Performance

Georgetowner • April 6, 2016

In April, we celebrate both the Bard’s birth and his death. There is no official birth date for Shakespeare, the world’s most celebrated playwright and writer, but he was baptized April 26, 1564, and he died April 23, 1616, at the age of 52.

All of which makes the Folger Shakespeare Library a great place to be this month. Throughout 2016, the venerable American institution of all things Shakespearean is celebrating 400 years of Shakespeare with exhibitions, performances and other special programming under the umbrella of “The Wonder of Will.”

The whole country will be able to see the touring exhibition “First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare.” Copies of the 1623 book — of which the Folger owns 82 of the surviving 233 in the world — will tour all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, landing at 23 museums, 20 universities, five public libraries, three historical societies and a theater. At selected sites, a touring production of “The Gravedigger’s Tale” will also be seen.

At the Folger, on Capitol Hill just past the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress, the big birthday party will be Sunday, April 24, with face painting, wandering minstrels, clowns, jugglers, a cake and the presence of Queen Elizabeth (the first, not the second) herself.

The day before, Saturday, April 23, the Folger will host a day of international live streaming, in which actors, scholars, artists and community leaders will share their connections to Shakespeare.

Having just completed the exhibition “Shakespeare, Life of an Icon,” on April 7 the Folger will open “America’s Shakespeare,” which will focus on how Shakespeare has become America’s Bard through letters, costumes, books, photographs and film. It closes July 24, to be followed by “Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen and the Cult of Celebrity,” beginning Aug. 6.

Musically, the Folger Consort will be performing “Shakespeare and Purcell: Music of The Fairy Queen and Other Works,” April 8 to 10.

The Folger gala will be Monday, April 18. A few days later, the wacky Reduced Shakespeare Company will return for the world premiere of “William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged),” running April 21 to May 8. In May, the Folger will wrap up its theater season with Aaron Posner’s “District Merchants,” a contemporary version of “The Merchant of Venice,” directed by Michael John Garcés.

“We still pay attention to Shakespeare because, no matter how networked our world becomes, he remains one of the ultimate connectors,” said Michael Witmore, director of the Folger. “In a sense, Shakespeare wrote the preamble to modern life.”

Shakespeare remains, is, was and will always be the most contemporary of authors. Directors, adapters and performers try to find ways to contemporize Shakespeare’s plays, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, although — forsooth and in truth — they don’t need it. I may be irritated to hear the word “prithee” time and again in the plays, because it sounds like a forced anachronism, but then again we may yet feel the same way about David Mamet’s four-letter explosions someday. The Bard doesn’t date, the plays and the writing are a bottomless well from which our modern times continue to echo outward and upward.

People still make the argument that the Bard wasn’t really the Bard. Personally, I have no doubt that William Shakespeare wrote the plays — for money, for esteem, for profit and prosperity and perhaps for posterity. Someone once said that a man who doesn’t know he’s a genius probably isn’t. I think Shakespeare may have guessed that he was special in his talent but probably didn’t think of himself as a genius. I think he thought of himself as a man of the theater, the modern version of which he practically invented.

He not only invented theater, but profoundly influenced the performing arts. The words certainly were the point of it all — the stories he purloined from ready-made sources — but there are musical, operatic, and vaudeville versions of Hamlet (not to mention a wordless one recently at the Washington Ballet).

Shakespeare to this day does what show business does: entertains us and makes us laugh, saddens us and makes us cry buckets and, most of all, without trying, makes us think of our own humanity. In his plays, we are not just at the theater, but on stage ourselves. In every Shakespeare play, there is something for someone: a pratfall, a joke, a fairy queen, a monster, a magician losing his magic, a king losing his kingdom, the outsider trying to find his way in an alien society and a parade of hypnotic, strong, beautiful female characters, which their swains and male contemporaries never quite understand.

That is the wonder of Will, just like today.

Georgetowner • April 3, 2016

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s “Circus Xtreme” has arrived at Verizon Center in downtown Washington, D.C., and with its famed elephants’ final show.

