Arts & Society

Corrie Dyke • March 14, 2014

The 6th Annual Heroes Curing Childhood Cancer gala took place at the Four Season Hotel Feb. 22. More than 400 guests gathered to hep raise funds for pediatric cancer patient care and research at Children’s National Medical Center. The 2013 gala provided the Dream Clinic in oncology at Children’s National, and this year’s gala will benefit the psycho-social support team in the center for cancer and blood disorders.

Georgetowner •

Franco Nuschese of Café Milano hosted a birthday bash for public relations maven Gwen Russell at the Georgetown hot spot. During the birthday dinner, a festive table ran the length of the upstairs Wine Room. Offering the first toast, Gina Adams referred to Russell’s recent surgery, announcing “2014 is cancer free,” and said guests were celebrating “not only a birthday but a rebirth.” For dessert, coconut birthday cake was eagerly devoured, as Nuschese toasted, “Gwen has always been in our family.” Russell happily added: “No family secrets will be shared.” [gallery ids="101671,144628,144623,144617,144630" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

The 5th Annual Tea on March 9 at the Ritz-Carlton Washington, D.C., had a circus theme to the delight of a sell-out crowd. The Levine at THEARC String Ensemble serenaded on the stairwell. Magician Eric Hennings delighted, and there were games and entertainment for all ages. For the third year, NBC4’s Eun Yang emceed and noted that, with nearly 50 percent of D.C. children living east of the Anacostia River, THEARC offers “the best the city has to offer in one location.” Washington Ballet @ THEARC dance instructor Ralph Glenmore introduced student Kennedy Jackson before the Washington Ballet Youth Ensemble performed “Garden of Colors.” [gallery ids="101665,144742,144722,144717,144725,144730,144734,144739,144745" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • March 13, 2014

You read about him, you talk to him, you see his life and resume, and you think life probably couldn’t get much thicker and fuller for Washington Concert Opera Artistic Director and Conductor Antony Walker.

Here we were, on a long distance call from Australia, where he was raised, and where he would return to conduct a production of “Carmen” at the Sidney Opera House, directed by Francesca Zambello, the artistic director of the Washington National Opera, thinking out loud about home, hearth and the WCO’s next production, Giuseppe Verdi’s “Il Corsaro,” on March 9 at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium.

“I understand you’re having a bit of snow,” he said. “It’s not too bad here. But being so far away, even though I love it here, you miss Georgetown.” Walker lives in Georgetown with his partner Lauren, their daughter, Genevieve, who is not yet one-year-old, and their 10-year-old border collie mix named Sadie.

“I love Georgetown,” he said, “I love the sense of history here.”

Walker is also a rising presence in the world of opera and classical music. In his early forties, he got high marks from the Sidney critics on “Carmen.” They wrote: “It’s a joy to be carried along by his [Walker’s] zesty reading of a score that in lesser hands can sound over-familiar or routine.”

“ ’Carmen,’ in a way, is the exact opposite of what we do at Washington Concert Opera,” Walker said. “It’s the most familiar of operas, even to people who don’t often go. And it’s a full-scale dramatic piece, the whole of opera, sets, and costumes galore.”

Walker has been artistic director and conductor of the Washington Concert Opera since 2002 and also serves as music director of the Pittsburgh Opera and artistic director of the Pinchgut Opera in Sydney. Since his professional debut in Sydney in 1991, he has conducted more than 200 operas, large and smaller scale choral and orchestral works as well as symphonic and chamber works with companies all over the world. On the opera stage, he has led performances by the Metropolitan Opera and numerous major opera companies.

He is big and getting bigger and is very much in demand, but you also suspect that the work he does with the WCO is close to heart. “We have a slogan,” he said. “It’s all about the music. It’s not an either-or thing. It’s a different way of seeing, experience and hearing opera, for that matter. It’s the stage, the singers, the orchestra, the conductor, performing a full opera, no sets no costumes. In a way, you ‘see’ a different sort of opera. It’s much more intimate. And, as a conductor, you’re very much exposed. You’re a part of everything in a way that everyone can see.”

