Breaking Glass - "You think I want to spend fifty-five years down there in that - celotex interior! with - fluorescent - tubes!"

We invited friends to go with us to see The Glass Menagerie, but they opted out.  I sort of understood.  Isn't this one of those mandatory plays that's depressing and hard?  I remember long ago seeing a movie or the play, but it didn't make a lasting impression.

But it's considered one of the great American plays by one of the greatest playwrights.  So we went.

Right off, as the tiny Out North theater space darkened, I was struck by the music - unfortunately not live - but still invoking a mood that fit the play perfectly.  (I later asked the director about the music since I thought it worked so well.  He said he hadn't liked the CD that came when they bought the rights to do the play, so he composed the opening piano part himself and pulled together other music for other parts.)

A mother, son, and daughter with a limp.  Dad, whose portrait hangs over the mantle, we learn as the play proceeds, was a charmer who one day just up and left.  The southern society Mom had grown up in - complete with ritualized gentleman callers - has now been replaced by factories and, in her case, poverty.  Only the son's meager income at the shoe factory keeps the family barely surviving the Depression of the 1930s in St. Louis.

Stage before the play began

The family members, collectively and  individually, are all outsiders.  For Mom, poverty keeps her an outsider from her DAR sisters, and she lives in a fantasy world of her lost Southern upbringing.  Laura, the daughter, with her bad leg (the script calls for a leg brace, but they played it with a shoe with a very high lift) was an outsider in school where she was painfully shy.  And Tom, the son, with his interest in writing, and his strange mother and sister, never fit in with the guys at school either.    All this sets up the basic conflict:  Mom wants to marry off Laura.  Tom works at the shoe factory to support the family but desperately wants adventure which he tastes nightly at the movies.  Laura is fine in the cocoon of home, tending her glass animals.  Beyond the walls, she gets sick. 

Mock up of the set

And the family tensions eloquently explode (Scene 3 excerpt from absolutenglish):

AMANDA: You're going to listen, and no more insolence from you ! I'm at the end of my patience !
[He comes back toward her.]
TOM: What do you think I'm at? Aren't I supposed to have any patience to reach the end of, Mother? I know, I know. It seems unimportant to you, what I'm doing - what I want to do - having a little difference between them !You don't think that -
AMANDA: I think you've been doing things that you're ashamed of. That's why you act like this. I don't believe that you go every night to the movies. Nobody goes to the movies night after night. Nobody in their right mind goes to the movies as often as you pretend to. People don't go to the movies at nearly midnight, and movies don't let out at two a.m. Come in stumbling. Muttering to yourself like a maniac! You get three hours' sleep and then go to work. Oh, I can picture the way you're doing down there. Moping, doping, because you're in no condition.
TOM [wildly]: No, I'm in no condition !
AMANDA: What right have you got to jeopardize your job - jeopardize the security of us all? How do you think we'd manage if you were -
TOM: Listen !You think I'm crazy about the warehouse? [He bounds fiercely toward her slight figure.] You think I'm in love with the Continental Shoemakers? You think I want to spend fifty-five years down there in that - celotex interior! with - fluorescent - tubes! Look! I'd rather somebody picked up a crowbar and battered out my brains - than go back mornings! I go ! Every time you come in yelling………
that God damn 'Rise and Shine!'- 'Rise and Shine!' I say to myself, 'How lucky dead people are ! 'But I get up. I go! For sixty-five dollars a month I give up all that I dream of doing and being ever! And you say self - selfs' all I ever think of. Why, listen, if self is what I thought of, Mother, I'd be where he is -G 0 N E ! [Pointing to fathers picture.] As far as the system of transportation reaches! [He starts past her. She grabs his arm.] Don't grab at me, Mother!
AMANDA: Where are you going?
TOM: I'm going to the movies!
AMANDA: I don't believe that lie!
TOM [crouching toward her, overtowering her tiny figure. She backs away, gasping]: I'm going to opium dens ! Yes, opium dens, dens of vice and criminals' hang-outs, Mother. I've joined the Hogan gang, I'm a hired assassin, I carry a tommy-gun in a violin case! I run a string of cat-houses in the Valley! They call me Killer, Killer Wingfield, I'm leading a double-life, a simple, honest warehouse worker by day, by night a dynamic tsar of the underworld, Mother. I go to gambling casinos, I spin away fortunes on the roulette table ! I wear a patch over one eye and a false moustache, sometimes I put on green whiskers. On those occasions they call me -El Diablo ! Oh, I could tell you things to make you sleepless ! My enemies plan to dynamite this place. They're going to blow us all sky-high some night ! I'll be glad, very happy, and so will you ! You'll go up, up on a broomstick, over Blue Mountain with seventeen gentlemen callers! You ugly - babbling old - witch. [He goes through a series of violent, clumsy movements, seizing his overcoat, lunging to do door, pulling it fiercely open. The women watch him, aghast. His arm catches in the sleeve of the coat as he struggles to pull it on. For a moment he is pinioned by the bulky garment. With an outraged groan he tears the coat of again, splitting the shoulder of it, and hurls it across the room. It strikes against the shelf of Laura's glass collection, there is a tinkle of shattering glass. LAURA cries out as if wounded.]
[MUSIC. LEGEND: 'THE GLASS MENAGERIE'.]
L A U R A [shrilly] : My glass ! - menagerie. . . . [She covers her face and turns away.]

