Tag: Playhouse on the Square

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Theater Theater Feature

Into the Woods, All the Way, and Free Man of Color.

CREDIT: Jack Yates

With Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim takes audiences on a musical, psycho-sexual romp through the pages of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. The Sweeney Todd composer’s take on bedtime stories like Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella is less like an animated Disney musical than Hitchcock shocker. The irony is that when Into the Woods became a film, Disney made it. While Theatre Memphis’ lush, color-saturated production is not a copy of the film, it has a post-Disney feel.

Theater Memphis’ Into the Woods is nothing short of lovely, with lush storybook designs by Jack Yates complemented by Jeremy Allen Fisher’s even lusher lighting. Voices are strong, the orchestra sounds fantastic, and the acting is solid.

Renee Davis Brame may be the best wicked witch Memphis has seen to date, which is no small compliment considering how frequently the show is produced. Imagine Bette Davis eating Bernadette Peters to absorb her superpowers. She shares the stage with a strong ensemble that includes Lee Gilliland and Lynden Lewis as the Baker and his wife, and Cody Rutledge as a dimwitted giant-killer named Jack.

Jack Yates

Old fairy tales get a little freaky in Into the Woods.

Into the Woods is relentlessly modern, putting it at odds with Theatre Memphis’ production,which is only intermittently so. The things that make the show so sumptuous dull the musical’s sharpest edges and un-sex it. What’s left remains gorgeous and exuberantly performed.

Into the Woods at Theatre Memphis through April 3rd

All the Way is an overstuffed sausage-grinding play about President Lyndon Johnson’s first 11 months in the White House. It begins with Kennedy’s assassination and ends with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill and LBJ’s election.

George Dudley is always a pleasure to watch on stage, and his LBJ is no exception. Curtis C. Jackson and John Maness stand out as NAACP leader Roy Wilkins and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. Greg Boller relishes his time inside the skin of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and Michael Detroit makes a sympathetic, if never entirely convincing, Hubert Humphrey. The women of the ’60s are finely represented by Claire Kolheim, Irene Crist, and Kim Sanders. Unfortunately, this enormously scaled show requires more than acting.

All the Way should make us see that soldiers are blown up in boardrooms not on battlefields, and how even progressive politics can play out like a slow-motion lynching. It should make us flinch and look away often. It never does, but it’s an election year, which may put audiences in the mood for a three-hour reminder of the days when even an oil-funded politician as crude and bullying as Donald Trump could dream of a “more perfect union” and get elected.

All the Way at Playhouse on the Square through March 26th

Charles Smith’s Free Man of Color is a melodrama more relevant than well-told. It’s the story of a slave with uncommonly kind masters who, as a newly freed man, is given a chance to attend college. It’s also a story of 19th-century liberalism, and a man of learning who staked his reputation on the progressive belief that, with the proper education and rigorous training, exceptional Christian males of African descent might one day go back to Africa, conquer other brown people, and rule over them as God intended.

Although Free Man of Color is inspired by the true story of John Newton Templeton, who attended university in Ohio, Smith’s play is essentially a work of historical fiction. That doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Templeton, played with boundless decency by Bertram Williams, is invited to live with university president Robert Wilson, who treats his precocious student like a son when he’s not treating him like the Elephant Man. Wilson’s wife, played with chest-thumping authority by Kilby Yarbrough, Jane is a period-perfect hysteric, forever on the verge of going all “Yellow Wallpaper” in the absence of agency and purpose. She creates more context by voicing her concerns for Native Americans who are hunted like coyotes.

Michael Ewing is ramrod straight as Wilson, a self-enamored political animal with a gift for otherizing.

Free Man of Color wants more dynamic treatment but still succeeds in leaving audiences with plenty of food for thought.

Free Man of Color at the Hattiloo Theatre through April 3rd

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Intermission Impossible Theater

“All the Way” Comes Up Short at Playhouse on the Square

All the Way isn’t nearly as straightforward as it seems. It’s not a piece of naturalistic theater you can just stage. It’s not a musical either, but with grand themes, leitmotifs  of venality and an orchestra-sized cast, this overstuffed sausage-grinder about Lyndon Johnson’s first 11-months in the White House needs to be conducted like a tense modern symphony full of explosive tragedy and punctuated by brassy squawks, and soaring metaphoric strings. If careful attention isn’t paid to the show’s desperate melodies, and ever-shifting time signatures All the Way turns bloodless, like Disney World’s Hall of Presidents without the Morgan Freeman gravitas. Playhouse on the Square has transformed the show into a fashion parade of gorgeous vintage suits, and unconvincing wigs on a pink (marbled?) set that looks for all the world like it was wrapped in prosciutto. It’s a remarkable showcase of extraordinary talent grinding its wheels in a low-stakes historical pageant. When actors as sharp as Delvyn Brown and George Dudley can’t make historically large characters like Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson interesting, there’s something powerfully wrong with the mix.

I’m a fan of director Stephen Hancock, but have noted occasions where concept muddled clarity. The opposite is true this time around. Kennedy’s assassination can’t be treated like melancholy Camelot nostalgia. All the Way may open with a funeral march, but it needs to be bathed in horror and bubbling over with chaos that threatens to grow worse as the play progresses. The Gulf of Tonkin incident isn’t an aside, it’s an explosion. Every provision cut from the 1964 Civil Rights bill in order to get some version of the legislation passed before the election has to bleed real blood and stink of the strangest fruit.

George Dudley is a pleasure to watch. He’s whip-smart, and even when he’s badly used the man’s a damn powerhouse. But everything is different this time around. He’s not surefooted like he usually is. Like so many of the actors in All the Way, Dudley seems unfocused, and not entirely in control of his lines. Still, you can’t act height and vertical advantages aside, he’s still the only actor in Memphis I can imagine capturing Johnson’s crude and conflicted brand of Texas idealism. And when he’s on, he’s on fire.

‘All the Way’ Comes Up Short at Playhouse on the Square

For all of its shortcomings, All the Way is something of a landmark. I can’t recall when I’ve seen such a gifted assemblage of swinging D plopped down on a single stage. With a handful of exceptions, every noteworthy Memphis actor has been called on to do his patriotic duty, and most have answered with gusto. Curtis C. Jackson and John Maness stand out as NAACP leader Roy Wilkins and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. Greg Boller relishes his time inside the skin of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Michael Detroit makes a sympathetic, if never entirely convincing, Hubert Humphrey and John Hemphill, Sam Weakly, and John Moore all do some fine character work. The women of the 60’are finely represented by Claire Kolheim, Irene Crist and Kim Sanders, but they are outnumbered, outgunned, out shouted, and pushed to the edge of the picture. It’s an historically appropriate dynamic, of course, but it could stand crisper translation to the stage.

Regretfully, Robert Schenkkan’s script requires more than quality acting.

All the Way is a fourth wall breaker. At the end of the show Dudley asks the audience if anybody was made to feel uncomfortable about by the things they witnessed as ideation becomes legislation, slaw, then law. He asks if we wanted to hide our faces or look away. That moment should be the key to reverse engineering an American “teaching play” that lists ever so slightly toward German Lehrstücke. It should make us want to look away. Not because of the sad black and white photographs projected on enormous screens behind the actors, but because when politicians “make the sausage” people are the meat in the grinder.

