Wanderlust at The Generic Theater....

About Hampton Roads, for Hampton Roads

A Nice Place To Be Sexually Frustrated

There’s fun to be had at the expense of...well, us, the sexually frustrated under-achievers of Hampton Roads, in a new play which opened to a full house last night, June 17, at the Generic Theater, down in the bowels of Norfolk’s Chrysler Hall.

Wanderlust, by local writers Jeremiah Albers and Brad McMurran, is the opening show in the Generic’s annual New Plays for Dog Days Festival. It’s also the third production in Norfolk’s Summer Play Fest of new works, in cooperation with The Venue and the Little Theater of Norfolk.

The 90-minute play (without intermission) comes with warnings about mature adult content. But there’s really nothing in the show that would shock anyone over fourteen, unless it’s the underlying theme of futility when it comes to negotiating a mutually satisfying sexual relationship.

We have the wife of a well-liked local TV reporter who won’t have sex with him but is paying to have it with her old high school boy friend.

The boy friend, for his part—a heavy-drinking musician—doesn’t even recognize the waitress/singer-songwriter he met at his music gig the night before when she comes to his apartment for the date he’d made with her.

The singer-songwriter, determined to salvage something of the night, then takes a sailor home with her, which quickly leads to some rough sex which gets her pregnant after which the sailor is charged with a DUI while driving her car.

Now the committed heterosexual sailor, if he wants to get his DUI charges dropped, must submit to the homosexual advances of his prominent, well-connected attorney.

But the gay lawyer is in the closet, married and coldly indifferent to his wife’s torrid mating calls to make her pregnant before her biological clock runs down.

At the same time the wife, a realtor, hoping to close the deal on a house the well-liked local TV reporter and his unfaithful wife are interested in, loses her moral compass in the mutual sexual attraction growing between them. As does he. When he impulsively asks if he can see her sometime—outside of real estate—she says yes.

And that “yes” is the last word, putting the finishing twist on this tangled web of relationships among the twenty-to-thirty-something set, and it’s the only one that has promise, ending the evening on a slightly hopeful note. Never mind that the newscaster and the realtor are both married to someone else. Divorce is worth the hassle when two people meet who both like living in Hampton Roads.

Jokes about our region, in fact, are liberally sprinkled throughout the script.

“Local news is evolution in reverse,” says Melissa, wife of TV reporter Tony.

“What other place in the whole world would build a mountain out of trash?” Tony asks Theresa, his realtor and probable second wife.

Meredith, the aspiring singer-songwriter, is proud that she escaped her origins in “a trailer park in Broadwater, Virginia, and made it all the way to Norfolk.”

Melissa calls Hampton Roads a stepping stone to a bigger place. Jonah believes he’s a failure as a musician because he’s playing in Norfolk, not New York, which, in any case, he hated. Meredith believes she needs to go to New York to find opportunity.

Dan, the gay lawyer and, if I heard right, a Regent graduate, has political aspirations that should easily lift him to higher ground. (Hard not to think of Bob McDonnell.) Luke, the sailor, doesn’t care where he is so long as there’s available pussy.

Only Tony, unhappily married to a wife whose ambition for him exceeds his own, and Theresa, equally unhappily married to a closeted gay Christian lawyer, share the same dream—to live in Hampton Roads and raise a family.

These interlocking stories are interestingly told in a series of seven vignettes set in a bedroom with its inviting double bed as the dominating focus. Whose bedroom it is changes from scene to scene, and smoothly at that, with a running crew efficiently dressing and redressing the set between episodes.

The scenes, meanwhile, fold neatly into one another, with one character from each scene appearing in the next in a relationship with a new character who proceeds in the next scene to a relationship with yet another new character. The technique gives a sense of the interconnecting social circles in Hampton Roads, where you never meet anyone who doesn’t know someone you know.

The three women characters are especially strong—Rachel Lang as Melissa, the unsatisfied wife; Nancy Dickerson as Meredith, the aspiring singer-songwriter, and Eileen Quintin as Theresa, the wannabe Mom.

The four men, while all competent in their roles, seem uniformly a little timid about inhabiting their characters fully—Joshua Gray as Tony, the newscaster; Matt Labarge as Joshua, the musician; Martin Hurst as Luke, the sailor, and Henry D’Alonzo as Dan, the gay lawyer. At times all of them are hard to hear, especially in their vulnerable moments of sensitivity.

Albers directs the production with his usual impeccable attention to detail—clean set, precise lighting, and incidental music between scenes (by local composer J.R. Flynn) that interestingly blends a sound both classical and experimental, comfortable and edgy.

So it is in Hampton Roads, “a procrastinator’s town,” as Tony and Theresa agree—not too fast, not too slow, “a great place to raise a family”—yet so few are content here, victims of a restless melancholy.

