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| Charlene Baldridge Photo by Kenhoward |
The Weekend: Intimate to Immense–
a Spectrum of Wordiness
Full Gallop with Mercedes Ruehl at Old Globe
Diana Vreeland (1903-1989) was known as “The Empress of Fashion.” As the editor of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, she dictated taste in both fashion and décor for 35 years, making and breaking careers and spending lavishly, before being fired abruptly from Vogue in 1971. She was nearly 70 years old, an age when most women would have retired and gone to live with sons in California. Not Vreeland. She toured Europe for four months, spent lavishly, and returned to plot what next.
Old Globe audiences meet her in Full Gallop,Mark Hampton and Mary Louise Wilson’s one-person show, which premiered at the Globe 20 years ago with Wilson as the indomitable, possibly self-deluded woman.
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| Mercedes Ruehl as Diana Vreeland Photo by Jim Cox |
Directed by Andrew Russell, Mercedes Ruehl plays Vreeland in the lusciously appointed Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre (through October 25). Scenic design by Sean Fanning as seen from a slightly elevated perspective is almost painfully exotic, an orgasm of color.
Ruehl appeared notably in the film The Fisher King, for which she received both Academy and Golden Globe awards. Her Broadway credits include Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers (Tony Award) and Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? among many others.
Ruehl presents a much softer, and therefore more sympathetic, Vreeland than Wilson did. Ruehl also brings out the humor and wisdom in the 95-minute script. It’s not necessary to have been a New Yorker in the era, though there is some rapid name-dropping. If you’re familiar with those famous or infamous people your appreciation may be enhanced. Over the course of numerous cigarettes and many gin and tonics, Vreeland deconstructs herself, her life, her losses and her loves. She also imparts the strong sense that she never doubted herself.
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| Mercedes Ruehl as Diana Vreeland Photo by Jim Cox |
By the end of the play, when she gloriously accepts a new job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we are aware that she doesn’t doubt herself now, either, certainly a message for all over a certain age who find the world has been kicked out from under their feet.
www.theoldglobe.comor 619-23-GLOBE
Playing Catch Up with Orange Julius
Attending Mozart & the Mind last weekend put my schedule into chaotic arrears. Friday night, I played catch-up by attending Moxie Theatre’s Orange Julius, an intimate, complicated and important world premiere by Basil Kreimendahl, directed by Will Davis. It is beautifully acted by Rae K. Hendersen, Jeffrey Jones, Dana Case, Wendy Maples and Steve Froehlich and plays through October 18.
The play is a tone poem that swirls around family relationships, gender identity, wild flights of fancy (in the absence of directness we often create alternative realities) and the Viet Nam War.
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| Jeffrey Jones and Rae Kay Hendersen Photos courtesy of Moxie Theatre |
Hendersen does a superb job as the young protagonist named Nut, who is the daughter of Julius (Jones) a Vietnam vet ultimately rendered walking comatose by Agent Orange. He is dying of cancer. Case is Julius’s wife and Maples is his other daughter. Froehlich portrays Ol’ Boy, a foul-mouthed he-man stereotype in Nut’s war experience fantasy, trying to get Julius evacuated from ‘Nam. Nut participates in these scenes, although her identity here is not certain. Her gender isn’t either. But then, her identity is uncertain everywhere. She is the child left out by circumstance of being different and of being born at the wrong time. She has big secrets to divulge and to learn. Nothing is clearly resolved, and the onlooker must be content with that, merely bathe in the final image and the finite three words.
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| Hendersen and Jones |
One goes home filled with curiosity about the larger issues and indictments, and with compassion for those who are lost in the fallout of war. They fill the headlines every day. Horrifically, just today, Saturday, as I write this, a Doctors Without Borders facility in Afghanistan became “collateral damage.” How I hate that term. It’s as if everyone is expendable when the war machine must be fed.
Kudos to Moxie, as usual, for taking on this gnarly work and for the playwright and director for seeking to create awareness. Victoria Petrovich’s scenic design is immensely helpful in making the transitional leaps for us. Jason Bieber is lighting designer, Emily Jankowski, sound designer, and Jennifer Brawn Gittings, costume designer.
Mo’olelo opens its season with Cell
Apparently, issue-laden plays may have as many styles as they have issues, and despite affecting moments that hew close to human pathos, stellar acting, and spot-on direction, nothing can make them into a cohesive, good piece of theatre. Nothing, that is, but back to the drawing board. To me, on Sunday afternoon at Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company, it seemed that award-winning playwright Cassandra Medley’s Cell needs smoothing and tightening. It shifts in tone and style somewhere during the interval, making act two – cinematic to the nth degree – a different play than act one. Somewhere in the supporting material, I read that Medley had a one-act play for quite some time before adding the second. Perhaps that is why. There was still so much to say that it had to be piled on.
