theatre review | ‘the glass menagerie’
Published March 23, 2010
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I wrote a love letter once in the form of a revised memory that I shared with another person. It was supposed to be an apology—an illustration of what would have occurred differently in that moment if, perhaps, I’d grasped for more consideration or humility. To anyone else, it would have read like a reminiscence, but really it was an ideal expression of guilt: “Truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion” as stated in the opening lines of The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams’ memory play.
Sixty-five years after its premiere, local professional company Rose of Athens Theatre will stage the covertly autobiographical play that thrust Tennessee Williams into the ranks of great dramatists, over which he would eventually co-reign with the likes of Eugene O’Neill, Anton Chekhov and Harold Pinter. But before such accolades and even before he cast off his given name of Thomas, he was in his mid-20s, holding four unproduced full-length plays, ushering at a movie theater, and what seemed to be his one big break, the staging of Battle of Angels, literally went up in smoke. Still, come 1945, what to Hollywood seemed a forgettable screenplay called The Glass Menagerie had made its way to Broadway. And so the poet found the stage: “The turbulent business of my nerves demanded something more animate than written language could be.”
So much about Tennessee Williams’ story is resonant to the aspiring artist: menial forms of employment, nomadic living and rejection after rejection. But the details?his shoe salesman father, mentally ill sister, frustrating childhood, the escape and inspiration he found in literature?each hang suspended through the narrative of The Glass Menagerie, rearranged in the self-governed play of narrator Tom Wingfield. While such insights into Williams’ biography were largely unknown during the show’s debut run, looking back now offers, appropriately, a deeper poignancy.
In his opening soliloquy, Tom informs us that we are watching an illusion. Perhaps offering the disclaimer that memories can never again be real or accurate, he introduces his mother and sister, Amanda and Laura, as characters, and their lackluster St. Louis apartment as a set. Framed by the depressed ’30s, the play opens as Amanda and Laura exude a warm and sinister image of playfulness that is almost immediately squelched by the fear of destitution and dependency. Tom, however, drenched in urgency, resorts to outbursts, avoidance and possible alcoholism in the mourning of his ambitions beyond factory life: “I just shudder a little thinking how short life is and what I am doing!”
The most challenging aspect of this play is reconciling this illusion, accepting the distortions and trusting Tom as purveyor of the story. The post-mortem tone of dim lighting and ethereal scenery informs us from the beginning that these memories are less fond and more haunting. Anchored in a dream-state, this production, directed by Lisa Cesnik Ferguson, evokes the fragile and symbolic planes that serve to remind us that we are visiting Tom’s world of personal remorse. The Glass Menagerie is about traps: the dead-end job, the double life, the tiny apartment for three, a limp in one leg, gender roles, the depleted economy and depressed working class. But as Tom exclaims, “Who in hell ever got himself out of [a coffin] without removing one nail?”
So, partly an apologetic love letter, this play is also a gracious requiem. And as Tennessee imparts that “memory is seated predominantly in the heart,” the Wingfields show that hope, seated predominantly in the past, is a present wasted on escape.
theatre review | ‘our lady of 121st street’
Ain’t No Whales in Harlem
October 17, 2009
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If you’ve ever visited your childhood school building, particularly when the hallways are vacant, there’s a charge in the atmosphere from endless layers of memories. This exact sensation is how I felt watching Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Our Lady of 121st Street, currently on the mainstage at the University of Georgia.
Scattered school desks populate a dimly lit classroom. Painted in a style that scenic designer Victoria Fisher describes as inspired by graffiti, stained glass, and the blottiness of Jackson Pollack, it looks frozen in a state of disarray with papers littering the floor. A large, blank chalkboard looms in the corner until a burst of The Nihilistics’ “Love and Kisses” and a sloppy “Our Lady of 121st Street” is scrawled across the board, transforming the room into the Ortiz Funeral Home in Spanish Harlem where momentarily, former cohorts from the local parish school will reunite after 15 years to pay respects to the recently deceased Sister Rose. But for the first time since school, the maladjusted crew of mourners must navigate their relationships with one another without the governing Sister, as she’s not only dead, but her body is missing.
