What's with all the jumping between buildings?

I will try to avoid spoilers for Inception, Kick-Ass, and A Standing Long Jump... or at least keep them cryptic.

I've been kind of down recently. This is I'm sure a great surprise since normally I'm like a hooker in a bathtub: I have hope in my soul-- or however that goes. But it's true, I've been down. And I'm not usually a superstitious person unless I think it's funny for some reason, but I do sometimes get suspicious about the messages the universe is sending me... like when I keep seeing people jumping between buildings. Not really, thankfully, (because that would really depress the hell out of me, but it's been a surprisingly specific theme in the last month or so.

First there was A Standing Long Jump at this year's Fringe, starring a couple people I swear God put on earth to be watched in James Craven and Ali Dachis, and the magical Namir Smallwood. The standing long jump is a metaphor for those moments in life where one has to take the leap with someone, or see them pass out of our world forever. But the metaphor plays out in a couple of literal leaps from the roof of one building to another, knowing that at least somebody's going to fall short and plummet four stories to the alley below.

17 Things I Learned in 17 Shows at This Year's Fringe

1. Teachers do a lot more than run through the pages of a textbook. (Pardon My French!)

2. Joe Mauer is very forgiving. (Two Truths and a Lie)

3. Making a deal with the Devil will leave you smelling of rotten eggs. (The Damned Audition)

4. Ghosts are cool. (Rachel Teagle Believes in Ghosts)

5. Jack Chick is an underrated comic genius, even if he probably doesn't realize it. (The Jack Chick Plays)

6. Native Americans really are portrayed exactly like the mentally challenged. (Sad Carousel)

7. See You Next Tuesday is not a good last thing to say to somebody. (See You Next Tuesday)

8. Dancers are cool. (O(h))

9. Ikea is the new cruising spot. (Naked Yoga and Other Gay Love Stories)

10. Henry IV is the first Star Wars prequel. (Kill Will)

11. Taking your clothes off can be good for you. (Kathy Jensen is Pretty)

12. Cell phones are annoying. (That Sara Aziz!)

13. Whether you realize it or not, the world will keep moving forward in your absence, and you will never return to a place and time you've left behind. Also, chicken cacciatore is not always easy to come by. (Amaretti Angels)

14. Shel Silverstein is a dirty motherfucker. (An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein)

15. Bowties are cool. Actually this one was from Doctor Who, but one of the 17 shows I saw had nothing to say about anything and I had to come up with something.

16. You may only get one chance to make the leap... don't miss it. (Standing Long Jump)

17. The glam rock, heavy mascara shredded everything look is coming back, or at least it should. (Garage Band)

Rufus Gets His Hair Cut (one show only)*

After letting my frighteningly agitated and sometimes violent friend Dewdrop cut my hair, I thought there should be a way to capture that drama, and there are certainly worse things being performed out there. So before next year I'll have to grow my hair back and my mountain man beard, and then at show time we'll put a few things in place: me, Dewdrop, a pair of scissors, a pair of clippers, a chair, a hand mirror, a roll of gauze, and a giant drop cloth.

Through the process of ever sillier haircuts and abstract chunks shaved out of my beard, and her attempts to sell me on her artistic vision mixed with threats to stab me with a pair of scissors, and my attempts to escape before things get worse will test our friendship and our will, as we each struggle to define our role and decide with what standard of grooming we will live or die. One performance only, since I will obviously have to grow my hair and beard back, and allow the probably quite painful scars to fade.

It might be terrible, but I guarantee a few good reviews for offering the audience a something real, which can't be reset and replicated for the evening show, which is one of the promises of live theater: the anxiety and the haircut will both be real. Now I just need a $50,000 grant to develop my script, and to finance all the shampoo and conditioner I'll need to use all year to prepare my mane.

(*-Kathy Jensen is Pretty and Rachel Teagle Believes in Ghosts have definitely sold me on the marketing value of putting my name up front. Also on the value of offering weird southern groceries as a promotion, but that's another story.)

"it’s strange to be here, the mystery never leaves you", Rosy Simas Danse at Bedlam

I’m generally a major skeptic of dance as an art form. I freely admit, I’ve seen some groups use movement as a critical part of a larger work but when it’s all about the dance I usually find myself wishing I’d sat closer to the door. (No joke, the last time I saw a dance show I seriously considered climbing down the back of the risers and sneaking out the fire escape.) I believe it’s an inherent flaw to the art form, that there’s just something about dance and musical theater that it way too easily turns into heavy handed pretention and repetition, high-strung divas so busy sniffing their own farts they miss that the restlessly bored audience got the whole point in the first three minutes... in short, keeping my attention with dance theater is harder than dubbing a Nicholas Cage movie into Cantonese*.

With that in mind, I have no idea what possessed me to hike down to Bedlam on Friday night for "it’s strange to be here, the mystery never leaves you", a new dance work presented by Rosy Simas Danse. Realistically even the dancers don’t want me there, scowling and jaded and about the worst audience member a dance company could ask for, grabbing a chair up front scowling and rolling my eyes. And after work I really wanted nothing more than to sink into my couch for the night, not shower, change clothes, and head back out into the damp washcloth of humidity this city has been all summer, but some instinct whispered “Go see something. Anything. Find some life somewhere tonight."

To my surprise, I loved it, and I couldn't take my eyes away (even for the cute baby dykes in matching knee-high ring socks sitting next to me). And here I really thought getting stuck with a front row seat was going to be a brutal exercise in forcing a smile and taping my eyelids open. As often seems to happen when people like me who are decidedly not dance aficionados see something we love, I can’t really find the words to explain what I saw in it or why it moved me about all three pieces of the show. I can say that the wet, naked finale in which several dancers gathered in a gentle downpour of water and then slid and spun around the slick stage was beautiful, and oddly reminded me every time I’ve tried to explain sports to art folks: sometimes in that sweaty, emotional celebration of the body you see something brilliant happen. So I may have been selling you short, dancers.

