Baltimore Theatre Journal

Dance Sampler

2012-01-28T13:17:00.000-08:00

Baltimore offers endless selections of drama and music. But dance events are unfortunately rare.

Currently playing at Theatre Project, Shorts offers sixteen brief dance numbers by various regional dance companies and dancers. This varied anthology does not disappoint. A comic delight, Triplets features Sara Few, Martha Johnston, and Jennifer Seye in a vignette of quarreling triplets choreographed by Jennifer Seye. Choreographed by Cait Moler and performed by Marilyn Mullen and Adriana Saldana, These Walls have Windows is the evening's most sophisticated piece. The dancers elegantly negotiate textile bonds through geometric turns until they become engulfed in them. Accompanied by an ear-piercing rock duet, Adrienne Latanishen delivers some of the evening's most athletic and accomplished dancing in eclat. Several pieces explore the border between dance and non-dance. Prepare ascend fly ties dance to repetitive body movements and insect-like hums; #boildedrabbits adds a dose of improv theater to the proceedings.

Not everything in the anthology succeeds. Some bodies are less than lithe; some dancers exhibit little technique or discipline. A few of the routines come perilously close to what one expects on Dance Moms. It is unclear why no male dancers were present in the performance. But the flaws detract little from an exuberant sampler of dance trends in Charm City.

Barnyards and Bullies

2012-01-06T08:50:00.000-08:00

Joshua Conkel's Milk Milk Lemonade features an absurdist slice of America.

Energetically performed by Single Carrot Theatre, the black comedy features a perplexed middle-school student Emory (played by Aldo Pantoja), tormented by his Wagnerian grandmother Nanna (Elliott Rauh) and by the brutal kid-down-the-block Elliott (Giti Jabailly). To find solace on his lonely chicken farm, Emory befriends the uber-chicken Linda (Jessica Garrett), whom he attempts to save from the farm's lethal processing machine. A lyotard-clad narrator (Genevieve de Mahy) gaily directs the play's action, provides a voice for the clucking Linda, and wears the evening's best costume as a spider who attacks the hapless Linda under the porch.

The dreams of the play's characters are pop Americana. Emory would like to win stardom on a knockoff of American Idol with his disco ribbon dance; Elliott wants nothing more than the perfect prom date. Amid hilarious dance routines and eccentric jokes, the play deals with the serious issue of social roles and stereotypes. Nanna hectors the effeminate Emory and drags his doll aways from him; Elliott bullies Emory to the point of violence. In Nanna's world, everyone has a distinct role: men are brawny and aggressive, chickens are meant to end up fried on the plate. For the ever-sensitive Emory, even chickens (and moths) have souls and the equally sensitive Linda must be saved from the death machine's blades. Although the admonitions against bullying push the play beyond a pop cartoon, the audience may want to come up for air when the preaching becomes overheated.

At the center of the action is Aldo Pantoja's exuberant performance as Emery. His lythe dances and sentimental protests capture adolescent angst in a boy who is simply different from the others and who sympathizes with similarly misshapen others. The rest of the cast is similarly energetic; director Nathan Cooper continues Single Carrot's brand of athletic, mobile performance. But these performances have a one-note montony. Nanna is all bark with little humanity in her devotion to her farm and grandson; Linda is vaguely pleasant rather than endearing. One of the heroes of the evening is Melanie Lester and her team of designers from the Maryland Institute College of Art; their colorful and witty costumes light up Conkel's pop fantasy of fame and fulfillment.

Darkling Texture

2011-09-03T09:27:00.000-07:00

Frederick Knott happily admitted that he wrote plays for only one reason: money. He succeeded. His thrillers Dial M for Murder (1952) and Wait until Dark (1966) have delighted audiences for decades. Countless regional, collegiate, and community theaters have staged these gems of suspense, even if critics have sniffed at their highly contrived plots.

Vagabond Players' revival of Wait Until Dark maintains all the chills of the thriller. The climax of the play is still the end of the second act, when the blind housewife Susy (April Rejman) confronts the drug criminal Roat (Christopher Cahill) in an apartment where all sources of light have been extinguished. Even when we've seen the play (or the classy Audrey Hepburn film version) a hundred times before, we anxiously follow the pitch dark fight ingeniously tilted in favor of the blind housewife. The gripping climax is only the most exciting moment in Allan Herlinger's surefooted direction of the piece, in which the atmosphere of menace is carefully intensified as the action progresses.

The Vagabond's production offers more than the predictable thrills. The director and cast have drawn out the dark humor of the piece. This is especially striking in Cahill's performance as Roat, the murderous drug dealer. There is more than a touch of Richard III in Cahill savoring every violent moment as he kills his two criminal colleagues (played by Leonard Gilbert and Torbeg Tonnessen) and launches his assault on Susy.

The direction also brings out the psychological darkness of the characters. For all the fun-and-games of the climactic struggle in the dark---Did she just throw acid in his face? Will someone please shut that refrigerator door!---the most impressive part of the scene is its treatment of Roat's sadism. Wanting more than the heroin stuffed into a doll hidden in the apartment, Roat's humiliation of Suzy digs deeply into the theater of cruelty. The direction also effectively evokes the violence in the tense relationship between Suzy and the disturbed girl Gloria (Isabelle Anna Herlinger), a pesky neighbor. Suzy's reliance on the mercurial Gloria to help save her becomes a stark act of faith in an unpromising savior.

Enhancing the psychological darkness of the piece is the claustrophobic set designed by Bill Price. Painted in various tones of gray and black, the apartment and its furniture signal the threats, depression, and despair hovering over the play's action. Even before curtain rise (in a theater without curtains), the menacing mood of the evening is established.

Vagabond's production of Wait Until Dark provides all the thrills one could expect in this warhorse thriller. Its acidic wit and nocturnal psychology add something more.

On the Beach

2011-08-19T09:45:00.000-07:00

The inaugural production of Seymoure Theater Company, Joe
Dennison's Muldoon is a gripping meditation on writing and violence.

Set at a Yucatan resort during the Zapatista uprisings in 1996, the play features three American exiles who confront their own violence in the isolation of a dingy hotel. A college professor, King (Stephen Deininger), his graduate assistant, Polly (Megan Rippey), and an alcoholic beachcomber, Pickle (Lynda McClary) are entangled in their own flights from something more than their native land. King is fighting his decline as a writer and his slavery to the bottle; Polly is confronting her diagnosis of terminal cancer; the uproarious Pickle is reeling from the death of her draft-dodging boyfriend (the mysterious Muldoon of the title) who fled to Mexico in the 1960s.

All three actors powerfully evoke the despair and violence-just-beneath-the-surface of their respective characters. McClary seems to be having the time of her life as the outrageous earth mother Pickle. She recites her stream-of-consciousness monologues, her obscure prophecies, and her poetic puns with alternating humor and intimidation. The second act provides the opportunity for several scorching confrontations as the more conventional masks of the characters fall on the shell-strewn beach.

As the action unfolds, the play explores how the growing violence of the characters turns into the narrative of the book King is desperately attempting to write. By the end of the play, it appears that the book (or the long-lost Muldoon) is actually authoring their destructive actions. While such meta-drama provides a challenging frame for the action, it occasionally becomes too didactic, as in the overly chatty ending of the first act.

Chip Chiperson's direction keeps an empathetic focus on the humanity of the characters, who could easily deteriorate into starchy literary theorists or cartoonish thugs. Even in the more academic passages, the pathos never disappears. The spare seaside set (designed by Joe Dennison, Alec Lawson, and Kendra Richard) and the ensemble of seaside sounds (designed by Dave Kiefaber) create a fitting atmosphere for the action. They reinforce the magical realism of the script.

Running this weekend and next at Mobtown Theater, Muldoon provides a challenge to thought and emotion in an exotic setting.

Obscure Questions

2011-08-13T09:15:00.000-07:00

A new entry in the Baltimore Playwrights Festival, Nancy Murray's Asking Questions studies the collapse of a lie. With a deft mixture of comedy and tragedy, the play probes the tormented relationship between a mother and daughter entangled in a deception over the fate of the daughter's father. But the eccentric direction of the drama at Fells Point Corner Theatre raises its own questions.

In Murray's drama, Meg (Shanna Babbidge) has long told her teenaged daughter Mandi (Julia Pickens) that her father had died in an automobile accident. As the play progresses, the lie unravels, with Mandi increasingly insistent on discovering the true identity of her father. Through a series of plot twists, the long-lost father Mark (Kevin Griffin Moreno) reappears. The play ends with the daughter finally meeting her father, who may or may not have conceived Mandi through an act of date rape. Enhancing the play's structure is the use of two shadow characters. Mandi's friend Jen (Erin Boots) entices Mandi into dangerous pub crawls that reproduce Meg's destructive behavior as a teenager herself. A flamboyant gay friend of Meg, Doug (Andrew Syropolous) provides comic relief to the play's dark action. A gifted comedian, Syropolous lights up the drama's funniest scene, Doug's encounter with Mark as a bogus census-taker.

Peter Davis's opaque direction of the work does little to evoke the emotional depths in this piece of psychological realism. At key moments in the play, starting with an obscure mime at the very beginning, Meg seems to preside over the action from a velvety throne. Why this tormented woman is presented as such a regal figure remains unclear. In early scenes, the actors' words are punctuated by sitcom laugh tracks. Why? Throughout the play, the action is suddenly overwhelmed by the sound of chirping birds. Why? The one successful surreal touch of the evening are the Dali-esque flats designed by Heather Joi. The direction itself feels gratuitously surreal and some of the basic work of the director (such as getting actors to speak slowly enough for their lines to be heard by the audience) remains undone.

