Finders keepers

by Marty and Martha Roth

The holidays have come and gone but our theatrical memories deserve a few words in passing, particularly since some of these pieces may come again. Russia’s Bolshoi Ballet appeared at Northrop, the world’s worst dance venue. The Bolshoi stands out among world dance companies for two things: its technical perfection and its high drama; the dancers are vivid actors, and all its presentations can fairly be called “dance theater.” We saw only “The Nutcracker,” with new choreography by Yuri Grigorovich, and it was a splendid feast for the senses. We hope the tour made so much money for the Bolshoi that it cannot bear to stay away, although we wish Minneapolis could build a theater fit for them.

“The Holiday Pageant” by Michael Sommers and the Open Eye Figure Theater is a lively production of a Middle English mystery play that began seventeen years ago in Sommers and Susan Haas’s living room, with a blanket strung across the floor for a curtain. It has grown into a real show, produced at the Southern Theater with costumes, set, and lights, telling a vernacular comic version of the nativity story set in a miraculous world of gods, angels, and devils.

It was most satisfactory theater, thanks to effective comic staging and a number of vivid performances, notably by Sarah Agnew as both an apprentice devil and an angel and Luverne Seifert as the peasant clown Tud. Our three-year-old granddaughter saw it with us, and although much of it eluded her there was enough to keep her interested, particularly Sommers himself as a manic devil. The play is well translated and features minimal but effective use of puppetry; we hope there will always be a place for it on the Southern’s holiday schedule. We also enjoyed a one person play, Becky Mode’s “Fully Committed,” at the Jungle Theater until Jan. 5 (alas, these monthly deadlines). Set in the basement of a wildly fashionable New York restaurant, the action consists of a reservation clerk fielding requests, demands, bribes, pleas and cajolings of the customers and coping with the prima donnas on the staff. It moves to the rhythms of customers’ appetites, rather like Arnold Wesker’s “The Kitchen.” Not always as taut as one might like, the brightly written script stays too much on one level. Still, it was a joy to take in and Nathan Keepers, who has impressed us before at Jeune Lune, is charming and adept in the only role.

We suspected that underground theatrical venues might already be buzzing with anti-Bush and anti-war skits and satires, and our suspicions were confirmed by Maxine Klein’s “Ambushed,” produced by Candid Theater Co. on the West Bank. Performed by a largely student cast, “Ambushed” hits all the obvious targets with gusto although it may be a little high on outrage and low on black humor. As a piece of political satire it belongs with Michael Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine,” a wonderful title—perhaps the best thing about the film—expressing the far-out connections that Moore is so quick to invent or seize upon. In this case, Americans bombed Kosovo on the same day as the shootings at Columbine High School, with bombs that turned out to have been manufactured at a Lockheed plant near the school.

We applaud and endorse everything in this film. Moore says what no other media voice in America will more than hint at, and, wonder of wonders, he seems to have impressed its progressive message upon a broad middle-class consciousness. Even so, much is ignored and Moore’s sensational equations are often intellectually vulnerable. We must confess with some reluctance that however much we agree with Moore we do not like him: it may be his unplucked redneck image, or perhaps we find his encounters with the enemy a little smug and self-congratulatory. Charlton Heston is a perfect object of abuse but there is something mean-spirited in Moore’s triumph over the bent and sputtering old man.

Those resourceful and imaginative people at Ten Thousand Things Theater Company aimed very high with their recent “King Lear.” The play is long, with a plot that twists like a corkscrew. Shakespeare and the Jacobeans (following earlier Italian and Spanish playwrights) were fatally in love with intrigue, and the elements of the older theater have mostly rusted away. Stephen D’Ambrose had a striking presence as the ailing king but needed more distance and more production magic to truly bring Lear off, to create a figure so sublimely foolish as to justify the rage and petulance that sets all of nature awash and aflame. And lack of production magic, alas, is the defect of 10K Things’ many virtues. Some of the cities’ finest actors took part, and Luverne Seivert as Edmund and Jim Lichtscheidl as the Fool stood out amid general excellence.

If it weren’t for the regular appearance of a Mike Leigh film, how would we know what the working class was like? His most recent work, “All or Nothing,” perfectly fits his cinematic credo of making the “unextraordinary lives of ordinary people” interesting and meaningful. The characters here are very different from the comic pastoral Londoners of “Life Is Sweet” and “High Hopes”; they are the burnt-out fag-ends of the great nineteenth-century working class squeezed into service jobs and packed away in vertical slums in Southeast London. Rebelliousness and class consciousness are no longer imaginable; respect, kindness, even humor are in short supply. Leigh’s cinema is amazingly real and passionate: we care about his characters and out of the smallest encounters he can pull scenes that rise to their emotional limit and exhaust themselves in just the right sequence of language and silence.

