Performance

Gary Tischler • September 21, 2012

There are actually several audiences for “First You Dream: the Music of Kander and Ebb,” a musical revue of the song and show book of John Kander and Fred Ebb, now at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater through July 1, and all of them are going to be peachy-pleased with the results.

There’s the group which saw the original production, created and mounted at Signature and co-conceived there by David Loud and Signature artistic director Eric Schaeffer: it will be delighted to find four of the original cast members performing with newscomers and a 29-member orchestra in a much less intimate, but much boldly brassier, setting.

There is a potentially large number of persons who know about Kander and Ebb. The lyricist of the pair, Ebb, passed away in 2004. Their unique, rich and prolific partnership spawned such huge hits as “Cabaret” (stage and screen) , “Chicago” (stage and screen), “The Rink,” “Liza with a Z,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Woman of the Year,” “The Act,” “Zorba” and “The Happy Time.”

And there is still a larger group which has at least lip-synched to the title song of “Cabaret.” Some of them have sung aloud, either in the shower or at a karaoke bar, the line, “What good is sitting alone in your room?” That would be most of the rest of us, old chum.

And no question—beyond an interest in Kander and Ebb, if not a passion—there is a group which appreciates terrific songs, beautiful songs, dazzling songs that are sung with great style and emotion by a group of six terrifically talented actor-singers or singers, born to sign on Broadway or formed there in performance. That part of the audience will be richly rewarded, whether they are singing “Cabaret” and “Chicago.”

Taken together, those audiences ought to do well by this thoughtful, passionately performed and staged whammy of a musical revue. But it is so much more.

Several degrees of separation are in order here. I can make no comparison with the Signature original, one way or the other, but I’ve seen numerous versions of “Cabaret” on Washington area stages, including one at Signature. I’ve always been puzzled by the lack of breakout success of “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” an astonishingly original musical. I’ve talked with George Hearns, who did “The Visit” with Chita Rivera at Signature, although the show never quite made the Broadway leap. I also talked with the late Harry Guardino about his experience with “Woman of the Year,” who told vivid stories about working with Lauren Bacall. I’ve seen Liza Minelli on stage at the Kennedy Center, and it should be noted that she was a Kander and Ebb favorite, who could “ring them bells” for sure as well as just kill you with “Maybe This Time.”

Mostly, what you marvel at in “First You Dream”—the song (from 1997’s “Steel Pier”) snakes its way through the show like a seductive, but not pushy, hurdy gurdy man—is the sheer variety and diversity that’s in the body of work in terms of theme, substance and style. The creators have thankfully chosen many songs that are less familiar to a general audience, which gives the show the quality of one of those happy, bottomless swag bags from which emerge a constant parade of happy gifts for the audience. I’m thinking here of songs like the ridiculously giddy “Boom Ditty Boom,” the combination of “Walking Among My Yesterdays” and “Go Back Home” (a touching, beautiful turn by the three male singers, who also do the jaunty “Military Man”), the beautiful and tough love-for-life song, “My Own Space” and “Love and Love Alone,” paired with “Life Is.”

While the gifted collaborators roam all over the thematic, stylistic landscape, there is still a constant. At the core, there is: show biz, shows, showmen, stage rats and royalty, the urgent need to bare your heart in songs and music, the gotta-sing-gotta-dance, the glitz and rags of it all that informs Broadway, musicals, broken hearts that break under a spotlight. You can see why they liked writing for Minelli. You can see why Bob Fosse was drawn to “Cabaret” and submerged himself in “Chicago.” Here are music and songs which often manage to be both lurid and lovely. Hear how they string together “Only in the Movies,” “Happy Endings” and “At the Rialto.” Behold the sleazy soft-shoe sale of “Razzle Dazzle”and the wonderful finale of “Show People.” Feel the pairing (beautifully segued by Matthew Scott) of “Cabaret” and “I Miss the Music.” It is why we go to shows, remember the songs and rub old wounds in the dark like that.

Finally, a few words about the performers. They deliver. They have killer voices. They reach out and touch someone. To be fair, I remember the remarkable Heidi Blickenstaff (Is that a great stage name or what?), who starred in a musical version of the vastly underrated “Meet John Doe” at Ford’s Theatre several years ago. I was happy to see her again, blasting out “Sing Happy” in a sequin dress and lead the way in the deliriously funny, iconic “Ring Them Bells” to cap the first act. Then, there was that moving pairing of James Clow and Patina Miller in “Blue Crystal” and “Marry Me.” Alan Greene dominates “Life Is” and surprises you with his authority and presence and emotional power. Leslie Kritzer knocks “I Don’t Care Much” out of the park.

