Cutting a window into the trestle

Jeremy Mangan mural installed under trestle at Freighthouse Square

By Alec Clayton

Published in the Weekly Volcano, Dec. 28, 2017

Crane installing one of a dozen mural panels, photo courtesy Jeremy Mangan

A large mural measuring 7½ by 48 feet by Tacoma Foundation of Art Award winner Jeremy Mangan was installed beneath the railroad trestle near Freighthouse Square last week and revealed in an installation celebration at the Amtrak Cascades Station on December 15.

Titled "The Wood Carving Beach," the mural depicts a beach where wood carvings have piled up along with driftwood. Mangan says the carvings could have washed up on the beach, or they could have been carved on site, or both.

Mangan made a 12-inch by 77-inch painting in oil on panel. Then, Winsor Fireform in Tumwater scanned the painting, converted the colors to multichannel/duotone, enlarged it, and printed the image onto 12 steel panels, each 7½-feet tall by 4-feet wide, using porcelain enamel pigments. These panels were then fired in kilns and sealed to create the finished mural. The artist says the scanned and enlarged image accurately reproduces the painting down to the detail of a single brush hair embedded in the paint.

Mangan is a well-known Tacoma artist. In addition to the Foundation of Art Award, he has been the recipient of a 2015 Tacoma Artists Initiative program grant and a 2013 Artist Trust fellowship. He was a Neddy Award finalist, and he won the People's Choice Award at the Tacoma Art Museum’s 10th Northwest Biennial.

Mangan says, “I wanted the mural to relate to the neighborhood and the area. I wasn’t looking for overt connections, but rather more subtle overlaps in form and content. Wood and lumber became a central theme, and I took my primary cues from the clapboard construction of Freighthouse square, the wooden dome of the Tacoma Dome, the history of logging and lumber transport in the area, the timbers of the old railroad trestle itself, Thea-Foss waterway, the beaches and driftwood that surround us, and the history of wood carving and shaping in the Dome District and the region — indigenous peoples to present.

“Given the mural’s location on a retaining wall underneath the trestle, I wanted to create space, light, distance. I wanted to ‘cut a window.’ I thought about people driving and walking by, so I aimed to create an image that would work well from a distance and up close. And given the public nature of the piece, I wanted it to be inviting, bright and whimsical (but still with the dose of mystery and strangeness which is typical of my work). I wanted it to interest both adults and children. Hopefully it’s an enjoyable image that invites the viewer to both visually explore and posit narratives. Why are all these wood carvings on this beach? Where did they come from? How long have they been there? Why would someone go to the trouble to create them? I hope the mural stirs the imagination and rewards multiple viewings.”

The Wood Carving Beach by Jeremy Mangan, underneath the railway trestle at the intersection of E 26th and E G Streets in Tacoma's Dome District.

Shon Frostad’s maritime paintings at the Seaport Museum

Reviewed by Alec Clayton

Published in the Weekly Volcano, Dec. 28, 2017

 “47° North, 122° West, Turquois,” mixed-media painting by Shon Frostad, photo courtesy the artist

When I walked into the Seaport Museum to see Shon Frostad’s painting exhibition, there was a moment when I could not recognize the paintings as paintings, because the museum is filled with boats, anchors, charts, bones of whales, and other memorabilia of sea life, and I thought the paintings I saw on a wall to my left were sections of old ship hulls. As it turned out, they were paintings of sections of ship hulls —so realistic that they become almost surreal. Like Andy Warhol’s replicas of Brillo boxes, they are indistinguishable from what they are paintings of, yet clearly not the real thing. There’s something eerie about that, especially in such a setting as a seaport museum.

The title of the show comes from the symbols seen on the sides of commercial vessels.

“The symbols on the ship's hull indicate such things as a vessel's 'draft', or depth in the water, what the allowable draft is for that vessel depending on the season, and even the particular ocean the ship may be traveling in,” says Frostad. “One circular symbol indicates the insurer of the vessel; another where a tugboat may or may not contact the ship's hull. Yet others show where a ship's inner bulkheads or compartments are.”

The tile of this show, 47 º North, 122 º West, refers to the geographic coordinates for Tacoma.

Frostad’s paintings on wood panels vary in sizes up to 4-by-8 feet. Some of the lettering, as well as such painted details as brads and welded seams, are built up to a quarter inch above the surface, either through the use of thick paint or with some kind of gel or other media.

What stands out is the stark simplicity and straightforwardness of the images, the color combinations, and most of all the incredible textures that lend the works the look of rust, scratches, worn and peeling paint. The only thing separating them from actual sections of ship hulls is none of them are literally bent or scratched. It is all illusory trompe le’oeil painting.

In addition to these paintings, Frostad has included two more traditional modernist figure paintings, both of surfers. One, called “Hang Ten” is a close-up, realistic painting of feet with toes hanging off the front edge of a surfboard. The other one, “Surfers,” shows a line of surfers with tan bodies and swimsuits standing on a beach holding their upright surfboards. The figures are painted flat, with what appears to be pencil or graphite outlining their bodies. Both are nicely executed but do not have the visual impact of the paintings of ship hulls.

This is a show that is guaranteed to be enjoyable, and the museum itself is filled with fascinating memorabilia of a working seaport.

47° North, 122° West by Shon Frostad, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday and noon to 4 p.m. Sunday, through Jan. 19, admission $6-$10, free to members and children under 5, 705 Dock Street, Tacoma, www.fosswaterwayseaport.org.

