Archive: September, 2012
By Howard Shapiro
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Headlong Dance Theater’s This Town Is a Mystery is as much — and maybe more — an experiment in communmity building as it is an artistic pursuit. It’s a Live Arts part of the Live Arts/Philly Fringe, running every night during the festival, and each night is different.
That’s partly because the Headlong piece is really four pieces in four separate places, plus dinner, and includes the audience in a basic way: We bring the food. Since spring, Headlong has been making dance/theater pieces with four Philadelphia families, each a separate work of about a half hour. Families perform each night perform in their homes. Each ticketholder is assigned a family’s performance, and must bring a covered dish of food for a potluck after-performance dinner.
As an unusual evening of community building, it works – at least the performance I saw did. I went to the Aryadarei home deep in South Philadelphia, where Zahed and Shannon and their three children — Sulaimon, 12; Sydney, 10, and Shaheen, 7 — performed little dances interspersed with family tales.
When I chose to see this I couldn’t guess what it might be about, but its title and location down by the river recalled to mind the film Querelle with Jeanne Moreau as the brothel’s madame singing “Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves.” I wasn’t far off. The Poetry Brothelᵀᴹ, a registered trademark of The Poetry Society of New York, has branches in Barcelona, Chicago, New Orleans, and New York and made its Philadelphia debut tonight in Grasso’s Magic Theatre. It’s a darkly pseudo-Victorian space with a bar, a ticket booth and a lobby that makes a perfect lounge where you can size up the lovely Poetry Whores and purchase $5 tokens to have them give you a private reading of their poetry. Its revue-like format also allows for suggestive songs by the Femme-Mynistiques, Geri Vanore, Alexa Gold, and Gabrielle de Burke -- songstresses of high-repute. Rachel Fogletto recounted sexual escapades in Safe Sex, and so did Monica Day, but I can’t give the title of her monologue here. During intermissions called Open Brothels, I gave my first token up to a pair of redhead twins who took turns with me, reading alternate lines of the same poem. Later, for two tokens, I engaged a set of triplets who knelt at my feet adoringly and read in a similar fashion, while shyly tucking little love notes into my handbag and pockets. Both South Philly Lou (Lynn Hoffman) and Doctore Bluez (Carol Moog) gave me freebies. I fled into the night with my clothes still on.
$25 Grasso’s Magic Theatre 103 Callowhill St. Sept. 15 7 and 10 p.m. Sept. 20 8p.m.
By Howard Shapiro
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
I now write in defense of beautifully staged, meticulously lighted, handsomely dressed, genuinely acted and shrewdly contrived soppiness. I make no apologies.
You will either detest the new musical Love Story, which has all of that and more at the Walnut Street Theatre, or you’ll give yourself over to stunning manipulation. You may regret it afterward — you’ve been played like a soulful cello by a cast full of Yo Yo Mas — but while you’re being sucked in you’ll be fully in the moment.
That’s precisely what happened to me. In retrospect, it happened against all odds, in a show that has so many scenes with so much kissing, I wonder about the production’s ChapStick bill; that is a stretch at 100 intermissionless minutes; that offers stereotyped characters cut from cheap cardboard; that — like the book it came from — is a jarring mixture of glib repartee, lovey mush and, finally, overwhelming sadness.
Just when I thought I knew Strindberg, the great modernist author of Miss Julie and The Father, Philadelphia Artists’ Collective gives us a revelatory production of his rarely performed Creditors; Charlotte Northeast’s directorial debut is nothing short of dazzling. Of course, she does have a remarkable trio of fine actors to work with.
This riveting old-fashioned drama is built on Strindberg’s profound belief that the battle of the sexes is a war to the death. It begins with two men talking: Adolph (Dan Hodge) is ill and desperate: a painter who has lost faith in painting, he has been emasculated by his novelist wife, Tekla (Krista Apple), and his marriage is foundering, mired in suspicion and jealousy and distorted by power struggles. Gustav (Damon Bonetti), a mysterious smooth talker, manipulates the conversation, advising Adolph to assert himself and “husband your masculinity.”
The performances are breathtakingly nuanced, sculpted with subtlety and passion -- Hodge and Apple and Bonetti are absolutely embedded in their roles. And the venue is perfect; the upstairs reading room of the Franklin Inn Club suggests the past, a world of books and grandfather clocks and ascots and long skirts, where dangerous obsessions roil under a civilized surface.
It's a funny thing about Charlotte Ford's Live Arts Festival show, Bang: about half the men I've encountered who saw it liked it, while every single one of the women to whom I've spoken about it really, really liked it. However, the other half of those men called it variously "pointless," "silly," "gimmicky," "stupid" and "lazy."