As a group, after a lengthy first act, they accomplished a remarkable thing. They elevated their game in the second act. I already miss the music.

“First You Dream: the Music of Kander and Ebb” at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater through July 1; 800-444-1324 or 202-467-4600; Kennedy-Center.org. [gallery ids="100859,126832" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

Over the phone, Natasha Trethewey’s voice sounds warm. It’s a voice inviting you to talk, as opposed to maintaining the interrogatory stance of an interview.

Thursday, Sept. 13, the tone may change a little, become more authoritative and firm when the poet from Mississippi gives her inaugural reading as the 19th Poet Laureate Consultant—the United States Poet Laureate—at 7 p.m. in the Coolidge Auditorium in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress.

It’s an auspicious, even historical occasion for Trethewey, as the reading marks the 75th anniversary of the library’s Poetry and Literature Center while establishing her as the nation’s most visible and official poet, another landmark in a somewhat meteoric career which has seen her garner and garlanded with achievements and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for “Native Guard” in 2006 and the Book Prize from the Mississippi Institute Arts and Letters. She is also the current Poet Laureate of Mississippi.

“I was a little bit shocked, truth be told,” she said of being named poet laureate. “It’s a great honor, of course, and I know I’m expected to do the reading and give a lecture at the end of the term. And it will be an opportunity, naturally, to advance the reading, the nurturing, the education and the writing of poetry. I will do everything I can to do that. And it gives me a chance to be here in Washington, where I used to roam the stacks some time ago and did research for my collection, ‘Native Guard.’ ”

In a time of information overload, Trethewey brings a unique gift as a poet of note. In her four collections so far, she has written about people who are often ignored by poetry, the shadowy people who have lived intense and forgotten lives in the midst of history, black soldiers who fought in the Civil War, the servants and nannies of the South, her own relatives, the victims of catastrophe, the ghosts that seem to linger in every tree branch and furrowed field in the South and in her own history.

The history of the South is a treacherous subject to navigate, and her own memories can be equally daunting. “I try to bring memories with me, to air them out, cleanly, vividly,” she said. She has been called “the poet of memory” by some. The Librarian of Congress James Billington chose her in part, he said, because “she intermixes her story with the historical story in a way that takes you deep into the human tragedy of it. It is her ability to weave the present and the past to engage the public and the personal and to give language to the unsaid that makes her poems of such lasting impact.”

Her story is specific: she is the daughter of a bi-racial marriage that was considered illegal, with a white father and an African-American mother, who lived in Mississippi. Her father, himself a poet and writer, and her mother divorced. Later, her mother was murdered by her second husband, who remains in prison. The horrific event led Tretheway to poetry. “It’s when I first thought of being a poet,” she said. “It was an effort to digest, to understand and deal with what happened, and that leads you eventually, to everything else, the atmosphere of Mississippi, the South, the Civil War, the lives of forgotten people.”

Her poetry is by no means stylistically consistent or even recognizable as hers except by its subjects. It has the strange quality of being powerful, deceptively and often simple in its use of words and language, diverse in the method and style. Her words are sometimes discursive, sometimes as haunting as a dream whose meaning is stark and elusive. There are also poems like “Elegy,” written for her father, Eric, to whom she remains devoted. It’s about an episode of fly fishing, daughter and father in boots in the water. It’s a poem that is at once full of atmosphere, and attention to details of her father with her, other things beckoning. “I rewrote quite a bit,” she said. “He says he liked it, and then he said, but it’s strange having an elegy written about you when you’re still alive.”

The past, she thinks, recedes from us, sometimes willfully, sometimes at our behest. “When we lose memory, we sometimes lose it forever. I try to retrieve it, tell stories about things that we don’t always want to think about it.”

Hurricane Katrina figures in her poetry but is also a subject of non-fiction book. “People forget,” she says. “Not Katrina but the havoc and destruction, the loss of living not just life, everywhere, it hit Mississippi with a violence that was different from what happened in New Orleans.”