“We’ve also specialized in doing operas that are rarely performed, works by composers everyone knows, but works that aren’t done often,” Walker said. “It’s not because they’re obscure or because they’re not good. I think ‘Il Corsaro’ is a masterpiece or very near to it.”

“It’s very characteristic Verdi,” he added. “This was a time of revolutionary passion in Europe and Italy. It was Byron’s time, too, and you can hear and feel that in this opera.”

Tenor Michael Fabiano takes on the title role of the pirate and corsair Corrado, with the noted lyric soprano Nicole Cabell, starring as Corrado’s great love, with Tamara Wilson, named Washington’s singer of year in 2011, as Gulnara, in the the Washington Concert Opera production of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Il Corsaro,” March 9 at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium.

Gary Tischler •

After the young actor Andreu Honeycutt has staggered downstage and out, apparently wailing, after they’ve put away the large lynching rope, after the explosion of n-words in the last minutes of the play and the telling of horrible racist jokes, after all that and the two hours preceding all that, there’s an awkward silence that descends over the audience at “We are Proud to Present…” at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre.

The audience, squared off across the stage in different sections, eventually claps, but the six actors in the play do not return for a bow. In some ways it seems awkward to clap, like cheering at a funeral or the site of a bloody traffic accident. Nobody’s helping us out. So, we wander out kind of dutifully, and there are the actors, handing out programs and smiling expectantly.

Even for Woolly Mammoth Theatre, with its long history and reputation of presenting new, edgy theater nobody else does, in ways that are driven by daring, sometimes discomfiting, staging, “We Are Proud to Present…” is unusual, like a daring and beautiful woman going out for a date dressed as a menacing clown.

This isn’t really a play in the usual sense. Worked out in detailed, rehearsed ways, it nevertheless resembles a provocation, an improvisation, a little like a street performance with lots of grounded details, not to mention the tail end of a day. And, in what amounts to a recent trend with Woolly productions, its immersive, inside-and-out activities surround the performance — chores to do if you choose — along with information provided to excite debate and talk. Add in the re-arrangement of the furniture of the theater, so to speak. Also, there are echoes and contexts from other plays, books, history to chew on and a zig-zag course from out-and-out-laughter to discomfiture to silence that you can actually hear.

We should afford you the full title, which may or may not spark recognition from audience members: “We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From The German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915.”

The play—actually a play within a play—is about six actors trying to put together a play about Kaiser Wilhelm-era imperial Germany’s occupation of said Sudwestafrika (now Namibia) as a way of getting into the colonial games of great power nations, chief among them Victorian Great Britain. During the course of that occupation of an area populated by several different tribes, chief among them the Herero people, the Germans tried the usual imperial gambits of pitting tribes against each other. In the end, they took the course of attempting a mostly successful genocide of the Herero people because the Herero had resisted and fought back. Orders were given to kill the males and force women and children into the desert. When it was all over, some 100,000 Hereros had died. In 2004, 100 years later, Germany apologized for what happened.

Six actors — three black, three white; two women, four men — have gathered to create a play that deals with that history, but their only source material are letters written by German soldiers to their families, none of them referencing what happened or offering descriptions of the tribal population. They are full of Victorian romantic and sentimental cliches about hearth, home, love and children, missing the fireside and the wifely presence.

Initially, led by the director (in a spirited, decisive performance by the compelling Dawn Ursula), the cast members struggle, they are actors after all, of various degrees of commitment, all of them with enough ego to spare. This cast is made up of actors playing actors in search of a part and understanding of the material. The world they’ve entered suggests, at least, Pirandello’s mystifying “Six Characters in Search of An Author.”

The squabbling among them is initially about the roles: there’s the angry young black actor, the aforementioned Andreu Honeycutt, who has no interest in playing Germans and reading German letters, an older black man played by the commanding Michael Anthony Williams, and two white men—the arrogant one, played with odd confusion by Joe Isenberg, and the older guy, played with contained force by Peter Howard. There is also the generic white woman, who gets to have a name—Sarah—played with aplomb and sometimes quaint, silly goofiness, by Holly Twyford, who, asked to feel sad about the death of a cat, guts out a cat wail.

