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"]

Gary Tischler •

After a sold out run of performances last fall, the VelocityDC Dance Festival is coming back for a second season. This vibrant performance experience presented by the Washington dance community will hopefully continue to be a seasonal offering in the DC Area.

Representing an exciting direction in dance presentation and audience development for the DC area, VelocityDC began as the first large-scale collaboration between DC dance leaders. The event was designed to showcase and promote the exceptional artistic quality of the area’s dance community, modeled very similarly to New York City’s supremely successful Fall for Dance Festival. The festival features site-specific performances throughout the Washington community as well as instructional public dance classes at THEARC.

VelocityDC is organized by a consortium of local movement and dance-centric arts entities, among them the Washington Performing Arts Society and the Shakespeare Theatre Company.

Featured among the performances this season will be Jane Franklin Dance Company, Liz Lerman
Dance Exchange, CityDance Ensemble, Furia Flamenco, and the Washington Ballet. Performances run October 7-9. [gallery ids="99205,103441,103439" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

Pity the National Portrait Gallery and its director Martin Sullivan.

Weeks after mounting the astoundingly comprehensive, direct and illuminating exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” both the Gallery and Sullivan got cuffed and buffeted from every direction, proving again that no good deed goes unpunished.

“Hide/Seek” is a good deed, although you’d get some in-your-face debate on that from the Catholic League and House Republican leaders John Boehner and Eric Canto.

The exhibition is a good deed, not in any do-gooder, mealy-mouthed way, but because it is a very good exhibition. Secondly, it took a certain amount of courage to even go forward with the project, especially in the National Portrait Gallery, which isn’t exactly the headquarters for portraits of outsider cultures in America. There is a Hall of Presidents here, but not a Hall of prominent LGBT men and women.

“Hide/Seek” seeks to create a portrait, general and specific, through over 100 paintings, sculptures, photographs and videos, of gay and lesbian culture in America—its iconography, its artists, its style of life both hidden and open. In that sense, it’s a history piece, and it serves comprehensively to fulfill what’s mostly missing in the Gallery: portraits of culturally and artistically prominent gay men and women in America—even if the exhibition is not permanent.

Not only that, but as the title indicates, the exhibition is concerned with how gay men and women managed to articulate their tastes and desires to others in a society which shunned, closeted and punished, legally and otherwise, those differences and desires.

It’s a hefty subject, a hefty title, complicated, subtle and broad at once. Walt Whitman, the literary sage of gay eroticism is here, recognized by the moderns as a kind of rambunctious, but also deflective prophet. Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Anthony Tudor, Carl Van Vechten, Janet Flanner, Marsden Hartley, Djuna Barnes Frank O’Hara, James Baldwin, Jasper Johns and Robert Mapplethorpe, in one form or another, are all significant to gay cultural history. And let’s add Andy Warhol, his self-portrait(s), and his painting of Truman Capote’s shoe.

But the canvas is much broader: a series of photographs in which two men walk on opposite sides of a sidewalk, pass each other, turn around, or men’s clothing advertising, or blues lyrics from Bessie Smith. This is an exhibition not only about notables, but about gay desire in many of its aspects. I would suspect if you had an exhibition made up purely of portraits of famous, notable gay men and women, artists, actors, and so on, nobody would bat an eye. But add the process, the life, the loves, the courtships. Add the word desire, and, well, you’re in trouble. Gay sexuality is precisely the thing that straight people don’t want to deal with, the thing that engenders all the clichés, the horrible jokes, the fears in the military, the secrets held within. They say the heart knows its mind, but so does desire, and both are insistent.

How do you hide in plain sight?

Through fashion, design, self-portraits, by creating great works of art. The exhibition, so varied, so full of riches, is an eye-opener to many, I’m sure, myself included. But it is also rich in terrific paintings, photography and stories.

It warrants more than one visit. Robert Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait, for instance, shows him as his own best subject, never mind the bad sex photos that made for big audiences.

For the Portrait Gallery, this was the third exhibition, each different, each not quite the usual fare in recent months. This is not meant to compare, but the ‘One Life’ exhibition on Post Publisher Katharine Graham, Al Wertheimer’s dramatic portrait of Elvis Presley in 1956, and now “Hide/Seek,” should be a triumphant triptych.

So what happened? For weeks, nothing, until Catholic League president William Donahue discovered a single, four-minute video by the late David Wojnarowicz, which included 11 seconds showing ants crawling over the Crucifix. Donahue called it “hate speech.” Outrage ensued. Boehner, the presumptive Speaker of the House, and whip Eric Cantor lashed out dire warnings and expressions about taxpayers money and the American people. “American families have a right to expect better from recipients of taxpayers’ funds in a tough economy,” Boehner said. There was talking of pressure to close the show itself.

Sullivan in response issued a statement that included, in part: “I regret that some reports about the exhibit have created an impression that the video is intentionally sacrilegious. In fact, the artist’s intention was to depict the suffering of an AIDS victim. It was not the museum’s intention to offend. We have removed the video. I encourage people to visit the exhibition online or in the building.”

More outrage, this time from artists and art critics, some of whom sound like the high priests of DC art, smacking Sullivan for “caving in,” insisting that it was censorship. Small demonstrations erupted and the video was moved to a gallery near Logan Circle. Everybody talked and wrote in maximalist, scorched-earth terms.

We wouldn’t support censorship of any kind either. But I think it’s a little unfair to shower blame on the museum director when the real blame lies with the politicians and religious leaders who want to have the power to censor in the name of the American people. The GOP leaders especially can now say for sure they control the purse strings—not by the way for exhibitions, which are financed by private or corporate sponsors, but for the operations and salaries paid to museum employees.

Nobody is going to fire a critic for insisting on the holiness of artistic expression, even if it is less than holy or downright awful. Easy for us to say.

As it was, Sullivan returned the attention to where it really belongs: to a very fine, fascinating exhibition. Like the man said, go visit the website or the building.

“Hide/Seek” will be at the National Portrait Gallery through February 13, 2011. For more information, visit www.npg.si.edu [gallery ids="99576,104859" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

It’s official: Henderson, who was named interim chancellor by newly elected Mayor Vincent Gray last year in the wake of the apparently mutually arrived at departure of controversial and high profile chancellor Michelle Rhee, was recently confirmed unanimously by the DC City Council, making her neither defacto or in waiting, or interim or acting anything, but THE DC Schools Chancellor.

No surprise there. Gray had already made her position permanent earlier this year. Henderson, who came with Rhee when she was named Chancellor by then mayor Adrian Fenty, is very much in the Rhee vein philosophically—accountability being the trump card when it come to teaching and teachers—but has a very different operating style.

Rhee became a national and highly visible figure when she engaged in a school reform program that included large numbers of teachers being fired, trying to get private funding for merit pay, reaching a hard-fought contract with the teachers in spite of a combative, tense relationship with the teachers union, and generally making her a national figure in school reform advocates.

Henderson’s style—while following some of the same tenets espoused by Rhee, to whom she was very close—was much more people friendly and pro-active and was more adept at building relationships with and listening to parents and teachers. Some Rhee foes from previous hearings which tended to get combative said they would vote for Henderson, including At Large member Michael Brown and Wards 8 Councilman Marion Barry. Even the head of the Washington Teachers Union Nathan Saunders, a vocal critic of both Rhee and Henderson’s reform efforts at times made nice.