When I got out of the show it was that perfect moment as the heat of the day started to break, and I borrowed a free city bike and rode home with the buzz of that show still in my legs. Everything in the world seemed fresh and fragrant and calm, and I became aware of that paradoxically energized, lavender tranquility that I have spent fifteen fevered years searching for and found in only a few disconnected places, like watching the waves crash into the taiga on Selwyn lake, sweated into the sheets of a certain blonde, or the Baha’i temple in Evanston that seems suffused with it it’s left a purple vein flowing all the way back into the heart of the city… but as usual, I digress.

In short, I simply felt good walking out of the theater that night. And that’s why for all my endless whining, I keep crawling back to the big G, keep dragging myself kicking and screaming to shows when my eyelids and my legs are ready to come tumbling down… because sometimes you see something beautiful and it washes away the rest of the day.

Keep spinning, dancers... I hope we can see this work presented again.

*-He never opens his mouth!

Traveling Light, or the second most fun I've had in a cemetery

I really enjoyed this show, in which Theatre Pro Rata borrowed the Layman's Cemetery to stage a late night meeting between playwright Joe Orton and Beatles manager Brian Epstein in 1967 London, a few weeks before their ghastly deaths. For this one night, Epstein and Orton get to discuss art, sex, identity and clothes, and a taste of a world in flux as they argue, exchange clothes, and tangle with the police. It ties the deafening scream following the Beatles to beginning the decriminalization of homosexuality, and the larger and brighter world we find ourselves in when the violence of control is banished by the light. It achieved this best through WPC Foster laying bare the tragedy of Orton and Epstein's deaths, making me ache to see them finish what they'd started, plundering a sweet grave and birthing something beautiful with Orton's edge and Epstein's finesse, driven by the romantic power of the Beatles, and maybe also through the grotesque metaphor of the title.

But actually never mind about all that, that's not really the reason to go see it. Go see it because it's fun. Go see it because it's moving. Go see it because it's funny. Go see it because it just works.. putting so much dated counter-culture kitsch into one play, from the Beatles to swinging 60's London to nasty bathhouse humor to a gimmicky setting and the safe culture wars of a half century ago under the banner of the Sgt. Pepper's cover in most hands would make for a deathly tiresome masturbatory fantasy, but in this case playwright Lindsay Harris Friel and Theatre Pro Rata find the heart in all of it that drives the pulse of a bloody, sweaty breathing play. The kind of play that delights as it gently tugs on the creases of the brain, adding like a dream to our memories. It's the kind of show that makes me want to go home and write, until I remember I burned out long ago and I have nothing left to say.

So yeah, I liked it. Maybe it's just that the button-down chick with handcuffs in the graveyard was a deep scoop through the memories of another time in my life when I stood closest to love and art and death, so I hope others will try it and decide for themselves. I do recommend a bit of bug spray, and perhaps not drinking a liter of water then forgetting to scout out a bathroom beforehand... when I got out everything was closed, and by the time I caught my train home my back teeth were floating. (That may have been more information than anybody required.) And if you do take a chance, consider the worst case scenario is you have a cool hipster story about attending a show in the graveyard, right?*

More details and a study guide are available on Pro Rata's website:
http://www.theatreprorata.org/home.htm

*-Actually the worst case scenario would be my friend who may have gotten bit by a bat and may also be hallucinating the presence of a giant clown in her backseat, but I think it's still worth it.

King of Shadows

King of Shadows is a good show. Spooky and poignant, this play about a grad student collecting stories from street kids until she meets one with a story she can't handle is full of supernaturalism and mystery, but subtly uses them to tell a much smaller and yet more powerful tale about the failure of its protagonist to make real connections to other people, no matter how many ways she thinks she's reaching out. I hesitate to even tell more of the story, because I walked in the door cold knowing nothing about the play and loved that experience, because really the only reason I went is that its director is such an amiable guy I wanted to support his work. Also Pillsbury House Theatre offering free tickets to arts organizations really helped, so I hope I can pay them back a bit by spreading the word about this show.

I've seen Randy Reyes put in great performances on stage, and while I am in no way qualified to judge his work as a director it felt to me like he got everything there was to be had out of this script. In my mind the script falls short of greatness but still lands somewhere very good and very interesting, and this production does a very nice job artistically and technically of bringing everything good about it to life. I must admit I've found it curiously difficult to judge some works when they're fresh in my mind, needing instead to find what still resonates in my head and my heart weeks and months later, like Marco picking up the chair or the journey to the City of Bones. I really liked Catherine Johnson Justice in what I would think has to be a difficult part, anchoring a play with a central character long on cold, abrasive edges and short on charm besides what the actress brings to the role. It is also somewhat gratifying to see new plays with a very different gender balance than a lot of older work.

I definitely recommend King of Shadows (or I would be if anybody was actually reading this) and in this case I'm not just shilling, because I really don't know anybody involved in this production beyond the occasional awkward wave in the hallway... I think if you offered Randy $10,000 for his next show if he could come up with my name within 3 tries his guesses would be "Gaius", "Rumplestiltskin" and "Mmmwhahamarumph... you heard me! Now where's my money?" Anyways, it's hard to beat getting a nice dose of culture and rich conversational material in such an intimate setting as Pillsbury House for $20 or less, and PHT seems to have quite a lot of options for getting into their show even cheaper like Wednesday pay what you can performances, and today I even got a parking place right in front of the theater, so really what excuse do you have? Seriously, even the cookies on sale at intermission were good.

King of Shadows

Oct 2 - Nov 1

Pillsbury House Theatre

3501 Chicago Ave S

www.pillsburyhousetheatre.org

As a post-script, it is funny how art ties together and the same themes come up in different works by different artists... as I sat in the theater waiting for the show to start I read the end of Dan Simmons' novella “Looking for Kelly Dahl” about the violent end to a teacher's failure to for all his good intentions to make a difference to the student who needed him the most, and the last show I saw was Jon Ferguson's new play Supermonkey, about a doorman's string of brief interactions with his tenants and his attempts to nurture them into something more meaningful (“Fruit plate!”) I wonder how much these other works affected the way I took in King of Shadows... fortunately I think I managed to tune out entirely the resemblance of one of the characters to the gay hustler with full-body tourette's from Crank 2: High Voltage (the least artistically redeeming work I've seen this year... seriously “Streethawk” was better).