Talking with her is kind of easy. In some ways, words have a way of taking on understood meanings and stories sound familiar, even universal, shared, especially the more specific they get. She still teaches at Emory University in Decatur, Ga., where her husband Brett Gadsden is a professor specializing in civil rights history. Georgia is also the place where her mother died, where she has made a home, the place of good and bad memories.

“I love teaching,” she says. “I love the fact that so many of the students can be electrified by poetry, want to understand it and do it.”

You might think she writes carefully, digging. “Actually, part of my process is walking my dog, a Boston Terrier named Maggie, and I get a lot of ideas doing that, being with her,” she said. “I think dogs, you look at them and you want to be the person they think you are. They give so much.”

As the new poet laureate, she’s in heady company—Robert Penn Warren, who influenced her work greatly, Philip Levine and others. They comprise a kind of poetic past.

The conversation after a while is like a gift—dogs, the Civil War, fathers and daughters, words in the wind, inspiration in a stream, family, the past. She can handle the past in her writing, where poems become a memory’s gift, such as fishing with her father in “Elegy”:

“I think, by now, the river must be thick

with salmon. Late August, I imagine it

As it was that morning, drizzle needling

The surface, mist at the banks like a net
settling around us—everything damp

and shining. That morning, awkward

and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked

into the current and found our places —
you upstream a few yards, and out

far deeper. You must remember how

the river seeped in over your boots,

and you grew heavy with that defeat.

All day I kept turning to watch you, how

first you mimed our guide’s casting,

then cast your invisible line, slicing the sky

between us; and later, rod in hand, how

you tried — again and again — to find

that perfect arc, flight of an insect

skimming the river’s surface. …”
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Gary Tischler •

If Gaetano Donizetti’s 1830 work, “Anna Bolena,” makes him the virtuoso of bel canto opera, it also presages what comes next. In the dexterous, emotionally powerful soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, we might just have the perfect performer that connects the Verdi generation to bell canto.

At least, that’s what she demonstrated in her star turn in the title role of the Washington National Opera production of “Anna Bolena,” ably abetted by a strong cast, by the inventive direction of Stephen Lawless and by a story that is familiar to contemporary audiences through the outpouring of contemporary and older pop culture versions in books, literature, television mini-series and films.

In short, we know these people, we know Henry VIII, the impetuous and sexy object of his desire Anne Boleyn, her lost lover Percy, the woman who replaces her, Jane Seymour, even if they’re called Enrico VIII, Anna Bolena, Riccardo and Giovanna Seymouor, as is the Italian wont of Donizetti.

Now, we know them a little and a lot better, given the emotional and dramatic intensity of the production, the seething, soaring quality of Donizetti’s music and Radvanovsky’s voice and acting ability, which gives the lie to bel canto’s reputation as a venue and stage for pure technique and beautiful singing. We do hear beautiful singing, often of the kind that, as it should in this case, has the power to break hearts and make you hold your breath. Bel canto singing of the kind evidenced in “Anna Bolena” is a little like white water rafting, it’s treacherous, dangerous, full of runs that rush like waves on top of each other, where major and even mistakes can strip a performer naked.

On the evidence of “Anna Bolena” (and I don’t have any other for her), Radvanovsky is one fine white water rafter and heartbreaker as well. She’s said that Maria Callas—who brought bell canto opera back to popularity almost singlehandedly and you can just imagine how—is her inspiration, and she does her proud. The trick with opera is not just to lay back and pinprick the notes and technique. That won’t satisfy the less-than-aficianados. It’s the temperament of opera, the willingness to go all in—reality and plausibility be damned—that makes it so appealing, such an experience, and in “Anna Bolena” the experience is dramatically achieved by inspired singing. That’s what happens in the famous duet of dueling rivals between Anna and Jane Seymour, a duel of riveting, warring emotions that span jealousy, guilt, forgiveness, resentment, great passions, emotionally clarity achieved through singing. In this duel , Sonia Gonassy as Jane holds her own with Radvanovsky, it’s a kind of emotional and vocal duel which both of them win.

Director Stephen Lawless has chosen to stage this intensely focused story and production in a setting (by Benoit Dugardyn) that resembles Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, a kind of surrounding area of rich brown wood that can reform itself to bring a scene into excruciating focus to become a bedroom, a chamber a prison cell, while above the doors is something resembling a circular balcony where crowds of courtiers, men and women in red and black, various factions, appear to peer down on the scene, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere for the characters, a place where no one is ever truly alone. This accurately reflects a political atmosphere that existed among Renaissance royalty and rulers in Tudor England, the beginnings of the police state.