Avenging Angels

2011-08-12T08:27:00.000-07:00

Entries in the Baltimore Playwrights Festival rarely burn with poetic intensity. Produced by Theatrical Mining Company and playing at Notre Dame College's Copeland Theater, Abraham and Isaac does. That is its strength but in its more static patches also its weakness.

Written by Stephen Schulze, this drama features a Columbine-like mass shooting at a school. The father of one of the victims, Charlie Barrow (Howard Berkowitz) tracks down one of the assailants, Ethan Brody (Daniel Sakamoto-Wengel). A military veteran and experienced hunter, Barrow's long monologues recount the killing of his daughter Vicki (Annie Unger) and the ensuing hunt. Richly metaphorical, the narratives evoke the shock of the bereaved father and the author's carefully observed love of nature. The grief of Charlie's estranged wife Anne (Raina Dewald) and the shame of Ethan's parents (masterfully played by Paul Ballard and Anne Marie Feild) enhance the pathos of the piece. A clever memorial service, in which the entire audience becomes the congregation of the bereaved, deepens the emotional pitch of the work by rooting it in the biblical suffering of Job and Christ crucified. (Tiffani Bliss Brown's delivery of the stirring sermon, however, is oddly muted.) Ably assisted by choreographer Nancy Flores, director Barry Feinstein's use of mime to evoke the violence and anguish of the characters underscores the play's poetic air.

At times, however, the poetic reminiscences freeze the work's action. The long narratives of the past become cumbersome; the too frequent strolls through nature exude a faded romantic perfume. The second act is overwhelmed by long patches of philosophical speculation. The vaguely Nietzschean theorizing by Charlie, Ethan, and Sheriff Watt (Steve Lichtenstein) on the enigma of evil rarely rises above cliche.

An emerging playwright---this is his first produced play---Schulze powerfully evokes the nihilism, grief, and bewilderment at the heart of our violence-soaked society. Abraham and Isaac is well worth the visit to Notre Dame. But the author has not quite made the transition from the poetic monologue and the philosophical treatise to the act-centered (rather than word or concept centered) world of drama.

Lyrical Gravel

2011-08-07T16:41:00.000-07:00

Unraveled on the Gravel is a novelty for the Baltimore Playwrights Festival. Curently running at Audrey Herman Spotlighters Theatre, Kevin Kostic's play is the first musical in BPF's long history. The work studies the tormented relationship between Ray (Josh Kemper) and his fiancee Amber (Sarah Jachelski). Moving backward in time, the drama unveils the sources of the couple's emotional conflicts through their college years and through their fluctuating friendship with fellow students Marlon (Nick Huber) and Wayne (Michael Milillo). An odd ghost/alter ego/ friend Wricks (Christopher Jones) provides provocative commentary on the doomed relationship.

Carrying a perfume of 1950s existentialism, the play convincingly unpeels the layers of Ray's self-hating anguish, which manifests itself as an eerie addiction to hitchhiking. The actors provide a solid ensemble portrayal of a tormented network of friendship and hostility, ably directed by Michael Tan. The closing "secret" of the play is too pat and sudden, but gusts of humor soften this somewhat psychoanalytic exploration of self-destruction and misplaced guilt.

Capably accompanied by an acoustic-rock trio (Brennan Kuhns, Christopher Marino, Elliott Peeples), the score permits Ray to reveal his inner demons and desires. The score is not exactly memorable (you won't be humming the tunes on your way out to Saint Paul Street), but the earnest expression of raw emotions through music effectively underscores the self-revelation at the core of the piece. Unfortunately, most of the cast cannot sing. (The two exceptions are Huber and Jones.) The offkey notes---more than a few---constitute the performance's most excruciating moments.

This musical drama represents one of BPF's most ambitious works. Despite the lyrical flaws, the complex web of psychological anguish in the play's soul glows.

Bedroom Suite

2011-06-04T14:53:00.000-07:00

One of the theatrical signs of summer in Baltimore is the Strand Theater's Friends and Neighbors Festival. This year's edition has something for everyone, especially everyone with a taste for fringe. Running on alternate nights, this collection of six new plays by different authors provides the barest workshop productions: $20 was the maximum budget for each director. But less can be more, as a successful evening of very short one-act plays indicates.

Directed by Da'Minique Williams, two bedroom comedies feature squabbling married couples. In Sean Pomposello's Unlimited Nights, Lucy (Kate Shoemaker) and her husband (Raymond Kelly) confront a series of strange middle-of-the-night phone calls. The spat over the calls leads to a bitter walkout. In Susan Middaugh's Such Good Neighbors, Mavis (Jill Colucci) and her husband (Raymond Kelly) come to a confrontation over Mavis's gossip addiction. She enjoys listening to the fights of their next-door neighbors (especially when she holds a wineglass up to the wall), but when her husband becomes the object of the neighbors' disputes, her curiosity turns into paranoia.

Together, the plays run less than half-an-hour. Yet there is a an odd, pleasing symmetry in the bedroom farce that rapidly escalates into marital war. The direction and acting are crisp and energetic in a bare-bones black-and-white bedroom set---what do you expect for $20?

Indian Turn

2011-04-17T06:27:00.001-07:00

Performing at Theatre Project, the Dakshina/ Daniel Phoenix Singh Dance Company offered an invigorating program of classical Indian and contemporary dances.

Somewhat surprisingly, the highlight of the everning were two contemporary Western works. In Kaddish, accompanied by the music of Ravel, Melissa Greco Liu gave a beautifully expressive interpretation of a woman racked by desire, solitude, and grief. Cleverly using spotlight and blackouts, By the Light employs Beethoven's music to ground the desires, absences, and reconciliations of an elusive romantic couple. Supported by Jamal Ari Black, Natalie Pinzon ably expressed the fluctuating emotions of the piece.

Choreographed by troupe leader Daniel Phoenix Singh, the more distinctively Indian dances seemed less secure. The opening invocation, Pushpanjali revealed the uneveness of troupe members' technique. The closing piece, Vasanth is an exercise in narrative ballet based on a tale of Shiva and the rebirth of the seasons. The joyous piece uses traditional Indian dance, mime, ballet, contemporary dance, and even a bit of Broadway chorus line to evoke the Hindu myth. But in this fusion of disparate dance traditions, one has the impression that the mixture of approaches has yet to gel into a coherent overall style. In his solo piece, Gokula Nilaya, Singh revealed his own mastery of technique in his supple, lyrical movements.

Bewitching Chaos

2011-04-16T08:19:00.001-07:00

It is hard to believe that Run-of-the-Mill Theater is already producing its seventh Variations anthology. This year the theater features nine short plays focused on the theme of chaos. The result is a Variations on Chaos rich in diverse dramatic genres and high in magical atmosphere.

The evening opens with John Conley's "Farewell to Hippocrates," a stark condemnation of the contemporary medical profession's violation of the ethical ideals it claims to uphold. In a fine piece of ensemble acting, directed by Alec Lawson, a brooding trio of doctors (Beverly Shannon, Sarah Heiderman, and Rachel James) assaults the Hippocratic ideals of life, purity, and privacy. Kevin Kostic's "One Out of Five" is a charming piece on the anxieties of the parents of quintuplets. Directed by Danielle Young, Justin Isett and Emma Healey are suitably harried as the anxious couple. Susan McCarty's "Where Will We Go, What Will We Do?" is a farcial spin on the gay marriage debate and the anxieties it provokes. Under Kendra Richard's direction, Justin Isett, Beverly Shannon, Sarah Heidermann, and Ben Hoover are properly manic. J-F Bibeau's "In Theory" features two faux monkeys involved in a scientifc hoax. Directed by Kendra Richard, Emma Healey and Ben Hoover make energetic chimps, but this one-joke play could have used some pruning. The program's wittiest comedy, Laura Merrill's "The Great Unspeakable Tragedy of the Poorly Made Soup" features four frenzied diners (Emma Healey, Justin Isett, Phil Doccolo, and Sarah Heiderman) who turn blame and recrimination into a fine art. Alec Lawson's direction uses a full emotional palette to express the diners' abrupt interactions.

Written by Clarinda Harriss, "Taming Chaos" is an entertaining literary joust on how to interpret a poem, featuring a guest appearance by Wallace Stevens and a mysterious chicken (ably mimed by Brett Messoria). Kendra Richard's direction enables Rachel James, Sarah Heiderman, and Ben Hoover to bring out the love of literature at the play's core. Matthew Smith's "Pastoral Smut" brings a touch of neoclassicism to the evening. A contemporary couple seems to be role-playing the old pastoral archetypes of nymph and shepherd. Danielle Young's direction and the performances by Justin Isett and Emma Healey provide an elegaic touch, but the play seems uncertain in tone. Joe Dennison's nightmarish "First Day" features an authoritarian military officer (convincingly played by Beverly Shannon) ordering a new recruit (Emma Healey) into her sadistic war games. Kelly Cardall's stark direction underscores the violent despair of the situation. Closing the program is Ben Hoover's "Parable no.4." A poetic piece, the play features two lonely, isolated persons (touchingly played by Sarah Heidermann and Phil Doccolo) whose separate monologues finally end in a lethal encounter. Since both characters simultaneously deliver their monologues, it is not easy to follow the narrative (it has something to do with someone dying in the nineteenth century), but the play's lyrical qualities, enhanced by the tableau-like direction of Alec Lawson, turn the audial chaos into consolation.

