What Work Is: My Brother-in-Law's Kitchen

So for a couple of days this past week I got out my old tools and literally knocked the rust off of them and did some repair work on a stoop I built for my sister and brother-in-law at their house upstate. It has been a long time, 1992 I think is when I built the thing, making all the concrete pavers myself in the basement of a house we rented on Staten Island. Not all of my masonry work comes with a lifetime maintenance contract, but if you ever tasted my brother-in-laws cooking, you would not be surprised that I make a trip up there now and again to taste what his grill produces in exchange for some deck painting or power-washing.


This morning there is not a part of my old body that does not hurt. Getting old sucks. Moving on can be very painful. This brings me to the real subject of this missive: Moving on after 9/11. For some of us the events of that day will be forever and indelibly imprinted on our souls, the pain and the nightmare with us in a very palpable way every waking and many sleeping moments for the rest of our lives. The world moves forward and there is going to be an Islamic Cultural Center built on a block where citizens once had to run for their lives from a massive dust and debris cloud caused by the collapse of two of the worlds tallest buildings. Many died, many more have been poisoned afterward by toxic air. The wound is still fresh and slow to heal. So the out-cry against the mosque is understandable. We cannot force healing on a wound in a humane way. It is a slow process aided by compassion, understanding and most of all, faith. Even Atheist's have faith. After all is said and done I will be proud to say I am an American, and a New Yorker and tolerant of the building and the people who want to see it built. I see their point. They are as American as you and me. They feel the same hurt as I about the events of 9/11 and have had to live with a bigoted stigma ever since. Efforts to establish identity and change hateful perceptions is a lofty and worthy goal. It will be a long hard battle before their dream can be realized, much rhetoric will issue forth re-opening old wounds. I have ultimate empathy for those who want to build and create, and I only have my faith that those who propose to move forward into this forever hallowed ground will understand the resistance from the many who suffered at the hands of a few.

May Love and Peace guide us.

Our Divine Mr Brooks

Screenplay written by and starring Scott Brooks, Directed by Jenny Greeman, with Heather Dilly,Diana Delacruz,Jonathan Sale and Kristofer Aigner

Mid-town International Theater Festival
Workshop Main Stage Theater
312 W 36th Street

Scott Brooks has been "banging his head" against the stonewall of success for as long as I've known him. In his latest stage effort his considerable story telling talent and his knack for crisp, witty, dialogue have combined to bring us this acerbic tale of faith, faithlessness, disappointment and the cold hard facts of life. And he can act! Wow, can he act! This is a must-see for people who enjoy watching people living their dreams.

Diana De La Cruz is wonderful, as are Heather Dilly and Jonathan Sale. Jenny Greeman's direction is superb.

The script leaps off the stage; brought to heart-wrenching life by some wonderful actors. The black box quality of the Main Stage actually enhances the experience, the minimalism of the set shadows the essential-ism of the text. Nothing is superfluous, or fluff, and every note rings with scathing truth. Masterfully done. Kudos, kudos, kudos. They say good theater compresses time…this did not feel like 90 mins. Scott: Man you hit one out of the park!

PS This is my resume. Let's do lunch.

June Swoon

As June ends and Summer begins in earnest I can't help but think how beautiful a photograph this is. The back-back, the skate board, and the Yankee cap tell one story, but the music emanating from this young man by way of his piano playing was absolutely sublime. Moments after I snapped the picture his cell phone rang and he was off to another "appointment" reminding me of just how fleeting life is and how it is important to take a moment to simply get present with the wonder of it all. The Mayor, Mike Bloomberg, in his infinite wisdom has scattered pianos all over town inviting players to play to the delight of everyone. NYC is a summer place when the nights hum with the electricity of the streets, people are out of doors walking, running, kayaking in the Hudson, riding bikes, and skate boarding or lounging in a cafe or sidewalk bistro. Life is being lived to the fullest by residents and visitors alike. It reminds me of why I am desperately in love with my home town and take great pride in the privilege of serving her.

We Have A Doctor in the House!

The final flourishes on a celebration that started when Jennifer-Scott Mobley completed her graduate work back in March of this year culminated with Commencement ceremonies at Avery Fisher hall last night. I am so proud of her achievement. Congratulations on a job well done and a degree well earned. To my wife: All of our love and your hard work combined to make this moment, thank you for sharing your life with me.

Mark

"You take my breath away..."

LASCIVIOUS SOMETHING
JULIA MILES THEATER, 424 West 55th St. NYC
Tuesday, May 4, 2010 7:00 PM

by Sheila Callaghan
directed by Daniella Topol
with Rob Campbell, Dana Eskelson,
Ronete Levenson, and Elisabeth Waterston

