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Spring Training

Spring Training
Grapefruit League

New York Mets vs. Cleveland Indians
Tradition Field, Port Saint Lucie, FL
March 20, 2008

Smaack. 
There is only one sound like this. A stick of white ash swung in a powerful arc by a man with powerful forearms collides with opposing force against a sphere of horsehide hurtling toward it at 90 mph. The trademark sound of a national sport.

Marching into the dark maze of walkways leading to the grandstand of a major league baseball park sets you up for one of the peak visions in American sports. The walk up a narrow ramp then POW!  the impossibly immaculate emerald green of the playing field set off by the terracotta base paths with three marshmallow pillow bases. Perhaps it’s the scale of seeing the whole shebang - seats, field, walls, lights - with one glance. Or the simplicity about it, grass and dirt, blue sky overhead for day games, dusk settling in for night games. If you’ve only watched the sport on TV, you’re unprepared for the scale of splendor in this grass.

The two team managers meet with umpires at home plate to hand in their lineup cards, the national anthem is played, defensive players jog to their positions, fans cheer. The grand old game begins, an American ballet, soap opera, and occasional roller derby all wrapped into one. The game is an extraordinary mix of deliberate acts laced with moments of blinding speed and physical skill. Over the next two or three hours we will cheer, gasp, groan, clap, chat amiably with people we’ve never seen before - and perhaps have nothing in common except that we are here together. And would never choose to speak with on the outside world.

The cement beneath the seats will become littered with peanut shells, beer cups, and hotdog wrappers. Every so often a really big smmaack resonates through the stadium when a batter connects the sweet spot of his bat with the incoming pitch. The crowd erupts in a reflexive roar.

Assembled around you are more people that live in some small towns in America. Rush Limbaugh followers, NPR devotees, atheists, god fearing people, vegetarians, tree huggers, teamsters, and none of them at this moment with an ax to grind. Except maybe why the manager leaves a pitcher in the game too long or why he doesn’t pinch hit for a certain batter.

And in a spring training game in Florida’s Grapefruit league, even that doesn’t seem to matter much. For a few precious hours the walls of the ballpark keep the worries of the world at bay. We drop our worldly judgments like so many peanut shells. That’s worth the price of admission right there.

The Scene

The Scene
Play by Theresa Rebeck
Directed by: Scott Edmiston. Set, Janie E. Howland. Costumes, Gail Astrid Buckley. Lights, Karen Perlow. Sound, Dewey C. Dellay.
At: Lyric Stage Company, through March 15. Tickets: $25-54. 617-585-5678
Running time 2 hrs plus one 15 min intermission

The Scene is a neo-classic themed play dressed in black high heels. It’s a no holds barred drama, loaded with smart dialogue, plot twists, quick turns, and sharp acting all around. MIddle-aged writer making the scene at high visibility Manhattan party meets younger woman from Ohio. Writer’s career has peaked and he rages with contempt at the vapid NY artsy suck-up scene. Woman is attracted to his volcanic anti-establishment scorn and the fact that he knows people sunning themselves higher on the glitzy entertainment pyramid.

The play is lit up by Georgia Lyman whose portrayal of Clea from Ohio is riveting. Clea is a bimbo savant, mixing her faux Ohio naivety with calculating detachment and an uncanny sense of what makes people around her tick. If they can be useful to her, she will find the chinks in their armor and climb over them.

The brains inside the body that is her portfolio seduce Jeremiah Kissel’s Charlie, the washed up writer. Everyone in the theater knows Charlie is heading for a cliff. Charlie seems to have one last chance at the play’s end. His choice will decide whether he remains a has-been or can swallow enough of his pride to become a somebody again.

Barlow Adamson as Charlie’s best friend and Julie Jirousek as Charlie’s wife Stella are serviceable foils for Charlie and Clea, and fill out themes of friendship and how much bending a marriage can take before it breaks.

Charlie’s affair is used as a catapult to launch stones at the wasteland that is the entertainment industry. No one can succeed without selling off chucks of integrity. Big fish eat little fish. Little fish gulp down enough to become big fish and eat little fish.

The fact that the dialogue has an HBO flair is because writer Theresa Rebeck has written extensively for Law and Order, NYPD Blue and LA Law. She’s also written powerful plays such as Mauritius and View of the Dome.

The set and music are spare and edgy, perfect for the mano a mano dueling going on between characters. The play doesn’t offer new insights on the human condition but does make a helluva scene.

The Clean House

This play showcases one of the best comic scenes you'll ever see . Although the play becomes more reflective in the second act, the incandescent performances of Paula Plum and Nancy E. Carroll will tickle you long after you leave the theater.