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| Agosto, Sephus, Thompson and Gaffney Photos courtesy of Mo'olelo Performing Arts Company |
Add to their dilemma – all four of them – individual problems, long-standing dysfunctional family dynamic, past personal caretaking failure, present romantic intrigue and a rapacious prison guard – and you have huge complications on top of an already untenable situation, which is the system and abuse within it. When all else fails, call upon the ancestors, and then follow with chaos, confusion, upheaval, a major breakdown, a tardy reconciliation, promises, and curtain.
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| Thompson, Sephus and Agosto |
Esteemed San Diego actor Sylvia M’Lafi Thompson portrays Rene, the alcoholic matriarch. She has just taken in the other two women, her sister Cerise (Monique Gaffney) and Cerise’s daughter, young Gwen (Andréa Agosto), who is trying to find her way in life after some misfortunes concerning a man and job failures. Vimel Sephus portrays the women’s’ supervisor. He has eyes for Gwen, which complicates matters considerably.
I admire Medley for addressing this rampant and serious social issue, so fraught with individual peril on both sides (act one has been produced in New York; this is the world premiere of act two). I also admire Fort’s attempt to tame, clarify and wed the two acts, the drama and the issues. This is her first directorial outing as Mo’olelo’s new artistic director. Her adept casting acumen bodes well for the future.
Cell plays at 8pm Thursday-Saturday and 2pm Sundays through October 18. Most performances afford theatregoers an opportunity to participate in post-performance or pre-show talks. www.moolelo.net or 619-231-4137.
The Immense yet spare, Healing Wars at Playhouse
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| Ted Johnson and Megan Frederick Poto by Jim Carmody |
After this person’s bombardment with words by Mark Hampton and Mary Louise Wilson, Boris Kreimendahl, Oscar Wilde (review appears in October 16 Gay San Diego), and Cassandra Medley, it was heaven to be confronted with Liz Lerman’s spare, multi-media exploration of war and its effects on humanity from the Civil War to the present day. The title of the piece is Healing Wars and it anchors La Jolla Playhouse’s 2014 Without Walls (WoW) Festival (October 9-11). Healing Wars is seen in the Mandell Weiss Forum through October 25. The press opening was October 4.
Director/conceiver Lerman and choreographer Keith Thompson, who regularly dances with her troupe and has his own troupe as well, choreograph the work. Original text sources are curated by Lerman and Bill Pullman with devised text developed in collaboration with the performers.
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| Tamara Hurwitz Pullman Photo by T. Wood |
The credits are the only complicated things you need to know, along with a smattering of world history, heavy on the American Civil War. Just relax, take in all the sensory input and spectacle, and let the message wash over you in ever-increasing awareness of the non-verbal imagery that supports the text. Even though healing of war wounds led to technological advances, war sucks. Heroes abound. The contrast between 1861 and now in an assistive device that allows an amputee to walk tacitly delivers the message. No fakery involved.
Lerman and Thompson, a rough-hewn, stunning looking man whose supple and strong body rivets one’s attention, set Healing Wars on a company of individuals (including Thompson) most of whom are accustomed to working with her. These are not slim and beautiful dancers en pointe; they appear to be flesh and blood people of all ages and body types. They work and breathe as one, delivering single-mindedly and purposefully, aided by commentary provided by a compassionate doctor played by Jeffry Denman. You know, the battlefield medic who can’t save everyone and therefore carries the dead around with him for the rest of his life. Tamara Hurwitz Pullman stands in occasionally for Civil War nurse Clara Barton, and Miko Doi-Smith, a registered nurse, mother and dancer in real life, is an other–worldly, eons-old entity who helps the dying make transition.
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| Hurley and Thompson Photo by Jim Carmody |
I came home grateful for the beauty of spirit that played out before my eyes, grateful to be alive, and filled to the brim with prayers for peace.
Other credits: Scenic and costume design by David Israel Reynoso; lighting by Jen Schriever; sound by Darron L West; media design by Kate Freer.
Healing Wars continues Tuesdays through Sundays through October 25. www.lajollaplayhouse.org or 858-550-1010.
Next week this column will address new music by Yale Strom, the Rep's My Mañana Comes, Broadway San Diego's Phantom of the Opera, and New Village Arts'The Weir.
Charlene Baldridge, charb81@cox.net