pt at large

The Firebugs (12/19/05)

The Firebugs, a play in one act by Max Frisch (1911-1991)
Running time 95 minutes
Presented by TheatreZone, the Chelsea Theater Works, 617-887-2336
189 Winnisimmet Street, Chelsea, MA 02150
December 8-23, Thurs.-Sat. 8:00, Sun. 3:00

Boston’s equivalent of “Off, Off Broadway” is probably Chelsea, where TheatreZone established a beachhead in 1999 by purchasing the historic Post Office/Oddfellows Hall in Chelsea Square. Located on the second floor, the theater space is another of the small gems of space devoted to the burgeoning local theater scene. Five rows of 15 comfortable seats are tiered to ensure no bad view in this modestly sized venue.

Navigating to the theater is a performance piece all by itself as it takes the playgoer from Boston through the ever-changing lane configurations to the Tobin Bridge. One lapse in concentration can easily put the driver on the road to New Hampshire, so pay attention. Once over the bridge, homing in on the theater is a piece of cake and on-street parking easy to find. At $12 -$18 a ticket, the price is right even if you do get lost or the show isn’t up to snuff.

Swiss playwright Max Frisch was consumed by the question of the passive complicity many Europeans showed as they turned a blind eye to the horrors of WW II. In his 1950s play “The Firebugs", Frisch explores the consequences of a failure to act when two seemingly homeless men ingratiate themselves into the home of a successful middle class hair tonic salesman and his wife.

Seeing and hearing what should serve as hair raising signals that the pair are the arsonists that have been plaguing the town, the salesman, who can connive to sell a phony product to gullible buyers, ironically refuses to acknowledge the truth when the pyromaniacal twosome talk openly about their plan to incinerate his home next in their fiery spree. The salesman is in the same self-delusional boat as his hair tonic customers: they’re all hoping for a miracle to trump reality.

Frisch uses a morality play format in which yellow-jacketed firemen standing around the edges of the set act as a “chorus” and sound warnings that the middle class blowhard salesman cannot bring himself to believe. He’d rather protect himself by trying to make friends with the evil doers (collusion?) than report them to the police; his foolish strategy has deadly consequences. Frisch undoubtedly remembered the “appeasement” used to tolerate Germany’s bellicose intentions in the late 1930s.

The two “firebugs” are played with just the right amount of gleeful camp to keep them credible but pathologically dangerous. The play’s scenes of comic relief between the salesman and his maid unmask the pompous salesman’s elitist behavior and represent another axe Frisch grinds during the play.

The “chorus” of firemen is a distraction. It seems too dated and states what we can already infer from the characters. The three-level see-through set cleverly shows the salesman’s parlor and attic where most of the action occurs. The lighting is effective. The sound effects are imaginatively done by a man in full view in the far corner of the set.

The play doesn’t break new ground but does put a hot poker to our consciences. How do we respond to the realities of our times? What consequences do we pay if we remain passive in the face of social inequities, intolerance, or even the vexing tangle of emotions and laws as we respond to threats of terrorism?

In playwright Frisch’s mind, action won’t necessarily result in success but inaction will certainly be doomed to failure. In today’s climate of social and political flux, we have chances every day to take a position on whatever side of the divide on which we stand. To remain silent is to play with fire.

For information about TheatreZone, and a set of directions that should prevent you from heading to New Hampshire, visit http://www.theatrezone.org/

M.J. O’Connor’s Irish Pub

M.J. O’Connor’s Irish Pub at the Boston Park Plaza
27 Columbus Avenue, Boston, MA 02116 (617) 482-2255
Hours of Operation: Sunday through Saturday 11am-2am

December 16, 2005

I’ll admit it. I was expecting something formulaic when I entered M. J. O’Connor’s Irish Pub at Park Plaza. Shamrocks, leprechauns in bowler hats, and a motif awash in green. But, Faith and Begorrah, I was pleasantly surprised to enter a welcoming, warmly wood-burnished pub. Instead of turning on my heels, I made a beeline for the L shaped bar to contemplate the lunch menu and enjoy the compelling features that drew me over the threshold.