There's only one R in Kushner

For the last time... if you're talking The Empire Strikes Back, Robocop 2, Eyes of Laura Mars, Never Say Never Again... that's Kershner. If you're talking Exotica, The Black Dahlia, The L Word, Not Another Teen Movie, The Crow 2, that's Kirshner. If you're talking abuse of executive power and defaulting on IMF loans, that's Kirchner.

If you're talking A Bright Room Called Day, Angels in America, Slavs!, Caroline or Change, Munich, The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, East Code Ode to Howard Jarvis, Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy, Geraldine of Albania Meets Lucia Pamela on the Moon... for the last time his name is Tony KUSHNER.

Why must people who add an extra R to his name always do it with such smug authority? "I know all about him, except how to say his name." I mean really.

Macbeth at the Garage

I went to the Theatre Garage with a surprisingly heavy heart, owing partly to how tired I was and partly to revisting the neighborhood of a star-crossed romance I had with a certain long-haired theatrical type (you know, one of those) who lived across the street. So a blood drenched show about intrigue, betrayal and evil women sounded like just the thing to pick up my spirits.

If the Guthrie is distinguished by its grandeur, and Pro Rata by being so provocative and raw, then the production company behind this show, Torch Theater, differentiate themselves by their dedication to accessibility in all forms. The obvious reflection of this is making every show accessible to blind and deaf patrons, but there's also such an apparent effort to shoo away the snooty veneer of... the thee-a-tah... and bring audiences into closer contact with the performance. When I called to make ticket reservations I was surprised to find that Lady Macbeth herself (Stacia Rice, Miss Jane Eyre herself for all you Charlotte Brontë junkies out there) recorded their daily automated message, but she is in fact a founder of that theater,
and her decidedly un-diva-like involvement in the daily operation of the theater really demonstrates their mission to fight snootiness and exclusion in all its forms. Plus I imagine her sexy voice is part of the reason people come to see her strut and fret her hour upon the stage.

And Stacia is great as Lady Macbeth, in a very Detroit minimalist techno sort of presentation with a stylish yet versatile black set and fabulous costumes. After Jane Eyre I had wanted to see Stacia in something different that maybe gave her a little more room to come out and play, so it was a treat to see her in a very focused, very modern show like After a Hundred Years last spring. Macbeth splits the difference between elegant period piece and stylish modern psychological drama represented by those two shows, but the immediacy of that tiny theater and the minimalist made this an actors show, it was really fun to see Stacia and Sean Haberle's presentation of the ruthless couple.

In the past, I've never really followed that transtition from level-headed schemer to raving lunatic in Lady Macbeth and the descent from noble soldier to paranoid preacher in Macbeth, either reading it or in Roman Polanski's film. (Out of Joint's west african production at the old Guthrie Lab had its own cohesive take on the story, but I've been told to stop annoying people by raving about that production.) In this production, Sean Haberle's Macbeth slips into almost rodent-like mannerisms whenever challenged make him a furious warrior pressed on by his gnawing insecurities, which makes it easier to believe his descent into tyranny. And Lady Macbeth's ineffectual attempt at an angelic intervention in Fife, helplessly watching the slaughter behind a white silk hood, bridges the gap between the childless woman who can talk casually about dashing her own baby's brains out to the gaunt, sleepwalking figure who aimlessly shuffles off the stage in Act V.

It's a good show, and I couldn't help but think as I was watching it I wish I could get more kids there. Back in our days at the Academy the Scottish Play was our first introduction to Shakespeare, and I wish I could slip a few kids into a show like this that's trying so hard to engage rather than to elevate. A theater that invites you to take your drinks back in with you and offers non-crinkly bags for you to put your noisier snacks in just seems made for people who are thirsty for a first taste of culture but maybe not aware of it. And it really has been great the last couple of nights I went to the theater to be in a crowd that was clearly having a fun night out, with much to discuss afterwards. So yeah, I'm sold on Torch and Pro Rata, at the Garage or the Gremlin or anywhere else, and I hope my vast readership gives Macbeth a chance. And really if your choice of Halloween entertainment is seeing Macbeth for $20-$30 or Saw V for $8.50, it's well-worth the extra money (and the snacks are more reasonably priced).

Killer Joe at the Gremlin

Not knowing recently if my Guthrie adventure was coming to an end or just turning a page (or more likely entering a long murky denouement) I had decided to start sampling more of the local theater scene to see what I was missing with my usual obsessive tendency to over focus, drawing the universal from the particular, rather than distilling it from the mass of experience like everyone else (that may make no sense to anyone but me, but hey it's not like anybody's reading this). On my first sample of one of our smaller theater companies, I got everything I asked for and rather more than I bargained for.

Really it's not my first taste of what the rest of the local scene was doing, since Theatre Latte Da had just done such a wonderful production at the Guthrie of Old Wicked Songs and I saw Penumbra's operatic production of Gem of the Ocean here on August Wilson's birthday. So on Thursday when I mentally flipped a coin to decide between Torch Theatre's production of MacBeth at the Garage and Theatre Pro Rata's production of Killer Joe at the Gremlin, I figured it should be interesting either way (and boy was it ever). Ultimately my decision came down to needing to eat first, and when I couldn't find a parking spot on 4th to run into Pizza Luce for a slice or to dash into Koy to ask Kirby how quick he could get me a bank roll and a cuppa green tea, I decided to go to the theater I knew was across the street from a Mickey D's and wouldn't be full enough for anyone to notice my post-Big Mac gas attack. The winner was Killer Joe at the Gremlin.

