Murray Ross

Moments to Remember

On the last night of The Lost Boys I sat next to a gentleman who had seen many of our shows in the distant past. He reminded me of a play we did about 30 years ago, The Nerd, and of how funny it was.  He said he and his son have never laughed so hard, and they still talk about the moment when the nerd (the hilarious Leonard Riley) emerged from the bathoom, trailing a long strip of toilet paper in his shoe.  I too can recall this moment vividly, always with a laugh, and it occurs to me that long after a show has been swept away there are still moments that remain in the heart and the mind's eye, even decades later. 

So thinking back over this last year at THEATREWORKS, what moments, what images abide from this year's season?  Here is my list, show by show.

Boeing Boeing: This was one of the most popular shows in our history, but thinking back no specific moment jumps into my mind--instead I recall lots of pleasant sensations, indeed a continuous wash of pleasant sensations without one surmounting another.  But when I close my eyes, what do I see?  All right, I confess: it's the girls. All three of them, Air Italia, Lufthanasa, and TWA.  They were sensational to look at, especially in the beautifully tailored air hostess outfits Jan Avramov put them in. No wonder that Lothario Bernard could not give any of them up. Who can blame him? No man, I say, no real man!

The Inspector General: There's a lot to remember from the stylish and energetic student production, but there is only one image that is firmly imprinted above all: the final tableau when the entire compnay froze into mannequins of astonishment after learning the real inspector has just arrived. Our production followed the famous direction of Meyerhold by sustaining this freeze for 90 seconds, a very long time in the theatre, almost as long as a sixties foreign film.  Long enough for the audience to wonder, laugh, squirm a little nervously, and feel almost as trapped as the characters themselves. Great stuff.

The Seagull:  This beautiful play is composed like a painting, full of resonant pictoral moments: Nina in the moonlight, as the earth spirit in Konstantin's play; three women on a bench on a hot summer's day; a dead seagull dropped at a girlfriend's feet.  But for me the image that stays most in the mind occurred in the last act, on the Russian estate, with the wind howling outside.  Nina has come in from the rain, and she hears the laughing voice of the lover who adandoned her in next door. And immediately she flies, she flies like a small bird, to the door, pressing herself against it to hear everything.  Jamie Ann Romero was so lovely, so delicate in her mouse gray travelling dress, and with her hands and face pressed against the door, saying nothing in the darkness with light gleaming under the door in the next room, she spoke volumes.  She was a seagull.  One of the most beautiful moments ever on our stage.

The Merchant of Venice: Another play studded with vivid verbal and visual imagery.  I'm tempted to say most memorable were the signs I posted full of biblical proscriptions against usury, since they were the source of some unusually vehement protest.  But inside the tent you can hardly forget Shylock, and especially the entire trial scene, wonderfully and forcefully acted by the whole company, led by Christopher Lowell and Jane Noseworthy.  It's one of Shakespeare's most lucid and thrilling set pieces; it makes the audience completely reverse their opinions about nearly everything. But the moment from this production I most treasure was the very last one.  The lovers are dancing to a hot Charleston in Belmont,and Launcelot Gobbo is spewing out money from a money blower all over the stage.  The tent is raining money, the joint is jumping, everyone is so happy excepting the lonely Antonio, alone on stage as someone nearly always is at the end of a Shakespeare comedy, and then Jessica sees on stage her father's yarmulke---she stops dancing, she picks it up, and looks at it.  Blackout.

Church.  There's a lot to remember about this play, but most of it was what happened afterwards--it was easily the most controversial show in our history.  And that's rather surprising when you consider it consisted mostly of four earnest if slightly odd ministers preaching the Word of God, and telling stories. And yet I venture to say that everyone who saw it will remember the final  image that the entire play was pointing towards: the arrival, one by one,  of a full gospel choir singing "Ain't Got Time to Die."  The music was powerful,and even more powerful than the music was the feeling of joy and faith written on the faces and hearts of the choir members. You just can't beat that.

Women of Will. Tina Packer is a force of nature, and when powered by Shakespeare she is titanic, as she demonstrated over and over in her one woman show dedicated to Shakespeare's women.  But the image that abides with me comes not from her potent performance, but from her workshop with our theatre students, and particularly one instance where she took in hand a young man who was rather timidly mouthing a few lines from Hamlet. In the space of five minutes she coaxed him, lead him, mauled him, and beat him--using his body like her putty to remold, like her drum to beat, and suddenly this mousy young actor was speaking Shakespeare from the center of a new being.  Astonishing.

