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The Messy But Effective Premiere of WE ARE PUSSY RIOT at the Contemporary American Theater Festival

Libby Matthews, Liba Vaynberg, and Katya Stepanov

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com July 14, 2015

Based on my entirely unscientific poll, WE ARE PUSSY RIOT was the audience favorite among the five plays being staged at this year’s Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. You might not expect that kind of popularity for a show that chaotically intersperses and dilutes the story of the titular well-known Russian feminist punk protestors imprisoned for a provocation in February 2012 at Moscow’s Russian Orthodox cathedral with the much less-known story of an older male prisoner seized during the later Bolotnaya Square protests. Nor would one predict that kind of favor for a show whose script was subject to major reorganization during the rehearsal process. Yet the dynamism and the sheer energy, not to mention breathtaking bravery, of the young women at the center of the action, carry the day. With all the show’s problems, including a dramatically justified but still emotionally deflating denial of a curtain call, audience members leave exhilarated.

I think the success of the piece notwithstanding these drawbacks rests upon what author Barbara Hammond and her various collaborators at Shepherdstown get right. This includes a recreation of an actual Pussy Riot provocation/performance (which is visually all of a piece with the documentary evidence in HBO’s Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer); excerpts from the Russian government’s show trial which rely largely on the actual words of the defendants, lawyers, and judge; and the language and attitudes of the authorities, especially the police and the judiciary, which are notorious. And overarching these, the show nails the crisis of authority and legitimacy for the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church the Pussy Riot protestors helped exacerbate for a while to an acuteness sharper than even the play conveys.

When these things are working, often sparked by the infectious (and accurately portrayed) high spirits and attractiveness of the three young women Putin’s minions held to account, one tends to overlook things like the problem of deciding at any given moment whether it is a political prisoner, a prosecutor, or Vladimir Putin himself talking (all gamely but confusingly portrayed by the highly adaptable T. Ryder Smith), like determining whether the political prisoner is conversing with an examining physician or the ghost of poet Anna Akhmatova or even the judge (all played by the nearly-as-flexible Sarah Nealis). We overlook the story being told in a more phantasmagorical than representational way, just sitting back at times and let parts of it wash over us,

It’s okay. There’s a good argument to be made that a well-made play about these deliberately unpolished provocateurs would have been as much of a contradiction of what they stand for as tucking in a tribute to the Russian Orthodox patriarch. In any case: no fear, not happening here. In fact, the play doesn’t even hold still long enough to end with a tableau of some sort showing our three heroines as heroines.

Instead, by portraying two of them after their release from prison cozying up to and performing with Madonna, the show poses some hard questions about the responsibilities young heroes and heroines shoulder when their first youthful triumphs are behind them. So far as I can determine, this part is fiction; two members of the group did appear on stage with Madonna, but only to speak. Still, others in the Pussy Riot collective sought to eject them because of this supposed apostasy from the anarchist ideal, so it obviously struck a nerve. But no one can stay young forever. Nor can the demands of fame be easily evaded. Would it have been selling out to perform with Madonna, had that really happened, especially when Madonna had earlier, during the show trial, turned up the heat on the Russian government by giving a concert in Moscow flaunting a message supporting the defendants written on her back? Tough question, and one the members of Pussy Riot will increasingly confront in real life as time goes on. The struggle to change Russia is not going to stop, and the Pussy Rioters will certainly be looked to for leadership, or comment, or at least example for others to emulate. So I think this was a fine question to pose near the end.

Let me, in parting, tip the hat to Libby Matthews, Liba Vaynberg, and Katya Stepanov, pictured left to right above, for their fine portrayals of the heroines Nadya, Masha, and Katya, respectively. They astutely captured and shared the good cheer, determination, and sheer guts of the women they portrayed.

This is the world premiere of WE ARE PUSSY RIOT. The play will require some polish in subsequent productions. But I honestly hope it does not receive too much.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Photo credit: Seth Freeman

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Personality Disorders and Personal Worlds: WORLD BUILDERS at Contemporary American Theater Festival

Brenna Palughi and Chris Thorn

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com July 13, 2015

Johnna Adams is hardly the first playwright to experience at firsthand the connection between mental illness and creativity. (Adams acknowledges her bipolar disorder but says she would not have had a playwriting career without it.) In having to deal with bipolar’s double-edged inspiration, she joins the illustrious company of the likes of O’Neill, Strindberg, Ibsen, and Williams. Nor is she the first to suggest that madness may be inspirational to an artist. DeQuincey, Poe and Coleridge, among others, have drawn that connection. But surely few have painted the connection in quite the bright colors that World Builders: A Love Story, receiving its world premiere at Shepherdstown’s Contemporary American Theater Festival, does.

Both the characters in World Builders, Whitney (Brenna Palughi) and Max (Chris Thorn), have been compelled by their disorder to turn their backs on the real world, and on the actual human connections available to them with friends and family, to obsess instead about imaginary worlds of their own making.

Whitney’s world is a dynamic, bustling science fiction epic with, as she brags, “seven colony worlds that Earth’s survivors fled to,” which now contain “seventy-two alien-human hybrid races.” Her fantasy embraces “forty-seven major characters and one hundred and thirty minor characters.” In particular, she revels in the love story of Mikor and Selestina, a prince and princess who meet when her intergalactic space yacht encounters his pirate flagship. In other words, in her mind she is helming a fictive universe even more complex than that of Game of Thrones (a comparison Adams herself draws in an interview in the program), though it seems a happier and more swashbuckling place than Westeros.

Max’s fantasy world is quite different and far more ominous, clearly owing much to the disturbing material of Silence of the Lambs.

But for each of them, their world, however artistic and creative, is also of a place of some danger, because it has supplanted the real world, to the point where mere human contact is of next to no interest to either of them. Hence their families have forced them into a locked ward at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, where they are on a controlled trial of a medicine that will rid them of, in Whitney’s words: “[O]ur schizoid personality disorders. Anti-social tendencies. Brief reactive psychoses. Autoerotic fixations. Dissociative and narcissistic behavior.”

The trouble is, the medicine is working. It has two important effects. It is freeing them up to fall in love, but it is also sundering them from their fantasy worlds. Thus the second half of the (intermissionless) play is taken up with a number of questions that boil down to comparing the value of a sane life with love but without creativity and an insane life with creativity but without love. I will not reveal the resolution, but I will say that it is a thoughtful and earned one.

Adams is author of the challenging Gidion’s Knot, which also premiered at Contemporary American Theater Festival in 2012, a play which also explores tradeoffs between artistic and creative license and the demands of civilization. It is interesting to see her evolution as an artist. World Builders is arguably a more cheerful, and is certainly a funnier, work, though Gidion’s Knot looks into the existential furnace more deeply. And World Builders is certainly a less compact piece of writing. In a play with a running time of about an hour and a half, I felt that about a half hour was surplusage. Much of the dispensable material was devoted to Whitney’s world. While Whitney’s and later Max’s descriptions of Whitney’s world are funny and charming, there is too much of them. There is also too much wringing of the hands about how to resolve the play’s dilemmas, and perhaps too much of the awkwardness of these two highly disengaged personalities beginning to experience love.

