Just drop in to see what condition your condition is in

How cool is this? TCG is hosting a series of national town hall meetings to take stock of theater and our place in it. Here’s your chance to kvetch with the best of them and contribute to the ongoing national debate about what to do with this glorious anachronism we call the American theater.

Alas, since you need to register the Thursday before each forum, it’s already too late to participate in the actors’ dialogue. But that leaves four more, and fortunately, you wear many, many hats in the theater anyway, right?

Ironically enough, I’ll be missing the dramaturgs’ klatch; I’ll be steeping myself in new playwriting at the Iowa New Plays Festival. Twelve plays in six days! I do love a good marathon.

Anyhow, here are the deets:

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TCG Independent Artists' Forum
Moderated by Board Members of TCG

We want feedback from independent theater artists: How can we strengthen the relationship between individual artists and institutions? What would strengthen the artistic vitality of theatre?

TCG is hosting a series of five teleconferences for independent theatre artists. These focus groups aim to engage individual theatre artists in a far-ranging dialogue to discuss how individual artists are doing in the American theatre field today.

Five teleconferences are scheduled, each for a specific discipline in the theatre: actors, directors, dramaturgs, playwrights and designers. We recognize that many artists play multiple and varied roles within the theatre, and that for some artists, these categories do not fully capture what they do in the field. If you are a multi-disciplinary artist, or you do not see your discipline represented in the calls below, please self select one category that you feel is closest to your area of expertise.

The teleconferences will take place for one hour on the following days:

• April 19, 4pm EDT: Actors
• April 26, 4pm EDT: Directors
• May 3, 3pm EDT: Dramaturgs
• May 3, 4:30pm EDT: Playwrights
• May 10, 4pm EDT: Designers

Artists interested in participating must register below by 5pm EST on the Thursday prior to the teleconference. Our intent is to have as geographically and culturally diverse a group as possible represented on the call. As such, 30 participants will be selected from the registrant pool by lottery. Participants will be notified either way by the end of the day on the Friday prior to the call. For maximum efficiency, a series of questions will be circulated to participants prior to the call. Registrants who are not selected for the call will be given the opportunity to voice their points of view via electronic survey.

Follow the link above to register. And let me know what happens.

Malcolm McLaren's next gig: shaking up Valhalla

Saddened today to hear of the passing of Malcolm McLaren, a supernova of a music producer who helped changed music forever during the Punk and New Wave movements back in the day. His clients included The Sex Pistols and Bow Wow Wow, among others. The po-mo mash-ups we take for granted nowadays have their roots in some of his visionary efforts.

This oh-so-80s video may give you pause, but give yourself a treat and just close your eyes, allowing yourself to be enshrouded by Mr. McLaren’s lush re-envisioning of a classic staple. This is from his 1984 album, FANS:

Roomba cat, O roomba cat, where are you going to

That’s right, I’m breaking a 9-day silence to bring you funny videos from the Internets. But it’s in honor of an event of massive impact. Namely: last week the James came home with a Roomba! We welcomed it into the family immediately and life hasn’t been the same since.

While the Roomba may be a far cry from the Jetson’s beloved Rosie, it doesn’t sass you back when you push its CLEAN button. It sallies forth from its berth at once, with encouraging alacrity, looking for lint, grit, dust bunnies, what have you.

What makes its search oddly lifelike is that it doesn’t go in a straight line, but rather meanders all over the place. It halts in mid-stride and goes off in another direction; it circles around madly as if in doubt of where it’s needed most; it clambers over low barriers such as rugs in a way that’s reminiscent of the Robinson’s old Chariot. Whenever it bangs into insurmountable barriers, it just wheels around goes another way (as we say in casting, using whisker-like feelers that jut out from the undercarriage.

You can place small electronic posts around the house to ward the Roomba away from places you want it to avoid -- like your office, when you’re working in it -- and the thing somehow senses areas where the floor drops away, which saves it from falling down the stairs. Brilliant! You just turn it on and it industriously wanders around; its white noise because an unobtrusive soundtrack to your day.

Best of all, when the Roomba gets tired, it finds its way back to its berth; it backs in, settles down, and as it recharges, it’s “clean” button pulses like beating red heart. Scary!

Admittedly, I had hoped for a video-worthy response to the Roomba from Mac the Kerry Blue. I expected outrage from him at this manic interloper, or at least for his terrier instincts to kick in. But he just looked at the thing, shrugged, and went back to sleep. Hence I’m hoping you’ll be satisfied with this YouTube office fave instead.