The Glass Menagerie opened on Dec. 26, 1944 - Williams was 33 - in Chicago.  And if you do the math, you'll figure out that he would have been 100 years old this year. 

As I said at the beginning, I saw going to the play more as an assignment, but the acting was superb and the play proves itself as an enduring classic.  I suspect it will touch a lot of people in our own time of Depression and where many young adults find themselves living back home with their parents instead of having adventures out in the world.  And Mom's life in memory of a Southern charm eclipsed by a new soulless, industrial culture will seem familiar to many who have seen the rapid changes brought on by technology during their lifetimes.

There are only four characters.  Amanda, the mother, played by Scarlet Kittylee Boudreaux.  The son Tom, played by Max Aronson.  The daughter, Laura, played by Sarah Bethany Baird.  And the gentleman caller, Jim, played by Patrick Parker Killoran.

I was lost in their world with them for the duration.  Everything they did was right.  I really don't know how Laura pulled it off, but her change from painfully shy to fully engaged at the end worked perfectly.  

[OK, I need to explain this last picture.  I've learned with my tiny Canon Powershot, that stage lighting tends to wash out the faces unless I set the camera to a few steps darker than the meter automatically would do.  But since I don't shoot during the play (unless they say I can) I forgot about my camera, and only quickly pulled it out to get the actors bowing.  But it was too late to change the setting.  And then they were gone.  It was too bright and trying to get the faces better exposed in photoshop made for weird effects.  So I tried the glass filter (this is the Glass Menagerie, right?), and it wasn't that successful either, but I think the effect works better than the original. (If you double click it, you can see it much better than blogspot shows it.)  And if you know the actors, you would recognize them.]


This is, as I said, one of the great American plays.  A terrific production [really, I do support Out North, but I wouldn't lie to you either] is playing in town that makes this a great evening out in an intimate little theater where you can see the expressions on the actors' faces because you're that close.    It's playing until May 22, Thursdays-Sundays.  Get more information at Out North.

Germany 1930s - US Today: Anchorage Cabaret Production Comparisons

An abstract black and white train rattled across the large screen over the stage where the young American Cliff Bradshaw is being charmed by German smuggler Ernst as the ride they train toward Berlin. (See a brief clip of this in the video below)

The screen above the stage gave Director Christian Heppinstall a whole nother stage to work with and he filled it - setting the context of the scene, adding to the crowd, setting the mood, and quoting Adolf Hitler between scenes.  His interpretation - reminding us that the Nazi party came into power during similar economic times as today.  Just as the US suffered a humiliating attack on the World Trade Center, Germany had been humiliated after WWI.  The banks were in trouble, and Jews, like Muslims today, were being used as the scapegoats.  And enough of the population were willing to be enticed by nationalism to hate the outsiders and elect a tyrant. [I do know the director, but if I didn't really like it, I'd either not put up anything or I'd tell you what I had problems with.  I liked this a lot.]



But all that is mostly in the background of this great musical.  On stage a young cast is clearly enjoying playing their young sexy characters and they do a great job with the singing.  But not all the cast is young and we have some fine performances from an older generation of actors as well.

And the live musicians greatly added to whole performance.

I love that Anchorage  has really talented folks who are able to put on great plays like this and pull it off on a shoestring.  (Well, I'm sure it doesn't feel like a shoestring for those raising the money, but compared to Broadway productions what our local theater does with minuscule budgets is amazing.)

I'd really like to do a much more thoughtful discussion here, but I realized that it's already Friday again and Cabaret is on again this weekend  through April 9 at the Wild Berry Theater.  This is one not to miss - a big vibrant musical with a strong cast and great production values.  And while the stadium seating gives every seat an unobstructed view and makes it feel bigger, the theater only holds about 100, so you are up close and almost part of the production.

But don't take my word for it.  Check out the video. [It's worth it just to see the great kiss scene].  But remember this was taken with my pocket Canon-Powershot and the stage lighting severely challenged my automatic light meter.  So I've used  iMovie FX in some clips.  And the sound doesn't come near to capturing it.  But it does give a bit of a sense of what you'll miss if you don't go this weekend (or next.)

Taking bows.

Audience gets to talk with the actors after the performance.

Will Rogers, Persian Books, Cyrano at Ruskin

Here are a few of the things we did Saturday.  It's late so I'll keep it brief. 

