Family and Romance Tug at an Iowa Housewife in “Madison County”

Review:  The Bridges of Madison County

By Perry Tannenbaum

When the touring production of The Bridges of Madison County came to Knight Theater in the spring of 2016, I can easily imagine CPCC Theatre set designer James Duke watching the rusticated wooden bridge as it descended from the fly loft. “We can do that!” he would be thinking to himself. And nearly 17 months later at Halton Theater, he has done it, in a spare, taciturn design style that works well with the Midwest – in this case, Iowa – ably complemented by Jeff Childs’ lighting design.

One additional inverted V goes a long way to simulating the lonely Johnson homestead where roaming National Geographic photographer Robert Kincaid falls in love with Francesca, a stoically transplanted Italian housewife marooned on the prairie after raising a wholesome 4H family. Scenery pieces at ground level aren’t quite as mistakable for the touring version, largely because crew and cast shuffle them in and out of the wings with conspicuously less professional polish.

Once everything is set in place, the sound of the current CPCC Theatre production consistently overachieves. I can also imagine Rebecca Cook-Carter, CPCC Opera Theatre’s artistic director, looking at the touring version of Madison County and saying, “We can do that!!” Look down in the orchestra pit at the Halton and you won’t find brass, woodwinds, and batteries of electric guitars and keyboards. Musicians are overwhelmingly classical string players, and their conductor, Craig Estep, has made valuable contributions to both theatrical and operatic productions at CP in the past.

In adapting the wildly popular bestseller by Robert James Waller, James Robert Brown’s score does occasionally soar toward opera in its ambitions when we listen to his melodies and orchestrations, both of which won Tony Awards. But there’s a very relaxed vibe to the roving photographer that contrasts with Francesca’s operatic frustrations, swooping toward chamber and country music. When the storyline detours toward the nosy neighbors and the raucous State Fair, velvety classical violins are likely to mutate into bluegrass fiddles.

If she hadn’t been on my radar in 2011, playing a supporting role in the CPCC Summer Theatre production of Hello, Dolly! I would have thought that Sarah Henkel was a genuine Italian neophyte as Francesca. Hand movements were shy, awkward, and clichéd at first when we looked at the opening wartime scene that tied Francesca’s fate to the uniformed Bud, who pales to humdrum farmer by the time we see him again in Iowa.

With Robert’s arrival, the shy awkwardness begins to work for Henkel, and as the couple’s intimacy increases, the fumbling and tentativeness dissolve, so there’s no longer a disconnect between Henkel’s actions and her soaring mezzo-soprano voice. I still missed a lot of the lyrics she was singing, but as passion took the place of preliminary exposition, that difficulty mattered much less. Compared with the virtually indecipherable Elizabeth Stanley on the national tour, Henkel was clarity itself.

Since I raved about Andrew Samonsky as the lanky dreamboat who captivated Francesca on tour, its no small compliment to say that Ryan Deal is nearly as fine as Robert. Deal may even be better at getting into the vagabond country lean of the music. As passionately as many local theatergoers might feel that he will never surpass his previous autumn exploits in Phantom of the Opera and Les Miz at the Halton, Deal delivers here, seemingly more comfortable in this music.

While Deal is not likely to be mistaken for a lean, rugged Marlboro man, the gap between him and Samonsky might have been bridged at least partially if Deal, along with director Cary Kugler and costume designer Rachel Engstrom, had seriously considered what a hippie looked like in 1965. To get instantly labeled as a hippie by a provincial Iowan, more hair and looser, more casual clothes are required. An untucked sport shirt just won’t do.

Politeness and consideration, mixed with a heavy sprinkling of artistic intensity, are also part of Robert’s appeal, and Deal conspires very nicely with Henkel on the chemistry of the mutual seduction. Looking at how Kugler directs and how Engstrom dresses the townsfolk, you will likely think that Marsha Norman borrowed heavily from Meredith Willson’s Music Man in crafting the Iowans in her script.

Next door neighbors, Taffy Allen as Marge and Jeff Powell as Charlie, are exactly as you would expect. She’s unsatisfied unless she’s ferretted out every spec of scandalous gossip while, even when she’s most annoying, he can be mollified with a fresh slice of pie. Closer to the vortex of the central romance, Francesca’s family is humdrum rather than silly. Steven Martin as Bud, the husband, is a solid and confident blockhead, but we get the hint from Martin that some of his cocksureness comes from Francesca’s support.

Yet Bud is the primary reason that the kids need Mom. Gabe Saienni as Michael needs Mom to help him convince Dad that there is an alternative future for him that doesn’t include taking over the farm. Sharing the role with Olivia Aldridge from night to night, Leigh Ann Hrischenko convinces us that Carolyn’s needs are even more acute and poignant. Mom stands as buffer between Carolyn and her father’s brusqueness, and despite the fact that she may have raised a prize-winning steer, it’s Mom who must bolster the younger sib’s determination and self-confidence.

As the romance heats up, Francesca must choose between her inner drive to break free and globetrot with Robert or the tug of her loyalty, calling upon her to remain in Iowa with a family that needs her. After two hours and 18 minutes, plus a 20-minute intermission, you wouldn’t want the choice to be easy, would you?

 

“The Christians” Has Much to Say About America Under The Donald

Review: The Christians

By Perry Tannenbaum

When Pastor Paul picks up his microphone at an unspecified megachurch to begin his sermon in Lucas Hnath’s The Christians, he tells his congregants – thousands of them, flocking to the Sunday service – that there is a crack in their church. Describing this crack in a four-part sermon, Paul weaves together a 20-year history of the astonishing growth of his church with two epiphanies, both involving conversations with God.

One of these epiphanies results in Paul’s marriage to the beautiful Elizabeth, who sits proudly next to her husband on the mainstage. The other leads to a new perception of God’s goodness and justice, one that rejects the idea of eternal damnation for all people, no matter how virtuous, who have not accepted Jesus as their savior.

So on the same Sunday that Paul can announce that the vast church property has finally been fully paid for, including its “parking lot that you can get lost in,” he also proclaims that his church no longer believes in hell.

Ironically, the crack that Paul described in his sermon was abstract, not previously perceived by anyone else in the assembly, but by the end of the Sunday service, Paul has created a real, tangible crack. Unable to accept the new doctrine, Associate Pastor Joshua walks out after some spirited disputation from the pulpit. The very visible rifts won’t end there.

As a native New Yorker and someone who takes his Bible seriously – at least the Old Testament – this opening scene combines two of the irritating qualities that I discovered in Christians when I emigrated from Gotham. So many of them converse so regularly with God, a most exclusive privilege in the Bible that I was raised on, that they must believe that their God is handling as many simultaneous personal conversations as Ma Bell.

More irritating is the whole spectacle of Christians who “wrestle” with their faith and feel like other people should care. So when I saw the world premiere at the Humana Festival of New Plays in 2014, I often found the Actor’s Theatre of Louisville production tedious and bland. Later that year, adjudicating the 2015 Steinberg Award as a member of the American Theatre Critics Association panel, Hnath’s script appeared in my Inbox.

