Tag: theater

Categories
News

Memphian Katori Hall’s Play to Open in New York

The New York Times has a nice story today on young Memphis playwright Katori Hall. An excerpt:

KATORI HALL’S earliest plays were a smash, keeping the audience rapt for hours. They were staged in a Fisher-Price dollhouse in Ms. Hall’s Memphis living room, and she was author, director, doll handler and the entire audience.

“That’s all I did was make up little plays and perform them for myself,” she said in a recent interview. “When I lost the Fisher-Price people, I snuck into my dad’s toolbox and got batteries to make into people, and I’d roll lint from under the couch into balls and make them the dogs.”

Ms. Hall, 26, is about to find a wider audience. Her first major production, “Hoodoo Love,” begins previews on Tuesday at the Cherry Lane Theater in the West Village and opens Nov. 1.

Read the Times story.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

The Aristocrats

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was a radical aesthete and completely obsessed with surfaces. It’s his indulgent (and totally unironic) voice ringing out in The Picture of Dorian Grey, declaring the complete uselessness of art. It’s sometimes helpful to remember that much of the wicked wit’s finest work was intended to be digested as art for art’s sake and to revel in the comic craftsmanship.

The Importance of Being Earnest is so obstinately unimportant, it’s utterly meaningless: a bad pun wrapped up in an absurd sex farce artfully doodled over two symmetrical hours. It’s a nouveau puzzle box that revels as much in the perversity of its own cucumber-sandwich-eating decadence as it does in the cognitive dissonance of Victorian morality. It’s an enduring hymn to hypocrisy and grotesque seriousness, and Germantown Community Theatre has done it up like a proper English tea — with lots of lumps and cake.

Director John Rone and set designer/actor Bill Short have created a versatile space filled with glass buddhas, exotic masks from far-off lands, and a big squiggly painting that may or may not look exactly like a mighty scrotum. It’s a visual feast of high-toned whimsy that uses small gestures to make the most out of GCT’s matchbox stage.

“Ignorance is a delicate, exotic fruit,” says Wilde’s practically perfect ingenue Gwendolyn Fairfax (sounding for all the world like a foreign correspondent for Fox News). Gwen lives in the city but detests crowded places and wishes to marry Jack Worthing mainly because she thinks his name is Ernest, though it isn’t (but it is). “Touch it and the bloom is gone,” she says, in praise of her beautifully undefiled (ahem!) mind. Mary Buchignani, a rock-solid comedian who almost never fails to satisfy, delivers these iconic lines like they were newly minted and just for her. Her nearly sociopathic moral flexibility and reflexive preening makes her the perfect foil for Laurence Goodwin’s brassy soubrette take on Cecily Cardew, the earthy and iconoclastic country heiress who is in love with the wickedly witty Algernon because she thinks he’s bad (which is true) and because she thinks he’s Ernest (which isn’t).

It’s been suggested that Lady Bracknell’s response, upon discovering that Jack Worthing was a foundling discovered in a handbag in Victoria Station, is the most diversely interpreted snatch of dialog in the history of the English-speaking stage. Veteran actor and director Jo Malin returns to the stage after a long absence to put her stamp on Wilde’s famous gorgon. “You can hardly imagine that I would dream of allowing a girl brought up with the utmost care to marry into a cloakroom,” she asks with cool, ironic bewilderment. “To form an alliance with a parcel?” Very nearly perfect.

Jason M. Spitzer and Julie Reinbold turn in textbook performances as the Reverend Dr. Chasuble (a randy cleric) and Miss Prism (the no-less-randy governess). Justin Willingham charms as the irascible Algernon. Only Tripp Hurst, weighted down by a British accent he can’t quite get control over, fails to make the most of Wilde’s deliciously sly banter.

Rone has turned in a smart, vibrant, often snappy, and always stylish production of a certifiable classic, finding lots of new laughter along the way. The cast, with noted exceptions, is very nearly perfect. The director’s command of the material is as obvious as it is impressive, and his choreographed set changes are nearly as much fun to watch as the scenes. And yet, in spite of all this, everything stalls in the second act. Just as the farce starts to unwind, this Earnest starts to run out of steam without ever completely running out of charm.

The logical inversions that Wilde employs may be clever to the last, but they aren’t completely unpredictable. It doesn’t help that his barbs have set the standard for jokes about marriage for the last century. If the actors don’t maintain a brisk pace, all the verbal gymnastics can seem ridiculously ornamental and cumbersome. Considering that the play’s big final punch line is so deliberately bad (“I’ve now realized … the vital importance of being earnest”), speed may sometimes be preferable to more obvious virtues.

At Germantown Community Theatre through October 21st

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Unpleasantness

Voltaire said it best when he wrote, “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” Doubt is the quarrelsome traveling companion of both caution and inquiry, while certainty, as recent events might suggest, can turn a nation of normally decent people into reckless cheerleaders for unnecessary war.

Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Doubt, currently on stage at Playhouse on the Square, begins with a lyrical sermon weighing the respective values of certainty and skepticism. Framed by a stained-glass window, Father Flynn, a progressive Catholic priest (played by a tougher-than-usual Michael Gravois), makes the case that doubt can create a bond between man and God that is as powerful and satisfying as unswerving faith. It’s this sermon in praise of uncertainty that makes the conservative Sister Aloysius (flintily played by Ann Marie Hall) certain that Father Flynn likes to bugger little boys.

Doubt is one of the most celebrated plays in recent memory — and one of the most unoriginal. It’s Arthur Miller’s The Crucible writ small. It’s a watered-down version of David Mamet’s Oleanna. It’s a sympathetic revision of Christopher Durang’s scathing satire Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You. It’s a 90-minute witch hunt that leaves audiences wondering if, in this particular circumstance, the hunter wasn’t fully justified. It’s a decent potboiler dressed up to resemble something a little more serious. Good, not great.

After a disappointing performance as Bananas in Theater Memphis’ House of Blue Leaves, Hall is back in top form. Her withering glances can make your knuckles throb like they’d just been slapped with a ruler. Hall’s powerful and powerfully frustrating performance underscores her unlikable character’s one mitigating delimma: As a female working in the patriarchal Catholic school system, she has tremendous responsibilities that must be executed in the absence of any meaningful authority. The near futility of Sister Aloysius’ struggle against an old-boy system with a history of protecting pedophiles makes her disregard for substantial proof of wrongdoing nearly tolerable. And in the end, when she breaks down and confesses that she too is riddled with doubt, it’s clear she’s talking not about herself but about the church and possibly God.

Doubt works best when the audience is left to wonder whether or not Father Flynn is a predator or a victim. Unfortunately, that’s not the case at Playhouse on the Square. Director Jerry Chipman, who easily handled the moral ambiguities of How I Learned To Drive, has been less successful with Doubt. Under his guidance, Father Flynn has evolved into a creature with two heads — one crowned in compassion, the other in indignation. His guilt is certain enough to undo the play’s suspense, turning what could be a compelling mystery into Erin Brockovich in a habit.

Doubt is set in 1964, and much of the play’s action is informed by the recent assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an event that sent Americans spiraling into a national identity crisis. The civil rights movement was coming to a full boil, threatening social norms in regard to ethnicity, economic conditions, and gender roles. The youth movement that flowered in the “Summer of Love” and wilted by the end of the decade was just beginning to bud, and bedrock institutions of church, state, and short hair for boys were being questioned, as were the intentions of anyone over 30.

Even rock-and-roll, a sound as American as Elvis, had been hijacked by a band of mop-topped Brits whose questionable morals were sure to infect, weaken, and ultimately destroy the national character.

The Catholic Church, looking to weather the storm of social change, was beginning to adopt a comparatively liberal agenda. This is the historical and political context that makes Doubt so potentially resonant in post-9/11 America. But this Doubt is cursed with the kind of certainty that boarders on intoxication. It plays out like an expression of irrational suburban fears that everyone not actively hunting child molesters is either a child molester or a liberal enabler.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day, or so the cliché goes. And so it is with Sister Aloysius, whose tirade against the wicked pagan imagery found in the Christmas song “Frosty the Snowman” is richly comical. The unfortunate suggestion, however, is that there is a real method to the good sister’s madness.

At Playhouse on the Square through October 21st

Categories
Best of Memphis Special Sections

Arts & Entertainment

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Watch more than one episode of a reality show such as “Super Nanny” or “Project Runway” or “Dog Whisperer” or any of the home-design shows (or “Flava of Love,” for that matter), and you’ll notice a theme: Consistency matters. The winners of this section are a reminder of that point. Of the 13 categories, 11 of the first-place winners were in the same spot last year. One exception was in the “Best Local Athlete” category, for which there was no clear winner. But it’s the other category — “Best Sports Team” — which is particularly telling and proves the consistency maxim. Last year, the Grizzlies ruled. This year, after a very disappointing season, they’re in third place behind the (undeniably hot) University of Memphis men’s basketball team at number one and the Memphis Redbirds (who had an awful season themselves) at number two.

Best Golf Course

1. The Links at Galloway

2. TPC at Southwind

3. The Links at Overton Park — tie —

Spring Creek Golf Course

Tucked into one of our city’s nicest neighborhoods, Galloway has been one of our city’s finest courses for almost half a century. A recent multimillion-dollar renovation made something good even better, with much nicer fairways, greens as flat as a pool table, a lovely clubhouse that replaced the stone-covered building — all in a parklike setting.

Best Museum

1. Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

2. Memphis Pink Palace Museum

3. Children’s Museum of Memphis — tie —

Dixon Gallery & Gardens — tie —

Stax Museum of American Soul Music

The oldest art museum in Tennessee continues to draw crowds to its galleries. Originally a tiny jewel box in Overton Park, a massive expansion project helped turn the Brooks into one this country’s top museums.

Best Art Gallery

1. David Lusk Gallery

2. Jay Etkin Gallery

3. D’Edge Art & Unique Treasures

We’ve spent many fine evenings attending openings at David Lusk, which features an outstanding roster of artists. They also host an absolutely-have-to-be-there event for Memphis art lovers — “The Price Is Right,” an annual sale of works for under $1,000.

