"The Toenails On The Other Hand" - "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead" at the Studio Theatre

What’s this play about? Hmmm. Well, that’s kind of a hard question. I’d say it’s an existentialist play. It’s about free will vs. determinism. If I had to describe it in faux-movie pitch terms, I’d say it’s Hamlet meets Waiting For Godot. It is also really, really funny, provided you’re an egghead. (Fortunately, I’m a bit of an egghead, and I saw the play with the two eggheads who raised me.) But if you must have a synopsis, here goes: Tom Stoppard’s premise is to take the events of Hamlet as interpreted by two minor characters and use that as a foundation for the exploration of themes of determinism vs. free will, epistemology, and literary structuralism. Our two protagonists hang about the castle of Elsinore, trying to figure out what is going on based solely on the information gleaned from the sparse scenes of Hamlet in which they appear.

I have a friend who used to work at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, and she is of the opinion that this is an extremely difficult play to perform correctly. While I’ve read the play, and seen the 1990 movie that introduced Tim Roth & Gary Oldman to America (and was filmed in Yugoslavia for some reason), this was the first time I’d actually seen it on stage. So while I don’t actually have any other productions to compare it to, I still concluded that my friend was totally right in her opinion. All plays are about language, obviously. But this one is having so much fun playing around with language, and it has such high-minded and abstract concepts at its core, that it is very hard to follow unless the spectator stays very focused throughout the performance. This is complicated further because there is so much dialogue crammed into the play, and it is coming at you so fast.

Fortunately, the two excellent actors who played the leads made it easy to stay focused. Despite the play’s running joke that no one, including the lead duo themselves, can remember which is Guildenstern and which is Rosencrantz, Raymond Bokhour (as Rosencrantz - I think) and Liam Craig (as Guildenstern?) create two distinct characters who complement each other by their differences. Bokhour’s Rosencrantz (or is it Guildenstern?) is ingenuous and curious, ready to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone who can help him figure out what’s going on. Meanwhile, Liam Craig, as Guildenstern (or perhaps Rosencrantz) is cynical, suspicious, and more than a bit angry at finding himself in such a bizarre and nonsensical spot. Both become increasingly visibly frustrated as the play continues and the answers they so seek fail to materialize. The pair is on stage for pretty much the whole time, so they’d better be sympathetic and interesting. Otherwise, time will crawl along like a slug in molasses. The acting, as usual for the Studio Theater, is consistently good. Drew Edelsheim also deserves praise as the Player King, who appears often, seems to know more than he lets on, and gets to deliver one of the plays choicest lines: “We’re actors. We’re the opposite of people.” (He doubly deserves praise since he had the unenviable task of replacing Floyd King, a true pillar of Washington, D.C.’s underappreciated theater community.)

I dug the set design. I’ve heard that not everyone did. I thought it was innovative, and more importantly, worked within the context of the play. When putting on a play that mainly involves two cats standing around having involved conversations about what’s going on, I think it makes perfect sense to have them in a setting which appears fairly bland and generic. Adding lots of trapdoors, hidden panels, and moving walls allows the actors to move about in unorthodox ways and also means the set can be opened up when necessary. (One thing that I particularly like about the Studio Theatre’s main space is that the seats sort of curve around the stage, which projects slightly into the center of the seats in the middle. This encourages more direct interaction between the actors and the audience.) There are very few props, and with the exception of a couple of chairs, no furniture appears on the set either. This puts extra emphasis on the actors, which is a good thing for a play as high-minded and focused on language as this one.

The lighting designer did a great job, too. Perhaps a lot of people don’t consciously notice the lighting at a theatre, but good lighting design can add to the effectiveness of the production by heightening emotion or adding nuance to a particular scene. Also, the lighting syncs up very well with the set in this production, which is not always the case.

I was not as thrilled by the costume design. A minimalist set will ad extra attention to the actors, and to their clothing. The costume design wasn’t bad. Most of the individual outfits work for the individuals wearing them. But they lack an overall thematic coherence. For the most part, they go very well with the actors wearing them, but not that well with each other.

