A Teller of Tales

If you go to the Shakespeare Theatre looking for excitement, stage combat, or pratfalls, Hughie might not be the right show for you. The play, written by Eugene O’Neill and directed by Doug Hughes, is close to an hour long and has only two speaking characters. It’s set in a run-down motel somewhere in New York City. The play is all dialogue and no action--unless pacing, smoking cigarettes, and rolling dice can count as action.

Despite the lack of significant dramatic movement, Richard Schiff (playing, according to the handbill, “Erie Smith, a teller of tales”) still managed to take up the whole stage with his persona. Even in the face of Erie’s charisma, the Night Clerk at the hotel (expressively acted by Randall Newsome) quickly is distracted, listening to garbage collectors and the e-trains, or so the omniscient narrator tells us.

The Night Clerk is not the only one in the theater who loses interest. Given all of the sighs, snores, and rustling, I’m pretty sure that at times most of the audience (me included) had their attention stolen away from the plot of the play. But I don’t think that the production was intended to hold the audience’s attention. As my attention drifted, so did the Night Clerk’s. I began to feel that he was being compared to me. Occasionally my mind drifted off and I missed what Erie was talking about. Every so often, the narrator informed us that the Night Clerk was also feeling guilty about losing focus on Erie’s story. Just as the Night Clerk is distracted by the world of the hotel, we sometimes drift away from what we are watching on stage.

The distractions felt by the Night Clerk and by the audience are enhanced by the many distractions on the stage. Every corner seems to be filled with strange and magical doors, windows, paintings, and a clock. Also supporting the central theme of the play are Catherine Zuber’s costumes which fit the characters perfectly in more than one way. The Night Clerk was dressed in a trim but worn tuxedo which looked well cared for, even with the fraying collar and cuffs. His care of his cloths mirrored his feeling of responsibility for his job. The audience didn’t even need the characters to engage in dialogue before we understood their personalities. The lighting, designed by Ben Stanton, was both straightforward and expressive. Lights followed Erie’s pacing and dimmed gently every time the Night Clerk’s thoughts wandered.

All in all, the production is seamless. Without action or excessive humor but with a significant depth of ideas, the play left me thinking for hours. The play has a strange quality to it and is perhaps best acknowledged by the sound of the name of the play’s main speaker: eerie.

Most of all, the play was open. What is its meaning? Does it come from Erie’s story? Is it from the way he tells his story? Does it come from the response by the clerk and by us? Or is there even a meaning at all?

Making Books

Every few weeks, the National Gallery of Art hosts a “Teen Studio.”  At each session, students explore an exhibit, then do a related project.  The topics vary widely, from oil painting in Flemish art to pre-Photoshop altered photography. I've been lucky enough to go several times in this last semester.

My favorite session so far explored two seemingly different topics; hand bookmaking and the Pre-Raphaelite school of painting. Nathalie Ryan, who works in the education department at the National Gallery, began by giving a talk about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Brotherhood tried to return to an earlier style of painting, before the influence of Raphael. They tried very hard to focus on reality even while depicting allegorical or fictional subjects. They also cared a great deal about color and light, using strong bright primary colors rather than the lighter softer pigment preferred by the more Raphaelite Royal Academy of Arts. Here is an example of one of the paintings we looked at while in the gallery:




As a lover of poetry, I especially embraced the idea of making painting more like romantic poetry. The member of the brotherhood who pioneered this idea was William Michael Rossetti, brother of the poet Christina Rossetti.  (Families, interestingly, were important to the Pre-Raphaelites.  Because of their status as a secret society, all of the models for the brotherhood were family and friends of the five or six artists.)

After the introduction, we took a tour of the new gallery exhibit “Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design.” We saw a lot of wonderful art, but also spent a lot of time talking about it and asking questions. The art wasn’t only painting. The paintings mimicked the view of the human eye just enough to make me think about the paintings as, if not truth, things that the artists had thought about enough to achieve that level of depth. There was also statue, tapestry, furniture and books. I loved how things that I’m used to thinking about as fiction were depicted with such a level of reality.

One of my favorite parts of the studio experience is the opportunity to have lunch with other like-minded teens.  Each time I've been the food has been great and the company has been excellent.

After lunch, we returned to the studio room where we started, and began to make our own books!  Making the books was a lot of fun and also very challenging. The end result was terrific.  I look forward to drawing in my book, and making more books in the future.

