Reader’s Theatre
Two bins of memories are tucked into a nook in our basement "shelf room.” Not photos or kindergarten art projects, but a collection of favorite children's books. When it came time to winnow our fairly large collection, our son, now 25, selected several dozen "keepers" to be saved from the resale shop. There are classics--Dr. Seuss and The Little Engine That Could. But also very personal favorites that recall the pleasures of reading aloud to an appreciative audience.
Some of our favorites: Olive, the Other Reindeer (J. Otto Seibold and Vivian Walsh), about a dog who wanted to join Dasher, Rudolf and company on Santa's sojourn. Ten Minutes to Bedtime (Peggy Rathman), in which a child's bedtime routine is interrupted by a tour group of hamsters who wreak havoc in a series of illustrations with detail and activity that rival a Bruegel village-scape.
The Scrambled States of America (Laurie Keller), a book that playfully answers the perennial political question of recent years: What's the Matter With Kansas? In this enviably simpler United States., Kansas is bored. He tries to find excitement by switching places with Hawaii, but is even lonelier than before (being way out in the ocean). So he throws a party, invites all the states, who then decide to mix things up a little by switching places so they can spend time in a different part of the country. It doesn't work out. Florida moves to Minnesota's spot and is too cold. California ends up next to Wisconsin, but breaks out in hives because it is lactose intolerant. In the end, of course, all the states end up back where they started, settled and content (a scene even more fantastic than it was 20 years ago).
Browsing through the wit and color of children's book illustrators is one way to relive that parenting past. Reading is another. And I mean reading aloud. When my son and I graduated to books like Charlotte's Web or Harry Potter (we called them "chapter books"), my long imprisoned inner ham actor was given a nightly furlough. I puffed up my chest to intone the somnolent wisdom of Dumbledore. I squeaked out jittery dialogue a la Templeton the rat (Charlotte’s Web). I groaned the pessimistic complaints of The Hundred Acre Wood's Eeyore.
We listen to more and more recorded books these days. I just finished reading/listening to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Rushdie’s prose is hypnotic with energy and imagination. I felt its exuberance when I read silently, but really heard it in Lyndam Gregory’s “performance” on a recorded version. It’s lovely to leave great prose to the professionals like Gregory. But I sometimes crave the stage of a captive, bedtime audience.
The Cherry Orchard at the Goodman
Robert Falls’ The Cherry Orchard. Photo by Liz Lauren.
The plot of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard is pretty simple. Here’s how Robert Falls described it last Saturday after a performance at Chicago's Goodman Theatre. Act one: A family discovers they need to sell their cherry orchard. Act two: They find that they really need to sell the cherry orchard. Act three: They sell the cherry orchard. Act four: They figure out what to do after they sell the cherry orchard. But around that simple story is a dramatic world that teems with life. Some dreams are fulfilled and others shattered. Revolutions loom and the old order begins to fracture. A past tragedy casts a long shadow--some characters are able to move on, others are mired in remorse and sorrow.
Raven Whitley and Kate Fry. Photo by Liz Lauren.
With such rich characters and incident, you'd think that Chekhov's plays would be big hits, staples of theater companies and favorites of audiences. It is true that, as Falls told the talkback audience, Chekhov is one of the most produced playwrights around the world. But his plays are very hard to "get right," often mired in conceptual baggage or tipped too far toward either end of the comedy-drama spectrum. Falls and his actors here strike the perfect balance. Some characters react to the challenges of life with a shrug, others with histrionic collapse. Some stare directly into impending doom without seeing it, others divine the tumult to come.
Falls, who recently retired from the Artistic Director position at The Goodman, is considered one of America’s great theater makers, and this production shows why. Performers navigate hairpin turns from gaiety to despair. Silences speak volumes. There’s no frim-fram or Concept (capital “C”). He trusts the genius of the playwright and the work, and let’s it speak through his actors and staging. The Cherry Orchard runs through May 7th.
Playground Antics
Heidi Armbruster, Adam Poss, Elan Zafir and Makha Mthembu in The Milwaukee Repertory Theatre’s God of Carnage. Photo by Michael Brosilow.
The plot of Yasmina Reza's The God of Carnage is also pretty simple. But as you might guess from the apocalyptic title, Reza's take on contemporary American urbanites isn't as generous as Chekhov's. The lights come up on two couples in a posh New York City apartment. There has been a playground incident--one of their sons has hit the other with a stick, knocking out a couple of teeth. They are meeting, as responsible parents do, to handle the situation "like adults." "There still is such a thing as the art of coexistence, isn't there," says Veronica. Well......
The mood, at first, is civil, sophisticated, and even congenial. Clafoutis is offered (a cross between a fruit tart and pudding). How can we help our kids resolve the situation and appreciate right from wrong? The politesse goes on a little too long, however, and you begin to suspect the antipathy bubbling beneath the surface.
As tension builds and hostility emerges, we see the flesh and blood beneath the pristine role models. The pleasure of Reza's play lies in the way she shuffles various geometries of conflict: couple vs. couple, men vs. women, mano a mano, or every human for themselves. Ids emerge and overwhelm, 10-year-old Antiguan rum is guzzled, shirts and shoes are stripped off, nausea is induced and "relieved" (all over Veronica's prized book of Oskar Kokoschka prints!). Ultimately diplomacy morphs into existential conflicts expressed in neanderthal threats and acrobatics. As Alan explains toward the end of the play, "I believe in the god of carnage. He has ruled, uninterruptedly, since the dawn of time." Director Ryan Quinn deftly navigates the gradual transformation, which ultimately feels you leaving breathless. Even aficionados of clafouti and espresso, it seems, are just a nudge away from mayhem.
I Wish It So
Dawn Upshaw has an impressive resume in the world of opera and classical music. She's nabbed several Grammy awards, including one for the gorgeous suite Winter Morning Walks, Maria Schneider's setting of poems by Ted Kooser. But my go to recording of late is I Wish It So, an album of lesser-known Broadway songs. The composers represented are all in my songwriting pantheon (Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein and Kurt Weill). But the beautiful. killer cut on this disc is the title track by Marc Blitzstein (from the obscure 1959 musical, Juno). Listen here.
Buds
We leave National Poetry Month behind this week. And as Spring in Wisconsin begins to kick into gear, here’s a poem by the United States Poet Laureate to usher in the season.
Instructions on Not Giving Up
By Ada Limón
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
I’ll be away from the internet next week and will not publish a Friday Five on May 5th. Look for another column on May 12th.
Have a good couple of weeks.