The Studio Theatre billed this as a “40th anniversary” production, as the play premiered at the Old Vic in 1967 (when Tom Stoppard was not yet thirty). Despite that, it’s not dated at all, and it’s easy to see why it’s performed so often. It’s also easy to see how hard it is to do right. Apparently, I’m not the only person who enjoyed it. Bob Mondelo, of NPR and WETA’s Out And About, said this is the first production he's seen that equals the one he saw on Broadway in 1967. The reviewer for Washingtonian magazine gave it four stars. Terry Teachout, the Wall Street Journal’s theater critic said it was “the best Rosencrantz & Guildenstern [he’s] seen on stage.” Wow.

I can’t make that claim, as it’s also the only “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern” I’ve seen on stage. But I can say this: it reminded me why I love live theatre. There’s a magic moment right at the beginning, when the lights go down, and you know you’re going to see something unique. No two performances are ever exactly the same. But even if you catch this particular production on an off-night, I bet you’re still going to love it.

Theatre Review: "Dead Man's Cell Phone" at Wooly Mammoth

Last week I had the pleasure of enjoying an evening at the theatre. This was my first time at the Wooly Mammoth’s new spot on D Street in the burgeoning East End, which people have unfortunately taken to calling “Penn Quarter,” despite the fact that “The East End” is a much cooler name for a neighborhood. In case you’re not familiar with the Wooly Mammoth theatre company, it is “Washington’s most daring theatre company,” according to the New York Times. In d.c., if you like plays, and you want to check out the classics (Shakespeare, Ibsen, Shaw) you’d probably head for the Washington Shakespeare Company’s Lansburgh Theatre (which is less than a block from Wooly Mammoth’s space) or their old digs at the Folger Theatre on Capitol Hill. If you want something a little more left-field and wackier, you’d be best served strolling on over to the Wooly Mammoth, or perhaps the Studio Theatre.

Currently playing at the Mammoth is “Dead Man’s Cell Phone,” which has been extended twice. The play is a world premiere by a playwright named Sarah Ruhl. In addition to being really young to be a successful professional playwright (she’s 33), Ms. Ruhl is also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, so apparently she’s bad-ass. What I found particularly impressive is that she is great at writing funny. I cannot remember the last time I cracked up this much whilst watching a play. Writing something that is going to make people laugh out loud is exceedingly difficult, so those who are capable of it deserve mad props. (I suspect that writing funny plays may be slightly easier than writing funny novels, as the collaborative nature of the theatre might provide the playwright with talented actors to phrase the funny parts the right way.)

While the play was indeed most amusing, I didn’t feel it was quite as successful at getting across its point. (And I’m not entirely sure what that point was – and I should at least have a germ of an idea of what the point was.) It seemed like there was supposed to be some subtext about technology driving people apart rather than bringing them closer together. But if the playwright was trying to impress that upon the audience, she failed to impress it upon me. In fact, technology, in this case the cell phone of the title, brings the main character into people’s lives. She doesn’t exactly behave the best way once she’s there, but the phone itself serves as her entrée.

The set design was sparse and minimalist (one can imagine that those two adjectives would go hand in hand), which I can totally dig, especially if it is also really creative, as it was here. The acting was uniformly excellent. The main character, Jean, is rather mousy and meek, but Polly Noonan injects the character with enough dynamism to make her compelling and likeable. Sarah Marshall gets many of the best lines as the eponymous dead man’s mother, and she spews them out with angry enthusiasm but never crosses the line into caricature. But there is one thespian that particularly stands out. That would be Rick Foucheaux as Gordon Gottlieb, the cadaver of the title. He’s not on stage that much, yet his character guides everyone else’s actions. And in addition to the emotional climax of the play, he gets to take center stage alone for what I felt was the best part of the whole thing. The second act opens with a monologue/diatribe/oration by Gordon that goes on for several minutes. Rick Foucheaux barely moves; he’s sitting down the whole time. The writing, of course is very strong, but in this scene the actor radiates such magnetism and charisma that you sit there, transfixed, just watching some dude talk for five minutes. And it’s probably the best part of the whole play.

