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.

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.

A hellish host and her enigmatic guest square off in a deadly game of cat and mouse: Theatre in the Park's SWITZERLAND

Lynda Clark, in Theatre in the Park's SWITZERLAND

Switzerland
4 stars (out of 5)
Theatre in the Park
Through Aug. 15
theatreinthepark.com

It’s hard to say which of the two was more improbable: the witty, charming and utterly psychopathic Tom Ripley, a character at the center of five unforgettable books, a brace of films and an upcoming series on Showtime, or his creator, novelist Patricia Highsmith.

By most accounts, Highsmith’s perpetually outré behavior in professional and social settings placed her in a category far, far beyond high-maintenance.

Director Lynda Clark (who also plays the writer in the current Theatre in the Park production) is just getting warmed up when she checks a series of dysfunctional boxes in her program notes. True: Highsmith was markedly misanthropic, abusive, histrionic, controlling and a hardcore alcoholic.

But add to those endearing traits xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism, and it’s small wonder that, after her death, her own publisher, Otto Penzler, termed Highsmith “the most unloving and unlovable person I’ve ever known.” He then concluded, “I could never penetrate how any human being could be that relentlessly ugly.”

For all these failings, she remained a brilliant writer. History notes that Highsmith wrote the first published lesbian novel with a happy ending, The Price of Salt, under a pseudonym in 1952. Thirty-eight years later, it was republished under her own name, and later adapted into the 2015 Cate Blanchette film Carol.

For the most part, though, her novels were forbidding, existential examinations into the dark side of the psyche, which earned her comparisons in some circles with Albert Camus, and secured for her a chevalier, or knighthood, in France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Ira David Wood IV & Lynda Clark, in SWITZERLAND

In her three-act thriller Switzerland, playwright Joanna Murray-Smith places this literary gorgon in the last chapter of her life, in self-imposed exile outside Locarno, Switzerland. On this morning, she has an unwelcome visitor: Edward, a young emissary from her American publishing house (played, with unassuming diffidence at first, by Ira David Wood IV).

As Edward tries to ingratiate himself, Highsmith goes, true to form, straight into hand-to-hand verbal combat, with no quarter given. "From the moment you walked through that door,” Clark all but brays as the author, “I could see that you brought the slap-dash of America with you.”

Edward protests when Highsmith brands all American young people as oversold – and self-deceived – on their own achievements. When he chides, “I don’t think I’m deluded,” she calmly replies, “That’s because you are deluded, genius!”

Gamely, Edward keeps trying to convince the author of his merits. “From the first time I read Strangers on a Train, I felt something,” he says. “I felt a connection!”

Clark serves up Highsmith’s response, with topspin to spare: “Funny, but I didn’t! Goodbye!”

Highsmith becomes more repellent as she grills Edward on the details of his parents’ deaths. “I love a car wreck,” she exults, “who was driving?” When informed it was an accident in winter, she all but gushes, “I do love an icy road! They’re lethal!”

But the power dynamics shift as Edward gradually reveals knowledge about Highsmith that’s a bit too close to the bone. The inveterate chain-smoker is now dying from lung cancer. Her last couple of books haven’t been great. Whatever legacy Highsmith is going to have could be altered by the one last novel that Edward and her publisher want her to write – for markedly different reasons, as it turns out.

A psychological war of cat and mouse ensues as Edward parcels out revealing little tidbits of information he really shouldn’t have. Meanwhile, a dangerously volatile Highsmith eyes her knife and gun collection, which Edward’s just added to with a gift from her publisher, with increasing interest and calculation.

Wood and Clark, in Theatre in the Park's SWITZERLAND

Those skirmishes take place before both characters cross lines they won’t be able to uncross.

Murray-Smith’s plot gradually ratchets up the suspense, although her armchair psychoanalysis remains too obvious to add much to these proceedings.

Gabriel Esparza’s uneven light design place Clark’s character in inappropriate shadows at times, before unsubtle lighting transitions needlessly underline heightened emotional moments. And although we’re not that far north, a projected digital rendering of the Alps on designer Nathaniel Conti’s set remains strangely illuminated at all hours, day and night.

Lynda Clark has long been a celebrated actor in the region; she certainly has the artistic and emotional bandwidth for this character’s challenges. I can’t help feeling, though, that if she hadn’t taken on distracting double duty here as actor and director, an artistic resource outside herself might have helped her craft a deeper, more finely detailed reading of her character, and further explore the nuances of Highsmith’s bizarre extremes.