It's no big news that an audience sometimes disagrees on the success of a show, but the gender split here is pretty striking. For my part, I'm 100% on board with Toby Zinman's review, right down to feeling that the final bit undermines Ford's triumphant naked strut through Old City.
Maybe women have an intrinsic understanding of the maneuvers behind Etzold's, Ford's and Sanford's clown personae that escapes a lot of men. And plenty of men mistake the personae women adopt when they know they're being watched for their true identity. After all, men fall in love with strippers and hookers all the time. Perhaps there's a pitch at which women operate that's just outside the hearing of some men; where they watch Bang and see a bunch of nonsense, we see tropes being turned inside out.
Part of it may also be that the trio explores just a bit about what it means to live in a woman's body, to live up to the culture's exhibitionistic standards when, in fact, you jiggle, you're awkward, you don't feel like it. The women remove their feminine mystique along with their clothes and make themselves ridiculous. I guess, if you take your sex seriously, or prefer women and their desires to be the butt of jokes rather than men and theirs, that makes some people mad.
By Howard Shapiro
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
You enter into a series of about a half-dozen nearly empty rooms where the sound bounces freely. In one of them, five actors - two men and three women - stand silent. They are dirtily marred and splattered with paints so that they look as if they have never understood the fine points of a bath. There are no seats here. You will take this journey with them, from room to room.
But first, a few words. Like: "You are my other, and I love and hate you at the same time" and "the hurt is the heart of everything," spoken while the ensemble assumes many poses. You are at … the beginning of the world? You learn that a "big movement" made the beasts and the beasts made the eels and the eels made electricity and everything exists at some core. A creation story.
And you are going far back into it, for the actors stop speaking in anything but groans and grunts and occasional belches, as if an acting teacher had asked for something very primal or stunningly constipated. They do this while slithering along the dirty floors on their bellies, or plodding on all fours or threatening each other or slowly, methodically carrying one another off though the surrounding audience to different rooms for more grunting.
By Howard Shapiro
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
You enter into a series of about a half-dozen nearly empty rooms where the sound bounces freely. In one of them, five actors -- two men and three women -- stand silent. They are dirty and splattered with paints; they look as if they have never understood the fine points of a bath. There are no seats here. You will take this journey with them, from room to room.
But first, a few words. Like: "You are my other, and I love and hate you at the same time" and "the hurt is the heart of everything," spoken while the ensemble assumes many poses. You are at … the beginning of the world? You learn that a "big movement" made the beasts and the beasts made the eels and the eels made electricity and everything exists at some core. A creation story.
And you are going far back into it, for the actors stop speaking in anything but groans and grunts and occasional belches, as if an acting teacher had asked for something very primal or stunningly constipated. They do this while slithering along the dirty floors on their bellies, or plodding on all fours or threatening each other or slowly, methodically carrying one another off though the surrounding audience to different rooms for more grunting.
By Howard Shapiro
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
You enter into a series of about a half-dozen nearly empty rooms where the sound bounces freely. In one of them, five actors - two men and three women - stand silent. They are dirtily marred and splattered with paints so that they look as if they have never understood the fine points of a bath. There are no seats here. You will take this journey with them, from room to room.
But first, a few words. Like: "You are my other, and I love and hate you at the same time" and "the hurt is the heart of everything," spoken while the ensemble assumes many poses. You are at … the beginning of the world? You learn that a "big movement" made the beasts and the beasts made the eels and the eels made electricity and everything exists at some core. A creation story.
And you are going far back into it, for the actors stop speaking in anything but groans and grunts and occasional belches, as if an acting teacher had asked for something very primal or stunningly constipated. They do this while slithering along the dirty floors on their bellies, or plodding on all fours or threatening each other or slowly, methodically carrying one another off though the surrounding audience to different rooms for more grunting.
The new production from New Paradise Laboratories, called 27, begins and ends in huge shots of haze expelled onto the stage. And it's pretty much haze all through, even without the industrial-strength mist maker.
But then, 27 is about death and some sort of purgatory -- and although things aren't quite as gruesome as they are in the middle part of Dante's The Divine Comedy, when souls are stuck in an endless world of waiting, it's just as unsettling. The show takes its title from the deaths of singers Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix and Amy Winehouse, who all died at age 27.