Despite Albers’ and McMurran’s key roles in creating material for the Pushers, an improv group known for spicy irreverence, in Wanderlust they get a little sentimental, offering, in the end, a rather gentle portrait of their hometown. (McMurran comes from Portsmouth, Albers’ family moved to Virginia Beach when he was seven.)

If only we could satisfy our insatiable lust, maybe we’d all be happy to stay.

Wanderlust continues at the Generic tonight, June 18, at 8, tomorrow at 2:30, and Thursday through Sunday next weekend, June 23-26. For more details, click here.

At the Venue on 35th....

“I Just Wanna Be Your Barbie Doll”

Denise Stewart Tells All

Before last night, here’s all I knew about Barbie dolls: A lot of girls had them when they were growing up, and there’s some sort of fetish surrounding them that always seemed a little weird to me, the way little girls in short skirts and net stockings performing adult show tunes is a little weird.

In fact, I don’t think I ever knew a girl well—not my sisters, not my girl friends, not the girl I married—who played with Barbie dolls.

Until now. In a little more than an hour, in fact, I got to know someone pretty well who knows a whole lot more about Barbie dolls than I ever considered before.

I know her because she told me and about twenty others many of the intimate details of her life from stormy childhood to post-graduate orphan, and she not only played with Barbie dolls. She lived a vicarious life through them.

These revelations transpired at The Venue on 35th in Norfolk last night, June 16, when Denise Stewart, a Charlottesville playwright and actor, opened her one-woman theatrical blog, Dirty Barbie and other girlhood tales, for a four-performance weekend run. The production is the second in the Norfolk Summer Play Fest of new works.

Stewart is a focused, energetic performer with a lot of stamina and little inhibition. She is also generously endowed. (She’ll tell you that, even if I hadn’t. It’s important to her story.)

These qualities attract attention and hold it through her performance of selected, comi-tragic episodes from a tumultuous but, I suspect, not uncommon, dysfunctional, and thoroughly contemporary family life.

Stewart makes no secret that it’s her own dysfunctional family life. This show is straight autobiography whose episodes, like blog entries, have titles which are projected on a stage-right screen. Beginning with the show’s opener, “Dirty Barbie,” we learn right from the top that Barbie is all about little girls’ fantasies of getting laid, preferably by a guy like Ken, Barbie’s male clone.

But Stewart’s story, on the other hand, is about what happens to real girls after they get laid, and, unlike Barbie’s perfect life, it’s not very pretty.

Stewart’s father, we learn in an episode entitled “What Church Do You Belong To?,” is an alcoholic ex-Marine who beats her, her three siblings, and her mother. After he dies of cancer, he’s not much missed. But her mother is also an alcoholic who lets the neighbors in Moorsville, NC, look after her, as told in the episode “How Southern Women Saved My Life.” Their home is a battleground of constant bickering and fighting. The kids essentially raise themselves in a pop-culture environment of television, junk food, top-40 hits, high school football, and smart-ass acting-out.

It’s got to be some sort of tribute to her grit that Stewart not only survived that scene but emerged as the disciplined creative force that she is. But I’d hazard a guess that acting out her story serves her emotional and psychological health to no small degree.

The question is, do we care?

At first, I didn’t. The whole Barbie thing was alien to me. But that didn’t seem to be the case with the women in the audience, young as well as older, who chuckled and giggled with familiarity all the way through. The fantasy of Barbie—”a two-point-five billion-dollar industry,” Stewart exclaims—seems to embody a feminine mystery, some sort of rite of passage peculiar to women which men may not even want to understand.

What man wants to face the fact that he’s not Ken?

In any case, I warmed to Stewart’s story as it went on and she stopped reminding me so much of my own younger sister who also lived in a fantasy world I couldn’t understand but thoroughly scorned. (She was nuts over late-’50s pop stars like Ricky Nelson and Fabian.) It soon became apparent that Stewart is inviting us, her audience, not just to witness but to relive with her select scenes from her chaotic early life. From raging pre-pubescent brat to cool college workaholic to her final defiant dance, swiping two Barbie dolls through her crotch like a disco queen twirling a pair of tawses, Stewart entices us to share in what it was like to grow up as her—on the bet, largely successful, that we’ll recognize ourselves.

Or at least the women will.

There’s some great wit in the piece. For instance, when her college roommates take off for Key West over spring break, looking for sex while she stays home alone and masturbates, she says, “They can have all the sex and I can have all the orgasms.”

Or, explaining why she never got caught drinking as a teenager, despite her consistent abuse of alcohol, she says, “I was a good liar with good grades.”

This self-deprecating view of herself and her life, making dark comedy out of suicidal loneliness, saves the script from sinking into a confessional morass. The scenes, in fact, are well-paced and move smoothly from one mood to another with enough variety to keep us watching. There are conclusions drawn, as well, offered as truths gained from hard experience.

