Posts Tagged ‘Rush Rehm’

The Stanford Repertory Theater (SRT) has launched its annual summer festival with “Voices of the Earth: From Sophocles to Rachel Carson and Beyond.” The polished reading from nearly a hundred writers, thinkers, scientists, and politicians, compiled by the Artistic Director Rush Rehm and Charles Junkerman, Stanford’s dean (emeritus) for Continuing Studies, ends tonight, alas! But other shows on this year’s theme, “The Environment and Social Justice,” will debut in the coming weeks. Go here to read about two new plays, Polar Bears, Black Boys & Prairie Fringed Orchids, by Vincent Terrell Durham, and Anna Considers Mars, by Ruben Grijalva. SRT also hosts a popular film series.

“Voice of the Earth” was a moving tribute to our planet. However, the first quarter-hour made me wonder if the seven performers/readers could keep the show together for 90 minutes, entirely on snippets from the 7th century B.C. to now. Yet they did!

I had some quibbles about the tendentiousness – Reagan, Bush, Nixon, and inevitably Trump were excoriated, with satisfied groans from the liberal audience. But what about Obama‘s complicated relationship with fracking? And were the Native Americans really all peace and love and Great Spirit? (One quote referred to whispering to the bears, rather than killing them. Do not try that at home.)  There’s always a danger of sentimentalizing, even kitschifying nature, extracting the roughness and toughness of our familiar earth – it’s radical foreign-ness.

I was happy to see a number of Stanford “Another Look” book club author’s featured: J.A. Baker, Joseph Conrad, W.H. Hudson. And a few personal friends and favorites – Richard Wilbur, too.

Kudos to cast members Gianna Clark, Thomas Freeland, Jake Harrison, Sequoiah Hippolyte, Brenna McCulloch, Emma Rothenberg, Gabe Wieder.

I picked out a few quotes from the evening. Here they are:

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste . . . ”

– Wallace Stegner (from a letter)

Rilke, in a painting by Leonid Pasternak

Do you still remember: falling stars,
how they leapt slantwise through the sky
like horses over suddenly held-out hurdles
of our wishes—did we have so many?—
for stars, innumerable, leapt everywhere;
almost every gaze upward became
wedded to the swift hazard of their play,
and our heart felt like a single thing
beneath that vast disintegration of their brilliance—
and was whole, as if it would survive them!

– Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Edward Snow

“… I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself – actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of man, to life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. Then another time, on the American Line, when I was lookout on the crow’s nest in the dawn watch. A calm sea, that time. Only a lazy groundswell and a slow, drowsy roll of the ship. The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me. Dreaming, not keeping lookout, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which slept together. Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came. The peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men’s lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint’s vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again.”

Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Doomed Polyxena (Lea Claire Zawada) mourns the life she will never have. (Photo: Frank Chen)

Euripides‘s play Helen is the most lyrical and tender of the playwright’s canon, and the most surprising as well. Here’s the story: Helen was never carried off to Troy by Paris; she was whisked away by the gods to Egypt to cool her heels while the Trojan War raged. (She is, after all, the daughter of Zeus … or maybe Tyndareus.) In her place, an eidolon – a specter, a lookalike, a double – went to the doomed city. Now the war is over. Menelaus is presumed dead. And the King of Egypt wants to marry Helen, twenty years older but still a humdinger. She’s clinging to a sacred shrine that offers sanctuary against his unwanted advances. What’s a queen to do?

Joe Estlack as Odysseus, Polymnestor, Menelaus (Photo: Zachary Dammann)

The story has its precedents. Herodotus advanced the same tale in his Histories. And the poet Stesichorus said the same in his Palinode. But Helen – almost a romantic comedy, really, but too tinged by tragedy to make it so – is most memorably told by Euripides. Too bad it’s not told often enough. So that’s one reason to see the Stanford Repertory Theater’s current production, Hecuba/Helen, in the Roble Studio Theater.  It opened last weekend and runs through August 19.

“Like the Odyssey and, even more, like the late Shakespearean romances, Helen has in some ways ‘got back to the fairy tale again,’ with its sunlit clarifications, reunions, and happy ending,” wrote poet Rachel Hadas about the play. “But its brightness is porous; plenty of suffering makes its way through. The enormous and tragic waste of the war, the pain of exile, isolation, and blame – the beauty of Helen shines through these elements without ever avoiding or denying them.”

