Showing posts with label Education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Education. Show all posts

Sunday, December 10, 2023

World Premiere of ‘The Messenger’ Boldly Probes the Complicity of Silence

 

Attention must be paid as one enters the Palm Beach Dramaworks theatre.  A stark white angular platform is set atop the stage with one sharp corner pointing directly towards the audience.  The entire set is bathed in white, a tabula rasa on which will be written the message of The Messenger.  PBD’s new Resident Stage Designer, Anne Mundell, has populated a corner with books and files, randomly placed and chaotically spilling onto the floor.  It is edgy, perplexing, inviting. 

 



PBD has always been known as a home for serious classic works, but Producing Artistic Director William Hayes has been moving the theatre towards innovative new plays with the logic that if regional theatres don’t produce such works, who will?  The Messenger was incubated in its Dramaworkshop.  Hayes has said he believes this is the “most important play ever produced at PBD and at the most appropriate time.”

 

Indeed, what transpires in the intermission-less 90 minutes bears out that statement, from the opening moment when a monolithic section of the wall opens bathed in bright light with ominous, deep musical tones (perhaps a hat tip to Kubrick’s 2001?) as the characters emerge representing the past, present, and possibilities of the future.

 

Although this is not a holocaust play per se, it finds its gravitas from the life of Georgia Gabor, a holocaust survivor, who immigrated to the US and later taught math in the San Marino Unified School District for two decades.  The persecution she suffered in her adopted community was a terrible addendum to her life, as well as its implications for society.  The Messenger pulls us into the central overarching issue, man’s inhumanity to man.  It is a play about persecution and how history seems destined to repeat itself.  It is about the consequences of being silent, especially in this social-network polluted world where those who “scream” loudest are generally those who perpetuate ethnic and racial persecution.

 

While it is a four-character play, Gabor’s story, played by PBD veteran Margery Lowe, is the only one based on a real person, with much of her dialogue coming from Gabor’s memoir My Destiny.  

 

Jenny Connell Davis, PBD new Resident Playwright imaginatively creates the other three characters from facts of different eras and designates years as their names to clarify where they place in the panoptic vision of the play.  All are women.  It is remarkable that she has been able to create characters that grow more and more real, ones the audience empathizes with, in a play which is essentially surreal and symbolic.

 

They are 1969, a curator at The Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California; 1993, the mother of one of Gabor’s students; and 2020, a high school student and former volunteer at The Huntington.  Off stage character, Miley, a friend of 2020’s, shares this story as well.

 

Their episodic stories materialize out of time sequence and are kaleidoscopically woven into the fabric of Gabor’s experience. The actors pour their hearts into these stories, making poignant connections between then and now.

 

Angela Gulner, Gracie Winchester, Margery Lowe, Annie Fang; Photo by Alicia Donelan

The success of this world premiere is in large part due to Margery Lowe’s experience in appearing in new plays, especially at PBD.  It takes a special sensibility playing the lead where no one has gone before, to make the character interpretation one’s own.  Lowe has a special advantage playing Georgia Gabor as both are diminutive in stature but lions in spirit.  Lowe also had the advantage of being able to study Gabor when she was interviewed in 1984 by The 1939 Society. 

 


Lowe perfectly captures her character, and triumphs with Gabor’s words from her memoir although her Hungarian accent takes some acclimation to clearly understand.  Nevertheless, Lowe has reincarnated Georgia Gabor with her flirtatious mannerisms, her dynamic personality and stalwart resolve to tell her painful story over and over.

 

But it is what she experienced afterwards – again becoming a victim of anti Semitism in the wealthy community of San Marino CA. -- where Lowe’s performance provides a strong catalyst in moving the arc of the story.  The other characters’ develop into real people under her watchful eye, the ripple effects washing over the audience. 

 

Bill Hayes directs The Messenger.  His vision and his labor of love underscore his belief in the play and are borne out by this production.  His talented assistant director, Jessica Chen, whose background is in dance brings her eye for fluidity to the stage.  

 

Gracie Winchester plays 1969, capturing youth’s wide eyed wonder of working in the august Huntington Library, where possibly becoming a curator comes into conflict with her discovery that the Library harbors a dark secret, the original copy of the Nuremberg Laws, which was designed to deprive Jews of basic rights, signed by Hitler himself.  How did they come to the Huntington and why were they filed away, never displayed, forgotten?  1969 has to make a choice to reveal the facts, but perhaps at the expense of a cherished career.  Winchester makes you feel her character’s dilemma as well as her outrage, and sad capitulation, the playwright connecting the dots with 1969 appearing as a regretful old lady with a parasol in 2020’s era at “the Hunt.”

 

Angela Gulner makes her PBD debut as 1993, and gives a bravura performance of someone thinking she is doing the right thing as the antagonist, organizing a partition objecting to Gabor’s teaching.  As a parent we all know how we will go to extremes to guard one’s child.  But did she cross a line when she is the one that takes action to stop Gabor for inviting children to hear her survivorship stories after school (not a requirement)?  Gulner protests (“her history is not OUR history”).  She’s a math teacher!  She has no right to teach what should be left to historians!  Yet her moving performance elicits sympathy as well as being reminded of current events in our schools right now. 

