pt at large

Grounded: A One Act Play With Firepower

"Grounded"
Written by George Brant
Directed by Lee Mikasa Gardener
Set, Steven Royal. Lights, Wen-Ling Liao. Sound, Dewey C. Dellay. Production design, Kathryn Lieber.
A Nora Theatre Company Production
Central Square Theater
450 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139
Date closing: March 22
Ticket price: $15-$56

“Nooooooo!” I silently screamed to myself in the last minutes of the play “Grounded.” That’s when I realized how deeply Celeste Oliva had dragged me into her role as a Pilot unraveling in the performance of her duty.

Ninety minutes, one actor, one prop, one helluva an explosion of drama. That pretty much describes the play "Grounded" at the Central Square Theater in Cambridge.

That’s precisely the reaction that playwright George Brant wanted to create in this modern day morality play.

By the time you begin to breathe normally when the stage lights fade to black, you think differently about the use of drones (umanned aerial vehicles/UAVs) to conduct warfare. No boots on the ground? Great, it’s not as dirty or bloody so we don’t suffer casualties.

As soon as Celeste Oliva walks on to theater-in-the-round stage, she fills the space with a charge of Alpha electricity.  Wearing an olive green flight suit and dark aviator glasses, she exudes warrior mentality. Competitive, confident, cocky, she’s as much a bad-ass as any of the flyboys.

Our hot-shot pilot has just been grounded. The pilot formerly luxuriated in the endless blue sky over her cockpit, a mighty warrior, free and fierce, strapped into a million dollar war machine flying at Mach2, dispensing righteousness upon enemy convoys, housing, and fortifications. By the time her missiles have rained hell on the targets, she can see the dust rising from miles away as her jet screams for home. And she screams with satisfaction from the gleaming aluminum tube.

Now? Grounded because she got pregnant. No more a member of the high and mighty fraternity of top dogs.  Pissed off. And ordered to report to duty in the Nevada desert an hour’s drive from her home to take 8 hour shifts piloting a drone circling like a lethal predator five miles over war torn Iraq. All she has to do is focus, concentrate, concentrate, concentrate to locate terrorists, pull the trigger and then go home and have dinner with her husband and daughter.

Drones have the astonishing optical ability to zero in close enough to a suspected enemy to determine whether he shaved or not that morning. Our pilot gets good at finding and firing. She exults at watching earth, truck carriages and wheels, rocks and rubble tossed into the air. She is so far removed from the battlefield. So safe from being wounded or killed.

Physical distance makes the killing process easier. Cultural differences and moral differences psychologically insulate the warrior. Our enemies have weird practices and customs and religions. Killing by pulling the trigger on a remote controlled drone helps keep the enemy as just that, an abstract concept rather than a warm blooded human being with a family, friends, and community.

One day turns into the next. Pack lunches for her daughter’s preschool day, kiss her husband goodbye, head for the office, tap the pilot she’s replacing on the shoulder and focus on the gray and white screen in front of her.

“What’s that?” she wonders after gleefully inspecting the debris flying from a missile strike one day. Body parts.

Grounded really takes off after that revelation. We watch our Pilot’s descent into psychological paralysis. Can operating one of those unmanned killing machines have the same effect on a pilot as thrusting a bayonet into a man’s stomach?

Celeste Oliva’s monologue builds slowly, reaches emotional altitude and delivers a devastating payload. Her performance on the small circle of lighted stage packs as much power as a sidewinder missile in its chamber on a drone’s wing.

Photo A.R. Sinclair Photography

Grounded was named a Top 10 Play of 2013 by The Guardian and the London Evening Standard, Grounded was nominated for the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award.

Intimate Apparel: Satsfying Fit at the Lyric Stage Company

Intimate Apparel
A Play by Lynn Nottage
The Lyric Stage Company of Boston
Directed by Summer L. Williams. Other credits: Anne Sherer (set design), Amanda Mujica (costume design), Chris Judacs (lighting design), Kelsey Jarboe (sound design), Stephanie LeBolt (assistant director), and Bryn Austin (dialect coach).

Running  time 2 hours, 15 minutes with one intermission
February 13- March 14, 2015

Just because all the pieces of the play Intimate Apparel look terrific, it doesn’t mean they fit perfectly. But this is a lovely play, actually a series of vignettes deconstructing the life of Esther (Lindsey McWhorter), an African American seamstress with uncanny ability to match fabric and craftsmanship to the lingerie needs of her clientele. The range of her Manhattan clients allows playwright Lynn Nottage to explore themes of race, sexuality, loyalty, self worth, and social status.