The program had its false notes. To provide a transition between the plays Joe Dennison's "Well There You Have It," a satire on drive-time radio, has been hacked into smaller pieces. In an evening already heavy on text, this flood of extra words might cause migraines in certain audience members. The dim lighting abets the atmosphere of menacing chaos, but this audience member would have liked a better look at the intriguing abstract mural dominating the back of the playing area.

Variations on Chaos is a fine achievement in collaborative theater. The varied scripts, fluid direction, and energetic performances contribute to the evening's point that everyday order is illusory and that the apocalypse may be closer than we think.

Grim Noel

2011-03-26T11:14:00.001-07:00

It's closer to Easter than Christmas, but Single Carrot Theater's current production of The Long Christmas Ride Home would be a welcome gift at any season.

Loosely inspired by Thornton Wilder's Happy Journey from Trenton to Camden, Paula Vogel's play features a dysfunctional family trapped in a hellish Christmas trip and dinner. The Father (Kaveh Haerian) is destroying his family through infidelity, verbal abuse, and physical assault. The Mother (Genevieve de Mahy) has surrendered to despair. As young children, the offspring Claire (Britt Olsen-Ecker), Rebecca (Amy Parochetti Patrick), and Stephen (Elliott Rauh) suffer the violence in utter bewilderment. As adults, the children destroy themselves through acts of self-mutilation. The abuse of too many bitter Christmases has become internal self-hatred.

Uneven in quality, Vogel's script is more convincing in its opening parts, where a trendy Unitarian Christmas Eve service---in trying to keep all spiritual options open, the family is nothing but a spiritual void---forms the prelude to a violent Christmas dinner. The closing section of the play is less persuasive. The parallel destinies of the three children are too pat. The gay son destroys himself through promiscuity, the lesbian daughter prepares to shoot her former paramour, and the straight daughter freezes in a snowdrift when she discovers she's pregnant. Predeceasing his sisters, Stephen becomes their guardian angel; his longstanding tenderness in a broken family gives a poignant note to the conclusion. But in straining for the quality of a parable (with Wilder's Our Town very much in the background), Vogel's text becomes moralizing.

Jessica Garrett's direction expertly weaves the comic and tragic strains of the play into a coherent and moving whole. One of the central features of the play is the use of puppets to represent the young children in their loveless childhoods. Beautifully designed by Betsy Rosen, Don Becker, and Eric Brooks, the puppets are expertly choreographed to express the play's emotions of confusion, anger, resentment, and humiliation. Among the uniformly fine performances, two stand out. Genevieve de Mahy poignantly expresses the despair of the buttoned-down mother locked into a dead marriage she can neither redeem nor abolish. Aldo Pantoja memorably acts the role of the hip Unitarian minister in the evening's most humorous performance; he also does yeoman's duty as the eccentric Grandmother and the mystical Dancer who envelops Stephen in the play's closing glimpse of the afterlife. The stark black set, designed by J. Buck Jabaily, underscores the nihilism of a family whose sins of humiliation and despair pass from generation to generation.

Dido, Alberto Gonzales, and Timothy Nelson

2011-02-05T10:52:00.000-08:00

American Opera Theater, one of the region's (and the nation's) most innovative opera companies, has done it again. Directed by Timothy Nelson, the company has put together a double bill of unlikely one-act operas: Melissa Dunphy's 2008 The Gonzales Contata and Henry Purcell's 1688 Dido and Aeneas. A strange pairing but it works, due largely to Nelson's choreographic direction.

Recently composed by Dunphy while an undergraduate at West Chester University, The Gonzales Contata is a political satire cobbled together from passages in the 2007 Senate hearings concerning Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The satire is cartoonish, with senators playing hide-and-seek and throwing paper airplanes at each other. The male senators are played by females; the single female on the Judiciary Committee (Senator Feinstein of California) is played by a male (with brio by Brady Del Vecchio). Amidst the fun, there is a hilarious aria for Gonzalez ("I Cannot Recall") and an oddly moving hymn to America at the end, once the ambitious politician has fallen from power. The score drags at moments, deteriorating into the grade-B horror movie soundtrack that seems to be the lot of much contemporary music. But Nelson's mock-martial staging maintains the production's verve and soprano Molly Young turns the hapless Gonzales into an almost tragic figure.

The production of Dido+Aeneas is the evening's highlight. Nelson has transposed the tale from classical antiquity to the present. In front of a bare black table, a housewife struggles with a tottering marriage (to businessman Aeneas) and the psychological demons within her. The original witches, spirits, and messengers of the original libretto are transformed into forces lodged within the mind of the troubled woman. Behind a scrim, the darkened chorus embellishes the decline and suicide of the protagonist. Both vocally and dramatically, Emily Noel provides a riveting portrait of a tormented and abandoned woman. Unfortunately, the Aeneas (Jason Buckwalter) delivers a more pedestrian performance. The Purcell score only gains in pathos and purity in this radical transposition of the action.

As usual, Nelson has wisely chosen his supporting forces. Supporting soloists and expert choruses are provided by the Handel Choir of Baltimore and the Peabody Conservatory of Music. The Ignoti Dei Orchestra provides moving accompaniment for the Purcell, although the baroque ensemble struggles with the atonal lurches of Gonzales.

Of Grief and Magic

2011-02-04T09:08:00.000-08:00

With its distinctive mission to favor the theatrical voice of women, the Strand Theater offers a solid production of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Based on her earlier memoir, the play explores Didion's grief during the improbable year in which she faces the sudden death of her husband and the prolonged medical crises leading to the death of her daughter.

The monologue is vintage Didion. Precise details of jewelry, clothing, medicines, corn fields, and airplane seats are recalled with a military severity. The pain of the year's grief is threaded with ironic comments on comparative river views and senses of time. This is very much the tiny affluent world of the literati who circle Didion and her author husband John Gregory Dunne. Not everyone is buried from the vaults of Manhattan's Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. Not everyone can dryly compare commissions for Life vs. Vogue. The author's bewilderment at the death of the family wanders through the brittle, name-dropping gossip of several blocks on the Upper East Side.

Dianne Hood provides an engaging performance of the one-woman monologue: not an easy task at a running length of 80 minutes without intermission. Hood's Didion is very much the grande dame: in regal control of all the lethal events, ready for a precise commentary on each odd twist, lucid about her inconsolable grief as she magically and impossibly tries to wish her husband and daughter back to life. As consistent as Hood's performance is, the emotional range seems limited. The irony, the control, and the literary wit of Didion are present, but the rage and the bewilderment at the losses seem subdued. A certain primness dominates.

Miriam Bazensky's direction permits Hood to move gracefully over the Strand's tiny stage. Every effort is made to avoid the stasis that so easily overcomes dramatic monologues. In recounting her adventures with grief, Hood occasionally moves into an effective soft mime.

One of the heroes of the evening is set designer Debbie Bennett. The sleek, stylized set of Didion's apartment projects the coolness, accomplishment, and (thanks to a prominent mirror) the self-absorption of Didion. Even in her most painful self-disclosures, the self-assurance and wry calculation of Didion remain the stronger.

Touch of the Buddha

2010-12-18T11:26:00.000-08:00

Single Carrot Theatre stretches itself once again to present Gao Xingjian's the other shore. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000, Gao has constructed an elusive play which was not elusive enough for Chinese Communist authorities, who banned its performance on the mainland. In 1995 Gao personally directed the premiere of the play in Hong Kong.

Composed of enigmatic scenes, the play features The Man (a sort of Chinese everyman) and a lythe ensemble of actors who cross a mysterious river (death? the frontier of a totalitarian state?) to undergo various tests of suffering. Writhing, singing, dancing, shouting in choral unison, the pilgrimage of the Man and his tribe endures the pain of learning language, of remembering the lost beloved, and of facing the fear of death. What may have angered the Communist authorities is that the troupe repeatedly faces the suffering of ostracism. Characters are killed for their nonconformity, scapegoated for imagined betrayals, and coerced into confessing as true what they know to be false. A scene set in a temple, replete with chant, incantations, candles, and incense, suggests that in the mystery of the Buddha these various sufferings might (or might not) find their ultimate redemption.

Expertly directed by J. Buck Jabaily, the ensemble brilliantly moves from Greek chorus to ballet corps to enraged mob through the play's undulating action. Nathan Fulton's candle-lit black and white design deepens the production's atmosphere of adoration and troubled dream. Dennis Elkins exudes the bewilderment and courage of the lonely Man who barely manages to keep his integrity amidst the pressures to social conformity and annihilation.

Influenced by disparate theatrical sources (Beckett, Grotowski, as well as traditional Chinese theatre), Gao offers a mysterious neo-Buddhist tale of the effort to maintain some individual freedom against the biological forces of death and the political forces of conformism. This is not Cartesian theater for those who savor the clear, distinct, and obvious. Presented by Single Carrot's energetic ensemble, the other shore offers up visual and audial dream images of what we find painful and elusive in the human effort to jump over what constrains.

Down and Out at Fells Point Corner

2010-08-23T10:18:00.000-07:00

You've been there a hundred times before. You are racing into the subway entrance. A homeless panhandler aggressively demands change. You briskly speed up, certain that the money would only go to drugs and that your taxes are supporting a flood of social services this aggressor should use.

In Scorpions, Mark Scharf's new play for the Baltimore Playwrights Festival, the scenario has suddenly changed. William, a prim office worker, discovers that Mattie, the homeless beggar staking out a Washington subway stop, is more than meets the eye. Intrigued by the witty, Dickens-citing panhandler, William puts Mattie up at his apartment, brings her to the company happy hour, and starts an affair that may be more than Platonic. A hateful coworker, Derek specializes in humiliating William through racial slurs on William's Asian background and destroys his colleague's quirky affair through an attempted seduction of Mattie.