Movie Review: "Transformers"

My expectations for this film were low, and they were met. Actually, Transformers exceeded my expectations, such as they were. The action sequences were bad-ass. I expected that. There were lots of really cool explosions. The CGI was awesome, so the robots looked really good, as the film did generally. I was expecting that. I also expected some silly imagery in the visual scheme of the film. Stuff like pilots running in slow-motion towards waiting jets with a hazy sky and a setting sun in the background, followed by close-ups shot from below of the jets swooping in between two office buildings. This is usually interspersed with a besieged authority figure (in this case, an underwhelming Jon Voigt as the secretary of defense) declaiming inspirationally. Mitchell Amundsen, the director of photography, worked on The Island, MI:III, Pearl Harbor, Armageddon and Bad Boys II, so he knows exactly what this sort of movie is supposed to look like.

Another thing I was expecting was a really weak script, one that was derivative, devoid of inspiration or innovation, and shot through with bad dialogue and cliches. Check. This was established with an implausible conversation among some soldiers right at the start of the movie. Some of the stuff in here is really absurd: "the NSA’s recruiting right out of high school now," someone remarks before we first meet a "signals analyst" who happens to not only be blonde and hot but also has a thick Tasmanian accent for some reason. What? (Observant D.C. residents will notice that after she leaves the Pentagon she then hails a cab at M Street & Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, which takes her to a house that is clearly in Southern California.) The Men in Black are here rendered as "Sector 7," a super-secret government organization (sure) founded by Herbert Hoover (uh-huh) that guards ancient alien technology (why not?) hidden far beneath the bowels of the Hoover Dam (yeah, right) using it to reverse-engineer the microchip and airplanes (as if). Of course, rather than having all of this revealed a little bit at a time, it spews forth in a blast of exposition two-thirds of the way into the film. It takes a while to get going. And it's too long.

Seriously, I do not understand how screenplays this poor get made into movies! It is not that hard to write an action movie with soul, one that combines believable characters with white-knuckled excitement. It is not so difficult to craft an adrenaline-pumping thrill ride that has sincere, affecting emotion, rather than pseudo-macho posturing and love stories as shallow as a kiddie pool. We need not sacrifice all substance for style.

That said, they did get some pretty good actors for this film. Josh Duhamel acquits himself capably as an army captain, and Megan Fox is not only a serious vixen, she makes the love interest three-dimensional and likeable. Anthony Anderson is underused, and makes the most of the poor lines that stereotype his character as a nerd, a coward and a glutton. That character is also a Redskins fan, which is pretty cool. He wears a Portis jersey throughout the film, so at least they got that right.

It’s kind of weird, when you first think about it, that Shia LaBeouf (best know for the Disney tween sitcom Even Stevens) is cast as the lead in a movie that cost literally hundreds of millions of dollars. But someone asked me yesterday if it was appopriate for children, and I replied, "well, it was made for adolescent boys." When you consider it from that aspect it totally makes sense to have an 11th grade protagonist. And Shia "Ou est" LaBeouf is pretty much perfect for the role. He’s not one of the cool kids, but neither is he a complete dork. He’s endearing and confident. The teenage boys who come to see this film will find it very easy to identify with and cheer for him. And, admittedly, he does get some pretty choice lines. To be fair, the script does have some funny parts to it. But perhaps not quite as many as there are parts that are unintentionally funny.