Much of this is initially very funny—actors after all often offer a ridiculous face to the world—but as they continue to fail to come to grips with the subject—the murder of the Hereros—racial concerns rise to the fore.

“We haven’t dealt with what happened,” says the angry young man, and he tries to get them into that area. There’s talk of appropriating suffering, appropriating roles, until prodded by their director, they come face to face with the monster in the historic woodshed.

When the young white actor has to shoot a defenseless Herero, he at first can’t do it. “I’m not like that,” he says. “I can’t do this.” But, of course, he can, and now we are in the thick of it: songs of loss and home and massive suffering. In a kind of not surprising, but nevertheless shocking, segue, we appear to be in the American south. The white actors are talking “Cracker Southern,” and the rope is raised. It becomes hard to swallow, because there is a temptation to say stop.

The play by young playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury walks into the muddy waters of comparative crime, of the unsettled cloud of race American style, not to mention the Holocaust, also perpetrated by Germany, and other genocides of all kinds. The segue into our times, or the times just preceding, is not smooth. It happens all of a sudden and here we are, and suddenly everyone gets quiet.

Does it add up that way? A question that’s raised, but only individuals can answer it. As it is, the proceedings lets you look not only at yourselves, but across the way at other members of the audience who sit silent, crossing legs, scrunched up, or a couple that hold hands strongly, after appearing to argue, the faces changing every bit of the way. It’s uncomfortable to look at people like that because surely they’re looking at you.

“We Are Proud to Present” is all of a piece in recent theatrical offerings by Woolly Mammoth—last year’s almost stately “The Convert,” which dealt with Christian missionaries in Africa, “Detroit,” which was configured somewhat similarly physically, and “Appropriate”, a wildly feverish play about buried secrets among members of a white Southern family written by an African American playwright.

However worked out this play was, and it was done with care, it had the look of stuff that happens every day to most of us: life and death, cab rides in which a driver offers up the notion that there may be such a thing as a coming apocalypse, the hurly burly of demographic change in this city.

“We are Proud to Present … “ runs at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre through March 9.

Ari Post •

National Portrait Gallery

Face Value: Portraiture in the Age of Abstraction

April 18, 2014 – January 11, 2015

Portraiture in the 20th century was a difficult terrain for artists to traverse. It was a time when many members of the artistic community agreed that abstraction was the new artistic language and figurative work had little more to offer the world in terms of progress and innovation. “Face Value” is a group exhibit of artists who helped reinvent portraiture for their era and demonstrated the enduring value of exploring the face and figure. Pulling a collection of work from the mid-1940s through the 1970s, the exhibit features artists such as Elaine de Kooning, Robert Rauschenburg, Chuck Close, Jamie Wyeth, Andy Warhol and more, highlighting those who pushed the boundaries of portrait traditions, invigorated and challenged by new modes of abstraction and the roiling currents of their time.

American Art Museum

Ralph Fasanella: Lest We Forget

May 2 – August 3, 2014

Ralph Fasanella’s parents were among three million Italians who immigrated to America in the early 20th century, searching for a better life for their families. Growing up in the working class neighborhoods of New York City, Fasanella (1914 – 1997) worked as a truck driver, union organizer, gas station owner and ice delivery man before turning to painting in the 1940s. Though untrained as an artist, he developed a style that reflected his working class and immigrant roots, celebrating the common man and tackling complex issues of postwar America in colorful and infectiously exuberant paintings of urban life. “Lest We Forget” celebrates the 100th birthday of this quintessential American artist, bringing together paintings spanning his 52-year career. Don’t miss this one!

The Kreeger Museum

K@20: Kreeger Museum 20th Anniversary Exhibition

February 20 – July 31, 2014

As a longtime champion of local and regional artists, it is fitting that the Kreeger’s 20th anniversary exhibition should highlight Washington area artists. “K@20” features 14 artists from all walks of life who have played a large part in shaping this city’s unique and remarkable arts scene. Showcasing a broad spectrum of mediums, subject matter, and styles by renowned artists such as Sam Gilliam, Gene Davis, Jeff Spaulding, Yuriko Yamaguchi, Tom Green, Ledelle Moe and Michael Platt, the selection of artworks offers a fresh perspective on the collective strength of Washington’s art community.

