Next stop, Wonderland

Elizabeth Pearson, Jennifer O'Connor and Amy Meyer go down the rabbit hole.

Plenty of people haven't noticed, but there's a loose network of smart young actors working in Boston now - they're not loyal to a single troupe, but you'll find some of them most nights at the Piano Factory, or with Whistler in the Dark downstairs at the New Rep, or in the latest production from Way Theatre. Right now you can find a covey of them roosting at the Calderwood Pavilion in Imaginary Things, or, Treacle from the Well, a new show from the fledgling troupe Imaginary Beasts. Inspired by the classic Alice in Wonderland books, and written and directed by the (heretofore-unknown-to-me) Matthew Woods, Impossible Things aspires to be "an experiment in theatrical nonsense," in the manner of the Reverend Dodgson's grand experiment in literary nonsense. Whether Mr. Woods fully succeeds in that ambitious aspiration I'm inclined to doubt; still, his show is a surprisingly charming entertainment, marked by delicately evocative design and ingeniously poetic movement.

Indeed, as my friend Art Hennessey has pointed out, the costumes are the real stars of this show. Designer Cotton Talbot-Minkin (write that name down, local producers) clearly knows just what she's doing - her bio lists five British pantomimes among her designs - and she has beautifully colorized, and slightly eroticized, the essential look of John Tenniel's original imagery. No one's listed as set designer, but it should also be noted that the simple scaffold-and-curtain upstage works beautifully with both the costumes and Brent Sullivan's imaginative lighting - and the bow on the package is the inventive soundtrack (again uncredited) which mashes up everything from Dark Side of the Moon to that song you always hear on the calliope. In short, the design here is of a sophisticated piece, and often operates at a visual level (above right) you'd expect from a theatre with ten - or a hundred - times this one's budget.

Still, whether the text measures up to this vision I'd say is an open question. Like many a show inspired by a classic, this one is inevitably shadowed by its source, the actual Alice books, and Impossible Things sometimes feels like a smart tour through a Bennington or Vassar term paper, with an attendant, enthusiastic air of "Isn't this totally cool?" Which it is, definitely - I'm just not sure what the Imaginary Beasts have brought to the party that's actually new - and some things about Alice which I feel are central to its experience have mysteriously vanished down the rabbit hole.

For Alice, of course, is not so much whimsical "nonsense" as intellectually penetrating "non-sense," that is, a strange exploration of the conundrums slithering like slithy toves within the confident construct of our discourse. Carroll famously dithers between mathematical and linguistic logic (a topic in little evidence here), and a salient fact about Alice - that many people forget - is that frustration and anger are always banging about in it, violence is often incipient, and the sunny languor of its heroine is shadowed by the suppressed, pedophilic paradox of its author: i.e., that any congress with his dream girl will shatter the very quality that attracted him. To further explore these themes at the level of the source is one "impossible thing" that's probably too much to ask of Imaginary Beasts; still, some original extrapolation of Dodgson is the question the production begs, isn't it?

Instead, we get a poetic, lightly ironic gloss on Alice's addled, victimized femininity (there's only one boy in the show, the versatile Jordan Harrison). The script loosely follows the fate of "Mary Ann" - an obvious doppelgänger for Alice, Mary Ann was the White Rabbit's unseen maid, with whom he confused Alice at the opening of her Adventures in Wonderland. Mary Ann's identity, as conjured by Imaginary Beasts, turns out to be multifoliate, to say the least, as she endures travails similar to her literary sister's - summer storms, surreal tea parties, mysterious train trips, and other curiouser misadventures lead to a final encounter with the authorities (and perhaps even death) in what looks like a shadowy spider web.

