no pictures, please.

no pictures, please.
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Queuing up for Ljova and the Kontraband at
Chautauqua, where the ushers really do usher
you to your seat and the guy behind me just said:
"And Isabelle Fletcher? She ripped tears right
from my head."

Regrettably, I don't know who Isabelle Fletcher is.

Posting by cameraphone.

Update: Have you heard these guys? They're remarkable and the show was a delight.

and go we know not where

Shakespeare is hard. Every time I sit down to see some Shakespeare I dread the possibility of poor execution. Will this director, these players, leave me wondering what they’re saying? Feeling like a kneaded clod for not comprehending the four century old metaphors?

Which is why, when Shakespeare is done right, there is gratitude. A gratefulness that underscores and complements the full emotional range that the Bard unfurls with his brilliant book.

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s production of Measure for Measure made me glad like that.

I have no recollection of Measure for Measure before last night. I know I read it once. I slogged through most of the Riverside Shakespeare as an undergrad; even the history plays. But I can’t recall experiencing the oppressive weight and rage invoked by Antonio’s benightedness or the sweet relief of mercy measured out that flooded me last night. Nor do I recall being filled with grief and apprehension on hearing Claudio explain why death is a fearful thing.

I may have dismissed the play when I read it long ago because of its quaint mores -- the whole of the action hinges on sexual transgressions that are no longer life or death concerns. We do not execute men for impregnating women out of marriage; we file complaints when men in power request sordid sexual favors in exchange for political ones or we wait and call TMZ when they renege on their side of the deal.

The director Scott Williams doesn’t allow these old-world concerns to trip us up; they instead serve the core action of the play and provide just the tension required to keep the volley alive; just the strain needed to peel back the seeming and reveal the being. Nor does the director marry off all our players easily at the end -- his handling of the final scene between the Duke and Isabella is one of the moments of this production that makes it peer to London and New York productions -- Rupert Goold’s Macbeth and Sam Mendes' As You Like It come to mind.

Only the stagecraft was second rate and distracted from the whole; as did the decision to seat several rows of audience on the stage. Better that they lose the snowy soap flakes, give up a few ticket sales, and tuck away whatever that monstrous unused tubing was that floated over the stage like it was waiting for the Blue Man Group to come charging out and toss out the rain capes.

All the better not to distract from the central trinity of players in this production, all of whom answer to the strength that Shakespeare demands: Robert Sicular as the Duke, Chip Persons as Angelo, Lenne Klingaman as Isabella.

Klingaman as Isabella is especially remarkable. It would be easy to play a nun as pious and celestial, cold and untouchable; but the tiny Klingaman is rooted and real with the strength of an oak, a woman who preserves her power without apology and acts through it to make a difference for others without sacrificing herself. Antonio’s transgressions make perfect sense in the magnetic pull of her presence; as does the Duke’s sweet hopes to capture and own her.

That Williams saw an opportunity in the final scene to turn easy assumptions inside out and ensure that Isabella remains true to herself and that same strength that bathes her world with mercy and grace -- here is where the audience is changed and amazed.

And grateful.

getting's another

The thing that set OK Go apart from their perfectly serviceable opening acts last night at the Metro (The Booze and Earl Greyhound); that sets them apart from any live performance I’ve seen recently, is that these guys know how to play.

I don’t mean instrumentation, although they have that down -- I haven’t yet met an OK Go song I didn’t like -- I mean they know how to PLAY.

Like puppies.

You’ve seen the treadmill video, and the Rube Goldberg contraption that recently went viral. Both have that something that goes on when they take the stage. There were no treadmills last night, no dominoes or paint guns (although the confetti blaster drove the crowd nuts), but that same spirt of fun turned everything they touched to gold.

The intimacy of the space of the Metro made a difference of course; we landed prime balcony seats, so we could be geezers and sit on our bums while the rest of the crowd crushed in tight on the floor. Their playing to a home town crowd also contributed -- OK Go gave their first CD release party at the Metro, and opened for folks like OMD on the same stage -- and they seemed happy to be home in Chicago. But it was more than that.

