Nothing Like a Local Soap Opera

Jeri and Kate (Samantha Camp and Betzy Miller) get nasty with the dead guy (Demetrick Louis) in Perky's Coffee House (top). From left: Customer, Bert (Mick Flaaen), Jeri, Linda (Aya Hashiguchi), and Kate. Photos by Jason Ganwich.

Dukesbay Productions’ Java Tacoma: Episode 38

“Java Tacoma: Episode 38” is a laughable light confection live soap opera set in Tacoma replete with local digs. You may have seen Episode 37, but if you didn’t it doesn’t matter. In the tradition of all good TV drama they start off with a recap of the last installment. The audience is informed that in the previous episode Jeri accidentally put her dead husband’s ashes in the coffee at Perky’s Coffee House and it turned out to be the best coffee anyone had ever tasted. Bert and Linda are going to have to close the coffee house. In this episode we find out that they’re not going out of business after all; they’re just moving to dreaded Federal Way, where children are born without souls.

That’s the premise. It’s a simple and ludicrous story with imaginative plot twists and loaded with double entendre and other word play, well written by local playwright Curtis B. Swanson and nicely directed by Randy Clark.

The cast is outstanding. Betzy Miller plays Kate, a crazy, outspoken local character who is convinced that she drives men wild with her sexual allure. Samantha Camp plays Jeri, a real estate agent who easily matches Kate in the appeal department. With sly facial expressions and posture she manages to make the simple act of giving out her business cards seem like an indecent proposal – with the running joke “I buy and sell. I go both ways.” The coffee house owners, Bert and Linda, are played by Mick Flaaen and Aya Hashiguchi. They serve as the (somewhat) straight characters (i.e., second bananas) off of whom the comics bounce their jokes. But they break out of their roles for one briefly insane scene when they appear as a Latin lover and an Asian woman. This strange interlude is totally out of context and seems to be not real but perhaps Jeri’s hallucination. It borders on offensive ethnic stereotyping but is more of a jab at the stereotypes than at the characters. Furthermore, the jabs at Asian women are softened because Hashiguchi is Japanese.

The final cast member, Demetrick Louis, plays an unnamed customer and a dead man. The previous sentence is not true, but it is necessary in order to describe Louis’s acting without giving away a major element in the story. As the dead man he does ‘nothing’ hilariously and we cannot but admire his ability to remain motionless without bursting into laughter as Kate and Jeri try out their sexual allure on him. As the mysterious customer he makes wild statements with astounding deadpan dramatic flair.

Kudos to Allan Loucks, composer of the original theme song and original score.

Subtitled “Friends, Neighbors and Siblings,” “Java Tacoma: Episode 38” is a one-act play that runs just about an hour and is over far too soon. It’s pure, inspired silliness, that does not aspire to anything greater than light fun, and while it may be a little too far out for some people, I found it totally enjoyable.

Tickets are $15, and that includes your choice of coffee (decaf or regular), tea and an assortment of baked goods. If I had the time and didn’t have to commute from Olympia, I’d go back to see Episode 38 again, and I hope there will be an Episode 39.

JAVA TACOMA: Episode 38
"Friends, Neighbors and Siblings"
November 4,5, 11,12, 18,19,2011 
Trinity Presbyterian Church Fellowship Hall
1619 6th Ave.
Tacoma, WA 98405
Show starts at 7:30pm.

For reservations: By phone (253) 267-0869,  By email: info@dukesbay.org
Reservations are recommended. Tickets payable at the door, cash or checks only.

Mexican Folk At

Miguel Linares, Skeleton Street Vendor, mid 1970s. 

Papier-mache, paint, wire, cord, 39 x 14 x 12 inches. 

San Antonio Museum of Art, 

The Nelson A. Rockefeller Mexican Folk Art Collection.

David Villafanez, The Ascension of Christ, ca. 1975. 

Wood and paint, 34 x 22 x 6 5/8 inches. 

San Antonio Museum of Art, 

The Nelson A. Rockefeller Mexican Folk Art Collection.

