pt at large

Triiibe at Gallery Kayafas: A Real Trip(lettt)

TRIIIBE
At: Gallery Kayafas
450 Harrison Ave, Boston, MA
Through May 17, 2010
www.gallerykayafas.com


Whether you’re scratching your head and saying, “Whaaaat?” in amazement or smiling at the fun these people are having, you’ll be glad you came to Gallery Kayafas to explore the photography show “Triiibe.”
 
 Those three “i”s in the title refer to identical triplets Alicia, Kelly, and Sara Casilio who love to use their astonishing identicality to mess you up - and they succeed. When they dress the same in “Paint By Number”, your eyes dart from one face to the other to the other trying to find a tiny mark, mole, set of lips, anything, that will differentiate one from the others. You wonder- can they possibly be as identical on the inside as they appear on the surface?
 
In “Compatibility Quiz,” another of the 16 gorgeous color photographs in the show, the three don’t try to disguise their faces but wear different colored wigs and dress up like a party girl, a librarian, and a hipster, all leaning against a barroom counter. Before you realize it, you assign certain cultural values and assumptions to them based on their appearance. You’ve fallen right into their clutches. 
 
Whether these chameleons choose to camouflage themselves or confound us with their mirror images, they’re not just into trompe l’oeil compositions.
 
Photographs titled “Right to Life,” “Abstinence Eve,” “Black and White,”  “Equal Opportunity,” and “Homeland” have a point of view that’s more in the form of a thesis than a slogan. These performance artists aren’t flame-throwers. They tap you on the shoulder and say, “What’s your position on this?”
 
So when you see “Black and White,” a photo of a pregnant woman partially covered by a white sheet being observed by Supreme Court justices, the looks on the siblings’ three faces tells the narrative. In “Homeland,” a father and mother pose with a photo of a son in military garb in a framed picture on the wall behind them. White bread America - or not?
 
  Their use of wigs, clothing, and make-up deconstructs their gender and personal identity and adds an insidious voyeuristic aspect to each photograph. Substitute three non-related women for Alicia, Kelly, and Sara and the statement evaporates.

Every photo is a triple take. Are we looking at identical sisters or are we looking at the women and men they’re posing as and what’s their point? The show produces an interactive ping pong effect in your head as, in spite of yourself, you try to figure out who’s who and what they’re up to. Their point? They’re still themselves as they pose to be others. Aren’t we all the same under our own skins, they seem to be asking.

A series of four photographs titled “Shelf-Life” is goofy and playful. Their heads appear disembodied, protruding from holes on a shelf, and for all the world look like alabaster sculptures on display.  In “Shelf-Life #4 ” it looks like they’ve emptied their prop closet and scattered beads, eyeglasses, wigs, handbags and scarves on and around their heads. “Shelf-Life #1” looks like the shelf after a great sale. Nothing left except their alabaster heads in subtle repose.

The large format photographs nearly step right out of their custom frames. Lush color, precisely detailed, they maximize the photogenic triplet's flesh tones, facial contours and body language. There’s a wondrous collaborative relationship between photographer and sisters.
 
Cary Wolinsky really gets what the Casilios are up to. A renowned photojournalist since he began with the Boston Globe in 1968, Cary Wolinsky’s photo essays have been published by National Geographic, The Smithsonian, and Natural History magazines. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts and other prestigious institutions have collected his fine art prints.

He first saw them as they pulled off a piece of guerilla theater at Massachusetts College of Art (their 2001 alma mater) in 2005. He’d just left his gig at National Geographic. Their stunt was the spark that ignited the formation of their collaborative group “Triiibe” in 2006.

Note the couch, same as one in photo

This is a family production on both sides of the camera. Cary Wolinsky’s son Yari, a freelance filmmaker, has made videos of the performance artists in action. They’re not part of the show but they demonstrate the triplets power to leverage their identical appearances to make their own political points. Click on page 3 of the Gallery link on Triiibe’s website to find his stunning "Bailouts and Bonuses" video of the sisters on Wall Street. Cary Wolinsky's wife Babs Emmel is often called upon for artistic advice and clothing management.

