Monthly Archives: October 2024

“Beyond the Surface” Amazes and Parties-Down

Review: Beyond the Surface at McBride-Bonnefoux Center

By Perry Tannenbaum

The new Charlotte Ballet season is off to a blazing beginning. Presenting Beyond the Surface at the McBride-Bonnefoux Center for Dance through October 26, the troupe looked fresher and younger than ever. But the choreography was far, far younger: two world premiere hatchlings that emerged from their shells last Thursday from Omar Román de Jesús and Mthuthuzeli November, and a third Charlotte Ballet commission by Jennifer Archibald that had its premiere less than two years ago in the same studio.

On that auspicious occasion, Archibald’s fledgling was at the top of the Innovative Works program, sparking hopes that the pieces that followed would reach the same high level. This year, HdrM is nestled in the middle of the program – and my 2023 hopes were already realized again in 2024 with the premiere of De Jesús’s Balúm.

Yes, the first dance of the night easily merited a climactic spot in any evening of premieres: beautiful, complex, mysterious, symbolic, intricate, moving, epic, and surreal. Music by OKRAA, Ola de Luz, was relentlessly propulsive, with random noises at random intervals littered around the main core, a minimalist loop with a harp-like timbre. Once that core cleared the noisy interference, like a spiraling starship navigating through a belt of asteroids, a sudden hypnotic calm and spaciousness prevailed – and the wonder of this dance multiplied, lending it an uncanny glow.

De Jesús has indicated that he is exploring our interactions with the air that engulfs us, from the moment we are born until we take our last breaths. Or maybe that emergence from the noise field near the beginning of the piece is an expulsion from the womb, our birth after a pre-natal prelude. The Puertorriqueño choreographer also has a hand in scenic design and Branimira Ivanova’s costume designs, for she has some specific prompts to execute in fashioning the dancers’ outfits and props.

The most notable of these are black: Two umbrellas that conjure up the surrealism of René Magritte and the fearfully magnificent ambiguity worn by Rees Launer. One of the umbrellas starts upstage center, held by one of the dancers seated on a bench, and it gets passed from dancer to dancer during the action, frequently cycling back to its starting position. The other is held stolidly by a woman on a side bench who resolutely faces away from the action until the stunningly gorgeous denouement – when we get to see the air!

At various moments when Launer grips our attention, we can have different conjectures about what his stern character represents. A raging fire-and-brimstone preacher? a demon? a witch? the Angel of Death? Launer will be a member of two of the three ensembles that get to present Balúm during its current 16-performance run. Another standout in the opening weekend’s seven-member ensemble, Maurice Mouzon Jr., will be in all the performances of this piece.

The liquefied movement of the dancers – along with some robotic intertwining – was juxtaposed with no-less-idiomatic lifts that were more horizontal than vertical. Like chapter markers at the end of episodes, the ensemble would gather and swirl around the stage in an evocative oval parade. Autumn leaves swirling in the wind. Often two or three subgroups performed simultaneously before an ensemble swirl would resolve the dissonance.

What amazed me most was that synchronized entrances and overlapping actions were so precise when there were seemingly no musical cues to give the dancers a toehold. If you’ve heard music by Philip Glass, you know that minimalism is not particularly danceable music. Musicians playing it and maestros conducting it must concentrate intently on the score to keep their bearings amid the repetitiveness. I’m still gobsmacked by how this Charlotte Ballet team pulled this off.

Following Balúm, a piece so untethered from every aspect of its music except for OKRAA’s tempo, Archibald’s HdrM struck me from an altered perspective. Archibald’s ability to mesh expressive movement to a soundtrack of musical compositions by Ludwig Ronquist, Heilung, and Federico Albanese stood out more boldly than ever after the more abstract and surreal De Jesús piece – though these intimate bonds in HdrM could be broken by abrupt mechanical disconnects from the score.

Two other conflicting factors came into play. Most welcome was the opportunity to see the Canadian-born choreographer’s work reprised by three of the eight dancers who performed at the 2023 premiere, Raven Barkley, Luke Csordas, and Shaina Wire. The piece looked more natural and “lived-in” twenty months later, so its internal contrasts were sharper and its sensual moments more relaxed. Barkley, in particular, stood forth dramatically, as sensual, captivating, and devastating as we’ve ever seen her. Nor can you fail to notice the ‘do.

Here, more than in any other dance of the evening, the ensemble bought into the “Unfiltered” theme of CharBallet’s 2024-25 season with their spirited, lyrical work. My only worry was off the dance floor and in the program booklet, where Archibald’s useful explanatory remarks where no longer in print. There in 2023, she was concerned with environmental psychology and posed a pointed question: “Is there a social responsibility to humanize architecture?”

