Hyde Park Theatre
through August 9
Running time: 1 hr, 15 min
Sibling rivalry, sibling allegiance: the relationship between brothers is
the raw material for myths and legends. Clayangels, written and performed by
Daniel Alexander Jones and his brother Todd Jones, brings to Frontera @ Hyde Park Theatre two
men’s relationship that is at once unique and universal. Mixing biographic
narrative with music and song, Egyptian mythology, and some old-fashioned gossip, the
Joneses have assembled an often entertaining primer for getting to know them.
Daniel, the elder, head shaved, gently in command, guards, placates,
reproves, remembers how achingly long it took to meet his newborn brother. Todd (the
name means “death” in German!), the younger, a rapper with long dreads,
strong, explosive, stalks the stage, lies down in his brother’s arms, confronts and taunts. The
connection between the two is deeply personal; at times, one senses contact that goes
beyond simple performance. Such introversion borders on indulgence, a loss of
contact with the audience for introspection that only few may access. Both performers can
charm, though, and moments of inward awkwardness give way to audience-friendly
explorations.
The pace of the evening is leisurely: a sort of tranquil music hall with
turns and sketches, one bit sliding gently into the next. A pair of
joined-at-the-hip, dowager neighbors flank the Jones’ bi-racial home to pass judgment on the
young men. They part to reveal Egyptian god and guard, together forever as servant and
master (although the roles often reverse). The two men recall their lives together
as children engaged in TV conflict (to PBS, or not to PBS) and their lives apart as young
men following their individual call to music, performance, and self-expression.
Peppered throughout are images of brothers at play, at odds. The audience must draw
its own conclusions, make its own connections from the wealth of material: personal
and historical, mythical and rhythmical.
Set design by Kim Koym and lighting by Scott Segar echo the sometime
futility of the piece. Koym has created a stepped, tomb-like structure that emanates
the desert warmth of ancient Egypt, but little dynamic happens upon or inside it. Segar
provides a beautifully lit climactic moment, but there is something perfunctory about
the body of the play: the physical elements cannot match the mystery of the words
of myth and history. Grisha Coleman (who co-directed the play with performance
artist Laurie Carlos) provides a musical score that seems closest to the heart of
the piece: a third character, diffused amid the theatre, engaged in the onstage
conversation, augmenting the mystery and the mundane of brotherly love.
— Robi Polgar
Works By Annette Lawrence: Mortality in Brown Paper
Women & Their Work,
through August 27
The colors on Annette Lawrence’s palette are sparse and simple: black and
white. Her canvas of choice: brown paper. Along with her use of cryptic, rhythmic
symbols and figures, these elements form a diagram of Lawrence’s thoughts, a skeletal
narrative of issues ranging from racial matters to the floor plan of her house.
Each work comes across in a quiet, humble way, like someone getting your
attention by lightly tapping your shoulder. Lawrence uses black and white in a serene,
yin and yang kind of balance, with thick acrylics that emphasize the brown
paper’s fleshy imperfections and the trials it endured as a box or a bag. Lawrence’s
selection of media and subject matter lends the works an innate feeling of transience that
resonates throughout the entire collection, as seen in Tracks, a vast blueprint-like
grid of Lawrence’s past homes. The subject and the material — acrylic on a huge,
dismantled brown cardboard box — is a double metaphor for the impermanent essence of
the material world around us.
Perhaps the best example of the show’s fleeting nature is Phoenix, a
series of 12 acrylics on brown paper, arranged in three rows to form a tidy box. Read
in a narrative form, the first piece on the first row represents the beginning; it
depicts a small structure, with a series of slash marks seemingly counting off below
it. As the narrative progresses, the viewer is brought closer to the structure —
yet the marks accumulate so that by the last piece they all but devour the
structure. It could almost be construed as a jovial work; perhaps the marks represent
the number of people who have entered the structure? Is this another of Lawrence’s
former homes? Its true meaning is much darker; the work depicts the progressive destruction
of church burnings, a fact that propels the piece, once merely interesting, into
a place of brutality and, again, mortality.
Lawrence’s mounting technique is also strikingly ephemeral. Many of her
frameless works, including Phoenix, are actually glued to the wall, on the edges of the
pieces. When the show comes down, the pieces will be cut off the wall, just inside
the glued area, so that with each new exhibition, the works become smaller and smaller.
The only way to save them from self-destruction is to find them a permanent home,
but permanence does not seem a fitting destiny for these paintings. — Cari
Marshall
Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities: Engaging From the
Page
Planet Theatre
through August 2
Running Time: 2 hrs, 30 min
Adults like to complain about “these kids today.” They listen to
odd music. They don’t respect their elders. They don’t like to read. Granted,
there may be some real problems brewing in the nation’s high schools, but your average
teen’s lack of interest in reading is largely the fault of those who force them to
read books that are as dry as the paper they are printed on. The student’s only
motivation for getting through these dusty old tomes is the next morning’s quiz, not a
desire to see how the story ends. This ensures that most students will always hate
Shakespeare, loathe Hawthorne, and detest Dickens, despite the fact that these chaps
actually knew how to tell a fine story, once you get beneath the layers of archaic
language and paid-by-the-word prose.
Everyone who has had to endure high school English should check out Kirk
Smith’s adaptation of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities at Planet Theatre, performed by
its Summer Youth Theatre troupe. Set against the backdrop of the French Revolution,
which seems like it was foreshadowing the mid-1980s, Dickens weaves the stories of more
than eight characters into an epic tale of excess and sorrow. Smith has managed to
distill the drama from this much maligned text and, despite the fact that this
version still seems as wordy as the original, create an evening of surprisingly engaging
theatre.
The cast, which consists of teenagers and five adults, has used Smith’s
fluid adaptation to its advantage. Mary Fletcher, Meredith Fraser, and Tiffany
Nicely-Williams give solid performances in their many roles, and Patricia O’Keefe shines as
Lucie Manette, the young French orphan who is the object of two men’s affection.
One of these suitors, Charles Darnay, is smartly acted by Renato Del Vento, and
Matthew Patterson gives an amazing performance as Sidney Carton, the man who has
always admired Manette from afar. Patterson perfectly plays Carton’s drunken peevishness
while consistently showing the character’s hidden spine.
While there are some uneven performances in this occasionally melodramatic
tale, Jason Amato’s saturated lights, which echo the heightened emotions of the
text, and Pio Pulido’s set, with a guillotine as its focal point, more than adequately
fill in any gaps that may be left. Perhaps the only technical drawback is sound
designer Blaine Indemaio’s use of a film-like underscore. At times, the sound becomes
too artificial and makes it difficult to hear the actors.
But this show is enough to make even the most classics-scarred person want
to pick up the novel and give it one more try. Largely, this production is the
best of times, not the worst of times. — Adrienne Martini
This article appears in August 1 • 1997 and August 1 • 1997 (Cover).