Maureen Huskey | The Woman Who Went to Space as a Man / 2018

a world of endless picnics

by Douglas Messerli

 

Maureen Huskey (writer and director) The Woman Who Went to Space as a Man, music by Yuval Ron / Los Angeles, Son of Semele Theater / the production I saw was on Sunday, October 28, 2018

 

You might describe the Son of Semele Ensemble’s small, hole-in-the-wall theater—which I attended for the first time yesterday afternoon—as being a haven for believers in drama the way many religious believers perceive their store-front churches. For this small company preaches “bold and imaginative theater” (what they describe as risk-taking work) that “embraces the friction between emotion and intellect.” In Greek myth Semele’s son, fathered by Zeus, was Dionysius.

 

     Clearly, they have found just such a playful and risk-taking work in Maureen Huskey’s science-fiction musical, The Woman Who Went to Space as a Man.

    The play, however, is not quite as inexplicable as its title, for this work recounts the strange story of real-life science fiction author James Tiptree, winner of several Hugo Awards (given annually to the best science fiction or fantasy writing), who was beloved by fellow writers Ursula LeGuin, Joanna Russ, Philip K. Dick, and numerous others, and who had a large group of admirers with whom the author corresponded for decades. Tiptree was known for a masculinity of tone, much as was Hemingway; but the plots of these works did not always favor the male heroes, who were often destroyed, killed the entire population of earth, or themselves were destroyed—as we observe in the opening tableau—by the author’s female characters, as in “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” when, after being saved by a crew of female astronauts, the males cannot resist their tendencies to rape and abuse. Seemingly inexplicably, in this first theatrical image, while the women crewmembers inject vials of poison into the males on the rampage, a woman (Betsy Moore), who appears to be the pilot of ship, sits, stage center, with a gun held to her head—obviously contemplating suicide.

     For those of us who have never heard of Tiptree, let alone read his works, the stage actions seem almost like some bad science-fiction film that makes little sense. Yet soon after, another of Tiptree’s female characters, Mira (Megann Rippey) appears in full extraterrestrial garb (beautifully realized by costume designer Lena Sands) to guide the suicidal Alice back through the history of her life, which unravels and helps to explain what we have just witnessed.

     One might have feared such an obvious structural device of unspooling the central character’s past could lead to a rather predictable series of interactions that psychologize and simplify what has just begun as a fantastical mystery. Yet Huskey’s play, fortunately, retains its playful confusion, in part by introducing sung music by composer Yuval Ron, that functions a bit like such whacky musical interludes in the plays of Mac Wellman, charming us at the very moment that, in their unexpected appearance in what might have been a simple genre play, deeply enrich the work.

 

    Even if we are taken back down the yellow-brick-road from the Emerald City to the land of the Munchkins, we are never quite certain where we are. We begin, in this instance, in Alice Bradley’s (later Alice Sheldon’s) childhood (with the lovely Isabella Ramacciotti playing the 12-year-old little Alice) as she appears on what she later describes as one of her “endless picnics,” this with her mother, Mary (Anneliese Euler) in the wilds of Africa where, it appears, the imperious woman has just shot her first elephant, apparently an absolutely normal activity for her and her husband of the elite class (reminding one a bit of the Trump children). Surely, the wealthy socialite Mary seems to presume that the entire world belongs to her, including her own daughter’s childhood writings, which the mother quickly incorporates into her own published travelogues, which celebrate the fact that she has undertaken such a dangerous journey with a young child. The newspapers later shouted the fact that in their travels it was the first time the pygmies had even seen a young white girl.

     They hardly have time to return home before Alice, now 16 (played by Paula Rebelo) is told that it is time for her Chicago appearance at the debutante ball. But by now Alice is clearly resentful of her mother’s heavy-handed control of her life, and impulsively elopes with a handsome young man who is also a drunk and, somewhat like the men in “Houston…” regularly beats her. Six years later she divorces, enlisting in the army where she serves as a World War II intelligence officer.  