Although the panel kept Hnath’s drama among the elite scripts into the final voting, for me, it was definitely middle of the pack among the 27 works we considered. Did I miss something when I read the script? Or perhaps did Actor’s Theatre of Louisville miss something when they brought it to life?

I was hoping so when I entered Booth Playhouse, for Steve Umberger and his Playworks Group were bringing The Christians to town in its local premiere with a cast that evoked Umberger’s years as artistic director of Charlotte Repertory Theatre. In his return to Charlotte, Umberger was also backed by a design team associated with his greatest directorial triumph, the 1995 production of Angels in America, Parts 1 and 2.

From the outset, Umberger’s answer to both of my questions was a resounding yes. The Playworks church choir – “the bigger the better,” Hnath urges in his playscript – is far more energetic and spirited in Charlotte than it was in Louisville, led by Dareion Malone from an electric keyboard and populated with singers who can rock the house when they solo. Set design by Joe Gardner is slicker, more dynamic than the Humana production, with twin projection screens above the action cuing the congregation on the lyrics of the songs and the key points of Pastor Paul’s sermon.

Brian Robinson decisively exorcises blandness from this production as soon as he launches into Pastor Paul’s sermon, slick and confident with the mic and moderately charismatic so that he never becomes a Joel Osteen caricature. There is enough self-confidence and self-absorption to qualify as hubris, yet Pastor Paul’s geniality and approachability keep him far short of Oedipal arrogance. Paul tells Joshua he can leave his church, not that he must. Big difference, and Robinson gets it.

But it’s Chandler McIntyre’s performance as Sister Elizabeth, arguably McIntyre’s best ever, that crystallizes what the Louisville version missed. Embedded in Paul’s narrative about how he met his future wife on an airplane is a theme that is more relevant to us all today than whether hell exists. Here he passes along a note via a helpful stewardess, quoted from an NYU English prof that serves as the play’s epigraph: “I feel an uncontrollable urge to communicate with you, but I find the distance barrier insurmountable.”

It’s a pretty classy pickup line – until it becomes something totally unexpected in a bedroom scene unlike any that you’ve ever seen before. All through this drama, everybody speaks into a microphone, and there are no scenery shifts. Those conditions are only mildly incongruous when we see Elder Jay, representing the church’s governing board, coming into Paul’s office, picking up a microphone, and discussing the repercussions of Joshua’s defection.

Husband and wife picking up mics in the privacy of their bedroom takes the incongruity into comical territory. Sister Elizabeth starts off this climactic scene much as she has seemed before, a loyal, decorous, and diffident pastor’s wife. As Paul airs his suspicions and she reviews his breaches in respect and trust, we watch the quiet pulpit ornament grow into a whirlwind that could intimidate Job, let alone Paul.

Soon afterwards the question scribbled more than 20 years earlier on an airplane is reprised, but we see a different slant from Hnath on the insurmountable distance Paul has spoken of. In a way that hadn’t jumped at me off the pages of the playwright’s script nor the Louisville production, I can now see that Hnath is asking this: Can we work, pray, or even live together anymore after we’ve recognized that we fundamentally disagree?

It’s a very American question, transcending theology. Our nation rests on two very contradictory pillars – the narrow “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” dogmatism of the first Puritan settlers and the “liberty and justice for all” openness of the Deists who framed our Constitution. We probably thought the insurmountable distance between these outlooks had been permanently bridged long ago. What Humana and I didn’t see in 2014 was the election of 2016. A serious crack in our society has re-emerged.

We get fine performances from the rest of the cast that further humanize and texturize their disagreements. As Joshua, Jonavan Adams fumbles a bit in his disputation with his mentor – as he should, since the new doctrine has caught him off-guard and he’s explicitly “wrestling” with his mentor’s sermon. But Adams helps us focus on how much he would like to believe there isn’t a hell, for he vividly envisions his mom there.

April C. Turner emerges from the choir as Jenny, a troubled congregant whose questioning of Pastor Paul is even more powerful than Joshua’s – because she’s had the time to write down her thoughts and gather reactions from around the community in the wake of the schism. To a lesser extent than Sister Elizabeth, Turner grows more formidable right before our eyes as Jenny becomes more comfortable behind the microphone in the spotlight. There’s also a gentle hint that she becomes progressively more irritated and emboldened when Pastor Paul seems to be patronizing the seriousness of her concerns.

Before and during this huge turning point, Graham Smith makes his presence felt as Elder Jay. This isn’t the most towering performance we’ve seen from Smith – he was, after all, Roy Cohn, in Angels back in ’95 – but it ranks among his most rusticated. And the man can still make an exit. His private conversation with Pastor Paul, which had been most notable for me in getting across Jay’s practical business anxieties, registered more deeply this time around, for they also discuss Associate Pastor Joshua and bring out more about him than we knew.

Joshua not only harbors that “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” viewpoint, he’s been aggressively talking up hellfire on the streets of town. So Paul may actually have had Joshua in mind when he perceived a crack in his church, and his defection may not have been as sudden and unanticipated as it first appeared. Pastor P may be as cunning and calculating as Jenny suspects.

Needless to say, I found The Christians to be a far more substantial piece the third time around – and it’s not surprising to learn that Umberger first encountered it in the aftermath of the 2016 election. The revitalized impact of a production like this reminds us how important a professional theatre company can be in the cultural life of a city. Response from the audience during the post-performance talkback confirmed that a satisfying cross-section of people at Booth Playhouse can instantly get what The Christians is saying to us now.

We had that extra intellectual jolt in our community far more often during the years that Charlotte Rep became a prominent member League of Regional Theatres (LORT) under Umberger’s leadership. Umberger could possibly build his current Playworks enterprise to similar prominence, if The Christians draws the support it deserves.

A Labor of Rockin’ Love and Face-Melting Fury

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Preview:  American Idiot

By Perry Tannenbaum

Anger, alienation, disillusionment, and frustration were all part of the high-octane fuel that powered Green Day’s punk rock opera, American Idiot, in 2004. The group’s first post-9/11 CD struck a chord, winning awards on both sides of the Atlantic, including Best Rock Album at the Grammys. The targets of the group’s wrath – media, suburbia, Bush Era militarism, and ubiquitous TV – remained fresh enough for Green Day lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong and stage director Michael Mayer to transform the celebrated album into a Broadway musical in 201o.

Starting their second consecutive season in exile from their planned-and-purchased permanent home on Freedom Drive, still tangled up in a red tape mess of zoning, safety, and building regulations – on an existing building, mind you – Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte has a bit of pent-up anger, frustration, and disillusionment of their own. They may be wrapping all of that into their incoming American Idiot grenade.

The Charlotte premiere opens in previews this week on the campus of Queens University, the second consecutive show that Actor’s Theatre has brought to Hadley Theater. Official opening night will happen next Wednesday.

ATC artistic director Chip Decker not only empathizes with the angst of American Idiot, he gets the band.

“I have loved Green Day’s music since the [1991] album Kerplunk,” Decker boasts. “American Idiot dropped in 2004, and I could not listen to it enough. I think we were all reeling still from 9/11, the wars, etc., and this album gave a release valve to many who were angry, scared, lost, disillusioned and looking for hope in a difficult time.”