Oh: I hope you recognized the important cultural referent in this post’s caption. I know Prince did. Here it is, for your convenience, just in case:



You're welcome!

Opera in the underworld

Mention “opera” and most people envision what’s now called “grand opera” — mammoth war horses, mostly from the form’s reputed 19th-century heyday. While grand indeed, this is also the era that gave opera a bad name with many of these same people, thanks to preposterous plotting and general obviation of basic acting skills, not to mention extreme length.

You can thank a handful of far-sighted directors, notably including Peter Sellars, for rediscovering baroque operas, where dramatic tensions often arise less from what happens and more from internally divided characters, like Xerxes and Orpheus. But wait! Doesn’t that sound like a modern sensibility?

Bingo. Many astute commentators, including the venerable Mr. Scatter, have noted an operatic curiosity: contemporary opera, written by notable composers such as John Adams, Philip Glass and, yes, the trailblazing Leonard Bernstein, seem to have returned to exquisite miniatures of opera’s earliest composers.

I myself discussed this with Portland Opera’s visionary General Director, Christopher Mattaliano, when we were seated together at a banquet a couple years ago. Which proves that once again, the advance guard of American culture is all thanks to me. Case in point: PO’s current offering is a dazzling triple bill that gives you Bernstein’s unfairly overlooked Trouble in Tahiti along with two Monteverdi gems, Il ballo delle ingrate and Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, all in scarcely more than two spellbinding hours.

Together the two composers comprise nearly the full span of operatic history. Monteverdi is justly immortal for composing opera’s first masterpiece, Orfeo. It’s exciting to see his two neglected chamber pieces presented together. First we see The Dance of the Ungrateful, which is essentially a meditation on a human cynicism that tends to take love for granted, eschewing its ennobling power. As a corrective, Venus bargains with Pluto to allow damned lovers to return to earth and scare the living back to their true purpose.

In a dazzling coup de théâtre, the opera moves seamlessly and without warning into the second piece, The Battle of Tancredi and Clorinda, which we understood is a corrective tale counterbalancing the wuthering ennui deplored by the previous story. This is reinforced through seeing the condemned of hell, who were mute in the first piece, adopt major roles in the second.

Following intermission, Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti seems at first to be … well, centuries away from Monteverdi’s brooding concerns. It’s a bright and sunny day in Suburbia -- in any suburbia, as the libretto makes clear. But we see at once that this is a feint, and underneath the cheery Formica surfaces is the very ennui Venus railed against earlier.

The two lead roles, played by Jose Rubio as Sam and Daryl Freedman as Dinah (pictured at left in the photo by Portland Opera/Cory Weaver, with a blind Cupid upstage) are outstanding as the husband and wife trapped in this Mad Men-like scenario, who feel unable to halt or even slow down their drifting apart. Gradually and inexorably, figures from the Monteverdi pieces populate the stage, sometimes adopting roles and other times simply bearing silent witness to the lives of the two mortals. Toward the end, there is the merest hint that this state of desuetude may be bettered — or will it merely be accepted?

If changes do happen for the better, you feel that it will be partly due to the invisible influence of Pluto’s emissaries, doing their best to provide a cautionary vision for Bernstein’s struggling 1950s couple.

Overall, this is a bracing and moving conception, one that brilliantly combines three very different operas into a single, cohesive vision. It’s also a glimpse into how opera can be so much more than the mere cultural duty to which it’s often relegated. Mr. Mattaliano and his company are to be commended to bringing us work that matters — opera that sticks with you long after the applause has died down. Bravo and bravi.

So take note: The triple bill has just three more performance, inclding today’s matinee, and then April 1 & 3. Make sure you see this extraordinary presentation. Leave your preconceptions about opera at the door, whether they’re pro or con, and treat yourself to a trip to the underworld you’ll not soon forget.

Now and forever

It’s always fun to go to public events with Megan. In addition to the pleasure of her company, I get all these approving smiles from women of a certain age. No doubt they’re thinking: isn’t that sweet, that nice man is taking his granddaughter out for some very improving culture.

Last night’s event was Cats. Yes, THAT Cats, the Andrew Lloyd Webber juggernaut currently playing at the Keller Auditorium as the Portland stop in a national tour. Though the spectacle premiered in 1981, I never saw it back in the day, because there were no comps whatsoever to be had. (In my student days, I saw only the second acts of Broadway shows anyway, and Cats just didn’t tickle my spider sense.) So I was grateful for the opportunity to see what nearly 30 years of fuss has been about.