The show features artists, according to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, “who redefine the word extreme in everything they do, magnifying traditional elements of the circus and combining them with never-before-seen spectacles, original fast-paced performances and incredibly hilarious moments. Audiences will be dazzled and astounded by the beautiful Bengal tigers, double-humped dromedaries ridden by brave Mongolian women and, for the last time, the most popular members of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey family: the magnificent Asian elephants.”

“The ultimate family entertainment experience features high-wire wizards, spectacular strongmen, BMX trick riders, trampoline daredevils, inconceivable contortionists, a high-flying human cannonball, a bungee aerial skydiving display and an international assembly of more than 100 world-renowned artists.”
 
The company also noted, “The show is also the last opportunity for local residents to see the treasured Asian elephants before they are moved to their permanent home at the Ringling Bros. Center for Elephant Conservation in Florida in May 2016. The elephants’ move to Ringling Bros. Center for Elephant Conservation will allow the company to focus on its Asian elephant conservation program and the pediatric cancer research partnership with Dr. Joshua Schiffman of Primary Children’s Hospital and the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City, Utah.”

The circus is at Verizon Center through April 3 — and will be at EagleBank Arena in Fairfax, Virginia, April 6 through April 17. 
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Georgetowner • March 30, 2016

When Septime Webre announced earlier this month that he was ending a highly successful and energizing 17-year run as the Washington Ballet’s artistic director to “focus on creating new ballets and to staging on other companies the many original works I have created for the Washington Ballet,” there was still some unfinished business to consider.

That would be the rest of the company’s season, a diverse quartet of four productions that exemplify Webre’s unique leadership. Webre gave the company more than a flash of the new, with his own stagings and works and by bringing the choreography of stars like Twyla Tharp, Christopher Wheeldon, Mark Morris, Paul Taylor, Hans van Manen and William Forsythe to Washington.

Over the remainder of the season, in the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater, we will see Webre’s style clearly illustrated, beginning this week (through Feb. 28) with “Director’s Cut,” which includes the evocatively titled “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated,” with music composed by Thom Williams for Forsythe’s influential ballet of 1987. Also on the program is the remarkable “Prism,” choreographed by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa to improvisations by pianist Keith Jarrett.

Webre comes front and center with “State of Wonder,” 32 intricate dance translations set to Bach’s classic “Goldberg Variations,” with live music by S&R Foundation Artist in Residence Ryo Yanagitani.

March will see the arrival (through April 3) of “Hamlet” by Ballet Austin Choreographer and Artistic Director Stephen Mills, which features music by Philip Glass. Webre calls Mills’s “Hamlet” “sleek and dramatic — from the choreography to the sparse and contemporary scenic design, a performance that is like no Shakespeare work you’ve ever seen.”

Then there’s “Carmine Burana.” “This is personal to me,” says Webre, who did the choreography for Carl Orff’s retelling of 24 medieval poems. “The work inspired me, and it also was something I considered a highlight of my time here.” “Carmina Burana” will also feature the 100 voices of the Cathedral Choral Society under the direction of Dr. J. Reilly Lewis. Paired with George Balanchine’s “Themes and Variations,” it will run from April 13 to 17.

Finally, coincidentally if not fortuitously, there is “Bowie & Queen,” an evening of dance tributes to the rock legends David Bowie — whose recent death at the age of 69 hit several generations of admirers hard — and Freddy Mercury, the electric lead singer of Queen. It will run May 4 to 15.

Electric choreographer Trey McIntyre has created “Mercury Half-Life,” exploring the life and times of Mercury, who invented and reinvented himself often as the crowd-pleasing but pioneering rockmeister of Queen. Edwaard Liang pays tribute to Bowie and his chameleon persona and music with the help of violinist Machiko Ozawa in “Dancing in the Street.” Both works are company premieres.

Gary Tischler •

When most people think of ballet or call up memories of it, they do not think of dance.  They think in pictures and movement—a stage full of shimmering ballerinas in white en pointe or a prima ballerina lifted into the air as if preparing for flight,  solos and pax de deux and divertissements, those often spectacular splashes  of costumed dancers offering eye-popping entertainment that has little to do with the plot proceedings, but are there for the wow factor.