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The leading men feel at least as deeply about the music as their director. In fact, you can gauge their respective ages by when they climbed aboard the Green Day bandwagon. Matt Carlson, who plays Johnny, the Jesus of Suburbia hero from the album, says he latched onto American Idiot when he was about 14, and that it was the first album he learned to play on guitar from beginning to end.

Jeremy DeCarlos, a mainstay in the finest Actor’s Theatre productions since 2004 –onstage or thrashing his guitar – plays Johnny’s alter ego, St. Jimmy, leading the suburban Jesus into citified debaucheries. He says he got the Green Day bug during the summer of 1994, when “Basket Case” was a hit single off the Dookie album.

“I felt like Billie Joe wasn’t just singing to me, but as me in a way,” DeCarlos recalls. “I ran out and bought the album and wore a hole into it. When my mother presented me with my first guitar, I told myself that if I ever learned how to play one song on it, it would be Green Day’s ‘Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).’ It took me roughly a month, but the first song I ever learned on guitar was a Green Day song!”

So how does a punk rock opera with three characters become a musical that can fill a Broadway stage? Well, Armstrong and Mayer added new characters, and Green Day chipped in with more music, conveniently ripped off from 21st Century Breakdown, the follow-up album to American Idiot.

Now instead of one disgruntled Jesus itching to escape suburbia, there are three – Johnny, Will, and Tunny – along with three women. Johnny and Tunny do escape, respectively to the wicked city and the US Army, but Will won’t, dutifully staying behind when he learns that Heather (the only woman in the show with a name) is pregnant with his child. So yes, we get three depressing outcomes to wail over.

“The book is wafer thin, single ply generic toilet paper thin,” Decker admits, “but I feel like that was a very intentional choice. I was able to find my own voice and feelings in the album, and I think that is what the story lines do in this. They present a thought and feeling, but do not try and insist that the viewer (or listener) accept that view as the truth.”

And just because he reveres the music doesn’t mean that Carlson worships the suburban Jesus he’s delivering to us as the leading man. Johnny actually comes off as something of a jerk when Carlson describes him, and he isn’t sure we’ll like him: “He is the edgy, cocky punk guy you knew in high school who never did anything with his life.”

But the music! That draws a different reaction from the young rocker. Like many of Green Day’s faithful, Carlson was a bit leery and disappointed when he first heard that the punk band was taking their act to Broadway. Had to be an artistic sellout, right?

When he eventually encountered to final product, Carlson was pleasantly surprised. “The American Idiot album is so different versus the stage score,” he opines. “I love the simple punk rock sound of the album, but maybe because I’m into musical theatre, I like the stage version even better. On stage, the concept album is made more complete with the play script and music.”

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There’s more music in the musical, but all of it remains guitar-and-drum driven. Instead of muscling up with strings, winds, and brass, Broadway orchestrator/arranger Tom Kitt beefed up the sound with more voices and harmonies. You’ll hear a pronounced difference, to take just one example, if you listen to the Broadway cast album version of “Give Me Novacaine.”

The lyrics come through just a tad more clearly, as if we’re in a theater rather than concert hall. The sound of the steel guitar is noticeably richer, with a more relaxed Hawaiian flavor. With the onset of the thrashing section, the crescendo is more dramatic, louder drums and added male voices yield an anthemic thrust. Reaching the soothing outro, we hear – can it be true? – a group of female backups caressing our ears.

But hold on a second. The prospect of seeing ATC musical director Ryan Stamey lead a Broadway-sized band into Hadley Theater isn’t any more likely than the possibility we’ll see over three dozen flat-screen TV monitors stuck up on the back wall. One violin and one cello are promised, but the instrumental congregation will be trimmed from eight to five, a definite U-turn toward true punk rock intimacy.

Yes, we’ll see two guitars, just like on Broadway.

Decker has been known to strap on a bass guitar himself, and he often lurks in the wings as a sound designer when he isn’t acting or directing. One of the most admirable Actor’s Theatre achievements over the years has been their ability to deliver the youthful energy of such high voltage musicals as Hedwig and Rock of Ages without repulsing their graying subscribers who prefer decibel levels below triple digits.

“You know, this is always a tough balancing act,” Decker says, “because our bands are legit power musicians who want everything to go to 11! But there is so much story in the lyrics of musicals, that if you can’t hear the words, you don’t know the story. So yeah, keeping it balanced and rocking is the challenge. Our cast is doing a great job telling their story, and I think people will dig it. Or you can just go and rock the fuck out. Either way, your face will be melted.”

One-Two Punch of Surprises Powers “Eat the Runt”

Review: Eat the Runt

By Perry Tannenbaum

Even before you set out for the Charlotte Art League, the quest for parking, and the unique Eat the Runt from Donna Scott Productions, you need to remember one key preparation: bring your smartphone. Yes, you’ll be asked to turn off or silence the device when the action is set to begin, but before that, you’ll be asked to join the remainder of the audience in choosing the cast for that evening’s performance.

Eight actors vie for the seven roles listed in your program. The audience goes through the cast list one by one, voting their choice for each role on a group texting setup by punching the number assigned to each actor. Playwright Avery Crozier gives each of the characters at his (or her) second-tier art museum a unisex name, so any member of the ensemble directed by Tonya Bludsworth might play any of the roles on a given night.

To execute all of the possible 40,320 casting permutations, each actor must be prepared to play all of the roles, wear all of the costumes, and pounce on cues from all his or her castmates. That not only multiplies what each character has to memorize and the number of costumes designer Luci Wilson has to create, it also multiplies the amount of time that the ensemble must devote to rehearsal – even though they can’t begin to cover all the possible scene partners they will have during the actual run of Runt performances.

On the Saturday night that I attended, I voted with the audience on four of our choices: Ericka Ross as grantwriter Chris, Stephen Seay as human resources coordinator Jean, Tracie Frank as curator of modern art Hollis, and Kevin Shimko as museum director Pinky. Andrea King won the juiciest – and most demanding – role as Merritt, interviewing for a vacant position at the museum. Kevin Aoussou as director of development Royce and Jenn Grabenstetter as museum trustee Sidney rounded out the cast.

Somehow Stephen West-Rogers’ previous exploits in theatrical versions of Fight Club and Trainspotting had escaped the notice of Donna Scott fans. Nor did his new clean-shaven look bring fresh evocations of his ruggedness. As a result, West-Rogers was the odd man out, sent away to take the night off when Shimko snagged the last remaining role.

After this poignant moment, presided over by Scott, we were asked to give the cast a few minutes to sort things out, a reasonable enough request, I thought. When they returned, it was virtually impossible to find any indication that this wasn’t the fixed cast that had rehearsed Eat the Runt every night. King especially was a delight as Merritt, deftly bringing out the applicant’s uncanny ability to take the ideal approach for each museum official who interviewed her.

Merritt’s chameleonic shifts bespoke either a dangerously unstable personality or a cunning Machiavel – one perhaps gifted with psychic powers. Whether it’s the hemorrhoidal HR coordinator, the horny development director, the coke-addicted curator, or the defensive trustee, Merritt always seems to pounce on the perfect approach without any need for probing. It’s only when she’s spouting Ayn Rand to the museum director that Merritt drops hints of a supernatural gift.