“Their sense of humor is disarming as they engage you with the issues they want to focus on,” gallery owner Arlette Kayafas says.

From the concept to the content, this show is a real trip, as in triplet.

Photos by Paul A.Tamburello, Jr.

 
 

South End Pita: Never A Dull Special

South End Pita
473 Albany Street
Boston, MA 02118
Monday - Friday 6 AM - 10 PM, Saturday 10 AM - 10 PM

April 23, 2010

South End Pita owner Rod Ouassaidi is a culinary adventurer. His customers are the beneficiaries. I should know. I've returned here several times since I discovered the tiny outpost and wrote about it in March this year.

“Chicken kabob is one of the most popular lunch time dinners. I like to keep my customers happy by adding new twists to the basic recipe so they don’t get bored,” he says with a conspiratorial smile. “I’ve never prepared it like I did this morning. I'll bring you an order of it. Let me know what you think.”

Often the day’s special is gobbled up before I arrive in the early afternoon so I’ve taken no chances today.

My late-morning reward? I get the first helping of today's special: chicken kabob with caramelized onions and chick peas over a bed of rice with Moroccan spices and chopped parsley confetti atop it all.

The caramelized onions add a subtle touch of sweetness, the chick peas have an earthy little snap to them, “al dente,” as Rod says, and the chicken is moist and kissed with Moroccan spices. I clean the plate.

The simple salad dressing of olive oil, garlic, lemon, Dijon mustard, and a dash of pepper marries the iceberg lettuce, sliced tomato, cucumber, black olives, green peppers, and two round rings of onion, topped with feta cheese, into a little statement showing how to get so much taste out of so many familiar ingredients.

Photo by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

From Orchids to Octopi: Coming To Grips With Charles Darwin

FROM ORCHIDS TO OCTOPI: An Evolutionary Love Story
Written by Melinda Lopez
Directed by Diego Arciniegas
Presented by Catalyst Collaborative@MIT
Performed by The Underground Railway Theater
At: Central Square Theater, through May 2
450 Mass. Ave., Cambridge. 617-576-9278,
$35, $25 seniors, $20 students


When is a play a play and when is it an educational experience? Well, you’ll have to make up your own mind if you check out “From Orchids to Octopi: An Evolutionary Love Story”, a play created by Boston playwright Melinda Lopez to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s “Evolution of the Species”.

Lopez gets a gold star for even attempting to create the play. No matter which way you slice it, the play is a challenge to present.

On a cerebral level, the play has the goods. Lopez devised a plot involving the original Emma and Charles Darwin, a modern couple named Emma and Charles, a carnival barker and several minor characters whose names you might recognize, Reverend Thomas Malthus, for example.

The strength of the play is one of its liabilities. The play’s dialogue is loaded with references to abstract ideas that have to do with how and why we humans evolved from one celled organisms to artists and restaurant chefs, the modern Emma and Charles, respectively.

Evolution from fins to hands, from quadrupeds to upright bipeds, the persistence of pestilences like tuberculosis to decimate the planet’s population from time to time, the extinction of creature that didn’t or couldn’t adapt, all sorts of lingo about the origin of the species from the ooze to the patio - all of it is crammed into quick paced dialogue between the two Charles’s and the two Emma’s and, in a terrific concept, a carnival barker.

In an ideal theater world, the play’s program would be required reading before witnessing the production. The program includes:
• Three pages of “Why Is Evolution So Hard To  Understand” by Roxanna Myhrum, excellent background material, lists and elaborates on five key ideas:
    Humans instinctually make sense of the world using non-evolutionary concepts.
    The scientific language of evolutionary theory often has other meanings that lead to confusion.
    Culture and technology drive change in the modern world.
    The exact mechanism of change and inheritance are complicated and carried out on an invisible scale.
    The implications of evolution for human society are sometimes controversial.