But if at times the show meanders (sans, I'm afraid, the books' famous dream logic), it's still punctuated by striking imagery: the repeated appearance of a Magritte-like portent of death, twirling a parasol and trotting like the White Rabbit, was a particular favorite of mine, as was that summer shower, and a brilliant tableau vivant of a Tenniel illustration from Through the Looking Glass (above left). The show's individual performances were sometimes nearly obscured by the stagecraft, but there was still strong work in most episodes. Eliza Lay - who's now kind of the reigning queen of the fringe theatre scene - was, as usual, a standout, although she seemed a bit too ruminatively self-aware for either Alice or Mary Ann (or was the idea that Mary Ann was Alice all grown up? I wasn't sure). She may have been overshadowed, however, by Jennifer O'Connor, a mainstay of Whistler in the Dark, who was deployed in a dizzying array of roles, from a frog to a sheep to Marilyn Monroe (a thematically extraneous moment, I thought, but O'Connor pulled it off). Amy Meyer and Elizabeth Pearson, always light on their feet, provided enthiastic back-up in a similar variety of personae. This troupe certainly has great potential - but next time I'd like to see them deploy their skills - and Mr. Woods's visual talent - on an actual great script, rather than an also-ran of their own devising.

I still love She Loves Me

Brooks Ashmanskas brings down the house with the title song.

I went back to the Huntington's She Loves Me with some slight trepidation, I confess, rather like that feeling you get after a fantastic first date; was it real? Or were you in some crazy state you didn't understand - maybe something hit you on the head, and you hadn't realized it?

Well, I needn't have worried - it's real; the show was just as captivating the second time around. It was interesting to see how it had settled in - at first it wasn't as high energy as it had been on opening night (understandable - this was a Tuesday, after the actors' one day off), and there were a few muffed lines - but gradually it came clear that if the show was slightly less precise, it had actually grown in romantic atmosphere (to quote one of its funniest lines). And while the audience, a slightly tired weekday crowd (it had been sweltering all day) wasn't as responsive as a typical opening night crowd (which is usually stocked with board members, dedicated subscribers, actors, and friendly hangers-on), you could feel it gradually falling under the musical's spell. By the end, just as before, everyone was near rapture, and I was convinced this was one of the most charming shows I've seen in my life. And how anyone could doubt Brooks Ashmanskas's performance (above) is just beyond me. The partner unit has already seen it three times. If there are tickets, I'm tempted to make one last visit myself. It closes Sunday, but opens again in Williamstown on June 27.

Present perfect

"View of Madrid from the Vallecas Fire Tower," as installed at the MFA; photo by Tim Lowly.

Those who despair of the contemporary art scene are in for a wonderful surprise at the new Antonio López García show at the MFA. For here is "realism" - a mode largely disdained today - with not only a few new tricks up its sleeve, but also something deep and moving to say about "reality." If you thought you'd never see another new picture you wanted to stare at for hours, or if you thought the long love affair between the painter and his brush was over, then you must see this show. After several seasons of blinking chandeliers, assemblages of junk, and the other empty technical displays that have filled both the MFA and ICA, López García may restore your faith in what was once a sine qua non of great art: its sense of spiritual mystery.

Indeed, it's hard to believe that López García was quietly amassing this extraordinary body of work while Warhol was mass-producing soup cans, and Lichtenstein apotheosizing comic books. Perhaps the artist's sequestration in Spain allowed the small miracle of his career to occur: for ever since the historic face-off between Velázquez and El Greco (currently being re-enacted right next door, in a brilliant programming coup), realism and mysticism have been the two rivers running through Spanish art. Yet in López García, the two great currents become one - or rather, one flows beneath the other.

In fact, you can see the artist getting his feet wet in the shallows of mysticism early in his career - works like "Boy with Slingshot," (1953) which feels like a forced marriage between Balthus and de Chirico, push at us a vague sense of surreal import; in another painted relief, what seems to be the "ghost" of a child floats eerily down an empty corridor. At the same time, polychromed reliefs like "The Clothes Rack" (1963-64) feel like paintings trying to reach out into space, to provide a physical presence as well as an image.