Forget about the gimmickry at the top of the evening, it’s very rare for any playwright to be able to detonate a walloping surprise at the end of Act 1 and at the end of Act 2. Crozier not only achieved that, but the surprise at the end of the evening slickly explains away much of the puzzlement we may experience as the series of job interviews metastasizes and explodes.

A few days later, some of the deception that had been played on me became clearer. By then, I couldn’t regret the fun ride that Eat the Runt had taken me on. It may be radically different for you if your casting choices turn out to be more incongruous, risqué, or preposterous. That may increase the already plentiful comedy.

Alfred’s “Brown Tale” Is Very Chicago and Very Funny

Review: A Brown Tale

By Perry Tannenbaum

Notwithstanding the lingering leeriness I feel about going to see them, one-person shows can be memorable and truly special. Billy Crystal’s 700 Sundays, Frank Gorshin’s Say Goodnight, Gracie and Colin Quinn’s Long Story Short stand out as the best that I’ve seen by men, while I’d point to Julie Harris’s Belle of Amherst, Lily Tomlin’s The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe, and Tova Feldshuh’s Golda’s Balcony as the best by women – plus two more at Spoleto this year, Avital Lvova’s Angel and Ayodele Casel’s While I Have the Floor.

Well, all of those stellar performers need to make some room for James T. Alfred, who has written and is currently performing A Brown Tale at Spirit Square. The OnQ Performing Arts production, directed by Lou Bellamy, runs through September 23, and you need to catch it or miss perhaps the funniest one-person show I’ve ever seen.

Quinn’s tour-de-force is the only show I can remember that was as howlingly hilarious as Brown Tale, but Alfred may deserve the edge because Quinn took all of human history for his subject while Alfred confines himself to his own life. Unless you saw Alfred starring as Martin Luther King in a touring production of The Mountaintop at Booth Playhouse in 2014, you might not even recognize his name.

I had interviewed Alfred for a Mountaintop preview feature three years ago, but while it was clear that the actor was closely acquainted with the playwright who penned that Olivier Award-winning script, there was never a hint that he himself was a writer. Alfred’s admiration for Bellamy certainly came through, and the esteem must be mutual, since Alfred is a permanent member of the Penumbra Theatre, the great African American theatre company founded by Bellamy in 1976 in St. Paul.

So aside from MLK, the Penumbra connection ensures that Alfred’s past credits include a swath of August Wilson plays, not exactly a harbinger of the rich array of broad physical comedy that A Brown Tale offers. Speaking to Alfred a few years ago, I got the word that he was currently based in Chicago. His performance at Duke Energy Theater shows that he and Chicago go back a long way, most memorably during years living with his grandma in the projects.

We get to hear about how déclassé the high-rise projects were compared to the equally humble squat dwellings that surrounded them. But the most amusing comparisons began at the top of the show when Alfred introduced us to his very rightfully estranged parents. Mom was a devout churchgoing Christian, while Dad was a spawn of Satan and emulator of James Brown – plus a hypochondriacal DJ forever questing after VA compensation for his PTSD.

What must have united them, for the short time it took to conceive James, were their foul mouths. Mom was the rare phenomenon of a cursing Christian, and Dad couldn’t finish a sentence with punctuating it with an expletive.

More daring comparisons occurred later after Alfred went to college, where we get the inside scoop on the difference between getting over on black women and picking up whites. A parallel episode, with greater scope for mimicry and physical comedy, subsequently compares the service we can expect at a black-staffed McDonald’s and what we routinely encounter in a “pink” neighborhood McD’s. Probably not material a white performer could get away with, which adds to the zest.

Alfred isn’t always going for the funny bone. There are segments about the neighborhood candy store, the local Boys & Girls Club, local schools, and the annual rite of shopping for new school clothes for the new school year. You get a hint of warmth in these vignettes, particularly when Alfred recalls how neighbors in the projects kept an eye out for the welfare of each other’s kids, and he spills over into anger recalling the politics that killed family life in the projects.

Three extended scenes are at the heart of A Brown Tale and why you’ll enjoy it. The first is a colorful travelogue taking you room-by-room through a project apartment, beginning with the daily conversion of the kitchen into a hair salon. Our end point is Alfred’s initiation into the world of substitute teaching – taking over a special education class that’s off in an annex separated from the main building of an elementary school.

But the greatest crowdpleaser last Friday night was clearly the evocation of a Sunday church service, with cameos from the preacher, the choir director, and a church elder, plus a coda on Christian dating. The highlight here was the elder’s testimony, beginning in subdued awkwardness and ramping up to a frenzied climax of shouting, high-stepping righteousness, sprinkled with some babbling in tongues.

It can’t be easy to walk the tightrope between crude mockery and hilarious gusto when you’re onstage evoking an impoverished special needs child or an ecstatic churchgoer bathed in the Blood of the Lamb. You need to be able to trust an objective pair of eyes watching you perform and sculpting a scene. Clearly, Alfred and Bellamy are a very special team that’s able to hit exactly the right tone, and we’re very lucky that OnQ brought them here so we can cherish their masterful teamwork.

Angels Provocateur Returns as Conciliator

Preview: The Christians

By Perry Tannenbaum

There’s plenty of history between Steve Umberger and the Queen City, stretching back to 1976 when he founded the Actor’s Contemporary Ensemble. That company became Charlotte Repertory Theatre, which gave us an epic production of Angels in America, Parts 1 and 2, in 1996. On the wings of Umberger’s supreme achievement as Rep’s artistic director came a firestorm of local homophobia and negative national publicity that strafed the cultural landscape of this city like nothing before or since.

Reverberations from that controversy kept rumbling for years afterward, resulting in the eventual ouster of Umberger in 2002, and the self-immolation of the company he founded by a rogue board of directors in 2005. In an acrimonious parting shot in the announcement closing Rep down, board chairman William Parmelee charged that Charlotte had little interest in supporting professional theatre.

Well, Umberger is back, and he isn’t here to stir up any new controversies or settle old scores. He is here to remind us that differences of opinion don’t need to be acrimonious – and maybe, just maybe to prove that Parmelee was dead wrong.

Picking a drama that can achieve those aims wasn’t simple, but Umberger and his PlayWorks Group chose Lucas Hnath’s The Christians, a work that premiered in 2014 at the prestigious Humana Festival in Louisville and went on to win acclaim in Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, and off-Broadway. Hnath made a bigger New York splash earlier this year on Broadway when A Doll’s House, Part 2, his sequel to Henrik Ibsen’s famed feminist drama, picked up eight Tony Award nominations.

Umberger honed in on Hnath before the playwright’s Broadway triumph – at exactly the right moment.

“I first read it right after the election,” Umberger recalls, “when everyone was starting to find everyone else’s viewpoint contemptible. I wondered if there was a play out there that would truly represent everyone fairly and let them tell their side of it in a way that would be heard. Then I found The Christians.”