     We also now perceive that Alice may have some lesbian tendencies, but she quickly squelches any such desires and, almost again on a whim, marries another veteran, Col. Huntingdon Sheldon (Alex Wells), with whom she keeps a romantic distance, while he fondly looks after her. By this time she is also working on graphic art (she had a work shown at the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington, D.C) and some manages to obtain a Ph.D in experimental psychology (these things not featured in our theatrical presentation of her life), but yet she obviously still feels vaguely unsatisfied. And we recognize both her binding ties and the interlinks of her life through the set-decorations endless ropes and knots.

      Part of the problem is her conflicting notions of her self-worth—and who wouldn’t be uncertain about oneself given the complete self-assurance of her mother—she becomes determined to write, not the travelogues of mother, but in a genre she had long admired, science fiction—insisting that her husband never tell her mother of her new venture.

     We suddenly realize who that woman sitting it the spaceship’s pilot-seat truly is, as the now Virginia housewife determines to take control of her life by writing under a pseudonym (James Ferrero taking on the role of her pseudonymous self), James Tiptree, Jr. So begins her incredible career, wherein as she put it elsewhere, “His pen was my prick,” allowing her to perhaps create a kind of transgender self in a time when it was simply unthinkable. For decades, through her imaginary self, Alice made not only a new career, but a new identity filled with the possibilities of being a male in a world that still held women in their homes. She could create strong men and kill them off, weak women and give them dignity. She finally had the power to kill off whole universes if she chose.

      Only when her own mother died, and she took a small break in her writing, did it become apparent who James Tiptree, Jr. really was. Her science-fiction fans were shocked by the revelation, and questions arose about what masculine and feminine writing was—the inklings, we can imagine, of the gender issues that are still being struggled with today, particularly given that the Trump administration has just announced their intention to define individuals only by their sexual parts.

      Even though she continued to write under the Tiptree name for another decade, she understandably must have felt she had lost control of her voice, and when her husband was in ill-health and could no longer care for himself, and she herself was suffering from bad health due to years of smoking, she shot her husband and put the gun—the one we see in that very first scene—her head, creating a double suicide.

      Huskey does not give us any easy answers to this tragedy. We must work them out of her purposely fragmented work ourselves. But the issues here are not only contemporary ones but force us to go back in time to wonder how many others—and there were far too many—who felt they had to tamp down their talents and their voices for fear of cultural shunning. I think its so fascinating that this author chose an alternative reality, both imaginatively and in terms of gender, to demonstrate her talents. When that was taken away, there was little left. She was simply a little old lady in Virginia writing well-crafted fantasies.

      I should add, that besides the cast members I mention above, all the ensemble players, including Kamar Elliott, Emma Zakes Green, Nathan Nonhof, Robert Paterno, and Ashley Steed were quite convincing. The lighting by Rose Malone was memorable. I’ll be back to worship at the altar of this small space soon.

 

Los Angeles, October 29, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (October 2018).

Arthur Miller | A View from the Bridge / 2016

tearing down bridges

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arthur Miller A View from the Bridge / Los Angeles, Ahmanson Theatre, the performance I saw was opening night, September 14, 2016

 

I have to admit that Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, with its hyperventilated incestuous urges, its homosexual slurs, and even a hint of homoerotic desire, all circling round the well-meaning but not so bright longshoreman Eddie, has never been one of my favorite plays.

      At least in the production I saw last night at Los Angeles’ Ahmanson Theatre, famed Dutch director Ivo Van Hove tossed out the family’s dowdy little apartment stuffed with fussy and falling-apart furniture. The original, in which five people are pushed into a single flat makes for a kind of claustrophobia which, at moments, if it generates some body heat, also takes all the air out the drama.

 

    Van Hove, perceiving the play as a kind of Greek drama, has created instead a open rectangular space which serves as living room, bed room, lawyers’ offices and any other space that might be necessary. By creating two side panels of audience seats on the stage itself, the director has further created the sensation of a Greek amphitheater, while simultaneously diminishing the vast space of the stage and allowing for more theater seats. A single central opening, backed in black further creates a sense of dramatic entry as the characters come and go. As in the original, Van Hove uses the family lawyer as the chorus (the metaphorical “bridge” of the play’s title), commenting on and helping to explain the inner feelings of a man who cannot himself express them.