And it’s always the same people in the grinder.

There’s a frequently repeated line in All the Way about how Johnson is the most, “sympathetic president since Lincoln [to African Americans].” It’s ordinary sloganeering, of course, and an uncomfortable truth when considered from even a relatively short distance. It’s also a helpful line for considering how easily mimesis fails this kind of play where dynamic interpretation makes the difference between horrorshow and hagiography.

Face full of Johnson. Michael Detroit and George Dudley in All the Way at Playhouse on the Square.

All the Way isn’t bad, it’s worse than that. It’s boring. It’s a play that should make us see that soldiers are blown up in boardrooms not on battlefields, and how even progressive politics can play out like a slow motion lynching. It should make us flinch and look away often. But it never does.

It’s an election year, of course — in case anybody out there in Flyer-land hasn’t noticed. I suspect there’s a certain crowd caught up in the pageantry who are in the perfect mood for a three-hour reminder of the “good old” “bad old” days when even an oil-funded politician as crude and bullying as Donald Trump could dream of a “more perfect union” and get elected. Once, anyway.

Even political junkies and policy wonks may wish to spend cocktail hour chugging coffee. 

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Theater Theater Feature

Playhouse’s The Gospel at Colonus; New Moon’s The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later

CREDIT: By Chris Neely. Courtesy of Playhouse on the Square.

I remember being so intimidated by Gospel at Colonus‘ co-creator Lee Breuer. The relentlessly experimental director and playwright conducted his improv workshop like a drill sergeant, barking out the names of famous painters and sculptors from the sidelines. He’d say, “El Greco,” and we’d adjust our improvs to reflect the painter’s stylistic flourishes. Then, as the room transformed into a colorful passion play, he’d change the scene to something by Goya or Bosch or Diego Rivera. And we, his students, would all change our missions accordingly. This was never a test of our acting or improv skills, of course. It was a cultural literacy exam. And, although I didn’t fully understand it at the time, Breuer wasn’t especially interested in good acting, in the conventional sense. He was looking for translators.

Playhouse on the Square’s explosive production of The Gospel at Colonus may seem like a clever (if culturally sketchy) adaptation of the least-studied play from Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle. More accurately, it’s a translation aiming to reclaim the ecstatic nature of early theater and root out the meaning of things that are difficult to convey with words. Using a range of classic gospel styles and full-throated pulpit storytelling, The Gospel at Colonus invites audiences to participate in a blind king’s transformation from accursed sinner to acclaimed hero in his final hours. It’s easy to mistake this for a comparative exercise, mingling Greek and Christian myth. It is simpler than that. It’s the appropriation of a script we all know (church), in the service of a script we don’t know, because A) theater’s meaning has changed and B) Oedipus at Colonus is eclipsed by Oedipus Rex and Antigone. Literate congregants may also recognize allusions to Samuel Beckett’s Endgame folded into a stew that is vibrantly existential.

Playhouse director Tony Horne knows how to stage a no-holds-barred musical. To that end, The Gospel at Colonus is an exercise in both abandon and restraint. Dance is minimal but choreographer Emma Crystal uses it to generate and amplify tension in ways we don’t normally associate with Broadway. Kathy Haaga’s epically scaled set stops time, dropping the audience in the middle of a classical ruin, as ancient as it is postapocalyptic. It’s a space built for poetry and magic and with the help of music director Julian T. Jones, the cast delivers.

Curtis C. Jackson brings a James Brown-like pleading to old Oedipus. He’s answered in kind by his sister/daughters Antigone and Ismene, gorgeously sung by Claire Kolheim and Rainey Harris. The show belongs to the chorus and when it’s rocking, this chorus can absolutely take you to church.

Ten years after Matthew Shepard’s death, the Tectonic Theater Project — a New York-based theater company best known for creating a docudrama called The Laramie Project — returned to the scene of the crime to re-interview primary sources and take the town’s temperature. From those interviews they created The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later. This epilogue, currently on stage at the Evergreen Theatre, explores a phenomenon we’ve come to describe as “trutherism,” and Laramie’s need, as a community, to define itself as something other than the homophobic place where Shepard was killed.

In 2004 ABC’s 20/20 revisited the slaying. The show suggested that both the media and the court had gotten Shepard’s murder all wrong. Shepard’s death was recast as a robbery and drug binge gone bad. Ten Years Later plays out as a deliberate refutation of 20/20‘s shaky revisionism. It shows that nothing changes the reasoning behind the killer’s victim choice and brutality.

There’s not one standout performance in the New Moon Theatre Company’s Ten Years Later. It’s a show about teamwork. This creative team, assembled by director Gene Elliott, works. Both The Laramie Projects are exercises in minimalism in the spirit of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. This time, the story moves beyond Shepard and his killers to explore the art of persuasion, bias confirmation, and the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about who we are. And how these stories we tell ourselves about who we are duke it out until there’s only one story left standing.

Strong stuff, beautifully acted.

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Theater Theater Feature

Playhouse’s Rocky Horror is too much of a good thing.

I would like, if I may, to take you on a strange journey. It seemed a fairly ordinary night when Bill Andrews — a Rocky Horror veteran — sat down in a sturdy, conservative, high-backed chair to tell the story of Brad Majors and Janet Weiss, two young, ordinary, healthy kids from the happy, perfectly normal town of Denton, on what was supposed to be a normal night out … a night they were going to remember for a very long time. While Andrews is (as always) spot-on as the musical’s narrator/criminologist, this introduction underscores everything that’s wrong with Playhouse on the Square’s incredibly fun, undeniably fab but somewhat gutted production of Richard O’Brien’s decadent, glam-rock fairy tale. While Dr. Frank-N-Furter is obviously the star of this horror show, its story is presented as a case study: the strange tale of Brad and Janet, their harrowing journey out of innocence. It’s basically Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel & Gretel but with electric guitars, aliens, and erotic candy. And for all of the goodness that happens in this production, it really is unfortunate that, after the opening sequences, these two characters — finely acted by Jordan Nichols and Leah Beth Bolton — almost fade into the background, and none of the other characters are ever allowed to really savor their moments in the spotlight. Once Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Jerre Dye) prances on stage as everybody’s favorite transvestite, it’s hard to even see anybody else.

There are basically two ways to stage Rocky Horror. You can either highlight the musical’s narrative threads, a weave of British pantomime, the Brothers Grimm, and classic drive-in cinema. Or you can say goodbye to all that and give yourself over to absolute decadence. Director Scott Ferguson chooses the later, which makes his show short on dynamic tension but big on jolts delivered directly to an audience’s pleasure centers. His vision of Rocky Horror is a pansexual psycho beach party fantasia complete with fast (but faulty) cars, zombies, tons of choreography, and some inventive video projection.

If you’ve heard that Dye’s performance as Frank-N-Furter is the greatest thing that ever happened, you’ve not heard wrong. Dye can work those heels and sell what he’s got. If Rocky Horror has a musical heart it’s “Hot Patootie” (“I Really Love That Rock-and-Roll”). With its 1950s swagger and its PG-rated backseat make-out lyrics, it’s the heteronormative baseline from which all else is extrapolated. It’s also the dimmest spot in Playhouse’s floorshow, treated like a throwaway until Frank breaks out his chainsaw to end it.