I would expect audiences to forgive the play’s overstuffing, if only because of the lovely direction by Nicole A. Watson, which makes this odd story of mostly disengaged people totally engaging most of the time, and the work of Thorn and Palughi, who make both their characters’ jagged edges and their soft places appealing. Palughi, in particular, blessed with a most animated face and narrative enthusiasm, could probably tell me about Whitney’s forty-seven major characters and still keep me amused.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Photo credit: Seth Freeman.

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The Obergefell Dissents: All Due Respect

Published in the Daily Record July 10, 2015

Along with most of my friends and most of the people I respect, I rejoiced in the result of the Supreme Court’s recent Obergefell decision, establishing same-sex marriage as a constitutionally-protected right. Yet I realized as soon as I heard of that result, and even before reading Justice Kennedy’s opinion, that there was a paradox in the ruling that dissenters were bound to seize upon. No one is going to argue with a point the dissents (separately written ones by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Alito, and Thomas) all make: that same-sex marriage is a novelty both in human civilization and in American law. And the Constitution is very old. How, then, the dissenters have asked, is something so new rooted in something so old?

Something New From Something Old

The dissenters’ critique is mostly serious – setting aside Justice Thomas’ disingenuous inanity about slavery not affecting the dignity of the slaves[1] – and we need to give it its due respect. The dissents collectively go to the legitimacy of judicial activism – which for many years has mainly been fomented by the dissenters, incidentally.

The answer Justice Kennedy’s majority ruling provides to the critical question (how does something so new come from something so old?) is detailed but straightforward in its outline. Kennedy sees due process and equal protection as deliberately abstract terms, bones to be fleshed out anew in each generation, intentional play in the joints. Our understanding of these terms is bound to evolve, and it has evolved. Marriage is so fundamental to human happiness that it has long been recognized as a fundamental right for both due process and equal protection purposes.[2] In order to be meaningful it must allow people to select their own spouses without much interference by the state, as recognized in the old Loving case, which denied the states the ability to forbid interracial marriage. To be meaningful for heterosexuals, in like wise, it must contemplate men and women marrying, and in order to be meaningful for homosexuals it must contemplate same-sex couples marrying. The state has no compelling interest in forbidding the exercise of that right, and hence no power to do so.

The dissents question or deny Kennedy’s premise, i.e. they say that due process and equal protection usually protect enumerated rights (ones explicitly referred to elsewhere in the Constitution, like freedom of speech), and that constitutional jurisprudence has traditionally been extremely cautious to recognize new unenumerated rights as lying under the protection of those clauses. Equating same-sex marriage with the opposite-sex marriage protected by due process and equal protection, they say, is a fundamentally different jump from the jump between same-race to mixed-race marriage that occurred in the Loving case.

Not “Redefining” Marriage, Just Who May Marry

Let me say right now that this is where the dissents lose me. That is, I (and doubtless most of my friends) do not personally find same-sex marriage to be such a radically different thing from opposite-sex marriage, for all its novelty in human history. Allowing it does not, to use the dissenters’ term, redefine marriage, merely who may enter into it. But I acknowledge that others see it quite differently. And so let us go with the dissenters’ premise for a moment and see where it leads. I think, granting their premise, they have two reasonable perceptions.

Some Bad Calls

First, they point out that if we assign Supreme Court justices the task of determining what new rights are fundamental, that assignment is being handed to a group with a less than stellar record. The dissenters’ Exhibit A is Lochner v. New York, the 1905 decision that elevated the freedom of contract of bakery owners above the power of the New York legislature to enact legislation protecting rank-and-file bakers from sweatshop hours. They also mention Dred Scott, the 1856 decision that announced a substantive due process right to hold slaves. And they are certainly right about the lesson to learn from these cases.

I would go further. The majority does not mention 2010’s Citizens United, my own personal Exhibit A, where the Court perceived that corporations, like human beings, have freedom of speech; talk about an ill-advised leap in the world of fundamental rights! Citizens United, being recent, is a far more potent instance of the threat. (No surprise it goes unmentioned, though, since every one of the dissenters joined the Citizens United majority.)

So yes, justices have been known to get it wrong when they identify fundamental rights. And they will again. Still, identification of fundamental rights is part of their job description.[3] They should heed the dissenters about doing it hesitantly, that’s all.

Judicial Policy-Making

The dissenters’ second point is that judicial expansion of fundamental rights will instantly stifle the legislative policy-making which was busy taking place around the country over the same-sex marriage issue. Had the majority not intervened, the dissenters protest, the emerging consensus around the issue would have been placed on the far more legitimate platform of legislative enactment by democratically-elected lawmakers.

Justice Kennedy responds unapologetically that the fundamental thing about fundamental rights is that they are not subject to legislative negotiation. That was effectively the Court’s line in Dred Scott, Lochner, and Citizens United, too, and it was wrong there. So I share the dissenters’ discomfort with overriding state policy-making. But in this case I don’t see how the Court could have waited. There was a conflict in the Circuits that was setting up a train wreck on a large scale: many same-sex marriages lawful where contracted that would have gone unrecognized in states the couples might have moved to. Crossing a state line could not have been allowed to wreak such crazy consequences. And it would have happened a lot, given that it was not in the cards that all the states would have gone with the emerging consensus in favor of same-sex unions anytime soon.[4] Until the Circuit split, it seemed that the court had been holding back after the Windsor case, which ended the federal policy against same-sex marriage.

But the dissenters are also right that the Court should try, where possible, to leave policy to legislatures.

Paramount Considerations

That said, in this case there were even more valid paramount considerations. The biggest was this: Same-sex marriage is new, but for constitutional purposes it fits hand-in-glove with conventional marriage. Justice Kennedy’s encomium to matrimony as essential both to society and to human happiness was right on target. In all the litigation over that issue, there has never been an intellectually coherent reason advanced to exclude homosexuals from that institution, or to prohibit them from participating in it with members of their own sex, the only way that would confer its benefits upon them and hence upon society.

The dissenters mocked Kennedy’s encomium to marriage, saying that all the hearts and flowers did not add up to a constitutional argument. They were wrong; hearts and flowers are exactly where the marriage right and many others begin, because fundamental rights are there to secure human happiness.

We must, as the dissenters urged, remain vigilant against the Court getting it dreadfully wrong when it identifies fundamental rights. And the Court should be mindful of the great benefits of letting the political process play out. But Obergefell still exemplifies why we have play in the joints, and a Court to flex them.

________________

[1] Thomas’ point was that slavery didn’t rob slaves of their innate human dignity. True, but trivial and transparently not a response to Justice Kennedy’s point. When Kennedy said that gays were being deprived of dignity by laws that discriminated against them, he obviously meant dignity in the eyes of society and of the law.

