SALLY CRAGIN

Permanent

SALLY CRAGIN — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:01:25 GMT

Body modification as art at the Peabody Essex Museum
As Massachusetts’s puritanical Blue Laws started to fade in the late 1990s, the kids on Comm Ave rejoiced.

Thirteen ways of looking at ink: Reflections on a lifetime of personal connections with tattoos. By Sally Cragin

As Massachusetts’s puritanical Blue Laws started to fade in the late 1990s, the kids on Comm Ave rejoiced. Suddenly, youthful rebellion in the Bay State had a host of new accessories, from legal exotic pets to shiny little doodads embedded in a flap of skin. A few years later, when a ban on the most ancient form of anti-establishment expression got lifted at last, no hipster’s pelt was complete without a bold new tattoo.

The Maori of New Zealand would probably find this impulse exceedingly shallow, and possibly immature. Their tattoo tradition, moko (monochromatic spiral-inspired face and body tattoos) is a sign of cultural solidarity and individual expression, and occurs only after much soul-searching and consultation with a tohunga ta moko, an expert tattoo artist. Moko gets a spectacular showing in a new exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum. “Body Politics: Maori Tattoo Today” includes 30 images by photographer Hans Neleman, extracted from his 1999 book Moko-Maori Tattoo. The exhibition will also feature artifacts from the museum collection that relate thematically to moko, and a short film narrated by Maori community leader Tame Wairere Iti, which includes footage of Iti receiving moko on his shoulder.

“Body Politics” was sparked by curator Karen Kramer Russell’s own personal interest in tattoos (she’d gotten one at age 16 in Amsterdam). When Kramer Russell came across Neleman’s book, she realized that moko was a thematic fit with the Peabody Essex’s collections and tradition. Since 1799, the Peabody Essex collection has been built from treasures and curios gathered from remote locales by maritime merchants who wanted to show the hometown investors what their money was purchasing. When you consider how many sailors came home with tattoos after visiting the Pacific regions, moko can be seen as just another kind of souvenir.

“There are a number of reasons why people have tattoos,” explains Kramer Russell. “It’s a great way for group identity and cohesion, and in the 19th century, when sailors were going around the world and encountering new people and places, they were being inspired by what they saw. Moko artists will make sure that the moko design complements body features. And moko design is planned over time — that’s always been the case and still holds true today. For a Maori person to decide to ‘receive moko,’ (that’s their phraseology, they ‘take it on’), it takes on a life of their own. They think about this for a long time — why they’re going to have moko. It’s discussed within their family.”

Beane town

SALLY CRAGIN — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 22:01:00 GMT

Speakeasy walks The Little Dog Laughed
The dish runs away with the show, not just the spoon, in Douglas Carter Beane’s Tony-nominated 2006 The Little Dog Laughed .

The dish runs away with the show, not just the spoon, in Douglas Carter Beane’s Tony-nominated 2006 The Little Dog Laughed. SpeakEasy Stage Company presents the regional debut of this juicy comedy about a film actor, Mitchell, who falls in love with a hustler, Alex. Mitchell’s hyper agent, Diane, gets wind of the romance, as does Alex’s wanna-be girlfriend, Ellen. Of course, there’s no possibility that Mitchell is coming out — not if Diane has anything to say about it. The play, which opens next Friday, is a sly send-up of show-biz hypocrisy — terrain the fortysomething Beane previously mined in As Bees in Honey Drown.

Speaking from his apartment in New York, Beane explains that the original inspiration for the play came from “reading the daily blogs of hustlers. I was fascinated with how mundane they were and how full of dreams, hoping to meet the right guy and all.” He realized a hustler character had to have a john with a lot at stake. “The original character of Mitchell was a politician, and then he became a movie star, and then I started to write the Diane character. She sort of . . . took over.

“I knew in New York when we cast Julie White, her style of performance was going to eat this play, and I was up for that.” Beane laughs, as well he might, since White won a Tony for her role. As for Mitchell, he’s a composite of various celebrities Beane has encountered in his career. The very famous, he says, “have something that is very attractive — they’re blank slates. Mitchell is someone who’s coasted all his life, who finally says, ‘I get to be a person’ — or a facsimile of a person. So he’s a fun character because he’s figuring out things for the first time. This also makes him less premeditated. He’s lovable — that would be a good first love for Alex.”

Beane adds that there’s a tremendous difference between performing on film and on stage, and his choice to make Mitchell a film star was deliberate. “For theater, you have to be more intelligent, because there’s technique involved, but someone just off the street can be a fabulous screen actor.”

Acting teacher

SALLY CRAGIN — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 16:44:42 GMT

Nilaja Sun’s journey from tough schools to art
Here’s what happens when teaching artist Nilaja Sun takes on a typical 10th-grade class in the South Bronx.

