People Before Profit blog

Spy parenting 101: Deadly decisions on “The Americans”

Fri, 01 Apr 2016 12:56:00 +0000

Philip and Elizabeth Jennings are good parents. That is their baseline identity. Beyond the spying and pretense, the mayhem inflicted by or upon them-they are determined to do right by their children.

The couple did disagree last season on the Centre's (Moscow's) push to bring their daughter, Paige (Holly Taylor), into the spy trade, with Elizabeth for and Philip against.

Elizabeth (Keri Russell) considers her job of protecting the Soviet Union behind hostile lines to be of the utmost importance. In previous seasons, we saw her and Philip (Matthew Rhys) do battle against South African apartheid, CIA backing of mujahideen in Afghanistan (out of whose ranks later came Saudi Osama bin Laden), and U.S. backing of Central American right-wing insurgents.

Why wouldn't she view her mission as vital, so yes, she wants Paige to eventually enter the family trade, although she'd like for her daughter to serve the Soviet Union via a safer venue, such as the State Department. Philip, on the other hand, worries their American daughter will reject her parents once she realizes the true scope of their work.

Frankly, I think they should skip Paige and go straight to newly tall Henry (Keidrich Sellati), a son who acts as though as he could do well as an undercover soldier.

In this episode, the couple's ongoing fears escalate about Pastor Tim (Kelly AuCoin), to whom Paige had confessed the truth about her family. Philip and Elizabeth first try a velvet glove treatment with the minister.

"What we do isn't so different from what you do," Elizabeth says, as she describes themselves as peace workers trying to defuse tensions between hostile sides, and working for equal rights. Not altogether untrue, but the holes in their explanation are countered by Pastor Tim, who cites the then-current issue of Jewish dissidents in the Soviet Union.

"If you were to report us, we'd go to prison. Henry and Paige would go into foster care and there's a good chance they'd never see us again." Philip is telling the whole truth and nothing but at that moment.

"Let's all think about this for a few days and then talk again," advises the minister, who later proclaims with a righteous air he has shared Paige's secret with his wife.

A troubling revelation, one the couple shares with their handler, Gabriel (Frank Langella), in his apartment.

Philip hands over last episode's tobacco tin-within which is stored a vial of a deadly U.S.-made pathogen-about which Gabriel says wearily, "Can't seem to get rid of this, can I."

Gabriel alludes to the possibility of eliminating the pastor and his wife, which Philip dismisses on the reasonable grounds that Paige is too smart not to figure out what really happened.

Gabriel, stuck with a deadly vial and upset parents, says he'll talk to the Centre about what to do, but in the meantime, "Keep calm and tell Paige to work on keeping Pastor Tim quiet."

When Philip later tells Paige about Pastor Tim blabbing the truth to his wife, Alice, Paige is extremely upset over the betrayal, so now Philip has to be the calm person in the room.

He tells his daughter that her pastor and his wife are a part of the family's life now and will be for a long time. How long is very much an issue, but not exactly a subject one discusses with a teenaged daughter.

Paige needs to talk to Pastor Tim, he says, for "we can't have him turn against us, so we have to think about him in this situation, what he would think."

This is an element of spycraft, understanding one's enemy or potential asset, a skill Philip is teaching his daughter.

But when Paige does meet with Pastor Tim, he is still pompously defensive about his action.

Paige lets it fly. "Alice likes to talk. When I tell you something that's a secret, you can't just decide, well, I think I'll just tell my wife."

Gabriel talks to fellow handler Claudia (Margo Martindale) about his charges.

"We need to get them out," (back to the Soviet Union) he says, but this is an argument he's not going to win. The vote by their higher-ups at the Centre is to remove the troublesome minister and his wife.

Which leaves Gabriel, on his next chat with Philip and Elizabeth, trying to talk up the fun of having a vacation at Disney's Epcot Center. "Go, take the kids. While you're away, the pastor and his wife will have an accident."