The Gremlin Theatre is in St. Paul on University near Raymond Ave, home of Key's where they always put onions in my motherf***ing omelette no matter what I order. Seriously, if they would just knock that off and quit telling me "Oh, those are just white tomatoes" I might pop in there again... I've seen it happen to other people too, so I don't know why their kitchen is so fixated on making sure everyone is getting their daily dose of sulfites. At least the guy throwing up in a garbage can six feet from my table was a one-time thing, even if it did last 20 minutes. But don't let his review fool you, if they'd bring back the regular waffles ($3.95 with a second one for $1.00) I would totally hop on the #16 bus and go back.

And now that I've cleared that up, the Gremlin shares its building (and its bathrooms) with the aikido school next door, which meant that when I arrived at this University Ave storefront with empty display windows and a door that just directed me down a creepy hallway to a back room draped with black curtains, I was expecting to find a naked FBI agent sliding around silk sheets and Laura Palmer talking backwards to a dancing dwarf... and where the hell was Annie anyways? Oh dear, I may have wandered off on another tangent. The rough look of the theater was in perfect keeping with the set, which was a garbage strewn trailer in some Texas hell-hole. It looked like a tornado had just hit the theater and deposited all this crap on stage. As I settled into my creaky, threadbare seat (nicked from the ruins of the Loading Dock Theater) I thought these were dire beginings to an evening at... "the Thee-a-tah!"

But I was wrong. Killer Joe is the story of Texas trailer trash who concoct a half-baked scheme to bump off their mother for the insurance and live like minimum-wage kings, and that horrible looking collection of trash was exactly how those people lived, with biting ants on the floor and the constant flicker of NASCAR in the living room. It was a really great show, full of characters I couldn't look away from, sometimes because I was desperate to know what would happen next, and sometimes because they were like a sore I couldn't stop scratching. If Quentin Tarantino nd Robert Rodriguez owned a theater, this is the show they would open with (well, either Killer Joe or Titus Andronicus) because never have I seen anything crammed with so much nudity and raw sexual violence that wasn't direct-to-video. Apparently the playwright Tracy Letts also penned August: Osage County which won him a Tony Award earlier this year, and I hear those aren't easy to come by.

I was looking for something I wouldn't see at the Guthrie, so I was certainly intrigued when the first actor to cross the stage came out completely bottomless. As she and her son-in-law bickered about the appropriateness of her exposed bush in graphic detail, I had to admit Pro Rata had certainly delivered. The honest, uncomfortable nature of that presentation, the imperfect, quivering exposed bodies that sent a tingle up my spine and and the brutal violence that twisted me in my seat was so raw that by intermission I was chatting up the lobby staff about my vast expertise as a theater volunteer and offering my services. And it was only partly because she was cute and had a genuine, guileless quality that said, "I'm groovy-relaxed enough to be delighted by my haiku shirt and to possibly give you a chance" that I was talking to her, and mostly because of the art on display. (And given all the pain, confusion, and growing sense of horror that everyone who dates me seems to experience, I'm going to leave it to the cute of the world to amuse themselves.)

Killer Joe runs at the Gremlin (2400 University Ave in St. Paul) until Oct 19 with tickets on a sliding scale ($14-28), and I encourage anyone looking for a visceral theater experience to give it a try, especially since October movies are so dire (and there's only so many times you can see An American Carol, Captain.

http://www.theatreprorata.org/
Box Office: 612.874.9321

On Nazis, Skinheads, and the Dichterliebe

Q. What's green and flies over Germany?

A. Snotzis

I have to admit a lot of Nazis and skinheads kept popping up in my recent art and entertainment choices, and it's really left me in the mood for some light, happy escapist fare, but I couldn't help but be a little shaken tonight by some of the other recurrent threads in three films and plays about skinheads, Nazis and classical music, and the sensation of being numbly set adrift in icy cold water that is pervasive to all films about skinheads.

I've seen four that are worth a mention: Romper Stomper, American History X, The Believer and This is England, and without a doubt the strangest is The Believer. Ryan Gosling has this uncanny knack for rising way above the material, and there are some serious flaws to this film's aimless plot, its "incest andS&M sex kitten who wants to learn Hebrew" subplot, and above all its cop-out ending, but Goslingdoes a lot with the film's bizarre premise: a Jewish skinhead. The bitterness in Gosling's Danny Balint and the furious preoccupation with Jewish history and theology that twists into a strangely reverent loathing is absolutely fascinating, and the fact that Gosling is able to express all that internal conflict while retaining a cohesive performance is amazing.

I've raved at length elsewhere about the last Shane Meadows film I saw (Dead Man's Shoes) but I couldn't help but feel that there was something missing from last year's This is England. The performances of both films have this stark, genuine quality like Meadows went back to 1983 and followed some kids around with a camera and filmed them from the bushes without them noticing, making it a subtly powerful film. I couldn't shake a certain feeling of inevitability, as the film had to follow the same well-worn arc of every other skinhead film I've ever seen, and that left This is England somewhere just short of brilliant, but very much worth watching.

It did leave me pondering the lost children who become the monsters of these films, and the degree to which I find myself sinking into that same feeling of alienation recently, since I don't know what I'll be doing with my days in a few weeks. For that reason the way that feeling drifts like a fog out of every scene in This is England shook me so much, I took a walk down ironically deserted street where all the restaurants pull in their sidewalks on Sunday night, the pleasant chill of October mixing with a craving for pizza and deep melancholy.

It was an odd confluence of films, randomly popping up in my Netflix queue, when there's an amazing show playing at the Guthrie set in 1986 Vienna about a young American pianist who's lost his touch studying with an eccentric Austrian professor. Old Wicked Songs explores the same idea of putting on a costume to declare to the world who you are, with the hope that you can find that identity within yourself and fill out the costume. The play is set on the eve of Kurt Waldheim's election and so stirs up the legacy of Nazism in Ostereich, while most of the populace continues to bury their heads in the sand. I hate to describe too much of this play given the innocent seduction of the audience in the early scenes, but it's about wearing the clothes of a pianist, of a Jew, or of a Nazi, and finding that this may only magnfies the emptiness within. It follows the opposite trajectory of the skinhead films, wherein a character finds themselves by building their skinhead identity and then rejecting it.

