theatre

It’s a mere three months post-interview, and a month after I thought I’d have it up on the blog, but at long last, the Very Little Theatre interview!

Back in the day when it was so cold that I had to keep my jacket on in the green room during the interview, VLT past president Karen Scheeland and VLT board member (and publicity director) Scott Barkhurst gave me an interview and tour of the VLT’s building. Details from that to come later (though hopefully sooner than three months — Scott, feel free to poke me about that).

The VLT, 24th & Hilyard (interior and exterior)

That building, by the way, has been around since 1950. Of course, that was 21 years into the so-far 79-year run of the VLT, so even the building is a bit of a newcomer. There are rumblings and mutterings about how to improve the building (dead spots on the stage have led to some miking, for instance, and the less said about the electrical system, the better — though the lighting designers do a superb job) or whether to construct a new building — but nothing, as far as I know, is yet decided.

1978's The Chalk Garden, with Karen Scheeland [then Karen Biggs] and Gerda Brown

Karen Scheeland became a member of the all-volunteer organization in 1969 after playing a role in 1968’s Devil’s Advocate.

1996's It Runs in the Family, with Stan Boyd, Achilles Massahos, Scott Barkhurst, and Ron Hart
Scott Barkhurst was a music student at the UO when he played the flute in the VLT orchestra in 1967. Later, he helped with lights and eventually, he says, “turned into a VLT person,” becoming a member in 1973. They spoke with me in late March.

Scheeland recently turned in a performance as Vi in Memory of Water, which closed June 21, and Barkhurst played the tailor (among other roles) in April’s On the Razzle; both remain active in all kinds of ways every VLT season. (This year’s season closes out with Truman Capote’s Glass Harp, opening Aug. 1, directed by recent VLT president Suzanne Shapiro*.)

Read more by clicking here.

I know, I've been a bad bad blogger. So much architecture to write about (Berlin; Tokyo; Iraq; Dresden and more), cover stories to cover, exciting theater to ... er. Well, actually, I've been going out of town a lot, and that means the weekdays are packed with, gasp, print-related tasks.

As loyal readers know, Chuck and I went to Portland and saw Twelfth Night and The Beard of Avon at Portland Center Stage. I loved the second play and wasn't as into the first one. Then I went to Portland the next week and, after spending holiday gift cards at Powell's, popped into the PNCA to see the Joe Sacco show — which reminded me of why I'd love to teach a sort of alternative forms of literary journalism class at the UO's Literary Nonfiction Progam, from whence I got a master's degree in 2004. Sacco's Palestine (now available in special edition) and Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995 combine journalism and graphic novel skills (or comic skills? There's not a good language for this now — illustration skills?) to create moving and fascinating stories.

Then we went to Portland again (!). And I went gallery-hopping in the Pearl, something I've wanted to do when it wasn't a crazed First Thursday event. My faves of the many galleries I hopped through in one morning: Dennis Zaborowshi at the Blackfish Gallery; Thomas Conway at Pulliam Deffenbaugh (where I had a good time talking with gallery owner Rod Pulliam as well); and finally, though I think the art is a bit too easily accessible in some ways, I did like Carolyn Cole at the Butters Gallery as well.

Now we're on Bainbridge Island after a trip through the UW School of Dentistry yesterday — a cricle of hell I don't recommend — and a long wait for the ferry. Not going to see any theater tonight, sadly; I think people want to see the movie The Savages. Going to recover blogging capacity soon. Still reading Guardian theater blogs and other theater things, still thinking, still reading a lot of books. Reporting on those things to come.

Hey fans, I know you're out there, waiting with baited breath. Hopefully, Molly will liveblog the Oscars tomorrow! Because I know she wants to comment on people's fashion choices ...

Photo by Cliff Coles; click for larger image of Hal (Quinn Mattfeld), Robert (Wesley Bishop) and Catherine (Kate Cook).

Ghosts and Puzzles
Proof requires leaps of faith
by Suzi Steffen

Games: Number games, word games, logic games … mind games.

The math and science geeks I know play many games to occupy their speedy brains. In David Auburn’s Proof, the author creates a high-stakes emotional game for mathematicians, with intuitive connections that his main character desperately needs others to make — leaps that they, poor fools, can’t quite complete.

Proof played at the Lord Leebrick Theatre a few years ago, and it’s brought back to Eugene on the cavernous Soreng stage by brave soul Kirk Boyd, artistic director of the Willamette Rep. Boyd is stuck with a ridiculous space, but he has a talent for choosing plays that both challenge and please his audience. Proof fits the playbill. The audience gasped, oohed and aahed many times the night I went to the play, demonstrating that most saw neither the Leebrick production nor the 2005 movie with Gwyneth Paltrow. That’s charming and rewarding for the actors and director Pat Patton, an experienced Oregon Shakespeare Festival actor and director.

But is their enthusiasm warranted? The script, despite its Tony Award, has some problems with characterization. The actors at the Rep deal half-successfully with those issues, but the play’s games still have the power to affect and move an audience.

The puzzle the playwright creates revolves around the reconstruction of a time when Catherine (Kate Cook) tried to escape the vortex of her father Robert’s insanity for a life of her own. Robert (Wesley Bishop) was a brilliant mathematician, still venerated by students and colleagues, whose severe psychosis destroyed his career. He has a few months of clarity in the midst of decades of madness, and that time serves as a touchstone to the later setting of the play, when Robert has just died.

Auburn wrote the script, according to director Patton, after learning that “a number of famous mathematicians had suffered from mental illness.” Well, sure. So have a number of unknown mathematicians — along with people who can’t balance their checkbooks. Auburn exploits our fascination with mad geniuses through his characterization both of Robert and of Catherine. The smart, lonely young woman fears she may have inherited her father’s madness, and her older sister Claire (Megan Smith) worries about that too.