Nilaja Sun

Here’s what happens when teaching artist Nilaja Sun takes on a typical 10th-grade class in the South Bronx. “Many of my kids — when I first meet them — have a poor diet, and I work with them early in the morning. They’ve had Lord knows how much sugar in their bodies, and then they have to go through a metal detector, so they’re already in a bad mood. These hormonal teenage kids have been forced to be adults very early, so you’re working with teenagers who feel like adults whose childhood has been taken away from them.”

These kids, their teachers and administrators, and even their custodian are among the 16 characters in Sun’s 2007 Obie-winning solo play No Child . . . The piece was commissioned by Epic Theatre Ensemble, which sends teaching artists into the New York schools. Sun thought she’d perform it for a month. But after it debuted at the Beckett Theatre in 2006, she spent nearly a year reprising the acclaimed tour de force at Off Broadway’s Barrow Street Theatre. Now the show, which also won Lucille Lortel, Theatre World, and Outer Critics Circle awards, is on a tour that brings it to American Repertory Theatre this Friday

For the past nine years, Sun has worked with kids in the New York City Public Education system. Her classes range from 20 to 36 kids, and activities include producing original shows that put as many as 120 kids on stage. The characters in her theater piece, she explains, “are distillations and amalgamations of kids and teachers I’ve worked with. There’s Mrs. Kennedy, the principal of the school for 17 years. Miss Pam, a newer teacher, who used to work in investment and decided to work in the city schools. We have the janitor, the narrator who’s seen the South Bronx morph into what it is today. Then you have all the students: the diva of the classroom, the leader, the sci-fi kind of kid, the child with a speech challenge. They’re all in 10th grade, 16 to 18 years old.”

From Sun’s vantage, the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind mandate has had mixed results. “I think it’s important for teachers to be accountable and schools to be accountable. That’s an idea that’s close to my heart, and it [the Bush mandate] is also the stepchild of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which was a great idea. But like many ideas, it’s great in the beginning. And then it’s challenging to figure it out.”

Razor’s edge

SALLY CRAGIN — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 20:28:32 GMT

Judy Kaye on reuniting with Sweeney Todd’s Demon Barber
According to the Tony-winning actor, there’s always more to discover about the Demon Barber’s culinary accomplice.

Judy Kaye with Demon Barber David Hess

When Judy Kaye steps onto the stage of the Colonial Theatre in British director John Doyle’s Tony-winning revival of Stephen Sondheim & Hugh Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, it will be her fifth incarnation of the not-so-lovable Mrs. Lovett. But according to the Tony-winning actor, there’s always more to discover about the Demon Barber’s culinary accomplice.

“I love playing a role over and over again and seeing how I’ve grown up,” says Kaye. “It’s amazing what happens quite spontaneously — you think you’ve explored everything and then there’s a whole other layer. It can happen on a day when you’re not feeling well, but you ‘put on the drag,’ as they say, and then a light bulb goes on.”

Doyle’s Sweeney Todd, which kicks off its national tour in Boston, represents a stylistic departure from the original 1979 musical about the Victorian-era barber who turns personal heartbreak into a throat-slitting rampage. That one featured dozens of performers and a full pit orchestra. Here there are just 10 people on stage, and the actors double as the instrumentalists (with Kaye on tuba, orchestral bells, and percussion). The show captured numerous 2005 awards including Tonys for Best Revival of a Musical and Best Direction. Kaye took over the role of Mrs. Lovett from Patti LuPone, who received a Tony nomination. But it’s a long way from her previous experience as the bawdy baker of human meat pies.

“It’s much more intimate — we compress it,” says Kaye of the new production. “I had to get used to its being a chamber orchestra. For example, Johanna’s theme and the ballads were sung by the chorus, and now it’s just one voice instead of 10 voices, so you can hear the lyrics.”

Doyle’s idea emerged out of financial necessity. His production debuted in a 261-seat theater before traveling to the West End, Broadway, and beyond. For Kaye, the stripped-down orchestration is providing a different vantage on the piece. “I’m hearing for the first time symbolic touches that embellish the work.”

But what drew her back to Mrs. Lovett? “I love Sondheim. And I’d love to be able to say I call the shots on this, but it’s whatever comes down the pike. When they asked me to step in for Patti LuPone, it scared me but also told me in my bones to do it. I think I was put on the planet to do musical theater.”

Arabian nights

SALLY CRAGIN — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 16:16:37 GMT

Roosen's monologues considers sex beneath the veil
Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues was frank — nay, explicit — in its exploration of women’s sexuality.