[I put two pictures together above, moving the sign out onto the lawn]

These are the Santa Monica mountains a short walk up from Will Rogers' house.  David Hockney fans may recognize this type of landscape from the Pool with Two Figures.  Though Hockney took some liberties and greened things up a bit - even though the hills in the picture are pretty green after record December rainfall.  And so you folks back in Anchorage don't feel too bad, it was cloudy all day and chilly for here.  High 50s F.

Will Rogers was a horseman and there are stables and polo grounds on his former property which is now the State Park. 

 

 Jumping past some other events, we stopped in a Iranian book store in Westwood.

The Ruskin Group Theatre is on the grounds of the Santa Monica airport which we go through regularly while we're here.  Since it's so close to my mom's house, we thought we should try to catch a play here.  So, on the way home we stopped to see if we could get tickets.  We were put on the waiting list. 

And got in.  Like some of our wonderfully intimate theaters in Anchorage, the audience is almost onstage here.  We enjoyed a well done performance of one of my favorite plays, though I felt almost a little too close during the sword fight scene.  

You should be able to figure out what play by looking at the lead character taking his bow.  Watching the play tonight, I realized the must have been in my subconscious all my life as a role model - with its championing of doing it right, being independent, not selling out.  Not that I've always succeeded, but I've tried. 

"He has comic timing tattooed on his genes" - Scott Schofield Performs at Out North

Scott in January

I first saw Scott Schofield last January when he introduced the Under 30 performances.  At the time I was surprised by his easy presence in front of the audience.  There was something special about him, though I didn't quite catch what he was doing here, something about being a visiting performer.  We missed his performance of Debutant Balls because we went to Juneau.

Scott after Wu Man

In July he introduced Wu Man and friends.  This time Scott was introduced as Out North's new artistic director.  Again, I was impressed.   Enough to write this as a side note to a long discussion of Wu Man and the evening's music:

His introduction Wednesday was a pleasure to listen to.  His words were good, his delivery fluent, and he effortlessly rotated to acknowledge the audience members sitting behind him on the stage. 

I'm giving all this background to just say, there was something special about this guy which I picked up from the time I first saw him.  Friday night I learned that he is an established performer who has performed all over which was brought home when in one of his pieces he mentioned that he'd 'just played to a packed house in Brussels."

So, my gut was right.  Out North has pulled a minor coup by snagging Scott as the artistic director.  He's closing in on his 30th birthday (this also came out - I think in the Q&A after the performance) and looks like he's approaching 20.  But he's been performing a long time and knows lots of people beyond Anchorage, a number of whom he's going to entice up here and introduce us to.

Friday night (and he does this again Saturday - tonight) he was on stage at Out North as a performer, though he confessed afterward that he couldn't completely get his administrator role out of his head  asking himself, as a performer and an administrator, "Is this show going to go well?  Is this going to help or hurt our future box offices?"

He didn't have to worry.  This guy is a natural story teller. He says raconteur, which I can't write unless the spell checker has it. (Phew! It did.) And his material is compelling.  The program says,

Two Truths and a Lie. . . is a collection of three autobiographical solo performances which have toured nationally to critical acclaim:  Underground Transit (2001), "Debutante Balls" (2004) and "Becoming a Man in 127 EASY Steps (2007).  

After Show Q&A

He gave the briefest of introductions - I'm not even sure what he told us.  Enough for us to know that he was born and raised as a girl and the title "Becoming a Man" meant just that, literally.  So, he had 127 steps.  Our job as the audience was to give him numbers and he'd find that particular step and perform it.  Or, as it turned out once or twice, show us the video.

I don't know a lot of people who have changed genders and the couple I can think of switched from male to female.  And it wasn't something we talked about.  I listened to Tafi's presentation focused on male Samoan children who are early identified as Fa 'afafine at UAA's Diverse Voices presentation.  I've read Middlesex.  My favorite documentary at the Anchorage International Film Festival last year was Prodigal Sons told by a woman returning to her rural home town for her 10th high school reunion who left for college after being the quarterback of his HS football team.  I'm sympathetic to the idea, but the male-female dichotomy is still one of the most rigid we have.  Homosexuality still causes many people grave distress.  The idea of being a woman and then a man or vice versa challenges our brains' flexibility.  We think it has to be either/or.

In the book - Two Truths and a Lie - Scott writes about coming up with this performance.

"Okay," my partner-in-crime S. Bear Bergman sighed as ze [sic] always does when calming me down on a late night, long distance phone call.  "So you have about 127 stories to tell and an hour in which to make sex change EASY, step-by-step."  I made notecards from memories, ruminated, and typed.  Then I found one of my old Choose Your Own Adventure books from elementary school.  Later, on tour in New York, T Cooper and Felicia Luna Lemus left Joe Meno's book The Boy Detective Fails by the couch they made up as a bed for me.  There I found the decoder ring.  With such random origins, how could I write any linear play?  The elements of chance that structured my process had to be reflected in the product.

