Gary Tischler • April 10, 2013

What befits a baseball opening day the most? Well, if you’re a Washington Nationals fan, a perfect opening day would consist of the two young faces of the franchise doing what they do best.

It would be Stephen Strasburg pitching seven innings of shutout, three-hit ball.

It would be Bryce Harper, after picking up his NL rookie of the year award, showing why he got it by hitting not one but two home runs, providing the winning margin of a 2-0 victory opening day victory over the Miami Marlins who floundered at the plate like beached—well, you know—fish.

“He hit that one straight and up,” a Nats employee on the second level told us. “I heard it went straight over center field.”

That it did. Straight, like a Tell arrow through an apple, so sudden you barely had time to wonder if that really happened.

That was in the first inning, on a one-ball count and it happened so fast that it took a second for the roar of the crowd to build to an even bigger roar. My thought was more like “Holy s—” but the guy waving his jacket like a toreador was speechlessly grinning. A smile formed on the face of a white-haired fan up here, spreading out to his beard stubble. He was wearing a Harper jacket.

But even before the Harper fireworks, the methodical Strasburg bearing and pitching, the day was a gift to everyone—fans, officials, players, and, okay, maybe not the Marlin players in their grayish uniforms taking batting practice. But they didn’t know that then.

The Marlins, like everyone else and ourselves, basked in God’s green acres of baseball turf, in outfield and infield, in blues skies and throw and catch warm-ups, and in walking side by side fathers and sons and grandfathers and granddaughters. “I’m being grandpop today,” the grandpop from Fairfax said. “Only thing is, I can’t keep up with her.”

You could see the difference in the air and on the Metro—if somebody wasn’t coming from the zoo on a Monday late morning, they were for sure going to the Nationals game, surging a lot out of Virginia in a sea of red and white, Zimmermans, Strasbergs, Harpers and Desmonds and worthy Werths, boyfriends and girlfriends, and a 14-month-old boy with his dad behind home plate. “First time,” his dad said. At least he wasn’t trading stocks on eBay or selling them to us.

Opening day is the opening of sacred ground and as yet untarnished hopes and the laying to rest of the year before. It was, after all, the grandest of years and the suddenly worst kind of year that had the Nationals, once the losingest team in baseball, rising to the heights of baseball’s best record, only to lose a game they had in hand, a strike away from advancing to the National League playoffs.

The scoreboard celebrated for us—Jason Werth’s walk-off home run was seen again, Strasburg’s easy motions and Harper’s dirty uniform derring-do.

Now, the Washington Nationals are being picked as World Series by Sports Illustrated, a curse in some quarters with historical examples of being so, or just an embellishment of the notion that we have a pretty damn good team here.

We all, we happy few gathered at home plate to see Adam LaRoche, who looks like a ballplayer personified, a grown up still playing a man-child game and Harper, a man child playing like a gutsy grownup. They—and ageless manager Davey Johnson and general manager Mike Rizzo, were all honored with various awards at home plate.

In April in spring, a baseball stadium is a kind of holy place before the grass gets torn up, the dust scattered, —the temples are home plate, first base, second base and third base, the fields of play are green and pristine, and now, before someone hollers the sacred beginnings of ball playing—which is to say “Play ball”—the uniforms, especially the Nats’ white with red names and numbers, seem blindingly washed, like the togas of senators on a stroll—Washington senators. In his uniform, Davey Johnson looked like he was going to the prom.

The bald eagle Screech—who still looks like a chicken by another name—wandered, well, like some other kind of bird, among the gathered folks, television reporters, the odd writer, the photographers, the U.S. Army Chorus, the veteran throwing out the first ball, the ball girls and ball boys. Mayor Vincent Gray, a ballplayer of some renown, showed up to deliver the lineup and when we asked him if he was still playing he said, “You bet.” He sounded so confident that we almost asked him if he was running again for mayor, but we refrained. Because Gray was today like the rest of us a fan glad to be here and politics in Washington stayed outside the gates with no tickets to the game.

Children ran out into the field at one point taking up the position. “America the Beautiful” was heard and country songs and songs I never heard before. They could have been the theme from “Field of Dreams”, or “The Natural”, and why not.

The announcer called out everyone’s name on both team and so many job-holders among the Nats—even the assistant massage therapist got to trout out on to the field—that I started to wait for my name to be called but in vain.

I went to Easter Mass on Sunday—and opening day today. For different reasons, each occasion had the effect of turning me for a second into a small boy again—awed with memory in the first case, happy in the sun in the second.

Happy day. The Washington Nationals are in first place and undefeated. What befits a baseball opening day more than that?
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Gary Tischler •

Joy Zinoman, looking very cool in various shades of black and gray, was sitting on a couch on the second floor of the Studio Theater recently near a window that overlooked a bustling flow of traffic on 14th Street, a bank, numerous shops that hadn’t been there back in the day, all the signs of neighborhood transformation that she and the Studio Theatre had helped shape.

