After an on-the-go day, Saturday night was alright for...a movie.
I was meeting a friend at the Criterion for "My Old Lady," a dreadfully named film by playwright Israel Horovitz, with whom I'm well familiar.
Having seen more than half a dozen of his plays in Richmond over the past few years at Firehouse Theater, I appreciate his ability to walk the line between woe and tenderness.
We were far from the only ones out for a movie tonight and by the time we got our tickets and popcorn, the theater's only available seats were in the third row, meaning the most erect of posture was necessary.
But it also put stunning scenes of Paris right in our face as the story of an unhappy American whose father wills him a big apartment in the Marais district unfolded.
On arrival, he finds a 92-year old woman (played by the indomitable Maggie Smith) as the occupant living there with her daughter and that the apartment is a "viager," meaning he has to pay her 2400 Euros a month and she has the right to live there until she dies.
Naturally, he's hoping that's sooner rather than later.
Discussing age, she informs him she likes her breakfast every day exactly at 8 a.m., her dinner at 8 p.m. and no lunch because it holds no appeal to her.
"Precision is the key to a long life," she assures him. "And wine."
Advice I intend to take.
He discovers an old photograph of his father and the woman with the inscription. "If you do not love me, I shall not be loved" - a Samuel Beckett quotation that finishes sublimely with "If I do not love you, I shall not love" - and the past rears its convoluted head.
As they get to know each other, we learn that their pasts are more connected than any of them knew and eventually he starts to be attracted to the old woman's daughter.
After he kisses her for the first time, he tells her she's beautiful.
"I'm not beautiful, I'm old," she responds.
In what is a very romantic exchange, he comes back to her the next day and tells her to repeat what she'd said about being old and not beautiful. He's come up with the perfect reply.
"A perfect flower is nearly old," he says, not sure if she'll appreciate his analogy but of course she does.
Well satisfied with a middle-aged romance that began life as a play, we walked out of the theater next to a couple who asked how we had liked it.
They'd started the evening seeing another film and walked out after ten minutes and into "My Old Lady," enjoying it considerably and satisfied that they'd made the right call.
Taking Dame Smith's advice, I invited company over for wine and music, wiling away the rest of the evening listening to the sunny dance pop of J. Views, the languid vocal stylings of Wye Oak and the timeless harmonies of the Spinners while sipping Monmousseau Cuvee J.M. Rose and Aime Roquesante Rose, so creamy tasting after the bubbles that proceeded it.
As to the precision part of longevity, I'll get to that another day, maybe after I stop basking in the glow of being considered comparable to a perfect flower. Nearly old.
Showing posts with label israel horovitz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label israel horovitz. Show all posts
Sunday, September 21, 2014
Thursday, May 8, 2014
Don't Stop Believing
Theater is my temple and my religion and my act of faith. Strangers sit in a room together and believe together~ Harvey Fierstein
And sometimes that believing gives you a sense of history retold...or foreshadowed.
The Jewish Community Center was the venue for guest director Carol Piersol's production of Israel Horovitz' "Lebensraum," an incredibly powerful piece that had three strong actors plating 50+ roles using a wooden wall of props over 90 minutes.
The premise was both simple and far-fetched: what if a future German chancellor invited six million Jews to come to Germany with the promise of citizenship and full benefits as a way to assuage their sea of guilt for the Jews killed during the Holocaust?
The actors - Stephen Ryan, Matt Shofner, Sara Heifetz- were mesmerizing, shape-shifting from character to character to narrator and back again, sometimes in the course of two sentences.
Simple props, voice inflections and accents helped define characters as the story unfolded.
The chancellor's "project homecoming" is shown eliciting very different reactions. A concentration camp survivor wants to go back for revenge. An out of work Massachusetts dockworker wants to move his wife and son to Germany. Israelis fear for the safety of their people.
In one brilliant scene, Stephen portrayed two men having a conversation, putting on different hats, voices and demeanors to convey the decidedly different essence of each.
There weren't a lot of lighter scenes, but one involved the arrival of a Jewish, married, gay French couple (played to limp-wristed perfection by Matt and Stephen in berets) who want to claim their citizenship. Needless to say, they are not what the Germans had been expecting.