Scott performs Two Truths and a Lie again tonight (Saturday) at 8pm at Out North.  Tickets at the door.  It will be a different performance from the one we saw because the audience isn't likely to choose the same numbers.

Now, as much as liked this, I think it could have been even better.  The lottery aspect of the audience choosing which scene he's going to play means there are a lot of missing parts and the actor doesn't know which scene is up next. 

Even with that caveat, Anchorage folks, what I'm saying here is WE'VE GOT THIS WORLD CLASS PERFORMER TELLING THIS MESMERIZING STORY AND NO ONE KNOWS IT.  So go now and see Scott.  In ten years when he's moved on and he's famous, don't kick yourself because you didn't see him 'way back when' in an intimate little theater in Anchorage before the world discovered him.

As Judith Jack Halberstam, Professor of English and Gender Studies at USC, wrote in the front of Scott's book,

Scott, it should be said up front and often, is simply a mesmerizing performer.  You could listen to his voice all night.  He has comic timing tattooed on his genes, and he can make the trip from irony to sincerity in 3 seconds flat. 

Why Cars Kill About 160 Moose a Year in Anchorage

We were coming home from Scott Turner Schofield's performance of parts of his book "Two Truths and a lie" at Out North tonight and the car in front of us turned soooooooooo slooooooooowly at the green arrow onto Northern Lights.


You can really tell who doesn't have studded tires, I was thinking.  Then as we were almost home another car put on his right turn blinker (that's good) and then turned into a cartoon slow motion car for half a block before the turn.  Then J said - there's moose.

 I was barely moving when the car turned right to reveal a moose and calf barely visible in the dark.    You can see why so many get hit.  Or maybe I should say you can't see.

I'm always amazed at how these huge brown animals can blend so well into their surroundings.  I've passed moose while jogging and not realized they were there until I sense something there, and look over to see one eating ten feet away as I pass.  It was a good thing the car in front of me took so long to turn right and I was barely moving.

Sunset, Sunrise, and Reefer Madness In Between

October and November are always the months when my exercise routines fall apart.  This year, coming back from LA in mid-October was even worse.  I got to run in LA most days, and it felt nippy back in Anchorage.  But I did keep biking and walking a lot.  But then we got ice and it was darker and I found lots of excuses.  So Friday, when it was just about 20˚F (-7˚C),  I went for a short run.  Our official sunset was at 4:10 pm.  This shot of the moon was taken at 4:55pm.  (Digital cameras are nice that way, you can see exactly when you took the picture. On the other hand, the moon's shadow is actually a spec of dust on the sensor.  It shows at certain openings but not at others.  On my Powershot, according to the repair shop, getting at the sensor is tricky and probably not worth it. I know, I can photoshop it out or hide it in the background.  But I wanted to make a point of it here.) 

Almost home, I came across our neighbor and his dog in the alley.

[The pictures are all from the curtain calls, not the show.]

We went to the Wild Berry Theater to see Reefer Madness.  From Wikipedia:   


"Reefer Madness (aka Tell Your Children) is a well known 1938 American exploitation film revolving around the tragic events that ensue when high school students are lured by pushers to try "marihuana": a hit and run accident, manslaughter, suicide, attempted rape, and descent into madness all ensue. The film was directed by Louis Gasnier and starred a cast composed of mostly unknown bit actors. It was originally financed by a church group and made under the title Tell Your Children.  

The film was intended to be shown to parents as a morality tale attempting to teach them about the dangers of cannabis use." 

Seventy two years later, it's just a big spoof.  This was done pretty low budget and compared to some of the really fine local theater I've seen lately, it was at the next level down.  There was a lot of young, buff, naked (and some older, not so buff), male flesh. (Nothing you wouldn't see at a swim meet and less than the TSA man sees, but there was enough to be remarkable - in the literal sense - especially from the front row.) The singers were all good, some of the dancers did beautiful leaps, and the audience was having a good time.  At $20 a head (online) it's live theater for not a lot more than a movie and the theater is small (not much over 100 though it looks bigger) so everyone has a good seat.  We ended up in the first row and it felt like we were part of the performance at times.  Actually, we were at one point when Jesus Christ handed out saltines.

On the way home we noticed patches of micro-fog around the bigger street lights. 

And this morning, when I drove J to her 8am workshop, a lot of the trees and shrubs were frosted.


But as we moved a little east, it cleared up and even though sunrise wasn't scheduled until 9:15am,  it was starting to lighten over the mountains to the east a little after 8am. 

We do have long twilight periods at 61˚ North, summer AND winter.

