Arts & Society

Robert Devaney • March 10, 2012

Set the scene at a local bank, plan a heist and throw a party a la movie, “The Thomas Crown Affair,” whose investigators say things like “I love this neighborhood,” “Some of these broads are wearing my salary” and “This is an elegant crime, done by an elegant person. It’s not about the money.” Sounds like a perfect fit for our town.

It was like that March 3 at the TD Bank on Wisconsin Avenue, where teller counters became the bar, during a benefit for the Citizens Association of Georgetown’s free music series, Summer Concerts in the Park, now in its 10th year

Suspects included Jennifer Altemus, Nancy Taylor Bubes, Jack and Michele Evans, Carol Joynt, John and Kristen Lever and Topher Mathews. What were they hiding? Joynt was carrying a kid’s pink backpack, Bubes lugged around a guitar case, Lever was rolling some luggage, and holding a vintage case was Altemus, who was caught trying to abscond with a Katherine Sable print. Whodunit? She did. The CAG president, no less. Mystery solved. What a town. [gallery ids="102437,121424,121401,121409,121417,121429,121435,121442" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird • March 8, 2012

Ambassador of Luxembourg Jean-Paul Senninger and Mrs. Louise Akerblom hosted Arts for the Aging’s 23rd Annual Benefit Gala at their residence on Nov. 1. The black tie evening featured a VIP champagne reception and an elegant buffet. Following the Ambassador’s opening remarks, violinist and AFTA teaching artist Anthony Hyatt played the national anthem of Luxembourg. Gala co-chairs Susanne Eisinger and Joyce Hagel-Silverman presented the 4th Annual Lolo Sarnoff Award for Outstanding Vision and Creativity to Dr. Dorothy Kosinski, Director of The Phillips Collection. Board Chair Susan Rosenbaum, AFTA’s first successor to founder Lolo Sarnoff on the newly established National Honorary Advisory Council, said what so many were thinking, “Our hearts and love are with Lolo tonight. For the first time in decades, she could not be here with us for the gala. She asked me to thank each and every one of you for helping to keep her dream alive.” Monique Summers-Mally and Eva Lamb co-chaired live and silent auctions. AFTA delivers arts experiences designed to enhance the quality of life of older adults, especially the vulnerable and frail. [gallery ids="100386,111249,111242,111246" nav="thumbs"]

Jeff Malet •

Bowen McCauley Dance performed the ambitious “Le Sacre du Printemps” (“Rite of Spring”) to glowing reviews on Thursday, March 1, 2012 at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater. The husband and wife team of Fabio and Gisele Witkowski provided the music with a lively four-hand piano arrangement of the famous Stravinsky score. Costumes were designed by Chelsey Schuller and Tony Cisek. (Photos by Jeff Malet.)
View our photos of the performance by clicking on the photo icons below.

View additional photos of this performance plus additional dances by the company by clicking here. [gallery ids="119135,119046,119038,119031,119022,119013,119005,118996,118986,119055,119063,119126,119117,119109,119101,119094,119086,119077,119070,118977,118968,118957,118858,118849,118841,119144,119150,119155,118830,119162,118868,118876,118948,118940,118930,118921,118911,118901,118893,118885,100516" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

In Jason Grote’s new play “Civilization (All You Can Eat),” now getting a sharp and haunting staging at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, everybody’s hungry all of the time. Hungry, not so much for food, as for the top-heavy buffet of life and stuff that’s out there like a sparkling city-as-a-mall, but now beyond the reach of our burdensome absurdly high-interest credit cards

The characters—the humans in any case—in “Civilization” are leading lives built on dreams that have morphed into settle-for-it-reality. A respected college professor and intellectual now travels the inspirational talk circuit, promoting corporate solutions in a time of chaos. A middle-class mom struggles to keep her home, the love of her addled daughter and her sad sanity. A wanna-be-filmmaker becomes somewhat famous for making a Twix commercial that goes viral. Would-be actors strive to stay alive—one doing voice overs for Japanese sexual computer games, the other doing standup after getting fired from the commercial. A young girl tries to help her mom make the mortgage by doing a home-made porno video with her boyfriend.