The ambiance inside practically shouted “Guinness!” Worn down to the bare wood at its rounded edges, the smooth L shaped walnut stained bar showed the effects of years of elbows and jars of beer and ale being plunked, perhaps pounded, upon it. The stand of seven beer and ale taps on each side of the L stood like tall sentinels ready to return your salute after you’d ordered one of them.

The rich color scheme was the biggest surprise. In the softly lit place was a mélange of rich ochre and pale rose, both rag rolled onto the walls and ceilings. Opposite the bar side of the pub, varnished wooden tables and chairs configured for four, six, eight patrons were arranged under the exposed timber ceiling and occupied by a business suit to flannel wearing clientele that filled the place for lunch. The mix of colors on the walls and furnishings had a surprisingly inviting effect and seemed to whisper, “Come in and take a load off.”

Having walked inside after a brisk thirty minute stroll around Park Square in 20 degree weather, it took me all of ten seconds to decide on the Guinness Beef Stew, garden salad lunch. While waiting for my stew to arrive, I studied the menu and noticed the brogues of the bartender and a couple of the wait staff. To my utter amazement, hardly anyone was watching the three video monitors in the pub. They were actually talking to one another in real time. I realize the Irish are said to be blessed with the “gift of gab” and on this day the entire clientele behaved as if they came from the same gene pool.

Today’s lunch menu listed appetizers ($6-$10), soups ($3- $4.50), salads ($5-$10), sandwiches ($8-$12), entrées ($10-$12). The daily specials included choices not usually associated with Dublin: Santa Fe Chicken Sandwich $8, Steak Boxty $10, Grilled salmon wrap $8, Chicken Stir Fry $9, and Chicken Marsala $9.

My beef stew arrived in a hot stoneware ramekin topped with a swirl of whipped potatoes. The artfully arranged mesclin salad strewn with cherry tomatoes and sliced cucumber topped with julienned carrots was covered with just enough balsamic dressing to add taste without drowning the delicate mesclin. Being the peasant I am, I would have appreciated a hunk of crusty bread to set upon the oblong plate on which the whole business was served.

My bones needed thawing and the sturdy chunks of beef, potato, and carrot in a “rich stout reduction” under the whipped potato did the trick efficiently but were not memorable otherwise. The sharp balsamic dressing was a surprisingly good counterpoint to the mellow taste of the stew.

The pt at large sparkling service award made its debut here today. Just as I was wondering how I was going to sop up the beef stew’s juice with only the knife and fork that came with the meal, a voice over my shoulder said, “Here you are, you might need this to finish your stew.” and a waiter placed a large soup spoon beside my platter. That gesture made me forget about the bread and remember to try the place again in the near future. pt at large rates M.J. O’Connor’s as a good bet for solid pub grub and a comfortable, reasonably priced way station while you’re shopping or touring the town.

Head’s Up: to sign up for January’s “Cabin Fever: A Winter Beer Dinner to Warm Your Cockles”, and for menus and a photo tour of the pub, log on to http://www.mjoconnorsboston.com/mjoconnors/

Harvard Square Art: Three for free, Part 3

Harvard Square Art: Three for free

THREE
• “Red”, a juried show sponsored by the Cambridge Art Association,
University Place, 124 Mt Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA
Monday - Friday 9 A.M. - 6 P.M., Saturday 9 A.M. - 1 P.M.
November 18, 2005 - January 19, 2006
www.cambridgeart.org

PART THREE

A few steps into the lobby of University Place and you get the idea that Santa made a low level pass over the place, shook out a huge mixed bag of art - oils, watercolor, collage, etchings, sculpture, painted furniture - and ordered his elfsquad to assemble it all in the central lobby and main corridor.

The show is titled “Red: It's more than just a color: a metaphor, feeling, idea, or hue” And, glory be, the content is a healthy counterpoint to the four far-out pieces inside the Carpenter Center. Here is a show that the amateur art lover can comprehend without the aid of drugs or alcohol.

As promised, each piece has a component that suggests or contains red. pt @ large did a quicktime march through the nearly 100 artists represented then retraced his steps to linger with favorites. With this much variety, there’s something everyone might want to find under his or her Christmas tree or Chanukah bush this holiday season. Remember, artist’s need to shop, too. The pieces are all for sale.