"he died by muffing the trick of catching a bullet in his teeth. "

The ADN had a NY Times obituary Saturday about Charles Reynolds who they called "Magicians' magician."  What caught my eye was at the end of this short paragraph:

He lived in a little house in Greenwich Village crammed with magic books, mummy cases and antique posters, including a dozen of the American magician who went under the Chinese name Chung Ling Soo and who became an instant legend in 1918 when he died by muffing the trick of catching a bullet in his teeth. (emphasis added)

Did they shoot the bullet or toss it to him?  

Chung Ling Soo was an American who took on his Chinese persona after being slighted by a real Chinese magician and successfully toured the world, speaking only through an interpreter in public.

Wikipedia explans:

The muzzle-loaded guns were rigged so that the bullet in fact never left the gun. The guns were loaded with substitute bullets, but the flash from the pan was channelled [sic] to a second blank charge in the ramrod tube below the actual barrel of the gun. The ramrods were never replaced after loading. The guns were aimed at Chung, the assistants pulled the triggers, there was a loud bang and a cloud of gunpowder smoke filled the stage. Chung pretended to catch the bullets in his hand before they hit him. Sometimes he pretended to catch them in his mouth.

The trick went tragically wrong when Chung was performing in the Wood Green Empire, London, on March 23, 1918. Chung never unloaded the gun properly. To avoid expending powder and bullets, he had the breeches of the guns dismantled after each performance in order to remove the bullet, rather than firing them off or drawing the bullets with a screw-rod as was normal practice. Over time, the channel that allowed the flash to bypass the barrel and ignite the charge in the ramrod tube slowly built up a residue of unburned gunpowder. On the fateful night of the accident, the flash from the pan ignited the charge behind the bullet in the barrel of one of the guns. The bullet was fired in the normal way, hitting Chung in the chest. His last words were spoken on stage that moment, "Oh my God. Something's happened. Lower the curtain." It was the first and last time since adopting the persona that William "Chung Ling Soo" Robinson had spoken English in public.

Magic, The Science of Illusion, gives more information on his life and his feud with Ching Ling Foo but, strangely, makes no mention of his last performance.   It also has pictures. 

Boris Karloff gives us another version, demonstrating yet again we need to recognize that different people claim to possess different truths about the same situation. 




Travelanche offers the story with yet new variations. A notable observation and worth bearing in mind today (substitute the word politics for vaudeville):

In vaudeville, phony tended to play better than authentic. Chung made his entrance from the ceiling suspended by his Manchurian pigtail. Ching would never do any such thing for the simple reason that his pigtail was real! 

Finally, here's a video that appears to be of the actual William Robinson before he became Chung Ling Soo.  It says 1900 and it's very short, but he does the trick described by Travelanche that he was supposed to have copied from Ching Ling Foo.

Six Dead Bodies Duct-Taped to a Merry-Go-Round

So, this guy was on leave from the service and his wife was supposed to pick him up, but she wasn't there and this guy in a truck offers him a ride and eventually that leads to the bodies and the merry-go-round. 

That was one of the four plays in Anchorage Community Theater's (ACT) FourPlay which was extend to this weekend.  We went two weeks ago.  They're headquartered in an industrial area on 70th near the Old Seward Highway.

[UPDATE Nov 13:  Even though I revised this a couple of times before I posted it, it doesn't convey what is important here.  But we had to leave, so I posted it.  Later I realized what I really wanted to say was this: 

Imagine having 30 minutes or so to communicate anything you want the world to know.  Your tools are several actors, a stage, lighting, props, costumes and make-up, and sound.  What would you want to say?  How would you convey it?  That's sort of what these folks faced.  The first piece - A Wee Rembrandt -  had two museum guards tied to posts after being robbed.  This one was interesting, and perhaps reflected what might have happened in such a situation, but barely touched the many issues that could have come up. 

Thanksgiving Dinner with the Last Whore in Calhoun County was more successful in touching universal issues about family, identity, shame, and others. (This is two weeks after seeing it and it still has an impact on me.)  All in this very short time period.  That was what was so neat about these pieces.

So what made this a good evening at the theater was the challenge of the format first, and then seeing how well they were carried through.  We have some outstanding actors in this town.  And thinking how I wouldn't know where to start if I had 30 minutes to fill on stage.]

Before the Show

All four short (@ 30 minutes each) plays were created by local playwrights and they played off somewhat strange premises (like Six Dead Bodies) but pulled it off.  Partly because the acting was good enough that I believed in the characters and didn't see them as actors. 

My only real objection was that so much of the action was on the far right side and we were sitting on the left side, so my neck was starting to hurt from being turned.  It just seemed to me in a long skinny theater like that, they need to move the action along the whole stage so that the audience isn't forced to crane their necks in one direction for long periods.  With four plays, they could have moved the action around.  Only the last play really used the whole stage.  And we were never sure what the kitchen was all about.


In the last piece, The Bodice Ripper, two women are sitting on the porch writing their first Romance novel and they have a caped pirate like character to try the lines out with.  Truly imaginative in the story and the portrayal.   When they wrote and rewrote a fight scene, we saw it as they wrote it.  And when it went into the slow motion, I was going, "Wow."  The actor's face slowly contorted as it was hit eerily mimicking a slow motion movie shot.  

