When the adults go missing, the children cannot survive: Scrap Paper Shakespeare’s ROMEO & JULIET

ROMEO & JULIET
3 stars (out of 5)
Scrap Paper Shakespeare
Yours, Durham
Aug. 16 - Sept. 1
scrappapershakespeare.org

It’s one reason so many theatricals keep returning to Shakespeare: to search through ancient texts for something new. In recent years the region’s directors have found in Romeo & Juliet – a script now more than four centuries old – an accelerated culture’s addiction to immediate response and instant gratification, and the ghastly consequences of inculcating in the young the racial prejudices of the old. Even a critique of unchecked science found its way out of an improbable 1996 sendup/sequel at Chapel Hill's Forest Theatre, which – somehow – fused the famous star-crossed lovers’ text with the plot from the horror/sci-fi cult film Re-Animator. (Its name? Necromeo & Juliet.)

This actually happened.

(Yes, it actually happened. Google it.)

But Scrap Paper Shakespeare’s spirited new iteration, which closed Sept. 1 at an offbeat Durham photographic gallery space named Yours, took on different work.

With a notable ensemble of strong newcomers and rising actors anchored by stage veterans Simon Kaplan and Chloe Oliver, artistic director Emma Szuba's sometimes comic, sometimes pensive production underscored the immaturity – and catastrophically poor impulse control – not only of the familiar central characters, but the culture in which they lived.

It also underlined the titled couple’s youth as well. In an eerie ceremony during the chorus’s opening monologue, a symbolic prop or talisman was solemnly bestowed upon each character. It was jarring – but undeniably appropriate – when Juliet received a teddy bear.

Close, but not quite...

For lest we forget, this snarky recent meme on social media nearly got it right: Ultimately, Romeo and Juliet records the fatal, five-day relationship between a 13-year-old girl – a present-day 8^th-grader, in other words – and a boy who was maybe 17. 

The friendship bracelet that actor Emma Roe sported was as indicative as the hot pink girly-girl diary her character blissfully scribbled away in. This Juliet was clearly a bubbly, curious adolescent – and not a terribly deep one at that – whose first contact with and discoveries about emotions involving attraction, infatuation and desire would tragically be her last.

As for Romeo, his level of emotional regulation showed up in the kvetching and whines of actor Joe Perdue in Friar Lawrence's chambers. The reluctant teen murderer had gone there to hide after killing Tybalt, Juliet’s hot-tempered cousin, not in self-defense, but for revenge after the duelist slew Romeo’s friend Mercutio.

No, we haven’t seen a director play this scene for laughs before. But when Romeo was unable to recognize his good fortune at being banished from Verona (instead of being merely put to death), an undignified meltdown that left Perdue laid out on the floor – as written in the script – earned well-deserved chuckles from the audience, while the bewildered Friar (a marvelously exasperated Andy Li) tried in vain to hide him. The comedy was only reinforced when Nancy Huffaker’s indignant Nurse distastefully nudged the floored, flaccid lover with her foot, cawing, “Stand up. Stand an you be a man!”

Nancy Huffaker as Nurse, and Emma Roe as Juliet

Repeatedly this production made us wonder: Where were all the adults in fair Verona? For who in their right mind would train and arm a group of teenage boys in lethal swordplay, stoke them with not-so-ancient hatreds, put a cold Corona in their hands and then send them out, unsupervised, on the streets?

Oliver’s smug Samson and actor Grayce Anne Mosler’s boisterous Gregory seemed a laughable pair of day-drinking frat boys in the opening scene – albeit with concealed carry permits. But when their beery machismo sparked a larger fight than they were ready for, they panicked, as children do, and the eventual senseless bloodbath was guaranteed.

Functional adults also know how to deal with anger and frustration. But when even the oldest characters in Szuba’s production were incapable of basic anger management at home, the real roots of Verona’s civil strife became apparent.

In one of this production’s tenderest moments,  Kaplan's Lord Capulet gently comforted Juliet for her tears, ostensibly for the slain Tybalt, when he murmured, with concern, “[T]hy sighs, / Who, raging with thy tears and they with them, / Without a sudden calm, will overset / Thy tempest-tossèd body.”

Then, not three minutes later, Capulet threatened to disown her utterly when she refused to marry another suitor, Paris: “[H]ang, beg, starve, die in the streets,” he hectored, “For, by my soul, I’ll ne’er acknowledge thee, / Nor what is mine shall never do thee good.”

After this same man said to Paris, a day before, “My will to [Juliet’s] consent is but a part. / And, she agreed, within her scope of choice / lies my consent and fair according voice,” the velocity of Capulet’s rage was as evident as its utter irrationality. A capacity for such seismic shifts, without warning, doesn’t make for stable relationships. A Capulet who turns like this on his own daughter is clearly capable of doing far worse in a neighborhood quarrel.