It's that sense of "presence" that, once folded back into the picture plane, finally provided López García with his great theme. Many critics have commented on the artist's luminous palette, and almost hyperreal attention to detail - indeed, López García re-acquaints you with just how sensual an encounter with a painting can be - but few have commented on how he differs from "photorealists" such as Richard Estes, who were just as persnickety about detail, and who led the last significant resurgence of realism. Like López García, Estes often painted empty urban landscapes - but he was all about surface, often literally about reflection for its own sake: the scenes were dazzling, but jazzily flat. López García, by way of contrast, conjures a palpable sense of space in his imagery - even in "Sink and Mirror" (1963, above left), where, if you look closely, you can see he re-jiggers the perspective halfway down: we feel not simply the physical presence of the subject, but its existence - the painting is opening up to us as an experience, like the artist's painted reliefs seemed to try to do. When López García offers a study of his empty studio or bathroom (note in that mirror at left that we're not reflected in it), he produces not merely an image of incomparable verisimilitude, but also conjures the room's independent atmosphere, its own memory, if you will, as part of its "reality."

How is this strangely radiant, Vermeer-like atmosphere, achieved? The answer probably lies in the way López García's paintings somehow feel pregnant with time. (Indeed, if an Estes is a snapshot, a López García is a time exposure.) Perhaps the best example of this quality is seen in "The Dinner" (1971-1980, below) - and yes, you read those dates right, he worked on this piece for nineteen years. Indeed, the painting's history has become its true subject - notice the piece of pork down center, its rawness rendered with stunningly moist precision, perhaps because it's the oldest patch of paint on the canvas, the rest of which seems in various stages of flux. Some spots look plastered, then painted over, like testaments of decisions withdrawn and forgotten; the young girl stares out at us with sweet, slightly troubled dissatisfaction at her unstable surroundings, while her mother has all but broken up into distracted shards of fragmented attention. These pictorial peculiarities could easily be gathered under the modernist obsession with the physical picture plane; yet curiously, in López García, they seem to ramify into metaphor as well.



His giant paintings of Madrid exhibit a similar obsession with time's passage - indeed, their very construction suggests the course of their development: all the big ones "accrete," as it were, from several panels, added as the pieces expanded in scope. The work process leaves other traces: perspective lines and dotted grids, and even little "notes-to-self," float through the images like ghosts. And it's no coincidence, I think, that these obsessive views of the city always include new construction at the edge of town, sometimes even taking construction sites as their point of view (as in "View of Madrid from the Vallecas Tower," at top). Once again, time pauses silently, without our noticing, as the city grows of itself, pushing out into a desert and sky which shine with something bright but unknowable.

There are other wonders in the show - such as an Adam and Eve made literally of earth, save for glittering glass eyes - but for me perhaps the most affecting piece was "Skinned Rabbit" (1972, at left) a quietly tragic work that harkens back to the dead hares of Chardin, but glows with a delicately harrowing intensity. The poor creature, dead, flayed, and soon to be eaten, is curled into a fetal position, ready for its final rebirth, its dead eye staring blindly into the space it once thought it knew. It's hard to describe the metaphysical and mortal import with which López García has freighted this little red question mark, all while draining it of any pretension, or even sentiment, save a certain unassuming sympathy. Or perhaps "identification" is the right word. This is what we all become, after all - we're all waiting to die and be eaten - at which point the mystery of presence, which López García has spent his life trying to reproduce, will be silenced for us all.

You knew this was coming . . .

Yes, I've decided to "chart" the print theatre critics - after all, they're performers too, my friends. But much to my surprise, it turned out to be far more difficult rating them than it was rating productions, and I'm not sure I've really got it right. Part of the problem is the simple fact that none of them are all that great, but they're all bad in different ways (the theatre companies are marvels of consistency by comparison); and part of the problem is that there are almost too many hypothetical axes to judge them against. Louise Kennedy was pretty easy to rate - her writing is superb, or at least it's a superb rendition of the Globe's house format, but she's intellectually incurious, not particularly engaged with theatre, and views herself and her peer group as some kind of objective lens; obviously one would rate her high on style, but low on substance. Terry Byrne and Nick Dussault were even easier - since both are clearly weak on both counts (so it's no surprise these two birds of a feather flock together). Carolyn Clay is trickier, though - her writing is dry, often expository and impacted, but also highly witty - the trouble is that her perceptions can be wacky when she has no academic guidelines to steady her, and of course she's made very, very big bets that went utterly wrong (such as her cheerleading for Peter Sellars). So how "perceptive" is she, really? It seems to depend on the day. And even if she seems brighter than, say, Ed Siegel, isn't he a bit more reliable (I wound up rating him higher on perception due to this consistency)?