They were having fun, and they let us in on it. Like the best kind of far away friend who shows up for a weekend and fills the house with laughter and long nights and all kinds of catching up. Or that time when you were 10 and you spent whole summer afternoons choreographing dance routines with your big sister until you achieved perfect synchronicity.

They did that thing all of us should be doing every day when we get busy with our work, whatever work it is that makes it all matter. They did that thing Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi calls flow.

Jesters, artists, seers. They remind us.

Thanks, guys. Needed that.


OK Go's Facebook snapshot from the Metro, Chicago
Saturday 17 April 2010

p.s. OK Go is on tour, OK? Go!

the long red road

I subscribed to the current season at the Goodman because it promised the premiere of The Long Red Road, directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman.

I’m a Hoffman fan. Missing his Iago was one of the bigger disappointments of the last theatre season. I patiently endured Synecdoche, New York for Hoffman (and for Charlie Kaufman) because he gave up such a brilliant performance in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Hoffman’s performance in Charlie Wilson’s War drew solid lines around the cartoons of Tom Hanks’ and Julia Roberts’ performances. His Capote? Was Capote.

Hoffman’s directing was why I showed up yesterday at the matinee performance, but soon I found myself curled in the same aversive cringe that overcame me when I saw him play his over-amped meteorologist in Twister.

As a simple assemblage of parts, the play was a success. The stagecraft was sublime, disparate lives scattered across Western states somehow intertwined through the shared bits and pieces of any household: The front door. A bathroom.

The disappointment? A play that never lulled long enough in its steady rage -- fueled disparately by either alcohol or resentment -- to reveal the tender underbelly of any of our players; to give us a point of empathy from which to enlist in the brutality of a ride that ends in violation and death and conflagration.

Or as Mr. Hoo stated as we made our way out of the theater: “Sadly, I couldn’t bring myself to give a sh*t about any of those f*ckers.”

True: Several audience members walked out in the first act, one loudly intoning “Garbage. This is garbage.” Many more never made it back after intermission.

I held on because I wanted to believe something more would unfold to make me care about these characters; to redeem them. In the end, just as our blonde saviour Annie learns through her fruitless love for a tired and dying alcoholic, there was no change, there was no transformation, all remained as it was from the beginning, driving down to its inevitable end, as if foretold in the first few scenes.

Perhaps it was just this inevitability that Mr. Hoffman was striving for, like the sodden, shaky dullness of the hangover that certainly follows the binge. Maybe he achieved his directive after all.

full of wise saws and modern instances

When it comes to As You Like It I usually don’t. As a rule, Shakespeare’s comedies leave me cold. I like my Bard with a little Tybalt in it; a Cordelia and her mad daddy at odds and then reconciled; or a couple of star-crossed lovers dead in a heap on the cold stone floor, the whole neighborhood full of regret.

Sam Mendes’ direction of As You Like It at BAM’s Harvey Theater changed my mind -- not in a pure binary way, but in one of those subtle shifts of perception that dissolves intolerance and makes the world richer and more inclusive for it.

Shakespeare’s comedies are now something more subtle and rich and real than they were before.

The set design is richly cinematic, with a luminous quality that one might expect from the director of American Beauty, but most appreciable was the transformation of the story itself from the ways I’ve experienced it in previous productions (in less capable hands).

Mendes has uncovered something true about Shakespeare’s play that I never knew.

Gone is the madcap screwball tone and laughable gender confusions. Instead:

• The gravity that binds us to those we care for occupied the stage like an unnamed actor, swinging the players into their orbits as gravity influences planets around a single star in unique but concomitant obliques.



• Twinning was everywhere and beautifully explicated in ways far more psychologically revealing than Rosalind could convey by simply donning drag. Power and class are flip flopped; gender is bent. When we move from the court of the usurping Duke to the winter woods of his expulsed brother we see the treacherous Duke (whom we’ve come to know as erratic and violent -- fearful of maintaining his shaky status) step, with his retinue, to the hard wood wall that backs the stage.[1] In the dim light the wall rises to reveal the wild and the wood behind them, and they step out of their court finery into weather ravaged rags. Before our eyes they become the court in exile. Before our eyes we see the wheel of Fortune spin and end on her head.