[2] When I looked at the way this judicial debate was shaping up last year, I anticipated that most of the “action” in the upcoming Supreme Court case would be on the equal protection front. I was wrong. As at least one of the dissents commented, Justice Kennedy’s exploration of the subject stayed mainly in the due process arena, although it certainly relies on equal protection as well. To me, the resort to equal protection would have been more helpful if Kennedy had stayed closer to conventional equal protection analysis, which is not concerned so much with fundamental rights as with inequitable treatment of similarly-situated groups.

[3] When people, even smart ones, are upset with something judges have done or might do, they tend to forget this. That is when the “unelected judges” slur gets slung. (Of course, when we are pleased with them, then they are all “Daniels come to judgment.”) But we have known since Marbury v. Madison (1803) that courts have a fundamental duty to hold legislation up to the Constitution and disqualify legislation that does not conform. We have likewise known that judges must in the end use their own conceptions of the Constitution in making that comparison, and that, with federal judges deliberately isolated from political retribution by their unelected status, “It is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.” There must and will be times when the law thus construed will relate to fundamental rights. This is not overreach; this is the judiciary doing its job.

[4] The dissents tend to make it sound as if the states were all reaching a consensus in favor of same-sex marriage. I haven’t done the analysis, but clearly there were plenty of states, at least four of them inside the Sixth Circuit, the Circuit that caused the split, which had forbidden same-sex marriage by legislative means or constitutional enactment. Had the Supreme Court deferred to the wisdom of all of the nation’s legislatures, universal sanctioning of same-sex unions probably would not have occurred in the lifetime of anyone reading these words.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Shredded Storytelling Undermines THE PILLOW BOOK at Cohesion/Strand

Joseph Coracle, Rebecca Ellis, and Michele Massa

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com June 27, 2015

One of the frequent perks of being a theater reviewer is receiving a .pdf of the script. It’s a great crutch; you don’t need to scribble down piquant bits of dialogue. But in the case of the show I saw last night, The Pillow Book by Anna Moench, the script is not so much a perk as a vital lifeline. Seeing the play in performance without reading the script – allof the script, including a so-called Actor’s Guide at the back – you will never be able to make enough sense of it.

The Pillow Book takes off from the current vogue of non-consecutive story-telling; everyone wants to emulate the mystification of Pulp Fiction, with its sudden reveals of not only what will happen, but of what did happen. And recently there has been an additional vogue, which I call Cubistic story-telling, in which the characters and their lives turn out multiple ways, without an authoritative single story line. The recent Broadway musical If/Then was a mild example of dramatic Cubism (one in which the central character’s life is told from the perspective of a pair of unexpectedly consequential choices she makes, and we see the life she would have had either way as a result). The approaches can also be combined, as in another recent Broadway production, Constellations by Nick Payne, where the couple at its center meet and get together, or don’t get together, and come apart, or don’t come apart, and she dies or she doesn’t die of cancer – and in addition to all these slightly different stories there are periodic breaks from chronological order. These works make the viewer struggle to follow the conflicting and shuffled storylines, but never leave the viewer in the dust.

The dust, however, is where The Pillow Book will leave you, and, as the Actor’s Guide reveals, utterly gratuitously. For it emerges from the Actor’s Guide that, under a chaotic surface, there are three internally coherent, if externally inconsistent stories being told, stories that would be much more absorbing if we could piece them together in real time. There are three characters (John, Deb and Deborah), whose names do not change, even though the John of one story line has nothing to do with the Johns of the two other story lines, and Deborah is “an abstraction of Deb, not grounded in anything but Deb” – whatever that may mean, and the women frequently double up as incidental characters (an exterminator, a member of the ski patrol, etc.) still without losing their names. And the scenes that limn just one of the three storylines for instance are, in chronological order: 15, 16, 4, 2, 7, 14, 18, 28, and 31. You will therefore be left wondering why John, who seems to want so badly to have a child with his wife Deb, suddenly seems to be trying to explain to a daughter about the loss of his wife. Turns out that while delivering this explanation, John is enacting the role of the parent of Deborah, who is not a character in the story of the John who wants the child with Deb, who is not a character in Deborah’s story. But you won’t be able to work that out on your own. And that’s just an example of the incoherence.

And what a waste that incoherence is! Anna Moench writes beautifully; she is really, really good at crafting a memorable scene and characters about whom one could be persuaded to care. But all that goes for naught when one can’t tell where on earth one is. Director Jonas David Grey advises in his program notes to “Allow yourself to take in each image of this ‘collage’ before trying to piece it all together. And trust the relationships, for they tell the story.” Sorry, that kind of advice might work with some works (I think the aforementioned Constellations would be a case in point) but with this play those two precepts are simply in conflict. The superimposed and non-chronological storytelling causes the stories to shred each other, and in consequence, the relationships, which can be glimpsed, can never be comprehended thoroughly enough to become trustworthy.

The more is the pity, because the acting and direction are also so good. Michele Massa as Deb, Joseph Coracle as John, and Rebecca Ellis as Deborah convey wit, anger, regret, fear, longing, and passion as the need arises, without a false step. Together with their director, they seem to have mined from the text everything Moench has buried there to be excavated.

And what, briefly, is that? I think it is a note of regret over things not achieved or seen, but it is a regret tempered in certain ways. John in his role as a tourist visiting the Serengeti wants to see elephants, and is guaranteed by his guide Deborah that he will see them, but she shows him only dung beetles and termites. Later, however, after he temporarily and accidentally blinds her with Mace and causes her to break her hand, they seem to be setting off for the elephants again. And Deborah seems to be getting over a sexual assault the trauma of which explains some of her erratic behavior. John in his role as Deb’s husband, wrestles with her reluctance to conceive a child with him, though their “parenthood” of a dog seems to fill some of that need. John, in a completely different role as Deb’s husband, is unable to make the marriage work, runs away to go skiing, and has an accident that shatters his femur, but at least help is on the way, and he is likely to be patched up.

I’m not the only critic who has lamented the damage wrought by the play’s incoherence, which was a common complaint when The Pillow Book was staged at New York’s 59E59 in 2011. For all that, however, I’m glad of a chance to have seen it, and I’m glad that it was brought to Baltimore by a coalition of two fringe companies, Cohesion Theatre Company (ending its first season) and The Strand Theatre Company, which focuses on works by and about women. We need companies that are willing to take on the challenging works, even if (as I think was the case here) some challenges can’t be entirely surmounted. I hope we’ll see more collaborations like these.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Photo Credit: Shaelyn Jae Photography

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Teaching War

Love Theme from The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, by Robert Cobert (1983), encountered ca. 2000

Buy it here | See it here | Sheet music here

Kids grow up. Lucky parents get to have fun with them as they do it. In the case of me and my young son Matthew, the route to shared fun was quickly identified – we gorged on movies and television together. Many weeknights after schoolwork we shared one or another TV series; on Friday nights we’d often frequent the multiplexes together. And this was still an era when we could patronize the neighborhood video rental store (now long gone) to fill in nights when there was nothing on. Today, Matt having inconsiderately grown up, those nights are now among my most precious memories.