To borrow an idea from Mary Shelley and a line from songwriter Stephin Merritt, I think this show needs a new heart. Given a chance, all this sexy silliness can suckerpunch you with an emotional wallop. It starts when Eddie and Columbia are separated in “Hot Patootie.” Things heat up when Frank discovers the line between extreme and “too extreme,” and sings “I’m Going Home.” It all comes together as Brad and Janet struggle to find their way back home in the haunting “Superheroes.” And the audience is left to contemplate time, space, and meaning in the wistful, minor key reprise of “Science Fiction Double Feature.” We don’t really get to experience any of that this time around, but does it matter? Emotion is a powerful and irrational master, but so is pleasure. And, based on what I eagerly viewed on stage at Playhouse, the audience was clearly its slave. Using almost no scenery, Playhouse’s energetic, mostly able ensemble, delivers about as much fun as a person can have with their clothes on. Or half off. Or even fully off in some truly pathetic cases. You know who you are.

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Cover Feature News

Indie Memphis Film Festival 2014

History will record 1998 as the year technology demolished the barrier for entry into filmmaking, bringing together high-quality digital cameras and desktop computer editing to enable resourceful would-be directors to bring their visions to fruition. But just because you can make a movie doesn’t mean you can get it to an audience to be seen, so that year, a group of Memphis film geeks put a sheet up on the wall of a downtown bar and projected movies they had made and movies they wanted to see.

A lot has changed since the Indie Memphis Film Festival’s humble beginning. Cameras and editing software have capabilities undreamed of at the turn of the century, rendering celluloid all but obsolete. Home theater and streaming video have opened new avenues for distribution that have theater owners looking over their shoulders and Hollywood studios pushing out bigger and more elaborate spectacles. Indie films still struggle, but now there are thousands of them produced each year, by specialty studios and plucky visionaries with DSLRs. The festival itself has grown from its underground bar-room roots into one of the most respected — and fun — festivals in America. For audiences, the problem has evolved from “How can I find something different to watch?” to “How can I make sense of all these choices?”

That’s where carefully curated festivals like Indie Memphis remain relevant. This year, more than a thousand entries were winnowed down to two dozen competition features, as well as showcases and gala screenings that not only explore the state of the art, but also celebrate classics that have left indelible marks on indie history.

The lineup of narrative features, documentaries, shorts, and experimental videos that will roll out over the four-day weekend at Overton Square venues Playhouse On The Square, Circuit Playhouse, The Hattiloo Theatre, and Malco’s Studio On The Square is among the most diverse in the festival’s history, offering something for every taste. Choosing from such a wide selection of movies can be a daunting task, so we’ll break down your choices by areas of interest to help you explore one of Memphis’ premiere cultural events.

HOME-GROWN

The Bluff City cinema underground looks healthy, as 2014’s crop of local features include both veterans and newcomers. Three narrative features and one documentary will vie for the Hometowner prize.

Eric Tate, star of The Poor & Hungry, which launched director Craig Brewer’s career at Indie Memphis in 2000, returns to the screen in Chad Allen Barton’s Lights Camera Bullshit. Tate leads as Gerard Evans, a film school graduate who returns to Memphis to direct art films, but instead finds himself embroiled in a sordid comedy of filmic errors by his unscrupulous boss Don (Ron Gephart). Tate plays straight man to a cast of Memphis indie all-stars, including Markus Seaberry, Don Meyers, Jon W. Sparks, Dorv Armour, Brandon Sams, McTyere Parker, and the late John Still as a terrorist disguised as president William Henry Harrison.

5 Steps to a Conversation

Director Anwar Jamison returns to the festival with his second feature, 5 Steps to a Conversation. Jamison stars as Javen, an easygoing guy who is having a great day until his wife leaves him, saying he needs to grow up and get a job. He signs on with a sleazy, cult-like multi-level marketing company selling free pizza coupons door to door for $20. The film manages to be both funny and affecting (imagine Glengarry Glen Ross as a comedy) featuring strong performances by Jamison, David Caffey, Memphis slam poet Powwah, and 4-year-old Amari Jamison.

Satan (Sylvester Brown) tempts a married couple on the rocks in Just a Measure of Faith, the debut feature of husband/wife team Marlon and Mechelle Wilson. This sincere expression of religious conviction envisions a pair of souls hanging in the balance after a car wreck leaves Jacob (Tramaine Morgan) near death while his wife Kayla (Maranja May-Douglas) is haunted by past sin. It also features stirring musical scenes by gospel singer Euclid Gray.

Director Phoebe Driscoll

Director Phoebe Driscoll’s debut documentary Pharaohs of Memphis traces the history of jookin’, Memphis’ indigenous dance form, from its inception in the 1980s as a way to defuse tense situations on the street to its present as an international sensation, through interviews with the form’s pioneers and its present star, Lil’ Buck. Archival and contemporary footage illuminate the dancers’ athletic beauty.

Rory Culkin in Gabriel

ON THE ROAD

There has never been a film adaptation of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye or Franny and Zooey, but the writer’s disaffected teenage characters drifting through upper-class environs have inspired films like The Graduate and The Royal Tenenbaums. Opening night feature Gabriel takes Salinger’s theme of mental illness upending families to a harrowing extreme. Rory Culkin plays Gabriel, who we meet clutching a much-read letter on a long-distance bus ride. He is searching for a lost love named Alice, whom he wants to marry, but he’s on thin ice with his family. Gabriel’s father killed himself, and they are afraid that he will follow suit, or worse. Culkin turns in a finely tuned performance, carefully crescendoing Gabriel’s encroaching mania as his antipsychotic meds wear off. Director Lou Howe’s pacing is as tight as his visual compositions, and his screenplay is compassionate and affecting, making Gabriel a festival must-see.

Frank Hall Green

Bruce Greenwood and Ella Purnell in WildLike

Frank Hall Green’s WildLike is also the story of a troubled young loner on the road. Mackenzie’s (Ella Purnell) father is dead and her institutionalized mother has sent her to live in Alaska with her uncle (Brian Geraghty), who is sexually abusing her. She runs away during a trip to Denali National Park and lives by her wits until she chances across Rene (Star Trek‘s Bruce Greenwood), a widower who is hiking through the mountains to forget his grief. The pair form an unlikely bond among the sweeping vistas of the Alaskan wilderness as they avoid the pain of their lives. Purnell’s fearless performance is the highlight of this elegant work.

Halloween’s Mike Myers

Halloween

HORROR

Friday night of Indie Memphis weekend is Halloween, and what better way to celebrate than with a midnight screening of the movie that kicked off the slasher genre: John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween is a textbook of filmic scare tactics. The random jump scare, the relentless menace, redirected sexual guilt — you will never see them done better. Halloween made Jamie Lee Curtis a movie star and set Carpenter on a trajectory that would take the exploitation underground mainstream. If you’ve never seen it or if it’s been a while, the elegance of the film’s construction will make its distant descendants like Saw and Hostel look sloppy and amateurish.