After the show

Good stuff and only $10.  Less that a movie for live theater.  No wonder it was sold out and they extended for two more weeks.  But if you want to go Saturday, be sure to call in advance and reserve a seat or buy it online. 

It's mostly street parking but be careful not to park in the towaway zones.  Read the signs
 



As acronyms go, Anchorage Community Theater's is one of the best - it spells out what they do, and do well, ACT.

Arctic Entries - Anchorage Story Telling

I'd heard about this project before, so when I got the email about Monday night's story telling I wanted to go.  But we also wanted to see the German movie playing at Bear Tooth - Soul Kitchen.  It looked like we could do both.  Soul Kitchen was ok, but nothing special.  But it got out at 7:15 pm which gave us time to boogie down to Cyrano's for the story telling.

So, here's their deal:

What’s Your Story?

In the spirit of “This American Life” and other urban storytelling events, Arctic Entries brings Alaskans to the stage to share their personal stories, funny, sad, and sweet. At each performance, 7 people each tell a 7-minute true story relating to this show’s theme, along with performances by local musicians. Let Arctic Entries warm you with great homegrown stories. Monthly performances from September-May at Cyrano’s Off-Center Playhouse in Anchorage.

Proceeds benefit the homeless.  Supported by the Storytellers’ Guild of Anchorage.

Dr. David Baines

 Stories are powerful and if you have a good story that you really believe in, it will be compelling for the audience.  And these were.

Max Rafferty

• Wayne Johnson •  how he got into fencing.  
• David Baines, who was a late replacement, • medivacing a patient out of Dutch Harbor.  
• Jeff Ellis • being a wax technician for the Australian cross country ski team at the Vancouver winter Olympics.  
• Dave Rittenberg • his last day at work at an Appleby's in New Hampshire.  
• Regan Brooks • the only time she [Update Sept 10, 2015:  I'm getting rid of the original language here at Regan's request because people are finding it on google and not actually looking at the post and in her current career, it's causing problems, because, as I said in the earlier update, it isn't what it appears. deleted, deleted, deleted] [UPDATE April 27, 2011:  Future employers - this isn't exactly what it sounds like, so if you're concerned, ask her about it in the interview]
• A psychiatrist named Kennedy was recruited from the audience to replace one of the story tellers whose back had gone out •  treating a patient with the Vines.   
• Max Rafferty •  his efforts to build morale (mostly his own it seems) at a tech company in the early 1990s. 

 As you can see, the intimate space at Cyrano's was packed - they even had people sitting on pillows in front of the front row.

The next one (from their website again):

Monday, December 13th at 7:30pm at Cyrano’s Off-Center Playhouse, $7 tickets at the door
“The Holidays” – Stories of the families we choose, the ones we don’t, the traditions we celebrate, and the festivities of the season
Storytellers TBA

This is live entertainment for less than the price of a movie.  And it was really an optional donation so people who really (that means you don't have lattes every day) can't afford it.  The proceeds go to help the homeless.

The ADN Won't Review This Play

Seafarer at Cyrano's before Act I

We only got back to Anchorage late Wednesday night, but I was getting emails already in LA inviting me to give money at receptions Thursday night, for about five or six candidates, there was a talk at UAA, and an email from Cyrano's about The Seafarer.  

"...each member of the cast nailed it. I felt intoxicated myself just from watching the booze go down. The way they tossed those lines around, with that Irish version of the English language, was the best, most realistic conversational exchange I've ever seen in a play (didn't seem like I was watching a 'play')." -- Kerry Feldman

"The Seafarers is FANTASTIC. I'm super impressed with the acting. Congrats on a great show." -- Scott Schofield  [Note:  Everything else calls it The Seafarer.]

Sandy Harper, Cyrano Producing Artistic Director, post show

I've known Kerry for a long, long time at UAA, and I've met Scott a few times now at Out North and if they both gave such strong recommendations, I had better pay attention.  ( I didn't realize until I read the program Thursday night, that Kerry is a member of the Cyrano's Theatre Company and one of Scott's 'sustaining volunteers' at Out North was one of the actors in Seafarer.) 

I called to see if there were still seats left for tonight's show and there were.  

I'm not a fan of literature that focuses on dysfunctional alcoholics. (Are there functional alcoholics?)   It's painful to watch and it's not a world with which I identify.  But  these works take me into a world I don't know and can learn from.  If they're done well.  It took me a while to get over my bias, but as things progressed, the play had a lot more to say than I was expecting. 

Dick Reichman as Richard Harkin (after the show)

It turned out to be outstanding - five male parts, all with Irish accents - and the playwright, Conor McPherson is hailed in the program as "the best new playwright of his generation."  Of course, I had to check that.  Wikipedia says, "He is considered one of the best contemporary Irish playwrights."   The LA Times review of his recent movie "Eclipse" was very positive.