• We see the play’s hallmark gender confusion played out not as buffoonery but as a part and parcel slice of humanity, where human sexuality is more subtle than a pure pipefitting of parts, and all players are ultimately more nuanced than they seem.

Where the production is weak:

• There’s a lovely strain of melancholy that moves through the play and influences its pacing. This works beautifully until the end, where it’s forced upon the reconciliation scene where parties are wed and the father and daughter are reunited. We need a little more madcap pacing here to make it play right; a few more exuberant reunion embraces, and we need them sooner than they were received.



• Somewhere in the mix, too, we lose sight of why Rosalind remains disguised in the forest. She’s encountered her father, we learn, and yet remains concealed. Why? It supports her charade with Orlando, of course, but the threat is no longer clear or imminent -- we need a sharp reminder of why she conceals her true self once she’s transitioned to the safety of the woods.

But these are small things, and the play as a whole is a lovely retreat and a mind opening three hours. Bonus to the whole is the delicate integration of orchestration. Musicians are placed both above the stage to set the tone and then emerge to make music within it. I’m of the school that believes a well-made play has a little bit of music and dancing in it -- As You Like It accomplishes both, and the choreography of the happily coupled pairs somehow managed make me cry, which I have to count as a success even though it startled me.

Thank you, Mr. Mendes, and Company. As it turns out, I liked it very much indeed.


As You Like It is a Bridge Project production, a collaboration between BAM, the Old Vic and Neal Street. It will run at BAM through March 13th.

Cast:
Ashlie Atkinson, Phoebe
Jenni Barber, Audrey
Michelle Beck, Celia
Edward Bennet, Oliver
Christian Camargo, Orlando
Stephen Dillane, Jaques
Alvin Epstein, Adam & Sir Oliver Martext
Jonathan Lincoln Fried, Le Beau
Richard Hansell, Amiens
Ron Cephas Jones, Charles the Wrestler
Aaron Krohn, Silvius
Anthony O’Donnell, Corin
Juliet Rylance, Rosalind
Thomas Sadoski, Touchstone
Michael Thomas, Dukes Frederick & Senior
Ross Waiton, William
Stephen Bentley-Klein and Shane Shanahan, Musicians

Originally uploaded by beebo wallace

[1] I mentioned to my brother -- my date for the evening -- that the wall in question reminded me of the wall in Mary Stuart, representing her imprisonment in the Tower. Come to find out it wasn’t happenstance -- Neal Street, Sam Mendes production company which is entangled in the Bridge Project, was also involved in bringing Mary Stuart to Broadway.

Seat A1

Seat A1
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Mary Stuart at the
Broadhurst Theatre

Posting by cameraphone
from 44th between
Broadway and 8th Ave
just before curtain

made it.

made it.
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Made it somehow, against all reason, even though my plane squatted on the tarmac for 55 minutes more than it should have before dropping me into LaGuardia one brief hour before the Tuesday 7PM curtain time (which has thwarted me before: see Equus).

Made it, somehow, which I'm sure is what William H. Macy was thinking after the first night of his run in Mamet's Speed-the-Plow in a role that Jeremy Piven bailed out of as the result of mercury poisoning from too much sushi. (Or so his doctor says. Mamet was unforgiving and wisecracked that Piven was off to pursue a career as a thermometer).

Macy is Mamet's man and he pulled it off with only a few recovered flubs and one duped line and two big hugs from his co-stars -- Raul Esparza and Elisabeth Moss -- which he received shyly (does William H. Macy do anything any other way?) in the twilight space where the curtain drops on the other world of the play before it rises again to the hot footlights of the curtain call and whatever the audience has to dish.

K says Macy's no Piven and I believe her, but I loved him all the same.

Posting by cameraphone from Times Square.

p.s. More on Mamet »

to have and to hold

Illus: Soviet Mayan Playing Cards via bad banana blog

Steppenwolf’s production of Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer was solid and satisfying. Still, I stepped out on to Halsted after last evening’s performance, the night strangely warm after a day in the high 50s, the ice and snow of the brittle days before having melted in the rain, wondering: what is it with guys and their poker games?

