Review: Our Late Night by Wallace Shawn

Mikelle Johnson and Greg Dean
Photo by Anthony Rathbun

Imagine inviting a bunch of people over to a party, say in New York circa 1975, and on the way something in their brains shift so that they lose the ability to inhibit their innermost thoughts, fantasies and telling of their sexual escapades and desires. Wallace Shawn does exactly that in Our Late Night, now playing on the Catastrophic Theatre stage at DiverseWorks.

And what a dishy lot Shawn as conjured. This tribe knows no barrier between brain and tongue; secrets cannot be contained. Tony (Kyle Sturdivant) tells all about his night in the tropics. When Kristin's (Karina Pal Montano-Bowers) plan of applying burning jelly is rejected by Jim (Troy Schulze), she suggests bondage as a second choice. Grant (Jeff Miller) gets off on his daughter's leg hair and Samantha (Carolyn Houston Boone) vomits up bird feathers. These are the best friends of hosts Annette (Mikelle Johnson) and Lewis (Greg Dean), who just may kill each other later that night.

Our Late Night isn't so much as a play as it is a dreamy dip into full-on voyeurism. Director Jason Nodler sets this up exactly with the facade of a modernistic hi-rise apartment. We literally watch the play thought the stunning windows of their sleek digs. We are not the only ones peeking into this naughty world. The characters all listen to each other with an intensity that amplifies the seedy content. Never has doing nothing on stage been this sexy. Gently miked, it's as if the actors are whispering into our ears. Its marvelously creepy and effective.

The cast—superb all—consists of veteran Catastrophic company members along with seasoned newcomers. Johnson evokes a wistful Annette, girlish and devilish in one swoop. Her velvety voice pulls us right into the space of the play. Dean's stern husband, Lewis, projects a rough authority and commanding presence. Schulze imbues Jim, the only one to keep his thoughts to himself, with an uncomfortable awkwardness. If the play had a second act, I imagine he would be next to explode. Schulze manages the tension well. Miller gives Grant, the smarmy doctor, a delicious edge. Sturdivant carries the arc of Tony's tropical adventure with a manic momentum. Montano-Bowers gives Kristin a dark side of Nancy Sinatra vibe, equal parts funny and scary. Carolyn Houston Boone is understated, elegant, and the best listener in the bunch. She holds the space of this strange play with an uncanny grace. We want to know more about why she coughs up feathers.

Nodler's direction holds true to Shawn's brand of deviant realism, letting the silky prose push forward into the intimate spaces, without neglecting the base humor. It's a difficult play made oddly beautiful, even serene and tender in parts. Nodler mines the material's breathing spaces, keeping it authentic, and always human. Dean's set is impressive and monumental for DiverseWorks, while Kirk Markley's lighting design adds to the seductive ambiance. With Our Late Night, Catastrophic lives up to its tag line, “We will destroy you,” with yet another winning night of theater.

The Catastrophic Theatre presents Wallace Shawn's Our Late Night through April 3 at DiverseWorks.

The American Idol of Opera: Forget the large woman in a horned hat

Opera Vista founder Viswa Subbaraman holds his third annual opera festival Saturday through March 27 at the Czech Center Museum Houston. New works from national and international composers will be voted on American Idol style. There will also be two chances to see last year's festival winner, Line Tjornhoj's haunting Anorexia Sacra at the Live Oak Friends Meeting House.

Recently named an Arts Mastermind by the Houston Press, Viswa Subbaraman is carving his own particular niche in the opera ecology of Houston. The fledgling troupe's big hits include a stellar performance of Leonard Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti on the Bayou Bend grounds, performing Amy Beach's landmark opera Cabildo at the actual Cabildo Museum in New Orleans, and numerous outreach programs that make opera seem fun, accessible and unscary.

Next fall, Opera Vista premieres The Silent Prince, a new opera from Thailand, at Hobby Center followed by a Bangkok tour. Subbaraman tells us exactly how he creates an opera-friendly place.

Q: How did you catch the opera bug, and have your parents gotten over the fact that you are not a doctor?

A: I took the conducting route. Almost all great conductors are opera conductors. I did not get interested in opera until I was a sophomore at Duke, where I majored in biology and music. Yes, everyone in my family is a doctor. My mom always says, "You used to be so smart Viswa. What happened?"