Philip is dubious, but Elizabeth is all in favor, saying, "We don't have a choice." She doesn't want to go yet on the run to the Soviet Union. She sees the problems for her children having to suddenly deal with being in a country where they don't speak the language and having to adjust to thoroughly alien circumstances.

Back at the house, they seed the kitchen counter with an Epcot travel brochure and act suitably iffy when Henry sees the brochure and immediately advocates for a family vacation.

Henry thinks he's won a debate that never existed in the first place. Plans have been made. Fun in the sun for the Jennings family, but death for Pastor Tim.

In other ongoing plotlines, we learn more about Elizabeth's inexplicable joining of the Mary Kay cosmetics sales team. In the 1980s (as in much of the world currently), women in capitalist societies lagged behind in level of education, income, access to all areas of the workforce and they also faced familial and cultural constraints well beyond that of men.

This is why Mary Kay, Avon and similar female-dominant sales companies positioned themselves as tools for advancement. On occasion, such a goal actually came true, but in this case Elizabeth must be up to something more than making friends with the warm and funny Young Hee (Ruthie Ann Miles).

Invited to a family meal with Young Hee, Elizabeth seems to actually be having a good time, and one thinks that the wine-drinking male relative at the table may be a potential asset in the making.

Later, when Philip asks, "Are you getting in there?" she replies in the positive. That particular mystery continues.

For poor Martha, Philip/Clark's real-pretend wife, the central mystery may be solved, for Clark is indeed a spy, but she says to Philip, who wakes up during a scheduled sleepover in their Centre-provided apartment, "I'm still not used to it."

At work in the FBI office, Martha has attracted the suspicion of Stan Beeman, but he hasn't found anything actionable at this point. Fellow agent Adalbert is dubious, but does agree to take Martha to dinner. This would leave Martha's apartment available for Stan's inspection.

Does Martha have stowed away a photo of Clark aka Philip? Not an easy thing to explain away.

Speaking of Stan, Elizabeth advises Philip to try to patch things up since they could use a friendly face at the FBI. Stan is laboring under the delusion that his ex-wife, Sandra, is having a fling with Philip.

When Sandra happens to drop by the Jennings house, Philip tells her about the mix-up and then subtly tries to lead Sandra toward thinking sympathetically about her ex.

Philip points out his rock hard belief that if he left his house for whatever reason, his family would come with him, but in the same situation with Stan, "I can see him leaving that house and living in a motel, and not wanting to see Matthew because because who wants to see Dad in a motel? I've been through it."

Food for thought for Sandra, but for Stan's ex-lover/exploited sexual servant Nina, conversation is hardly pleasant.

She is meeting with her court-assigned lawyer in the Soviet Union, where once again she's committed an act of treason. Already on thin ice, she chose during the previous episode to send a message on behalf of extracted scientist Anton to the man's family in the U.S.

The message might have been innocent but the use of smuggling connected to a top-secret facility is a cut-and-dried major offense.

Her lawyer tells Nina that "exceptional punishment" is on the table as a possible outcome of the case, but Anton has told investigators that he knew nothing of Nina's actions. When Nina reads his words, she is delusionally happily.

Later, Nina dreams of being released into a bright room where Stan says he is sorry for what she has gone through. She turns to see Anton, who appears sad-then she awakes, back in her cell. She could be facing execution, reason enough for her mind to go wandering.

Meanwhile, Philip and Elizabeth pay what always feels like a rare visit to their cover business, the travel agency. They talk in their office again about what to do about their kids and the trip.

Phil confides, "The last two days I've had an alarm going off in my head. It seems Paige loses whatever we do. We have to meet with Gabriel."

But when they arrive at their mentor's apartment, he is deathly ill and the obvious culprit has to be that deadly weaponized glanders.

Loyal to Gabriel, there's no question of abandoning him, so they set up with a quick meet with William, the dissident American scientist who had provided them with the sample.