She didn’t dwell on it. She just took it in. Zinoman, who founded of the Studio Theatre in 1978 and was its artistic director until she announced her retirement in 2010, was back. She never really left, of course, since she still teaches here in the Studio Acting Conservatory, but now she is back to direct.

In an interview with the Metro Weekly after her retirement, she was asked if she would direct in the future at the Studio. “If the play is right, and they offer me enough money,” she said.

It looks as if the play is right. “4000 Miles”, by rising young playwright Amy Herzog, who was the subject of a feature profile in Time Magazine’s Culture section recently, is the thing, for sure. “David [artistic director David Muse] asked me if I wanted to direct this play, so I read it, and I was just drawn to it. It’s perfect for me and the Studio. It’s powerful, intimate, and completely unsentimental. It’s a generational play because the main characters are a young man who visits, then stays with his 91-year-old grandmother in Greenwich Village. Amy drew the character from her own grandmother. Then there’s Tana, getting a chance to work with Tana Hicken.”

Hicken, of course, is one of Washington theater’s most consummate, unfailingly excellent actresses, a company member at Arena Stage when it sported arguably the country’s outstanding repertoire company, as well as gracing Washington stages in major and memorable parts for decades.

Zinoman and Hicken last worked together when Zinoman and Studio mounted Athol Fugard’s moving “The Road to Mecca” with Holly Twyford. In the intimate spaces of the Mead Theatre, that production measured up to and perhaps surpassed the original production seen at the Eisenhower Theater many years ago with Fugard himself and Kathy Bates.

“Tana is a joy to work with, it’s like coming home,” Zinoman said. Indeed, talking with Zinoman and watching her as Muse came by to say hello, as well as a costume designer and members of the staff here, there was an air of homecoming. Zinoman had been rehearsing for days already, so it was not like a “look who’s here” kind of thing. Rather, there was a feeling of professional and personal pride that a founder might have, that the place was solid and on sure footing.

“It’s not like you stop in theater. You don’t just retreat,” Zinoman said. “When I announced my retirement, it was with the idea of not so much leaving, but retiring when you’re still doing your best. And I didn’t want to hang around—there’s a great temptation there, you know, to do that, and I didn’t want to do that. So we traveled, a lot. We lived in Italy for a while, and that was getting away from it. You couldn’t accidentally stop by.” She has, of course, a rich family life—she travels with her husband Murray, a retired state department official, they have three grown children with lives of their own, and careers of their own, and she is a very proud grandmother of four grandchildren.

“You cannot imagine how wonderful that is, being a grandmother, I love it,” she said. Mind you, she’s not being gushy here, although she’s entitled, she’s just stating a fact not so matter-of-factly.

“Herzog is phenomenal, it’s a great play for me to be doing,” she said. “I also love teaching here, there’s a continuity to all that.”
Plus, she did “Sounding Beckett”, an unusual production of three short plays by Samuel Beckett with musical composition and performance by the Cygnus Ensemble at the Classic Stage Company in New York. “It was a terrific experience, it was a challenge, and we had Ted, Philip and Holly.” That would be Ted van Griethuysen, Philip Goodwin and Holly Twyford and Zinoman’s informality speaks to her reputation as an actor’s director—and perhaps also a designer’s and theater people’s director.

“I think in terms of the actors, that’s true but I’ve worked with so many really gifted actors—and that’s why working with Tana is so important to me in this production,” she said. This is about the time that a conversation with Zinoman turns into a memory play, a parade of actors, designers, partners in time like Russell Metheny, playwrights and plays because, barring kinescope and videos, that’s what we have of plays, their remembered affects and effects. When “The Slab Boy Trilogy”, a set of three plays rich with British working class characters which she brought to Studio a number of years ago came up in our talk, she smiled. “Oh, Slab Boys, they were wonderful plays,” she said, sounding then like someone remembering the brilliant and fully-formed antics of a favored child.

Actors have a special place here—you can practically recite the parade from memory—Jon Tindle, van Griethuysen, Goodwin, Twyford, Nancy Robinette, Sarah Marshall, June Hansen, Floyd King, just to name a few, and, of course, Tana Hicken.

Hicken sounds surprised at being considered a star in the firmament of Washington actors, although she understands it. “My husband Donald and I have lived in Baltimore for years, and that’s what we consider home.” He heads the Baltimore School for the Arts and is a prominent director and directed his wife in the one-person play “The Belle of Amherst” about Emily Dickinson.
Yet, it’s also true that Washingtonians have been blessed with an accumulated avalance of fine performances from Hicken, working at Arena as part of the repertoire company until it was disbanded, at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, at Theater J, at Everyman Theatre, and at Studio.

