Welcome to the master race - would you like a juice box?

Carolyn Baeumler and Catherine Eaton get to know each other in The Exceptionals.

What do you do when your best parenting instincts prod you toward a vision of eugenics that the Third Reich might have approved?

That's the queasy question posed by Bob Clyman's The Exceptionals, at the Merrimack Rep for just one more week. Or rather that's the question that's almost posed by The Exceptionals - the playwright tiptoes up to it but isn't quite sure how to seal the deal on that troubling proposition.  And with good reason - he's clearly leery of letting his clever play slide toward the pulpy territory of, say, The Boys from Brazil or They Saved Hitler's Brain.

But Clyman doesn't even go as far as, say, Brave New World, and that means his play somehow feels as if it's still in development (we can sense its thematic conclusion is simply missing).  The Exceptionals is still pretty exceptional, though - it's certainly the most interesting political play I've seen in some time, and glints with a dismayed, yet sympathetic, sense of comedy in Charles Towers's smoothly disturbing production.  Clyman's deep insight is that with the new capabilities of our fertility clinics, a vision of a master race can rise just as easily out of Parenting Today as it once did out of Mein Kampf - and the Merrimack cast (and particularly the gently manipulative Judith Lightfoot Clarke) capably put over that idea as implication if not statement.

Clyman's conceit is at first glance utterly believable - a huge "longitudinal" study is underway of very intelligent women who have sought out equally intelligent sperm donors at a gleaming new fertility clinic (that kind of match-up goes on all the time, even now; I think there's actually a list of Nobel-prize-winning sperm donors available to serious IQ-climbers).  At the start of The Exceptionals, two very opposed women have met at the clinic to discuss with the staff counselor Claire (Lightfoot Clarke) the futures of their two gifted offspring.  Gwen (Carolyn Baeumler) is a tense striver; Allie (Catherine Eaton) a more laid-back slummer - a woman who, perhaps out of affection for her blue-collar roots, has never "made good" on the promise of her potential, but instead prefers to kick back with a paperback by Danielle Steele.  Gwen has no husband; Allie has an infertile, "average" one (Joseph Tisa) - a nice guy who's already uncomfortable with just how bright his kid has turned out to be (he's doing quadratic equations in kindergarten; already Dad can't help with the homework).

As the play progresses, however, these parents' wishes slowly take a back seat to the clinic's wishes - and those of its unseen director, "Dr. Vorsiff" - and we begin to perceive a creepy, unspoken agenda operating behind the frosted glass and floral arrangements of these sleekly appointed digs (perfectly realized by designer Judy Gailen, btw).  Said agenda includes slowly separating little "Ethan" and "Michael" from their respective parents and enrolling them in a 24/7 program that will ensure their full intellectual bloom, like "beautiful roses," as Claire coos to the audience.  This horrifies both mothers, to be sure;  but if making sure your child got the very best meant he or she had to join the Hitler Youth Boarding School - well, what would you do?

Alas, so far playwright Clyman only hints at this underlying social issue, when I'm afraid it's basically the end-game of his whole set-up (he has to face it - albeit very delicately - to do his own concept justice).  Right now the author instead spins his wheels a bit on the question of fatherlessness (for both mother and child) - a poignant and rewarding dramatic subject, to be sure, and one about half his audience no doubt relates to intensely; obviously the culture is already edging toward the obsolescence of the father.  But what happens when even the mother becomes superfluous - when the paternal corporation in effect becomes the gifted child's only parent?  I kept wishing Clyman could lead his heroines (or anti-heroines) to a deeper awareness of what, exactly, they might be participating in; instead, he keeps the political personal (and so limits the horizon of his play).  Only Claire, appropriately enough, sees things clearly (below) - she's well aware that as her clinic succeeds, and more and more women opt for higher IQs for their children, the less-intellectually-endowed will inevitably fall further and further behind.  She sees this as "evolution" - but evolution toward what, exactly, she prefers not to say.

Only Judith Lightfoot Clarke's "Claire" can really see what's coming in The Exceptionals.

Right now, I'd argue Claire's internal conflicts all but cry out for more development - still, Judith Lightfoot Clarke makes the most of her subtle cries for help.  As the driven Gwen, Carolyn Baeumler is herself a bit forced at first, but by the finale was deeply touching as she found herself required to sacrifice everything for the sake of little Ethan.  Meanwhile the hearty, likable Catherine Eaton was at times almost a shade too laid-back as Allie - we missed the watchful wit that must lurk behind her "what-the-hell" attitude.  These are but quibbles, however, in what amounted to an excellent ensemble - which ably conveyed Clyman's vision of the "not-too-distant" future.  That is, if it's distant at all.

The standard-bearer?

In today's Globe, theatre critic Don Aucoin bemoans the decline across the culture in standards of excellence.  In every area of public life, it seems, our awards (or the number of nominees for those awards) are proliferating. "From the Oscars to sports to Idol," Aucoin sighs, "We’ve become a little too all-inclusive." Indeed, he frets whether 'lowering the bar' "[might] also reflect an underlying uncertainty . . . about what constitutes excellence nowadays."

Hmmmm. Deep thoughts, surely. And to be honest, I agree completely with Don! But I had to wonder - where does he himself fall in this 'all-inclusive' critical culture?

Let's find out!

Opening up my trusty Excel app, I decided to plot my own reviews against Don's for every show we both covered in the last few weeks (I wrote about several more shows than he did, but maybe that's because I'm a little more inclusive on that score!).

The results are at left, tabulated two ways - one with a smooth curve reflecting my sense of increasing quality, and the other a smooth curve reflecting Don's.  (Needless to say, a certain subjectivity was involved in reducing the reviews to numbered rankings, but I think if you read them all - and you still can, online - you'd roughly agree with my assessments.)

Not surprisingly, we pretty much concurred on the best shows of the winter (In the Footprint, The Cripple of Inishmaan, and Psy, all at ArtsEmerson, and Ruined, at the Huntington).  I, however, ranked several of the lesser shows quite a bit lower than Don did - which may, of course, have merely been a matter of personal taste.

But look at the scales involved.   On a scale of 0 to 5, I rated shows all the way from 1 to nearly 4.5.  Don kept to merely half that range - only the ART's Ajax dropped below a "3," which I roughly think of as an "average" show, i.e. "flawed but could be worth your while."  Seen that way, Don thought every show but one of the winter season was worth your while, where I only thought about half of them were.

So while I can agree with Don's assessment of the culture at large (in which, as the Dodo told Alice, all must have prizes), I do wish he'd look in the mirror just once, and ask himself whether he's really bucking that trend or not.  In his reviews, everyone may not win the prize, but almost everyone is nominated.

Mr. President, with all due respect - it's time to bomb the muthafucka

An F-15 Striking Eagle.

I don't usually write directly political posts here at the Hub Review. And I'm by nature a pacifist (believe it or not).  But I'm sorry, it's time - past time - for real solidarity with Libya, and by extension the rest of the Middle East. And that means military action against the Gaddafi regime (which even now is murdering its own citizens in Tripoli).  We sat on our hands as the Iranian revolution failed. Are we really going to do it again? Isn't there some way to push a resolution through the UN Security Council and quickly have some F-15s on their way to military targets (military targets only, not cities, not civilians) in Libya?  History has HANDED us an opportunity to re-align ourselves with an entire region (and with Islam), and we are, excuse me, so far blowing it.  The Middle East needs us now, and we can help its people achieve democracy - or at least a chance at a better life - with minimal risk to our own forces.

As for the usual fears regarding direct military action - yes, there are risks.  There are ALWAYS risks.  But this time the popular will would be behind a limited intervention, not against it, and that would make all the difference.  As for handing regional dominance to Iran - please; the Iranian regime is itself fragile.  Who knows if the fall of Gaddafi might bring about a renewed revolutionary spirit in Tehran, too?

