Friday, December 30, 2005

The Producers

Wow! It's a return to the grand old movie musicals of the 1940s and 1950s with the fabulous staging and choreography of Susan Stroman and the hilarious dialogue of Mel Brooks in the new movie release of The Producers.

My actor friend Eric and I caught the matinee screening yesterday and it was a wonderful, light-hearted experience. We laughed, we smiled, we wanted to applaud at the end of some of the big production numbers, and after the conclusion I wanted to spin and dance my way out of the theater.

The movie screenplay is pretty faithful to the musical script, and I think they did a better job of translating the musical to the screen than producers for the recent movies of Rent and The Phantom of the Opera. The potentially offensive Negro jokes have been excised with no loss, and it seemed like they cut out a song or two (I'm not one of those people who's memorized the musical soundtrack), but the movie does not suffer.

Casting was good, too. Of course, the Lane-Broderick duo was carried forward. Those of you who are Nathan Lane fans will be happy to know that Nathan is still Nathan. He's a funny, physical actor, but I always think he's Nathan Lane playing Nathan Lane, regardless of the play, musical, tv show, or movie he's doing. And Matthew Broderick—OMG, Ferris Bueller has gotten old and wrinkled!—was a treat with his way-better-than-expected dancing skills. Neither Lane nor Broderick are singers, but they both get through the songs without it being too painful.

A lot of people who've already seen the movie complained about Uma Thurman as Ulla, but I thought she did a fine job in the role. Naturally she's not the woman who did the part in the musical's cast recording, but she does her own interpretation and it was appropriate and entertaining. Will Ferrell surprised me with his performance as Franz Liebkind, and I think this is the first time I've ever liked Ferrell in a movie role. And I can't say enough about John Barrowman, the tenor stormtrooper who fabulously sings "Springtime for Hitler" while looking the epitome of the Aryan youth.

The dance numbers were great, and they did several of those formations with the camera directly overhead like used to be in the old movie musicals. I kept finding myself in wonderment with a stupid grin on my face during most of the big songs, and they made an interesting choice to have big musical endings with a moment of silence (just like they would have done on stage), instead of transitioning immediately back into the dialogue and story, so it felt funny not being able to applaud at the end—it was set up for applause!

Eric thought he recognized someone in the cast with whom he'd been on stage before, so we stayed to watch all the credits (yeah, it turned out it was Eric's former colleague), and we were two of the only five people in the theater to see the little ending vignette with Mel Brooks which played at the very very end of the credits.

So, go see the movie! It's great entertainment.

Thursday, December 29, 2005

I read the book

This evening, I finally read the short story "Brokeback Mountain" from Close Range: Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx, which was the basis for the current film Brokeback Mountain playing now in select cities and going into wide release on January 6.

NOTICE: Contains "spoilers."

The short story had been published in New Yorker magazine back in 1997 or 1998, and until recently was available for downloading from the magazine's website. A new book with just "Brokeback Mountain" was published last month as a tie-in to the release of the movie, though, so the New Yorker link has been deactivated. Not wanting to pay the $14.95 for the hardcover or $9.95 for the paperback, I ventured out to a Border's Books, found the special edition (it's thin!), and stood there and read the story. That should tell you just how short this short story is.

The first thing that struck me about the book is how closely the screenplay writers stuck to the original story, even with much of the original dialogue intact. The movie version was able to fill out a lot of the detail in the story, particularly with the mountain vistas, sheep herding, and the family lives of both Ennis and Jack. The one thing they didn't follow was the detailed descriptions of Ennis and Jack written by Proulx. Ennis is supposed to be very skinny with a growth on his eyelid and Jack is supposed to be curly headed and bucktoothed, later getting his teeth fixed and getting fat. I suppose, however, giving us Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal is a suitably acceptable compromise.

One key scene which is clarified in the short story is Ennis's phone call to Jack's widow, when she tell him about the truck tire accident. The possibility that Jack may have met with tire-iron wielding gay bashers is a flash in Ennis's imagination. When Ennis discovers that Jack may have had an affair with another Texas rancher, he feels the tire iron incident may have been more likely, but there is no confirmation one way or the other.