Sara managed to play both the non-Jewish wife of the dockworker as well as the teen-aged Jewish girl with whom her 15-year old son soon falls for and made both believable.
Their blossoming romance was the sweetest part of the film as the two learned that great loves are made not of similarities but of differences.
Him: You think I'm funny?
Her: You are funny!
Him: Then we most definitely need to kiss if you laugh at my jokes.
Piersol's direction was fast-paced so something was happening every moment, from the Boston couple becoming local celebrities to the German workers organizing to protest the jobs being taken from them for the new Jewish arrivals to Israeli activists arriving to become citizens in hopes of protecting their people.
Always someone was speaking, either in character or as narrator explaining the action. After a while, it felt eerily like a live action newsreel unfolding upsetting events even while intellectually, we knew we were watching fiction.
Hands down, it was some of the most powerful theater I've seen due in equal measures to Horovitz's story and completely compelling performances by the trio bringing it to life.
With the added weight of so much of tonight's audience being Jewish, it felt like we were watching something visceral and unforgettable.
My only regret was that I went alone so I didn't have anyone to discuss it with afterwards.
I was meeting a friend for a late dinner and conversation, though, just not about the play. I got to the Roosevelt just as the dinner rush was winding down and ordered a glass of Pollack Rose while bartender T. made sure I'd be at the next DJ night.
A DJ from my neighborhood record store playing late night tunes? Hell, yes.
With soul music uncharacteristically playing, the vibe tonight was slow and mellow, a terrific backdrop to meet up with my friend and find out what she'd been up to.
When the subject of my upcoming birthday arose, she posed a question. "How much technology can you stand?"
I think we all know the answer to that. I use a computer daily and won't own a cell phone until they pry the land line from my cold, dead hands.
"Have you heard of pagers?" she joked because she's so hilarious.
She had skirt steak for dinner while I chose pork belly, little neck clams and potatoes in kimchee broth, a spicy and satisfying bowlful that carried me through our discussion of mothers and daughters, double dragon and conspiracy theories.
Meanwhile I heard my name - first and last- called and there sat a recording engineer I know from the neighborhood, enjoying a cocktail with friends and are clearly surprised to see me somewhere other than Jackson Ward.
Which just goes to prove that he doesn't get out much or he'd know better.
And sometimes that believing gives you a sense of history retold...or foreshadowed.
The Jewish Community Center was the venue for guest director Carol Piersol's production of Israel Horovitz' "Lebensraum," an incredibly powerful piece that had three strong actors plating 50+ roles using a wooden wall of props over 90 minutes.
The premise was both simple and far-fetched: what if a future German chancellor invited six million Jews to come to Germany with the promise of citizenship and full benefits as a way to assuage their sea of guilt for the Jews killed during the Holocaust?
The actors - Stephen Ryan, Matt Shofner, Sara Heifetz- were mesmerizing, shape-shifting from character to character to narrator and back again, sometimes in the course of two sentences.
Simple props, voice inflections and accents helped define characters as the story unfolded.
The chancellor's "project homecoming" is shown eliciting very different reactions. A concentration camp survivor wants to go back for revenge. An out of work Massachusetts dockworker wants to move his wife and son to Germany. Israelis fear for the safety of their people.
In one brilliant scene, Stephen portrayed two men having a conversation, putting on different hats, voices and demeanors to convey the decidedly different essence of each.
There weren't a lot of lighter scenes, but one involved the arrival of a Jewish, married, gay French couple (played to limp-wristed perfection by Matt and Stephen in berets) who want to claim their citizenship. Needless to say, they are not what the Germans had been expecting.
Sara managed to play both the non-Jewish wife of the dockworker as well as the teen-aged Jewish girl with whom her 15-year old son soon falls for and made both believable.
Their blossoming romance was the sweetest part of the film as the two learned that great loves are made not of similarities but of differences.
Him: You think I'm funny?
Her: You are funny!
Him: Then we most definitely need to kiss if you laugh at my jokes.
