Going My Way?

"My Way Little Girl" in the Warehouse Alley

by Paul Gillis


Last night I caught the second Fringe performance of "My Way Little Girl" in the alley next to the Warehouse Arts Center. (The first was on the Kennedy Center Millenium Stage.) This was definitely one of the most remarkable, out-of-the-mainstream programs I have seen at the Fringe this year.



Called an "installation piece", it begins with a tableau vivant of provocatively dressed women lounging on hay bales around a sleeping male figure, and banjo music. (The musical accompaniment by Dan Mazer is quite effective; there are no spoken words.) A stern woman teacher gives a mysterious lesson to a girl; then the man dons a doctor's garb and all hell breaks loose.





The piece was created by Andrew Zox, and seems to have been dredged up from a deep level of dreams. But to my mind, it dealt with very real cultural issues--specifically, the control and oppression of women, and the domination of the medical establishment over the process of childbirth.

The alley setting is very effective. The thought of it playing at the Ken Cen is particularly amazing--but I heard there was a very good Q & A session there after the performance. This is definitely a show to see if you are seeking the real Fringe element. More photos are posted in my web gallery:
http://paulgillis.phanfare.com/album/338390/490153#imageID=22398850

Death Before Dying

Modern and Sufi Dance, and Cross Fertilization

By Bob Morrison

Everything I know about sufi dance could fit on the period at the end of this sentence. Nonetheless, my ignorance did not prevent me from throughly enjoying Death Before Dying, a fusion of this exotic dance vocabulary with the more familiar one of the Western World's modern dance.


Conceived, produced and directed by the single-named Arpita, the show also benefits from live sufi and rock music by the band Moksha. At first I found it interesting to hear how the music changed when the dancers from Arpita's Eastern dancers and choreographer Jane Franklin's Western dancers traded places on stage.


Then I began to hear the eastern instruments adding their alternate scales and tunings to the rock numbers, and the electric guitars joining the accompaniment to songs sung in a language I couldn't understand.


The dancers, likewise, began adding gestures and poses from their opposite counterparts.




The program notes delineate a story line of love and violence. I never was able to follow it. When I mentioned this to Arpita the following day, she replied, "Well, it's pretty abstract." So I felt a little better. Maybe I'm not hopelessly provincial after all.

What I was able to do was thoroughly enjoy the beautiful form and motion of the dancing of two cultures, and the subtle changes taking place with cross-fertilization between them.


More images from "Death and Dying" are available for your viewing pleasure at my Bonnie Briar Productions web site. Please visit.

Cheers,
Bob

Love & War: With the Bard's Broads & Dames

Dark-Light Duels of Movement and Language

By Bob Morrison

Shakespeare, I believe, is tampered with at almost certain peril. Yet once in a while everything works and we remark fresh insights into his classics. "Love & War: With the Bard's Broads & Dames" is a happy example of the latter, playing in Touchstone Gallery on the second floor of 406 7th Street.

"War/Piece," the first of two parts, presents views on war by a variety of Sheakespeare heroines, from Hecate and the three witches to Katherina in "The Taming of the Shrew." Principal Hilary Kacser, who also serves as producer, portrays these ladies with stirring word and deft dance, echoed and complimented by the ensemble of Jordan Boughrum, Jennifer Crooks (also the director) and Liesyl Franz.







Part number two, "The Juliet Project," explores a single heroine in the guise of letters left a the Tomb of Juliet in Verona, Italy. Drawing on the Shakespeare piece, as well as responses to these letters by Club di Giulietta, Boughrum, Crooks and Franz are joined by Jason McIntosh and Mike Wong.






There will be two more performances of Love & War at Touchstone, Friday the 27th at 7 p.m. and Saturday the 28th at 9 p.m.

For photos of a dress rehearsal, see my July 18 blog. For more photographs of the performance, please visit my Bonnie Briar Productions web site.

Cheers.
Bob

Margherita

Layers Within Layers

By Bob Morrison

Full disclosure: I was paid to take the publicity photos for Margherita that appear in its advertising and program, and I first met actor Marian Licha at an ITVA-DC event more than a year ago.

In this play about Benito Mussolini's secret Jewish lover at the beginning of World War II, much is not as it seems and the obvious often turns out to be fantasy. Margherita Sarfatti is confidante and mentor to Il Duce--as well as his lover. The part is played with sensitivity and style by Marian Licha, whose portrayal of "Frida Vice-Versa" at last year's Capfringe was very well received.


At the height of his rise to power, Mussolini wants and needs the love letter he sent to Margherita. Does she still have them? If so, will she give them up? Jessica Lefkow directs with a sure hand, allowing ambiguities to remain unresolved and thus drawing us surely into the story.