Q: Talk about your upcoming festival. New work in any art form is risky, and there seems to be a major drought when it comes to new operas. In Houston, we are lucky if we see a premiere every other year. It's slim pickings out there in the opera factory biz, don't you think?

A: The fear behind new opera on a grand scale is that if it doesn't go well the organization is out a few million. They need to take large risks to produce new work. We are a chamber opera contest with very specific requirements. It's doable. Over the past three years we have looked at over 200 chamber operas, so I have a good idea of what's happening nationally and internationally.

Q: How exactly do you face the opera fear factor?

A: We try to get away from opera's image of a large woman wearing a horned hat singing at the top of her lungs in a foreign language. We have a series called Opera 101, which takes place at Boheme once a month where we do all kinds of activities that engage people. Last month, we wrote an instant opera. We had two ringer singers in the audience, and of course that helped. There was a Vespa in the story, and some guy went and got his Vespa for the performance. I do something different each time. In the festival we give the audience a vote, American Idol style. Audience members can also give comments and feedback along with the jurors. They have some measure of control of their experience.

Q: What's the crowning jewel of the festival?

A: We fully produce the opera that won the previous year. We will be presenting Danish composer and 2009 winner Line Tjornhoj's opera Anorexia Sacra at the Live Oak Quaker Meeting House, which is a perfect space for the opera. It's based on the letters of Clare of Assisi, founder of an extreme ascetic medieval order known as "Poor Clare's." She died of anorexia in 1254. Tjornhoj was also inspired by pro-anorexia sites on the Web and attempts to build a poetic bridge spanning 800 years.

Q: What's your big plan for Opera Vista?

A: My hope is that we are building the next generation of audiences for Houston Grand Opera and Opera in the Heights. We take a more aggressive approach with presenting operas outdoors at Bayou Bend every fall where people can enjoy a glass a wine and walk around, using our American Idol model with the festival, and events that are way less button-down than traditional opera. I hope to make Houston the Cannes or Sundance for new opera.

Reprinted from Culturemap.

Distraction “R” US: The Myth of Multitasking

If this year didn't have enough disappointments, now we find that multitasking is a bust, or more specifically, a myth. Turns out our brains can't do two things at once. All this time, we thought we were accomplishing so much, but really we were just switching back and forth between activities. To make it worse, all the flip flopping comes at a cost, quality. It's a bit like a circuit overload; an overwhelmed noggin just shuts down.

It doesn't take a genius to know that the person driving in front of me, chatting on their cell phone, is not paying attention to the road. And don't get me started on texting and driving. The science on the failure of multitasking is mighty convincing. Stanford University researchers Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass and Anthony Wagne at the Communications between Humans and Interactive Media Lab (News.Stanford.edu ) found those who like to juggle activities underperform in comparison to one-thing-at-a-timers. Apparently, multitaskers simply cannot ignore distractions and their memories are impaired as well. So do multitaskers excel at switching back and forth between activities? The researchers predicted so, but guess what? They were wrong again, it appears that multitaskers are also unable filter out irrelevant information. But wait; there's more … Arousing our stress hormones, multitasking can actually be detrimental to our health. Walter Kirn chronicles all the bad news in his piece in The Atlantic Monthly (TheAtlantic.com), “The Autumn of Multitasking.”

Russell Poldrack, UCLA associate professor of psychology (Psych.UCLA.edu), discovered that we actually use a different part of our brain when we multitask. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Poldrack discovered that the hippocampus, the brain's power center for memory, is not engaged when we learned with distractions. Instead, the brain's B team for learning, the striatum, is activated. His conclusion is that there is a distinction between learning a simple activity like exercising to music, which enhances brain function, and learning something new in an environment with distraction, which doesn’t.

This isn’t exactly new information. Way back in 1959, Margaret and Lloyd Peterson published “Short Term Retention of Individual Verbal Items” in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. Their subjects tried to learn something new while counting backwards. As you might predict, it didn't turn out well.

None of these studies mentioned that fact that doing a few things at once is really fun and empowering. I get a sense of wild joy when I try to scramble eggs, make sure the croissants don't burn and brew the coffee, attempting to have everything ready at the exactly the same time. I feel like the conductor of my very own orchestra, or breakfast ensemble anyway. But hasn’t our techno-world has been entirely structured to scramble our attention? In the one minute we check our Facebook feed, we get a sense of thousands of people doing thousands of things. Is that all just useless information that we are wired to soak up? Is there actually a purpose? Or are we just following technology's lead?