Piersol's direction was fast-paced so something was happening every moment, from the Boston couple becoming local celebrities to the German workers organizing to protest the jobs being taken from them for the new Jewish arrivals to Israeli activists arriving to become citizens in hopes of protecting their people.
Always someone was speaking, either in character or as narrator explaining the action. After a while, it felt eerily like a live action newsreel unfolding upsetting events even while intellectually, we knew we were watching fiction.
Hands down, it was some of the most powerful theater I've seen due in equal measures to Horovitz's story and completely compelling performances by the trio bringing it to life.
With the added weight of so much of tonight's audience being Jewish, it felt like we were watching something visceral and unforgettable.
My only regret was that I went alone so I didn't have anyone to discuss it with afterwards.
I was meeting a friend for a late dinner and conversation, though, just not about the play. I got to the Roosevelt just as the dinner rush was winding down and ordered a glass of Pollack Rose while bartender T. made sure I'd be at the next DJ night.
A DJ from my neighborhood record store playing late night tunes? Hell, yes.
With soul music uncharacteristically playing, the vibe tonight was slow and mellow, a terrific backdrop to meet up with my friend and find out what she'd been up to.
When the subject of my upcoming birthday arose, she posed a question. "How much technology can you stand?"
I think we all know the answer to that. I use a computer daily and won't own a cell phone until they pry the land line from my cold, dead hands.
"Have you heard of pagers?" she joked because she's so hilarious.
She had skirt steak for dinner while I chose pork belly, little neck clams and potatoes in kimchee broth, a spicy and satisfying bowlful that carried me through our discussion of mothers and daughters, double dragon and conspiracy theories.
Meanwhile I heard my name - first and last- called and there sat a recording engineer I know from the neighborhood, enjoying a cocktail with friends and are clearly surprised to see me somewhere other than Jackson Ward.
Which just goes to prove that he doesn't get out much or he'd know better.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Amused Until Midnight
I don't know when the next time will be that Amuse lets me stay until midnight, so I had to take advantage of their hospitality tonight.
It was all part of my couple date, you see. We met at Black Sheep for a pre-theater dinner and managed to sneak in just before the Friday night crowds arrived and began the waiting game.
With a bottle of white Rioja and plates of the crawfish etouffe biscuits and the barbecued shrimp, we recounted recent meals (my rabbit and softshells and their brains and liver) while ogling the battleships being served around us.
Dinner ran the gamut from the smoked trout salad to the barbecued duck leg with Israeli cous cous to the Cardinal, a perfectly balanced salad of mixed greens, dried cherries, roasted beets, pickled onions and "bird seed," a mixture of various seeds.
The unsurpassed LaBrea tarpit (dark chocolate creme brulee) finished the meal, as usual.
Tonight's cultural offering at Firehouse was Israel Horovitz "Shorts," four very brief plays interspersed with short dance pieces and two violinists providing musical interludes.
"The Bridal Dance" underscored every negative stereotype about womanizers, body image and relationships, including marriages gone bad from the get-go (as in at the wedding).
"Stage Directions" was the knockout piece, a story told entirely through three characters' speaking their stage directions only. It sounds like such a simple construct and yet it was very powerful.
During intermission, I headed to the head only to hear my name called. It was Treesa Gold, one of the Richmond Symphony's violinists who'd been called just hours before to sub for the scheduled violinist.
"You are everywhere!" she said, hugging me. "And you're sight-reading music in the dark of the theater!" I told her. Mutual admiration all around.
"Inconsolable" was about a mother's suicide and a failed marriage and was heartbreaking. especially when told through the eyes of the daughter who discovers her moms' dead body.
"The Race Play" ended things on a lighter note with the tale of a charity race where the younger runners allow the iconic older runner to take the race. The play required the actors to run in place the entire time and all were glowing by play's end.
Playwright Horovitz was in the audience and it was hard to deny the power of the stories he told so succinctly. The capacity audience was clearly impressed.
My couple date and I left for Amuse with our intellects stimulated, some built-in conversational material and seeling some late-evening libations, not sure how much of a crowd to expect.