Happy Valentine's Day!

originally from Mandatory

Carol of the Bells

Happy Holidays!

This is a recording of my duet partner Karuna and me playing at a holiday concert at a local retirement home. Hope you enjoy it!

Praludium by Shostakovich

My friend Karuna and I have been working up a few duets together this semester. Here is one of our performances at a local retirement home (accompanied by Karuna's mother on the residence's out-of-tune piano):

Holiday Music at the State Capitol

My violin studio had the great pleasure of being invited to the Maryland State Capitol for a concert to celebrate the holiday season. The concert was billed as a candlelight performance--which it was not for fear the building might burn down. Despite the lack of candles, we all enjoyed playing for the huge crowd in the enormous room with its amazing acoustics.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

When mortals and immortals meet, mayhem occurs. And that is just what happens in the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The show (directed by Ethan McSweeny, the director of the fantastic Much Ado About Nothing) set its sights high, hoping to explore Shakespeare’s world of fairies and mortals in a new way. Although it is innovative, the production is not completely successful.

The stage itself is a masterpiece. Sidney Harman Hall is transformed into an old theater, long unused, with racks of costumes and props lying on the stage. The fairies inhabit the theater during the night, slipping through trap doors to have their midnight revels, to steal props and costumes, and to observe the mortals. This setting brings the fairies down to earth. Both city and forest are symbolized in the same set, beautifully designed by Lee Savage. This decision allows McSweeny to suggest that the fairy world and the moral world are mapped atop each other, almost like anagrams, rather than being alternative worlds.

Sometimes the audience gets a strong sense that the two worlds are in fact one. At other moments, the director’s effort to distinguish the two worlds creates awkward or meaningless division. For example, during the scenes taking place in the fairy world, pre-recorded bird song occasionally bursts out of nowhere in the old theater. At one moment the theater seems to be the actual world of the fairies. At other moments, the theater merely seems to symbolize a separated forest, removed from the theater of the mortals.

Costume designer Jennifer Moeller has created outfits for the mortals from the era of the 1940s. The costumes ranged from a military uniform for the Duke to prep school uniforms. Lysander (Robert Bietzel) was dressed in jeans and carried a guitar on his back throughout the play. Somewhat incongruously, Helena appears much more formal and adult than her peers, wearing a classic 1940s dress rather than teen garb. The fairies, on the other hand, all wore bits of old costumes, pilfered from the theater within the theater. Many of the clothes seemed to be from fallen empires--from Rome, from Greece, or even from the overturned French aristocracy. Underling fairies wore elaborate Victorian lingerie with occasional touches from those and other fallen empires.

In an effort to emphasize the sameness of the mortal and immortal worlds, the clothing of the teen lovers begins to look more like the clothing of the fairies as they spend the night in the “woods.” During a slapstick brawl between the four humans, they remove their mortal clothes and find themselves in their underwear, becoming fairies in their own right, at least to a degree. At this point, these humans can suddenly use the fairies’ trap doors to get around the forest.

When Bottom and the other “Rude Mechanicals” begin to practice their play, they find themselves on a stage upon a stage, upon a stage! The thespians’ scenes are less inventive than the rest of the production but garner a lot of laughs. Snout (Herschel Sparber) plays Wall with the contents of a recycling bin trailing from his outstretched arms. Flute (David Graham Jones) plays Thisbe as a Disney princess thrilled to be prancing on stage. My favorite costume piece was definitely Bottom’s donkey head. When it first appeared on his head, it looked quite real, but soon it took on an almost “steam-punk" look.

The highlight of the show was Puck, masterfully played by Adam Green. Whether he was leaping from trap doors or splashing mud and water on the humans, he held the show together with his playfulness and sly humor. This production cast Puck as more of a trickster than a brooding spirit. There was a Cirque du Soleil aspect to the immortal world with fairies turning cartwheels and shimmying up ropes. Puck joined them by conducting many dialogues while swinging from the fictive theater’s dilapidated chandeliers.

The magical portrayal of the immortal side, in contrast with the somewhat cold and uncharismatic portrayal of the mortals, leads the audience to connect much more strongly with the fairies. Despite McSweeny’s attempt to integrate the two worlds (taken to its furthest extreme at the end of the play, which I will leave a surprise), we as viewers are left with a disappointing sense of how separated the two worlds are.