By Hakim Bellamy
If you like Greek Mythology, you LOVE Greek playwriting. If you are still tripping over the “visual spectacle” that was 300, then be more impressed by the live comedy, harmony and over the top absurdity of Aeschylus’s Trojan trilogy for a fraction of 300’s opulent budget. Don’t just support live art, but support art that is “LIVE”! (The ebonetically correct translation of live can be phat, hot, decent, way cool, far out, etc.) The manifestation of this “liveliness” happens at the North 4th Arts Center this Friday and Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 2pm (September 28th-30th). It happens when you put two of your favorite historical time periods together, in your favorite town, in one hour’s time. The era of the Trojan War, mixed with the Vaudevillian flair of a 1940’s USO radio show, set in…get this…Albuquerque, for one of the most existential and entertaining hours in your life that you could equate with time traveling.
Now, if you are thinking that you could never follow those daytime soap addled, Greek tragedies in high school, no worries! This play/comedy/musical is as accessible as it is accurate. Trust me, I know, I sat in the audience this past Saturday having known nothing about Aeschylus or his Oresteia. And having not read the program prior because I arrived in my typical moviegoer fashion, early enough to miss all the pre-stuff, but late enough so the lights just went down as I entered the auditorium. I still was able to follow the complex storyline and the laugh lines to boot. Credit that to the amazingly clever renditions of these classic Greek characters by Gary Mahoney (aka Garrick Garcia) and The Kastroupel Sisters (Jessie Barkl, Molly Kohl and Susan Stroupe). Now if you are thinking “How do these four pull off a multiple character cast for over three plays?”, then the answer is “Brilliantly”. In the legacy of Orson Welles complete with reporter types modeled after Carl Phillips, the North 4th Arts production has authentic 40’s looking microphones from the Golden Age of Radio. The talented foursome who make up the cast of this production sing and dance their way into more larger than life characters than Eddie Murphy in the Nutty Professor I & II.
So if you are looking for something to do this weekend, how about a tale of Athenian democracy in a post-war Grecian society? A tale of justice rather than vengeance, a message of hope in these current times of war. Join the Kastroupel Sisters and Gary Mahoney, LIVE, crowd participation is encouraged…and enforced. Brought to you by Lysolia All Purpose Cleaner and Hephaestus Weaponry & Cutlery. Don’t ask? You’ll get it when you see the show. Find out more about prices and show times at www.vsartsnm.org.
Hakim Bellamy is Social and Community Programs Director, NM, State Office of African American Affairs and Albuquerque Slam Poet. reach him at www.myspace.com/hakimbellamyazhizelf or www.digiflowz.net
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Response to “Reviewers” posted by JH on August 3, 2007.
I've just posted a review of “Body Burden” to the blog that was broadcast on KUNM. It's the third review I've written in the last couple of months. All three have been “positive.” But, unlike JH, I don't think that means that my credibility as a critic is either compromised or that people will stop paying attention to my reviews.
Between 1990 and 1999 I was the regular on-air film critic for "The Women's Show" on WMNF FM in Tampa, Florida. Over those years I wrote hundreds of film reviews and only a handful of them were negative. Was that because I'm not a discerning, discriminating critic? Not at all. It's because I was very careful about the films I chose to review. Unlike a paid film critic for a newspaper who has to review everything that comes along, I, as a volunteer, was able to pick and choose the films I wanted to review. If it sounded like a stinker or a waste of my time I just wouldn't bother. I went to see films I thought were going to have significant content and that had a good chance of being something my audience might want to see. Sometimes I was disappointed and when that happened I said so and said why. But mostly I liked the films I saw, and, importantly, I had good, thoughtful things to say about those films. My listeners didn't discount my reviews because they were largely "positive." Rather, they came to rely on my reviews as a guide to films that they might want to see.
(You can read these old film reviews, if you like, at http://www.mith2.umd.edu/WomensStudies/FilmReviews/ or on the Rotten Tomatoes website at http://www.rottentomatoes.com/author-4017/).
I'm not "afraid to call a spade a spade," I just try, as the public does, to select shows that I think I might want to see. If the acting is bad or the production values weak, and it detracts from my theater-going experience, I'll be disappointed and won't be afraid to say so. So far, in the plays I've reviewed, that hasn't been the case. Obviously different people are going to disagree in their reactions to shows. One that speaks to one person may not speak to someone else. That's a function of your taste or your life experience, perhaps, but not a reason for calling the credibility of the critic into question. Nor should the fact that a critic may know some of the cast members call the integrity of the review into question. Anyone who has worked in the theater community in Albuquerque very long at all is going to know people in our community. If you don't want to offend your friends, you probably shouldn't be a critic! -Linda Lopez McAlister
Between 1990 and 1999 I was the regular on-air film critic for "The Women's Show" on WMNF FM in Tampa, Florida. Over those years I wrote hundreds of film reviews and only a handful of them were negative. Was that because I'm not a discerning, discriminating critic? Not at all. It's because I was very careful about the films I chose to review. Unlike a paid film critic for a newspaper who has to review everything that comes along, I, as a volunteer, was able to pick and choose the films I wanted to review. If it sounded like a stinker or a waste of my time I just wouldn't bother. I went to see films I thought were going to have significant content and that had a good chance of being something my audience might want to see. Sometimes I was disappointed and when that happened I said so and said why. But mostly I liked the films I saw, and, importantly, I had good, thoughtful things to say about those films. My listeners didn't discount my reviews because they were largely "positive." Rather, they came to rely on my reviews as a guide to films that they might want to see.
(You can read these old film reviews, if you like, at http://www.mith2.umd.edu/WomensStudies/FilmReviews/ or on the Rotten Tomatoes website at http://www.rottentomatoes.com/author-4017/).