The Lost Boys. Another show studded with images bursting from Roy Ballard's remarkable set, which in effect converted our entire stage into a vet's nursing home.  I won't soon forget the flying scene on scooters and trapezes, or Tinker Bell almost dying, or the parade of boys, pirates and redskins, or Hook swimming to his ship, or little Wendy and Peter shaking hands as they say goodbye in Neverland, or Pan flying on his wheelies, Peter standing heroically on the rock, or an old man staring into an aquarium, or the fight on the lagoon with trays and toilet plunger.  But my favorite, I confess, was the dance the lost boys did with Peter and Wendy on their last night on the island:  "Such a deliciously creepy dance it was, in which they pretended to be frightened of their own shadows."  Our wonderful old lost boys will never make it to the finals of  Dancing with the Stars, but that's just that show's loss. They put a spell on us with charm, gusto and semi-precision timing.  You had to love Melvin Grier shaking his booty (in rehearsal I asked him if could dance, and he said, "I'm black, of course I can dance!"--and he could).  You had to love Peter and Wendy's rock star entrance, he with his aviator glasses, and she flipping like a flying fish over his shoulders.  Speaking as a lost boys myself, I loved it, and was ready to jump up and join them.

 

So that's my list.  It was  kind of a tough year all round in many ways--but rich on our stage.  If you have other moments from 2011 you remember and want to share, please do!

 

Happy New Year to one and all!

 

 

 

 

The Costumer's last bow

While she's been a regular at our theater for 36 years, she was surprised to be called to the stage after the final performance of The Seagull on Sunday. 

 

For more than three decades Betty has begun working on our shows as early as anyone, and she has probably logged more production hours than anyone else on our staff. Her name has never been up in lights. Her work is back of backstage.  And yet there is no one who has more consistently raised the bar of our artistic quality. Betty Ross, as some of you know, has been our resident costume designer for the entire history of THEATREWORKS. And also my better half.

Some of you may think a costumer is the person who sits behind a sewing machine and makes dresses from old curtains so the show can go on.  That would be right--and wrong.  At our theatre, a modest theatre, our costumers do sit behind sewing machines for many hours.  They also are budget conscious, so those old curtains might very well become the dowager's dress.  But to stop there would be to radically underestimate the qualities required. 

A long time ago, in Santa Barbara, an Australian psychic gave Betty a reading, telling her many things she would like to have been told (strange how this happens), including an encouragement to push ahead with her painting.  In fact the psychic was right to tell her so, but in the process he allowed as how for Betty, costumes were nothing, for her making costumes was as easy as falling off a log.  Had I been present I would have leaped at his throat.  And while thrashing the wits out of him, I would have said, "Do you have any idea of how hard costume design is?  Do you know how long it takes to imagine and then create a good costume? Do realize that a costume designer must understand a play, have a feeling for character, be grounded in art and social history, have an artist's sensibility, a rich understanding of fabric and materials, possess the resourcefulness of a great scavanger, the ability to dance with whimsical,fuzzy minded directors, the capacity for working long hours, patiently forebearing actors who deliberately put on weight, who regularly tear their trousers,and who come with feet never meant for shoes?  Do you realize costume designers have to assemble teams of slave volunteers who toil endlessly and happily in sweatshop conditions? Compared to that, great oracle with the ponderous jaw, painting is easy--anyone can throw paint at a canvas. But to be a great costumer you have to have a degree in history and literature from Harvard, you have to have spent time curating at museums, collecting graduate degrees in theatre and in art history at Berkeley, you have to have spent a lifetime of looking hard at everything, and that's just for starters!  It's costuming that's hard, O clueless psycho-babbler!"

It's fortunate for everyone that I was not present at this reading  (the psychic also told Betty to beware of me; he called me too analytical, a "scapel brain"--- little did he know he might have been dealing with a psychopath).

I haven't finished my rant.  The costume designer for the theater, for our theater, is also the least publically recognized figure of our artistic team.  People sometimes applaud when the curtain goes up, looking at the set (and they would sometimes at our theatre too, if we had a curtain). Actors take their bows nightly to beating hands. Directors bask and accept congratulations.  Costumers remain largely anonymous.  So it was a fine thing when Betty Ross finally arrived on stage Sunday afternoon for the first and only time in her long life in the theater,to take a final bow after 26 years of amazing work that has produced over 1,000 great costumes.  The cast was there, wearing a few of  her clothes(she went out with a big Chekhovian bang--not a gunshot but a firework, a blaze of glory). Nancy Shanley and our advisory board was there, with flowers and gifts. And I'm happy to say that when Betty did finally get out on stage she got the standing ovation she richly deserved, including one from her not always uxorious husband.