      All of this opens up the play, allowing, as the director as argued, the playwright’s words to speak out their poetry. But, alas, Miller’s language has always been rather pedestrian, most of his figures being everyday blokes; and even though it’s given special privilege here, the character’s utterances feel as dowdy and diminished, at times, as the overstuffed furniture that one encounters in most productions of this play.

 

    What exacerbates this feeling is that the play has been cast with very young talents. And while all are appealingly fresh thespians, few of them have the heft of the supposedly Sicilian middle-age figures of whom Miller writes. This is important, in the original, because, except for the two youngest of this household, all others feel worn out and used (just like their now missing furniture), with few choices left. Marco (Alex Esola) may intend, after a few years of working in the US, to return back to Italy and his wife, but we know he will have lost their best years together and will never recover that hole in his life. 

      Eddie (Frederick Weller) is so attracted to his growing-up niece because, like a daughter, she has lit up his otherwise drab working-man’s life. His feelings for her, moreover, have a great deal to do with middle-age angst. Like many a hard worker who suddenly discovers himself in his late 40s, he is terrified of what’s ahead. If the new interloper, Rudolpho (Dave Register) does succeed in carrying her off, Eddie will have little joy left.

      Like so many wives of men like Eddie, Beatrice (Andrus Nichols), although loving, feel as if they have been cast off, and in emotional response, find it harder and harder to demonstrate that love.

       This younger cast simply does not have the heft and weight to give these feelings their due. Indeed, the handsome and lean Weller, throughout much of the play, seemed simply too slight and frail to convey the range of emotions raging through his character; at moments we simply couldn’t hear him. At first I feared that my somewhat elderly ears were playing tricks; but as rose to leave at the end of the play, the gentlemen on my left spoke to each other of having the same problem in simply hearing him. It was not that Weller was not a good actor, he simply didn’t yet possess the “gravitas” of the character.

       As Catherine, moreover, Catherine Combs seemed more like a mini-skirted pre-teen than an eighteen-year-old high school graduate set on becoming a stenographer and secretary. I am sure Van Hove made this a conscious decision in order to establish the girlish attitude that innocently crossed sexual lines in her relationship with her uncle. But when the handsome and charming Rodolpho comes into her life, it is a bit difficult to even comprehend his attraction to a being who seems to be still a child. The tall and somewhat lanky Register, moreover, seemed at odds with the diminutive Combs.

     But, finally, it is simply the oppressive obviousness of Miller’s script that dooms his dark drama. We know, almost from the beginning, where this drama is going to take us: in tragedy for male lead, Eddie, and disaster for the two illegal immigrants. The same scenario is being played out in our daily newspapers even today.

 

    The only surprise in Miller’s rendering of this tale is Eddie’s confusion over his own sexuality. It is almost as if, since he cannot sexually “have” Catherine, he will convert the handsome Rodolfo into someone whom he might love. In his confused macho thinking the very fact that the young Italian man sings, is easy-going, can quick-design a dress, and dance means that he must be “odd,” code word for gay. In his mind, he may justify his long kiss on the lips with Rodolfo as “outing” the man before Catherine in order to save her; but we know that there’s definitely something else going on there. And it is the only time when Eddie transforms his ever-present anger into some sort of passion; and, accordingly, Miller’s sudden revelation still startles even today.

      Of course, after such an unthinkable act, he must destroy everyone around him, particularly himself, using his own kind of macho—very much present in the Italian Marco—as a tool of his death. The only hope Miller leaves his audience is that Rodolfo and Catherine may be spared and will go on to create a more fluid familial life. But since Rodolfo, as Marco’s brother, may be implicated in the murder, we cannot even be sure of that.

 

Los Angeles, September 15, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (September 2016).

John O’Keefe | All Night Long / 2018

fear of sleeping

by Douglas Messerli

 

John O’Keefe All Night Long / directed (with scenic design) by Jan Munroe at Open Fist Theatre Company at the Atwater Village Theater / the performance I saw with Pablo Capra and Christina Carlos was opening night, September 14, 2018

 

Although I published John O’Keefe’s 1980 play, All Night Long, in the anthology From the Other Side of the Century II: A New American Drama, edited by Mac Wellman and me in 1998, I had never before seen a production of the play. Thankfully, Open Fist Theatre Company determined to present it at Atwater Village this season, and I immediately put it on my schedule.