Perhaps the core truth Stewart wants us to know—and I paraphrase— is this: If you do the hard work and share it, people will know you better, and maybe that’s all you can hope for.

Stewart has done the hard work. We applaud her skill in turning intensely personal experience into a disciplined public performance. And we do know her better. Denise Stewart is Dirty Barbie, another way of saying Every Girl.

The Venue’s production is the third for Dirty Barbie. It premiered at the Lee Street Theater in Salisbury, NC, in March. In April it played at the Earl Hamner Theater in Afton, near Charlottesville. And, according to Stewart, it follows the form in which it originated, as stories from her childhood which she first wrote for her online blog, Dee Dee’s Living Will.

Dirty Barbie and other girlhood tales continues at The Venue, 631 W. 35th St., tonight and Saturday at 8 and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $15. Make your reservations at 757-469-0337.

Meanwhile, the Norfolk Summer Play Fest’s third production, Wanderlust, by Brad McMurran and Jeremiah Albers, opens at 8 tonight, June 17, for two weekends at the Generic Theater down under Chrysler Hall in Norfolk. For details, click here. Then check back on this page tomorrow for a review.

At The Venue at 35th...

A Dark Portrait of Marilyn Monroe

Opens Norfolk Summer Play Fest

The first Norfolk Summer Season Play Fest, an ambitious schedule of new plays, opened Memorial Day weekend with Best Always, Marilyn Monroe, a somewhat disturbing drama by Virginia Beach resident Kathleen McBlair.

This nearly one-woman play—a single actor occasionally appears as both of Marilyn’s two ex-husbands—takes us behind the glamorous facade of America’s foremost sex symbol to reveal a woman tormented by a serious bi-polar disorder.

Addicted to pills, alcohol, and terminal insecurity, McBlair’s Marilyn is almost a total victim of her own stardom. The play, therefore, is as much a meditation on the dark side of glamour and fame as it is an imagining of the inner demons tormenting a particular, insecure Hollywood star.

Though there are many funny lines, there were few laughs in the nearly full house on opening night, May 27. The drama is, in some ways, almost too real. It’s my guess that many in the audience were struck with both pity and terror, seeing parts of themselves in Marilyn’s need for continuous applause to give herself worth. After all, we all need applause. Marilyn Monroe just needed it in a very big way.

Still, there are moments when Marilyn is not overwhelmed by her stardom or her insecurities and whips off some pretty sharp observations on the world she inhabits as an archetype, a living icon. More of these in the play would be welcome, reminding us more often that this is a very smart woman who is not fooled by the fools around her.

Two of those fools are her husbands, baseball star Joe Dimaggio and playwright Arthur Miller. Dimaggio is insanely jealous of Marilyn’s sex appeal to just about every other man in the developed world. Miller is overwhelmed by her need for constant attention and reassurance while he’s trying to write weighty scripts about the human condition.

It would have been interesting to know more about the inner workings of both these men’s minds and motivations. For example, both Dimaggio and Miller find self-justification in characterizing Marilyn as the dysfunctional one while we in the audience notice that they have their own serious delusions and blind spots.

But exploring them isn’t playwright McBlair’s concern here. Her concern is Marilyn.

Eventually we realize Marilyn is more at home in her own imagination than she is in the outer world. Her ego is entirely too fragile to navigate through the hazards of other egos bristling with complexes of their own.

Her own imagination is most accessible with the help of pills and alcohol, which are, of course, her downfall. McBlair doesn’t let us see her die, as we know she did in “real life.” She simply exits, drunk and sedated as she throws us the play’s last line, “Today’s the day my daddy’s coming to get me.”

Read that as you will.

Without doubt this is a strong play that could speak to a wide audience because it connects so strongly with our shared collective fantasies of who we Americans are—or wish we were. Those fantasies are shaped by Hollywood. For better or worse, we, like Marilyn, cannot easily distinguish between life as it really is and life as we live it through our movies.

Marilyn Monroe, even today—fifty years after her death—is the reigning goddess of that hugely influential medium, and McBlair’s play captures the high price a girl must pay who is rare enough to arrive where she arrived. The tragedy is that it doesn’t seem to have been her fault. Her fate, yes. But not her fault.

Jennifer Lynn Nott-Martin plays the disintegrating Marilyn with a real spark of authenticity, but the role is daunting—practically a two-hour monologue with layers of psychological complexity—and she could have used more than four weeks’ rehearsal to make it fully her own.

It would be unfair, therefore, to criticize the actress for some of the more awkward mannerisms and transitions in her rambling, drunken monologues. Better to point out that in many places her impersonation is quite credible—she talks like Marilyn (for the most part), she looks sufficiently hot, and, most important, she makes clear her character’s tragic dilemma as an international sex symbol whose longing for normalcy—love, family, peace of mind—eludes her with the force of a damning judgment, turning her mythic American success story into a paranoid nightmare.