Oya Campelle and Nazmiye Oral

The Veiled Monologues | Zero Arrow Theatre, Mass + Arrow St, Cambridge | October 16-21 | $15-$59 | 617.547.8300

Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues was frank — nay, explicit — in its exploration of women’s sexuality. But Dutch writer/director/performer Adelheid Roosen noticed something missing from the text. “When I played in it, I thought, ‘Why does this not include the Arabian part of the world?’ ”

She’s speaking by phone from New York, where her own 2001 show The Veiled Monologues is getting its American premiere, at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, before coming to Cambridge this Tuesday, under the auspices of the American Repertory Theatre. Although her piece was inspired by Ensler’s work, it’s a continuation of material Roosen (who will be directing but not performing in the English-language production) has been exploring for years. She had completed a theater narrative titled Five on Your Eyes that drew on her interviews with Moroccan women, daughters of the first migrants to Holland. “These women had one leg in the society of the parents when they are at home. They go to the mosque, pray, and take very good care of their virginity. But the other leg is in the Dutch culture, which is more liberal and open and individual.” She found when she visited her Muslim friends that they “have to keep up with both societies. They don’t want to isolate their parents, so they have the two-culture thing in their hearts and a loyalty to both sides.”

To construct The Veiled Monologues, Roosen interviewed women with Muslim backgrounds in Iran, Iraq, Mali, Turkey, Kurdistan, Syria, and Somalia. “What touched my heart very much was that they were young, beautiful, and spiritual young ladies, and they were in huge pain. And here this environment is looking at people and saying, ‘You belong to my group,’ or, ‘You don’t belong to my group.’ Those children are wanting to experience life, and they come into the loyalty problem. And everyone is keeping up appearances.

“Every time I went to a Muslim home in Holland, I went as a tourist in my own country. When I went to do the interviews, I’m in a street I’ve never been in and in a house I’ve never been, and here’s this beautiful woman, and she’s giving me her food and her stories, and it’s a beautiful exchange.”

Channeling Hitchcock

SALLY CRAGIN — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 19:40:18 GMT

The 39 Steps Lead from the Huntington to Broadway
The classic British hero is cool, collected, witty, slightly bored, well-mannered, and possessed of lightning-fast reflexes when needed.

Charles Edwards in the British production of The 39 Steps

The classic British hero is cool, collected, witty, slightly bored, well-mannered, and possessed of lightning-fast reflexes when needed. “We have a whole line of heroes — Bulldog Drummond and James Bond,” explains British actor and director Maria Aitken, who’s helming the new adaptation of the Alfred Hitchcock film The 39 Steps that’s set for Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company and then Broadway.

In the 1935 Hitchcock film, the steadfast, firm-jawed ex-serviceman is Richard Hanney, who’s played by the elegant Robert Donat. But this The 39 Steps is a comic adaptation of the film (and the 1915 John Buchan novel on which it was based) by English actor/writer Patrick Barlow. After opening at London’s Tricycle Theatre last year, the play scored the 2007 Olivier Award for Best New Comedy and transferred to the West End, where it’s booked through 2008.

In addition to mixing some Monty Python into its Hitchcock, Barlow’s play is a stripped-down affair, utilizing just four actors in more than 100 roles. Only hero Hanney is spared the multiple casting; he’ll be played by British actor Charles Edwards, who reprises his role in the British production. And, yes, the complicated and improbable journey taken by Hanney (after a woman is murdered in his room, he flees cross-country) is faithfully rendered on stage, with effects both high- and low-tech. “We have three different kinds of smoke,” notes Aitken.

Hitchcock’s 18th film and breakthrough project, The 39 Steps boasts all the elements that came to define his classic style: the icy blonde, the mad dashes on and off public transportation, the double-dealing spies, the droll and understated punch lines. Aitken and her casts have seen the movie dozens of times. “It’s surprisingly funny when you see it again — you realize it’s a comedy thriller, and some of our best lines are Hitchcock’s.”

Aitken also points out that “Hitchcock transformed the original 1915 book by putting a woman in the film — he felt that was a grave omission.” At the Huntington, all three female roles are played by Jennifer Ferrin. “It’s marvelous to find an American girl who can slide effortlessly into these three types,” says the director. Madeleine Carroll plays the “icy blonde” role in the film; here, says Aitken, the part is “more Garbo-esque.”

Would you like Mozart with that?

SALLY CRAGIN — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 15:33:14 GMT

Don Juan Giovanni and Figaro fuse theater and opera
Tracy Chapman sang about revolution that “sounds like a whisper,” but at the American Repertory Theatre the French Revolution will be broadcast loud and clear.

Police force

SALLY CRAGIN — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 18:52:49 GMT

Many little things they did were magic
Along came the Police, packing cold, steely hits with flashes of heat.