Transformers reminded me, more than anything else, of Team America. This is not surprising, considering the homies from South Park were parodying the whole ouevre of Messrs. Bay and Bruckheimer (who was not involved with this movie, although apparently Steven Spielberg was - if so, he didn’t exert nearly enough artistic guidance). This is especially true in a scene where fancy fighter planes blow the living crap out of a villlage located in "Qatar - The Middle East" with little regard for the locals or the American soldiers hanging about. Aside from the robots, anything you see in Transformers you probably saw in Pearl Harbor, Armageddon, The Rock, or Bad Boys. Perhaps I’m judging this film and those who made it too harshly. Movies like this are like twinkies, they’re filling but there’s no nutritional value, and that’s sort of the point. They’re called "popcorn movies" for a reason. Sometimes all you want is some slick photography, some hot babes, and some ass-kicking action sequences. I’m sorry if I sound like a crank. But this is the kind of action movie that gives action movies a bad name. There are filmmakers out there (James Cameron and Tony Scott come to mind) who prove it’s possible to make awesome action movies that have a heart. So I don’t really see the point in making one like this when you could make one like that.

Just Reading Some Early 20th Century German Expressionist Plays

Recently I’ve been reading some of the oeuvre of Carl Sternheim, a German playwright of the early 19th century. It’s pretty good stuff, but you have to know a bit about Expressionism to really get the plays. I’m referring specifically to Expressionism in a literary sense. And what is Expressionism? If we define it as an intentional distortion or magnification of reality, then Sternheim’s dialogue can be approached from the right perspective.

Because in marked contrast to the realism of his contemporary Henrik Ibsen, Sternheim makes no effort whatsoever to write realistic dialogue. (I’ll go ahead and add here that I am an enormous fan of Ibsen and I think his greatest gift as a playwright was his ability to write dialogue that actually sounds like something someone would actually say. Quentin Tarantino is also quite good at this.) In fact, the unrealistic nature of the speech in his plays is kind of the point. Much like Raven-Symoné’s execrable sitcom, the characters in Sternheim’s plays converse in words and phrases that could not sound less like real speech. Which is, of course, his intent. By using unrealistic and distorted speech, he can exaggerate the negative traits of his characters and thus call more attention to them. Since his best plays are satires of German middle-class social mores, exaggeration and Expressionist dialogue was probably the best call in that context.

However, there is one big problem with Sternheim’s approach. In the introduction to the collection of plays I’ve been reading, the translator laments that the plays are not performed more often. But there’s a reason these plays aren’t performed very often: they’re not terribly accessible. According to the online Literary Encyclopedia: “the stylized language in which he wrote made considerable demands on his audience.” No shit. The inaccessibility I refer to manifests itself in two ways: first, if you’re not familiar with Expressionist writing, you might say to yourself, “What the hell is going on here? Nobody actually talks like that.” Secondly, and perhaps more significant, is the subjects he chose for his plays. Sternheim’s best work is satirical, but more specifically he is satirizing the developing bourgeoisie in early 20th century Germany. If you don’t know anything about the social history of pre-war Wilhelmine Germany, then the whole point of his plays is going to go totally over your head. His tales are so closely tied to a specific time and place that it becomes very difficult to fully appreciate them outside of that context.

Let me offer William Shakespeare as a counterpoint. Shakespeare’s work was undoubtedly influenced by the political and social atmosphere of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Knowledge of that atmosphere will absolutely aid in the appreciation of his work. But it’s certainly not necessary. This is because Shakespeare concerned himself with themes and subjects that are resonant in any culture at any time. There is a reason his plays are performed as often as they are and in so many different languages (including the original Klingon). While countless high school students may bemoan the density of his language, it’s important to remember that Shakespeare’s plays are about things like love, honor, duty, and the bounds of friendship and loyalty. That’s considerably more timeless than tales of the German middle class of the early 20th century.

All artists, and writers especially I believe, have to ask themselves how accessible they want their work to be. If you want to write a 1,200 page book that meticulously details Lyndon Johnson’s 10-year senatorial career, it's not realistic to expect it to be a bestseller. Likewise, if you want to focus your themes on a really specific time and place, perhaps you shouldn’t expect your work to age too well. I don’t mean to take anything away from Carl Sternheim. I think he was an excellent playwright and I think his plays accurately and effectively convey the messages he was trying to get across. But ultimately, I think these plays might work better as historical documents than they do as pure stories.