Between Big Explosions and Small Ones

Our sharing didn’t mean we always gravitated towards the same things. Matt, for instance, could not get enough of special effects-heavy extravaganzas where a lot of things blew up and bad guys and good guys would shoot it out. I cared more for character-driven small films. More often than not, when our aspirations diverged, we went his route. But not always. And there was a lot of ground in the middle.

Probably the most beckoning middle ground was the area of war movies and TV. Lots of spectacular stuff there, things blowing up, and shooting. But then too lots of room for stories that plumbed the depth of the human heart and touched on big themes, not least of which were war itself and the tides of human history

Of course with a youngster, you can’t make just anything available. Saving Private Ryan, for example, is not appropriate for a 10-year-old.[1] But a lot of the best material is in a gray area. I did want us to share early the long, somewhat rambling Winds of War and War and Remembrance series, based on Herman Wouk’s novels. They were then freshly out on videotape. Yeah, there was some very grownup Holocaust material in it. (I think I may have initially skipped some of the most graphic parts.) But the more conventional war story stuff in it (sailors and soldiers getting ready for and fighting a war) carried its own challenges.

Stuff to Talk About

Those of us who grew up as I grew up, those for whom Vietnam was the specific war we defined ourselves against (as I’ve discussed here, for instance), were bound to have problems with the tone. Herman Wouk was certainly not an unqualified admirer of the military, witness his book and play The Caine Mutiny, which ultimately excuse the tyrannical Captain Queeg, but not before showing that his actions provided much to excuse.

Still, by and large, the American sailors and naval officers presented in the shows are decent types, and even the German general staff officer we get to know is more admirable than not, though of course the SS people are appropriately loathsome. But to a child of the Sixties the tone was still too worshipful. I was fully prepared to concede that World War Two was a “good war.”[2] But…. But it remains true that even the best war will provide even the best countries with opportunities and excuses to act badly, and none will completely resist those opportunities. Very little of that came through.[3] So there had to be a discussion of that.

On the other hand, the series did pretty well present the Holocaust, both the brute facts of the extermination and also the way it had appeared in real time to Americans who heard only rumors and largely disbelieved them, and whose own genteel anti-Semitism may have facilitated the killings. This was important to teach my son, whose forbears may have included my Jewish grandfather from Lithuania and Jewish grandmother from England, but whose cultural exposure to the horrors of this particular genocide would nonetheless likely be limited by the predominantly Catholic background and milieu in which he himself was being raised.[4] So we certainly had discussions about that.

Great Men?

Also, as vast as the scope of the Winds of War series was, it did tend to focus on the “Great Men” a bit too much for my taste. You know, Roosevelt and Hitler and Stalin and Churchill. Wouk’s storyline gives its hero, Pug Henry, access to each of them, and even when Henry isn’t dealing with them, we get privileged glimpses of what they’re up to. Not for Wouk the Tolstoyan view (shared by Victor Hugo) that the Great Men are actually history’s puppets. In Wouk’s book, these are leaders of great consequence whose decisions were determinative. While greatly enjoying the glimpses Winds of War gave us of these privileged leaders, Matt and I also talked through the opposing view of the Great Men.

At bottom, though, we must have surrendered emotionally to it, whatever our intellectual approach. How could we not, when their faces were presented to us at the outset of every episode, peering out of the giant letters of the title,[5] set against a background of roiling clouds, while Robert Cobert’s majestic Love Theme rolled in the background and the opening titles rolled with it?[6] Cobert, a journeyman who wrote much game show music, may not have been a John Williams or a Hans Zimmer, but this was his moment of greatness.[7] The music tells us that this is a great story, epic in scale, and full of emotion, full of heartbreak and love. Strings sing the theme over a bed of growling trombones; it is irresistible.

So we found ourserlves idolizing FDR and Winnie along with the brave Henry and Jastrow families whose stories were the primary focus.

High Chastity, Low Def

The Winds of War is also incurably old-fashioned – was old-fashioned even when it was being produced, and not just because it presented us Americans as the good guys, good with hardly a trace of the kinds of shadows Vietnam had shown must have been there even in the “good” Second World War. It was old-fashioned because of the “newsreel” introductions, with the voice of William T. Woodson announcing facts the way newsreel announcers had done, authoritatively, unhesitatingly, conveying far more effectively by their tone than through any assertions that there is only one perspective to consider – that of the omniscient white male. Again, this needed to be unpacked, and we did that together.

Perhaps the most old-fashioned thing about it was the rampant chastity at its heart. We are supposed to believe that married Pug Henry, the naval officer we follow for five years, who has an affair with a delectable British lady throughout most of that period, never beds her through all the wrack and ruin of war until he is divorced from his faithless wife and married to the Brit. Roosevelt is not a randy old goat, and he and Eleanor seem to have a fine marriage. We are supposed to disapprove of a flyer’s widow having an affair to hold her misery at bay. We are meant to pardon the British lady having a fling with an old flame only because: a) Pug isn’t ready to marry her yet; and b) the old flame is slowly dying of a tropical disease, so it’s mercy sex. Meanwhile, we are supposed to believe the hot British lady is desperately in love with Pug even though he’s portrayed by Robert Mitchum, who was twenty years too old for the part.[8] All very interesting discussions to have with a ten-year-old.

There was technical old-fashionedness too; if you view the DVD transfers available now, you can see how much less satisfying the low-density narrow-screen productions of that era were. More visual information on the screen is just more interesting. And for all the huge budget, the kinds of trompe l’oeil that any digital effects shop would endow any war movie with today are simply missing.

Evenings of Discussion

In short, we were looking at an artifact together, Matt and I, one whose flaws were as instructive as its achievements. So much to talk about. Now, when I hear those sinking cadences of the main title (which I play for myself occasionally), I remember those evenings of discussion, and wish I could go back. I’d like to think my son, who grew up to be a maker of videos and blogger and podcaster about movies (and beer), feels the same way from time to time.

__________________

[1]. A scant four years later, at the time of the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day, I was able both to share that movie with my son and take him to the commemoration. I wrote about that visit here. So I was able to work into it.

[2]. I was mellowing a bit; thirty years earlier I would have been close to making categorical assertions that no war was justified.

[3]. To be scrupulously fair, the two series do show, among other things, the following: the American State Department actively resisting giving asylum to Jewish refugees, the British government lying, with effectively criminal consequences, about the defensibility of Singapore, and the machine-gunning massacre of Japanese sailors by an American submarine which has sunk their ship.

[4]. Like me. See here for some of my own history in this regard. My son, like me, was going to a school named St. Thomas (mine had been Ann Arbor’s St. Thomas the Apostle, his Baltimore’s St. Thomas Aquinas, but still). And the majority of his gene pool, unlike mine, was made up of people who, however much or little they may have worshipped, called themselves Catholic.

