Category Archives: General

Bob Hicks, General, Journalism, Music

Mr. Scatter becomes a lobbyist (with a laptop)

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As the old joke goes, tonight’s the night!

This is not Mr. Scatter. Not by a long shot. It's Storm Large.
Art Scatter regulars might have noted that it’s been Philip Glass Week in Portland, and tonight at Keller Auditorium his 1993 opera Orphee opens in its West Coast premiere, performed by Portland Opera. Reports are promising: Glass liked the dress rehearsal so much that he whipped up a deal to have all four performances recorded and turned into a CD for Orange Mountain Music. It’ll be this opera’s first full recording.

And sitting in the lobby, along with his laptop and four other local members of the blogospheric chattering class, will be Mr. Scatter, there to file a continuing stream of instant analysis, much like a pontificating television face on a national election night:

“Orpheus has been caught on camera looking over his shoulder, and that could spell serious trouble for Eurydice’s chances in the tensely fought Afterlife race. At stake is control of a sprawling district that runs from the far shores of the River Styx to the lush meadows on the surface end of the cave opening. We’ll update you as we learn more. But this could be bye-bye to a once-promising career. Over to you, Storm.”

Here are my owlish teammates, and where you can follow their instamusings:

Storm Large. The rock diva and musical-theater star of Cabaret and Crazy Enough will post at www.stormlarge.com. You’ll recognize her. She’s the tall good-looking one, and her posts will probably be littered with Words Not Ordinarily Associated With Art Scatter.

Byron Beck. If Portland’s a town, Byron’s the man about it. He knows just about everybody, and just about everything, and dishes it out when and where the mood strikes. www.byronbeck.com

Jim Withington. The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art has been one of Glass Week’s sponsors (it has a long relationship with Glass) and Jim will be blogging on PICA’s Urban Honking.

Cynthia Fuhrman. Portland Center Stage’s resident marketing genius is very smart and very funny and no doubt will be a lot of fun to read. She’ll be posting on the PCS blog. Rumor has it that while the other bloggers will be sipping beer as they type feverishly away, la Fuhrman will be pampered with cocktails, no doubt with colorful little paper umbrellas to pretty them up. It’s rigged. Florida election here, folks.

Marc Acito. BONUS PICK. The witty Portland novelist (How I Paid for College; Attack of the Theatre People) and playwright (Holidazed) actually has a role in the opera. But when he’s backstage he’ll be blogging on the show at The Gospel According to Marc. Amazing exploit!

That’s all, folks. Until tonight. News at … oh, 6:30, 7, 7:15, 8, 8:30 ….

——————————————————————————

PHOTO: This is not Mr. Scatter. Not by a long shot. It’s Storm Large. Credit: Laura Domela

Bob Hicks, Film, General, Music

Movies into operas: the great Cocteau/Glass experiment

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“I’ve never been very interested in film,” Philip Glass said one morning this week at a long table set up in a rehearsal hall in the Portland Opera studios. “I don’t go to movies a lot.”

Jean Cocteau in his 20s. Wikimedia Commons

An odd confession from Glass, the 72-year-old composer who was in town for several days in conjunction with Friday night’s opening of the West Coast premiere of his 1993 opera Orphee at Portland Opera.

Orphee is, after all, one of a trilogy of operas that Glass has written based on the transcendent movies of Jean Cocteau (the others are La Belle et la Bete and Les Enfants Terribles).

And in a time when classical performers (Yo Yo Ma, Luciano Pavarotti, Andrea Bocelli) achieve celebrity but composers ordinarily don’t, Glass has become famous partly because of his forays into film, beginning with the hallucinatory Koyaanisqatsi in 1982.

Original poster for "La Belle et la Bete." Wikimedia Commons

Still, what he said made sense, especially when you consider the ways that he’s interacted with film — he’s hardly Hollywood-mainstreamed it — and the sentence he added immediately after his confession: “And yet film is an important aspect of the collaborative arts.”

Collaboration, he said, is one of the great attractions of the film world: It’s filled with extremely talented artists working toward a goal. The technology is amazing. And of course, compared to any of the performing arts, movies are seen: “The reach of film is extraordinary.”