I'm not "afraid to call a spade a spade," I just try, as the public does, to select shows that I think I might want to see. If the acting is bad or the production values weak, and it detracts from my theater-going experience, I'll be disappointed and won't be afraid to say so. So far, in the plays I've reviewed, that hasn't been the case. Obviously different people are going to disagree in their reactions to shows. One that speaks to one person may not speak to someone else. That's a function of your taste or your life experience, perhaps, but not a reason for calling the credibility of the critic into question. Nor should the fact that a critic may know some of the cast members call the integrity of the review into question. Anyone who has worked in the theater community in Albuquerque very long at all is going to know people in our community. If you don't want to offend your friends, you probably shouldn't be a critic! -Linda Lopez McAlister
“Body Burden” at the Adobe Theatre.
Reviewed by Linda López McAlister
Playwrights who write about the development of nuclear weapons and the aftermath seem to like to invoke ghosts. Michael Frayn called up the ghosts of Niels Bohr and Werner Heissenberg in his play Copenhagen about the race to develop the atomic bomb. Now New Mexico playwright Dale Dunn has conjured up the ghost of J. Robert Oppenheimer in her new play Body Burden that had its world premiere last weekend at the Adobe Theater in Albuquerque. Perhaps they do this because the moral dilemmas that this subject matter poses are so enormous that our struggles with them will last into eternity.
Body Burden explores these dilemmas in relation to a little known program carried out by scientists at various atomic research facilities in the 1960s that sought to determine “the Maximum Permissible Body Burden” for various radioactive materials on the human body. According to playwright Dunn, it has been documented that some of these experiments were conducted on children growing up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where she grew up. The program is called “Project Sunshine.”
The play’s protagonist, Kate Pendleton, left Los Alamos after high school, and now returns twenty-five years later—after having had a miscarriage, a failed marriage, a cancerous thyroid gland and finding herself unable to continue her career as a journalist. On her journey back to New Mexico, she stops at night in the desert and cries out in despair, thereby conjuring up two spirits, the ghost of J. Robert Oppenheimer and a lost, time-traveling, Girl Scout from 1966 who could have been her at that age. What she finds when she returns to her mother’s home in Los Alamos are gut-wrenching revelations about her parents and her old high school friends, all of whom are haunted in varying ways by their relationships to the work of the laboratory. These revelations and her interactions with Oppenheimer and the lost Girl Scout begin to help her make sense of the course of her life and, possibly, provide a way to move on.
Director Lou Clark has done an enormously skillful job of bringing this complex and thought-provoking play to the stage. She has cast some of Albuquerque’s finest actors and they give moving and truthful performances throughout. Laurie Lister as Kate Pendleton and Vernon Poitras as the ghost of J. Robert Oppenheimer created what I thought were particularly engrossing and insightful characterizations. The scenic and lighting design by Leonard Madrid and the beautifully realized sound design by Clareann Despain added immeasurably to the overall effectiveness of the production.
Body Burden is a play that will continue to haunt you long after the lights go out and the audience leaves the theater. This production at the Adobe Theater that runs through October 7th may be its first, but I predict that it will not be its last. It makes an important contribution to our ongoing understanding of the human condition, for good or ill, and deserves the widest possible audience.
Playwrights who write about the development of nuclear weapons and the aftermath seem to like to invoke ghosts. Michael Frayn called up the ghosts of Niels Bohr and Werner Heissenberg in his play Copenhagen about the race to develop the atomic bomb. Now New Mexico playwright Dale Dunn has conjured up the ghost of J. Robert Oppenheimer in her new play Body Burden that had its world premiere last weekend at the Adobe Theater in Albuquerque. Perhaps they do this because the moral dilemmas that this subject matter poses are so enormous that our struggles with them will last into eternity.
Body Burden explores these dilemmas in relation to a little known program carried out by scientists at various atomic research facilities in the 1960s that sought to determine “the Maximum Permissible Body Burden” for various radioactive materials on the human body. According to playwright Dunn, it has been documented that some of these experiments were conducted on children growing up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where she grew up. The program is called “Project Sunshine.”
The play’s protagonist, Kate Pendleton, left Los Alamos after high school, and now returns twenty-five years later—after having had a miscarriage, a failed marriage, a cancerous thyroid gland and finding herself unable to continue her career as a journalist. On her journey back to New Mexico, she stops at night in the desert and cries out in despair, thereby conjuring up two spirits, the ghost of J. Robert Oppenheimer and a lost, time-traveling, Girl Scout from 1966 who could have been her at that age. What she finds when she returns to her mother’s home in Los Alamos are gut-wrenching revelations about her parents and her old high school friends, all of whom are haunted in varying ways by their relationships to the work of the laboratory. These revelations and her interactions with Oppenheimer and the lost Girl Scout begin to help her make sense of the course of her life and, possibly, provide a way to move on.
Director Lou Clark has done an enormously skillful job of bringing this complex and thought-provoking play to the stage. She has cast some of Albuquerque’s finest actors and they give moving and truthful performances throughout. Laurie Lister as Kate Pendleton and Vernon Poitras as the ghost of J. Robert Oppenheimer created what I thought were particularly engrossing and insightful characterizations. The scenic and lighting design by Leonard Madrid and the beautifully realized sound design by Clareann Despain added immeasurably to the overall effectiveness of the production.
Body Burden is a play that will continue to haunt you long after the lights go out and the audience leaves the theater. This production at the Adobe Theater that runs through October 7th may be its first, but I predict that it will not be its last. It makes an important contribution to our ongoing understanding of the human condition, for good or ill, and deserves the widest possible audience.
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