“It’s always rewarding to be working with Joy,” she said. “And what I love about this play, is that, well, it’s really very funny. I don’t mean to say it’s a comedy, it has serious themes, beautiful writing, but it is also very funny, in spite of its seriousness. I just did a prevue and luckily the audience seems to get it, they laugh. But I’m surrounded by young actors, which makes the play resonate strongly.”

If your mind contained vivid memories of performances in the Washington theater, you’d be surprised to find how often Hicken pops up—in Shakespeare, in Chekhov, as the flinty grandmother (again with Twyford in “Lost in Yonkers”, in a searing, lost performance in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and one recalls for some reason, as the person who sums up and ties together all the improbable, frayed loose threads at the end of The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of “The Comedy of Errors”. Very funny indeed.

“4000 Miles” is currently playing at the Studio’s Mead Theatre.

Gary Tischler • April 3, 2013

The Conservative Political Action Conference — also known as CPAC — was held at National Harbor in Maryland, just south of Washington, D.C., March 14 through 16, instead of the Washington Marriott Wardman Park near my Adams Morgan neighborhood where it was last year. That was a bit of downer, as I couldn’t simply walk into the conservative political lion’s den as I had last year.

I probably shouldn’t be writing about this although I don’t work for MSNBC nor am I a big fan of Bill Maher. But if liberal Democratic strategist Paul Begala and conservative pundit Tucker Carlson can spar more or less good naturedly in CPAC’s popular “Fight Night” event, I can’t resist making a few observations.

In this CPAC, the annual Washington Times Straw Poll—a sort of heated popularity contest for in-the-moment political prom king bragging rights among conservatives—seemed to matter only a little, adding as it did a little more luster to the suddenly red-hot conservative darling Rand Paul, the new senator from Kentucky, and son of eternally and perpetual Libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul. Rand finished ahead of youthful Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who only a few weeks ago was anointed the savior of the Republican Party in a Time Magazine cover. Although Pope Francis I is currently the cover boy of Time Magazine, don’t be surprised to see Rand on Time’s cover soon. This can be a mixed blessing, of course, somewhere between making the cover of Sports Illustrated and being Playmate of the Year. Look what happened to the first GOP hero of the year to make the Time cover, New Jersey GOP Governor Chris Christie, who not only did not receive a speaking offer from CPAC, but was the butt of a fat joke from still thin-and-mean pundit-author-of-many-many-books Ann Coulter, who also chose to call former President Bill Clinton a “forcible rapist” during her speech.

But I digress, which wasn’t difficult to do during the course of this three-day nearly love fest among conservatives, where defiance, quips, anti-Obama snarks and intramural spats were the order of the day. If you’re a conservative at a thing like this, it’s natural given today’s political climate—or as we call it around here, the eternal frost or the ice age—to express your disagreement with, defiance of, and outright contempt for President Barack Obama, and say things about him that you might not say about your worst enemy or Bill Maher or the North Korean ruler for life, as the ever popular, funny and zinger queen (sit down, Michele Bachman), Sarah Palin did when she called the president a liar in the manner of the infamous shout-out from a GOP congressman during a State of the Union address.

That happened often. But we were also treated to some rumblings in the ranks. Senator John McCain, who must by now feel like a GOP dinosaur or just sour, got so exasperated that he called Sen. Paul and fire-breathing Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, “wacko birds.” McCain later apologized and said “he respected them both.”

Social conservatives who passionately oppose gay marriage rights got a stinging surprise at the convention when Ohio Sen. Rob Portman who once shared their opposition said he was for it after his son came out. Both liberal and conservative pundits piled on.

Possible presidential candidate and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush said that the GOP “can’t be seen as the anti-everything party” and urged for more inclusionary stances. In this crowd, that sounded almost liberal in tone.

At CPAC, the GOP and its conservative members seemed to return to its more intransigent stance of being in opposition—they liked Paul’s filibuster on drones not because they agreed with him but because he was defying the president—and they witnessed a bravura performance by former Alaska governor and McCain vice-presidential running mate Sarah Palin. There seemed to be an attitude that Obama and the Democrats shouldn’t actually act like they won the election and that the GOP should stop soul-searching why they night have lost the election. Sen. Cruz said it was not a failure of conservative principles. More and more, the most conservative members there—and they were all there—acted as if an electoral anomaly had occurred (twice), some sort of glitch in the body politic that didn’t need addressing.

Palin was her usual dry, acerbic, one-liner self now that her daughter’s career on “Dancing with the Stars” appears to be at an end. A standup comedy career is an option. Witness her attack on New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s anti-“Big Gulp” campaign. She also took on Karl Rove, once considered the devil by liberals, but now, apparently, a target for the conservative wing of the party, after he questioned some of the tactics of ultra-conservatives.