Wood brings an expected professionalism to Edward’s character, playing the cards his character has held to his chest until the last act with relish.

Clark, Wood, and fight and intimacy choreographer Jeff A.R. Jones craft a memorable last moment, a true totentanz that unites this fated couple as they dance into the darkness.
 
In so doing, the director, performers and playwright bring a momentary, improbable – and, fittingly, somewhat grisly – grace to a life that so often lacked it.

What a way to go.

A fight for two souls - a realtor's, and a neighborhood's - both in jeopardy: August Wilson's RADIO GOLF at Pure Life Theatre

RADIO GOLF

4.5 Stars (out of 5)

Pure Life Theatre

Closed June 27, 2021

purelifetheatre.com 

It is a cautionary tale from the times to come: the chronicle of the man who so zealously sold the world – all of it, lock and stock – ever confident that, at the end, there would still be someplace left for him to stand.

Tyanna West and Mike Harrison in RADIO GOLF
Photos by Maria Barber

A miscalculation potentially as disastrous gradually unfolds before us among the characters in August Wilson’s Radio Golf, whose notable Pure Life Theatre production closed Sunday. The year is 1997 and, after much work, two young Black real estate developers at the height of their powers are about to completely erase what little remains, by then, of the heart of Pittsburgh’s Hill District.

Those familiar with Wilson’s works will recognize the Hill, not only as the very real-world neighborhood where the playwright grew up, but the site of nine plays in Wilson’s titanic Century Cycle. Throughout the ten dramas in his Pulitzer prize-winning magnum opus, Wilson explores a series of sea-changes in the Black experience in America, as reflected in the shifting fortunes of the district and its colorful inhabitants through every decade during the 20^th century.

From this distance, it is somehow fitting that Wilson’s cycle ends with that neighborhood facing an existential threat posed by one of its own: Harmond Wilks (Mike Harrison), the favored child of a ruthless realtor whose business practices helped run the Hill into the ground.

As dramaturge Terra Hodge recalls in an opening video curtain speech, from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s a new generation of affluent African Americans established themselves in numbers never seen before as wealthy entrepreneurs like Wilks. In the same time, others, like Wilks’ wife, a public relations maven named Mame (Tyanna West), and his business partner and boon companion from college, Roosevelt Hicks (T.J. Swann), made their way into the halls of corporate power.

But in Radio Golf, Wilson asks the price of such pursuits – not only on the pursuers themselves, but on the communities they come from. If a single generation is taught, in the words of Wilde, the price of everything and the value of nothing, Wilson suggests that they will leave little of their heritage and historical identity for their posterity.

T.J. Swann and Mike Harrison in RADIO GOLF

At the opening of Radio Golf, Harmond is a real-estate developer in his own right, who has amassed the financial and business connections needed to wipe his old community off the map. Not that he’ll admit to that, of course – at least not in any forward-facing statement – although his massive mixed-use project hinges on the Hill being designated a blighted neighborhood for a federal restoration grant. When he proudly tells rough-edged Sterling Johnson (slow-burning Robert Cotton), a school mate who now works in construction, “We’re going to bring the Hill back,” Johnson corrects him: “What you mean is you gonna put something else in its place.”

Johnson has a point. The tenements in Wilson’s Seven Guitars and the boarding houses in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone will not be found in Harmond’s 180-unit luxury apartment community; its manicured patios, lawns and raised garden plots will not resemble the disarray in front of Troy Maxon’s house or in back of King Hedley’s. No jitney stands or juke joints will lurk among its toney shops, and Memphis Lee will definitely not preside behind the counter of the planned Starbucks (just beyond the Whole Foods, next to the Barnes & Noble).

Nor will its inhabitants apparently sound anything like its previous residents. Compared to the live, jazz-inflected patois and verbal polyrhythms heard throughout the Century Cycle, the soullessness of the period's greed culture manifests here in the conspicuously arid corporate tongue, slick advertising slogans and political banalities that predominate whenever Harmond, Mame and Hicks speak.

Gerald Campbell, Robert Cotton and Mike Harrison in RADIO GOLF

Compare that with the vivid argot of Elder Joseph Barlow, a.k.a. Old Joe (Gerald Campbell): one of the inconvenient, idiosyncratic trickster figures that dot Wilson’s landscapes. When Harmond tells him, all too credulously to present-day ears, “This is America. This is the land of opportunity… I can be anything I want,” Barlow quickly sets him straight.

