pt at large

Carrie Newcomer: from the heart and the heartland

The distinct register of Carrie Newcomer's buttersmooth throaty alto singing voice immediately separates her from the folk/pop pack. The singer/songwriter from Indiana visited Club Passim in Cambridge, MA on the second stop of her tour to promote her new CD "The Geography of Light."

To see lyrics, listen to clips of her music, and find out more about what makes her tick ( and sing) visit her website at http://www.carrienewcomer.com

Carrie Newcomer
Club Passim, Cambridge, MA, February 21, 2008
Gary Walters on Kurzweil electric piano

Carrie Newcomer’s singing voice is one of those “Beam me up, Scotty” instruments that seems to transport a listener into a state of grace. After the first few minutes of being sonically bathed by her honey rich alto, a listener’ sits back, involuntarily releases tension in the shoulders, and smiles. On a recent night at the venerable Club Passim in Cambridge, MA an audience was about to hear 75 minutes of “the world according to Carrie”.

She writes the music as well as she sings it. Like a Norman Rockwell painting, somewhere in Newcomer’s music you can find universal truths sketched in small details of everyday life. She’s a perfect antidote to the noise all around us - unsettling world crises, economic recession, random acts of violence, and the chatter of talk radio.

She’s no Pollyanna, though, and is not blind to loss, grief, or injustice. She just counters it by putting lyrics and melody to the indomitable spirit that can endure it, survive it and gather strength from it.

“I know that we have failed,
But I’ve seen that we can fly.
There’s goodness on this earth that will not die.”
she sings in “A Mean Kind of Justice.”

It takes confidence, talent and deeply rooted beliefs to put this stuff over.

With shoulder length auburn hair that matches the amber waves of grain of her native Indiana, Carrie Newcomer ‘s songbook is pure heartland. Expect rich melodies, wry guitar picking and echoes of folk, country, rock,and gospel traditions.

The song “Betty’s Diner” encapsulated the character of an entire town and Newcomer’s sensibilities as a songwriter. The song’s chorus shows an eye for detail that melds time, place, and the human condition, in which ‘despair and hope sit face to face.’

“…here we are all in one place
the wants and wounds of the human race
despair and hope sit face to face
when you come in from the cold
Let her fill your cup with something kind
eggs and toast like bread and wine…”

Club Passim was the second stop of her tour to promote “The Geography of Light,” her eleventh CD for Rounder Records. Her songs have been inspired by the poetry and stories she’s written, contacts with other writers, and her Quaker faith. But just as often, they’re inspired by observing what’s right under her nose, giving the songs a spinning-straw-into-gold quality

The axis of many of her songs is personal observation, what she calls ‘paying attention’ the world around her. Geodes are commonplace sights around her southern Indiana home, bumpy gray stones on the outside, with gorgeous crystal formations in their centers.

She sings
“You cant always tell one from the other.
And it’s best not to judge a book by its tattered cover.
I have found when I tried or looked deeper inside.
What appears unadorned might be wondrously formed.
You cant always tell but sometimes you just know.”

Underlying the philosophic, reflective tone of this album is a sense of affirmation.
“Leaves don’t drop, they just let go,
And make a place for seeds to grow, ” she sings on “Leaves Don’t Drop.”

For her, “There is a song at the center of things,” including her dreams, reading list, and personal experience.

“I’ve come to believe that mystery is as near as my front porch," Newcomer says when she introduces “There Is A Tree”, and proclaims,
“I’m the fool whose life’s been spent
Between what’s said and what is meant.”

When the set threatened to slide into sonorous monotony, Newcomer hauled out goofy upbeat songs like “Bowling Alley Baby” and “E-mail”. The songstress had all of us singing the “Don’t Hit Send” chorus and chuckling at her comment “Merlot and email don’t mix well.”

“Why do I do this, I ask myself, “ she ponders before her last encore number.
Her answer, “You get where you want to go but rarely where you thought you’d be.”

That just might have the makings of a future song.