It seems to me that there’s something about the game of poker -- games of chance in general, maybe, but games of poker especially -- that men are in the habit of elevating to the realm of rite and ritual.

Am I wrong to pin it on the men? After all a woman, Shirley Jackson, wrote The Lottery, which is all about chance and the communal act. Although it’s true that women play poker, both casually and professionally and have even, I’m sure, run themselves equally to ruin, the game of the mythic West and the tables and back rooms of Vegas seem always in the imagination of writers to be played by men. Women appear in cocktail skirts or wifely attire, porting in sandwiches and refreshments, sometimes shaking their heads through the thick smoke and bad behavior.

There’s something monastic about men gathering to play. Objects are arranged and shared according to rules unspoken but understood. Fortunes are driven by brief decisions and the flick of a wrist. Everything depends on the moment of transubstantiation -- when chance intervenes and three of a kind transforms into a full a house.

As with any religious rite, the cascade of consequences that follow (in the pages of literature; in the lyrics of a Kenny Rogers song) from the way the cards are dealt and played carry that tense, tired, sweaty patina of the struggle between self-determination and chance.

The man at the pew is haunted by the same question as the man at the card table: Do we decide, or are these things decided for us?

And the question was there last night on the Steppenwolf stage, a room full of drunk men playing cards with the devil, one with an earlier score to settle, all of them with a lifetime of missed chances and fuck ups to regret. Only one of them waking painfully to the awareness that he played a role in the unhappy events that spilled around him and were his history.

Like a Midnight spent in Mass by a true believer, the game was played and everything changed for this one awakening fellow.

Only it hadn’t. His departure with the devil was long before determined; the certainty of his cold terrifying eternity was foretold by the nuns.

But then it did.

Because layered on top of the game was Christmas, and with it came a sudden, miraculous boozy intervention that might have looked, if it lay in a manger, all the world like redemption, but because it was near-sighted and smelled like whiskey on an old man’s breath it looked an awful lot like dumb luck.

Which can so easily be mistaken for a miracle, under the right circumstances.

Which these were.

The Seafarer
By Conor McPherson
Directed by Steppenwolf ensemble member Randall Arney
Featuring ensemble members Francis Guinan, Tom Irwin, John Mahoney and Alan Wilder with Randall Newsome

In the Downstairs Theatre
Thu. December 4, 2008 — Sun. February 8, 2009

intermission in louis' house

intermission in louis' house
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Theatre is lit with historically authentic light bulbs -- which means the interior of the 1889 building is super dark, and you have to peer hard to see the mosaics and the pink marble columns and the multiple fireplaces and the extraordinary Sullivan cast iron grillwork.

Also gets darker as you climb higher to the cheap seats. We climbed up to the sixth level during intermission and stared down a rake that was steep enough to make me nauseous.

(Or maybe that was just election season residue.)

The sight lines, however, are extraordinary, even from the tippy top seats, and the acoustics are amazing (as assessed from level two).

Posting by cameraphone from the road home. Still weepy from Margaret Garner.

<metadebate />

Two flavors:


Them's Countin' Words
(ReConstitution 2008) from Sosolimited
on Vimeo.

Sosolimited, a group of designers out of Boston who remix the debates as part of a live performance where they take the closed caption feed and create visualizations of the language the candidates are using. Last night's mix isn't yet available online (at this writing), but a few clips from last week are »


And Current, who Hacked the Debate by streaming Tweets over the video broadcast »

(To participate in the hack on October 15th append the hashtag #current to your tweet.)

fingering the affairs of state, also.

Video: Sarah Palin, Talent Competition (1984)

I'd say she's a little flat. And her toungueing needs some work (she's more of a "hoo-hoo-hooer" than a "tu-tu-tuuer" when she hits her notes.) Also, her fingering was a bit sloppy. As you are well aware, an "accomplished flautist" (heck, even a fifth grade flautist) needs to move all the right fingers AT THE SAME TIME to play a particular note. She'd move one, then decide it was time for the rest to follow, resulting in sloppy execution.