A fiesta of Mexican culture at the Tacoma Art Museum

The Weekly Volcano, November 2, 2011

What a fun show! Folk Art Treasures of Mexico at Tacoma Art Museum, I mean. Nelson A. Rockefeller, former Governor of New York and former Vice President of the United States, owned one of the world's largest collections of Mexican folk art, which was given to the San Antonio Museum of Art and The Mexican Museum in San Francisco after his death. The San Antonio museum has loaned TAM some 80 major pieces from its collection for this comprehensive survey of Mexican folk art.

There are paintings, tapestries, toys, miniatures, painted wooden chests, water bottles and much more featured in this show - including many pieces that were made for Day of the Dead celebrations.

Almost overwhelming in their size and bright color are two eight-foot-tall paper-mache devils that hang high on the wall and a painted backdrop of the Virgin of Guadalupe measuring 11-by-13 feet. This colorful painting has elements similar to surrealistic landscapes, with distortions in size and perspective that almost create vertigo in the viewer. The image of the virgin, as large as the buildings, hovers over the city like a guardian angel. This is a beautiful painting. Interestingly, it was never intended as "art" as North Americans think of art - nothing in this exhibition was. It was painted to use as a backdrop for professional photographers. The work was transported all over Mexico and people posed in front of it for family photos. It was often used as a backdrop for photos documenting religious pilgrimages.

Many of the artists represented in this show are unknown, and none of them were professionally trained. Most of the pieces featured in the show were made for storing or carrying things, for wearing, for play and entertainment or for religious sacrament or celebration. Although made for practical purposes and not for show, the artists display amazing inventiveness and aesthetic sensibility, and in many instances a bizarre sense of humor balanced by reverence for tradition and sacrament.

All pieces are made by hand, often with meticulous detail, and most are made from cheap materials. Nothing in this show was created with the hope that it would someday end up in a museum, but we can be grateful to Rockefeller and the participating museums that they are here now and suitably preserved (many of them are very fragile).

There are beautifully decorated spurs and a meticulously carved saddle and machete case, playful children's push toys, and a number of miniature figures in a glass case that are so small you almost need a magnifying glass to see the intricate detail. One of my favorite pieces is "Huichol Indian Portrait," made of broom straw and wax. I thought it was painted until I got very close and then read the label.

The wall labels are instructive, and I wish there had been more of them, because I wanted to know a lot more about the culture and history and how some of these works of art were made. There is a comprehensive catalog for sale in the museum store, available in both English and Spanish.
Folk Art Treasures of Mexico


Through Feb. 19, 2012, Wed.–Sun., 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Third Thursdays 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
$10, student/senior/military $8, children 5 and younger free
Third Thursdays free from 5-8 p.m.
Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma
253.272.4258

Imagine I’m a writer

Part four – Avoiding screw-ups

The pages of a novel offer the novelist countless opportunities to screw up.

In my first novel, Until the Dawn, I wrote a scene about Marybelle going home after Chuck and Janet’s wedding reception. She was secretly in love with Chuck but was trying very hard to be happy for the newlyweds. This was a scene leading up to when she met the man she was going to marry. She had caught a ride with some friends, and to lend the story verisimilitude I wanted a popular song of the day to be playing on the car radio. I thought the Marilyn Monroe song “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” because it seemed to resonate with what was in Marybelle’s heart. But for some reason – I can’t remember why – I changed it to a Hank Williams song. After the book was published, my friend Larry Johnson informed me that the song had not yet been published when the scene was set. Oops! I screwed up. I wonder how many people caught that mistake.

In a second edition I changed it to Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow,” which I don’t think had the same kind of resonance.

In The Backside of Nowhere I looked back at the history of the Lawrence family to when Pop Lawrence’s great grandfather, Jedadiah Lawrence, founded the family store in 1856. Nice little back story. The only problem was I had said the town was founded by former slaves right after the Civil War. Check the dates. I screwed up. Fortunately I caught that one.  

Such mistakes are easy to make because the people and events in a novel aren’t real. The writer makes them up as he goes along, and it’s very easy on page 230 to say somebody was overweight while forgetting that on page 12 you said he was skinny. Mistakes like that are why God made editors.  Unfortunately she didn’t make them flawless.