Back in the late ’70s, when "disco sucked" (even when sometimes it didn't) and punk emerged, yowling from fanciful regions of Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren's mind, you knew there had to be a "dressed-up" version of the new tunesmithing. Along came the Police, packing cold, steely hits with flashes of heat. Our introduction to them, Outlandos d'Amour, featured a Warholian cover portrait. High-contrast shadowing of their haughty expressions belied radio-friendly soulfulness. For the record, the first time I heard "Roxanne," it came newly minted on the overnight show on WBCN.1 I was a year away from deciding it might be fun to be a rock critic, but I remember my fingers freezing over the keyboard on that second mournful "RawcksssssssssAnne."

Here was that rare creation: a new version of the "almighty yawp." Stewart's sly drum roll and the skippity-beat of Andy's strum actually echoed the mournful refrain. At that point, we'd all heard "I Yam the Anteee-KRISTA," from Johnny Rotten, and in my dorm, certain kids from Nooyawk had records by the Ramones, but the Police were mystifying. Adults with teenage yearning who looked like teenagers who looked like trouble.

How could one resist? The sound, anyway. Though I never went to see them or even reviewed their records, I also never turned off the radio when one of their gleaming numbers came on. Their songs were instantly recognizable: a little ska, a nod to reggae, always catchy, and expressing slightly sinister emotions.2

The Police were about skinny ties and a sneer. Not particularly sexual, mostly because Sting's exuberant egotism negates any mystery.3 Maybe they were electrifying live in a small club (and they did play the Rat in Kenmore Square waybackwhen). But there were much more addictive bands on the local scene. Boston had an amazing trio with a unique sound. Mission of Burma took risks and had a skittering ear-splitting edge to everything they did. Bands in Boston would be hurt if you praised their commercial potential — and other bands would resent them for it. What was this wondrous place in LondonEnglandEurope where being successful and creating a catchy non-peppy sound was okay? 4

Pass the jelly

SALLY CRAGIN — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 20:38:25 GMT

John Kuntz toasts Mr. Marmalade
It came about “because I knew a girl who wanted to wear a tutu on stage.”

Rachael Hunt and John Kuntz

Mr. Marmalade | Company One at Boston Center for the Arts Plaza, 539 Tremont St, Boston | July 13–August 11 | $25-$30; $18-$25 seniors; $15-$18 students | 617.933.8600 or www.bostontheatrescene.com

Boston actor/playwright/clown John Kuntz first encountered Mr. Marmalade, Noah Haidle’s
breakthrough 2004 comedy, in the pages of American Theatre magazine. “I just loved it right away,” he laughs. “There’s this little girl and Mr. Marmalade [her imaginary friend], who’s addicted to coke and pornography, and there’s this little love triangle with this boy she likes named Larry. It was funny and disturbing and right up my alley.”

At the time, Kuntz was a Huntington Theatre Company Playwriting Fellow. He raved about the play to his colleagues. “I said, ‘Have you read this? It’s great.’ And then a couple of years later, they produced [Haidle’s] Persephone, so it seems like I’m singlehandedly responsible.” He sold the author; now he gets to play the part.

Company One takes on Haidle’s improbable and provocative Mr. Marmalade beginning this Friday, with Kuntz in the title role. The premise is whimsical: Lucy — age four, but played by an adult (Rachael Hunt) in a tutu — has encounters with her imaginary friend Mr. Marmalade and with, among other characters, a pair of potted plants (also played by actors). “It’s interesting playing a character who is a figment of someone’s imagination,” muses Kuntz. “Everything I think and say, she’s conjured up. And I love how theatrical the play is — it’s not one of those plays that can turn into a film or TV show, it really belongs on the stage.”

The now 28-year-old Haidle explains that Mr. Marmalade was his first project as a graduate student in playwriting at Juilliard. It came about “because I knew a girl who wanted to wear a tutu on stage,” he says over the phone from New York. “If the play works, people forget that they’re watching a 20-year-old play a four-year-old. I like having an audience work a little harder.”

Haidle welcomes input during the rehearsal period, and he’ll adapt a character to fit an actor’s talents or quirks: “Part of the joy of being a living playwright is working with the choreography of a production.” He adds that one friend’s way of pronouncing the word “jalapeño” influenced a moment in the play.

Plus-size love

SALLY CRAGIN — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 16:11:22 GMT

SpeakEasy embraces Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig
For a playwright and filmmaker known for pinpointing every possible human folly, Neil LaBute is candid about his reputation as a master mocksmith of bad behavior.

Neil LaBute

For a playwright and filmmaker known for pinpointing every possible human folly, Neil LaBute is candid about his reputation as a master mocksmith of bad behavior. “My job really is to cause trouble — to create conflict,” he explains when I reach him by phone. “I look for ways to mess up whatever scenario there is. If they’re off on a picnic, I’m bringing in the rain; I’m bringing in the hungry homeless. If it seems like a perfectly good marriage . . . , wait till Neil arrives.”