 

      I don’t think it’s the kind of comedy/drama that one might describe through plot for those who have never seen it. First of all, the “plot,” such as it is, keeps shifting, events happen without explanation (for example, at one moment Eddy’s [John Patrick Daly] previously-loving family turn on him, sending him out into the night for the punk rockers to get him, yet he soon after reappears through an upstairs wall; the family’s eldest daughter, Tammy [Caroline Klidonas], seems to be sleeping with her father Jack [Philip William Brock], but at other times it all just seems to be a joke or even a game; although this family stays up, so it appears, the entire night, terrified to go to bed, hours go by in minutes and occasionally slip back in illogical reversals of time).

  

    The publicist and director refer to this play as a “surreal” work. And, indeed, it does often remind one of Thornton Wilder’s surrealist American comedy, The Skin of Our Teeth, suggested by comments by Tracey Paleo, writing in a review.

      Yet I might characterize it a bit differently, as a sort of absurdist mash-up of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night with the 1950s television family-oriented The Donna Reed Show, along with elements of other such TV situation comedies as Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. Costume designer Kharen Zeunert even hints at the standard pearl necklace worn by actress Barbara Billingsley with the mother Jill’s (Alina Phelan) outré necklace. Certainly Jill represents the implacableness of Donna Reed, Jane Wyatt, and Billingsley; nothing quite ever perturbs her sunny outlet of a kind ditsy housewife view of the world except when, challenged by her son, she claims all the contents of the house to be “hers,” declaring her son as not only having a voracious appetite (a bit like All in the Family’s “Meathead”)—throughout the plays he downs masses of bologna and ham, at one point even retrieved from the stage floor, a task that no actor might ever have imagined; the entire cast dines on blue jello!—and proclaiming:

 

                       You! You twerp! You don’t even have the stuffing to be a homosexual!

                       You pre-ejaculatory squirt! You’re the one that really fucked up my life!

 

     I haven’t even yet mentioned the existence of yet another daughter, Terry (Cat Davis), evidently a procreation from some alien medical procedure, (a “test tube daughter” born after Jack and Jill could no longer have children), which perhaps explains her preference for hiding out in a closet wherein she undergoes several monstrous transformations before she returns, dressed in slightly metallic-like toppings over her cutesy dresses. Despite her utter strangeness, Terry obviously is a thing of the future who may long outlast these battling dinosaurs.

      Born in Waterloo, Iowa in 1940 (just 7 years before I was born in that same city, perhaps at the same hospital), O’Keefe lived throughout most of World War II, a jarring time for children, mostly in state juvenile homes since his mother had basically abandoned him, showing up, as he once told me, for brief periods that only complicated matters. In those days boys in such state institutions were often sent out to work, at various times, on local farms, the experience of which he recounts in his terrifying and also funny work, Reapers, in which the young state school laborer is treated to homoerotic like “startlements” by the farmer’s son. Is it any wonder that, growing up when and how he did, that O’Keefe’s view of family life is someone distorted?

     Yet, for all that, in their pared down and often frantic pronouncements, father, mother, son, and daughters do make clear their fears, their values, and sometimes even their dreams in a not-so-acclimatable world. And by play’s end, they greet the new day with a kind of Beckett-like sense of “going on,” even if they feel that that can’t, the mother serving up her own body, symbolically, as their breakfast.

     As a woman behind me suggested in the intermission, this all makes so much more sense in the context of where we are now in a society having to deal with Trump. I’d agree, but perhaps we should recall that the US has always been a strange and scary place, particularly in the post-War years in which O’Keefe was simply trying to survive as a child. The very pulls of the society of 1950s, between content affirmation of family and familial roles (I’ve long argued that women, despite their having to deal with the hubristic idea of male domination, were often really the forces of power in those years) and the horrible political terrors of the “Red” threat and all that might be associated with that, are well represented in O’Keefe’s powerful play, beautifully realized by the direction and scenic design, at the Atwater Village Theater, by Jan Munroe.

