Howling along with the Hound of the Baskervilles

It's strange the way theatre has set about mocking itself and its means, isn't it. Or perhaps it's not so strange - the theatre has to grapple with the current culture, of course, and in the current culture, knowingness is all; our collective self-image no longer trades in the romantic, or even the heroic, but merely in the self-aware. The avatar of the age is the viewer who has already seen it all, and seen through it, too.

Enter The Hound of the Baskervilles, another romp through the narrative thickets of a naïve classic and the broad tropes of matinee melodrama. After such local hits as The 39 Steps, Hound feels a bit formulaic itself, frankly; I'm more than ready for a parody of this kind of show. But Hound is also frisky and fun as a post-modern puppy, for the most part, and it's blessed with a crack comic cast (at left, doubling and tripling in all the roles, as required) and very tight direction from Thomas Derrah (who's more on top of this particular case than even Sherlock Holmes, methinks).

It helps a bit that - dare I say this? - The Hound of the Baskervilles isn't all that good to begin with. Before you start baying at the moon yourselves, I should add that while I enjoy the character of Holmes - who doesn't like hanging out with drug-addicted homosexuals? - the stories in which he stars are . . . hmmm . . . how to put this . . . "usually a clumsy mess" sums it up rather nicely, I think. Hound is a particular howler - the writing seems even more arcanely flat-footed than usual (a sample: "I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure?"). And alas, this time Holmes is off the scene much of the time, and the plot only counts as a "mystery" because its structure is so convoluted. I'd take a random episode of Scooby-Doo (the apotheosis of this particular form) any day.

Hmmm. Maybe I'm undoing my own argument a bit here; perhaps parodying this stuff is the only way to put it over! And if Hound has no underlying themes or subtext of its own (unlike, say, Irma Vep), at least it's not looking down its nose at its source (like 39 Steps); it thinks Sherlock Holmes is a hoot, and in the end it's pretty much faithful to the text (although wasn't Laura Lyons AWOL? I confess I 'rested my eyes' here and there, so maybe I missed her).

At any rate, let's be grateful that this particular cast has such sharp comic chops. Lead Remo Airaldi (late of the ART) is an odd physical match for Holmes, and he doesn't really do a "characterization" (or even a parody of one), but he consistently brings to bear that squeaky comic pique that he brought to everything he did at Harvard, and that makes most of the jokes work in an almost abstract way. And once he's in drag (a particularly peculiar form of meta-drag this time, with a bowler and braids) he's really a scream. Meanwhile Bill Mootos makes a perfectly clueless foil as Watson, and talented newcomer Trent Mills clowns his way brilliantly through the wide, wacky supporting cast of Baskervilles, et. al. Plus the show is smartly designed, and there are witty music and sound (and costume!) effects, too. I confess I think an adult may feel that this Hound gets a little long in the tooth before it's over, but as a kid's show it's one of the best bets in town.

Talking 'bout an evolution

The criticisms leveled at Melinda Lopez's From Orchids to Octopi (at the Central Square Theater through May 2) are basically on target: its structure is a chick-lit cliché, and so are its sexual politics. But I still thought it was okay, particularly as it was commissioned by the National Institutes of Health to put over the theory of evolution in dramatic terms, and it manages to do that, pretty much, in an entertaining fashion.

Indeed, it's when the show is at its most didactic that it's also the most fun, thanks to some delightful costumes and props, broad but tight playing by the bemused cast (as they essay the roles of various fish, mammals and dinosaurs), and especially David Fichter's wonderful mural (at left, with the artist), which is slowly assembled over the course of the play, before being revealed in its entirety in a brilliant coup de théâtre.

Alas, it's true that Lopez's "frame story" is too much like too many other plays of late: contemporary professional woman (here "Emma") becomes obsessed with a figure from the past (here Darwin), and before you can say "Voyeurs de Venus!" or "Legacy of Light!" past and present have become intertwined, figures are popping in and out of space-time, reproduction has been muddled with creativity, and warm, uplifting life lessons have been dusted off from back episodes of Touched by an Angel. To make matters worse, the central relationship between modern "Emma" and her husband "Charles" (do I have to remind you of the names of the historical Darwins?) is likewise direct from chick-lit-journal-land: Emma's sweetheart of a husband is just becoming too successful, and isn't paying enough attention to her as she juggles the pressures of both an unexpected pregnancy and a commission for a mural about you-know-who.