They All Matter

The D.C. public school system has been in the news more often of late due to Mayor Adrian Fenty’s recent “takeover” and ousting of Superintendent Clifford Janey. While I certainly am no fan of Mayor Fenty, I can’t predict whether or not his efforts will improve the quality of education received by children in the District. I might, however, ask those optimistic about the mayor’s plans to name a single urban school district in America that provides a quality education. Why is this? Why can’t America’s cities provide such a basic need to its youngest citizens?

According to a series of articles in the Washington Post last week, Philadelphia provides a quality education. Or at least, the quality has improved markedly over the last several years. (Click here for the full article.) One thing you will learn from reading the whole thing (and it is pretty long) is that this cost a lot of money. And that many of the gains accomplished by Philadelphia’s visionary superintendent are in danger of being wiped away because politicians won’t pony up more ducats. In a way, it is not surprising that education is such a low spending priority for governments: the people the money is spent on can’t vote. You can cut teacher’s salaries, cut arts & music programs, and it’s not like the children whose schools are damaged are going to vote you out of office. But try to cut medicare or social security, and you’ll have so many pissed-off voters that the AARP will be all up in your grill before you can say “Jiminy Christmas.”

But there is actually another point here that I’d like to make. I tutor at an elementary school in Alexandria, Virginia. More than half of the students there receive subsidized lunches, this despite the fact that in most cases both of their parents have at least one job. I was recently there for a “volunteer appreciation lunch.” It was nice, but it wasn’t really necessary; anyone who engages in that sort of thing to get recognition needs to reconsider his motives.

This spring I’ve been working with a fourth-grader and helping him with his reading skills. At the lunch, I got to talk to his teacher, who told me that the kid’s reading comprehension and speed has improved noticeably since he started working with me. It was immensely rewarding to hear this. The thing about tutoring is that it’s pretty much impossible to measure a quantifiable result. If you volunteer for Habitat For Humanity, at the end of the day you can say, “hey, there’s a house.” If you remove non-native plants from a nature preserve, you can say, “I bet those damn Japanese maples will think twice before they set up shop around here again.” You’ll have a tangible, material result. In reference to my tutee, the teacher also added “I know he can be a handful sometimes.” Yes, he can, and those kids are the ones who need help most. Because they are the easiest ones to give up on. It’s hard to give up on people who make it easy for you to help them. If you are one of those difficult kids, then the more people there are that give up on you, the easier it is to believe that you’re not valuable. If people keep treating you that way, eventually you’ll start to believe them.

The article in the Post details a senior named Reggie Mays. He grew up in an unstable family environment in an ugly, violent neighborhood. He got suspended several times as a freshman. But now he’s gone from a D student to a B student, and he’s planning on going to college and law school. What happened? He received “lots of academic and personal support” and “prominent Philadelphia lawyers mentored him.” In other words, people told him he was important. People told him he matters. That his feelings, and his goals, and his dreams, are just as valid as some kid who grew up in the suburbs and had his life handed to him on a silver platter. Reggie himself added that without the guidance, “I’d be locked up or doing something illegal…I wouldn’t have anything to strive for to keep me going.”

Fun Facts About the Isle of Man

Sometimes when people ask me about my ethnic background, just to mess with them I’ll say, “I’m one-sixteenth Manx.” My great-great-grandfather Robert Garrett left the Isle sometime in the 19th century and immigrated to Florida. The main reason I say this is to be willfully obscure. Most people have never heard of the Isle of Man and have no idea that people or things from there are called Manx.

