Gary Tischler •

At the end of “Let Me Down Easy,” Anna Deavere Smith’s provocative, shattering play about health care in America now and the hour of our death, Smith stands alone on a stage littered with castoff costumes, clothing, food, props, bottles, pencils, lying on the floor. It looks like the aftermath of a party or a food fight—or an abandoned emergency room where a life-and-death struggle has just taken place.

It’s all that remains of the 20 people portrayed by Smith during the course of an uninterrupted and rangy evening in which she explores, in her inimitable fashion, the arena of our health and bodies, and the pains we sometimes endure because of the way we deal with falling ill, and the moment when we come face to face with the finality of death. By a shift in vocal timbre, a way of walking or sitting, an accent, a laugh, a sprawl on a couch, a way of talking, outstretched arms, a tie, a coat, a cowboy hat, she explores and portrays the geography of our culture.

Smith, an impressively talented, cogent and curious, woman functions as playwright, actress, writer and interviewer for “Let Me Down Easy,” a project somewhat similar to others she is well know for. There was “Fires in the Mirror,” which examined the aftermath of a race riot in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and “Twilight: Los Angeles,” which focused on the devastating and violent 1992 riots in Los Angeles. But while these previous works also saw Smith portraying dozens of real people alone on stage with remarkable dexterity and even-handedness, they were focused on specific, dramatic and explosive events. “Let Me Down Easy” is much broader in its scope and approach.

While the massive national health care reform legislation, passed amid much bitterness last year, provides a framework for a large extent of what concerns the people in this play, there is a lot more going on than might be contained in even such a sweeping legislative effort.

“Let Me Down Easy” is about specific people, many of them quite well known to most of us for one reason or another. Athletes, like the controversial American Tour de France bicyclist Lance Armstrong, who overcame cancer and rode to greater achievements. Sportswriter Sally Jenkins. A boxer. A rodeo bull rider. Model Lauren Hutton. Television movie critic Joel Siegel, dying on a couch of colon cancer. Playwright and performer Eve Ensler, of “The Vagina Monologues.” Former Texas Governor Ann Richards. There are doctors, medical academics, a musicologist, a choreographer and a physician at Charity Hospital in New Orleans who experiences the terrifying ravages of Hurricane Katrina.

Such a diverse group of voices, of men and women from various walks of life expressing similar and differing concerns, at first produces an unformed, disconcerting narrative, like trying to grab Jell-O with your hands. But the effect, in time, is accumulative, and it arrives with shocking and powerful clarity, and with gentle but undeniable finality. It may not be a definitive destination, an over-arching theory or philosophy, or even ready-made solace, but it is a destination, an arrival, and an ending.

There have been complaints that there are too many celebrities here and that the play is unfocused or mish-mish. Maybe so. Maybe it’s too big a subject to have a definitive story line or conclusion that you can take to the bank or to the church. And it’s fair to say that the better-known people portrayed here add less to the total than those not so well known. While much of “Let Me Down Easy”—a theatrical blues riff with multiple meanings—concerns itself with terminal illnesses and how it is dealt with by hospitals, the medical community and patients, there are sections on the ailments and issues peculiar to athletes, as well as how society deals with women’s bodies and their functions (hence Ensler and Hutton).

But many of the characters share a common plight against cancer, a battle, sometimes successful, sometimes not. And suddenly there is very little distance between women like Richards, the sharp-tongued former governor of Texas dying of cancer, and Smith’s own aunt, Lorraine Coleman, a retired teacher.

There is a surprising bit of laughter in the play—some as a result of Smith’s fabulous work as a mimic, mime and master of comic timing—but the constructed and performed production picks up power as it goes along. A kind of dread aching to be relieved ensues somewhere in there. Smith gives us Kiersta Kurz-Burke, a physician at the New Orleans charity hospital who has been ignored and abandoned for days during Katrina; Eduardo Bruera, of the Anderson Cancer Center, talking about “Existential Sadness”; Joel Siegel, only in his fifties, flat on his back, the face projected dramatically on a wall, dying of colon cancer; and Trudy Howell, the director of a South African orphanage where children deal with the loss of parents and their own impending deaths, entitled appropriately, “Don’t Leave Them In The Dark.”