[5]. Well, to be precise, emerging from the letters in the second series, War and Remembrance, as seen here. That series originally ran in 1988-89. The earlier series, Winds of War, ran in 1983, and had a somewhat different title sequence. The title graphics would have had to change, if for no other reason than that the cast had markedly changed over the five-year intermission. Same music, though.

[6]. I’m not at all clear why it’s called the “Love Theme” – as it was in connection with Winds of War. It accompanied every title sequence, and, to the best of my recollection, was not specifically associated with any of the love affairs depicted in the shows. The same piece of music was labeled the Main Title in connection with War and Remembrance’s album.

[7]. In more than one sense; this was reportedly the longest score ever written for a drama.

[8.] I believe Mitchum (1917-1997) was 66 when he originated the part, which puts him in his 70s by the time the second series was in the can. In the books Pug is supposedly in his forties. Meanwhile, Victoria Tennant (b. 1950), the hot British girlfriend, was in her early-to-mid-30s when shooting began. Mitchum certainly had the necessary gravitas but, while quite well-preserved, was, well — well-preserved, but no longer a McSteamy.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Magna Carta: Accidental and Cautionary

Published in the Daily Record June 22, 2015

Eight hundred years ago this month, at a spot that now looks up at a glide path for jets coming into Heathrow from the west, England’s King John signed a parchment of some approximately 3600 words of Latin.[1] Today we call the parchment Magna Carta (“great charter”). It didn’t have that name at the outset, and didn’t get that name, when it did, to praise its greatness. (The name evolved simply to distinguish it from a smaller document, the Forest Charter.) Like practically everything about Magna Carta, the name was unforeseeable when it was issued, and shaped by the accidents of time.

Forget the Scutage; It Was the Due Process

The bulk of Magna Carta deals with concerns of great interest in 1215 but neither very interesting nor very comprehensible eight centuries later: fine adjustments to the relationships among the free peasants, the gentry, the nobility, the Church, and the King; struggles between river fishermen and cities that depended on navigation for trade; debts owed Jewish moneylenders; national relations between England and its semi-vassal lands Wales and Scotland. Even the vocabulary is strange: scutage, and novel disseisin, and wapentake. And most of it you don’t need to know now; time has washed most context away.

What remain today are only the most important things: the rule of law and due process, and their inevitable concomitant we now call separation of powers. They were the most important things back in 1215 as well. The other issues were attracted to the document like iron filings to a magnet; but the magnet was the struggle over how the land was to be governed. John’s exactions had precipitated that struggle.

Kleptocrat at the Bargaining Table

John had become a master of squeezing out of British citizens of all classes taxes and forfeitures and revoked tenancies and debts purchased from third parties. A lot of his rapacity was deceitful and a whole lot of it was lawless. John needed the loot to finance a war he could neither afford nor win: the fight to save Normandy, a land the British crown claimed, from the clutches of Philip Augustus, the French king. In retrospect, the notion that medieval Britain could have held onto pieces of France permanently seems like foredoomed folly; there was this Channel and two diverging national cultures separating them, after all. And a kleptocratic government was never going to work over the long term in England, either. Eventually, predictably, the barons rose up, and John was facing both a revolution and insolvency. He had to parley and deal.

Central to the shape of the deal was bound to be his history of misgovernment. He may have been the king, but he had stolen from his citizens, and so there had to be a mechanism to make him disgorge his takings. He may have been the king, but no one was going to be safe unless he acknowledged that he was subject to the laws. And there had to be a mechanism to force him to follow the laws, because his word counted for nothing; too many people had been burned by his deceitfulness and his cruelty, like the mother and the scion of the Briouze family, starved to death in each other’s presence (the mother having eaten her son’s cheeks).

Checks and Balances

From these conditions were born the provisions (many of them) that held that the King must follow “the law of the land,” and that he might seize or tax only according to that law and by means of “judgment” (what today we call due process) and not by mere royal fiat. And just as important were three enforcement mechanisms. Taxes had to be approved by a representative assembly summoned at 40 days’ notice. The local royal courts had to be overseen by local knighthood to act as a check on the notoriously rapacious sheriffs who ran them. And John’s big thefts, both past and prospective, were to be reversed and prevented by a permanent council of 25 magnates.

The most famous provision, a sort of Fifth Amendment for the Thirteenth Century, proclaimed: “No free man is to be arrested, or imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go against him, save by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.”

Not So New, But Maybe Revolutionary

These “novelties” had been kicking around for some time, in England and elsewhere, and Magna Carta was thus not as original as some who celebrate it have persuaded themselves. (Similar developments were also occurring in Spain and Hungary.) But if implemented fully, Magna Carta would have been nothing short of revolutionary in its effect on England.

John had no intention of allowing that revolution, and he quite nearly succeeded in thwarting it when he got Pope Innocent to issue a papal bull invalidating Magna Carta, and letters excommunicating those who would enforce it.

Unkillable

After Innocent’s bull, John probably felt he had killed Magna Carta, but then dysentery promptly killed him. And his son, Henry III, also constrained to parley by the cost of war, had to re-proclaim it – actually three times. Each time the re-proclamation contained modifications. Admittedly, those modifications effectively gutted the enforcement provisions that most bound the king (the panel of 25 barons, for instance). But the notion that the king was subject to the law and should act by “judgment” and not fiat was still there. And if that was still there, then the notion of separate governmental powers was bound to persist, regardless of what a curtailed Magna Carta left out. Because you can’t expect reliable adherence to the law and administer due process without separated powers.

In fact, the law of the land/due process/separation of powers complex was the only part that persisted. Because it was somewhat erroneously viewed as being the place where that complex began, Magna Carta had become the darling of legal scholars and theorists Coke and Blackstone, authors much read in 18^th Century America. Among the American readers of that era were the framers of the U.S. and state constitutions, documents which all, in one way or another, structured governments in response to those notions.[2]

Cautionary Lesson

Thus the unlikely evolution of Magna Carta concluded: it was transformed from a document without a name that had adjusted dozens of forgotten social frictions and tried to corral a spectacularly bad monarch into “Magna Carta,” theoretical foundation of our form of government; from a treaty among, by, and mainly for the benefit of the British ruling classes into an exemplar of justice for all. Magna Carta’s original contours had been worn away by the tides of time, leaving something surely as unforeseeable to its framers as those jets roaring into Heathrow.

I thought about this while attending a state bar meeting in Ocean City, a Maryland sandbar apparently doomed by rising sea levels. On that weekend just before Magna Carta’s 800^th anniversary, I mused that everything around me that seemed so solid was bound to disappear. A century from now, lawyers will not likely be meeting there; no one will. And the actions we take as lawyers are mostly apt to be just as transitory; those few that last will probably do so in unexpected ways and for unexpected reasons, like the actions that produced Magna Carta. A humbling thought.