In Nicholas Carr's now-epic essay in The Atlantic Monthly, “Is Google Making Us Stupider,” he lays out the reasons for the sea change. Carr chronicles our mental shift occurring as we process smaller and more numerous snippets of information. Technology is actually changing the way our brains work.

Chris Welsh, owner of Mastery of Learning (MasteryOfLearning.com) and an expert on neuroscience, urges us to consider a few key facts. “We multitask all the time,” he says, “like walking and talking. We just need to be more selective about what we pay attention to.” Welsh concurs that doing many things at once can be a brain drain. “Cognitive functions take up the same real estate in the brain. We burn through a lot of energy with all that stopping one thing to do another thing.” Welsh urges us to think of having an attention budget and to practice some form of mindfulness. “We need to exercise our ability to stay focused. As habitually distracted culture, we just need to create new habits of focus. Start with something modest like 5-10 minutes of focusing on one thing and gradually increase the time.”

But that doesn't mean we need to stay glued to a one-thing-at-time lifestyle either.

I'd like to think that the human attention span is a fluid thing, darting and drifting as life comes at us. “We are hard-wired to be curious about what's in our environment,” says Welsh. “A distraction can be something interesting you can learn from. But we don't need to be distracted by every shiny thing; we can be selective about what distracts us.”

As to why we humans seem to cherish task juggling, Welsh has an explanation for that as well. “We like our entire bandwidth filled,” he says. “When we focus on just one thing that doesn't happen, so we look for something to fill it.”

So I guess it's not my fault that while writing this piece I checked my email and Facebook numerous times, watched a snippet of a Canadian TV series on YouTube, read Paul Krugman's New York Times column and sipped a delicious St. Arnold Elissa India Pale Ale. What can I say? I'm just a girl trying to fill her bandwidth.

Reprinted from Absolutely in the Loop.

Review: :Letters You Wrote

Dancepatheatre
Photography by Sara Draper

Magnolia Ballroom
Houston, TX
March 18, 2010


Dancing to text presents some tricky territory, and Sara Draper's Dancepatheatre presentation, Letters You Wrote, ran into a few of them. Using family letters from post war era 1945-1965, Draper set selected letters to movement along with improvised music by members from The Foundation for Modern Music.

The final offering, Letter #7 from Beth to Friends, was the most fully realized. Here, the family scurries about in a pre-Christmas frenzy. We get a feel of the world of this letter before it actually begins, a chance to know these people and care what they have to say to one another. Nicely danced by Cassandra Shaffer, Sara Draper, Patricia Solorzano and Allison Truax, the final letter allowed enough space and time for the true intimacy of the letter to come centerstage.

Draper, always engaging to watch, lit up the stage in Letters #4 and #5. Even in her 50s, Draper's crisp clarity continues to charm, proving a bright spot in a problematic evening.

The trouble starts with the Magnolia Ballroom, which is way too acoustically live to hold an overly amplified layering of spoken word and live music, already in competition with a squeaky floor. The buzzy visuals of Houston's urban scape, visible from the audience's seats, add to the confusion. Letters are an intimate and long forgotten communication. Placed in a non-theatrical setting such as this, the pieces suffered from a lack of isolation in light, space and sound quality. The formal reading style of narrator Richard Jason Lyders also seemed an odd choice. Why would something as causal as a letter sound like a 1940s radio show? Whitney Adkins' more natural style served the pieces with a lighter touch. The excellent musicians, Nicholas Leh Baker and Maiko Sasaki, offered their own take on each letter, however, as the evening wore on, it began to sound all the same.

Trained in anthropology, Draper did a fine job in selecting letters that revealed the character of the post-war era. Clever vintage costumes added to the nostalgia. In the evening's best moments, Draper played more with the rhythm of dance and text, allowing the words to have a breathing space. But too often, too much was happening all at once. The movement choices ranged from literal interpretations of the words to abstract dancing, often distracting from the content of the letter.

Sadly, this leaves us to conclude that letters are perhaps best meant to be read by the addressee, quietly and all alone.

Reprinted from Dance Source Houston.