I’ve learned from my many mistakes to keep notes on each character, what they look like, how they dress, what kind of car they drive and so forth, and to keep a timeline of what happens when. I even draw maps of fictional towns such as Freedom, Mississippi and Wetside, Washington, and floor plans of houses, because I don’t want someone looking out across the deck when playing the piano that was not on the deck side of the house in earlier chapters or catching the bus to go home from Barney’s Pub when they live only two blocks away.

See? You thought writing a novel was easy.

A novel may have a dozens or more characters, each with his or her personal quirks and speech patterns, etc., and the story has to take place in a specific time and place, and if you don’t get it all right you can rest assured that somebody is going to call you out on your screw-ups. There are two things I’ve done to, if not eliminate embarrassing errors, at least keep them to a minimum. One is to have major characters be my age so that at any point in their lives they will be listening to the same popular music and watching the same movies and wearing the same fashions as my friends and I did at the same time (although for the life of me I can’t remember what kinds of dresses my mother wore in 1954). Since my memory of those things can be faulty, there’s always Google. Thank you, Google. I don’t know how writers managed to write without you. The second thing I’ve done that makes it a little easier is that in my last two novels and the one I’m working on now, I’ve set the stories in fictional towns. Since the towns don’t really exist, they can have floods and hurricanes and riots whenever I want them to. But I still have to maintain internal consistency, and that ain’t easy.

Now I’m working on a sequel to Backside, and that presents a whole new set of problems. I have to keep going back and re-reading the first book in the series to avoid stupid inconsistencies. For example, at the end of Backside I said that Beulah discovered she was a lesbian – oops, I gave something away – and that she broke up with her longtime boyfriend, Abdul, and fell in love with another woman (never identified by name). Well, in the new book Beulah and Abdul got married and he was a rookie linebacker for the New Orleans Saints, and then they got divorced, and finally met the new love of her life, Marcia – a street performer who showed up one morning at Little Don’s Diner riding a unicycle. I wrote big scenes with these characters and then went back and re-read parts of Backside and discovered things I had written and forgotten. Such as, Abdul turned down the offer to play for the Saints and Beulah’s new lover was an old friend from high school. In the new book Beulah and Marcia had never met before that morning when Marcia came riding up to Little Dons. So I had to rewrite big sections of the book. Yikes. Sometimes this crap can be very frustrating.

Jekyll and Hyde

 

Mark Peterson, Micheal O'Hara, Blake R. York, 

and in background Niclas R. Olson in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"

at Tacoma Little Theatre. Photo by Dean Lapin.

This is the last weekend for “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” at Tacoma Little Theatre. If you’ve not seen it before, know at least this much: horror can be beautiful.

This adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s horror classic bears little resemblance to the novel and even less resemblance to any of the many cheesy film versions. Adapted for the stage by Jeffrey Hatcher (“Murderers,” “Tuesdays With Morrie”) it’s Jekyll and Hyde updated for the 21^st century. It’s stylish and macabre, with an emphasis on the complex psychology of the good doctor (no longer so good) and his evil other self.

Brett Carr’s set and lighting are essential to the uniqueness of this production. The set blends an abstract evocation of London in 1883 with beautiful and realistic details of a Victorian era drawing room with rich and velvety browns and greens on the walls and in the furnishings. Jekyll’s elegant home transforms itself into a starkly industrial looking surgical dissecting theatre and other sets. The lighting is moody and dramatic. All set pieces are on wheels and they roll around in smoothly choreographed fashion as actors enter and exit the stage. I have often said that set changes can make or break a play - there is nothing so irritating as long and cumbersome set changes to destroy the mood and flow of the action. In this play the set changes are like a highly stylized ballet that enhances the mood. Only once was there any noticeable disruption in the flow. It was in the opening scene opening night when a door is broken and then the broken panel is replace in the dark during the transition to the next scene. There was a little noise and a delay of a few seconds.