The other day I mentioned in my movie review that there was one scene other than Jack's death which made all the gay men in the theater gasp and hold their breath. I'll say now that the scene in question is when Ennis is in Jack's bedroom at his parents' house and he discovers Jack's still unwashed bloody shirt from that final fistfight they'd had at the end of their sheep herding summer twenty years previously. Inside Jack's shirt was Ennis's shirt; Jack had wanted them to be together and close just like the shirts; he symbolically put Ennis inside his own skin; it was such a testament to Jack's deep love for Ennis. I think most gay men who've ever been deeply in love still have some relic, some souvenir, of that relationship, however tragically or badly that love affair ended, and thus, the gay audience members were struck both with the emotion of Ennis's discovery and their own emotions recalling from their own life that souvenir of love lost, giving them an Aristotelean catharsis.

The short story is good. This is one of the few times, though, that I'm going to say that I like the screen play better than the book.

Monday, December 26, 2005

It's full of allegory, but did they realize......

All month we've been hearing about the Christian allegory in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the new movie based on the children's novel by Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, how many of the evangelical churches have been encouraging their members to see the show, and how evangelical spokesmen have been whining about the attention Hollywood has been paying to Brokeback Mountain whilst ignoring Narnia. Finally, we decided to go see the movie today to form our own opinions and see what all the fuss is about.

Note to parents: This is not an appropriate movie for young children! It is very scary in some spots, one child character is kidnapped and put in bondage, a child is physically struck by the evil character as a means of punishment, there is a prolonged, graphic battle scene, and there are several graphic killings. I would not take any child under eight and I would urge you to use your discretion to consider how sensitive your eight- to ten-year-old child may be.

Narnia is in wide-release, with many theaters showing the film on multiple screens; our auditorium was barely one-quarter full, and there was a predominantly middle aged and older audience with a handful of young children. It's a shame that the evangelicals have conscripted this movie, because I'm sure a lot of the potential audience for the film will stay away because of the Christian cult associations. As an interesting bit of trivia for the evangelicals, the actor portraying Edmond, Skandar Keynes, is the great-great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin.

If you go see Narnia just for its entertainment value, it's not really that bad of a movie. There is a lot of fantasy and battle, and the special effects are generally very good. None of the actors in the cast are known stars, yet they all do an adequate job of portraying their characters (the three "known" actors provide only animal voices: Liam Neeson as Aslan, Rupert Everett as the Fox, and Dawn French (The Vicar of Dibley) as Mrs. Beaver). In many instances, the film reminded me of an elaborate video game which might be played by younger teenagers, and a lot of the plot strongly resembles the stories of Lewis's contemporary at Oxford, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy (and the recent motion picture versions). But Oscar worthy? No. It's still a good movie, though.

I've never been a big fan of Lewis, especially since I used to socialize with a lady who did her doctoral dissertation on Lewis and talked about him incessantly. I've never read the book on which this movie is based, so this analysis is based solely on the movie, not the plot details which may have been included in the book. The plot is simple. Four British siblings are sent to live in a country house during the London bombings in World War II. In the new house, they discover a wardrobe (or what we might call an "armoire," a big piece of furniture for storing clothing) in an upstairs bedroom which some how magically leads to the mystical and magic land of Narnia, which is populated with all sorts of mythological creatures and talking animals. All is not well in Narnia, though, as their benevolent god-leader, the lion Aslan, has been driven out of the land for the past one hundred years by the evil White Witch, Jadis. The arrival of the four human children, however, inspires Aslan's return because of a prophecy that four humans would help defeat the powers of evil and return happiness to the land of Narnia.

The story line sets up the classic battle between good and evil, though I think the allegory here is a little odd for Christians, since the good guys are dependent upon magic and potions to achieve their victory. There is a rather lame Christ-like self-sacrifice by Aslan for the greater good. Otherwise, I found no strong Christian message, and any number of allegorical meanings can be thought up to fit this script. Perhaps things are clearer in the book, but I missed the sermon in the movie.