Some items that buzzed my credit card included:
• Fiedlerworks, an oil painting by Patrick Anderson
• Pekin Opera, a solar etching by Christiane Corcelle-Lippeveld
• Junction, an oil painting by Greg Thielker
• Bo and Mischia, a Fuji print by Paul Weiner
• Grief and Emma, an oil by Donna Pomponeo

If you insist, there are dozens of stores that will gladly take your money as you forage through and make your holiday purchases. But these “Three for Free” exhibits are free to visit and either challenging or comforting on the eyes. Merry Whatever!

Harvard Square Art: Three for free, Part 2

Harvard Square Art: Three for free

TWO
• Lumen Eclipse, an outdoor video installation set over the Information Booth next to entrance to the T in the epicenter of Harvard Square
Daily 5 A.M. - 1 A.M.
www.lumeneclipse.com

PART TWO
Videos are becoming the oxygen that feeds our mass culture. Video screens have popped up on iPods, at the checkout counter at the supermarkets, at your health club, and on cell phones. So why not erect a couple of monitors atop the Information kiosk a few yards from the Out of Town News stand? And load them with a confection of three short videos you can watch while you finish your latte and drink in the original people watching carnival that plays live every hour of the day in the pit leading to the stairs of the Harvard Square T.

pt @ large assumes you’re hip enough not to be thinking how civic minded of Cambridge to present entertainment to the 53,000 people who walk by the booth every day. We’re talking commerce here. The videos are sandwiched between advertisements for a slew of businesses with a short sashay from the two monitors. If pt @ large were paranoid, he’d wonder if said establishments had a surveillance camera trained on the kiosk that tracked viewers right into their doors after being sucked in by the advertising.

The three videos are pleasant little potpourri of animation and reality: one allegory, one paean to sisters everywhere, and one riff on a modern day Alice in Wonderland tale. On the outside chance you’d prefer to see these videos without having panhandlers asking you to contribute to their housing or sustenance needs, you can view them (the videos, I mean) at www.lumeneclipse.com

OK, now that you’ve taken a breather, it’s on to the third stop of the “Three for Free” tour.

Harvard Square Art: Three for free. Part 1

Harvard Square Art: Three for free

ONE
• Quantum Grids, Carpenter Center for the Arts, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA
October 15, 2005 - April 16, 2006
http://www.ves.fas.harvard.edu

TWO
• Lumen Eclipse, an outdoor video installation set over the Information Booth next to entrance to the T in the epicenter of Harvard Square
Daily 5 A.M. - 1 A.M.
www.lumeneclipse.com

THREE
. "Red", a juried show sponsored by the Cambridge Art Association,
University Place, 124 Mt Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA
Monday - Friday 9 A.M. - 6 P.M., Saturday 9 A.M. - 1 P.M.
November 18, 2005 - January 19, 2006
www.cambridgeart.org

The retail stores in Harvard Square may have become a look-alike patchwork of national franchises but the artwork in the neighborhood is just as eclectic, unique, or opaquely incomprehensible as ever.

pt @ large recently spent a couple of hours sampling three exhibits within a bit more than a three minute walk from the Out of Town News kiosk, the square’s epicenter. The free exhibits ranged from the abstract to the whimsical to what most mortal galleristas would quantify as something they’d recognize as ‘art’. By sheer dumb luck, the order in which I visited them proved restorative to my sense of aesthetics and faith in the world of art.

PART ONE
Quantum Grids, Carpenter Center for the Arts

The leading edge of art revolves around a different sun than most of what you’d find in the halls of the MFA. Like life, art is always in a state of flux, change is a necessary ingredient for growth, and the results are not always comforting. Ergo, we can employ viewing modern art as practice for dealing with life’s complexities and curves. Hey, it’s cheaper than a fifty-minute visit with your favorite therapist.

Most mortals enter exhibits of modern abstract art at their peril. We’re confronted with representational art with grotesque subject matter; or paintings with no discernable subject matter; or use of experimental or “found” materials; clusters of wires, metals, stones, or paper maché that resemble, well, piles of wires, metals, stones or paper maché.