      The acting, in all cases, is exceptional, and the company expresses in this revival of the San Francisco Magic Theater production the freshness of this 38-year-old play. O’Keefe himself, remains, perhaps a little more grizzled than when I last saw him, a powerful and intelligent figure who seems, at the moment to be making a kind of comeback, with another play, Don’t You Ever Call Me Anything But Mother appearing this fall at Zombie Joes Underground.

 

Los Angeles, September 17, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (September 2018).

Stephen Petronio | American Landscapes / 2020 (streamed live)

AMERICAN HISTORY

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stephen Petronio (choreographer) American Landscapes / NYU Skirball, 2020 (streamed live)

 

If you don't know the Joyce Theater in New York City, it is the very center of US dance. It's a theater where all the major dance companies have and will continue to perform.

     For some inexplicable reason (I've never been there), I regularly receive their e-mails. And I love it. Actually, I later discovered I had been in that space, when as Ira Joel Haber reminded me it used to be the Elgin Theater.

 

     Recently, they announced on their "Joycestream"—a way they can keep in touch with people who love dance in a time when there are no longer any audiences—they sent me an announcement of a streaming of choreographer, once the manager for Trisha Brown's company, Stephen Petronio's dance group for what was to have been their annual Joyce Theater preview of "American Landscapes," performed by the dancers Bria Bacon, Taylor Boyland, Ernesto Breton, Jaqlin Medlock, Tess Montoya, Ryan Pliss, Nicholas Siscione, Mac Twining, and Megan Wright, along with guest performers Brandon Collwes and Martha Eddy, danced intensely.

     I can't say I was particularly impressed by their dark blue body clothing—women in simple body stockings and men in high-rise shorts, which did not at all accentuate their supple muscular mid-body extensions.

     But, in a sense, Petronio's choice was perhaps purposeful. This was a performance not about his dancer's bodies, but about their constantly shifting relationships—gay, lesbian, and heterosexual relationships through a long history of time documented through Howard and my dear friend Robert Longo's artistic relationship, a long friend as well of Petronio's (he recalls how his $50 charity purchase of one of Longo's "Women in the City" drawings was one of his very first art purchases, leaving him to have to absent himself from lunches for a full week) led to a close friendship.

     The images, along with the insistent drive of the music composed by Jozef van Wissem and Jim Jarmusch created, with Petronio's choreography, a kind of tri-partite structure, despite his intended abstraction.

      The first part, in which the dancers moved from left to right clearly represented a shift from the East to the West coast.

      What begin as duos and triplets moving forward in lateral space, in the second part was represented, along with Longo's increasingly violent imagery—from an almost pastoral setting, to the nuclear terror of World War II and the post-War years—to a kind of strange line-dance, despite the failure of some of the performers to survive it, dropping away from the linked hand-upon-hand framework of the almost Fosse-like chorus line. Indeed, several of Longo's images, including his glorious swirl of dark red roses suggested iconic images from film, this particular one from Vertigo, but others from The Magnificent Ambersons, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and other films.

     In the third section, as the figures moved through space in the other direction, couples paired-off into gay and lesbian relationships, which seemed to suggest to me the traumatic shifts that occurred in New York City in the AIDS epidemic, the horrifying 9/11 events, and, of course, the impossible to comprehend current virus events.

     Yet, even as events got worse, Longo's images moved to an almost prelapsarian return to nature, even if the images were a bit blurred and dripping with the blood of the past.

     Petronio's ballet is a profound statement that speaks of our early longings and impossible failures, including those of our current time. The performance at the New York Skirball Center

was not only about the American landscape but, in a true sense, about American history itself.

 

Los Angeles, May 16, 2020

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May 2020).

Wallace Shawn | The Designated Mourner / 2017

the survivor

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wallace Shawn The Designated Mourner / Directed by André Gregory, Los Angeles, Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) / the performance I saw was on Thursday, May 11, 2017

 

It’s easy to see why Wallace Shawn and director André Gregory might wish to revive Shawn’s 1996 play, The Designated Mourner, which is currently being performed at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (Redcat) in downtown Los Angeles.

