pt at large

All Is Lost: A Film

All Is Lost: A Film

The film is, with the exception of the first minute when the lone sailor reads aloud a note he pens after 8 days of surviving on a life raft, without dialogue. The sound of the ocean, raging, lolling, calm and the wind flapping the sails or enclosure over a tiny life raft are what matters. They are all the mariner hears, all we hear.

I’ve been offshore several times as crew on Trans-Atlantic crossings. After a couple of weeks, the rhythm of sea sets into your bones. Conversations become sparse in the cockpit. Water in motion is the constant soundtrack. You hear it slapping against the hull an inch from your ear when you’re sleeping, swooshing in swells when you’re on watch, even the tiniest of ripples against the topsides in a calm, the sea a perfect mirror so still and flat it looks like you could step off the boat and take a stroll right over it.

Then there’s the sound you never want to hear. Water rushing into the cabin. Which is when “All Is Lost” begins. If water could talk, it might have been reading the sailor the Last Rights.

The mariner doesn’t talk. Slowly, tentatively, as the reality of the shipping container that stove in the starboard waterline of his 39 foot sloops takes shape in his head, which, moments before in a midday nap, was perhaps filled with dreams of the life he left behind, he acts.

Radio communication gone. Most food stores gone. Most of his water gone. The next hundred and six minutes are a man’s bid to survive.

What’s left? Materials he finds to attempt to patch the vessel. A jug of water, a sextant - the gift he never thought he’d need. A previously unopened book titled  “Extreme Weather: A Guide and Record Book”. The vast Indian Ocean. And a will to live.

The sailor does what he can. He tries to fix the radio. He tries to patch the hull well enough to withstand herds of cumulonimbus clouds packing mighty storms charging from the horizon. He nearly drowns as he tries to rig a storm jib during a gale. His boat sinks. He’s now alone and afloat on a tiny life raft, it's thin skin the only barrier between him and the deep. The image of his tiny raft, one yellow molecule bobbing in the vast ocean, shrieks “ALONE!”

Focused, nearly stoic, he does one small thing at a time. He learns to use the sextant. He plots a course toward the shipping lanes. He makes a still to produce drops of water. He tries to fish. Sharks appear. Container ships appear and vanish over the horizon.

Close up shots of the 77 year-old sailor’s craggy, salt-crusted face are eloquent speeches about his deteriorating emotional and physical state. One by one, his options are closed down. He is forced to reconcile hope and resignation. When I realize I’d feel manipulated if the cavalry were to charge over the next wave and save him, I realize how this must end.

It is left to us to interpret the note he scrawls. “I think you would all agree that I tried,” he writes, “All is lost.” To whom is it written? Does it matter? Weak, dehydrated, possibly delusional, he tucks the note into a jar, seals the lid, hesitates, then casts it weakly into the ocean.

The film’s ending is enigmatic, ambivalent and satisfying, a Rorschach test of your sensibilities. If you’re a certain age, it puts you smack in the middle of your own vast ocean of coming to terms with death. Will all be lost? Depends on how you navigated…and luck.

Windowmen: Morality Play in the Fulton Fishmarket

Windowmen
A play by Steven Barkhimer
Boston Playwrights’ Theatre
949 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215
Cast: Daniel Berger-Jones (Lester), Nael Nacer (Rocco), Alex Pollock (Kenny), Brandon Whitehead (Vic), and Will Lyman (Al)
Director: Brett Marks
Set, Anthony R. Phelps; Costumes, Rachel Padula Shufelt; Lights and sound, David Wilson.

Running time: two hours ten minutes with one ten minute intermission
November 24, 2013

This play is as much fun and layered complexity as you're going to get in a two-hour theater production. It has everything going for it. The right cast, the right theater, the right set.

A recent college graduate, Kenny (Alex Pollock), is hired as an office assistant at Turner Point Fish in the Fulton Fish Market in roustabout lower Manhattan in the early 1980s, long before it becomes gentrified. With a major in philosophy and a minor in math, he seems to be a weird fit. Vic (Brandon Whitehead), blue-collar and proud of it, is the “Windowman,” who runs the small office. Vic vows to take it easy on him on his first morning of work a little before 4 AM. The previous assistant lasted exactly one day.

Playwright Steven Barkhimer drops two plot bombs in the first minutes of the play. “We were $400 short yesterday. It’s not the first time,” business owner Al tells Vic, who dismisses it as a mistake that will be corrected. A minute later, Al follows with, “I’m getting a computer, that should solve the problem.” It’s hard to get a read on Vic – is he relieved or worried?

After the play’s first frenetic minutes, you sense something is awry. Orders are barked in from a PA system from the warehouse floor. They’re paid for through the noisy sliding metal window, which seems to be a sixth character by the play’s ending. The phone often rings with mysterious gravel-voiced Sal who wants to talk with Al, owner of the business. Kenny screws up some of what Vic calls “the codes”.

