Monthly Archives: July 2009

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

In German or English, learning the language of the stage

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From left: executive director Nurella Doumitt, artistic director Beth Harper, office and financial manager Georgia Cacy.

“Do it in German,” Beth Harper said.

Harper, the guiding light of Portland Actors Conservatory, was talking with Simona Constantin, who after two years at the conservatory was trying to figure out what she should do for this week’s graduation showcase Wednesday through Saturday nights.

Constantin, whose English is way better than your German probably is, was worried that her English skills were too rough. And, as much as she loves Portland, she was getting ready to return home to Berlin at the end of summer, where she’ll try to break in to the professional theater scene.

So, do it in German.

She will. Constantin, one of nine grads who’ll perform monologues in this week’s program, will perform one piece in English (Christina Mulchauy’s Sex in a Cold Climate) and one in German: Die Heirat, or The Marriage, by Nicolai Gogol. And if that doesn’t prove that acting’s an international language, nothing will: a German actress from an American school performing a Russian play in a German translation for an American audience.

Simone Constantin: In the language of the stage.“The goal is, after two years, to turn out actors who are ready to go out and act in the professional world,” Harper said a couple of weeks ago at a small media gathering to showcase the showcase and the conservatory itself.

And if your professional world is going to be in Berlin, … well, there you go. Beth Harper is a very practical dreamer, and her advice to Constantin was vintage Harper: Think big, go for it, but figure out how to get there.

It’s been a long road for Portland Actors Conservatory, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary, and I’m happy to say I was there when it was on the ground floor.

Which it wasn’t. It was a walkup in the Hollywood District, in a couple of rooms that had been a dentist’s office, and its ribbon-cutting was jammed with prominent theater folk of the time: I remember talking with Isabella Chappell and Bill Dobson from the old Portland Civic Theatre. Later, when it was still called The Training Ground, the conservatory moved to another walkup in Old Town with a cramped little theater whimsically called the Loft in Space. Finally it landed at the Firehouse Theatre, a city-owned former firehouse just above downtown on a hill to the west of Portland State University, and there it remains, busting at the seams. (There are remodeling plans to make the place play bigger.)

In the early years of my accidental career as a theater critic, Beth was one of the people who helped me realize that theater is the stuff that happens in the spaces between the actors: the energy, the connections, the passing of the ball on the fast break. She was a very fine actress, and a very good director, the kind who never let herself show but brought the best out of the script and the performers. She studied those scripts, broke them down, then put ’em back together again. And she talked a lot about the need for craft to let the art come out.

So it wasn’t a huge surprise when she became a teacher and a businesswoman. And an idea of making this thing a true school was always part of the dream. Last year the conservatory gained full accreditation from the National Association of Schools of Theatre, a major step but far from the end of Harper’s grand plan.

Now, for a select group (as many as 20 students the first year, down to 12 max the second) the conservatory offers its two-year, full-time professional program. It continues its studio program for ongoing studies — a necessity in a discipline like theater — a summer youth program and a season of plays performed by students and guest actors.

It’s also a hallmark of Harper’s practical approach to theater that the conservatory offers a variety of approaches to the craft. Students learn movement, clown, Meisner Technique, Shakespeare, improv, text analysis. They learn design, and even theater management. Whatever works. Whatever technique gets you there. That’s the one to use.

Teachers include the likes of Michael Mendelson, Sarah Lucht, Philip Cuomo, Rose Riordan and Cynthia Fuhrman — names to be reckoned with around here. Grads include the likes of Maureen Porter, Rafael Untalan, Andrea Alton (Saturday Night Live), Brooke Blanchard (The West Wing), Mario Calcagno, Gilberto Martin del Campo, Zero Feeney and Nathan Gale.

What’s it all come down to?

“After two years,” the graduating Constantin says, “you are more of yourself than you were when you came here.”

Not a bad result.

—————————————————–

DETAILS on this week’s conservatory graduation showcase:

WHO: 2009 graduating class of Portland Actors Conservatory
WHAT: Graduation Showcase performance, An Evening of Monologues
WHEN: 7:30 pm Wednesday through Saturday, July 15-18
WHERE: Portland Actors Conservatory
1436 SW Montgomery Street
Portland, OR 97201
COST: $15
TICKETS: http://www.actorsconservatory.com
Call 503-274-1717 for the box office

Photos by Drew Foster

Bob Hicks, Environment, General

Where have all the otters gone, long time ago?