 

    When the play originally appeared, with its major theme of intellectuals working within a society that is determined to destroy their kind, critics felt that the unnamed country of the play was surely some Latin American city in a country such as Argentina or Chile in which precisely such things had happened. Today, incredibly, we can see it as a statement about what might possibly happen in the US under President Trump.

     Yet, Shawn’s play is not truly centered on the intellectuals such as the elderly poet-thinker, Howard (Larry Pine) and his beloved daughter, Judy (Shawn’s real-life companion Deborah Eisenberg), but on Judy’s lover, Jack (Shawn), who begins the play pretending to be one of them, but gradually shows himself as a totally selfish and lazy being who actually has no intellectual aspirations whatsoever.

     As for many of neo-cons and populists, the world of art, literature, and poetry is perceived as an artificial elitist pursuit, in which its advocates spend most of their days dismissing and dishing friends and enemies whom they perceive as not worthy of their own pursuits. And Shawn makes that world real enough in his several long monologues, that, at first, we’re not so sure that he isn’t right. Certainly, I’ve been guilty of the same sins, and presumably anyone who might attend a Shawn/Gregory production might be expected to feel some justifiable remorse.    

     Throughout the first act, we gradually begin to perceive how Jack, at times literally “in bed” with his intellectual friends, begins to doubt their perceptions and honesty. Bit by bit, we see this man turning over the few ideas he really has in order to reveal that he is not comfortably “highbrow,” but pleasantly “lowbrow,” a man who truly prefers, as he describes it, to be a rat—not in the sense of one who snitches (although given the increasing political changes throughout the play, he might well be one of the populace, who like Russian and East German citizens collaborated with police to destroy their fellow citizens), but the sleek small-headed survivor who doesn’t mind eating whatever is put before him.           

    Jack, given Shawn’s seeming intense populism, seems even somewhat convincing. Do these intellects truly know what they claim to? Is someone like the great poet Donne really worth reading in this day and age? Mightn’t one simply sit at home and watch television while jacking off to porno without being seen as some kind of creep? Aren’t ordinary citizens as valuable as the highly intelligent readers and thinkers amongst us?

      Indeed, Jack is so convincing that by the end of that first act, we might ask ourselves these very same questions. After all, those are similar Trump put to his audiences which allowed him to build his slim electorate who happened to be in states that gave him his victory.

      Shawn’s subtle satire begins reasonably enough. But soon those same questions begin to read a bit like shocking Swiftian insistences, particularly as the new government in power begins to arrest and even kill the intelligentsia. Jack removes himself from his former friends—and Judy—just in time, as they begin to hear the nightly gunfire, seeing people near them getting shot, and, finally, themselves being arrested. As Judy asks: “How could this have happened?” “How can that have happened?!” “Why, it seems impossible!” And yet, the answers to those questions are quite obvious. People like Jack run off. Friends pretend to no longer know each other. The challenges of an intellectual life become too demanding. As Judy expresses it: “If you try to swat a fly, it moves out of the way. And humans are the same. They step aside when they sense something coming, about to hit them in the face.”

      Even when the police come for her, her father, and friends, she is surprised by how meek and accepting she and the others are about it. Sentenced to five years each, many do not survive the prison internment, and when those who survive come out, like her father, they are still exterminated. Jack later sees that some others of his former friends have been killed in another kind of group execution, including Judy.

      By now, however, the meek populist, just an ordinary man with no pretensions, has no feelings left. Even if he is a bit startled at first, he can no longer open up his mind and heart to feel anything. His only solution is to see himself as a kind of “designated mourner,” as someone, who having known about their values, might mourn their passing, including the end of a poet such as Donne. His stupid paper pyre celebrating the now exoteric past is a pointless thing, like the celebration of dead man’s passing by putting a candle on a cupcake.

     By play’s end, the confessor of these terrible sins, Jack, feels no recriminations, insisting that life has indeed “gotten better,” that sitting on a park bench he can still enjoy the setting sun, the smells of nature, etc. So what if all attempts to transcend the ordinary with intelligence and wit have been killed off. Is life truly any worse for those of us who perceive we are simply ordinary? The barbarians are us always.