The furious pace of ordering, calculating, writing receipts, is tense. Exactly how tempting is the cash coming through that window?

Kenny (Alex Pollock) and Vic (Brandon Whitehead)

“I’ve never seen so much money in my life,” Kenny says surveying the mountain of greenbacks he tallies at the end of his first day. Cash indeed. We begin to wonder about the codes Vic tells Kenny to write on the invoices.

We have ideas how the computer might change business as usual. But what the hell is going on with the money? And why do some of the orders barked from the floor end with “Going south”?  Why is Vic so picky about how he wants Kenny to write up the invoices? Rarely does a play establish its footing so quickly and firmly.

The genius of the play is how these questions are answered. Using back-stories and revealing dialogue, Barkhimer paints a picture of Kenny, Vic, and Al undergoing transformations on a scale fitting the problems by which they are bound together. By the end of the play, you really care about what becomes of the three main characters.

Playwright Steven Barkhimer’s ear for the play’s dialogue was honed at the Fulton Fish Market, where he worked after graduating from college in the 1980s. For the next three years, Barkhimer got a degree in the college of hard knocks. If you’re fussy about vulgar language, take a pass on this play.

The set is simple and brilliantly conceived. The messy, cramped office space set in the shoebox-sized Boston Playwright’s Theater with seating at the front of the stage magnifies the immediacy of the intense action going on in the office, the only place we see the action unfolding. The rest is brought to life as characters in the office allude to the action where the fish are sorted and sold on the warehouse floor.

Al comes into the office periodically to check on Kenny. Al inherited the family business. Erudite, inquisitive, and hard driving, if he weren’t running Turner Point Fish, he’d probably be a principal in his own law firm. He’s a hard-ass boss intrigued by this college kid with a knack for numbers, Socrates dialectics and no idea where he wants his life to go. He quickly sizes Kenny up. “The longer you don’t know what you want, the longer you do what someone else wants,” he tells the wishy-washy kid in a paternal but firm way.

None of this would amount to small change if we didn’t get invested in these three guys. First of all, they look and talk so damn right for their parts and have mannerisms to match them. Vic’s beer gut, disheveled appearance, flannel shirt hanging out, is the voice of the working man (“I was born in Brooklyn, live in Brooklyn, and will die in Brooklyn.”).  He takes a liking to Kenny, asks him about his love life (“Are you sending it in every night?” he asks, making a crude gesture) and makes us laugh with his witty, vulgar ripostes to customers at his “window.” Vic confides to Kenny that he has family troubles. His plan to manage them is the fulcrum on which the play turns.

With his diffident way of answering questions, lack of direction, it’s clear that Kenny is drifting. He has a grasp of business efficiencies and the ability to work under pressure cooker days beginning at 4 AM. Kenny can keep track of Vic’s orders coming and going through the sliding metal window box that Vic uses to rake in cash from customers and send receipts to customers at a frenetic pace. There are orders from the warehouse floor, from the phone, from the window. The crackle of business is intense, with the immediacy of a 911 call we can feel all the way to the back of the small theater.

Will Lyman’s Al is the play’s center of gravity. He commands respect or fear. He can quote Socrates, spot fault lines in the cash business, drives his employees hard when he works with them on the warehouse floor. He can read a man’s character as easily as he can gaff fish with the hook hanging over his shoulder. He’s developed his own moral code, a code that is brilliantly on display in “Windowmen”s final scene.

The play is rounded out with Rocco (Nael Naser), a shady small businessman who connives to get better prices and pay late. The other minor character, in cahoots with Vic, is Lester (Daniel Berger-Jones) who works on the warehouse floor with Al and the rest of the crew.

As the second act gets underway, I realize I’m watching a morality play in which men try to do the right thing, each by their own lights. Honesty becomes a relative commodity, a wandering North Star to Al, Vic and Kenny. They’re good men, decent men, doing the best they can.

Al’s plan to resolve business and personal matters is satisfying and laced with wisdom and unexpected humanity. As the lights dim to dark onstage, we see how their fates have changed for the better. And we cheer.

Photo courtesy Boston Playwrights' Theatre

Splendor: Wide Angle, Unfocused, Rambunctious Play

Splendor
A World Premier by Kirsten Greenidge
Directed by Shawn LeCount, Dramaturgy by Illana M. Brownstein
Boston Center for the Arts, Plaza Theater
November 15, 2013

There are a ton of threads and themes coursing through this play. Several of the cast’s ten members play multiple roles. The play catapults across four decades between 1965-2012 in Bellington, an imaginary small insular town north of Boston. Just as soon as I thought I had a tentative grip on the story, another character would appear, often an older or younger version of one in a previous scene, and Greenidge would parse out more back-story.