Justin Fox Burks

Best Live Theater

1. Playhouse on the Square

2. The Orpheum

3. Theatre Memphis

Jackie Nichols’ Playhouse on the Square has consistently presented top-notch performances for more than a quarter century. Operating out of the old Memphian movie theater on Cooper, Playhouse is in the midst of erecting a state-of-the-art facility across the street, which will provide them even greater opportunities.

Best Movie
Theater

1. Malco Studio on the Square

2. Malco Paradiso

3. Muvico Peabody Place

We can remember when the only thing that stood behind Paulette’s was a parking lot. Then Malco had the idea to construct a “boutique” theater, one with intimate auditoriums and featuring films that somehow missed the larger circuits. Well, that gamble paid off, big time, and Studio on the Square is without question one of the best places in town to watch a movie.

Best Casino

1. Horseshoe Casino

2. Grand Casino

3. Sam’s Town

Our readers must feel lucky at the Horseshoe, a perennial Best of Memphis winner. Horseshoe also features some of the coolest musical and comedy acts on tour.

Best Picnic Spot

1. Shelby Farms

2. Overton Park

3. Chickasaw Gardens Lake/Pink Palace Museum

On weekends, it’s getting harder and harder to find a nice quiet spot to set down a blanket and have a picnic, but we agree that Shelby Farms probably offers the most choices, and it is an amazing thing to “get away from it all” even though you are still smack-dab in the middle of everything.

Best Place To Meet Singles

1. Church

2. Online

3. Beale Street

This category certainly told us a lot about our readers. We’d hoped that those of you who went to church did so for spiritual enlightenment and not to check out the hot chick or guy in the choir.

Justin Fox Burks

1st Place: Best Live Theatre

Best Free Date

1. Mississippi River

2. Shelby Farms

3. Memphis Zoo on Tuesdays

We hope that everyone who listed “Mississippi River” meant watching the river from the safety of Tom Lee Park or some other vantage point, or maybe even boating in it (though not too many people we know seem to do that, for some reason). At any rate, we hope you didn’t mean swimming in it.

Justin Fox Burks

1st Place: Best Free Date

Best Family
Entertainment

1. Memphis Zoo

2. Redbirds Game

3. Children’s Museum of Memphis

The Memphis Zoo seems to be a hit with our readers for any number of reasons. Perhaps because it really is one of the best zoos in the country.

Best Sports Team

1. University of Memphis Tiger
Basketball

2. Memphis Redbirds

3. Memphis Grizzlies

We’re anxiously waiting to see if the Tigers get a #2 — even #1 — preseason ranking, but no matter how they play, Coach Cal’s Tigers have captured the hearts of Memphians.

Justin Fox Burks

1st Place: Best Family Entertainment

Best Grizzlies
Player

1. Pau Gasol

2. Mike Miller

3. Rudy Gay

When the Grizzlies first came to town, all anyone talked about was a fellow named Shane Battier. But a lanky Spaniard also began to pile up points in the paint, and when Battier jumped ship, Gasol quickly became the fan favorite. We keep hearing all this talk of trades, but new coach Marc Iavaroni insists Gasol is here to stay. We hope so.

Justin Fox Burks

1st Place: Best Grizzlies Player

Best Local Athlete

READERS’ CHOICE

Pau Gasol

DeAngelo Williams

Mike Miller

Loren Roberts

John Daly

Chris Douglas-Roberts

One of our colleagues, who knows quite a bit about sports in Memphis, recently declared that if Memphis ever put up a statue to its greatest athlete, it would have to decide between Larry Finch or Pau Gasol. Coach Finch didn’t garner many votes this time, and nobody drew enough votes for us to declare first-, second-, or third-place finishes, but our readers love their sports, naming players from basketball, football, and golf.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

The Greatest

Jim Ostrander, the man for whom Memphis’ annual theater awards are named, could do it all. His singing could fill the vacuum of space; his skills as a comedian were rivaled only by his skills as a tragedian. And although he was stoutly built, he could kick up his heels with the best dancers around. Ostrander’s laugh was famously large, and backstage lore held that you couldn’t have a bad show if he was in the audience. This year’s Ostrander nominations show that Memphis’ theaters are living up to the example set by their namesake: They can do anything.

Yes, musicals do dominate this year’s award season, but very few of them can be described as fluff. From the biting social commentary of Caroline, or Change, to the knowingly silly satire of The Musical of Musicals (The Musical!), these are complex artworks far removed from the escapist fare that defined America’s musical theater for most of the 20th century.

Theatre Memphis staged Steve Martin’s light absurdism with Picasso at the Lapin Agile, while Rhodes College tackled Samuel Beckett’s most famous monster, Waiting for Godot.

Shakespeare was well represented by an extraordinary (and underrecognized) production of Romeo and Juliet at Germantown Community Theatre, while Othello stalked the boards of Theatre Memphis’ Next Stage. Classic comedies like The Odd Couple were balanced by the grim realities of The Glory of Living and The Rabbit Hole.