And I feel a responsibility to let Anchorage folks know this is really good theater and you have just Friday and Saturday evenings at 7pm and Sunday afternoon at 3pm to see it. I asked Sandy if there were tickets left and she said yes.  But tonight's show was pretty close to full, so I'd recommend you get tickets ahead.  Cyrano's is downtown at 413 D St.

Why a responsibility?  The play's program says:

So, here I am online telling Anchorage and beyond. 

You aren't allowed to take pictures during the performance so the ones here were taken before the play started - at the beginning and during the intermission - and after it was over.  So the actors I caught were out of costume.  Except Sharky's band aid which Rodney Lamb forgot to take off. 

The Guardian wrote about McPherson and this play:

Mark Stoneburner as Nicky Giblin (post play)

There's a distinctive sound Conor McPherson makes when he describes how he writes plays: a sort of viscous, splurting noise, like something gooey landing, splat, on a table. Plays come "very much from the unconscious for me", he says. "I describe it as coming from the body and your brain is catching up." It starts when an image arrives unprompted in his head; slowly the people it contains start to move and talk, then splurt: there they are on the page.

It's not an explanation that quite does justice to the poetry and magic of his work. Ever since The Weir opened in London in 1997, when he was just 25, McPherson has held audiences and critics spellbound with his tales of lost souls and troubled lives. Often, the trouble he depicts reflects his own: although he says he never sets out to write about his own experience, you can trace the path of his life in the stories of alcohol abuse, broken relationships, death and disappointed hope he depicts.

Rodney Lamb as Sharky (post play)

Next week he makes his debut at the National Theatre with The Seafarer, a fable about two brothers - one an incorrigible drunk, the other newly, tentatively sober - playing host to the devil on Christmas Eve. McPherson is the first to admit: "I'm all the characters in the play" - perhaps most especially the disappointed demon, Lockheart [all the other sources leave out the 'e'], who envies the men among whom he moves. McPherson wrote the play in fewer than eight months; it could be his most moving, accomplished work yet. .  .

 By the way, Wikipedia says the play's name comes from an old poem by that name.

The Seafarer is an Old English poem recorded in the Exeter Book, one of the four surviving manuscripts of Old English poetry. It contains 124 lines and has been commonly referred to as an elegy, a poem that mourns a loss, or has the more general meaning of a simply sorrowful piece of writing. . .

It is told from the point of view of an old seafarer, who is reminiscing and evaluating his life as he has lived it. In lines 1–33a, the seafarer describes the desolate hardships of life on the wintry sea. He describes the anxious feelings, cold-wetness, and solitude of the sea voyage in contrast to life on land where men are surrounded by kinsmen, free from dangers, and full on food and wine. . .  [There's more at Wikipedia The Seafarer.]

Just before Act II

 

 I probably better mention that Brian Saylor did the set design.  I worked with him at UAA  too.   

Out North Previews Their 2010-1011 Season

Here's another catchup post.  This was the Sept. 16, 2010 Season Preview at Out North Theater.  They are housed in the old Grandview Gardens Library building.  The evening began with a silent auction in the art gallery.  The exhibit was touchable art.

This bowl even has braille!

People were milling around the auction items, keeping an eye out for other bidders marking up the bid. 


















Republican House candidate from Spenard, Thomas Higgins was there. 

One of the auction items was this collection of Sarah Palin pins. 

Then the event began.  Out North has brought a lot of - I'm struggling here for the right adjective, like edgy, but that isn't enough cause it is generally provocative in a very substantive way raising important issues other venues aren't willing to touch - performances.  After tumultuous beginnings, Out North has managed after 25 years to become established as an important part of the Anchorage arts and theater scene without losing its daring.  Gene and Jay should be pleased that their baby is in good hands and growing up well now that the parents have left home. 

I was  impressed with the line up of coming events as well as how it was all presented.  It began with local Hmong kids dancing and playing the khaen - a wind instrument I came to appreciate while living in rural Thailand long ago.  But at first it had the same noise quotient as bagpipes have.  And there was a good deal of genuine and funny clowning around.  Just about at the end of the event, Scott pointed out that what he was reading his notes from was an Out North I Pad.


Here's a bit I caught on video - unfortunately it only includes Scott Schofield, the new Executive Artistic Director whose abundant energy and enthusiasm and imagination suggest an exciting year.  Two types of events he mentioned were particularly intriguing to me.  He's scheduling some new, even unfinished films and plays, that will include Skype linkups with the directors and playwrights so the audience can give them feedback.  All this technology allows Anchorage to be both far away and right in the middle of things.  