In the staging, Lawless focuses the heart, no more than in an early scene, when Anne, sensing she may be in serious trouble of the fatal kind, imagines herself on the block, and goes through the graceful motions—arms outstretched, head on the block—of supplication and surrender. It makes your hair stand on end every bit as any of Radvanovsky’s vocal achievements.

Not only is Radvanosky’s voice a powerful dramatic tool—in the duel with Seymour, in her final scenes, in her glowing maternal powers when a child-princess Elizabeth is on stage but also in taking on the very fine bass Oren Gradus as Henry VIII. More traditional was the tenor Shelva Mukeria as Percy, a performer who has an appealing and grand voice but doesn’t quite achieve the charisma such a compelling swain should have.

This seems to me, at the very least, also a telling story about women and how deal with love and power and the desire for both. Throw into the mix the wonderful Claudia Huckle as Smeton—a so-called “pants” part in that she plays a young boy, a court singer smitten with Anna who ends up betraying her—and you have a grand powerful production of an opera that is bound up by one of opera’s first themes: power and its uses and misuses.
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Gary Tischler •

Washington theater fans think they know Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Floyd King. This makes sense. After all, hundreds, maybe thousands, of Washington area theatergoers have spent plenty of time with him going back to the 1980s. It’s true that he’s had different faces in different roles, but we feel like we know him well enough. We’ve seen his Parolles, his Feste, his fool, all the people in “A Tale of Two Cities”, and the ale-loving delegate from Rhode Island in “1776”.

King greets his fans with a handshake in the lobby of the Lansburgh Theatre, where he and the rest of the Shakespeare Theatre Company is in rehearsal for a production of an adaptation of Gogol’s “The Government Inspector”, which runs through Oct. 28. King’s manner is casual, his face is recognizable and his voice is more so, modulated down to conversation.

King is pumped about the production, which is a true ensemble piece. It brings together a horde of actors with whom he’s worked with before. “That’s what I love about this, it’s like some sort of party, almost, or reunion, Nancy [Robinette], Ted [Sabin], Rich [Foucheoux], and all the others, including Hugh Nees, Derek Smith, Sarah [Marshall],” he says. “We’ve all been around a while and we all know each other.”

Michael Kahn is directing. About the only AWOL actor is Ted van Griethuysen, with whom King has worked many times. “We’re old friends,” King said of him. He was the fool to van Griethuysen’s Lear, and together they played the bumbling duo of Dogberry and Verges in “Much Ado About Nothing” like the two stumbling bums in “Waiting for Godot”, the absurdist play by Samuel Beckett.

Most theater folks will tell you that King is one of the area’s finest comic actors, especially in Shakespeare plays. Being a great comic actor is only an inch away from being a great tragedian, or as an actor once said, “Tragedy is easy, comedy is hard.”

King thinks recognizes that fine, wavering, trembling line. This is what King brings to the acting game. His voice alone can elicit laughter. He can also become becalmed, introspective, preen like a peacock on a dime.

After seeing King in so many plays, we often we feel as if we know him. Here are some things we don’t know.

Much of King’s career has been spent in Washington, but, surprisingly, he isn’t a Washingtonian. “I have a place in New York, and a house in the Poconos,” he said. “I go there for peace and quiet, and it’s easy to get to from New York.”

There’s one more thing we didn’t know about King.

“This is the last play I’ll be doing in Washington this season,” he said. “Yes, that’s it at least for this season. I haven’t contracted for any other roles. I haven’t taken any other offers.”

Shakespeare is King’s bread and butter, but he believes its time for a change of pace.

“I’ve done most of the parts I can suited for in Shakespeare,” said King. “I want to take stock. I want to relax a little. I want to go back to Minnesota, and San Francisco and other places. It’s not permanent. It’s just time for a change a little bit.”

This makes King’s appearance as a postmaster in “The Government Inspector” all the more special.
“I’m enjoying it,” he said.

You should too. In the meantime, we’ll all be “Waiting for Gogol,” for the return of the King. [gallery ids="100983,131801" nav="thumbs"]

Jeff Malet • September 17, 2012

“Hamlet” is one of Shakespeare’s best known and oft-quoted plays, involving political intrigue, tragic death and philisophical reflection. “Hamlet” comes to the Folger for a two-week run courtesy of London-based Shakespeare’s Globe. This production has already toured Britain extensively and begins its North American trip here in Washington, D.C.