Paul Costen is not as successful in his dual portrayal of Dimaggio and Miller, who often merge into the same character in manner and voice. Some of that may have been the writing, and there is some symbolic value in the effect. But the overall impression is that Costen also needed more time to refine his interpretations. He is, however, an imposing male figure on stage, which carries a built-in punch to the point that Marilyn is a victim of male dominance, in her career and in her personal life—all because she is so damn beautiful and sexy.

Males in the audience are justified in squirming.

Aliki Pantas, a recent graduate of Old Dominion University’s drama department and director of many Hurrah Players’ youth productions, makes her debut directing adult material with this ambitious piece. She replaced an ailing Phil Odango after beginning rehearsals as his assistant. It hardly needs stating that she rose to the occasion, though, like the actors, could have used more time to smooth out rough edges, including some halting sound cues.

A running crew, which included Venue producer Patti Wray, efficiently swept through scene changes. And the theater’s expanded lighting system has practically erased the dark spots the stage was previously known for.

The only problem I saw with the play itself was an overwriting of Marilyn’s outbursts of self-loathing, repeating her attacks on self and others in the same words too often for my taste. More attention to her wit and self-humor throughout might relieve that weight while also developing a more fully fascinating character.

Best Always, Marilyn Monroe plays tonight, May 28, and next weekend, June 3 and 4. All shows are at 8 p.m. For reservations, call 469-0337.

The Summer Play Fest will continue at The Venue June 16-19 with Dirty Barbie and other girlhood tales by Denise Stewart, while the Generic Theater will offer Wanderlust, by Brad McMurran and Jeremiah Albers, June 17-26.

Further Play Fest productions at The Venue and the Generic are scheduled throughout the summer, joined by Little Theater of Norfolk in mid-July with two staged readings of plays in pre-production development.

Check the theaters’ websites for more details, which this column will report as they happen.

A New Series of Compelling Plays

Agnes of God Opens at The Venue

If you ask me to describe in one word what The Venue at 35th’s current production of Agnes of God is like, that word would be “intense.”

The John Pielmeier play, billed as “a supernatural thriller,” had its Broadway debut in 1982, and there are some dated passages in its compelling dramatic script. But they hardly distract from the journey of the three female characters, whose initial cool composure at their first meeting quickly escalates into heated strife, as each struggles in increasing desperation to protect herself from revealing the soul-shattering truths about herself which each conceals without full self-awareness.

In fact, if there is anything redeeming about their journey, it is that self-awareness, however bitterly contested, is ultimately cleansing, preferable to preserving an illusory ego identity to cover a frightened, isolated, deeply wounded self held together by threads and patches. Over the course of the two-and-a half-hour drama, as if drawn into a three-way mirror, each sees her own reflection in the images of the others and is forced to endure the relentless peeling away of the defenses which protect a number of closely guarded personal secrets.

Especially highlighted—giving the play, if anything, more relevance than ever—is the haunting, underlying spiritual ambiguity of modern life, where our longing to believe in magic and miracle or, indeed, a loving God is undermined by the materialism of physical science and technology.

Kudos, then, to playwright Pielmeier, but Agnes of God could hardly fly without three actors willing and able to ride together on the emotional roller coaster the script demands. Fortunately, Phil Odango, who directs The Venue production, has assembled those actors in this, the first in a new series of “compelling plays celebrating the human experience,” which he plans to bring to the café’s tiny stage in the months ahead.

The story, apparently based on an actual case which unfolded in upstate New York in the 1970s, focuses on Sister Agnes, a 21-year-old novice in a Roman Catholic convent who has been indicted for killing her newborn infant daughter, found in a waste basket in Agnes’ room, strangled with her umbilical cord. The court has appointed a psychiatrist, Dr. Martha Livingstone, to evaluate whether Agnes might be considered insane. Serving as Agnes’ advocate, before the court and with Dr. Livingstone, is Mother Superior Miriam Ruth, who is most anxious to control the evaluation so that Agnes may be exonerated of any crime and returned to her supervision in the convent.

At the outset, Dr. Livingstone seems to be a detached, competent professional. Mother Miriam Ruth comes across as a control-oriented, somewhat condescending example of moral certitude who is only concerned with what is best for Agnes. Agnes herself projects a beatific innocence, denying any knowledge of a child as she takes refuge in a cloying love for God.

All three, of course, are posing yet don’t seem to know it, which makes their disintegration so compelling. Mother Miriam Ruth and Dr. Livingstone soon enter into an obsessive battle to define Agnes according to their own needs—the atheistic woman of science against the pious woman of faith—while, for her part, Agnes clings to her innocence as if her very life depends upon it, which, in many ways, it does.

M. Elizabeth Dickerson turns in quite a strong performance as Dr. Livingstone, the psychiatrist who descends from cool detachment to complete emotional involvement in her personal need to prove herself right by dragging out of Agnes the truth of her child’s conception, birth, and death.