Codependent Menageries

Katlyn Hubner at Feast Art Center

by Alec Clayton

Published in the Weekly Volcano, Dec. 14, 2017

 “Undertow” painting by Kate Hubner, courtesy Feast Art Center

In an artist’s statement, painter Kate Huber quotes a dictionary definition of the words in the title of her show at Feast Art Center. “Codependent : a codependent person is one who has let another person's behavior affect him or her, and who is obsessed with controlling that person's behavior. Menagerie: A collection of wild animals kept in captivity for exhibition.”

She goes on to define the state of mind depicted by the paintings. “As I have been trying to find myself again for the first time in years, I have been exploring my bad habits of how toxic it can be to make someone else’s ‘problems’ my own. The pretty pain of being engulfed by a cunning and quiet lack of boundaries. That eventually, you begin to lose or confuse your own thoughts, becoming entangled with another. A self-imposed identity crisis.”

There are only five paintings in this exhibition, all in the five-by-six-foot range. If I might go out on a limb with a potentially ludicrous statement, these five paintings might be the best figure paintings I have ever seen outside a major museum, the best by a local or regional artist. Each painting is of a naked human figure or group of figures. Some of the figures are realistic, while some are of ambiguous gender and others devolve into unrecognizable, animal-like shapes —or grow out of such shapes or are wrestling with them. The colors are sizzling with hot reds, pinks and purples, contrasting with a variety of blue tones in the cerulean-teal family. There are harsh and uncomfortable angles of bodies and limbs. Arms ending in clutching hands appear out of unrecognizable animal forms. In many instances, background shapes created by the spaces where body parts meet become positive shapes. The artist explains, “In hopes of making complicated compositions with the form, I want the lines and the triangles of the limbs and reflections to bring a controlled anxiety to being. When you can't tell just how many people are involved; Using colors to bring a slight euphoria to the dark matter.”

Hubner’s painting style is like a marriage of the realism of Phillip Pearlstein and the lushness of Wayne Thibeaud, with the drama of Alfred Leslie or Jack Beal  — that’s like a catalog of the best modern figure painters all combined in the work of one woman from Seattle.

Kate Hubner’s Codependent Menageries, noon to 4 p.m. Saturday, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sunday, and by appointment, through Jan. 7, Feast Arts Center, 1402 S. 11th St., Tacoma, www.feastarts.com 

Evolution of a Painting

“Fun in the Sun” oil stick on board 13” x 47.5”

I did the painting "Fun in the Sun" sometime around 1990. It was a painting of a group of men and women at the beach sitting on folding chairs. Friends at the time were convinced that the figure on the far left was a self-portrait and the far right was my wife, Gabi. I can't remember if that was intentional or not, but they do look something like us at the time.

Starting a little more than a decade later, I made a few other paintings based on it. Sometime around 2004 I did a large series of digital art works done by scanning photos of my earlier paintings and then manipulating them with Paint Shop Pro. "Digital Triplets" was one of those. It was based on the figure third from the left in "Fun in the Sun." I changed him into a woman and copied and pasted the figure twice, and digitally drew into it. I thought of the center figure as breaking into molecules like people from "Star Trek" being transported.

“Digital Triplets” scanned and manipulated photo

Next came "Doublemint Gerbils." It is the man on the left in the first painting again and the woman in the yellow bikini doubled.

“Doublemint Gerbils” Oil stick on paper, 10” x 13” 

With “Parents of Narnia,” done in 2006, I began to abstract the figures more.

“Parents of Narnia” oil on canvas, 21” x 25”

Finally, I made one of my favorite paintings, “Champagne Summer,” in October 2006. With this one I think I pushed the abstraction as far as I could and still be recognizable as figures. I thought of it as celebratory, champagne bubbles. Thus the title.

“Champagne Summer” oil on canvas, 48” x 60”

Review: Once Upon a Mattress at Tacoma Musical Playhouse

by Alec Clayton

Published in The News Tribune, Dec. 8, 2017

Emma Deloye as Princess Winnifred the Woebegone and Jeremy Lynch as Prince Dauntless the Drab, photo by Kat Dollarhide

It is rare for me to Google a play before reviewing it, but I Googled “Once Upon a Mattress” to see if my suspicions about the 1959 Broadway production were true, and I found this on Wikipedia: “Initial reviews of the play were mixed, but critics and actors alike were surprised by the show's enduring popularity.” I suspect it’s popularity was due to one thing, the star power of Carol Burnett. Minus a lead actor with Burnett’s magnetism, it is a run-of-the-mill musical, entertaining but not extraordinary.

The Tacoma Musical Playhouse production might not have Carol Burnett, but it does have Emma Deloye as Princess Winnifred the Woebegone and Jeremy Lynch as Prince Dauntless the Drab, and there is a lot of star power between those two. I might also point out that the cleverness of those names, plus others such as King Sextimus the Silent (Joe Woodland) and the absurdity of Princess Winnifred wanting to be called Fred, are evidence of the kind of sneaky little comic touches writers Jay Thompson, Dean Fuller and Marshall Barer slipped in to elevate “Mattress” a step or two above the mundane.

Based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea,” Prince Dauntless is dying to find a bride, but his mother, the thoroughly despicable Queen Aggravain (Deanna Martinez) insists he can marry only a woman who is a true princess – meaning she must not only be of royal blood but must also be of princess quality. And to prove she is of princess quality, she must pass tests devised by the queen and her minion, Wizard (John Miller) – tests that are impossible to pass. Surely telling what the test is Princess Winnifred must past will not be a spoiler. It is a test of sensitivity, to see if she can feel a single pea place under the bottom mattress of a stack of 20 mattresses.