The muse that fired the artist’s imagination is often mute when it comes to whispering meaning and intent into our ears as we gape and wonder, “what is this and why is it here?” Turning to the gallery’s guide for elucidation is a descent into a cave with a cerebral echo chamber in which curators speak in tongues as they labor to explain the voice of the muse to bewildered visitors (more on this below).

pt @ large, always game for a view of art at the edges, visited the Sert Gallery in the Carpenter Center. The four artists represented are Cai Guo-Qiang (Chinese, b. 1957); Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929); Sol Lewitt (American, b. 1928); Fred Tomaselli (American, b. 1956).

Guo-Qiang considers the Atomic bomb to be the iconic image of the 20th century. His “The Century with Mushroom Clouds” gets him in touch with his inner Feng Shui and his Chinese hometown’s reputation as the gunpowder capital of the world. His concept is to balance Feng Shui, the optimal flow of energy to a structure, with the deadly flow of energy produced by the A bomb. Guo-Qiang covers an 18’ by 10’ parchment paper with scores of mushroom cloud images he’s made by burning the surface of the parchment paper with gunpowder. The clouds he burned have a similar mushroom shape but differing sizes and gradations of blacks and grays. Whether an optimal flow of energy was achieved is unanswerable by this writer although I do think it was mounted auspiciously on the west wall.

What makes the piece resonate beyond one dimension is Guo-Qiang’s black and white video installation of 1940’s A bomb tests in Nevada. Even sixty years later, watching the bomb’s thunderous impact, the gargantuan upheaval of a piece of the planet into the stem of that mushroom cloud inspires awe, fear, and despair over the deadly force we introduced that day. Part of the clip shows a regiment of army grunts kneeling miles away from the original ground zero. The rush of wind and dust that, like a wave whooshes past them and then rushes back toward the blast, actually rocks them back and forth. The scene of the soldiers in the foreground dwarfed by the mushroom cloud darkening the sky in the distance stirs a gut feeling of how we’ve become the servant of what we created. The unsettling question Guo-Qiang’s work inspires is, “Can we protect ourselves against ourselves?”

“Accretions II, 1967”, by Yayoi Kusama, is a 3’ by 6’ oil on canvas. What has been accreted are hundreds of tiny white dollops of white over a deep rose base. If you let yourself gaze at it with your third eye, it takes you far into the cosmos as you imagine speeding past stars and into space at hyperspeed.

Sol Lewitt’s “Four-Part Geometric Structure” is a set of twenty individual white painted structures placed on five gray painted wood panels. pt @ large imagines the geometric shapes might be the focus for a field trip for a high school geometry class.

Fred Tomaselli’s “Guilty, 2005”, an inkjet digital print that superimposes a color design over a New York Times page one headline, is an artistic jab at the greed that brought down Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski.

The Carpenter Center is at the ivied edge of Harvard Yard, right next door to the Fogg Museum, Harvard's oldest art museum, that covers the history of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present. The Carpenter Center’s sunlit lobby with several small tables lined in front of a huge plate glass window, offers a great view of ivy league pageantry - professors, students, tourists, and UPS trucks as they make their daily rounds. And a good place to relax before heading to the middle of Harvard Square, the second destination for the day's artistic trifecta.

But wait. The lobby is also the place to contemplate one of the most prodigiously rarified versions of “art speak” that pt @ large has encountered: the small brochure that accompanies the exhibit.

Describing the exhibit, associate curator Linda Norden writes, “The title ‘Quantum Grids’ with an emphasis on the quantum, refers to just one of the ideas the juxtaposition of these four works proposes formally and conceptually: if the word “grid” usually conjures an image and implies a desire to contain and order, “quantum” is often inseparable from “leap” and the ungraspable range that “leap” would describe.”

Oh, I see.

The centuries old proverb “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is nowhere as valuable as in an exhibit like this. You just have to lighten up, not try too hard, and let your random access memory take charge. Surprisingly, Norden seems to echo that when she concludes her explanation of the exhibit by saying, “Each of the artworks here invokes the grid less as container than as counterpoint, as a mechanism through which to imagine the irrepressible, irrational, and incomprehensible human behaviors that define our moment.”

