what would go through the killer's mind; why he would do it; how his sister would react; the shadow it would cast on her mind; the cost of forgiveness.

Reviewers like to compare Sacasa to Rod Serling. He reminds me more of Neil Gaiman (who wrote the Sandman graphic novel series) and Guillermo del Toro (the director of The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth). The connection is more than the mix of reality and fantasy. It's more a genuine sense that an Other World really does exist -- and it's not a fantasy. And not always friendly.

Horror comes in two flavors: It's either absolutely irrational or it's a bloody application of divine law. Sacasa suggests a third possibility: horror is a reflection of divine law -- which makes no sense to human reason.

That really scares me.

'The Mystery Plays!'
Short version: Gets under your skin.

Through Nov. 15
FSU/Asolo Conservatory production
Cook Theatre, FSU Center for the Arts
5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
351-8000

3..2..1..."Contact."

2009-10-23T23:13:00.000-07:00

First, let's get one thing straight. "Contact" is not an adaptation of the tedious Jodie Foster SF flick. It's Susan Stroman and John Weidman's Tony Award-winning "dance play" from Y2K. As the clunky phrase implies, there's much dance and little dialogue and zero lyrics to the music. Evidently, NYC theater people had an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin argument about whether or not it really was a musical, so they decided to call it a "dance play."

Folks, they should've called it a sex play. It's "Contact" in the sense of sexual contact. That's fine by me, but I don't want to dance around it. The show is dripping with sex. It's the kind of thing that made Oliver Cromwell close down the theaters.

The first number is "Swinging." It's a riff on Fragonard's 1767 painting, "The Swing." The scene: Once upon a time in France, there's a lady on a swing and two upper class dudes hanging out with her having a picnic. How arty. My friend the Internet says the painting is loaded with sexual symbolism. "Contact" unpacks that symbolism, and if I make it any clearer I'll have to talk dirty. In terms of staging, there's an actual giggling lady on an actual swing. When the one dude goes to get wine, she has acrobatic sexual dalliances with the other dude. It's sorta like a circus act with implied bumps and grinds. The original swingers. It's as deep as a Pepe LePew cartoon. And as much fun.

The second bit is another Silly Symphony. The scene: NYC in the 1950s. A low-level gangster (James Clarke) takes his wife (Nadine Isenegger) out to a buffet-style Italian restaurant for a night of dining and verbal abuse. He tells her, "Just sit there. Don't talk to the waiter; don't flirt with the busboy; don't you fucking move." He makes periodic feeding trips to the serving line. Whenever he's offstage, his wife launches into increasingly steamy dance sequences. In the final Fellini-esque number, she jumps in the head waiter's convertible and zooms down the road to do the deed. She returns in time to get slapped by her husband and -- after a hilarious bit where the waiters play three card monte with his 45 automatic -- she shoots him. But it was all in her head: a pathetic, Lucille Ball fantasy of freedom. She offers him a rose; he throws it on the floor. She accepts more verbal abuse and goes on with her lousy real life.

The final vignette: NYC in Y2K. Various locations. Michael (Fletcher McTaggart), a lone wolf filmmaker, drunkenly accepts a Clio award for yet another sell-out commercial. He returns to his Manhattan flat to do himself in. The answering machine keeps interrupting him. He winds up at a swing dancing club (a big fad back in Y2K) where he starts chasing The Girl in the Yellow Dress (Shannon Lewis). House rules: getting the girl means dancing with her. Sadly, the dude can't dance. To make it worse, the Swing Dancers intimidate him like rejects from the Jets and Sharks. But you know how it works in these things: Michael magically turns into a great dancer as a pure act of will. (Hey, who needs lessons?) He gets the girl! Then it all melts away. Turns out, the night of swinging was all in Michael's head. In reality, he's hanging by a rope -- but miraculously manages to save himself. In the end, he makes a human connection with the woman in the floor below who's always bitching about his loud noise.