“Let Me Down Easy” has a restless feel to it, but it also has the sure touch and magic of Smith’s abilities as an actress, that gift of playing many parts convincingly with minimal props. Over and above the identifying tricks of such props, or the brilliant use of her voice and inflections of accents, tone and vocal speed, there is something else that convinces us like a punch to the heart. True, Smith is a terrific actress—you’ve all seen her in films and as a national security adviser on the defunct “West Wing” series—but that’s technique. What makes her work soar is her own empathy toward the people she’s put on stage; it’s as if she’s caught souls in a glass jar. She’s not a chameleon. Some recognizable part of her is always there. It’s not as if she somehow disappears into a person. It’s more like she joins with them.

“Let Me Down Easy” doesn’t function so much as drama; rather the people that we come to know as they swagger, suffer, snack, snort, laugh and dream are a kind of self-portrait of us. What we often hear are sentences we’ve heard, or what we will ultimately say ourselves sooner or later.

We’re left with a salve, like fresh water, And Smith stands alone in a bow, the stage littered with the debris, the left behind stuff of human beings.

“Let Me Down Easy,” written and performed by Anna Deavere Smith and directed by Leonard Foglia, will be performed at Arena Stage through February 13. For more information visit ArenaStage.org.
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Gary Tischler •

Sitting in the balcony seats at Arena Stage’s Kreeger Theatre overlooking the stage, I had a disquieting thought as I watched George and Martha go at each other in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”

I thought: there are no fictional characters. Everything I experienced at this compelling, raw production, even in its few calmer moments, felt realer than anything called “reality show.” It felt realer than anything on the nightly local news. George and Martha and their unfortunate guests Nick and Honey are famous in theatre history, and they churned up the stage, kick-started your memories, made you grin and laugh. They made you see yourself in their revelations, their brawling, their need to compete, hurt, connect, disengage, wound and understand.

In the more intimate confines of the Kreeger, the only escape is the Exit signs. Unlike the Kennedy Center production at the Eisenhower Theater, which gave you breathing room and distance, or the Liz-and-Dick movie version, witnessing this show at the Kreeger (and I think that’s what the audience is doing, bearing witness) is like being dropped into a combat zone.

The authenticity, the “real,” is not only created by a quartet of terrific actors and actresses, but by director Pam McKinnon’s sharp pacing, creating little puddles of reflections in a roiling sea, before combat begins anew. That pace keeps the play—two acts and well over three hours—from lagging. You may feel punchy, a little beat up afterwards, but you are never disinterested, sleepy or bored.

Part of the reason too is that the set by Todd Rosenthal looks so large and detailed. It’s a living room/disorganized library where steps, stairs a hallway and a door lead off to other spaces unseen, but imaginable. It looks rumpled, lived in, dominated by sprawling, scattered books and a stand-up bar to which the characters retreat to renew. Combat is not too strong a word for what happens during the long, nightmarish all-nighter we see—in fact the play has a fight choreographer and a fight captain listed in its credits (for the record, Nick Sandys and Carrie Coon, respectively).

Meet George and Martha, if you haven’t already. They are the creatures and creations of Playwright Edward Albee, who’s having quite a time for himself in Washington, being honored here with an Albee festival, a reading of all of his plays, and his presence at Georgetown University for part of a Tennessee Williams festival.

George and Martha live raggedly, furiously on the campus of a Northeastern university where George is a history professor married to the irascibly sharp-tongued, combative Martha, daughter of the university president, which makes contact with her a prize for a young biology professor like Nick and his hot-house flower of a wife, Honey.

George and Martha, who appeared to have finessed themselves into a rough marriage full of disappointments, carnage and games, hold court in the wee hours with Nick and Honey for an evening of horrible trash talk and insults hurled in equal parts like stilettos or rocks.

Amy Morton, half-blonde and all fury, with edges even in her hair, is like some sultry, long-striding lioness of displeasure, discontent, and just plain dissing. She’s hungry for the fight, but also hungry for all the lost love between the two. Periodically, she’s looking for physical comfort from George, who turns his back and picks up a book, or wards her off with a biting insult, one of which he repeats often: “I am seven years older than you, my love, and no matter what I will always be seven years older than you.”