How extraordinary? Glass recalled a story about the day Godfrey Reggio, the director of Koyaanisqatsi, called to tell him their movie was going to be shown on PBS:

Philip Glass in Florence, 1993. Pasquale Salerno/Wikimedia Commons

“I said, ‘What’s that mean?’

“He said, ‘It means 6 million people will see it that night.’

“I practically fainted. That is not a number that comes into my work very often.”

As it turns out, Reggio’s guess of 6 million viewers was off the mark. Twenty million tuned in.

And that’s how a composer becomes famous, minimalism or maximalism or any other ism aside. Who outside of the pop world is even better-known than Glass as a composer? John Williams, composer for the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Superman and first three Harry Potter movies.

So. The movies, yes. Glass noted that he did a little work on film crews to pick up extra money when he was a young man living in Paris, and even acted — pretty badly, he said wryly — in a few bit parts.

But he noticed something about film: “It was not an interpretive art form, it was a definitive art form.”

By that he meant, once a film is finished it’s frozen. That’s its form forever and ever, world without end, amen, amen. You can remake with new stars, but then it’s a new work. You can even do virtual scene-for-scene homages like Werner Herzog’s ravishing remake of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu or Gus Van Sant’s frame-for-frame re-do of Psycho, which had all of Hollywood scratching its collective head. But those, too, become their own discrete objects.

A play or a symphony or an opera, on the other hand, is an elusive, transformational thing, taking on new shapes and layers of meaning with each successive performance: The idea of Carmen today, after thousands of performances, is somehow different from anything Bizet imagined, Glass suggested.

“And then,” he said, “it occurred to me that maybe I could look at film in a different way.”

Continue reading Movies into operas: the great Cocteau/Glass experiment →

Bob Hicks, General, Journalism

Original Scatterer Barry Johnson takes a flying leap

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… into the next great adventure of his life.

Barry, who had the idea of Art Scatter in the first place and was the doctor on duty who slapped it on the bottom in the delivery room and sent it off squawking into the world, has told his many friends and followers he’s leaving The Oregonian as of Dec. 18.

Barry JohnsonHe made the announcement today on his Portland Arts Watch blog, where for the past year or so he’s, well, kept watch on the arts in Portland. Lots of terrific ideas and elegant writing have spun out of PAW in its print and online versions.

Truth is, though, Barry’s been doing this sort of thing for the past quarter-century at the O, where he and I worked together pretty much all that time until I left two years ago. There are still a few editors there who can’t tell us apart. The biggest difference: Barry did a better job of keeping his cool when bureaucratic insanity struck.

Sometimes he was my editor, sometimes I was his editor, sometimes he rolled up his sleeves and cooked up a big pot of Kentucky burgoo. Always we were friends and colleagues, talking things over, parsing the paper and the arts scene, coming up with plots to Save the Journalism Business that never got out of the batter’s box, much less to first base.

Barry wrote — continues to write — about art, theater, dance, architecture, planning, music, books and other things with wit and insight. Art Scatter readers have seen plenty of evidence of that in his many posts here: Just click his name under “categories” at right and you’ll get a sense of the breadth and insights of his vision.

This is a big loss for The Oregonian, which like most newspapers continues to shrink precipitously. A lot of gloating’s going on about that in a lot of corners of the blogosphere, but in fact it’s an American tragedy. Without the good, hard, basic reporting that newspapers for all their flaws have done better than anyone else, this fragile experiment called the American Democracy stands a much lesser chance of thriving or surviving. And without the newspapers, where will all the blogospheric pontificators — me included — get our raw material?

Barry’s departure is also a big loss, at least temporarily, for Portland’s arts scene. But this is no retirement. It’s a recalibration. Barry has ideas — plenty of ’em — and we’ll let him spin them out himself when he’s good and ready. Who knows? Maybe he’ll even post something on Art Scatter!

Welcome to the outside world, Barry. The water’s fine.