However, the simple fact is this: she plays the FLUTE. Quite crappily, as we have seen, but the public is forgiving. Flutes and lots of mascara lull the masses. It's what they (woodwinds and cosmetics) were created for. Regardless, this IS a noble instrument that deserves a platform. And when played by a beautiful cross-eyed woman (keeping one eye on the tip of her nose, another on Russia so those airplanes of theirs won't fly over) well, that's just BRILLIANT! They've definitely locked up the Band Camp demographic with this bold, musical move.

My sister, aka she who aspired to be a mermaid, who is also a first-chair sitting, band line marching, hard-core tooting flautist. I asked her to run a critique of Sarah Palin's 1984 pageant performance, which she graciously did, even in the whirlwind of packing up her kid for a trip to Disney World.

popular

I just keep waiting for her to bust out singing 'Popular'.

My buddy MV, who's all about Broadway, telling me Fey-Schmey: Palin is a dead ringer for Kristin Chenoweth, currently of Pushing Daisies, previously Glinda the Good Witch in the musical Wicked.

I've never seen Wicked so I had to look up the song »

equus

equus
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

For the record: Theatre in Manhattan starts at 7pm on Tuesday nights. So even if you hassle your waiter to get back to you fast with the check and you arrive with 25 minutes to spare (presuming the curtain's at 8 like every other night of the week except Monday of course) you're still going to miss the first 35 minutes and wonder why the whole place is so quiet when you arrive at will call only to be hushed and ushered in (generously, I thought) where you can stand at the back and watch the first half of Equus unfold.

And good thing too if your seats are like ours -- just four rows from the stage but all catywompus (sic?) and off to the side where you have to perform a gestalt and fill in the faces and bits of stage that you can no longer see.

But you will manage to squeeze in all the naked bits quite nicely, and it won't be nearly as creepy to see Daniel Radcliffe, aka Harry Potter, work his way through that difficult chapter of adolescence where one feels compelled to commit strange and unexpected acts with and against horses, as you thought it might be.

And it will certainly give you plenty to talk about over that second glass of wine after the show, when you aren't talking about binary oppositions and whether or not the thing they were wrestling over was worth the wrestle.

Equus tonight in previews with Daniel Radcliffe, Richard Griffiths, and the inimitable @karigeltemeyer.

Posting by cameraphone from Midtown when I should really probably be sleeping instead.

superior donuts

The trick with a good stage play is to make the stage go away. It’s not an easy thing to do: it’s a hulking artifact, that stage, and even if you blow away the proscenium arch you still have creaking floorboards and awkwardly placed stage props and missed entrances and forgotten lines to remind you that oh yeah: We’re here in this dark room watching a bunch of folks pretend.

Filmmakers have more of a margin to get it right. Long hours in the editing room trimming out the awkward bits give them leeway to make the magic that much more magnificent, lets us ride those few flickering hours in a state of suspended disbelief without the disruptions that real-live pretenders can introduce when they’re really live, and -- when the movie’s really good -- make us want to go back and ride it again.

Steppenwolf’s production of Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts [1] gets remarkably close to absolute crystalline suspension.

I can’t recall a single wrong note in the dialog of the play that we watched unspool yesterday afternoon, and the cast as a whole is so solid, so believable, so enjoyable to watch -- each conveying authentically that something that is born to them through family and place and in aggregate becomes this thin slice of the city that is Chicago -- the whole was so well done that I was sold on the story well-told.

There was only one awkward moment when the stage showed itself -- in a session of clumsily blocked fisticuffs that didn’t deliver the pow and bang and fury of a filmed spectacle (the addition of a few well-placed sound effects could smooth out the rough spots). And too there was the revelation at the beginning of Act II (once I consulted my program during the intermission) that the fellow playing the lead role so appealingly, and who seemed so familiar, was Michael McKean, aka Lenny from Laverne & Shirley and David St. Hubbins of This is Spinal Tap. But that displacement disappeared almost immediately, so completely does McKean occupy his role.

I was apprehensive going in. I was expecting a cranky play. The New York Times ran a piece on Letts last weekend in which he remarked on being angry when receiving his Tony -- a tangled mix of emotions that rolled out of a difficult year in which he lost his father, a member of the August cast, to lung cancer. This confirmed the read that I took last month when I asked Letts a question from the audience during his appearance at the Printers Row Book Fair -- asked him why he chose to write for the stage and not for film, when the attention that film receives, and the dollars that follow, are so much greater.