Another unique thing about this show is that there is not one Hyde but four distinctly different Hydes played by four different actors, one of whom is a woman. They are: Mark Peterson, Blake R. York, Niclas R. Olson and Jennie Jenks. Each of the actors playing Hyde also plays multiple other characters. Without any appreciable changes of costume or makeup other than the addition of capes, top hats and a cane, all of these Hydes convincingly become various other characters such as a doctor and a police inspector and a house servant. And as an ensemble they collectively become an eerie kind of Greek Chorus as two or three Hydes stand behind the other Hyde and mimic his actions with quiet hisses and growls and threatening gestures. It is in these scenes that the Hydes are most menacing – especially York and Jenks whose faces almost become Halloween masks at times. I’ve seen both of these actors in other plays, but I’ve never seen them transform themselves so effectively. 

Olson looks too young for the characters he plays, Hyde, Lanyon and others, although I must temper that by saying the age of these characters is never explicit. Olson is outstanding as Lanyon, but less effective as Hyde. His Hyde is more a parody of a Simon Legree-type than the complicated and truly evil Hyde played by the others three (dignified, proud and evil in the case of Peterson’s Hyde 1). 

Nicole Lockett succeeds in making it believable that a drab charwoman could fall in love with a monster and continue to love him even when she knows he had committed brutal murder, but I wish there could have been something a little quirkier or more exciting in her personality.

Micheal O’Hara is an excellent Dr. Jekyll. He plays the good doctor with dignity and passion – and righteous indignation in his heated confrontation with Dr. Carew (York) in one of the most powerful and well-acted scenes in the play.

Background music provided onstage by pianist Leslie Foley added to the oddly romantic mood of the play. 

This play is intelligent, dark and disturbing, with a dabbling of macabre humorous relief; and it is beautifully directed by Elliot Weiner, who clearly grasped the depth of Hatcher’s script and does a great job of blocking the continuous flow of actors, props and set pieces.

WHEN: 7:30 p.m.Friday and Saturday and 2:00 p.m. Sunday, through Nov. 6

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

TICKETS: $15 - $25

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

Pretty stuff

Large group show at Childhood's End Gallery

The Weekly Volcano, October 25, 2011 

Beth Brooks' "Market Day" pastel

Barbara Noonan's "Small Town Bliss" pastel

The latest show at Childhood's End Gallery seems to be geared toward gift buying - a prequel to the holiday season and a celebration of the gallery's 40^th year in Olympia. Everything is decorative, colorful and safe almost to the point of blandness, but very well done. It's a group show, and all of the artists display well-honed skills. But for the most part it is all too conventional for my taste and, in a couple of instances, too gimmicky.

Not that there's not a lot to like in this show.

The first works I noticed were a group of etched copper wall pieces by Shelly Carr. Each consists of square and rectangular copper plates etched with drawings (or perhaps photographs that have been etched into the surface) of things like street signs, random words, parts of buildings and bicycles put together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The arrangement of the pieces and subtle variations in color and texture are visually pleasing, but the imagery seems superfluous. When the overall affect is an abstract arrangement of colors, shapes and textures that is pleasing to the eye, which these are, the imposition of recognizable imagery becomes a distracting gimmick. These pieces work best when seen from enough distance to appreciate the overall patterns.

The same can be said for Lucia Harrison's paintings on the back wall. They are small works in Prismacolor mounted on board. Each is in two parts. From across the gallery they look like dense and intricately patterned paintings with great depth of overlapping forms, but they lose some of their impact when seen up close, even though a closer inspection reveals that they are paintings of grasses and birds and twigs. It's the nature of colored pencils to be somewhat insipid; these would have been much better if painted in oil or acrylic.

Some of the more enjoyable pictures in the show are in a group of pastels by Marianne Partlow. They are flower pictures in rich tones of deep blue and purple with accents in orange and a soft yellow-green. The drawing is loose and free, and the colors are very nice.

I also particularly enjoyed some of Barbara Noonan's pastels, most especially "Small Town Bliss," which may well be the best work of art in the show. It's a very gestural drawing of a country road in tones of peachy orange with a few lonely houses perched on the horizon. It's nicely drawn, and the layering of the peach color with a dull blue-gray is excellent.