Tomé Cousin is the director and choreographer. A high level of difficulty, but he made it look easy. As the piece is a hybrid "dance play," the Asolo Rep teamed up with Sarasota Ballet to pull if off. Along with the Asolo actors, the production featured full-time ballet dancers Rania Charalmbidou, Rita Duclos, Kate Honea, Logan Learned, Octavio Martin, Ricardo Rhodes and Tracey Tucci. They also make it look easy. And all look like they're having a great time.

I did too. I have a few minor beefs, mostly on the level of bits of business. Did we need the dude with his apron around his ankles in the second bit? Would a busboy bust a gangster's balls -- even a minor gangster? My only major criticism: using the "It was all in your mind" gag twice. But on the whole, I loved it.

To me, Contact functioned as a live action, flesh-and blood cartoon. Since I am a cartoonist, that's no insult. Cartoons and dance have a lot in common. You don't need a lot of yatta-yatta-yatta. The best cartoons are about the movement of bodies in space.

More importantly, motion is mind made physical. Cartoonist know that too. The rage of the Bull in Bully for Bugs. The Wolf in Red Hot Riding Hood turning straight as an arrow at the sight of his desire. Stimpy's psychotic insanity in"Sven Hoek."

Movement is an expression of desire -- and its frustration and fulfillment. Movement is character, in other words. As every cartoonist knows, how you move is who you are.
If you can create character with as few words as possible, so much the better.

Contact does just that. It's filled with dance, but no dance for dance's sake. All the motion on stage serves the creation of character. A play of few words.

That's all it needed.

Contact
Through Nov.
An Asolo Rep production
in collaboration with Sarasota Ballet
FSU Center for the Arts
5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
351-8000

The Cat's Meow

2009-10-11T12:21:00.000-07:00

Hey. I never realized Alex from A Clockwork Orange had a sister. Who knew?

Actually, that's "Meow Meow," the multi-talented Australian vamp -- and one of the star attractions at the Ringling International Arts Festival. She bills herself as a post modern cabaret singer. This basically means her act is inside quotation marks. It's funnier than it sounds.

Anyway, Meow Meow arrives late, dragging her baggage. (Get it?) She can't get her act together. (Get it?) She's fragile, coming apart at the seams. She starts apologizing to the audience. Repeatedly. "I'm sorry ladies and gentlemen. I can't do this anymore. I just can't." Her act continues under threat: She could split at any moment. It's sorta like that scene in Blazing Saddles where Sheriff Bart puts a gun to his own head. "One false move and the singer gets it."

The comic flywheel inside the show: Meow Meow is a stage persona. A cabaret singer, one part Marlena Deitrich, two parts Liza Minelli. A diva doll. Hypersexual, cold, decadent, inaccessible, mad, bad and dangerous to know. But the human being inside that persona is having a hard time crawling inside her Meow Meow suit night after night. The theatrical clockwork is hard to wind up. The hyperfeminine machinery is a pain in the ass.

The actress inside Meow Meow is sorta like a female female impersonator. She keeps calling attention to the sheer energy effort and athleticism (the spike heels, corsets and the costume changes) required to create her uber-diva character. It's hard work. It's also a trick on the audience. Like Penn and Teller, she shows you how the magic works. Even then, the trick is still amazing.

To spell it out: The performer is a singer/actress pretending to be the singer/actress pretending to be Meow Meow. Ta-da!

Hey, besides which, the lady can really sing.

Apart from the post-modern huggery-muggery, Meow Meow's act boils down to repeated public humiliations of the audience, usually men. One of those audience participation things where she drags victims on stage and makes them jump through hoops. (Gotta tell you, gang. Sarasota did not shine. The guys came off like the stuffed shirts in a Marx Brothers movie. They didn't want to play.)

Funny stuff, though towards the end, it got to be a little too much of the same stuff. I wanted the act to end with the same narrative energy it started with. Meow Meow quits show biz. Or the audience applauds and, like Tinkerbell, she shines on and her stage career continues. Didn't happen. No matter.

She pushed performance to a space it doesn't usually go.

She took the audience with her whether they liked it or not.

Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!

