Exit, Pursued by a Bear at Olympia Little Theatre

I THINK!!! Olympia Little Theatre’s Exit, Pursued by a Bear is an edgy, gutsy dark comedy in line with some of the riskiest works seen in Olympia, such as Theater Artists Olympia’s double dose of Reservoir Dogs or The Goat or Who is Sylvia.

Jason Downer as Kyle and Nicole Galyean as Nan

 

The reason I put the word “think” in all-caps, italics and followed by a string of exclamation points is because I was unable to clearly hear and understand enough to be able to objectively critique the play. Attribute that to the Southern accents. As I stated in another review just this week, I am not an astute judge of accents, but I spent the first 30 years of my life in Mississippi; I should be able to understand people doing a Southern accent. Perhaps the acoustics or the OLT sound system can share some of the blame. And yes, I do have less than perfect hearing. I wear hearing aids. But if I can hear the New and Old England accents in Fighting Over Beverly or the Mississippi Delta drawl in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (both Harlequin Productions), or odd speech in n other shows at OLT such as Murderers or Sea Marks, both of which had the potential for such problems, then I should be able to hear these back woods Georgians in Exit . . .

from left: Katrina Groen as Sweetheart, Jason Downer and Nicole Galyean

from left: Katrina Groen, Kevin Gowrylow as Simon and Nicole Galyean

Having said that, this play with a most intriguing title by Lauren Gunderson is an innovative dark comedy about a disturbing subject: spouse abuse. I applaud Gunderson and OLT for attempting it.

The premise is certainly unique. Nan Carter (Nicole Galyean) has been repeatedly abused by her macho hunter husband, Kyle (Jason Downer). In order to teach him a lesson or seek revenge (it’s not entirely clear which), she recruits her lifelong best friend, Simon Beaufort (Kevin Gowrylow) and her new friend Sweetheart (Katrina Groen) to theatrically perform for Kyle scenes from his miserable life after having conked him over the head with a frying pan and duct taping him to a chair.

Nan is a great admirer of Jimmy Carter and mentions him frequently throughout the play. She wishes Jimmy Carter was her father. She also loves her husband but can no longer put up with his abuse. She swings back and forth between wanting to forgive him and wanting to kill him. This is a complex and difficult character to portray, made doubly hard by being such a dark comedy that verges on farce. Galyean’s acting is natural and believable in this complex role.

Downer is wonderful as Kyle. For an actor who spends much of his stage time duct taped to a chair and half of that with his mouth taped shut, he does some terrific acting — mostly done with grunts and a myriad of facial expressions.

Sweetheart is a gun-toting trailer-trash sexpot with dreams of becoming a Hollywood star. She loves Shakespeare and peppers her performances with references to the bard. (The strange title of the play is, in fact, a stage direction Shakespeare wrote in his script for The Winter’s Tale. Groen is fabulous in this role. She looks the part and acts it with great relish.

Simon is a clichéd, stereotypical gay man who first enters dressed as a female cheerleader. I have big problems with this character. I do not like that he was written as such an obvious spoof of a gay man and I’m not crazy about the manner in which Gowrylow portrays him, although I can’t imagine how else he could be portrayed. I looked up other reviews of the play and found that others had the same complaint about the character.  That said, Gowrylow plays Simon as well as can be expected. He certainly throws himself into the part and holds nothing back, and he actually gets some of the best comedic lines.

Some of the set-ups are done with video projections, and some of the narration is done by characters telling their stories in asides to the audience. And there is a random karaoke number that I thought was totally superfluous.

Matthew Moeller’s set design leaves a lot to be desired. Moeller can do better, as proven by his work on OLT’s recent productions Boeing, Boeing and Educating Rita. OLT normally has seating on three sides and a backdrop that in most shows in the back wall of whatever house or apartment the scenes take place in. For this production they brought in folding chairs to create an in-the-round space which took away the ability to effectively use a back wall.

Finally, you might want to know what this play has to do with being pursued by a bear. For the answer to that you’ll have to attend the play.

WHEN: 7:55 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and 1:55 p.m. Sunday through April 13

WHERE: Olympia Little Theatre, 1925 Miller Ave., NE, Olympia

TICKETS: $10-$14, available at Yenney Music Company on Harrison Avenue (360-943-7500) or http://www.brownpapertickets.com/profile/23136 INFORMATION: 360-786-9484, http://olympialittletheater.org/

Fighting Over Beverly at Harlequin

David Wright as Zelly and Dennis Rolly as Archie

 

Harlequin Production’s love affair with playwright Israel Horovitz continues this season with the deceptively light comedy Fighting Over Beverly, the sixth Horovitz play Harlequin has produced in six years — each one a gem.