The play is ingenuously paired with a very different offering from Euripides, Hecuba. Like the tragedian’s Trojan Women, it’s a rending,  agonized lament from the female denizens of Troy, now orphaned and widowed and childless, as they are about to be hauled into slavery and worse. The threnody is interrupted occasionally by men, kings, soldiers, messengers, coming to relate the latest disastrous news or murderous decision. It’s one steady momentum downward, to Hecuba’s final revenge against her betrayer, before the Trojan queen’s descent into becoming, as prophesied, a howling dog.

African American poet Marilyn Nelson describes Hecuba as “the distillation of the pain described in the slave narratives” – “Her children dead or stolen, her husband slain, her homeland lost forever, her nobility reduced to rags: again and again, I read Hecuba’s stories in the slave narratives. Children torn from their arms and sold, lovers beaten and sold or murdered, no place to run, no place to hide, their very bodies a badge of inferiority.” And so it is.

Courtney Walsh as Hecuba, Doug Nolan as Agamemnon. (Photo: Zachary Dammann)

All the roles are doubled up, or trebled up. Stanford Rep regular Courtney Walsh revels in the exhausting challenge of playing both Helen and Hecuba – though I think her touch is made for the dark-edged comedy of Helen more.

Two men in particular give an array of arresting performances  – Doug Nolan as Agamemnon a hardened soldier softened by the surprise of love. Less than an hour later he is the bullying Theoclymenus, the duped King of Egypt, alternately petulant and belligerent. Joe Estlack is the stalwart yet doubting Spartan king Menelaus – and also the oleaginous traitor Polymnestor. (He won me over when he inventively and energetically portrayed an entire shipwreck all by himself, with gurgling, coughing, spitting, and sputtering.) Props to Jennie Brick as the chorus leader and also the lippy portress-cum-bouncer at the Egyptian palace. And Stanford undergraduate student Lea Claire Zawada makes a moving and anguished Polyxena, whose life is sacrificed to the ghost of Achilles.

Thank you, sir.

The epigrammatic Greek Chorus is always a challenging convention in modern drama. Aleta Hayes‘s choreography updates the concept while hewing to its origins. It’s effective, though my own preferences run towards a plainer, less stylized interpretation, where the chorus women deliver their lines simply, singly, as lookers-on and occasional participants. The projections on the screen were more distracting than helpful, and opened the drama outward when it needed intimacy and tension.

The doubling and trebling of roles, as we watch very different characters and emotions shine through the same faces we saw minutes before, remind all of us how we each take so many roles in a lifetime – all but the best and worst of us swing from hero to villain, buffoon to sage, and back again. During Hecuba/Helen, a killer becomes lover and then a killer again, the powerful are humbled, a betrayer becomes the betrayed … and the smart-mouthed portress who kicks Menelaus away from the threshhold morphs into the benevolent prophetess Theonoe.

As the “Nevertheless, She Persisted” theme of the double show demonstrates, Euripides was an early champion of women. He was also deeply horrified by war, having lived through the long and bitter struggle between Sparta and Athens. Euripides shows both in the case of the Trojan women of Hecuba, and in Helen, which showcases a woman who been scapegoated for a war she never caused, and just wants to go home to Sparta.

Artistic director Rush Rehm translated these texts from the Greek for this production, and the final piece is stageworthy, more so, perhaps, than the more lyrical rendering of poets who have tried their hands at the task:

The gods reveal themselves in many ways,
bring many matters to surprising ends.
The things we thought would happen do not happen.
The unexpected gods make possible,
and that is what has happened here today.

Courtney Walsh (Hecuba), Lea Claire Zawada (Polyxena), and in the chorus Emma Rothenberg, Jennie Brick, Brenna McCulloch, Gianna Clark, Regan Lavin, Amber Levine. (Photo: Zachary Dammann)

Voices from the chorus: Brenna McCulloch, Amber Levine, Regan Lavin (Photo: Zachary Dammann)

The Bliss Family: David (Bruce Carlton), Judith (Courtney Walsh), Sorel (Kiki Bagger) and Simon (Austin Caldwell).

Playwright and songwriter Noël Coward spent a single weekend in the home of actress Laurette Taylor and her husband, the playwright J. Hartley Manners. The visit was such that he later, in three feverish days, wrote the play for which he is arguably best known, Hay Fever. Taylor made a big target: her larger-than-life personality was renowned, along with her theatrical moods and eccentricities. She was the sort of person who, we would say today, sucked all the oxygen out of the room. The play was a hit from the moment it opened in 1925. There were casualties, however. To put it mildly, Hay Fever strained the friendship.