• A brief “Evolution of Life” from 4.6 billion years ago until November 1859 when Darwin publishes “On the Origin of the Species.”

• “The Life of Charles Darwin”, a three page biography by Michelle Hochberg
 A two page “Time Line of 20th Century (ish) Science”

• One page titled “On The Origin of From Orchids to Octopi” listing scientists consulted via in-depth interviews (including MIT Professor of Biology Hidde Ploegh, the father of one of my former fourth grade students), and other scientists and advisors consulted during the formation of the play.

• A two page reproduction of Charles Darwin’s “Marry - Not Marry, this is the question” that lists his reasons for marrying or not marrying.

That gives you an idea of what’s rattling around in playwright Melinda Lopez’s mind after the National Institutes of Health commissioned Catalyst Collaborative@MIT to create a play that explains the importance of Darwin’s work and how it manifests itself in our daily lives.

Lopez’s idea of inventing a 21st century Emma, an artist hired to paint a mural celebrating Darwin’s work is brilliant. The cast of Charles Darwin (Wesley Savick), Emma Darwin (Underground Railway Theater Director Debra Wise), modern Emma (Kortney Adams), modern Charles (Tom O’Keefe) stretches hard to keep the story together. Savick and Wise are especially grand with their roles and their other roles as a Carnival Barker with a mile a minute evolution science rap and a wise cracking obstetrician, respectively.

What isn’t a stretch is the sobering reminder that germs and viruses adapt to the drugs we’ve created to eradicate them. O’Keefe and Wise fill in some links in the evolutionary time line by wearing sandwich-board type puppets and comically expound upon the roles of early invertebrates, bacteria, and the like.

The puppet representing tuberculosis gleefully reminds us how it’s adapted quite well, thank you very much, is still one of the world’s deadliest diseases, and that a staggering on third of the world’s population is infected with TB.

Ultimately, the play can’t handle the burden of knowledge it tries to impart. The dialogue is often too fast to digest and many of the connections it tries to make between Darwin’s theory and our own everyday lives are a bit too square to fit into a round hole.

If you’re looking for an intellectually rousing night at the theater, this might be your cup of tea. But I advise you to adapt by arriving at the theater with your tea a half hour before curtain time and bring your reading glasses. The Orchid and the Octopi will make way more sense after you read the program thoroughly.

Photos of David Fichter's terrific murals courtesy of the NIH web site

A Closer Walk With Patsy Cline: Velvet Thunder

"A Closer Walk With Patsy Cline"
With Bridget Beirne and Tom Frey
April 7, 2010 - April 17, 2010
Fiddlehead Theater Company at Back Bay Events Center (John Hancock Hall)
200 Berkley Street
Boston, MA, 02116


Yes. You heard me right. Patsy Cline. Whaddya mean, you don’t like, “country”? I dare you to listen to “I Fall To Pieces” or “Crazy” and tell me you don’t like country. Let me straighten you out with a few facts, Hoss (a term of endearment Cline used to refer to her friends).

Patsy Cline is the Number One Juke-Box Play in the World. Her "Greatest Hits" album has been in first place for more than 200 weeks on Billboard’s Top Country Catalog Albums. Whether you like country music or not, you’d have to have had your radio turned off for sixty years or so not to have heard her sing something or someone cover a song she made famous.

Sing is a tepid word to describe what Patsy Cline did. She emoted. So does Bridget Beirne who sings the daylights out of her role as Patsy in the play, “A Closer Walk With Patsy Cline,” at the John Hancock Hall in Boston.

Cline’s uneven rise to fame and death in a plane crash as her career was peaking is cleverly told through the eyes of Mr. Little Big Man, a disc jockey at WINC, “The Music of the SouthLand with 10,000 watts of country power out of Winchester, Virginia.” The guy has loved Patsy Cline since Virginia Hensley (her original name) showed up at the station in 1948 at age sixteen and drilled a hole in the man’s heart with her raw talent and phenomenal pipes.