Just asking that question helps us to connect with Archibald’s struggling language of movement. It also hints at the likelihood that Kerri Martinsen’s drab costumes are intended as institutional, such as clothing worn in hospitals, prisons, or mental wards. Aside from the contrast between lithe and mechanical movement, HdrM holds our gaze with a nice balance of ensemble, individual, and pair segments that flow naturally into one another.

Like many finales we’ve seen before from CharBallet, November’s Vibes and Variations is the most celebratory and carefree piece of the night. After last year’s From Africa With Love, it’s also the second consecutive November premiere to kick off a season at the McBride-Bonnefoux Center. Where Africa was surprisingly serene and monochromatic, preoccupied with mauve-colored ostriches from his South African homeland and their exquisite fragility, Vibes seems to wander westward to South America, to samba, tango, and carnivale.

Ivanova’s costumes burst with pastel cotton-candy colors and outré pleating, what my late mom in her saltiest Yiddish would call ongepochket, crassly over-decorated. The bulges on the men’s costumes give them seahorse legs and the frilly women look like spinning tops in a color scheme that matches the men’s harlequin-like rigs. The music starts off rather quietly with Gaby Moreno singing the first vocal on the program, her cover of “Cucurrucucu Paloma” over a simple acoustic guitar accompaniment, smoldering with bossa nova intimacy and sadness.

Things intensify as the 15-person ensemble digs into the Bang on a Can All-Stars’ version of David Lang’s strangely percussive – and minimalist – “cheating, lying, stealing.” But the most intense partying launches when we arrive at beatmaker Jamie xx and MC Moose performing the brash, irresistibly mindless “Gosh.” Catching my eye most compellingly were Csordas and Fuki Takahashi, each of whom will be in two of the three rotating ensembles performing November’s piece throughout its current run.

If I have to predict who will land the title role in Carmen next spring when artistic director Alejandro Cerrudo and CharBallet unveil their Vegas-showgirl update, my guesses would be Takahashi or Barkley. Since that Charlotte premiere will be running for two weekends, both temptresses could take turns at it.

“The Humans” Is More Haunting Than Ever

Review: The Humans @ Armour Street Theatre

By Perry Tannenbaum

Thanksgiving in Chinatown, in the shadow of the fallen Twin Towers – Stephen Karam’s spooky, mystifying, and hilarious The Humans hands us a world teeming with paradox. For an afternoon in a creaky old two-story apartment, newly rented by Brigid Blake and her boyfriend Richard Saad, her family gathers to celebrate, the whole lot of them nursing open wounds – and their Alzheimer’s-stricken elder, “Momo” – trying to heal from recent setbacks.

First staged in the QC at Knight Theater in a 2018 touring production starring Richard Thomas as family patriarch Erik Blake, Davidson Community Players brings us a downsized reprise in the first locally-produced staging, with the venerable Hank West in the lead.

Haunted by his return to the vicinity of Ground Zero and by his recent misdeeds, tormented by a deadly mix of sleeplessness and nightmares, Erik vies with elder daughter Aimee for which of the Blakes is suffering the most. Since last Thanksgiving, Aimee has come down with ulcerative colitis and taken major hits to her love life and her career as a Philadelphia lawyer – with major surgery looming on the horizon.

Yet Erik fires a wicked one-liner at Brigid, whose gripe, like his wife Deirdre’s, barely hovers above the “suck it up” level compared with his own. “If you’re so miserable,” he asks the health food fanatic, “why are you trying to live forever?” Inside negativity, Karam can be equally trenchant and funny when Aimee philosophizes about her recent breakup: “Maybe loving someone long-term is more about deciding whether to go through life unhappy alone or unhappy with someone else.”

Only Deirdre and Erik have an agenda for the afternoon, subtly suggested in a couple of brief dialogues. We’re mostly watching Karam’s keen observations of family interactions – their bonds, their tensions, their little quirks, and their tectonic divides. These appear all the more chaotic because dialogue often overlaps and action is happening simultaneously upstairs and in the more commodious basement.

Knight Theater probably gave us an oversized impression of Brigid and Richard’s love nest, while DCP’s Armour Street can’t help look both height- and space-challenged. Remarkably, Evan Kinsley’s more cramped set design lessens the struggle of viewing multiple tracks of action and family intrigue. Yet Karam and director Glynnis O’Donoghue are still able to provide enough compelling distraction at a key moment to allow the aged Momo to disappear without our noticing.

Even without two-story height, Kinsley’s set has an alleyway leading to an elevator shaft to accommodate the wheelchair-bound Momo’s transit between the two floors. The slice of set that serves as the upstairs somehow has enough space for the front door, an entrance to a bathroom (Aimee’s frequent retreat), and the only window looking out on the city. When the apartment’s oddities need to impact, Kinsley’s set and Sarah Provencal’s sound design deliver.