Dennis Rolly as Archie and Karen Nelsen as Beverly

Typical of Horovitz, Fighting Over Beverly mixes eccentric characters into a concoction of outrageous comedy blended with stark reality. His characters are as real as they get. They are typically middle age or elderly working class, no-bullshit characters who set up audiences with belly laughs before hitting them with raw emotion. Horovitz never shies away from touchy and controversial material as in the rage and tension of American Jewish and Palestinian students trapped together in a hotel room during the bombing of Beirut in Six Hotels and the sex and murder in the dark comedy Gloucester Blue. But he can be sweet as well, as in the romantic comedy My Old Lady. Fighting Over Beverly is more in the vein of the latter.

 

David Wright and Dennis Rolly

During World War II a young English woman was engaged to British pilot Archie Bennett but jilted him to marry the American pilot Zelly Shimma. Now, half a century later, Archie (Dennis Rolly) comes to Gloucester, Mass. (site of nearly all Horovitz plays) to steal his wife, Beverly (Karen Nelsen), away from Zelly (David Wright). He says Zelly has had her for 53 years and now it’s his turn, and the two old codgers fight over Beverly’s heart. Thrown into the mix and also fighting over Beverly is Zelly and Beverly’s 40-year old daughter, Cecily (Ann Flannigan), a driven executive in the Los Angeles entertainment industry with a history of failed marriages.

The plot seems simple enough — two old men out of touch with reality ridiculously fighting over the love of an old woman who may or may not want either one of them. But this is a deeply layered story that is much more complex than it at first seems. Into the comedic stew it mixes the whole history of foreign war brides who left their homes never to return because they married American soldiers — usually in an all-fired romantic hurry without thinking it though and often without knowing them well enough to actually love them; yet they typically stayed with them and endured for a lifetime out of a sense of duty and for the sake of the children.

The writing is superb, and it is brought to life by acting that is equally outstanding. It is an ensemble piece Rolly is as funny as he’s been in any other play I’ve seen — and there have been plenty, from the mysterious Mr. Lockhart in Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer to an insane Marley in Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol to roles in just about every Shakespeare play the bard wrote, nearly 70 plays in all according to the program for this one. His gestures, his voice and his strutting rooster posture as Archie are hilarious. Unlike fellow critic Christian Carvajal who admirably seems to be able to recognize accents down to the town if not the block a fellow lives on, I can spot if an accent is vaguely British or Irish or from Massachusetts or Louisiana. Rolly’s is British enough and I enjoyed it.

Wright, who was outstanding as the crotchety old goat Richard Harden in The Seafarer and as the afflicted grandfather in Horovitz’s Unexpected Tenderness, again plays an unlikable but somehow endearing character as Zelly. He’s gruff and easily angered, and when he expresses bitterness it is convincing, yet you can’t help but feel like you’d like to spend time with the guy.

Nelsen is another veteran of Horovitz plays at Harlequin (Mathilde in My Old Lady). As with Wright’s Zelly, you can’t help but love her and pity her and ultimately admire her strength and courage as she portrays a very conflicted Beverly. She is utterly believable.

As Cecily, Flannigan is a firecracker of nervous energy, and when she is caught off guard when her parents do unexpected things — as they do often in this play — her expressions of astonishment are comic gold.

Also comic gold is the big fight scene, which takes place practically in slow motion and is more stylized than realistic. I honestly couldn’t tell if that was intentional or not, but it was hilarious.

I could almost call Fighting Over Beverly a romantic farce, except farces are never so believable. This is a great play played well.

WHEN: Thursdays through Saturdays, 8p.m., Sundays 2 p.m. through May 24

WHERE: State Theater, 202 E. 4^th Ave., Olympia

TICKETS: prices vary, call for details

INFORMATION: 360-786-0151; http://www.harlequinproductions.org/

The Guerilla Girls invade Tacoma

The Weekly Volcano, May 1, 2014

The biting, satirical, outrageous feminist art group Guerilla Girls will present a live performance sponsored by Tacoma Art Museum and University of Washington Tacoma. The event is called Guerilla Girls: Not Ready to Make Nice. What they will do is anybody’s guess, but rest assured it will be provocative, entertaining and educational. It happens Saturday, May 10 at Phillips Hall, UW Tacoma.

Plastering New York in the mid to late 1980s with provocative posters, billboards and banners and putting on in-your-face performance art pieces while wearing gorilla masks, the Guerilla Girls stunned the New York art world by skewering the establishment with outrageously humorous presentations of undeniable facts — a typical example being a poster plastered all over town with a picture of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ famous nude “Grande Odalisque” wearing a gorilla head and holding a phallic feather duster and with the headline “Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get in the Met. Museum?” and in smaller type, “Less than 5% of the artists in the modern art section are women but 85% of the nudes are female.”

Another famous poster is the one listing the advantages of being a woman artist, which include, among others, “Having an escape from the art world in your 4 free-lance jobs, not being stuck in a tenured teaching position, seeing your ideas live in the work of others,” and finally “Getting your picture in the art magazines wearing  gorilla suit.”