We’re talking about classical ballet — “Swan Lake,” “Giselle” or “The Sleeping Beauty” — powered by gorgeous music from the likes of Tchaikovsky and others, and danced right out of the inspirational, emotional and technical  toolbox of classical ballet.   This kind of ballet — pre-Balanchine, pre-Graham and certainly pre-Morris — is ballet as throwback, its sturdiest, most definable and recognizable and appealing, and also its most Russian, in many instances.

The Mariinsky Ballet out of St. Petersburg, Russia, which was turned into a major force by the legendary choreographer Marius Petipa in the late 1800s  is classical ballet at apex. If  you want to dive into that particularly hypnotic pool,  the Mariinsky production of Petipa’s “Raymonda” at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House through Feb. 28 is, if not entirely the most outstanding, certainly one of the most  characteristic examples of the form.

You have to want to swim in this ocean, and it’s a long, exhausting swim—three acts, roughly three hours. For the most part, it’s worth it because you get to see a kind of spectacular final product and the nuts and bolts of the process.  The ballet vocabulary of duets, of pose and poseur, of difficult athletic feats turned into delicate pictures and motions, into dance, the tutu skirts, so other worldly but also immediate identifiers of what world you are in. We view the display of arms and legs just so, acting in the midst of dancing tells you a lot about what it takes to live in that world and the ultimate reward of creating difficult and delicate beauty.

“Raymonda” — the name of the medieval Hungarian princess over whom a prince and knight and a Saracen intruder battle over — is still an example of the same old stories, a fight for love and glory in a kingdom far, far away (Hungary, as it happens), in a time long, long ago (the Late Middle Ages, as it happens).

Here, Raymonda (a lithe, at once steely and fragile Oxana Skorik) lives at the Hungarian court, awaiting her bethrothed, Rene de Brienne, (Soslan Kulaev), a dark-haired, bold knight whose portrait comes alive while Raymond dreams of him.  On hand also is Abderakhman, the visiting Saracen chief who plots to abduct Raymonda with his retinue of slaves and servant.

Act one is like a long introductory play—courtiers, solos by two energetic dancers, retinues marching, moving and dancing, Raymonda showing off her dancing chops and so on.  Act two ends in a decisive to-the-death duel between Rene de Brienne and Abderakhman, and act three is a celebration and one long series of wonderful danced divertissements which cater to Hungarian musical flavors and in which Oxana Skorik shows off all of Raymonda’s considerable qualities.

“Raymonda,” to me, is about elevation, trust—in her partner—the use of hands and fingers, the ability to make muscular strength seem as strong and moving as a leaf. The spectacle in the last act is spirited, its meant as eye candy and the dancers, instead of traditional ballet wraps, have what look like very contemporary-styled shoes.

Contemporary is not the watchword here. It’s the release of tradition of classical forms, classical music by Alexander Glazunov, which has its own stand-alone qualities. Here, it serves as a rich and pleasant part of the whole, if not an overpowering force.

This production of “Raymonda” serves the time-honored glories and pleasures of classical ballet.  It seemed perfect for the audience on hand, which included older couples, single moms with budding ballerinas in glittery outfits, all sorts of couples, the young and the old, the aficionados discussing both glaring and small errors, the joys of the principal dancers, as well as dealing with the length of things.

As Tevye sang: “Tradition. Tradition.”

Gary Tischler •

When it comes to the 88th Annual Academy Awards, I say: Thanks.

No, really.

Thanks.

Oh, I know, it was really, really long.

Even Oscars host Chris Rock, who made it appear less long, said so: “Man, this is really long.” Or something like that.

And sure, the ABC folks on the red carpet talked too much and mentioned the word, “exclusive,” way too much, and somehow we still managed to find out who or what they were wearing.

No.

Thanks, really.

Thanks, Chris Rock.

There was a lot of speculation about what the edgy — still edgy — comedian and actor was going to say as host of the show about the controversies and contretemps surrounding the diversity issue at the Oscars.  Which is to say that this year, as for last year, there were no persons of color nominated for an Oscar in the acting categories and top echelon categories. The result was that a number of  notables in the industry — film maker Michael Moore, actress Jada Pinkett, wife of Will Smith, who was ignored by the academy for his portrayal of a Nigerian doctor who exposed a concussion problem in the National Football League in “Concussion,” as well as outspoken director Spike Lee, boycotted the proceedings.  The controversy exposed a diversity problem not only in the nominations but in the membership of the supporting organization which has voting membership of largely older white persons.