If the atmosphere at the CPAC was an indicator—and, like polls, they rarely predict the political future so early on—the cold war between the administration and the House of Representatives, between the Republicans and the Democrats, and, between Republicans and Republicans, is bound to heat up. Nobody wins, except Mr. Stalemate, and maybe the future of the country.

Gary Tischler •

One of the really, really swell things about living where I do in the Lanier Heights of Adams Morgan is that I can walk to the National Zoo. Which meant that today, even though it was bitter cold on a day that is supposed to be a part of spring, I could walk over to the zoo to the press opening for the National Zoo’s new state-of-the-art Elephant Community Center, part of its Elephant Trail program that also includes an Elephant Barn which opened in September.

Walking over we ran into National Zoo Director Dennis Kelly who was headed in the same direction. “This is about saving the Asian elephant,” Kelly said. “Wait until you see. It’s not just an exhibit. It’s something we all care about passionately. There is a real threat here. This is about research, observation and study. It’s a great opportunity for us.” The Asian elephant is on the endangered species list.

“I know some people who remember this from way back,” he said. “I used to live near National Cathedral. I could walk here all the time. Sure, it’s a great thing to have as part of your neighborhood.”

The zoo’s chief veterinarian Suzan Murray is obviously passionate about the elephants. They number three now, although the zoo wants to build a functioning, familial herd of “maybe seven to ten elephants,” she said

Once you get in the new center—the former elephant house, which housed, back in the day not just elephants but rhinoceros, hippos and giraffes—you get an real sense of space and excitement about the future. And that’s before the three elephants Ambika, Shanti and Kandula actually arrive—well, two, because Kandula, who is Shanti’s son—has opted to stay outside. Kids are making elephant noises on an exhibit that lets them do it. There are press persons and parents and elephant keepers milling around with each other, looking at the new center, which has the look of something bigger, plenty of light, a sand (and heated) floor, lots of straw and branches and toys, which lets the elephant keep their minds bus and a pedal which lets the elephant turn on the shower.

If you want to talk about elephant passion—it’s hard to pick among Murray, Marie Galloway, the elephant keeper at the zoo for the past 26 years, or the three children who were the winners of the Washingtonian Magazine’s letter writing contest, Ethan Schipper, a kindergarten student at Westbriar Elementary School in Vienna, Sarah Price, a third grader at Woodacre Elementary School in Bethesda, and Tony Phonemany, a fifth grader at Crestwood Elementary School in Springfield.

The children were there with their families, high energy as you expect but when Shanti and Ambika ambled in, they—and everybody else—got quiet. Elephants of all ages and stages remain mysterious, proud animals. They’re tool users but also playful, slow and big—their weight runs into tonnage. Unlike, say, Pandas, who get by on unworldly cuteness, elephants get respect wherever they might appear—they’ve got majestic mojo, no question.

Maybe the most passionate and most excited person in the room was Galloway who tells you that Ambika was actually very shy about entering the new space, while Shanti raced toward it the minute the doors opened and her son opted for the cautious way. “He backed in,” she told the gathered press. “So, yes, elephants do walk backward.”

“I could talk about elephants all day if you let me. Elephant stories,” she said. “They are so very, very smart. So, we do things all over the enclosure—hide treats or food, let them figure things out. You’ll never get to the end of everything there is to know about them.”

Ethan Schipper wants to work with elephants. “I want to save your family,” he wrote in his letter. “He gave all the contents in piggy bank—$1.85—to help the elephants. “This is the woman who helped when Kandula was born. She caught him.” Ethan stood silent, one of those best-day-of-your-life moments difficult to articulate whether you’re five or 85.

The Elephant Community Center is part of Elephant Trails project, a $56-million effort which began several years ago and which now which totals 8,984 square meters. The community center features state of the art animal care facilities, space for socializing, training and playing, has climate control a wading pool and shower, and it is a complete green building.

Gary Tischler • March 25, 2013

The more distant the recent past becomes, the more it tends to appear in our immediate rear view mirrors.

In America, we often suffer from selective memory, bracketed by convenient decades, or categories—Reagan’s Eighties, the transforming, revolutionary 1960s, the conforming, placid Leave-it-to-Beaver-disrupted-by-Elvis Eisenhower 1950s, the Greatest Generation, WWII, the Great Depression, the Roaring Twenties, and so on.

Rarely do the Seventies appear in that mirror with any intensity, and when they do, the images are thought to be grey and indistinct, the music bland or discordant, the cars too long and the gas lines longer. There’s a certain disdain and disconnect that’s accumulated about the decade, as if it was mildly depressing with signs of American decline appearing like pimples on a once confident teenagers face, it’s as if nothing much happened, and whatever happened, we’d just as soon forget about it and move into Reagan’s morning in America.

So what are all these folks doing here, many standing in line waiting to get into the National Archives last Friday?