I really wish more people could have seen Latte Da's production of Old Wicked Songs, but I get the same feeling about virtually every show I've seen in the Dowling Studio. I don't know how much longer my time at the Guthrie is going to last, but I see a Dowling Studio Package ($80 for four tickets usable at any show) in my future. I feel like I had so much more to say about all of this, but I'm just so damned tired with the emotional back and forth and the grind of being here every morning that has characterized my time at the theater recently. Here's hoping I can figure out what I'm doing past Halloween.

The Ugly One

Never have I been so entertained by the story of an ugly man than I was by the American premiere of Marius von Mayenburg's The Ugly One, other than maybe that red stripe commercial where he tells the guy he can make himself beautiful by standing next to a bottle of red stripe ("You sir, are very ugly!"). I'm sorry it's having such a short run here at the Guthrie, but I'm sure it will reappear many, many other places in America in the next few years. It was really cool to see Kate Eifrig back in the Dowling Studio, playing three different women this time instead of the nine she played in her last show here (9 Parts of Desire), and I still say she should have a website for her stalk-- her fans. Fans, I said fans.

The Ugly One has the virtues of being provocative, funny, and short, presented in a minimalist homage to Detroit techno with no backstage area and props just strewn about the edges of the room, until the actors filed in to the noisy house and began their performance. The whole show is about what happens when the world's ugliest man has dramatic facial surgery that makes him irresistibly beautiful, introducing drastic changes to his lifestyle, until he discovers that this process is infinitely reproducible, and everyone in the world starts to look like him. Through all these changes his identity and the sense of purpose and belonging in his life are lost, making this story as tragic as it is funny.

I was also amused at how German this play is even in translation, especially with the rather Euro-stylin' Nathan Christopher as Karlmann the assistant plug-tester and Karlmann the sexually confused boy who serves as his mother's boy-toy wrangler. The whole cast seems like people who ought to be on stage more often, and worth looking for when they are, despite not being diminutive ingenues and dashing, lithe dancers... well actually I think a couple have put in some time as glam rock magic faeries in scandalous tights in the other show as well. And against the three hour tours of Gem of the Ocean and Midsummer, The Ugly One's 55 minute run time made for a nice antipasto of culture.

A Midsummer Afternoon's Feverish Catnap

I just saw A Midsummer Night's Dream, and wow that was just #@*&'ing crazy. It took me a while to get into the spirit of it, but once I did that was absolutely hilarious. There's glam rock faeries swooping in and doing musical numbers in a variety of styles, the Mechanicals are actually funny, there's hot young people in their underwear and glam rock faeries swooping around in next to nothing, but what really drew me in was when I realized they were going to be able to add in their own flourishes and still actually respect Shakespeare's text and tell the story without the irreverant eyeroll that says "we're too zany sexy cool for this dried out Elizabethan prose... jazz hands on three!" that accompanies an adaptation as unrestrained as this one. And there are crazy painted glam rock faeries with feathers everywhere and glittery codpieces dropping down from the ceiling, it's crazy.

I don't often get to laugh as hard as I did at the Mechanicals' play at the end, and to just enjoy the whole energy coursing off of that bunch. And this is one thing I love about the new Guthrie, that you can have three completely different styles of art going at the same time and everyone just spills back out into the bars at intermission. Lou Bellamy and Penumbra are digging deep into American history and the human soul in Gem of the Ocean on one side, Joe Dowling and the Guthrie are blowing up a confetti factory on the other, and above it all there are French dancers stomping out their cigarettes in 3/4 time upstairs in the Studio. I love this place, I really do.

And now I'm off to the Twins-Red Sox game at the HumptyDome to take in a completely different style of performing art at what I'm now starting to think of as the fourth theater. And Midsummer put me in such a good mood that not even that stupid umpire from the Black Sox series finale who waited so long to call a strike on a 3-1 count that the batter headed to first and both runners moved up as everyone in the building thought it was a ball. Okay, let's be honest... that guy could still ruin my good mood. But if he's the home plate ump tonight I'm totally getting Oberon to come swooping out of the stands to verily smite his ass. Forsooth.

Gem of the Ocean

This past Sunday, Carl Eller and I took in the Guthrie's presentation of Gem of the Ocean, although not together (I'm not in tight with any Purple People Eaters). Carl sat in the good seats while I was chaperoning the Howling Dowlings, who are young and talented and still in search of a better name.

I suppose the most important thing to say about current production of Gem of the Ocean is that while it is presented by the Guthrie, it is Penumbra's show, and from that flows everything good and bad about the show. The Penumbra Theatre Company is one of about three African American theater companies in North America, and that allows them to offer something you'll likely never see anywhere else, a show performed by a black cast aimed only at a black audience, with all others in attendance welcome to come along for the ride. August Wilson was a huge believer in Penumbra, who performed more of his plays than any other theater in the world and had a personal relationship with him, so there was no better company to see perform the beginning of his 20th century cycle on the late playwright's birthday.

It certainly was a tremendous performance, especially James Craven as Solly Two Kings, in a story that was certainly not like anything I'm used to seeing. The play, set in turn of the century Pittsburgh, is about a lot of things but what really struck me was Solly Two Kings, a former slave and conductor on the underground railroad, trying to pass along the legacy of that to another generation in the midst of a racist backlash and great turmoil about what the future of African Americans was going to be at the dawn of the 20th century. They really didn't care if I got what they were doing, and I'm sure I missed a lot of it, but man my eyes were glued to James Craven every time he came on stage. The journey to the City of Bones was truly a departure to something mythical, and the operatic quality of those voices rising through the proscenium theater, it really was something special. And there are certainly a lot more positive things I could say about Penumbra's show, including repeating fifty-seven times how great James Craven was.

I do have reservations about the production, and I wonder if some problems are a result of Penumbra being too close to Wilson and his work. There is a relentless gravity to the play and it holds so many notes far too long for my taste, often taking a very moving moment and crushing it under a second helping of pathos. This makes the play exhausting more than exhilarating, which is actually kind of tragic. On the whole, I was still left with a lot to think about, a desire to see Penumbra on stage again, and a deep gratitude to the Guthrie for putting the weight of their marketing machine and their magnificent venue behind the show, which will hopefully be the first of several collaborations with Penumbra. No word yet from Carl Eller on what he thought of the show, or the Vikings' weakness at offensive tackle.