Next Friday, SpeakEasy Stage Company will open the Boston premiere of LaBute's 2004 play Fat Pig; it’ll be directed by Paul Melone, who also helmed the troupe’s previous LaBute effort, The Shape of Things. In the canon of LaBute’s work, which includes the film In the Company of Men and the plays bash and The Mercy Seat, Fat Pig is gentler than you might expect. It explores the burgeoning relationship between Tom and Helen, nice regular folks for the most part. But Helen is described in the script as “a plus size,” and Tom’s romance sparks derision from his office mates, who weigh in (yes) with their disapproval of his adipose amour.

New York critics noted the warmth between Tom and Helen, and LaBute himself reckons that Fat Pig falls outside his usual realm of disintegrating relationships. “It was fun for me and interesting to write about something that’s starting. Usually, it [the relationship in my work] has existed for a while and I’m about to make it wither. It was different watching the courtship and the beginnings of the relationship.”

Helen is cheerful and quick to joke about her size. Her candor appeals to Tom, and LaBute finds her commendable too. But she’s adamant that Tom be honest about his willingness to accept her as she is, and Tom’s conviction begins to waver. “There’s a certain bravery in his confessing his cowardice. Most people don’t realize that they’re serial killers or that they want to run for president. They find out smaller truths — like ‘I’m not as nice or kind or brave as I’d want to be.’ ” Eventually, Tom succumbs to peer pressure. “While I applaud him for being truthful, I say, ‘Damn, that’s too bad, because I think you guys could have been very happy together.’ ”

Still queen

SALLY CRAGIN — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 19:38:38 GMT

Dinah Washington evoked at MRT
Rare is the biographical theater piece that seems to create a new genre of theater.

Laiona Michelle

Rare is the biographical theater piece that seems to create a new genre of theater. But such a one is on view at Merrimack Repertory Theatre (through March 11). DinahWas, Oliver Goldstick's tightly scripted, Obie-winning musical revue/narrative about the life of Dinah Washington, is ingenious and engaging and turns out to be about much more than the singer’s life.

Dinah Was would be entertaining even if all it did were to present singer/actor Laiona Michelle crooning Washington’s signature hits, which include “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” and “Come Rain or Come Shine.” But it does much more. Goldstick has taken vignettes from Washington’s life and interwoven them with her jazz and blues standards. And the writing and the characterizations are so skillful that the script moves easily forward and backward through time. (Merrimack's projected titles pinpointing year and locale also help.)

The play begins with Washington’s arrival at Las Vegas’s Sahara Hotel in November of 1959 to perform a show she hopes will be her breakthrough gig as a crossover artist. But it’s a long walk to the stage when the singer discovers that there’s no room at the inn for people of color. Instead, a fleet of trailers awaits in the parking lot. What’s an acolyte of Billie Holiday to do? Stage a lobby sit-in while still in her underwear (a tightly structured black slip). “The Queen of the Blues prefers indoor plumbing,” she tells the officious manager before launching into the mournful ballad “Bad Luck” (by Washington and Juanita Hall).

The two-act play goes on to offer a bone-chilling look at the institutional racism of the day, which is cunningly countered by Washington’s white record-company boss, Sam Greenblatt (W.T. Martin). But more enthralling than the social picture is the character of Washington herself. She’s a pistol — impatient, headstrong, ambitious. In the scenes with her mother, Mama Jones (played with vicious righteousness by Nadiyah S. Dorsey), you see exactly why she is as she is. Mama is quick to judge her talented daughter, finding fault with everything from her name change (from Ruth Jones) to her fashionable fur coat. “I can’t be walking on stage like I just walked out of the cotton fields of Tuscaloosa, Alabama,” Dinah tries to explain. “So now you ashamed of where you from,” Mama retorts.

Nun sense

SALLY CRAGIN — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 23:26:49 GMT

Cherry Jones has no doubt about Doubt
Theatergoers who attended American Repertory Theatre in the 1980s saw an exquisitely versatile actor, Cherry Jones.

Women’s war

SALLY CRAGIN — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 14:56:58 GMT

9 Parts of Desire probes the Iraqi female psyche
Most of the world has an outside-in perspective on Iraq, but the Lyric Stage Company is presenting an insider’s view in Iraqi-American writer/performer Heather Raffo’s 9 Parts of Desire .

Lanna Joffrey

Most of the world has an outside-in perspective on Iraq, but the Lyric Stage Company is presenting an insider’s view in Iraqi-American writer/performer Heather Raffo’s 9 Parts of Desire. Súgán Theatre Company artistic director Carmel O’Reilly helms the regional premiere of the one-woman show, in which Lanna Joffrey portrays nine separate Iraqi women.