Minstrel (Tony Williams) sets the personal and fairy-tale mood of the play by opening it with a sweet song as he plays both the narrator and a character in the story. Then the curtain opens on an elaborate castle set designed by Bruce Haasl as the prince and Lady Larken (Ashley Koon) and the ensemble sing the comical “An Opening for a Princess,” which basically announces that the kingdom is advertising for potential princesses to audition for the right to marry Prince Dauntless, followed by a romantic love song, “In a Little While,” between Lady Larken and Sir Harry (Josh Wingerter).

All the principle actors are strong in their roles. Minstrel, King Sextimus and Josh Anderman as Jester make for a fun comic trio plotting against the queen and for the prince and princess. Anderman performs some hilarious physical feats on a dance number, and the king, who has no voice, speaks delightfully via charades. Some of his facial expressions bring to mind Tim Conway. Deloye is funny and strong as the princess. Her rendition of “Shy” is one of the best things in the show, along with her ridiculous gyrations atop the stack of mattresses. Finally, Lynch wonderfully plays the prince as a hapless, dimwitted and lovable man-child.

“Once Upon a Mattress” is a silly bit of comic fluff that might not be the best thing TMP has every done, but it is enjoyable and skillfully produced and acted; love is triumphant, and the evil doer gets her comeuppance.

WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Saturday-Sunday, 2 p.m., through Dec. 17

WHERE: Tacoma Musical Playhouse at The Narrows Theatre, 7116 Sixth Ave., Tacoma

TICKETS: $22-$31

INFORMATION: 253-565-6867, http://www.tmp.org

On Golden Pond at Olympia Little Theatre

 by Alec Clayton

Meigie Mabry and John Pratt as Ethel and Norman Thayer, photo by Austin Lang

On Golden Pond, written by Ernest Thompson and directed by Kendra Malm for Olympia Little Theatre, is a sweet, touching, funny story about aging, about facing death, about family strife and perhaps most of all about a crotchety and wisecracking old man learning — perhaps in the nick of time — how to express his love for his wife and daughter.

It is not a Christmas play; in fact, it is set in the summer. And this reviewer for one is glad they decided not to do a Christmas play this holiday season. Jews, Muslims, and people who practice religions other than Christianity and atheists who are part of our community are bombarded with a slew of Christian-related entertainment every year at this time, and I applaud OLT’s decision to present a warm and tender show about the love of family with no manger scenes and no Santa Claus.

Oliver Garcia as Billy Ray and John Pratt as Norman, photo by Austin Lang

Veteran actor John Pratt plays Norman Thayer, the crusty old man at the heart of the play. I had the pleasure of interviewing Pratt and Malm, along with Christian Carvajal, for the OLY ARTS “Sound Stages” podcast, and he told us he was 79 years old. Norman is 79 when the play opens and celebrates his 80^th birthday during act one. Pratt told us of many other ways in which he is like Norman. Even if he were not an outstanding actor, which he is, he would be the ideal person to play Norman, and that is evident from the moment he walks onto the set, a beautifully built rustic cottage designed for OLT by Christopher Valcho. Pratt becomes Norman, just as Valcho’s set becomes their old cabin on Golden Pond, a cabin that shows with excellent detail in the marks of 48 years of the Thayer family living out their summers there.

Norman believes it is going to be his last summer in the lake cabin. He has heart palpitations and is convince he will not live out the summer. At least that’s what he tells his wife, Ethel (Meigie Mabry) —over and over and over. But Ethel puts little stock in his dire predictions of impending death because he’s been saying he’s going to die soon for decades. Norman puts everybody on with brilliantly barbed humor that borders on vicious, and Ethel knows he doesn’t mean a word of it. His crustiness is a cover for his inability to express sensitive feelings.

Their daughter Chelsea (Lorana Hoopes) stops by the cabin for a short visit with her boyfriend, Bill Ray (Garrett Shelton) and Ray’s 13-year-old son, Billy Ray (Oliver Garcia). Chelsea and Norman clash as they have done all her life. She says they’ve always been mad at each other, and Norman retorts, “I didn't think we were mad; I just thought we didn't like each other.”

When Chelsea and Bill leave Billy Ray with her parents for the summer, Norman bonds with Billy Ray and has, for a short time, the kind of relationship Chelsea wishes she could have had with her father when she was growing up. Fishing with Billy Ray and introducing him to his favorite books (he is a retired English professor), rejuvenates Norman.

Except for Pratt, all the cast members are relatively new to OLT. Mabry was seen in OLT’s recent production of All the Kings’ Woman, and Garcia played the young Galileo in Starry Messenger. None have extensive acting experience, but you’d never suspect it from their thoroughly professional acting in this play. They portray their characters as down-to-earth, flawed but likeable people. Dean Phillips who plays Charlie the mailman is a charming frequent visitor to the cabin on the lake.

Note: The play was written in the 1970s and set in that time period. By today’s standards, some of Norman’s witticisms are politically incorrect, if not downright offensive, but as directed by Malm and acted by Pratt, it is clear to the audience that he doesn’t really mean those things but is just trying to get a rise out of Ethel — which never really works.