_______________

[1] My source for most of the facts referenced herein, including the jet glidepath (albeit that one point I confirmed independently), is David Carpenter’s utterly magisterial Magna Carta With a New Commentary (2015).

[2] For succinct summaries of the way 17th and 18th Century British legal scholars picked up Magna Carta and ran with it, straight into the arms of the framers of American constitutional documents, see A.E. Dick Howard, Magna Carta: Text and Commentary 25-30 (1998) and J. Podgers, America’s Magna Carta, 101 ABA Journal 36-45 (June 2015).

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Funny But Not Quite Nailing It: BLITHE SPIRIT at Everyman

Beth Hylton as Elivra

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com May 31, 2015

Blithe Spirit, now being revived at the Everyman Theatre, purports to be a light confection, a sort of situation comedy where the situation is the intrusion of the ghost of a writer’s dead first wife into his second marriage. But there is a sourness at its core, a vision of marriage amongst the British upper crust which, stripped of the farce in which playwright Noel Coward has swaddled it, is bleak. The “happy” denouement is the writer’s freeing himself of both wives, one of whom has cheated on him (and he on her) and tried to kill him, and the other has proven (so Coward would have us believe, at least) a termagant. In Coward’s view, at least as presented here, marriage is an unstable, temporary arrangement designed as much as anything else to provide a staging ground for genteel infidelity; marriage is apt to turn abusive, even murderous, and the best thing that can happen to a man is to be rid of the whole wretched thing.

I suspect that Coward’s vision of marriage had something to do with the time and place in which he found himself at the time he wrote the play (England in 1941). Any number of artists who were able to observe and comment upon the institution of upper class marriage in that time and place reached the same general point of view (see, for instance, Evelyn Waugh, Mary Wesley, and Elizabeth Jane Howard). I suspect Coward’s outlook on genteel marriage also had something to do with his being gay in an uncloseted way (not officially so, but it was commonly known) – and hence having no “dog in the fight,” as it were, and being licensed to dispense an outsider’s view.

In total harmony with this acerbic view of these straight people and their marriage is Coward’s default comic trope: the bicker. It keeps happening again and again, particularly between Charles, the writer, and his second wife Ruth, typically propelled by misunderstandings based on the fact that Charles can see and hear the ghost of Elvira, his ex-wife, and Ruth cannot, and at first does not even believe Charles’ protestations that she is in the room with them. It’s funny – up to a point. There are times it can flag and just become tiresome, which in a sense is Coward’s point. We are meant to find it tiresome – tiresome enough to justify a sense of relief when the wives can both be exorcised at the end. But in order for the conclusion to produce comic relief rather than disgust, we have to identify with Charles, and see his henpeckedness as something like actual victimhood, and the exorcism of his wives as a deliverance. Given Charles’ own behavior, including alcoholic overindulgence, infidelity, and a certain childish petulance, this isn’t easy.

Significantly, the 1964 musical adaptation of the play, High Spirits, directed by Coward himself, directly focused on Charles’ self-centered nature, and gave the two wives (both of them spectral by that stage in the action) a duet in which they very effectively called him on it. And then, instead of allowing Charles to escape them, the musical killed off Charles too at the end and showed his shade happily reunited with theirs, which actually is a more comically satisfying way of tying up loose ends. (In killing off Charles, Coward and his collaborators were following David Lean’s approach in the screenplay of the 1945 movie, which confirms that the problem was evident from the start.)

The musical shows convincingly that Coward himself was or became aware of the big problems in the play. But the musical, in which he helped solve them with a couple of other writers, is not produced nowadays, while Blithe Spirit, the play, is frequently revived, with all its problems intact. And now Everyman has essayed it.

As enthusiastic as I am about Everyman, I cannot say that this production exactly nails the play.

The good parts first: Bruce Nelson is splendid as Charles, and Beth Hylton as Evira (depicted above). I cannot imagine an actress doing a better job conveying the sheer joy Elvira takes in making mischief. The set (Daniel Ettinger with special effects by Lewis Shaw incorporated into it) and the costumes (David Burdick) are perfect. I understand that the costumes are styles from the 1920s rather than the war years; it would take someone with greater costume acumen than myself to recognize the difference, but certainly the women could have been flappers. And everyone’s garb is worth looking at, including one wonderful pajama outfit worn by Ruth (Megan Anderson) that resembles as much a work of art as a garment. The special effects built into the set, which include a levitation mechanism and a poltergeist-like spontaneous decomposition of the sitting room, are hilarious.

The good but not as good: Nancy Robinette‘s portrayal of the medium, Madame Arcati, who brings the ghosts into our world. Coward’s jokes with this character are complicated. She is no phony, despite a setup in which we are led to expect she might be. But she has all of the drawbacks that one might expect of a real-life medium if mediums were real-life: despite great enthusiasm, she has limited competence or learning. Moreover, she adheres to a great many principles as if they were technical requirements of her craft (no Indian tea, for instance), and Coward deliberately leaves unresolved whether these are personal eccentricities or actual job requirements. Robinette gets the eccentricity part right, but her portrayal skimps a bit on the other part, an absolute stereotype of the British stage and screen: the jolly spinster filled with English gumption and pluck. (Margaret Rutherford and Beatrice Lillie pioneered the role in the play and the musical respectively, which may give the reader of a certain age a notion of what I’m talking about.)

Finally, the less-than-satisfactory. Megan Anderson is wrong for Ruth. Now Anderson is an actress I greatly admire, having marveled just this season at her turn as The Pilot in Grounded; tough, profane, and ultimately traumatized. But there is nothing about her Ruth that I believe: not the British accent, not the black bobbed hair, not the bickering, and certainly not the notion that a man who had been married to the delectable, kittenish Elvira would invite the stolid kind of character Anderson gives us to succeed Elvira. The play only works at peak capacity if we can sense Charles being torn between his two wives. Here the chemistry between Charles and Elvira is palpable enough, but I never sense anything approaching it between Charles and Ruth.

In the end, this production does little to solve the problems in the play. There is a kind of magic which will exorcise the problems, and let us not notice them: Center Stage’s production of a few years back managed it. This one cruises and coasts on the farcical elements and the bickering and Arcati’s eccentricities, and in so doing it certainly keeps the audience laughing. But it does not dispel the sour taste lingering at the end.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photograph. Photo credit: ClintonBPhotography.

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What to Say After Freddie Gray

Published in The Daily Record, print edition June 1, online edition June 3, 2015

As its title The Big Picture might suggest, this column has always shied away from focusing too closely on issues local to Baltimore. But there come moments when talking about Baltimore is talking about “the big picture.” If I needed any confirmation that we’d reached such a moment, it happened on a recent vacation in San Juan. Making conversation, two different cabbies asked me where I was from, and as soon as I told them, they expressed condolences – and considerable awareness of our local troubles.