I had hoped to frame the question in a way that gave him a chance to speak to the strengths of theater -- what he thought set it apart as an experience from other dramatic arts -- but a storm was kicking up outside the tent and only part of my question made it to the podium. His reply was petulant and defensive and not at all illuminating, as if he assumed that I thought he was an idiot to write for the stage when he could be making it big in the movies -- and that he thought I was an idiot for asking it. I sat down chastened, unsatisfied, and not liking Tracy Letts all that much.

Superior Donuts, written in part before August: Osage County ever hit the stage, turned my heart in his direction again. I expect Mr. Letts is riding the tide of grief, something we all get to do, something that can make one decidedly cranky. Reasonably so.

If August and Donuts are any indication of how he will make his despair sing for us then, Mr. Letts, please take your time.

And godspeed.



p.s. Got a kick out of the fact that a line from the play has appeared here before at detritus. Consider the donut »

[1] as I post this the link to Steppenwolf is broken -- apologies -- hopefully they’ll get it fixed soon

das pintele yud

One of the central purposes of the exhibition is not only to explore the way maps summon national identities but, conversely, to investigate the way they function to force other identities out of locations.

Curator Rhoda Rosen writing in the catalog of the exhibit Imaginary Coordinates showing now at the Spertus Museum through September 7, 2008.

The Spertus Museum wasn’t on the docket for Sunday. The plan was to hit the matinee showing of The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a life in Yiddish Theater at the CSO, a show that held a lot of promise if you don’t mind (and lord knows I don’t mind) running in circles that trend twenty to thirty years my senior and concern themselves with things like the Yiddish Theater in America that took root in New York’s Lower East side the last time we got all worked up over the unstoppable tide of immigrants landing on American shores.

That time it was the Irish and the Ukrainians and the Poles and the Russians who were Gilding our Age -- and a fraction of those pouring in from Eastern Europe were Jewish. The story told at the Symphony, as it was patched together by Michael Tilson Thomas, the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, concerned two of those immigrants who also happened to be Thomas’ grandparents and two of the leading lights of that Yiddish Theater: Boris and Bessie Thomashevsky.

It was unexpected that we’d have a couple hours to kill before the show, and the Spertus had been on the list of things to see ever since Blair Kamin mentioned its remarkable architecture in the Trib and we stopped by briefly with half an hour to spare sometime back to see what was doing only to discover that they wanted a good chunk of change to get to the ninth and tenth floors where the exhibition and the collections are.

Time being short we took a pass then, poking around the library instead and digging the amazing video work at the top of the stairs by the cafe (that g*d*it I didn’t take notes on), but on Sunday we circled back with our hour and half, which by the time the guide [1] was ready for us had diminished to 45 minutes. We were the only ones under her charge so she was kind enough to trim it back and gave us the floor show in the time allowed.

What we saw was this: An exhibit which I incorrectly called Imaginary Boundaries in an earlier post -- it’s actually called Imaginary Coordinates -- about mapping the thing that you might expect a Jewish American Museum to put on a show about: The Holy Land.

In a way that you might not expect from a Jewish American Museum: From an attempted non-partisan point of view.

“Attempted” because of course the place itself imposes a point of view, and you could feel the tension in the room. There was a fair amount of heat generated by the couple who we picked up in the elevator, who rode up with us, asked a few barbed questions about what was going on here and then politely excused themselves from our guide’s good graces.

We saw them later taking their seats at the Thomashefsky show. Maybe they were just in a hurry. Maybe they weren’t put off by the fact that artifacts from both sides of the conversation shared equal space; by the fact that a map rendered from the memory and by the hand of a Palestinian man in exile to describe his home village which no longer exists, was provided equal real estate alongside the hand-drawn storyboard that a father bound for Auschwitz (who would never return) drew for the four-month old son whom he tucked away in hiding, the storyboard outlining the life that he hoped for him -- his safe survival, his potty training, education, marriage, and finally, “next year in Jerusalem!” (The storyboard compelled the small boy, grown to man, to move to and settle in Israel.)