What Makes Music Good? Wu Man and Friends in Anchorage

Wednesday night at Out North was like being in an avant garde little theater in Berlin.  And yet we were here in backwater Anchorage listening to an exciting concert at OutNorth.  Where can you hear music composed by two Koreans, a German, a Chinese, and a Japanese for pipa, cauyaq, gayageum, saxophone, trombone, and marimba played by musicians from China, Bethel, Anchorage,  Juneau, and Canada via Fairbanks?  Not just musicians, but good ones, including an international star who recently worked with Yo Yo Ma. 

Wu Man is one of the most acclaimed pipa player in the world.  The Wikipedia entry on pipa says this about Wu Man:

Prominent students of Lin Shicheng include Liu Guilian (刘桂莲, b. 1961), Wu Man (吴蛮, b. 1963) and Gao Hong (高虹, b. 1964). Wu, who is probably the best known pipa player internationally, received the first-ever master's degree in pipa and won China's first National Academic Competition for Chinese Instruments. She lives in San Diego, California and works extensively with Chinese, cross-cultural, new music, and jazz groups. [emphasis added]

Here's Juneau musician (how little that conveys of her bio in the program)  Jocelyn Clark introducing a piece by German musician Karola Obermüller.  She warned the audience not to use normal music criteria, in fact, to just attend to the sounds in space.  Clark played the gayageum which the program describes as a Korean zither.



There were sounds from the marimba, then short breaks before other instruments threw out some sounds.  Now I happen to enjoy music that doesn't follow our standard conceptions of music, but I did begin to ask myself, how does one determine whether this is 'good?'  Later I asked several of the music professors there variations of this question - is there a difference that you could notice between a piece like this and something someone like me with almost no formal musical knowledge could produce in Garageband?   One said, "Maybe, maybe not."
Another responded, "How do you know if food is good?"

[Photo from left:  Wu Man holding the pipa, Jocelyn Clark, Morris Palter (marimba and other percussion), Stephen Blanchett (voice and cauyaq -Yupik frame drum), Richard Zelinsky (Sax), Christopher Sweeney (trombone).]

[Wu Man showing someone the music after the concert]



Does it even make sense to talk about good here?  Some of these pieces seemed to be more experiments in sound and silence which deliberately attempted to do things that were beyond the normal rules musicians might follow.  Whether the intent was to see what they could get by violating such rules or these pieces were in them and they simply had to write them even if they didn't follow standard musical expectations or something in between, I don't know.  I didn't think of that question until later.

One form of good, as one of the music professors suggested, would simply be whether the musicians actually played what the composer had written. And that was another question I'd had while listening to The Oort Cloud because the composer was in the audience.  You can see Yoriko Hase Kojima introducing the piece in the second photo above. Since she was there, I wanted to ask her if there were any points where she went, "Oh no, they missed that"?

And I got the chance to do that at the reception afterward.  Here she is talking with Canadian born percussionist and UAF music professor Morris Palter. 

 She smiled at my question and said, no, they did it very well and she was very pleased with the performance.  She had flown in from Tokyo and was headed back the next day.

But that begs the question of whether the piece itself is 'good.'  This music forces one to confront the socially constructed nature of good.  How much is good simply related to what we are used to?  Asian music such as Chinese opera isn't something that most Westerners can appreciate on first hearing it.  What if we had heard this sort of music all our lives?  It would sound totally normal.  One professor said he'd need to listen to it several times to start getting a sense of it. 

Alaska composer Phil Munger was one of the people who got to sit behind the performers close enough to watch the saxophonist's music.  Here he is talking to Morris Palter. 

[Update July 4:  Phil follows up on this post and addresses these questions about good and bad music in a long post at his blog.]

[Trombonist and UAA music professor Chrisopher Sweeney talking after the performance.  Anchorage saxophonist Richard Zelinsky is behind him.]

I need to say that a number of the pieces were more traditional music - particularly Chinese classical music for pipa, such as the second Youtube of Wu Man from wumusicpipa below.  Wednesday night's concert was being recorded and I hadn't asked permission beforehand to record any video so I have nothing from the concert. 


The concert was a collaboration of a number of organizations.  It's a little hard to put them all together from the program, but CrossSound in Juneau was one and OutNorth here in Anchorage was another. [Update: Actually there was a thank you page in the program but I missed it.]  On the right is Scott Schofield, Out North's new artistic director after the performance.  Preparation for the performance began just as he arrived at OutNorth.  His introduction Wednesday was a pleasure to listen to.  His words were good, his delivery fluent, and he effortlessly rotated to acknowledge the audience members sitting behind him on the stage.  (See, there are some things I feel have some basis for evaluating.)  We're lucky to have him here and I look forward to continuing great nights like Wednesday at OutNorth. 


This YouTube I found of Wu Man playing with the Kronos Quartet gives a bit of the sense of what I'm talking about in terms of the more experimental music we heard, though this sounds closer to more traditional music than a couple pieces Wednesday.









 I also found one that gives a sense of Wu Man playing a traditional Chinese piece.