The play’s set features a bandstand at center stage and a tiny radio booth on the side of the stage. Mr. Little Big Man, on his stool in the booth at WINC, is spending the night of March 6, 1963 reminiscing about Cline’s climb through early rejection, personal injuries, and relationship problems to her breakout song, “Walkin’ After Midnight. ” Career launched, Cline blazed an unheard-of trail from the Arthur Godfrey Talent Show, to The Grand Ole Opry, to Carnegie Hall, the first country singer to ever be invited there.

Beirne, as Patsy fronting her very lively quintet of piano, guitar, bass, laptop/pedal steel and percussion, takes over each time the jockey plays one of her songs.

Cline’s patter with the band reveals her comfort in her own country skin and her unerring sense of showmanship. “I started out singing at parties in Virginia and they haven’t been able to stop me since,” she says before taking off on the show’s first song, “Come On In,” She had the goods. She believed in herself when acknowledgment was slim and didn’t crow about it when adulation came her way.

Although it has to distill Cline’s rich life into ninety minutes, “A Closer Walk With Patsy Cline” manages to weave in the small details that made this woman special. One night, Cline, just beginning to get name recognition, stepped out on stage and said, “We’d love to sing for you folks tonight but the promoter hasn’t paid us yet.” The promoters, who often skipped town with the proceeds and stiffied the singers, promptly paid the entertainers on the night’s billing. They didn’t mess with “The Cline” after that.

Through changes in her attire and the venues in which she played, Beirne show us Patsy at work on stage. Cline was a force but no prima donna. Virginia Hensley transforms from gingham dressed school girl in Winchester, Virginia to a woman in a fire engine red hat, fabulous fringed vest, skirt and boots in Las Vegas and finally to an icon wrapped in a gorgeous floor length gown in New York City - but her two feet stay firmly planted in the soil of working class Virginia. Patsy Cline was one of the first singers to have such enormous crossover appeal.

“I just sing how I hurt inside.” Patsy Cline

She never hid her country roots, could carry off an “aw shucks, what’s the fuss about” character, and bantered and mugged shamelessly with an adoring audience that sensed her authenticity.

Through the progression of songs, the show traces the arc of her career. You also get a glimpse into mid 20th century America through Tom Frey’s multiple roles as disk jockey Little Big Man delivering commercials for Mr. Clean, Ajax, and as a comic doing his shtick as the second banana introducing Patsy Cline to the audience in Las Vegas and at The Grand Ole Opry.

Most of all you get Beirne singing full throttle Patsy Cline. Cline had “pain in her voice that speaks to your heart” said Mr. Little Big Man. On ballads, Patsy Cline’s rich contralto voice is velvet thunder with a distant echo of unfathomable grief. Listen to “I Fall To Pieces” or “Crazy” or `Sweet Dreams.” The timbre in her voice resonates in your heartstrings. I get a lump in my throat every time I hear those songs - happened earlier this week when Beirne sang them, too.

Beirne doesn’t duplicate that dark mournful edge to Cline’s voice in ballads like “I Fall To Pieces” but honestly, I don’t know if anyone can. What she does is give us a sense of the joy Cline had in singing and her uncompromising way of giving everything she had on every song every night. You may call her country but you’ll certainly realize you've never heard anything quite like Patsy Cline's way with a song.

Even though you know it’s coming, the show’s last scene on that March night, in which Mr. Little Big Man gets a news flash about Cline’s death in a plane crash, is a heartbreaker.  The plays final two songs feature Cline, starkly lit in a stunning white gown, reprising "Crazy" and "A Closer Walk With Thee."

Barely 30 years old, Patsy Cline was gone. It took a few moments for the choked up audience to respond - a standing ovation for the musicians, Tom Frey, and Bridget Beirne, but mostly for the woman who made the memories possible.