Onur Tukel

On the other side of the horror coin is Onur Tukel’s Summer of Blood. Tukel stars as an obnoxious Brooklyn wannabe hipster who runs across a mysterious stranger in a dark alley and is transformed into a vampire. But just because he’s an undead blood sucker doesn’t mean he’s done trying to score with women, and his vampiric powers make him the chick magnet he’s always wanted to be. Of course, there’s the never-ending thirst for human blood to contend with, but that’s just a minor annoyance in this hilarious deconstruction of both mumblecore pretension and good-guy vampire movies.

Thomas Allen Harris, director of Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People

An untitled photograph by Lyle Ashton Harris as seen in Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People

AFRICAN AMERICAN

This is the first year the Hattiloo Theatre will show Indie Memphis films and, appropriately, the festival’s slate of African-American-themed films has never been stronger. In addition to two homegrown narrative features by black directors, a pair of documentaries is worthy of attention. The first is opening night’s Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People. Director Thomas Allen Harris digs deep to find the forgotten and ignored images that African-American photographers made of themselves and their world while America pretended they didn’t exist. These images provide glimpses into the everyday lives of people long dead and who were suffering the persecution of Jim Crow.

Director Lacey Schwartz was raised in a middle-class Jewish household in New York. She had a bat mitvah and went to synagogue and was never treated any differently than anyone else. But when she went to college at Georgetown University, she was forced to confront a secret: Her biological father was African American, and the people she met at school didn’t consider her Jewish. In her documentary Little White Lie, she confronts her dual identities and asks hard questions about society’s assumptions and her own.

Wild Canaries

Lawrence Michael Levine, director of Wild Canaries

CRIME STORIES

Since The Great Train Robbery, filmmakers have turned to transgression as a way to highten stakes for their characters. Brooklyn-based Indie Memphis alum Lawrence Michael Levine tops his acclaimed 2010 Gabi on the Roof in July with Wild Canaries. The comedic take on Rear Window finds Levine and Gabi herself, Sophia Takal, starring as Noah and Barri, a New York couple who suspect their elderly neighbor was murdered by her son. Or maybe as part of a real estate scam. Or maybe she died from old age. Their hilariously incompetent investigation shows very little chance of finding out, until it does.

Man Shot Dead

Director Taylor Feltner

Two documentaries take similar, first-person approaches to examine the ripple effects single criminal acts can have on families — from the perspective of the victims and the perpetrators. In Man Shot Dead Arkansan Taylor Feltner investigates the 1966 murder of his grandfather, Glen Wade Dickson. This real-life Rashomon uses interviews with his family and a search for the only surviving witness to the killing to find meaning, but as the director’s grandmother Bernie says, closure doesn’t come easy, even after 48 years.

Evolution of a Criminal

Director Darius Clark Monroe

Evolution of a Criminal is the story of how director Darius Clark Monroe, a bright, seemingly happy kid, came to rob a bank at age 16. Using interviews with his family, his accomplices, customers in the bank, and the prosecutor, as well as reconstructions of the events, he shows how good intentions soured into bad decisions and the fallout that will haunt him and his family for the rest of their lives.

SCIENCE FICTION

In legendary director John Carpenter’s 1988 They Live, a drifter named Nada (wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper) stumbles across a pair of sunglasses that show him a horrible truth: Earth is controlled by a group of aliens who use subliminal messages in advertising to brainwash the population into compliance with their plans for colonization and genocide. This low-budget exploitation movie sank with barely a ripple upon release, but 25 years of cult adoration and critical reappraisal have recognized it as one of the most brilliant and subversive science-fiction movies ever made. In the brave new world of today’s media landscape, its themes of deception and manipulation are more relevant than ever.

Matt O’Leary in Time Lapse

Two very different time travel movies reveal the sci-fi trope’s versatility. What would you do if you could see the future? That’s the question that Bradley King’s Time Lapse asks. Reminiscent of the tightly plotted puzzle films of Christopher Nolan, the film follows a group of roommates as they find out that their neighbor, an eccentric inventor, has created a camera that sees 24 hours into the future and has pointed it at their apartment. Once they start winning big at the races, their bookie comes sniffing around and their secret puts them all in grave peril.

Alex Boling’s Movement + Location is a more subtle take on time travel. Kim (screenwriter Bodine Boling) is an refugee from the resource-starved 25th century living a peaceful, if confusing, life in New York City with her roommate Amber (an excellent Anna Margaret Hollyman). But things start to unravel when she meets fellow time travelers and they must keep their presence hidden, first from Amber, and then the world of 2014 that can’t know what’s about to happen to it.

MUSIC

Memphis is a music town, and Indie Memphis has always sought out the best music documentaries. Well Now You’re Here, There’s No Way Back is actor/director Regina Russell’s debut documentary, chronicling the rise, fall, and rebirth of 1980s hair metal pioneers Quiet Riot. Singer Kevin DuBrow and drummer Frankie Banali started rocking the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles in the late ’70s, but were virtually ignored in the New Wave-loving ’80s until their cover of Slade’s “Cum On Feel The Noize” unexpectedly topped the charts. After decades of heavy metal decadence, DuBrow OD’d in a Las Vegas apartment in 2007, ending the band. The second half of the film follows Banali (who will be on hand for the screening) as he comes to grips with his friend’s death and tries to stage a comeback.

Director Kenneth Price was a hit at Indie Memphis 2011 with his documentary The Wonder Year, which profiled hip hop producer 9th Wonder. When Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates saw the film, he worked to bring its subject as a class at the Ivy League school. Price’s sequel, The Hip-Hop Fellow, documents the process of 9th Wonder trying to win academic respectability for hip hop, as he creates a curriculum and gives fascinating insights into the origin and evolution of one of America’s most popular music genres. His year-long teaching and research project seeks to deconstruct and research the origins of the samples that went into creating 10 of the greatest hip-hop albums of all time.

For more Memphis-centric music films at Indie Memphis, see our Music section feature, “Soundtrack to Indie Memphis.

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Heathers

HEATHERS

Cultural phase changes are rarely noticed at the time they happen; only in retrospect do they become obvious. The cynical, slacker 1990s didn’t start with Twin Peaks or “Smells Like Teen Spirit” — it began in1988, with the barely noticed release of a teenage comedy called Heathers.

The 1980s was the decade of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” where we collectively decided to put on a happy face and let the wealth trickle down. The movies of the decade were escapist science fiction epics, He-Man action, and angsty teen coming-of-age movies that said we could all resolve our differences and just get along. Then the caustic, gonzo Heathers flipped the table.

Great satire always predicts the future. Just as Network predicted Fox News way back in 1976, Heathers predicted school shootings and the cynical exploitation of public opinion that would follow. Winona Ryder and Christian Slater star as a teenage Bonnie and Clyde who upend the social pecking order at Westerburg High School by killing some of their frenemies and staging them as suicides. Memphian Shannen Doherty is one of the titular mean girls.

The film remains blazingly funny on its 25th anniversary. Its whip-smart dialogue wrings laughs out of the horror, and gave Generation X the tools to laugh off the world’s casual cruelties. Director Michael Lehmann and writer Daniel Waters will be on hand at the Indie Memphis screening for what is sure to be a spirited and hilarious discussion of the film’s creation and legacy.