In this allegorical vacuum, one thing that jumped out at me to my great surprise is the high degree of homoerotic imagery and allegory in this film.

First of all, the eldest of the four children is a tall, slender, blond-haired, blue-eyed, sixteen- or seventeen-year-old boy with a ruddy flush to his cheeks and a soft British accent, the quintessential sexual interest of ephebophilic British academics like Lewis. His name is Peter (at least it's not Lance or Rod or something), and when the four children assume their thrones as kings and queens of Narnia, he is crowned King Peter the Magnificent. He has a long, broad, shiny sword that he likes to pull out and hold a lot and which he received as a gift from an older, bearded man, representing both Santa Claus and a sugar daddy, who taught him how to use it. And further, Peter the Magnificent rides into battle atop a white unicorn; between the unicorn's horn and Peter's sword, there is double phallic imagery and the two phalli, representing the phalli of a homosexual couple, are needed to vanquish (with the help of extra magic from others) the evil female witch. In several scenes, he reminded me of the blond Colin Farrell in the gay movie, Alexander, riding around playing army commander. Late in the movie, we see the children all grown up, with the very adult and bearded Peter having no wife or girlfriend, and just happily hanging out with his sisters; clearly Peter has chosen a homosexual lifestyle and is very content and successful with it.

Peter's younger brother, Edmond, is about twelve to fourteen years old and has dark brown hair and the most gorgeous big brown eyes. Edmond is constantly admonished to follow The Way of his elder brother, but he rebels and aligns himself with the evil female. The evil witch just uses Edmond for what he can give her, giving him a little "Turkish delight" as a reward for his good behaviors, then puts him in chains in a dungeon after she has slapped the crap out of his face, meaning that those boys who go after women will fall into the evil ways of BDSM culture and become beaten-bloody submissives. Two supporting characters attempt to help Edmond return to The Way of his brother; he betrays them both, though, trying to gain the affections and approval of the evil female, and in both cases the evil female turns the good guy into stone. When Edmond finally turns away from the evil female to join The Way of his brother, she gets her revenge by running him through with a spear, teaching us of the treachery of women and the superior homosexual path of The Way.

Jadis the White Witch has really bad hair, reminding us of the social unsuitability of anyone with bad hair. She wears a lot of big dresses which would be the envy of any drag queen, and she is surrounded by attendants who are bears and trolls. And, once the evil White Witch is vanquished, all of her minions and bad guys disappear, giving us another message about her kind of culture, how worshipping a witch/female as a queen is wrong, and the goodness and superiority of The Way.

The two sisters represent two present-but-unneeded female archtypes in homosexual culture. Big sister Susan has become "boring" according to her siblings and is an unadventurous nag, just like the age-appropriate, marriage-seeking females who would want to date a boy like Peter. Little sister Lucy is a chubby, fun-loving girl who encourages her brothers to do things and go places, always wanting to tag along, representing the archtypal "fag hag."

Far-fetched? Unintentional? Gay propaganda? Consider these things:
—Lewis was a lifelong academic at Oxford, and later Cambridge, during an era when discreet homosexuality and pederasty was common amongst the upper classes, especially in prep school and collegiate academic settings.
—Lewis formed a close friendship with a fellow soldier in World War I who was later killed in combat.
—Lewis invited his Army friend's mother to live with him and supported her until her death in 1951.
—Lewis was estranged from his father.
—Lewis had bouts of depression.
—Lewis went to an English public school (what we Americans would call a private boarding school or prep school) where he was extremely unathletic.
—Lewis did not marry until 1956 when he was 57 years old, wedding a divorced Jewish poetess said to be his intellectual equal who fascinated him on an professional level.
—He admitted to having married solely so that his wife could stay in England and not have to return to her country.
—His wife soon became mortally ill with bone cancer, and it would be reasonable to assume that they would have had a limited sex life because of her illness.
—Several Lewis biographers report that while Lewis and his wife loved one another very much, the relationship was platonic.
—After his wife's 1960 death, he did not remarry and lived with his elder brother until his death.
—As a child, Lewis loved Beatrice Potter stories because they featured "dressed animals," and wrote and illustrated his own animal stories.
—Anglican Christians in the early 20th century did not manifest the great hatred of homosexuals currently seen amongst American evangelical Christians.
While there is no proof of Lewis being a homosexual or committing homosexual acts, there is ample circumstantial evidence which points out the strong possibility of a potential homosexual psychological orientation, especially when viewed as a whole. I submit, therefore, that veiled homosexual messages are just as probable in Narnia as the more openly-discussed Christian messages, and that while Lewis may have intended an overt Christian message, he also may have included a major subtext glorifying pederasty and homosexuality.