So fine, I’m going to talk about them here. The trouble is, what do I say? Not because I don’t have any point of view, but because – and I suspect I’m like a lot of other Americans – I have a lot of contradictory points of view. Let’s run it down:

• Police riot control. If you were like me, you were watching the looting and burning of the CVS while the police nicely lined up a block away, doing nothing, and you were outraged. Later, though, you had to acknowledge that if the police had chosen that moment to intervene, lives would have been lost. So which was more important, lives or property? When you answer, bear in mind that the property lost wasn’t simply what was being stolen or burned at that moment. It included the jobs of the people who worked at the wrecked businesses, and the sense of security felt by Baltimoreans miles away, and the willingness of potential Baltimoreans to come here to invest or work or play. The looters were wrecking a commons. At some point, doesn’t that commons outweigh a few human lives? I’m not suggesting an answer; I’m just asking a question.
• Criminal charges. Like many Baltimoreans, I was stirred by States Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s remarks. And it is hard to dispute that Ms. Mosby’s speech and her filing charges helped quell the riots. Only the most hypertechnical defender of the police can seriously maintain they did nothing wrong leading up to Freddie Gray’s death, even if we don’t know every detail yet. Does the police behavior merit criminal charges, though? There’s been quite a debate over that, one that only criminal lawyers (and I’m not one) seem to be able to engage in intelligently. But I do understand conflicts of interest, and I know that when Mosby’s detractors allege those, they are talking irresponsible nonsense. Filing criminal charges to support a donor’s civil suit? Come on! And I don’t trust the detractors. The vitriol hurled at Ms. Mosby in my circle of Facebook acquaintance comes exclusively from friends who, whatever their good qualities, say the most knee-jerk racist things.
• Drugs. At the bottom of much of the talk about why West Baltimore exploded is the “Hamsterdam narrative.” (In The Wire, the police momentarily allowed a drug enforcement-free zone by that name.) The narrative goes like this: We’re going to have drugs, no matter what. Because of a massive failure in our city to retain heavy industry, there are few employment opportunities in some neighborhoods other than selling drugs. Policing in those neighborhoods is therefore almost exclusively focused on suppressing the main neighborhood economic engine. It turns the entrepreneurs who may be in many respects the neighborhoods’ best and brightest into criminals, and forces them into antisocial lifestyles which, were their trade simply legalized, they would not be constrained to embrace. And it pits the police against neighborhood youth, distorting the profession of policing in the process. Finally, the whole mess, including its inevitable upshot, expensive mass incarceration, distracts attention and detracts resources from a health care approach to drug dependency. I completely agree with this narrative; but I won’t say that I wouldn’t feel a little strange if we actually changed our policies to make the selling of heroin and cocaine as legal as the selling of alcohol. There’s no doubt that if we did that, some lives would be ruined; it’s just that there’s good reason to believe more lives would be un-ruined. It’s a matter of tradeoffs.
• Criminal records. One of the problems in our minority neighborhoods much discussed in the wake of the riots was the low employment, which is largely blamed on the fact that an alarmingly high percentage of the otherwise potentially eligible workers there have criminal records. (See the previous point.) Yet if someone has done his or her time, that should ordinarily be a closed chapter. Employers should ordinarily not be able to ask about it or check an applicant’s criminal records, or be held liable for having failed to do so. And licensing authorities which are required to assure themselves that persons seeking to be anything from burglar alarm installers to lawyers meet the universal “good character” requirement should be barred from considering criminal records in making that assessment. Oh yes, there would have to be exceptions, but I believe we could get by with precious few (nuclear bomb makers and child care workers, perhaps). Would more bad apples get through? You bet; but because we have for the two generations of the “War on Drugs” abused our power to charge, convict, and imprison, our criminal records, even when factually accurate, remain unreliable guides to character. Again, there are no perfect solutions, but I’m confident the benefit we would all draw from unruined careers would outweigh the losses caused by the bad apples who would not be screened out.
• Hitting kids. One of the strange things to come out of the riots was the approval heaped on a mother captured in a video literally beating her son because she found him taking part. At one time I would not have said this, but I do now: hitting your kids is never acceptable. Period. I recognize that finding your child taking part in an insurrection that might result in him being beaten or shot by police, or arrested and maybe suffering Freddie Gray’s fate after an arrest, would lead most parents to take desperate measures. So I am not condemning the mom, just disagreeing with her. I say there’s far too much parental hitting going on, and I think that parental example is part of what makes kids think it’s okay to be violent themselves.
• Development. For years, we’ve been throwing tax money (often quite wastefully) at condo and hotel developers and auto race promoters and who knows who else to polish up our harbor zone. In that zone and other genteel ones, we’ve subsidized the bus rides of those who could already afford them. Meanwhile, in certain other neighborhoods, we’ve left boarded-ups, food deserts, lead paint, vermin, and unsubsidized mass transit – along with too many violent or negligent police officers, and too few cops who actually live in Baltimore. And then we wonder why those certain other neighborhoods explode.

The riots were like a bunch of Rohrschach ink blots, in which you could see almost anything, and almost any side of any issue. We’ll have to work with our confusion for awhile. But after that work we have a responsibility to reach conclusions and take action. Changes must be made.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Solemn and Unusual: 1776 at Toby’s

Dan Felton

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com May 18, 2015

There are times it’s hard to credit that 1776 is even a musical. In this retelling of the drafting and signing of the Declaration of Independence, there is some singing and some dancing, and there are even some laughs, but little effort to follow the tried-and-true path to rousing musical success. This is fundamentally a tale of a group of men sitting in a room debating, and Peter Stone, author of the book, gives us – a group of men sitting in a room debating. With only twelve songs in the show, there is one half-hour stretch which features no music at all. What romance may be found lies between John and Abigail Adams (sung across some space of open stage to underline that it is purely epistolary), and between Thomas and Martha Jefferson – both couples already married. None of that falling-in-love stuff here. The first-act closing number is a stark, melancholy and ghostly evocation of the horrors of war that echoes attitudes toward Vietnam when the show originated. The finale, which in almost any other musical would involve the entire cast singing, is simply one voice speaking the names of the signers as they step forward to execute the Declaration, as the sound of bells gradually drowns out the speaker. And yet the work has considerable power and appeal, and it is not strange either that it won the Tony for Best Musical in 1969, or that Toby’s has revived it.

Though 1776 takes massive liberties with the historical record, it gets the central fact right: a roomful of men struggling through the summer heat, and through disagreement and compromise, to forge a document of eloquence and unimaginable consequence. The uplifting solemnity of the event is preserved, and indeed it would be hard to imagine a more appropriate way of concluding it than with the tolling bells already mentioned.

Toby’s brings its customary high performance standards to this revival, including a number of its seasoned veterans (Lawrence B. Munsey, David Bosley-Reynolds, Robert John Biedermann 125, Jeffrey Shankle, and Marykate Brouillet among them) in the ensemble, all of them troupers who could do musical comedy in their sleep. Standouts include Daniel Felton as Edward Rutledge (pictured above), who gets to sing one of the spookiest songs ever to grace (if that’s the word) a musical: Molasses to Rum, an almost incoherently evil paean to slavery, and Matthew Hirsch, as a courier from General Washington who delivers the previously-mentioned evocation of war’s horrors, Momma Look Sharp.