Leigh’s story focuses on one family, three of its members heavy with fat—a depressed drudge of a daughter, a rageful young son, and the passive, mumbling husband Phil (played by Leigh’s alter ego, Timothy Spall)—and the small, slim wife, Penny, simmering with years of resentment. For all the weight of misery that presses down upon these dingy lives you wouldn’t expect the movie to be hopeful and sweet, but that is its great surprise. Out of this human sludge, Leigh evokes decency and family love. Part of the pleasure of Leigh’s quiet, even stodgy films is keeping up with his excellent stock company—for example Lesley Manville’s Penny contrasts wildly with her genteel middle-class Lucy Gilbert in Topsy Turvy.

Adaptation begins on the set of Spike Jonze’s earlier film, “Being John Malkovich,” as scriptwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nicholas Cage.1) slinks around, ignored by everyone. Charlie’s next project is the adaptation of Susan Orlean’s (Meryl Streep) “The Orchid Thief,” a personal, digressive meditation on the fabulous flowers that Charlie vows not to subject to a standard Hollywood treatment. Charlie is a balding introvert, paralyzed by self-loathing, with an extrovert twin brother, Douglas (Nicholas Cage.2). Douglas is everything Charlie is not: sweet, trusting, and gullible, and when he also decides to write a screenplay, it consists of Hollywood cliche run amuck. The brothers’ story is intercut with the story of Susan’s original research in the Florida swamps with a flamboyant and obsessive genius (Chris Cooper), who has no front teeth.

The film resembles its story: while it flounders aimlessly without a strong plot, it has a kind of narrative interest that most Hollywood films only dream of. When it follows the advice of the hack whose screenwriting seminar Charlie attends in the depths of his writer’s block, and commits itself to a strong ending, it decomposes. Despite this weakness “Adaptation” is richly packed with human moments and encounters and, rarest of all, thinks about things in a movie-like way.

In faithful imitation of a spellbinding, lyrical and boring original, the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris,” Stephen Soderbergh has made a lyrical and boring “Solaris” of his own, but cutting across the obvious homage is a more telling evocation of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001.” The great science fiction films all dwell on sequences of images of the mute, isolated male. Soderbergh adds the postmodern breakdown of character and authenticity but treats it in a grand nineteenth-century manner. Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) responds to a call for help from a space ship anchored off Solaris. When he arrives he finds the crew strangely affected by their environment; one scientist, Jeremy Davies, is totally disassociated (and gives a remarkable performance as an intergalactic pothead), the other, Viola Davies, is paranoid. Kelvin finds himself dreaming of his dead wife Rheya (Natascha MacElhone) who then insinuates herself into his waking life.

None of the sci-fi implications of the Tarkovsky or Kubrick film seems to interest Soderbergh. He is out for romantic love: the motif of the film is “when you wish upon a star.” And it really doesn’t matter that his love is shot through with skepticism: fatal illusion only adds to the grandeur of the subject. The film fails because Soderbergh’s main actors don’t fit the story or fill the screen: Clooney cannot act either interiority or silence and MacElhone is effective only as an erotic image.

“Real Women Have Curves” is a feel-good, shoestring-budget independent paean to Latina spunkiness. Ana Garcia (America Ferrara) plays the daughter of a gardener and a seamstress in the L. A. barrio who graduates from Beverly Hills High School but dares not dream about a university education. Her mother, Carmen (Lupe Ontiveros), is unaccountably angry at her ambition (even if unstated), her lack of interest in marriage, and her overweight, shared by all the women in the family.
“Real Women” has many attractions but the filmmaking is just not mature enough. The script tends to go soft and avoid the hard moments it sets up, and it says nothing either valid or exciting about migrant labor—in a sense its world is as yuppy as the Latina underclass of “Maid in Manhattan.” Ana has a wonderful face and a fresh manner but the film cannot imagine her except as bratty and petulant. On the other hand, the theme of “overweight,” of excess flesh, is gloriously dealt with in graphic and triumphant ways, not merely in an underwear dance in the sweatshop but in Ana’s every performative moment.

With “Maid in Manhattan” director Wayne Wang has fallen into mainstream triviality. This Cinderella romance was written by Kevin Wade (“Working Girl”) and it has the earlier comedy very much in mind. It may have begun in the vicinity of an authentic romantic comedy but lost its way because the desire for hard comedy has been sapped by half a century of Disney and television sitcoms. Worst of all there is no erotic chemistry between the two leads: Ralph Fiennes is too busy frowning over an American accent that simply won’t come, and Jennifer Lopez goes to sleep waiting for him. The only vein of strength belongs to the inner workings of a major hotel, but even that is quickly blown, although Stanley Tucci and Natasha Richardson give creditable performances and Bob Hoskins is delicious. But class is an impossibly distant memory in this America, so how on earth could they have expected it to work? What could the film have been about?