Freer and Sackler Galleries

Bountiful Waters: Aquatic Life in Japanese Art

March 8 – September 14, 2014

If there is one thing that Japan is known for in America, it is its sushi and seafood culture that is second to none in the world. Indeed, since prehistoric times, the waters that surround the islands of the small and powerful nation have informed its culture and sustained its inhabitants. Flowing from mountain ranges to form rivers and lakes and feeding into the ocean, the plants and animals that live in and around the waters continue to be a major source of a revenue and a primary dietary source for its population. “Bountiful Waters” features a selection of prints, paintings, illustrated books and ceramics that depict Japanese appreciation for the beauty and variety of fish and other species. The highlight will be the public debut of the “large fish” series of twenty woodblock prints by renowned Japanese artist Hiroshige (1797 – 1858).

The Phillips Collection

Made in the USA: American Masters from the Phillips Collection

March 1 – August 31, 2014

The Phillips Collection’s private collection of American masterworks is finally coming home, after a years-long worldwide tour. The exhibit tells the story of American art from the late 19th century, when it was entirely dismissed by the prominent European art communities, through post-war American art in the 1950s and 60s, when it came into its own as a significant international force of artistic progress and innovation. The exhibit will be a landmark artistic experience, featuring over 200 works by over 100 artists, and taking up most of the museum’s gallery space. Artists range from early American progressives such as Arthur Dove and John Marin, to Mark Rothko, Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis and Richard Deibenkorn. Don’t miss it.

Art Museum of the Americas

Territories and Subjectivities: Contemporary Art from Argentina

March 27 – Summer 2014

Identities of boundaries and belonging are formed through cultural affiliation and familiarity, and so in many ways the idea of territory is quite subjective. For instance, most of us born in the United States will proudly bond with any fellow citizen over this mutual belonging, while a native Texan and Oregonian might have bitterly conflicting ideas of politics and cultural history. “Territories and Subjectivities” will examine the very notion of territory as something that we define for ourselves, not as an inherent condition of the world. Featuring contemporary artists from each of Argentina’s 23 provinces, this exhibit will present a panorama of modern-day Argentinian identity, revealing interweaving and conflicting notions of cultural ownership and identity within a single country that reflects the juxtaposition between any nation’s singularity and clashes of regional identity.

National Sporting Library and Museum

Foxcroft School: The Art of Women and the Sporting Life

March 15 – August 24, 2014

In conjunction with Foxcroft School’s Centennial Celebration, “Foxcroft School” is an exhibition focusing on women as sporting enthusiasts, sporting artists and sporting art collectors. The exhibition is comprised of loans from alumnae of the prestigious Middleburg college-preparatory school for girls and their relatives. Approximately thirty paintings and sculptures will provide a picture of the collecting interests of these remarkable women and their role in 20th century sporting life and art.

Corcoran Gallery of Art

Jennifer Steinkamp and Jimmy Johnson: Loop

March 15 – April 20, 2014

Drawing on the architecture of the Corcoran’s rotunda, “Loop” is a site-specific visual and music installation created by media artist Jennifer Steinkamp and electronic composer Jimmy Johnson. Originally commissioned in 2000 for the Corcoran’s 46th Biennial Exhibition, the artists use a high functioning graphics computer to create electronic visual patterns that enhance the space with rows of undulating multicolored digital rope and projections. Music plays along with the moving images. It will be an immersive and completely unique exhibit.

National Gallery of Art

Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In

May 4 – November 30, 2014

While no artist could be farther from the abstract, post-modern and pop art movements that define American art in the 20th century, Andrew Wyeth (1917 – 2009) is one of our era’s great painters, who created a quiet shift in the tectonic plates of the American landscape. A painter of formal virtuosity and stamina like almost no other of his lifetime, he used both Renaissance traditions (like egg tempera) and new world techniques to create some of the most indelible images of our time, largely centered around farms and quiet landscapes of his hometown in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. “Looking Out, Looking In” will present an exhibit of over 50 of Wyeth’s paintings, drawings and tempera paintings focused around the artist’s frequent use of windows as symbol, subject matter, framing device and inspiration.
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Gary Tischler •

If you can imagine the Washington National Opera as a Nantucket whaling company, then you can congratulate it for finally landing the great white whale of contemporary opera: composer Jake Heggie’s and librettist Gene Scheer’s “Moby-Dick,” now at the Kennedy Center through March 8.