Then there's the problem of what the axes should be on the chart. Some of these folks are intuitively perceptive, but hardly logicians - they can't really argue their cases. Others (like Bill Marx, who's not on the chart, as he's no longer in print) can develop a line of thought, but are far from dependable intuitively, and clearly have emotional issues which occlude their judgment. Jenna Scherer was another problematic data point - obviously smart, and the funniest of the lot, but too immature and moody to be useful; her real forte would be critical stand-up, if such a form existed.

Before you say it - why am I not on the list? Well, first, I'm not a print reviewer. And though I certainly think I'm a solid stylist, when it comes to the "perceptive/unperceptive" access, I'm really off the chart, literally, simply because I don't really do what these people do - I don't write "reviews," per se, and I often open up whole avenues of free inquiry, which they're not allowed to do. So yeah, in my conceited, arrogant way I think I'm better than any of them - but on the other hand, I'm not sure how well they could do against me if they weren't shackled to their editors' demands; it's only fair to compare them against each other, not me.

Lastly, some might call me on unconscious sexism - my two "most perceptive" reviewers are men. That might, true, be due to sexism. But it also might just be the case.

Night of Tomorrow's Stars

I spent last Saturday evening being charmed by the Boston Ballet School, which presented its Spring Showcase over the weekend at the Cyclorama. The School actually needs a space larger than that to really spread out - dozens of young dancers are enrolled at its various studios, north and south, and at least one of the works on display (Balanchine's "Walpurgisnacht") looked a little squeezed on the temporary stage. But the youngsters and teenagers all managed well within its confines, even taking in their stride the unexpected (like the sound system's sudden failure) with a sweetly premature professionalism.

The students on view were from the School's "intensive" program, and it was clear from their poised presentation of various "Etudes" (accompanied with brio by pianist Tanya Foaksman) that they had all mastered an age-appropriate level of technique (toe shoes didn't appear until later levels, as they shouldn't). Indeed, the fresh-faced students sometimes appeared more nervous than they should have been - but then the relieved looks of "Yes, I landed that!" only added to the evening's appeal. The various deployments went by briskly, and the teachers had cannily given almost everyone a chance to shine, and even devised a few winsome bits of proto-choreography. Needless to say, the parent-heavy audience was appropriately adoring. It was also gratifying to see the vast majority of the girls (who still, alas, far outnumber the boys at these academies) looked to be slim, but at a healthy weight; there were only one or two skinny young things I wanted to take out for a cheeseburger.

After the kids strutted their stuff, the program was given over to dance excerpts for the senior students and "trainees" (many of whom already had taken jobs at ballets across the country), culminating in a performance of Balanchine's "Walpurgisnacht," from 1980. The senior boys were first showcased in a series of Bournonville's "Enchaînements," or exercises that teetered on the edge of actual choreography, followed by a pas de deux from Rossini's William Tell featuring trainees Sylvia Deaton and Dylan Tebaldi. The blonde, beaming Deaton's attack was hearty yet precise, while Tedaldi made rather a bemused young swain (albeit a naturally musical one). Next came the requisite piece from Jorma Elo - this being the Boston Ballet School, after all - which was essayed with loose-limbed aplomb by Akiko Ishii, Yurika Kitano, Emily Mistretta, Brittany Summer, Isaac Akiba, and Jeffrey Cirio - some of whom occasionally seemed relieved to successfully dodge Elo's patented scissor-kicks (which I confess are getting a bit repetitive). Alas, Elo's finale was undone by a recalcitrant CD - I'm sure the kids were disappointed, but I wasn't, not really.