In case you didn’t know, the Isle of Man is a small island located in the Irish Sea. It is nearly equidistant from Ireland, Scotland and Great Britain. It is approximately 35 miles long and between 8 and 15 miles wide. Here are some more fun facts about the Isle:

• The Isle of Man has the oldest parliament in continuous existence in the world. It is called the Tynwald and it has been meeting regularly since 979. The Isle of Man is not part of the United Kingdom or the European Union, nor is it part of the Commonwealth. Legally, the island is a crown dependency, as are the Channel Islands. The head of state of the Isle of Man is HM Queen Elizabeth II, represented by a lieutenant-governor. The UK takes care of defense and represents the Isle in international forums, but the Tynwald has almost total control over domestic matters. Nonetheless, the Manx are British citizens.
• The eldest three of the Brothers Gibb (Barry and twins Robin and Maurice) were born on the Isle of Man. Andy Gibb was born in Manchester shortly before the family immigrated to Australia. (I might as well take this opportunity to point out once again that the BeeGees totally don’t get the respect they deserve. They had top ten hits in the UK and the US in the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties. Who does that? Pop music is so fickle that anyone who can pull that off deserves some cred. They also basically introduced disco to a mass audience more or less by themselves. Some people might not necessarily think that’s a good thing, but those people are wrong.)
• There are two varieties of the famous Manx cat: the “rumpy,” which has no tail at all, and the “stumpy,” which has a small vestigial tail.
• The Manx Gaelic language is a Goidelic Celtic language, grouped with Irish and Scottish Gaelic, as opposed to the Brythonic Celtic languages, such as Welsh, Cornish and Breton. Together the Brythonic & Goidelic language families comprise the Insular Celtic Languages. Ned Maddrell, the last native Manx speaker, died in 1974. Since then, however, there has been an upsurge in interest and many bilingual primary schools exist on the island. Manx Gaelic is recognized as an autochthonous regional language by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
• The symbol of the Isle is the triskelion, which consists of three bent human legs. In the case of the Isle of Man, the legs are armored, and the triskelion can be found on the Manx flag as well as the coat of arms depicted above. The Manx flag used to fly in front of “The Crackhouse” on 13th Street North in Arlington. The Isle’s Latin motto references the triskelion: Quocunque Jeceris Stabit, which translates as “whichever way you throw it, it will stand.”

What's Dalton reading this week?

Well, last week I finished Manhunt for my book club. The name of our book club is B.I.B.L.E. Study, which stands for Brotherhood of Intense Book-Loving Enthusiasts. One neat thing about being in a book club is you get to read books that you wouldn’t have decided to read on your own initiative. Like Manhunt. I enjoyed this book, but it’s not the kind of thing I think I would have read otherwise. It’s too much information about too small a topic. It covers a period of just 12 days in a very small geographic location. I now have way more information than I could ever possibly need concerning the chase for John Wilkes Booth following Lincoln’s assassination.

Generally, I like to alternate fiction and non-fiction (I totally don’t get those people who say they don’t like reading fiction). And after 400 pages about the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination, I wanted a quick, easy read. So I started up Le Mort de Napoleon by Simon Leys. It’s only about 120 pages and I finished it in about 24 hours. So it definitely qualified as a quick, easy read.

Then I switched back to non-fiction, and now I’m about halfway through Soccer In Sun & Shadow (originally El Futbol A Sol Y Sombra) by Eduardo Galeano. The author is a well-known Uruguayan intellectual. And for some reason, I love it when intellectuals write about sports. (Except perhaps when George Will writes about baseball; there’s far too much of that excessively nostalgic golden-days-of-summer-type crap.) It annoys me intensely when intellectuals denigrate sports and act as if it's beneath them. Interestingly, Galeano actually addresses this early on in the book. Conservative intellectuals, he argues, think of sport as something appropriate for the masses, but not worthy of those who have an ability (and the time, and the money) for the genteel pursuits of the mind. And left-wing intellectuals, he posits, feel that sport “saps revolutionary fervor,” or something like that. “Bread and circuses,” sans bread. It’s true that dictators frequently turn the patriotic spirit aroused by sporting events to their own devices. Antonio Salazar even had some term for this, like “patria e futebol” or something. Unlike most tyrants, he actually admitted he was using nationalism and sport to keep the masses distracted.