Ungrateful guest.

The Stanford Summer Repertory production, which opened last weekend, continues through August 9, with Courtney Walsh as Judith Bliss, Kiki Bagger as Sorel Bliss, Richard Carlton as David Bliss, Rush Rehm as Richard Greatham, Catherine Luedtke as Clara, Austen Caldwell as so-so novelist Simon Bliss, all under the direction of Lynne Soffer – tickets and info here. You can’t really call a family dysfunctional when they’re so pleased with themselves, can you? The Bliss family likes itself, even if no one else does.

The play has been described as a cross between outright farce and comedy of manners. Stanford weighs in for the former, sometimes to its detriment. I could have used a slower pacing in the opening scenes, to hear the dialogue more clearly and get a feel for the characters before the comedy builds its own momentum. Sometimes the performers don’t seem to be actually listening to each other, or minding the cigarettes they light up and stub out every few minutes.

Judith Bliss is not just living in her past but the past, a different era of theater altogether. Perhaps a modern audience wouldn’t have understood the distinction, but it’s part of the fun of the play. The central character, matriarch Judith Bliss, is an actress who is past her heyday, hungering for a smashing comeback and longing for the return of melodrama with its clichéd gestures and formulaic plots. That era had given way with an excited crash to the brazen sexuality of the jazz baby. (Remember 1925 was the magic year of both Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and The Great Gatsby.)

She really did make a comeback.

This production builds heat as it moves, trust me (and kudos to costume designer Connie Strayer). Two characters to watch in this production: Berkeley Rep veteran Deborah Fink excels as vamp flapper Myra Arundel. She’s sleek, smug, and self-contained as a cat, and doesn’t begin to unravel until the very last scenes. Another scene stealer: Kathleen Kelso as ingenue flapper Jackie Coryton. She’s making her Stanford Repertory Theater debut. The tall, willowy blonde sways uncertainly like a tall narrow tree in a high wind. The face under the cloche hat is constantly on the verge of crumpling into tears. She’s already unraveled, the moment she steps into the country house.

The original Judith Bliss, Laurette Taylor, was an actress from a previous era, more of the generation of Mary Pickford than Anita Loos or Clara Bow. Was Laurette Taylor the has-been that Noël Coward immortalized? Not quite. She finally did make her comeback in 1946, but not in the revival of a cheesy melodrama. She was the original Amanda Wingfield in an unforgettable performance of The Glass Menagerie. Tennessee Williams’s “sad, delicate drama of a struggling family in extremis was greeted with modified rapture by most of the critics as a new voice, a potential turning point for a tired commercial theatre,” according to Robert Gottlieb in The New Yorker (here):

But the true rapture was reserved for the play’s star, Laurette Taylor, reappearing after a difficult interlude of alcoholism, but still a revered name in the theatre. Her biggest success, decades earlier, had been in the comedy Peg O’ My Heart, which she performed for years both in New York and around the country, and in a movie adaptation. Now, as Amanda Wingfield, first in Chicago and then on Broadway, she emerged as an actress without peer, her performance referred to again and again as the greatest ever by an American actor. When I saw her, I knew it was the finest acting I had ever seen, and, more than sixty-five years later, I still feel that way. But why? What did she do that made her acting so unforgettable?

She simply didn’t act. Or so it appeared. She wasn’t an actress; she was a tired, silly, irritating, touching, fraught, aging woman with no self-awareness, no censor for her ceaseless flow of words, no sense of the effect she was having on her children—or the audience. It was as if you were listening in on the stream of her consciousness. Her self-pitying yet valiant voice, reflecting both the desperation of her situation and the faded remnants of her Southern-belle charm, was maddening, yet somehow endearing. You wanted to hug her, to swat her, to run from her—in other words, you reacted to her just the way her son, Tom, did.

 Actress Patricia Neal called it “the greatest performance I have ever seen in all my life.” Sometimes there really are happy endings. Even for drama queens.

Dysfunctional family? Maybe not. Richard Carlton, Courtney Walsh, and Kiki Bagger in “Hay Fever.”

The madness of Ahab. (Photo: Frank Chen)

 “The soul is a sort of fifth wheel to a wagon.”

.