Groups such as Playwright’s Forum and Our Own Voice supplied Memphis with numerous original works.

The 2006-’07 season has seen Memphis theaters tackle big issues relating to race, gender, and economic strife via scripts as diverse as Oleanna, The Full Monty, and Crumbs from the Table of Joy.

It short, it has been a good year for Memphis theater, and on Sunday, August 26th, Contemporary Media (parent company of the Flyer) and the Greater Memphis Arts Council will celebrate the best of the best when the Ostrander Community Theatre Awards get under way at the Memphis Botanic Garden. Cocktails are served at 6 p.m. The ceremony begins at 7:30 p.m.

Ostrander Community Theatre Awards
Nominees for 2006-2007

Key: TM=Theatre Memphis, NSTM=Next Stage at Theatre Memphis, POTS=Playhouse on the Square, CP=Circuit Playhouse, GCT=Germantown Community Theatre, HT=Harrell Theatre, POTSTW=Playhouse on the Square at TheatreWorks.

SET DESIGN: Christopher McCollum for Picasso at the Lapin Agile at NSTM; Bruce Bergner for Seussical at POTS; Christopher McCollum for The Odd Couple at TM; Jimmy Humphries for The Rabbit Hole at CP; Pam Hurley for Little Shop of Horrors at TM.

COSTUMES: Rebecca Powell for

The Rabbit Hole at Circuit Playhouse

Seussical at POTS; Andre Bruce Ward for My Fair Lady at TM; Jason Bishop for The Wild Party at CP; Janice Louise for Picasso at the Lapin Agile at NSTM; Rebecca Powell for The Mousetrap at POTS.

LIGHTING: Jared Land for Little Shop of Horrors at TM; Ben Wheeler for Seussical at POTS; Matthew Landwehr for The Rabbit Hole at CP; Ken Friedhoff for The Full Monty at POTS; Ben Wheeler for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at POTS.

PROPS: David Nofsinger and Bill Short for My Fair Lady at TM; Carey Stipe for I Am My Own Wife at CP; Bill Short for It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play at POTS.

SET DRESSING: Bill Short for It’s a Wonderful Life: A Radio Play at POTS; Carey Stipe for I Am My Own Wife at CP; Christopher McCollum for Picasso at the Lapin Agile at NSTM; Dave Nofsinger and Bill Short for My Fair Lady at TM.

MUSIC DIRECTION: Angelo Rapan for Little Shop of Horrors at TM; Angelo Rapan for Evita at HT; Dennis Whitehead for The Wild Party at CP; Dennis Whitehead for The Full Monty at POTS; Gary Beard for Musical of Musicals at NSTM.

SOUND DESIGN: Eric Sefton for Romeo and Juliet at GCT; Rory Dale for I Am My Own Wife at CP; Rory Dale for The Rabbit Hole at CP; Steven Gary for Oleanna at NSTM; Rory Dale for The Glory of Living at CP.

CHOREOGRAPHY: David Ollington for The Full Monty at POTS; Amy Hanford for Evita at HT; Jerre Dye for Little Shop of Horrors at TM; Pam Hurley for Musical of Musicals at NSTM; Jay Rapp for The Wild Party at CP.

The House of Blue Leaves at Theatre Memphis

SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL: Shaheerah Farrakhan for Caroline, or Change at POTS; Irene Crist for The Full Monty at POTS; Cheyenne Nelson for The Wild Party at CP; Sheana Tobey for The Wild Party at CP; Crystin Gilmore for Caroline, or Change at POTS.

SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A MUSICAL: Kent Fleshman for Little Shop of Horrors at TM; Greg Pragel for The Full Monty at POTS; Daniel Zakarija for The Full Monty at POTS; Jeremy Garrett for Big River at POTS; John Hemphill for Big River at POTS.

LEADING ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL: Illeana Kirven for Caroline, or Change at POTS; Emily Pettet for Beauty and the Beast at HT; Miriam Rodriguez for Little Shop of Horrors at TM; Kim Baker for Seussical at POTS; Jude Knight for Musical of Musicals at NSTM.

LEADING ACTOR IN A MUSICAL: Marques Brown for Little Shop of Horrors at TM; Aaron Lamb for The Full Monty at POTS; Andrew Weir for Big River at POTS; Pete Montgomery for Seussical at POTS; Kent Fleshman for Musical of Musicals at NSTM.

DIRECTION OF A MUSICAL: Dave Landis for Caroline, or Change at POTS; Cecelia Wingate for Little Shop of Horrors at TM; Bennett Wood for Musical of Musicals at TM; Gary John La Rosa for Seussical at POTS; Dave Landis for The Full Monty at POTS.

MUSICAL PRODUCTION: Caroline, or Change at POTS; The Full Monty at POTS; Seussical at POTS; Little Shop of Horrors at TM; Musical of Musicals at NSTM.

SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A DRAMA: Alicia Queen for Othello at NSTM; Erin Shelton for Crumbs From the Table of Joy at CP; Jo Lynne Palmer for The Exonerated at POTSTW; Irene Crist for The Rabbit Hole at CP; Maya Geri for Crumbs From the Table of Joy at CP.

SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A DRAMA: Tony Isbell for Picasso at the Lapin Agile at NSTM; Jim Palmer for The Pillowman at POTSTW; Aaron Lamb for The Pillowman at POTSTW; Ed Porter for The Rabbit Hole at CP; Barry Fuller for Picasso at the Lapin Agile at NSTM.

LEADING ACTRESS IN A DRAMA: Kim Justis Eikner for The Rabbit Hole at CP; Erin McGhee for The Glory of Living at POTS; Kristi Steele for Crumbs From the Table of Joy at CP; Erin Shelton for Othello at NSTM.

Caroline, or Change at Playhouse on the Square

LEADING ACTOR IN A DRAMA: Michael Khanlarian for Othello at NSTM; Kyle Hatley for Picasso at the Lapin Agile at NSTM; Barclay Roberts for The House of Blue Leaves at Theatre Memphis; Marques Brown for Picasso at the Lapin Agile at NSTM; Michael Gravois for I Am My Own Wife at CP; Michael Gravois for The Pillowman at POTSTW.

DIRECTION OF A DRAMA: Stephen Hancock for I Am My Own Wife at CP; Stephen Hancock for The Pillowman at POTSTW; Tony Horne for Crumbs From the Table of Joy at CP; Dave Landis for The Rabbit Hole at CP.

DRAMATIC PRODUCTION: The Pillowman at POTSTW; Picasso at the Lapin Agile at NSTM; Crumbs From the Table of Joy at CP; I Am My Own Wife at CP; The Rabbit Hole at CP.

ENSEMBLE ACTING: Cast of Musical of Musicals at NSTM; cast of Crumbs From the Table of Joy at CP.

BEHIND THE SCENES AWARD: Michael Compton at TM; Rory Dale at POTS; Betty Dilley at GCT.

EUGART YERIAN AWARD FOR LIFETIME SERVICE TO MEMPHIS THEATRE: Julia “Cookie” Ewing.

College Ostrander Awards
Nominees for 2006-2007

Key: U of M=The University of Memphis, Rhodes=The McCoy Theatre at Rhodes College

EXCELLENCE IN SET DESIGN: Laura Canon for Waiting for Godot at Rhodes; Michael Jones for Elegies at U of M; Douglas Gilpin for Noises Off at U of M.

EXCELLENCE IN LIGHTING: J.D. Sargent for The Last Days of Judas Iscariot at U of M; Laura Canon for Waiting for Godot at Rhodes; Ken Friedhoff for Elegies at U of M.

CHOREOGRAPHY, STAGE COMBAT: Susan Chrietzberg for As You Like It at the U of M; Jerre Dye for Dancing at Lughnasa at Rhodes; Susan Chrietzberg for Noises Off at the U of M.

LEADING ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL: Claire Hayner for Elegies at the U of M; Annie Freres for Elegies at U of M; Kirie Taylor Walz for Elegies at U of M.

LEADING ACTOR IN A MUSICAL: Kevin Todd Murphy for Elegies at U of M; Ryan Scott for Elegies at U of M.

SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A DRAMA: Jade Hobbs for As You Like It at U of M; Shannon King for Dancing at Lughnasa at Rhodes; Alicia Queen for Agnes of God at Rhodes.

SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A DRAMA: Thomas Kelly for Waiting for Godot at Rhodes; Daniel Sturtevant for Waiting for Godot at Rhodes; Matthew Crewse for As You Like It at U of M.

LEADING ACTRESS IN A DRAMA: Alicia Queen for Dancing at Lughnasa at Rhodes; Ann Marie Gideon for As You Like It at U of M.

LEADING ACTOR IN A DRAMA: Jason Hansen for Waiting for Godot at Rhodes; Michael Frame for Noises Off at U of M; Nate Smith for Waiting for Godot at Rhodes; Pete Montgomery for Dancing at Lughnasa at Rhodes.

ENSEMBLE ACTING: Cast of Elegies at U of M; cast of Waiting for Godot at Rhodes; cast of Dancing at Lughnasa at Rhodes.

DIRECTION OF A DRAMA: Jerre Dye for Dancing at Lughnasa at Rhodes; Pamela Poletti for Waiting For Godot at Rhodes; Stephen Hancock for Noises Off at U of M.

DRAMATIC PRODUCTION: Waiting for Godot at Rhodes; Dancing at Lughnasa at Rhodes.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Glorybound

The closing metaphor in Rebecca Gilman’s ironically titled The Glory of Living at Circuit Playhouse is as unsubtle and effective as a slug to the back of the head. We are treated to the sights and sounds of Lisa (played by Erin McGhee, pictured), a remorseless killer on death row as she delights in learning to play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on a toy piano her father gave her before he died. Daddy just gave her the piano, you see. He never actually taught her how to play.

