Agamemnon scores big at Dukesbay Theater

 Published in the Weekly Volcano, June 4, 2015

Samantha A. Camp and Brian Wayne Jansen, J. Carrie Ivory in background. Photo by Bruce Story-Camp.

Watching Agamemnon at Dukesbay Theater opening night was a totally immersive theatrical experience. This is the way theater was in the beginning when many theatrical traditions still in common use were first invented, and it plays as well in 21^st century Tacoma as it must have in Greece 2,400 years ago.

The set by Matthew Philbrook and Brittany Porter is thoroughly modern and gorgeous; the movement of the actors — most notably the chorus — is highly stylized like a ballet set to words, and those words are plain spoken and easily understood. The drama is so intense it’s a wonder audience members did not flee screaming, especially taking into account the intimate seating where actors practically touch some of the audience.

Photos by Bruce Story-Camp

The story is set at the end of the Trojan wars. Greek King Agamemnon (played with gravitas by Brian Wayne Jansen) has triumphed in war and is on his way home. He has sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia (J. Carrie Ivory) to the gods, an atrocity which his wife, Clytemnestra (Samantha A. Camp) can never forgive, and he is bringing home with him a slave concubine, Cassandra (also played by Ivory), who was captured in Troy. She is also a prophetess who can see the future.

In a Greek tradition that has endured up until modern times, much of the story is told by the chorus. Every cast member is in the chorus at some point and each steps out of the chorus to play various characters. Even the lead characters, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, take their turns in the chorus, and Jansen even takes a turn as an unnamed guard.

The abstract patterns of movement by all of the actors in and around the equally abstract set is choreographed by Katie Lappier and creates an otherworldly mood suitable to a time in which gods interacted in the lives of men and women. There is chanting and poetry from the chorus and both Ivory and Glenn Guhr, who plays Menelaus and Aegisthus, sing separate funeral laments. Ghur’s voice is deep and beautifully controlled while Ivory’s is hauntingly sad and lovely.

Jansen’s and Camp’s performances are almost indescribably intense. Jansen, a large man who somehow looks even bigger than he is in this performance, is magisterial and commanding. It is believable that his subjects would look to him as to a god. His expressions of grief and pain are overwhelming. I first saw Jansen in a couple of comedies, Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Take Me Out, and thought he was a natural comedian. And then I discovered upon seeing him in Titus Andronicus (in which he was also paired with Camp) that he can be equally adept at high drama. Camp is also amazing. She begins as likeable and charming but devolves into a hideous person in an acting stint that is spectacular.

No makeup artist is listed in the program. I suspect the actors did their own.  Clytemnestra’s blood smeared face and the black makeup around Agamemnon’s eyes are simple and highly effective.

The costumes are clearly put together with little or no budget and almost succeed in making contemporary clothing look like clothes worn in ancient Greece. The light gray hoodies worn by the chorus and the women’s gray skirts create an overall ashen look of mystery.

The set is a modern art installation of brightly colored twine in cones of light that flow from platforms on the floor to high on the wall. They are strikingly minimalist and highly appropriate to the stylized manner of presentation.

Agamemnon is not an easy play to watch. It looks into betrayal and murder and deals unflinchingly with difficult questions or loyalty and justice without providing easy answers. The drama is heavy and unrelenting. But anyone who appreciates fine art should find it fascinating.

Congratulations to the cast and crew and especially director Kathryn Philbrook for a job well done.

Agamemnon,  Friday.-Saturday, 7:30 p.m., Sunday, 2 p.m. through June 14, Dukesbay Theater in the Merlino Arts Center, 508 South 6th Ave., Tacoma, $15, $10 students/seniors, http://agamemnon.brownpapertickets.com/

Paint, Steel, Porcelain at Brick & Mortar Gallery

Published in the Weekly Volcano, June 4, 2015

"Lafawnda’s Cancan” oil and copper on canvas by Laura Hanan. Photo courtesy the artist

It makes my heart happy to see that Laura Hanan has re-opened Brick & Mortar Gallery. The once funky little gallery on Pacific at 9^th street is now elegant and welcoming and in business again after a hiatus of six years with a selection of Hanan’s paintings plus porcelain wall reliefs by Steve Portteus and steel sculptures by Josh Lippencott.

Both Lippencott and Portteus are showing work that is gift-shoppy and appealing to popular taste but finely crafted and, particularly in the work of Portteus, original in concept. By way of contrast, there is absolutely nothing gift-shoppy in Hanan’s paintings. They pure, bold and unpretentious. They are abstract oil paintings on canvas based on an image of a workbench, a photo of which is projected onto the wall of the gallery.

“My new paintings were inspired by minimal marks left in construction environments such as the stains and scars on a carpenter’s workbench and the paint-splatter left on sidewalk public works barrels,” Hanan said. “The intrinsic beauty in these random marks, textures, contrast, and earth/mineral tones motivated creations of strange, otherworldly landscapes and creatures.”