So, rather than being a great Christian movie, I'm afraid we're going to have to explain to all the evangelicals that this movie is merely another Hollywood glorification of homosexuality and the Gay Agenda.

Sunday, December 18, 2005

Nutcracker blues

Well, the idiots in management and on the board at Washington Ballet, who locked out the dancers last week over a safe working conditions dispute, basically thumbed their noses at the dancers and their patrons, and canceled the rest of their Nutcracker run. This is not the first time the company has had labor problems over board policies, working conditions, and relationships with artistic director Septime Weber. The Nutcracker is the major money maker for most ballet companies in the country, a money maker that allows them to do their other works during the course of the year. Washington Ballet's run only lasted half the scheduled time, and they will have cancellation costs for the Warner Theater and the contracted orchestra musicians for the final two weeks, so that will eat up any profit they might have had from the first half of the run. Sadly, it also puts the remainder of the season in peril and it bodes poorly for the continuing viability of this ballet company in future seasons.

Heavy handed anti-union techniques may be appropriate for industrial-type labor, but it is incredibly shortsighted and inappropriate in the non-profit arts arena. I have been saddened at all of the labor disputes I've personally witnessed around the country during the past decade or so where the boards (who are supposed to be trustees for the public interest) have shut down orchestras and dance companies, rather than working with the artists to resolve concerns, impoverishing all of us and killing the fine arts in the parts of the country which need them most. Arts organization board members need to start doing their jobs and stop treating their groups as social occasions and opportunities for cocktail parties.

Classical musicians and dancers are highly educated professionals, many with graduate degrees, who deserve a living wage and safe working conditions. Having company management tell the press when dancers complain about a sharp increase in injuries during a rehearsal period that injury rates are "consistent with average injury rates at other companies" is not the sort of thing you want known by people like me who've been plaintiffs' personal injury attorneys! And it certainly isn't good public relations to show patrons how little management respects dancers.

So, having passed up an opportunity to see Nutcracker danced earlier this month at the Kennedy Center by the better American Ballet Theater from New York City, I'm a bit miffed at Washington Ballet's board and management. I was wanting my limited entertainment dollars to support a local group instead of a well-funded national company, and I was also curious to see Washington Ballet's "Washingtonized" production, re-imagined and set in Georgetown. Alas, the company will probably fold now, and I'll never get to see it.



I'm not going without my annual Nutcracker fix, however, as we went this afternoon to the closing performance of the Bartlesville Civic Ballet in Marie Foster Hall at the Taliesin West/Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation-designed Bartlesville Community Center (in the shadow of the Price Tower, Wright's only skyscraper). It's a bit of a nostalgic journey for me, since this is the company where I made my dance debut decades ago in Graduation Ball, and balletmistress "Miss Charlotte" is still imperiously presiding over the company!

There is a certain charm to watching a civic ballet. Since we're looking at kids and students instead of professionals, we can appreciate a performance for its sweetness and for unexpected gems, rather than watching with a hypercritical eye for perfect dance technique and brilliantly innovative choreography. Bartlesville has always had a good company, and they draw dancers from other nearby small cities. Miss Charlotte also invites back a few of her former dancers once they've gone off to college, and had a half dozen young women and one very handsome young man (and, wow, has he grown up since I last saw him dance!) to serve as soloists for this production; the better high school-aged dancers are demi-soloists.