Scharf's dialogue crackles through this play's combination of comedy and melodrama. The sharp witty passages soften the somber action and outcome of the play. The dramatic scenes, notably the attempted seduction of Mattie, bristle with brittle, humiliating conflict. The play occasionally lags, as in the dangling monologues and in the more pedantic musings on ethnicity. But it successfully avoids the stereotypes associated with this genre of theater and keeps both the offbeat comedy and the emotional conflict of the piece on track.

Despite a cumbersome set, which seems to have more furniture than the Ethan Allen showroom, director Miriam Bazensky briskly moves the action toward its bitter conclusion. Robin Rouse gives the standout performance as Mattie. Her sharp barbs and bravura gestures intensify the comic aura of the production; her breakdown after the humiliating encounter with Derek constitutes the performance's emotional apex.

Playing at the Fells Point Corner Theater, Scorpions offers a grim but entertaining glimpse of the relationship beyond dysfunctional.

Some Very Nice Things at Copeland

2010-08-16T08:07:00.000-07:00

Ken Greller's This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things is an intriguing wisp of a play. Yes, it's yet another dysfunctional-relationship drama, but it admirably transcends the limits of that currently overused genre. Brilliantly directed by Peter Davis, the production features an ensemble of actors who convincingly bring this quirky meditation on romance and power to life. Produced by the Theatrical Mining Company, the drama is a new entrant in this year's Baltimore Playwrights Festival.

Currently playing at Notre Dame College's Copeland Theater, the play focuses on two troubled romantic relationships :one straight (Nathan and Suze), one gay (Ben and Tim). In the brief space of an hour, the couples experience desire, breakup, regret, and apology. In the witty dialogue by Greller, the perplexed romantic partners bounce (sometimes literally from the walls) in sharp, quirky dialogue and absurdist speculation on issues of power. The moralizing conclusion to the jaunty play is a bit of a downer, but the play's puzzles, explosions of emotion, and bemused characters keep the drama humming. Accenting the surreal note of the evening's actions, a statue molded by Nathan (which periodically becomes alive) becomes the play's ultimate object of erotic desire.

The direction of the play by Peter Davis is as close to flawless as one comes in BPF creations. The entire cast has clearly mastered its characters. Every actor manages to convey both the pathos and the offbeat humor of his or her character. There are no flubbed lines, lighting miscues, or wooden performances to mar the production. In this classy ensemble performance, two actors stand out: Christopher Krysztofiak as the perplexed Nathan, whose ever-shifting relationship to his paramour Suze, his friend Ben, and his enigmatic statue gives the play its fluid continuity. Just as impressive is Jessica Ruth Baker, who performs the roles of mother, employer, and mysterious statue. Her cool, crisp performance as the boss in the scenes where she fires Nathan constitutes the play's dramatic highlight. Her balletic performance as the statue underscores the lyrical but surreal atmosphere of the entire drama.

In Davis's capable hands, the ensemble delivers a performance which seems as much a ballet as a play. Each gesture, movement, and glance is carefully choreographed for maximum effect. The varied lighting design by Charlie Danforth provides strong visual support to the precise direction.

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things is a play for adults, not for children. It gives the dysfunctional-relationship genre a quirky, absurdist twist that saves it from cliche. The vibrant work of the director and ensemble cast will remind you why live theater is so special, indeed sacred, after all.

Hammarskjold: The Philosopher's Tale

2010-08-14T13:04:00.000-07:00

A new production in this summer's Baltimore Playwrights Festival, Ron McKinney's Hammarskjold is a psychological mystery embroidered by philosophical debates. Premiering at the Audrey Herman Spotlighters Theater, the drama pivots around the puzzling identity of several mental patients and a baffling bomb attack at the United Nations. By the end of the performance, the threads of these disparate mysteries have been neatly tied together amidst a more abstract dispute on the difficulty of separating appearance from reality.

Set in a New York psychiatric hospital, Hammarskjold focuses on several therapists treating two problematic patients. An aggressive psychologist, Dr. Madison O'Reilly explores the enigma of a patient who believes himself to be Dag Hammarskjold, the secretary-general of the United Nations who died in the Congo uprising in 1961. Adding to the mystery is the fact that the patient knows in extraordinary detail the life of Hammarskjold; this knowledge seems to have been acquired by more than extensive reading or chance. A far quieter, self-doubting psychologist, Dr. Robbie Hanson attempts to unravel the sources of the rage of his Congolese Patient, Mputa. As they treat their patients, both therapists face their own internal conflicts as they undergo analysis by their own supervisors. A senior officer of the hospital, Dr. James Schmetterling supervises the investigation of these mysterious cases and carries on a tormented relationship with girlfriend Charlie Merleau, a security officer investigating the unsolved UN attack.

Unsurprisingly, the author of the drama is a philosopher and university professor. As the play comes to an unexpected (and poetically satisfying) resolution of its various mysteries, McKinney engages in speculations concerning history, sexuality, professional ethics, reincarnation, providence, fate, and discernment of the truth through psychoanalysis. On occasion, these excursions are moralizing and wearying. One might learn more than any human being would wish to know about Hammarskjold's biography and Congolese politics. But the satirical humor of the dialogue and the curiosity concerning the outcome of these various puzzles prevent the drama from stalling.

Lynne Morton's austere direction of the play maintains its therapeutic and rather abstract atmosphere. The characters pursue their detective work, their conflicts, and their romantic interests as participants in a therapeutic session on which the audience eavesdrops. Only emotion and argument remain. The therapists and security guard cling to their ringside places; the enraged patients are frozen in the outer ring of the performance space. Ably assisting this stark rendition of the script is the minimalist set design by Carrie Fucile. A diaphanous set of wires enclose the stage as if the audience is viewing the imprisonment or masking of the mind during the play's debates and discoveries. The two patients vent their rage from a blank white distance. Only in the play's transcendent ending does the ecstatic Charlie break the emotional paralysis and the physical stasis in which the other characters are enclosed.

The quality of acting varies. Andrea Bush gives a bravura performance as the bisexual Charlie. From beginning to end, her presence, diction, and emotional verve dominate the stage. Bob Ahrens (the Hammarskjold patient) and Kevin Baker (Mputa) plumb the emotional depths of their anguished characters. Kerry Brady (Madison) captures the aggressive bounce of her character; the performances of Ron Decker (James) and Jeffrey Coleman (Robbie) seem more tentative.

With its complex action, speculative dialogue, and austere production, Hammarskjold provides a challenging exercise in philosophical drama.

Graduation Blues

2010-07-18T09:04:00.000-07:00

A play is struggling to get out of Commencement, but the liberation has yet to take place.
Written by David Allyn, the drama is a new entry in this year's Baltimore Playwrights Festival.
Performed at the Vagabond Players, the play concerns the travails of Danni, a college senior on the verge of graduation---or is she? Blasting into her life for the commencement exercises are her (disinvited) father and her (equally unwanted) mother. To make matters more complicated, her father has brought along his much younger trophy fiancee, a lingerie model. Reciprocating, the mother has brought along her twenty-something policy advisor, who also doubles as her sometime lover.
The opening comical pop-ins and pop-outs quickly settle down into more serious business as Danni announces that she is not graduating, has dropped out of college, and has converted to Islam. Much of the rest of the play is devoted to rather wearying discussions of Danni's motives, the need to find a meaning in life, and the emptiness of conventional religion, especially for this family of secularized New York Jews. The script does not avoid the vapors of this sort of discussion and rarely rises above cliche in its more soul-searching moments.
Karin Crighton's direction crisply moves the cast around the set, which convincingly duplicates the standard dilapidated off-campus apartment of undergrads. This is truly ensemble acting, with each actor carefully reacting to others as well as delivering his or her own lines. Each actor is convincing in his or her role: Stacey Bonds as the frustrated Danni; Rodney Bonds as the aging businessman facing unemployment and decline of virility; Patricia Batyi-Benz as the mother who has turned neo-con politician; Alex Kafarakis as the handsome, slick political consultant. But the roles themselves remain stereotyped.
In the evening's two most refreshing performances, Lynn McCormick turns the tables on her character's stereotype of the dumb blond model by checking out of her once-glittering engagement and converting to the feminist cause. In a hyper-kinetic performance as Danni's roommate, Kelly Fuller spices up the action with her exotic commitment to the cause of "poly" liberation (those who want more than one partner) and her quirky asides at just the right moment of the play's lagging action.
The play's intriguing pentagon of characters at its center and its moments of witty monologue reveal Allyn's talents as a playwright. But the heart of this tale of adolescent rebellion and the bitter loneliness of late middle age still remains to be excavated.