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Sea Otter in Morro Bay, California. Photo: Mike Baird/Wikimedia Commons

I’m sitting at the beach, where I’ve been the past week, and I’m thinking about time.

Cape Foulweather is out there, a spit in the ocean to the north, so shrouded in fog that I can’t see it at all. A little to the south, also invisible, lies Gull Rock. Hard by it is Otter Rock, a bony outcropping that hasn’t seen an actual otter in more than a century.

Up the road either way is a flimsy yet stubborn string of weathered motels, chowder joints, candy shops, taverns, groceries, kite shops and other human clingings to the edge of the continent. I’m partial to Mo’s, where you can get a decent beer and a decent chowder and a decent smile.

People scratch for a living here, and sometimes the scratches run deep. But on a beautiful day, when you’re pointing in the right direction and you aren’t looking at the scars, it can be one of the happiest places on earth.

And of course, the scars are there because we all want to come to this place and snatch a little happiness, and we all want to be comfortable while we’re at it. Yes, I burned precious liquefied dinosaur to get here.

I hear birds I can’t see. I breathe watery air. I sip black coffee. I feel almost at home.

When I’m down this way I like to visit Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center, which has a pleasant walking path along the estuary of Yaquina Bay and where a lot of valuable research is done. In the visitors center, if you time things right, you can see the resident octopus chomping on crab at mealtime (kids love this show). In the little shop I found a fascinating-looking book of ship lore, from chanteys to wrecks to mutinies, that I didn’t buy because I already have a big stack of books waiting to be read. And the displays are always well-explained for general and young audiences: science made not easy, but accessible and interesting.

The Hatfield Center makes you think about geology, about the skeleton on which life attaches. To geology, the little things we think of as time are barely a blink. Yet in those blinks we can make a gawdamighty mess of things, often while we’re in the process of improving them. As one display panel says:

Most of nature does not run at the time that we measure in seconds or minutes or days. To understand these patterns we must understand time itself.


Impossible, of course. But we can take a stab at it. Under the circumstances, I’d say, we have to take a stab at it.
Continue reading Where have all the otters gone, long time ago? →

Bob Hicks, Cities, General, Music

Big Ben turns 150: Where does the time go?

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Big Ben at dusk, 2004. Photo: Andrew Dunn/Wikimedia CommonsToday is the 150th anniversary of Big Ben’s first chime, and artdaily.org has a charming report on the celebration, which was highlighted with the playing of a new composition by Benjamin Till that involves ringing nearly 200 bells across central and east London. Some hadn’t been sounded in 60 years.

It was July 11, 1859 when the big clock bell on the tower of the Palace of Westminster first rang. (Originally “Big Ben” referred to the bell, not the clock, but most people have come to think of Big Ben as the whole package — bell, clock, and tower.) It’s had a few outages since then, including wartime blackouts, fire and maintenance, but Ben has come to be the heartbeat and certainly, with its bell and Quarter Chimes, the sound of London.

And, my, but it’s English: Through thick and thin, come rain or shine, we will soldier on. (Or is that the U.S. Postal Service?) I love that the bulldog nation’s timepiece is also its signature sound, and that the anniversary has been made into a musical event.

Till based his new work on the macabre yet oddly beloved nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons, which fresh-scrubbed British lads and lassies have been chanting for ever so long. The lyrics refer in riddle form to the sounds of church bells across the city:

“Oranges and lemons” say the bells of St. Clement’s.
“You owe me five farthings” say the bells of St. Martin’s.
“When will you pay me?” say the bells of Old Bailey.
“When I grow rich” say the bells of Shoreditch.
“When will that be?” say the bells of Stepney.
“I do not know” say the great bells of Bow.
“Here comes a candle to light you to bed.
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.
Chip-chop chip-chop — the last man’s dead.”

At which point, I suppose, there won’t always be an England anymore. At least, not an England with a head on its shoulders.

I’m not English (although some of my forebears were) but I think what I like most about Big Ben isn’t its storied British steadiness and precision but its imprecision. Compared to modern electronic and nuclear timepieces, Big Ben marks the time with the unsteady gate of a drunken folk dancer. The computer on which I’m typing would have a massive coronary if its internal clock were suddenly to coincide with Big Ben’s beat.