On Golden Pond, 7:25 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and 1:55 p.m. Sunday, through Dec. 17 Olympia Little Theatre, 1925 Miller Ave., NE,Olympia, 360.786.9484, http://olympialittletheater.org/, $11-$15, $2 student discount, available at Yenney Music, 2703 Capital Mall Dr.

Two intriguing shows at University of Puget Sound

Christopher Paul Jordan and Gustavo Martinez

By Alec Clayton

Published in the Weekly Volcano, Nov. 30, 2017

wall painted construction,” mixed media by Christopher Paul Jordan, photo by Gabi Clayton

Christopher Paul Jordan might well be Tacoma’s most prolific artist, and his fame is quickly spreading to Seattle and elsewhere — deservedly so for this recent Neddy Artist Awards winner, if his latest show at Kittredge Gallery is any indication.

The show is called Latent Home, and it features powerful work in painting, video, and other media that is astounding both in terms of cultural commentary and as pure aesthetics. Most of the work is what I would call sculptural painting, meaning it is three dimensional but painting in concept. It is painting with an expressionist bent that harkens back to artists such as Willem de Kooning and burlap collages of Alberto Burri, and sculpturally it is like the bent car body sculptures of John Chamberlain.

Along one wall is a series of photographs of urban landscapes printed on styrene that has been bent, scratched and apparently melted in spots. These pictures depict modern, gritty, urban scenes that are hyper-realistic and made even more so due to the rough handling of the media. To the left of these photos hangs a mesh metal screen upon which a photo is projected. The projected image is filtered through the screen and lands on an abstract painting of incised, concave lines like bent and broken tree limbs on a rough white surface that appears to be Styrofoam. These lines dig into the surface about an inch deep and look as if they were gouged out of stone. Abstract though it is, it calls to mind remnants of ancient forest scenes.

Along the back wall are large photographs and paintings of landscapes into which are incised more of the limb-like lines. Also on this wall is a piece with jagged and multicolored cloth-like styrene draped over a short rod that projects a foot or two from the wall, and near it another similar piece that hangs from the ceiling like melted rubber or plastic, or colorful laundry on a clothesline.

And then there is a painting applied directly to the wall with colorful rectangles and protruding from it a black box covered with many more of the multicolored scraps and shards of painted styrene, and on the face of this box is an orange cardboard slide viewer that looks like the face of ET.

Taken as a group, Jordan’s pieces defy easy description. They combine harsh reality with lyrical abstraction. They reflect the realities of abandoned city basketball courts and landscapes encroached upon by urban sprawl and the mountains of debris that pile up in our landfills. They are gritty, rough, colorful and quite beautiful.

In the back gallery is Gustavo Martinez’s Guardians, Warriors, and Allies, 14 ceramic sculptures of creatures that call to mind ancient Aztec gods. Rough and imaginatively, these clay figures stand four-to-five feet tall and are embellished with feathers, deer antlers, steel and epoxy, painted with acrylic paints. They suggest Native American figures as well as fantasy gods and monsters. 

These are shows that should be seen.

Christopher Paul Jordan’s Latent Home plus Guardians Warriors and Allies by Gustavo Martinez, Kittredge Gallery, Monday-Friday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday noon to 5 p.m., through Dec. 9, 1500 N. Warner St., Tacoma, 253.879.3701

A Christmas Carol the way Dickens wrote it

By Alec Clayton

Published in the Weekly Volcano, Nov. 30, 2017

Joseph Grant (left) as Ebenezer Scrooge, and W. Scott Pinkston as Jacob Marley, photo by Tim Johnson

A Christmas Carol as adapted by James Venturini for Lakewood Playhouse is probably as close to the way Charles Dickens himself would adapted it for the stage if he were alive today.

In his day, Dickens toured the world telling stories and reading from his books, so it is appropriate that he shows up as the narrator for this show in the person of actor W. Scott Pinkston who does a great job of playing the parts of both Dickens and Bob Cratchit. He wonderfully transitions between these two characters on stage in full view of the audience, not with an elaborate costume and makeup change but by simply taking off his hat and coat, hanging them up, putting a scarf around his neck, and undergoing a subtle but significant change of persona.

Unlike the popular musical version, this one is straight drama. But there is holiday music in the form of carolers who occasionally wander the streets of London.

I saw a preview performance, essentially the final tech rehearsal, two nights before opening night, and it was flawless. Artistic Director John Munn said there had been a 10-hour tech rehearsal of act one two days earlier and a 7-hour tech of act two the next night. That should give you an idea of how complicated and vital the lighting, sound and other technical aspects are to this production, and the evidence of how superbly they pull it off is seen when the ghost of Jacob Marley (Alex Koerger) first appears on stage. Koerger is a large man who looks even more imposing when seen next to Ebenezer Scrooge (Joseph Grant), who is a small man. He comes in draped in chains and bathed in a ghostly blue-white light, and his deep voice echoes as if coming out of a deep cave. Outstanding special effects make audiences believe in the unbelievable and accept what they see as real (suspension of disbelief) without questioning what kind of hard work and precision timing is going on backstage to create the magic. Combine that with great acting from Koerger and Grant, and we are whisked out of our seats and set down in an old man’s haunted bed chamber.

Koerger, by-the-way, is not only an effective Marley, he also plays a delightful Fizziwig and Old Joe. As for Grant, I have seen him turn in outstanding performances in a lot of plays, and this one ranks right up there with his best. His acting chops show not only in the big gestures and expressions of horror and fear and remorse, but in his tiniest expressions of disdain for underlings and the holiday spirit.