The prima ballerina and premier danseur for this production were guest artists Mary Elizabeth Arrington from City Ballet of Houston (formerly of Tulsa Ballet) and Domingo Rubio formerly of Ballet Hispanico of New York, Joffrey-Chicago, and the National Dance Company of Mexico, dancing the snow queen and king, the sugar plum fairy, and the cavalier.

As usual, the kindergartener-aged kids as baby mice and as angels stole the show. Never discount the "ah" factor! I was holding my breath during the dance of the snowflakes because the tech people had fake snow falling in pooled "blizzards" on the stage, right where some of the women were not only dancing en pointe, but were doing pirouhettes and leaps, and I just knew someone was going to fall and break a leg! All was well, though, and it was a very successful afternoon, even with all the sleepy and tired pre-schoolers in the audience who did just fine for act one, but got cranky before the end of act two.

Of course, the highlight for me for the afternoon was seeing all the cute young daddies in the audience sitting with their children. Some of them were so cute (and I don't mean the kids)!

I probably should have stuck around for the post-performance reception to say hi to Miss Charlotte, but we decided to escape while we could to avoid the traffic (traffic being a relative term in Bartlesville) since we somehow managed to be amongst the first out of the auditorium. Just as well. I'm not feeling social today.

Friday, December 16, 2005

Celebrating the solstice

Tonight I went to the Christmas Revels in Lisner Auditorium on the George Washington University campus. The Revels this year is called "Journey to the Northlands" (the cultures rotate annually) and is a celebration of Yuletide in the Scandanavian countries with traditions and customs dating back to pre-Christian Druidism and sun worship surrounding the winter solstice. A surprising number of our Christmas customs, including Yule logs, egg nog, evergreens in the house, candles, and decorating trees, come from pagan traditions of Druidism and northwestern European mythology.

It was a long show, running from 7:30 until 10:15, and the mixture of song, dance, and theatrics helped the time fly, even in view of the extremely uncomfortable seating in Lisner Auditorium. I was also kind of annoyed by their management policy to seat latecomers, with some people coming in as much as forty minutes after curtain time, and then they had the ushers show the truants to their actual seats, which, if in the middle of a section, necessitated whole lines of people standing up to allow passage through the extremely narrow rows, all the while obscuring the view and other distracting the people behind. The auditorium also seems to be lacking in adequate restroom facilities: restrooms were in the basement under the lobby, and the mens' room had only three toilet stalls and three urinals, and I would predict the women's room was of similar size, given the locations, which is just not enough to handle a crowd of 1500.

It was interesting listening to some of the creation stories from Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland and hearing others of the many traditional mythological tales from the area, many of which were told with heroic sized puppets. While there was a little bit of overt "Christmas content" in the show, most of it was more folk-traditional, so we saw not only mythology but a lot of the solstice traditions. They imported some excellent acrobatic dancers and several traditional folk musicians from Europe to round out the cast of over a hundred people. Several times they had cast members dancing in the aisles out in the house, and they were big on audience participation, asking them to waive their arms, clap their hands, or sing traditional songs.

It was a fun show. I wish my Finnish friend Henri had been here—he could have told me what was going on! If anyone is in D.C. this weekend, they are doing two shows tomorrow and one Sunday.

Review: Brokeback Mountain

Stunning vistas, beautiful horses, and an Oscar-worthy performance by Heath Ledger have brought the mountain to the people.

Braving huge lines of people extending out the theater doors, down the street all the way to the Metro station and beyond, and I, wearing my black Stetson, caught the opening Washington, D.C., performance of Brokeback Mountain today at 1 p.m. Those without online ticket reservations were being shunted to the 2 p.m. showing, as the 1 p.m. show sold out online. It was an eccelectic crowd, largely male, but a not exclusively so, and with a broad range of ages from the geriatric to the teenaged. The movie is still in limited release across the country, so the one and only D.C. theater showing the film was the Loew's Dupont Circle 5, an older, smaller place usually limited to showing art and independent films, where they devoted three of their five screens to Brokeback Mountain with hourly showings.