PLAYLIST
“Come On In”
“Gotta Lotta Rhythm in My Soul”
“There He Goes”
“Seven Lonely Days”
“Faded Love”
“Turkey In The Straw”
Walkin’ After Midnight”
“Your Cheatin’ Heart”
“Stop, Look, and LIsten”
“Always”
“Lovesick Blues”

Act 2
“Blue Moon of Kentucky”
“I Don’t Wanna”
“Just A Closer Walk With Thee”
“She’s Got You”
“Back In Baby’s Arms”
“Sweet Dreams”
“I Fall To Pieces”
“Bill Bailey”
“Crazy”

Photo of Bridget Beirne courtesy Edge Boston
Photo of Patsy Cline web archive

Opus: Brilliant Work at the New Repertory Theater

Opus
A drama by Michael Hollinger
New Repertory Theater
Arsenal Center for the Arts, Watertown, MA
March 29 - April 18
Directed by Jim Petosa
Cristina Todesco, scenic design, Eric Propp, costume design, Scott Pinkney, lighting design, Ben Emerson, sound design, Amy Weissenstein, production stage manager

Shelley Bolman -Alan
Benjamin Evett - Dorian
Michael Kaye - Elliot
Becky Webber - Grace
Bates Wilder - Carl

Who knew the dynamics within a chamber music ensemble could provide such arena-sized satisfaction. The New Repertory Theater ensemble actors in "Opus" at the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown blow the hinges off your notions of the serene, elegant unity of a high powered group of talented musicians playing Beethoven, Mozart and the whole catalog of classical treasures we associate with the genre.

The world-renowned Lazara String Quartet is preparing to perform at the White House and a television audience of millions. Ho hum. How will this produce drama. By the time 90 minutes has flown by, we’ve witnessed several deliciously drawn subplots that rival “Lost” for complexity and shifts of power. The harmonics produced by the Lazara String Quartet are heavenly but the social dynamics between the principals morph into guilty pleasure soap opera, capable of casting a strong spell of "Desperate Housewives" upon you. And it works.

Writer and former violinist Michael Hollinger has created a play that alternately soars with passionate, informed dialogue and crashes fabulously at high speed into brick walls. His dialogue miraculously layers references to stops, rests, frets and music scores between passionate, sometimes comical, sometimes confrontational, interactions between high-strung musicians.

The characters, as different as the instruments in the quartet, own their parts with conviction. They offer highly charged and nuanced performances that mine the territory of personal identity and group cohesion.

A key member of the group, Dorian (Benjamin Evett), is cast out because of erratic behavior that surpasses his musical genius. Grace (Becky Webber) is hired to replace him. Lazara Quartet’s wonderfully over-the-top violinist Elliot (Michael Kaye) egotistically pushes his musical and personal agenda, disturbing the group’s inherent tendency toward unity. Quartet bassist Carl (Bates Wilder) and second violinist Alan (Shelley Bolman) navigate the turbulent territory between allegiance to the deposed player Dorian, the newest member Grace, and their desire to make world-class music with rigid, impervious-to-compromise, Elliot.

Alan (Shelley Bolman), Elliot (Michael Kaye) , Grace (Becky Webber), Dorian (Benjamin Evett) , Carl (Bates Wilder)

Hollinger consistently breaks the escalating tension with one-liners from the cast that had last night’s audience laughing out loud. The music sequences were recreated by having the quartet mimic bowing their instruments, letting us imagine their fingering over the instruments’ frets, over recorded music of whatever score they were playing. The synchronization was terrific, nothing was lost in translation.

Evett’s and Kaye’s use of body language and facial expression are particularly brilliant as they range through Elliot and Dorian’s complicated relationship.

This is a very rewarding night of theater. The final moments of "Opus" are a hold your breath piece of drama. A short epilogue intended to flash forward from the play’s last dramatic scene, falls inexplicably flat. It is the only missed note of a finely tuned piece of theater.

Photo from wickedlocal

The regiMAN

Every time I open one of my email accounts, I’m greeted by a popup with a man’s face alternately looking as wrinkled as a dried prune then miraculously smoothed out by a liquid sprayed over his handsome face.