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

OBT dancers stage a little ‘Uprising’: Catch it if you can

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Martha Ullman West, Art Scatter’s esteemed global correspondent for the terpsichorean arts, files this report from last night’s action in the balletic trenches of Mississippi — that is, North Mississippi Street in Portland. Sounds like a good place to move your feet tonight or tomorrow:

Candace BouchardLast night at Mississippi Studios, where six of Oregon Ballet Theatre’s dancers were performing the first of three nights of a sweet little show that company soloist Candace Bouchard whipped up in a couple of weeks, I couldn’t help thinking about George Balanchine.

Not as choreographer, although Bouchard, who was choreographing for the first time, produced some more than adquate steps to be performed on an extremely small platform.

Lucas ThreefootRather, because history is to some degree repeating itself.

After the 1917 Bolshevik revolution Balanchine and his mates, including his first wife, Tamara Geva, danced in after-hours nightclubs in Petrograd in exchange for a pound of sugar or a loaf of bread.

Food shortages were rampant, the currency was in flux, and there was nothing to buy if you had any money in the first place.

Ansa DeguchiOBT’s dancers are not starving, and they’re not coping with food shortages caused by a revolution, although they are calling a projected series of performances in nontraditional spaces Uprising. This program, which repeats tonight and tomorrow, is the first. But Bouchard, soloists Stephen Houser and Ansa Deguchi, and company artists Leta Biasucci, Olga Krochik and Lucas Threefoot have been off-contract at OBT since the Emeralds season-opener, and they are definitely dancing to put food on their tables.

Leta BiasucciAnd dancing very well, to a large degree because they were dancing to live music, the often infectious beat produced by the indie folk band Horse Feathers.

In the show’s first half they were clearly having a very good time, whipping off some pirouettes, rising to the occasion of a very small stage (platform, really, but at least it was wood and they weren’t dancing on cement) with, in Threefoot’s case, some jetes that came close to being grand.

Steven HouserBouchard, whose goal was to make classical ballet user-friendly, did not patronize her audience. Incorporated into the choreography were difficult fifth positions and some complicated lifts.

The second half dragged a bit, in part because of the level tone of the music, although Bouchard managed to get all six dancers onto the stage at once in a perfectly viable pattern of movement to end a show that was charming and thoughtfully conceived, and that got a well-deserved rousing ovation from an audience in which I recognized very few faces.

Olga KrochikIt’s a generous performance, danced with the same heart these dancers put into their OBT work, and the close quarters of Mississippi Studios give even seasoned ballet-goers a fresh perspective on the dancers’ talent.  Company dancer Grace Shibley was represented by some simple costumes, incidentally, in which the dancers could move well, although I could have done without the spangles on Houser’s vest.

Uprising (no connection to Hofesh Schechter’s piece of the same name) will be repeated tonight and tomorrow night (Wednesday and Thursday) at 8 p.m. at Mississippi Studios, 3939 N. Mississippi St. Catch it if you can.

PHOTOS, from top: Candace Bouchard, Lucas Threefoot, Ansa Deguchi, Leta Biasucci, Stephen Houser, Olga Krochik. Courtesy OBT.

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Bringing it all back home: Steven Grafe at Maryhill

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Queen Marie of Romania dedicating the still unfinished Maryhill Museum of Art in a 1926 ceremony.

Queen Marie of Romania dedicating the still unfinished Maryhill Museum in 1926.

Eventually the world seems to show up on the doorstep of the Maryhill Museum of Art.

Which is a funny place for the world to show up, in this isolated concrete mansion overlooking the Columbia River Gorge in the semi-desert landscape of Klickitat County, Washington.

But look at the evidence. Marie, the bohemian queen of Romania, and Loie Fuller, the American dancer who was the toast of European arts circles around the turn of the twentieth century, were vital figures in the founding of the museum.

One of the museum’s signature collections is the ornate scenes of Theatre de la Mode, the post-World War II tableaux of design that helped get the French high-fashion industry back in gear and that features fantasies by, among others, the incomparable Jean Cocteau. Another important collection is the museum’s icon paintings, many from eastern Europe and Russia. It’s a long story, and worth hearing, but not right now.