Diane Sokolowich as Sister Agnes is equally up to her task, presenting an Agnes whose emotional states reel unpredictably, yet credibly, from benign sweetness to hysterical outbursts of rage and hate.

Jeanne Elizabeth Pivirotto holds her Mother Miriam Ruth together well, with many impressive moments. But I would have liked to have seen a more controlled modulation of her moods, rather than her reliance on in-your-face outbursts at every challenge from Dickerson’s Dr. Livingstone.

That said, and without giving away too much for those unfamiliar with the plot, these three women play out this powerful drama with great integrity and truth, each round of interaction with each other digging ever-deeper in an outright war between rationality and faith with no real answers ever provided. In the end, all we really know is that, for better and for worse, each of the women is unmasked—to herself and to each other—and there are no winners. One wonders if healing may follow after such emotional carnage, but all the playwright gives us about that is a hint.

Director Odango makes the most of The Venue’s small stage so the actors never seem to crowd each other. Additional lighting equipment, which arrived the morning of the show’s opening, are a welcome addition to the theater’s hardware. Costumes and makeup by Gabby Nelson are convincing and, in the case of the nuns, appropriately sexless, as opposed to the doctor’s more worldly look.

For those who crave emotional and psychological complexity in the theater they attend, this Agnes of God is well worth seeing. But, though it is scheduled for nine shows, the run is compact—from opening night, Wednesday, Jan. 18, through Saturday, Jan. 22 and from Tuesday, Jan. 25 through Saturday, Jan. 29. All shows are at 8 p.m. Ticket prices for this one have been raised from the usual Venue fare—$20 general admission, $15 for seniors, students, and military. But the product is high quality.

The Venue at 35th is located at 631 35th St. in Norfolk. For information and reservations, call 469-0337.

Shorts for All Seasons

Six Babies in an Incubator

An evening of six short plays by local authors—limited in theory to ten minutes each—came to the stage of The Venue on 35th Street, Norfolk, for two weekends, Nov. 12-20. The overall result was as entertaining as it was diverse, with a bit of values education tossed in.

The plays were written by members of the Virginia Playwrights Forum, a homegrown entity which, after several incarnations over many years, is now in residence at The Venue. Area playwrights schedule readings of their work by experienced local actors, receive audience feedback, and, if group consensus is favorable, are invited to advance their plays through further readings which hopefully will lead to full productions.

Such was the case for six authors in Shorts for All Seasons: America Revisited, adroitly directed by Denise Dillard.

Among the plays were four by longtime Playwright Forum regulars P.A. Wray, Jean Klein, Harriet Schley, and John F.X. Delaney. Two are by relatively new contributors Shari Graber and Bonnie Cluver. Each in its own way features contemporary Americans coping with age-old challenges, threats, annoyances, and temptations. 

Jay Graber as
Alexis de Tocqueville



Actor Jay Graber served as a master-of-ceremonies of sorts, portraying Alex de Tocqueville, nineteenth-century French author of the classic Democracy in America. In a conceit that may have been unnecessary to the production’s quality, De Tocqueville, under orders from God, returns from the afterlife in 2010 to compare and contrast his original estimates of America with what we are seeing in the evening’s plays. His brief comments before and after each play, thanks to actor Graber’s personable antics, provided a desirable breathing space but did not add as much weight to the whole as you might expect from as savvy an observer as  the original De Tocqueville.

As for the plays, some make their points more artfully than others, but everyone in the audience could find something to smile about and enjoy some solid performances as well.

In fact it was the impressive quality of the acting which fulfilled the evening. Each of the eight actors played prominent roles with skill and gusto.

Doing the heaviest lifting were Elizabeth Dickerson, Matt Gilbert, and Jennifer Marshall, who turned in memorable portrayals of quite different characters in three of the plays. Percy Johnson, Brittney Harris, and Candy Dennis were prominent in two, and Bill Armstrong in one.

Dennis, stepping in during the last week to substitute for another actress sidelined by injury, carried her script with her. But, as we’ve come to expect from this long-time local star, she played her parts with full vigor. Armstrong, meanwhile, popped buttons in his comical turn in the spot light.

The most common theme the playwrights explored, in very different ways, was dysfunction in human relationships.

In Shari Graber’s “An American Tragedy” Dennis played Mame, an abused wife with an irrepressible spirit, in contrast to Jennifer Marshall as Maggie, her neighbor, depressed because her husband is indifferent to her. Indeed, Percy Johnson’s indifference as Maggie’s husband Marty was nearly somnambulistic, in contrast to Matt Gilbert’s manic Jack, Mame’s archetypal male stud caught in an extravagant syndrome of violence and forgiveness fueled by alcohol.