Beth Brooks' impressionistic pastels are also nicely done. Her best work is one called "Market Day," which pictures a dense crowd of shoppers in a market. It had the cropped and textured feel of a Degas pastel.

I was disappointed in Susan Aurand's three paintings with oil and found objects on wood panels - disappointed primarily because I had been so highly impressed by the last works of hers seen in this same gallery. Aurand's current works are similar, but they come off as too hokey and tricky. In each of her paintings an object assembled from found materials sits in the middle of a sky that is either stormy or on fire with sunset colors. In one the object is a door with a ladder propped in it, in another it's a window, and in a third it is a shelf with odd objects a la Joseph Cornell. They are beautifully painted and constructed, but too contrived.

Also included in the show are works by Alfred Currier, Mary Denning, Keith Lazelle, Ross Matteson, Ron Hinton and others.

[Childhood's End Gallery, through Nov. 13, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday-Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday, 222 Fourth Ave. W, Olympia, 360.943.3724]

A farcical Shirlock Holmes

TAO presents “The Hound of the Baskervilles”


Olympia’s most outlandish theater troop, Theater Artists Olympia, in co-production with The Oufit from Tacoma is doing Steven Canny and John Nicholson’s spoof of the classic Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story “The Hound of the Baskervilles” in the basement of the Eagles Club in Olympia.

Everything about this play but the script and the acting is cheap and tawdry. Come to think of it, the script and the acting are too, but intentionally so and with a comic effect that is for the most part right on the mark – the mark being your funny bone.

The venue itself is cheesy and cheap, through an unmarked and barely lighted door and down steep stairs into a large, clean typical basement space where hard metal folding chairs have been lined up to face a makeshift stage. The set – a door on rollers that is turned around to change from indoor to outdoor settings and a few folding panels on wheels that are moved about to represent different settings such as the Baskerville manor and the moors – looks cheap and, with the exception of the door, are totally unnecessary. It’s a pet peeve of mine, and maybe it doesn’t bother others as much as it does me, but I hate it when stage hands constantly move set pieces around in full view of the audience. In most plays it destroys the flow of the action and takes the audience out of the play. It may be argued, however, that in this play it becomes part of the comic set-up that plays right into the manner in which the actors repeatedly break the fourth wall to argue with each other and with the audience. It’s funny when the actors step out of character; it’s not funny when stage hands move walls around (the exception opening night being when stage manager Eric Mark couldn’t get part of a wall to stand still and ad-libbed a comment).

Beau M. K. Prichard as Watson and Christian Doyle as Sherlock Holmes in “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (top); Prichard, Doyle and Brian Lewis as Sir Henry Baskerville (bottom).

The essentials of Doyle’s famous story, have not been changed, but it is retold by Canny and Nicholson in a style reminiscent of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)” – even down to the speeded-up retelling of the complete first act at the beginning of the second act, which is done to make a point because actor Christian Doyle is pissed off at the audience. (Not really, it's an act.)

Doyle (not related to Arthur Conan as far as I know) plays Sherlock Holmes and many other characters, including a very ugly woman with whom Sir Henry Baskerville (Brian Lewis) falls in love, and the ugly woman’s Egor-like brother. Lewis also plays multiple characters, and Beau M. K. Prichard plays a funny and rather ineptly dignified Doctor Watson.  TAO promotes the show as featuring “Three actors, 30 accents, 50 quick changes and one bloody great time.” I didn’t keep count of the number of characters or quick changes, but there were quite a few, including at least two times when Lewis loses his pants and counting a couple of stuffed rag dolls as characters.

“The Hound of the Baskervilles” is hilarious throughout, but it did begin to drag a bit toward the end. (Perhaps it was the hard metal chair – I recommend bringing a pillow to sit on.) All three of the actors are outstanding. Their timing is great. Lewis and Doyle in particular display great skill in quickly changing characters, and all three are able to strike outlandish poses and hold them for the many, many times they pretend to be still images – Lewis playing a one-man photo gallery of everyone in the Baskerville family, and the trio striking crazy poses as lights go on and off in a train. These sequences alone are worth the price of admission and amply display the acting skills of Lewis, Doyle and Prichard, and the directing skill of Mark Alford, a recent Evergreen State College graduate and founder of the student production company Riot To Follow Theater Productions. The show marks Alford’s excellent community theater directorial debut.