 

Annie Fang, also making her PBD debut as 2020, deals with some of the emotional highlights of the play, particularly her relationship with the off stage Miley, who is a math genius, is certainly destined for a top school (the community’s raison d’être), and yet is more interested in art.  They are Asian Americans and during Covid were called “Chinks” while volunteering at the Huntington by the same kind of people who might hurl Jewish invectives at Gabor.

 

The incident blows up in social media, today’s ubiquitous Petri dish for scapegoating and persecution and 2020 tries to distance herself from the widely circulated video of Miley confronting her tormentor. Ultimately Miley suffers the ultimate consequence of silence.  As we can only see and feel Miley through 2020, Fang’s performance is particularly noteworthy.

 

It is an ingeniously written play by Jenny Connell Davis and director William Hayes manages the actors on the stage as they tell their overlapping stories, moving from shadows to light.  Portions reminded me of a Sondheim duet where counterpoint is featured.

 

As an abstract play, where characters may be moving from point A to B, more along a surrealistic path, Resident Lighting Designer, Kirk Bookman has challenging transitions, essential ones to keep the audience engaged.  Much of the time shadows are as important as lights up, as all characters are on stage throughout even if not engaged in their own particular part.

 

Bookman works in concert with Video Designer Adam J. Thompson.  Parts of the play are filled with projected videos, some falling on the actors themselves but mostly on the white walls, in particular videos of artistic compositions by Miley, and very moving to see them being created in real time.  Other projected images are disturbing though, such as the bombed out Ghettos which Gabor “lived in,” and symbols of hate that both Gabor and 2020 had to endure.  Overall, the video and the lighting of the show are even more integral than the typical play and kudos to Mr. Thompson and Mr. Bookman.

 

Sound design by Roger Arnold is portending, even startling at times (gunshots), boot steps of the Hungarian Nazi sympathetic Arrow Cross Party, all in keeping with the dystopian theme of what Gabor endured, during the war.

 

Against a white-washed stage Costume Designer Brian O’Keefe’s choices were endless (except white!) and here he creates costumes not only appropriate for the different eras of the characters, clearly distinguishing each, while still sharing certain earth tone palettes. O’Keefe is a stickler for the details.  They are award winning visions, and I loved 1993’s wide legged pants and sunglasses pushed up in her blond hair.  It tells a lot about the sought after community where helicopter parents landed with their kids.

 

O’Keefe brilliantly designed the swirling dress with the ubiquitous stretchy belt cinching in Ms. Lowe’s tiny waist which not only showed off her diminutive figure to perfection but allowed the actress to swish about in her more flirtatious moments.  The dirt-red sweater thrown about her shoulders added the final perfect touch.

 

The execution of the complex staging of this play warrants kudos to PBD’s Stage Manager, Kent James Collins.  Opening night went as smoothly as if the play had been in previews for weeks (vs. the reality of two days).

 

The Messenger is not only a world premiere, it is also the first production in a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere series and regional theatres in Texas and Minneapolis are already committed to producing it.  Fittingly Mrs. Roberta Golub, Georgia Gabor’s daughter, is the executive producer of The Messenger. 

 

At the end, Fang, who plays 2020, has the temerity to begin to “step outside the box” (full lighting for this dramatic effect).  Can the future learn from the past?  Isn’t it incumbent on all to become activists, to become messengers of The Messenger?  That is the ultimate question of this imaginative new play.

 

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

It’s Come to This



I’ve passed through Baltimore more times than I care to count but never toured the city.  I know the Baltimore portrayed by Anne Tyler, a place of comfy familiarity. She must be appalled about what’s happening in Baltimore, although it is not surprising. Racial riots and tensions are not new in America.  It is reminiscent of the 1992 Rodney King riots in L.A. which followed the acquittal of police officers after a police brutality incident was caught on video tape.  But that was a “one off” capture of an incident.

What is new is the widespread use of cell phone, surveillance, and dash board cameras that reveal the everyday nature of the problem.  Twitter and YouTube deliver the message to a nation crazed for user-generated content.  The more we see, the more inured we become to the root of the problem, racial and economic division. 

Meanwhile media firms are pouring endless money into creating “shows” designed to be watched on ubiquitous mobile devices, the holy grail of streaming Internet firms such as Netflix.  We’ve become a nation of somnambulists, cynical about the political process (ironically revealed by Netflix’s House of Cards – does life imitate art or vice versa?). According to a study done two years ago, “by 2015 Americans are expected to consume media for more than 1.7 trillion hours, or an average15.5 hours per person per day, again not counting workplace time. 

2015 is now. My wife recently boarded an aircraft from Atlanta and most people were watching videos on their laptops or iPods or even cell phones and although anecdotal evidence at best, many were of interactive games or slam-bang explosive Hollywood films.   Imagine, most of your waking hours consuming media of this nature?