And in the meantime - can you just imagine the faces on the fucking Tea Partiers and birthers - not to mention that idiot Glenn Beck and the disgusting Rush Limbaugh - if their arch-enemy brought down Muammar Gaddafi?  When Barack HUSSEIN Obama was behind the destruction of one of America's longest-standing enemies, the nutjob who outwitted Reagan and both Bushes?  I confess that would be a sweet, sweet day - almost as sweet as the fall of the Libyan madman would be to his own oppressed people.

Well met by Moon-light

The view from Moon.

As you might imagine, I rarely have time to go to the movies - most of the films I see now I catch late at night, via those little red envelopes from Netflix (curse them for trying to get me to stream!).  This week turned up a genuine gem - Duncan Jones's Moon from 2009, a small-scale throwback to the paranoid SF of the 70's, featuring an equally small-scaled, but quite moving, performance by Sam Rockwell.  The movie takes place on an isolated mining operation on the dark side of (naturally) the moon.  The base's lone occupant Sam (Rockwell) is responsible for mining Helium-3 from the lunar surface - where, actually, it's theorized to be abundant - and shooting it back to Earth for use in the booming nuclear fusion industry (yeah, right).

Sam's at the end of a three-year stint, with only the HAL-like computer "Gerty" (voiced not by Drew Barrymore, which would have been a nice touch, but by Kevin Spacey) alleviating the isolation of his long stay in solitary; to make matters even worse, the live communication link to Earth has been down since who knows when.  And clearly Sam is beginning to show signs of strain; he's prone to rambling discourses to himself, and at one point hallucinates that there's a young girl loose on the base.

While servicing one of the roaming He-3 "harvesters," he has a similar, seeming hallucination - is that another astronaut he sees wandering across the lunar surface?  Distracted, he suffers a crash against the harvester, and passes out - only to seemingly re-awaken back in the base, under orders to never venture outside again.  But why?  What's out there? (SPOILERS AHEAD.)

If Moon seems at first to be prepping for a Solaris-style head trip, it instead settles into a low-key, but absorbing, groove as a kind of Silent Running-meets-Blade Runner thriller - one in which the machines and the replicants turn out to be the heroes, btw. For I suppose it's giving away no surprises at this point to reveal that Sam isn't what he appears to be; he's a clone - the latest, apparently, of many that "the company" has used to maintain its isolated moonbase. Once these corporate overlords get wind of Sam's discoveries, however, they announced a "rescue mission" is on its way - one that the "Sams" realize is more like a search-and-destroy mission.

From then on, Moon only lightly touches on the themes it seems to have raised regarding the humanity of clones - although it does grow steadily more affecting, as the Sams realize that everything about them (their memories, their ideas, even their "relationships" back home) has been implanted by the company.  I felt, in fact, that the movie could have pushed a little harder on this most resonant of its themes - that all of us today depend on corporations for our identities.  Still, I was happy to settle for the variant on The Great Escape that Moon became, as the Sams attempt to ingeniously elude their corporate fate.  I don't want to overrate this worthy little project - it's essentially a good first feature (by the talented Duncan Jones).  But it's certainly worth catching on Netflix.  And the fact that it was ignored by the Oscars almost feels like a seal of approval (and another reason to ignore that silly telecast).

Christophers and his chorus in previous action - photo by Stu Rosner.

I looked at my partner after the Handel and Haydn performance of Israel in Egypt last Sunday and simply said, "I think it's official." He nodded slightly.

"They're the best chorus in New England," we said together.

I know, the BSO's Tanglewood Festival Chorus is bigger - and given its size, admirably precise. The Boston Baroque chorale can be more personal and intimate. But for sheer eloquence and - how to put this - artistic firepower (?), I don't think the Handel and Haydn chorus has a peer these days.

The true begetters of this accolade are, of course, the singers themselves - pound for pound, these professionals are, I'd argue, the strongest group of vocalists in the region.  But of course their conductor, Harry Christophers, has had something to do with whipping them into such tip-top shape.  Way back in 2007, when I first heard Christophers (just before he was anointed Artistic Director of H&H), I was stunned by his facility with the chorale.  I continue to be stunned.  The man is a magician, that's all there is to it.

And Handel's little-heard oratorio Israel in Egypt gave him quite the stage on which to work his magic.  Christophers chose an early version of the 1738 composition (there are always various extant scores for Handel's oratorios, as he tweaked them over time), one that favored the choruses over the arias (you see Christophers knew both the work's central strength, and his secret weapon).  And then he went to work, drawing every shade of vocal color possible from Handel's palette.

It's quite a palette (in a way it's two palettes, as Handel often divides the chorus in two, like the Red Sea, and has it sing antiphonally with itself).  Other critics have cited the current political relevance of the piece; it was a political hot potato back in the day, too, for reasons of royal succession that are obscure now, just as the current parallels with Hosni Mubarak will be obscure in a few years' time.  Because amusingly enough, the oratorio itself isn't particularly political - unless you find the idea of freedom somehow controversial.  It is, instead, a gigantic tone poem, in which Handel's musical "image-painting" in Part II is perhaps the freest and most inventive of his entire career.

At times, I admit, the vocal metaphors here are nonetheless almost amusingly naïve - whenever God's angry, the chorus stomps around vocally, for instance.  But most of the time they are arrestingly imaginative.  When the flies descend on Egypt, the string section begins to sing like a cloud of insects, and when the fiery hail crashes down from the sky, an anarchic rumble of timpani and brass erupts (the orchestra was in fine form throughout, btw).  Most frightening is "He sent a thick darkness over all the land, a darkness that might be felt" an eerie dirge (of creepy modern tonality) that ended with a chilling emphasis on that last "darkness that might be felt."  In another mood entirely, "But as for his people, He led them forth like sheep" boasts one of Handel's sweetest melodies.  The introduction to the work is nearly as good as these pyrotechnics (even if it includes some themes "borrowed" by Handel, both from himself and other composers), and here the opening stanza of the piece, "The sons of Israel do mourn, and they are in bitterness" proved particularly haunting, as it was sung with a dazzling sense of emotional balance and precision.

Alas, Israel in Egypt peters out a bit - at least in imaginative terms - in Part III, perhaps because its text becomes repetitive and triumphalist (the Egyptians seem to die a thousand deaths in the crashing waves of the Red Sea).  And here the arias took over, which aren't quite as inspired as the choruses.  Christophers chose to assign these solos to members of the chorale (as is often done), which showcased some individual singers well, but pushed one or two vocalists into the limelight who, though blessed with gorgeous voices, didn't quite have the power to fill Symphony Hall.  Soprano Margot Rood and alto Emily Marvosh came off best - both brought a flexible technique and ripe color to their respective solos; there was also an impressive vocal wrestling match between basses Nicholas Nackley and Bradford Gleim, and a sparkling duet for H&H mainstays Brenna Wells and Teresa Wakim.  Elsewhere the singing was always adequate, but not quite transporting - until the chorus took over again, and Christophers and his vocal crew were once more in their element.

What's so funny about peace, love and the Venetian baroque?

An Il Giardino jam.

Imagine Elvis Costello and the Attractions tearing through the Venetian baroque, and you've roughly got the idea of Il Giardino Armonico ("The Harmonious Garden"), which held a Boston Early Music Festival audience pretty much spellbound last Saturday at Sanders Theatre. The Gardeners essayed their program ("A Venezia!") in stylish, slightly-kinky duds that reminded me of the skinny ties and sharp suits of the New Wave of my youth; lutist Luca Pianca, for instance, was dressed in what looked like black satin, while lead violinist Enrico Onofri was draped with a long white scarf (which doubled as a chin rest for his violin).  And of course they had the hair: when conductor Giovanni Antonini finally appeared (to lead Vivaldi's Concerto in C Major for flautino), he arrived sporting a windswept millennial pompadour teased up in rock-nerd splendor (below left).

