“The World As We Know It (by 6 women of a certain age” at CorningWorks

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CorningWorks

What do women “of a certain age” have to tell us about the world?

A great deal, it turns out, although – when told through the medium of dance, as in the CorningWorks dance assemblage The World As We Know It – obliquely and with circumspection. These women aren’t giving their hard-earned knowledge of the world away.

The piece consists of six solo dance performances knitted together by interludes featuring the entire ensemble. Less overtly thematic and narrative than much of Corning’s previous work, the pieces, taken both individually and collectively, nonetheless explore familiar territory for her: gender roles and expectations, social pressures on women, and women’s lack of access to social and economic power. The ironic costuming underscores the evening’s political edge: when the “tribe” of women come together in the interludes, they are dressed in oversized pastel-colored men’s suits that make them look like children playing dressup; but as the interludes build to a final tableau around a “boardroom table,” it becomes clear that in reality the suits are nothing but an empty signifier of patriarchal power, a silly marker of status.

Beth Corning; Photo by Frank Walsh, courtesy CorningWorks.

Each solo dance is expressive in a different way of women’s embodied desire, yearning, and pain, building on a shared  movement vocabulary to capture and convey the weight of lived female experience. Five of the six dancers are “of a certain age,” and they seem to move from a place deep in muscle memory; what they know of the world is communicated more through small, subtle, and secret gestures than through flamboyant athleticism.

Yet there is also plenty of agility and dexterity woven into each solo. The show opens with “In medias res,” Li Chiao-Ping’s acrobatic pas de deux with a table, which is set to text constellated around the syllable “be.” In the second solo, Mauriah Kraker’s “the quiet,” dancer Simone Ferro seems to shed her skin like a frantic butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. Women’s domestic matters find exploration in the next three solos: Endalyn Taylor pulls forward moments of physical and emotional crisis in “Is All,” a piece choreographed by Sarah Hook that I took to be a meditation on postpartum existential despair; Charlotte Adams emerges nude from a bathtub in “Imagining Ketchikan (Canciones del Corazon),” rendering visible the joy and pleasure that a mature body continues to be able to both produce and feel; and Beth Corning reprises, from her 2016 piece Remains, a scene around a dinner table that evokes the generations of family whose endearing habits and irritating idiosyncrasies have been lost to time. The final solo, Heidi Latsky’s “Unfinished,” is danced with brio by Jillian Hollis; a redhead like Corning, Hollis seems to stand in both for Corning’s younger self and for the future of the dance form, a future that will carry forward, in bodies at all stages of life, the insights and wisdom earned by artists like Adams, Chiao-Ping, Corning, Ferro, and Taylor.

“The Gun Show (Can we talk about this?)” at Quantum Theatre

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Quantum Theatre

While there are several guns conjured to the imagination in EM Lewis’s one-person play The Gun Show (Can we talk about this?), the most frightening moment of the play (for me, at least) doesn’t involve any weapons at all. That moment comes when Andrew William Smith – my colleague at the CMU School of Drama, whom I know to be a reasonable, rational, calm human being – becomes red-faced with fury as he channels conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s incoherent and illogical rage at the prospect of even the most minor regulation on guns.

Andrew William Smith. Photo by Sarah Schreck, courtesy Quantum Theatre.

That can’t be an easy place for Smith to go. But then there’s nothing easy about this play, which relates five “stories” from the playwright’s own experience with guns, three of which are relatively benign, and two of which are harrowing (no further spoilers here, you are safe to read on). Lewis – who grew up in rural Oregon, and still lives on her family farm – has a lifelong relationship with guns, gun culture, and gun owners, a relationship that was complicated by a tragic event that occurred sixteen years ago and eventually led to the writing of this play. As such, Lewis occupies a fairly unusual position in the conversation on guns: she has lived – and deeply gets – both sides of the debate.