Rock, on balance, was probably the best choice to deal with this issue while still managing not to ignore that he was host of the biggest television entertainment event of the year.  “Are the Oscars racist?” he asked rhetorically. “Hell, yes,” he replied, “but in a sorority sort of way.”

“I was asked to boycott,” he said. “And I thought about it.  And I noticed  that it was only unemployed people who were asking me to boycott … but I thought about quitting, but I thought … they’re not going to cancel the Oscars because I quit.”

Probably not. And it’s a good thing Rock didn’t quit. He called the evening “The White People’s Choice Awards,” which was funny.  He had skits including black girl scouts selling cookies to the audience, interviewing black people at a Dolby Theater about movies like “The Danish Girl” and “Room” and so on.

The audience laughed, and it’s then that you remember one of Rock’s gifts, he has a way of telling tough truths — “Black people were too busy being lynched in the sixties to worry about who wins the Best Short Subject Award” — and making people like it. He made a memorable appearance at the Kennedy Center for its first Mark Twain awards in which he had a pungent answer to the question of what Twain might say to honoree Richard Pryor if they had met.

But here’s what did happen:  after a while, even without trying, that you noticed just how white-heavy both the audience and the nominees were — about 20 individuals seemed to troop up for certain films and they were: all white. There’s a telling shot in the Washington Post of Rock cajoling the audience in front of him — made up almost entirely of:  well, you know.

Rock’s guidance of the show gave the show a certain edge, a little unpredictability, as opposed to finding out that Leonardo Di Caprio won the Best Actor Award for “The Revenant,” an award everyone wanted him to win badly.  DiCaprio, who usually shows up for these things with his mother, was gracious, a young man of manners and good sense who also managed to call attention to the danger of global warming. Watching DiCaprio give great performances is not unusual — seeing him live often is, there’s something unknowable about him, perhaps the hallmark of a really good actor. So, thanks to you, too, Leo.

And how about that kid actor, Jacob Tremblay, who played Brie Larson’s son in the tense “Room”? Larson won the Best Actress Award, but Tremblay won over everybody with his kid demeanor, eyes popping out when the Star Wars robots walked on stage. Thanks, Jacob, for being a good boy. How about a big thanks to Louis C.K., the comedian and presenter for best documentary short? He said that the award would be something special for winners, who “will never be rich as long as they live. They’re going home in a Honda Civic.”

Thanks to actress Charlize Theron for reminding us what sleek Hollywood glamour is all about, tall, thin and stunning in a knockout red gown that was deeply cut without doing damage. And thanks to Lady Gaga for her singing of “Til It Happens to You,” a clear-as-a-knife-cut ballad about sexual attacks, proving again what a remarkable singer she perhaps has always been. Sad for Sylvester Stallone not to win Best Supporting Actor Award for playing Rocky one last time — or maybe not.  And thanks for all the scenes from “Mad Max” and all the tech and design awards it got.  Now, I don’t have to see it — but good for George Miller for reviving the movie and reveling in the modern toys he had to play with.

And thanks for “Spotlight” for getting the spotlight as Best Picture.  One of the things about Oscar night is that it makes you want to see the movies you didn’t see — like “Spotlight” and “Brooklyn” and its Irish star in the appropriately green dress.

Oscars? Good show, and thanks again.

Gary Tischler •

This week being the week of St. Patrick’s Day, it’s not hard to think of Sir James Galway in his Irish persona, because he most definitely is Irish, East Belfast-born and -raised. And he most definitely sounds Irish during the course of a brief phone interview, which manages to feel like a fine little slice of the life he leads.

Galway — Sir James, being a knight and all — has the natural lilt, the distinct vowels and a heartiness behind it, that identifies him as the Gaelic sort. To see him, and especially hear him, in person, well, there’s the afternoon concert at the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall, Sunday at 4 p.m., part of the Washington Performing Arts season. (He will perform with his wife and fellow flutist Lady Jeanne Galway and pianist Phillip Moll.)