It is a homecoming of sorts for Anglo-American actor Michael Benz in the role of Hamlet. Benz graduated in 2004 from Georgetown University with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and theology, followed by a degree from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, and Globe regular Bill Buckhurst co-directed. A fine cast features Carlyss Peer as Ophelia, Dickon Tyrrell as Claudius, and Miranda Foster as Gertrude.

Hamlet plays through Sept. 22 at Folger Theatre, at The Folger Shakespeare Library which is located at 201 East Capitol Street, SE, in Washington, DC. For tickets, call 202-544-7077, or order them online.

View our photos of Hamlet at the Folger by clicking on the photo icons below. [gallery ids="100972,131249,131257,131265,131273,131282,131291,131299,131307,131316,131324,131332,131241,131233,131366,131360,131171,131354,131181,131349,131191,131200,131208,131217,131225,131341" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

If you want to know something about American performing arts culture, look at the annual Kennedy Center Awards and who is honored. This year, it appears especially eclectic.

This is a trend for the Kennedy Center Honors that’s been moving apace ever since it embraced the arenas of pop music, including not only a Sinatra but giants of blues, rock and roll and country music.

This year, it is legendary bluesman George “Buddy” Guy and one of the loudest and best of the super rock groups (think the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and the Who), Led Zeppelin, and its surviving members, getting honored.

Also selected for a Kennedy Center Honors salute is late-night talk show host and comedian David Letterman (Johnny Carson being the forerunner in this sub-category), one of the finest classical ballerinas and dancers to grace the world of ballet and dance, Russian Natalia Makarova, and Dustin Hoffman, arguably one of the finest modern film actors in the last 50 years, to stand alongside the likes of Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino.

Makarova, who is 71, came to America in 1970 and assayed a memorable turn in “Giselle” for the American Ballet Theatre and built a memorable career.

Letterman is an icon, not perhaps in an artistic sense, but in the sense of his role as late night host, a more cerebral, ironic and even cool version than, say, the more put-upon Jay Leno.

Guy won six Grammy awards playing and making Blues music, a guitar player who oddly influenced a generation of British players (including members of Led Zeppelin) as well as Eric Clapton.

The Led Zeppelin rockers—Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and keyboardist John Paul Jones—have with this honor made it all the way up the “Stairway to Heaven.” Their rock and roll, often full of anthems, lengthy riffs and pure, powerful playing has lasted and so have they—still plying their trade as musicians and super-stars.

Hoffman we remember well in “The Graduate,” “Tootsie,” “Lenny,” “Rain Man,” “Midnight Cowboy,” “Kramer Vs. Kramer,” “All The Presidents Men” and so on and so on, still trucking, still working hard at 76, becoming a very funny man in the “Focker” movie, playing Ben Stiller’s father. He was also a memorable Willy Loman on stage in “Death of a Salesman.”

Georgetowner George Stevens, Jr., is once again producing the Kennedy Center Honors which will be held Dec. 2. Stevens himself is getting an honor this year. It’s been announced that the film director and founder of the American Film Institute will receive an honorary Oscar at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Board of Governors’ Dinner in Los Angeles Dec. 1—one day before the big show here in D.C.

Gary Tischler •

“The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” by Kristoffer Diaz is quite a package. It carries a lot of stuff, themes, metaphors and even some poetry, plus a pyro-technic presentation that will wow you.

Down at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre, with director John Vreeke almost convincing theater folks to cheer, hiss and boo for the villains and heroes of this Pulitzer-Prize finalist play by a really gifted new writer, audiences become two audiences. Right there, that’s a very cool thing to happen: people actually get directed, they respond to the demands of the character and the play’s setting. For Woolly audiences, this is not your everyday happening: they’re comprise a tricky grab-bag of tastes, they want their crude moments wrapped in sophistication and their meaningful moments to have some edge, intellectual heft.

“Deity” has all of that, plus a staging that will knock your socks off, accompanied by loud music and noise, videos and punch and spark. It has Diaz’s gift for nailing the pow-pow and tech-tech, multi-culturalization of our more urban spaces in terms of language, its new, fractured phrases and words, its speed and rhythm.

But it’s about . . . wrestling.