“These are the voices of women who are never heard,” O’Reilly explains. “The piece covers a woman in her 70s to a young girl to a woman of 38. These are unique voices, but they speak to all of us because each woman is talking about all the same things — family and children and values and love.”

The performer of 9 Parts changes character by adjusting her abaya, the traditional black Iraqi robe, and the different voices “are very beautiful,” O’Reilly adds. “It’s written in a way that you sense there’s a kind of song.”

Playwright Raffo is currently dividing her performance time between two productions (in Washington and in LA). She grew up in Michigan a first-generation Iraqi-American but still has family in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East. She views the play as a work in progress. “I only do rewrites when I feel like the Iraqi psyche has taken a shift, not for every bombing.” And having one performer embody nine different characters was a way to underscore the “sense of civil war.”

Raffo is a journalist as well as a performer, and she spent 11 years conducting interviews with Iraqi women. She explains that the first Gulf War, the subsequent sanctions, and a second war made her “need” to write a play. “As an actor, I was always looking for plays to do, and I didn’t know I had a writing gene in me. It came out because I had so much to say — not because I thought I could say it. It was burning inside me.” The stories that are revealed in the play range from that of an artist whose paintings of Saddam hung in museums to women who have lost their entire family to coalition bombing raids.

Her play isn’t the only one to be inspired by the war, but she sees it as the first to get across a different perspective. “The other plays out there are deeply political in tone, but they’re Western in their point of view. They don’t address the Iraqi psyche from the inside.”

High philately

SALLY CRAGIN — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 14:16:18 GMT

Mauritius enters the weird world of stamps
“When I started working on this play, a lot of people came out of the woodwork and said, ‘I used to collect stamps,’ ” explains writer Theresa Rebeck over the phone from Los Angeles.

Mauritius

“When I started working on this play, a lot of people came out of the woodwork and said, ‘I used to collect stamps,’ ” explains writer Theresa Rebeck over the phone from Los Angeles. “And there was something freaky behind their eyes.” She pauses for a half-beat. “That I really liked. That collector’s hunger.”

Next Friday the Huntington Theatre Company premieres Mauritius , Rebeck’s new play about a pair of half-sisters who inherit a collection that includes the one- and two-penny post-office stamps issued from the South African island Mauritius, stamps that have sold for millions of dollars. “Collector’s hunger” is a big motivator for the other three characters in Mauritius , who may be genuine philatelists or just working a long con.

Director Rebecca Bayla Taichman (who will direct Rebeck’s The Scene in New York later this fall) says of the playwright (also a successful writer for film and TV) that “her plays have a violence and rawness, and if you push them to the edge of where they can go, the humor crackles.”

Rebeck herself still sounds bemused by the world of high-level philately, a terrain in which “tiny slips of paper have wondrous and bizarre meaning attached to them.” Once she started researching stamp collecting, “I found these two stamps quite magical, and then I became a bit of a wacko, nerd-like in my fascination in this world.”

“People have weird, sensual relationships with the object,” explains Obie-winning actor Marin Ireland, who plays Jackie, the sister eager to get the collection appraised. “Jackie starts the play in a place of desperation and has her survival instinct kick in, and then she goes to a more intense place. Theresa’s stuff is so rich for actors because there’s so much emotional landscape to explore — it’s thrilling and exhilarating.”

Rebeck has been on her own joyride with the work and had “no idea what would happen. I usually don’t write with such an open template. I usually like to have some idea of where I’m headed.” There were numerous drafts and workshops, and the play was read last spring as part of the Huntington’s Breaking Ground festival. She continued to work. “There was a lot of thinking and rethinking of the structure of the play. It’s still slightly incoherent to me.”

On the record

SALLY CRAGIN — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 14:38:32 GMT

High Fidelity to hit Boston before Broadway
The days when Boston was the chief tryout town for Broadway-bound musicals are long past.

Will Chase

The days when Boston was the chief tryout town for Broadway-bound musicals are long past. But our collection of record stores and record collectors makes us the perfect fit for the first needle drop onHigh Fidelity , a new musical based on Nick Hornby’s 1995 comic novel about the life and loves of an obsessive record collector (which also became a popular 2000 film). It opens at the Colonial Theatre on Tuesday and runs for four weeks before moving to Broadway in November.

The project began five years ago, when composer/conductor/musician Tom Kitt told lyricist friend Amanda Green (daughter of Broadway legend Adolph) that he was interested in turning the Hornby book into a musical. “I thought it was a brilliant idea because we’re both huge fans,” says Green when I speak to her and Kitt by phone. The pair found out who had the rights, bought them, and then, Green adds, “started writing songs on spec and having workshops.”