 
 
To the psychic, I say: you had one clue--Betty should be painting, and she has been and she will be. To the many people who have sat and sewn and spun with Betty for so many years in the costume shop  (Kristin, Jan, Jean, Liya ,Barbara, Lauren, Colin, and many more), I send my highest regards and appreciation. And to Betty, speaking as Artistic Director of THEATREWORKS, I'd just say,"Thanks, doll---you're the greatest."

 
 

 

 

 

 

Two Bird Pictures

Here's the famous photograph of the first reading of The Seagull at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898:

 

From left to right,seated, the characters are: Polina, Dorn, Shamrayev, Trigorin (Stanislavski), Chekhov, Masha, Medvendenko, Nina, Konstantin (Meyerhold).  Standing, left to right, are Nemirovich-Danchenko (Director), Sorin, Arkadina (Knipper),and two members of ther company not in the production.

Here is our 2011 version:

 
 

From left to right,seated:  Polina (Barbara Summerville),  Dorn (Tom Paradise), Shamrayev (Bernie Klucewski), Trigorin (Matt Mueller), Chekhov stunt double, Masha (Kate Berry),  Medvendko (Dylan Mosely), Nina (Jamie Ann Romero), Konstantin (Ben Bonenfant).; standing,left to right: Sorin (Louis Schaefer), Arkadina (Jane Fromme), Cook (Craig Engle), Yakhov (Steve Wallace), Maid (carol Sinon).

The original Seagull is of the top three time theatre travel destinations of all time (the other two are Hamlet in London in 1600 and The Oresteia in Athens in 458 BCE).  The Moscow Art Theatre Production of 1898 was beyond compare.  But a very strong version of this great play, with this great cast, plays through Sunday.  You could see it a dozen times and it would still be talking to you.

Bird on the wing

The Seagull closes this week. It's the greatest play we've produced all season, one of the best plays ever written, with one of the best ensemble casts in our long history. Very fine acting! It looks good too, from beginning to end, and it sounds good. I strongly advise anyone who cares about theater to see The Seagull. If you don't think it's a great play, see it again (I'll give second comers a complimentary ticket if we have any available seats: [email protected]).  If you still don't think it's great, then we'll do lunch and I'll convince you over blini and beer.  If you are still not convinced after lunch I will offer you a puff on one of my special medicinal cigarettes.  If that fails, I will just beat you. Then I will blow my brains out since it's clear my entire life mission has been an utter failure.

The Seagull's Last Act

Some notes on watching the fourth act of our Sunday afternoon performance.