What happened to reading?  Same answer as to what has happened to education.  As long as we put a premium on consuming video content while minimizing education, there really is no answer to the racial and economic tensions that will play out in the future.  Along with rebuilding our infrastructure, and our inner cities, education must be this nation’s highest priority to provide opportunity where people feel there is none. Better police tactics are needed, and research and education is required there as well.   No wonder there is such despondency.

Easier said than done naturally, and having a dysfunctional government is not helping. As presidential electioneering gets underway the failings of the whole process will become even more apparent, thanks to Supreme Court sanctioned unlimited campaign contributions by corporations and individuals: its a few mega billionaires and corporations vs. the rest of us. 

And it’s come to this in Baltimore today: the Baltimore Orioles will play the Chicago White Sox in an empty stadium -- our National Pastime with no spectators allowed because of safety concerns. Eerie symbolism of things to come? Is that how we want to live our lives? 

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Connecting the Notes



One of the things I get to do in this blog is editorialize about, well, almost anything.  Things that catch my eye sometimes have a rumination period.  Such is the case with two fairly recent articles in the Wall Street Journal and thoughts I’ve expressed about American popular culture and the state of American education.  Perhaps the reason I still subscribe to the Wall Street Journal is that in spite of its now Rupert Murdochian slant, one I lamented when Sarah Palin became associated with his empire (yikes, that was almost four years ago!), is that it has expanded its “life and culture” coverage, delivering consistent high quality. 

First, to set the stage I quote from Philip Roth – from an interview earlier in the year with a Swedish journalist (not the WSJ). He so eloquently described the losing battle that teachers and parents are having with “the moronic amusement park” of popular culture, omnipresent in our traditional media and the Internet: The power in any society is with those who get to impose the fantasy....Now the fantasy that prevails is the all-consuming, voraciously consumed popular culture, seemingly spawned by, of all things, freedom. The young especially live according to beliefs that are thought up for them by the society’s most unthinking people and by the businesses least impeded by innocent ends. Ingeniously as their parents and teachers may attempt to protect the young from being drawn, to their detriment, into the moronic amusement park that is now universal, the preponderance of the power is not with them.

It brings up the obvious issue of cultural values.  If our youth is being dumbed down to such an extent by the scores of pop figures rolling off the American Idol / America’s Got Talent assembly line each year, slavishly lionized, what kind of a future is there for classical music, opera, serious theatre, and literature?  To what extent is our educational system itself responsible?  And what can be done about it?

Terry Teachout, the now reigning theatre critic of the Wall Street Journal, addresses the popular culture side of this equation in his recent article, Pop Go the Highbrows. He cites as evidence the “devolution” the Kennedy Center Honors. In 1978, the first five recipients of that once-prestigious award were Marian Anderson, Fred Astaire, George Balanchine, Richard Rodgers and Arthur Rubinstein. This year’s honorees will be Al Green, Tom Hanks, Lily Tomlin and Sting, with the peerless ballerina Patricia McBride thrown in to humor the highbrows.

He goes on to say Alex Ross, the music critic of the New Yorker, got it just right when he wrote the other day that the Kennedy Center Honors have degenerated into “one more temple of celebrity culture, magnifying the fame of already familiar faces....The logic that has taken hold of the Honors is one of pop triumphalism: it’s not enough for pop culture to dominate the mainstream; it must colonize the spaces occupied by older genres and effectively drive them from the field.”

The following day the WSJ published Joanne Lipman’s A Musical Fix for American Schools. Perhaps you too have long lamented the state of our educational system, particularly the wide gap between the haves and the have-nots, and how our educators are low in our value system, paying a great teacher a mere fraction of what we pay other professionals, lawyers, doctors, business people,  you name it, not to mention entertainers and sports figures.  In 1990 when I returned from a trip to Japan, it became particularly obvious to me and I wrote an article, Why Johnny Can't Compete noting that "quality education is truly available to all in Japan and it is widely perceived to be desirable.  Japanese teachers occupy a high status in society and are well paid.  Illiteracy is virtually unknown."



Lipman’s essay hit me as an epiphany.  It’s not only about paying our better educators more, holding them higher in our esteem than other professionals; it’s about radically revamping our educational system.  Music democratizes education, allowing every child to participate on an equal footing, teaching cooperation, and “research shows that lessons with an instrument boosts IQ, focus and persistence.” Among the key points in the article:
            *Music raises your IQ
            *Musical training can reduce the academic gap between rich and poor districts
            *Music training does more than sports, theater or dance to improve key academic skills
            *Music can be an inexpensive early screening tool for reading disabilities
            *Music literally expands your brain

Why shouldn’t our educational system incorporate extensive music education (and by that I don’t mean only music history, but, more so, musical theory and practice, classical music as well as  jazz for its improvisational characteristics) into its curriculum?  Perhaps if students are able to perform those forms of music, the tide can be turned against, as Roth puts it, society’s most unthinking people.