Before long, the producers who had mounted the 2004 Tony-winning musical Avenue Q had signed on and gotten director Walter Bobbie (a Tony winner for Chicago ) on board. “The first time I heard Amanda and Tom’s songs, I was so excited because it had never occurred to me that this book could be a musical,” says producer Robyn Goodman. “We thought this would be a tremendous challenge because most of the book is an interior monologue.”

As luck would have it, up-and-coming playwright (and Southie native) David Lindsay-Abaire, whose Rabbit Hole s nagged a Tony nomination last year, was at a workshop with Goodman. “He was sitting behind me, and he said, ‘I have to work on this musical — I love the book and I know how to do it.’ ”

All the same, obsessive, lovelorn Rob, who treats true love Laura so badly, has to seem an unlikely hero for a Broadway musical. But Kitt and Green saw humor and humanity, and they also realized, Kitt says, that “as a male/female team we can relate things to what Rob and Laura do.” Even when those realizations seemed, well, too outré for the project. Green laughs, “We wrote a song, ‘I Slept with Someone Who Slept with Lyle Lovett,’ and I said, ‘NO, this is too gross.’ But Tom laughed and said that’s what guys think: ‘Hey, maybe I can meet him and he can send some sloppy seconds my way.’ ”

Wilson’s legacy

SALLY CRAGIN — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 21:22:30 GMT

The Huntington tunes in Radio Golf
He is missed. And he is mourned. Although playwright August Wilson, who passed away last October, will no longer be in his customary spot in the Huntington Theatre Company rehearsal hall, his presence pervades the preparation of Radio Golf .

James A. Williams (Roosevelt), Hassan El-Amin (Harmond), and Michole Briana White (Mame Wilks) in the Huntington production

He is missed. And he is mourned. Although playwright August Wilson, who passed away last October, will no longer be in his customary spot in the Huntington Theatre Company rehearsal hall, his presence pervades the preparation of Radio Golf. This final installment in his 10-play cycle chronicling the lives of African Americans in the 20th century premiered at Yale last May, has had several subsequent productions, and now becomes the first Wilson work to go up at the Huntington without him. Set in 1997, Radio Golf focuses on the upwardly mobile black middle class, a segment of the population Wilson had not previously put on stage.

Principal characters are mayoral candidate Harmond Wilks, his publicist wife, Mame, and his golf-mad banker friend Roosevelt Hicks. Wilks and Hicks are scheming to renovate the Hill District in downtown Pittsburgh, an effort that requires the demolition of the house at 1839 Wylie — which happens to be the spiritual center of the Wilson cycle and the setting for his penultimate play, Gem of the Ocean. When the ownership of this magical house comes into question, dramatic forces are unleashed and larger questions emerge.

“How do you move forward with your future without tearing down your past?” asks director Kenny Leon, who has directed nine of Wilson’s plays including the Tony-nominated Gem of the Ocean at the Huntington and on Broadway. “We have this mentality in this country to tear down and build up, and we don’t think about the cultural traditions that we tear down.”

John Earl Jelks has appeared in numerous Wilson plays and portrayed Citizen Barlow in Gem in Boston and on Broadway. In Radio Golf, his Sterling is a forthright opponent of the planned development, a high-rise that will destroy a historic neighborhood. “Sterling isn’t driven by money,” Jelks explains. “August Wilson wrote what they call another version of the Bible. You have Genesis and you have Revelation. And this is our revelation.”

Wilson here remains a canny analyst of human behavior. His aspiring developers appear to offer progress and a sensible party line. “You got to have rule of law,” says Wilks. “Otherwise it would be chaos. Nobody wants to live in chaos.” But the playwright’s 1839 Wylie partisans have a valid case as well. “He wrote from the voices he knew, but at the same time it was universal,” says Jelks. And the fate of 1839 Wylie is a crucial piece of Wilson’s African-American story. “We have to embrace our past and move forward,” says Leon.

Bedeviled disciple

SALLY CRAGIN — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 18:52:17 GMT

Company One puts Judas on trial
The Last Days of Judas Iscariot is an extended serio-comic courtroom saga that the title character spends much of curled up in a fetal position

Free fisticuffs

SALLY CRAGIN — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 21:41:10 GMT

Shrew to be tamed on Boston Common
After last year’s Hamlet , Commonwealth Shakespeare Company artistic director Steven Maler decided he wanted a play “with life and character and vitality to it — an upbeat type of spirit” for this year’s offering of free Shakespeare on Boston Common.

Jennifer Dundas

After last year’s Hamlet, Commonwealth Shakespeare Company artistic director Steven Maler decided he wanted a play “with life and character and vitality to it — an upbeat type of spirit” for this year’s offering of free Shakespeare on Boston Common. And the Bard’s knockout newlywed battle, The Taming of the Shrew, offered a challenge in terms of sexual politics. “I wanted to see how it would work and how it would resonate in a contemporary context.” Maler adds that he’s found Petruchio’s journey more difficult to comprehend than Kate’s. “How do you make him an appealing character given the process he goes through with her?”

