This argument doesn’t take 90 minutes to make, so the play is padded with a tediously predictable section in which the governor of Virginia intimidates a local museum into not showing Mann’s work. Much more pertinent is the famous 1972 photograph of nine-year-old Kim Phuc, running naked, burned by napalm. And then there’s the mother whose children were put into foster care after nude photos of them were reported by a drugstore print service to the police. Context is all.
At the end, the stage is bracketed by borders of grasses and wildflowers, with a tree in the background. Mann’s children didn’t object to being photographed at the time — no surprise — and, we’re told, they haven’t complained since. Some Things Are Private takes Sally Mann’s Edenic intention at face value and challenges the theatergoer, along with Kramer, to prove otherwise.
Related:
Both sides now, Manufactured landscapes, Different strokes, More 
- Both sides now
The actors were shown a number of photographs by Sally Mann and asked to decide which of them they found the most beautiful and which the most disturbing.
- Manufactured landscapes
Depending on our mood, most of us seek out albums that coddle our hopes, fears, and concerns; failing that, we want escapism, foreign environments that either take us where we want to be or startle us with the thrill of the new.
- Different strokes
Some say the movie impulse comes from voyeurism, but I think a case could be made for sado-masochism, especially after watching some of the selections in this year’s Boston Underground Film Festival.
- Road to ruin
In contemporary art, Three Gorges Dam on China’s Yangtze River is a 1.3-mile-wide symbol for humanity’s hubris.
- Surreally real life
Why is Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House a brutally funny comedy? Beats me.
- Play by Play: April 24, 2009
Theater around town
- Dan Deacon and Jimmy Joe Roche: Ultimate Reality
Kind of like one long Rorschach test, Ultimate Reality is a collaboration between experimental music producer Dan Deacon and visual artist Jimmy Joe Roche.
- Epochalypse soon
The end times do indeed commence on December 21, 2012. On that date, this fragile blue orb of ours will suddenly cease to be a very fun place to live.
- His last year at Marienbad
Alain Resnais, perhaps as a dig at his screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet, sometimes tells a joke about their notorious 1961 movie.
- Origin of species
When in 1976 Jennifer Bartlett premiered her epic painting Rhapsody, John Russell, the chief art critic of the New York Times, proclaimed it “the most ambitious single work of art that has come my way since I started to live in New York." “Jennifer Bartlett: Early Plate Work” at Addison Gallery of American Art ”50 Photographers of Tomorrow” at Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University
- Creation’s silent roar
Nicole Duennebier’s painting reaches into a primordial deep-sea darkness to pull out luminescent patterns dotting undulating shapes.
- Less
Topics:
Theater
, Hermann Rorschach, Sally Mann, Deborah Salem Smith, More
, Hermann Rorschach, Sally Mann, Deborah Salem Smith, Laura Kepley, Less