“America is a giant slot machine,” he says. In Barlow’s metaphor, the Black man is given a single coin – one that the machine rejects every time. “You look at it and sure enough it’s an American quarter. But it don’t spend for you. It spend for everybody else. But it don’t spend for you.”

When Harmond assures him that golf will give kids all the rules they need to win in life, Barlow asks dryly, “But don’t you need some grass?” Looking around the blighted landscape, he states the obvious: “Ain’t no grass around here.”

Since there was a legal error in a tax foreclosure sale, Barlow holds the deed to a tract of land that could derail Harmond’s developmental plans – and he has no interest in selling it. But the old eccentric serves a greater purpose in Wilson’s world than merely gumming up a real estate deal.

In Barlow’s gentle, never-ending reminders of the old neighborhood and the old neighbors Harmond left behind, an uncanny emissary from another time is calling a lost young man back home: reconstructing a path from Harmond’s alienation toward reconciliation and community.

“I remember you had a porch,” he says. “A white porch and sometimes you would sit up there out the rain.” Barlow then recalls how young Harmond expressed himself “in everything. Even the way you scratch your head… All that’s like talking. We’d sit out there in the yard. You didn’t have to say anything. You didn’t have to have no other meaning. Everybody just sitting out. That was some of the best times I had in life.”

As Campbell’s voice soothes the dialogue under Jamal Farrar’s direction, you can all but hear the summer thunder and the bullfrogs. And as Wilson’s words transport us, they also frame Radio Golf as a spiritual fight, not only for the souls of the central characters, but the soul of a neighborhood as well.

When Harmond ventures to the house in question – the one-time domicile of Aunt Ester, a mythic folk priestess and spiritual healer who supposedly died at the ripe old age of 366 – a sense of place, generations or centuries old, reorients him toward restoring, and not erasing, the past.

Swann and Harrison in RADIO GOLF

As he does, Harmond finds his business-oriented rose-colored blinders don’t fit so well anymore. When Hicks demands they tear down the house they do not own, Harmond files an injunction, jeopardizing the entire project. In that moment, a thunderstruck Harrison stares at actors Swann and West, as if just seeing them for the first time in designer Deb Royals’ aging, dingy little office.

“You’ve got to have the rule of law,” he insists. “Nobody wants to live in chaos.”

That decision sets up the final conflicts, in which every central character must choose the world in which they – and everybody else – must live.

In the last words he ever wrote for stage, Wilson elevates the stakes, as Black characters fight with all they have over conflicting visions of their past, their present, and their posterity. Their incendiary rhetoric leaves none on stage unscathed – and few of us in the audience as well.

West delivers Mame’s passionate indictment on the relationship between privilege and protest, with compelling authority. “You’re acting like a kid who because things don’t go his way takes his ball and goes home,” she coldly tells Harmond. “That’s what your problem is. You’ve always been the kid who had the ball. You’re the one with the glove and the bat.”

When Johnson and Hicks square off, actors Cotton and Swann bring the heat, peppering their riveting combat with ethnic slurs and other verbal knifework. After Johnson concludes, “It’s Negroes like you who hold us back,” Hicks finally reveals his true racial allegiance: “Who’s ‘us’? Roosevelt Hicks is not part of any ‘us.’”

When someone like that has the power to erase a neighborhood, a people’s history is also placed in peril.

Wilson’s final work serves potent notice of how fragile our legacies can be. It’s significant that a playwright’s last thoughts on his way out the door were these: Preserve the past. And consider the future.

Mapping out a dangerous road: Tamara Kissane's modern suffrage drama THUNDERCLAP premieres online tonight in Burning Coal Theatre's 19TH AMENDMENT PROJECT

 

Playwright Tamara Kissane

Piedmont Laureate Tamara Kissane’s newest play, THUNDERCLAP, premieres Thursday night, August 27, as a part of Burning Coal Theatre’s 19^TH AMENDMENT PROJECT. The festival of 14 short films, co-produced by the League of Women Voters of Wake County, commemorates the centennial of women’s right to vote, featuring newly commissioned scripts originally written for stage by national and local playwrights, adapted for screen by 11 regional theater companies.

In Kissane’s domestic drama, co-produced by William Peace University, a family of social activists are about to get an unwelcome reality check when their daughter, who’s just reached voting age, tells them she is not going to vote. Worse news for us? Her friends at school have made the same decision.

I spoke with the creator and host of the ARTIST SOAPBOX podcast by phone on August 14, 2020, for a overview article on the festival in the Aug. 19 issue of INDY Week. Edited highlights from our 99-minute conversation begin, after the jump.