Review: Houston Ballet American at Heart

Ballet: Hush
Choreographer: Christopher Bruce
Dancer(s): Nicholas Leschke, Kelly Myernick
Photo: Amitava Sarkar

Shhhhh! The marvel that is Christopher Bruce's Hush is still playing on my inner youtube channel. Performed as part of Houston Ballet's American at Heart, Hush reached to even deeper heights of dance-making glory than I recall from its premiere in 2006. Bruce brings us into the life of a traveling theatrical family. Perhaps they are stopping on their way to their next show, and we are glad they did. Original cast members Kelly Myernick (mother) and Nicholas Leschke (father) and Melody Herrera (youngest daughter), Jessica Collado (older sister), Ian Casady (older brother) and Ilya Kozadayev (younger brother) make a perfect if not odd family.

Each adheres to Bruce's idiosyncratic off-kilter style, while adding their own personal spin. Bruce mines every possible permutation in the ecology of the family, letting its subtle dynamics play out in solos, duets and rousing group dances. There isn't an un-thought through second in this ballet. Bruce even ends each variation with tender stage pictures, allowing emotional and visual rests. Set to Bobbin McFerrin's collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma's score, also named Hush, the ballet oscillates between public and private moments that occur within the safe confines of the family.

Myernick tackles her solo, set to the Gounod/Bach Ave Maria, with the soul of a mother, running after little ones, washing the floor, doing the endless things mothers do automatically. She so elegantly captures the relentlessness of motherhood, it's raw instinct and never ending purposefulness. Leschke, moving with a weighted grace, catches her at the solo's finale, bouncing her back and forth to a resting normalcy. Herrera eats her little brother's fly, bounces like a frog on dad's back, dancing up a firestorm of lil' sis energy. Collado's spirals her wrists in sensual curves, embracing a young woman's discovery of self. Her dancing is voluptuous and self-absorbed as it should be. She concludes with an awkward strut back to her place in the hierarchy. Casady embodies the restrained demeanor of a male adolescent, while Kozadayev is all curiosity in his bug-chasing solo.

At the end, the mysterious clan turns toward the star cloth and continues down their path. And don't we just want to follow them there? It was simply a breathtaking performance of a breathtaking ballet. Christina Giannelli's lighting design added to the magic, myth and delight, nicely delineating the inner from the communal moments.

It's always a wonder to ponder Balachine's work, and Houston Ballet did not disappoint with his 1928 pinnacle of modernism, Apollo. It's a role built for Connor Walsh's considerable cluster of talents; his clear, exacting lines and pointed attack matched Balanchine's spare use of effort, shape and form. Amy Fote (Calliope), Sara Webb (Terpsichore) and Myernick (Polyhymnia) made sparkling muses, each their own distinct radiance.

The program took another step back in time with Jerome Robbins' 1944 Fancy Free, a fun romp about three sailors on shore leave, and the precursor to his Broadway musical On the Town. It's a time capsule of a ballet, capturing wartime patriotism at its height. Casady, Jame Gotesky and Oliver Halkowich delivered robust performances, full of boy charm. Gotesky was a hoot in his hip swiveling rumba, while Casady's rough and tumble quality rang authentic. Halkowich's quick-footed spunk completed the trio. Fote and Collado bestowed the passers-by with a sexy polish.

All in all, it was a night of dance history meeting dance magic. Not a bad week for a company that just topped their new digs with its final steel beam.

Review: HGO Turn of the Screw

_{Andrew Kennedy (Quint) and Michael Kepler Meo (Miles). Photo by Felix Sanchez}

Houston Grand Opera reaches its half-way point of its stellar six-year Benjamin Britten cycle with Turn of the Screw , a series that has so far included Billy Budd and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Based on the 1898 Henry James ghost story, published during the spiritualism craze of the day, Turn of the Screw follows the spooky tale of a governess who arrives at an equally spooky English manor to care for two, you guessed it, two spooky kids, Miles and Flora. And, if you are not frightened yet, there's a pair of ghosts, Miss Jessel, the former housekeeper, and a deceased employee named Quint.

Amanda Roocroft projects the right amount of anxiety as the Governess to sweep us into the thick of the intrigue. Judith Forst delivers a believable performance as the troubled housekeeper, Mrs. Grose. Andrew Kennedy imbues the red-haired Quint with a kind of restrained grace, while Tamara Wilson makes a positively chilling ghost as Miss Jessel. Making his HGO debut, the young Michael Kepler Meo is a total find as Miles, the odd and strangely adult child. Joelle Harvey, as Flora, the older sister, adds a whiff of fresh air in an otherwise claustrophobic opera.