If anyone doubted, in short, that period music is going pop, Il Giardino Armanico was here to lay those doubts to rest. These guys apparently consider themselves period pop stars, playing period pop music;  and maybe they're not wrong - the Venetian baroque just happens to be a lot older (and a whole lot better) than the pop music we've got today.

Even his hairstyle is baroque.

And if I was deeply amused by this whole conceit (in both senses of the word), I have to admit, most of the pieces the Gardeners played were essentially songs, and were studded with the kinds of solos that Keith Richards or Eddie van Halen would have killed for (and these musicians leaned back in basically the same rock-god stance as they tore through them; all they needed were the bandanas and the pirate boots, and we might have been in the Worcester Centrum).  Then again, the baroque masters no doubt improvised back in Venice; so why shouldn't their modern-day interpreters do so now?  And nothing really matters as long as the players have the chops, does it?

And rest assured these players do have the chops.  Pianca, who founded the group with Antonini in 1986, is (simply put) the best lutist (by far) I've ever heard in my life.  Onofri is likewise a superb violinist; dazzling, in fact (as was second violin Marco Bianchi).  These guys can play in their pajamas for all I care.

Some non-aficionados might have had a few quibbles with the way the Gardeners played their program, though; they ran through their first pieces without a break (two sonatas by Castello, interlaced with both Merula's "La Lusignola" and his familiar "Ciaccona").  This was a lovely mash-up - and what's more, Pianca seemed to be shifting his accents here and there, so it felt a bit like a jam, believe it or not.  The segues back and forth from one composer to another, however, may have been slightly confusing to some in the audience (luckily, I knew the Merula well enough to figure out roughly when I was listening to what).  The presentation fell more into conventional place for the rest of the concert, highlights of which were that Vivaldi concerto - played at supersonic speed (which, perhaps resulted in a few lapses in control by Antonini on the "flautino" - here a sopranino recorder), a poignant sonata by Giovanni Legrenzi, and the exquisite opening movement to the now-obscure Baldassare Galuppi's Concerto in G Minor.  In fact, one left the concert marveling at just how much gorgeous music has fallen into obscurity over the centuries.  Luckily, we have Il Giardino Armonico to tease it back into bloom.

Weavers of gold

András Fejér, Edward Dusinberre, Geraldine Walther and Károly Schranz - The Takács String Quartet.

Takács in Hungarian means "weaver," which has always struck me as the perfect moniker for the Takács String Quartet (which was founded in Budapest nearly 36 years ago, and visited Jordan Hall last weekend under the aegis of Celebrity Series). True, the quartet is named partly for its founder, Gabor Takács-Nagy, but somehow it seems worth noting that "weaver" is such a straightforward word - hardly arty or sylvan; and yet we understand precisely what it means in terms of a string quartet. These guys thought of themselves as weavers. Weavers of something exquisitely beautiful, of course! But still - just weavers.

And Hungarian weavers, at that. For somewhere deep in the weave of the Takács sound, you can still hear, I think, the lilt of Romany life, a dash of country spice, perhaps even a flicker of gypsy fire. This although only two of its founding members, Károly Schranz on second violin and András Fejér on cello, are still with the quartet. Time's vicissitudes, and even death, I'm sad to say, have taken other members; the current ensemble includes Edward Dusinberre on first violin and Geraldine Walther on viola. Neither, you might guess, is Hungarian; Dusinberre's British, and Walther American. Yet both these virtuosos have (yes) woven themselves superbly into the quartet's core sound while hinting here and there at their own distinct musical personalities (Dusinberre - eloquence; Walther- swoon).

You felt this artful braiding most keenly in the group's opening gambit, Haydn's Quartet No. 55, Op. 71.  It's a big, wonderfully variegated piece, an entertainment that in its reach clearly aims for the concert hall rather than the salon - and indeed, it was one of the first pieces of "chamber music" written expressly for public (rather than private) performance.  The Takács took it at a spirited clip, and without slighting its complexity or lyrical finish, suggested a dancing lightness that reminded one - oh yes! - that Haydn spent much of his life in Hungary, at the Esterhazy estate.

Next came Béla Bartók, via his String Quartet No. 3 - a very different kind of Hungarian sound (and mood).  Unsurprisingly, the Takács has made a specialty of Bartók - after all, his string quartets are widely regarded as the pinnacle of the form in the twentieth century.  Most of the Third Quartet is a vast architecture of anxiety built from the simplest of means (a short motif comprised of a rising fourth and a falling minor third). From this simple seed Bartók conjures an intense atmosphere of dread in his first movement - and then in the third, he recapitulates the whole thing through a series of even more intense variations (the screw only tightens). Two other movements operate like interventions between these obsessive sequences - but while both are derived from the same folk-dance melody, they're only marginally less disturbing and raw. (Sometimes I think that if you didn't know from history that the world was falling apart in the first half of the twentieth century, you'd be able to guess it from Béla Bartók's quartets!) The Takács played with fierce commitment throughout, yet with impeccable technique, even through the quartet's eerie, otherworldly effects. The leap from Haydn to Bartók was a jarring one, and I couldn't argue that the Takács found any common ground between them. But as a demonstration of sheer virtuosity, the juxtaposition of the two was dazzling - this was not just two forms, but two separate worlds of music, and the Takács seemed to have a sympathetic mastery of both.

The final item on the program was Schubert's enormous Quartet No. 15 in G Major, a kind of follow-up to "Death and the Maiden" - which I heard just a week or two ago, played by the Philharmonia Quartett Berlin. I must say the difference between the Takács and the Berliners was quite pronounced - the members of the Philharmonia seem to be playing in separate bubbles of technical perfection, while the members of the Takács were in constant rhythmic communication, and played with such passion that they had to mop their brows between movements.

As in a fair amount of Schubert, Quartet No. 15 has an air of greatness about it (particularly in its gigantic opening movement), but meanders to the point of slightly diminishing its own grandeur. The Takács couldn't do much about that slight sense of anticlimax, but the first movement was still everything it should be (the quartet's shivering tremolos were particularly memorable). And their playing remained dazzling throughout - which is a good thing, for if No. 15 meanders, it's still a marathon, and technically demanding for its entire length. Perhaps the players' resulting exhaustion precluded an encore - although the audience all but begged for one.  Well, maybe next time; we can hope, can't we?

Barker's bark, and his bite

Does it make sense if my current critical position is "We need more classics - just not the really impossible ones?"

Let me explain. As the meanest critic around, my usual song of woe is that I'm stuck watching talented actors try to breathe life into sludge like Afterlife, or clever-but-empty sitcoms like The Understudy. We've now got the local chops to take on greater challenges, I find myself droning over and over - so why not try?

And to be honest, a few troupes have tried of late - only with texts like Ajax and Cymbeline and Henry IV, Part II. Texts that are obscure, frankly, for a reason - they're the "classics with issues"! Worth doing, yes (of course), but as part of fulfilling a whole program rather than just filling a slot in a season. A company commits to scripts like Cymbeline or Ajax when it has a core of actors who are highly skilled, and conversant with the idiom, and familiar with one another.

In other words - you have to learn to walk before you run the marathon, okay?

Which brings me to Whistler in the Dark's new production of Howard Barker's The Europeans - a play that isn't quite a classic (and might never achieve the status, say, of Barker's Scenes from an Execution or The Possibilities), but shares with gnarly texts like Cymbeline a level of intellectual challenge that the vast majority of "new plays" never aspire to.  In point of fact, Whistler consistently operates at the highest level of intellectual accomplishment of any troupe in the Boston area (yes, well over the heads of Harvard and B.U.).