Finally came the big event, Balanchine's "Walpurgisnacht," to the "witches' sabbath" scene from Gounod's Faust. If the subject matter gives you pause, rest assured the dance proved pretty tame for a satanic orgy - indeed, as my partner whispered, it read more like "Prom Night on Bald Mountain": the girls let down their hair in the last variation, which gave the final steps a frisky air, but "Girls Gone Wild" this was not. Still, it sports Balanchine's usual inventive music-visualization (rather compressed here, but danced as cleanly as the Ballet itself managed with Mr. B's Concerto Barocco), and ironically enough, it's utterly free of his usual sense of incipient doom. Again as usual, it also feels a bit like Sadie Hawkins Day: two dozen ballerinas face off against a single danseur. Luckily, the Ballet had a male trainee up to the job: Dustin Layton, with his powerful legs and dark good looks, was just the boy a girl would want to save her from a witches' sabbath, and he both sailed through his solo and partnered ballerina Rachel Cossar with sexy sensitivity. It's too bad he's off to North Carolina Dance Theatre, because he'd be a welcome addition to Boston's own roster. Miss Cossar, for her part, like Miss Deaton, has already been accepted to Boston Ballet II, and it was easy from her clean, classic line to see why; but with her wholesome looks she was rather miscast as the high priestess of a black sabbath - "Our Town," you thought, might be more her cup of tea. More in her element was the spritely Olivia Hartzell, who led the gamboling sorceresses with delicate vivacity. But to tell the truth, her happy smiles were matched on every side.

A night at the opera. And the ballet. With a little poetry thrown in.

I'm (very) late in posting about an enjoyable evening I had over a week ago, at the "Russian Revel" benefit for the upcoming Ballets Russes 2009 festival (which will be held next May). The cause is certainly a worthy one; it would be hard, in fact, to think of a company more worthy of commemoration than Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, which was, to put it simply, not just a crucible of twentieth-century ballet, but a crucible of modernism in general, in which Debussy, Stravinsky, and Ravel rubbed shoulders with Picasso, Braque and Bakst, choreographers Fokine and Balanchine, and dancers Pavlova and Nijinsky (among many, many others).

The original idea for the evening, it seems, was to evoke the premiere of the Ballets Russes in Paris in 1909 - but despite the looming image of Diaghilev upstage, this seemed merely a ruse for including all things Russes. Only the first number was closely linked to that original opening night, and said pas de deux, from Le Pavillon d'Armide, a forgotten piece "reconstructed" by Jurius Smoriginas, proved charming, but little more (although it was danced with a light, buoyant simplicity by Olga Konosenko and Nerijus Juska). Intriguingly, however, Le Pavillon looked more dated than moderne: the candy-colored costuming recalled turn-of-the-century bathing attire gone commedia, and the choreography wouldn't have looked out of place in The Nutcracker. Would much of the coming centennial look the same way?

Well, we couldn't ponder that long, because, for some reason, the distinguished poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko came next, even though he really has nothing to do with the Ballets Russes - even if, towering as he does literally as well as figuratively over Russian poetry, he was most welcome. Yevtushenko, who currently divides his time between Russia, New York, and the University of Tulsa, of all places, proved a sly raconteur, as well as a poignantly expressive reader of his own verse (so expressive, in fact, that he made the provided translations almost superfluous). Nattily attired in lightly clashing pastels, the poet let his wryly ingratiating manner belie the edge sliding beneath the surface of such sardonic poems as "The City of Yes and No," and "I Live in the Country of Sort Of" (a sly poke at American moral complacency) before suddenly dropping the smiling mask entirely in a bitter condemnation of the murderous Putin regime.

We were quite far, by now, from the proto-modernism of the gay, fey Sergei, but the program attempted to stagger back in his direction with arias from Borodin, Feodor Chaliapin, and Mussorgsky. Of these, the Chaliapin (whom I'm unfamiliar with), while perhaps the weakest pieces in musical terms, nevertheless made the best impression, via the deep colors and dramatic power of baritone Anton Belov's earthy pipes. But the programmers had saved the best for last (and one sensed somehow they knew it), with Georgian prima ballerina Nina Ananiashvili's interpretation of Fokine's "Dying Swan." This piece, after years of over-embellishment (and the ministrations of such artistes as the Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo), now hovers somewhere near self-parody, but Ananiashvili took a surprisingly effective, straightforward, un-self-conscious approach. Her line was appropriately sinuous, but weighted, as she mutely sank ever closer to the earth. There was no self-pity here, merely loss - and if the celebration next summer can tap into something like her level of craft, it should be one for the history books.

No Torture. No Exceptions.

Off-topic, but this can never be said often enough.