So-called professional wrestling at that, that loud, booming, self-marketing sport of raw wrestling, quasi-street fighting, megaphone combination of star-power pull and bull, fake violence made to maybe turn graphic, its carny writ large, and there’s still one born every minute.

There’s precious little not to like here, except maybe the not surprising premise, which is that it’s really sad that wrestling is so duh-damn phony, false and inauthentic. This situation is a tragic one for at least one of the four protagonists in this play. The underlying theme, it struck me, was that wrestling is phony and false, as reflected by American culture (see reality shows, or don’t see). Might as well complain that the dust bowl has too much dust.

The tragic anti-semi-hero in this play is one Mace, a thin, wiry-muscled athletic small guy and fall guy, who understands the sheer beauty of wrestling, and furthermore, knows how to wrestle. But he’s been slated and fated to act the clown, the villain, the loser in wrestling’s every match, but he takes pride even in that, in doing that well. He hates his status but loves the world he lives in. “In wrestling, I make the other guy look good, that’s my job,” he says. “And there’s an art to that.” Mace, played with alarming, sometimes dangerous energy by the gifted Jose Joaquin Perez, understands his role—keep your mouth shut do your job. “I do the heavy lifting,” he says. That’s also what Mace does in this play—he’s the one that is the narrator, the story teller, like Sister Mary Ignatius, he explains it all to you, perhaps a little too much, and in fits and starts. “That’s not really what the story is” is not a phrase you want to hear too often in a play.

Mace is the fall guy for Chad Deity, a muscled, buffed, gleaming, grinning body of charisma. He’s a wrestling, celebrity deity, who can’t wrestle worth a spit, but he has the one thing that’s required: he’s a super-star. Both of them, each in their own way, work for EKO, the pitchman, marketer, owner, promoter and everything for something called THE WRESTLING, an accredited organization that holds power over all.

Enter one VP, a young magic man from the ghett-o, of Indian (as in India) origin who picks up hoops like its no big thing, speaks all the languages of the world, including street, hood and urban of everywhere, who cares not a fig for wrestling or its code, rules and, beauty and grace, its plots of bad guys and good guys and fake aches and hurts. But Mace thinks he’s his way up—and convinces EKO of it, too. Suddenly VP becomes the Fundamentalist, with his sidekick, the former Mace becoming a walking Mexican cliché called Che Chavez Castro, complete with sombrero. The play suddenly turns into a kind of serious farce about us and them, and given this week’s news, probably even a little more disorienting than it already is.

Nothing good can come of this—Deity remains a star, VP wants to undermine wrestling, and EKO can make dirty money and glory out of anything. But there are times in this production that you don’t even notice any of the deeper things going on—you’re too wrapped up in the ring that’s settled on stage from above, in the crashing fake noises as bodies fly around like missiles. It’s true that it is a smaller, more intimate ring. (Imagine all this in the Verizon Center, accompanied by thousands as opposed to a hundred or soin the theater.)

It’s, all said and done, exciting, dramatic, you discover again that wrestling, like reality shows, like politics, are amazingly theatrical. And Perez as Mace, the fast-talking Adi Hanash as VP, the amazing Shawn T. Andrew as Deity and veteran Michael Russotto as EKO are like foils and co-conspirators in a story about battles whose scripts have already been written. They make it worth your while.

Gary Tischler • September 13, 2012

Annie Baker is kind of sneaky, or at least she writes plays that feel like they’re written by a cat burglar.

Her plays—including “Body Awareness,” now receiving an affecting, imaginative staging at Theater J, as well as the hit, “Circle Mirror Transformation,” performed at the Studio two seasons ago—sneak up on you. They’re not so much disarming as surprising—like the moment in a story where someone wipes the dirt off the orphan’s face and finds out he is heir to the kingdom.

The way Baker operates is to set you up. She lets you make assumptions about characters, about what’s likely to happens next, then makes you throw the assumptions in the trash as you move along. It’s not that the assumptions are wrong, entirely, or that some things that you see coming from a distance doesn’t happen. It’s just that the seeming simplicity of her work and her use of language, her authenticity, if you will, seduces you into thinking that the play is simple, too, that it can’t be rescued from its apparent pitfalls. It’s complicated, and awkward, but it opens your eyes and heart at the end.