My only criticism is that to all appearances, Toby’s has substituted a recorded score for a live orchestra on this occasion, and, apart from a certain lack of spontaneity, there were moments when performers and orchestra were a half-beat or so out of synch. That did not happen much, but it was noticeable when it did. On a related note, however, Toby’s sound design (by Mark Smedley) was crisper and clearer than I have heard it (under another designer) in recent performances.

In any event, the show, underattended the night I was there, is a fine evening of theater, and, because of, not despite, all the palaver, it is especially worthwhile to take youngsters to. I had a fifth-grader with me, and he was goggle-eyed at the debate and the bell-ringing conclusion. Never underestimate the theatrical impact of ideas and of ideals. You should go.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Photo credit: Jeri Tidwell.

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Marley: A Rare and Topical Event

Mitchell Brunings

Posted on BroadwayWorld May 18, 2015

Get your tickets quickly for Marley, because it will likely sell out. It is the first time Center Stage has produced a true Big Musical. In recent years Center Stage has produced its share of regional theater-scale productions of established hit musicals, including Pajama Game, A Little Night Music, and, earlier this season, Next to Normal. But the ambition of this show, the size of the cast (probably the largest I’ve ever seen at Center Stage), and the fact that this is a world premiere, combine to make this an event a first for this venue. Marley shows every sign of being intended for Broadway, and every sign of being able to hold its own once it arrives there.

This is something we haven’t seen in a very long time in this town: a full-scale hit musical in the making. We probably would never have had a chance at it or anything like it were the author, Kwame Kwei-Armah, not also Center Stage’s Artistic Director, who has been reported as determined to give it first to his own company.

In form, it is a standard jukebox musical of the biopic variety, built around the life and the oeuvre of a great popular musical act, in this case reggae superstar Bob Marley. With a certain amount of fictionalizing and combining of historical characters, a generous use of flashbacks, and a dramatic arc that ends with a big concert, it has most of the hallmarks of the genre. And the foundation, as always in these shows, is a recreation of the experience of hearing the performer. Just as John Lloyd Young, for all intents and purposes, was Frankie Valli in Jersey Boys, so first-time actor Mitchell Brunings is Bob Marley. The physical resemblance is tolerable, the dreadlock-tossing mannerisms, the Jamaican patois, and most of all, the weary, slightly hoarse tenor, are all there.

In short, this is the kind of show we Baltimoreans ordinarily see at the 2300-seat Hippodrome in retreaded road-show format after Broadway has leeched much of the spontaneous excitement. It is a completely different matter to see such a production in the intimate setting of the 541-seat Pearlstone Theater. And it is no small satisfaction to witness the Pearlstone’s audience using that space the way it is encouraged to do here: singing along, standing up and dancing along with the show. At the finale, the audience is invited to come up to the stage and dance with the cast – fourth wall be damned. After years of occasionally stodgy, if always tasteful, productions at Center Stage, Kwei-Armah in four seasons has simply swept aside the old paradigms of what could be done and what should be done in that house.

We all know Center Stage is about to hit an inflection-point in its development, a year exiled at Towson University, as the company’s permanent home is refurbished. Doubtless things will be different next year, and different again when the troupe returns to its permanent quarters. So this show is a kind of climax to a short era: Kwei-Armah’s first four years. Marley sends it out with a resounding celebratory bang.

The bang isn’t simply a matter of scale, ambition, and audience participation. Within the strictures of the jukebox musical, this is a well-made and well-staged play. It covers three years towards the end of Marley’s life, when the violence generated by the unholy alliances between Jamaica’s political parties and criminal gangs temporarily drowned out Marley’s political but nonpartisan message. Marley therefore made his home in London for two years as a sort of refugee and recluse. When he returned, he spearheaded a concert at which he persuaded the two leading feuding politicians to appear on the stage together with him, and even hold hands, as a message of national – and human unity. The tale forms a natural dramatic arc; as I’ve said already, it is conventional (because it works), for biopic-style jukebox musicals to end with a concert at which the star’s personal issues are also to some degree resolved. And this is what Kwei-Armah presents.

This complicated story, told in accents and with a vocabulary not necessarily familiar to American audiences, demands some curating and interpretation beyond what a dramaturg can supply in program notes. And here the brilliant set, by Neil Patel, carries the heaviest burden. The turntable in the center becomes an Island record (Marley’s label at this point in his career), complete with the actual label design Island records featured in the mid-70s. And surrounding that sometimes revolving disk is a series of moving screens on which projections, variously pictorial, graffitoed, lyrical, or whatever help the audience grasp the context, are shown. (A hat-tip to projection-designer Alex Koch.) The screens also slide around to facilitate entrances and exits.

And of course, by an accident of timing for which no one can claim credit (although many should acknowledge blame), Marley speaks not so indirectly to Baltimore’s own current situation. You could make an argument that the lyrics of Marley’s song War, presented in the show, exactly summarize the root problem in our town right now:

Until the philosophy which hold one race superior
And another
Inferior
Is finally
And permanently
Discredited
And abandoned
Everywhere is war
Me say war.

That until there no longer
First class and second class citizens of any nation
Until the colour of a man’s skin
Is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes
Me say war.

That until the basic human rights
Are equally guaranteed to all,
Without regard to race
Dis a war

Even though the historical Marley was probably mainly thinking about apartheid when he sang these words, you could not possibly sing them on a Baltimore stage these days without making the audience think of events closer to home. That common distress, and a common sense of determination, were palpable in the crowd the night I watched the show. Bob Marley, very self-consciously a prophet, sang for his moment, but he sang as well for the ages, which includes our own. Center Stage could not have bought Bob Marley’s topicality, but it could earn it, and did. One could believe it really was Marley up there, singing right to us.

Of course, in the manner of modern biopic jukebox musicals, that sense of presence, that verisimilitude, were reinforced by at least the show of airing the hero’s failings. So we get reasonable glimpses of Marley’s indecision and his incessant womanizing, and his (to most listeners, anyway) wooly Rastafari mysticism. An example of how not to do it: in Berry Gordy’s autobiographical script for Motown, Gordy whitewashed the way his own overreaching business practices alienated his stable of artists; as a result, if you knew anything about the story, the big reconciliatory concert scene at the end felt utterly phony. Marley‘s big reconciliatory concert feels true.

So I think this work will have legs beyond Baltimore. With a well-crafted book and a rousing songbook delivered by a singer who can make us believe Marley is in our midst, it should go far. And for something like that to get its start in Baltimore, when the era of tryout houses is almost defunct, is almost unheard-of. It should absolutely not be missed. If you can score tickets.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn except for excerpted lyrics and production photo

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