Maryhill with spring lupine. Photo: Nyland WilkinsPartly because of weather and isolation, Maryhill is a seasonal museum, and it takes its annual break Nov. 15 before starting up again in spring, on the ides of March. That gives you a couple of weeks to make the drive out the Gorge: It’s a little more than 100 miles east of Portland, about the same distance as Eugene, but a much more interesting drive.

When Lee Musgrave arrived as curator of art from Los Angeles 14 years ago he brought a vision for contemporary art to amplify and complement the museum’s historic collections, which ranged from outright curios to engaging oddities such as a collection of global chess sets to some very good Rodins. Works by the likes of Red Grooms, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons started popping up on the museum walls, plus pieces by a whole lot of contemporary Pacific Northwest artists.

Musgrave retired this summer, and his replacement, Steven L. Grafe, is just getting his feet dry. I’d say “wet,” except it doesn’t rain much at the Maryhill end of the Gorge, and Grafe already knows a lot of the territory.

Grafe arrives at Maryhill after almost six years at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, where he was curator of American Indian art. It was a good stop for a specialist in Native American art and culture. But Maryhill is very close to home.

Steven Grafe, Maryhill's new curator

Grafe earned his masters and doctoral degrees in art history from the University of New Mexico, where his doctoral dissertation was on pre-1880 beadwork from the southern Columbia River Plateau — an area of deep interest, not coincidentally, in the Maryhill collection. And he put in a couple of years as chief curator of the Southwest Museum of the American Indian in Los Angeles, in addition to curatorial stops at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado and Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina.

He grew up in Salem, got his bachelor’s degree in studio art at Oregon State University, and has deep Northwest roots. His father’s family is from the Santiam area east of Salem, his mother’s family is from around Zigzag near Mt. Hood, and his wife went to Madison High School in Portland.

“She’s wanted to live at the east end of the Gorge since she was in high school,” Grafe said a couple of weeks ago when he was in town for a museum marketing meeting.

Continue reading Bringing it all back home: Steven Grafe at Maryhill →

Bob Hicks, Film, General, Music, Theater

Mr. Scatter steps out from behind his wall of Glass

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"Orpheus and Eurydice," Nicolas Poussin, 1650-51

ABOVE: “Orpheus and Eurydice,” Nicolas Poussin, 1650-51. Musee de Louvre, Paris. INSET: Philip Glass, composer of “Orphee.” Wikimedia Commons.

DON’T LOOK BACK. Bob Dylan gave that sage advice, possibly after considering the experiences of Lot’s wife, who turned into a pillar of salt after peeking back at the lost pleasures of Sodom, and of Orpheus, who doomed his wife to the Underworld by glancing over his shoulder as he was leading her back from the far side of the River Styx.

Well, Mr. Scatter’s made a couple of rash decisions lately, and he’s determined not to look back: Mrs. Scatter would be seriously ticked off if she turned into a salt lick in Hell. Onward and forward, eyes on the prize.

*************

RASH DECISION #1: I’ve agreed to be one of Portland Opera’s speed-bloggers on Friday night at the opening performance of Philip Glass‘s Orphee, a 1991 opera (premiered in 1993) based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and on Jean Cocteau‘s mysteriously poetic 1949 film adaptation, also called Orphee. Portland Opera‘s production will be the opera’s West Coast premiere.

Philip Glass/Wikimedia CommonsWhat this means is that, while you’re filing into Keller Auditorium before the show, I’ll be in the lobby seated at a table with several other bloggers, dashing out immediate impressions and committing them to cyberspace before I have time to repent and delete. I’ll have a backstage tour beforehand, and yes, I do get to see the show, after which I’ll dash back to my laptop and blog some more. This will be either the rough draft of history or outtakes of an unsifted mind, but I will Not. Look. Back.