And so on: all of these peoples are barely hanging on or seeing their lives alter inexorably in the time of our troubles, the beginning of the great recession and the squandered hopes of the Obama election.

Actually, there’s one character whose hunger and hopes are insatiable and undeniable—that would be Big Hog, a pig who escapes the food chain treadmill he is on by acquiring a greedy, fragmented human consciousness. What he wants is food and knowledge, and he wants to rise above himself to a state of man as striver. He gobbles up rabbits, pop culture tidbits, junk food and junk news and know-how. He’s the ominiverous beast in our midst.

Sarah Marshall, the gifted Washington actress who once played a dog in a play called “Sylvia” and played her with gusto and believability, channels Big Hog on his journey through mayhem, madness, murder and mud, until he scales the heights of becoming a mysterious business tycoon—could be a software genius, could be Trump, could be what he is which is big hog, sitting down to an expensive dinner with the film-maker and consuming the old-fashioned way.

Big Hog is frightening, but the plight of the characters as they stumble connected and disconnected, frayed and clueless is pretty scary, too. There’s nothing quite so uneasy as the dinner which features the film-maker, her husband and woman—an out-of-it drowning honorary member of the margilanized class.

Grote energizes his play like Robert Altman, the late film director of “Mash” and “Nashville” fame, a style in which the periphery noise and talk is both intrusive and instructive to what’s happening with the central characters. You can do that just by looking around when you’re experiencing Grote’s play: I saw people who had taken advantage of Woolly’s promotional materials (pig snouts you can wear) and so on, on their cellphones keep up with Big East basketball while snorting like Big Hog. That seems to be the point here—all of the characters are weighed down by their struggling, by their connections to each other, by their burdens, by the dilution of their dreams. Those dreams, like their bank accounts, have become thin and their voices tinny. They’re living under a sad, gloomy cloud of history which keeps right on raining and thundering, the wind blowing, the wolf at the door.

Woolly Artistic Director Howard Shalwitz has staged this fragmented play with style and energy, you never get bogged down although there are enough opportunities. A talented cast — especially Naomi Jacobson as the struggling mother, Jenna Sokolowski, looking for love and an acting part in all the wrong places, Daniel Escobar doing standup and especially the affecting Casie Platt as Jade, the young girl just trying to help — makes connections to us, which important to us.

But it is Big Hog who makes the biggest impression. It’s best perhaps not to think about him. He’s a feral “Babe,” who feels he has achieved a kind of communion with us. Maybe he has.

“Civilization” is at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre through March 11.

Mary Bird •

The National Museum of Women in the Arts held a Feb. 23 opening reception for the current exhibit Royalists to Romantics: Women Artists from the Louvre, Versailles, and Other French National Collections, curated by Jordana Pomeroy. NMWA board president Winton Holladay, French cultural attaché Roland Celette and NMWA director Susan Fisher Sterling made welcoming remarks. Many of the works from the time of the French Revolution, on exhibit through July 29, have never been displayed outside France.
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Mary Bird •

The Washington Project for the Arts, a non-profit promoting excellence in contemporary art throughout greater Washington, celebrated its “Annual Art Auction Exhibition and Gala,” March 3 for “Select,” which opened Feb. 11 with works of more than 100 local and national artists on display and available for purchase. [gallery ids="100527,119414,119407,119387,119400,119395" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner •

Choral Arts supporters, old and new, came out March 1 on an unexpectedly balmy evening to chase away the winter blues at the George Town Club with the music of guitarist Michael Bard and many libations and laughs. In the midst of their legacy season for retiring founder Norman Scribner, the group is preparing to celebrate the maestro with a performance of Brahms Requiem at the Kennedy Center Apr. 22, followed by an after-party at the House of Sweden and a tribute concert and reception on June 13 at the Washington National Cathedral.

Mary Bird • March 7, 2012

The first event for the Young Ambassador’s Council of The Children’s Inn at NIH raised nearly $30,000 at the House of Sweden Feb. 25, as hundreds of young professionals danced to live music and enjoyed an evening of cocktails and hors d’oeuvres. The Inn is a non-profit, cost-free haven for families with seriously ill children undergoing treatment at Bethesda’s National Institutes of Health. [gallery ids="102439,121380" nav="thumbs"]