2009-08-07T19:20:00.000-07:00

Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.
Your world is you. I am my world.

--Wallace Stevens, Bantams in Pine Woods

As Percy Sledge reminds us, "When a man loves a woman, he can't keep his mind on nothing else." Well, according to Neil LaBute, that ain't exactly true. If the woman is too much woman.

We learn this lesson in Fat Pig, the Banyan Theater's final summer offering for 2009.

The plot: boy meets fat girl.

Specifically, Tom (Sam Osheroff) meets and falls in love with Helen (Margot Moreland), who happens to be sparkling, witty and a fan of old war movies. She also happens to be plus-sized, hefty, Rubenesque, insert fat-euphemism here.

Tom's friends at the office find out and don't dig the fat chick. Evil fratboy Carter (Dane Dandridge Clark) steals her picture and email blasts it to the rest of the office. His ex-girlfriend, thin chick Jeannie (Bethany Weise), is one of those hell-hath-no-fury-as-a-woman-scorned types. The fact that her replacement is a big lady just makes her fury all the more furious. Tom can't handle the social pressure. In a universe of two, he'd stay with Helen forever. In a universe full of people who don't dig fat chicks, Tom dumps her. True love does not conquer all. Get the message? Curtain.

I half expected the lobby to be filled with glossy brochures for stomach-stapling treatments.

But let's rewind to the performance itself. No complaints here.

The Banyan troupe was hitting on all cylinders.

Osheroff's Tom repeatedly reminded me of Dustin Hoffman's character in The Graduate. Moreland neatly danced along the cliff edge of turning Helen into the jolly fat girl -- and did not fall in. She remained believable and sympathetic. Clark's character was a true shit -- but got most of the funniest lines in the play. Clark got a lot of comic mileage out of this bastard, which I mean as a compliment. Weise's Jeannie was a great comic characterization; a crackling thunderhead of hurt and sexual rejection -- an empowered modern woman ready to zap her ex-boyfriend at any time.

Kirk Hughes's set design (mix-and-match sliding panels) was downright groovy.

Director Greg Leaming got into a sit-com groove in the first act -- which I think followed LaBute's intention in the text. The couple meets cute; you expect When-Harry-Met-Sally rom-com payoff to follow. Like Lucy with the football, LaBute is suckering the Charlie Brown audience for the harsh truth of the second act. ("You expected a happy ending? Ha!" "Auuggggh!") Needless to say, the play switches gears, and the second act isn't so funny. The director switched gears, and suitably slapped our hearts around with the poignant -- if ultimately unbelievable -- material.

Yeah, unbelievable.

Once again, I'm forced to peel away a great performance from a script with bad (or dishonest) logic. That's always worse in a message play.

And that's exactly what this is.

Like a South Park episode, you always learn something after a LaBute play. In contrast to South Park, it's always bad news. I half expect Kyle to come out and say "I've learned something today. We'd like to think we accept fat people. We don't. We treat them like shit. If you like fat people, your friends reject you. That's just the way it is."

LaBute specializes in Satanic after school specials. His movies and plays usually revolve around some trendy issue. (Sexism, attitudes about fat people, etc.) He stakes out the politically correct attitude, and takes a contrary position. This makes his work "edgy."

With Fat Pig, once again, LaBute shoves our face in Harsh Reality and rubs our noses in it. But logic rears its ugly head ...

Bad logic:

* An up-and-coming corporate alpha male wouldn't take shit from his friends.
* A wimpy beta male who would take shit wouldn't have this successful position.
* Friends who trash your girlfriend and publicly humiliate you ain't friends.
* In the age of Sensitivity Training and lawsuits, this wouldn't happen so openly.

Yet again, logic be damned, LaBute has his message to make. But the theory of human character and behavior behind it doesn't add up. People aren't as rotten as LaBute makes them out to be. They aren't that righteous, either. People are rotten and righteous. It's a choice. That free-will thing.

I got the message.

I just don't buy it for a second.