To prepare, I’ll be on hand for Creativity and Collaboration: An Evening with Philip Glass, a Tuesday night gathering with the composer at the Portland Art Museum’s Kridell Auditorium, where Glass will talk about his music and career. The evening’s sponsored by the opera, the Northwest Film Center (which screened Cocteau’s Orphee last night) and the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, which has a long history with Glass. I’ll also get a chance to talk with Glass in a group interview Tuesday morning with a quartet of musically savvy Portland writers: Marty Hughley, Bob Kingston, James Bash and Brett Campbell. Glass’s trip to Portland will be pretty brief: By opening night of Orphee he’ll already be in Mexico City, performing some of his chamber music.

My fellow bloggers (sounds like the beginning of a political speech) on opening night will be actress/rock star Storm Large, man-about-town Byron Beck, arts marketer extraordinaire Cynthia Fuhrman, and someone (not sure who) from PICA. Our compensation, I’m told, will be “plenty of beer, nuts and cookies during intermission.”

I don’t have a Facebook account and I do not Twit, so here’s how it’ll work: I’ll start a Glass/Orphee post on Friday evening and write everything on it, hitting “publish” at regular intervals so the post gets longer as the night goes on. I’ll mark each new entry by its time, so you can get a sense of the “running” part of the running commentary.

And I will not look over my shoulder. Someone might be gaining on me.

*************

RASH DECISION #2: My friend Susan Jonsson sits on the board of Well Arts Institute, a group of theater and other artists who use writing and theater to, as they put it, “generate well-being, hope, and meaning for people in life-altering health situations.” Some very talented people are involved in this project, and the transformational possibilities of storytelling are near the core of what they do.

Well Arts Institute: hand to handSo when Susan asked whether I’d be a guest performer in Well Arts’ fall show, Voices of Our Elders, I said yes. The process is fascinating. Well Arts people do a 10-week workshop on memoir and creative writing with older people in care centers, listening to their stories, transcribing them, helping them shape them. The result is a show of monologues and a few dialogues from people looking back on their lives, on what was important, and contemplating what’s to come. It’s a fundamental form of personal history and an emotionally involving form of documentary theater.

Well Arts director Lorraine Bahr has assembled a good cast to present these stories: John Morrison, Ritah Parrish, Deirdre Atkinson, Steve Boss, Andrea White, Wendy Westerwelle and writer-performer Vince Falco. Each performance will also include a revolving lineup of guest readers: singer Shirley Nanette; actors Delight Lorenz, Luisa Sermol, Tom Gough and Susan Jonsson; onetime Broadway hoofer and legendary Portland director/teacher Jack Featheringill; Oregon Arts Commissioner and longtime theater supporter Julie Vigeland; and me.

I went to a rehearsal on Halloween afternoon at the Olympic Mills Commerce Center, a rehab development housing arts, food and design businesses at 107 S.E. Washington St., near the riverfront in the close-in East Side light-industrial district. This is where the show will be, and it’s an interesting new creative hub, worth visiting: We rehearsed in front of the Zimbabwe Artists Project, a space covered with gorgeous appliques and fabric paintings created by women of the Weya region of Zimbabwe.

Voices of Our Elders runs at 3 and 7 p.m. Saturdays, Nov. 7 and 14; and at 3 p.m. Sundays, Nov. 8 and 15.  I’ll do my reading — a piece I like quite a bit, called The Day I Went to Enlist — at the Nov. 14 matinee. Ticket and other info here.

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater, Visual Art

Scatter’s Halloween/Day of the Dead rotogravure edition

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Mr. Scatter anticipates an evening of answering doorbells and dispensing mass quantities of solidified high fructose corn syrup when the lights go down tonight. But there are other, possibly better, ways to celebrate Fright Night. A visual selection, not one of which has to do with overturning outhouses:

"Canta y no Llores" at Miracle Theatre. Photo: Russell Young

Miracle Theatre Group’s original Day of the Dead play “Canta y no Llores” continues through Nov. 15 at Teatro Milagro. Performed in Spanish and English, it looks back on the trials of the Great Depression. Ticket information here. Photo: Russell Young

Halloween at Disjecta: a night of the living dead

Disjecta, the big barn of an art and performance center just a swing of the ax from the Paul Bunyan statue in Kenton, has a Halloween two-fer. Kid-and-family-friendly stuff rules from noon to 4 on Saturday, with proceeds going to benefit Chief Joseph Elementary School. Then, starting at 9 in the evening and continuing ’til the graveyards empty, all inhibitions are off for a dance party of ghoulish proportions. Details here.

