Family Dysfunction Revisited

S. Ann Johnson's play Sick Stories, Gentle Granddaddy packs an emotional wallop.  Produced by the Theatrical Mining Company at Notre Dame's Copeland theater, the drama depicts the plight of a dysfunctional East Baltimore family through the eyes of Mabelle, a member of the family's middle generation.  Asked to deliver the eulogy for the grandfather she adored, Mabelle slowly learns the reality of her grandfather's violent, alcoholic past and the damage he inflcited on the family before she was born.  As she recognzies the shadow side of her venerated grandfather, she comes to terms with her own bourgeoning enslavement to a charming but irresponsible boyfriend who is following the same path of substance abuse, anger, and the neglect of basic duties toward family and work.  The play delicately raises the issue of a dangerous pattern in the African-American community, whereby woman and children find themselves abandoned by their husbands and fathers.  It focuses on the particular types of damage inflicted by alcoholism in these scenarios of neglect and abandonment.

The play's most powerful scenes arise when the characters storm into confontations over blame and recrimination for the plight of the family.  Moments of humor enliven the predominantly grim tale of discovering abuse through probing other's narratives, once dismissed as exaggeration. 

Not everything works in the structure of the play.  The lead character's frequent addresses to the audience are too often a statementof the obvious; a more poetic subtext remains to be unearthed.  Like many plays which highlight narratives of the past, the play stumbles at times on the "Do you remember when?" moment.  But these are minor flaws in a play which is often gripping in its emotional intensity and admirable in its effort to balance outrage and fear with acceptance of human weakness.

The directors Shelby and Tyrone Chapman provide vivid direction to the play, which could easily have become a static memory play.  Especially convincing are the scenes of verbal and physical confontation, not so easily staged in the tiny confines of the Copley stage.  Standout performances are given byKhris Burrell as  the mercurial Granddaddy and April Johnson as his ebullient wife, Queen.  They and the rest of the cast effectively communicate the pathos of the piece, while still communicating the joy of certain family celebrations. 

Love's Rainbow

A new entry in this summer's Baltimore Playwrights Festival at the Fells Point Corner Theater, Rich Espey's The Rainbow Plays uses seven different short plays to explore variations on LGBT love.  Each of the first six plays is supposed to reflect one of the colors of the LGBT flag (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple) with their corresponding values (life, healing, sunshine, nature, harmony, and spirit).  The seventh and final play ties together the themes of the rainbow and delivers a final exhortation to the audience.

In effect, the entire piece still feels like seven discrete plays.  In some of them the LGBT theme seems tacked on as an afterthought.  As in most anthologies, the plays vary in quality.  By far the most moving was Messages Deleted, a clever study of a hidden lover and distraught father who happen to meet each other as they attempt to clear out the possessions of the son/lover who just died in an automobile accident.  For different motives, they are trying to remove traces of the deceased's homosexuality but after initial conflcit they meet in mutual grief.  Steve Ferguson (Mark, the lover), Rodney Bonds (Gene, the father), and Jared Jiacinto (as the hovering spirit of the dead Sam) deliver convincing performances in this elegaic piece.

The weakest plays are predictable pick-up sketches.  The male version occurs between two football players (Steve Ferguson, Rasheed Green) in Hoya Saxa.  The female version happens in a restaurant between a diner, a waitress, and a narrator (Jennifer Hasselbusch, Kelly Cavanaugh, Amy Miller).

The evening struggles to deliver something more than political agitprop, but it does not always succeed.  In Bang Day the creationist student who opposes evolution comes off as a terrorist ready to destroy the school via a knife.  It is not the only anti-religious stereotype in a production purporting to promote tolerance.  The closing play Zoo Story 2 opens promisingly enough in the comic world of gay penguins but the angry didactic ending would make Rachel Maddow blush.

Lisa Davidson's direction is efficient and effective.  Played against a simple black backdrop, the play smoothly shifts from one setting and mood to another.  The appropriate costumes, colorful props, and excellent lighting give fluidity and intensity to the evening.  The performances are clear and crisp.  The direction and performances deliver the humor in these various pieces, but the emotional depths within the stronger scripts seem relatively unexplored.