A Bit of Film and Theater, featuring bits of Michael Gondry and bits of Wendy Wasserstein*

Be Kind Rewind

After reading Nobo's sweded review, I had to see this movie to find out what "sweded" meant, and it was enjoyable research. I haven't laughed as hard in a long time as I did at some of the sight gags in Be Kind Rewind. For those of you who didn't catch the extraordinarily self-explanatory trailer, this film is about a couple of guys in a Passaic, NJ video store who, after accidentally destroying their whole inventory, start filming their own 20-minute versions of movies to rent to customers.

It's not only hilarious, but also makes a running commentary on several ideas surrounding the film industry. Very briefly amongst all the Jack Black posturing and Mos Def mumbling and bumbling the film will slip in a question, like is what these guys are doing only miming (badly) the work of others or are they making creative decisions? Do they deserve 3 billion dollars in civil penalties for copyright infringement, or have they really hurt anybody, and who do these stories belong to once they've been so blended into pop culture? Interestingly, the film never lingers over any of these questions and never really finds a meaningful conclusion to any of its various potential subplots, except maybe one.

The closest it comes is in the homemade film about Fats Waller that intersperses much of the action in Be Kind Rewind, a short film that becomes so untethered from Fats Waller and from history in general, and falls so short of its intended purpose that we're left wondering what the point of it was. But there is a meaning to that little homemade film: when everything in the theaters is a 10th generation copy that can be boiled down to a one-sheet and a couple scenes to stick in a trailer, why not get off the couch and make your own movie? Create your own content, be part of building something rather than consuming and buying copies. Yeah, you're probably not going to change the world or even save the video store, but it's still a lot more fun than Transfomers.

Third

The unwillingness of Be Kind Rewind to pursue a line of thought until it could be nailed to a particular conclusion really reminded me of one of the best plays I've read and seen in the last year. (This year it was 1776, The Home Place, and Third that I wish could run forever until everybody I knew could see them or maybe just until Benjamin Franklin sprained his ankle jumping over Richard Henry Lee's whip in their big dance number.) The play is about a middle-agd feminist professor who collides with a young student, nicknamed "Third", over his analysis of King Lear, and that's the great thing about both Third and Be Kind Rewind: I can tell you the problem that forces people into conflict or into action, but that isn't what either work is really about.

I could write a book about Third, because there are so many different ways to attack Wendy Wasserstein's final play, but part of the point is Third is everything that Professor Laurie Jameson and the other people around her are not. He's young and vital where Laurie's body is reminding her she's old enough to have two adult children, and her father's mind is fading fast while her best friend is quietly succumbing to cancer. He's a white man born in the 80's who doesn't resent the man or remember any of the various revolutions in academia and culture that formed her character. And most of all in an environment of people trying to redefine themselves and sharpen that identity to an edge that will slice apart the dominant memes around them, Third actually likes who he is.

The indefinable nature of the play is also why I loved the Guthrie's production, because it was so different from what I envisioned. Third was more social than I read him, and Laurie less angst-ridden and more witty. And it was so unbelievably beautiful. As I'm sure I've raved about before, the set was a white box onto which all of the sets were projected, while furniture slid in front, occasionally with Sally Wingert seductively draped across it. The scene of Laurie finding her senile father disoriented and out in the rain, with these gorgeous moving projections of nautical charts behind them, it was an absolutely beautiful scene where they both blessedly regress a bit, dancing in the rain. As his light fades, Jack isn't entirely sure who he's dancing with, but he excitedly tells her all about his beautiful daughter Laurie, who's so smart and looks just like Marilyn Monroe. Laurie the commanding professor, embattled mother and cultural warrior goes back to be her father's darling child for a few more minutes in the rain, and even lets him lead.

Playing the rapidly fading Jack Jameson was Raye Birk, actor and educator with a host of film, television and theater credits, for instance he delivered the mail at Cheers (the bar wasn't on Cliffie's route). Sally Wingert and Angela Timberman brought a very different energy to Professor Jameson and her ill friend Professor Gordon, but the two characters who were practically all-new when I saw them on-stage were Tony Clarno's Third and Emily Gunyou Halaas who brought a strange name and a very natural presence to the role of Laurie's daughter Emily, whose failure to emerge as a rebellious bisexual vegetarian driven to found her own ecotopia is a major disappointment to her mother.

I can only hope more theaters decide to share this play with the world, because that was just a brilliant show. Topping the job Casey Stangl (one of the few women directing in the theater) did bringing it to the Guthrie stage would be harder than dubbing Nicholas Cage into Cantonese, but I hope people continue to try. Five years after its premiere, the atmosphere of this play set in the run-up to the Iraq War with the Blue State-Red State simplified political map waiting in the wings seems even more relevant, and more insightful with hindsight. Just so long as they don't make a movie and cast Gwyneth Paltrow playing Laurie as a teenager afraid to raise her hand in class, with lower lip in full quiver. (Not that anybody would do that or anything.)

*--Title of this post shamelessly borrowed from "A Bit of Fry and Laurie", which proudly advertised itself as having bits of Hugh Laurie and bits of Stephen Fry, with pictures of their ears and noses and other "bits" in the opening credits. And that was damned funny as well.

Cool things I saw this week

Miss Evers' Boys

Last week I went with the Guthrie to Hennepin County Medical Center for a dramatic reading of Miss Evers' Boys, a play about the Tuskegee Experiments written by former Guthrie actor David Feldshuh, who earned a PhD in Theater and an MD from the University of Minnesota. For anyone not familiar with the Tuskegee Experiments, black men from a rural area in Alabama who were infected with syphilis were enrolled in a study and told they were getting treatment for their disease, while the unchecked disease ate away at their brains for an astonishing forty year period.

