pt at large

Iruna Restaurant, Cambridge, MA

Iruna Restaurant
56 JFK Street
Cambridge, MA
May 26, 2005

The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain. The rain in New England stays with us like an uninvited guest. (Ben Franklin once said that “After three days, men grow weary of a wench, a guest, and rainy weather,” but I won’t go there!). Needing comfort food after a week of gunmetal skies and incessant rain, The Adventurer drove over to Cambridge for a noontime repast that would take his mind off a weather forecast of several more days of precipitation. I found respite in the tiny Iruna Restaurant, a few steps down a short alley at 56 JFK Street just outside Harvard Square.

This place is irresistibly retro, with creaky, straight-backed wooden chairs, dark stained wooden floors, and glass-topped tables for two or four. The décor consists of two or three hanging plants, a couple of posters and the wooden wainscoting that’s probably been there since the eatery opened forty years ago. The two dining rooms are small, with tables at close quarters. Since I was dining solo, I eavesdropped on several conversations, deducing that the clientele this day hailed from academia - a collection of students and their parents, and professors telling war stories. (Note: this would not be a good spot for a tryst.)

The special of the day was breaded veal topped with a dollop of butter infused with lemon, garlic, and parsley. It was served with white rice and accompanied by either white bean soup or gazpacho, and a garden salad. The veal arrived in short order, pan-fried with a crusty bread crumb coating, savory but a bit too chewy. The piping hot soup contained a good handful of whole white beans and was served up in a tomato base. Small morsels of ham gave it a smoky taste, altogether restorative on such a dreary day. The rice had a slightly buttery taste and the salad, dressed with oil, vinegar and a hint of something nutty that I couldn’t identify (should I admit that?) was the most tender iceberg lettuce salad I’ve had in years.

The lunch menu offers Tortillas, Bocadillos (sandwiches), Ensaladas (salads), Hot and Cold Tapas, Postres (pastries, as if you couldn’t tell that one), and Bebidas (beverages, including white and red Sangria).

The spare furnishings of the Iruna Restaurant might not remind one of the Costa del Sol but the food will. And the prices are enough to make a diner shout “Olé!” My dinner came to $7.49 including tax.

Now, assuming you’ll forgive me for citing bawdy Ben, I hereby invite you to call me up if you’d like to join me for a Spanish lunch anytime soon.

The Boston Theater Marathon VII

The Boston Theater Marathon VII
The Calderwood Pavilion’s Virginia Wimberly Theater
May 22, 2005

Fifty plays in ten hours? Yep. And if anything in this world would qualify to be called an epic event, this was it. Sunday’s seventh annual Boston Theater Marathon ran all day long and went by in a blur of creative sweat. As in the running marathon, the event was loaded with shining talent, zany outfits, show offs, and the occasional plodder. The themes of the plays took on contemporary hot button subjects as well as personal and social issues that have been subjects of playwrights since Euripides.

A true diehard could have paid the admission charge of $30 at 12 noon, watched the show leap out of the starting blocks, and cheered entries as they rambled past until the finish at 10 pm. The Calderwood Pavilion’s Virginia Wimberly Theater is way more comfortable than even the best lawn chair and impervious to the still dismal New England spring, so sitting through the entire event wouldn’t have been difficult physically. But mentally, whew.

The marathon was run with Swiss watch precision. Five ten-minute plays started at the top of each hour. The two minutes between plays was like an efficient gathering of the Keystone Cops, with sets and actors rapidly changing places on the darkened stage. Like the other marathon, this one flashed by with such rapid pace that it was impossible to do anything but react in the moment and save the analysis for when you could catch your breath for a couple of minutes at end of each five-play hour.

The audience in the Wimberly Theater was more relaxed than for standard productions and that in itself was refreshing. They ran the gamut from seasoned to inquisitive, young and old, gay and straight. Their responses were robust. Laughter was frequent, spontaneous, and, in the case of some of the plays involving same-sex themes, occasionally a bit uncertain.