Most of them were waiting to see the new exhibition “Searching for the Seventies, the Documentary Photography Project,” showcasing some 94 photos from about 22,000 taken by 70 photographers from 1971-1977.”

The title alone suggests that the Seventies haves gotten lost somewhere in the overcrowded American imagination which now feeds on reality shows that aren’t real, access to everything and connection to all, mostly without focus.

The documentary photography project is reminiscent of similar Depression Era efforts, including the classic James Agee/Walker Evans book “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” as well as the Roosevelt era Farm Security Administration’ photography program. “In Search of the Seventies” was a project of Documerica, which in turn was funded by the new Environmental Protection Agency, it had as a goal the idea of dealing with the energy crisis, a nascent spirit of environmentalism, urban renewal, economic crisis and challenges and the role and the rights of new political and social movements and identity by women in an America whose diversity in terms of racial, ethnic, gender and sexual identity, diversity was rapidly becoming visible and active.

Put that way, the project, instigated by EPA public affairs employee and former National Geographic photo editor Gifford Hampshire and headed by National Archives curator Bruce Bustard, seems almost dry and political.

It’s anything but that—while its focus seems to be on environmental issues—it appears to have reshaped the meaning of the word environmental to include the American human landscape, the human face that reminds us of ourselves over a period of ten years that were anything but uneventful. The result—as seen in the nearly one hundred photographs—is a look at how and in what ways and where Americans lived in a changing environment—the literal one as well as the metaphoric and social one.
On the day of the exhibition’s opening last week, there were lines, and inside, the seventies crowd mixed with young professionals, people who had brought their kids late in the day, and surely many of us who saw some vestiges of our younger selves in the photographs. “Oh my god,” one woman said, “there’s my Buick Skylark”. Cars, in fact, play a large role in the exhibition—as polluters, in a massive junkyard piled like GM auto corpses on top of one another, as rusted and abandoned by the side of a road in Arizona, as sleek, long American cars as proudly displayed in front of a garage in Lakewood, Ohio.

“Searching for the Seventies” isn’t necessarily about the dangers to the environment per se—although it came about a year after the first Earth Day was held, the EPA was signed into existence law by Richard Nixon. The photographers—all working with color, all of them gifted and talented—had a broad mission to follow what they were interested, what their lens and hearts saw, or so it seems judging by the results, some of them with very specific assignments. Broad themes are also here—“Everybody is a Star”, “Ball of Confusion”, “Pave Paradise”, alongside the specific journeys Jack Corn moved through Appalachia—traveling through West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia, coal mining territory, where he photographed the miners, their plights their families, many of them suffering from black lung disease, or the dangers inherent in the grueling work they did. There are miners. There’s a pool hall. There’s the hopeful young face of Clarice Brown, 19, who worked as a secretary for the United Mine Workers in Charleston, West Virginia, the man with the red helmet and lamp in Virginia-Pocahontas Coal Company #3 close to Richlands, Virginia.

There’s John H. White, the Chicago Daily News photographer who shot images of Chicago’s black population and neighborhoods, which struggled with poverty but also exuded a new vibrancy captured by his lens.

There’s Lyntha Scott Eiler who went on assignment to Arizona, especially in the north, capturing development surges, Native American children, the effects of strip mining and the smoke from power plants.

And then there’s Tom Hubbard, who once worked for the Cincinnati Enquirer and returned to his old stomping grounds to find a little bit of the soul of 1970s America in Fountain Square, an all-purpose square and park in downtown Cincinnati, which appears not so much as a specific place but a generic American place with a fountain, benches, musicians and jugglers, lunchers and people playing chess and protesting and carrying signs, much as you might find at Freedom Plaze, Dupont Circle or Farragut Square. The clothes look different, hats are from then not now, and dresses are as short as they are now and bell bottoms are the rage among dudes.
In a section called “Everybody is a Star”, you see the emerging people who fueled some of the outbursts of change in the 1960s—protesters, a man with a t-shirt emblazoned with a USA logo, wearing tie-dyed pants, sporting a beard and muscles and a black lab puppy. You see them all, rising up, the young black couple, he in a blue suit, topped by an Afro, she in bright red dress, three women sitting outside a retirement home in South Beach, farmers keeping safe during a dust storm, migrant workers, a bright-eyed teenager in her bedroom in Meeker Colorado, a guy selling Italian Lemonade.

You don’t necessarily hear America singing.

Actually, it’s John Fogerty and Creedence Clearwater Revival or Linda Rondstadt, bawling her man out with “You’re No Good, You’re No Good”—or Carole King going on with “I feel the earth move under my feet” as you move along.

What you see is planes, trains and automobiles, people waiting in line for a Metro shuttle in Bethesda, the smoke and rust of factories, run-down neighborhood, small towns hanging on, diners and the freeways of America.