The Lady and Lord (Chloe Oliver & Simon
Kaplan), at the Capulet's feast

Under Szuba’s direction, a blasé but perfectly coiffed and clad Oliver (in a double role) had already demonstrated Lady Capulet's own arrested emotional development earlier, while giddily endorsing a sudden marriage to the ever so socially awkward Paris (a second comic coup for the double-cast Li). When Lord Capulet’s wrath fell full force on Juliet, she was too busy being a trophy wife to offer any comfort or support. 

And as her family failed, Juliet's flimsy social safety net only made all matters worse. For what responsible religious leader would marry two teenagers a day after their first date? And what older caretaker would abet that union behind the backs of the child’s parents, her employers? 

When the Friar and Nurse were the closest that any adults in this world came to possessing wise counsel or emotional maturity, the titled pair were truly doomed.

Thus, this production showed Romeo and Juliet not to be an ageless love story, but the document of a community’s collapse instead. As immature adults behaved like kids, they left the real children wholly unprotected. Tragedy inevitably followed.

===

Scrap Paper Shakespeare's scrappy, go-for-it aesthetic frequently involves creating stagings on a shoestring budget, and making available spaces work, no matter how far they are from ideal. Integrity in the acting and directorial concept – as opposed to sumptuous sets and technical wizardry – are key, and this production of Romeo and Juliet certainly delivered.

Until, that is, it didn’t: quite abruptly and, worst of all, during the final act.

The ambitious young company's notable 2023 production of Shaw’s Arms and the Man made our best-of-year list in part for staging a play of that complexity on what we termed “a postage stamp-sized set,” wedged between two pillars at Durham's long-time alternative performance venue, The Fruit.

But in the even narrower studio space at Yours the company found a point of diminishing returns, as the venue forced compromises on the show, some more troublesome than others.

Arrayed from floor to ceiling, the studio's photographic bric-a-brac remained a distraction throughout the show, as did a vending machine for Kodak film, whose LED display kept scrolling the words "out of order." The office wall clock above the stage, which kept us posted on the correct time throughout the show, was also disconcerting.

(We'll have to see if these still pull our focus when the company returns to stage Claire F. Martin's Arabella in December.)

Ian Winek’s effective fight choreography minimized the disappointment when this production had to substitute knives for swords in the famous third-act fight between Mercutio (a memorably roisterous Callie Banholzer) and Tybalt (steely Collins Wilson).

Juliet (Emma Roe) & Romeo (Joe Perdue),
on the crowded dance floor at the Capulet's feast

Why? The space wasn’t wide enough to accommodate two actors holding rapiers.

That dynamic also made a claustrophobic mosh pit of the Capulet's feast, where the world was too much with – if not, at times, on top of – Romeo and Juliet to give their initial encounter believable privacy or intimacy.

But the final failing glitch came when this staging prevented between a full third to one half of the audience, included those of us seated on the third row, from viewing the climax of the play in the dramatic closing scene in the Capulet crypt.

In the absence of risers that might have raised the action on stage to a place where it could be visible (or elevated the back audience bank to a point where they could see), the patrons in the front two rows blocked the view of those behind them to all events taking place just above the floor.

In this staging, that included the moving final moments of the title characters' lives, and their subsequent deaths.

That is unacceptable for a production of Romeo and Juliet. 

It’s a theater's first responsibility to provide seating from which audience members can actually see their production. When a company doesn’t fulfill that obligation, professional acting and directorial excellence are irrelevant; audiences cannot value – and may well not return again – for what they cannot see.

===

But let's close this essay in praise of something I could observe. 

Perdue & Roe, as
Romeo & Juliet

In a number of iterations over the years, directors have dared with Romeo and Juliet to confront us with the many unacknowledged, unimagined – and, often, unaccepted – faces of human love. In casting the title roles interracially, in featuring actors in differently-abled or simply aged bodies, and in transcending traditional gender roles and definitions, productions before now have repeatedly raised the question of who and what our culture has deemed lovable, as well as all it has historically disqualified from love.

It took courage for Szuba to cast Perdue, a larger-bodied actor, as an unconventional Romeo, and it took courage for him to take the role in turn. But in so doing, this production not only questioned the ranges of human forms that deserve to be loved, but broadened them as well, in a victory for larger-bodied people, and for us all.

That was something worth seeing, indeed.