Indeed, The Europeans is almost nothing but intellectual challenge; it's even a challenge figuring out what the play itself is about - because "What should this play be about?" is, in a way, Barker's theme.  Or rather "What should Europe be about?" is his theme - or maybe "What do you think Europe should be about?" (followed by the inevitable rejoinder "Well, you're WRONG!").

For this Howard Barker (at right) is an argumentative fellow; not for nothing was his theatre named "The Wrestling School."  His dramaturgy is all about pedagogy of a sort - that is, of the cruelest, most contradictory sort.  Barker likes to call his style "The Theatre of Catastrophe" because he repeatedly hurls his characters into extreme circumstances, in which they must make the harshest choices imaginable - but always without moral context, or anything like complete knowledge of the meaning of their decisions. In short, their situation is that of real life - moral paradoxes pondered in ignorance (while God looks on) - only intensified and made ruthlessly abrupt.  Barker's characters must make their way in the dark - they are, in fact (need I say it?) "whistlers in the dark" (indeed, it's from a bit of Barker verse that the Whistlers derive their name).

Debating the point of debate in The Europeans.

But The Europeans (at left) is pitch-black even by Barker's standards; it operates more as an ongoing interrogation of itself than a drama per se.  And needless to say, a script committed to self-questioning requires the kind of confidently charismatic acting that operates independent of "character" and "plot" (since both concepts are under continual assault).  That the Whistlers come up with one or two performances of this caliber is remarkable in a fringe troupe; still, I'm afraid the cast of The Europeans is variable enough that a good chunk of the script slides into obscurantist badgering, despite the best intentions of everyone involved.  (Sometimes, in this nightmare of the dark, all of Barker's dogs seem to merely bark.)

Unlike most of the playwright's dramas, The Europeans opens right after a catastrophe: in its first scene, the dazed citizens of Vienna awaken to the fact that the long siege of their city in 1683 has ended, and that they have triumphed over the Ottoman Turks.  They have "saved" "Europe."  But what is "Europe" - or rather, what could, or should it be, beyond a collection of territories held together by bayonets?

Clearly what the Viennese fought for wasn't worth saving - their rulers are cowards, and their clergy is corrupt.  And the horror of the conflict is still omnipresent - people now babbling about culture have recently been dining on rats, and in the local parks picnickers treat severed heads as playthings.  Meanwhile the Turks have merely fallen back to positions a bit further from the city walls.

So nothing is stable in this dehumanized environment, but suddenly anything is possible, and that's Barker's point as he sends two key characters through its maze of contradictions - Starhemberg, the military hero who is himself a kind of cipher; and Katrin, a "citizen" who survived a brutal rape by the Turks (during the course of which her breasts were cut off, in a classic Barker flourish) only to find she is now heavy with child.

From this pregnant (sorry) set-up the script lurches forward as a kind of moral gross-out crossed with a digressive dialectic. But Barker's larger point slowly comes clear: that pain must be the basis of any honest form of art (his own M.O., conveniently enough).  And at the level of bald statement, the Whistlers do put this over.  But at the same time the author clearly intends for a dramatic focus of sorts to form around Starhemberg and Katrin as their paths intertwine - and at this I'm afraid the Whistlers (and director Meg Taintor) are less successful.  As the military hero moves from interrogation to action, he is slowly revealed as Barker's personal factotum, as well as a quasi-mystical puppet master, with Katrin and her child serving as unwitting pawns in his plan to both resolve history and escape from it.  (That this "reconciliation" should prove as cruel as anything that has come before should surprise none of Barker's fans.)

But I'm afraid as Starhemberg, actor Curt Klump limns little of these developments; Klump has done solid work in the past, when he has had less ambiguous material to work with; but alas, his Starhemberg isn't so much a cipher as a blank.  Which is too bad, because he's working against a brilliant performance from Jen O'Connor as Katrin.  This Whistler mainstay by now has Barker in her blood, and her battered, defiant Katrin seems to channel the playwright's manner with deadly accuracy.  Meanwhile, as the absurdly corrupt priest Orphuls (who longs to off his own repellent mother), the usually-reliable Scott Sweatt goes slightly wrong in his purring sensuality; this guy should just be funnier, oddly enough, and somehow Sweatt never finds the correspondences with Starhemberg that Barker seems to be hinting at.  Around the edges of the production, there's a fine cameo from Elizabeth Rimar as that disgusting mother (by far the best work I've seen this young actress do), and as Katrin's sensible sister, Marie Polizzano (who was so subtle in Circle Mirror Transformation) finds good moments here and there, but still seems to think she's working at Annie Baker's scale (which she's not).  Elsewhere there's solid work from Nate Gundy as the fatuous Emperor Leopold, and an amusing turn from Dakota Shepard as his Empress (although she misses the fact that while the lady's crazy, she's made of solid steel).  Meanwhile Evan Sanderson made a good impression in a variety of smaller roles.  But alas, Dan Grund didn't make much of an impression at all as the Court Painter - a serious gap in a play with a particular focus on what art can mean when we're all in the dark.

Barker skeptics may find this acting patchwork evidence to support the growing consensus that the playwright is a bit of a poseur - a self-appointed Grand Inquisitor with a slightly-dated outlook of outrage whose obsession with incoherence gets him off the hook of having to develop a coherent play.  But the Whistlers do mine enough dramatic gold here to convince me that Barker's bark still has bite - in the abstract, at least - and intermittently, The Europeans is certainly gripping (whether or not we like what we see in its dark mirror of history).  Intrepid theatre-goers, who wonder at what new ideas this ancient form can offer, won't want to miss it.

Ajax goes AWOL

Brent Harris and Mesafint Goldfeld in Ajax.

The news isn't good from the A.R.T.'s production of Sophocles's Ajax (now through March 13), but at least the news isn't irritating. The production doesn't work, but it also doesn't feel like a fraud the way The Blue Flower and most of Diane Paulus's work has. Ajax feels basically like an old A.R.T. show - indeed, Robert Brustein and Jeremy Geidt are even in it, as part of a video chorus - but, like the vast majority of old A.R.T. shows, it's kind of a pseudo-intellectual bore.  But this time the boredom feels somehow comforting; it's almost like a nostalgia trip.

It's true that director Sarah Benson (of Soho Rep fame) has some interesting ideas about the play - or at least they're interesting on paper; they don't gel on stage, for complex reasons.  Not all the performances are strong (although a few are), and Ms. Benson strikes such a distant stance toward the material that the modern resonances she seems to be looking for (she has updated the action to Afghanistan or Iraq) never actually come clear.  Is Athena supposed to be Condi Rice?  Is that Obama as Odysseus? We wonder such things vaguely at times, but mostly we're thinking, Do I care?

And mostly no, you do not care - although sometimes you do.   Brent Harris looks and sounds great as the gonzo Ajax, for instance (above), and brings a welcome jolt of whiteboy-freakout to every scene he's in.  Still, he doesn't convey Ajax's actual arc - because he, and the production, seem to want to half-pretend Ajax is falling apart because of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  Unfortunately, that's not what Sophocles is saying; Sophocles is saying that Ajax is a professional killer who has finally gone off his leash ( he attempts to murder Odysseus and the other generals, but due to a delusion brought on by Athena, only succeeds in torturing some livestock).

What society owes such a killer for services rendered is the fundamental question of the play.  And when Benson and Co. finally get around to it, the production finds something like its footing, thanks to a passionate turn by Nathan Darrow as Teucer, the sole defender of the once-glorious, but now suicidal Ajax, and some solid work from James Joseph O'Neil as Menelaus and (believe it or not) Thomas Derrah as Agamemnon.  But up till then the production is consistently undermined by weaker work from Linda Powell (daughter of Colin Powell) as Ajax's captive consort, Tecmessa, and Ron Cephas Jones as a strangely blank Odysseus.

Ajax and his chorus line.