Protecting their identities with the masks, the Guerilla Girls use the names of deceased female artists. One of the girls going by the name Georgia O'Keeffe said, “We wanted to play with the fear of guerrilla warfare, to make people afraid of who we might be and where we would strike next. Besides, ‘guerrilla’ sounds so good with ‘girl.’”

They are known for wearing short skirts, high heels and fishnet stockings in addition to the gorilla masks. One of the girls using the name Emily Carr said they wear those clothes with a gorilla mask in order to confound “the stereotype of female sexiness.” 

The Guerilla Girls’ website describes their philosophy on activist art: “We try to be different from the kind of political art that is angry and points to something and says ‘This is bad.’ That's preaching to the converted. We want to be subversive, to transform our audience, to confront them with some disarming statements, backed up by facts —and great visuals — and hopefully convert them. We carefully craft everything we do. We try to twist an issue around and present it in a way that hasn't been seen before.”

In Gloria Steinem’s words, “If I had to name a group that symbolized the best of feminism in this country, I would say, 'The Guerrilla Girls.' Smart, radical, funny, creative, uncompromising, and (I assume) diverse under those inspired gorilla masks, they force us to rethink everything.”

Guerilla Girls will be selling merchandise at the event. They’ll have a selection of books and posters outside the auditorium. 

Tacoma Art Museum anticipates a sold-out show and recommends purchasing tickets in advance. Tickets will be sold at the door only if the event has not sold out. Cost: $20 ($15 for Tacoma Art Museum members, students, senior, and military).

The show starts at 1 p.m. at Phillips Hall at University of Washington Tacoma.

Coastal Alchemy at Museum of Glass

The Weekly Volcano, May 1,2014

Art is most effective when it can evoke the essence or the spirit, of a person, place or event without necessarily looking like that person, place or event. More often than not it is most effective when it does not look like the subject because illusory depiction often detracts from the core of the artistic statement. Coastal Alchemy at Museum of Glass beautifully, inventively and powerfully evokes the natural world of our Pacific Northwest in painting, sculpture and poetry by artists Anna Skibska, Meg Holgate and Trenton Flock.

To borrow words from the press release: “With lead artist Anna Skibska creating glass collages and sculptural installations, Meg Holgate contributing her luminous landscape paintings, and poet T.S. Flock’s visual poetry, Coastal Alchemy offers visitors three different but interwoven perspectives on the region. Central to their collaboration is a sense of being on the edge, on the margin of the continent, between land and sea, surrounded by nature. A similar affinity for the sense of place in the Northwest characterized the so-called Northwest Mystics.”

Flock’s visual poetry is the first thing that meets the eye upon entering the gallery. Approximately 120 cadenza sheets are suspended by shimmering wires across the wall that faces the entry. Handwritten lines of poetry fill these sheets. Are the words of the poem written on a wall text or in a catalog? If so, I missed it, and it is impossible to read the words as they are displayed; but visually it is beautiful and luminous and sets the mystical tone of the exhibition.

To the right are two large galleries filled with Skibska’s glass sculpture, collages and works on paper and other mixed media. To the left stand two more large galleries filled with paintings and stacked rocks in display cases by Holgate.

With minimalist forms and subdued colors, Holgate captures the feel of our streams and forests in quiet reverence. Some of the paintings are on glass or on surfaces that combine paper and glass. They are majestic and simple. The softness of her painting is awe inspiring. There are paintings that are little more than a series of vertical forms representing tree trunks, one called “Moonshine IV” that looks like a space ship, and a painting of a rock barely visible in the mist but which casts a hard-edged black shadow. These are astounding paintings.

Skibska’s sculptures and collages are almost indescribable even though some of them have very clearly defined subject matter. There are portrait heads, animals and other figures on glass, paper and other materials, with words attached on and near the paintings in such a way as to obscure any sense of where one work stops and another begins while lending additional meaning to the works. And suspended from the ceiling in front of or nearby each piece is a kind of mesh glass grid that takes the form of, variously, boxes, balls and clouds, or like crystalline spider webs that shimmer in the light and cast intriguing shadows that partially obscure the imagery on the walls. Walking through these two galleries that house Skibska’s work is like taking a stroll along a beach at the edge of a forest — a beach that is littered with driftwood, gnarled tree trunks and rocks. There are no beginnings and no ends. There is humor, there is beauty, there is mystery; there is the essence of nature without slavishly copying the look of trees and mountains and bodies of water.

This, in my humble opinion, is the most engaging exhibition I have seen at MOG sense the show of Richard Craig Meitner’s strange vessels three years ago.

[Museum of Glass, Coastal Alchemy, Wednesday-Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Sunday, noon to 5 p.m., through Sept. 28, 1801 Dock St. Tacoma, (866) 468-7386 http://museumofglass.org]