These, I'm sure, are like the real problems of many couples, but let's just say that the original Darwins faced worse - plus these are problems (pregnancy, success) that a lot of other couples would kill for. So it's hard to feel too much sympathy for our New Age Emma and Chuck, particularly as Emma seems kind of high-maintenance to begin with. There's a more intriguing plotline revolving around the fears she entertains about that "genetic lottery" once she has learned more about it - but we get the feeling as these issues edged toward questions of reproductive rights (and even, possibly, "smushsmortion") they were trimmed back, more's the pity. And as for the quite-dramatic (and highly relevant) arc that Darwin himself traced - from Anglican trainee to biblical debunker - well, somehow that's never in the dramatic cards at all.

Still, even if her structure is both predictable and unwieldy, Lopez does craft her individual scenes well, and she has dreamed up some clever skits to convey the essence of that "genetic lottery," complete with Wesley Slavick slicing the ham deliciously as a kind of cosmic carnival barker who passes out mutations like prizes at a county fair to hopeful Paleozoics who line up for their big chance. There are also some snappy scenes with Debra Wise as a no-nonsense OB/GYN, and the play even generates a few chills with Tom O'Keefe's turn as the ever-mutating tuberculosis bacillus. Only Kortney Adams, as Emma, never gets to have any fun.

But Lopez's smartest move was getting real-life muralist David Fichter on board. His paintings for last season's Galileo have become the stuff of legend, and he has operated at the same delightfully high standard here (we even learned in a talkback that his own research generated some of Lopez's dialogue; now that's convergent evolution for you). I'm not sure what the Catalyst Collaborative@MIT, which sponsored From Orchids to Octopi with Underground Railway Theater, is pondering next, but my advice is: try to pick a subject that David Fichter can paint!

A postscript on "post-racial" Boston theatre

This is a brief postscript about Harriet Jacobs, which closed this weekend at the Central Square Theater, and which I'm only writing about because the cast of the production was so strong I felt I had to applaud them in print. Alas, the play, by Lydia R. Diamond, struck me as even weaker than the same author's wacky Voyeurs de Venus, which I suffered through last year. Diamond trafficks in sanctimonious psycho-biography disguised as pedagogy, and certainly the complicated life of the heroic Harriet Jacobs deserves better than the flat proclamations she has provided here. But as the playwright is sexy and connected (friends with Peter DuBois of BU, where she teaches, and actually married to a Harvard prof), I guess we're stuck with her for the time being.

And so are these actors, it seems. I don't think I've seen the sparkling Kortney Adams since she had to scream at the bare boobies in Voyeurs; and why the hell is that? She's got Shakespeare's Rosalind, or maybe Shaw's Candida, written all over her. Why is she doomed to declaim the likes of Lydia R. Diamond? Likewise when did I last see the wonderful Ramona Lisa Alexander? I guess it was in the riveting In the Continuum over a year ago - another "black play." To be fair, I recall the Actors' Shakespeare Project cast both the sweet Sheldon Best and the luminous Kami Rushell Smith (above left, as Harriet) in their recent Much Ado, so here's to them for freeing a few of these actors from the ghetto of political correctness. And the Wheelock Family Theatre, bless 'em, cast the hunky De'Lon Grant in both Saint Joan and A Tale of Two Cities. The soulful Obehi Janice, meanwhile, has only just begun to be seen locally at all.

This isn't really meant as a jab at the show's producer, Underground Railway Theater - I'm glad somebody is hiring these folks - except insofar as the choice of play is concerned. Even within the political parameters of "young, female and black" I just have to believe there are better playwrights out there than Lydia R. Diamond. Of course to be fair, American slavery was so horrific that it would take a truly great dramatist to create art from it rather than agitprop - still, 150 years on, isn't it time we began demanding that? On the plus side, designer Susan Zeeman Rogers's channeling of Kara Walker was mildly interesting, and director Megan Sandberg-Zakian at least kept things moving, although she seemed satisfied to also keep them somewhat superficial. Then again, what other choice did she have? Oh, well. Here's hoping that Diamond's Stick Fly, which opens soon at the Huntington, marks a step up from, and out of, this writer's ongoing post-graduate seminar.

Jews for Jesus (oh and queers too)

Oy! Here it is the middle of Hanukkah and I'm staggering from one Christmas pageant to the next. How come, with the Jews controlling show biz and all, there isn't a single Hannukah show in this town, I'd like to know? Or wait - maybe that's the plan! What better way to celebrate a holiday than with eight days of presents and no shows? Now it all makes sense!