It's a very good house, full and generous of spirit. The fourth act begins in darkness, after the house lights go down and Masha is offstage calling for Konstantin.  It's the first many echoes of what has come before -- in the first act Masha goes off calling for Konstantin after he has fled the fiasco of his play.  Masha is calling Konstantin every minute of her life, and he never answers. . . She enters, lights the lamp--there's nothing but darkness and the wind howling in the chimney.  Her husband, Medvedenko says they really should take down the remains of the stage that was built for Konstantin's play--"it's stuck there, bare and repulsive as a skeleton, with the curtain flapping in the wind.  Another echo: in the first act Doctor Dorn asks for the curtain to be opened, because closed it seems a little "spooky." In the semi-darkness our stage, with the light leaking through our vertical boards, looks skeletal, and  a little spooky too . .  There's talk of babies and old people, how they are needy,how they are the same, and this is visually reinforced when Polina and Konstantin come in to make up a bed for the dying Sorin in the study, which looks like a child's bed. . . Everything has changed:  Masha and Medvedenko are married now; they have a child.  Time has passed.  Everything is the same--the married couple are still far apart (as Medvendko says in the first act, "my soul and your soul have no common point of connection").  He is still fussy and anxious; she's still sad and taking snuff. They sound like a married couple. In one minute Chekhov gives a complete relationship.  Masha is determined to rip her unrequited love out of her heart; just as she was two years ago.  The audience laughs when she says,"Once love has dug its way into your heart you just have to gouge it out again," and they laugh again when we hear music from the next room,and Polina says, "That's Kostya playing.  Means he's despressed."  By now the perpetual unhappiness of the characters is a source of comedy--but just then we see Masha silently dancing a few waltz steps with the music, and the deep yearning of her heart is wordless and poignant.  These ten seconds alone explain why actors love Chekhov--why I love Chekhov. Kate Berry is so lovely and gawky here. . . Polina, as usual, offers wholehearted and entirely unproductive sympathy--she's one of those people who are genuinely moved by her loved one's pain, yet ends up always talking about herself: endearing, familiar, annoying, ridiculous, human. .. Medvedenko as usual never gets a horse to ride on, and as usual he is always saying goodbye and never leaving the stage . . .  Sorin and Dorn enter and have a duet, replaying themes of the second act (he still wants to live, and the Doctor, both sympathetic and strangely distant, offers him no comfort at all--the doctor is a strange one, with his insistence on the dispassionate view of death and the existence of a universal soul--the first of the act's echoes of Konstantin's first act play). . . Konstantin enters, sits at Sorin's feet on a stool--like a baby chair-- and tells us Nina's tale of seduction, misery, child's death, and stage debut--all the lurid material Chekhov rarely shows us on stage.. . Noises off, and Arkadina, Trigorin and Shamrayev enter---Jane Fromme in a wonderful dark beaded red outfit, glittering softly by candlelight . . the actress does know how to dress. They're all just the same too, except not, really. The "great actress" is even more desperate to assert her continuing triumphant success (though she's no tour de force--she's forced to tour); and the great writer looks a lot more shallow now---the old man won't shake his hand. . . Masha gets a another good laugh when Trigorin asks if her marriage is happy, and she does nothing at all . .. A game of Lotto is played,  "it's a boring game, but it's not so bad once you get used to it", just like Clue or Monopoly . . then it's time for dinner and the the stage is cleared for the astonishing denoument, the scene with Nina and Konstantin, so beautifully played by Jamie and Ben---I think it's one of the best ten minutes ever seen on our stage. A scene whose beauty and poignancy is also built on echoes--Konstantin talks about his cliched long winded writing--"the strains of the grand piano, dying away in the still, sweet smelling air. "-- an echo of Trigorin, his writing rival, who in act two saw a cloud that looked like a grand piano, and who noted the sickly sweet smell of heliotrope .. Nina caught in the whirlpool of life, fighting to keep her head up, trapped in a short story, fighting to get free, fighting through her fog, her past, the wind howling outside .. every single word she says is wonderful here. . the spell suddenly broken by laughter of her former lover in the next room, she rushes to the door, pressing herself against it to hear, the light between the walls catching her face, the walls and the door like a membrane between her and the lover who lost interest in her; this is one of the most beautiful moments in the history of our theater, and it passes in an instant--the entire scene flickers like a candle between the girl overflowing with feeling and the boy frozen and motionless. . . Nina is speaking of her new life as a real actress, and the richness of watching a real actress (Jamie Ann Romero) play a young woman (Nina)  who tells us she is an actress who sometimes acts badly but then sometimes feels beautiful onstage is kind of unfathomnable . .  then the last of the great echoes, Nina's reprise of lines from Konstantin's play in the first act--lines which then seemed wooden, pretentious, juvenile but which now ring with quiet and poetic authority and truth . . "and in the lime groves, the May beetles are silent."   A pause, a last quick embrace and she's gone into the night,and the rest of the play is pynctuated silence . . the silence of Konstantin's destruction of his manuscript (Chekhov wanted this to go on fortwo minutes; it seems excruciating to  witness it for one on our stage); the laughter of the returning guests . . the meaningless presentation of the stuffed seagull and the sharp startling crack of gunshot. . .  more silence as the doctor goes off to investigate . . and then returns to reassure the room that it was only a bottle of ether bursting in his medical bag . . . then taking Trigorin aside to tell him to get Arkadina out of there because Konstantin Gavrilovich has just shot himself . . the lights fade and the entire room drops for a moment into silence because we are not sure the play is over (as Arakdina has just said, "for a moment, everything went black").  Chekhov deliberately ends the play between notes-- Ibsen would have had the doctor make the announcement, Arkadina would have fainted and the the curtain would fall in a tableau.  Here there is no tableau . . the lotto game is going on . . the news has not been shared . .. and the play simply drops into the void, leaving the audience rather surprised with the lights come up on the cast taking bows. .. I have rarely, if ever, seen an audience so unprepared to applaud at a play's close.

It's just an amazing play.