The Clean House
A play in two acts by Sarah Ruhl
Running time 2 hrs, 15 min including one 15 min intermission
New Rep Theater, Arsenal Center for the Arts
321 Arsenal Street, Watertown, MA
617-923-8487
February 27 - March 23, 2008

The Clean House ends up in shambles with its inhabitants all the better for it.

The play opens with Lane and her husband Charles (whom we don’t meet until Act 2) hiring a 27 year-old Brazilian to clean their home. Mathilde has a congenital funny bone, hates to clean, and spends her time thinking up the world’s funniest joke. Lane’s sister Virginia appears, wound up tighter than a two-dollar watch, and offers to clean her sister’s house and let Mathilde cogitate comic stories. All on the QT.

The play takes off in the first act with brilliant pairings of Lane the doctor, her sister Virginia, and Lane’s house cleaner Mathilde. Paula Plum overplays Lane with shameless gusto, Nancy E. Carroll underplays Virginia with deadpan wit, and Cristi Miles plays Mathide the Brazilian housekeeper with sunny South American zest. Plum and Carroll cavort with exquisite comic timing, facial expressions, and voice tone. Ten minutes in and you can see that they’ve got it all going on. They know it, you know it and it feeds on itself beautifully. The audience erupted in applause after several interchanges between the two.

Obsessive-compulsive Virginia talks about traveling with her husband to see the ruins in Egypt and can only think, “Why doesn’t someone just sweep those up?” Virginia fills her life by cleaning her apartment religiously.  Her riff about dust is a hoot and you wait for her to feed you more. Mathilde is preoccupied trying to think of the world’s best joke and has no appetite for cleaning. So Virginia offers to clean house for Mathide. The deal Virginia offers the Brazilian maid fits both their needs - Virginia will clean the home of her sister Lane and her doctor husband and Mathilde can try to create the joke that keeps  eluding her.

As Virginia comes to visit in the first act, it is hilariously apparent that Lane and her sister have a  landfill of sibling rivalry. Toward the end of Act 1,Virginia and Mathilde discover a pair of women’s underwear among Charles’ laundry, an item that implodes the solid appearance of Lane and Charles’ marriage.

The second part of the play seems to leave the station on a different train. It’s not so much a question of improbability as tone. Charles, who has fallen in love with one of his cancer patients, comes to the apartment to introduce Ana to his wife (and Virginia and Mathilde who are present). Ana is dying, and Charles has found his soul mate. The humor and more sober aspects of mature love, mortality, along with Charles’s Pollyanna-ish “Cant we all get along together?” attitude can make good theater but the segue was hard to swallow after such a totally comic beginning.

Will Lyman as Charles nails the doctor-as-smitten-lover role. He portrays enough of the remote and practical surgeon in his man who has found his soul-mate role to give us an idea of who he was with Lane and of his struggle to embrace his newfound exuberance. Bobbi Steinbach as Ana is an earthy Mediterranean sunflower beginning to wilt and bend with the weight of her disease. She will not allow herself to drop to the ground before dying and concocts a plan to die on her own terms.

The second half veers close to soap opera from time to time, trying to balance the tears and the laughs and is saved by the terrific ensemble acting and the unorthodox imagination of playwright Sarah Ruhl.

The elegant set designed by Cristina Todesco is as white as an operating room and a terrific foil for the order to chaos back to order arc of the play. Jamie Whoolery’s projections against a backdrop of gridded windows at the apartment’s rear wall ingeniously fill in sights and sounds that connect the scenes.

The first act of this play is as much a tour de force of two actors as you’ll see anytime, anywhere. If there are awards to be given at the end of the year, Paula Plum and Nancy E. Carroll will clean house.

Photo, caption, courtesy of Boston Globe: Cancer-patient Ana (Bobbie Steinbach, left) is involved with a doctor who is married to Lane (Paula Plum, right) in Sarah Ruhl's play. (Andrew Brilliant/Brilliant Pictures)

Jammin' in J.P.

Jam session: Jazz, Latin, World Beat, Pop, Folk, Brazilian
Jamaicaway Books
676 Centre Street, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130, 617-983-3204
www.jamaicawaybooks.com

A jam session? Jamaica Plain has a reputation for the quirky assembly of restaurants, bakeries, ethnic stores and coffee shop that line Centre Street, the main drag down  the middle of town. But a jam session? On Sunday afternoon? In the basement of a bookstore?

You’d never know about it unless you happened to walk right by the sign in front of Jamaicaway Books proclaiming "Jazz, Latin, World Beat, Pop, Folk, Brazilian - Today 2 pm - 5 pm."

Never mind the small crowd. The musicians were having a grand time. Singer Lisa Law, who performed in her church choir in Dorchester earlier in the day, reeled of a searing rendition of “The Nearness of You” and scatted up version of ‘Route 66”. Fulani Hayes followed with  “Georgia on My  Mind” and the Duke’s “Take the A Train”.