The divides between the Blakes will be familiar to anyone who has grown up in a family of siblings. Although Brigid would never consider living in Philly, the geographical divide is as important here as the generational difference, for neither of the daughters would ever think of moving back to Scranton, PA – except to a summer home that Erik tells us can move towards construction once there’s a sewer system near their pristine plot.

Those anticipated PA pilgrimages will not bring either of the sibs back into the bosom of the holy church. Nor will it erase the fact that these country folks’ children are irremediably citified, one a lawyer and the other an aspiring composer. Safety, religious, and lifestyle concerns plague the homespun parents. Ahead of their Thanksgiving visit, Deirdre has sent a care package that includes a statue of the Virgin to protect Brigid’s new home. Meanwhile, Aimee can expect an email any time a lesbian commits suicide.

Karam provides plenty for the Blakes to discuss in their near and distant back histories, with a handful of stunning updates. If things get dull, he serves up a choice collection of singularly awkward moments that would instantly embed themselves in family lore ever after, lovingly and mockingly retold at holiday dinners and special celebrations.

There’s even a “pig smash” ritual unique to Blake Thanksgivings, a nice spotlight for Richard. Often the aspiring social worker serves as our ears in his role as outsider, giving the Blakes the chance to explain all that is long-known among themselves.

These moments reverberate warmly within us, but the most haunting vibes, from Erik’s dreams and experiences, touch us all, nonchalantly invoking 9/11 and Superstorm Sandy – specters of terrorism and climate change. Over and over, whether Deirdre wheels Momo around or Aimee summons an Uber with her cell, we hear an eerie, insistent whisper from the playwright emanating from his vivid, painstakingly detailed dream: this is how we live.

On Davidson’s compacted stage at Armour Street, the natural flow of The Humans, the lack of powerhouse confrontations that shake us to the core when we witness such American classics as August: Osage County, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or The Little Foxes, reminds us of Chekhov’s more placid classics. Rich and funny and touching as all the action is, we will likely struggle to discern a solid plot until Erik’s big reveal.

Inexperienced theatergoers are therefore advised to ignore any FOMO anxieties they may be experiencing and surrender themselves to the many delights, laughs, shocks, and epiphanies that West and his castmates deliver.

On the page, Karam’s script doesn’t pop out at you with the color and verve that O’Donoghue gets from this ensemble. West actually comes onstage with a couple of key advantages over Richard Thomas. We more readily accept West as an ordinary janitor-turned-equipment-manager, and he can bring out a curmudgeonly edge to Erik that I’d never noticed before.

No less surprising is the bubbly, goofball likability that Breanna Suarez brings to Brigid, though she is often the family contrarian and party-pooper in the script. The vibrant energy she exudes somehow turns pure negativity into simple immaturity, emphasizing Brigid’s spoiled qualities. As our genial hostess, Suarez tunes in on Brigid’s side hustle as a bartender, so she’s the life of the party while subtly fueling the true plot, endearingly committing a faux pas for the ages along the way.

Portraying West’s wife for the first time since 2005, when they both earned best actor honors in Coyote Ugly, Anne Lambert makes the wait worthwhile. Although Citizen Trump famously descended his escalator in June 2015, between the time that The Humans opened Off-Broadway and when it reappeared on Broadway with a completely new cast and director, Deirdre likely struck the late-2015 Broadway crowd as a MAGA maniac.

Interestingly, Karam could have taken Hillary Clinton as his model if he had written his tragicomedy 20 years earlier, but Lambert still strikes me as a MAGA nutjob even if that couldn’t have been the playwright’s intent. The religious zeal, the paranoia, and the constant moralizing are almost non-stop, so thanks to Lambert’s implacable disapproval, Deirdre winds up ennobling Erik and humanizing her daughters – just by enduring her. Yet there is an unmistakable sincerity to this steely, troubled soul.

Deirdre’s relatively spurious sufferings also brighten Aimee’s halo. Her woes are certainly the most tangible, so Alyssa Whitting has the freedom to add some hard edges to her performance, aiming her best zingers at Brigid with an assortment of barbs for the rest of the fam. Ascending and descending DCP’s imaginary staircase for extended poops, Whitting makes a pungent impression when she’s with us. She’s the slick urban professional among the Blakes, getting better reception on her cell than Dad and handling all the key calls.