Her doubled understanding of how people feel about guns is mirrored in the play’s structure: Lewis is both on stage – played by Smith – and also in the audience at every performance, observing him narrate her story and silently reacting to its telling. Her presence not only raises the emotional stakes of the play, but also instantiates her primary purpose: in a very real sense, what Lewis has staged here is a dialogue with herself, one that models the kind of nuanced and complicated dialogue she hopes her stories might inspire.

Those stories are compelling, and she heightens their theatricality by peppering her script with cheeky moments of ironic self-awareness. Director Sheila McKenna takes advantage of such metatheatrical moments to provide comedic relief, and under her direction Smith shapes a performance that plays in multiple registers, from light banter with the audience to an intense recreation of a traumatic memory. He also brings equal conviction to each of the script’s shifting and contradictory stances towards guns: it’s clear that he aims to avoid putting his actorly finger on the scale in favor of one side over the other.

A challenge for this play, however, is that it can’t avoid making some assumptions about its audience. For example, at one point Lewis accuses “city dwellers” (like those of us in the Pittsburgh audience?) of being indifferent to the needs of people in rural communities who need guns because they can’t count on law enforcement for protection. Implicit here is a slippery-slope argument that any desire to see some regulation on guns is a desire to make all gun ownership illegal, and as an “urbanite” myself I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of resentment at what felt, to me, like a straw-man setup. Moreover, while the play’s main premise is that conversation has become impossible because of extreme and hardened positions on both sides, that’s something of a false equivalency: despite Jones’s paranoia and the NRA’s propaganda, those who wish to enact common-sense gun regulations do not occupy the same kind of extreme position as those who equate any regulation whatsoever with tyranny and fascism.

Nonetheless, because Lewis’s personal history illuminates many facets, pro and con, of gun culture and gun ownership, her play opens what may be new perspectives and new ways of looking at the problem to people coming from all points on the spectrum. Among the loaded questions she provokes are: Who is really endangered by guns? What is the relationship between guns and security? How do we define “safety”? A talkback after each performance invites audience members to consider those and other questions: the dialogue begins.

Readings in Performance and Ecology

Readings in Performance and Ecology.  Forthcoming May 2012!!

Letter from a Reader (II)

“Dear ‘Tatler,’

Forgive me for getting harsh on you here, dude, but that last post was really crappily written!  I mean:  you teach writing?  Really?  I’m thinking the emperor’s got no clothes!

First off, there’s a real problem with coherence in the post.  You start with this whole bit about whether or not critics should read plays before seeing them, yadda yadda…but then you drop the topic and don’t really take it up again.  So, are you saying critics should read plays before seeing them, or not?  You seem to think that it was ‘okay’ that you hadn’t done your homework before reviewing all those other plays, but then you seem to be saying, ‘well, this time I did do my homework and I didn’t like the play so …’ — so, what?  It’s not clear what your point is here.  If I were, say, a literature or drama prof I’d be giving you some pretty big point deductions for going all ‘OT’ and vague on your reader.

And then, it’s totally unclear whether or not you actually are recommending the play to your readers!  Like, WTF?  Is it good, or not?  What kind of review is it if we don’t know whether or not to go see the play?

And finally, in your third paragraph you repeat the phrase ‘in fact’ twice, and you’ve got the word ‘fact,’ like, four times in the post.  Starts to feel like you’ve got some wierd verbal tic.

‘Impeccaby written?’  I don’t think so….Seems like we should be able to expect more from a drama prof at CMU, is all I’m saying.

— Anonymous”

Dear Anonymous —

Thank you for taking the time and energy to respond to both the style and content of the Tatler’s writing.  Your criticism is astute and perceptive — indeed, when prompted to view her own prose objectively, as your letter does, the Tatler must confess that your criticisms are precisely those she would level at herself!  

There is no excuse for bad writing or bad manners — both are the offspring of laziness and/or arrogance.  