We've all heard the storyline over the past several weeks prior to the opening about how two cowboys, Ennis (Heath Ledger) and Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) meet, fall in love, marry women, live in different states, and continue their romance for twenty years until the death of one of them. Director Ang Lee has created a beautiful epic period piece, helped in no small measure by the gorgeous Wyoming mountain landscapes. Those of us from the heartland will recognize every character from our rural experiences, and we know people just like each of the actors.

The Australian Ledger was noteworthy in his part as the quiet country man who doesn't talk much, and when he does, he speaks in a near monotone, only opening his mouth wide enough for a cigarette or maybe the occasional beer bottle. There was no trace of Ledger's natural Aussie accent as he convincing portrayed the flat, Wyoming western-American accent. As with so many of the men we know just like this, the only emotion he is confortable expressing is anger; nevertheless, between Ledger's expressive eyes and the tensing of muscles in his face, plus Lee's skillful direction, we can feel the depth and strength of his other emotions. Ledger has already been nominated for best actor with the Golden Globes, and he should also be nominated when it comes time for the Academy Awards.

Ennis lives in Riverton, Wyoming, where several of my cousins live! I daresay I've never seen that "post office" building before, even back in the 1960s and 1970s.

Gyllenhaal also offers a strong performance, but this is another situation like with the movie Amadeus, where both Tom Hulce (Mozart) and F. Murray Abraham (Salieri) were nominated for the best actor Oscar ultimately won by Abraham.

Many people in areas of the country where Brokeback Mountain has not yet been released have been asking me about whether or not this movie is suitable for seeing with family. I would say that it would be alright to see with parents and adult siblings or relatives, but I would be reluctant to take anyone under 16. Nudity in the film is limited; there is one scene where the cowboys strip off all their clothes so they can jump off a cliff to swim in the lake below, but the camera films the scene in a long shot, so while the viewer knows the cowboys are naked, one can't see anything; in another scene one of the cowboys has sex with his wife, and when he rolls off of her, there is a substantial nude breast shot; each cowboy also has a solo nude bathing scene, but they are both filmed in profile in a non-prurient, non-revealing way.

The one brief scene which makes me question the propriety of the movie for young teens is when the cowboys first make love. It's an unexpected, spontaneous moment when they roughly rip one another clothes off and have to use spit for lubricant; while we don't see much more than faces, we know exactly what is happening. While heterosexual movie equivalents to this scene are often longer and more graphic, society as a whole is still not used to the idea of homosexual lovemaking let alone watching it on screen. Consequently, I will not be surprised in the least if some small town, red state courthouse doesn't play host to an obsenity lawsuit if this movie plays in that county (the fact that it is clearly not obscene does not bar litigation for a formal determination of that fact, especially since 2006 is an election year).

The pace of the movie is stately, and there are no real action scenes to wake up the Great Unwashed Masses. Similarly, while it's a love story showing the unexplored area of two non-flamboyent men, it is not maudlin or melodramatic. And, interestingly, the one tearful time in the movie was not the death of one of the cowboys, but something afterwards (which I will not reveal here—after you've seen the movie, email me and we'll talk), when I heard most every gay man in the theater gasp and hold his breath. Go see it—you'll know what I'm talking about it when you see it.

So, Brokeback Mountain is excellent, and it doesn't disappoint. I urge you to go see it as soon as you can when it opens in your area.

Weekend entertainment

What to do? What to do?

Was going to go see Washington Ballet's "Georgetown-updated" version of The Nutcracker tonight, but they are having yet another labor dispute between management and the dancers, and management locked out the dancers and cancelled Thursday night's performance. Sometimes arts organization management can be so stupid. Who knows when the dispute will be over and when Nutcracker will be back on?

Brokeback Mountain opens later today....as far as I can tell, the first showing is at 1 p.m. at that art theater just south of Dupont Circle. Who wants to go with me?

Does anybody celebrate the Winter Solstice? Any pagans out there? There's some kind of "musical and theatrical celebration of the Winter Solstice" at Lisner Auditorium this weekend, and I'm kind of intrigued. Is anyone else?