Since he is, after all, by most standards and reputation, the “world’s pre-eminent flutist,” you may also want to dial him up on YouTube. He is the man with the beard, now a little white and wizened; he is the “man with the golden flute”; he is the man who has made the flute and everything you can play on it hugely popular.

Like Jean-Pierre Rampal, only more so, Sir James has spread the gospel of the flute around the world. In his time, which is both then and now, he embodies the flute soloist as a superstar of music, both live and in concert, and captured on the millions of records that have been sold.

“Everyone in our family played something. Me, it was the flute, and I took to it not so much easily as naturally,” he told us in a previous interview. He has the gift of both gab and genius: he was for many years a member of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, but then quit to take on a solo career — a risky proposition in some ways, but it made him who he is today.

“I saw — listening to jazz and pop and how some people played all that — what you might be able to do with the flute in that large arena,” he said. “And it’s not just about accessibility and popularity, it’s about teaching as well, because that’s a big and important part of what Jeanne and I do, when we do master classes or have people bring flutes to the concerts.”

Galway’s mainstreaming took the form of a quantum leap. You can see him on YouTube being interviewed, or playing with other kinds of stars (in one instance, playing the flute in Aspen with John Denver singing “Annie’s Song,” and in another, playing “Danny Boy” with full orchestra) and how perfect and natural that is. An album called “James Galway and the Chieftains in Ireland” from 1987 might be particularly worth listening to on this day.

“No question, it was like a large number of doors of possibility opened up,” he said.

He seems born to the flute. One observer said that Galway lives the flute, his last breath will be on the flute. Then again, it may be in mid-sentence, also, because he’s a talker.

“What we try to do with our program here, on tour, which we love, is to get the full depth and breath and range of what you can do with the flute,” he said.

To that end, there will be Phillipe Gaubert’s “Sonata No. 3 for Flute and Piano,” Franz Doppler’s lively “Rigoletto Fantasy for Two Flutes” (playing with Lady Galway, nee Jeanne Cinnante), Francois-Joseph Gossec’s “Tambourin,” Marin Marais’s “Le Basque,” the great violinist Fritz Kreisler’s “Schon Rosmarin” and Francois Borne’s “Carmen Fantasy,” among others.

Galway and his wife live in Switzerland by Lake Lucerne, but tour extensively. It’s a long way from the teeming streets of Belfast where he was born just before World War II.

And he’s a knight.

“Right,” he says. “It’s quite an honor, sure. It changes your life. It kicks you right out the working class, that’s for sure.

“Yeah, I know, what to call me. Sir James I guess is fine. But people like to call me Sir Jimmy, because to most people and myself, I was always a Jimmy.”

He is that, but more than that: a worldwide whirlwind carried by the echo of the flute — a golden flute for sure.

Gary Tischler • March 24, 2016

The plays of William Shakespeare have long inspired other artists, from composers to filmmakers. “Romeo and Juliet,” for example, the classic tale of doomed young lovers, has been transformed into an opera by Gounod and several ballets and films (not to mention “West Side Story”).

But what about “Hamlet,” often considered Shakespeare’s most confounding play, where words matter, where the hero’s intellect and psyche is a critical part of the play? There are, of course, film versions of the play itself, including the Oscar-winning Laurence Olivier version, and there is the 1868 opera by Ambroise Thomas (which resurfaced recently, after years of semi-obscurity, with productions including a Cold War version at Washington National Opera in 2010).

But what about dance? How do you make a psychological and word-driven play like “Hamlet” come to life as a ballet?

Washington audiences will get the answer when “Hamlet,” choreographed by Stephen Mills, artistic director of Ballet Austin, gets a company premiere by the Washington Ballet, featuring music by contemporary music icon Philip Glass. The ballet will be performed March 23 through April 3 at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater.

For Mills, “Hamlet” is a milestone work that echoes with meaning for him in different ways. In 1959, the folks at Ballet Austin went looking for a new artistic director. They found him in Mills, already a critical member of the company. His first work in his first year at Ballet Austin? “Hamlet,” of course.