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American Cheerleader directors David Barba (left) and James Pellerito (right)

SPORTS

For sports fans, the can’t-miss film at Indie Memphis is Hoop Dreams, the 1994 epic that launched a thousand 30 for 30 episodes. On the short list of the best documentaries ever produced, it tells the story of Arthur Agee and William Gates, two high school basketball players trying to make it to the big leagues, and who will reunite at this 20th anniversary celebration.

American Cheerleader is as optimistic as sports documentaries get. The practice footage and interview segments argue that competitive cheerleading empowers girls by transforming them from walking sexist clichés into skilled practitioners of a very difficult, very dangerous prep sport. It follows the two-time defending champions from New Jersey’s Burlington Township High School, as well as the up-and-comers from Kentucky’s Southwest High. You may develop a rooting interest as the final round begins, but tiresome good vs. evil conflicts seldom appear.

In contrast, Amir Bar-Lev’s ambitious, disturbing Happy Valley, which looks at the sexual-abuse scandal involving Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky and its impact on the residents of State College, Pennsylavania, is a headfirst dive into a mine shaft flooded with subterranean prejudices, moldering messiah complexes, and cracked, sunken chunks of community pride. In archival footage, Penn State football coach and unofficial town paterfamilias Joe Paterno comes across as an eminently sensible public servant who once called football “a silly game.” But Paterno set his moral high ground ablaze when he swept Sandusky’s abuse under the rug. As Happy Valley shows, the repercussions from his actions are still visible as statues and murals become public battlegrounds, and community residents turn over media vans in protest. The film is complex enough to dredge up tons of issues and sure to leave interested parties waiting more. — Addison Engleking

…

SHORTS

There is no better way to sample the endless variety of perspectives film festivals have to offer than the shorts programs. The key is to stumble upon as many contradictory things as possible.

The Hometowner Narrative Shorts program presents a sampler of Memphis talent on Friday night. One unifying theme in the varied program is violence, usually with a gun drawn for either comedic or dramatic effect. In Robert Rowan’s Friendly Faces, two gleeful idiots laugh maniacally at each other for long periods and attack someone on a basketball court for no reason. The block is chock full of familiar faces behind and in front of the camera: For example, Don Meyers, the aforementioned basketball court victim, also directs Fade To Black, a short about Parkinson’s disease dedicated to his father. On the other end of the spectrum, Adam Remsen’s Quicken celebrates the joy of new life.

Elsewhere, an office worker fails beautifully in Lights Camera Bullshit lead actor Eric Tate’s hallucinatory, darkly humorous directorial debut Default Settings. A young woman teeters on the edge of madness in Laura Jean Hocking’s experimental Two Whole Days of Nothing But Uppercase “F*CK.”

Shane Watson’s documentary Untold Stories focuses on Trayvon Martin and other recent cases of unarmed black shooting victims. It shares with other Memphis docs a philosophical inquiry about the nature of civic life and an appeal to change it. Emily Heine’s No One Sees You asks why public, non-moneyed art on walls is illegal. Lara Johnson’s Geekland: Fan Culture in Memphis shines light on our pop culture outcasts.

The music documentaries likewise have a kind of a direct, barebones emphasis on their subjects, from Matt Isbell making guitars in Once There Was a Cigar Box to multi-instrumentalist Sean Murphy making haunting sounds in Sketches of Crosstown. The eulogy Jim Dickinson: The Man Behind the Console, is bookended with simple old images of a performance at Otherlands.

The best of the non-local shorts is Buffalo Juggalos by Scott Cummings, a dry, ironic provocation consisting of brief portraits of Insane Clown Posse fans. At first the shots are naturalistic, on front lawns, with babies and pet ferrets. But slowly, it becomes more and more exploitative until the movie resorts to fake crime, simulated sex, and an explosion. It is queasy, and yet often the images add up to a celebration of grassroots art. — Ben Siler

…

Sophie Traub in Thou Wast Mild and Lovely

ARTHOUSE

Joy Kevin is a closely-cropped portrait of a financially strapped New York couple whose life together butts up against age-old difficulties of money, boredom, and wandering attention, but whose solutions are never predictable. The simple subject allows the film to meander gracefully through Kevin’s (Jordan Clifford) mumbled, joking evasions, and Joy’s (Tallie Medel) dancer’s charisma.

The movie is light as a feather but stiff as a board. Kevin, an aspiring comedian, is a kind of post-feminist Woody Allen. Joy is tough, a real estate agent by day and experimental dancer/choreographer by night, forced to be in control even as she badly needs to be vulnerable. It is in this generationally familiar lightness, and the final failure of the film’s smooth, joking likability, that Joy Kevin achieves gravitas.

In Josephine Decker’s Thou Wast Mild and Lovely Akin (Joe Swanberg), a married school teacher, takes farmhand work for the summer on Jeremiah’s (Robert Longstreet) homestead, where he becomes sexually obsessed with Jeremiah’s adult daughter, Sarah (Sophie Traub). Akin’s obsession is twisted into the unhealthy (but never explained) dynamic between father and daughter, and metered with the quiet cruelty of farm life. Flies swarm a cow, the blood from a chicken stain’s Sarah’s dress, and Akin dreams of Sarah suspended by ropes in a red barn. The unslept tension that drives the movie is realized through sharp sound editing and Terrence Malick-inspired cinematography.

There is no shortage of media about teen pregnancy, whether cool and controversial or tough and possibly romantic. In Nathan Silver’s Uncertain Terms, teen pregnancy is none of these. Instead, it serves as a backdrop for the slow gestation of Robbie’s (David Dahlbom) marital troubles when he takes up residence as a handyman at a boarding house for knocked-up girls. There, he becomes infatuated with the somehow virginal Nina (India Menuez), who, despite her advanced pregnancy and serious relationship with a ne’er-do-well boyfriend, dresses in flowing white and floats detachedly around the house. Desperate to escape the growing complexities of their respective situations, Nina and Robbie bond quickly. Uncertain Terms, like The Virgin Suicides, is a portrait of girlhood-becoming-womanhood as experienced by a misled man who, despite his attempts to find meaning for himself in the power of the girls’ situations, remains a hopeless outsider. — Eileen Townsend

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Whiplash

Whiplash

WHIPLASH

As Terence Fletcher, the black-clad music instructor at the center of writer-director Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, J.K. Simmons is a compact, muscular demon, unfettered by the rules of teaching, etiquette, and human decency. Sometimes Chazelle uses shadows or offscreen sound to foreshadow Fletcher’s arrival, but most of the time he simply bursts into a scene, and the effect is as jarring as a smoke alarm going off. Fletcher’s pupils are terrified of him; they look down whenever his head looms above them like a menacing moon. But young drummer Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller), a student at the New York conservatory where Fletcher “teaches,” wants to play in his studio band. Yet once Andrew gets his big break, it’s tough to fathom why he stays. The physical and psychological abuse he absorbs leaves him doubting whether he’ll ever become anything at all, much less the next Charlie Parker.