Neil Armfield, who has directed all the HGO Britten operas thus far, directs with an eye for the weird, keeping the intimacy intact. The austere sets and costumes designed by Stephen Curtis conjure a dark and foreboding Victorian atmosphere. With towering walls topped with bronzed children's toys, childhood looks out of reach. The scale is wonderfully off, making us even more unsettled. Curtis creates a prison of secrets where there is no way out. Nigel Levings' lighting design adds to the eerie world at every chance it can with mirrors, shadows and tricky illusions.

But it's in Britten's brilliant music that we really feel the shudder going down our spines. With the HGO orchestra pared down to 13, Patrick Summers navigated the brittle, dissonant ridges of Britten's score with his usual finesse. All in all, Turn of the Screw goes down like a strong shot of Gothic glory.

Reprinted from Culturevulture.

Gemma Paintin of Action Hero on A Western

James Stenhouse in A Western. Photo by Gemma Paintin

Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse, otherwise known as Action Hero, make a stop in Texas to perform A Western, a site-responsive theater piece, as part of the Fuse Box Festival on April 24^th at The Historic Victory Grill. The Bristol-based Brits take their myths seriously, and fully intend to have a show down in the Lone Star state. Action Hero considers the audience as collaborators and conspirators, so expect to be free to cheat on cards, love the hero, and, if you must, shoot him down. You can read my Culturemap Art in a Bar rant here. Paintin interviews Stenhouse on their process here. She brings us into the saloon below.

Dancehunter: I am really intrigued by your idea for A Western because a guy walked into a bar in Texas not the UK. The bar thing is our myth. So here we have you two Brits doing a walking into a bar piece in a bar in Texas. What gives?

Gemma Paintin: Well it's kind of our myth too, because that iconography seems so familiar to us, even though we don't come from that place. It's partly about being so influenced by a culture that's not our own. Those stories of cowboys and Westerns are part of our collective memory even though as a British person, I have no real connection to it. Yet, it feels so much a part of my experience of growing up. I think lots of non-Americans feel that way. It belongs to us by proxy through cinema and TV.

DH: What's fun about bringing this piece to the wild west itself, which is Austin?

GP: The first word in the piece is 'Texas,' so it's going to be incredible to perform it actually in Texas. That's pretty exciting for us as all of the places we have performed it have been emphatically not Texas, and that's what the piece is about in some ways. This isn't the wild west, we are not cowboys, this is not the saloon, but we try to recreate this place that feels so much a part of our experience of America and cinematic heroes, and the audience shares that ambition with us and help us make it. So what happens when we will really be in Texas, where those things really are? I guess it will become more about James and I as outsiders, retelling our versions of the Western to you. But I think the audience will still join in the game of remaking our imaginary Western, to shoot the hero and shout “yee hah.” Maybe the yee-hah's in Texas will be more authentic than the ones back home! We'll see.

DH: True, we wrote "Yee Hah" book. Do bar folks know what to do, or does it depend on the bar?

GP: The bar staff always know we're going to perform, we don't just turn up unannounced. And most of the audience usually knows too. Sometimes, we get a few unsuspecting people who just came for a quiet drink, and now there's some kind of stand-off happening beside them, but they often get the most involved by the end.

DH: Do you get there and access what that bar is all about and adapt the piece accordingly? Is there anything you do ahead of time?

GP: All bars have a different feel, and we re-work the show for every new space. We do a bit of work before we arrive with pictures of the bar, but generally you have to go there to get a feel for it. How can this place stand in for a desert, where would the mountains, the long road, the saloon doors be? We try to re-imagine the space as the landscape we describe, and that the audience knows so well from A Fistful of Dollars, or Wyatt Earp or whatever, or maybe they don't remember consciously watching a Western, but the landscape is always there for them, somehow. It's been on a drip-drip their whole lives, always seeing those places and characters via Hollywood.

DH: Does anything ever get out of hand, or is that just the risk you take when you perform in a bar?

GP: Well, it depends, as I say the bar always know we are going to perform and people come along specifically to see the show, so it's not random, but usually people want to collaborate with us to create this epic. We invite them to play a game, and mostly they accept the invitation. People do like to go a bit crazy at the end though; they shoot our hero down. Everyone wants to do that, don't they?

Action Hero performs A Western as part of the Fuse Box Festival on April 18 & 19 through Diverseworks, at Rudyards in Houston and April 24 at 9 pm at the Historic Victory Grill in Austin.