The Guthrie has run a program for about nine years in which they read this play at the UofM medical school, and the day before they go to a different medical facility to perform for working doctors at places ranging from HCMC to the Mayo Clinic, and its just, well, really cool. The effect that play had on the doctors was remarkable, and it sparked a broad discussion between the actors and the doctors and nurses about issues of race in medical care, the legacy of Tuskegee, and generally how doctors interact with patients, and the generational differences so visible in patients and doctors. This play is apparently the highlight of training on medical ethics given to doctors and nurses at the UofM, and it was interesting to hear the discussion it sparked amongst nursing students talk about how different their relationship with doctors is today. All I did was a bit of unskilled labor and scraping the Guthrie van through the HCMC parking lot, but man was that a cool thing.

Third

Wendy Wasserstein's final play is fantastic, and I now know why everybody says Sally Wingert can do no wrong. I caught the dress rehearsal on Friday and the whole production was so intriguingly different from what I pictured when I read the script, it was an absolute delight to see what Casey Stangl did with it. The set and music were unique in their own right, a series of covers of songs from the 60's and 70's, including Cake's immortal cover of "I Will Survive" and a box onto which a series of projections of still images and video created the numerous scenes of Third, with furniture sliding out from the wings, Sally Wingert seductively draped across it, as necessary. Just a superb production, sharp and bright, and Third packs into two hours a story that can be explored from so many different angles it's one of the most stimulating plays I've seen in ages... much like The Home Place, the last play I saw on the McGuire stage. And it's nice to see Sally in a speaking role, since the last time I saw her was as the chain-smoking, scene stealing Parisian maid in Private Lives stomping across the stage and snarling in French at anyone who tried speak to her.

Peer Gynt

This is one of the hardest plays in the world to stage, and Henrik Ibsen himself suggested ditching act four altogether. The Guthrie's Minnesota-styled production stages the play as the fevered vision of a man having a heart-attack, full of dazzling dances and quirky humor (Help me, Omar Sharif!) and I figured when I walked in to the Pirandellian framing device of a birthday party with a band playing the Beer Barrel Polka, it was going to be a strange trip and it certainly was, complete with subterranean trolls singing the Vikings fight song. Mark Rylance is one of the world's most prestigious stage actors (when they rebuilt the Globe, as in Shakespeare's theater, Rylance was the first creative director) so I figure there aren't going to be too many opportunities in life to see him don a thick Minnesota accent in the all-singing, all-dancing, sometimes-rhyming, troll and belly-dancing infested bizarre voyage of Peer Gynt, and I'm glad I was there to see it. (And not just for the belly-dancing). It's hard to know what to think of Peer Gynt, it's so overwhelming, but Mark Rylance is a god.

Gerald Green's dunk

Gerald Green's signature dunk in the all-star weekend dunk competition was really cool, as he had teammate Rashad McCants place a birthday cupcake behind the rim, and then Green got enough air on his dunk to blow out the candle before dunking. He should have won and defended his title, because that was way cooler than Dwight Howard's Superman dunk. Gerald Green, #15 in your programs, #1 in your hearts... and about #12 off the bench for the Wolves right now.

Sir Ian McKellen at the Guthrie

Monday night I had the privilege of attending Joe Dowling's conversation with Sir Ian McKellen on the Guthrie's thrust stage, which was a fantastic good time. Obviously a few other people thought so since it was a full house of 1100, and simulcast to an audience in the proscenium stage as well. This is part of why they built the funky new modern building, so they can do cool stuff like this, despite Sir Ian's mild protest at the end of the evening that it didn't feel right to be using a microphone in Sir Tyrone Guthrie's theater.

Having seen Sir Ian McKellen on stage in Richard III at the Ordway and Dance of Death (which is that poster hanging on my wall) and on film in Gods and Monsters, which despite an Oscar is about the most tragically underrated film of all time, and having seen the incredible work in Joe Dowling's run as creative director of the Guthrie, including his own production of The Home Place that's currently running, I was really excited about this. I've generally found both of these guys fascinating people in their insights about their craft, and some of Sir Ian displayed that particular mix of intellectual gravitas mixed with bawdy juvenilia that has made Monty Python and Blackadder like crack to adolescent nerds, proof that there is somebody out there who speaks your language. For instance Joe Dowling referred us to www.mckellen.com, which is actually a pretty cool website detailing his career in pictures and his own words, and the years of e-posts in response to questions are really cool, and a bit to Joe's embarrassment, Sir Ian helpfully added that the porn on his website is really quite discreet.

Some of his most interesting comments on the theater over the course of the evening were about actresses, and after describing the pressure of playing in Stratford following in the footsteps of Lawrence Olivier, he went on to give his opinion that of his generation, the names likely to reverberate were not men like himself or Derek Jacobi or Alan Bates, but some of the women like Maggie Smith and Judi Dench, claiming we were living in “the era of great actresses”. This was also interesting when he got into a discussion with a girl playing also playing Lear in an obviously open-minded production, and he got on the topic of the lack of great roles for women in theatre, concluding that when Judi Dench asked him where was her Lear, the grand definitive part for an actress, he should have suggested that she just strap her breasts down and play Lear herself.

There was something intriguing in contrast to that remark, and to his whole general thrust that the rediscovery of Shakespeare in each new production or interpretation was the joy of it, like discovering the first time he played Romeo that the balcony scene is quite overwrought and funny when viewed from the audience's perspective. His counter-example to his general opposition towards encumbering traditionalism was when he claimed one cannot understand Twelfth Night without seeing it performed by an all-male cast. (Having first seen it as a high school musical, and later as Ken Branagh's grey-washed tragedy, I feel I may have come nowhere near understanding it.) Having done so much of it, he gave us one other interesting perspective about Shakespeare, talking about the roles he didn't want to play, the “easy” parts in Shakespeare, like Hotspur, Mercutio, and Puck, which struck me as a strong statement considering they are, or certainly can be, pretty memorable parts. His claim was though that there is no real challenge to them for an actor, and as a result you almost never see a bad performance in those roles... I couldn't help but think of the dreadful SoCal Romeo+Juliet in which about the only watchable performance is Harold Perrineau's Mercutio, and realize he was right.