Chazelle’s aggressive, up-tempo account of Fletcher and Andrew’s evolving relationship follows loose and shifty rhythmic lines. It charges along like Buddy Rich, then plays around with the beat like Elvin Jones. The result is an uneven, slightly overlong affair that nonetheless yields several rich, well-measured scenes: a dinner-table pissing contest between Andrew and his brothers; a pair of quiet romantic interludes with Andrew and his girlfriend (Melissa Benoist); and a highly contrived yet deeply affecting (and profoundly ambiguous) musical finale.

As a movie about teachers and education, Whiplash is as phony and false as Dead Poets Society. But as an expressionist riff on the price of artistic greatness, it’s thoughtful, exciting, and difficult to shake. — Addison Engelking

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Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Indie Memphis Film Festival Announces 2014 Lineup

At a gala party last night at the High Cotton Brewing Company, Indie Memphis announced the lineup for their 17th annual film festival, which will be held October 30 to November 2. More than 40 feature length narrative and documentary films, as well as dozens of short subjects, will screen over the course of the four-day festival.

John Carpenter’s They Live

Four classic films will receive gala anniversary screenings. Director Michael Lehman and writer Daniel Waters will be on hand when Heathers, the 1989 black comedy starring Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, will celebrate its 25th anniversary at the festival.

Indie Memphis Film Festival Announces 2014 Lineup

Friday night of the festival is Halloween, so it is appropriate that the work of one of America’s greatest horror directors, John Carpenter, will be honored with two gala screenings, beginning with his 1988 science fiction classic They Live, starring Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David.

Indie Memphis Film Festival Announces 2014 Lineup (3)

At midnight, Carpenter’s Halloween will screen. A direct descendant of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Jamie Lee Curtis’ film debut defined the 80’s slasher genre and holds up better than ever today.

Indie Memphis Film Festival Announces 2014 Lineup (2)

The festival will also celebrate the 20th anniversary of one of the best documentaries ever made, director Steve James’ Hoop Dreams.

Indie Memphis Film Festival Announces 2014 Lineup (4)

Hometown filmmakers are well represented at the festival with three narrative features: Chad Barton’s comedy of filmmaking errors Lights, Camera Bullshit; Anwar Jamison’s workplace comedy 5 Steps To A Conversation; Marlon Wilson and Mechelle Wilson’s Christian drama Just A Measure Of Faith. The sole local documentary is Pharaohs Of Memphis, director Phoebe Driscoll’s history of jookin’.

Indie Memphis Film Festival Announces 2014 Lineup (5)

Twelve films will compete for Best Narrative Feature, including the Brooklyn heist comedy Wild Canaries, Onur Tukel’s vampire comedy Summer Of Blood, the time travel drama Movement & Location, and the Texas-based crime drama Two Step.

Indie Memphis Film Festival Announces 2014 Lineup (6)

The thirteen films up for Best Documentary Feature include the kenetic sport doc American Cheerleader; The Hip Hop Fellow, tracing producer 9th Wonder’s experience as a teacher at Harvard; Man Shot Dead, an intimate history of a family torn apart by an unsolved murder; and Well Now You’re Here, There’s No Way Back, about Quiet Riot drummer Frankie Banali’s fight to keep the heavy metal dream alive.

Indie Memphis Film Festival Announces 2014 Lineup (7)

Other notable films include Sundance winner Whiplash, a music drama starring Miles Teller as a young jazz drummer and J.K Simmons as his demanding teacher, and The Imitation Game, an early Oscar contender starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the eccentric British codebreaker whose work in World War II led directly to the invention of the modern digital computer.

Indie Memphis Film Festival Announces 2014 Lineup (8)

The festival, which will also include numerous panels, special events, and parties, will take place in venues around Overton Square, including Playhouse On The Square, Circuit Playhouse, the Hattiloo Theater, and Malco’s Studio On The Square. The Memphis Flyer will have an in-depth examination of the festival as the cover story for our October 30th issue. Go to indiememphis.com for details on how to buy passes for Memphis’ greatest film weekend.

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

The Memphis Roots of “One Man Two Guvnors”

The Cast of ‘One Man Two Guvnors’

One of the niftier things about One Man Two Guvnors, the Commedia-inspired romp, currently onstage at Playhouse on the Square, is its incorporation of live British Skiffle music, which evolves over the course of the show into something just a little more Fab.

I’m not sure that Playhouse has done the best job of integrating Two Guv’s musical and non-musical elements, but I’m not complaining too loudly either because shortcomings, real or imagined, don’t diminish the fun.

But it’s an unsubtle play, innit? And yet there are subtle reasons why this thumbnailed musical history pairs so well with farce to create the romantic dystopia of mid-20th-Century working class England at the point on the cultural map where it collides with Britannia’s criminal class and the bourgeois.

The Memphis Roots of ‘One Man Two Guvnors’

To say that skiffle is rooted in Memphis is an overstatement, of course, but the distance is deceptively short between Presidents Island and Liverpool. Today the word “skiffle” is probably most commonly associated with England in the 1950’s, but it’s really just another word for the spasm bands and jug bands that played throughout the South in the early 20th-Century. The form has deep roots running from Chicago, where “skiffle parties” were thrown to raise rent money, down South to Beale where jugs farted and banjos sang, and on to Storyville in New Orleans where jazz oozed up from the gumbo.

The Memphis Roots of ‘One Man Two Guvnors’ (2)

Skiffle music’s defining qualities are exuberance, and innovation born from poverty. Skiffle band banjos might have started out in life as pie pans. Washboards, spoons, and “bones” stood in for drum kits and washtubs (or jugs) for bass. If you didn’t have a trumpet a kazoo would do. And if you didn’t have a kazoo, a comb and slip of tissue paper worked just as well. Mandolins might be fashioned from broken guitar necks and gourds. Saws sing, if you know how to strike or bow them.

The British Skiffle—the revival that brought together so many key players in the British Invasion-– doesn’t exist without artists like Gus Canon, Ma Rainey, or Memphis Minnie. Or without more polished acts like the Hoosier Hotshots who made movies with Gene Autrey, and were a huge influence on genius jazz clown Spike Jones.

The Memphis Roots of ‘One Man Two Guvnors’ (3)

Early rock is often imagined as a collision of country, blues and gospel and, of course, it is all of that. But from its lower class roots to the exuberant but distorted sounds of crudely repaired amps and the dollar bill Johnny Cash threaded between his guitar strings to make it sound like a snare drum, early rock artists seem to be carrying on skiffle and jug band traditions. When jazz and folk players in the UK embraced skiffle in the mid 1950’s musicians like Lonnie Donegan and bands like The Vipers embraced its folk roots and its rockabilly branches all at once.

The Memphis Roots of ‘One Man Two Guvnors’ (4)

So, I should probably get back to One Man Two Guvnors for a tic. Commedia dell’arte is some silly, silly stuff. What we call slapstick takes its name from a club composed of two wooden slats that literally slap together and make a loud smacking sound whenever one Commedia clown uses it to strike another for laughs. There are no beatdowns with a slapstick in Two Guvs, though there is one slapstick bit that could easily be called “the lazzo of beating your own self down.” At its best this kind of humor aims at the lowest common denominator but catches everybody in a shotgun blast of inspired zaniness. And in its original incarnation, Commedia could also be very smart and subversive, its stock characters representing extreme elements among rulers and the too easily ruled. It began as a kind of street performance, like the flash mobs of yesterday, but not so twee. Commedia belonged to the people. And fewer characters better represented the people than poor beaten-down half-devil, Arlequino — the perennial servant of two masters. He’s the appetite personified, and would easily trade a fortune promised, for a beer in hand. Oi!