At Onda Gallery, a photograph by Paulina Hermosillo

In the Alberta Art District, Allan Oliver’s Onda Gallery specializes in the art and craft of Latin America. His Day of the Dead exhibit, continuing through Nov. 22, gathers work from nine Hispanic artists from Portland and the Willamette Valley, plus several others exploring similar ideas. The photo above is by Paulina Hermosillo. More information here.

Film, Food, General, Laura Grimes

‘Rocky Horror’ and the finer points of parenting

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The midnight movie of choice

My younger Large Smelly Boy plans birthday parties with the frightening precision of an engineer. Felix Unger? Meet Martha Stewart.

He begins months in advance, poring over magazines and listing all the activities he wants to do and all the recipes he wants to make. He redoes his lists. He designs his invitations. He insists it won’t rain and that he will be the one to splay open the pita. What he doesn’t do on a spreadsheet he makes up for with a timeline.

So it went that on a recent day when my calendar was crammed to the gills I found myself in Craft Store Hell tracking down adorable sparkly gold drawstring bags that he insisted meant everything to his idea of Party Perfection.

Before that, it was Household Goods Box Store Hell and a phone conversation that went something like this:

Me: They have piñatas, which means we don’t have to make one from papier mache, right? Do you want one?

Him: (Evasive mumble mumble.)

Wait ... aren't pinatas from Mexico? Stan Shebs/Wikimedia CommonsMe: They have a pirate, a fish, a parrot, a mermaid and … let’s see … a penguin. Which one do you want?

Him: (Evasive mumble mumble.)

Me: Do you want a piñata?

Me: This is your chance to get a piñata.

Me: You realize I’m not going to have time to do the papier mache, right?

Me: Do you want a penguin?

Me: I’m going to have to leave now.

Him: Wait! What do they have again?

Me: A pirate, a fish, a parrot, a mermaid and a penguin.

Him: What?

Me: A pirate, a fish, a parrot, a mermaid and a penguin.

I loaded a penguin in the back end of the Large Smelly Boymobile.

***

We bought three large bags of candy for the piñata and for Halloween night. I casually say bought, for picking out just the right packages required a frenzied fit of worry. I’m still sort of amazed we didn’t spend the night surrounded by Snickers Bars and Butterfingers.

They only come in a package deal ...Who knew small packages of Reese’s Pieces don’t come in individual bags? They can only be bought in a mixture of candy. We discovered this only after looking over Every. Single. Box. Of. Candy. In. The. Aisle. Candy mixtures that include distasteful candies apparently do not equal Party Perfection. This is a problem. This requires looking through all the mixture bags to find one with the most Reese’s Pieces and the fewest distasteful candies.

A few days before the party I came home and the penguin was sitting on the dining table and the large bags were nearly empty of candy. The LSB had pawed through the bags, picked out his favorite pieces and stuffed them all in the piñata. Only the Twizzlers and Milk Duds were left.

This had been a giant mound of candy I had envisioned would be doled out among many dozen trick-or-treaters who could rampage at will through the neighborhood stoked up on high-fructose corn syrup.

Instead, now most of it was in the butt of a penguin that would be whacked open, and it would be divvied up among six Large Smelly Tweenagers who would be confined to my living room for several hours.

Continue reading ‘Rocky Horror’ and the finer points of parenting →

Bob Hicks, Books, General, Theater

Whose play is it, anyway? On authors and interpreters

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Sartre's "No Exit" on the tilt, at Imago Theatre. Photo: Jerry Mouawad

Sartre’s “No Exit” on the tilt, at Imago Theatre. Photo: Jerry Mouawad

Who wrote that play?

I don’t mean, did the modestly talented actor Will Shakespeare really write all those great stageworks, or was he just a convenient front man for Edward de Vere or some other dandy of the ruling class?