The quartet drinks—a lot. And then some more. Honey, who appears to have tricked her hubby into a marriage by way of a false pregnancy, gets sick. The two men spar like intellectual gladiators, Nick using his youth, George his infinite, bottomless gift for expressing disgust with the best of words, wit and viciousness.

These four don’t just sit around. They pace, they hurl themselves at each other, they come close to blows, and they lounge askew on the couch. It’s clear what the games are: the famous “Hump the Hostess” and “Get the Guests” among them.

And in this production we give you Traci Letts as George, the feral historian. We’ve seen diffident, cruelly distanced and impossibly nuanced Georges, but never quite this furious and ferocious a George. Letts, who is also a playwright—with plays full of familial combat in them—gets that just so; he convinces you that this very public, teeth-bared cruelty is somehow just. He’s like Peter Finch in “Network” who can’t take it anymore.

And strangely, you know George and Martha carry around with them every opportunity, every bit of whatever love they had, with them. They are in ruins, full of dried up tears, spent passion, words like war, opportunities lost to the endless abyss of the past.

The title refers to a song she sang at the party they attended that night—giddy, silly and then, like a lost voice in the night, heart-breaking after all. Now that’s a reality show.

Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s Production of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” directed by Pam MacKinnon, is at Arena Stage’s Kreeger theater until April 10. For more information visit ArenaStage.org.

Gary Tischler •

Mary Zimmerman is back. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Zimmerman’s “Arabian Nights” comes to Arena Stage fresh on the heels of the closing days of Zimmerman’s vision of Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” at the Shakespeare Theater. The two plays being so close together are an embarrassment of theatrical riches, for which you need heart, mind, empathy and imagination to be working at full capacity to get the full effect.

“Arabian Nights” is no Disney production, nor Richard Burton’s, nor the Frenchman’s who wrote something like it in the 1700s. It belongs to none of the storytellers who might have told the original stories over the centuries. There is no Ali Baba here, no Sabu or Sinbad. The authorship and content of the “Arabian Nights” tales are thick with thumbprints and a host of Middle East and further east cultures.

The program will tell you that this production was written and directed by Mary Zimmerman and adapted from “The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night,” as translated by Powys Mathers. This is probably a truth, but to put it squarely, the final author is Mary Zimmerman, as is the case with most of her work, no matter if it goes back centuries. The rambunctiously inventive director-playwright explodes the stage every time out.

“Arabian Nights” at the Arena belongs to Zimmerman; hers is the power and the glory, the credit and the blame—some of which will surely come. Oddly enough, this “Arabian Nights” also belongs to us, if we choose to own it. By us, I mean the members of the audience, but also historical Americans who have left heavy, wrenching footprints in the glorious city of Baghdad, where this night of nights is set.

Picture this: a stage, full of wrinkled, large canvasses, unfurled, deeply pleated. Picture this now in the court of a medieval Baghdad, where a troubled, dangerous king is marrying virginal brides every day for three years and killing them nightly, after finding his first bride in the arms of another man whom he dispatched. He is a man with an awesome fear of women and love. He says “Say not, ‘If I might love and yet escape the follies of loving’, but rather ‘Only a miracle brings a man safe from love.’”

He has almost depleted the kingdom of marriage-age young women by this time, and so picks Scheherazade, the daughter of his closest adviser, the Wazir. Accompanied by her faithful sister, she comes dutifully to the palace and spins a series of stories for the king, cliffhangers of love, death and comedy, so that he’s forced to stave off her execution one day at a time. Just so, her father comes each morning with a shroud for her funeral.

We may know this story already. But we don’t know the story as Zimmerman tells it. You weren’t expecting the tale of the madman and how he got that way. You surely weren’t expecting the burlesque-like routine of “What’s in the Bag,” the contents of which are improvised by the actors each night.

And you probably weren’t expecting to see, with an ache in your heart, an ancient civilization resurrected like a fleshy, musical mirage before your eyes. This is the Baghdad of Harun al Rashid, the city’s most fabled ruler. It is a city where poets ruled as much as sheiks and kings, and women were beautiful, dangerous and impossible to know. Zimmerman’s Baghdad is a city of fable, merchants and musclemen—not the modern city wrecked by shock and awe, where Sunnis and Shiites battle and hand-made bombs are just another roadside attraction.