Many of her paintings have one or two circular discs made from copper and glued to the surface of the canvas amidst loosely painted organic shapes applied in washes so thin as to soak in and show the weave of the canvas. In contrast to the Helen Frankenthaler-like washes of color are the hard circles and black shapes layered on with thick paint that looks like hot tar. The contrasts of these divergent forms and methods of paint application is bold and startling, yet the different shapes and surfaces blend together into a single whole. This is painting that is gritty, raw and accomplished.

The paintings look spontaneous and quickly done, but Hanan confirmed that some of them were re-worked extensively.

Viewers should be able to easily read landscape into her forms, and they may also see reflections of grease and oil and tar soaked into concrete or brick or the surface of the afore-mentioned work bench.

I like all of her paintings, but if asked to pick a favorite it would be “Cryptonic Crusades,” which has a black shape in the center perched atop a white shape. It looks like a black bear on a floating chunk of ice, like a scene of melting ice in the arctic but with a stranded black bear instead of the expected polar bear.

Lippencott’s welded flower sculptures and cut-steel landscapes are technically well done but not original in thought or execution. His two standing steel sculptures are by far his best works in the show.

Portteus’s relief sculptures of landscapes and flowers are quite attractive. The most interesting aspect of his work is the use of little multi-colored balls of clay arranged into fields of color.

“Daisy” is a single flower with white petals and a yellow center on a field of blue, green and olive balls. It has a pop-art sensibility that is refreshing. His best works are “Tide Pool #1” and “High Tide.” The former is a tide pool created from clear epoxy at least an inch deep with star fish and flowers floating on the water and a crab clinging to the rocks. The latter is a field of large clay balls partially submerged in clear epoxy. It is the most abstract of his pieces. It is astonishingly beautiful.

Paint, Steel Porcelain, Tues. and Thurs. 20 a.m. to 2 p.m., Fri.-Sat., noon to 9 p.m. through June 15, Brick & Mortar Gallery, 811 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, 253.591.2727.

Come to the Cabaret at TLT

Posted on The News Tribune

Mauro Bozzo, center, plays the emcee in Tacoma Little Theatre’s production of “Cabaret.” He is surrounded by dancers, from left, LaNita Hudson, Haley Kim, Kathy Kluska and Amanda Jackson. Courtesy DK Photography

Read more here: http://www.thenewstribune.com/2015/06/04/3821322_cast-directors-twist-combine-to.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

Stated as succinctly as possible, I love “Cabaret.” It is one of the greatest of modern musical theater productions. Whether done on Broadway or in a community theater, it is a knockout – funny, titillating, and heart wrenching. Combining hedonism run amok with one of the most horrific events in human history and setting it to music makes for theater that grabs the mind and heart.

The staging of “Cabaret” at Tacoma Little Theatre is as good as any production I’ve ever seen. The music, the acting, the costumes and choreography are outstanding, and the icing on the cake is that director John Munn has added some surprisingly effective twists to this well-known show.

Elise Campello as Sally Bowles. Courtesy DK Photography

It is Berlin 1931. Hitler is coming into power. The Kit Kat Klub revels in decadence with performances by showgirls and boys that celebrate lewdness. The headliner at the Kit Kat is English showgirl Sally Bowles (Elise Campello), who makes no bones about having slept her way into a showbiz career. An expatriate American writer, Cliff Bradshaw (Niclas R. Olson) comes to Berlin and gets involved in the seedy life of Berlin’s bohemian scene and falls in love with Sally. As they try to navigate the ups and downs of love and life, the Nazi juggernaut comes to power. Cliff sees that the Nazis are a threat to them and their friends, but Sally and many of the others shrug it off.

The emcee at the Kit Kat (Mauro Bozzo) stirs the already boiling pot.

Bozzo is sassy and flirtatious as the naughty emcee. His holds the audience in his hand from the rousing opening number, “Willkommen” through the sexy “Two Ladies” and the absurdly comical “If You Could See Her (through my eyes),” which makes a powerful political point disguised as pure silliness. Bozzo is simply marvelous both as an actor and as a singer.

Campello plays Sally Bowles as a lurid and brazen sexpot with undertones of sweetness and even naiveté – undertones that are skillfully conveyed not so much with her words but with her expression. Her brashness in songs like “Mein Herr” and “Don’t Tell Mama” perfectly complement the emcee’s risqué demeanor. She elevates brazen sexiness to high comedy and then becomes achingly serious with the sadness and longing of the song, “Maybe This Time,” expressing self-doubt in private that she can never show publicly. And she reveals shocking raw anger and hurt in the final version of the title song.