At 10:15, the ticket lines at VMFA were headed almost to the entrance. Most people in line appeared to be under thirty, no doubt having decided that Friday night would be a great time to finally check out Picasso.
Upstairs at Amuse, there was a decent crowd which only grew over the next hour as people streamed in after seeing the show.
The bar was full, so we snagged a table by the window. Later the manager came over and playfully asked me if I'd ever sat at a table at Amuse. Why, yes, a couple of times...and never by choice.
There was a couple making goo-goo eyes at each other at the bar; later the manager told us that they had gotten engaged at the bar tonight. It was very sweet, although it seemed an unlikely location at which to propose, at least to us.
The green fairy floated over to our table with glasses for us womenfolk while the masculine one had a cocktail of some sort. All around us, tables were abuzz with post-Picassoites enjoying an uncharacteristically late night at Amuse; I saw musicians, servers and former neighbors.
With the cool glow of the purple lights overhead, it definitely didn't feel like we were in Richmond anymore. Do it again, Amuse. We'll stay as late as you let us.
It was all part of my couple date, you see. We met at Black Sheep for a pre-theater dinner and managed to sneak in just before the Friday night crowds arrived and began the waiting game.
With a bottle of white Rioja and plates of the crawfish etouffe biscuits and the barbecued shrimp, we recounted recent meals (my rabbit and softshells and their brains and liver) while ogling the battleships being served around us.
Dinner ran the gamut from the smoked trout salad to the barbecued duck leg with Israeli cous cous to the Cardinal, a perfectly balanced salad of mixed greens, dried cherries, roasted beets, pickled onions and "bird seed," a mixture of various seeds.
The unsurpassed LaBrea tarpit (dark chocolate creme brulee) finished the meal, as usual.
Tonight's cultural offering at Firehouse was Israel Horovitz "Shorts," four very brief plays interspersed with short dance pieces and two violinists providing musical interludes.
"The Bridal Dance" underscored every negative stereotype about womanizers, body image and relationships, including marriages gone bad from the get-go (as in at the wedding).
"Stage Directions" was the knockout piece, a story told entirely through three characters' speaking their stage directions only. It sounds like such a simple construct and yet it was very powerful.
During intermission, I headed to the head only to hear my name called. It was Treesa Gold, one of the Richmond Symphony's violinists who'd been called just hours before to sub for the scheduled violinist.
"You are everywhere!" she said, hugging me. "And you're sight-reading music in the dark of the theater!" I told her. Mutual admiration all around.
"Inconsolable" was about a mother's suicide and a failed marriage and was heartbreaking. especially when told through the eyes of the daughter who discovers her moms' dead body.
"The Race Play" ended things on a lighter note with the tale of a charity race where the younger runners allow the iconic older runner to take the race. The play required the actors to run in place the entire time and all were glowing by play's end.
Playwright Horovitz was in the audience and it was hard to deny the power of the stories he told so succinctly. The capacity audience was clearly impressed.
My couple date and I left for Amuse with our intellects stimulated, some built-in conversational material and seeling some late-evening libations, not sure how much of a crowd to expect.
At 10:15, the ticket lines at VMFA were headed almost to the entrance. Most people in line appeared to be under thirty, no doubt having decided that Friday night would be a great time to finally check out Picasso.
Upstairs at Amuse, there was a decent crowd which only grew over the next hour as people streamed in after seeing the show.
The bar was full, so we snagged a table by the window. Later the manager came over and playfully asked me if I'd ever sat at a table at Amuse. Why, yes, a couple of times...and never by choice.
There was a couple making goo-goo eyes at each other at the bar; later the manager told us that they had gotten engaged at the bar tonight. It was very sweet, although it seemed an unlikely location at which to propose, at least to us.
The green fairy floated over to our table with glasses for us womenfolk while the masculine one had a cocktail of some sort. All around us, tables were abuzz with post-Picassoites enjoying an uncharacteristically late night at Amuse; I saw musicians, servers and former neighbors.
With the cool glow of the purple lights overhead, it definitely didn't feel like we were in Richmond anymore. Do it again, Amuse. We'll stay as late as you let us.
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