A Great Weekend

Spent a four-day weekend in the Twin Cities, doing some fun things. But before we left I had my first gig of the summer with the Rochester Salvation Army, celebrating Donut Day. I stayed calm- and watched a lot of donuts being enjoyed.

Friday evening went to see the movie, Chef. Don't miss it. It is fun and engaging with excellent cinematography of food. It also has a heart-warming story. Nothing radical or revolutionary. Just a very well-done story that makes you feel good.


While at the Guthrie Theater on Saturday we got a good look at the mighty Mississippi. It was tearing across St. Anthony Falls and under the stone arch bridge like there was no tomorrow.

 

Sunday was a baseball day. Too bad the Twins lost, but it was still fun being there in the spring sun. Lots of jumping around, though.

Monday we first went to Como Conservatory. As usual the flowers were magnificent. The second picture below is a Bonsai bougainvillea in bloom. The white wall behind it and the light makes it look like a ceramic model. No, it was as real and as stunning (if not more) than the picture shows.

Finally, a stop at the Mall of America where the GRAMMY Museum of LA has a traveling exhibition of The Beatles. I had to try the guitar with skiffle great Lonnie Donegan and sit at Ringo's drums. Hey, compared to the still living Beatles, I'm still young.

The Power of Art

Saturday was a Guthrie Theater day. We saw a challenging and interesting drama from Britain, Our Country's Good.

Our Country's Good is a 1990 play written by British playwright, Timberlake Wertenbaker, adapted from the Thomas Keneally novel The Playmaker. The story concerns a group of Royal Marines and convicts in a penal colony in New South Wales, in the 1780s, who put on a production of The Recruiting Officer.

In the 1780s, convicts and Royal Marines were sent to Australia as part of the first penal colony there. The play shows the class system in the convict camp and discusses themes such as sexuality, punishment, the Georgian judicial system, and the idea that it is possible for ‘theatre to be a humanising force'.
--Wikipedia

I found it engaging and a play that made me think about the power of art- specifically theater and story telling. The audience seemed to be puzzled by it. It wasn't as straightforward as some might like. It is done in a “sketch-scene” way that has a more experimental style to it. The cast played multiple roles- prisoners and guards- which impacted the style. As I said I found it engaging. One scene in particular grabbed me.

In the scene and costume change the some of the cast stood still at the front of the stage while other things were going on. Several of them held the wigs that would have indicated their British persona. The character closest to me stood there with the wig held out in front of her. Then, in very deliberate action, she took the wig and placed it on her head. She went from prisoner to guard in a brief moment.

We are all both prisoner and guard; we are all just one scene change from a different life than we have been living. Whether it is a single act of crime- or the accident of birth- we are all the same.

As to the "humanizing" action of theater (and the arts, by extension)? Well, that was the whole idea. yes, in the play it works that way- or at least implies that it does. But it went beyond that. It felt like a similar story to Les Miserables. The basic debate was whether "criminals" are able to be rehabilitated. The Jaevert-types believed that this was an impossibility. Once bad- always bad. But there is always a Jean Valjean who challenges that. The playwright and producers of this play believe (like Victor Hugo) that change is possible.

Such is a debate that never goes away. Sadly. Maybe we need to continue to challenge the Jaeverts of the world who insist that redemption isn't possible and that the only way to deal with "these people" is punishment- and punishment forever.

Challenging.

I, for one, am glad Jesus didn't believe that!

Power in Performance

We were at The Guthrie this past weekend for their remarkable production of Othello. We are season subscribers and find that our 7 - 10 plays a year are some of the best use of our entertainment budget. This was no exception.

Every time we sit there before the show starts, I am struck by the sense of anticipation. It is similar to what happens when the opening titles start in a movie. But here, in the theater, we are about to see live actors on stage in front of us. These are actors who are about to have us suspend our sense of belief of the world we are watching and transport us to different places in different times right before our very eyes.

The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis does it better than most and as good as any of the best. It is a top-level performance. Always.

So as I sat there on Saturday, the lights very slowly dimming and tense music filling the theater, I sat back ready for the experience. I have never seen a production of Othello. (I have seen many Shakespeare performances at American Players Theatre in Spring Green, WI, and the Guthrie. This great tragedy has not been one of them.) I found myself anticipating the story, the intensity, the way Shakespeare can always take your emotions and twist them into pretzels as you love every minute of it.