Our Lady hinges on its relationships: between the characters, their former selves, the present environment and their memory of it. There’s a puerile, but fierce energy to every exchange; buried resentment and fond memories saturate the air. Old flames and friends jab each other with Guirgis’ comically brutal language. In the first scene we meet Balthazar, former student of Sister Rose and the officer charged with investigating the disappearance. From the start, MFA candidate Matthew Bowdren pulls off the mix of ineptitude and authority. These antitheses and dichotomies are precisely where director Kristin Kundert-Gibbs nails it: childhood and adulthood, sin and repentance, religion and impiety, growing up too fast while remaining stuck in the past.
Whether they’re on the street or at a bar, the characters never leave the classroom. Even Sister Rose’s empty casket is a teacher’s desk. With hints of Catholic ritual and a pace reminiscent of class changes, Kundert-Gibbs’ adherence to the root is what gives the production its depth. Each actor presents their own individual relationship to the environment, from the way they walk through the space, to the manner in which they scribble on the chalkboard. It becomes just as clear to the audience, as to the characters, who belongs and who does not. And herein lies the story’s crux: the fumbling search for acceptance, or further more, absolution. But from whom? Yourself, the world, or God? What’s the difference?
Amy Whisenhunt
theatre review | ‘the shape of things’
Published January 26, 2010
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Making a film that features Nicholas Cage punching out droves of pagan women isn’t the path to my heart, and neither is making a film that drips with pure, depraved, masculine prowess. Throw in a rape scene and it’s all over.
Then again, what if pleasure, comfort, and safety isn’t the point, but rather the complete lack thereof?
So, what’s up with Neil LaBute? There are only so many nauseatingly apologist film reviews a girl can take. Each one so quick to brush off the psychopathy and apparent fixation on vassalless female characters with a cute, “That’s our misanthrope!” seal of approval. But I sensed there must be something more complex at work, so I put away my big red “Misogynist” stamp and looked deeper. If fiction is a canvas wherein relationships enlighten us to the truth of ourselves, our world, then what happens when, to paraphrase LaBute’s words, cruelty is the canvas?
A Pygmalion-style make-over story with the genders reversed, The Shape of Things opens in an empty exhibition room at an art museum where the lovely renegade artist Evelyn, conspiring to deface a censored sculpture, is thwarted by the security guard, aptly called Adam. Fast-forward just moments after their tryst and we see them enthusiastically engaging in the oblivious PDA of new coupledom. She’s a grad school spitfire goddess, challenging Adam’s self-doubt and, to his chagrin, burning his best friends in intellectual debates at the same time. But he’ll do anything for her; he should be thankful she cares.
We don’t know Adam previously, but after a brief courtship, his friends enlighten us to what’s changed since Evelyn showed up: his weight, his hair, his new expensive clothes. These “improvements,” while reluctantly lauded by his best friends Phil and Jenny, are also met with a mix of bemusement and suspicion. But as Evelyn’s suggestions escalate to the point of sending him under the knife, Adam grows more evasive with the details and more disconnected. Wrestling with a version of Adam that is no longer recognizable and failing to penetrate the shell, Phil concedes: “we’re not on intimate terms.” And that’s it right there.
Working on dual levels: superficiality and authenticity, intellectual distance and emotional attachment, The Shape of Things explores what happens if we attempt to marry these dichotomies within the realm of a relationship. Is it possible? Ethical? All relationships are experiments after all. There’s no way of knowing how or when they may or may not end. And when they do, what’s left is just sad evidence: trinkets, letters, pictures—sentimental useless items, right? Maybe not, we find, as LaBute merges the scientific and the emotional, with disturbing results.
At the play’s denouement, Evelyn is an easy villain. Clap your hands—another Eve-prophecy is fulfilled. But that wouldn’t make Neil LaBute too clever. If The Shape of Things incites excavation below the surface, then LaBute’s exploitation of our gut reaction to the story of original sin makes for a more interesting statement of moral ambiguity. All the serpent business is black and white—we know how it ends. What’s compelling, though, is watching amorality and immorality fraternize, ranging from fibs to “sick fucking jokes.” Uncertainty of the difference is disorienting, but, as I said, pleasure isn’t the point. With the tenacity of his anti-heroine, LaBute adheres to the mission of going too far and refusing to apologize, which feels like salt in a wound by the final scene, but the element of human complexity over straight-up maleficent archetype drives home the point. Evelyn’s fleeting moments of true emotional response make her stoic indignation that much more disconcerting.