Queering the Ballet with James Baldwin: Ballet Ashani premieres Giovanni’s Room at Duke University

Giovanni’s Room
4 stars (out of 5)
Ballet Ashani
von der Heyden Studio Theater
Rubenstein Arts Center, Duke University
Sept. 9, 2023

When we hear of new adaptations nearing the stage, we sometimes wonder how (and, occasionally, why) a group of creators will attempt to translate a work of art into another genre. Iyun Ashani Harrison is a recent pandemic-era add to the Duke Dance faculty, an emerging choreographer in contemporary ballet, which remains a rarity in North Carolina. Still, when he announced that he would adapt the controversial classic, Giovanni’s Room, for his company’s North Carolina premiere, the news provoked curiosity – mixed with some skepticism – from the start.

James Baldwin’s semi-autobiographical novel, which Dial Press released in 1956 after an editor at Baldwin’s publisher, Knopf, initially recommended that the manuscript be burned, remains a touchstone of queer literature. That’s not only for the work’s depictions of the louche life in the gay underground of Paris during the early 1950s, but also its nearly surgical dissections of the origins – and disastrous consequences – of gay alienation and shame that its narrator and central character, an American expatriate named David, has thoroughly internalized.

The novel has crossed into other genres before now. Long before stage adaptations emerged at Yale, on BBC Radio and (just last month) in Oslo, actor Marlon Brando signed on for a screenplay that Baldwin began with South African filmmaker Michael Raeburn in 1978. By now, no leap of faith is needed to conclude that Baldwin’s rich dialogue and cinematic writing would ably fund a theatrical work or an independent film.

But ballet? What would take an artist in that direction? 

 

Choreographer Iyun Ashani Harrison
photo: Duke Dance

Harrison addressed the question in a post-performance talkback at Rubenstein Arts Center on Sept. 9. “So much of what we do in ballet, and the elitism inherently inside the practice, is because of how its funding structure works,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be accountable to people.” That realization forced the choreographer to ask himself what he was prepared to do about it.

“If we want to move forward and be more inclusive in ballet,” Harrison continued, “one thing that’s important is the stories we tell. And if every story is about the White Swan and the prince, the princess and their fairies [from Swan Lake], then where do the black and brown people—that we know existed and were in Europe at the time—how are they represented? How can ballet function differently in the U.S., because it has to function differently here?”

When Harrison thought back to Baldwin’s novel, which he first read as an undergraduate student in New York, he realized that the contents of the book were “so similar to the typical ballet structure. The femmes fatales—Odette, Giselle—they have to die, right? And I thought, well, that’s Giovanni. Then we have the antagonist: Guillaume, the pig. You just start to look at that, and it actually has that kind of melodramatic thing that ballet wants to have.” 

So far, so ambitious. Still, how could a genre as visually driven as ballet convey the distinctive voices in the novel’s emotionally fraught interior monologues? How could an art form dominated by physical gesture convey not only the grit, but the granularity with which Baldwin’s first-person narrator nakedly articulates the sexual shame and alienation inculcated into mid-century American and European cultures, and the crippling impact it ultimately has on him?

James Baldwin
photo: Judaica Europeana

The issue of voice is artfully addressed, at least to a degree, when digital composer and audio designer Aaron Brown places the raspy, halting voice of Baldwin reading from the book’s first chapter into several of his sometimes taut, sometimes ambient soundscapes. Digitally manipulated, Baldwin’s voice reverberates as if a cavern, as the freighted boom of low frequencies underlines a lie about David’s attraction to men that the character can no longer make himself believe.

 

Harrison’s sense of drama and stagecraft – as well as the performativity of sex and gender roles that his work examines – are immediately visible as principal dancers Brandon Penn, JamNeil Delgado and Felecia Baker, dressed to kill in Harrison and designer Julia Piper’s immaculate and daring top-shelf nightclub wear, emerge from the shadows of Duke’s von der Heyden Studio Theatre to make their austere initial tableau. Everyone has a formidable front in the clubland world the choreographer plunges us into, a fact reinforced by the deeply disquieting, reflective full-head oval mirror masks, seemingly lifted from the realm of sci-fi, that are worn by some in the corps de ballet.

Brandon Penn (David) & Felecia Baker (Hella)
photo: Joseph Lambert

 

 

Penn is cool, aloof, in control—and almost as non-disclosive as the mirror-faced mavens, above—as a David who flawlessly manipulates both a sinuous, nimble Baker as his expatriate girlfriend, Hella, and earnest Delgado, who embodies the passionate Giovanni, an Italian barkeep that he ultimately becomes involved with. The troika, all gifted with superb balletic technique that capitalizes on striking physical lines, explores Harrison’s angular and carefully sculpted choreography in an opening movement that foreshadows the conflicts to come.