G&S do the Charleston

2010-07-17T11:06:00.000-07:00

In the Young Victorian Theatre Company's production of Iolanthe, Gilbert and Sullivan's tale of fairyland meets the Jazz Age.
The operetta's gossamer plot concerns the problems deriving from the illict marriage between a fairy, Iolanthe (Madelyn Wanner) and a too human Lord Chancellor (Troy Clark). Their part-human, part-fairy son, Strephon (Jeffrey Williams) desires to marry Phyllis (Sara Kete Walston), a ward of the Lord Chancellor. Alas, the taboos of fairyland and the laws of parliament forbid the marriage. After a great deal of gauzy nonsense concerning fairy solidarity, parliamentary corruption, and the changing-of-the-guard, boy finally gets girl and the bevy of newly engaged fairies and peers can trot off to a honeymoon in Fairyland.
Under the artistic direction of James Harp, this Victorian tale is transplanted to the 1920s. The stylish Art Deco set, the flapper costumes, the hip flasks, the silent-film conventions, and the hints of the Charleston provide a charming frame for the evening. Walston makes a delightful Mary Pickford coquette and Alexis Tantau (Queen of the Fairies) makes a commanding vamp. But when the director alters the lyrics and book of W.S. Gilbert to include anachronistic 1920s slang, the production sags. The sag becomes a collapse when Harp inexplicably "updates" the material to make references to current politics. What do Obama, Arundel Mills, Robert de Niro, and the hapless John Edwards have to do with Iolanthe? What do they even have to do with the Roaring Twenties? Nothing. Such gimmicks only cheapen an otherwise professional production.
The musical end of the production provides higher values. Under Phillip Collister's direction, the impressive orchestra provides a clear and sensitive account of Arthur Sullivan's score. The different textures of the score (lyrics, patter songs, satires, pleas) are faithfully evoked by the well-disciplined ensemble. Wanner, Waltson, Tantau, and Williams bring fine voices and carefully sculpted interpretations to their respective characters.
The Young Vic's production of Iolanthe generates some charming fairy dust in its handsomely sung version of G&S, but its gratuitous gadgets indicate that Sullivan actually knew what he was doing when he wrote the original libretto.

The Violent Bear It Away

2010-07-09T06:13:00.000-07:00

Currently playing at the Copeland Theater at Notre Dame College, Susan Middaugh's Black Widows is a delicious black comedy concerning two widows with a taste for larceny, fraud, and murder. Directed by Barry Feinstein, the drama is the most recent entry in this year's Baltimore Playwrights Festival.
At the center of the play stands the unlikely couple of Vera and Gwen. An embittered refugee from Russia, Vera is the cynical landlady for whom the accumulation of wealth is the only conceivable goal in life. No moral rules apply if you can get away with it; ethical objections to crime are only the sentimental bleat of the world's losers. Against this Nietzschean virago stands the timid Gwen, one of the world's sentimentalists. Her passion to protect stray dogs is matched by her passion to protect stray homeless alcoholics who dot her neighborhood. Having successfully tapped Gwen's streak of greed, the irresistible Vera expertly maneuvers the docile Gwen into escalating acts of minor theft, insurance fraud, and finally murder of the homeless men whose insurance policies they have commandeered for themselves.
The vibrant performances of Ann Mainolfi (Vera) and Babs Dentz (Gwen) are the treasure of the evening. Vera's cynical treatment of humanity and of the hapless Gwen exudes an ecstatic joy as she mows down her victims physically or verbally. The occasional flashbacks to the annihilation of her family at the hand of the Nazis evoke the source of this cynicism. Mainolfi's ability to change from beaming charmer to threatening bully in the space of a second brings the destructive but beguiling character alive. In her haunting character of Gwen, Dentz provides the evening's most moving performance. At first the caricature of the deranged pet-lover, Dentz shows genuine affection for the homeless men the duo is attempting to con. Her anguish over the escalation of crime is powerfully conveyed. Her final confrontation scene with the imprisoned Vera shows Gwen at last freed from the domination of the manipulative Vera and free to enjoy such humane pursuits as dog shelters, waitressing, and just being kind to the down and out.
Complementing the expert performance of the lethal duo is Glenn Vitale's cagey performance as John McArdle, a homeless vet who maintains a proper suspicion of the gifts showered upon him by these two alleged church ladies. In one of the evening's more entertaining twists, McArdle actually begins to recover from what had seemed a fatal addiction to alcohol. His unwelcome longevity causes Vera to mow him down in a trumped-up car accident.
The strength of Barry Feinstein's direction lies in the strong performances and ensemble feel he has elicited from his talented cast. The piece's dark humor and sincere sentiment about human suffering are kept in good balance. Unfortunately, at the opening night performance at least, the technical glitches indicated that the production was not quite ready. The many lighting miscues, confused movements, and flubbed lines broke the flow of the performance. The set gave the play a rather inert look, but the recorded original score (trumpet by Joseph Conway and guitar by Charlie Sigler) used the instruments cherished by the two homeless characters and gently recalled their ambitions to become jazz musicians in earlier times---another humane touch in a dark comedy with a soul.

After the Madness

2010-07-04T08:21:00.000-07:00

Currently playing at the Strand, Afterthoughts is a probing meditation on the massacre of students by a deranged fellow student. Loosely based on the Virginia Tech killings in 2007, the play focuses on the recollection of the massacre by five survivors: three of whom have died and wander through the afterlife and two of whom are still tethered to the earth. Written and directed by emerging playwright Alec Lawson, the brief drama (running time of one hour) provides a vivid portrait of the effort to make sense of what is senseless.
The drama presents this recollection of horror on two levels. In center stage, a triangle of the deceased try to understand the killings and make sense of the gloomy afterlife they have awakened to. Two murder victims (Will, played by Dan Walker, and Alison, played by Sheila Toomb) confront the killer (James, played by Michael Geib), who committed suicide at the end of his spree. The dialogue here is uneven. The in-jokes about theater majors age quickly; the "wisdom of life" remarks are often moralizing; the speculation on the afterlife has a grade-B "Twilight Zone" quality. The performance of the trio of actors is oddly restrained; little of the shock of the massacre comes through. Still, the expert blocking of the actors gives an appropriate sleepwalking quality to a trio wandering on the border between life and eternity.
More convincing is the simpler duet of survivors (played by Cordelia Snow and Courtney Williams). Perched on a balcony, the two survivors recount at a distance the events, the personalities, and the time-line of the fateful day. Their sober testimony ultimately proves more moving than the rambling debates of the trio in purgatory.
Enhancing this portrait of inexplicable violence is the brilliant set and lighting design by Kendra Richard. The black-and-white sculptural set of tumbled platforms and splintered fragments freezes the violence of the massacre and provides a haunting platform for the survivors' tales. The effective lighting, especially of the two living survivors dangling from the balcony, underscores the dream-like quality of the drama. One of the aesthetic strengths of the Strand Theater is its complete reconstruction of performance space for each production. Richard's reconstruction for Afterthoughts is an extraordinary achievement.

Global Crunch Comes Home

2010-06-28T07:22:00.000-07:00

At Fells Point Corner Theater, Kathleen Barber's In the Shadow of Lushan skillfully turns the political turmoil of globalization into the personal crisis of one woman. Jo-Jo Banaker (Peggy Dorsey) valiantly defends her family-owned company against the conniving efforts of Caz (Mark Scharf), director of a rival company, to take over Banaker's by financial manipulations.
The battle between Jo-Jo and Caz inflames the entire staff of the tottering company. Chic (Richard Peck), the genial foreman, worries about the future of a middle-aged man who knows only the informal mom-and-pop environment of Banaker's. Frannie (Peggy Friedman), the faithful employee, cringes at the low-paying, low-skills job that await her if the company folds. Bobby (Vic Cheswick, Jr.) blames the company's turmoil on job-stealing immigrants, too visibly represented by a new mysterious worker, the Mexican Mateo (Michael Zemarel). As the business confrontation between Jo-Jo and Caz defrosts into chapters of romance, stalemate, and mutual admiration, the relationship among the employees deteriorates into mutual suspicion and desperate scapegoating. The opening company fun, where employees mock Japanese business "shame circles," turns into an angry knife assault.
The solid cast successfully gives the turmoil of globalization a human face. Foreign competition, price wars, illegal immigration, aging industries, and "Bidding Olympics" flow off the stage as the words and gestures of the increasingly angry and exhausted workers. At the center of the meltdown, Peggy Dorsey ably presents the charm of a successful executive comfortable in working in an old-fashioned family mode but uncertain in the cutthroat politics of the new world market. Slipping abruptly from adversarial to romantic partner, Mark Scharf is a sharp, sandpaperish foil to Dorsey's more maternal persona. Vic Cheswick is especially strong as the charming Bobby, who quickly turns from fun and games to xenophobia and attempted murder.
Josh Bristol's direction of the piece is serviceable, but the multiple exits and entrances seem interchangeable. The actors are often frozen into awkward positions, as when George (E. Martin Early) speaks into the back of Jo-Jo. The movements in the sudden romance scene and the sudden knife attack seem stilted. The nondescript set conveys the gray, metallic nature of the factory (and of the gloomy world economy looming just beyond the door), but its drabness only accentuates the halting character of the player's movements.
Barber's play marks a promising beginning for this year's Baltimore Playwrights Festival. Global economic conflict becomes intimate family anguish.

Thin Satire

2010-06-26T09:07:00.000-07:00

Will Eno's Tragedy; tragedy is a compact satire on American television news. But even at seventy minutes in running length, the play becomes one weary joke.
The comedy's news team must wrestle with an astonishing piece of non-news: The sun has set and it is night. The avuncular anchorman (coolly played by Rich Espey) attempts to tease some news out of his clueless news team. Constance (Jessica Garrett in an offbeat performance) tries to drum up some local interest in reaction to the news, but there is little more to report than shifting fog and rain. In an edgier performance, the earnest John (Nathan Cooper) manages to snag a man-in-the-street (Michael Salconi) whose reactions amount to one-minute negatives. An increasingly deranged Michael (played with manic energy by Nathan Fulton) reports the political blather of the governor, unable to cope with the encircling gloom. As the non-news event progresses, the psychic nights of each baffled commentator emerge through the non-sequiter prose. Old resentments about distant parents and childhood names scratch the vacant journo-babble. But the existential huffing-puffing cannot redeem the one-note satire.
Under J. Buck Jabailly's capable direction, Eno's sketch is given a polished production. Set in a series of life-size boxes, the various news personalities suffer visual as well as psychological isolation as night (and the absurdist reactions to night) envelop them. Each character moves from fumbling, vacuous reportage to anxious self-disclosure and desperation. Even the box isolation begins to break down as Michael, the most unhinged of the commentators, walks right into the audience to deliver his valedictory on the mysterious governor. But despite the occasional fury and Beckett echoes, the play cannot overcome its SNL-sketch limits.