The Memphis Roots of ‘One Man Two Guvnors’ (5)

Skiffle was very much a working/underclass movement and in its skiffelized version of the English underbelly One Man Two Guvnors tells the story of just such a man. Francis Henshall— our Arlequino— can’t afford to say no to an extra paycheck, and he’s too distracted by his food and sex drives to even serve himself. It’s serious anarchy. It’s punk rock.

The Memphis Roots of ‘One Man Two Guvnors’ (6)

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Theater Theater Feature

On Madhatted; One Man Two Guvnors; and A Member of the Wedding

The Flyer‘s annual Best of Memphis issue is an opportunity to pay tribute to our favorite things. From where I sit, Overton Square developer Bob Loeb had the best idea anybody’s had in ages when he decided to build the entertainment district around the square’s most enduring creative culture: live theater. Few changes to the local landscape are as exciting as the new Hattiloo Theatre, a nexus for Memphis’ African-American creative class, that opened on the square earlier this year, just across the street from the Circuit Playhouse, which turns 45 this week with a revival of The Fantasticks. Theater tourists visiting the square this weekend can choose between that, the Hattiloo’s soul-searching production of The Convert, Madhatted, a manic take on Alice in Wonderland at TheatreWorks, and the madcap farce One Man Two Guvnors at Playhouse on the Square. I’ll be taking a closer look at these last two shows in the column below, in addition to Theatre Memphis’ slow but satisfying production of Carson McCullers’ A Member of the Wedding.

I wasn’t a fan of Madhatted when the show debuted at the Memphis Children’s Theatre Festival a few years back. The script felt insubstantial, and the manic non sequitur was exhausting. But Our Own Voice Theatre Troupe (OOV) saw merit in the piece, which makes complete sense since OOV’s founding director Bill Baker (the White Rabbit), is a master of absurd clowning, and his edgy fooling has become a company specialty.

OOV’s Madhatted is an improvement, although it still devolves from inspired nonsense into the ordinary kind, becoming strained as the act wears on. But the business is funny and themes relating to identity are clarified giving the revival much-needed heft.

Madhatted borrows lyrics from the Tom Waits musical Franks Wild Years, cultivating an air of Waitsian menace. It’s too much of a reminder that Waits collaborated with avant garde director Robert Wilson on a darkly majestic version of the same story.

Madhatted fluctuates between grand and grating, a curiosity custom fit for more adventurous theatergoers who like to dive down the occasional rabbit hole.   

Madhatted at TheatreWorks through October 11th

In addition to being a masterful clown show, One Man Two Guvnors is a romp through the soundscape of pendulum-swinging England circa 1963, as skiffle bands transformed into mop-topped rockers like the Beatles and Stones. Live music pulls double duty as sideshow and soundtrack, and the tone set is spot on.

Two Guvnors is a ball-kicking farce (literally), adapted freely but with care from Carlo Goldoni’s 18th-century Italian comedy, Servant of Two Masters. The original story is transformed into a slapstick extravaganza set in the UK underworld. Francis Henshall (an updated vision of the stock character Harlequino — a personification of the human appetite) has just been fired from his skiffle band and, being desperate for work, takes employment from two masters who keep him running. Hilarity ensues, as it will.

Cameron Reeves is completely brilliant as Two Guvnors‘ hungry, sex-starved clown of generous proportions. He builds his gags from the ground up, like pieces of classical architecture, designed to survive the ages.

One Man Two Guvnors at Playhouse on the Square through October 12th

Membership yields privileges not extended to those merely invited to party at the club. And if you’re serving, forget about it. These messages alone make Carson McCullers’ A Member of the Wedding seem prescient, if not positively up-to-date. The elegant novel and awkward, author-adapted play don’t tell a coming-of-age story so much as a coming-to-grips story. It’s unfortunate that some things that make the novel compelling don’t translate to the immediate medium of live performance.

Member tells of Frankie, the tomboy who has fallen in love with her brother, his bride-to-be, their wedding, and a dream of running away from the tedious, humid place where she’s excluded from clubs and ignored by her father.

Lauren Ledger makes a lanky Frankie, showing a real affinity for the role, and Holden Guibao is an adorable John Henry. The always-excellent Delvyn Brown is once again superb as Honey, the doomed jazz trumpet player, smelling of reefer and smoldering with anger and frustration.

As Bernice, the one-eyed domestic, Judi Bray is an understated force, knowing herself and the precarious position she occupies.

Echoing the novel, secondary characters are little more than scenery, and the play’s final tragic events drop like the atom bombs Frankie reads about in the newspaper. There’s good content here, but the form remains problematic.

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Intermission Impossible Theater

Will Call: Tips & Tidbits for the Theatrically Inclined

CREDIT: A Teutonic likeness of John Hemphill

A Teutonic likeness of John Hemphill

We are entering into one of those awful/wonderful periods when the weather is perfect and there is so much nifty stuff to do that you can’t possibly do it all. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the more interesting theater and dance offerings available for consumption this weekend. 

I love Steve Martin’s very Martinized adaptation of Carl Sternheim’s German Expressionist comedy, The Underpants. It’s a profoundly silly meditation on the nature of fame telling the story of a middle class couple who have trouble renting a room until the wife experiences a terrible wardrobe malfunction. Don’t let the early 20th-Century trappings fool you, this story could have easily been devised as a response to the age of 4Chan and Instagram. A top-notch cast includes a pair of Johns (Hemphill and Maness), Rebecca Sherrod, Deborah Burda Nelson, and Jenny Kathman. It’s one weekend only, which means I’ll miss it. But I’d love to hear reports back from people who can make it out Bartlett to see this comic gem. 

I’ve Got Your Tea Party Right Here

Our Own Voice Theatre Company is unlike any other company in town. It began as a troupe dedicated to exploring experimental techniques, as well as issues and ideas related to mental health and “normalcy.” So, in some regard, Madhatted, a locally-adapted vision of the mad tea party from Alice in Wonderland is a perfect fit. And I can assure you, if you saw this show at the Memphis Children’s Theatre Festival a few years back, it will be a different experience. Info here. 

The classic farce Servant of Two Masters has been reimagined as a music-filled slapstick extravaganza called One Man Two Guvnors. Francis Henshall (an updated vision of the stock character Harlequino)  has just been fired from his folk jazz skiffle band and being desperate for work he takes employment from—yes— two masters. Hilarity ensues, as it often so does. Details here. 

Dance fans — both street and classical — have a special opportunity this week to explore both the origins and the future of Memphis-style bucking and jookin’. The “Old School vs. New School 3” dance competition at Minglewood Hall pits Memphis’ first generation Gangsta Walkers against younger dancers looking to see if their bucking and chopping measures up against the original masters.