We can sense some of these acting problems are due to a certain absence on the part of the director - she's clearly not quite sure what to make of the matter-of-fact machismo of the play.  But alas, some of the show's conceptual problems are due to her presence.  Benson has decided to place the Chorus of the tragedy up on video screens (kind of like the title sequence for The Brady Bunch) with almost all the lines Sophocles wrote for them given over to Remo Airaldi (who's physically onstage, above).  With most of its actual dialogue missing, the Chorus instead mostly ad-libs lines like, "Whoa, too bad about Ajax going postal, dude."  The results are both banal and weirdly disconnected from the action (perhaps that's the point, but it doesn't work dramatically).  And it's amusing to ponder the number of well-known Harvard profs and hangers-on chosen for this "Chorus" - I guess this is the A.R.T.'s idea of "the common people."  Like the rest of the production, it feels out of touch with reality.

Visualize this

Papa, can you hear me?  (Guess not.)

I had the strangest feeling at My Name is Asher Lev (left, at the Lyric Stage through March 12); as both a lapsed Catholic and an admirer of Judaism, I felt I was being insulted at one remove- twice. Let me explain: Asher Lev - drawn from Rabbi Chaim Potok's novel of the same name - treats the world of the Hasidim, the mystical, revivalist branch of Orthodox Judaism. In the book (which I haven't read), it seems Potok explores the conflict between Hasidic precepts and the world of art - young Asher is portrayed as a brilliant artist, an idealist whose obsession with the visual flies in the face of his spiritual tradition (which has long viewed all artistic representation as a form of the "graven images" forbidden by "HaShem").

So far, so good; I'm all for critique of everything, including Judaism; and obviously I'm greatly concerned with the visual arts.  And at first glance, you might imagine that My Name is Asher Lev engages with the flowering of Jewish art that occurred with the triumph of modernism.  Indeed, Jews are all but absent from the Western artistic tradition until the twentieth century (the only one I can think of offhand from the earlier century is Camille Pissarro - and nobody comes to mind before him).

Once modernism - a sensibility largely forged in a Jewish salon in Paris - had established itself as a cultural force, Jewish artists began to make themselves known.  And tellingly, the more abstract modern art became, the more Jews dominated the scene - indeed, almost every major follower of abstract expressionism (which flowered during the period of Asher Lev) was Jewish: Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston and Morris Louis were all Jewish, as were later artists Roy Lichtenstein, Sol LeWitt, Julian Schnabel - the list goes on and on.  Surprisingly, however, Jews dominated figurative art of the period as well, at least in pop form: Jerome Siegel and Joe Schuster, the creators of Superman, were Jewish, as was Bob Kane (creator of Batman), and both Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, X-Men, et. al.); American comics are essentially a Jewish tradition.

So a huge cultural shift occurred in Judaism in the twentieth century - one which, it's safe to assume, the Orthodox opposed (and perhaps still do).  But if you're looking for a sensitive treatment of the tensions between Reform Judaism and its more conservative (and perhaps anti-sensualist) brethren, look elsewhere than My Name is Asher Lev.  For Aaron Posner's dramatization strips all historical and religious context from the novel's central conflict.  I have to imagine Potok was more sensitive in this regard - even though in the end, Asher Lev becomes obsessed with painting not just naked ladies (a constant trope of middlebrow theatre!) but crucifixions.  That's right, for some reason this young Hasid feels it's his calling to revitalize a Catholic artistic tradition - even though Catholics were a central force in the attempted genocide of his people just a few years before.  And why? Because, Asher sputters, the crucifixion is the greatest image of suffering he can think of.

Hmmm.  Now it seems to me a few scenes from Auschwitz or Treblinka could give even the Grünewald Altarpiece a run for its money.  But what do I know, I'm just a goy.  Maybe the Jews don't really know from suffering!  Yet when the play climaxed with young Asher painting his mother dying on the cross, I had to wince just about every which way it's possible to wince - I was insulted for both the Jews and the Catholics, as well as for poor old Mama!

Okay, I know this very silly adaptation of Chaim Potok's novel means no harm; it's merely meant to operate in a kind of TV-movie-of-the-week mode, like Herman Wouk's The Winds of War, in which real history and real spirituality (and real art) don't really exist. Hence, perhaps, the utter seriousness with which it's being presented; director Scott Edmiston approaches it on his knees (which only makes this overrated director look more superficial than ever), and actors Joel Colodner, Anne Gottlieb, and Jason Schuchman give it their all. Indeed, whenever Colodner's onstage, his passion almost makes you believe in this schmaltz. (Almost.)  Janie E. Howland's set - seemingly a chunk of Brandeis has landed in the Lyric - is likewise superb, and Karen Perlow's reverent lighting leans heavily on candles flickering in shadow. Sometimes, watching all this serious professionalism devoted to such hokum, I felt myself about to cry out, "Yes, yes! Papa, please - can't you see cute Jewish boys should be free to paint crucifixions?" But then inwardly I'd find myself snickering. I mean, Jesus Christ. Or do I mean oy vey?

Stephen Thorne and Angela Brazil in The Crucible.

These days it seems it's Miller time on American stages. That's Arthur Miller I'm talking about, the once-celebrated writer of Death of a Salesman, All Our Sons, and other earnest contemplations of American politics, money and immorality. Our new playwrights studiously avoid that kind of thing, of course, so - how to put this - they're not much use in the current political environment.

But Miller's sturdy melodramas (okay, maybe they're tragedies, I certainly don't mind if you call them that!) once again seem startlingly apropos, and are popping up in theatres across the country. Because guess what - the corruption of the Iraq War wasn't all that different from the seamier side of World War II (All My Sons).  And every day the greedy, self-absorbed boomer generation looks more and more like Willy Loman (Death of a Salesman).

And then there's The Crucible (now at Trinity Rep through March 13), Miller's lengthy contemplation of the Salem witch trials.  Once thought a metaphor for the McCarthy "witch hunts," (and specifically, a critique of Elia Kazan's famous naming of names to HUAC), it now resonates with parallels to the mob mentality of the Tea Party and Fox News.

Trinity doesn't press this angle, however (although a few bleached-blonde news anchors breathlessly reporting the latest from Salem might have been fun).  Instead director Brian McEleney (who after Twelfth Night and Absurd Person Singular has begun to look like Trinity's most reliable director, and perhaps its next artistic director) allows us to draw our own parallels with the present day, even if it's very present in Eugene Lee's ingenious set, which fills the Chace Theater with a huge blow-up of Providence City Hall.  Before this suggestive backdrop, on bare wooden platforms, McEleney offers a bare-bones take on Miller's script - which, as you'd expect, highlights both its strengths and weaknesses.


For while The Crucible may have become a high-school classic, it's not quite in the same league as All My Sons or Death of a Salesman.  It's longer and preachier than either of those, and Miller can't help but insinuate a 50's-era sexual soap opera (between John Proctor and Abigail Williams) into proceedings that might have been more gripping if they had simply hewed closely to the frighteningly inexplicable historical record.  To me, the Salem witch trials are terrifying because they're not melodramatic; they depend, instead, on the cold, calculated malice of the childish and the religious - aided and abetted by the machinations of those who saw in their cobbled-together kangaroo courts a way to attack, or even exterminate, their personal enemies.

As long as Miller keeps these facts in his sights, however, The Crucible is gripping - in fact it's certainly the most gripping script I've seen this season, and for the usual reasons - the stakes are high, the characters compelling, the writing clean and clear.  And the Trinity actors manage well across the many roles most of them have to play (the cast is huge).  Still, only perhaps Angela Brazil (as Elizabeth Proctor) is working close to the top of her form.  Stephen Thorne makes a sympathetic, but slightly flat, John Proctor, and newcomer Olivia D'Ambrosio sometimes hyperventilates as Abigail Williams.  Indeed, many in the cast tend to get a bit shouty - Fred Sullivan, Jr., could work more subtlety into his bullying Deputy Governor Danforth, and the usually dependable Rachael Warren I think could make Mary Warren a bit more of a mouse.  Better are Mauro Hantman, as the slowly disillusioned John Hale, and Terrell Donnell Sledge, who gives an eloquent simplicity to Giles Corey, the man who was pressed to death rather than confess.