“It meant a lot to me and I wanted to begin with something new, and something significant,” Mills said in a telephone interview. “I would probably guess ‘Hamlet’ wouldn’t be everybody’s first choice for a ballet, a dance piece. In part, it’s about language and words, but, I think, it also lends itself to a ballet. It’s a silent ‘Hamlet,’ but not a mimed ‘Hamlet.’ Dance has its own language, of movement, of gesture, where you use every part of your body to illustrated emotions, to show feeling and, most importantly, in this case, to tell a story.”

Mills has created other Shakespeare dances, including “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “The Taming of the Shrew,” which were part of the Kennedy Center’s Ballet Across America series, in collaboration with the Suzanne Farrell Ballet. One of his signature works is “Light/The Holocaust & Humanity Project” from 2005.

“I think, and thought then, that the story of Hamlet and all of its incidents — the urge for revenge, the father-son relationship, the killings and plots — they’re part of a highly dramatic story that can be done in a ballet, in dance,” he said.

“If the story, the play, is in sharp, clean focus, you can make something very special about it. You don’t need elaborate costumes, and castles. It’s a universal, timeless story, very resonant in our time.” Mills has seen the Olivier film, which he found inspiring. “There’s so much movement in it, choreographed, stylish. And it’s all in black and white. Visually, it was stunning. It was very minimalist.

“I think in musical terms. My ballets don’t always have music in them, but most of the time, they do. And I think the music of Philip Glass is perfect for this,” Mills said.

“Philip’s music is often pigeonholed, I think — that’s somehow it’s atonal or difficult — but his work can also be very accessible, very powerful and moving, which I think when you’re dealing with ‘Hamlet’ is critical.

“‘Hamlet’ is about big themes, big feelings,” Mills continued. “Narrow it down and it’s about relationships and relatives, revenge and politics, which are very contemporary themes. So what’s important in terms of the ingredients are the situation, the score and the look. They’re all design elements that are very important.”

The focus in this “Hamlet” is squarely on his family: his father’s ghost, the adulterous mother Gertrude and the new and murderous King Claudius, along with Ophelia, her brother and her father.

Artistic Director Septime Webre called the production “sleek and dramatic, from the choreography to the sparse and contemporary scenic design,” by Jeffrey A. Main. “This is like no Shakespeare work you’ve ever seen. Mills strips down the complex play by focusing on the lead characters, all the while interjecting several take-your-breath-away moments.”

“It’s a real pleasure to have ‘Hamlet’ at Washington Ballet,” Mills said. “Septime and I are old friends, we’ve known each other for over two decades. We were both in the same company in Texas — I think we both wore the same Peter Pan costumes.”

Gary Tischler • March 18, 2016

“The City of Conversation,” Anthony Giardina’s play set in the politically atmosphered home of a Georgetown hostess — from 1979 to 2009 — is a play that, in and of itself, reads surprisingly well.  It’s witty, sharp, smart, full of sometimes daggered bon mots and a plot that has its revealing twists and turns.

Yet the current Arena Stage production in the Fichandler reveals something else about the work:  it plays really well on the stage as a very human family drama, as a political comedy-drama that echoes mightily in these crazed primary times, and as an evocation of halcyon days in Georgetown when women like Hester Ferris, an avowed liberal player, presided over dinners that might decide the fate of bills making their way in committees in Congress, or larger issues, like Supreme Court nominations.

Viewing the play, you get what’s not on the page—the raised eyebrows, the pauses between the launching of a sharp barb is launched and when it lands, the texture of language as a kind of combat and the emotional and dexterous back-and-forths that reference political leanings and social and financial classes.

The play occurs within three economically written and emotionally punchy settings. It opens with President Jimmy Carter’s infamous or famous — depending — “malaise” speech in the background, even as the players on hand talk about Senator Ted Kennedy’s impending run for the presidency.  The middle—and most acidic and personally combative—phase occurs during the zealously partisan battle over the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court during the Reagan Administration.  The end game, elegiac and surprisingly almost sentimental, occurs on the day of Barack Obama’s historic inauguration as President of the United States.