The first discord emerges in “The Proposal,” the work’s second movement, as the playfulness Penn and Baker evince in David and Hella’s young relationship gradually morphs into something darker, against the spiky, pizzicato strings of Ravel’s String Quartet. As the pair play with a long, sheer white scarf which David has worn since the opening, he fashions that connecting line between the two into a tether and then a pair of reins to increasingly circumscribe Hella’s movement. Amid this, his marriage proposal is rendered a performative display, seemingly addressed as much to his audience as to his supposed fiancé. Hella’s justifiable dance of indecision is performed en pointe, by a character literally uncertain where she stands; it presages her departure, as she rejects the scarf David flings one last time about her shoulders from a distance.

Penn embodies the agonies of that rejection in a memorable moment in the next section, “David’s Lamentation,” where his hands crawl, spider-like, up from his chest and down from the top of his skull. When they reach David’s mouth, they pull his jaws apart, piercing his dark night of the soul with an eerily choreographed—and totally silent—scream.

In search of succor, David seeks out the company of Jacques, a rich habitué of Paris’s gay subculture. Harrison places bare-chested dancer Anthony Otto Nelson Jr. in a full-head mouse mask, black feathered collar piece and silky gray shorts, choreographing Jacques as a coquettish figure interested in offering David more than tea and sympathy.

Guillaume (Martin Skocelas) & Jacques 
(Anthony Otto Nelson Jr.) / photo: Joseph Lambert

(As such, he’s not the only gay character to be animalized onstage. Martin Skocelas performs Guillaume, the boorish owner of an underground gay bar, in a sinister full-head boar’s head mask – with a telltale reddened rim at the base – atop a brown trenchcoat costume punctuated by lacy Victorian wrist cuffs and a matching white jabot.)

After Guillaume roughly auditions—and then propositions—new bartender Giovanni, the mischievous Jacques escorts David into the underworld of Guillaume’s Bar. To Brown’s electro drum and bass-influenced club score, dancer Leah Esemuede fires up the dance floor with the corps de ballet before a predatory Guillaume attempts to establish primacy over the stage and his new employee. Giovanni has other ideas though, as Harrison’s sensuous choreography explores his initial attraction and approach to David.

Firing up the dance floor: Leah Esemuede & Les Milieu
photo: Joseph Lambert

While the sound of human breaths punctuate Brown’s soundscape, Delgado’s Giovanni swoops in, arcing upward repeatedly as if to inhale the sweat on Penn’s chest. As the rejected Guillaume and Jacques look on from the corners, Giovanni embraces and supports David from behind, in a sensuous moment that recalls daVinci’s Vitruvian Man.

The heat intensifies as the tables turn. Giovanni stands with his eyes closed as David seizes him from behind, placing his hands on the sides of Giovanni’s head. As a sudden gasp pierces the dance floor soundscape, Giovanni’s eyes fly open, in an undeniable, climactic coup de théâtre.

Giovanni, Guillaume & David 
(JamNeil Delgado, Skocelas & Penn)
photo: Joseph Lambert

When the two leave the pulsing dance floor, Guillaume follows, scrutinizing the increasing intensity of their interactions before threatening the pair, banishing them both from the club.

David’s deep-seated ambivalence about his sexuality plays out across the movements that follow. The tentativity and tenderness with which he approaches Giovanni in their first encounter’s pas de deux contrasts with his deeply closeted disregard for him in a public courtyard.

In Harrison’s “Witnessed/Exposed” section, the shame that David feels veers into the realm of paranoia. As lurid images are projected onto a suspended bedsheet, company members slowly twist the fabric, distorting the pictures. David crumples as company members zoom in with flashlights to claustrophobically illuminate the pair as they sit together. In a later nightmare, a fanged Hella stilettos the floor of Giovanni’s room en pointe before dramatically unsheeting their bed, dragging David across the floor for a fight.

The sturm und drang of that imagined encounter is only surpassed by David and Giovanni’s breakup scene that follows, as Delgado, in Harrison’s choreography, delineates the depths of David’s betrayal and abandonment. Giovanni’s ensuing decline and debasement at the hands of a vindictive Guillaume presage the violent ends for both, before an ending, different from the novel, in which David holds Giovanni’s body in a moment that echoes Michelangelo’s Pietà.

 

Giovanni (Delgado) & David (Penn)
photo: Joseph Lambert

Aside from Aaron Brown’s prismatic score, some of the evening’s most poignant and emotionally resonant moments – in seven of the work’s 15 sections – are set to striking prerecorded works by Ravel. Though the composer is more famous for full orchestral works like Bolero and Pavane for a Dead Princess, musical advisor Natalie Gilbert correctly advocated here for the intimacy – and, at times, the starkness of exposed individual musicians – in small ensemble arrangements of his work instead. After his spiky String Quartet animates David and Hella’s early play together in “The Proposal,” a piano trio performing Ravel’s Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty and The Fairy Garden conveys at first the pensive delicacy and then the subsequent delights of David and Giovanni’s first night together.