Also turning in performances of special note is Callie Williams in the multiple roles of a solicitor, Mrs. Cratchit, a charwoman and others. She is funny and touching and larger than life, especially when playing Mrs. Cratchit. And her voice stands out beautifully among the carolers.

Gary Chambers, a memorable Riff-Raff in last year’s The Rocky Horror Show and as Sir Henry Baskerville in the madcap The Hound of the Baskervilles, is a fun-to-watch Ghost of Christmas Present with his haughty but kind demeanor.

Director Alan Wilkie and his crew does a great job of herding a large cast in a theater-in-the-round space to present a ghostly, technically marvelous dramatic production that is coherent and smoothly flowing, and Venturini’s adaptation adheres to the spirit and style of the original. Special recognition is also due to set designer Andrew Redford, lighting designer Jacob Viramontes and costume designer Virginia Yanoff.

A Christmas Carol, 8 p.m., Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m., Sunday, through Dec. 17, Lakewood Playhouse, 5729 Lakewood Towne Center Blvd. Lakewood, $20-$26, pay what you can Thursday, Nov. 30, 253.588.0042, lakewoodplayhouse.org

TACOMA LITTLE THEATRE’S ‘OFF THE SHELF’ PRESENTS A TASTE OF HONEY

Tacoma, WA- Tacoma Little Theatre presents Shelagh Delaney’s, A Taste of Honey, directed by Sara Freeman.  This production will take place on Thursday, December 7, 2017 at 7:30pm.

Shelagh Delaney's visceral working-class drama caused a sensation in England in 1958. Part of a wave of "kitchen-sink" realism, Delaney was the angry young woman writing alongside the wave of novels and plays from "angry young men" like John Osborne and Kingsley Amis. Her unflinching depiction of poverty, lack of education, alcoholism, and broken family ties refused the elegance of drawing room comedies and put a teenage girl struggling with her mother and an unplanned pregnancy at the center of the story. Vicious, funny, fearful, and hopeful, A Taste of Honey pulls no punches about mothers and daughters, absent fathers, dead-end jobs, teenage love affairs, and social prejudice and its depiction of race and sexuality still stings today. This is a juicy play about characters with tart tongue and vulnerable hearts, fighting for every sweetness they can get.

Featuring a cast of Tacoma’s finest: Gretchen Boyt, Cassie Jo Fastabend, Paul Richter, Nick Butler, and Nick Spencer. 

Tickets for the December 7, 2017 performance at 7:30pm are $10.00 for non TLT Members, and FREE for those who are members. Tickets may be purchased online at www.tacomalittletheatre.com, or by calling our Box Office at (253) 272-2281.

TLT's OFF THE SHELF

We know that there is a tremendous amount of wonderful theatre that deserves to be heard but sometimes just doesn’t get an opportunity. With “Off the Shelf”, local directors and actors will be bringing some scripts to life that we hope you will find entertaining, challenging and educational to our stage. We hope that you’ll sit back and enjoy an evening of theatre. You never know, you might see one of these shows on our mainstage in the future.

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Sculpture, drawings and paintings by Malayka and Tom Gormally

By Alec Clayton

Published in the Weekly Volcano, Nov. 22, 2017

Gallery view showing paintings by Malayka Gormally and sculpture by Tom Gormally, photo by Malayka Gormally

Husband and wife Malayka and Tom Gormally are highly respected Seattle artists who bring a world of experience to artworks that reflect on current social and political issues in a show called Present/Tense at Spaceworks Gallery.

Born to immigrant Jewish parents in the San Francisco Bay area, Malayka lived for a while in Olympia before relocating to Seattle. She brings a lifetime of activism to paintings that document current social events from demonstrations to art openings. Her drawings and paintings are taken from specific events which she has attended, photographed, and depicted artistically back in her studio. The drawings are done with ink that she thins down, giving her lines the look of graphite, and often mixed with watercolor or other media. They are simple, striking images, especially the drawings, which have an open feel with few figures and few details (but the details she does include are telling). Drawings such as “Immigrants Pay More Taxes Than Trump” (the wording on the sign a single woman is holding) and “Women in the Immigration March” are so simple as to have the look of pictures in a coloring book with smooth outlines and very few areas colored in with a thin wash of watercolor. Her lines are elegant and lyrical, as are the subtleties of shading. 

There is one drawing called “We Are All Immigrants,” which shows five women seated during the Immigration March. It is a line drawing with only three small areas colored in: one woman’s skirt and head cover, and a row of tiles on the floor. There is also a much larger oil painting taken from this sketch that has a lot more color in it. Of note is the way she highlights the woman in the center by use of a bright yellow dress and the way parts of the figures are outlined with the same yellow, creating a halo effect.

I find the simpler drawings more dramatic and more touching than the paintings, which tend to be denser and with more color, more figures and more to see in the settings.

In some of the paintings there are transparencies that allow line drawings to be seen through the painted areas. This is most effective in “Signs,” a painting of participants in a pro-Muslim demonstration at Seattle City Hall Plaza, and in “Artists at the Art Fair,” a painting of the artists Ramiro Gomez and Kehinde Wiley at an opening. Gomez is standing and fully painted, while Wiley is lying on the floor with another man, unidentified, and is depicted in line only. I had an opportunity to ask the artist about this, and she said viewers must interpret any possible meaning for themselves.