Set in a megachurch, The Christians fits Charlotte like a glove. After building up his church from a storefront acorn to a mighty oak, Pastor Paul delivers a progressive sermon that proposes to take his church and all who belong to it on a spiritual hairpin turn. Because in a recent conversation with God, God told Paul that there is no hell.

Quite a bombshell for the associate pastor whom Paul has mentored, for church elders who have backed and supported Paul for 20 years, and for his wife Elizabeth, who was blindsided by her husband’s bold new doctrine. So are many members of the congregation, which now numbers in the thousands. They have believed strongly in Pastor Paul, but everyone isn’t ready to be redirected like sheep into strange new beliefs.

It’s as if a Republican were elected President and told his party that they were mean.

Only there’s a bond between these people as they wrestle with their faith amid the fallout from Paul’s sermon. Spiritually, how far is Associate Pastor Joshua willing to bend and still serve his mentor’s church in good conscience? Administratively, how can Elder Jay keep supporting his church’s founder if there are massive defections from the flock? And personally, how can Elizabeth forgive Paul for not consulting her on a move that could have such a dramatic impact on his livelihood and their family?

Yes, there is mutual love and respect between all of these Christians. Yet the issues are substantial, and Paul, the visionary leader, may be the most selfish and inconsiderate in the group.

Umberger gets to reunite with some of the same suspects who worked with him decades ago on Angels – set designer Joe Gardner, lighting guru Eric Windbreaker, and actor Graham Smith, who made Roy Cohen such a demonic firebrand. Two other Rep vets are in the cast, playing the lead couple. Chandler McIntyre last hooked up Umberger and Rep in Wit (2001), and Brian Robinson, playing Pastor Paul, is a two-time CL Actor of the Year who played key roles in three CL Shows of the Year: Malice Aforethought (1992) and Falsettos (1993) for Rep, and Take Me Out (2004) with Actor’s Theatre.

More recently – and more to the point – Robinson gave a fine account of Father Flynn in another religious cliffhanger, John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, playing opposite Umberger’s wife, actress Rebecca Koon. That North Carolina Stage Company actually toured Charlotte with that production in 2008 after Robinson had moved to Atlanta.

“When I lived and worked as an actor here from 1988 until 2008, the city was teeming with homegrown theatre. It’s certainly not all gone, but it is certainly greatly diminished,” says Robinson. “Rebecca and I had done Doubt together, and our friendship became quite close. In August 2016, I was exploring the idea of creating some theatre. Steve was the one of the first people I thought of when considering with whom I would want to partner. I asked Rebecca what he was up to. Her response was, ‘I think he’s in a similar place. You should call him.’ And now here we are, one year later, about to unveil the fruits of this first collaboration.”

Burnt by the lackluster support from the CharMeck Arts & Science Council after the Angels flap when he led the Rep, Umberger is relying on a more conservative, self-sufficient financial model with PlayWorks Group.

“Even though [The Christians] is a single production, it’s set up so that it could actually pay for itself, if enough people come,” Umberger explains. “That could also conceivably be expanded to multiple plays in some sort of season that looks like a company. It doesn’t require massive corporate sponsorship or grant funding or big giving. It only takes enough people buying a ticket.”

Umberger is also tapping into homegrown talent he hasn’t worked with before in mounting his new venture. He saw Jonavan Adams in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom this past spring and has tapped him to play the schismatic Pastor Joshua. Strangely enough, Umberger had never met playwright/actress/director April C. Turner until Christians auditions, though her C.O.T.O.: Chocolate on the Outside drew a Loaf nomination for Best Drama back in 1997.

Turner turns up as Jenn, the truth-seeking congregant whose questions wreak havoc among Paul’s flock. Just as convinced as Hnath must have been in 2014 that Hitler was synonymous with evil, Jenn asks if Der Fuhrer is earmarked for hell.

“Steve is a pro,” says Turner of her first Umberger experience. “He is passionate about his work, and he owns his voice as a director. He’s a gentle director, yet firm in his vision. We spend a lot of time asking and answering questions about ‘what’s really going on’ and digging into the details of the needs of each character.”

Adams, who came to understand who Umberger was only after he was cast as Joshua, also chimes in with a glowing review.

“It’s surpassed my expectations in every way,” says Adams of the rehearsal process. “This play calls for a uniquely gifted director to be able to explore its nuanced complexity.”

But we still need to wonder whether Parmelee was right more than 12 years ago – whether Charlotte really is fertile ground for professional-grade homegrown theatre. Since Rep died in 2005, Charlotte hasn’t had an Actor’s Equity company that was part of LORT, the top-tier League of Regional Theatres.

It’s sad, says Robinson: “The citizens of Charlotte deserve and need a thriving professional theatre scene that is locally produced.”

Will we turn out to help make it happen? This may be our last best chance.

Triumphant “Aïda” Cast Slogs Through Tedious Sir Elton Score

Review: Aïda

By Perry Tannenbaum

Strip away the triumphal march, the trumpets, and the whole processional parade – complete with elephants, if you’re lucky enough to see the famed outdoor productions in Verona – and we discover that Verdi’s Aïda is a rather compact story. The captured Ethiopian princess is at one corner of the love triangle, opposite her slavemistress, Princess Amneris. Both of them love Radamès, the dynamic Egyptian general who is ordained by the goddess Isis to lead the Pharaoh’s army against the forces led by King Amonasro, Aïda’s father.

Pulling against the strong Aïda-Radamès chemistry are their loyalties to their warring countries, the jealousy of Amneris, and the obedience that Aïda owes to her father. Sealing their fates, Pharoah rewards Radamès for capturing Amonasro in battle by promising his daughter’s hand in marriage to the victorious chieftain.

It’s fascinating to watch how Linda Woolverton modernizes the 1871 libretto in her book for the Disney version currently running at Theatre Charlotte – with a couple of deft feminist touches layered on.

Raised on soaps and romcoms, modern audiences could never abide a torrid relationship between romantic leads already established before the curtain rises. So Woolverton efficiently wedges a mini-courtship into her storyline, with Radamès giving Aïda to Amneris as a gift to lighten his beloved’s sufferings in captivity.

Verdi and librettist Antonio Ghislanzoni were perfectly content to portray Amneris as a cunning, vicious shrew from beginning to end. Not Woolverton. She gives the beautiful princess a slick character arc in a thorough makeover, starting her off as a vain and pampered clothes horse on loan from Legally Blonde. Amneris evolves into a peace-loving reformer who not only empathizes with the martyred lovers but also narrates their story, three or more millennia later, returning in mummified form, a shining presence in a gooey stew of museum mystery and reincarnation.

If composer Elton John and lyricist Tim Rice had done their jobs as well as Woolverton, Aïda would be a masterwork. It’s often amusing to see what John, Rice, and Theatre Charlotte do to compensate for the absence of Verdian spectacle – but it’s never thrilling, despite the collection of talent that director Corey Mitchell has assembled at the Queens Road barn. John’s parade of power ballads grows tedious as the evening wears on, and the longueurs are compounded by unnecessary outbreaks of dance that, notwithstanding choreographer Ashlyn Summer’s exertions, display little precision and less sensuality.