What you see in the rear view mirror is the daily rhythm of change in America, moving out of the sixties, trudging toward the eighties. What you see in this rear view mirror is a younger face, looking vaguely familiar. [gallery ids="101195,143776,143770,143743,143765,143749,143761,143755" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • March 18, 2013

“Nordic Cool,”, the vast, exciting, diverse, and indeed cool international festival of theater, dance, music, visual arts, literature, design, cuisine and film with participation of more than 750 artists celebrating the arts of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Greenland, the Faroe Islands and the Aland Islands will finish its dazzling run on Sunday night, March 17.

The festival was held at the Kennedy Center which was itself transformed by the festival from Feb. 19 onward. The visuals and art which arrived with the festival literally changed the look of the Kennedy Center day and night, what with a blue northern lights show at night, to begin with.

But I’m going to miss the ship of shirts.

I will miss Trondur Pattursson’s painted glass birds which gave of the romance, the sadness, the danger, the freedom of flight all over the center. The birds—seagulls, the widespread, sometimes orange, blue and red wingspreads of what might have the albatrosses and teals that accompanied sailors to the sea—have flown away again.

I will miss the elks roaming the grass outside the Kennedy Center—not real elk, but wooden sculptures called “Elk Towers”, assayed by Juha Pykalainen from the Aland Island, the elk fitting in nicely with the triumphant outdoor sculpture of “Don Quixote.” The elk will be gone along with the sound of rushing water.

That would be the paneling that accompanies a photographic exhibition centered on waterfalls and the disappearance and shrinking of water resources in the world by the internationally famous artist-environmental activist Ruri from Iceland. “The world’s water supply is shrinking at an alarming rate,” she told us. “It’s not just in my country but everywhere.” She then took us to a series of panels which, when you pulled them out, allowed you to hear the roar of waterfalls and rivers and stream, each with a distinctly different sound, which will be more different still, say, five years from now, and not as loud, until decades from now, the sound might be that of a rivulet.

All over the Kennedy Center, upstairs and downstairs, exhibitions hallmarked the state of contemporary Nordic design—especially the furniture, including a chair with a bears head prominently featured, but also a chair one would take great care to sit on. This is the land of Ikea, after all, as well as Ibsen and Bergman.

Upstairs, a large section was roped off for the use of children, who create anything they wanted with an abundance of Legos. Houses of the future—environmentally cool and practical, it appeared, if sometimes strange to navigate—were on display, near where a wintry fashion show was.

In the Hall of Nations, an installation called “Are We Still Afloat” was immediately dubbed the ship of shirts in that it was created entirely by the use of thousands of donated shirts from the locals—including Kennedy Center staffers—by Kaarina Kaikkonen, a Finnish artist who’s known for her use of found material in her sculptures and installations. The sculpture—which filled the Hall of Nations and created a stir as visitors stopped and searched the decks, so to speak, or had their pictures taken. “The ship is broken,” Kaikkonen told us. “Parts of it are lost.” She then asked me where I might put my shirts, front and outside, or inside. It was an interesting question—there’s no really satisfying answer.

We happened upon Trondur Patursson, the Faroe Islands painter and sculptor who with a large and quite kinetic beard looked like a relative of the ancient mariner—and he turned out to be a veteran seafarer. “They remind me of the seas and my travels and my homeland,” Patursson said of his stained glass birds, many of which seemed, in certain lights and times, to be flying, looking perhaps for him.

Go to the Kennedy Center this weekend—last chance to hear the flapping of colored birds, the rush of water, the billowing of sails made of shirts, elks trudging on grass in a blue light. Last chance to see “Nordic Cool,” which is way cool.

Gary Tischler • March 14, 2013

Around ten years ago, singer Helen Reddy says she just got tired of performing and needed to move on to other things.

“I was just plain tired,” she said. “Of touring and everything that went with it. I’d done it most of my life from a kid on.” And then, recently, something happened. Reddy realized she missed performing.

“I sang at a birthday thing with my sister,” she said. “And I realized that I missed singing. I missed the audience, and so I thought I wanted to come back.”

Not without some trepidation. At first, Reddy did gigs in California, which had been the base and home for the Australian-born musical superstar of the 1970s and 1980s, the period when she had some of her biggest hits.

Now, she’s coming to Washington, to the Barns at Wolf Trap specifically for two concerts, Thursday and Friday, March 7 and 8, at 8 p.m.

“You know what I really like?” she asked. “It’s that contact with the audience, that back and forth, the emotional tug. It’s not just about nostalgia, or a greatest hits’ kind-of-thing. I have some of my old band mates, and I’ll be doing some of my hits, sure, but also standards, and songs of mine that perhaps aren’t so familiar, but that I love.” “No, no backup singers,” she said, laughing.

In a way, her presence in the states and in Washington has a little bit of serendipity to it—the city is and the country is in the midst of celebrating March as National Women’s History Month. Where would Women’s History Month be without a mention, the very presence of a kind of women’s history anthem, still defiant, still particular and pertinent?