Tom Gormally’s sculptures are more abstract and more symbolic. He does a lot of work with architectural elements made of wood and with the shape of the United States map created with dot-pattern LED lights or drawn with graphite and cut-to-shape mylar sheets — often in combination with the letters “US” used as a kind of word play on the double meaning of “us” as a group of people (US and THEM) and as the initials that stand for United States.

Straight-back chairs that are warped or balanced on one or two legs play a large role in his sculptures. They look as though they can’t possibly stand as they do and are intentionally disorienting. They were inspired, according to Malayka, by the movie Koyaanisqatsi, a Hopi word meaning “life out of balance” — which succinctly sums up what an exhibition pamphlet called “the contemporary climate of socio-cultural and political divisiveness” of our country today.    

Malayka and Tom Gormally, 1-5 p.m., Monday-Friday and 1-9 p.m. Third Thursday, through Dec. 21, Spaceworks Gallery, 950 Pacific Ave., Tacoma

American Idiot comes to Lakewood Playhouse

By Alec Clayton

Published in the Weekly Volcano, Nov. 24, 2017

American Idiot poster designed by James Stowe, courtesy Lakewood Playhouse

American Idiot the musical was a sensation when it premiered in 2009 (and subsequently moved to Broadway in 2010). Based on the smash hit album by Green Day, the play featured all the music from the album plus Green Day songs from the album 21st Century Breakdown and "When It's Time," a song written for the musical. The book was written by Michael Mayer and Green Day lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong with lyrics by Armstrong. It was nominated for a Best Musical Tony Award.

Watch out, South Sound, American Idiot is coming to Lakewood Playhouse in January 2018 as part of the Playhouse’s famed (shall I say notorious?) “Outside the (musical) Box” series whereby once in each season they take a chance on something that likely won’t appeal to typical community theater audiences. In the beginning, the shows that were produced under this label were hard-hitting dramas. Playhouse Artistic Director John Munn described them as “newer or challenging plays that weren't typically produced at the Playhouse or at other theaters in the area,” such as the previous “Outside the Box” show Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet. Munn says that two seasons ago they decided they had been producing the plays with the “Outside the Box” title long enough and no longer needed to identify them as something different. “By shifting it to musicals, we felt that our audiences would immediately understand what it was we were trying to do with those shows. We started with Avenue Q, then The Rocky Horror Show, and now American Idiot.”

More music than dialogue, American Idiot tells the stories of three “idiots” determined to escape the boredom of their small-town lives. Johnny (Mark Alford) goes to New York to become a musician, Tunny (Ton Williams) joins the military and is shipped to Iraq, and Will (Cameron Waters) stays home to be with his pregnant girlfriend, Heather (Kiana Norman-Slack).

Alford explains that Johnny and Tunny “flee a stifling suburban lifestyle and parental restrictions,” while Johnny and Tunny “look for meaning in life and try out the freedom and excitement of the city. Tunny quickly gives up on life” and Johnny “turns to drugs and finds a part of himself that he grows to dislike, has a relationship and experiences lost love.”

He says all three characters struggle to find fulfillment. “Watching them try to find it is sad, hilarious, and angering, but most of all it's relatable.”

The Lakewood Playhouse production will be directed by Munn, with musical direction by Deborah Lynn Armstrong and choreography by Ashley Roy. It will also be stage managed, a job that is almost never credited by reviewers but which is second in importance only to directing, by Becca Dawn Marsh.

Munn says, “In the Tradition of The Who’s Tommy and Pink Floyd’s The Wall comes a rock opera for this generation. An energy-fueled rock opera, American Idiot, features little dialogue and instead relies on the lyrics from Green Day's groundbreaking album to execute the story line. It’s about believing that we have to go out into the world to try and change ourselves, when that change can come from within wherever we might be, including the place you call home.”

He goes on to say, “We had over 70 incredibly talented people audition. From that we had to narrow it down to 23 talented men and women that were amazing actors, be able to sing pitch-perfect for the difficult harmonies in the show and also be able to dance everything from ballet to K-Pop. In addition to that, some of them have to be able to play their own instruments from guitars to the drums.”

Alford says, “I can't say anything about this production without mentioning that the cast and crew are absolutely dynamite. Expect a cast full of dynamic voices, acrobatic choreography, and lots of loud music.”

Also appearing will be Dani Hobbs, Ashley Roy and Shannon Burch in named roles plus a 15-person ensemble.

This production of American Idiot will be a South Sound Premiere.

American Idiot, 8 p.m., Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m., Sunday, Sept. 8-Oct. 8, Lakewood Playhouse, 5729 Lakewood Towne Center Blvd. Lakewood, $20-$26, 253.588.0042, lakewoodplayhouse.org

Local theaters celebrate Christmas

By Alec Clayton

Published in the Weekly Volcano, Nov. 16, 2017

Never does a Christmas season come and go without some local theater doing a version of A Christmas Carol. Doing the honors this year is Lakewood Playhouse with an adaptation written by Playhouse stalwart James Venturini. Popular local actors to inhabit the Dickensian world this holiday season include Joseph Grant as Ebenezer Scrooge; Gary Edwards, memorable as Riff-Raff in The Rocky Horror Show, as the Ghost of Christmas Present; and a host of other local actors.

Playhouse Artistic Director John Munn promises this one will showcase “all of the wondrous and magical elements of this classic Christmas story that has thrilled and charmed generations for centuries.”