Still, even if imperfect, this Crucible struck me as a kind of tonic after much of the pseudo-political theatre I've endured recently.  It's certainly stronger than anything on the boards in Boston proper right now, and I urge you to make the trek to Providence to catch it while you can.

The Great Recapitulation

Hardman and Grant in Cymbeline.

Once you get to be my age, with decades of watching and pondering Shakespeare behind you, the whole canon can begin to seem like one very long play. And when I consider Cymbeline, I sometimes think the Bard himself might have begun to feel the same way.

For Cymbeline, written late in Shakespeare's career, is a strange enormity, and one that all but cries out for explanation. It's one of Shakespeare's longest plays, and certainly his most variegated - whenever I think of it, I'm reminded of Polonius's hilarious description of the players in Hamlet, who specialize in "tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited."

Cymbeline, I suppose, counts as "tragical-comical-historical pastoral" (unless it's "poem unlimited"). At bottom, it's a national foundation myth - it concerns a legendary war that separated Britain from Rome. But literally a dozen different plots and modes flower briefly within that frame - the play opens with an unequal marriage that seems a variant of the one in All's Well that Ends Well, but it soon morphs into a miniature Othello (with a villain named "Iachimo," or "Little Iago"), before transmuting itself into something akin to As You Like It, with a subplot borrowed from Romeo and Juliet. And this is before we even get to the tropes lifted from Twelfth Night, Comedy of Errors, and King Lear. It's hard, actually, to think of a play by Shakespeare that doesn't have an echo in Cymbeline (maybe Henry VI), which is why I sometimes call it "The Great Recapitulation."

But why a recapitulation at that stage of Shakespeare's career? Well, Cymbeline does stand at a key juncture in the canon - after the great tragedies, and the "problem plays," and just after the odd patchwork that is Pericles - the latter half of which is almost certainly by the Bard, the first half of which is almost certainly by somebody else. But that latter half - in which a daughter is restored to her father, and a family re-united - would prove the inspiration for Shakespeare's final period, the "romances," with their uniquely haunting combination of tragedy and comedy. The greatest of these, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, take two opposed tacks to the structural problem of a tragi-comic synthesis. Cymbeline, by way of contrast, is something of a pile-up; watching it, it's tempting to guess that, armed with a new motif that he felt could serve as the culmination of his life's work, Shakespeare's first impulse was to stitch it into a vast recapitulation of his entire oeuvre. In a way, with Cymbeline the Bard took a very, very deep breath before saying, "And now for something completely different."


The results are, I admit, sometimes somewhat bizarre. Cymbeline shape-shifts at will, and though there's a central character - Imogen - who ranks among Shakespeare's finest, almost everyone else feels like a minor variant of some other, earlier personage, and poor Imogen's adventures grow almost maddeningly convoluted and extravagant (Headless corpses! Roman invasions! Visits from Jupiter!). Still, I have seen Cymbeline work - and work superbly; but only once, and only when enormous resources, and brilliant talent, were thrown at it (in the great Robin Phillips's masterful production at Stratford in the mid-80's).

But the Actors' Shakespeare Project, which is presenting this enormity just through this weekend as part of its Winter Festival, is producing it behind a storefront in Davis Square, with only seven actors seemingly attired for yoga, and only an oriental rug for a set, and without even proper theatrical lighting (but with a background soundtrack of bass guitar pumped in from the bar next door). I'd like to report that somehow a miracle has taken place, and that against all odds ASP has produced a brilliant sketch of this epic text. But I'm afraid any reduction of Cymbeline would be impossible; its gnarly sprawl is central to it; you can't "sketch" it.

What we get instead is a kind of delicate burlesque of the play by a small troupe of funny, talented players - which works, off and on, particularly if you know the script already and are in a forgiving mood. If you don't, or are not, the whole thing may strike you as inexplicable. I'm an acquaintance of the director, Doug Lockwood, and he's a smart and funny guy - and an inspired Shakespearean clown. So I wasn't surprised to find a light, clowning mood assert itself - the villains were prissy or over-the-top, and we never thought for a moment that things might turn out badly for sweet, innocent Imogen. This isn't right for the play - the chief thematic feature of which is the slow emergence of love and order from Lear-like cruelty and chaos. But if you don't have the resources to do the play - well, it's better than nothing; and it seemed to me that for much of the time the audience was cajoled into a mood of slightly confused amusement.

As Imogen, Brooke Hardman was always energetic and appealing, but far too sturdy and modern for a fairy-tale heroine whose delicacy we should feel is often about to crack beneath the weight of the horrors she must endure.  But then miscasting is all but ASP's signature, isn't it - talented actors playing against type could almost be described as the troupe's artistic statement, its raison d'être.  Thus we watched as Marya Lowry did what she could (i.e., caricature) the play's evil queen, while the talented De'Lon Grant, though plausible as Imogen's hubby, made her cloddish suitor (and son to said evil queen) Cloten a bitchy hoot rather than any kind of crude threat (we felt throughout that Hardman's Imogen could take down mother and son in two seconds flat if she felt like it).  Meanwhile Neil McGarry seemed a bit lost as Iachimo (is petty malice so hard to play?), but Ken Baltin was a better Cymbeline than most, and a quite funny Philario.  Rounding out the (mis-) cast were two of Boston's best young rising stars, Danny Bryck and Risher Reddick, who did yeoman duty in a bevy of roles that didn't suit them at all (at one point they were even supposed to be twins!). The single intriguing feature of the miscasting was Lowry's turn as the cross-gendered "Belaria" - Lowry turned this Kent-like figure into a haunting version of the powerful, noble mother who always seems to be missing from Shakespeare.

And I have to admit that a good deal of the cast's antics charmed, even if they were consistently off-kilter. I don't know why Doug Lockwood wanted to take on Cymbeline, but he got through it in a way. (With the help of heavy cutting, I might add; he skipped Jupiter's appearance entirely, and did we hear "Hark, hark, the lark"? Maybe I couldn't hear it over the bass from next door.) The curious may find some fun in this production; others may find it cute, but feel that it leaves you clueless.

It's St. Valentine's Day, and so thoughts turn inevitably to whom - and what - we love.

And one of the things I love is theatre - but I have to admit, the poor old thing's been having a rough time of it lately. Some would even argue she's on her last legs; luckily, however, everybody's got a remedy for her. If she'd only drink this elixir, or drop that habit, she'd be back to her old self in no time.

To be honest, just last fall Boston theatre seemed, indeed, to be hale and hearty; in October we even seemed to be enjoying a golden age of sorts. But lately the news has not been so good - perhaps it's just the cycles of the moon, or El Niño or something, but I've sat through one weak play after another for what seems like weeks. Oddly, performances and production values have remained strong - it's the actual plays themselves - the new plays, the supposed engine of the whole enterprise - that seem to be conking out.

I know many playwrights reply to this kind of claim with the counter-claim that no, it's the critics who are conking out, that we "hate" theatre, or are out to stifle innovation, or are racists or I don't know, whatevah (you can check Parabasis for the latest revision of this meme!).  I only wish these people could spend an hour or two at one of the contentious meetings of the IRNE committee, in which critics go head-to-head for the shows they believe in and care about.  Such fracases are hard to square with the vision of reviewers as hostile to theatre, trust me.  Indeed, you leave such meetings convinced that critics actually care too much, that we're the last constituency that really and truly loves the theatre in and of itself.

