Archive: October, 2012
In their song Human, The Killers ask “Are we human, or are we dancers?” The singer says his sign is vital, his hands are cold. On Thursday evening at Christ Church Neighborhood House, Meredith Rainey and Marcel Williams Foster put that question to the test in Carbon Dance Theatre’s Science Per Forms. It’s a wonderful title for a piece that explores humanity’s contest between body and machine and the question of which drives which.
The 45-minute work had multiple collaborators: Nine science, technology, architecture and design wonks from Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania associated with IK Studio and the Hactory (yes, a haven for hackers,) and six dancers under the guiding light of Foster and Rainey.
The academics created the machina sans Deus, a table-shaped creature suspended so its four “legs” (manipulated by computer commands) could bend its “knees” inwards with spider-like efficiency.
Anna Noble is the interlocutor between the technology and the dancers and the unrelenting master of both. She wears “Accelerometer Devices” on her wrists, airplaning her arms so that each wrist commands a different-colored cube projected on the back screen. They stretch, dissolve, and spring back, much in the way a body might, or like dancer Annie Wilson who opened the work lying on the floor, contorting herself in twists and twitches that presaged the movement.
By Wendy Rosenfield
FOR THE INQUIRER
Philadelphia Theatre Company’s world premiere musical Stars of David, based on Abigail Pogrebin’s collection of interviews, asks a whole lot of famous people a single question: How do you feel about being Jewish? The net result of those answers is a survey of a dozen public figures whose attitudes toward Judaism range from ambivalence to outright chauvinism.
This is less a celebration of being Jewish in America than a window onto a splintered minority — many of whom, despite being defined by religion, find their religion’s teachings largely irrelevant, and identify with being Jewish mostly through empty rituals and food. In the staged version of Pogrebin’s work (as opposed to its printed entity), nearly everything of historical consequence in Jewish life seems to have disappeared. There’s no mention of the Holocaust and only passing reference made to immigration or Israel. Even the breast cancer gene gets shut out. This can’t be good for the Jews.
By Toby Zinman
For the Inquirer
Like most Concept Art, The Exit Interview is better as a concept than as art. Written by William Missouri Downs, and directed by Seth Rozin, the play is a sometimes entertaining sometimes tedious satire about God and the world. Or about faith and atheism. Or about science and theology. Or about the commercialization of art, the crassness of contemporary news media, the fecklessness of academia, the objectification of women, the horrors of gun violence or, alternatively, the horrors of oboe obsession, or….Well, you get the idea: too much. Way too much topic, way too little play.
The plot premise is the “exit interview” of a fired college professor, one Dick (“I prefer Richard”—well, he would, wouldn’t he?) Fig (the estimable Dan Hodge). Conducting the interview is a shallow human resources type (the always fine Cheryl Williams) who believes she can prove God loves her by making a collage of her wished-for life. A masked gunman appears, terrorizing the campus, motives unknown.
By Howard Shapiro
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Monday night signaled a turning point for Philadelphia's ever-expanding theater community in a region with 50-plus professional stage companies, almost 1,000 members of the professional Actors' Equity union, more new theater spaces under construction, plus audiences with seemingly insatiable appetites for live stage work.
And Tuesday afternoon will mark a major step down a new road for that community.
By Toby Zinman
For the Inquirer
Religion is onstage everywhere lately: New Jerusalem by David Ives at Lantern, Angels in America by Tony Kushner at the Wilma, A Bright New Boise by Sam Hunter at Simpatico, Grace by Craig Wright in New York, and opening soon, the new musical, Stars of David, based on Abigail Pogrobin’s book at Philadelphia Theatre Company.
By Howard Shapiro
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
The prolific Philadelphia playwright Bruce Graham must be leading a charmed life. In a matter of months, The Outgoing Tide, his funny and searing exploration of dementia and its effect on a family, has been given not one but two terrific productions here.
The first was in Center City in the spring, at Philadelphia Theatre Company. The second now plays in Wilmington, where Delaware Theatre Company takes The Outgoing Tide — with its perfect narrative arc, smooth writing, and genuine tone — and runs with it in a production directed by Broadway producer Bud Martin, in his first season as artistic director in Wilmington. He had been running Act II Playhouse in Ambler.
Martin assembles a formidable cast: Peter Strauss (TV’s Rich Man, Poor Man and others) as Gunner, the salt-of-the-earth retired owner of a Philly trucking firm, who lives down the Shore with his wife, played by Michael Learned (The Waltons, Nurse). Ian Lithgow (a recurring role in 3rd Rock From the Sun) portrays their adult son, in the middle of his own divorce problems while he’s being confronted with those of his parents.
By Howard Shapiro
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Mamma mia! Ladies, wazza-matta you? Ufff! Is this any way to behave in the kitchen? That flour’s not for throwing. That ladle’s not for bashing. And ... yikes! ... put down th ose guns!
Hey, waidaminit! Are you really ladies, ladies? Let alone sisters? I don’t think so. It looks like the frumpy one who calls herself Delphine is a guy named Jay Falzone, and the one called Carmela who thinks she’s super sexy, she’s really Stephen Smith.
Ooops, I hope I haven’t given anything away.
By Jim Rutter
FOR THE INQUIRER
On the speaking circuit of 19th-century America, no one commanded greater audiences than Mark Twain. Just as Charles Dickens mastered the format across the pond in England, the author of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer crisscrossed the country, reading his books to sold-out crowds.
Wendy Bable’s Mark Twain: Sacred Cows Make the Best Hamburgers builds on this historical fact. She set her play in 1904, the self-proclaimed last lecture of Twain first annual final farewell tour. This introduction sets the tone for the evening: a bit whimsical, with a hint of Twain’s sardonic, bubble-bursting humor. People’s Light and Theatre Company’s production offers a bit of the same: an enjoyable and educational means to expose kids (nine and up, at least) to both reading and live performance.
By Jim Rutter
FOR THE INQUIRER
Women in Shakespeare’s day weren’t allowed to perform on stage. In Quintessence’s production of the Bard’s Othello, director Alexander Burns won’t let them play either.
At first glance, it seems an odd choice. The central plot revolves around Iago (Josh Carpenter), an ensign passed over for promotion by his capricious Moorish general Othello (Khris Davis) in favor of pretty-boy academic Cassio (Daniel Fredrick). Othello’s marriage to the fair Desdemona (an excellent Ross Bennett Hurwitz) adds race-baiting and sexual jealousy to this triangular conflict.
By Toby Zinman
For the Inquirer
Seventy scenes. Three hundred lighting cues. Ninety minutes. Four terrific actors.
An offstage voice murmurs: “Scene One: Go” and Jeffrey M. Jones’ Seventy Scenes of Halloween begins. It will continue with seemingly randomly numbered scenes (“Fifty-four: go,” Thirty-six: go”) to scare and amuse us. Director Aaron Oster has arranged this fragmented plot so cleverly that while we’re busy trying to piece the story together, we discover it doesn’t matter nearly as much as it usually does. There are many tricks and many treats in this nifty production by Luna Theater.
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.