Unlike his films In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, which are arguably extreme for extreme’s sake, either for sport or the inescapable point of no return, The Shape of Things is an internecine concoction of manipulation and artistic purpose. If you feel conflicted when it’s over, you’re on the right track.
theatre review | ‘put it in the scrapbook’
George Contini Is on the Fringe
Published November 3, 2009
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Fringe might just be theatre’s punk scene. In 1947 in Edinburgh, Scotland, the pioneers of fringe broke off to create their own all-inclusive subset of the performing arts—the more alternative, the better. Like other artists and groups of people relegated from the mainstream for ideas and presentation too radical for the masses, fringe was a response to exclusion by larger theatre festivals. Today fringe festivals are held all over the world as havens for small companies, avant-garde artists and all things weird and freaky. No matter how many times Kiss Me, Kate plays at the opera house, fringe remains a place for the risky, queer, innovative and experiential theatre that revitalizes the art form over and over again.
But fringe isn’t about ghettoizing the non-mainstream. Diversity is key in performer and audience. The spirit of openness, acceptance and exploration of fringe theatre is what makes it an avenue for identity expression and a powerful tool for conversation. Gaining its name because it suitably refers to art on the outskirts of pedestrian creativity, it pretty much guarantees audiences an unusual theatre experience. This November, local actor, playwright and associate professor of theatre at UGA, George Contini, will be transporting his original one-man show, Put It in the Scrapbook, about the life and career of famed female-impersonator Julian Eltinge, to the New Orleans Fringe Festival.
He first conceived of the script in 2004, and Contini spent years molding it with the help of director and fellow professor of theatre, Kristin Kundert-Gibbs. Put It in the Scrapbook is a fascinating, heart-breaking and heroic personal account of an artist’s professional demise, as well as a case study of early-20th-century gender politics. Born William Julian Dalton, Eltinge became a beloved star of Vaudeville, Broadway and silent film, earning him the highest salary of any performer in the United States. After years of celebration and success, a shift in the cultural perception of female impersonation chipped away at his reputation, distilling his celebrity and talent down to mere perversion.
When we first meet Dalton, he seems worn down and tired, while at the same time still reeling from having everything yanked out from under his feet. The show begins with a news bulletin: The Eltinge Theatre, erected on Broadway in 1918, has been renovated into a new AMC movie theater. Who is Julian Eltinge? Just some drag queen, apparently. Contini then invites us into Dalton’s ornate, musty dressing room before the final performance of his career in October, 1941 at The Rendezvous, an L.A. club for “undesirables,” the term for homosexuals. We witness, in a half-guided and half-voyeuristic manner, a recounting of one of the most influential careers in American theatre history, from whimsical start to piteous finish. Of the play, Contini says: “[It] traces Eltinge’s career from his first performance impersonating a young girl for the Boston Cadet Academy in 1898 through his years of international fame during the 1920s to his eventual decline by 1940.”
Inside the dressing room, the audience meets a variety of characters: the aged Dalton, with a coarse voice and slumped posture, Eltinge the performer, plus those currently in his life and ghosts from his memories. We never see Eltinge “onstage.” Instead, we watch him in the mechanical and vulnerable state of preparing for a show. This is precisely what gives Put It in the Scrapbook such depth. Dalton is both unfocused and completely on point. We see him at his best, performing songs from his repertoire, and his worst, ripping dresses off the racks and throwing them on the floor. Juxtaposing fame and disgust, resilience and hopelessness, Contini captures the incredulous state of Dalton’s public favor like it’s a broken promise. How could it be that he once dazzled audiences with song and dance and, now, can’t wear a dress in public?