So it strikes me that it will not be the critics who undo the theatre - instead, it may be all the other people who insist they love the form who actually may be loving it to death.  At any rate, it seems most observers already feel reviewers are tangential to the whole declining enterprise.  One need look no further than the ongoing imbroglios over Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark - critics finally descended on the production after weeks (and weeks) of previews, and rendered a devastating verdict.  But most of the commentary on the web has centered on the ethics of reviewing a "preview" (even when it's not, obviously, really a preview), or has questioned whether even the combined forces of the entire New York press can stop Julie Taymor and Bono's juggernaut.

This of course, boils down to the question: "Does it matter if it's bad?"  I, of course, feel it does matter if it's bad - and although I've only met a few people who've seen Spider-Man, they've all agreed it's really bad.  Virtually all the reviews said it was bad; the Times claimed it was one of the worst musicals ever.  It's bad.

Yet many people still seem to think it should be a success of sorts.  It doesn't matter to them that it's bad - the aligned forces of pop and finance have created a "phenomenon," and therefore it should be allowed to go on, regardless of its quality.  They're of a kin with the people who feel we should see less of the classics, and cut back on Shakespeare - they essentially ask the question, "Does it matter if they're good?", which is really only an inversion of the query, "Does it matter if it's bad?"

I'm not sure, however, how long a cultural enterprise can go on when everyone knows deep down inside that it's bad.  The writers who boo the classics and insist that new writers be heard whether or not they're any good strike me as quite a bit like those financiers who pushed junk mortgages on the public not so long ago - the lack of quality of those financial instruments didn't matter then, either, because the market would "always" go up.  Just as theatre can "always" survive whatever we throw at it.

Well, count me out of that whole boondoggle - and count me in as a regulator of sorts.  I may not be able to triumph over the current theatrical administration, but at least I'll go down trying.

Because I really do want to save the thing I love.

Foxy lady

Vixen Sharp-Ears and her brood. Photo by J.J. Bates.

I'm always torn over productions like Boston Opera Collaborative's The Cunning Little Vixen (at left, through Sunday at Mass. College of Art). On the one hand, Leoš Janáček's opera is a wonderful one, and surprisingly, many of its deepest themes come clear in the BOC version. On the other hand, I have to admit the singing is adequate but uneven, and so is the orchestral playing.

So you have to go in appreciating the constraints of an ambitious, but still basically volunteer, organization like  Boston Opera Collaborative.  When a company's reach exceeds its grasp, I feel I have to say so.  But - and this is rather a big "but" - I can't pretend I didn't enjoy The Cunning Little Vixen.  Those who know the opera (as well as those who don't) will appreciate that its spirit is captured eloquently here, despite the variable technique of some of its performers.

The Cunning Little Vixen may be the only great opera adapted from a comic strip - but either comic strips used to be a whole lot more profound than they are now, or Janáček worked a miracle with his source.  For while Vixen certainly plays well as a whimsical piece for children, it's also a haunting meditation on mortality for adults.  Indeed, for the great Janáček, who was seventy-something when he wrote the score, the adventures of "Sharp-Ears," as she's known in the original strip, clearly formed the basis for a fond farewell to the joys of romance and youth (and maybe life itself).

That strange yin-yang of youth and age floating in the opera's atmosphere makes it unforgettable (and the hummable melodies that Janáček penned for Sharp-Ears don't hurt, either).  The surprise is that stage director Roxanna Myhrum captures nearly perfectly this rueful mix.  She's helped immensely by witty costumes and puppets provided by costume designers Deirdre McCabe Gerrard and Lauren Sack, and scenic designer Olivia Brownlee.  And while Myhrum's cast is variable, she has solid sopranos in her leads, Erin M. Smith and Natalie Polito - and Ms. Smith, it turns out, is  also a stylish actress.  There were other good acting turns in the company - I was amused by Daniel Schwartz's Badger, for instance - but fewer outstanding vocal performances.  To be fair, however, the Tower Auditorium at Mass. College of Art is a hideous place to sing, and the performers had to project over an orchestra playing without a pit.  Meanwhile the dance numbers (yes, there's dancing too!), choreographed by Gabrielle Orcha, were sweetly performed but a little repetitive.

Down in that non-pit, music director LidiyaYankovskaya did give a good account of the score (and the orchestral reduction she was working from is a lovely one), but the playing didn't always cohere - as is often the case with volunteer orchestras, she had a solid string section,  but more variable winds and brass.  Such gaps may ruin the experience for operatic elitists, but for other fans, a chance to see a solid version of this charmer may outweigh those concerns.  And certainly this production serves well as an introduction to the form for children - even its bittersweet ending (warning: poor Sharp-Ears meets an untimely end) will give them a hint that, you know, things don't always turn out that well at the opera.

End of the line

Are we dead yet?  The cast of Terminus.

You keep thinking it has to be a joke.

You think that when the heroine pops out the eyeballs of the crazed lesbian abortionist who's brandishing a sharpened spear.  And you think it when she wakes up (after having been knocked out cold with a folding chair) to find a guy masturbating over her, ready to shoot.  You think it when the other leading lady reaches orgasm with a flying demon made of worms.  And you really, really think it when the serial killer is strung up by his intestines (which have been pulled out through his arsehole), and swings face-down from a construction crane, singing (I'm not kidding) "The Wind Beneath My Wings."

But it seems it's not a joke.  Indeed, it's deadly serious (even though the audience every now and then breaks out into guffaws).  "It" is Terminus, a new play by Mark O'Rowe, in a touring production by Dublin's Abbey Theatre, now at the Paramount as part of ArtsEmerson's Irish Festival.

And what I can say but - either you want to stay very far away - or you don't want to miss it.

The title alone tells you that Terminus is about the ultimate, the finale, the end of line.  And the play certainly stands as the ne plus ultra of pretentious bad taste.  It's a braided trio of monologues about horror and death, and hell and more horror and death, and more horror and death and hell.  Did I mention mental suffering and abject squalor and physical torment?  Maybe I did already.

And what's more, Terminus is also a rap.  Yes, hipsters - Irish rap!!!  Okay, it doesn't have an actual beat, but playwright O'Rowe is constantly bustin' rhymes of the "Christ/shite" and "fuck/truck" variety during his lurid descriptions of urinating lesbians and grotesquely deformed fetuses (since he keeps no steady rhythm going, however, this is pretty easy).  Yes - imagine the love child of Harlan Ellison and Dean Koontz working with Dr. Dre, and you've got Terminus.

Inevitably, you also find yourself thinking, "This actually could be great if it were made into a midnight movie, and people could throw rubber eyeballs at the screen."  Oddly enough, it's also so pretentious that it might work as an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.  On rollerblades.  Could somebody please forward the script to Sir Andrew?

Although I know what you're thinking - Jesus H. Christ, Garvey, can't you tell you're inside a living graphic novel?  (Yes, I can.)  And that the playwright is simply pushing said form's adolescent tropes to their logical, if extreme, conclusion?  (Again, ditto, yup, I get it.)  Only the thing is - I'll just leave all that bull to the pop critics, if you don't mind.  I've got real novels to read and real art to review.  I don't have time to watch Junior doodle cartoons of worms eating corpses all day.

Because as "drama" - oh, God, where to begin with Terminus?  I mean,  please - it's so dull. Its Twilight-Zone-level irony never varies, and its droning tone never wavers; you could literally doze off to its background Vault-of-Horror hum (and one or two people around me did just that).   I knew from the Abbey's tour of Playboy of the Western World a few years ago that this troupe was a bit over-rated, but I had no idea they were such self-serious dorks.  You keep waiting for some slightly arch phrasing, some flicker of an eyebrow, to nudge the whole thing into the hilarious parody of current pop culture it's screaming out to be.  But no such luck; the stark lighting, the smashed set, the grim, downer line readings - they're taking this thing (and themselves) very, very seriously.  And so I just don't want to acknowledge the director or designers or even the actors - they may be taking themselves seriously, but that doesn't mean I have to.