Mitchell previously directed this show for Northwest School of the Arts with a little more sparkle, orchestra, and budget – a production that ran briefly at Booth Playhouse in 2009. Maybe Sir Elton’s Aïda works better in the hands of high schoolers. The one holdover from the NWSA edition, Emily Witte as Amneris, is even more stunning this time around, most notably when she hits us with the full force of her arrogance in her “My Strongest Suit” showcase. It’s the kind of superficial villainy that will deeply satisfy fans of Wicked, Glee, and Kristin Chenoweth.

There is a slight country twang to Witte’s singing that would have added a bit of unique abrasiveness to Amneris, but music director Zachary Tarlton encourages the same style from Ron T. Diaz as Radamès, so that twang becomes an Egyptian trait – as if, in Disneyworld, everybody who hails from Memphis, whether it’s Egypt or Tennessee, sounds alike.

Further detracting from the gravitas Diaz should be aiming for is Radamès’ bizarre confrontation with his father, the evil priest Zoser. You wonder just how seriously we can take either adversary when costume designer Hali Hutchison seems to be mimicking Disney’s Aladdin in designing the mighty general’s costume and Zoser’s ministers brandish glowing fuchsia staves.

Diaz never gets a shot at a passionate solo, so he shines brightest in “Elaborate Lives,” sharing the best of the power ballads with his darling Aïda. They sing it full out, face-to-face, no frills, near the end of Act 1, Victoria Fisher’s lighting dimming around them to augment the drama. Maya Sistruck does nearly the whole evening as Aïda with a simple resolute dignity, allowing herself the luxury of discernable facial expressions only at peak moments when she is romantically consumed or royally pissed.

Other than taking radical precautions not to reveal her royal origins, I’m not sure what justifies Hutchison’s humble sackcloth design for a captive princess. We do upgrade to red in the palace, but why Amneris would tolerate such a plainly dressed servant is still baffling. Yet the illogic does pay off in an enduring dramatic contrast, first in the climactic tête-à-tête duet before intermission and shortly afterwards in the “Step Too Far” trio, the most self-consciously operatic moment in the John-Rice score.

Aïda is simply better and purer than these Egyptians are – not Memphis or Nashville at all! – and just knowing her ultimately makes them better and purer.

While Josh Webb’s set design is no more impressive than the costumes or the choreography, budgetary constraints may have been holding him back. The cut-rate budget and the lackluster score might obscure the fact that the excellence of the cast runs deep. Aside from most of the dancers, Howl Cooper makes the only inauspicious debut as Amonasro, though he definitely has a warrior’s demeanor.

Jason Hickerson makes a wonderfully scruffy Pharaoh, a Charlotte debut only slightly eclipsed by Carlos Jimenez’s usefully cheerful depiction of Mereb, the perfect Disney servant. Implausibly, Mereb draws more solo spotlight than Radamès, yet Jimenez is decisively upstaged among the supporting players by the steely-voiced Paul Leopard, fulminating melodramatically as the murderous, conniving Zoser.

Thank heaven for vampires, witches, and pagans. Otherwise, there would be no class of people left for all of us to wholeheartedly hate.

Fire, Fury, and Painful Memories Drive Wilson’s “Jitney”

Review: Jitney

 

By Perry Tannenbaum

Allowing for inflation and cost-of-living increases since 1977, fares at Becker’s Car Service seem to be fiercely competitive – so competitive that the five cab drivers at the core of August Wilson’s Jitney all seem to be barely scraping by. The drivers’ lounge, adorned with a decaying Ali-Frazier poster, has a ramshackle look to it with a dust-colored couch held together by generous swaths of duct tape.

We never see whether the drivers’ jitneys (slang for gypsy cabs) are in any better repair than this crumbling HQ, but the idea seeps in that the struggling black customers in the Hill district of Pittsburgh are in no position to press the point. Early on in this fine BNS Productions effort at Spirit Square, director Corlis Hayes pushes the pace hard enough for us to assume that we’re in the midst of an urban rush hour.

These are men in a hurry – who aren’t necessarily getting anywhere. Pretty much the same can be said for Wilson’s story until Becker himself arrives. He takes off a fedora hat and lays down a satchel, signs that he’s better off than his employees, but he takes turns answering the phone – a pay phone – and giving rides. Still not rushing his story along in his flurry of driver entrances and exits, Wilson has Becker announcing two key strands of the plot.

After keeping it from his drivers a little longer than he should, Becker tells Doub, his steadiest driver, that the city has earmarked the property for urban renewal. The Car Service office will be boarded up in a matter of weeks. If that weren’t enough upheaval, Becker’s son Booster is getting out of the slammer after serving 20 years for murder. Becker never visited his son even once during his incarceration, so this does not figure to be a joyous reunion.

If you’ve seen Wilson’s Fences recently, you will likely find echoes of Troy Maxson in the elder Becker’s sternness and stubbornness. If anything, the father-son chemistry will prove even more important here. But Becker is more of a people person, as he would need to be in running a business, and he has a few soft spots beneath his tough hide.

We see one of those when he gives Fielding, a former tailor who has destroyed himself with drink, yet one more chance to come back on the job and straighten himself out. Becker also shows strength and courage defusing a heated confrontation between Vietnam War vet Youngblood and the gossipy Turnbo, who has meddled in the younger driver’s domestic affairs, frustrated at not stealing his girlfriend Rena.

There’s a fascinating range of personalities and back stories among the core quintet of drivers plus the boss’s son. Baring their souls – and their motives – everybody seems to get a monologue. Nor do Hayes and lighting designer Tony Wright veil the kinship between these monologues and long, lyrical jazz solos. Hayes usually directs her actors to blow their solos straight into the Duke Energy Theater audience, while Wright intensifies the light where they deliver.

During the passionate showdown between Youngblood and Rena, where both have been right and wrong, each of the combatants has a heartfelt monologue. Yet Wilson had even more pure audacity in a casual scene where the often-comical Fielding meets the tightly-wound Booster. The playwright brashly showcases his virtuosity by unleashing two consecutive monologues, one by the rueful Fielding recalling his better days when he tailored suits for Billy Eckstein and Count Basie, followed by Booster’s recollection of his first hard lesson in life when, as a child, he had a vivid dream about riding a red bicycle.

With so many monologues so evenly distributed, you need a cast that’s strong, deep and – when Wilson digresses – engaging. Hayes and producer Rory D. Sheriff have definitely produced with this ensemble. Though he isn’t given free enough rein in the opening scene as Fielding (we should be sure that the $4 he borrows from Doub will go toward refilling his whisky flask), Gerard Hazleton shoulders enough of the drunkard’s comedy without letting us lose our warm feelings toward him.

There’s a little more comedy squeezed from the gossipy Turnbo by Tim Bradley, probably because his sleaziness and nosiness are so outrageous, but he also forces us to take him seriously when he goes ballistic on Youngblood. More on the periphery, James Lee Walker II gives the local numbers runner, Shealy, a dandified flair though we still empathize with his romantic difficulties. On the other end of the cunning spectrum, Danius Jones makes Philmore a singularly quirky and clueless passenger, attaining full dopiness only when he returns in his bellhop uniform.