I pondered that all the way to Harvard Square.

Red Elm, Boston Playwright's Theater

Red Elm
A play in one act written by Dan Hunter, running time 1 hour, 20 minutes
Setting: Jack and Margaret Butler’s living room, flanked with sofa and easy chair covered in clear protective plastic, a card table and folding chairs in center, and doors leading to front hall and kitchen
Boston Playwrights’ Theater, 949 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215
Playing 12/1-12/18, call for times 617-358-7529

If you’re looking for a feel-good play for the holiday season, “Red Elm” should probably be removed from your shopping list. On the other hand, if you might enjoy watching a small Midwestern family implode under the weight of misunderstandings, self-deceits, and pretensions, this production at the Boston Playwrights’ Theater would be a good ticket to stuff into your Christmas stocking.

The play opens with a loud thud as Big Jack pushes through a door and dumps a heavy cardboard file box on the living room floor. Big Jack thinks he’s dying and tells his wife Margaret that he’s decided to change his will, which he says he cannot find and thinks is in the box. During the next hour and twenty minutes, the contents of the box will reveal a past that Jack rejects but is killing him spiritually if not physically.

As the couple settle into a game of not so friendly gin rummy around Margaret’s meticulously maintained folding card table, years of unresolved tensions begin to erupt as they verbally spar, which one suspects is the way they habitually communicate. It’s clear that pretense has a major role in their coexistence.

“If you fool yourself long enough, it becomes real,” Margaret says. Jack responds, “Fooling yourself is an honorable way to get along.” Corrosive is the more accurate term and the play begins its descent into a world of emotional damage done to a marriage built on denial and pretension.

Layer by layer, the play’s dialogue strips away the pretense that Big Jack Butler, his wife Margaret, and his son Ezra have been living with for years. The memory of the Butler’s dead son Bobby, immortalized in twice the number of photographs on the living room wall as photos of Ezra, casts a controlling shadow over Big Jack, Margaret, and Ezra. Big Jack bullies wife Margaret, Margaret is a study in self-delusion as she copes with her overbearing husband, and son Ezra tries to badger Big Jack into modernizing his business. Ezra is fearful Big Jack is not going to bequeath the farm to him, and is bitter about never measuring up to his father’s memories of son Bobby, who either died the death of a war hero or, according to Ezra, a drug overdose. Not pretty.

Photo: Linda, Ezra

The play is a tangle of relationships and secrets worthy of a good soap opera. The plot thickens when Big Jack asks his secretary Linda to come to the home to read him the contents of the boxes. Linda, a divorcee who grew up as a neighbor, is being courted by Ezra. Linda is on a tightrope act balancing between faithful employee who can keep a secret for her employer Jack and a woman with compassion for the bitter and conniving old man. When she says, “Every secret finds the light of day,” Jack squirms. Linda sees through Jack and says, “You’re a padlock looking for a key,” and he realizes he needs to unburden. Jack insists she read the contents of the box aloud to him. For each piece of the past revealed through Linda’s reluctant reading, another puzzling piece emerges.

In an angry confrontation with Ezra, Jack brandishes his red elm walking stick and talks about the wood’s ability to bend and not break. Ezra replies that the red elms that used to surround the farm have all died. It is clear that stubbornness and delusion have replaced resilience in Jack. Whatever has withered away in his soul is not about to be revived.

The ultimate failure of the play is not with the actors. William Young (Big Jack Butler), Ann Marie Shea (Margaret Butler), Mark Peckham (Ezra Butler), and Julie Jirousek (Linda) convincingly get inside the skins of their characters. Their mannerisms and dialogue move us alternately to be repelled by them or pity them. Too much of the family tangle is left to the last minutes of the play to resolve and seems rushed. A final twist comes out of left field and is not clear enough to help us connect the dots. In the final minutes of the play, Jack mutters, “You don’t get what you want in life.” True enough if you're unwilling to confront reality and find a place for love in your heart.

After the play’s climactic last scene, we see Big Jack staring alone into the darkness outside the front door of the set. The truths that have been unearthed have not set anyone free. We’re left with an empty feeling that we’ve seen the sound and the fury and it’s signified nothing.