Venturini says, “It's a non-musical adaptation. Modern audiences are mostly familiar with the tale through the many film adaptations and some annual stage presentations by large theatres; I wanted in this adaptation to give them a version as faithful to Dickens' original novella as possible, and preserve as much of his writing as possible while still making a lively and engaging play. We're using Dickens as the narrator, since he actually toured both Britain and the U.S. doing readings of his works during the last decade of his life.”

“Apart from that,” Venturini says, “I know that Alan Wilkie, the director, is interested in the ghost story aspects of the tale (which is, after all, subtitled "A Ghost Story of Christmas"), so in the adaptation I tried to craft the stagings of the four visits (Marley and the three Spirits) appropriately.”

It should be a rollicking ghostly tale.

Centerstage in Federal Way continues its holiday tradition of presenting English-style pantomimes, a.k.a. pantos. This year’s panto is Beauty and the Beast. For those who don’t know, pantos are a holiday tradition in London’s West End, the equivalent of our Broadway. They are loud, raucous children’s plays that also appeal to adults because of the sly jokes, local and pop-culture references, and bawdy double entendres that go right over the kids’ heads but which have their parents falling out of their seats with laughter. The kids love them because (1) they already know and love the stories and, just as much so as adults, love to see them mutilated for comic effect, (2) because of the outlandish stock characters, and (3) because there is always a lot of fun audience participation, and at the end they always throw candy to the children.

Pantos are popular fairy tales such as Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk or Beauty and the Beast retold with such stock characters as a good fairy who narrates the story and an evil character such as a witch who is usually played by man in drag, and a hero such as Prince Charming, who is traditionally played by a woman dressed as a man. Former Centerstage artistic director Alan Bryce, who comes from acting and directing in London’s West End, introduced pantos to Western Washington audiences in 2005 with a play about pantos, and Centerstage staged their first full panto, Cinderella, in 2007, so this year’s Beauty and the Beast marks the theater’s 10^th anniversary of doing holiday pantos.

For a change, Tacoma Musical Playhouse is not doing a traditional holiday play this year. Instead, their holiday show is the ever-popular musical Once Upon a Mattress. But I hear TMP has tweaked the script to include a Christmas scene.

In addition to sneaking a Christmas scene into Once Upon a Mattress, TMP will have special holiday events including their first Holiday Bazaar, Sing Along with Santa and the Swing Reunion Orchestra – A Big Band Christmas!

The Holiday bazaar arts and crafts sale will be held Dec. 9 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the costume shop next to the TMP box office. Sing-Along with Santa is Saturday, Dec. 2. The Swing Reunion Orchestra’s show will be an evening of holiday classics played by TMP’s 18-piece big band Dec. 4 starting at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $25.

A Christmas Carol, 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 24-Dec. 17, Lakewood Playhouse, 5729 Lakewood Towne Center Blvd. Lakewood, $20-$26, 253.588.0042, lakewoodplayhouse.org.

Beauty and the Beast, 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 25-Dec. 17, Centerstage, 3200 SW Dash Point Rd., Federal Way, 253.661.1444, 12-$35.

Once Upon a Mattress, 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 24-Dec. 17, Tacoma Musical Playhouse, 7116 6^th Ave., Tacoma, 253.565.6867, https://tmp.org

Two Centuries of American Still-Life Painting

The Frank and Michelle Hevrdejs Collection at Tacoma Art Museum

By Alec Clayton

Published in the Weekly Volcano, Nov. 16, 2017

 “The Writer’s Tale – A Precarious Moment,” oil on canvas by John Frederick Peto, from the Frank and Michelle Havrdejs Collection, courtesy Tacoma Art Museum

Two galleries in the Tacoma Art Museum are filled with 60 paintings from 200 years of American still life painting from the Frank and Michelle Hevrdejs Collection. Included are works by such masters as James Peale, Georgia O’Keeffe, Andrew Wyeth and Wayne Thiebaud, plus many lesser known artists. The paintings are clustered chronologically from the early 19^th century through contemporary 21^st century paintings.

From the earliest American still life paintings until the advent of Pop Art, the European influence is strong, especially 17^th century Dutch painting in the early years, French Impressionism from the late 1800s and into the early 20^th century, and then European modernism, most notably Cezanne and Cubism.

America became fascinated with Trompe l’oeil or “fool the eye” painting in the late 1800s, with paintings by such artists as William Merritt Chase; John Frederick Peto; and most celebrated of all, William Michael Harnett. Paintings by these artists look so realistic that audiences at the time said you couldn’t tell them from photographs —although even the most skillfully painted Trompe l’oeil pictures fell far short of the photographic illusionism of late 20^th century Photo Realism.

The most noticeable feature of the earlier works in this show is how dark they are. Nearly every painting has black or exceedingly dark backgrounds, and brown, dark green and black predominate. When we move into the 20^th century, palettes lighten significantly.

There is a large section of Impressionist paintings featuring little known American Impressionists (with few exceptions, American Impressionism never rivaled French Impressionism). Frankly, these paintings do not belong in this exhibition. They are not still lifes. They are pictures of women in gardens and in interior scenes and are included only because the interior scenes contain a few still life elements.

The beauty, the excitement, and the artistic quality that makes this exhibition worth seeing is nearly all to the found in the paintings from the 1920s to the most recent work in the show. Scott Fraser’s “Lemon, Lemon,” for example, an oil painting from 2014 of two lemons sitting on sticks with long, spiral peels hanging down. With its dark background and golden yellow lemons, it is like a reemergence of Trompe l’oeil, but with a clever modern twist.