“Body Awareness” is an earlier work and centers around an event called “Body Awareness Week,” a celebration of just about politically correct cliché in the world, including the sin of irrefutable, high-minded dead-seriousness. At its center are Joyce and Phyllis, a lesbian couple in a household that also includes Jared, Joyce’s 21-year-old son from a failed marriage, who the couple believes is suffering from Asperger’s Syndrome, a belief which Jared bitterly and sometimes savagely fights. Phyllis, supremely confident in her view of the world, a professor at the local college, is running “Body Awareness Week,” with a kind of flinty assurance and cheerfulness resembling that of the Church Lady. Throw in a very laid-back, somewhat-on-the-make photographer named Frank Bonitatibus, who’s got a show in the festival of artsy photographs of naked women, and you’ve got a self-awareness-and-the-rumblings of discontent-week in the house.

As with “Circle Mirror,” the characters are flawed, and initially at least, not particularly likeable. They have annoying qualities at first blush: Phyllis, who preaches the gospel of gender and language PC, has a tendency toward the pedantic translating into a superior tone; Joyce oozes earth-mother protectiveness and accommodation; Jared, whether he has Asperger’s or not, is a bundle of treacherous emotions that are difficult to deal with and Frank, in his cool vest, thin-legged often-washed bluejeans and beard, is an aging hippy, his male libido barely in check. He is also a catalyst for friction between the two women and the source of manly advice (of the worst sort) for Jared, who’s never had a girlfriend and calls himself an auto-dactic.

In an hour and a half with no intermission (this was also the case for “Circle Mirror”), “Body Awareness” director Eleanor Holdridge deftly lets the play take its time and lets us almost move in with the characters and the sparse space of the set which is the cabin-like home owned by the couple. In the process, you get lots of talk, edgy combative talk, awkward painful talk spoken with a naturalness that turns the characters into people you start to care about, almost in spite of themselves.

That’s one of Baker’s gifts and concerns: how hard it is for people to community, to speak the truth, not because they’re hiding something, but because they don’t know how. So, you get glimpses of the “Body Awareness” events and occasions, you get to see Jared’s painful, needy world (Adi Stein is terrific in the part), you hear snatches of the couple’s history—Joyce explains that Phyllis is her first girlfriend, wheras “Phyllis came out in kindergarten, she’s always known who and what she was.”

Often funny, often painful are the prickly arguments between Phyllis and Frank and Phyllis’s hostility towards the “male eye,” i.e. art, pictures and anything that objectifies women. Susan Lynskey gives Phyllis a frustrating edge, as in an all-edges quality which is sort of like sun tan lotion warding off the sun, while Marybeth Wise manages to create a Joyce who is at once warm, expansive and completely awkward. In a weird way, it’s what makes her appealing, funny and sexy. Frank, being the dog he is, sees that right away. Michael Kramer lets you see Frank’s carelessness, his need to be liked, to worm his way in. It’s an aggressive kind of irresponsible charm. He stops just short of hitching up his jeans by the belt and strutting.

Yet, all this conflict has the effect of re-arranging feelings and illuminating who the characters really are in the end. They seem like a group portrait of Dorothy and her companions, breathless after the dangers of Oz, knowing at last their own hearts.

As a play, “Body Awareness” is a kind of small gift for an unspecified occasion, like a really fine, if not trendy, bottle of wine, to be savored. It’s at Theater J at the Jewish Community Center on 16th Street through Sept. 23. Go for it.

Gary Tischler •

It’s hard to doubt that somewhere in the course of a long career of jabbing Texas politicians and officials with the written-word equivalent of a cattle prod that some state senator or party chairman or Bush family hanger-on, with teeth-clenched respect, allowed that she had a set of male equipment, the highest compliment a man can pay a woman he’s not trying to sleep with, but who makes him nervous anyway.

Whatever the case, Molly Ivins didn’t need it. She had something better—flat-out, unrepentant courage.

Now, she’s got something almost as good to help keep her memorable wit and entirely human qualities alive: She’s got Kathleen Turner, who stars as Ivins in “Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-ass Wit of Molly Ivins,” now at Arena Stage’s Arlene and Robert Kogod Cradle Theater through Oct. 28.

It’s as if Ivins, who died in 2007 from breast cancer, was once again delivering political thunderbolts that made you proud, laugh, or squirm, depending on who you were, with her syndicated column, in a long career as a journalist from the New York Times to the Texas Observer.