Phase one introduces us to the primary combatants.  Hester Ferris is having one of her famous dinners  at which she hopes to persuade a Kentucky senator to sign on for Kennedy’s proposal to have some Southern judges disavow their membership in private clubs that bar African Americans from membership.  Her son Colin arrives unexpectedly a day early from London, his fiancé and fellow London School of Economics student Anna Fitzgerald in tow.  Ann bluntly states her ambitions for a Washington career and offers to study Hester as a way of learning about the city’s and Georgetown mores. “Oh, I’ve seen that movie before,” retorts Hester, referencing “All About Eve.”   Ann — along with Colin — is a budding member of the new, conservative energy, which affronts the true-blue, iron-fisted Kennedy liberal.  The dye is cast when Ann, a la Sally Quinn, invades the cigar-smoking domain of the after-dinner, usually men-only part of the evening and does so with aplomb and blonde charm — so much so that it costs Hester her Kentucky ally.

Things come to a full head of bile in act two, when Colin and Ann, now married, have left their young son in the care of his grandmother, a Hester fully involved on the opposite of the Bork battle. The living room, when all (most of it pitiless and vicious) has been said and done, has become a personal battleground over politics with the grandson as a kind of hostage.

At this point, you can see the personal cost of politics for Hester, who makes a tragic sacrifice, and for Anna, a ranking GOP lawyer, who is so involved in the battle that she can’t abide the thought of losing.  These, we see, may be the roots of the great political divide that’s in our political life and shown on our screens almost nightly — a divide that’s become as irreconcilable as the split between Hester and her family.

Margaret Colin as Hester has to carry the show—with her home as its center revealing her views and her heart. She has plenty of both—and must dominate.

Colin does this with uncommon strength married to a flirtatious confidence—the character is having a long-standing affair with a married senator.  She also has a worthy opponent in Anna, played with a sexy ferocity by Caroline Hewitt.  Michael Simpson has the more difficult and less flamboyant task of not only playing Colin, but also Colin’s son, both diffident men with limitations not shared by the women they love—be they mother, wife or grandmother. Ann McDonough gets a lot out of the somewhat mysterious and self-contained role of Jean Swift, Hester’s ever-present, not quite long-suffering sister and companion in tightly held liberalism.

If the first two acts, swiftly and toughly paced by director Doug Hughes, are portraits of intimate political and family battles, the final act is something else again. It is Hester at twilight, her great battles over and seemingly won with Obama’s inauguration. But she is also alone with Jean, as her grandson Ethan and his partner Donald, a historian, arrive. The battle has cost Hester her family, and this is the first sight she’s had of her grandson. This last scene is almost a self-contained playlet, a sweet, awkward scene full of small tendrils of hope and echoes of the past (as well the future).  Hester’s home—full of artifacts, letters and photograph—has become a kind of museum of the political heyday of liberalism.

In this way, “The City of Conversation” strikes a loud echo and sends a warning of the cost of political passions held too strongly.   You don’t, after all, have to be suicidal to still suffer the pain of self-inflicted wounds.

Gary Tischler •

When it comes to Laurie Anderson, the word “icon” comes to mind. In her program, “Language of the Future: Letters to Jack,” performed with cellist Rubin Kodheli at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater last weekend that word comes to mind, but I find myself resisting.

You want something more simple than her resume in the program or available online, both of which are long and informative, but not necessarily revealing.  Anderson is in her sixties now and has been doing challenging, footloose creations of works of performance art, or art-art,  film, music, instruments, singing-talking, with and without someone, since the 1970s. In 1981, she sort or burst into the world consciousness with a little number called “O Superman,” a hit song — yes, a hit song — which you can see performed online, and which reached number two in the British charts, which may tell you something about what was going on in British pop mentality those days.  It was a chant and a song, part of  a larger project called “United States” as well as “Big Science.”

These titles, incidentally, sound like novels, epic poems, a wandering poet-minstrel in search of a large subject.  Anderson was married to the late iconoclast and soulmate Lou Reed. His jarring, boundary-stretching  music, we recall — dum dad um, take a walk on the wild side. He died in 2013.

There is all of this, too much to take in, all at once, the many, many projects, including the affecting film “The Heart of a Dog”, about the last days of her dog in which we learn that you can teach an old dog new tricks (like learning to play the piano).