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Review: Guantanamo

How many people are being incarcerated detained at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba?

Ever since the country entered the "War on Terror" in 2001, the American and British governments have been hard pressed to demonstrate that they are doing something to make the world safe for democracy, that they are doing something to insure the safety of citizens. Of course, there are only so many goat herds and tents that one can blow up in Afghanistan and so many weapons of mass destruction not to be found in Iraq, so Coalition forces turned to political and religious leaders who support Enemies of Freedom in Afghanistan, Iraq, and throughout the world. The problem is, how far down does the "problem" go? And who supports Enemies of Freedom: after all, don't all those bearded ragheads look alike?

As American and British politicians have so often reminded the public, there is no formally organized, official government or group which is the enemy in the War on Terror; consequently, it is a challenge to ascertain who in a village or who in a mosque is "good" and who is "bad." The governments' responses have been pretty much just a matter of suspecting any dark skinned Muslim male, although they will deny that. Choosing to "err" on the side of safety, large numbers of Muslims have been rounded up and held by military and police authorities for questioning—questioning which can last for months or years. Calling these people being held "enemy combatants" rather than "prisoners of war," the prisoners detainees have been denied Geneva Convention rights and initially were denied American constitutional rights of habeas corpus and speedy trials. Nearly a thousand people have been detained at Guantanamo Bay without any criminal or military charges against them, and liberal human rights groups estimate that over five hundred are still imprisoned detained today.

With this historical background, British playwrights Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo have crafted the documentary play, Guantanamo: 'Honor Bound to Defend Freedom,', which has been playing this past month in the Milton Theater at Washington's Studio Theater. What is particularly interesting about this play is that it isn't just another fictional, whiny, liberal rant; the lines are actual quotations from trial and deposition testimony and politicians' press conferences and speeches.

The truth of the lines is the strength of the play; at the same time, the documentary approach is the play's weakness. It's a hard two hours for the audience.

As the audience enters the theater, it is met with a stark, uncurtained stage. Tall chain link fencing runs all the way across the upstage side of the stage. Spread across the stage on both sides of the fence are sturdy metal cots with thin mattresses, each occupied by a man, some in white underwear, some in orange jumpsuits, all bored, all alone. These men remained on their cots throughout the play, throughout intermission, and were still in place when the audience left the theater at the end of the evening. Down stage of the cots, five sets of a small table and a chair were arranged across the stage in two rows.

As the play opens, the tables and chairs are filled with various, occasionally changing, seated characters: a few parents, a couple of former detainees, a brother, several reporters, a couple of lawyers, and so forth. An actor portraying a British law lord enters from the back of the house, walks to a podium down center stage, and gives a speech to the House of Lords about the "situation." Thus the barrage of quotations and testimony begins. Next, the various characters on stage give their testimony as a series of interwoven solilioquies, sometimes even quoting letters from detained family members, giving a couple of the detainees the opportunity to deliver lines. There is no real interaction between the characters, there is essentially no action to the play, other than quietly walking on stage to take a seat, and the lines are not quickly or melodramatically delivered, though, which is why the audience must be both engaged in the material and very much awake. The script is very much just a slice of life without any real beginning or ending, and no self-righteous concluding preaching. There is no curtain call, and the on-stage detainees merely continue their trying existence.

This is very much an ensemble cast. Several of the actors played multiple parts. While it is difficult to single out specific actors, Leo Erickson gave a chillingly accurate portrayal of U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and many television viewers will recognize "former detainee" Andrew Stewart-Jones from his appearances on Third Watch, Sex & the City, and various commercials.

Guantanamo, which opened November 2, closed this past Sunday, so readers, unfortunately, will no longer be able to view this production. Given the ongoing political climate, the continuing military action, the current Congressional debate about detainee and prisoner torture, and the pressures of Christian and Muslim fundamentalism, this play will no doubt be mounted by other companies elsewhere in the country, and it has a message which deserves to be heard and considered.