Preoccupied with the cooking, Ryan Miles as Richard is also frequently on-leave from the family flow, but he’s a fine audience surrogate when we need things explained. Without fuss or bravado, Miles keys into the fact that Richard is the most laid-back, financially secure person in the room – the one lifelong New Yorker – in between Brigid’s age and Erik’s, accentuating his unique perspective.

Momo’s lines are annoyingly repetitive and approximately 85% gibberish to my ear, meticulously transcribed by Karam word-by-nonsensical-word. So if Wandy Fernandez is accurately delivering Momo’s babblings as written without considerable improvisation, she has performed one the most prodigious feats of memory in the history of theatre. There is wonderful variety in her performance with a lovely little miracle in the middle, which of course gratifies Erik and Deirdre the most. Words or not, the woman can also throw a fit.

The cryptic ending of The Humans, where the thin thread of Karam’s plot crystallizes, was clearer to me the second time around. Along the way, it’s helpful to note the circular shape of the Blakes’ history, the dream Erik divulges stage by stage, and the explanation Richard offers. Erik’s worries, sadly enough, are suddenly more topical in the Carolinas than ever before. After Sandy, the fact that Chinatown was a Zone A flood zone was fearfully real. Now that Asheville is isolated, adrift from interstate highways until next year, we can legitimately wonder what zone is not a flood zone after all the climate damage humans have done.

Richard says it succinctly, recalling a comic book he loved as a kid: “horror stories for the monsters are all about humans.”

Bearde Crosses the Border With Ziad to Sublimity

Review: Jazz @ Theatree Bechtler with Nicolas Bearde

By Perry Tannenbaum

October 4, 2024, Charlotte, NC – As a listener and a sometime vocalist, my feeling is that a jazz singer backed by a piano trio can only verge on the sublime. Until a horn is added – saxophone, trumpet, or clarinet parlaying and intertwining with the vocalist – the divine nectar never quite sparkles with maximum effervescence. So it’s always a joy when the Jazz at the Bechtler series hosts a guest vocalist, for the leader of the house band, Ziad Rabie, always carries a tenor and soprano sax with him to fortify the artillery. Before Nicolas Bearde’s appearance on Friday, I hadn’t been to one of these bacchanals since Nnenna Freelon guested in May 2022, so I was behind the curve in terms of how the experience in the Bechtler Museum of Modern Arts lobby has been enhanced.

Perhaps influenced by Middle C Jazz over on Brevard Street, the Bechtler bandstand is now framed by large video monitors displaying a live feed of the concert – that is also projected as a larger-then-life backdrop upstage of the players. The effect of the live pastel projections is electrifying, especially if your sightline differs radically from the camera’s, and the projected images are helpful if your view of one of the musicians is obscured. A music stand downstage blocked my view of drummer Rick Dior sitting behind Rabie, but when I stood up briefly to snap a photo of him, I discovered that a second music stand right at his drum kit was still blocking my view. Luckily, the live feed up above him was available to us when he took a solo.

Bearde last sang in Charlotte at the tenth anniversary celebration of the Bechtler series staged at the adjoining Knight Theater in January 2022. That was my gateway to his discography, which certainly reinforced my notion that he agreed with me on jamming with a horn. There were plenty of Nat King Cole tracks online that were delightful to discover from his recent album on Spotify, along with a few Johnny Hartman gems on past recordings. He’s been around long enough, since before the turn of the millennium, to have accumulated two Spotify artist listings that do not overlap – and he still sounded like he’s at the top of his game. The two saxophonists who have played on Bearde’s last two albums, Eric Alexander and Vincent Herring, are both self-recommending – and they both supplied a sheaf of candidates for seamless transport to the Bechtler lobby and Ziad’s capable hands.

So did two of the songs Bearde sang in 2022, his own “Falling in Love Again” and Abbey Lincoln’s “Living Room,” both of which were reprised in more extended versions. The baritone began his set with the same song that began his 2016 album, Invitation,Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner’s “Come Back to Me.” Where Herring had inserted his alto, Ziad now blazed with his soprano sax, with extra space in the arrangement set aside for pianist Noel Freidline’s ruminations – all with the speed and verve of the lyric’s “turn the highway to dust, break the law if you must” spirit.

With “That Sunday, That Summer,” Bearde brought us the first of two tracks selected from his Nat Cole tribute album, both of which, not at all coincidentally, featuring Alexander on tenor sax. Bearde’s way with the song is jazzier than Cole’s 1963 saccharine hit – with its lush strings, full chorus, and glinting triangle – but I can’t say I like all the added syncopation he brings to the table. Best of the covers, to me, is a Sarah Vaughan version not to be found on Spotify. That revelation is online exclusively at Apple Music on her Jimmy Rowles Quintet album from 1974.