“An American Tragedy,” of course, is comic farce, a bit on the dark side. Well-written and often witty, it says that relations between the sexes is way over-rated, which we in the audience can see but the characters on stage cannot. It’s full of laughs but, for the most part, when you think about it—which the author urges us to do—it’s not really funny. That may or may not recommend it, depending on your taste.

Jean Klein’s “Priming the Pump” reaches a bit beyond totally unsatisfactory personal relationships to bring in the crass consciousness present in contemporary tabloid TV.

Here, Elizabeth Dickerson turned in an impressive performance as Grace, the apparently abused guest in the show “Fight for Your Life.” Unrecognizable in a wig and thick glasses, she alternately wailed and seethed over her husband’s intolerable violations on her body and soul.

Egging her on was Bill Armstrong as show host Bert Solomon, whose aim is to extract from Grace the slimiest acts of outrage imaginable, whether they really happened or not.

How it ends should be left as a surprise. It’s probably enough to say that this is an uncharacteristically dark and bitter piece from a playwright whose previous work has been more cautious. Is it an aberration? Or a preview of things to come in more extended formats?

Bonnie Culver’s “Cell” comments on the multitudes who carry on their relationships by cell phone. What sort of relationships are they?

The focus is on two sisters who haggle long-distance over selling their deceased mother’s house. Dennis played Sheila, the older, overbearing sister, and Jennifer Marshall was Lisa, the irresponsible sister more involved in pop culture than in family responsibility. Together the actresses created a hilarious, contrasting dynamic between the prim, controlling, easily agitated Sheila and the casual, bored, and resentful Lisa, who seems to live on junk food snacks.

Between the sisters’ phone conversations, supporting characters appear in a series of walk-throughs. Eddie, played by Percy Johnson, couldn’t keep the women in his phone book straight as one by one they all hung up on him, including his wife. Brittney Harris played an anonymous young woman addicted to text messaging. A nameless couple, played by Gilbert and Dickerson, strolled through arm in arm, each talking to a third party on their cells. It was all quite amusing.

Yet it’s not clear that the sisters’ bickering conversations have a whole lot to do with the rest of the ensemble activity. Playwright Culver may have two plays here, each one ripe for further and separate development.

“A Taxing Experience,” by Harriet Schley, takes up the plight of two women who might have gotten along well enough had they met at a laundromat instead of across a tax preparer’s desk on April 15.

Lu-Lu, played by Brittney Harris, needs a refund that night to avoid homelessness, but, as Helen, played by Elizabeth Dickerson, discovers, she doesn’t have all her W-2 forms. If Helen helps Lu-Lu, she could lose her job for filing false information. If she doesn’t, Lu-Lu could lose her house and have to go live with her sister. The heat is on Helen. What should she do?

The performers give the script all it asks for and more, but the argument goes on too long, which causes the action to sag a bit before it ends.

In P.A. Wray’s “A Slippery Slope,” two students in a Christian school, Beth and Davey, happen to have chosen the same subject—a species of albatross—for a research report. But their reports are very different, especially regarding albatross sexuality. Mayhem ensues, which Miss Johnson, their teacher, can’t control.

The Shorts cast soared with this play on closing night. Brittney Harris as Beth pulled out all stops in her hysterical insistence that Davey’s report could not be true. In contrast, Matt Gilbert’s Davey hardly ever raised his voice as he produced the scientific facts in a manner both modest and whiny. Elizabeth Dickerson believably fell apart as Mrs. Johnson, trying to referee the argument between scientific fact and fundamentalist dogma—her duty as a teacher versus the faith which employed her.

The play is a very funny gadfly on the butt of the religious right. Though it, too, tends to repeat some of its arguments, there is enough action to keep it moving across some very salient ground without actually digging up any bodies. The play might offend some people, but it’s likely to entertain many more.

Rounding out the evening, then, was John F.X. Delaney’s amusing morality tale, “The Lottery Winner.”

Horton Leon Bascomb, out of work and out of luck, uses his wits to escape temptation offered by a very sexy but very dangerous lady. Matt Gilbert is Horton, the lady is Jennifer Marshall, and both do a fine job landing Delaney’s arrows in the bull’s eye we can see him aiming for. In a duel between unending wealth and spiritual health, which side would you be on? Which would you choose?

Tuning into Shorts for All Season, like much that goes on at The Venue, was a bit for me like entering an incubator. I knew that some of what I was going to see would be rough-edged and maybe even amateur. But I also knew that things would be born there, sparks would be lit.

I was not disappointed.

Revisiting The China Syndrome...

and remembering Three-Mile Island

A few days ago Jala, my partner, brought home a DVD of the film The China Syndrome, which she found in a local thrift store. She thought—correctly, as it turned out—that it would be both entertaining and enlightening for us to revisit it after so many years.