The protagonist, of course, is the sea – murderous, obsessive, monotonous, devourer of lives, sanity, and time, time, time. The sea is the pervasive, melancholy backdrop for the Stanford Repertory Theater‘s compelling production of Orson Welles‘ Moby Dick – Rehearsed, mercifully without intermission, which would only have diluted the oceanic severity of Welles’s wonder of a script.  The “watery part of the world” is countebalanced by a quieter antagonist, the human soul itself, that “fifth wheel to a wagon,” as the mad prophetic sailor Elijah says early in the play. Welles whittled Herman Melville‘s 700-page metaphysical novel into a relentless and lyrical 90-minute show – it’s a daring choice for the artistic director Rush Rehm, and a rare opportunity. (The production continues through August 10 – tickets here.)

Call him Ishmael. (Photo: Stefanie Okuda)

The hard heart of the inventive production is Rod Gnapp, a Bay Area veteran of ACT, Berkeley Rep, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and others, who turns in a stellar performance as one-legged Captain Ahab. The captain is misguidedly bent on killing the whale who maimed him, his twisted face locked in a grim and grizzled rictus of resentment.  His short exchanges with the upright Quaker first mate Starbuck (played by Peter Ruocco), who finally cries, “I disobey my God, obeying him!” are among the highpoints in a drama that has many of them. Here’s another:  thanks to composer/sound designer Michael Keck and music director Weston Gaylord, the haunting, a cappella hymns and sailors’ songs are a delicious descant to the drama – in the end, a haunting lament for those who have given their lives for the sea.

The script itself has an interesting history. The original production took place at the the Duke of York’s Theatre in London, with a cast that included Director Welles, Gordon Jackson, Patrick McGoohan, and Joan Plowright. Welles eventually filmed about 75 minutes with the original cast, then abandoned the venture when he was disappointed with the results. Others, including McGoohan, thought the short film was impressive. We’ll never know. The film was lost when a drunken Robert Shaw was smoking in bed at Welles’s Madrid home. The house burned down, along with the only copy of the film. The Munich Film Museum owns a shorter film of excerpts from the play, filmed by Welles in 1971.

Moby Dick – Rehearsed is commonly said to be blank verse, which obviously isn’t true. At best, it’s broken iambics and prose – it falls off the metrical horse too often to be anything more.  Just fine for theater, since the ear isn’t counting off metrical feet, and the irregular rhythms throw the emphasis on a hypnotic tale about a monstrous obsession. It’s a lyrical, meditative script, with lines like this one from the narrator, from the young, inexperienced sailor Ishmael (played by Louis McWilliams):

“Our souls were so possessed that Ahab’s hate
was almost ours, and the white whale
our foe as much as his…”

Or from the spiritual insightful Starbuck:

“a vulture feeds upon his heart forever: –
that vulture the very creature he creates.”

Or from hell-bent Ahab:

“…How d’ye know that some
entire, living, thinking thing
may not invisibly be standing
there, where you are standing?
In your most solitary hours, then
don’t you ever fear the feel of eavesdroppers?”

I have some quibbles. Welles’ show-within-a-show convention was already shopworn when Welles’s wrote it, and adding a few lines about deconstruction and cellphones (already a bit stale themselves), add little comedy or humor. I’d rather cut to the chase. Also, the mad characters should dial it back a bit: they’re often loud and hard to follow, which is too bad, because the delivery muffs some of the most moving and poetic lines in the play. Besides, I’ve seen insane, and that’s not all of it. Insanity is scariest when it whispers, calm and confident as a megalomaniac in a boardroom. “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me,” announces the captain. Ahab is insane.

Interesting production video below. It doesn’t quite capture the power and desolation of this drama – how could it, really? See the real thing for yourself.

It’s been a busy weekend, too soon over and too little accomplished, but I did get an opportunity to see Orson Welles‘s Moby Dick – Rehearsed, Stanford Repertory Theater‘s current production, which opened this weekend. I’ll have more to say in the coming days about Welles’s little-known and little-performed masterpiece – meanwhile, I highly recommend that you get tickets while you can here. It’s a magnificent and moving show, under the direction of Rush Rehm, and I very much doubt you’ll find much else to top it in the Bay Area this summer. With Herman Melville and Orson Welles as your starter kit – how could you possibly go wrong? The play runs July 17 to August 10, Thursdays to Saturdays at 8 pm, Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. at Pigott Theater, Memorial Auditorium, on the Stanford campus. Stay tuned in the coming days for more …