One thing you obviously need is likable yet strong-willed principals; CSC has Newton native Jennifer Dundas and Darren Pettie. An Obie-winning theater, film, and TV actor whose career began at the American Repertory Theatre, Dundas finds Shrew a sweet homecoming. “For me, being home and on Boston Common, where I spent time as a kid, is familiar stomping grounds, so I have a certain comfort level.”

She hasn’t played Kate before and was “surprised by how much sense she makes. She’s a complete sympathetic character from my point of view.” Maler concurs: “She’s a woman on the verge. And she’s destined to a life alone if she doesn’t find a way to adjust herself to accommodate another person.”

Dundas suggests that in Petruchio Kate has “met her match because nobody else has the stamina or the dynamism.” And she’s relishing the opportunity to stretch, especially after playing a variety of “proper and demure” roles, mostly due to her petite size. “When I did Laura in The Glass Menagerie [at the Kennedy Center in 2004, opposite Sally Field], people said, ‘Ah — you’re perfect. You’re born to play that part.’ A lot of directors aren’t capable of seeing what I can do, and Steve can.”

No argument from Maler” “She’s fierce — an absolute delight to work with.” He also believes that the pairing of Dundas and Pettie is “a stroke of luck — he’s a Juilliard-trained actor with this extraordinary classical training and he brings such texture and humanity and humor to the part — also a wonderful sense of self-mockery, which is really important to Petruchio.”

Then there was the always-important question of era. Maler had an unusual inspiration: the Mamma Maria restaurant in the North End. “I wanted a world where women’s power was recognized and acknowledged. We all know the Italian mom really runs the roost. Whether the men think they do or not is immaterial. So that became the world for me. This play is meant to be a love letter to Boston and the North End, and it really is terrific fun, particularly since the Italians just won the World Cup.”

Bard or beard?

SALLY CRAGIN — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 22:17:15 GMT

Shakespeare steps on the Publick stage
This season the Publick Theatre will be doing Shakespeare in the park with a twist.

Drama loading

SALLY CRAGIN — Tue, 16 May 2006 21:45:48 GMT

Preparing for the Boston Theater Marathon
No sooner has the final runner staggered past the Prudential than it’s time to gear up for another long-distance event: the Boston Theater Marathon, which takes place this Sunday, May 21.

Kate Snodgrass

No sooner has the final runner staggered past the Prudential than it’s time to gear up for another long-distance event: the Boston Theater Marathon, which takes place this Sunday, May 21. Now in its eighth outing, this festival of 10-minute plays features work by 51 dramatists produced by 50 New England theater companies, with every state but Vermont represented. The vignettes come from novice sprinters as well as endurance champs Israel Horovitz, Robert Brustein, and Ed Bullins.

At the starting line stands original Marathon artistic director Kate Snodgrass, who laughs lightly when asked whether it gets any easier, then replies, “Not yet,” and adds that even in its early years producing the Marathon was a substantial undertaking. “We started with 40 theater companies and gained confidence, and that increased to 50.” This year’s new participants include Alarm Clock Theatre, City Stage Company, Hovey Players, Turtle Lane Playhouse, Metro Stage Company, 3 Monkeys Theatrical Productions, and Image Theatre Company. And Merrimack Repertory Theatre returns after a long absence.

One veteran Marathon actor, Richard Snee, makes his playwriting debut with Black Irish, which will be presented by New Repertory Theatre. An encounter between a human-resources director and a male job applicant, the play, he explains, finds the director telling the man that “she’s pleased he’s the first black woman to run the department, and he spends the play convincing her he’s not black, nor a woman.”

Snee appears in Black Irish alongside his wife, noted actress Paula Plum; both have appeared in previous Marathons. “Several people describe doing the Marathon as being shot out of a cannon,” he says. “Bang, you’re there, and 10 minutes later, you’re done.”

But it takes months to get there. This season brought 300 entries to be read by a retinue of judges including Snodgrass, who reads everything. Some writers are exempted from the audition process, among them Horovitz, Brustein, Bullins, and, this year, Kirsten Greenidge.

The 2006 roster offers a backyard sinkhole, a zombie in the basement, and a 10-minute opera. But Snodgrass finds that some years offer inadvertent hemes. “One year, there were several plays about trees, or characters on top of a cliff — obvious kinds of exercises that might have been assigned in a class.” Plays that rely on elaborate sets or that “move back and forth in time and space or have too much of a set,” she adds, usually don’t make the cut. “A 10-minute play is really a beautiful little haiku. It should have one movement, one change, and then it’s over. It’s like a poem, and you want to have one thing to say and say it as succinctly as possible.”