Unfortunately, the setting and scenery aren’t as equally developed as the music and costuming for Giovanni’s Room. When we see only fragments of William Paul Thomas’s atmospheric locational paintings, projected on separated panels at the back of the stage, they can’t fully plunge us into the chaos of Parisian club life or a courtyard where relationships are uncomfortably revealed. As for the fateful apartment in the title of Baldwin’s novel, a mattress placed in a corner upstage right conveys little of the atmosphere in the unlikely love nest in Baldwin’s novel, whose size and squalor David first finds intimate and then constrictive.

Delgado & the corps de ballet
photo: Joseph Lambert

For the striking new direction it takes us, it’s appropriate to affirm the artistic license Harrison uses to reimagine and restage Giovanni’s death, away from the French government’s actual form of capital punishment at the time: the guillotine, which wasn’t banned until 1981.

Still, this staging of Giovanni’s Room seems short-changed when it excises the pivotal scene at the end of the novel’s first part: a petit déjeuner at dawn in a dive in Les Halles, at the end of a night at Guillaume’s bar, where David first falls into a compelling but conflicted relationship with the titled character.

In Baldwin’s novel, Jacques—whose difference in age from the younger generation of characters is entirely erased in this production—brings the unmistakable voice of a gay emotional and ethical compass to that room. Harrison’s adaptation is lessened, and the conflicts it probes are foreshortened, when that voice remains unheard and unacknowledged here.

 

Queer lives have long been fundamental in the works of a host of major modern dance choreographers including Kyle Abraham, Sean Dorsey, Lar Lubovitch, and Bill T. Jones. Given the long-term influence of the American Dance Festival, modern dance has long been the Triangle’s most prevalent choreographic art form. It’s not surprising then that regional audiences would be far more familiar with their works than with those who’ve approached these relationships in ballet, including Lauren Lovett, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, Justin Peck and Adriana Pierce (whose work has been commissioned by Carolina Ballet).

David (Penn) & Giovanni (Delgado)
photo: Joseph Lambert

By comparison, however, ballet choreographers have had a fundamentally harder time incorporating queer lives into their art form. The rigid hierarchies in ballet are still deeply rooted in heterosexual gender roles, expressed in gender-segregated movement vocabularies that were largely codified in the early parts of its 600-year history.

Decades after the advent of gay 20^th-century choreographers like Rudi van Dantzig and Matthew Bourne, queer relationships remain rarely seen and danced in ballet. It was a telling moment in the Duke post-performance talkback when seasoned principal dancers Penn and Delgado both admitted that, in the entirety of their careers, neither of them had ever danced a pas de deux with another man before this production.

What does a pas de deux look like when one partner isn’t largely relegated to providing structural scaffolding and support for another?

From my seat, it looks like equity, or something closer to it than most of what we’ve seen in ballet up to now.

Harrison’s choreography articulates the slow unfolding of intimacy and sensual healing after David re-enacts Hella’s rejection, in Giovanni’s embrace, the tension and release in David’s resistance and reciprocation to his concern, their helical communion and Giovanni’s tender descent as he conveys David’s form to the floor.

 

Giovanni (Delgado) & David (Penn)
photo: Joseph Lambert

In Ballet Ashani’s impressive first regional production, Harrison makes space for gay lives in an art form that has rarely been experienced here. Sumptuous costuming, sensitive and compelling music, and nuanced choreography that probes the internal conflicts of his characters all convey significant promise for the future.

Harrison’s audacious, vivid and sometimes poignant adaptation of Giovanni’s Room ably confronts us with the disastrous facts of internalized gay alienation and shame. But when it leaves off-stage most of the specifics and sources of these psychological scourges that are articulated in the novel, along with the means of ethical resistance to them, a significant part of Baldwin’s cautionary classic remains unseen.

Listening to the silence to hear our truest voices: Honest Pint Theatre's SMALL MOUTH SOUNDS

The cast: Honest Pint Theatre's Small Mouth Sounds

SMALL MOUTH SOUNDS
4.5 Stars (out of 5)
Honest Pint Theatre
Pure Life Theatre, Raleigh
Through April 2

Paraphrasing Robert Fripp, in the theater, dialogue provides the cup that holds the wine of silence. Audiences, actors and directors know a pregnant pause can land a spoken line with greater impact. When a verbal coup de grâce is delivered, its truest benediction is in the stillness afterward; it speaks for itself when nothing more truly need be said. As mid-century abstract expressionist Mark Rothko once observed, “Silence is so accurate.”