Nottage’s attempt to marry all the themes taxes credibility but the individual pieces are achingly touching. Esther, at 35, is high on talent, humility, and core values and low on self-esteem and, according to her own assessment, plain and unattractive. Living in an all female boarding house, she foresees a life as a spinster.

When a letter from a laborer digging the Panama Canal arrives, Esther, who can’t read, depends on other characters to read it to her. This device connects her with her white Fifth Avenue client Mrs. Van Buren (Amanda Ruggiero), her red light district client Mayme (Kris Sidberry), and Mrs. Singleton (Cheryl Singleton), both African American, who each bring their class’s perspective to Esther’s situation.

Esther’s shopping forays take her to fabric merchant Mr. Marks, an unmarried orthodox Romanian Jew. The scenes between these two characters, marginal in social class and status, take on dual meanings as lonely Mr. Marks delicately strokes the rich textures of the silks he saves for her, his only customer with equal appreciation for the fine materials. One of the most breathtakingly tender scenes in the play takes place during one such meeting.

Esther agrees to marry George, the Barbadian laborer, sight unseen, who, we are not surprised to learn, is not the thoughtful, romantic man she expected him to be.

The triangle that develops between Esther and Mayme and George is telegraphed early on but crushes Esther and depletes her of savings and her dream of opening her own beauty shop.

“Don’t give a man a piece of your heart unless he gives you a piece of his,” Esther’s land lady, the sage widow Mrs. Singleton, tells her. Naïve Esther ignores the signs and pays the price.

The scenes between Esther and Mrs. Van Buren underline the gulf between the black and white societies of the early 1900s (and, we wonder, of contemporary society).

The Lyric Stage Company consistently makes the most of its performance space. The production values - set, costumes, lighting, music - were thought out imaginatively and cleverly delivered by Director Summer L. Williams.

No matter that the story is stitched together in a bit of a patchwork, the ensemble makes for a moving night at the theater.

Photo by Glenn Perry for the Lyric Stage Company

Gordon Parks: Back To Fort Scott, Timely Photo Exhibit

Gordon Parks (1912-2006)
"Back to Fort Scott"
Boston Museum of Fine Arts
January 17, 2015 – September 13, 2015
Robert and Jane Burke Gallery (Gallery 335)
March 3, 2015

Gordon Parks may not have had a plan when the Life Magazine photographer was assigned to visit his hometown in Fort Scott, Kansas. The first stirrings of desegregation were roiling in the South, a low indistinct rumbling quietly unsettling a way of life largely undisturbed since the Civil War. Parks felt it underfoot. Was there evidence of hope for his classmates that racial oppression could or would be overcome?

The magazine’s first black photojournalist had been hired two years before. His colleagues? Names that adorn coffee table glossies… Margaret Bourke-White, Andreas Feininger, Alfred Eisenstat, Cecil Beaton, Robert Capa, W. Eugene Smith, to name a few. Like them, Parks had an eye for content and composition. It was his life experience that separated him most distinctly from his colleagues.

“Back To Fort Scott,” a potent little exhibition of meticulously printed black and white photographs, is like an artsy, retro speed bump between adjacent galleries featuring big, bold modern art, colorful and expansive. The forty two photographs hung on the walls of the modest Robert and Jane Burke Gallery on the third level, the images mostly 8 x 10 inches in size require close observation.

Parks assignment was to take the temperature of the effect of school segregation in the south. Born and raised in Fort Scott, Parks had his own history. He reconnected with ten of the twelve of his ninth grade classmates with whom he graduated from same all-black Plaza Elementary School in 1927 and hadn’t seen since.

The very first photo in the exhibit - a middle-aged white man in farmer overalls stands at a train crossing in the middle of town, a speculative look on his creased face as he surveys the photographer. The "STOP" sign held in his hand is a perfect metaphor for Fort Scott, Kansas and the South in the 1950s. The hard lines of segregation are as deeply embedded here as those steel railroad tracks running through the middle of town. Parks the photojournalist had to be aware of the significance of the sign and the subject of desegregation.

Slowly walk around the four walls of the small gallery. Without reading one word of the background notes that accompany each print, you discover what he decided to say as Parks presents the subjects of his photographs.

Parks was slyly political. He knew the power and stature of Life Magazine and that white readers had little person-to-person interaction action with their black counterparts. He intended to present them in a portrait of “negro” life never seen before in a popular national publication.

His photos of couples and families were taken with backgrounds of front doors, front porches or living rooms, all signs of middle class stature. It's safe to say that white Americans hadn't seen this treatment of black society before. As a matter of fact, if you substitute white for black skin color, you have a documentary scrapbook review of white middle class America in the heartland.