On the other hand, Ben is musical. His inconsistencies are his art. He reminds us that for most of life, close is not just good enough, it’s preferable. I come from a time and place where the answer to “What time is it?” was “quarter past three,” not “3:17.” So you were two minutes off. So what? Were you timing a missile launching? Ben has hands. Hands are human. To be human is to alter your gait, just a bit.

So ring those bells. Syncopate that sound. Music’s not a metronome. And life moves forward through its mistakes, not its consistencies, which can only wish they were as interesting as hobgoblins.

General, Laura Grimes

How to not buy bras with large smelly boys

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By LAURA GRIMES

Buying bras comes with major tenets that are never violated:

Trust the truss./Wikimedia Commons— If you like a bra it will not come in your size.

— Cute little bras will not come in your size.

— Anything with the name “Wonder Bra” will not come in your size.

— Sexy numbers that come with slogans like “Amazing Lift” will not come in your size.

— You will secretly hope that a bra in your size does not come with a slogan like “Amazing Fork Lift.”

— Any bra that does not come in your size will have every size right up to the size that you wear.

— The bras you like will be displayed prominently in the big picture windows in the front of the store.

— Large hairy men in tank tops will walk past the big picture windows.

— You will think that some large hairy men in tank tops should shop for bras.

— Once you find a bra in your size it will look like giant clam shells stuck together with duct tape.

— Once you find a bra in your size it will come only in lavender.

— Once you find a bra in your size it will come only in a paisley design.

— Once you find a bra in your size it will come with weird inlay leaf designs that look like groping fingers.

— Bra-buying will be traumatic enough without receiving a text message from a large smelly teenage boy that says, “What’s taking you so long?”

— Once you find a bra you sort of like it will say something like “No Poke Wire.”

— Once you find a bra you sort of like AND in your size it will say something like “Concealing Petals.”

— “Concealing Petals” are something to conceal things called nipples because apparently they’re unacceptable.

— You will be horrified to realize that you were born with not one but two nipples.

— You will be horrified to realize that you nursed not one but two boys (not at the same time) with not one but two nipples (not at the same time).
Continue reading How to not buy bras with large smelly boys →

Bob Hicks, Books, General, Language

The Bulwer-Lyttons: It’s STILL a dark and stormy night

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They’re back: the annual Bulwer-Lytton Awards, the cream of the crop of bad writing.
Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, painted by Henry William Pickersgill. Wikimedia Commons

Except in this case it’s deliberately bad writing, short parody passages in emulation of the florid style of Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, PC, the 19th century British playwright, novelist and politician immortalized for his creation of the line “It was a dark and stormy night.”

The annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, first perpetrated in 1982 by English professor Scott Rice of San Jose State University, is a veritable treasure chest of purple prose, a perverse celebration of overstatement and strangely linked ideas.

Find the 2009 winners here, and weep for joy.

This year’s grand prize winner is David McKenzie of Federal Way, Wash., for this dark and stormy sentence:

“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the Ellie May, a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish: for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”

Bulwer-Lytton was a man to be reckoned with. A quick cruise through the Web reveals that, while his style may be painfully out of fashion, he could turn a phrase. The great unwashed and pursuit of the almighty dollar are his, and in his 1839 play Richelieu he created the pen is mightier than the sword.

Take a look at that famous dark and stormy sentence in full, the opening of his 1830 novel Paul Clifford:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

OK, the man didn’t know where to stop. But the thing about Bulwer-Lytton is that he knew how to stick a phrase in your mind so it stays. Madeleine l’Engle, Wikipedia reminds us, used “It was a dark and stormy night” to begin her wonderful, Newbery Medal-winning children’s adventure A Wrinkle in Time, which she wrote in 1962, a full 20 years before the Bulwer-Lytton Awards began. If it’s a good enough beginning for Meg and Calvin and Charles Wallace as they whisk through space and time, it’s good enough for us.

Still, when it comes to a good parody, what’s fairness got to do with it? Thank you, Lord Bulwer-Lytton, for providing the fodder. Let us close this chapter of the Art Scatter annals with these words from the winner of this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Vile Puns category, Greg Homer of Placerville, California:

Using her flint knife to gut the two amphibians, Kreega the Neanderthal woman created the first pair of open-toad sandals.