Even so, it still seems counterintuitive at first for Bess Wohl to champion that quality on stage to the degree she does in her 2015 drama, Small Mouth Sounds. After all, playwrights gain fame on the basis of what they do with words. But after Wohl took part in a silent weekend retreat with Buddhist nun Pema Chodron, she wrote a play that occurs at a similar event. Though her script covers 29 slender pages, it still takes nearly two hours to perform. That’s because most of the action described therein takes place with little or no dialogue.

The resulting, formidable challenge for a seasoned sextet of actors in this Honest Pint Theatre production at Raleigh’s Pure Life Theatre involves silently conveying a staggeringly broad bandwidth of vivid human experiences and emotions – through physical acting alone.

Under the discerning direction of regional independent theater veteran Jeri Lynn Schulke, the stressors that have clearly come between a couple are evident as they move into their cabin and all but wordlessly get ready for bed, in quarters artfully defined by lighting designer Anthony Buckner.

In another scene, a loving father conveys his greatest grief with only one selection from the title's inventory: a devastatingly soft and gentle “shhh.” 

Under notable fight and intimacy director Tara Nicole Williams, an aching passion and the unexpected, sudden fury that later erupts between two other characters are both evoked in silence. And in separate, uncanny moments, two women break with their long-term partners, in both cases without saying a single word.

Work like that requires exceptional acting. Fortunately, there’s no shortage in this commendable production.

Barbette Hunter, as Judy

Though company co-artistic director David Henderson’s Jan is never less than cheerful among his fellow students at the retreat, we bear witness to a grim and hidden joylessness when he’s alone. Newcomer Megan Montgomery convinces as the post-punk hot mess Alicia. In designer Erin West’s pitch-perfect costume design, her shredded Ramones t-shirt and serious Doc Martins are offset by an oversized designer pink gold bag perpetually spilling over with snacks, a broad array of writing instruments, clothing and other tokens from the chaos in her life.

As Rodney, a famous, self-styled YouTube yoga phenomenon who’s smugly slumming here through a confirmation of his obvious enlightenment, Chris Hinton brings satirical bite to a character who likely feels that, at this stage of his spiritual development, apotheosis would merely be redundant. It’s a treat to see Barbette Hunter get a theatrical workout here as the mischievous Judy, and co-artistic director Susannah Hough weigh in as her partner, Joan.

Veteran actor Dorothy Recasner Brown’s voice is heard throughout the work as the unseen teacher of the seminar: a Brit of the very old school with a decidedly arid sense of humor.

In her author’s note, Wohl observes that “(e)veryone in this play is in some kind of agony. In this way, they are not unlike the rest of us.” People on a retreat are frequently in retreat themselves, as they attempt to work through, or escape from, the challenges in their lives. Still, the teacher solemnly warns any group who’ve come in search of a spiritual pain-killer: “If this is what you want, I can do nothing to help you. If you want to avoid pain. It is impossible.”

Ira David Wood IV & Chris Hinton

Thankfully, Small Mouth Sounds takes on the unavoidable fact of human suffering with a generous, leavening dose of levity. Ira David Wood IV integrates impressive physical comedy into his role as the hapless Ned, finding unexpected mirth with chairs, a travel pack of tissues and near-nudity at a skinny-dipping beach. That quality also brings true poignancy to his character’s awkwardness with humans in general (and his attraction to one fellow student in particular) as he struggles to overcome a Job-like list of woes.

On the road to enlightenment, these winsome characters face a myriad of unanticipated obstacles – as we all do. The materiality of the body is challenged by mosquitoes, minimal, uncomfortable bedding, uncomfortable proximity to sketchy cabin mates, and inadequate food. Psyches that have been malnourished for far longer hunger as well, for connection, intimacy, meaning and community.

And yet, despite all of these and more, they – and we – persevere. 

Good idea.

For when we listen to the silence, sometimes it is possible to hear our truest voices, and heal and grow as a result. And as we do, that unspoken dialogue is sometimes punctuated by transcendent and exquisite laughter.

LAST CALL: Arts Journalism Seminar in Writing Performance Criticism Starts Jan. 9

Class begins Sunday, Jan. 9. Join us!

ARTS JOURNALISM SEMINAR: WRITING PERFORMANCE CRITICISM

SPRING 2022

BYRON WOODS

 

Performance criticism – publicly analyzing and discussing the meaning and impact of theater, dance and musical artworks, in the cultures in which they appear – takes place across a broad spectrum of audiences, technologies and markets. It regularly appears on public radio, television and in print. Online, we hear it on podcasts, and see it on social media platforms and blogs, vlogs, and websites for a variety of news and information sources.

 

But how do we join this ongoing, culture-wide conversation on the arts?

 

The question gets sharper if we’re not members of the groups that have historically dominated the discourse. When cultural discussions have been monopolized by the privileged, other marginalized social groups and their artworks have often been devalued, misrepresented or ignored.