Japanese Enchantment

2010-06-18T08:22:00.000-07:00

Naoko Maeshiba's Paraffin is a kinetic wonder. Returning to Theatre Project this weekend, Maeshiba's performance troupe Kibism mesmerizes the viewer with one mysterious tableau after another. Employing mime, aerial movement, and muscular choreography, the various scenes evoke search, love, oppression, and death.
Three particularly haunting scenes remain in the memory. Wrapped in golden dresses and tissue-paper headdresses hiding the face, three women taunt three athletic men writhing in their dark suits. In a melancholic picnic pursued under the rain, three characters evoke the jealousies and shared memories of family life through the rhythmic movement of pot, bowls, and blanket. Evoking mechanical oppression, a troupe of white-uniformed technicians reduce a patient to a suffering object under the ballet of their probes and charts.
Far from narrative, the performance evokes the raw passions of fear and desire as the body is stretched to its physical and expressive limits. Presiding over the performance as a regal, expressive angel on a trapeze, Maeshiba develops a choreography remarkable for its energy and sculptural precision. Her movement is ably complemented by her electronic musical score and by Kel Millione's lighting design, which bathes the entire production in an ethereal golden light.

Cerebral Entertainment

2010-06-06T14:18:00.000-07:00

One of the more offbeat theatrical offerings of the moment is Think Twice at Spotlighters. Directed by Rodney Bonds, the program is actually two one-act plays, Lecture with Cello by Robert Moulthrop and Sapiens! by Rich Espey. In each one-man play, a monologue explores the complexity behind some commonplace truths.
In Lecture with Cello a formally dressed musician gives a lecture on---you guessed it---a cello. The lesson gradually deteriorates into philosophical musings on the nature of truth and then into a furniture-throwing rant ignited by a lost passion. Employing the full gamut of emotions and gestures, Rodney Bonds astutely portrays the Chekhovian lecturer as he deteriorates before the audience's eyes and practically in the audience's lap. But running over an hour in length, the monologue's more metaphysical musings became tiring.
In Rich Espey's more accessible Sapiens! a young science teacher reacts in shock as some of his students challenge the theory of evolution. As the teacher seeks help from dialogues with other scientists, his wife, and memories from the past, the teacher slowly realizes that even many scientific "facts" rest on high probabilities and that certain truths about cosmic and human events might legitimately derive from religious or emotional premises. Like Bottom, Joshua Snowden winningly creates all the parts: Adam the teacher and all his imagined interlocutors. What began as a predictable tale of enlightened evolutionists vs. rabid creationists finally emerges as a cautionary tale on intellectual humility.
These two austere monologues are not standard summer fare but, directed and acted with incandescent passion, they are challenging, complementary explorations of the obscurity of truth, artistic or scientific.

Skin at the Strand

2010-05-09T10:15:00.000-07:00

On Saturday evening at the Strand Theater, Playwrights Group of Baltimore presented "Skin in the Game," an anthology of short plays written by members of the Group. Different in style, each play pivots around the phrase "Skin in the Game," apparently coined by Warren Buffet to indicate passionate investment. A packed audience at the Strand witnessed staged readings of plays ranging from the melodramatic to the romantic to the fantasist.
Exploring the current recession, John Conley's "Leopard and Parcheesi" features a bankrupt middle-class couple facing exile in their run-down Poconos cabin. Alex Hewett and Rich Espey movingly portrayed the squabbling couple. Dwight Cook's "SIG Tea" presents two bickering gay friends discussing conquests and the perils of outing in a phone call. Richard Keller and Aaron Trent wittily depicted the sparring duo. In Peter Davis's "Undertow," a ruthless businessman (Kevin Griffin Moreno) unsuccessfully attempts to bulldoze his wife (Alex Hewett) and his professional assistant (Nancy Flores). Brent Englar's humorous "Plunge" celebrates an awkward triangle (Christopher Krysztofiak, Tiffany Mowry, Elizabeth Galuardi) trying to be part of the polar bear club: a group of hearty naturists who dive into the ocean in winter. In the enigmatic "Don't Be" by Ken Greller, two mismatched friends (Alex Scally and Richard Keller) struggle with a car that keeps getting smaller and a bag of other "issues." In LaRonika Thomas's piece of social realism, "J-ROTs," a group of African-American high school students (played with intensity by Mardee Bennett, Ayesis Clay, and Aaaron Trent) debate the controversial merits of dedicating their lives to military service.
Despite the diversity of genres, this anthology of plays indicates that realism and naturalism still remain the default button of American playwriting, even the most recent.

From Wish to Prayer

2010-05-08T08:29:00.000-07:00

Single Carrot Theatre's lythe production of Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Tamberlake) lights up the harrowing but oddly humorous script by Sheila Callaghan. The tale of yet another dysfunctional family adds an unusual twist by turning the apartment that has witnessed the family's trauma into its own character, The Apartment (Brendan Ragan). The surviving family triangle has more than its quota of quirks. Mother Clara (Genevieve de Mahy) is a gourmet chef whose detailed dinner and even breakfast menus would make the winners of Top Chef blush. Daughter Janice (Giti Jabaily) is an 11-year old lost soul who has broken down into her private world of doll games, word games, and growling incantations. In the evening's wittiest performance, Courtney Weber plays Aunt Clara, the forlorn aunt whose life is devoted to the care of her 57 cats and stilted "girl talk" with her deranged niece. Providing further quirks are guest appearances by celebrities Justin Timberlake and Harrison Ford (both played by Elliott Rauh).
The energetic direction of Aldo Pantoja gives the production its pulsing, choreographed feel. Ragan's Apartment swings from the single rope that dominates the playing area; he leaps on ledges as he narrates the history of various tenants he has had to accommodate. Rauh complements the choreography with his athletic leaps and braggadocio imitations of the celebrities. As the play moves toward Christmas, with Clara trying to fulfill the strange Christmas list desires of Janice, the "family secret" that has caused the trauma comes into view. The father of the clan had died the previous Christmas in an accident related to the ragged apartment's rotting floors and dangerous electrical wires. A bit too neatly, Janice suddenly turns from curses to prayer as she recalls her deceased father over the votive candle her mother has given her for Christmas; Clara suddenly loses her anxiety and starts to coach her daughter on some group projects; even the aloof Aunt Barbara tries to patch up things with family by offering to move into a new apartment with them.
The script is not without its sentimentalities (cleverly disguised by its jagged structure) and the moral at the conclusion (Trust yourself; reach out; take reversal in stride) has the depth of a Hallmark card. But the energetic direction, physical gusto, and disciplined ensemble playing give the production its moving moments circling the emotions of loss as well as its dark humorous ones rooted in a family of sympathetic grotesques.

Ye Olde Casting Couch

2010-05-03T06:48:00.000-07:00

Vagabond Players is currently presenting David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow in a taut and dynamic production. A vitriolic attack on the ethics of Hollywood, the play is Mamet's twist on that old standby for Hollywood corruption: the casting couch. A rapacious producer Bobby Gould (played by Dave Gamble), egged on by his sycophantic assistant Charlie Fox (played by Michael Leicht), places a bet on Gould's success in seducing the office's new temp Karen (played by Beverly Shannon) within twenty-four hours. The clock is also ticking because a film deal Fox is urging Gould to seal the next day could turn Fox at last into a co-producer and a wealthy man. The absurd sex-and-violence script for the deal seems to guarantee its cinematic success. But as the seduction proceeds, the hunter becomes the hunted. The determined and oddly mystical Karen manipulates Gould into endorsing her own existentialist film project and turning the conspirators Gould and Fox into violent opponents. The usual Mamet smorgasbord of obscenities, humiliation games, and physical violence rounds out the pessimistic fun.
Two actors stand out in the cast. Michael Leicht projects Fox's desperation from beginning to end. His only goal is to close the deal and rise higher in the crumbling Hollywood hierarchy. There is no other life except servile ambition for this anxious climber. Beverly Shannon gives a remarkable performance as Karen. In the first scene, the nervous temp is bewildered by her new work and apparently shocked at the office's foul language. The dewey-eyed novice seems to have walked out of a neighboring corn field. In the second scene, the object of seduction suddenly becomes the seducer. Clad in a sophisticated red Chinese blouse and tight slacks, Karen assertively recommends seduction as part of an apocalyptic world of radiation scares, failing banks, and natural catastrophes. By the third scene, dressed tightly in a black outfit and crisply barking orders to the bedazzled Gould, Karen now seems to have walked out of the Marquis de Sade's Justine. Shannon's arc of transformation of her mysterious character is the dramatic highlight of the evening. Dave Gamble provides a solid performance as the odious Gould, but the range of emotional expression seems limited. In the opening scene, his cynicism does not appears as smarmy as it could. In the closing scene, his confusion and rage seem oddly restrained.
Steve Goldklang's direction carefully builds the emotional arc of the play to its violent conclusion, even if the humor of the piece seems muted. The stark, geometric set design by Roy Steinman handsomely reduces the play to its emotional basics: plots for future deals (expressed by swaths of raw material and color) and plots for seduction (expressed by a simple leather couch).