There's not much to do when you're a dead spirit still full of youth, and 75 minutes of it surely makes that point inside a set of bare walls, a lighted star with a huge hole in it, windows that lead the dead back into the room as they are pushed by a storm always brewing in the great beyond (a cool stage effect). There's a lot of flotsam around the room. Some of it is in the form of the six actors, who don't stay still for long. To musical background provided by one of them, guitarist Alec MacLaughlin. they have their own movements, which they perform again and again.
Their smacks on tables and leaps onto walls, plodding walks and crawls and sudden wildness are the reasons to see 27, which has a plot concerning a newcomer to death but is mostly form with little content. New Paradise's artistic director, Whit MacLaughlin, is an innovator in multi-media theater, but here he depends on good old sound, light and a sort of aching physicality to get across the feeling of premature death and wasted opportunity.
It was a darned shame RUB had to be moved from South Broad Street’s recently defunct Dolphin Tavern – where (full disclosure) I lasted two nights as a go-go dancer in 1969 before telling my agent not to send me there again – too skuzzy even then. But with only two days to load in, Gunnar Montana (Gunnar Clark in his real-life JUNK persona) did his darnedest to funk-up the Latvian Club’s side-room. Black spray-painted street detritus made for an interesting anti-Zagarian wall mosaic, but the narrow room’s low ceiling cramped the audience. The scaffolding and apparatus -- a six-foot tall furry penis on four stabilizing metal stands, a gurney, and a pink heart for aerial work were too big for the tiny space. I’m sure all this cramped the dancers’ style, though they gamely made the best of it.
Montana and his RUB collaborator Jasmine Zieroff also choreograph for the gentlemen’s club Delilah’s -- where (full disclosure) I was a judge three years’ running for the National Exotic Dancer of the Year Contest. They conceived of their four dancers as “post-apocalyptic android sex bots.”
In partial dis-clothesure, the brave beauties, Fatima Kargbo, Courtney Lapresi, Maureen Mo Lynch, and Ann Marie Gover were forced to dance so close to the audience, that by the end of the show we could see the Day-Glo paint that passed for pasties was cracking up. And often so nearly did they. Was Gover tangoing or tangling with the penis as it rebounded dangerously in her face? All four poured baby oil over each other and took to writhing on the floor in the oleaginous ending. I had a front row seat and was just glad they hadn’t chosen a jello-fight. They took a bruising just trying to walk off.
So did this show further the cause of feminism? Did it make you think of gender? Hell no, that’s why they call it the Fringe.
Toby Zinman's night job since 2006 is theater critic for the Inquirer. She also is a contributing writer for Variety and American Theatre magazine. Her day job: Prize-winning prof at UArts, author of four books about four playwrights (Rabe, McNally, Miller, Albee), and doer of scholarly deeds (winner of five NEH grants, Fulbright lecturer at Tel Aviv University, visiting professor in China). Her 'weekend' job as a travel writer provides adventure: dogsledding in the Yukon, ziplining in Belize, walking coast-to-coast across England, and cowboying in the Australian Outback.
Wendy Rosenfield has written freelance features and theater reviews for The Inquirer since 2006. She was theater critic for the Philadelphia Weekly from 1995 to 2001, after which she enjoyed a five-year baby-raising sabbatical. She serves on the board of the American Theatre Critics Association, was a participant in the Bennington Writer's Workshop, a 2008 NEA/USC Fellow in Theater and Musical Theater, and twice was guest critic for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II National Critics Institute. She received her B.A. from Bennington College and her M.L.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. She also is a fiction writer, was proofreader to a swami, publications editor for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and spends all her free time working out and driving people places. Follow her on Twitter @WendyRosenfield.
Jim Rutter has reviewed theater for The Inquirer since September, 2011. Since 2006, he covered dance, theater and opera for the Broad Street Review, and has also written for many suburban newspapers, including The Main Line Times. In 2009, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a Fellowship in Arts Journalism. Thames & Hudson released his updated and revised version of Ballet and Modern Dance in June, 2012. From 1998 to 2005, he taught philosophy and logic at Drexel, and then Widener University. He also coaches Olympic Weightlifting for Liberty Barbell, and has competed at the national level in that sport since 2001.
Merilyn Jackson regularly writes on dance for The Inquirer and other publications. She specializes in the arts, literature, food, travel, and Eastern European culture and politics. In 2001, she was dance critic in residence at the Festival of Contemporary Dance in Bytom, Poland; in 2005, she received an NEA Critics’ Fellowship to Duke University’s Institute for Dance Criticism. She likes to say that dance was her first love but that when she discovered writing she began to cheat on dance. Now that she writes about dance, she’s made an honest woman of herself, although she also writes poetry.