Unlike mad and fiery Captain Ahab’s doomed, mad expedition to destroy the white whale, the opera, making its long-awaited East Coast debut, doesn’t end in disaster. It is an invigorating, emotionally powerful, poetic and visually astonishing triumph. The production is fueled emotionally by Heggie’s accessible and richly varied music and Scheer’s poetic libretto, which echoes the novel’s style and 19th-century American poetics.

While an entirely operatic opera with all the elements in the operatic toolbox, “Moby-Dick” is also a very American opera. It’s almost a spiritual and emotional anthem to the era’s literary strivings. This isn’t just a question of language—the opera is written and sung in English—but one of style and themes. Throughout the nearly three-hour course of the opera, you hear (and see) the strains of what Walt Whitman heard, you hear American voices, transcendental strivings and New England religious and biblical tones, the salty, dangerous and lonely lives of whalers alone on the ocean.

The opera doesn’t arrive newly minted. It was first commissioned for the Dallas Opera—jointly with the San Francisco Opera, the San Diego Opera, the State Opera of South Australia and Calgary Opera—and had its world premiere at the Dallas Opera in 2010. The San Francisco Opera production was staged in 2012. For Washingtonians who had not seen the production, it existed as a kind of much-talked-about and much-written-about rumor.

To begin with, all the stories about the physical and technical aspects of the production are true: on stage, “Moby-Dick” is a spectacle of projection, lighting and a physical apparition which is both highly complicated and affecting. It’s sailors on ropes, decks and shadows, in whaling boats seemingly bobbing in fierce storms on high seas, sets that sometime dwarf the characters like the shadow of a giant white whale. The wizards who helped re-recreate the physical presence of the whaling ship Pequod include Robert Brill (set design), Jane Greenwood (costumes), Gavan Smith (lights) and Elaine J. McCarthy (projection design). It’s McCarthy we presume who’s responsible for the magical projection that hooks stars and ship together in the opening sequence.

But, as somebody once quipped, you shouldn’t come out humming the sets or the lights, however impressive. Opera is about music, words and music, singers and singing and, in many cases, fevered drama. As literature, “Moby-Dick” is nothing, if not operatic, dealing with obsession, man’s place in the cosmos, and relationship to the almighty, not to mention being a tragic adventure fully muscled with the brawn of an emerging America.

After all, this is about Captain Ahab, the one-legged leader of the Pequod, and his pursuit of the white whale Moby-Dick, who stole his leg from him. It’s about Starbuck, the reasonable and moral first mate, Queegqueg, the island harpooner, the cabin boy Pip and the sailors like Flask and Stubb, and the newcomer and sometime narrator of the tale dubbed the “greenhorn,” otherwise known as Ishmael, alone on the vast ocean, far from Nantucket.

This production is an intimate marriage of music and libretto. It brings out, if perhaps not all the essential details of Melville’s massive masterpiece, the key elements of the heart of the book. Heggie has become something of a master of the contemporary opera musical narrative form. He is the composer of “Dead Man Walking,” which has become a staple and received 40 productions as well as “Out of Darkness”, a trio of Holocaust stories. The music is remarkably varied. It’s a kind of ship of treasures itself, often wandering into pure songs, intimate duets between “greenhorn” and Queegeg, and Abab and Starbuck or arias (notably Ahab’s and the “greenhorn”). With echoing sea shanties or bursting like a wave, there’s no sameness in this music. This is a little remarkable given that all the action takes place on a single ship.

Just as critical is Gene Scheer’s libretto. Noted American playwright Terence McNally, who had the initial impulse to make an opera out of “Moby-Dick,” was originally slated to do the libretto but bowed out because of illness. Scheer, who has worked with Heggie on other projects, instead took over and produced a libretto that more than complements the music. It’s a marriage. Scheer finds the style and words of the characters and the time and the book, you can, as Whitman did, hear America singing, along with the Puritans and bible thumpers as well as strong-armed, brave and rum-loving sailors.