And so it goes with poor Lisa, who came up like a weed, with no reason to believe there was anything more to life than watching TV, fetching cold beers for drunk men, and staying out of the way while her mama turned tricks with the strangers she met talking on the CB radio. Is it any wonder that little greasy-haired Lisa ran off with the first perverted piece of car-thieving trash who paid her what sounded like a sincere compliment?

As Gilman’s occasionally humorous tragedy plinks to a false and fatalistic happy ending, it’s difficult for even the most strident anti-death-penalty activist not to view Lisa’s seemingly harsh sentence as something akin to a doctor-assisted suicide. Yes, her newfound capacity to learn may evoke pity, but it does nothing to erase or mitigate the horrors she’s witnessed, let alone the ones she’s facilitated.

In her directorial debut, Playhouse on the Square regular Courtney Oliver delivers the sordid goods, coaxing honest, unaffected performances from a tight ensemble of 10 actors. The bright-white lights under which she and lighting designer Ben Wheeler have chosen to tell Gilman’s story excuse the playwright’s many dark excesses. The chains, the beatings, the nudity, the pedophilia, and ultimately the murders all become clinical exhibits locked inside a safe, sterile environment. It’s an aesthetic device that keeps the characters interesting even when the storyline ventures deep into cliché.

Gilman’s hard-boiled story echoes the perverse and brutal kitsch of writers like Jim Thompson and Denis Johnson, but the shady Alabamans populating The Glory of Living are all about a meth habit away from either caricature or believability. We’ve seen all of these characters and many of these situations before (and better) in Bonnie & Clyde, Natural Born Killers, Heathers, and, to some extent, Craig Brewer’s controversial but decidedly less perverse Black Snake Moan. The only thing Gilman’s play has over these cinematic entertainments is a healthy lack of twisted romanticism and the living presence of the actors. Perhaps that’s enough.

Actress Tracie Hansom, who has built her reputation playing saints, princesses, and unruly pieces of trash, is in her element as Lisa’s mom, an aging lot lizard who’s entirely too trashed to get out of bed and ply her trade at the truck stops. Hansom shrieks and moans with revolting eroticism while Lisa sits balled up watching TV with Clint (Aaron Lamb), a charismatic child molester who will marry the 15-year-old and use her warped worldview and low self-esteem to turn her into his personal procurer as well as the person responsible for hushing up Clint’s victims for good.

McGhee and Lamb play well enough off one another, though there are mercifully fleeting moments when the couple morph into an unfunny (though no less over-the-top) version of H.I. and Edwina McDunnough from the Coen Brothers’ criminal farce Raising Arizona. What is ultimately missing from the picture is a motivation for the crimes. It’s not so hard to understand how the unloved and undereducated daughter of a whore might end up in a murderously codependent relationship, but are we really to believe that Clint’s oversized but underperforming member is the only reason for his bizarre needs and brutal behavior?

Gilman is a much more complex writer than The Glory of Living might lead one to believe. Although it seems as if the playwright is asking us to reconsider the worth of the human flotsam she has presented, it’s another message that rings through loud and clear.

Lisa tells her attorney (played with heart and awkward charm by Scott Duff) that some people were just meant to die. The young girls Lisa picked up and bumped off for her husband were foolish enough to get into a car with a stranger. As McGhee’s Lisa glows with joy over the simplistic tunes she’s learned to play on her toy piano, it becomes painfully apparent that for all her wasted potential, she was meant to die. If it hadn’t been the government doing the killing, it would have been Clint.

Through May 20th

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Great Minds

Picasso at the Lapin Agile is set in 1904 on the northern slope of the Butte Montmartre in a grimy bar, where the 20th century’s finest creative minds once came together to carouse over brandy and cherries and sing their sorrows away beneath a cartoonish painting of a drunken rabbit stepping out of his frying pan and into Paris’ smoky nightlife. But Steve Martin’s acclaimed, long-running comedy opens more like an American Western than any French farce. A wild-haired stranger identifying himself as Albert Einstein wanders into the saloon too early and looking for a woman nobody knows. The name “Picasso,” the baddest artist in town, hangs on the lips of every patron, and anybody who knows anything about Westerns knows that a showdown is inevitable. And what a showdown it is.

Picasso turns on Einstein and snarls like Clint Eastwood. “I don’t think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line,” he says. The words are delivered like a crushing final blow, proving once and for all that artistic thought is purer and far more radical than science. “Neither do I,” Einstein chirps merrily, and the battle is suddenly and hilariously over. Artist and scientist recognize their kinship, and Martin’s play turns into a punch-drunk meditation on the benefits and bitter ironies of possessing genius and achieving fame. Only an unidentified, hip-swiveling visitor from the future (and from Memphis) can interrupt the mutual admiration and put things into perspective.

Theatre Memphis’ creative team of Tracey Zerwig Ford (director), and Christopher McCollum (scenic designer) have done their level best to make the audience feel like patrons in the expressionistic bar of Martin’s bent imagination. Wine-drinking is encouraged, and Freddy the bartender, played by able straight man (and fair puppeteer) Henry McDaniel, is pouring reds and whites until the house lights go down and the action gets under way.