Fat Pig
A Banyan Theater Company production
Through Aug. 23
FSU Center for the Performing Arts
5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
552-1032
banyantheatercompany.com

Willy the Shakes

2009-07-31T22:40:00.000-07:00

Shakespeare was a bloody genius, no bloody question. But here's the awful truth, folks. He wasn't writing for us. Us sophisticated, 21st century, postmodern pinheads, that is. He was writing for 15th century Elizabethan pinheads. They were his audience.

Just to make things nice and sparkling clear. Shakespeare, whatever high-flown artistic motives he had, was writing to entertain that audience. And, in the process, make money.

As a result, here in the 21st century ...

Shakespeare's serious stuff doesn't translate. And his jokes don't fly.

To make matters worse, most of us first encountered WS as an assignment. Or, even worse. As a self-imposed exercise in intellectual snobbery.

Which makes attending a Shakespeare play sorta like going to church. Not the fun kinda church where they shake tambourines and hoot and holler. No. The dull variety of church. Where you sing every tedious verse of every tedious hymn in a slow, measured pace while the organ thunders. Where you perform elaborate rituals without context. Where you listen to a long, long, long, long sermon in an archaic dialect that makes you feel good about yourself by, perversely, showing how rotten you are.*

Such is the Church of Shakespeare. It's only natural that a pack of clowns would make us laugh by farting in it.

I refer, of course, to the Florida Studio Theatre's Reduced Shakespeare Company production of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged). All 37 plays in two hours or your pizza is free. No kidding.

It's funny stuff, folks.

* Titus Andronicus as a cannibalistic cooking show.

* All of Shakespeare's comedies mashed up together. Only one plot for the lot, after all. It's only fair.

* Shakespeare's history plays as a football game.

* Hamlet as reimagined by the Monty Python troupe holding a seance with the spirit of Groucho Marx.

Michael Daly, Brad DePlanche and Christopher Patrick Mullen act and Jim Helsinger directs. The comedy, in case you asked, which you didn't, but I'll tell you anyway, is character based, which is a fancy way of saying you're supposed to believe three theatrical nuts really think they can distill Shakespeare in two hours or less, including one reluctant maniac who starts equivocating when it's Hamlet time. Is that coincidence or what?

It's hilarious, but it's only hilarious because the sacredness of Shakespeare is indestructible.

At one point, one of the characters jumps into Hamlet's What a piece of work is man speech. The point being, essentially: What a piece of shit is man. It's depressing, if you think about it. But who cares? The language is so damn beautiful.

This feels like a hilarious mockery of Shakespeare. Hilarious it is, but it's no mockery.

It's really a love letter.

The Complete Wrks of Wllm Shkspr (abridged)
Through Aug. 23
Florida Studio Theatre
1241 North Palm Ave., Sarasota
366-9000
floridastudiotheatre.org.

*Hey, that's obviously the off-putting Hallmark Productions surface level of the Bard. Suffice to say, as much as Shakespeare was feeding the spirit of his time, he was speaking beyond his time. There's an ocean of meaning below the crowd-pleasing stuff. And all the centuries to the last measure of recorded time really are his audience. I could go on about this, but this byte-sized review is not the time or place.

Once upon a time in Vienna

2009-07-21T11:43:00.000-07:00

Plays about the artistic process have the same problem as sports movies. You watch Barton Fink struggle to write or Muhammad Ali sharpen his skills in beating the crap out of people. If you’re a professional, you think “That’s not the way it works.” If you’re not, you probably don’t relate to the material.

Jon Marans' Old Wicked Songs has a strikingly original take. Whether you're an artist or not, the playwright grabs you.

His play's central character, Stephen Hoffman (Ken Ferrigni), is an aging child prodigy with pianist performance problems. He goes to Europe get his groove back. The master piano teacher commands him to study with a voice coach first — Prof. Josef Mashkan (Kenneth Tigar). The deal: for three months, Stephen doesn’t get to play the piano. He sings while Josef plays. Which is sort of like sending Dale Earnhardt for three months of track and field lessons, but there’s a method to this madness. It’s all about using music to create an emotional connection, and not go through the motions in a dead formal exercise.