I could talk about the costumes, and the technical and showy detail that Zimmerman is so good at; lamps descend onto the stage, a man meets himself on the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates, ancient musical instruments play loudly and sweetly, and a civilization dies before your eyes.

It has been suggested that there are stereotypes in the show, and it’s true. But Zimmerman addresses this issue with a very important statement, which speaks volumes about the material:

“It is a precondition of war that we view other people as fundamentally different form ourselves; it is a precondition of literature that we view other people as fundamentally the same.”

Watching and responding to a story that depends on its rolling laughter is to remember that something as simple as a fart makes the whole world helpless with laughter. It’s surely a shared experience. But so is the torture of love, and so is the heartbreak of a love song. In these stories, we ought to recognize ourselves, our common humanity, as well as the pungent power of stories.

What’s in this bag? More than it has any business holding. Go hear the stories of “The Arabian Nights.” You will dream about it and talk about it. I guarantee it.
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Gary Tischler •

Giacomo Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” is probably the most performed opera in America. The Washington National Opera, with two different casts among the principals, is in the midst of a run of 13 performances for this most romantic and tragic of operas.

There are reasons for that. “Butterfly” is the opera that depends greatly on its music, which sounds like a given for any opera, but it’s especially true here. But it also has in its core the most basic and classical themes of theatrical literature—enduring, undying love and the tragedy that arises from it. And let’s not forget the classic East-Meets-West at the expense of East theme.

Clocking in at roughly three hours with one intermission, “Butterfly” would seem to be a bit of an endurance test for the operatically disinclined, but in the end, it is exactly what it’s often describe as: the opera for people who don’t usually go to the opera. Which accounts for the frequent presence of the opera on the season schedule of any company that can provide the singers, conductors and orchestra to do it justice.

The WNO certainly has that in soprano Catherine Naglestad (Ana Maria Martinez is the second Butterfly), who sings with heartbreaking clarity and acts the part of Cio-Cio-San, aka Madama Butterfly, in an appealing style that avoids overstatement and operatic histrionics that are sometimes off-putting to the uninitiated. Clearly, she’s the unadorned heroine of this opus. She has a beauty that combines with humility to create a young woman already used to the woes of the world but who clings nonetheless to an unfounded hope. Her movements around the stage are graceful without ever descending into Western clichés about Asian ways.

We all probably know the story—Lt. Pinkerton (ably sung by the Russian tenor Alexei Dolgov), a young and caddish American navy officer at the beginning of America’s robust foray into the Pacific, is stationed in Nagasaki, in a Japan where the Shoguns and codes of honor reign. He’s paid for a wife (both marriage and contract can be waived by him at any time), the lovely teenaged Cio-Cio-San, and duly marries her in order to taste as many pleasures as he can before settling down. Cio-Cio-San, forced to become a geisha because of her disgraced father, is smitten beyond reason, commons sense and caution. The feelings are expressed in a lengthy duet in Act One, but it’s Act Two that fills the heart with apprehension, and the soul with a kind of devastating glory.

Pinkerton of course leaves off on the ocean blue, and does not return for three years: Butterfly has been forced to sell off almost everything she has merely to survive, and has also mothered a son, a beautiful small blonde boy. She believes Pinkerton will return to hearth and home. He’s back all right, with an American wife in tow. Pinkerton never sees her, and it’s up to the American consul to relay that news and that the Pinkertons will take care of Cio-Cio-San’s son. Like some bereft waif, left with nothing, Butterfly’s left with an impossible decision.

Butterfly is at her most appealing as she waits, the ship in the harbor, with her son at her side. She has already let us know in thunderous soaring terms in the famous aria “Un Bel Di” (One Beautiful day), which everyone has already heard, if only as muzak in an elevator. She soars with love and hope and as the aria begins, so does the audience soar. You can practically hear a collective sigh move through the audience as the familiar music rises, and the audience soars with her, totally, tearfully satisfied.