“This is the first time in a long time that people will have an opportunity to see the original Gangsta Walkers,” says instructor, artist, and event organizer Jaquency Ford, who has hand-picked the dance partners who’ll be squaring off against one another at Minglewood. Gangsta Walking is the direct antecedent of jookin’, the Memphis-born dance style that New York Times dance writer Alastair Macaulay recently described as, “the single most exciting young dance genre of our day, featuring, in particular, the most sensationally diverse use of footwork.”

Will Call: Tips & Tidbits for the Theatrically Inclined

Pretty Tony will be in the house to perform his seminal club hit “Get Buck.” Original Gangsta Walkers include Wolf and Romeo, two-thirds of the G-Style, the ’80s-era rap and dance team that first began to mix breakdancing moves with “buck jumps.”

A stone’s throw to the east, at the new Hattiloo Theatre in Overton Square, FreeFall finds New Ballet Ensemble (NBE) presenting a concert showcasing the company’s critically acclaimed hybrid of ballet, Memphis jookin’, and world dance styles. NBE’s program includes a revival of Noelia Garcia Carmona’s Dos, a vibrant mashup of jookin’ and flamenco set to original music by Roy Brewer and showcasing the talents of Shamar Rooks. The New Ballet Youth Company presents Doin’ It Right choreographed by NBE alum and Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark dancer Maxx Reed.

NBE is also premiering “Three Dream Portraits” based on poetry by Langston Hughes with music by Margaret Bonds and choreography by General McArthur Hambrick.

If that’s not enough on the Memphis dance front U-Dig Dance Academy is hosting an evening of wine, international cuisine and (like you couldn’t guess) jookin. That also goes down  Friday, September 26, 2014 at the Jack Robinson Gallery, 400 South Main Street. Tickets for the event are $25; $50 (includes dinner); and $250 for a reserved table and will benefit the U-Dig Dance Club.

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

“4000 Miles” Goes the Distance at TheatreWorks

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I know this is the same road
I took the day I left home
But it sure looks different now
Well I guess I look different too— Bobby Bare, “500 Miles“

Gentle. That’s the word I hear over and over again in reference to 4000 Miles, Amy Herzog’s funny, thorny play about geographical, emotional, temporal, and even political distance across generations. Director Tony Isbell dropped the word when we chatted online. It’s popped up repeatedly in conversations with friends who’ve seen the play at TheatreWorks. Even New York Times critic Charles Isherwood called it a “gently comic drama,” in his review, so there must be something to the idea that it’s a gentle play. But that isn’t how I experienced 4000 Miles at all. It was an uncomfortably real snapshot of a generational moment. It was a sound thrashing of lifestyle-lefties, and a similarly-bracing critique of our elders and their astonishing ability to idealize the past, and enshrine it in ways that remain fixed, even as people change and cultures evolve. 4000 Miles is a quiet play, mostly. There’s no sustained shouting or violence to speak of, though death looks out from every corner of the room. Genuinely sweet moments are shared between a self-absorbed millennial and his grandmother, an old lefty at the tipping point of senility. But Over the River and Through the Woods it isn’t, nor is gentle a word I’d ever choose to describe this subtle, one-act reminder that the ultimate reward of a long life is outliving everyone who might attend your funeral.

Did I mention that the show is also funny. Because it is. What it’s not is tightly-plotted. Nor is it full of the archetypal characters that tend to populate the classic American family drama. To that-end, 4000 Miles— a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist, is a chamber piece, more meditation than assault. But it’s an uneasy meditation, almost never serene.

The play opens with a scruffy, baggage-laden Leo waking Vera, his elderly grandmother in her Greenwich Village apartment at 3 a.m. The last thing she expected was an early morning visit from her left-coast grandson, and she doesn’t seem all that happy to see him. Leo had been cycling across the country with a friend. When that friend died in a freak, horrible accident on the road, he broke off communication with his family in Minneapolis and went off the grid.

Leo’s not intentionally malicious, but the young trustafarian is a natural manipulator: A wounded rugged outdoorsy-type quick to use his personal tragedy if it buys some sympathy or helps get the hot Chinese girl who looks like his adopted sister into bed. He takes up residence with his grandmother on a temporary basis, but makes her promise to not tell the family where he is. During that time he mooches, like some gigolo version of a grandson, trading human company and smiles for favor, making only a few real connections along the way. Leo doesn’t mean to be mean, but he is, making fun of his grandmother for still using the Yellow Pages, and scolding her for buying bananas. “There’s no such thing as a local banana,” he calls after her disdainfully.

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Over the course of the play we watch Leo lose his girlfriend Bec, making one final douchey request to, “remember how our bodies were together.” It doesn’t work. We also witness an attempted hook-up with a rich girl named Amanda who flips out when she discovers she’s in the huge, rent-controlled apartment of a card carrying communist “I don’t know if I can have sex in a Communist’s home,” she says— or words to that effect. Her wild drunken anti-communist rant is one of the show’s best set pieces. Replace the word Communist with any racial descriptor and the monologue would probably still work. And the audience would be left slack-jawed in its wake. Then again, Amanda is Chinese. Vera isn’t exactly a Maoist or a monster but Amanda has family history, and can’t even be won over by her ironic, rent-control envy. Leo attempts to assuage her concerns, suggesting that Communism was a fashionable thing when his grandmother was young. “It was like recycling,” he says, cutting right to the play’s painfully frustrated heart.

4000 Miles took its first Off-Broadway bows about three months before the Occupy movement moved into Zuccotti Park. I mention that because, somehow that ultimately ineffective real-world occurrence seems more like the ending of Herzog’s play than its actual ending. She uses the outdoorsy Leo and the urban Vera to look at how far the easily-identified tropes of the American left had evolved. Class-conscious collective action, had become a lifestyle choice for people who can afford to protest GMOs and oil companies with their purchasing power. There is some suggestion that Leo is growing, by play’s end. It’s not hard to imagine him leaving for his new job out west only to get caught up in the massive street protest brewing in Manhattan. Nor is it hard to imagine him picking up camp on the second cold night.

Every character in 4000 Miles is a prisoner of perspective, but Leo most of all. He’s loveably disheveled, despicably self-centered and difficult to like. His grandmother Vera can be abrasive, and muddled, but she clearly has the more sympathetic role, and Karen Mason Riss is spectacular in the part.

Riss is a veteran performer who’s earned her accolades. She seldom misses, and although Vera isn’t exactly a flashy role, it can be counted among her best performances.

Christopher Joel Onken is completely believable as Leo, although his more cloying antics come across as being downright sinister. Carly Crawford is also effective, if a little stilted as Leo’s girlfriend Bec. Then again, if the show has a thankless part, that’s it.

Ron Gordon’s scenic design gives the impression that Vera’s not-so-Manhattan Manhattan residence is infinitely large on the inside. That’s a quibble, not a deal-breaker.

4000 Miles is a talky play, and not very action packed. It has never sounded like a show I would like very much. And yet I can’t remember when I’ve been quite so unexpectedly swept off my feet by a script and an acting ensemble. Grace, which also showcased the talents of Mr. Onken came close, but it’s a cartoon rendition of modernity compared to the subtleties of 4000 Miles.

For ticket information, here you go.