From the beginning imagery, the production moves from spectacle to wonder, to intimate scenes, buoyed by strong singing and believable, often touching acting. Two of the performers—the young American tenor Stephen Costello as the “greenhorn” (aka Ishmael), and American soprano Talise Trevine in the pants part of Pip were in the Dallas and San Francisco productions. They anchor the production: Costello with a clear, rangy, heart-touching voice, commanding without being pushy, especially in the aria “Human Madness,” accompanied only by an oboe. The greenhorn’s relationship with the Pacific whaler Queegeg is touching, as they cement their friendship and the greenhorn sings about learning the other’s language.

This is one of the strengths of the production—the surge from spectacle to intimacy. There are times when the overpowering sets tend to diminish the characters on stage. It’s a fine line to walk. That whole idea of man in the face of impossibly large forces is a thematic content after all. I would have like to see a little more charisma and force from tenor Carl Tanner’s Ahab when he’s singing out of a crowd, but he’s very affecting in his scenes with the stoic, pragmatic Starbuck (baritone Matthew Worth).

On the whole, guided with imagination by director Leonard Foglia and conducted with energy by Evan Rogister, “Moby-Dick” is an engaging American opera. It is something we’ve seen rarely here, an epic American experience, and a lodestone of inventiveness in almost all of its aspects. It ends—as it should—with the right words, the right tone, the right image, just so.

“Moby-Dick” is playing at the Kennedy Center’s opera house through March 8.
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Gary Tischler • February 28, 2014

As Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith reminds us, the play now at the Fichandler at Arena is called “Mother Courage and Her Children”—not just “Mother Courage,” as it sometimes is—implying that the character played in gruff operatic style by the great Kathleen Turner is motivated primarily by her maternal instincts.

That may be true, but there’s no solace for the audience or for Mother Courage in Bertolt Brecht’s astonishing epic, which the author of “The Three Penny Opera” and a host of almost tribal theatrical jeremiads against war, greed, militarism, big business and corporate interests began writing in 1938, on the eve of World War II, and only two decades after World War I, when “the war to end all wars” ended.

The play—hugely theatrical, casting a wide net—almost always has a way of looking both specific and humanly abstract. Certainly, that’s where Smith is going. She means to connect Mother Courage, her three children, a camp follower, a minister, a chef and sundry scoundrels, brutal soldiers, camp followers, and civilians from the Thirty Years’ War to the present and our own times and country with the presence of soldiers in present-day uniforms.

The suggestion that we’re always in some sort of Thirty Years War isn’t wrong, but given that we’ve conducted our winding-down and current war and most recent war in a way that our populations are disconnected from them in a way that the protagonists of this play are not, the idea is not as searing as it should be. The mix of present-day clothing and weaponry, not to mention contemporary colloquial profanity, does bring us closer to the characters that populate the Fichandler in-the-round stage, which looks like a bombed out-pit of debris from wars coming and going.

The problem with the ironically nick-named Mother Courage is that she tries to balance what she thinks is her astute business acumen with her love of her children. That acumen is mostly greed, driven by fear. She is fiercely neutral, without ideology, with a burning passion to save her children and her cart of goods, a kind of moving canteen that she and her children carry across the battlefields of central and western Europe. They skate just barely by, never sure, never safe, in a particularly savage war which ruined what was then Germany for decades.

Turner’s Mother Courage has a kind of gruff passion. She has verbal size and distinction. She knows the values of goods and her own shrewd self. She has the survivalist courage to take on whatever’s coming down the pike, which is always unexpected , unfair, unsavory, and unpleasant. She and her children—a big, tough strapping boy Eilife, played with a strong presence and even stronger voice by Nicholas Rodriguez, the vulnerable but numbers-wise boy she calls Swiss Cheese, played with pathos by Nehal Joshi, and Katatrin, solemn, quickly moving and silent, played with astonishingly loud silence by Erin Weaver—stagger across the muddy fields, cratered and shell-serenaded landscape like watchful wayfarers.