Claire’s a thankless role, one that Smith plays with an unfortunate accent and attitude (along with unsuitably frumpy costumes). Claire took care of Robert and Catherine financially while avoiding the emotional strain of dealing with them. She flies in for the funeral to dispose of everything and whisk Catherine off to New York — which is “so much more fun” than “dead” Chicago. To emphasize the “dead” theme, scenic designer Nadya Geras-Carson provides unseasonable dry leaves beside a strong yet dilapidated back porch.

But there’s life in Chicago yet: Interspersed with the stilted interactions between the two sisters are Catherine’s flirtations with Hal (Quinn Mattfeld, quite the most solid actor in this show) and remembered moments with Robert. Bishop, playing a mad/sane/mad father and genius, can’t resist chewing some scenery but provides a few touching moments as well.

Mattfeld goes a long way toward helping Cook, as Catherine, settle down. She’s all brittle cheekbones and oddly clipped phrases in the beginning, perhaps trying to show Catherine’s potential instability, but her gawkiness and wild-eyed stares leave the audience confused about why Hal would find her attractive.

And is Catherine delusional? Auburn balances that question through to the end, with feints and flashbacks slowly providing the clues to the puzzle’s solution. Cook must dance a highwire of depicting Catherine’s neediness without making her pitiful. She’s lived in hell with her father, but she won’t find heaven in New York or in Hal’s arms. As the audience learns the truth, Catherine must find a way out of her father’s shadow and into her own life.

********
Proof runs through Feb. 24 at the Willamette Repertory Theatre. Tix at www.hultcenter.org or 682-5000.

I am adopting British conventions for some grammar in this post. So sue me. Hey, it's about Australia and the U.K.!

Here is an article on last week's surprise announcement in Australia. The lead is:
AUSTRALIA'S richest indigenous art prize will be part of a bumper Christmas present for Western Australia's cultural sector - a sudden $70 million arts announcement to be unveiled today by Premier Alan Carpenter.

Wow! $70 million extra, all of the sudden. I think I'd like to be a writer/artist /theater person in Western Australia right now.

But not in a small U.K. town: This week, The Guardian reports (headline), "England's arts face bloodiest cull in half a century as funds are cut for 200 groups" — holy mother of ... what. The. Fuck!

Lyn Gardner said a few days ago that "It all feels a bit cack-handed." That's because the Arts Council of England won't release the list of programs they've cut until after a funding appeal in January, and it's also because a bunch of organizations are getting unexpected increases. Seems that, POSSIBLY, without all of the info, British arts groups are drawing these conclusions:
• Funding is going urban instead of rural.
• Big places that stand to earn a lot of money are getting a lot more investment.
• And no one really knows WTF is going on because the Arts Council aren't talking about it and aren't at all transparent.

Today's post from Lyn Gardner is way harder on the Arts Council because they have really, really screwed up. My favourite line is: "The Arts Council seems to have scored an own goal in its failure to communicate both its decisions and the criteria by which they have been arrived."

I love the term own goal.

But anyway, point is? I want arts money for small organizations, for rural organizations that are trying to bring theater and music and viz arts to small towns, for new organizations trying to do new things ... and I do not want governments to think of arts organizations as businesses. Arts organizations need governmental support, and I don't see anything wrong with that. I mean, if the government can freaking pay for billions of dollars a month for war, why the hell can't the government pay a few million dollars/pounds/etc. a year for the arts?

(And let me acknowledge that I myself benefitted this year from governmental support for the arts.)

Here's an end-of-the-year tax-write-off thingie you can do to support the arts in Oregon: Donate, for a tax credit, to the Oregon Cultural Trust. If you're curious, here's the list of Eugene's eligible nonprofits. There's a lot of 'em, and some of 'em are among the best organizations in town (I won't say which ones though).

Give arts money for Giftmas! You'll feel good and get a tax credit as well. What could be better? (Well, if someone kicked the ARSE of the Arts Council of England, I guess!)

British playwright Mark Ravenhill (apparently of Shopping and Fucking fame — why haven't I seen this play? ... Oh, wait, it's about gay men fucking and consumerism running amok. I don't really participate in either one, at least not as an adult.) wrote a blog post for The Guardian's TV blog about how he couldn't write gay characters anymore.

Here's the dumbest part ever:
I'm happy never to write another gay character again. It feels as though every aspect of the gay experience has been narrated, performed and picked over in the past 30 years.

WHAT, NOW?!

Here's one of the comments:
You're seriously trying to say that after thousands of years there's still no shortage of stories to tell about straight characters and relationships, while thirty years are enough to say everything worth saying about gay characters and relationships?

What he said.

But also, one commenter wrote, I strongly suspect you're doing the usual thing of equating 'queer' to 'male homosexual'. ... Please spare us from the male-only monoculture, whatever sort of people you're writing.

What she said.

As a matter of fact, I'm now on the prowl for any good lesbian plays at all. (Diana Son's Stop Kiss excluded.)

I know I'll be going "D'oh" as soon as I post this, but still. Without trying, I can think of at least 15 plays about gay men, but with trying, I've only come up with two plays about lesbians. And one of them, to quote a local person, should never be performed again.

I'm thinking this shows a tiny bit of sexism in the theater community. That means straight, gay or bi, men and women in the theater community need to encourage more plays by and about lesbians. Oh hey, that can include me, since I'm a media powerhouse and all. (I mean, I'm not, but what little power I have, I should use to help lesbians take over the country, right work for the betterment of all humanity, right?)

So, Mark Ravenhill, I really don't care if you stop writing about gay men as long as you write about or mentor people writing about lesbians.

Comment or e-me (suzi at eugeneweekly dot com) if you have some thoughts.