Bearde was entirely in his groove thereafter, beginning with his cha-cha inflected Burt Bacharach hit, “Close to You,” with some fine solos by both Ziad and Freidline – and a wonderful breakaway into 4/4 tempo in the middle of the vocal reprise – with some extra Beard/Ziad jamming afterwards. Lincoln’s “Living Room” was beautifully embroidered the second time around with an introductory Freidline fantasia intro from his electric keyboard and a regal solo from bassist Ron Brendle after Ziad’s tenor sax proclamation. Most unexpected and exciting was a new song, “Si Vous Saviez,” written by Rabie with Jennifer Shea. If you’ve heard John Coltrane’s Ballads album, you can begin to imagine the lovely sound of Ziad’s creamy, buttery intro on tenor sax, and Bearde took to the longish tune like he was seriously considering recording it on his next album.

The rest of the set included songs that Bearde has already taken to the studio, starting with the moody title tune from the Invitation release, which saw a fine intro and later solo from Ziad and, notwithstanding the comparatively mellow mood, a fine chunk of work from Dior on the solo I screened. Plucked from his Nat Cole tribute, “Thou Swell” actually began life as part of Rodgers & Hart’s A Connecticut Yankee in 1927, where its archaic language was perfectly apt. Both Ziad and Freidline contributed zippy, palate cleansing solos that readied us for the finale.

Once again it was “Falling in Love Again,” with Bearde elucidating on his composition at greater length before performing it this time. Further engaging us, he encouraged us in the audience to clap out the rhythm as Freidline, chided all through concert for his snazzy (and Sinatra-like) chapeau, pounded out a genial piano intro. Everybody was in great spirits by this point, and Ziad gave us one more reason to applaud with his screaming tenor sax.

Photos by Perry Tannenbaum

“Girl from ther North Country”: A Dream Dispelled

Review: Girl from the North Country at Belk Theater

By Perry Tannenbaum

When it premiered in 2017 at The Old Vic in London, Girl from the North Country must have seemed like the fruition of a musical theatre dream team. The original book would be by acclaimed Irish playwright Conor McPherson, who would freely roam amidst the vast catalogue of music and lyrics by Bob Dylan, the 2016 Nobel Prize Laureate, to choose his songlist. By most surviving accounts and reviews, Girl from the North Country was must-see theatre in two successive London productions, Off-Broadway in 2018, and on Broadway in 2020.

Previous peeps at the show on the road, chronicled in regional sections of BWW, have only been slightly less enthusiastic. So opening night at Belk Theater earlier this week was a massive shock when the national tour touched down here for the 28th of its 30 scheduled stops.

The first stunner was the sparsity of the crowd. Often sold out on opening night for brand-name shows, the Belk was less than half-filled for the Charlotte premiere. Traffic to the Uptown was no lighter than usual, and blackouts had already been a non-factor for previous events I had covered in Plaza Midwood and Davidson. Were fervid Dylan fanatics, among the most loyal anywhere, diverted by the WNBA Playoffs? Were they glued to their TV sets, watching the Walz-Vance debate?

Whatever reason the stay-aways may have had, the biggest shocker was that the no-shows were so right. The dream team is merely a mirage on the road, though the esteemed playwright is still listed as the stage director.

As much as we both love Dylan – my wife Sue and I held hands when the mighty “Hurricane” was sung – Girl from the North Country never fully connected with us. The boxer and escaped convict in McPherson’s script is Joe Scott, we’re in 1934 Duluth (three years before Rubin “Hurricane” Carter was born), and when Warren Nolan Jr.* plunges into the song, he must segue into “All Along the Watchtower” long before the tale of the framed boxer reaches its epic, cumulative power and intensity.

This is not the story of the Hurricane. Yet the connection of this suddenly anachronistic song, unlike the decisively irrelevant “Watchtower” or “Idiot Wind” that complete the medley, is stronger than nearly all the others we hear. At its worst, the beginning of Act 2 at Nick Laine’s dingy Duluth boarding house devolves into a chaotic Dylan concert with no forward-moving drama at all, the most inert and aimless musical theatre I’ve seen since Cats purred back from its intermission.

Action revolves around the innkeeper, his bipolar wife Elizabeth Laine, his alcoholic and artistic son Gene, and his adopted black daughter Marianne, five months pregnant. Curiously, Nick is the musical eye of this stormy family, the only member who never gets a solo to sing. John Schiappa is devoted to his demented wife, whom he dutifully feeds though she might slap the plate out of his hands, but he cares more for his longtime boarder, Carla Woods as Mrs. Neilsen, a possible financial lifeline if her late husband’s ever gets out of probate.

