Fore!
I have become one of those "golfers."
I know that seems a little snarky. I suppose I’m channeling my college-age self who had a less-than-generous attitude toward the game and its denizens.
Back then, before Tiger Woods made golf cool, golfers were generally white-haired, pink-faced, plaid-slacked fellas who swarmed the campus on weekends. They were jovial enough—no clubs thrown across the fairway or strings of expletives after missed gimme putts. But my 20-year-old ideas of a bright future lay elsewhere.
Before college, golf was a reliable diversion. The summer after sixth grade, I took golf lessons because, as my mother put it, "You certainly aren't going to sit around the house doing nothing all summer." I had just blown my lawn-mowing income on a new “stereo,” a $65 combination tuner-record player from Sears, so I had to cadge together a set of clubs from the cobwebbed bags in the garage corners of various family members. My favorite club at the time belonged to my grandfather. It was a six iron. The shaft was wood, the grip was white adhesive tape, and the blade was long and thin. It was positively medieval—if found in the possession of an insurrectionist, it would be confiscated as a weapon.
In those halcyon days, transportation and cash were scarce. After our Rec Department lessons, my friends and I realized that the nearby county golf course didn't open until 7 am, which gave us an hour of free daylight golfing. That's how I found myself riding a Schwinn Varsity 10-speed at 6 am through the Milwaukee County Grounds (as the Milwaukee Regional Medical Center was called then) with a bag of golf clubs slung across my back.
The golf-at-dawn ambition didn't last, but we had another solution. There was a large, open field just a half-block away (also part of the County Grounds). It had a small creek running through it (water hazard!) and was ringed by majestic trees. Our nine-hole "course" was a network of criss-crosses from tree to tree. No putting--you just had to hit the tree trunk.
Today, golf doesn’t involve dawn bike rides or tree-trunk ricochets. But new challenges await. Should I wear my arthritis hand brace under or over my golf glove? Pull cart, or propane-guzzling golf-mobile? How much do I need to give to the Sierra Club to assuage my guilt for wandering this chemically enhanced green space.
I have seen the fruits of golfers’ obsessions. The spiritless acres of Florida golf communities. The $70,000 set of clubs. The pants, dear god, the pants. But I have now felt the cool thrill of a tee-shot to the green (okay, so it was only 75 yards). I have heard the well-pitched PING that suggests a drive will fly straight and watched the slow arc of a putt on a sloped green that was hit just right. And so help me Tiger, it feels pretty good.
Signing Romeo
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is one of the bard’s household-word plays. Everyone knows it, from high school productions and movie versions, both authentic and adapted. It has been made “new” in all sorts of ways: setting it on the streets of LA or setting it to song in the streets of New York City; turning the young lovers into gnomes or zombies; gay men or senior citizens.
But there is something truly special about the American Players Theatre’s new take on Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy. Directed by John Langs—one of APT’s most inventive regular directors—it features actors performing in American Sign Language, including Joshua Castille, a hearing-impaired actor who plays Romeo.
Isabelle Bushue and Joshua Castille in American Players Theatre’s Romeo and Juliet.
As Castille signs his dialogue, actors ring the stage and speak it simultaneously. Langs and Castille have adapted the story slightly to root the deaf character firmly in the world of the play. There’s a lovely scene between Juliet (Isabelle Bushue) and the nurse (Colleen Madden) in which Juliet learns a few phrases in ASL to express her newfound love for Romeo.
As you might expect, APT has assembled an accomplished ensemble to tell Shakespeare’s great love story. But this is Castille’s show. He inhabits the youth and vigor of Romeo with tremendous physical dexterity. At times he’s an impetuous boy and others a tender contemplative. And his dynamic, impassioned signing doesn’t simply compliment Shakespeare’s language but magnifies it. In his journey through the play, he brings a complex, flesh-and-blood Romeo to the stage, climaxing in a coups-de-théâtre final moment that made me gasp aloud.
I have seen a lot of Shakespeare over the years. In the hands of some brilliant actors, his language has thundered and whispered, cajoled and menaced, soothed and serenaded. But until this production, I have never seen Shakespeare’s language dance.
Solo Turns
American Players Theatre opened two other shows recently, both of them notable for strong individual acting turns.
Nancy Rodriguez in APT’s Mala.