More mystery: Dave Coyne plays a reporter who purports to represent an offer from the Washington Post to buy the letters for a handsome sum. But is he really who he claims to be?


In my view the show rises on the performance of Paul McLane as Mussolini. He struts and wheedles, threatens and cajoles, and plays a heartless tyrant playing the lover with intensity and restraint.



I'm old enough to remember the tons of confetti swept in yard-high windrows to the sides of downtown Pittsburgh streets following the surrender of the Axis powers, and the Life Magazine photo of the bodies of Mussolini and another of his lovers strung up by their heels by angry mobs in Rome. But this tale goes far beyond a period piece to explore the human mind and heart, the relationships of power, and the power of relationship.

For more photos of Margherita, please visit my Bonnie Briar Productions web site.

Cheers.
Bob

Four Plays for the Price of One

"Other Plans" at the Scientarium

by Paul Gillis


"Other Plans" is a set of four short plays by Stephanie Alice Scarpinato. It's being presented by Another Life Productions at the Scientarium, a venue specially created by the Fringe Festival on D Street. In the first play, a scheming young woman tries to steal a precious family rosary away from her sick cousin. That's what you call old-time religion!

In "Hungry no More", a woman starts her new job--writing bogus letters, supposedly from starving children, to send to a crooked charity's potential donors. It begins to dawn on her that this might not be the most ethical line of work...


"If I Had a Hammer" portrays the tense relationship between a middle-aged man and his son in the era of civil rights protests. The young man has gotten in trouble for protesting, and his father wants him to just accept the prevailing attitudes of the other white people in their small town. But this forces the father to confront how he swept his own moral outrage under the rug many years ago.



The last play, "That's Amore", is the most upbeat. A young woman comes to her grandparents' house to get them to come to a family dinner where they will meet her fiance and his family. They resist, but she does her best to win them over. Ethnic humor, of the Italian and Irish varieties, abounds.

For more photos of these productions, see my web gallery at
http://paulgillis.phanfare.com/album/338390/487613#imageID=22275771

Indigo, A Blues Opera

Slave Woman Gets Woman, Loses Woman, Struggles to Get Woman Back

By Bob Morrison

The subhead above tells in words what producer, director and author Karmet Mayet Johnson's "Indigo, A Blues Opera" portrays in dance, mime, and music. Tomas Doncker as Papa Mosiah, the Guitar Man provides a gentle, slow blues background on two guitars and two Dobros in turn.



But the effects are mostly visual, and dancers Ashley Brockington and Karma Mayet Johnson speak for themselves in their own vocabulary. Throughout, members of The Painted Lady Performance Project create eerie and effective tableaux, mime commentary on the action, and serve as scenery and stage decoration. A sampling from Indigo below without further comment.












This production is billed as a condensed version of an evening-length opera. At almost 90 minutes for this staging, the full opera will certainly rival Wagner's oevre in the stamina demanded of its audience. Fortunately the Fringe performance takes place in the Warehouse Main Stage, and you can bring in the refreshments you bought at the Warehouse cafe. (Don't forget to tip the bartender!)

To see more photographs from "Indigo, A Blues Opera," visit my Bonnie Briar Productions web site.

Cheers.
Bob

The ExFiles

Humor Punches Up This Drama

By Bob Morrison

Playwright Joan Bellsey hangs her ExFiles story on a Lesbian mom’s struggle to find strength to wage a custody fight with her ex-lover over their son. In this quest, she is assisted by a varied array of former lovers--with various degrees of success.


But don’t expect unbroken intensity. Bellsey deftly contrasts emotionally draining scenes with right-on touches of laugh-out-loud comedy.


The production benefits from a cast and crew that reads like a Who’s Who of Washington theater. Jane E. Petkofsky, for example, plays Emma with convincing self-doubt, leavened with episodes of tentative bravery. Director Dorothy Neumann’s expert pacing enhances the plot throughout.


Holly Twyford brings relentless southwest optimism to the character of TJ. And Charles St. Charles, Brilane Bowman, Samantha Merrick and Barbara Klein bring their characters convincingly to life.


At the end, Emma’s nemesis brings along her PowerPoint presentation, a compendium of lecture don’t-dos we’ve all seen, and carries it off with an unwitting bravado that reaches new heights of comedic achievement. I mean, gales of laughter with the appearance of each slide.

Unfortunately, there’s only one more ExFiles performance--on Thursday the 26th at 7:30 p.m. But the photos on my Bonnie Briar Productions web site will be available longer and there are more of them. You're welcome to visit.

Cheers.
Bob