It's really from their conversation about Tyrone Guthrie that I understood how much the character of the whole discussion, casual and funny but reaching for something higher than reverence and gossip, was really in keeping with its setting in the theater with Sir Tyrone's visage looming sternly over 2nd street. I hadn't realized that Sir Ian McKellen's start in theater was at Guthrie's theater in Nottingham, but he talked at length about working under Guthrie. Sir Ian described Sir Tyrone's particular attitude towards both great actors and great theaters as “iconoclastic”, which formed his belief that the theaters he founded in Nottingham and Minneapolis could challenge the establishment in London and New York, and that they needed that constant challenge if they were going to really be great artistic centers. This really echoes the birth of original American theatre when The Emperor Jones was performed on a wharf in Provincetown in 1920, a revolutionary play performed out on Cape Cod (during another era of safe commercial melodrama in New York) that later would be performed around the globe.

On that theme McKellen also lamented some of the great directors whose unconventionality and innovation required that they leave Britain to establish themselves, effectively producing amazing work everywhere but the West End. His first truly great performance was the open air production of MacBeth he and Judi Dench did with just a circle drawn on the ground to separate the cast and crowd, and the props strewn around the edge, with McKellen (as MacBeth) first appearing to make thunder for the witches in the opening scene, and this reminded me of how happy I have been to have seen some things make it out here to the lonely prairie like the production of MacBeth set in Liberia performed at the Lab a couple of years ago, and how much I have to thank Joe Dowling for that. Although on the topic of the Scottish play, McKellen noted that he was wearing MacBeth's tartan on his tie, and that he had given a similar tie to a delighted Sir Lawrence Olivier... shortly before he died.

He concluded by taking off his mike, or at least turning it down, as if he couldn't countenance performing Shakespeare in Sir Tyrone's house with a booming PA, so he could give us one unique performance. The only Shakespearean part not performed a thousand times in the modern age is a scene the playwright contributed to Sir Thomas More, and that was first performed by none other than Sir Ian McKellen, and he left us with a speech from that play, of which I will only reprint the first part. He chose to give it I believe for greater reasons than vanity, given some of the current anxieties in both British and American political discourse, because in this scene, Thomas More responding to an unruly crowd who are riled up about all the foreigners in England, where someone has just called for “removing the strangers”:

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding tooth ports and costs for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I'll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.

Annoying Theatre Update: Jane Eyre surprisingly watchable

In the face of snide comments about my snooty pastimes, and because of the last play I saw, I just want to take a moment to rave about the Guthrie. Most recently I've seen Private Lives, 1776, and last Friday night, Jane Eyre, and it's on the basis of that last play that I really had to realize how impressed with the place I am, because I hated that rotten book so damn much. And yet, they somehow managed to stage a decent play out of such dire, dire source material, largely due to the talent of the cast, without a whole hell of a lot of help from Charlotte Bronte's idiotic story. Seriously, how about an ending that makes any damn sense instead of just plunging headlong into the woods and counting on supernatural nonsense to drag you back? It's an achievement to extract a workable performance out of that nonsense (although it's still a slow-paced play about the most miserable person on earth and opens with a seemingly endless montage of child abuse).

Of course, no offense is intended to a certain Oldtown resident and Charlotte Bronte aficionado, but unlike Amstelboy I think I only passed the Jane Eyre unit in junior high by writing a paper about one of her sister's books for extra credit. So I read two books while failing all the quizzes on one of them because I didn't bother with the schedule the rest of the class was on, but I feel I achieved a sort of moral victory by showing my disdain for that over-romanticized tripe. I also had a certain student affectionately known as Eyeballs to take the heat off of me, because while I would read an entire novel just to piss on the class, he would just piss on the class. Our combined strategies for handling the requirement to highlight key passages really didn't endear us to our instructor: I claimed there was nothing so momentous that I needed to highlight for in fear my little brain couldn't contain it, and he just highlighted random passages, because like me he could knock the book out in a couple hours if he had to. When nobody did their homework one day, and sternly keeping the laughter out of his voice he asked our teacher if she graded on a curve, I think he drew all her accumulated wrath for the next two months.

But leaving aside my tortured adolescence, I do love the new Guthrie. Part of the charm of it is the whole atmosphere of the new building, built as a modern tweak to the ruined mills around which the early life of this city revolved, inserting itself as the new heart of the Mill City, with giant, ghostly murals of the playwrights whose work gives life to the building. And it has created a whole new street life on Second Street of outdoor restaurants and cafes to go with the Guthrie's own Cue (try the sheepsmilk ricotta ravioli). I still can't walk the halls without pausing to examine all the backlit pictures of over 40 years of Guthrie productions, with the young faces of all those actors some famous some not shining out the dark blue walls, or without stepping out onto the endless bridge. All the windows that hint at all the nooks and crannies of bars, lounges, and classrooms throughout the building are all mirrored, reflecting to the street below an inverted image of all the theater goers peering out.

The eccentric thrust stage with its irregular aisles and multicolored seats and alpine slope was toned down a bit in its transfer from the old building, but still keeps it grounded as one of the United States' theatrical landmarks, and it stands out that much more for the new proscenium theater, exhibiting the restrained wit of England and the ardent pathos of Ireland in plays like Deirdre, Major Barbara, and most recently, Private Lives. There's been a zany, sparkling brilliance to the works I've seen on the thrust stage from the hilarious ensemble that managed to elicit tears of laughter and chills of patriotism in 1776, or the bright comedy with a dark heart they made of The Merchant of Venice. And after a year I still have yet to go to the third theater in the building, the realization of Joe Dowling's dream to bring the Guthrie Lab home and have a building that offers a venue for every type of stage: setting actors back behind the wall of the traditional proscenium arch, the vivid intimacy of the thrust stage, and the experimental Dowling Studio, where each play creates its own theater and its audience's place in it.

It's a cool place, is all I'm saying, and the next time any of my loyal readership (all three of you on a good day) are in town, come have a drink. Because blue... is the new black.