Othello was no exception. Raw energy exuded from the stage. I was being swamped by a tsunami of power and evil. Iago is the quintessential villain, the paradigm of evil, manipulating Othello and all around him for his own ends. The two characters are in this struggle from the opening scene although Othello doesn't know it until it's too late- at the end of the play. I was put through a wringer for the three hours of the production. It never let up and the two actors commanded the stage every moment.

In the second half of the play the two women, Desdemona and Emilia, have their chance, but the two leads are a force of nature onstage. There is little in the way of comic relief. Shakespeare built the play around these strong personas and, in comparison, all but the two women are just part of the scenery. An amazing feat.

All this by a playwright who lived 400 years ago and spoke an "ancient" version of the same language I do, while inventing portions of it as he went along. Issues of love and hate, prejudice and jealousy, power and its consequences never change, however. They are as devastating in the 21st Century as they were in the 17th.

To watch this being enacted in front of me, by real people, is an amazing experience. It is drama at its best. You don't, in a Shakespearean tragedy, get to the end and all will be well as they live happily ever after. Shakespeare lived in a world where the Plague could shut down the city for months on end. He lived in a world many never had the chance to live happily ever after. In his great tragedies he expressed the image of that experience.

 We walked out of the theater truly exhausted by the intensity. At the same time we were better for having been there, wiser in the ways of the world and given a view of the places the human soul can go when taken over by hatred or evil.

Will It Ever Be Different?

Saw the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning drama, Clybourne Park at the Guthrie today. It is a play about that continual American issue- racism- and our American difficulty coming to grips with it. It takes place in two acts 50 years apart. It is about changing times and unchanging humanity. It is about tensions as neighborhoods change. It is finally about how the more things the more they remain the same when we can't even stop and talk about them in ways that recognize the humanity and pain of all involved. It is easier to stereotype and argue, fear and strike out.

This is one more story of what I believe is the basic American failure, the underlying fatal flaw that could one day bring about the greatest difficulties our nation faces. It encompasses our fears and differences; it flows from economics and class, poverty and wealth, and a deep-seated need to judge and place ourselves or others as "different."

When we walked out my wife calmly said,

This makes me tired.

I knew immediately what she meant. Both of us have been speaking out on this, wrestling with it, mourning its ongoing undermining of the American ideal for over 50 years. We both remember Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. We have stood up to racism as often as we have been able to. We have struggled to identify our own roots of prejudice that can be so subtle and scary as to throw us into silence as we confess our shortcomings.

Here we are in 2013 with an African-American president- and sitting in the theater seeing a powerful portrayal of how far we still have to go.

Will we ever see it be different?

Please, God, open our eyes, help us all see with openness and humility what we can do and be if we only allow ourselves to be humans in relationship with other humans, all children of God.

On the Power of Language

I continue to reflect on the amazingly powerful production of A Long Day's Journey Into Night at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. (Previous post 1 and post 2.)

As I said in those earlier posts the power of a great American stage play needs the power of the actors to make it believable, of course. Stiff or poor acting would get in the way of the intensity and emotion of the drama. The audience has to accept that his is not just a play- but that it is reality being acted out for them. We know that the people on stage are not really the characters, but you sure have a tough time convincing your brain of that in a great production like the Guthrie's of O'Neill's Pulitzer Prize winning play.

As I continued my reflection's this past week, another item struck me. This has to do with Eugene O'Neill's amazing ability with words. The play was originally written in the 1940s and not produced until the 1950s about a day in 1912.. In many ways that was a really different time, even in drama. The acceptance and use of "vulgarity" was quite low. Thus the language that O'Neill had at his disposal was very different than if he were writing today. For reality's sake today that play would include a lot of strong language, i.e. the F-bomb. We have seen that in movies and stage plays quite regularly. It makes the language more "realistic" and the settings seem more contemporary. We may also hear that to use these strong words would help get the intensity of emotion across.

That wasn't acceptable in O'Neill's time, or even perhaps in the family at the time the action is supposed to be taking place. So O'Neill had to do something remarkable- he had to get that intense feeling across in his non-obscene dialogue. The characters had to let us know the amazing depth of their feelings and the devastating intensity of their lives with how they spoke, interacted, reacted and described their feelings. Instead of saying they felt like ----, they had to explain it so we would know how they felt, and allow it to penetrate us. O'Neill, like any great playwright mastered that and then some. Which is why he won four Pulitzer Prizes for drama!