The lessons revolve around Schumann's Dichterliebe, a heartstring-tugging cycle of unrequited love songs set to 16 poems by Heinrich Heine. Like Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, Josef gets into a battle of wits with Stephen and it’s no contest. It’s Old World vs. New World, American impatience vs. European romantic brooding; Philip Glass’ one-note, android music and Phillip Johnson’s glass houses vs. loop-the-loop 19th-century compositions and Vienna’s bric-a-brac encrusted architecture. Stephen might seem like a strawman set up to be knocked down except for one thing ...

For all his weepy, music-must-touch-the-heart romanticism, Josef is a right bastard.

More specifically, Josef seems to be an unrepentant Nazi bastard, constantly dropping little bon mots like, “The Jews weren’t the only ones who suffered.” The play is set in 1986, when Kurt “What, Me Nazi?” Waldheim is running for Austrian president. For Josef and Stephen both, that particular nerve has been rubbed very raw. Where their pain comes from, we find out later.

I expected the play to end on a Stephen-learns-from-Josef-but-the-teacher-learns-from-his-student note. Followed by one big hug. That’s not what happens — but I can’t tell you what happens without spoiling it.

Enough to say, it’s a great play with great direction by Maran — who obviously had great insight into the playwright’s intentions, since he happened to be the playwright. As to the actors, Ferrigni and Tigar put all their hearts, minds and souls into the performance.

Josef would have been proud.

Old Wicked Songs
A Banyan Theater Company production
Through Aug. 2
FSU Center for the Performing Arts
5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
358-5330
banyantheatercompany.com

My funny valentine

2009-07-02T14:35:00.000-07:00

When you're talking to the walls, it's time to take a vacation. The title character (and only character) in Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine winds up doing just that. The 42-year-old London housewife is stuck in her dingy flat, stuck with her lump of a husband, stuck in a rut. Then — by sheer dumb luck — she wins two tickets to a vacation in Greece. She goes — and eventually stays until she's good and ready to come home. The fact that she goes at all is an accomplishment. People are stuck for a good reason. She's not used to making decisions — she's used to asking permission. She has to work up her courage. When she finds it, she keeps it. Of course, to a sexually frustrated British housewife, Greece means more than statues and scenery. Shirley finds romance, too. Not the permanent kind. Just the validation that she's still got it.

It's a one-woman play and very well written. The art of story-telling means more than having a story — it's figuring out how to tell it. This is structured like a first-person novelette. You could take away the stage and have Shirley telling you her story on a bare stage with a microphone like a stand-up comedian. It would still be interesting. The words on the page, alone, are interesting. The playwright tells a truthful, warmhearted story without being sentimental or manipulative. It's a crowd pleaser, but never cheats. It earns every ounce of laughter and applause. And, on the opening night performance, there was a lot of it.

Kate Alexander directs and Shirley Bradshaw stars. Brilliant direction, acting and material. Dead brill' as the Brits like to say. See it if you can.

It's the next best thing to a vacation in Greece.

Shirley Valentine
Extended through Aug. 8
FST Gompertz Theatre
366-9000
www.floridastudiotheatre.org.

The other 40-year-old virgin

2009-07-02T06:27:00.000-07:00

Playwright Martin McDonagh pulls a bait-and-switch on the audience in his The Beauty Queen of Leenane — the Banyan Theater’s season opener. Bait-and-switch as in he promises one thing, then sells you another. The damn thing is, it works.

In the first act, you think you’re watching one of those repressed-woman-finally-blossoms plays. Sure and it’s set in a crappy town in Ireland in the 1990s. The central character, Maureen Folan, is a 40-year-old spinster who’s been trapped in a miserable, sexless existence taking care of her poisonous mother. Then, an old love interest shows up. They connect, and it’s very touching. He wants to take her to America with him. You figure, after a complication or two, he finally will.