Partly because they subtly echo the central father-son relationship, Doub and Youngblood are closer to the heart of Wilson’s drama than the men who garnish it with comedy or the colorful aspects of city life. Both of them are war vets, but Youngblood – if not as senseless as Turnbo makes him out to be – has been slightly warped by his Vietnam experience. Doub, traumatized and shaken to his core in the Korean War, has retained a stone-cold outlook beneath his cheery, avuncular demeanor.

With Keith Logan delivering Doub’s Korea monologue, it becomes the warmest moment of the evening, transcending its payload of advice for Youngblood. In its tacit acknowledgement of Youngblood’s essential goodness – and his confidence in Youngblood’s ability to benefit from sound advice – he’s a perfect model of the parenting skills that Becker lacks. Ironically, there are times when Logan’s acting is similarly exemplary for Jonathan Caldwell. While Caldwell brilliantly projects Youngblood’s immaturity and confusion, he could use a tip or two on either quickening his cue pickup or timing his delayed reactions.

Caldwell’s occasional awkwardness may slightly mar Youngblood’s scenes with Doub and Turnbo, but it meshes very well with Juanita Green in the confrontations with Rena. Hayes decrees a more conciliatory rapport between the lovers when we last see them than you might find in other productions, but Green keeps this becalmed closure from becoming saccharine.

Although Becker isn’t quite the perfect boss, he deals empathetically with his drivers, so there needs to be a powerful reason why he is so cold and cruel toward his son. John W. Price provides it indelibly in the most electrifying monologue of the night. The fire and thunder from Price as he’s excoriating Booster are unlike anything I’ve seen or heard from him before, fueled by white-hot fury and pain.

It’s an earthquake, and you can see Jermaine Gamble as Booster trembling amid the seismic shock. We get the idea from Gamble that Becker’s boy has grown up, hardened by prison, a fully formed yet scarred individual. Booster does fire back at his dad, but Gamble acutely calibrates the restraint and the hope that are wrapped into his resentments, almost like he’s still an adolescent in his father’s presence. It’s simply respect – all the more moving for its futility.

Within the space of two weeks, we’ve heard from two playwrights, Jeff Talbott in The Submission and August Wilson in Jitney, who have ignited their peak moments with the N-word. This one is far more unexpected – and shattering.

Calouche and Crossroads Take Flight Outdoors

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Preview: Crossroads Festival

By Perry Tannenbaum

A new dance festival is leaping into the QC, touching down at First Ward Park for the Labor Day weekend, September 1-3. Pretty interesting idea, right? But the new Crossroads Festival isn’t merely an outdoor dance festival. It’s free, it features aerial dance classes and performances, and the main event starts just after sundown.

Now that’s pretty wild.

Caroline Calouche has been the queen of aerial dance in Charlotte for more than a decade. Her usual haunts have been Booth Playhouse; where Caroline Calouche & Co. offers its annual Clara’s Trip, an aerial Nutcracker; and Spirit Square, where she organizes a festival in early spring.

So what lured Calouche to the great outdoors?

“I was inspired by many great outdoor shows like Boston’s Shakespeare in the Park and Montreal’s Annual Circus Festival,” Calouche says. “Creating an outdoor show for the Charlotte community that reflects who we are has been a dream of mine for quite some time. Thankfully, the Knight Foundation helped make this dream come true.”

Though there are precedents in San Francisco, Boulder, and Victoria, bringing aerial dance outdoors – along with the Cirque du Soleil flavorings Calouche sprinkles into her choreography – is a fairly unique undertaking. Even Cirque doesn’t go all the way, opting for a bigtop on its famous tours.

“I did look into a circus tent so we can have the show rain or shine, but – whew! – that was crazy expensive!” Calouche confides. “Plus I would like the performance to take place under the stars with Uptown Charlotte as the backdrop to connect more to the location.”

Connecting with Charlotte was clearly a major factor in Calouche & Co.’s winning support from the Knight Foundation. Buy-in from Charlotte Center City Partners was also key before moving on to Mecklenburg Parks and Recreation to secure the festival’s location. Calouche’s Crossroads concept digs deep into Charlotte’s historical DNA.

Long before Charlotte became the crossroads for America’s most corrupt megabanks, it was a crossroads of commerce. If the Cherokee or Chippewa had named our city instead of the British, that name would likely mean crossroads. While the Uptown’s main crossroad is on Trade Street, Calouche’s event and choreography will remind us how Charlotte has also evolved into a crossroads for culture as well.

Each of the festival’s three days will begin with a potpourri of free dance and fitness classes. You can browse the online schedule and choose from hour-long sessions in samba, salsa, tap, hip-hop, capoeira, or aerial silks. Fitness freaks can contort themselves into the yoga and Pilates they truly deserve.

At 6pm, the pre-shows begin, also with various lineups of performers each evening. Constants in the lineup will be the MILA Dance Team, Mrudani School of Performing Arts, and the CC&Co. Youth Ensemble. If you’re itching for the NC Brazilian Arts Project, No Limits Dance Company, Hope of Israel, Maha’s Dances of IndiaHope of Israel, MufukaWorks Dance Company, or the Jazz Arts Initiative TrioMufukaWorks Dance Company,, consult the same handy webpage to see who’s up Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

All of those evenings will conclude with Crossroads, starting at 8pm. Yes, it’s also free, and Calouche promises that there will be no letup in variety when she and her company take to the air. On the contrary:

“The show includes contemporary dance, breakdancing, tap, zapeando, shag, capoeira, aerial silks, trapeze, bungee, partner acrobatics, aerial rope, Cyr wheel, and aerial hoop,” Calouche reveals. “My artistic idea is to either cross history with dance and/or circus arts or cross cultural dances that are represented in Charlotte’s community today. Crossroads is designed as an event for unity and the opportunity for people to learn about Charlotte’s history and culture.”

Guest unifiers will include artists from an exciting mix of disciplines, including actress Iesha Hoffman, percussionist Tim Scott, and slam poet extraordinaire Boris “Bluz” Rogers. Hoffman will narrate, knitting the various segments together and maybe providing cover during aerial apparatus changes.

Scott will be featured during the segment where tap meets zapeando dance and during what promises to be a wild breakdance battle on aerial rope. Rogers takes Calouche’s unifying fantasia to a whole new dimension with an original poem inspired by a great unifier, Thaddeus Tate. During Rogers’ spot, he’ll connect with the entire Crossroads cast on the floor.

Tate was an African American leader in Charlotte from the 1880’s to the 1940’s. Instrumental in establishing a library branch, an insurance company, and the Grace A.M.E. Zion Church – while rubbing elbows with the Uptown elite as owner of the Uptown Barber Shop – Tate is particularly pertinent because he resided on the block that is now First Ward Park. So Rogers’ tribute will definitely strike home.

With its unifying and educational components, Calouche tells us to expect a casual atmosphere rather than a carnival one, more like Symphony in the Park or Shakespeare on the Green than Speedweeks. There definitely will be food trucks, and D9 Brewery will be on the scene to help keep beer bellies properly bloated.