The take-away: We are in our own homes; we are husbands, wives, children, and elders; we have jobs; we enjoy leisure time; we are proud folks with middle class ideals; we dress well; we have aspirations; we are black.

As was the Life Magazine protocol, Parks took notes about their jobs and wages. Most of the photos are untitled but accompanied by information gathered by Parks.

This is 1950, mind you. Life Magazine was the first all photographic news magazine. It sold more than 13 million copies a week at one point in a 40-year span in which it dominated the market. The audience was middle class America…white America.

Parks met and photographed Louella Russell, the only classmate still living in Fort Scott, and her husband and teenage daughter. He roamed the town, shooting photos of friends (including a few white residents) and being reminded of the strict segregation of the day as he photographed a young black couple in standing under the marquee of a segregated movie theater and a baseball game at a local park. Parks recalls sitting in the “buzzard's roost” in the back upper reaches of the theater, the only place "negroes" were permitted to sit. His photo of a baseball game shows two black girls standing in what is the ‘colored’ section at the edge of the bleachers.

 

The whereabouts of his other classmates corresponded with The Great Migration from the south and Parks hopped on trains to look them up in Kansas City, St. Louis and Chicago.

Parks reconnected with the white residents he remembered as young boys and girls. He'd been in a fist fight on the school playground with Lyle Myrick (leaning in doorway of his father's garage) that ended up in a draw, a handshake, and a friendship. He found a disillusioned and dejected Mazel Morgan living in a Chicago tenement with her ill tempered husband. As a bridge to connect with Life Magazine's white audience, he photographed some of the white workers in town.

Race is a flashpoint today. Another police shooting of a black man or boy is photographed and videotaped nearly every week. The kinds of violence felt by Gordon Parks and his former classmates were social in the form of deeply rooted segregation and bigotry. Parks was determined not to have them totally defined by it. He used images as his means of expression like another visionary man, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., would use words a decade later.

Did these photographs make a difference? We’ll never know. According to the magazine, the project was stalled by the outbreak of the Korean War and in 1951 by news of President Harry Truman’s firing of Douglas McArthur.

"Back To Fort Scott" is not a dusty relic with no relevance for us today. Americans of all races are awash daily in media coverage of racial disturbances and violence. The dense coverage tends to make us feel as polarized and segregated, riven apart, as the races in Scott, Kansas in 1950. This potent little exhibition emphatically shows us how similar we are in our aspirations, all of us in the family of humanity.

Photos taken in the Robert and Jane Burke Gallery by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Inching Along

Inching Along
March 7, 2015

This story about penises trended on top of news aggregators all last week. After seeing the story picked up in The Huffington Post, CNN, The Guardian, and many other reputable outlets, I, with some trepidation, decided, with tongue in cheek, to weigh in.

Rulers and tape measures got an extraordinary work out this week. Home construction project? Nope. The story published on the internet titled  "‘Am I Normal?’ Check Biggest Study Yet Of Penis Size, Among 15,000 Men". Source: BJU International

Kim Kardashian thought she could break the Internet with a photo of her silky- smooth abnormally? big butt. Her megalomaniacal aspiration got topped by the posting of the story of another body part, the only one of more interest to men than Kim’s ass. Their penises.

There isn’t a man alive who hasn’t considered the size of his penis. And compared it to others he sees in locker rooms or porn sites. It must be noted that every porn site I checked (of course done for research purposes of writing this post) has sidebars telling men how to get bigger penises. The bigger your penis, the bigger your masculinity quotient, the thinking goes. And by extension, the bigger thrill you’ll give the woman you sleep with.

With a touch of envy, I see that I don’t measure up to the mega-penises on display in porn sites. I’ve showered in men's locker rooms from my high school football days to the health club days of the present. I’ve seen the range of equipment from pretty big to pretty small. According to the story data and my own eyes, I’m in the normal range. And of course I pulled out a ruler to see how I measured up. The fact that I fit along the graph in the normal curve doesn’t mean I wouldn't still like to sport an extra inch or so.

Freud thought penis envy (this version of “Penis Envy” was published in February 2012 on PsychologyToday.com and removed two weeks later after public controversy!) was a woman’s envy that she didn’t have a penis.

Hell no, Siggy. It’s all about OUR penises. We are walking, talking penises. We parade them around. We play with them. We do everything but put them in puppet shows, but now that I think of it, some guys undoubtedly have.

We love it when a woman shows delight in contact with them. It’s a good thing that libido is so potent that when we’re in its full grasp, the only thing we think about is having our penises in her somewhere. We think the size of our penises is a big deal. What women think is a mystery.

The best outcome for small penis anxiety is to use the old Avis car rental slogan - “We Try Harder.” Pun intended.