This is the kind of thing you don’t often get in theater—satisfaction expressed in the audience, especially when in the presence of a significant artist like Nagelstad

But what you also don’t usually get is what happens next when Butterfly waits, her eyes on the ship, her heart waiting for a sight of Pinkerton, a sound of a footsteps. This sequence has Butterfly with her back to the audience, her heart to the front, and it’s accompanied by quietly powerful orchestral music, a kind of fugue leading to finalized disappointment. Nothing happens: lights change, become muted and bright, go dim on the ship, turn dark in her lanterns. It’s an astonishing sequence that you could never do in the theater, which relies so much on movement and words. You shouldn’t be able to do it in an opera either, but it works. It creates a kind of strain and pain that can only be relieved by the familiar but always shocking tragic ending.

Bene, bene. Bravo Bravo. Ciao, Cio-Cio San.

Gary Tischler •

Even while talking with Nicholas Kent on the phone, you could hear the murmur in the background.

Kent, the artistic director of the Tricycle Theater Company in England and the man responsible for putting together “The Great Game”, an ambitious three-play project on imperialism and other forays into Afghanistan at Sidney Harman Hall which ended last Saturday, was delighted by the buzz in the background. That would be audiences from the first two parts of the trilogy, talking it up about what they saw.

“That was one of the concerns about taking these plays on an American tour,” said Kent, who also directs “Black Tulip”, one of the mini-plays in the second part of the trilogy. “We didn’t know how the audiences would react. Obviously, it’s a very timely subject for Americans as well as Europeans, given the state of the commitment of the American military effort there.”

“The audiences,” Kent says, “have been amazing. There’s really a reaction here. It’s not like people are sitting there dutifully taking their medicine of serious or historic drama.”

In Washington especially, that was bound to happen, although it takes theatrical stamina and determination to take in all three plays, which feature the participation and writing efforts of twelve playwrights. The trio of plays actually comprises about a dozen plays of varying lengths. “We basically sent out a call for plays, and we got quite a result.”

Afghanistan looms large in the Barack Obama presidency. It haunts the minds of the U.S. body politics, and the cost of the effort in human loss can be seen almost every day in the small dramas provided by funeral corteges that make their sorrowful way to a plot in Arlington National Cemetery. “The Great Game”, a phrase coined by the eminent chronicler of the British Empire Rudyard Kipling, is an effort to tell the story of three great power efforts — futile on the first two, school’s still out on the last — to control events in Afghanistan. Part One is called “Invasion and Independence” and focuses on the British Empire’s efforts there, some of them ending in major massacres and defeats up until 1930.

Part Two chronicles the Soviet Union’s efforts to create a subject state by way of invasion, and the CIA’s varied forays there, helping the Mujahedeen’s anti-Russian rebellion. The same group would eventually morph into the Taliban. Part Three, “Enduring Freedom”, are the stories of the American presence after 9/11, a story that remains unfinished if not undone. “Obviously, Afghanistan is a hugely important event in terms of the United States,” Kent said. “That’s why we thought it would be an appropriate undertaking, especially in Washington.”

Kent’s Tricycle Theater Company is an odd mixture of a theater, and very much reflects the interests of its director. “I think sometimes people here think we just do plays they see as political, or archival, or documentary,” he said. “We also do entertainments, if you will, like “The 39 Steps”, or straight plays, including “The Great White Hope.” You do want to have an audience – it’s theater after all.”

But the so-called tribunal plays are what sets Tricycle and Kent apart from the rest of the theater world. Kent has staged plays about the war crime tribunals created in the wake of the break-up of Yugoslavia, about the British in Ireland, about Apartheid in South Africa and the Nuremberg Trials, as well as Guantanamo. Much of the dialogue in these plays comes from verbatim transcripts and documents of trials.

Kent chafes when people see him as a left-wing ideologue. “I’m not a lefty, per se. It’s not about lefty, right wing and things like that. It’s about justice, history, not forgetting. It’s about understanding history and its repetition. You shouldn’t really talk about Afghanistan if you know nothing about what’s gone on there for centuries.”

This sort of approach to history and theater can be highly affecting and dramatic in and of itself. During the course of a performance of the play about the Nuremberg trials, which included actors playing Hermann Goring reciting testimony from the trials, an elderly Holocaust survivor in the audience became so distraught that she stood up and shouted at the Goring character , yelling “Liar, murderer.”

“It was quite astonishing, yes,” Kent said.