Like Clara’s Trip, which tends to shuffle its Nutcracker mix from year to year, Calouche expects to vary the content of Crossroads each time the festival rolls around. It’s not just a title – it’s a theme.Dominique jump color Michael Church

“Crossroads is the name of the event, and the theme will remain the same,” Calouche explains. “There might be some scenes that stay the same, but there is still more research I can do and other collaborators I would love to work with.”

Aerial dance is difficult enough to stage indoors, requiring a fly loft (ordinarily used to drop scenery from above) that’s sturdy enough to suspend up to four dancers on a dangling apparatus. Don’t try this at home. Or at Theatre Charlotte or Pease Auditorium.

So how exactly do you stage aerial dance outdoors? It sounds like CC&Co. will borrow from the big top concept and strip away the canvas.

“JHE is our production company who is building our stage, trussing, audio and lights,” Calouche says. “The stage will two feet from the ground on the grass near the 7th Street side of the park with four legs of truss crossing in the center at 25 feet high. Essentially we are building a theater in the round outside.”

Visualize a one-ring circus where 20 dancers, circus artists, musicians, and poets will perform under the stars – if the weather holds. So what happens if it rains?

“We wait it out and start when it passes,” Calouche replies.

Come to think of it, when most of your dancing is up in the air, you really don’t have to worry as much when the dance floor gets slick.

Playwright Imposter Goes Off-Script in “The Submission”

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Review: The Submission

By Perry Tannenbaum

A gay white playwright and a black actress walk into a bar… Not a promising lead-in to a joke, because nothing funny or violent should happen. Writers who pen scripts about racists or homophobes for theatre, film, and TV usually draw a free pass when we ask ourselves if they might be harboring prejudices of their own. Same with the actors who appear in such productions. Surely they are as progressive and tolerant as the authors who create their roles.

Maybe more progressive and tolerant than we are.

In Jeff Talbott’s The Submission, currently at Spirit Square in a Three Bone Theatre presentation, we can trash those presumptions – under circumstances that would ordinarily strengthen them. Talbott’s protagonist, white gay playwright Danny Larsen, has written a drama about a black alcoholic mom, her cardsharping son, and their struggles to escape the projects. Takes some empathy to do that, right?

Danny has never had a play of his produced before, but he thinks this one might be special. His best friend Trevor agrees, so Danny submits his street saga to the prestigious Humana Festival, hoping that he will be among the elite few whose work will be premiered at the annual New Play Festival in Louisville. But to make sure his whiteness doesn’t become an obstacle in recognizing the merits of a play with black leads, he invents the African name of Shaleeha G’ntamobi to become its author.

When Humana phones to tell Danny that his script has been selected for the New Play Festival, he could own up to his subterfuge right then. But – reasonably or not – Danny is afraid that the prize will be withdrawn of he comes clean. So he temporizes, saying the playwright isn’t at home, and hurries out to hire an actress to impersonate Shaleeha.

It takes a few moments before the chosen actress, Emilie, can grasp Danny’s intentions – and for Danny to convince her that there’s no kinkiness involved. Wile Danny has demonstrated considerable empathy toward black people, Emilie is honestly impressed with the play, despite the playwright’s fears that he has trespassed onto forbidden territory. Plenty of goodwill on both sides.

Yet things go badly after the first meeting. Danny has a number of personal insecurities, more than a little buyer’s remorse, but worst of all, casual prejudices against black artists that he hasn’t faced up to. They begin to pour out during a second meeting – at a coffee shop, not a bar – when Danny refers to black actors as “blactors” and the awards they win as “blawards.” The unsavoriness of that viewpoint is compounded for me by the signals I get from Danny that feels entitled to speak his mind so brusquely because he’s Emilie’s employer.

Emilie doesn’t listen to these slurs passively – unless you construe a response like “You’re so full of shit your eyes are brown” as deferential. What began as a mutually beneficial relationship has already degraded into an uneasy détente. As the pre-production process unfolds in Louisville, with Danny missing out on all the little perks of close contact and communication with the big-name artists converging on the festival, Danny’s resentments and jealousies heat up and his attitude toward Emilie becomes more toxic. Dropping the director’s nickname can set him off.

No doubt about it, the balance of my sympathies went out to Emilie as she kept drawing Danny’s scorn for merely doing what he hired her for. Even when some of Emilie’s anti-gay attitudes surfaced, things didn’t even out for me, because some rational thought verifiable observation was actually mixed in with her resentment – and because Danny goes nuclear in their final verbal faceoff.

If you can see this explosion coming, the venomous crossfire may feel a wee bit overlong, and I was not very convinced by the way Talbott has Danny handling the aftermath of his festival acclaim. But director Sidney Horton keeps the action as taut as possible, and Scott A. Miller keeps us fascinated with each new slimy twist of Danny’s personality. We can believe that the same insecurities inside Danny that produce such aberrant attitudes might also produce great art.

On the other hand, Talbott has incorporated some entertaining – and dramatic – complexities into Emilie. In her Charlotte debut, Lechetze D. Lewis captures all that’s engaging and spontaneous about Emilie and all that’s strong. Not only does she deliver a groupie’s euphoria while she’s mingling with theatre royalty, she adds an extra dollop of giddiness as romance blossoms between her and Trevor. You don’t really marvel that a free spirit like this would go off-script when she’s supposed to read Danny’s acceptance speech.

But is she more cunning and All-About-Eve than she first appears? That’s a big question Talbott keeps nicely float, helped by Lewis’s pugnacity.

Trevor is caught in the middle of the crossfire as he becomes more seriously involved with Emilie. He’s somebody who readily grasps Danny’s blind spots, and Daniel Henry perfectly calibrates his weakness as a right-minded peacemaker – so I completely bought his allowing himself to be told to shut up while the main battle raged.

I’m not sure that Talbott didn’t intend Pete, Danny’s CPA-like partner, to be more of a clueless hunk. Yet Horton’s somewhat outré casting choice, Dan Grogan, keeps things very real during the marital infighting. Though Pete remains a needless appendage in the plot, he’s a stuffy outsider who makes our badly behaving protagonists seem more palatable. There’s an intentional poetic justice when Grogan’s best moment happens while he’s offstage. He’s that untheatrical.

Talbott is appealing with his self-regarding cleverness, particularly when Danny’s play mirrors his own. But more often, he seems intent on wearing the David Mamet mantle for faithfully transcribing Generation X. Sentences from these 28-year-olds repeatedly proceed after multiple false starts and loose fragments, often getting tangled in multiple detours before reaching a period – particularly when Miller deftly navigates as Danny. Every person onstage, especially the artists, seems compelled to drop at least two f-bombs with every breath.

Peppered with fucks and the occasional shit, the dialogue at Duke Energy Theatre doesn’t shock me so much as irritate me as The Submission barrels along. If this tedium and annoying effect are the crux of Talbott’s point, he’s making it too obliquely. And if he’s trying to assert that effing Gen-Xers really effing talk this way, I do not effing agree.

But selfies of a hot actress’s boobs messaged to her boyfriend? In the age of Anthony Weiner (and Snapchat), I wouldn’t be shocked to learn it’s happening right now.