“The title Put It in the Scrapbook refers to a number of things; it is the name of a song from one of Eltinge’s very first appearances in youthful drag. Also, most of what we know about Eltinge is from various scrapbooks housed in archives throughout the country. And, finally, a scrapbook serves as the entry to Julian’s memories in the play,” says Contini. Put It in the Scrapbook could also be viewed as a dramaturgical opus. Contini further explains that the songs heard in …Scrapbook have not been performed for an audience since Eltinge did so nearly 100 years ago. “Every piece of music you hear is a song that Julian used in an act, many of them written by him, and nearly all the words Julian speaks are direct quotes from interviews he gave or articles he wrote.”
Put It in the Scrapbook is a celebration of one man’s rise and fall against the backdrop of an ongoing struggle. It’s also a reminder that the personal really is political. In Dalton’s words, “I go through a performance with all the keen relish of a man moving a piano on a hot day. The most satisfying part of my work is when the show’s over and I take the corsets off. I can get a full, deep breath.”
theatre review | ‘the grapes of wrath’
Published October 13, 2009
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“What percentage of those living in public housing do you think receives a welfare check?” asks Executive Director of the Athens Housing Authority Rick Parker at a Theatre and Film Studies Departmental Colloquium. A few in the room yell numbers ranging from 10 to 60. It’s a simple yet prognostic example of the misrepresentation of poverty in the collective social consciousness: “Three percent,” Parker corrects.
Amid America’s recession, the Great Depression evokes a state of déjà vu within our societal memory. UGA’s production of The Grapes of Wrath has a relevance so ostensible that it begs to ask the question: How can we further this discussion beyond mere empathy? Displacement and utter loss are not only heartbreaking literary themes, but realities occurring here in Athens and across the States. While presenting such situations onstage draws attention to those most affected by the crisis—it’s part of the opportunistic and activist potential of theatre and art—more is required than show and tell; a challenge must be presented.
In 1936, John Steinbeck accepted an offer from The San Francisco News to tour the Hoovervilles of rural California and chronicle the Dust Bowl migration. These essays documented the despair and squalor of migrant life during the Great Depression while purporting policy recommendations as well. An avid New Deal liberal, Steinbeck was dedicated to the advocacy of poor agricultural workers, and The Grapes of Wrath was wrought from his accounts of these camps on U.S. Route 66.
The task is ambitious, but director George Contini champions this budget-less production to celebrate the idealistic and resolute spirit of Steinbeck’s novel. As the play begins, the first sound is the wind of a collective breath from the characters. At first the stage looks like a picked through yard sale: metal scraps, tires, logs, tattered baskets and chains occupy the space, until the cast, donning handed-down and thrifted clothes, enter en masse. Reaching upwards of 300 found objects from sheds and dumpsters, the set is literally made of trash. From the chipped doors to the rusted tools—the visible age and history of the objects tell us that the family’s roots were planted long ago. By using junk as props and set pieces, the characters must hold up the doors, tables and clothes lines in order to paint the location of each scene. It becomes obvious that the Joads are in a constant state of moving and rebuilding, and without cooperation, they face failure.
The Grapes of Wrath serves as a seminal critique of America’s perception of poverty. As a white family, the Joads represent the regular, normal Americans that fell from the class of “hard-workers” to “Okies” (pejorative word for a migrant worker), akin to a cast-off minority status. Portraying the Joads not in solidarity with the “Other,” but as symbolic of the potential desolation of the majority, serves to express the realness of such an outcome. Attributing one’s socio-economic status to one’s personal attributes, moral integrity and life choices instead of economic circumstances and institutionalized racism is a red herring for the fear that drives the public’s disdain for the poor as a means of distancing itself from the proximity of poverty. We’re asking ourselves this question in the health care debate: Where are the borders of compassion? Does compassion stop at our own flesh and blood or our own wallet? But as we struggle through financially today, there’s something to be said for the social progress we’ve already made that makes today’s recession unlike the Great Depression: the existence of institutionalized support systems such as public housing, for example. There we see the expansion of compassion further the duty to prevent and alleviate destitution. It’s important to be reminded of how far we’ve come in order to reveal what’s left to do: “Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.”
Amy Whisenhunt
Flagpole Magazine
Laura Vaughn Lights a Path for Dominican Youth
Published September 22, 2009
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“I was on a really isolated beach when two limpiabotas, which are shoe shiners, sat down their boxes of shoe polish, took off all their clothes and jumped into the ocean. It was just life at its simplest, life at its hardest, life at its best.”