“I don’t see these plays as political plays,” he said. “I don’t see myself that way. If you’re going to call my interests something, call them humanitarian.”

“The Great Game” is still of great interest to Americans here. Of course in Washington, the CIA, the government, the defense department, the state department, the national security and intelligence apparatus located here could fill several theaters for several weeks at least. It would be nice to think they’re checking out “The Great Game.”

Meanwhile, we can still hear the buzz, the murmur in the background. Though the troupe just left Washington, the first stop on its US tour, it will be in NYC from December 1-19 at the Public Theater. Check the Tricycle Theater website at www.tricycle.co.uk [gallery ids="99202,103429" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

Almost any production of William Shakespeare’s “All’s Well That Ends Well” is bound to be problematic.

That’s because the play is, well, one of those problem plays in the Shakespeare canon — plays which are difficult to stage, about which there are critical misgivings, to say the least. To that category you could probably lend the title “lesser Shakespeare”. They don’t go down well with their after-taste and often don’t play as well as they should because lesser characters sometimes take over the play. Put “Cymbeline” on that list alongside “Pericles”. Perhaps add “Troilus and Cressida,” “Henry VIII,” and even “The Winter’s Tale,” — let alone “Timon of Athens” to which we can only say, when’s the last time you’ve seen that?

The problem with “All’s Well That Ends Well” is that it is, at its core, something on the order of “As You Like It” and “Twelfth Night,” a romantic comedy with a shining leading lady attended by swains, fools and royals. Helena, the brave, resolute, witty, and smart as anybody and more heroine, loves her man and has to have him, and with no cooperation from the hero she gets him.

The problem then is that “All’s Well” doesn’t really end well in the romance department. It clears up the plot mess the author has devised and gets the two lovers together, but somehow this resolution
doesn’t sit well with most audiences. Because the object of her affection is the hunky and high-born Count Bertram, who’s a snob, a dolt, an idiot, albeit a brave one, and a fickle swain like one of those over-tanned bachelors on reality television. He’s totally unworthy of the fair Helena, so you know they’ll have kids (evidence on stage) and remain married while making themselves miserable. All this is done just to please the King of France and Bertram’s sweet, soulful mother, the Countess of Roussillon — a devout role model and guardian of Helena.

Tell you what — forget the idiot. Much like the more self-aware courtier, liar and coward Parolles, Bertrand is an easily recognized member in good standing of the vast army of the self-absorbed Michael Kahn, who’s directed this production for the Shakespeare Theatre Company. Kahn has given it a kind of stylish authenticity in the way he treats the language of the play. This is especially true of Miriam Silverman as Helena, whose way with the rhythms and rhymes of the words give a kind of musical insistence to her character. You can fault her for her why-do-good-women-go-for-lousy-men problem, but you can’t fault her for clarity, courage, smarts and bull-headedness.

Helena, the daughter of a famed physician, comes to court and promptly cures the king of a possibly terminal ailment. In return, the grateful king offers her any husband she wants. She picks Bertram, who is so mortified that he goes off to the wars in Italy and leaves Helena with a challenge; she will never be a true wife unless she gets his family ring off his finger or conceives a child by him, two things he vows will never happen.

Don’t ever challenge a woman to do the impossible. It’s a cinch. How she does it is one of those wonderful tricks that occur in many of Shakespeare’s comedies and romances, without anybody batting an eye (see “Pericles”, see “Winter’s Tale”). But proceedings are helped by the tolerance and love of the adults, Ted van Griethuysen as the French King, and Marsha Mason as the Countess. They provide a portrait of paternal and maternal affection rare in the theater. In the French king’s case, it’s not only good to be king, but it’s better to be a good king.

And there is Paxton Whitehead as the aristocratic court member Lafew, who’s acerbic wit is matched only by his kind patience toward the impossible Parolles, a man of whom it is noted that “he knows who he is, and is STILL who he is.” As played by Michael Bakkensen, self-awareness is Parolles’ saving grace, that, and a complete lack of any sense of shame.