But back to those Christmas pageants, because actually, there is something like a Jewish Christmas going on at the Central Square Theatre right now, where the double feature Tru Grace: Holiday Memoirs is running through Dec. 27. Half the program - the "Grace" half - is an adaptation (by director Wesley Savick) of Grace Paley's "The Loudest Voice," the famous short story about an immigrant Jewish family's quandary when their little girl is cast as the voice of Jesus in a Christmas pageant (because she has - yes - the loudest voice in her class). Paley (at left) was herself the daughter of Russian Jewish émigrés, and while the story is cast in a bemused, affectionate tone, there are deep ironies echoing through it.

To give you a taste of its mood, here is an excerpt from its climactic pageant:

Miss Glacé yanked the curtain open and there it was, the house -- an old hayloft, where Celia Kornbluh lay in the straw with Cindy Lou, her favorite doll. Ira, Lester, and Meyer moved slowly from the wings toward her, sometimes pointing to a moving star and sometimes ahead to Cindy Lou.

It was a long story and it was a sad story. I carefully pronounced all the words about my lonesome childhood, while little Eddie Braunstein wandered upstage and down with his shepherd's stick, looking for sheep. I brought up lonesomeness again, and not being understood at all except by some women everybody hated . . . I announced twelve friends, and half the boys in the fourth grade gathered around Marty, who stood on an orange crate while my voice harangued. Sorrowful and loud, I declaimed about love and God and Man, but because of the terrible deceit of Abie Stock we came suddenly to the famous moment. Marty, whose remembering tongue I was, waited at the foot of the cross. He stared desperately at the audience. I groaned, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" The soldiers . . . grabbed poor Marty . . . but he wrenched free, turned again to the audience, and spread his arms aloft to show despair and the end. I murmured at the top of my voice, "The rest is silence, but as everyone in this room, in this city -- in this world -- now knows, I shall have life eternal."

Obviously this is "assimilation" of a curiously subversive stripe - indeed, Paley turns so many subtle tricks in this passage, it's enough to make your head spin. The author slides imperceptibly from a burlesque of the cloying Nativity story into ironic historical statement and then on into a proclamation of triumph, as her cluelessly cooperative Jewish kids re-enact their people's persecution via the central myth of their persecutors - and then announce their survival and transcendence of same (somebody page Oberammergau!). "We shall have life eternal," Paley assures her Jewish audience from the loud Jewish mouth of Jesus Christ himself - in the thirties, no less, when European Jews were being rounded up into ghettoes and camps. And the contented American goyim have no idea of the true message of their Christmas pageant.

To be fair, the ironic, multivalent voice of this kind of fiction is a tough thing to transcribe onto the stage, but Wesley Savick's production feels more dumbed-down and deracinated than it had to be. And I confess it kind of pissed me off. True, Savick's script quotes most of Paley's own dialogue, but somehow he still manages to miss her voice entirely, and the loud-but-also-flat delivery of his child actors (the adults aren't all that much better) somehow lacks the vital charm of the declamations of Paley's kids, waving their fake shepherd's crooks at their tin foil stars. Indeed, I get the feeling Savick imagined he was contriving a kind of meta-burlesque here - just as Paley's Jewish kids aped and subverted the Nativity story, so his Cambridge kids would translate Paley's Jewish fable into some kind of awesome multi-cultural message. Sigh - if only. Alas, none of the short story's themes seems to have survived (much less been transformed by) the hearty violence of its translation into a kiddie show, in which the adults have been reduced to kvetching sitcom stereotypes - because, to put it bluntly, "The Loudest Voice" is for grown-ups, not children. And what's left after Savick and his cast have had their way with Paley is merely a broad piece of multi-cultural schmaltz. And I'm afraid I always prefer actual cultures to multi-cultures.

Things go better with the "Tru" half of Tru Grace, which is comprised of Savick's adaptation of Truman Capote's likewise-famous "A Christmas Memory" (the subject of a well-known television adaptation starring Geraldine Page). Even here, however, the trip from page to stage is a bit rocky, but as much of the poetry of Capote's piece can be found right on the surface of his evocative prose, Savick conjures some of the story's true atmosphere simply by quoting it. And he has solid, if not overly subtle, actors in Michael Forden Walker (as the six-year-old Capote) and Debra Wise, who essays his sixty-year-old cousin, Sook (both at left).