The fact that there are several two-page layouts showing a map of Bellington, “The Families of Bellington,” and four pages of Greenidge’s thoughts about “Points of Departure and Inspiration” is way too much to have to digest a few minutes before the house lights dim for the first act.  Any play that needs this much explaining is in trouble. Halfway into the first act, I felt like an unwilling contestant in Jeopardy.


The play’s pace was full tilt, characters abruptly entering and exiting the theater-in–the-round set. Sitting in the back row of the relatively small Black Box Theater, I missed dialogue when characters were facing away from me.

I don’t mind that the play jiggled between decades during each of the two acts. I do mind that it feels disjointed. There were chunks of the story that aren’t fully explained and Greenidge asks me to make connections with what feels like two tin cans and a long stretch of copper wire.

Bellington sounds like a beleaguered town, suffering from unemployment, class differences, grief over deaths of young family members and the still stinging results of bygone high school football games. There are high school romances, an interracial marriage, racial tension, small town gossip, infidelities over time, economic and socio-cultural biases. The playwright’s attempt to take it all on feels more like a soap opera than a theater production. And oh, the play begins the day before Thanksgiving 2012, when families converge, old hurts surface and Greenidge takes us back forty years where the struggles begin.

Scattered like stray pieces of rice on the church steps after a wedding recessional, there are bits of solid character acting. I just wish that Greenidge tried to tell us less and show us more.

Photos from play program by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Water By The Spoonful: Virtual Worlds, Real Lives

Lyric Stage Company, Boston
Written by Quiara Alegría Hudes
Director Scott Edmiston
Set, Richard Wadsworth Chambers; Costumes, Elisabetta Polito; Lights, Karen Perlow; Sound design/composer, Dewey Dellay; Video, Amelia Gossett.
November 15, 2013

This is not your average theater production.  The cast is Hispanic, black, Asian, and white.  The setting is split between an online chat room and real-time family drama. Until the second act unfolds it appears to be two plays, interesting but fragmented. Where the heck is playwright Queria Alegria Hudes headed and what’s the point, you wonder.

Like a street performer in Harvard Square, Hudes starts out juggling three balls, then four, then five, then adds a few plates, a bowling pin and a kitchen knife to the mix.  Can she pull it off, and will anyone get hurt are the two questions come to mind. After two hours and 15 minutes, you’re ready to dig into your pocket to give her, the cast and production team of  “Water by the Spoonful” a tip.

One chunk of the play revolves around two twenty something Hispanic American cousins Elliot Ortiz (Gabriel Roderiguez) and Yazmin Ortiz (Sasha Castroverde). The two cousins mothers are sisters. Sasha’s mother has just died, and their family is already fighting over her furniture. Elliot, a wounded Marine veteran, has a dead end job in a sub shop in Philadelphia and dreams of heading to Los Angeles to become a Latino movie star. The stage bond they forge feels authentic, forged in their own Puerto Rican family’s assimilation into American life.

The other chunk recreates an online chat room dedicated to helping its members steer clear of crack cocaine. These are broken people struggling to get through life a day at a time. Separated geographically and culturally, they are joined at the hip via computer.

The set deserves its own credit. Spare, a few plastic chairs, a plastic table, a desktop computer is all that’s necessary. During the online chats, a spotlight illuminates the participants who talk to each other’s online presence, no pretense of keypads or laptops, just people trying to get past the day without getting fired or high. These characters could not be more different. What they have in common is the will, often tested, to survive.

Theresa Nguyen, Johnny Lee Davenport* in Water by the Spoonful. Photo by Mark S. Howard.

Eight plasma screens hang over the simple set show who’s online or photographs or fuzzy videos representing an aspect of the play. We are so used to looking at IPads, iPhone and laptops that we don’t think twice about glancing at the video screens in our vision of the play. At its best, we can’t distinguish between what’s more powerful, the virtual or the real world, as both worlds tug at the characters.

Fountainhead (Gabriel Kutner) is a businessman whose crack habit cost him a job and perhaps a marriage. Orangutan (Therese Ngyuyen) is a young Japanese American searching for a mother in Japan who gave her away to an orphanage. Chutes&Ladders (Johnny Lee Davenport) is a fiftyish IRS bureaucrat trying to break out of self imposed isolation and guilt at losing his family when he got addicted to crack. You feel them.

They have become friends, virtual friends but with loyalties as thick as any real time friendship. They log on daily, know each other’s back story and aren’t shy about offering advice and tough love. The chat room moderator, Odessa (Mariela Lopez-Ponce), a recovering addict of seven years, keeps the chats civil. Her moniker of HaikuMom, the grounded one, is deserved. She’s the glue that holds it together. She also has the most disturbing secret, a secret that embroils and enables (in the best sense) all of them by the play’s conclusion.