 

How do new, different voices from all communities develop and add their insights and perspectives persuasively in this critical arena? What specific skills are needed?

 

I will teach a private seminar in performance criticism during the Spring of 2022. The class will take place in 13 sessions over 14 weeks, beginning the week of January 3 and ending the week of April 4.

 

You do not have to be a professional writer to benefit from this course. It’s designed for people who are passionate about the live arts, feel motivated to write about them, and are ready to raise their voices and explore, exercise and develop their literary and critical skills.

 

During the class, you’ll have many opportunities to sharpen your observational and analytical abilities, and respond to a broad variety of performance experiences. Carefully focused weekly writing assignments will incrementally build into full reviews and features.

 

In addition to the 39 contact hours in class, we’ll attend live productions, view online performances and meet with guest artists and technicians to gain greater insights into their art forms. In editing the writing of others, you’ll improve the essential skill of editing your own work.

 

With its emphasis on real-world skills and outcomes in writing persuasive critical reviews and features, this course will help you claim, refine and confidently raise your own voice in the public conversation on the arts.

 

I am an award-winning critic, arts reporter and editor with 27 years’ experience writing for regional and national newspapers, websites and publications. I have taught criticism at the college level as a six-time clinician and critic-in-residence at the Kennedy Center / American College Theater Festivals, and in courses on arts journalism at UNC Greensboro.

 

My achievements in the field have also been recognized in two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in arts criticism, two National Critics Institute fellowships at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, and multiple awards from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia and the North Carolina Press Association.

 

Demonstrable growth regularly takes place among my students. Dustin K. Britt, editor at Chatham Life and Style, says, “Byron's criticism seminar was challenging, thought-provoking, and a hell of a lot of fun. If I write well at all, it's largely thanks to those early sessions.”

 

The class will meet for a three-hour session on Tuesdays or Wednesdays; the schedule is being finalized at this point. The course experience is richer in person, but will also be available online. To ensure that all participants have an optimal learning experience, I will cap the class at fifteen students.

 

Tuition: Money is hard, and has gotten harder for most during the pandemic. I don’t want tuition to be a barrier for potential students, and particularly for those who might find it more difficult during a holiday season (although, for the right recipient, the class could make a useful and delightful gift).

 

In the interest of transparency, I will teach 39 contact hours and work at least one hour per student over the 13 weeks for out-of-class prep and evaluating writing assignments.

 

For students who can enroll and pay by Dec. 31, tuition is $500 for the course. After that, the price is $600.

 

Students may also pay for the class on a monthly basis: $200 per month, due January, February and March 5. I accept PayPal and personal check.

 

Discounted rates are also available on the basis of financial need.

 

Prospective students who want to see if the course might serve their needs first can attend the first class without further commitment, provided that space is available after all enrolled students are accommodated. Single class access: $30. Single-access students who decide to continue can apply that fee to the full tuition.

 

To enroll in the course, email me at byron.woods@gmail.com, or text or phone on (919) 225-4580.

If you have accessibility concerns, other questions or would like information on future courses in arts journalism, please reach me at the same contacts.

Seeking a gay father in the shadowland: Alison Bechdel's FUN HOME at Theatre Raleigh

Angela Travino as Alison Bechdel
in Theatre Raleigh's FUN HOME

FUN HOME
4.5 stars (out of 5)
Theatre Raleigh
theatreraleigh.com
Through Sept. 5

Longtime fans of iconic lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel know that she frames Fun Home, her autobiographical, Eisner Award-winning 2006 graphic novel, in the cautionary myth of Icarus and Daedalus.

But after seeing the regional premiere of its 2016 Broadway musical adaptation, in the sensitive, discerning Theatre Raleigh production that closes this Sunday, my thoughts turn to Orpheus and Eurydice instead.

The variations on that myth are numberless – as many as there have been mourners, over millennia. Still, a few things remain consistent, for the most:

In it, one precedes the other into the dark world below. In great grief, the second gains the power to leave the land of light and life, and seek the absent in the shadowland. Sometime in that sojourn they catch a glimpse or more of the beloved, and though they cannot ever bring them back, something, in the quest, is yet redeemed.

Sometimes, a single memory without pain makes the forbidding trek worthwhile – that, and a life, the seeker’s own, permitted to resume after an extended pause for a journey underground that gave no guarantee, ever, of return: a little death, in and of itself.

Bechdel’s character finds both in her search for answers among the artifacts of her childhood, decades after her father Bruce’s bewildering death.

The ensemble, in "Raincoat of Love"

We learn how crucial those artifacts are early on, when Bechdel’s character says she needs “real things to draw from because I don’t trust memory.” In that, daughter and father are alike; wary of “romantic notions of some vague long ago” in the opening song, “It All Comes Back,” both characters are ultimately drawn to “dig deep into who / and what and why and when / until now gives way to then.”