Laura Vaughn loves you. And with the same spirit of a woman who gives warm hugs with every encounter, her innovative theatre and language program, Cucuyo, exudes such compassion and ambition. Cucuyo is an encuentro for the arts. Located in the Dominican Republic, a Spanish-speaking island in the Caribbean, American and Dominican adolescents will spend three weeks sharing meals and making theatre. What’s the idea? “I want to talk about their important social issues and confront them through art,” says Vaughn.
Currently in the stage of recruitment and fundraising, Cucuyo plans to take its first trip in the summer of 2010. Ultimately, it aims to “provide Dominican and American youth with creative guidance and instruction in order to facilitate exploration of self and culture; engender, through collaborative projects, understanding, sensitivity and meaningful encounters between the two cultures, while simultaneously cultivating and refining the artistic abilities of each youth.”
Vaughn developed the idea for Cucuyo over a few years, a process sparked by her love for Latin America. In 2004 she visited the Dominican Republic for the first time where she lived with a Dominican family and facilitated health sessions for teenagers through a local university. But eventually she became conflicted by her role as a health educator on grounds of principle. “It’s not fair to the Dominicans,” she explains. Expecting teenagers to automatically commune with a foreign stranger on personal matters such as sexual health: “It wasn’t sustainable.”
Sustainability is a main theme in Vaughn’s philosophy. Traveling through Central and South America, she witnessed the activity of multiple artistic communities, some thriving and some not, which inspired her to form a social program founded in art. But Vaughn’s not a veteran of the stage. After becoming involved with the whimsical Forest Theatre of Pure Form, operating out of the yoga studio of local eccentric luminary Cal Clements, Vaughn fell in love with the collaborative power of theatre. The Forest Theatre aesthetic, which espouses DIY and the avant-garde, is grounded in the belief that formal training and experience are peripheral necessities to creating art. As Vaughn puts it, nothing serves more as an intersection of the arts than theatre, and if theatre is the impetus in a cultural partnership, no perceived differences—cultural, religious or linguistic—remain as barriers. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a painter; it doesn’t matter if you speak Spanish. We’re all going to be messy and we’re going to learn together.”
Two and a half years later, Vaughn now presides over a board of five volunteers as Cucuyo’s executive director and works as a Spanish interpreter at Athens Regional Hospital. “I’ve never left the Latino population. There are so many Latinos in this community who are literally scared to walk out of their house because they’re afraid the police will pick them up on the street. Anyone who can spend time with that, I will thank them.”
Vaughn describes Bonao, the small city where Cucuyo will reside, as a beautiful valley community surrounded by mountains. The language is warm and the people move in a relaxed social tempo. Its community center is a concrete, open structure, much like a Caribbean house, with a basketball court on one side and a stage platform on the other. Already established as an emotional center and place to gather, it’s not as bustling as it could be. “But I talked to them and the parents are excited to have this opportunity for their kids. There are little material and personnel resources because everybody’s trying to make a living and take care of their family.”
Vitalizing the center to become a nurturing space for Dominican adolescents is one small step toward the prevention of drug abuse and involvement in crime: some of the effects of poverty that she’s witnessed among teens during her time there. So, with a Bread and Puppet kind of resourcefulness and tenacity, she says: “Let’s put all this together, and with these talents and resources, share it with someone else.”
With an acute admiration and understanding for Dominican culture, she graciously anticipates the challenging dynamics that lie ahead. And hopefully, immersion in a different language, and possibly socio-economic status, will provide American youth with new perspectives they can bring home to the Athens community, an idea reminiscent of influential Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal, who once said, “We can learn enormously when we recognize ourselves in alterity: the Other also loves and hates, fears and has courage—just like me, like you, even though she/he, you and I have cultural differences. Precisely because of that, we can learn from each other: we are different, being the same.”
After all, cucuyo is a folk word meaning “firefly” and in Dominican folklore, fireflies serve as leaders of the living. “And I really like the significance that everyone has; we’ll call it an inner light,” says Vaughn.
Amy Whisenhunt
Flagpole Magazine