Ford treats Picasso like a rollicking atomic clown show, allowing scenes to smash into one another in a series of slapstick events. Although she sticks to the text, the performances Ford coaxes from her actors have the disarming effect of improv comedy. If Theatre Memphis’ take on Picasso is less polished than the version mounted by Playhouse on the Square a few years back, it is ultimately more thoughtful and engaging. If it is cluttered with too many self-conscious bits, it perfectly reflects the cluttered mind of the playwright who used to perform his banjo routine wearing bunny ears and an arrow through the head.

Although Einstein makes for an obvious sight gag, everyone seems to miss the visual comic potential of Picasso. If Kyle Hatley (pictured) were a foot-and-a-half shorter and forced to look up at those he looks down on, he’d be perfect as the libidinous father of cubism. Marques W. Brown, as the dottering, virtually unrousable Einstein, is the perfect foil for Hatley’s smoldering painter to stalk and prod. These two pivotal actors are buoyed by an excellent supporting cast, including the magnificent Barry Fuller as Gaston, the bar’s resident dirty old man, Tony Isbell as Sagot, a smarmy art dealer, and Ashley Bugg Brown as Germaine, a sassy barmaid and occasional philosopher.

Martin’s play also considers the poor unknown schmuck who anonymously impacts our culture: the man who invented the dunce cap and who thought of the ubiquitous photographic line “Say cheese.” Said schmuck is given to us in the form of Schmendiman, a boorish reveler who occasionally interrupts the proceedings to declare his own greatness. John McFerrin’s Schmendiman is so out of time with his fellow actors he actually feels like some drunken Shriner who wandered in off the street. It’s a cruelly effective approach to the role and very funny.

Ford’s style of comedy requires a certain kind of performer, and not everyone in the cast seems completely comfortable in their metaphorically oversized clown shoes. As “The Visitor” — an unnamed Elvis Presley — James Joseph Lukawitz is honest and effective but entirely unable to make the most of his enviable role. But even he has his moment.

Using his magical Elvis powers, the Visitor allows Picasso and Einstein to see their names written in the stars. “Where’s your name?” the artist and scientist ask their new friend. “Oh yeah, it’s there. Right above both of yours and three times as big. Just like Vegas,” the Visitor says, smugly adding, “Get used to it, gentlemen, ’cause that’s the way it works.”

At Theatre Memphis through April 22nd

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Culture-clash drama has more craft than inspiration.

Aside from a dutiful admiration and respect for high-quality craftsmanship I get when standing before the lesser paintings of a master or listening to the one undeniable single of an otherwise anonymous band, I didn’t feel a thing while watching Mira Nair’s film adaptation of The Namesake, Jumpa Lahiri’s expansive novel about three decades in the life of a Bengali family in New York and Calcutta, even though it is not a waste of time and has more than enough of everything I usually hope for in a movie.

For starters, The Namesake is a movie of great specificity in its actors; from Mississippi Masala to Vanity Fair, Nair’s affection for the beauty and variety of human bodies remains erotic and exciting. The physical contrast between trim, gentle, unobtrusive Ashoke (Irfan Khan) and his voluptuous, shy, arranged-marriage bride Ashima (Tabu) reflects their initial emotional discomfort, yet this contrast adds tension and sexiness when Nair shows us their first fumbling, midnight gropes toward physical affection. As the couple’s affections for each other deepen and mellow, their physiques eventually complete each other, as seen best in one calm, clever scene when they walk arm and arm, discussing the happy accident of their partnership.

Ashoke and Ashima’s uncomfortable, distracted oldest son Gogol (Kal Penn) is not as fortunate in finding a compatible mate as he wrestles with his bicultural heritage. Penn, who was so engaging in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, is a shifty, credible dramatic presence whose evolution and maturation comprise much of the second half of the film. Gogol’s frustration with his strange name symbolizes his larger ambivalence toward his Bengali background, and his embrace and rejection of his parents’ heritage catapults him from a bland, upper-class white-chick safety net named Maxine (Jacinda Barrett) into the arms of an intelligent, naughty, distant Indian girl named Moushumi (Zuleikha Robinson), who sexes him up and uses him like a club to beat back memories of her own disastrous traditional marriage.

The symbolic order of The Namesake is deliberate and novelistic throughout; shoes and bridges emerge as signs of travel, adventure, and tradition. And when these traditions don’t mix, Nair lingers over moments of cultural clumsiness, particularly in a long sequence when Gogol takes Maxine home. Nair is also intelligent enough to juxtapose the professional, cluttered busyness of New York with the teeming chaos of Calcutta while showing how both worlds appeal to Gogol.

Where India has the Taj Mahal, though, America has the airport and the pre-furnished apartment. During several key apartment scenes, the loneliness, disorientation, and alienation of Gogol and his family are most clearly felt; it’s as though they all suddenly find themselves stuck not just in a rented room but in a country whose greatest promise is little more than moneyed aimlessness. Within those spaces, the director’s sense of sorrow about the sacrifices made when forging one’s identity is clearest; within those spaces, I almost felt something strong about The Namesake.