Within the limits of an ideological genre, The Rainbow Plays  delivers a series of entertaining innovations on sexual difference.  The professional polish of the production makes it a strong BPF achievement.     

Nihilism with the Carrots 

         Newly ensconced in the old Everyman Theatre complex on Charles Street, Single Carrot Theatre offers provocative fare with its new production, Caridad Svitch's  The Tropic of X. 
         The play sketches a dystopian portrait of a future society where drugged individuals wander from one fleeting sexual encounter and drug fix to another, where nations have disappeared and melted into a polyglot Babel, where people are mesmerized by video games and  cowboy arcades, where dark militarisitc forces pulverize individuals into quivering numbers. dystopia is very much a grim portrait of our own culture.  The mirror is embellished by Svitch's hauntingly poetic language, which crests into long, jagged tirades by the principal characters.  Dominating the wasteland are Maura (Genevieve Mahy) and Mori (Nathan Fulton), two waifs who wander from their indolent sex and drug games to more violent ones of mug-the-tourist.  They finally descend into terrifying games of soul destruction operated by the omnipresent miltary forces of darkness.  One's name, gender, memory, and language are annihilated in the unending violence.  Maura and Mori achieve a final resistance of sorts as they are washed out to sea and away from the social madness, but their death, entwined in each other's arms, is a Pyrrhic victory over the lacerating chaos.  The local prostitute Kiki (Jessica Garrett), a master of suvival in the chaos, offers cynical but wise commentary as the destruction of the hapless Marua and Mori progresses.  An elusive DJ, Hilton (Aldo Pantoja) offers a more distant commentary on an authoritatian, pointless society, propped up by pop rock selections from the golden sixities and beyond.  Paul Diem plays a variety of antagonist roles (the sexual tourist, the john, the brutal military officer) in the role of Fabian.

     Carefully directed by Nathan A. Cooper, the cast brings a certain pathos to their roles, which could have easily remained engimas in the disjointed plot.  They also bring out the poetic vitality in the long arias Svitch has planted within the surrealist gloom.

       Especially striking in this production is the set by Lisi Stoessel.  The torn collages and irregular platforms evoke the perilous ledge on which the characters play against death in this collapsed society.  The chaotic play of color and form points to the personal and social annihilation which has become an aesthetic as well as a political norm.

 
   
 

Thinking Man's Passport

Summer theater is rarely the moment for thoughtful reflection.  But Kevin Kostic's new play Passport is a thoughtful meditation on cultural conflict and the vagaries of mid-life crisis.  Produced by the Theatrical Mining company at Load of Fun Theater on North Avenue, the play is a new entry in this year's Baltimore Playwrights Festival.

The play pivots around the mid-life crisis of Jeff, a humanitarian worker who finds himself in personal crisis on two different continents.  In Kenya, he must confront rioting mobs contesting a recent presidential election and driving the country back to its ancient tribal conflicts.  Two Kenyan sisters, Kioni and Louisa, occupying his Kenya apartment under siege force Jeff to face the limits of his humanitarian interventions and confront a political violence he cannot fathom.  Back in his Washington, DC apartment, Jeff must face his deteriorating marriage to Nancy, an ambitious teacher who is on the verge of deserting her increasingly distant spouse.

Ably directed by Barry Feinstein, the cast successfully realizes the potential of the conflict-ridden characters.  Mike Ware delivers an utterly convicing peformance as Jeff.  Even his gestures and facial expressions exude the anguish of a middle-aged relief worker who can no longer fathom the politics of the world in which he lives and the emotional enigma of his failing marriage.  Ama Brown (Kioni) and Mahogany Ayot Eerised (Louisa) bring out the sharp rivalry between the dueling sisters and the bitter conflict in the sisters' philosophies.  The pragmatic Louisa insists that compromise is good and necessary in one's professional and political choices; the fiery Louisa insists on a purer but more violent and nihilist creed rooted in tribal loyalty.  Enhancing their conflict is the mural painted by David Cunningham; it vividly represents the angry mob outside ready to devour the characters at any moment.  Claire Bowman empathetically portrays Nancy, the confused wife who can no longer tolerate the growing silence and distraction of her husband.