Well. Talk about truth in advertising. The play is about cats. Probably you already know this is all based on a book of light verse by T.S. Eliot, of all people: Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, from 1939. (Intriguingly, however, the one song you can actually hum, Memory, hails from Tom’s groovier, more avant-garde phase.) None of it makes a lick of sense, really, but it’s all very colorful, and the talented touring cast dances their tails off. (Ahem.)



The video posted above is not of the current national tour, but this is exactly what last night looked like; apparently all the production elements are codified. Never mind that the dance vocabulary and Webber’s hodgepodge of a score are shopworn (the synth-heavy arrangements recall MTV of yore), the thing is an event. The gleeful opening night audience include a startling number of people (and I’m talking adults here) with velvet cat’s ears on their heads and/or sporting puss print outfits. Impressive!

Cats is probably not a show for jaded theater lifers like myself; I can’t help but see through the tricks and even be a tad irked by the staginess of it all. But for those who still thrill at pulsing strobe lights shone in their faces or for whom lots and lots of makeup hold a forbidden fascination, the show may be magic. Certainly last night’s audience enjoyed the play thoroughly.

Know what else I’ve never seen? Les Miz and Miss Saigon. I’m counting on the Keller’s Broadway series to also fill in these lacunae in my theater education, tool. Where was I, anyway, during the waning years of the Broadway musical? It feels like I skipped from Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar straight over to In the Heights and Passing Strange. Feel free to tell me what I missed.

Happy Anniversary

Thoroughly enjoyed a Mini-marathon at PCS this weeend, catching closing shows — my inadvertent mode de guerre any more with theater, forever showing up at a run’s end. Saturday night I saw The 39 Steps, the fun send-up of Hitchcock’s ancient potboiler. And then today, Adam Bock’s eerie, disturbing The Receptionist, which was an outstanding production.

Somewhere in the middle of the former show, it came to me that yesterday was my “good night and thank you” day at PCS. Because it took me two weeks to dismantle my office, my actual last day was April 4, but the guillotine actually sang a year and a day ago.

In the course of that year, I’ve been back to PCS as a visitor or as an audience member many times, and you know what? It’s fine. Not painful or maddening or discouraging. Fine. But it always feels a little strange to be there as an outsider. I have to resist the urge to use the secret passageways and shortcuts I know are there; I must squelch the impulse to go up to confused patrons and ask if I can help them. But mostly it’s a pleasure, really -- nice to just relax into a good show and feel no responsibility for its artistic merit.

After all this time, I’m still asked whether I’ll return to PCS as a staffer — invariably by people who are not theater folk, of course. Those in the biz know it’s well-nigh impossible to get a department back once it’s been branded as accessory. (Berkeley Rep managed to get back its lit department eventually, but it limped along with a part-time contractor for years.) Usually I respond by saying I’d be willing to discuss a return, but that’s just a way to end the conversation. It’s doubtful that I’d go back, even in the unlikely event the opportunity arose — not because of emotional or psychic barriers, but simply because I’ve done that job already, you know? There would have to be a new reason, such as a dedicated new play development wing or something.

I am a little surprised I’ve not been asked back as an independent contractor, though, to teach a class or something. Not because I’m so gobsmackingly resplendent, but just because it would make business sense. Plus if I were still in management I would reason that the best way to recuperate a publicly embarrassing situation would be to co-opt the former staffer in question — give him a few gigs, keep him on a short leash.

That hasn’t happened. (Sigh. There’s never a good Machiavel when you really need one.) That too is all right; it’s not like I’m wondering what to do with my time. And as time goes by, I just enjoy being in the Armory as a spectator. It’s easier to resist the urge to pull weeds from the Vera Katz Park, to welcome Board members into the space, etc. When I walk into the lobby, it still happens that people I don’t recognize smile at me or else squint, as though they’re trying to recollect where they’ve seen me before…but this too will fade.

“Life is change,” as the Jefferson Airplane used to sing. “How it differs from the rocks.” Color me deinstitutionalized. And loving it.

Merry Ides of March

In lieu of anything interesting to offer you about ides, Shakespeare and/or Julius Caesar, I’m posting this epiphany of a video that my friend and colleague John J. Flynn recently shared with me. Check it out, you’ll thank us both.