But, again, to give the Guthrie crew their due, if these actors couldn't bring those characters to life, we would have walked out of the theater with a feeling or two, but not so wrung out by what we had just seen. The actors needed us to know those feelings and express them in inflection, actions, body posture, stage movement, etc. They were not just going through the motions- they were living them.

I don't know how they do it, actually. They have to walk off that stage and back into their own lives- and then get ready to do it again that evening or the next day. What class and motivation.

Thank you for an amazing experience.

Here are two videos of scenes:





And a video interview from Twin Cities Live with the two actors who play the brothers: LINK

When Addiction Was Always Fatal

At least, a time when there was no treatment for it in any way, shape, or form.

That was the other reaction I had to the Guthrie Theater's production of Eugene O'Neill's A Long Day's Journey Into Night. The play is based on O'Neill's own family history, taking place on one day in August 1912. In that day we see the father and two sons of the Tyrone family drink as their own way of coping with the wife/mother's morphine addiction take control after some time of sobriety that they hoped would be more permanent. Everyone is caught up in the devastation of addiction.

Hope? None! It is tragedy at it's worst. King Lear and Macbeth on the coast of Connecticut in 1912.

In 1912 addiction had no treatment available. It was a death sentence which everyone felt was a matter of choice. They could stop if they wanted to, was the standard thinking. It was an issue of morals and will-power and wanting it badly enough. In August 1912 Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson was only 16 years old.

Hope? Nope!

O'Neill's own family history shows the destructive power of alcoholism and addiction. He older brother and two sons died of alcoholism/addiction.

Today we live in a fortunately better time. We have a little better understanding of some of the underlying issues that have made addiction so difficult. We have seen the development of neuroscience giving us insight into the brain chemistry that is the possible cause and likely result of alcoholism and addiction. There are millions of recovering addicts today. They can live with a sense of hope that Eugene O'Neill and his family would never have known.

We are only at the early stages of our awareness. There is still so much we don't know and so many people who still don't get into recovery and stay there. Relapses occur at a frustrating frequency and we can't predict who will relapse and who won't.

But today we do have hope. It is not a 100% fatal disease. People do make it into recovery and stay there. The odds are better than in 1912 when O'Neill and his family stood in the midst of a multi-generational story of loss and pain. We have made a start and we can offer possibilities for the future so other families can liv with a sense of optimism.

You Know It's Great Acting....

....When the audience is pulled into the play and can't get out.

“I made mistakes in drama. I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.”
Frank Capra

Just had a great experience of this last weekend at The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. They are currently running what is arguably the greatest American drama- A Long Day's Journey Into Night. In brief it is the story of addiction and alcoholism written in the 1940s by Eugene O'Neill and based on his own life. It is a remarkable, Pulitzer Prize winning play. It is relentless in its intensity, with unbeatable dialogue that takes the audience many places they had no idea they could go. This is drama in the league of Shakespeare's King Lear or Macbeth.

Add to O'Neill's play the actors from The Guthrie and you are in something you can't get out of. You are pulled into the reality of addiction in ways that you never knew possible. You feel every ounce of pain. You want to look away in embarrassment. You don't want the play to go where you know it is going- headlong in one day's journey toward the dark.

As a season-ticket holder at The Guthrie, I am very familiar with their top-quality acting. I take it for granted. As a fan of stage drama since college (where we studied A Long Day's Journey), I am familiar with the power of great plays to turn you upside down. It is what I look for when I go to a play.

I was surprised though when friends and colleagues who were also at the performance reacted so strongly to it. They used terms like "painful" to describe the feeling of watching the Tyrone family on stage. They wanted to turn away. They had incredible visceral reactions.

We are people who live and work with addiction every day. Nothing in the play surprised any of us. Yet we all walked out exhausted, overwhelmed by the emotions flooding from O'Neill's words and the acting of the Guthrie cast.

That's great acting!

Chekov at the Market

Anton Chekov on outside wall of Guthrie Theater

Watches over Mill City Farmer's Market

Minneapolis, MN

June 30, 2012

Sir Tyrone and the Flowers

Picture of Sir Tyrone Guthrie

Outside Wall of The Guthrie Theater

Minneapolis, MN

June 30, 2012