When I click on the link of the regiMEN High Performance Anti-Aging System for Men, I find out that “When You Look Good Life Is Good.” I sort of thought everyone knew that.

Well, regiMEN claims it has ingredients proven to…"Repair sun-damaged skin, Improve skin texture and decrease dryness and Reduce the appearance of lines and wrinkles."

It helps that the guy whose face has been miraculously plumped up and de-wrinkled was about twenty-five to begin with.

Scrolling down the link I read, “What’s so different about men’s skin?”
I discover that…
It's thicker.
It produces more oil.
It has larger pores.
It dehydrates easier.
It is subjected to the trauma of shaving.
It ages in leaps and bounds.

I never realized I’ve been subjecting my skin to trauma every day for the last fifty years. In my misinformed, naïve thinking, my skin feels softer after shaving, and, I’m told by reliable sources, more caress-able, kissable, and likely to be welcomed when pressed against a woman’s cheek or more intimate territory of her anatomy. Continuing to traumatize my face still sounds like a good option.

It’s taken over sixty years for the skin on my face to leap and bound to its current physiognomy. I’m attached to it like I am to a pair of comfortable worn Levis, the kind of jeans a guy will absolutely not part with until the threads dissolve. 

I’ve earned those creases, wrinkles, and a couple of scars by sailing the ocean blue for thirty years, biking in Ireland, Canada, and Cape Cod, and screaming up and down the Westport River on my Boston Whaler in broad daylight with minimal sissy sunscreen protection. There’s character in those creases. Those brown spots near my hairline are badges of a well-lived life.

And if by some deficiency of self-esteem, I decided to use the regiMEN, what the hell would I do with the rest of my body? Would I have to immerse myself in the stuff to remove  evidence on my abs, butt, and neck of having lived six decades? That could get expensive. Besides, the actuarial tables don’t give a flying you-know-what about how great my face looks.

Guys with younger faces are a dime a dozen. I kind of like being one of the oldest guys on the dance floor. Some of the best dances I have all night are with boomer women who, with their own well-worn faces and bodies, channel the music with a conviction and passion that age can’t touch, and who enjoy grooving with a man who appreciates their experience and the package it comes in.

I like the smile that spreads across my younger partner’s faces when they feel me find their rhythm within the dance and lead them well but within the style they own. I don’t have to drive them around like a piece of furniture and show them how many young buck moves I can spring on them whether they like them or not. Next time they see a guy with gray hair and a well-worn face they might think, “That’s the guy I want to dance with next.”

So the fact is this. I was twenty once and thirty once and forty once and fifty once and now am sixty plus. As far as I know, I’ve been looking the way I ought to look the whole time. I believe I’ll still feel like THE MAN, even if I don’t start a regiMEN to prove it.

So yeah, life is good...still.

Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill: Billie's Last Dive

 LADY DAY AT EMERSON’S BAR & GRILL
Play by Lanie Robertson,
with musical arrangements
by Danny Holgate
Directed by: Spiro Veloudos. Music direction, Chauncey Moore. Set, Skip Curtiss.
Costumes, Mallory Frers. Lights, Karen Perlow.
At: Lyric Stage Company, through April 24.
Tickets: $29-$54. 617-585-5678

Billie Holiday’s life was a train wreck long before she stepped on to the fictional stage of Emerson’s Bar & Grill in South Philly a few months before she died in 1959 at the age of 44 of cirrhosis of the liver. By the time we’ve finished watching “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill” currently playing at the Lyric Stage, we see what else killed her.
 
The setting, a small, exposed brick, bare bones seedy bar, a few cocktail tables, rickety piano and a stool for the singer, might be fine for an aspiring talent on the way up. For Holiday, who’d sung in Carnegie Hall, it was the pits, the last stop. The haze drifting through the spotlights on the stage deftly conveys the smoky atmosphere in a dive like Emerson’s but also the fog through which Holiday is struggling emotionally.
 