Where would any mention of women’s history be without “I Am Woman”? Reddy’s hard-fought signature and anthem song, released in May 1972, had an up and down journey on the charts before finally making its way to the top of the Billboard charts in December of that year.

Not only did she first record and sing the song, but Reddy is its listed co-writer with songwriter Ray Burton. What happened after all that is something else again: the song resonated with women and the women’s liberation movement to the point that it became a musical flag for the women’s rights and remains so. There are millions of women—and no doubt quite a few men—who know the song by heart and will sing it without being asked. History keeps right on moving and the song moves with it. There are still firsts for women. Witness that the song was heard in the background after Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director.

Reddy’s presence in the nation’s capital, when all kinds of historical and commemorative exhibitions, symposiums and marches on women’s rights are being held, seems appropriate. You can bet that the song will be part of her show at the Barns, although not quite in the form you’re used to hearing it. “Yes, I will perform it,” she said. “Of course. It’s a strange thing, that song. I’m so proud of it, but it’s also one of those things, an achievement that’s kind of hard to top. I mean I’m a part of history now. So, that song has a huge importance to me and to others.”

“Woman” is not the only hit song Reddy ever wrote, recorded and sang—she’s had a big and long career, being part of an Australian show biz family, and setting out on a singing career in the United States in the 1960s. Her breakthrough hit was “I Don’t Know How To Love Him,” the Mary Magdalene ballad from “Jesus Christ Superstar.” It was followed by “I am Woman” and a host of other hits, including “Angie Baby,” “Delta Dawn” (the Alex Harvey-penned song also recorded by a teenaged Tanya Tucker and others) and “That’s No Way to Treat a Lady” among many others. Reddy reportedly has sold more than 25 million records worldwide—which is to say that in the 1970s and 1980s, she was huge.

That kind of red-hot heat of fame rarely lasts, but Reddy was to the stage born and toured often and also made forays into the legitimate theater stage, where she appeared as “Shirley Valentine” and in “Anything Goes” and “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” in addition to appearances in movies and on television.

“I think there’s nothing like that connection between audience and singer,” she said during our interview. “I really love it. I look out there and see members of several generations, people my ages, old fans, to be sure, but also new ones, and women with their teenaged daughters. That’s very emotionally satisfying to me.”

This month, for sure, it will be good to see and hear Helen Reddy at the Barns at Wolf Trap. She is, after all, Helen Reddy, a star who has lived a life from there and back again. The song and its lyrics resonate for women everywhere, but surely for her, too: “Oh yes I am wise/But it’s wisdom born of pain/Yes I’ve paid the price/but look how much I gained/If I have to/I can face anything/I am strong/I am invincible/I am woman.”

Gary Tischler •

What was it with Puccini and his women?

We know all about Mimi in “La Boheme” and “Madame Butterfly.” It’s a wonder he didn’t create Violetta, given his affinity for ladies dependent on men, falling in love with the wrong man, or ending up in tragic circumstances.

Manon Lescaut, a very young courtesan-type, seems to have attracted the genius successor to Verdi from the get-go, so much so that he ignored the fact that two operas had already been assayed about Manon, the heroine of a popular 18th-century novel by Abbe Prevost. Giacomo Puccini is said to have called Manon “a heroine I believe in. She can love more than one man. So, there can be more than one opera.”

On the surface of it, you have to wonder: Manon likes glitz, glitter and stuff, the high life, she is young, not exactly a femme fatale or even a practiced courtesan, but what she has is more than enough for Geronte, a wealthy, powerful, and need we say it, much older aristocrat who apparently sees her as a shiny elixir and rejuvenator of the flesh, a damsel he can dress up and own for his pleasure. Manon, who’s pushed on Geronte by her brother Lescaut for his own advancement—has a go at real love with the dashing, sensitive and impassioned young Chevalier des Grieux before she’s spirited away into the wealthy arms and high life of the world of Geronte.

That’s the setup, and you ask what’s to like about Manon. The way she’s embodied by soprano Patricia Racette in the Washington National Opera’s spring-season opener, there’s a lot to like, and even love about “Manon Lescaut,” both the character and the opera. In terms of both propensity of plot and music, this is early Puccini (1893), but it has all the earmarks and tells of his later grand works of genius, which followed “Lescaut—“La Boheme,” “Tosca” and “Madame Butterfly.”

We’ve already seen Racette, a singer with a rich, rangy voice, and in her case just as important, a gift, even a will to embody theatrically the parts she performs, in “Tosca,” but Manon, which she portrays for the first time in her career, is an entirely different challenge. It’s a traditional kind of role in the sense that it leads to wonderful duets (with the very able Bulgarian tenor Kamen Chanev soaring with her in heroic fashion) and arias. Chanev, in “Donna, non vidi mai,” sings with such believable passion that you understand as clear as heartbreak why he’s so smitten, and Racette when she joins him and by herself, gives him something to be smitten about, in spite of Manon’s appetites for baubles and dresses.