Sets and lighting were minimal: assorted spotlights, piped in music, beds, chairs, milk crates, wooden boxes and doorframes, and the occasional inflatable coconut tree. The minimalist approach gave the audience a chance to engage their own imaginations as two milk crates became a canoe (“October”), an inflatable coconut tree became an island (“Eralset or Scrabble in Babel”), or absolutely no props used at all (“Gus Penelope Syberson”)

What wasn’t minimal was talent. This observer sat through 20 plays between 2 pm and 6 pm. Nearly 300 entries were submitted from every corner of New England and, with few exceptions, the ones left standing were ready for their ten minutes of fame. For the most part, these sketches were brilliantly etched and filled with either comedy, pathos, or tragedy. Stereotypes were given shape, depth, and enough nuance to lift them off the page.

Plays like “October” highlighted that Mars/Venus incongruity is not the sole province of straight couples. “The Amazing Adventures of Captain Normal” was an antic send-up of a modern day Walter Mitty trying to break out of the mundane reality of his life. Imagine a man draped in a bedsheet and wearing his wife’s yoga tights under his polka dotted boxer shorts and you begin to get the picture. Lovers of wine and roses could laugh at the way “Blind Tasting” showed two dysfunctional lovers who used the vocabulary of wine snobs to connect with their co dependency. “Gus Penelope Syberson” was a charmingly choreographed set piece between a man, a woman, and technology, played by a sprightly woman in a frilly dress and elastic facial and body movements. Technology, after setting up bruising but hilarious battle, finally loses to the human instinct of wanting to connect with no computer chip acting as intermediary. Occasionally, plays surfaced that were more polemic than playful. The actors in “The Flood” sounded more like they were reading an essay than lines in a drama.

Humanity was the common denominator in these wildly disparate plays. The need to connect, to love and be loved, and to reach for the stars of our personal galaxies were telescoped into ten-minute lifetimes. Euripides would have been proud of these playwrights’ command of brevity.

Patty Griffin, Orpheum Theater, Boston

Patty Griffin’s soaring vocals effortlessly reached the far corners of the Orpheum Theater Friday night. Whether sitting solo at her piano or rocking out with her tight four-piece band, the former Cambridge waitress demurely relished the applause her admirers heaped upon her. Up-tempo or bluesy, Griffin’s pipes pack a wallop. Her rich alto voice can wrap around music from pop to Texas soul and is recognizable within a country mile.

>Photo courtesy of the Avalon Theatre
Avalon Theatre - Easton, MD
Photo taken by Rick Hester on 2006-04-15<

The set opened with one spot starkly lighting Griffin, who sang a gritty, bluesy version of Tom Wait’s “Ruby’s Arms”. The spare piano arrangement is a hallmark of the performer’s style and paved the way for several other solos. Griffin’s fans recognized most of the evening’s songs from her last two albums, “1000 Kisses” (2002) and “Impossible Dream “(2004). Her band joined her for a rousing rendition of “Wayfaring Stranger” and rocked through “Don’t Come Easy” and “Useless Desires”, both tracks from “Impossible Dream”.

Patty Griffin sings with the authority of a woman who has served time in failed relationships, speculated about the permanence of tender new ones, and keenly observed the theater of life playing around her. Like the best writers, she’s composed words not so much to explain those events as to explore them. Her lyrics are often non linear and rely on images that open an Alice-like tunnel for listeners to fill in with their own stories. Some of her songs, like “Top of the World”, are written in the voice of others, in this case her father.

Griffin’s singing surpasses her stage patter with the audience. She did elicit some laughter with references to the finally winning ways of the Red Sox but other attempts were a bit ambling and repetitive. Not that her fans minded. Griffin’s voice was what they had come to hear.

The two guitars players, drummer, and versatile horn player who make up her band worked together with obvious skill. An unanticipated downside to their enthusiasm is that their volume occasionally overpowered Griffin’s lyrics.

Griffin’s playlist sagged a bit mid-set under the weight of several songs with similar pitches and tempos, one of them a recently written tryout. Tucked into this quartet of songs was ‘Standing in the Shadow of a Hill’, a terrific example of Griffin’s uncanny ability to put her own stamp on covers of other artist’s songs. In this case, she gives a nod to one of her heroes, gospel singer Mavis Staples, without mimicking her.

Griffin’s two encores shows how difficult it is to pigeon hole her style. She sang Smokey Robinson’s “Tears of a Clown”, then a lullaby in French passed down from her mother and grandmother, and a ballad she penned after viewing a video Martin Luther King’s “Mountaintop” sermon. Her final song brought the concert full circle. Griffin, guitar in hand, lit by a solo spot on the dark stage, sang “Icicles”. Sweet alto voice, resonating chords, pure Griffin.