Irish Bitters

2010-04-25T12:16:00.000-07:00

Currently performed at the Strand Theater, Marina Carr's The Mai studies the deterioration of a rural Irish family over four generations. There are echoes of the old Irish melodramas of Synge and O'Casey in the poetic laments of Irish folk doomed by their histories. There is also a dose of Yeats, as the script attempts to mythologize the family's suffering into a neo-Greek tragedy, where personal suffering seems rooted in a a bitter cosmic fate. A contemporary Irish playwright, Carr adds a feminist note to the drama since it is very much the gender-specific suffering of women, tied to an ancient code of fidelity and forbearance, that constitutes the heart of the family collisions.
The play's eponymous heroine is the Mai (Amelia Adams), a stolid school principal who attempts to keep together her elegant house and her shattered marriage to a philandering husband against the forces of destruction. Perfectly costumed in a neoclassical tunic, the statuesque Adams gives the Mai the tragic poise which makes her the pivot of the suffering clan. The vacuous chatter and cello-playing of her adulterous husband Robert (Jonathan Sachsman) reveals that the Mai's efforts to maintain the appearance of marriage are as vain as they are noble. Her sisters Connie (Jessica Baker) and Beck (April Rejman) suffer similar romantic illusions from an impetuous marriage that has failed in a matter of months and from an all-too successful marriage that is nothing but convention. The Mai's child, Millie (Brenda Badger), who also acts as the play''s narrator, evokes the emotional damage that has already scarred the new generation emerging from the duplicitous marriage. Acting as the conscience of a dying Catholic Ireland, Aunt Julie (played with authority by Nancy Linden) and Aunt Agnes (Luci Poirier) lamely plead for the preservation of chastity and attempt to ward off divorce. In the evening's bravura performance, Natalia Chavez Leimkuhler plays the feisty Grandmother Fraochlan, whose personal mix of Catholicism, Gaelic paganism, and earthy sexual experience give her an exuberant defiance of adversity which the other family members lack. But her addiction to alcohol and opium, as well as the illusions of her own romantic tales, indicate that freedom and happiness are very restrained in this doomed, perfectly furnished house.
Director Jayme Kilburn has carefully cultivated the particular tragedy lurking in each character. The final ensemble scene is especially moving. There are some technical problems, however. Several of the actors speak too quickly to be heard. The effort of the ensemble to adopt appropriate Irish brogues is uneven.
Designed by the muralist David Cunningham, the set is a master piece. The chalk-like etchings of the Mai's elegant house exterior, interior rooms, and furniture, splashed over the walls and floor of the narrow playing space, evoke both the Mai's determined aspiration to a successful family and professional life and the fragile, fading nature of that doomed aspiration. Even before the lights dim, the Gaelic wheel of fortune is turning.

From Sound to Sight at Mobtown

2010-04-02T06:45:00.000-07:00

Currently presenting two new plays, Mobtown Theater at Meadow Mill mixes a dramatic search for sound with an even more dramatic search for sight.

Jim Cary's An Ounce of Blues follows a white soldier (Jack) who finally locates an obscure black guitarist (Mr. Walter) whom the solider has long idolized. The encounter between the two in the deep rural South centers on the reluctant performance on the blues guitar by Mr. Walter, complemented by the sudden love of Jack for Mr. Walter's perky assistant (Regina). As Regina, Lauren Blackwell lights up the piece which, despite its consistent "journey of discovery" structure, suffers from an overabundance of stereotypes about the Old South.

The tour-de-force of the evening is Joe Denison's Karovice. In this one-character play, a despairing artist delivers a brilliant monologue, where alliterations, puns, incantations, curses, prayers, and shards of memory trace the artist's progressive isolation. Powerfully acted by Mark Squirek, the mesmerizing monologue is illustrated by the artist's painting on originally blank canvases to express his harrowing mood swings. Ably directed by John Garner, the acrobatic performance by Squirek and the simple, primitivist stamp of the emerging paintings give the play its visual elegance.

Lacy Project at Strand

2010-02-15T12:46:00.000-08:00

The dynamic little theater on Charles Street, the Strand has devoted itself to the production of dramas by women and to the production of new and rarely staged works. In its current offering The Lacy Project by Alena Smith, it admirably fulfills both goals. The play reveals both the promise and limits of a young playwright only recently graduated from Yale's drama school. Focused on the hapless life of Lacy, a 22-year old woman closely tied to her dolls and to her mysterious photographer mother, the script explores various ways women are oppressed by their images: the unchanging doll, the MTV video harridan, the cute girl-in-the-red-ribbon who never quite grows up, the perpetual daughter, the bitter romantic rival to other women. When the play zeroes in on the conflict between Lacy, her hip-hop friend Giselle, and her suspiciously stolid roommate Charlotte, its feminist themes of oppression through gender stereotypes crackles. But when the dolls of Tracy come alive to perform their own battles over maternity and jealousy, the preachiness and the forced vulgarity become tiresome. There is nothing uneven in the production itself, tautly directed by Josh Bristol. The all-women ensemble of actors energetically pushes its characters to their self-destructive ends. Amelia Adams (Harriet) and Jen Anthony (Olivia) bring out the one-note vanity and sentimentality in their respective dolls-come-alive. As the unlikely lifelong friends, Lauren Lakis (Lacy) and Britt Olsen-Ecker (Giselle) accelerate their raw desperation as they plunge toward annihilation through sexual addiction, drug addiction, and gendered role-playing that destroys any unique self. In the evening's towering performance, Leah Raulerson (Charlotte) plays the reasonable, detached, hard-working roommate who gradually reveals herself as the most cunning manipulator of the lot. Her statuesque coolness amidst the desperation of the other characters gives the play's bitter conclusion its steely edge.

Carmen au cabaret

2010-01-23T05:47:00.001-08:00

American Opera Theater's production of Carmen will not please purists. Now titled Le Cabaret de Carmen, Bizet's opera has been turned into a series of acts in a rough, smoky 1920s Parisian nightclub. But this sizzling production will intrigue just about everyone else. Glorious singing is provided by Adonis Abuyen (Escamillo), Bonnie Mc Naughton (Micaela), and especially Brian Arreola (Don Jose), whose brilliant tenor rendition of a desperate Don Jose provides the evening's most thrilling vocal moments. Playing Carmen as an overbearing yet vulnerable chanteuse, Sophie-Louise Roland looks and plays the seductress with energy and conviction, but her singing remained the most frayed of the performance. Under Timothy Nelson's direction, the story is completely revamped. The toreador becomes a stand-up comic, Carmen's husband suddenly appears, a cynical madam (Lydia Gladstone) bossily moves the stage business along the cabaret stage and the patrons sitting in a apron downstage. The simple orchestra of piano (Simone Lutti) and cello (Jill Collier) provides an intimate and often intense accompaniment to the singing. The direction effectively recreates the underworld of Paris 1920: smoke-filled cabaret, violent floor shows, stand-up comedians, silky soloists overemphasizing emotion, the overwrought gestures of silent cinema. But some of the gimmicks don't work. The host (Timothy Nelson) is a simple knock-off of the Joel Grey Emcee from Cabaret; a gay subplot comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere; the stage business of the madam becomes tiresome. The energetic production works best in the simpler moments toward the end, when Arreola and McNaugton treat us to some moving arias where the purity of musical tone matches the purity of the emotion expressed.

Exquisite Messiah

2009-12-13T06:39:00.000-08:00

In the neo-baroque splendor of Saint Ignatius Church, the Handel Choir of Baltimore presented an exquisite performance of the hardy Advent perennial, Handel's Messiah. Melinda O'Neal's subtle direction of the choir created more than brilliant sound; it brought out the tonal range and theological soul of the oratario. Highlights were the chorus "Since by man came death," reduced to a musical whisper about the certitude of death, and the apocalyptic chorus "Worthy is the lamb that was slain," in which the triumphant hymns of praise crescendo into a literal shout. Using period instruments, the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra provided intimate accompaniment to the singers, although the "pastoral symphony" embedded in the oratorio sounded muddier than the rest of the performance. The small brass section was a standout, especially in the eschatological movements concerning the Last Judgment. Providing vivid interpretations of the oratorio's recitatives and airs, Katharine Dain (soprano), Ian Howell (counter-tenor), Steven Brennfleck (tenor), and Craig Phillips (bass) served the oratorio as vibrant soloists. Ms. Dain and Mr. Howell often thrilled by their rippling variations on the Handel score.

Stuff of Dreams

2009-12-06T13:04:00.000-08:00

How do they do it?