Director John Pascoe has staged most of the production in traditional fashion, with sometimes dazzling period costumes and wigs that have of their own. His principal design conceit is giant leaves in which audiences can read pages from the novel—an indication that, if you haven’t read the book, that Abbe Prevost writes in a style perfect for the creation of operas—super-charged poetically and emotionally. It’s a conceit that grounds the production when it needs to be, except on one occasion when we see entirely too much of the book, and not enough of the characters.

The production and the opera centers squarely on Manon and des Grieux, since the brother, ably sung and portrayed by Giorgio Caoduro, isn’t so much an imposing player as an onlooker. Jake Gardner as Geronte is a threatening, shadowing physical presence but doesn’t impress vocally.

In Racette and Chanev, “Manon Lescaut” has a convincing, passionate pair of lovers, ill-matched initially, but hearts entwined desperately, and sadly in the end, when Manon and des Grieux, through a series of revenge-minded events engineered by Geronte, end up in French-held Louisiana, cast out and fled into what appears to be a great desert. From their first meeting, recognition of love to Manon’s tragic end in a strange land, these two rise vocally and emotionally to making you care about the two lovers.

Gary Tischler •

I’m guessing—I could be wrong here—that there’s no video game called “Druids and Romans” or “Gauls and Romans.” Ancient Britain of Gaul under the occupation of Ancient Rome is a tough task for movie makers as well as stage directors who have to cut through the thicket that is Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline.”

It’s tough for opera, too, but that’s exactly where we find ourselves in Vincenzo Bellini’s bell canto mountain of an opera, “Norma,” which has as its main characters the powerful druid high priestess Norma, her (secret) lover and father of her two children, the Roman general Pollione, the young novice priestess Adalgisa, with whom has fallen in love, and the druid Oroveso, who is also Norma’s father.

As a druid—the priest class of the ancient Celts—Norma is a high priestess of the land’s power and its magic. She interprets the will of the gods: Should the druids war against the Romans or sit back and wait? This is a paramount question during this opera, but the biggest question of all is what happens when Norma finds out that she’s essentially being dumped for a younger rival. Things do not end well, as is wont to happen in ancient Britain and in opera.

Perhaps none of that matters too much when you having the rising star soprano Angela Meade, performing and singing the role of Norma and knocking it out of the park, aided and abetted almost on an equal plane by mezzo soprano Dolora Zajick as her rival.

Meade has already done parts of the role and a concert version of “Norma,” the big rock candy mountain of bell canto singing for any star soprano worthy of the name. There have been some great Normas by all accounts, including the legendary Maria Callas. I’m guessing there’s another one that can be added to that list and her initials are A.M.

Meade is known for her technical virtuosity, something I can’t argue with. According to some critics, she isn’t yet the actress that she might be. For all the high notes—the riverboat gambling singing that is the musical equivalent of skipping a pebble on water and making it go forever—what Meade accomplishes in this role is to act with her singing. She loads her voice up not only with impossible amounts of breath and breadth and tone, but also with the most important part of the music—the singing—which is invested with the heart of Norma. This happens whether Meade is singing alone in the horrific scene where she almost “Medeas” her children (“Teneri, Teneri Figli”) or when she’s singing with Zajick in which forgiveness and sisterhood reign in a deliriously delicious duet (“Mira o Norma”, but it could be BFF).

Norma is torn—war against the Romans, revenge against Pollione—and she still has to tell her people that she is the mother of two, fathered by the Roman general.

This sort of thing is difficult to put together, because great music (yes!) or not, great singing (yes!), the action and the characters don’t exist in a vacuum. While the ladies make you care about the ladies, you have to be comfortable in the surroundings in which so much often preposterous things goes on. Director Ann Bogart and designer Neil Patel have opted for a bare-bones, bone-clean primitive look which seems somehow perpetually cold—an angled slab of stage, a wall propped up by what look like long wooden spears, an omni-present moon which the druids worship. It has just enough strangeness to make you realize just how strange that world must have been. The Romans, fixed in their legionnaire uniforms seem out of place in this environment—which seems right—while the locals range from robes to whatever the middle-class druids might wear, while vestal virgin types in shimmering white make patterns on the stage. In this group, Dmitry Belosselskiy as Oroveso resounds with authority. On the other hand, Rafael Davila has a little too much reckless petulance in his voice, but then he is playing a cad.

But as for Meade, certainly, and Zajick as well, I can only echo the gentleman behind me who voiced his pleasure at Meade’s solo and their duets with a resounding “Bravissima!”

The Washington National Opera’s “Norma” runs through March 24 at the Kennedy Center.