And you don't have to, either.  Of course it would be rude to actually throw rubber eyeballs at the stage, but you can still do that mentally.  And to be honest, theatre geeks may not want to miss this show; it has the aura of legend about it, as Carrie and Moose Murders did.  People may be bragging that they saw it for years to come.

On the other hand, you'll never get these two hours of your life back.

So think carefully before you decide.

The dis-illusionist

The Illusionist faces the end of illusion.

Like a lot of grown-ups, I felt Sylvain Chomet's The Triplets of Belleville was the best cartoon I'd seen in years (if you haven't seen it, do), and briefly Choment was the "it" boy of high-brow animation. Since then, however, his career has been plagued by controversy - there were charges of plagiarism from a former colleague; Hollywood threw a big project his way (The Tale of Despereaux) but then replaced him; the funding for another movie fell through; and even The Illusionist (above), released seven years after Triplets, has arrived trailing a kerfuffle over its dedication to one of Tati's daughters (it's a long story). Given these travails, perhaps it's surprising that The Illusionist has arrived at all, and I advise you to see it while you can; it's perhaps not in the same edgy, original league as Triplets, but it's nevertheless one of the best movies of the year.

Drawn from a screenplay by Jacques Tati, The Illusionist finds Chomet in a nostalgic mood; he clearly identifies with the silent, subversive wit of the great filmmaker, and not only makes his star, a stage magician facing declining fortunes, a dead ringer for Tati but bequeaths to him the Frenchman's birth name as well ("Tatischeff").  The comedian even makes an appearance on a movie screen halfway through the picture (in a clip from Mon Oncle, I think).  Of course beneath the frisky grotesquerie of Triplets many of the same themes resonated: in Belleville, real joy was only found among loyal old ladies who loved dogs, frog legs and jazz.  It seems that to Chomet, modern pleasures are by way of contrast false and destructive, and driven by egoistic delusion - he ridicules the rock band ("Billy Boy and the Britoons") that pushes poor Tatischeff off-stage as phony poofters, for instance, and their screaming teen-age fans are portrayed as deluded children (Tati, who relentlessly parodied modernism in movies like Playtime, would no doubt have agreed).  Still, the times (the 50's) they were a'changin', and charming as his act may be, the Illusionist finds himself playing to little old ladies at deserted matinees (above), or to the occasional drunk (if hearty) Scotsman - who, in the best Chomet manner, at least knows how to have a good time.

When invited up to a gig at that pickled Scotsman's pub, Tatischeff picks up another admirer - Alice, a simple chambermaid who seems to believe she has passed through the looking glass, and that the magician's tricks are actual magic.  She trails after him as he moves on to another date in Edinburgh (below), and the film develops into a quaint, nearly-silent May-December romance - only without the romance (Tatischeff sleeps on the couch in his forlorn little room, while Alice gets the bed).

The film's vision of Edinburgh - a fantasy that's also an accurate geography.

What action remains in the movie is all indirectly stated: Tatischeff takes up odd jobs to sustain Alice's illusions, and keep his innocently selfish new ward in style - while she (inevitably) finds a different kind of magic in the handsome guy next door (and slowly leaves her protector behind).  I have to admit this poignant arc is never actually as pointed as Tati himself might have made it - because I'm not sure the unspoken courtliness that Chomet admires in his idol is truly his own forte.  The film is instead liveliest in the side gallery of grotesques who fill out Tatischeff's vaudeville programs - the clown who's so sad he's suicidal, the ventriloquist who gets drunk with his dummy - even the testy rabbit that, once out of the hat, always bites the hand that feeds it.  These characters have the eccentric, individual edge the crew from Triplets had, and we come to care for them far more than we do for sweet, blank Alice.  Indeed, the most devastating moment in the movie comes when Tatischeff closes down his act and lets that recalcitrant rabbit go free in the hills above town.  Suddenly he's alone, just like any other bunny; the dream is over.

One dream, however, remains - Chomet's wistful dedication to hand-drawn animation.  The evocative watercolors that make up the backgrounds of The Illusionist (with okay, the occasional digital flourish) supply the haunting atmosphere (below) that the foreground story sometimes lacks.  And I must recommend the film to anyone who loves Edinburgh as I do; Chomet captures Scotland's answer to Florence (where he actually made much of this movie) with a hand so loving, and so accurate, that I almost went and bought a plane ticket as soon as I left the theatre. Those familiar with that wonderful town will recognize many of its locations (even down to the street addresses on the buildings); at last this great location has found its cinematic apotheosis (as London and Paris have so many times before).  Something about Edinburgh's gaunt architectural romance I'm sure spoke to Chomet, just as Tati's courtliness did.  Perhaps the greatest praise one could give him is to acknowledge that he has brought both these profound sensibilities together onscreen.

Not just a city, but a sensibility - Edinburgh in The Illusionist.

Bell epoque

Joshua Bell plays Bach in the Washington subway - to at least one appreciative fan.

Above is a clip of perhaps the most famous violin performance of the past decade: the morning Joshua Bell stood in the Washington D.C. subway (the L'Enfant Plaza stop) and played his Stradivarius for spare change.  As you can see, he was largely ignored (although over three quarters of an hour, he did pick up around $50 in tips; not bad, if you ask me).

Needless to say, context is everything in the arts; Bell received quite a different welcome at his Celebrity Series appearance here last weekend.  Indeed, the crowd that filled Symphony Hall listened in something like rapture as Bell - who looks much as he has for the past, what, two decades - performed a suite of late-nineteenth century duo sonatas (with Sam Haywood, himself a remarkable talent, on piano) that showcased what he does best: the smooth, singing line that is as much his trademark as that famously sun-ripened tenor was Pavarotti's.

The ongoing critical debate over Bell amounts to the question: is there more to him than that glorious bel canto sound?  His fans argue, "Isn't that enough?," and I'm inclined to agree; at any rate, even if Bell's no musical intellectual, he's nevertheless intelligent (not quite the same thing as being intellectual), and he holds his programs to a high standard; he simply chooses serious music that plays to his strengths.  And there's no better place to find such music than in the (mostly) late romantic period - the Bell epoque, if you will. The program last Friday, for instance, was the Brahms Sonata No. 2 in A Major, the Schubert Fantasy in C Major, and the more-obscure Grieg Sonata No. 2 in G Major - all for violin and piano.  This is serious (and certainly self-conscious) stuff, but like much of the late-romantic repertoire, it's loosely structured, and heavier on melody than development; the Brahms in particular is a long collection of songs (and I mean that quite literally - a good part of the piece is drawn from the composer's lieder).

Bell in action.

Bell seemed to take that chamber-music aspect of the Brahms sonata to heart - his playing here was daringly soft, although appropriately warm and meditative.  The opening of the Schubert was likewise intimate (to plushly melancholic accompaniment from Haywood) but as the pulse of the piece quickened, Bell gave it a dancing, almost improvised air.  The Grieg - which I'd never heard before - was the pleasant surprise of the evening - moody, at times tinged with tragedy, and crammed with memorable phrases and melodies (again, drawn from song, this time Norwegian folk song).  Bell seemed at his most committed here, and made a convincing case for the piece as more than just nationalist fantasia (which is how it's usually viewed).

For his encores, the violinist dipped into Sibelius (the poignant "Romance") as well as Henryk Wieniawski (the rousing, if familiar, "Polonaise Brillante"), but made the deepest impression by reaching all the way back to Chopin for the violin transcription of the Nocturne in C-sharp Minor. This is the kind of piece - long, limpid lines of melody set against subdued harmony - that Bell brings off as few can. You left the concert feeling that perhaps you'd learned nothing new about the pieces he had played - but at the same time, yes, Bell's playing was more than enough all by itself.