As Elizabeth, Jennifer Blood gets the most outré actions from McPherson – even when she’s brooding at an upright piano – and a royal gem from the Dylan songbook at the end of each act, “Like a Rolling Stone” followed “Forever Young.” These briefly sounded like echoes from the days of Janis Joplin reign as rock’s blues queen. Days of mad incense and love. Elizabeth has more reasons to be jealous of her admirably stable and ruggedly handsome husband than justifications for her relentless resentfulness and orneriness.

Yet even this most powerful of McPherson’s roles never quite bridges the gap between the footlights and our hearts. My most generous theories for why this was so on opening night are the sheer size of the Belk, double the seating capacities of the houses where North Country played London and New York, and the wretchedness of the sound, a chronic Blumenthal ailment.

Come back to us, MJ! – or at least send your sound crew.

Sharaé Moultrie gives a velvety smooth voice to Marianne and, despite her precarious position as an unwed mother-to-be, enough serenity for us to occasionally suspect that her conception was immaculate. She gets her share of solos, if not the choicest harvest. Dramatically, Marianne is the calm center of a vortex, with love and affection swirling around her from at least three different men.

Concerned about her future, Nick seeks to wed her to the financially secure – but elderly – Mr. Perry, portrayed by Jay Russell with humility, gentleness, and heart. Manuel as Joe is almost immediately smitten by Marianne, no doubt imagining himself as her redemption and she as his. She has reason to be impressed, for when he was challenged to a fight by her drunken brother Gene, Joe reluctantly yielded to the challenge and floored Gene with a single blow.

Prodded by Nick to get a job to help steady the Laines’ finances and avert foreclosure on the guesthouse, Aidan Wharton* as Gene sees his hopes of becoming a writer fading away. More sorrows to drown in drink are triggered by his ladylove, Chiara Trentalange as Kate Draper, when she announces that she is already engaged to be more pragmatically married. The ensuing Wharton-Trentalange duet on “I Want You” was probably the most dramatically apt of the evening.

Might have been more impactful in a smaller house with cleaner sound.

McPherson puts plenty of life onstage that never quite projects to Belk’s empty upper balconies. Aside from Mr. Perry; a wild bible salesman with a frayed clerical collar arrives with Joe, Jeremy Webb as Reverend Marlowe; and our sometime narrator, Alan Ariano as Dr. Walker, pops up periodically at the boarding house, making his rounds. Of the two, Webb as Marlowe is far more dangerous – almost dramatic – for his fugitive status and his poverty make his sales pitches aggressively hard-sell and his fingers tend to get sticky when he thinks nobody is looking.

With so many plots already brewing in Duluth, McPherson thoughtfully adds a family from the outside world that tends to add variety to the inbred local atmosphere of seediness and decay. The well-dressed Burkes are a fallen uppercrust family, as iconic during the Great Depression as the downtrodden wanderers crossing the Dust Bowl to sunny California.

Both Mr. Burke, who lost his business during the Great Crash, and Mrs. Burke, who lost a chunk of her patrician trust and self-confidence as a result, are on the lookout for new opportunities, not necessarily with each other. Both David Benoit and Jill Van Velzer, playing the elder Burkes, also sit down occasionally to play the drums, adding a new musical level to the evening while expanding the social context of North Country. Benoit gets to be more decadent, proposing to manage a ring comeback for Joe.

The couple’s son Elias has some sort of learning problem, so D’Marreon Alexander* gets a breakout moment in Act 2 – parallel to Blood’s with “Rolling Stone” in Act 1 – when Elias suddenly emerges from his cognitive cocoon with “Duquesne Whistle.” Doubly surprising for me, for “Duquesne” hurtles forward with the drive of Dylan’s best work and because I’d never heard the 2012 composition before. Wow.

I wish I could praise any of McPherson’s dramatic moments as highly. We’re not likely to experience a theatre week such as the current one for ages to come. Two living playwrights who have translated works by Anton Chekhov – and do not hesitate to use his methods – have pieces running simultaneously in Metrolina. Arguably, McPherson’s book, repeatedly stressing the consequences of inaction, has more of the Russian master’s most distinctive flavor.

But Stephen Karam’s The Humans, set in post-9/11 and post-Hurricane-Sandy Chinatown, will rock your world. Anyone torn between the two would be best-advised to bypass the Broadway Lights production at the Belk and head up Interstate 77 to Davidson, where Karam’s masterwork is playing at the Armour Street Theatre.

*Note: On opening night, Wharton, who normally portrays Elias, replaced Ben Biggers (sick all week ) as Gene. Alexander replaced Wharton as Elias and Nolan Jr. subbed for Matt Manuel.