Going in, fans of Bechdel’s famous “family tragicomic” should know that playwright Lisa Kron and composer Jeanine Tesori’s 2016 Tony Award-winning take unavoidably simplifies the book’s complexities – and loses many of its mythic, literary and art-world nuances in the process. In all fairness, it would take more of a miniseries than a musical to do otherwise with such a densely-layered text.

But as a work in which an adult artist explores her lesbian coming of age during the same period that her closeted father could find no way forward and apparently killed himself, the musical version of Fun Home stands in its own right as a document of the historical queer struggle to navigate our culture’s often treacherous and changing currents.

It is tragic and telling that, even though daughter and father live in the same place, the site of the family funeral home cited in the title, they truly don’t live in the same times. The single generation that separates the two, and their radically differing experiences of the time in which they live, not only divides and estranges them; it spells the difference between life and death for one.

Kron and Tesori’s lyrics and score are uneven in places, yet they frequently ambush us with sharp insights on a difficult childhood in a family marred by secrets, denial and abuse.

Travino (in shadow), Sarah Smith & Ben Jones

In the poignant chorus of “Welcome to Our House on Maple Avenue,” Tesori's diminished fifth brings a cutting longing to the words the wife and children sing: “Everything is balanced and serene / Like chaos never happens if it’s never seen.” That occurs before a background counterpoint all but subliminally conveys an unstable father’s threat: “Stay very still and / maybe we’ll please him / Make one wrong move and / Demons will seize him.”

Needed comic relief comes when the kids (Rebecca Clarke as small Alison, and Ben Jones and Jude Stumpf as her brothers, Christian and John) band together to make a slice of 80s pop music in their imaginary TV funeral home commercial, “Come to the Fun Home.”

Darker tones arise in “Helen’s Etude,” Tesori and Kron’s tangled fugue of denial and desire. In it, Bruce (edgy Christopher Gurr) seduces a former student supposedly hired for yardwork – a trope so timeworn that the adult Alison (crisp Angela Travino) embarrassedly compares it to “a 1950’s lesbian pulp novel: ‘Their tawdry love could only flourish in the shadows.’”

Averi Zimmerman & Travino

When a teenage Alison flees these far-too-close confines and discovers her true sexuality as first-year student at Oberlin College, actor Averi Zimmerman winningly conveys the awkwardness, terror – and true delights – of first love as she sings of “Changing My Major” to her new girlfriend, Joan (given a needed calm and grounded read here by Faith Jones).

And the crowd cheered at “Ring of Keys,” Kron and Tesori’s joyous song of recognition, when Clarke’s Young Alison first sees a delivery woman – an “old-school butch,” bringing supplies to a local luncheonette – and gains an early vision of a possible new way to be in the world.

At points, adult Alison’s discoveries in her journey through the past surprise her. Though her father traveled throughout Europe during and after his time in the military, she marvels that a very small circle encompasses his mostly self-circumscribed life in the song, “Maps.”

But more than once, other sudden insights challenge the adult Alison to the core. After a flashback to her parents fighting prompts her childhood self to generate a desperately happy – and hallucinatory – song and dance number, “Raincoat of Love,” the oldest Alison shakily tries to steady herself: “It’s only writing, only drawing. I’m only remembering something, that’s all.”

Even darker revelations follow. After her mother (Sarah Smith) warns college-age Alison, “Don’t you come back here. I didn’t raise you / to give away your days / like me,” the adult Alison arguably tastes a moment of true damnation as she replays the final conversation with her father in the harrowing song, “Telegraph Wire.” Looking back, the adult Alison keeps repeating, “Say something to him,” adding that it “doesn’t matter what you say / just make the fear in his eyes go away.”

Christopher Gurr, as Bruce

Travino’s riveting performance here conveys the stakes as a last chance for connection – and possibly redemption – with her deeply troubled father slips through her fingers, and the needed exchange, though spoken, is never heard. That fate is clearly evinced in Bruce’s subsequent, metaphorical solo, “Edges of the World.”

On her trip into the underworld, the only one that Alison can ultimately save is herself. In “Flying Away,” the finale and fugue for three voices, the young, older and adult Alisons integrate their experiences as they joyfully sing to one another. 

All but literally they lift themselves out of the dark and the past on a redeeming memory, one without pain: of the metaphorical wings her father helped her begin to craft during an early childhood game of airplane – resilient, colorful pinions made out of imagination, a deep-seated ethos, strong self-knowledge and acceptance, and love.

Wings are useful when exiting the shadowland. Bechdel’s are strong. In Fun Home, they show us how to ascend as well, in a production that is strongly recommended.