Mother Courage is a part that can be done with scurvy, sexy humor—or it can plain done in, without humor. Turner is, at turns, funny and calls on her gift for sexuality when it is appropriate but with ease, and the love for her kids—a really tough love—is nevertheless self evident. It seems to blind her when it’s hitched to her greed. She’s like a con man who thinks war is just another mark she can outwit.

As an experience, this production, which features gloriously thrift-shop costume designs by Joseph Salasovich and a spectacularly beat-up war set by Todd Rosenthal, is almost overwhelming. It’s like being parachuted into a place you’ve avoided all your life. It’s a dangerous place. It has the unkempt odor of religious passions which can turn murderous in a second. It’s full of loss and constant change—one day you’re a camp follower, the next day, you’re a colonel’s mistress, which is what happens to a Grisabella-like Yvette played with loud charm by Meg Gillentine.

The production also has the gifts of David Hare’s tough translation, which knows the different between honest colloquial grief and polemics, and new music composed by James Sugg. Turner sings in the key of knock-you-over, when she’s doing “Mother Courage’s Song” and straight from the torn heart with “Lullaby.” Rick Foucheux displays a fine, touching voice in “The God Who Was a Man” as well as putting on a display of complexity in his role as the chaplain. The music is presented like there’s a circus band of gypsies and jazz men following the proceedings.

In the end, of course, everything Mother Courage does puts her children in danger, and they fall or disappear one by one, as she nevertheless hangs on to her cart. Those last images remind you of any war, of Lear, of great, imagined losses. And when the production does that, why that’s a kind of courage in and of itself.

Gary Tischler • February 27, 2014

Anoushka Shankar, the world renowned and world-class sitar player and interpreter of classical Indian music was talking about her latest album, “Traces of You,” in a phone conversation last week.

Listening to her and to some of the songs on the album like the single, “The Sun Won’t Set,” and the title track, you get a sense of the personal nature of her music and its universal appeal. It’s about what art—be it performed, recorded, written, painted or sculpted—reaches for a particularism that goes straight to the personal heart and imagination of the viewer and listener and then becomes magically universal.

This is what usually happens in the best and most successful creative endeavors. Whether receptively popular or consciously artistic, the results often seem mysterious—a “don’t know how” kind of happening that arrives with inscrutable blessings.

This is, it seemed to me, especially true for Shankar, the daughter of a legend in the world but more so in her roots, the wife of a film director who has taken risky approaches to cherished classical material in his work, and the half sister of a singer whose broad popularity nevertheless has it own mysteries.

“Traces of You” is often talked about as a highly personal work, in the sense that many see it as a tribute and musical ode to her father, Ravi Shankar, the legendary sitar player who popularized classical Indian music to the world. He became a prominent figure in the annals of rock and roll after rock musicians, especially Beatle George Harrison, took up the music. Shankar died at the age of 92 in December 2012. “It was a time of tremendous change for me,” Shankar said. “My father died while we were in the midst of recording “Traces of You,” and, of course, it was a tremendous loss for me and, I think, for all the people who loved his music.”

Everything about the album seems on the surface, and in its descriptions and particular sound, a way of turning loss into watchful celebration and memory. Anoushka invited Norah Jones, her half sister and Ravi Shankar’s daughter by a different mother, with whom she had worked before, to sing several of the pieces on the album, including “Traces of You” and “The Sun Won’t Set” and “Unsaid.” “It turned out to be a good experience, having her there, working with her. Instinctively, Norah understood what we were doing together.” They had both lost their father, and that is always a loss freighted with meaning and memory for everyone.

For Anoushka, the music is very much about and full of her father, with whom she toured, the man who trained her and gave her first sitar, the towering influence in her life. It is very personal and connected to family. There is the presence of Jones, the music of her father, and there is the fact that Joe Wright, her husband with whom she has a two-year old son, Zubin, directed the video of “Traces of You.” Another song, “Monsoon,” had its roots in 2009, when, she said, “I was just in the process of falling in love with my husband-to-be.” Wright himself shares an affinity for making original creations out of classical sources in such films as “Pride and Prejudice” and his recent astonishing version of “Anna Karenina.”