I mean, is the production you just saw actually of the play the playwright intended, or did it get reinvented so much in production that it actually became something else?

Charles Deemer has been gnawing on that bone as it relates to Jerry Mouawad’s critically praised production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit at Imago Theatre — a production that places the actors on an intricately balanced platform that shifts with every movement, echoing the tensions and balances among the characters.

Portland playwright Deemer first raised his objections in an Oct. 18 post on his blog, The Writing Life II. “Imago usually does original work, and brilliantly so,” he wrote. “It does original work here — it’s just misnamed. This production needs a little truth in advertising. It’s not Sartre. It’s variations on themes developed by Sartre. It’s interesting. It’s engaging. It just isn’t what the playwright intended and, as a playwright, I think this needs to be said.”

Deemer then followed up with comments on Martha Ullman West’s recent Art Scatter post about No Exit and a clutch of dance performances. “Composers do variations on a theme all the time and own up to it,” he wrote. “… What if someone went to the theater wanting to see the wonderfully grim original? What’s wrong with grim and cynical anyway?”

Then he added:

Let’s say a director resurrects Christmas at the Juniper Tavern and puts all the actors on roller skates because s/he believes it depicts the fluidity of their life journeys. Would I be amused? Guess.

“Edward Albee once closed down a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf because George and Martha were presented as a gay couple.

“I once had the opportunity to ask Arthur Miller what he thought of an all-black version of Death of a Salesman that was done here with Tony Armstrong in the lead. ‘This is not the play I wrote,’ he told me.

“An advantage of the business of playwriting, as opposed to the business of screenwriting, is that playwrights retain ownership of their work. You legally can’t make changes without permission. Consequently I’ve long suspected that many, perhaps most, directors prefer their playwrights dead.”

Theater fans aren’t as volatile as opera fans, and it’s the rage these days in opera circles to boo directors and designers for undermining the music with conceptual approaches. Theater directors have been doing that for years (often, as Charles points out, with the work of dead playwrights who can’t fight back) and are lauded for it.

Interpretation is huge in the theater. But where does interpretation stop and something related but fundamentally different begin? Sometimes it seems like directors and designers use pre-existing works like especially fertile junkyards, discarding what they don’t want and mining them for treasure they can turn into something of their own. Novelists do that sort of thing all the time. But John Gardner didn’t call his book Beowulf. He called it Grendel.

What’s the essence of a play? Is it words? Is it tone? Is it the look of the thing? Or does it shift with every play, according to the play’s own core and elasticity? Putting the actors on roller skates for Christmas at the Juniper Tavern would absolutely change the play into something else. It MIGHT not irrevocably alter The Comedy of Errors.

Continue reading Whose play is it, anyway? On authors and interpreters →

General, Laura Grimes, Music

Schlepping high culture in the Large Smelly Boymobile

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Haiqiong Deng, zheng (but not Dungeons & Dragons) virtuoso

Haiqiong Deng, zheng (but not Dungeons & Dragons) virtuoso.

While my brain has been on sizzle in other realms of the arts world, apparently a blog has been going on in my own house. The entire world can check in on what my current first husband has been up to, but I’m afraid to say I’ve been rather ignorant about it.

I feel a little sheepish about writing, actually. Recently, Mr. Scatter wisely and broadly covered America’s current fascination with Chinese culture, Martha Ullman West (otherwise known as Art Scatter’s highest paid correspondent) boldly encompassed the week’s vast dance scene and … me? Well, let me tell you about Cheez-Its.

***

A week ago Monday, Haiqiong Deng took a break from her concert tour to fly in from Boston and perform in Third Angle‘s China Music Now concerts.

United Airlines Boieng 767-300/Wikimedia CommonsHaiqiong (hiCHONG) is a virtuoso on the zheng (chung), an ancient Chinese instrument similar to a zither. Hers has 21 strings, each with a bridge that can be moved. For weeks it had been the big mystery instrument to me. I knew it was big, but I didn’t know how big. I couldn’t wait to hear what it sounded like.