Tuesday, December 6, 2005

Concert at the Coolidge

Tonight the Library of Congress, the W.W. Norton & Co. publishers, and the Shakespeare Theater Company presented a special private concert performance "Theaters Spectacular" to celebrate the publication and release of the new book Theaters by Craig Morrison. Theaters is a beautiful coffee table-type book that has thousands of photographs documenting the evolution of theaters, opera houses, and movie palaces in the United States. I would have loved to have gotten one during the book signing afterwards, but their list price was $71 and I decided I didn't need one that badly.

Anyway, it was an interesting book launch. The evening opened with an actor from the Shakespeare Theater reading the prologue from Shakespeare's Henry V who I distinctly recognized as one of the actors in a play I saw at the Studio Theater a couple of months ago. After greetings from the Theater director and the Library curator, the author gave a slide show "overview" of the book. Next, internationally-acclaimed architect Rafael Viñoly showed some photos of his designs for performing arts centers which he thought would bring the theater more to the people. Then, we got to the entertainment section of the evening.

First, a singer called Genevieve Williams from the Shakespeare Theater came out to do two songs from early 20th century American musical theater, Cole Porter's "Another Op'nin', Another Show" from Kiss Me, Kate and the Gershwin's "Someone to Watch Over Me" from Oh Kay, accompanied by Craig Fitzpatrick on the piano. Miss Williams is a large black lady with a lot of charisma and stage presence, but with questionable taste in clothing; she wore a too-tight short black dress with black panty hose and a pair of moderate, open-toe heels which she immediately took off and walked around the stage in her stocking feet! After the concert pianist played (see below), she came back out again to sign Irving Berlin's "There's No Business Like Show Business" from Annie Get Your Gun, wearing her shoes again, but midway through the song she took her shoes off again! Her songs were entertaining, but she did have an unfortunate tendency to go flat when she was "belting". I don't know why they split her performance into two segments; it would have worked just as nicely to hear all three songs together.

The main entertainer of the evening, though, was Russian concert pianist Svetlana Potanina. While Miss Potanina is not terribly well known in the United States, she has a major concert career in Russia, Europe, and Asia, and has quite a number of CDs in print. Her son is my friend Svet, who lives here in D.C., so that's how the Library was able to get her here to play. She was wearing a black, cocktail-length, multilayered, silk organza dress with an elaborate blue, green, and gold sequin design on the top half, with her long blonde hair worn up (I also noticed later she had a white cashmere overcoat with a white fur (Arctic fox? It was definitely not rabbit) collar). Her program included Rachmaninoff's Pieces-fantasies, op. 3, and Schumann's Fantasiestücke, op. 12, playing a couple of the five movements of the Rachmaninoff and three movements—The Night, Why, and The Gust—from the Schumann. For those of you who don't know the formal names of the Rachmaninoff repertoire, the first movement of Pieces-fantasies is the "Prelude in C-sharp minor" which is probably one of Rachmanimoff's most famous works. Miss Potanina made it look so simple to play, and I remember what a struggle and how much work that loud, bangy prelude really is! For an encore, she played Chopin's "Minute Waltz."

Sunday, December 4, 2005

Sunday afternoon

Tis another Sunday afternoon, and surprisingly warm and sunny outside. I almost went to go hear Messiah, just like I almost went Friday night, but I haven't been feeling in the mood to sit though a long concert. The Cathedral Choir of Men and Boys at the National Cathedral are singing Messiah this weekend, and I kind of wanted to hear it for the novelty of the boys' voices instead of the women, but I also didn't want to spend $30-60 on a Messiah ticket! LOL Oh, well, it's not as if I can't hear Messiah this month: the Washington Post lists the cathdral, plus twenty other organizations doing Messiah this month, including the National Symphony and a "soulful" Duke Ellington-inspired interpretation of Handel.

Washington is rather an embarrassment of riches this month. Not only are there all the Messiahs going on, but there are 22 different productions of The Nutcracker in the area, with at least one performance every day through Christmas Eve plus six performances New Year's weekend, and at least half a dozen theater companies producing some version of A Christmas Carol. That's not counting various Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, and "holiday" concerts advertised.