Maybe they weren’t put off by any of that -- but they sure were cranky.

Although Imaginary Coordinates is part of the citywide Map Festivus that’s been running for a little while now, the maps themselves -- among them elaborate Dutch maps from the 15th century, British renderings from World War II, a map of the Geneva Initiative from 2003 -- all of them the works by men, are offset in the exhibit by contemporary artworks, all of them the creation of women who have some connection to that same hotly contested piece of land.

Remarkable among them was Shirley Shore’s 2004 Landslide composed of a sandbox arranged to resemble a desert topography over which is projected in real time:

a square grid of blinking color cells generated by a code. Beginning each sequence with a palette of sixteen colors and thousands of color cells, the map gradually transforms as cells appropriate neighboring areas. When two colors ultimately dominate the grid, the program stops and begins anew. Landslide operates on an infinite loop in which each cycle produces a different map and a different visual experience. [2]

I asked the guide what the algorithm was that drove the colors in their consumption of one another -- she was unsure but speculated that it was the larger color blocks that swallowed the smaller ones with which they collided. The impact was remarkable: a strange camouflage that morphed into a topographical map and then began again.

As you might expect it was impossible to experience an exhibit like that, marking as it does the 60th anniversary of the modern state of Israel, without the hovering awareness of who is conquerer and who is conquered in this equation -- even with the careful attention that was given to both sides of the narrative.



The contrast then, with the Thomashevsky show, was to be reminded of the diaspora, the thing that came before all this by just a few brief years; Jews without a home struggling to make America theirs.

The Thomashevskys were remarkable showmen but they were social activists too, providing theater for the Jewish community (in the Yiddish language, which felt like home) about the trials that they faced in this new place. One of their most popular running conceits was of the “green” immigrant and his and her comedic struggles and ultimate triumphs in their new world.

When their drama-ridden personal lives resulted in a split (but never divorce) Bessie Thomashevsky created a new theater and went to town with treatments of women’s issues like suffrage and birth control that sold out houses -- the Jewish Suffragette was one of her most popular roles.

The show was light spirited and entirely enjoyable (although maybe a little too precious, given that it was a treasure served up by a loving grandson who held his subjects a little too close), but the contrast that it presented to the Spertus exhibit was remarkable. In the CSO show the theme of liberation was unmistakable: It vouched for the freedom to live a creative life and to fiercely claim human rights for oneself and one’s community. One of the more memorable themes that defined one of the Thomashevsky’s biggest blockbuster was Das Pintele Yud (sounds like: "das pintela yee"), which spoke to something ineffable and untranslatable from Yiddish -- a grammatical mark that symbolizes (what the song board attempted to translate as) the “spark of Jewishness”. Working, striving, inexhaustible. Rich, spirited, alive.

Brilliantly uplifting in the context of the immigrants’ underdog story on foreign shores. Wholly unsettling (confronted hard on the heels of the quick sprint we made down Michigan Avenue to bridge the distance between the Spertus and the Symphony Hall) when the underdog has become ubermensch, and a chord change has been sounded.



[1] The Chicago Tribune reported in May that Imaginary Coordinates “closed earlier this month for organizers to re-evaluate content, [and] reopened with the major change being that visitors now must see it on guided tours beginning at the head of every hour. Nearly everything else is unchanged, meaning the show is still the most surprising of the eight with art in Chicago's Festival of Maps as well as a rewardingly unconventional commemoration of the 60th anniversary of Israel's founding.” Coordinates' Rewardingly Unorthodox by Alan G. Artner (May 22, 2008)

[2] Imaginary Coordinates (Spertus Press Chicago)

summertime

Video: Ella Fitzgerald sings Summertime

Confession: When I have a client meeting, or when I have to present to a big crowd of folks, and I get all jittery and nervous, I sing.

Alone. To myself. In my hotel room. As I'm getting ready: ironing, showering, primping.

It's easier than worrying about how things will go. It focuses me better than walking through the pitch or the presentation does. And it warms up my voice so that it doesn't crack (too badly) when I first say "hello."

Summertime is the song I sing. Sometimes Blue Skies, but mostly Summertime, even if it's the dead of winter.