For those who don’t remember, The China Syndrome is the fictional tale of a Los Angeles TV news reporter and her cameraman (Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas), who, while on assignment at a nuclear power plant for a soft news story on the wonders of a cutting-edge technology, happen to witness an accident which the plant owners, in collusion with the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), then go to extreme lengths to cover up in order to protect profits rather than admit the likelihood of construction flaws which would require them to shut the plant down for a detailed (and expensive) inspection.

If not for the persistence of the news team and the heroic intervention of the plant’s control-room supervisor (Jack Lemmon), who is willing to blow the whistle, the plant’s reactor core would undoubtedly have melted down and exploded, creating a wasteland over an area, in the movie’s most famous line, “the size of Pennsylvania.”

The China Syndrome was released into theaters on March 16, 1979. On March 28, the world’s first major nuclear power-plant accident occurred in a near-meltdown of the core of one of the two reactors at Three-Mile Island in the Susquehanna River just south of Harrisburg, PA. So stunningly synchronistic with this accident was the movie’s release that some people—my uncle, a retired Episcopalian bishop, among them—believed with no little conviction that Jane Fonda (“Hanoi Jane,” the Vietnam War-era “traitor”) may have somehow engineered the accident as a publicity stunt for the movie!

In any case, Jala and I watched the movie again last night, a nightcap, so to speak, on our Fourth of July, and were struck at how relevant it remains today as a comment on another energy-industry giant whose profit-driven, hubric hindquarters are now exposed in public for all the world to see. I refer, of course, to Big Oil, represented by British Petroleum and its tragic blunder in the Gulf of Mexico—a demonic gift to the world that just keeps on giving.

Near its end The China Syndrome descends into Hollywood spectacle and melodrama. But before it does that it presents us with a long and chilling look at the cozy, interlocking embrace enjoyed among rubber-stamping government agencies and officials, corporate plutocrats, and media-executive puppets. In 1979 this was practically revolutionary material, and though it was up for many awards, including Oscars for Fonda and Lemmon, in the end The China Syndrome was too hot for universal recognition as the prophetic piece it really was.

Yet I’ve read that it grossed the 38th highest box office that year, in no small part because of the accident at TMI, with which it will be inseparably joined for as long as we preserve real history.

Now, in 2010, as the truth oozes out of every new crack in the public-relations wall corporations and government have cemented around their incestuous secrets, The China Syndrome clearly stands the test of time. I’d call it a classic—good entertainment, strong message—and urge any who can find access to it to watch it, whether for the first time or for nostalgia’s sake.

It was remastered and first released as a DVD in 2001 (our thrift-store version), but a later, higher-quality version appeared in 2005. On the website DVD Verdict (www.dvdverdict.com/printer/chinasyndromese.php) retired Judge Steve Evans, in a highly favorable review of the 2005 version, says, “It’s still astonishing to recall that this film about a malfunctioning nuclear power plant opened less than two weeks before a major accident” at Three Mile Island. “Here is the juncture where art uncannily imitates life, as characters in The China Syndrome advocate some of the same safety procedures that federal regulators would later introduce. (...) No intelligent person can doubt the overpowering influence of greed on business decisions, whether those decisions stem from Enron, Worldcom or the owners of a fictitious nuclear plant in California.”

If he were writing that review today, Judge Evans would no doubt include BP in his short list of most-corrupt corporations.

But why is it this way? 1979 was 31 years ago, and today, in the shadow of this BP disaster, government, relying apparently on the public’s short memory span, is preparing to enable a new generation of nuclear power plants under the pretense that advances in technology since TMI assure that such a thing can never happen again.

Don’t believe it! Read Dr. Helen Caldicott’s incisive book, Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer (The New Press, 2006) or Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005). The only difference between the nuclear industry today and the nuclear industry in 1979—accurately reflected in The China Syndrome and witnessed by the world in the industry’s public bobbing and weaving after the TMI accident—is 31 years.

And that leaves us with oil, which is inundating our American southeastern Gulf coast in a mass wipe-out of life down to its most essential, single-celled building-blocks. How far it will spread and how many of us it will impact is an open question. But one thing seems certain. This should be big oil’s TMI. If we don’t enforce it as such, we are a hopeless lot of dunces who do not deserve to graduate from kindergarten.

The China Syndrome reminds us of where we’ve been and, unfortunately, where we would not have had to go since, if only we'd listened—dare I say it?—to our artists!

Rest in peace, Jack Lemmon! Long life to you, Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas!

Love Songs for the Road

Reflections on a Staged Reading

Writing is a lonely profession, all the more so if an author doesn’t attract an audience of readers or viewers. As purist and romantic as it may seem, writing to please oneself has its limitations.

But more often than not the road to getting published or produced is a bumpy, gravelly, uphill climb, full of nasty ruts and cul-de-sacs. It’s only natural for writers to seek out one another in mutual support as they bring their verbal offspring into the first glaring light of public scrutiny.