Turner—movie star, outspoken supporter of liberal and progressive causes, mother, award-winning stage actress, and a still hot memory in the minds of many male movie goers of the 1980s for her performance as the femme fetale in the noirish “Body Heat”—is a perfect fit to march onstage and be Molly Ivins. If Turner’s famous voice—a rough shade deeper than in her “Body Heat” days, but just as impossible to ignore—has an equivalent somewhere, the words in Ivins’s column fit the bill, so it’s terrific that Turner’s speaking her words out loud. They’re going to echo loudly.

There’s a I’ll-do-it-my-way quality to both women. You can hear it over the telephone in an interview with Turner, or the way she tackled a glaring spotlight—“Whoa…can you give me a break here?”—as she sat down for a Newseum event, “An Evening with Kathleen Turner,” moderated by Shelby Coffey III, remembered here as the former Post Style section editor, and in the company of Margaret Engel, who co-wrote “Red Hot Patriot” with her twin sister Alison.

“That was fun,” she said of the Newseum event, “I like having fun.” Over the phone, the voice is down to a light roar, like a mother bear in a relaxed mode.

“I think we share some things. We have, I know, the same outlook, similar causes and political tendencies,” she said. “I am, if you did not know it, a member of People for the American Way. I am a chairman for Planned Parenthood. I support Amnesty International, among other causes.” Ivins wore her politics, which was liberal mixed in with a little verbal rage and lots of passion and in-your-face-humor.

Verbally, or on paper, both women share a common outspokenness, a big life story and a bigger-than-life-persona.

They could make an impression one way or another: Ivins with her 6-foot-1 presence and bright red hair; Turner with her physical sensuality, her voice, her acting chops, her movie star quality and directness. They both have led somewhat turbulent lives. It’s the nature of the beast when you become a movie star early on, although Turner objects to the “overnight” description. “I’d been working for quite a while. So, it’s not like I hadn’t been around,” she said of her, well, overnight rise to mega-stardom in “Body Heat.” “It was disconcerting, sure, with all the attention, the movie star thing, and it’s tough to handle.”

Her body of film work contains more unforgettable gems, which overrides the dross. You couldn’t get a better jump stardom jump start than “Body Heat,” “The Man With Two Brains” (in which she was as funny as Steve Martin), “Crimes of Passion,” “Romancing the Stone”, the hit woman to Jack Nicholson’s hit man in “Prizzi’s Honor,” and the remarkable movie about a marriage gone bad and mad, “The War of the Roses.”

“We [Michael Douglas and director Danny DeVito] were all proud of that,” she said. “That ending, the three of us had to fight for that, we battled with the studio on it and won.”In “Roses”, the movie took itself to where it was headed all along, and it was not a happy ending.

If you look for both women on YouTube, you see something else, the quality of sharp humor, insistence that attention must be paid. It’s mixed with tough honesty, evidence of big lives lived richly, with wind warnings.

“Molly could fill a room. She had presence. She cared passionately about politics. She had a huge heart,” Turner said of Ivins. “It’s important to me that I do her justice when I’m on that stage being her. The humor has to be there, and it is. Doesn’t matter where you are, people respond to that. I admired her immensely, no question.”

Ivins was no question, liberal-left, or as she’s quoted as saying in the press materials: “I am a liberal and proud of it. Fish gotta swim, and hearts gotta bleed.”

To her, work was everything: she left the New York Times, or was let go, depends who’s talking, to return to work in Texas, a base from which she blasted Texas politics and political figures.

Listen to Turner talk about the stage—where she was a triumphant Martha in a revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” by Edward Albee—you can hear some of the passion that Ivins must have felt when the words were rolling sharply and perfectly. “There is nothing like it,” she said of being on stage. “There’s a connection, a kind of conspiracy with the audience, that you are here at a moment that will never be repeated, that this is special, original, one-of-a-kind. I feel that way every night. It’s always fresh.”

For Ivins, Turner said she did not do any special research. “The words are already there, and you have to trust that. But I want the humor to be out there. I like making people laugh, making them crack up.”Things were not always top-of-the-world for Turner. In 1992 she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a debilitating disease which left her in constant pain. “I was told I might not walk again,” she said.

Still, she’s persevered. She remains in the ring, on stage, active in politics, and here in Washington, you can expect to see her at numerous events. And until the end of October, you can find her on stage at the Kogod Cradle, resurrecting Molly, making people think, making people laugh as the 2012 election campaign rolls on to its conclusion like a severe weather warning.
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