For an evening of Halloween hilarity I recommend this farcical version of “The Hound of the Baskervilles.”

When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday through Nov. 6.
Where: The Eagles Club Underground, 805 Fourth Ave. E., Olympia
Tickets: $12
More information: olytheater.com or brownpapertickets.com

Beyond Crayons

Worldwide youth art show at B² Fine Art

The Weekly Volcano, Oct. 20, 2011

“Beyond Crayons & Finger Painting 2.0,” the second annual art project at B² Fine Art features 75 works of art from Africa, Canada, China and the United States, all created by youth ages seven to 19. The overall inventiveness and technical quality of the work puts to shame work I’ve seen in student art exhibits at area colleges.

 

Pictured from top" “The Hidden” by Rebekah Slusher’s, "Serafina" by Nathaniel Santa, both from Tacoma, and and untitled drawing by Abongle Makwenkwe from George, South Africa

All of the American artists in the show hail from Western Washington, most from Tacoma and a handful from Seattle and Bellingham. The works from Africa come from George, South Africa, and because of some kind of conflict in George there were no identifying wall labels on any of the African art, but gallery owner Gary Boone said they expect to remedy that soon.

Boone pointed out an interesting difference between the art from South Africa and that from China. The Chinese art was all up-beat, colorful and joyful in outlook. Most of it was Animé influenced. There was no regional look to it. No recognizable Chinese people or culture or architecture. 

The Chinese entries were all happy fantasy pictures such as “Partner” by Li, Linghan, a delightfully sweet picture of a man with a camera and backpack rowing an alligator as if it were a boat, while on shore a man with binoculars rested in a hammock strung between two giraffes and a women rode a basket carried by a stork. Very fun. But this and the other Chinese drawings had no connection with their culture. It’s as if they’ve been programmed to put forth a happy face.

The African art, on the other hand, presented a more realistic picture of their culture and was much more varied in style and content. There are paintings and drawings of animals, scenes from the city of George, and other works that show the strifes and aspirations of the people of South Africa. One of my favorites is a piece by Abongle Makwenkwe that shows a group of children on a stoop in the city and seems to present a true feel of what it must be like to grow up there. Interestingly, the artist employs the device of using spots of color in a black and white composition, a device also used by two Tacoma artists, Rebekah Slusher and Lydia Fordice.

I don’t want to start chanting “U.S.A, U.S.A,” like some crazy nationalistic sports fan, but I must call attention to the hometown work. It was uniformly excellent despite a certain amount of clichéd imagery, which I think we can chalk up to youth and inexperience.

I was amazed at 11-year-old Maleah Bishop’s “Native American Winter Rug.” Her technique and material was something I’ve never before seen: photography kaleidoscope collage on faux suede textile. 

One of the most dramatic works in the show is Rebekah Slusher’s acrylic painting “The Hidden.” It is a street scene in tones of gray with the only color being two yellow taxi cabs. It looks like a photograph taken from a strange angle that condenses a large scene into a tightly cramped space. 

Lydia Fordice’s surrealistic pencil drawings are imaginative and technically superb. Like Slusher (I was told they are friends, and I suspect they influence each other) she uses spots of color within tones of gray to heighten the dramatic effect. In this case slashes of bright red and splatters of a duller red like dried blood. These drawings are dark and disturbing, but beautifully executed.

Also very impressive were a group of three drawings by Nathaniel Santa, all taken from Renaissance art. His portrait of “Beatrice Portinari” is taken from a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and there’s a skillful copy Da Vinci’s “Battle of Anghiari” and another portrait of a woman named “Serafina,” which is a piece derived from a photograph of a statue in Italy. All three are skillfully drawn. Now I just hope we can look forward to the day this young artist starts applying his amazing skill to his own original compositions.

[B2 Fine Art Gallery, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, till 8 p.m. Third Thursdays, through Nov. 30, 711 St. Helens Avenue, Tacoma, 253.238.5065]

 March 12th - April 19th