In a space this tiny, it’s like having an ensemble play in your living room. The fun of listening to a group of musician’s who haven’t played with each other before is watching them signal  each  other for solos, changes of tempo, and timing to end the tune. Band leader for the day Hakim Law on electric keyboard played graceful ballads or laid down funky rhythm and blues riffs. A glance at Cornell “Sugarfoot” Coley or Larry Roland, and they got busy on percussion and standup base, respectively.

Larry Roland has toured with Miles Davis in his early days. Coley teaches percussion down here.   Coley and singer Fulani Hayes decided to “do something to involve the community” and came up  with the Jazz Jam idea. Conga player Les Wood dropped by as did a local horn player, and they all teamed  up to pass a chart around and play a cool AfroPop version of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Black Nile.”

A couple of college kids, a family including youngster who’s studying drums, a sprinkling of other passers-by, didn’t jam the place but the music certainly did.

The noble idea may not take off but for a measly $5.00 contribution,it’s the best jazz you’ll find around these  parts on a Sunday afternoon.

Lizard Lounge: Underground music scene, really...

Setting the scene:
Greater Boston is blessed with a handful of small music venues that have as much 'character' as the musicians that play in them. Escalating rents,changing demographics in neighborhoods, and pressure to wring as much money per square foot from real estate has caused some of these places to shutter their doors.
Like lizards themselves, The Lizard Lounge has survived over time. At the moment, this quirky place is thriving with local acts hoping to flourish and veteran acts who've become part of the local scene. It's anyone's guess how long its run will last.

Lizard Lounge
1667 Mass Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
Monday 9pm - 1am, Tues and Wed 7:30pm -1am, Thurs - Sat 7:30pm - 2am,
Sun 7:30pm -1am
617-547-0759
http://www.lizardloungeclub.com/main.html 

Whether you like music or not, visit The Lizard Lounge as if it were a cultural artifact, an installation you’d see in the Smithsonian Institution next century under the heading “funky rock, folk/pop, blues, acid music scene in the late twentieth early twenty-first century”.

From the street, push open the door that heads downstairs, into what was likely a storage area for the Cambridge Common, the large Mass. Ave. pub with the polished wood bar, wooden booths, rivers of tap beer, mountains of good cheap pub food on the main level.

The Lizard Lounge doesn’t try too hard to impress. It’s one of its endearing qualities. The proprietors knew they weren’t gonna make silk from a sow’s ear - but create a terrific little joint to hear homegrown live music…yowzahh.

So down the stairs you go and enter a softly welcoming, reddishly lit… basement.  The room’s a little gussied up but it doesn’t take much to imagine the beer cases, kegs, broken barstools and the like that formerly inhabited the space.

Smack in front of you at the bottom of the stairs is what we’ll charitably call the stage, a twelve by ten space covered with two oriental rugs, assorted mike stands, amplifiers, speakers and a somewhat battered piano.

Rickety small tables surround the stage. More oriental rugs cover the floor and snake under a nook of booths at the far end of the room.  The back wall is mirrored to give the illusion of space. The stand up bar isn’t much longer that two guitar cases but is stocked with a serious assortment of your favorite beverages. This basement has style.

Check out the burgundy velvet curtains softly lit behind the bandstand and the black painted overhead ducts and ceiling. Substitute couches for the tables and you’d have the salon of a New Orleans bordello.

The Liz qualifies as a ‘scene.” The jambalaya crowd is a mix of regulars, partisans of the band, and the adventurous looking to find a diamond in the rough. Amongst the torn jeans and studiously casually attired younger crowd you’ll see the occasional boomer in relaxed fit Levis. The music is original, eclectic, and fearless.

Most come to listen. Alas, even in music rooms like the Lizard, a small but annoying minority treats the live music as if it were a jukebox. The woman twitting a non-stop one-way conversation with her friend next to me at a recent Jennifer Kimball concert, blurted, ”I love that song,” after talking every second through it.
I rolled my eyes, wishing she noticed, and moved to stand in back of the sound engineer, whose console was ten feet from Kimball on stage. Perhaps subject for another story, the need for some people to downgrade from multi-tasking to just paying attention during a live music presentation.

Every Sunday night features “The Legendary Lizard Lounge Poetry Night” with the Jeff Robinson Trio working around poetry slammers of all stripes.

In the Darwinian culture of music, most of the performers here will never have the good fortune to live off their music. But from the broth of places like the Lizard Lounge emerges singers, songwriters, and musicians who who’ve become solid local performers or well-known household names. You won’t always like the music but you’ll see a place where it is born.

Music rooms like this may be an endangered species. Check the web site, pick a night, and capture the scene.