When the Third Angle staff (I’m the managing director) were figuring who could pick her up from the airport, we had two questions to consider: Who wasn’t playing in the symphony that night, and who has a vehicle long enough to fit a zheng in it.

Guess what? I won.

A prime example of low cultureI was thrilled. And then panic set in. Did I have enough time to clean up the Cheez-Its?

Once a week, Mr. Scatter picks up six Large Smelly Sixth-Graders and schleps them to Dungeons and Dragons. You’ve heard of Soccer Moms? He’s a D&D Dad.

The boys pile in and then immediately grab for snacks and juice boxes. They’re usually pretty good about stuffing the trash into the garbage sack, but it’s six boisterous boys and crumbs fly.

A few hours before I was to meet Haiqiong at the airport, I realized I wouldn’t have time to get the van cleaned, but I had a few minutes to give it a once-over and open up the cargo hold. It was dusk and getting hard to see, but as soon as I plunked the back seat down one brilliant-orange square Cheez-It practically glowed.

I picked it up, noticed the van’s bulging trash sack and then threw it all in a garbage can. I took note that I didn’t have a replacement bag, but I told myself I’d worry about it later.

***

The baggage claim area at Portland International Airport has a sign: “Many bags look alike, please check tags.”

Haiqiong and I were chatty nonstop. People were everywhere, lots of luggage was going around the conveyer belt and we were chatty chatty chatty. She stopped at one point and grabbed a big suitcase off the belt and then we went on chatting. I occasionally eyed the conveyer belt for what I knew must be a hard-to-miss large something. I was curious. This was an important piece of Third Angle’s program. We flew her in specially to play it. What did it look like?

The crowd got thinner and thinner. The luggage disappeared bit by bit. And we continued to chat.

Dungeons & Dragons miniatures: NOT high culture/Wikimedia CommonsAnd then after a while, I got this eerie feeling. I looked around. Nobody was there and not a single piece of luggage was going around the belt. Where was it?

As I tried to quell this horribly unsettled feeling, I looked everywhere and then looked some more. I finally noticed a corral of luggage in a restricted area in a far corner. I got closer. No weird overlarge bag. I got closer. Nothing but rising panic. I got closer. And finally … it came into view: Behind a mound of luggage one really long green bag sat by itself. Relief washed over me.

When I told a uniformed worker the green bag was ours, she pointed to a green suitcase and said, “You mean that one?”

“No,” I said, pointing, “THAT one.” She took one look at the bag — about one foot by two feet by six feet plus — and waved me around the barrier to get it myself.

The zheng was surprisingly light.

***

On Thursday morning I fired up the van, started to pull out of the driveway and then hit the brakes. I pulled back into the driveway, walked into the house and stood in front of Mr. Scatter. He looked up.

The Large Smelly Boymobile (or reasonable facsimile)“You need the van. It’s D&D day. And by the way, it doesn’t have any gas. Sorry. Gotta go.”

But early in the afternoon in the office it hit me. The van had a bunch of boxes in it that I needed, including one very important sign for the concert that night. Mr. Scatter probably wouldn’t be back from D&D in time for me to get it. And I had left the back seat folded down so that there weren’t enough seats for the Large Smelly D&D Boys.

I made a phone call. How to get the boxes? Mr. Scatter had just filled the van with gas, he had put the back seat up and would drop by the office. Gawd, I love this man.

***

This is not Haiqiong Deng's zheng. It's the one on Wikimedia Commons.“Can you schlep the zheng?” the Not-So-Mysterious Jane said after the concert late Friday night. “It needs to get back to the hotel.”

“Schlep the zheng? Sure.”

I walked to get the van, my heels clicking on the sidewalk. When I opened it and looked around I suddenly remembered I had never replaced the garbage sack and the whole D&D gang had been in the van the day before. The back seat was littered with empty Cheez-It bags and juice cartons. I quickly stuffed it all in the snack bag and stashed it under a console.

It would have to do. It was time to schlep the zheng and one world-class virtuoso.

— Laura Grimes