The life examined ...
by
JOHN FENN
"MISSION STATEMENT"
5/14/97
Welcome, friends.
This website is driven by a terrier-like propensity on the part of yours
truly to think about, delve into, probe and pick over almost anything in
his life. Hence the "The life
examined ..." subtitle. The
source is from Plato's "The life unexamined is the life unlived."
Bottom line, this site is a totally unabashed ego trip. "IN MEDIA'S RACE", is derived from the Latin expression, "in medias res" (literally, "in the middle of things" - from Horace).
My eternal gratitude to John King for rooting out the academic sources for the two quotes which hitherto had remained unconnected flotsam floating in the soup of my consciousness.
Anyway, welcome again. New material will be published here on a bi-weekly basis, so bookmark and tell a cyberfriend, if you enjoy this site.
LOCAL EDITION "IN MEDIA'S RACE"
So let's say we have a theater in town. Perhaps there aren't too many seats, but the seats are never filled anyway, and the theater is losing money. Hey, not an unusual phenomena, right? When things get really bizarre is when the producer goes to the city requesting city money for a new building, more high priced seats and a better proscenium arch.
"That'll bring in business and
spiffy tourists who eat at restaurants and drink at bars. Win/win all around!"
Easy, now, Carl.
You're expecting maybe an "I went to the Orpheum Theater, paid sixty bucks and walked out whistling the proscenium arch and humming the orchestra pit" type scenario?
Please, Mr. Pohlad, what's wrong with this picture?
DOWLING'S DELIGHTS
What a season! The Great (and hitherto
cumbersome) Guthrie took off like a bird this year under Joe Dowling's delicate
nurturing. Memories of Tony Guthrie are in the air, flying beside this airborne
season.
A few years ago I took the pledge on Midsummer Night's Dream. Those
toga clad twits running about the forest like love-sick adolescents, had
worn thinner than my hair. Yet after Dowling knocked it out of the park
with his first productions - particularly Philadelphia, Here I Come
- I figured the dude had some sort of Celtic pipeline to infallibility,
so I threw caution to the winds and went.
His Midsummer was contemporary and definitely American. The mechanicals were deliciously Minnesotan and He (I take my divinities where I find 'em, thank you) included a heavy Rap-Do-Wop-African-American element.
Also on his application blank for Dramatic Divinity, Dowling swung a deal to produce August Wilson in the sacred halls of Anglodrama. The long and the short of it is, with his goal-line save of a distinctly lesser Shakespeare, and, at last, recognition of one of the top American dramatists of this century, Minnesota's latest theatrical Celt has breathed life into the old G.
6/10/97
Dreadful delay in this edition!
My computer made no less than four round trips by Airborne Express for brain surgery at the Macintosh Mash Hospital in New York.
This, plus performing a clean install on my significant other's hard drive (we're still together and compatible!), and the horror of hearing my PowerBook wail out the Macintosh Death Chimes (it's real, folks), put me into closer touch with cyberstuff than I might have wished. All of it made me acutely aware of the Net and computers as part of a gigantic edifice of information.
The Pyramids, Western Civilization, The Great Wall of China, nothing can compare with what we have wrought in cyberspace.
The only reason we are so unaware of the enormity of this edifice, is that the building blocks used in it's construction (bits) and the it's whole structure are invisible.
So, imagine an electronic bit enlarged just the size of a molecule, think how far a line made from all the bits contained in the Internet, and all connecting machines, would reach! Is there a mathophysicist in the house?
Remember also, that each bit represents a conscious human decision whether it is a 0 or a 1.
Suffice it to say that never in the history of civilization has so much information been assembled and made so available as in the last fifteen or so years.
So when I think of the amount of struggle
a lousy gigabyte of stuff caused me, the contemplation of all the rest of
it out there ... Appalling!!
6/21/97
MYRON JOHNSON'S DOLLS
We have to watch out for the "prophet in his own land" symptom. Only this season has the Guthrie gotten it together to do an August Wilson. Myron Johnson is an incredible, unique and marvelous voice in our artistic community, that we too often take for granted.
I saw three dazzling productions this season ...the Doll's Cabaret, Portraits and now Salome ... all different, all, in their own way, brilliant, and all full of choreographic and, often, dramaturgical delights.
Cabaret and Salome emerge as searing explorations of violence, power/sex and dysfunctional families manifesting their sickness through successive generations.
Portraits, particularly in Beethoven's Ninth, celebrated the glory of humanity with many splendored choreography, leaning heavily on classical forms.
Myron is nothing if not the great Eclectic! What an asset!
JUNGLE THEATER'S LONG JOURNEY
Well, the hitherto infallible Jungle (and I mean that sincerely) took a header with Long Day's Journey. Charles Nolte had no sort of handle on the patriarchal, tyrannical old Tyrone, opting for an ineffectual, sometimes whiney, wimp.
The boys (Edmund and James Jr.) were good and, God love 'em, really played drunk. In the final scene, the older brother was totally wrecked ... which is the way it was written.
The general handling of alcoholism was right on the money and Bain Boehlke harnessed insights re co-dependency and enabling that have developed since O'neill's death. This directoral deftness served to enhance those elements in the script which O'neill had intuitively put into the text.
But the death knell of the production was sounded by Binky Wood who, for reasons unknown, elected not to play a junkie. Kind of a freaky choice for Mary Tyrone.
Nonetheless, I have nothing but faith in the Jungle. Last season they whipped out the best performance of live theater I have ever seen, with their brilliant Waiting for Godot. The production fielded a cast of such unremitting excellence I was lifted out of my chair with delight.
© Copyright, 1997 by John Fenn
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