“One Year to Die” Is a Premiere to Be Proud of in Matthews

Review: One Year to Die at Matthews Playhouse

By Perry Tannenbaum

September 11 has been part of LaBorde family lore much longer than for nearly all other American families. On that date in 1943, the USS Rowan was sunk in Mediterranean waters by German torpedoes after delivering an arms shipment to Italy to combat the Nazis. Local actor/director/playwright/school principal Charles Laborde’s Uncle Joe was among those aboard the Navy destroyer lost on that day, along with 201 other officers and crew. Only 71 survived the attack, rescued by the USS Bristol.

Curiously enough, the official date of Uncle Joe’s death is listed as September 12, 1944 – still a full five years before Charles was born – because none of those 202 bodies was recovered. As the Naval Officer informs Charles’s grandma Edwina with full-dress formality in LaBorde’s new play, One Year to Die, Joe was officially “missing” after the Rowan was torpedoed until one year and one day had elapsed. Then the Naval Death Certificate would be issued.

The world premiere of LaBorde’s play opened last week at Matthews Playhouse and runs through September 29 at the Fullwood Theater.

While it’s intriguing to wonder how Charles’s grandparents, Oscar and Edwina, coped with this limbo year of unofficial death – maybe holding out hopes of a miracle for a few weeks or months – it’s hardly the stuff of sustained suspense and drama. To achieve these enhancements, LaBorde applies some research, imagination, and basic math.

Time-travelling back to his grandparents’ farm in Hessmer, Louisiana, which wasn’t big enough to be incorporated until 1955, LaBorde modestly multiplies the number of local families impacted by the Rowan’s sinking. Now two moms down in Cajun country are grieving over their lost sons, Edwina and Ella Broussard, an ailing black washerwoman who takes in laundry from the richer families in the region.

Everybody seems to know everyone else around town, so when the Naval Officer shows up on Edwina’s front porch to deliver his sad news, she can point him in the right direction toward the part of town where Ella presumably lives. The fact that LaBorde has invented her makes no difference. But it’s going to take far more resourcefulness from the playwright for him to even begin exploring the racial divisions and tensions that prevailed in the little town of Hessmer when the dark days of Jim Crow hadn’t been dispelled, even after African Americans were welcomed by our military.

No, for that to happen, LaBorde had to find a compelling reason for Ella to appear at Edwina’s doorstep. Indeed, to fully engage us and win our admiration for Ella, the mission driving her to Edwina’s farmhouse had to be compelling enough for her to knock on the LaBordes’ front door. Now you have an action sufficiently outré to set a little Jim Crow town in turmoil.

What on earth could be so important for Ella to commit such an effrontery?

She has enough imagination and ambition to match her chutzpah, for she plans to pay tribute to both her son Lonnie and Edwina’s Joe – along with all the other 200 soldiers aboard the USS Rowan who perished fighting the Nazis. The tribute will be a quilt of 202 gold stars on a field of blue, with the two stars representing Lonnie and Joe conspicuously larger than the 200 others.

The project is worthy, and quilting 202 squares with 202 perfectly centered stars, along with a suitable border to frame it all, seems to be a sufficiently monumental task to occupy two women for the better part of a year – once the ladies have solved the math problem of how to symmetrically configure those 202 stars. Director Dennis Delamar certainly isn’t going to gloss over the problem of getting the math exactly right.

But that front door thing is key (even though Edwina is proud to say it’s unlocked) and obliges LaBorde’s family to be tested onstage in a manner they probably never faced in real life. To the playwright’s credit, neither of his kinfolk is perfect in receiving their surprise guest – who should, as everybody in Hessmer knows, be knocking at the back door.

That is the attitude here from both Edwina and Oscar when they first encounter this unfathomable cheek. Just to double-underline the point that the LaBordes are not perfection, Edwina rebuffs Ella twice. Yet we soon see that they are willing to evolve, uniting with Ella’s cause once they’ve heard her out. Granting her the unique privilege of entering by the front door. But what about the rest of the town? Here is where LaBorde can inject suspense, drama, and a sprinkling of terror.

Joshua Webb’s set design, with its wood-burning stove and perpetual coffee pot centerstage, has a rusticity that allows for a wisp of primal danger and violence lurking beneath its humble domesticity. Both kitchens are lovingly dressed, but sightlines are a rather dreadful problem: unless you’re seated in the center or toward the right side of the Fullwood Theater audience, you might go home never knowing that Oscar had been visible building his stone wall – hidden by the Broussard kitchen to those of us sitting on left – in defiance of stone-throwing yahoos (or KKK) repeatedly breaking the LaBordes’ windows.