Melinda Lopez’s 2016 play, Mala, is a funny and unsentimental deep-dive into the travails of caring for an elderly parent. The family is Cuban, and “Mala” is Spanish for “bad,” which is what her mother calls her daughter in certain situations—like when mom is lying on the kitchen floor after a fall and is refusing to go to the hospital. Rodriguez narrates the events and plays all the characters. Her easy way with a story and her careful modulations between moments of comic exasperation and heart-rending grief give Lopez’s obviously autobiographical story a beautiful universal resonance.
There are acting chops aplenty to be found in Anton’s Shorts, a collection of Chekhov’s plays and so-called vaudevilles from early in his career. APT first performed a few of them in the mid-1980s, the first time the theater staged anything written after the Elizabethan period. Aaron Posner directed three of the five plays for APT’s virtual season, and has expanded the roster to create a satisfying full-length evening.
Tracy Michelle Arnold and Brian Mani in Anton’s Shorts.
Our host, not surprisingly, is Anton Chekhov himself (Nate Burger), who introduces each play with engaging and rhapsodic bits of his writerly philosophy. Peppered with phrases like “theater offers fictional truth or truthful fiction,” and “plays are engines of empathy,” it’s as entertaining an introduction to one of our greatest storytellers that you’re likely to find anywhere.
These vaudevilles are not the dramatic stuff of Three Sisters or The Cherry Orchard. In one of his letters, Chekhov says he wrote Swan Song on “four scraps of paper” and that “it took me an hour and fifteen minutes to write.” Nonetheless, they offer great roles for APT’s comically gifted actors. In The Proposal, Marcus Truschinski has the nimble physicality of classic Jerry Lewis, and Kelsey Brennan and Sarah Day are perfect foils. There’s a bit of the Nutty Professor in David Daniel’s solo turn, On the Harmfulness of Tobacco, in which a lecture on the evils of smoking turns into the tragicomic confession of a man trapped in an unfortunate marriage. In The Bear, Brian Mani blusters his way into the world of Tracy Michelle Arnold’s melodramatic mourning, demanding payment of her late husband’s debts. The rift transforms into romance, however, much to the confusion of James Ridge’s hilariously dutiful butler.
James Ridge and David Daniel in APT’s Anton’s Shorts.
Ridge gets the wistful star turn of the night in Swan Song, playing Vasili Svietlovidoff, an actor of a certain age mourning over what he fears was a wasted life. Musing to an empty theater, he discovers he’s not alone. His prompter (David Daniel) literally lives in the theater, and tenderly reminds Vasili of the glories of the stage life. Soon the actor is relishing the memory of great Shakespearean roles: Lear’s speech on the blasted heath, Guildenstern’s confession to Hamlet of his “unmannerly” love, and, of course, the last few lines from Jaques’ As You Like It speech about the seven ages of man. With post-pandemic theater on such shaky ground, it’s just the tonic for queasy theater lovers who fret about the future.
Road Trip: Baraboo!
Circuses have been falling out of fashion recently, but Baraboo, Wisconsin, home to the Circus World Museum, seems to be doing just fine. There’s a thriving small-town downtown surrounding the 1905 Sauk County Courthouse. A lovely path along the Baraboo River that connects the circus museum to parks and a zoo. And it’s a short drive to The International Crane Foundation, a research and conservation organization where you can see all of the 15 existing species of Gruiformes Guidae. If you’re planning a visit over Labor Day, you may wish to attend (or avoid) the Wisconsin State Cow Chip Throw in Prarie du Sac.
More Friedlander
After I wrote last week about the new book of Lee Friedlander photographs “curated” by Joel Coen, I went on a bit of a photography binge. There is pleasure aplenty in paging through the monumental catalog to Friedlander’s 2005 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, but the small collection that captured my attention was Factory Valleys, a series commissioned by the Akron Art Museum in 1979. Sixty photographs taken in Pennsylvania and Ohio offer a powerful vision of industrial America. The preface is an excerpt from Gertrude Stein:
Let me tell about the character of the people of the United States of America and what they say.
Let me tell you one thing, what they say has a great deal to do with what they do, and what they do they do do, as what they were was part of what they did, as by the time, this time, they are what they are.
How do they know what they are. They know it by looking at what they do. This is why the United States of America is important.
Have a great week!