It doesn’t work out that way. In the second act — let’s just say Maureen has something in common with Norman Bates. And I don’t mean a deep love for mother. The playwright’s dropped hints. But he tricked me into liking his character, so I ignored the hints. When Maureen does a bad, bad thing, I didn’t see it coming — and I usually expect bad things. Maybe the rest of the audience did, but I doubt it.

It's a shocker, but the playwright (who was 26 when he wrote this) pulls it off. Presto-chango! Frustrated-but-Goodhearted Maureen turns into Murderous Maniac Maureen. The trick works, but he should have ended it there. He pulls a dead rabbit out of the hat. The more the dead rabbit hangs around, the more it feels like a trick. Maniac Maureen just isn't believable.

OK, so I didn't like the ending — a minor point. Everything else, I liked. It's good writing and good theater, brilliantly directed by Gil Lazier. He has a crisp sense of pace and back-and-forth actions and reactions. He doesn't let you get a fix on the play — is it comedy? Tragedy? When the play hits you between the eyes, there's no time to get your guard up.

Great acting, too. Kim Crow plays the mom-from-hell, Jessica K. Peterson her demonic daughter. Derry Woodhouse and Gordon Myles Woods are the Dooley brothers. Derry's the shy, smart one; Gordon's the mean, loud stupid one. Each character comes across as a complex person with an inner life and a history.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane
A Banyan Theater Company production
Through July 12
FSU Center for the Performing Arts
5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
358-5330
banyantheatercompany.com

Still just a rat in a cage

2009-05-13T12:19:00.000-07:00

We live in a web of lies. Jason Wells' Perfect Mendacity tries to untangle that web. The web turns out to be complicated.

But here goes ...

Once upon a time there was an evil corporation. A scientist who works there, Walter Kreutzer (David Breitbarth), grows a conscience. A memo about one of the company's dirty deeds falls into his lap. He wants to blow the whistle, but he also wants to keep his job, so he passes the memo on to his wife (Diana Simonzadeh), a Moroccan expatriate who's had a conscience for quite some time. Predictably, she leaks the memo. Predictably, the company tries to track down the source of the leak — and Walter is one of the prime suspects. Slated to take a lie-detector test, Walter takes a course in beating them. (D’Avore Peoples plays the slick, smiling test-buster.) Along the way, his so-called friend at the company (Doug Jones) tries to entrap him. His wife decides he's a neo-colonialist weasel and leaves him. For good measure, she stabs him on the way out. In the end, Walter takes the test and passes it. The company surprises him with a second, unbeatable lie detector test. He's screwed.

Great directing by Michael Donald Edwards. Great acting by the Asolo Rep troupe. As to the script itself, Wells' play is stuffed with brilliance on many levels: great dialogue, great scene construction, great characterizations, a timely grasp of world issues. With all that going for it, the play didn't work for me. It took me a long time to figure out why. Then it hit me ...

The lead character is a rat. Truly evil characters (Alex from A Clockwork Orange or Richard III) can be fascinating. Walter, as Dr. Evil once put it, is semi-evil. He's just not interesting.

Wells -- who's pretty damn smart -- wrote himself in a corner. Heroically, he tackled two heavy subjects: (A) Evil, Blackwater-type corporations that get away with murder and (B) The technological assault on the sanctity of the human mind. Unfortunately, those two subjects cancel each other out. To make sure we're clear about the evilness of the corporation, the playwright's lead character isn't a Jimmy Stewart-type who has a crisis of conscience and finally does the right thing. Wells made Walter a rat trying to evade a rat trap. Will they catch him -- or not? Who cares?

Not me, folks.

He's a rat. I don't give a rat's ass if a character's mind is violated if he's just a rat who's trying to cover his ass to save his career. (For the only semi-good deed he's ever done in his life.)

There's no character arc. The character begins as a rat. He ends as a rat. His mind is pried open like a cheap bicycle lock. He's a ratfink, so I don't care.

Wire me up, folks. But that's the truth.

Perfect Mendacity
Through June 14
An Asolo Repertory production
FSU Center for the Arts
5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
351-8000