Photo courtesy of Carrie Newcomer's web site

The Little Dog Laughed, Black Box Theater Boston

The Little Dog Laughed
Play by Douglas Carter Beane
Directed by: Paul Melone. Set, Eric Levenson. Costumes, Gail Astrid Buckley. Lights, Jeff Adelberg. Sound, Benjamin Emerson
Presented by: SpeakEasy Stage Company.
At: Boston Center for the Arts Wimberly Theatre, through Feb. 16.

Boston has a thriving theater scene, filled with sizzle, substance, and everything in between. The Little Dog Laughed, currently running at the Calderwood Pavilion’s Wimberly Theatre, has the feel of an HBO sizzler. How to achieve happiness and not sell out what’s important to you - or sell it out with minimal collateral damage - is the theme and its actors spend two hours wheedling and diddling to flesh it out.

We’re all familiar with the compromises we make to get by in life, love, and business. Few might have to make more than the closeted film actor, his female lesbian agent, a choirboy male hooker, and his neurotic girlfriend. Seldom do we meet such screwed up people who happen to make us laugh, in spite of their lack of backbone, self-awareness, and personal principles.

Diane, the theater agent, is about to break into the big leagues by pitching a film starring her client Mitchell, the closeted movie star. When Mitchell falls in love with Alex, a young, naïve hooker, and worse, decides to make his homosexuality public, Diane brings in the heavy artillery and takes aim at her client Mitchell, Alex, Alex’s girlfriend Ellen, and the entire Hollywood establishment.

Maureen Keiller grabs the role of the supremely cynical, conniving Diane and wrings it out to dry. With facial expressions, comic timing, and a surgical eye for the soft spots in any human armor in her vicinity, she is formidable, and all the more fierce because she’s acutely aware that she sold her soul to expediency years ago. The wonder of it is that the other three actors aren’t blown away by her phosphorescent turns on the stage.

This is an exquisitely paired quartet of actors who play to and off each other. Robert Serrell’s Mitchell is a disarmingly ingenuous movie star who’s begun to acknowledge the ways he’s allowed his delusions of heterosexuality to suffocate his true inclinations.

Jonathan Orsini’s Alex is damaged goods looking for a soft landing anywhere his heart and trust won’t be battered again.
Angie Jepson plays Ellen, Alex’s comically self-absorbed girlfriend with blithe façade that barely hides the pain of a loveless upbringing.

The play doesn’t brood. It’s a fast-paced satire brimming with one-liners and scalding turns aimed at Hollywood’s shakers and movers, who, in Ellen’s experience, will not acknowledge your existence unless you have a product or a power they need.

Ellen, who has sold out more times than Wal-Mart, proposes a solution to the three lovers. Her shrewd business tactic, asking  “Is everyone happy?” before leaving the negotiation table, results in a denouement that will give you a good reason to reread gaudy Hollywood features in the tabloid press.

Post script: How in the world does the play’s title fit in here, you might be wondering. As the stage lights dim, Ellen recites a nursery rhyme that seems synchronous with her final victory. And playwright Douglas Carter Beane just winked at us and said, “Open your eyes, folks.”

Hey, diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon,
The little dog laughed to see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.

PHOTOS (by Mike Lovett): Robert Serrell as Mitch and Maureen Keiller as Diane; Jonathan Orsini as Alex, Maureen Keiller and Robert Serrell; Angie Jepson as Ellen and Jonathan Orsini

Don Pedro Biernay, a gem in the Chilean rough

Saturday February 2, 2008

Fine dust from the earth he tills is etched in the lines of his sun-weathered face. The dirt embedded under the nails of his small strong hands is the same dirt that produced the cantaloupe you may be having for breakfast today.

I've watched him work during my two-week visit to Susaan Straus’ and Ricardo Ceriani’s 50-acre farm in Nogales, Chile. He harvested 20,000 cantaloupes during this time - cantaloupes he had grown from seed. Each afternoon the fruit dealer’s truck lumbered out the dirt road to the highway, Don Pedro had confirmed the melon count on board.