Fortunately, Savick refrains from embroidering Capote's slim story (of the slow, secret assembly of some thirty Christmas fruitcakes). But from the start, we sense once again the heavy hand of holiday sentiment pressing down hard on the delicacy that won the material fame in the first place. Walker drops his mimicry of Capote's effeminate vocal pattern early on, and slowly abandons any attempt at conjuring his gnomic aura as well (below, in a 1948 portrait by Irving Penn), settling for the more accessible profile of a David-Sedaris-style knowing Christmas elf. Wise, for her part, manages a slightly generic pathos (like Walker), but doesn't conjure much sense of Sook's lonely, damaged self, nor the faint, sweetly perverse sense of shared "outsider" freedom that suffuses the story.

But then again, this season's parade of holiday pageants seems to have highlighted the difficulty adaptors have in capturing the subtlety of Christmas literature on the stage. It's all to the good, I'd argue in the abstract, that we're seeing stage versions of complex readings of the season from the likes of Dylan Thomas, Grace Paley, and Truman Capote. That's how a diverse theatrical season should operate. Yet I confess I'm getting a case of the holiday blues from many of these shows. A Child's Christmas in Wales put over something of the feeling of Dylan Thomas, but it was troubling to think that its "story arc," should the show become a tradition, might replace the original's lack of one in the public mind. Meanwhile "A Civil War Christmas" was just too weird for words, "A Christmas Memory" proved a mixed bag, and "The Loudest Voice" was a loud misfire. It occurs to me that the "diversity audience" may be unable or unwilling to appreciate the subtlety of its own favored texts. Or perhaps Christmas is a kind of dramatic steamroller that simply flattens anything other than the broadest critique (next up for me is "The Slutcracker"). Suddenly the relative delicacy of TV classics like "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "A Charlie Brown Christmas" is beginning to look awfully good.

Do the math

This weekend marks the last performances of Gioia De Cari's award-winning one-woman-show Truth Values (above) at the Central Square Theater. I've been a bit reluctant to write about the production, I confess, because I've become a bit involved with it personally - I've been trying to find a way to get it on videotape, and perhaps even on the air. I've come to realize this could be a long process - but in the meantime, you still have a chance to catch this smart, snappy take on what it was like to be a female graduate student at MIT in the 80's. The piece was marketed as a riposte to Larry Summers's famously sexist musings on women in science, but it's actually more a personal journey - and one that, ironically enough, might be seen as backing up Summers's position rather than undermining it.

But that's always the way of honest art - it rarely aligns with a political position, however enlightened. The good news is that because of her honesty, De Cari deftly side-steps political correctness and comes up with a piece that does, indeed, skewer with deadly accuracy the sexist stupidity of so many men in math and science, but also connects with deep questions of self-determination that all young people must face. And it also represents the first time I've ever seen MIT life (I graduated a few years before De Cari enrolled) accurately depicted on a stage in Boston, or maybe anywhere (Truth Values is basically what Good Will Hunting pretended to be). This alone is noteworthy, and actually rather politically intriguing - as were the attitudes revealed in the comments of several reviewers, one of whom noted he had hoped the show would "strafe MIT from the air." I'm glad De Cari disappointed him - indeed, the Institute instead comes off rather well in her account, even if its male denizens don't. After all, MIT has been engaged in a concerted, self-critical push to engage women in the hard sciences for ages (over my years there, the percentage of women students leapt from something like 20% to nearly 50%); if anything, it's society that has lagged behind the Institute. And of course Larry Summers has, too.

The Central Square Theater opens soon

At left is the entrance of the brand new Central Square Theater, home of The Nora Theatre Company and Underground Railway Theater, located at 450 Massachusetts Ave, in the heart of, yes, Central Square. Underground Railway Theater will inaugurate the space on July 24 with QED: An Evening with Richard Feynman, by Peter Parnell, featuring Keith Jochim as the eccentric physicist. In August, the theatre will host the Norton Award-winning Coming Up for Air – an AutoJAZZography, conceived and performed by Stan Strickland, and What the Hell are You Doing in the Waiting Room for Heaven?, a one-woman show from Deborah Henson-Conant, Boston's popular "hip harpist." In September, the Nora will make its first bow in the space with Dario Fo's all-too-timely We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!. For more information, check out the theater's website, here.