None of this is nonsense, but it is just a little too much.  None of it prepares, and none of it is suggestive of what Anderson does.  There is even a category for invention: the tape-bow violin.   She has been doing what she does for a long time now, and one thing I can say is that she is exactly suited for our times, nonetheless.  She has not seen and done everything — it’s as if there’s a lot to  fill in.

Anderson makes you ramble.  In “Language of the Future: Letters to Jack,” she reveals herself to be above all a story teller, a contemporary Scheherazade, who uses words, music, video, film, like a roadside witch, to beguile us into thinking of our own stories.

On a stage, she is a small presence, heard every which way, playing a violin, a version she invented herself, surrounded by tablets and electronics, alongside Kodheli, framed behind her by back projections, of snow falling unbearably wet and slow, of pictures of the Kennedy folk (hello, Pierre Salinger). She begins to talk about herself as a young girl in a Midwestern small down. The voice is seductive, warm as a heated drink, inviting even, self deprecating. She talked about the letters to Jack, which refer to Jack Kennedy — John Kennedy, a presidential candidate at the time.

“I had this confidence, self-awareness, annoying teenager type,  that was me, and I wrote a letter to him, and told him I was also running for office, for student council, and if he couldn’t perhaps write back to me with some advice and pointers.”   And Kennedy apparently did with one simple thing:  “Find out what the people you know want. Then, promise them everything.”

Later, she wrote another letter, she said, to Jack, pointing out that she had won her election.  Nothing happened for a time, and then a package came.  There was a note of congratulation on her victory, and inside the package were a dozen roses.  “Everybody in town knew about it and that was something special, of course, because every female in town was in love with Jack Kennedy at the time.”

Other things happened. When I was 14, she said,  I was at a pool in town and watch people doing somersaults and I thought, that looked easy, and I could do that and I went off the board into the air like a bird and I missed the pool.  She broke her back and nearly died and did not fully recover for a long time and spent considerable time in a hospital where nurses read books about a grey rabbit and she would wake up to their faces.  “But at night, they left, and I was in a ward full of children with burn injuries, and at night, when it was dark I would hear them breathe, moan and scream. And some of them disappeared and died and for a long time I did not allow myself to remember that, about the ward at night and the screams and dying children.”

In between these forays into stories, there is the music — both disjointed and suddenly beautiful in ways hard to talk about.  It is not soothing — the mix of this particular violin and other sounds and the aggressive cello are a bit other worldly, but not necessarily warm or comforting. They are meant to be listened to carefully, because there appears to be no plan, no guided composition.

There are other stories still. One about the grave of Herman Hesse in Switzerland where she left a not entirely respectful note. A longer tale was about going to a convent where she was going to be doing a workshop of some kind, and how the nuns rarely if ever spoke, and how one night, there was a gathering, which resulted in a sentence that you might never expect  to hear in your own and whole life: “After the pizza was delivered, the mother superior began to speak.” It was a striking sentence.

Through it, the presentation, her voice, especially and the stories, inspired you to drift off into other stories and memories — not to stray far off, the stories and the words and the music and images were like jumping off points.

I thought of a lunch where Salinger was present among us. I thought of not reading Hesse, but Rilke, and not Gibran, either. I thought of high school, and how even now, when some of my classmates from the 1960s have found me on the Internet. I still see them with butch haircuts and pony tails. Then, I remembered a girl from a summer I spent working at a Howard Johnson on the Ohio Turnpike, who had thoughts of becoming a nun,  and who wrote me a letter about how in 1960 she was going to work for Nixon — and that though we disagreed, we lived in such terribly exciting times.

Towards the dark side of the sold-out evening, Anderson brought us jarringly to 2016 with another letter, this one to Donald Trump. Her voice was electronically cloaked, sounding like one of those voices you always hear on secret procedurals: $30,000 in cash at the park and no cops, except she was talking about promises and votes.

After all of this, I find myself thinking of Anderson as a great interloper and innovator, someone who hardly sleeps and is always making us think that everything she still does feels like fresh salad, unrepeated, new ingredients all the time, living in the modern world.