That was for starters. By 8:00 AM other days, he’d hitched his fifty pound steel plow behind his muscular, dutiful red mare, LaRubia, and tilled several acres of corn fields. He’s prepared several more acres for a cabbage crop. He’s repaired rustic farm implements as they wear out and kept his eye on everything that moves or grows.

Don Pedro Biernay is 66 years old and has worked the fields since he was 16. He splurged once and took a week vacation. God knows how he relaxed. Born in Quillota, about two hours north of Santiago and a short drive to Nogales, Don Pedro and his family have lived in a small shack on the perimeter of this farm for decades. His grandfather immigrated to Chile from France.

He hasn’t reported in sick in fifty years. Sore and tired, yes, but way too proud to stay home. For the painful arthritis, he captures a honeybee and allows it to sting his shoulder. He says his shoulder feels better after the treatment. (Note: a Google inquiry surprised me with accounts acknowledging the effectiveness of this treatment.)

When my friends Ricardo Ceriani and Susaan Straus bought the farm from Sr. Saffi, Don Pedro was in the same category as the outbuildings - he came with the farm, a wizened miracle in a battered white leather hat.

He reads and understands the dirt beneath his feet, the clouds over his head, and things that grow around him with the ease with which you digest your morning paper. The birds, sun, weather, and winds speak to him in tongues he understands.

How often does the newly planted corn field need to be irrigated? Don Pedro knows. What will grow faster, melons or potatoes? Don Pedro knows. How many seasons will that plot of land produce alfalfa for Ricardo’s horses before it’s time to plant something else to give the land a rest? Ask Don Pedro.

He leads a hard, simple life. A few years ago, his fourteen-year-old grandson was killed as he stepped from behind a bus into oncoming traffic. Shortly thereafter, a daughter bore another grandchild. “God takes away with one hand and gives with the other,” Don Pedro said to Ricardo not long afterward.

Every morning, I see him, immaculate in his clean blue and white shirt and work jeans, making purposeful strides to his next job. I've never seen him at rest.

When it comes time to celebrate, his 5’8” 135 pound wiry body can consume and hold prodigious amounts of local red wine mixed with Coca Cola. And, as he did at the Saturday BBQ to celebrate the completion of the framing of a new barn, he holds forth with the same vigor he puts into plowing the land.

Class lines are still distinctly drawn here in the post-feudal countryside. Don Pedro is an “old school” laborer. He’s never approached, never mind entered, the Patron’s little farmhouse on a tiny hillock 100 yards away. but here in the barn that will hold orange produce before it’s shipped to market, he sits across from Ricardo, the Patron, and yaks with him as though they were a couple of country boys enjoying a Saturday picnic.

Here I was, sitting next to Don Pedro, a part of and, due to language barrier, apart from the celebration, when I heard the word “Clinton” and realized he was asking me a question.

“He wants to know who you think will win the election, Hillary Clinton or the black man Obama,” Ricardo translated for me. I felt some kind of cultural lightning bolt had struck the corrugated metal roof of the barn.  A major recalculation on every assumption I had about Don Pedro and god knows how many others in the Spanish-speaking country crowd around me was in order.

For the next 15 minutes, with Ricardo acting as the UN interpreter, I had a conversation with Don Pedro about the US presidential election, the Yankee and Confederate war about slaves (he wanted to know which side was ‘blue’ and which side was ‘grey’), the president who was a woodsman and had a tall hat (Lincoln) and the American war about tea and why it started.

“How do you know about these things?"  I said, wondering if he could read the incredulity writ across my face.

“I read, ”he said with a grin that did little to disguise a sense of pride.

“He says he used to lie down with a candle on his chest and read every night when he was a boy. When it got too late his father would make him blow out the candle, “ Ricardo said. “Once he went all the way to Valparaiso to find a book.” I recalled the story about Honest Abe allegedly walking miles to return a book. Here was another country boy with a thirst for knowledge sitting right beside me.

Apparently, I’ve had to travel several thousand miles into the southern hemisphere to relearn the “Don’t judge a book by its cover” lesson. I suspect it won’t be the last time I’ll need to relearn it.