Yet the Tatler would like to remind you, and all of her gentle readers, that  writing, like any other craft, involves making something where there was nothing before.  As such, the risk of failure is ever present.  This is also the case with theater, which is one of the reasons the Tatler aims to be as generous in her assessment of what she sees as possible, even in cases where a given play or production does not quite hit its mark.  

Thank you, dear Anonymous, for reminding us all that the writing of criticism should live up to the kind of aesthetic and intellectual standards to which the object of that criticism is subjected. 

— The Pittsburgh Tatler 

Why am I doing this?

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Bricolage, Camino, City Theatre, CMU, Hiawatha Project, MOMENTUM Festival, Pittsburgh Public Theatre, Readings in Performance and Ecology

I’ve already got a full-time job, not to mention a full-time home life (two girls, dog, home reno project, partner) and a looming book deadline.  Oh, and need I mention dramaturgical work on The Good Person of Sezuan at CMU and on the Hiawatha Project’s Camino?  So–why this, too?

I’ve wanted to get this blog going for a while; the desire to start it became even more acute this past winter, when my students were working on reviews in my critical writing course.   Many of the students were writing about shows they didn’t think were successful, and they had a terrific time tearing their subject down in high snark mode.  Their writing was funny, smart, crackling.  I was inspired, and vowed to myself to get this site going as soon as the semester was done.

Plus, I don’t get to the theatre as much as I should, being a theatre professor and all.  Making a commitment to reviewing local theatre online is a way of forcing some discipline on both my theatre-going habits and my writing habits.  I’m not doing as well as I should in that latter respect (only 2 posts in 2 months?  yikes!) but with summer will come some extra time, and I am determined to make this an active site.  [Part of the problem is that it’s taking me way too long to write each of my posts (including this one–I’ve been working 20 minutes so far on just over 200 words!)– I’m hoping that more frequent writing will eventually equate to faster writing.  We’ll see.]

As inspired as I was by my students’ funny nasty negative reviews, I realized when I sat down to create this blog that, alas, I will probably not be indulging in much lively trash talk myself.  I learned shortly after moving to Pittsburgh 4 years ago that there are really only about 75 people living here, and you quickly get to know all of them.  Most of the artists I’ll be writing about in these posts are people that I’ve come to know, admire, and like, and I have no interest in criticizing their work for the sake of strutting my snark.  Besides, I’ve worked in theatre in multiple capacities (as stage manager, pit orchestra musician, actor, electrician, props master, dramaturg, director) and I know how devilishly difficult it is to make the magic happen.  Like my students, I too was superior  to just about everything I saw when I was in my twenties, but now that I’m comfortably perched between the uphill and the downhill sides of life (and hoping to stay there for a good long while) I find myself with an attitude that is at once more humble and more generous.

I think this is a good thing.  I want to take seriously the task of using theatre reviewing as a way of encouraging the best local artists can do.  I’m hoping to see and write about as much locally produced theatre as I humanly can (remember the two kids?  there are only so many evenings I can go out!).  My mission here (if I can be so grandiose) is to do my small part to help enlarge and diversify the audience for local theatre by celebrating the good and the great when they are  good and great, and treating the not-so-good with empathy, generosity, and a gentle nudge towards the better.

So, what’s coming up?  Tonight I’m seeing God of Carnage at the Pittsburgh Public Theatre.  Anne Mundell, the set designer, leaked to me that there will be projectile vomiting (!) so….yeah.  (I’m thinking we’ll eat dinner after).  This weekend I hope to catch one or two of City Theatre’s new plays in their MOMENTUM festival, and next week, I’ll be taking the girls to Bricolage’s family-friendly matinee performance of Midnight Radio:  Superhero Edition!  I might let them post their own reviews, if they are up for it.  I’ve also got an article I’ve been writing in my head about the Alexander McQueen show and War Horse, but getting it into pixels will have to wait until I have a bit more time.

Stay tuned.  And if you’re a local theatre, and you’d like me to review your productions:  add me to your press invite list!

And in case any one cares:  this one took me 54 minutes to write, not including adding links or tags.    Yeesh.