That’s the general idea behind the Virginia Playwrights’ Forum, the foster child of Norfolk’s Generic Theater until this year when it struck out into independent existence at The Venue on 35th Street. There, included in a busy schedule of various performance events, a group of local playwrights meets once a month to listen to readings of one another’s work and to guide the best of it toward a coveted full production.

Midway between that first “cold reading” (usually by local actors who may not have seen the script before) and the nervous excitement of a fully mounted opening-night performance, a play passes through one or more public trial-runs known as “staged readings.”

At their best, staged readings are respectable performances, rehearsed and directed with basic elements of set, props, costumes, and effects of light and sound established. Audiences attending a professionally produced staged reading soon become absorbed in the illusion of the play, quickly forgetting that the actors are holding scripts.

After the reading, audience members are invited to critique the play, following a respectful protocol developed in Playwrights’ Forum meetings. What worked for the audience? What didn’t? Here’s where the rubber meets the road for a playwright. If all goes well, there’s a green light for a full production ahead, which the Forum will promote, if not at The Venue then through other connections.

But if the critique is too mixed or—heaven forbid—negative, it’s back to the word processor for one deflated playwright. Some playwrights do not survive the process and never write another play again.

For the most part, Love Songs for the Road, a “work-in-progress” by P.A. Wray, was enthusiastically received when it was tested before an audience in a staged reading at The Venue on Sept. 18 and 19. After several readings over the past few years, Wray, co-owner of The Venue and co-manager of the Playwrights’ Forum, should be pleased.

Still, the general audience consensus at the reading’s opening night performance suggested that she still has a bit more work to do.

The story, lifted from her own family history, concerns the ugliness which erupts in a family when Ellie, a widowed mother of seven and grandmother of 15, meets Jim, a long-distance truck driver 22 years her junior who applies one day to rent a room in her house and eventually becomes her lover.

But, as the saying goes, the course of true love never runs smooth. Jim, a simple, direct personality, wants to marry Ellie. But she fears this is “unrealistic” because of their age difference. She wants to keep the truth of their relationship a secret—from the neighbors, from her children—and, despite Jim’s objections, her insecurities prevail.

Her eldest son, Martin, however, becomes suspicious of his mother’s relationship and for a time dominates his siblings with the view that Jim is a low-life con artist bent on swindling their mother out of her “assets,” which he, a problem gambler in chronic debt, has a particularly keen interest in keeping in the family.

The plot comes to a head when Ellie, now in her 70s, is hospitalized with a broken hip. Martin, having appointed himself her power-of-attorney by forging her signature on the requisite legal documents, takes control of her affairs, banning Jim from the house and all further contact with Ellie. Powerless and despairing, Jim takes to the road in a marathon of trucking jobs. Ellie, confined to a wheelchair in a hopeless and increasingly unresponsive state, fades away with nothing but her memories while her children, essentially, wait, with varying eagerness, for her to die.

To reveal more would be a disservice to the playwright, though it should be said she doesn’t allow an audience to leave the theater depressed. In a post-play discussion, in fact, most audience members seemed touched by this unconventional love story with its convincing characters and authentic portrayal of the self-serving dynamics common in many—perhaps most—families. This universality at the heart of the play is undoubtedly its enduring strength. That it’s based on a true story only adds to the charm.

Still, some in the audience identified problems with the script, primarily in a tendency, as one viewer put it, to “clean up all the loose ends, more like a book rather than a play.” This is especially apparent in the denouement, where, once the primary conflict of Jim and Ellie’s enforced separation is resolved, the play does not end quickly and neatly, as it might, but goes on for several more pages as characters take turns narrating how the details of the resolution fall into place. Several earlier scenes are similarly overloaded by Wray’s need to explain her plot’s real-world logistics.

In other rough edges, scheming son Martin, as written, seems a bit too transparent as the stereotypical bad guy, while Ellie herself, particularly in the early stages of her relationship with Jim, displays a somewhat insufferable authority as the all-knowing mother with the correct opinion on everything, making us wonder what Jim’s attraction to her as a woman is based on.

And, as some audience members noted, the play should be trimmed. I wondered, in fact, if it might better stand on its own as a single act of ninety minutes or less.

The actors, of course, were above reproach, serving the play at this point more as conduits than artistic egos subject to critical scrutiny. Nevertheless, Jane Dewberry and Fran Peterson, reading Ellie and Jim as they have in three previous readings, have begun to own these roles. Providing able support were Dave Hobbs as Martin, Cliff Hoffman as younger brother Stu, and Steffani Dambruch as sister Carol.

Garney Johnson gave a plausible reading of Jim as a young man, matched by Robin Martineau as a younger Ellie. Fran Peterson directed, making such use of The Venue’s small performance area that, even with seven actors, it never seemed crowded.

Meanwhile, the playwright is left to reflect on the comments she’s received and decide which she will accept and which reject. Eventually, we may expect, another revision of Love Songs from the Road will appear, perhaps in a full production at a theater near you.