What makes the later works stand out so much from the earlier, in addition to the lighter palettes, is that they are more concerned with the elements of art than with the faithful reproduction of the appearance of objects. They distort perspective, use color expressively, and are concerned with the arrangement of objects in relation to one another.

Thomas Hart Benton’s “Abstract Still Life,” for example, depicts a flower with solid, abstract forms that have a sculptural look and beautifully glowing colors, and Emil Bisttram’s “Still Life with Red Apples” is like a Cubist still life by Picasso or Braque with a dance across the surface of contrasting dark and light forms.

William H. Bailey’s “Still Life with Pitcher and Eggs” is as realistic as any of the paintings by earlier artists but is clearly more about balance and contrast than it is about the appearance of the pitchers and eggs, and the velvety nuances of brown and white make you want to reach out and touch them.

And then there is Wayne Thiebeaud’s “Jelly Rolls (for Morton),” three jelly rolls in a line on a counter with a dark blue background and glowing, lighter blue shadows. I would venture to say that everyone who loves art has seen reproductions of Thiebeaud still lifes in books and magazines, but to see them in person — the thickness of his brushstrokes and the lushness of his colors —is to experience pure beauty that is transformative. Seeing this painting alone is worth the price of admission. It is a small painting at 19-by-22 inches, and unfortunately presented in a ridiculous frame, but how anything so small and so simple can have such a powerful impact is almost beyond comprehension.

I recommend you see this show for the Thiebeaud, for the William H. Bailey, and for the history lesson.

Tacoma Art Museum, Tuesday-Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., through Jan. 7, $13-$15, third Thursday free 5-8 p.m., 1701 Pacific Ave. Tacoma, http://www.tacomaartmuseum.org/

Tears of Duc'Wibahl at Evergreen

By Alec Clayton

Published in the Weekly Volcano, Nov. 2, 2017

"Faces from the Carving Studio Floor," painted construction by by Iāwera Tahurī, courtesy The Evergreen State College

This past year The Evergreen State College in Olympia hosted a gathering of indigenous artists from the continental U.S., Hawaii, Alaska, Samoa and New Zealand. In New Zealand and Hawaii, such gatherings of artists are called a hui. It took place at the Longhouse. Artists who took part in the hui were invited to show work in the art gallery at Evergreen. Clearly not all the 108 invited artists are represented in the show, but the gallery is jam-packed with paintings, prints of many sorts, ceramics, fine metals, fiber arts, beadwork, carving, digital media and glass. This impressive show highlights the thoughts, skills and imagination of artists from many cultures and traditions, reflecting both long-standing traditions and modern concerns.

We in the Pacific Northwest have been inundated with Native American masks, weavings, totem poles, and the powerfully graphic images of animals both mythological and real that typify Native art, and more specifically Coastal Native art. No matter how well-loved this familiar work is to those of us who live in the lands that produced it, we might believe ourselves to already know what we’d see if we attended this show.  I must confess that I shared that expectation. Nevertheless, I was glad I saw this show. Yes, there are prints and carvings of stylized animals, there are woven dresses and baskets, and there are carved wood masts and drums. It might be easy to dismiss this show as just one more museum-type documentation of Native culture; but to dismiss it so easily would be to miss out on the felt spirituality of much of the work and the artistic skill on display.

Following are but a handful of examples of what you can expect to see.

RYAN! Fedderson’s “Bison Stack II” is a small black and white print of a conical pile of bison skulls. The very top skull in the heap is being lowered into place on the peak of the mound like the angel or star atop a Christmas tree — lowered not by hand but by a construction crane of the type that dots the cityscape in Seattle. So what we have here is a testament to the wholesale slaughter of buffalo that destroyed a way of life at the time of the settling of the “Wild West” by Europeans combined with a potent symbol of the rapid industrialization by which we might destroy our own white man’s culture. Feddersen is a member of the Colville tribe.  Dorothy Waetford’s “IOEAU” is a bit of pop art sculpture that has no reference to her indigenous culture that I can grasp, although there might be meanings beyond my grasp. It consists of rounded, sculpted letters of the alphabet, the vowels of the title, in a natural red-clay color with a poured and cracked white glaze. Like Robert Indiana’s “LOVE” and Andy Warhol’s soup cans, it proves that the most common of everyday items can be rendered beautiful by the hands of an artist.

Karen Skyki Reed of the Puyallup tribe is showing a glass case filled with 27 tiny hand-woven baskets plus a woven doll and other items that are remarkable for their tremendous skill and patience. It is like a shelf of baskets to be found in a doll house.

Powerful and almost frightening is Othniel “Art” Oomittuk’s “Three Voices Bridging the Gap.” It is a large drum made of carved wood with a stretched rawhide drum head.

On the sides are carved a stylized fish, possibly an orca, and two large heads that appear to be singing. My guess is they are singing to the whale. As with many of the works in this show, there are probably references in this work to myths or legends or stories that I am not aware of. There is no wall text to explain possible meanings and traditions.

One of the more attractive pieces in the show, primarily for its rich coloring, is “Faces from the Carving Studio Floor” by Iāwera Tahurī. It is a set of three forms from scrap wood glued and screwed together and painted with bright green, purple, orange, yellow and blue slashes of color on the black wood. The colors are deep and luminous, and the abstract faces are fierce.

Tears of Duc'Wibahl, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Thursday, through Dec. 10, closed college holidays Nov. 10 and Nov. 20-23, Library Building The Evergreen State College, 2700 Evergreen Parkway NW, Olympia, www.evergreen.edu/gallery