Baltimore's Single Carrot Theatre has recently offered us Shakespeare, Ibsen, comedy sketches, satires of slam poetry, and neo-classical myth. In their latest production, Illuminoctem, they've turned to yet another genre: mime theater. Like their previous productions, this presentation of a tale by George MacDonald dazzles by its professional rigor and creative exuberance.
The literary inspiration for the production is simple enough. MacDonald's tale features a witch (Giti Jabaily) who torments the "day boy" (Nathan Fulton) by keeping him in heavily lit places and torments the "night girl" (Alexandra Lewis) by keeping her in exactly the opposite. The inevitable happens: boy meets girl, the spell is broken, and we retire to love on a standard 24-hour schedule.
If the inspiration is simple, the production is complexity itself. Four choreographers designed the movement for four separate pieces of the play. Marilyn Mullen's opening movement establishes the violence of the witch and her minions as they writhe and oppress the hapless, imprisoned girl and boy. Naoko Maeshiba gracefully stages the girl's encounter with fireflies as she flees from the witch. Sarah Anne Austin develops every conceivable gesture of longing in the romantic encounter between the boy and girl. The weakest piece is the final scene choreographed by Kwame Opare. The pulsing drums, day-glow effects, and rocking ensemble dance seem to have walked out from a rather dim disco lounge. The elegance and elision of the earlier scenes have disappeared.
The entire cast works supremely well as an ensemble, even if the athletic movements of the evening are clearly more of a challenge to some cast members than to others. Jabailly is starkly convincing as the witch whose mysterious desire to enslave and humiliate propel the action and finally her own downfall. As the light/darkness couple, Fulton and Lewis movingly project terror, naivete, and finally delight as they escape their opening oppressors. Jessica Garrett and Aldo Pantoja provide particularly strong performances as jailors who torment the imprisoned boy and girl through the ironic use of dramatic movement and musical movement as instruments of torture themselves.
Brendan Regan's consistent direction and the excellent lighting design by Joey Bromfield propel this eerie tale forward as a stream of dream-like images rapidly evolving from the starkest oppression to figures of hope and final redemption from evil, even for evil itself.

Gracious Virtues

2009-12-06T11:47:00.000-08:00

The Memorial Players based at Bolton Hill's Memorial Episcopal Church recently offered an inspirational anthology of scenes illustrating the themes of faith, hope, and charity. The opening scene, the famous table confrontation between Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker, was vividly executed by Chloe Wright (Helen) and Stacey McGhee (Annie). The physical realism of the battle between two determined women had the audience wincing and occasionally moaning in their seats. Christopher Mergen (Peter) and Amelia Wright (Anne) delicately recreated one of the lighter moments in The Diary of Anne Frank: the courtship scene between two hunted, uncertain adolescents. In O. Henry's perennial Christmas favorite, The Gift of the Magi, Halima Aquino and Jamie Griffith movingly expressed the affection and the humiliating poverty of the newly wed couple. This dramatic version by Thomas Hischak brings out the theological dimensions of the story. Extended references to the original Magi, King Solomon, and even the obscure Queen of Sheba give a broader framework to a story that often appears as sheer sentimentality in its more secularized film and television versions. One of the evening's heroes was set designer John Seeley; his breezy painted side panels provided visual definition to the spare production and elegantly echoed the vaulted ceiling and chandeliers of the Parish Hall, where the plays were performed. Adele Russell's sophisticated direction brought out the emotional truth at the core of each scene and underscored the universality of what could otherwise appear to be very private moments in families that are clearly different from the contemporary American norm. Gracious Virtues is a model of what church theater, as opposed to the simple performance of dramatic pieces on church property, can truly be.

Eurydice

2009-10-21T08:27:00.000-07:00

Single Carrot's recent production of Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice was an enchanted production which rightly produced sold-out audiences. This reworking of the Orpheus-Eurydice myth presents us with a rather intellectual Eurydice (her nose glued to a book) enthralled by musical genius Orpheus, whose music in his head transcends the occasional music we hear in the theater. As Orpheus attempts to rescue the dead Eurydice from the underworld, Ruhl adds a new character to the myth: the father of Eurydice who has somehow maintained shards of memory after an imperfect bath in the river of Lethe, the underworld's pool of forgetting. A magnificent chorus of stones and a lecherous Lord of the underworld on a tricycle provide more humor than menace to the desperate play of the central triangle revolving around death, mourning, and forgetting.
Giti Jabailly (Euryidce), Aldo Pantoja (Orpheus), and Brendan Regan (the father) provide the right blend between fervent attachment and cool other-worldliness to maintain the magical atmosphere of the tale, although one does wonder why both men go to such lengths to liberate a woman who does not seem similarly interested in them. The set designer Joey Bromfield works wonders in the Single Carrot's tiny black-box theater. Billowing white sheets, a dark pool of Lethe, and a straw-colored boardwalk evoke a barren, repetitious underworld where only the occasional passion survives in the royal purple costumes worn by several characters. Director J. Buck Jabailly smoothly balances the choreographed movements of the stones and the stilted gestures of the leads with the play's outbursts of grief and affection. Even the longer, preachier moments in Ruhl's script are lent a certain dignity and wonder in this succession of subdued tableaux vivants.

Charming Cocktail

2009-09-21T07:22:00.000-07:00

The Vagabond Players' new production of A.R. Gurney's The Cocktail Hour is a delightful romp through family rivalry and the mores of the American Protestant bourgeoisie.
The simple plot concerns a playwright, John (played by Blaise d'Ambrosio), who returns to his family home with the unwelcome news that he has just finished an autobiographical play about the family. Entitled "The Cocktail Hour," the play immediately becomes an object of fear, suspicion, and outrage among the family members: the domineering father, Bradley (played with suave aristocratic charm by Denis Latkowski), the sympathetic but anxious mother, Ann (played with an earth-mother solidity by Joan Crooks), and the hysterical sister, Nina (played with scenery-chewing gusto by Janise Whelan.) As the family progresses through its own cocktail hour, they trade quips about incompetent servants, dinner with the Episcopal bishop, the various charitable boards they control, and T.S. Eliot and other literary stars of yore. The banter thinly conceals their lament for a genteel Protestant culture that has vanished and their anxiety that John's play will open up a few family secrets they want to protect from the prying eyes of the public.
Roy Hammond's direction keeps the traffic moving smoothly as the characters bounce around the Antiques Roadshow decor of the set. The direction can't completely compensate for the limits of the script. At the end of each act, Gurney tries to transcend the cocktail chit-chat by having a man-to-man confrontation between the domineering father and the hazier son. But the climax of these disputes is simply melodrama. At the end of the first act, the son cries out to the father: "I think you've never loved me!" (Lights out. Intermission.) At the end of the second act, when an unconvincing reconciliation between father and son has been concocted, the father cries out that the revamped play (in his favor) should be called "The Good Father." (Ugh! Lights out. Stage call.) It is the funny yet moving portrait of a vanishing Protestant suburban elite, with its cocktail napkins, snobbish clubs, literary culture, and preoccupation with status that is the play at its strongest.
The real heroes of the evening are the set designer (Tony Colavito), the lighting designer (Bob Dover), and the unnamed sound designer. The set is an overstuffed living room filled with dated bourgeois artifacts that exude a nostalgia for an earlier, more glamorous past. The lamee curtains are too much Fred-and-Ginger; the walls groan under too many paintings; the arranged flowers are too perfect. An omnipresent blue light bathes the entire scene in a calm that is preternatural and that doesn't survive the increasingly anxious assault over the new script. The background music, a thousand-strings medley of show tunes from earlier times, sets the stage for the travails of a family lost in the alcoholic glow of a more glorious age.

Mercy at the Strand

2009-09-11T12:17:00.000-07:00

9/12/09
The Strand Theater's new production of Neil La Bute's The Mercy Seat is well worth a trip to their intimate theater in the North Station district.
The taut play features two lovers who happen to find themselves in the mistress's New York apartment at the moment of the 9/11 attack. The attack could permit Ben Harcourt, the male paramour who should have been at his office in the World Trade Center at the moment of the attack, to escape from a marriage that has gone sour. He dreams of fleeing with his mistress (who just happens to be his boss) and restarting life under a new identity. It could also permit the female paramour, Abby Prescott, to flee a job she constantly squawks about and start a new, more romantic life. The choices aren't simple, however, as marital duty and moral realism start to dawn on the stranded love duo.
In La Bute's usual manner, the discussion of these strange alternatives quickly degenerates into an obscenity-laced row about sexual harassment, family duty, romantic disenchantment, personal obsessions, and civic duty toward fellow citizens.
Ably directed by Danielle Young, Kasey Arnold and M. Brett Rohrer bring this one-act diatribe to life as they permit the emotions of their quarreling characters to rub each other raw. The bitter dance of recrimination and possible escape convincingly escalates in intensity until the play arrives at its quiet, ambiguous conclusion. The realistic set, complete with 9/11 wreckage dust peppering the furniture and costumes, underscores the intensity of the Arnold/Rohrer duel.
La Bute's script does not completely convince. Why would Abby even think of abandoning her powerful job for a man she humiliates as a selfish coward? Why would such an obviously intelligent woman (her lines are full of crisp literary and historical allusions) even consider a plot to disappear that clearly can't work? And why would Ben so passionately love a woman who insults him and denigrates him at every turn? For all the script's flaws, the Strand's production powerfully brings out the black humor and spiraling bitterness of an illicit relationship that has shattered two psyches as devastatingly as the terrorists shattered the WTC in the ashes of 9/11.

HighZero

2009-09-11T07:48:00.000-07:00

9/08/o9 High Zero Festival. Baltimore's High Zero Festival has begun to sprout in the North Station area (quickly becoming Baltimore's new Bohemia, with an assist from the expanding Maryland Institute and College of Art.) The installation-exhibit wing of the free improv sound festival opened tonight at the Load of Fun Gallery. In a conscious effort to out-avant the avant-garde, some of the installations are simply out there and not terribly enticing. Still, there is much to engage the contemplative gallery visitor. Top pics are Owen Gardner's "Space is Deep," where three electronically tuned guitars emit resonant sounds as they lie propped up on paperback classics of a vanished '60's counterculture, and Ayako Kataoka's "A Girl Said," an effort to capture sound visually in a wax-like medium. Hers is the quietist but most probing of the installations as it creates a Buddhist alternative to the audial score.