She is noted for her mastery of the sitar, for her beauty and for her fight for causes—especially about sexual violence against women, an issue that has been in the news in India. She is also noted for expanding the reaches of Indian classical music into jazz, American classical music and tango, sending it out until it returns somewhat changed, not so much fused as slightly altered and richer for the flight. “I love expanding the music while being faithful to it,” she said. “It has always been universal at its heart, Indian, but more.”

That’s why the album seems in many ways very specific and personal, but also uncommonly generous and kind in many of its aspects, an acceptance of life in all of its forms. “The music is very specific, but it has been drawn in and accepted by the world,” she said. “I know what I’ve done with my music, who I am, but things always change. I can’t predict what I will be doing musically in the future.”

“Look what has happened, this has been an enormous time in my life in the sense that I have grown with the music, I met my husband and fell in love, I’ve become a wife and mother, I’ve lost my father, all in a relatively short time,” she said. “All of this affects the music, the composing. I am not who I was several years ago, or when I was a child or an adolescent in California.”

She is, in some ways, the embodiment of the idea of the personal and universal being played out in art and life all the time. Looking at her—and for that matter remembering her father and his pioneering influence—you often see this beautiful woman, deft, not dramatic but a presence, sitar and sari. The image and the accompanying music seem exotic, different from, say Iowa or California, where she was a prom queen. At the same time, it familiar, the atmosphere speaks musically to common experience. The instrument itself seems difficult and ungainly, but yet, she elicits and plays music as clear and complicated as a proverb, and as easy as rhythm from it.

Describing how the album for Deutsche Grammophone evolved, she said “A lot of it happened unconsciously. Life took a journey of its own, and the music followed that form. The sitar leads the listener through the album like a narrator.”

Anoushka Shankar is presented by the Washington Performing Arts Society at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium, 8 p.m., Nov. 15.

Marie Loiseau •

“Almost nobody knows that November is Lung Cancer Awareness Month,” said Chris Draft, former linebacker for the Washington Redskins. “It’s not just a smoker’s disease. Anyone can get lung cancer.”

Draft’s wife, Keasha, a nonsmoker, was one such victim. She was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer in December 2010. The couple then launched Team Draft at their wedding in November 2011. One month later, Keasha lost her fight to lung cancer at age 38.

Lung cancer kills more people than breast, prostate, colon, liver, kidney and melanoma cancers combined. Yet many people remain frighteningly unaware of the disease. The stigma that it is “a smoker’s disease” has negatively impacted the amount of personal and financial support dedicated to lung cancer research.

Chris Draft has made it his mission to educate the public about lung cancer. He is the leader of the Chris Draft Family Foundation, which has a specific lung cancer initiative, Team Draft. This organization is leading a national campaign to “Change the Face of Lung Cancer.”

The personal inspiration of the foundation drives Draft to visit cancer centers around the country — he’s been to about 90 so far — and to advocating and to educate.

“We’re fighting for people and creating hope,” Draft said. “We focus on the survivors, bringing images of their smiles and laughter — those are the faces of lung cancer.”

Team Draft is carrying out a Survivor at Every Stadium initiative, which launched last year. The goal is to focus on survivors of the disease, educating attendees of sporting events nationwide.

On Nov. 4, Team Draft dubbed the Monday night football game — the Green Bay Packers vs. the Chicago Bears — a Lung Cancer Awareness Game. Lung cancer survivors helped raised the American flag at the beginning of the game and were recognized in the fourth quarter.

Draft was at the John P. Murtha Cancer Center at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., Nov. 6. The Murtha Center at Walter Reed partnered with Team Draft, the Department of Veterans, Lung Cancer Alliance and the Vietnam Veterans of America to hold its second annual Lung Cancer Screening Initiative. Veterans or beneficiaries were evaluated for lung cancer risk.

“Early detection, in any cancer, is the best first step,” Draft said. “Because of early detection, more people are living longer and living stronger.”

“We will continue to advocate for this stigmatized disease, continue to support survivors, and continue to educate people,” he said. Team Draft continued its work at the Nov. 10 Tennessee Titans and Jacksonville Jaguars game, another Lung Cancer game, to keep on spreading the word. “We hope to change the face of lung cancer,” Draft said.