     My only criticism of Shawn’s quite bitter satire is that he presents Jack’s (and perhaps Trump’s selfish populist cause) so convincingly that some, in this age when satire and irony have been seriously lost, might interpret his character’s statements as being those of the author himself. Peering through the strange and perverse lens of today’s political cynicism, things that might once have seemed impossible are now probable. And that, I believe, is Shawn’s point. The bizarre, the horrific quickly become—we know this particularly from the great wars of every century—daily events. The important thing is not to see them as permissible or merely banal. They are horrific and need to be addressed as such.

 

Los Angeles, May 12, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May 2017).

Dorian Wood | XAVELA LUX AETERNA / 2019

the rough voice of tenderness

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dorian Wood XAVELA LUX AETERNA / Alberto Montero, conductor / the performance I saw with Pablo Capra and Paul Sand was at Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) on November 22, 2019

 

In a period of just 2 months I have now attended 3 solo concerts in 3 different theaters of major singers performing in languages other than English: in October I attended, at the Wallis Theatre in Beverly Hills, a production of Brooklyn Rider and Megos Herrera singing in Spanish and Portuguese; in November I saw the glorious Julia Migenes singing French chansons at the Odyssey Theatre; and last night I attended Dorian Wood performing XAVELA LUX AETERNA at Redcat,

 

     On stage was a rather large barrel-chested man (Wood, who clearly prefers, as evidenced in the program, the pronoun “they”) dressed in a long white dress and earrings singing, along with a string quartet (made up of Madeline Falcone, Emily Cell, Cassia Streb, Isaac Takeuchi, with percussion by Marcos Junquera, and synthesizer backup Xavi Muñoz) songs sung by the great Mexican-Costa Rican singer Chavela Vargas, "la voz áspera de la ternura" (“the rough voice of tenderness”).

      Beginning as a street singer, Vargas was known for wearing masculine clothes, smoking cigars, and toting a gun. She was beloved by many in the literary and art world and was rumored to have a sexual affair with painter Frida Kahlo.

      As Dorian Wood’s baritone voice, moving sometimes to a strong tenor, reveals with lovingly rough tenderness, passionate, often almost ululating plaints, “they” are absolutely stunning, while at the same time incorporating Vargas’ famed songs along with other Costa Rican compositions, dug up, apparently by Wood’s musical director, the Spanish-born Alberto Montero, who at one point joins Woods on stage with guitar in a truly lovely, quiet love song.

      At other points, Wood is joined on stage with vocalists SAN CHA and Carmina Escobar, allowing the water-slurping Wood to momentarily rest “their” vocal chords, necessary since “they” explode into such intense musical passages that even the hands of the singer tremble with delight and desire.

      After listening to just a couple of Wood’s powerful songs, you quickly forget that “they” are not of the feminine sex, and begin to feel that “they” may have actually channeled the great Mexican-Costa Rican singer Vargas, an utterly amazing transformation since Wood doesn’t look anything like the singer herself.

      In a sense, what Wood has been able to do is to turn Vargas’ singing and masculine identity upside down, to retrieve the deep femininity within her then-radical lesbian demeanor. It is almost as if, dressed in a white quinceañera-like dress “they” reprieve the deep sexuality of the original singer.

      What was just as fascinating to me, as an outsider, not fluent in Spanish, was how the audience—a nearly full-house made up, obviously, of a large group of folks of Central American and Mexican heritage—clearly knew the songs “they” were performing. Only in major US metropolitan communities and border towns might you find an audience who could easily join “them” in singing one of the last songs “they” performed. My friends, Tony winner Paul Sand and publisher/editor Pablo Capra were equally delighted by the entire ambience of the evening.

      At a time when immigration has increasing been vilified, it was truly wonderful, as I again realized, to live in such a remarkably diverse city. Wood, born to Costa Rica parents in Los Angeles, had his mother in the front row, and, after a much-deserved demand for an encore, brought up “their” mother to the stage to break open the large piñata that had been hanging over the entire proceedings.

     The small, handsome woman, took several powerful swings and opened it, pouring what appeared to be small papers instead of any candy treats; the audience, fortunately, had already had almost all the sweet treats we could endure for one night. This time the standing ovations (and there were several) were truly deserved.

 

Los Angeles, November 23, 2019

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2019).