Because it's, well, just listen to that lyric. (And no: of course I don't sing it anywhere near like Ella. But isn't that something?)

slam BAM thank you ma'am

slam BAM thank you ma'am
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Met up with Rahul last night for some Beckett at BAM -- his first, which is all kinds of risky for me, because Beckett productions skew to the very very good or the very very bad with very very little middle ground.

Mitigating my risk was knowing that John Turturro and Elaine Stritch were in the Endgame cast, and we were soon to learn of two others (whose names I'm having trouble ferreting out from the BAMbill) who nearly outshone the two knowns.

Just nearly. The performances were pitch perfect across the board (nearly: Elaine disappointed just a smidge, playing the part a little too hard, but I think maybe my expectations are too high for my favorite dame.) and R generously guffawed where expected, giggled on cue, and had periodic extended laughing fits, all good signs that I hadn't led him too far astray with the suggestion.

But it was a safe bet really: R and I met in a hostile office environment where we quickly and almost subversively discovered that we found the same crazy absurd realities funny.

And that we were the only ones laughing.

Followed the performance with an astonishingly comforting Italian/Spanish/Portuguese meal in a Brooklyn basement that felt like a Spanish cava (is that a wine cellar? maybe it's a wine... anyway: we were in a wine cellar.) sharing astonishing, comforting stories about misadventures with one-eyed grandmothers and other excavated memories.

And then the subterranean ride home in which R demonstrated his unnerving knowledge of the NY public transit system's coming and goings, listening like a Pawnee guide to the incoming rail cars from a central spot and dashing to the appropriate platform when the train came rushing in, to take us back across the river to my swank corporate crib, already chasing into the next early morning hours but still, done too soon.

brooklyn academy

BAM
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Waiting on a friend. Two tickets to Beckett's Endgame at BAM's Harvey Theater in my pocket. Sipping tea. A little bit tired after a long day of meetings with one more on the horizon before I head home tomorrow night.

Reminding myself that I can sleep when I'm dead.

Posting by cameraphone from Brooklyn, NY

the scottish play

the scottish play
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

A few brief thoughts about the Scottish Play headlined by Patrick Stewart (oh hell: Macbeth. We saw Macbeth. This isn't a theatre. I can say it.) which I caught last night at the Lyceum with @karigee, because there isn't time enough to write up something thorough and thoughtful -– it was too big, and any approach I might make is heavily saddled with former English Major baggage, and I have to be at a meeting in half an hour.

So here it is:

• The sitcom Friends gets a lot of credit for introducing brief episodic scenes into the dramatic narrative. Shakespeare did it first.



• I thought this was a play about ambition. The director Rupert Goold wants me to know that it's about tyranny and tyrants and, maybe?, George W. Bush. And he's right. And I'm ready to rally against it.



• The thing of a play is: it must be inhabited. The life that is brought to this play through the blocking, through the body language, through the acting -– always and again I'm astonished by how powerful dramatic action can be. When it's well done.



• There's such a huge and clear difference between a mediocre Shakespearean actor and an accomplished Shakespearean actor. When a player can deliver that language with all the naturalism of breathing -- like Stewart did last night -- there's nothing better. It's potable poetry.



• Devastated by the scene where Macduff learns of his family's fate. Reminds me of the Henry production in Chicago -- the scene with Hotspur and his wife. How often did Shakespeare do this with the antagonist -– infuse them with a humanity that brings the big themes into startling focus? Making it all manageable. Evoking such compassion.



• Lady Macbeth: I wasn't your fan in the first Act, but now that you're washing out those spots I'm all yours. Such pure, believable madness.



• And, right: How old is Patrick Stewart again? Damn he's hot in those boots.

Posting by cameraphone from Union Square in NYC.

belated haymaking

Video: Jonathon Coulton sings First of May First of May / Outdoor F*ing Starts Today
A bit belated, but since I failed to get my super serious Haymarket post together in time, I thought I’d throw in my little bit late homage to May Day -- courtesy of Mr. Jonathon Coulton.

Not really safe for work, but what do you care? It’s Sunday.

And it's Spring.

&p.s. if you prefer earnest here's 2006's May Day recycled »