The script could still use further work.  At moments the dialogue becomes preachy, as when the sparring sisters deliver a predictable tirade against the failures of humanitarian projects in their home vilage and when Nancy tries to help her husband "become yourself" as their conflict comes to a climax.  The soapbox doesn't seem far from the efficient set in such passages.  But these are minor flaws in a play which intelligently probes a man in simultaneous political and romantic mid-life meltdown and which sets the conflict in the unusual world of international relief organizations.    

Inch of Water

Single Carrot's production of Foot of Water bursts with intensity but at the end of the performance of this original production, little more than energy remains.

Directed by Ben Hoover, this year-long work-in-progress explores human eroticism at its most primal.  Inspired by the ritualistic techniques of Polish director Grotowski, the actors exhaust themselves in forcefully representing the most basic gestures of human sexuality.  Curiosity, foreplay, and embraces pass in review as they lead up to a violent orgasm and brutal death of the lover.  Centered on an earth-motherish Jessica Garrett, the energetic cast (Nathan Cooper, Alix Fenhagen, Nathan Fulton, Aldo Pantoja, Elliott Rauh) depicts a bolero of sexuality as it moves from sexuality as an innocent romp to the violence, nudity, and death of the conclusion.  The mosaic of music and sounds chosen by sound designer Steven Krigel enhances this determined climb from the wistful to the murderous.  This visceral presentation of sexual desire is not for the squeamish (or for the non-adult), but the power and conviction of the ensemble lends this creation its cascading energy.

And yet.  For all its vitality and determination, Foot of Water doesn't quite manage to bring off its exploration of "the sociology of sex."  The tale of a fertility-raining fountain in a village becomes tired in the telling.  Much of the spoken text bears a similar banality.  The physical gestures of carnal desire are forcefully portrayed, but where is the rest of human sexuality?  Commitment, friendship, sacrifice, marriage, family---even children?  For all of its visual brilliance, this is an oddly sterile take on sexuality.  This rite of sexual awakening is very far from "the rituals we have all gone through or eventually go through in our personal sex histories" (director's note).  The grunts remain; the romance and the promise have vanished.     

Autobio Maeshiba

Premiering this weekend at Theatre Project, Kawatokawa (river/skin) represents Naoka Maeshiba's most personal piece of peformance art yet.  The solo ballet, heavily using mime, explores the various roles and transitions the Japanese choreographer has undergone in her emotional and artistic pilgrimage.

Moving from one prop or boldly colored piece of clothing to another, Maeshiba skillfully expresses the passions proper to each stage of transition.  Using complementary recorded voices, her depiction of the transition to America is the most accessible part of the work.  Humor and pathos alternate as the life of the often-baffled protagonist unfolds.  The choreographer's two unobtrusive assistants (Eva Hiott and Zach Bobst) provide simple gestural support and keep the props (especially during a humorous storm scene) moving.

Especially striking is the emotive range of Maeshiba's choreography and peformance.  One moves effortlessly from the intimate self-enclosure of "Dark Room" to the bombastic yells and flapping arms of "We, the Japanese."  Maeshbia often reacts passively to the various events of her complex transition.  Through her contorted gestures and baffled grimaces, she is moved, pushed, and shoved from one developmental state to another.

As compared to her earlier, more abstract Paraffin (presented at Theatre Project two years ago), Kawatokawa is a more personalist work.  Even in the obscure earlier sections of the work, the basic emtoions of fear, curiosity, and rejection float off the stage with carefully calibrated movements.  The audience is clearly touched as the piece rises toward its final paroxysm, even if the precise caus of that chiseled touch remains veiled.

Dance Sampler

Baltimore offers endless selections of drama and music. But dance events are 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 lythe; 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.