Between 14 songs, a worn out and insecure Holiday, played sensitively by Jacqui Parker, sings for an indifferent, unseen bar audience. She’s been ravaged by drugs and booze but can still, in a few infrequent glorious  moments, cop an attitude reminiscent of her glory days. She doesn’t have any energy left to hate the men who took advantage of her or blame herself for letting it happen.

What we get is Holiday tossing off stories of being raped as a young girl, the whorehouse she worked in, her wayward mother, the many musicians she met and sang with, and the men who messed with her in every way they could. She sang with the best bands of the twentieth century: Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw Duke Ellington, and Count Basie. Her nickname, “Lady Day,” was bestowed by Lester Young, the great sax player of the 1930s and 40s.

Chauncey Moore, playing piano player Jimmy Powers, anchors Holiday on the stage during her attacks of petulance or need for a fix.  He’s way better than many who probably accompanied her in her last few years.
 
Given her temperament, Holiday may have self-destructed no matter when she lived. “Your best talent is you pick the worst apple in the barrel every time,” Holiday recalls her mother saying about her choice in men. Holiday might have been a world-class singer; she was also a world-class enabler.
 
Bandleader Artie Shaw hired her as one of the first black singers to work with a white orchestra. After listening to her stories of life on the road south of the Mason Dixon line, even with one of the best bands in the country, it’s clear that segregation battered a big part of her soul and whatever self-regard she could muster.
 
During the 90-minute one act show, she disintegrates while gulping bourbon and once disappears, leaving Jimmy to improvise a boogie woogie until she reappears after she’s apparently shot up with heroin.
 
Till now, we’ve been watching Parker perform a documentary of Holiday’s life interpreted through song. When she wanders back onstage, barefoot and glassy eyed, it’s almost embarrassing to see such great talent reduced to slurry, unkempt caricature. All that talent, that sass, that gritty will to survive, flickers faintly and will soon to be extinguished. These are the most indelible moments of the night.
 
The aggregated toll of segregation, selfish and addicted lovers, and a complete lack of love from anyone who mattered and would stand by her have crushed her. Parker doesn’t try to mimic Holiday’s iconic, thin, raspy voice. No problem. When she sings “God Bless The Child” and “Strange Fruit, ” they resonate for all the sad reasons Holiday wrote them.
 
There's no other way writer Lanie Robertson could pull this off other than having Holiday be in a safe setting where she can say whatever she wants. Emerson’s Bar & Grill is not too far a stretch from the whorehouse in which Holiday  first heard records of  Louis Armstrong and Besse Smith. She’s in a black milieu and is pouring out her life story to a few people at the bar who might be paying attention. Several stories describe incidents with the ‘ofay’ (derogatory term for white people), the small minded, holier than thou, very un-black promoters and parole officers who made her life miserable.
 
She tells the stories without rancor and occasionally gets a laugh out of some of white folks very un-cool ways. So when she says, “The only difference between us and white folks is we wear our black on the outside,” I look around at the audience and don’t see many “we”s but after listening to her stories for the past hour, I know who she’s talking about. Good theater puts you in someone else’s shoes. Sometimes the better the fit, the more uncomfortable it feels.
 
“Singing is the best part of living for me,” she says early in the play. Her voice endured long after her body and soul began to desert her. As in the Besse Smith song she sings, "All I ever wanted was to be somebody's baby doll..." She never found that somebody who really cared about her.
 
The play doesn’t reveal profound truths but does give us liner notes to a musical icon of the twentieth century.