Rosalie Hilburn as Fraulein Schneider and Joseph Grant as Herr Schultz capture our hearts in the subplot centering on their love affair. Both are charming and delightful, and they break our hearts. The tenderest of moments in the developing love story between these two elderly Germans is when they sing “It Couldn’t Please Me More (the pineapple song). In the midst of this sweet love song they stop singing and pantomime the actions of the elderly lovers as the song continues offstage, sung by Rachel Fitzgerald, who is also hilarious as the happiest of hookers, Fraulein Kost.

The book by Joe Masteroff skillfully weaves together raunchy good times and the looming terror of Nazism’s rise to power, intensified by the music of the great songwriting team of John Kander and Fred Ebb. Adding significantly to the devil-may-care atmosphere of the Kit Kat Klub are the scantily dressed Kit Kat Girls (Amanda Jackson, LaNita Hudson, Haley Kim and Kathy Kluska) whose dancing to Lexi Barnett’s choreography is acrobatic and comical. Also adding significantly to the air of decadence are the costumes by Michele Graves.

The house was full the night I went, and I suspect it will be every night of this show, so call for tickets as early as possible.

WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2:00 p.m. Sunday through June 14

WHERE: Tacoma Little Theatre, 210 N “I” St., Tacoma

TICKETS: $22-$15

INFORMATION: 253-272-2281, www.tacomalittletheatre.com.

David Mamet’s “A Life in the Theatre”

Photo: Mark Peterson (left) and Frank Thompson (right) in David Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre. Photo by Christina Hughes

 Theater-goers accustomed to the intense drama of David Mamet plays such as Oleanna and Glengarry Glen Ross might be surprised at his A Life in the Theatre, a small play in which the less is said the more is implied, a bittersweet comic drama that runs about  an hour and a half without an intermission

Presented by Working Class Theatre NW, this little gem of a show opened at the Midnight Sun in Olympia and moves to Tacoma tonight through June 7. I caught a preview performance in Olympia.

A Life in the Theatre is a two-person show that is a demanding challenge to director and actors alike, and equally challenging to audiences. It is directed by Luke Amundson and features Mark Peterson and Frank Thompson.

The show is a series of barely related vignettes, almost too numerous to keep track of, that subtly coalesce into a touching and in places biting story of two actors who perform together in many plays over a period of time (never explicated stated, but at least one full season if not many more).

 John (Peterson) is a young actor at the beginning of his career. Robert (Thompson) is an older actor whose career is winding down and whose skills are deteriorating. We observe them as they talk to each other backstage while dressing and putting on makeup and preparing to go on stage, and we see them in a variety of performances on the stage, many of which are parodies of well-known plays. We see, for instance, a bastardized version of the storming of the barricades in Les Misérables, and we hear songs from popular shows such as Annie Get Your Gun. Some of these parodies carry over to the backstage scenes such as when Robert tries to explain to John the importance of a well-organized makeup table. He says, "On the boards, or in society at large, there must be law, there must be a reason, there must be tradition." When he says the word “Tradition” he sings it out like in the song from Fiddler on the Roof.

The challenge for the actors, which both Peterson and Thompson rise to emphatically and impressively, is not only that they have to portray many different characters (both well and badly) in the scenes on stage, but must convey much more than is actually said in the scenes backstage. The complex love-hate relationship between John and Robert is conveyed as much by what is not said as by what is. John, for example, eyes Robert askance. You see in his eyes that he thinks the old man is over the hill, yet we also see him look at Robert with begrudging admiration.

And he is right that Robert is over the hill. As the plays go on he begins to get confused, to drop lines. In one scene in which they are playing doctors performing surgery, he starts to repeat a scene they have already performed, frustrating John so much that he storms off stage when he cannot save the scene. In another scene he keeps talking to John while John is standing in the wings listening for his cue. John panics. He doesn’t know if he has missed his cue or not, and Robert tells him to go on stage, so he rushes out and says his lines. He doesn’t know whether his timing is right or not, neither does the audience.

Mamet’s script makes very little clear to the audience. We are left to imagine what is going on between John and friends outside of the theater that he alludes to and talks to on the phone. When Robert cuts his wrist, we do not know if it was an accident or a suicide attempt although it is clear that Robert is depressed. There are a number of other intentional ambiguities. One thing that is made clear is that they both love the world of theater, and even that is hinted at more than stated. For instance, there is a scene where John wads up a pieces of paper and throws it at a trash can and misses. Robert picks it up and puts it in a different trash can, the message being that the theater must be respected; there is a place for everything.

It is a challenging play for the audience for precisely this reason: that nothing is spelled out. Mamet expects us to find our own answers. Audience members may get or miss all the insider theater references. It is well written with dialogue not quite in the typical “Mamet speak” manner but typical of the way people speak in real life (here contrasted nicely with the more structured dialogue of stage characters). It is well staged, beautifully directed, and Peterson and Thompson are both outstanding.

 A Life in the Theatre, 8 p.m., May 28-31 and June 5-7, 733 Commerce, Tacoma, $10-$12, http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/1558116 or at the door