Complemented by Sean Ordway’s moody lighting design, which casts a spell even before the action begins, Yvette Moten’s costume designs have the timelessness of Norman Rockwell paintings on the covers of old-timey Saturday Evening Post magazines. It’s hard to resist the visual charm of this production as Delamar frames one memorable tableau after another. From the time we first see the spirits of Young Lonnie and Joe (Aaron Scott Brown and Bennett Thurgood in rather touching non-speaking roles) to the great starry quilt reveal, Delamar lavishes a series of freeze-frames that are a memorable slideshow within the show.

Some discreet subtraction is applied to LaBorde family history that results in somewhat awkward casting for the leading ladies, Paula Baldwin and Corlis Hayes. Nowadays, we’d expect moms of strapping young military enlistees to be in their forties or fifties, not 60+ – but the real Edwina had way more offspring than two sons, so she actually was aged 60 at the time of Joe’s death.

So sitting at her kitchen table, sustaining her renown as the county’s quilting queen, and looking rather matronly, Baldwin is exactly what LaBorde envisioned as Edwina. Life on the bayou does take its toll here, so Joe will merely be the beginning of Edwina’s ennobling griefs. Baldwin endures these crucibles like so many we’ve seen from her over her distinguished QC stage career, with signature stoicism. Neither Delamar nor LaBorde had any hesitation in casting her.

As for Hayes, I first encountered her at Johnson C. Smith in 1988 when she directed for colored girls at the tender age of “24” – just guesstimating here – so she’s also perfectly cast as Ella. Maybe the most heartwarming aspect of this production is the gift LaBorde has given her with a world premiere credit in this role. Confronted by both black and white folk, Ella is a far more nuanced and varied character than we normally see Hayes portray.

We instantly see the strong spine that brings her to Edwina’s door – twice – and we see her pragmatism in backing off the first time. She seethes back home and resolves to repeat her effrontery, still knocking at the front door. Then there’s the beautiful passive aggression when Edwina belatedly agrees to allow Ella over her front threshold. Hayes pointedly hesitates, referencing the insults she has previously absorbed and the dignity she maintains.

LaBorde has obviously labored over Ella, for she has her maintaining this steely dignity when confronted by her minister, Reverend Johnson, and even when she is complimented by white churchlady Nodie Ardoin, Edwina’s nemesis. Yet there’s one more telling Easter egg to be found in LaBorde’s script, that Hayes and Delamar brilliantly emphasize. As soon as Ella gets the first clear sign from Oscar that she might not be welcome in his kitchen, we see Hayes instantly cowering, clutching her pocketbook, and readying for a quick exit.

That’s the kind of good sense Ella has, for all of her sturdy spine. We can be thankful that this rich role has finally found Hayes.

If it weren’t obvious before, One Year to Die signals that Matthews Playhouse has joined the ranks of Metrolina community theatres that consistently present pro-grade work. The standard set by Hayes and Baldwin is met by the men who portray the Hessmer clergy, Steve Price as the soulful Father Morton only slightly upstaged by the charismatic Keith Logan as Rev Johnson. LaBorde would have done better by both of these religious leaders if he had refrained from broadly hinting that Catholic and Baptist ministers follow the exact same script when upbraiding wayward lady congregants.

Aside from Oscar, the other guys we see onstage are military, so we never sample the boorishness or the toxic philosophies of the town’s window breakers. The military cameos, however, are beautifully handled by Vic Sayegh as the Naval Officer who rocks the LaBordes’ world and Brian DeDora, who appears as The Sailor after the Normandy invasion.

Possibly, LaBorde dropped the idea of including the rock-slingers onstage, for Nodie bears the same last name as one of them. Robin Conchola as Nodie is actually the more benign of the “watchin’ committee” that darkens Edwina’s doorstep to register their condemnation, a lot more conflicted than Barbara Dial Mager as Sarah Jeansonne. It’s Conchola as Nodie who has the chance to be rebuffed by Hayes. Sarah is slower to evolve, so we can despise Mager longer, if only for her horrid wig.

As Oscar, also aged 60 when Joe perished at sea, Henk Bouhuys is delightfully homespun, although there’s still enough Jim Crow ingrained in him to be shocked by the ladies’ audacity. Bouhuys continues to project ambivalence long after Oscar decides the memorial project is worth doing no matter how the rest of Hessmer may think. Once he gives Edwina his assent, his loyalty is as steadfast as his love.

Whether it was absent-mindedness or a directive from Delamar, Bouhuys only intermittently sounded Cajun on opening night – while the rest of the players hardly bothered with an accent. So it was startling when Oscar became full-out Cajun just before intermission after a cowardly attack on the LaBorde farmhouse. Out of nowhere, the accent was stunningly convincing, adding some sharp ethnic spice to the most fiery monologue of the night.

Photos by Perry Tannenbaum