“All’s Well” ends well because it has to. The play itself is better than just well — it is stylish, acted with panache where appropriate and authenticity by the company. The shortcomings of the play, well, just say author. (“All’s Well That Ends Well” runs at the Shakespeare Theater Company’s Lansburgh Theater through October 24). [gallery ids="102543,120008" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

Remember those old, tinted granny glasses worn by hippies in the sixties, along with their bellbottoms, fringed jackets, tie-dyed blouses and long hair or afros? You don’t?

That will help. Or not.

Context isn’t everything when you go see the touring company of the hit revival of “Hair,” as it makes its first stop at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House, but it plays a part as to how the show will affect you.

“Hair,” the revolutionary Broadway musical which exploded like a powerful, bracing dose of a very new kind of cultural aftershave in 1968—a year when the world spun on its axis—will seem different to audience members who were in their twenties in the sixties, or who just turned 21 last week and celebrated with a Facebook announcement.

It’s strange watching “Hair,” which is so much of its own time in the here and now. It’s the Age of Aquarius, touching down in Washington days before what liberal spirits see as the beginning of the Age of Armageddon.

The sheer energy of the cast, a kind of boisterous insistence that what they feel, do and think matters like nothing else in the universe, makes this production of “Hair,” which was revived on Broadway with major success last year, an overwhelming experience no matter who you are.

Its been over forty years, but this bunch looks at times as if they just jumped off a particularly gaudy spaceship, spreading joy, free love, reefers, two-fingered peace and love and other goodies. This way the show seems almost new, as if shot out of a cannon.

If you’re a baby boomer, you’re likely to get a contact high, a strong rush of memory. If you’re not…well, it will bowl you over anyway, with its sheer physicality, its loud pop music that really
pops, strung with aching guitar riffs and the faint odor of pot and pop, so familiar are some of the tunes.

You’ll also admire the winning ways of the big cast—each and every single one of them. As in the past, the cast often swarms over the audience like bees, rushing out, chit-chatting, whispering,
jumping, singing, standing on seats, waving flags, whispering in your ears, rushing down the aisles. They’re like gonzo pied pipers.

“Hair” was shocking and political for its time, a non-stop entertainment train that pulled you along or got in your face. For every power ballad like “Easy to Be Hard,” or sweet optimistic song like “Good Morning Star Shine,” or surging anthem like “Aquarius,” there are the recitation songs about the sufferings of the environment (“Welcome, Carbon Monoxide”) or the recitation of every sexual act known to man, woman or anyone else. There are still the queasy hundred or so words that get substituted for African American, most of which were not in use until then.

There’s a thin plot, involving the sweet Claude who’s become draft eligible to be cannon fodder for Viet Nam. Mostly there’s characters: the exuberantly charismatic Berger; Claude, who has left his Staten Island home and pretends to be from Manchester, England; the torn Sheila who loves the commitment-shy Berger; the very gay Woof who insists he’s not; the very pregnant Jeanie, who doesn’t know who the father is.

They’re all part of the tribe: free and freedom loving hippies of the kind that enthralled and appalled America for part of the late 1960s—especially in 1968, the year of assassinations, war, political and cultural upheaval in extremis.

The “Hair” tribe hangs out in various open spaces in New York. They demonstrate at the draft office, burn their draft cards, exult in hair, and levitate on love and peace.

Dominating the cast is Steel Burkhart as the overpowering Berger who reeks of charisma—a guy whose preferred drug has to be speed, because he’s barely ever still. He’s a sack of hugs and hands on others and himself. He’s the anarchistic spirit of the tribe. Paris Remillard’s Claude, with a little help from the eternally optimistic Jeanie (Kacie Sheik), is the tribe’s most cherished innocent soul. And Sheila, played by the soulful Caren Lynn Tackett, is the tribe’s conscience.

But really, it’s the collective whole that counts. They come running. A blue-jeaned, butterfly-tattooed blonde girl shaking her long hair. Hud and his black compatriots prouding their Afros. The music overwhelming with the exuberant “Hair,” or “Let the Sun Shine In.” Berger crowing “I’ve Got Life” (and then some). The Tribe stripping demurely to the barely nude. They seem at turns like last Friday or a group from a galaxy far far away, revisiting. What a trip. And worth the trip.

“Hair” runs at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House through November 21.