Hudes brilliantly pulls the disparate threads together in Act Two. It’s not pretty but it is rewarding. This story of recovery and redemption couldn’t have been written by a playwright who didn’t love the Philadelpia environment in which Elliot, Yazmin and Odessa grew up and characters like those fragile members of HaikuMom’s chatroom.

By the play’s conclusion, you’re rooting for all of them. They may or may not make it but they’ve taken the first step toward a world where their lives transcend zeroes and ones.

Rolling Stones, Massachusetts Style

Ok, these guys are more famous and have more dough...and have been at it for decades.

But hey, these three friends have been rolling along for fifty years and counting... from junior high and high school days. They listened to Dylan before anyone else in town and were possibly in the lead for other clandestine cultural activities as well...just sayin'

pt, Jon Ahlen, David Connor in their hometown of Pittsfield, MA

Forever Tango: Primal and Complex, Music and Dance, Men and Women

Forever Tango
Cutler Majestic Theatre
Director: Luis Bravo
Orchestra director, Victor Lavallén., Costumes, Argemira Affonso., Lights, Luis Bravo., Sound, Rolando Obregón., Choreography, the dancers.

October 29-November 2, 2013

Tango is the brooding crown prince of dance. Any doubts about that would have been erased after watching Louis Bravo’s “Forever Tango” at the Cutler Majestic Theater last week. Dark, sultry, sensual, primal, this dance has an urgency that puts it in its own universe.

The Cutler Majestic Theater, a lovely jewel box of plush ruby red curtains and seats and ornate gold architecture is a perfect fit for Forever Tango. When the house lights darken, the only illumination is spotlights on the dancers and small orchestra on the stage - we are disconnected from our own reality, plunged into another world.

The men are built like stevedores and can glide like sylphs. The women in sequins and dark eye shadow have the body control of ballerinas who’ve been trained in a brothel. The men in black are suave, imperial, coolly detached and controlling…but unwitting puppets to their woman’s finesse and guile. These are dances of fiercely competing emotions, bold resistance, heated attractions, mute dialogues embedded in the Tango, born in the swirling caldron of cultures that bubbled up in the Buenos Aires of the late 1800s.

Each of the dance duets feel like artistic foreplay, each ends with a dramatic moment, a satisfying climax to exquisite storylines we imagine taking place between the dancers, who in the brief courtship may argue, resist, part, then reunite as destiny and their DNA has preordained. This is high drama set to music buried in the cultural stew of Argentina, with strains of music from European emigrées, gypsies, African slaves, and Brazilian country styles in the mix.

Performed in two acts, it is impossible to separate the music and the dancing. Each dance is followed by a musical interlude that all but sets you on the streets of an Argentine city. Mournful, wistful, seductive, it hovers like a drone targeting wherever you’ve buried that part of your dark, tormented, romantic soul. The orchestra, seated on tiers behind the dancers, contains all that is necessary. Cello (composer and creator Louis Bravo), violas, standup bass, piano and three bandoneons, the accordion-like signature instrument of the tango.

Soledad Buss and César Peral in “Forever Tango.”

Louis Bravo has described the tango as “a story you can tell in three minutes.” The brief plot in each routine lasts four or five minutes but are welded permanently into your visual cortex.

The men and women betray no emotion on their faces but communicate primal desire, fierce longing counterpoised with reticence, detachment and expressive body language. Their visages may be poker faces but the eyes are those of harlot or angel, womanizer or soul mate. Part of the draw to watching is that we can add our own story to the steamy ones we are witnessing.

The choreography, created by the dancers, includes complicated footwork, muscular lifts by the men, demanding extensions for the women, and exacting timing accomplished with exquisite athletic skill. Men's hands reach toward a woman's face. What's to come - a slap or a caress?  Even more beguiling is a sense that the woman would accept either as long as it ended in a passionate coupling.

Each half of Forever Tango includes a smouldering torch song. The singer, her zoftig body squeezed into her low slung sequined dress, is all black tresses, ruby lips, and white teeth pouring out the power and fragility of romantic love.

Imagine an Argentinian soap opera set to music and sung to the rafters. No translation from Spanish is offered, none is necessary. The diva seeming to make eye contact with you in the orchestra, is singing your song, your history, resonating with every romantic memory you've had since you were a teenager. You are ready to die for love as she finishes, black hair flying, arms outstretched, your heart having burst like a Roman candle illuminating the pain and pleasure of every love you have ever known.

By the final number that, like the very first, involves all twelve dancers, we’ve witnessed an evening of intense emotional tension without a word being said by the main characters. Their gestures have spoken for themselves.

Photo courtesy Forever Tango