The Namesake

Opening Friday, March 30th

Studio on the Square

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Hand Me Downs

Once in every generation, a play comes along that’s every bit as cloying and improbable as its title suggests. Lynn Nottage’s Crumbs from the Table of Joy — currently on stage at Circuit Playhouse — is just such a play.

Blind with grief over the loss of his wife, poor, uneducated but hard-working George Crump chases an address marked on a bottle of “elixir” and moves his family from rural Florida to Brooklyn to be closer to his new god, “Father Divine” (who actually lives in Philly). There he raises two precocious daughters, Ernestine and Ermina, according to “Sweet Father’s” strict principles of celibacy and anti-secularism until Aunt Lilly shows up, bags in hand. Lilly’s the late wife’s hot and still-unmarried sister, whom George used to fool around with back in the day. She’s a tragic bon viviant who hangs out in Harlem and talks about revolution but drinks all day and passionately espouses her belief that a smart, well-dressed black woman hasn’t got a chance.

Enter Gerte, the white, superficially sexless German immigrant George meets and immediately (and chastely) marries after sharing cookies (metaphor) on the subway (metaphor). Personalities clash, exposing the hazards of having too much faith and the disaster of having none at all.

Everybody struggles hard but ends up more or less okay except for poor Lilly, who ends up dead and “full of holes” (metaphor). Told from the unreliable perspective of Ernestine, a sophisticated verbal prankster who wishes her life was more like a Hollywood movie, Crumbs is a show with all the depth, subtlety, and clunky dialogue of an ABC “After School Special.” But for all its weird pretensions and goofy, writerly flourishes, it’s also an actor-driven piece, and Circuit’s uniformly excellent cast makes this yawn of a play much, much better than it probably deserves to be.

Keith Patrick McCoy does honest work as George, but the actor’s greatest asset — his deep resonant voice — is also his worst enemy. No matter how common his character, McCoy always sounds like a trained voiceover artist reciting Shakespeare. Crystin Gilmore, on the other hand, disappears into Lilly, making the tough old Commie feisty, foxy, and impossibly frail in the same breath. As a pair of completely dissimilar sisters, Kristi Steele (Ernestine) and Maya Geri (Ermina) do such beautifully detailed work they can almost make you forget about the play’s impossible tangle of sappy sentiment and mixed political messages.

When President Bush considered America’s cultural divide and spoke of the “soft bigotry of low expectations” not so very long ago, he wasn’t saying anything new, nor was he passing along a bit of conventional wisdom exclusive to tough-loving white conservatives. The president’s clever catchphrase echoed both the preaching style and philosophy of the Reverend General Jealous Divine, an African-American cult leader frequently referenced in Nottage’s play but never fully identified.

Before there was a George W. Bush (or an L. Ron Hubbard, for that matter), there was the almighty Father Divine, who proclaimed himself a god on earth, sold the power of faith and positive thinking to America’s poor, and damned mid-century social reform for promoting — yes — the soft bigotry of low expectations. Divine rejected out of hand the very idea that he could be labeled as African American, or black, or a part of a “downtrodden race,” or defined as anything other than a person of value. He preached that with enough positivism (and the occasional donation), reality will bend.

A black-and-white photograph of this saintly charlatan dominates the set of Crumbs From the Table of Joy, much as the portrait of Tennessee Williams’ famously absent father figure dominates the set in The Glass Menagerie. Exactly like it, in fact.

From its mannered bebop poetry to its quirky character development,Crumbs borrows too much from Williams’ iconic memory play to be purely coincidental, and yet the plays could not be more unalike. If The Glass Menagerie is an indictment of American class distinctions and the monsters they ultimately make, Crumbs is an apology for them. Where Williams self-consciously used the sentimental tropes of melodrama to editorialize, Nottage uses memory as a device to build a genuinely sentimental melodrama. And apparently, a very actable one.

Through April 1st

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Justice For All

Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

— Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird

Atticus Finch may not be the most dynamic hero in the canon of American literature, but he is certainly one of the most revered. The calm, meticulously fair attorney in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird never changes. He does all the right things for all the right reasons, even when he doesn’t think it will do a lick of good, and that makes old Atticus an ideal role model for the Community Legal Center (CLC), a 10-year-old organization that helps those who can’t help themselves by providing educational programs and pro bono legal services for people who can’t “pay the rent and pay a lawyer.”

On Wednesday, March 21st, the CLC hosts a fund-raiser at Theatre Memphis, culminating in a 7:30 p.m. performance of To Kill a Mockingbird, directed by Josie Helming. A silent auction begins at 6 p.m. Like Atticus says, “You rarely win, but sometimes you do.” And helping out a good cause while helping yourself to a few cocktails and a show sounds about as “win/win” as it gets.

Community Legal Center 7th Annual Fund-raiser, theatre memphis, Wednesday, March 21st, 6 p.m., $35 ($25 students). For tickets or additional information about the CLC, call 725-3904.