Gary Tischler •

These days, we take pictures for granted. They’re in our heads, in our phones, on our computer, in our digital cameras, makeable, and erasable. We live in an ocean of photographic imagery—the world of click and snip. In this environment, it’s hard to tell what’s art and what’s not. The question of art at the dawn of the age of photography, and the decades that marched ahead, was a question that was asked with great passion and answered in infinite ways by several generations of photographers, all of them searching for ways to elevate a technical innovation into the rarefied clouds of high art.

Two current exhibitions, at the National Gallery of Art and the Phillips Collection, take up the banner of that debate, how it was conducted, and the results it produced. Both exhibition titles sound like Masters of Fine Arts theses, but don’t be put off by that. If you have any interest in photography and art, photography IN art, and, for that matter, if you have a camera and use it often, you’ll find these exhibitions thought-provoking, imagination-stimulating, debate-instigating, and, with the presence of so many great works of photography, a great pleasure.

The National Gallery of Art exhibition, “The Pre-Raphaelite Lens, British Photography and Painting, 1848-1875,” is, as the title suggests, narrowly focused in time and art. It successfully connects the dots between early photographers, like the remarkable Julia Cameron and Henry Peach Robinson, to the groups of artists encouraged by the English uber-critic and cultural sage, John Ruskin, led by the likes of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The latter group was devoted to the art which preceded Raphael, hence the name they adopted. Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites were also keenly interested in the arrival of photography, which they tried to incorporate into their art.

The Pre-Raphaelites constitute a tight group of rebels—albeit very well dressed, crusty, upper class Victorian elite rebels. Ruskin, a Renaissance man of endless expertise, was a kind of titular leader and arbiter of art and culture in England, if not Europe, at mid-century when the effects of photography were beginning to be felt.

Pre-Raphaelites and photographers intersected at so many points that the connections seem almost incestuous. Artists like Rossetti believed that they should paint from and in nature, getting the very effects that photography could produce, and exacting details of landscape and dramatic details of personality, dress and features in portraits. They also loved to create illustrative paintings of scenes from poetry, literature, Shakespeare and legend—something photographers like Cameron also did, surprisingly, to much greater effect.

The Pre-Raphs, in a way, rejected the modern and tried to achieve an intense romanticism, especially in their efforts at portraits. Except for a few paintings—Rossetti’s effects in color and Ruskin’s watercolors—the photographers seem almost always to trump the painters. But then the painters had no one of the stature and brilliance of Cameron in their ranks.

“TruthBeauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845-1945,” at the Phillips Collection, is broader in its reach, wider in its geography, and more varied in the work on the walls. In the exhibition, the debate and comparison between photography and painting continues in the realm of photography as a vehicle for great and fine art.

The photographs in this exhibition have a haunting quality. They seem touched by some sort of mist, and it’s that artful, powerful quality that pervades much of the works of the photographers in “TruthBeauty” at the Phillips. There’s an insistence that a photograph is, can, and should be more than just a photograph—a mirror to reality.

Cameron, who may be a guiding, informing spirit, is represented here. But those photographer-artists who came later: Edward Steichen, Gertrude Kasebier, even the modernistic Edward Weston, and the edge-pushing F. Holland Day acknowledge the debt and direction of photography of art. In landscapes and in cityscapes, is there anything more haunting than Steichen’s “Flatiron—Evening”?

Cameron in her portraiture, which seems more like Tolstoyan novels, is more of a painter than the painters. Consider, for instance, Lord Tennyson, the great Victorian of British nationalism and empire, as painted first by George Frederic Watts in somber, beautifully lit fashion. Then look at Cameron’s photo portrait (dubbed “The Dirty Monk”), where you can see some wild, inner restlessness—something of the fanatic in the face. Tennyson, by the way, much preferred “The Dirty Monk.”

Still, nothing quite like Rossetti’s portrait of Jane Morris, the wife of his friend and his paramour, was achieved by the photographers. Here color and details create a miracle of hypnotic beauty.

“TruthBeauty” is rich (120 images) and diverse, a best of the best in many ways, and the Phillips is the last stop on a grand international tour, which was organized by the George Eastman House and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

“TruthBeauty” continues at the Phillips Gallery through January 9. “The Pre-Raphaelite Lens” continues at the National Gallery of Art through January 30. [gallery ids="99565,104793" nav="thumbs"]