Musical Numbers performed by Jacqui Parker

“ I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone” by Woodrow Johnson
“When a Woman Loves a Man” by Bernard Hanighen, Gordon Jenkins, Johnny Mercer
“What a Little Moonlight Can Do” by HarryWoods
“Crazy He Calls Me” by Bob Russell, Carl Sigman
“Gimme a Pig Foot” by Wesley Wilson
“Baby Doll” by Besse Smith
“God Bless The Child” by Arthur Herzog, Jr, Billie Holiday
“Foolin’ Myself” by Jack Lawrence, Peter Tinturin
“Somebody’s On My Mind” by Billie Holiday, Arthur Herzog, Jr.
“Easy Livin’” by Robin and Rolinger
“Strange Fruit’ by Lewin  Allen
“Taint Nobody’s Business” by Porter Grainger, Everett Robbins
“Don’t Explain” by Billie Holiday, Arthur Herzog, Jr.
“Deep Song” by Douglas Cross, George Cory

Photo courtesy of Lyric Stage Company

Limonade Tous Les Jours: A Perfect Concoction for Spring

Limonade Tous Les Jours by Charles L. Mee
Directed by Louisa Richards
Production Manager Adrienne Boris, Stage Manager Candace Mongellow, Scenic Design Kathryn Kawecki, Lighting Design Tamar Shavit
Black Box Theater at The Arsenal Center for the Arts
321 Arsenal Street, Watertown, MA
April 1-10, 2010
Thursday 7:30 pm, Friday 8:00 pm
Saturday 2:00 & 8:00 pm

The “limonade” being served at the Black Box Theater at the Arsenal Center for The Arts is a perfect concoction for spring.  The formula: A young cabaret singer. A middle aged American man. Paris. Two people recently devastated by love lost, “damaged goods” as they call themselves, who end up hovering close to the flame of love again like two moths with no short term memory.

Andrew, a fifty-ish American smarting from divorce from a younger woman. Ya Ya, a twenty-something cabaret singer recently dumped by an older man. He thoughtful, cautious, reflective (“boring” she says). She, a personality brimming over with the effervescence of a just uncorked bottle of champagne. Sex happens. Then they try to figure out whether to say hello or goodbye. Both are clear that they don’t want each other. Or need each other. Or both. Or neither. But they do anyway. And that’s the fun of watching the play unfold.

Ya Ya (Marie Polizzano) lights up the play with her antic, stream of consciousness, wonderfully Gallic ideas about love, sex, relationships and what she wants. Listening to her get going on a zany roll foaming with fizzy French female logic is hilarious. Her French accent is spot on and miraculously stays on for the entire production. She gushes with her ideas about what makes a man and a woman connect, never mind that they’re all contradictory.

Andrew (Peter Haydu) is the ice to Ya Ya’s fire. His sense of romance is more grounded and mellowed with age. His reflective nature is a speed bump for Ya Ya. She’s never met a man she can trust. Never believing their lives will touch beyond these moments, they share their vulnerabilities and their dreams with easy candor. They are two pieces of a puzzle that when turned just so, fit together perfectly. Is it enough?

The spare set design, music, and lighting fit perfectly with the theater space and the feel of the play. Interludes of Ya Ya’s cabaret singing (Marie Polizzano can sing!), the photo montage shown by their café waiter that adds another dimension to what they’ve been up to on their day in Paris, and a stunning song by said waiter (counter tenor Doug Dodson), add pow to the production.

Beneath all the funny lines, this play has to do with human yearning for connection. Anyone who’s been in a relationship knows that dance of finding the right fit and the work it takes to smooth the inevitable burrs along the edges.

What will become of them? Who knows. There are scores of reasons they’re not suited for each other, most of which they tell each other with penetrating, often comical, honesty. But since when has that foreclosed a relationship?  By the play’s final moments, we know their chance meeting has changed their lives.

Of course, the fact I enjoyed this play written by Charles Mee has nothing to do with the fact my former fourth grade student Louisa Richards directed it. And nothing to do with how rewarding it is for me to see a kid I knew as a reserved, earnest ten-year-old go for broke and become a founding member of Exquisite Corps Theatre, Boston’s newest theater company.

Young theater companies and start-up internet enterprises might be two of the most fragile, high-risk, high-gain ventures to launch. In my thoroughly biased opinion , if anyone can make lemonade out of the sweet and sour ups and downs in the world of directing and producing plays, it’s Louisa Richards.