The last time I sat in the theater on West 55th that makes a home for The Women’s Project I saw a whimsical and campy piece by the legendary Virginia Woolf. The most recent production now gracing the old stage is quite different. The play itself is amazing, an awkward love parallelogram between August, Daphne, Liza and a character named Boy that is steeped in Greek tragic tradition and American angst. The time is very specific: November of 1980 when idealist hearts broke upon the landslide election of Ronald Reagan,(more about “landslides” in a second). The place is a non-descript Greek island in the Mediterranean Sea which comes as near to utopia as Western thought can bring you. On this island, we find August played by the delightfully swarthy and satyr-like Rob Campbell, an ex-sixties radical hippie rabble-rouser who long ago lost his copy of Das Capital. Instead of leading workers to revolution, August has become a worker of the land and a farmer whose crop is a rare varietal with which he hopes to produce a legendary bottle of fine wine. His young wife Daphne, played to Goddess-like perfection by the radiant Elizabeth Waterston, is bearing their child. To complete this incredibly idyllic male fantasy, a girl named Boy shares the confines of their family vineyard into which August has married. Ronete Levenson as Boy is perhaps the most lascivious thing in Lascivious Something being about as taboo and inappropriate as it gets. She is the embodiment of unbridled passion, her looks, her body language her speech (all in Greek) evoke the reckless impulsiveness of youth. Into this seeming Garden of Eden strides Liza, a crazy-maker of legendary proportions played deftly by the beautiful Dana Eskelson. Liza is an ex-lover and cohort from Augusts’ war protesting past, a ferocious lioness with a mane and a propensity for biting to match.

Together this foursome unravels a tale of wine, politics, and tragedy. The lines about Greece and her money problems are almost prescient. Sheila Callaghan is a playwright who employs what my wife terms “magical realism”. Her characters in Lascivious Something wax poetic. Some of the most important scenes in the play have alternate endings. This repetitive device is jarring at first, but you soon get the hang of it. This first playing of the scene will be wildly inappropriate with real intentions and reactions of the characters’ truthful feelings revealed. The second playing of the scene gives a more reasonable reading and moves the play forward. Callaghan uses film genre methods in her plays ala Paula Vogel in Hot and Throbbing, but in a more subtle and challenging way. She employed similar techniques to great effect in her Pretty, Pretty or the Rape Play staged here in New York last year. Lascivious Something has been around since 2002 and had a run in L.A. earlier this year with a different cast. That production featured full frontal female nudity, which this one here does not.

One major problem I have with the New York production is the set by Marsha Ginsberg which is elaborate and seems shoe-horned into the old Julia Miles Theater. The retaining walls of crushed stone and wire-mesh are foreboding and overpowering. The stone beneath the actors’ feet shift and move as they walk over them and the entire set threatens to avalanche into the first rows of the audience. It makes an otherwise large stage seem crowded and difficult to navigate for the actors not to mention the constant thoughts about the structural stability of the stage holding all that weight. Intimacy may have been the goal here, but it is hard to believe anything can grow on such a rocky place.

Be all that as it may, this is a beautiful production which ideally should move to a larger house. We are still talking about it.

The Passion of the Christ...sort of...

SARAH RUHL'S PASSION PLAY
IRONDALE, 85 South Oxford Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn

This is actually three plays with the same premise: A behind the scenes look at a troupe of actors rehearsing and performing the classic Passion of Jesus Christ at three specific times in history: one being Elizabethan England, the second Hitler’s Germany and finally Reagan’s America.

What an experience, we went on Sunday, the perfect day for a Passion, though early spring would have made more sense. The play itself must be seen to be judged. I enjoyed most of the 3 hours and 30 minutes with two intermissions. However, the last act was a tad cliché with the Viet Nam vet suffering from PTSD. Be that as it may: The actors are amazing; the props gorgeous, perhaps this is a bit of an “actors” play in that there are a few esoteric jokes about theatre. Nevertheless, the point of this play is how the origin of theater itself is always with us in communion. It is also is about how monarchies, fascism and capitalism have just about hijacked theater (and religion?) as the world once knew it while attempting to co-opt them for their own purposes. Sarah Ruhl is one of our favorite playwrights at the moment, she also wrote “In the Next room…or the Vibrator play” which was staged on Broadway this season. The Irondale Center is a jewel in Fort Greene. This is a great find. Traditional companies focusing on Shakespeare might want to check this space out.

VIDEO: "Passion Play" Rises
How Epic Theatre brought Sarah Ruhl's new play to a Brooklyn Church

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcXAoilMPFI&feature=player_embedded

GIRL MEAT

Victoria Libertore debuted her solo workshop performance to a sold out space at the Brooklyn Art Exchange (BAX) last night, and received a standing ovation from her audience. The show lasted about sixty minutes but had us talking into the wee hours of the morning. I have distilled our discussion about what the piece is now, and what it can become with time. Portraying Countess Bathory, a notorious mass murderer from Hungary who died in 1614, Libertore takes on the most challenging role of her career. We meet the Countess in the last moments of her life as she is walled into a room in one her many castles. Aided by magnificent costumes, props and sets by Jeff Studivant and Jono Lukas respectively, Libertore has a bit of fun with the gruesome, gory details of Bathory's legendary cruelty. In so doing she dominates an entire audience. In the end this sad tale is about a woman who is the prisoner of her desire to be beautiful forever. Narcissistic vanity may be the driving force of her fury, but a keen sense of our place in history here and now allows Libertore to bridge centuries of myth with laser like accuracy. "I have eye like hawk," she says. With those eyes she communicates present day themes of lust and greed, along with the irresponsibility of those in absolute power using graphic depictions of torture and abuse. Rosalie Purvis directs.