When William learns what has happened, he flees the park but Philip takes him down and emphatically spits in the man's face. If there is contagion, William has it now. Now William has to help.

They return to Gabriel's apartment, where the scientist gives everyone antibiotic shots and places the frozen vial container in the oven to kill it.

The next part is even more fraught with peril. They all must stay in the apartment for thirty-six hours and keep receiving shots, in hopes they can survive glanders.

Compared to what the U.S. had in mind as a potential death toll for the bioweapon, this room of four potential sufferers pales by comparison.

Despite their own lives being in danger, all Philip and Elizabeth can think about are their children being alone for that length of time.

And with the trip called off, are Pastor Tim and his wife still targets for elimination?

Tune in next Wednesday for another tale of '80s spycraft on The Americans.

Photo: "The Americans" Facebook page

“Film” and “Notfilm": Playwright Samuel Beckett meets Buster Keaton

Fri, 01 Apr 2016 09:58:00 +0000

Calling all film buffs: Go see a double feature of Samuel Beckett's "long lost" 1965 experimental short Film starring Buster Keaton, and Ross Lipman's documentary Notfilm, about their encounter and the intriguing result. While this may not exactly be their cup of tea for popcorn munchers at the multiplex, Notfilm and Film are must-see for any cinefile worth their salt.

On the face of it, a collaboration between the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton sounds like an unlikely alliance of artists. Beckett - best known for 1953's Waiting for Godot - pioneered the Theatre of the Absurd. As such, the philosophical Nobel Prize-winning writer, who explored the meaning of life, appeals to more serious, sophisticated theatergoers and esthetes.

Kansas-born Keaton, on the other hand, was among silent cinema's most popular stars, appearing in numerous crowd-pleasing comedies full of slapstick and Keystone Kops-type chases. Many of his simplistic plots revolved around boy-seeking-girl, but with his persona as "the Great Stoneface," Keaton was also commenting on the human condition. Furthermore, during his peak Buster, who won a 1960 Honorary Oscar, was also an extraordinarily imaginative, innovative filmmaker. Many of Buster's original visual gags are considered visionary, transcending mere special effects. Movies, such as 1924's Sherlock Jr., are full of motion picture panache that expanded the lexicon and vernacular of film and the cinema as an art form. (Sixty years later Woody Allen "plagiarized" it in The Purple Rose of Cairo like Joe Biden unleashed on a Neil Kinnock speech.)

Notfilm reveals that the down-on-his-luck Keaton agreed to act in Film for the money (in 1965 the has-been silent star also traded on his former fame by appearing in the teen screen romps Beach Blanket Bingo and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini). Keaton did not comprehend Beckett and his screenplay. Nevertheless, given Buster's vast contributions to filmic form, there may be a method to the madness of the comedian cooperating with the vanguard bard of the avant-garde.

Beckett brought his absurdist and minimalist sensibility to his exploration of the cinematic medium in the 20-minute Film. It is shot entirely in black and white by Boris Kaufman, is almost entirely silent - with one notable exception - and does not have a musical score. In 1961's ironically named Happy Days, the characters Winnie and Willie spend most of their time buried in dirt, while in 1957's Endgame, Nagg and Nell reside inside of garbage cans. Similarly, as "The Man" (or "Object"), Buster is confined to a dingy room in what appears to be a tenement for most of Film.

Although this may seem counterintuitive because Keaton was a sublime actor, during most of Film the Great Stoneface's visage is unseen. His back is turned toward Kaufman's camera - or "Eye" - although Buster is identifiable because he's wearing his trademark porkpie hat. In the final shot, Beckett breaks the motion picture persona the so-called Stoneface nurtured and this short would be notable for this, if for no other reason.

Like much of Beckett's oeuvre, Film has a bleak view of humanity that would have been called "existential" back in the days when the playwright lived in a Paris where beret-clad, Gauloises-puffing, baguette-gobbling philosophes debated "what it's all about" in cafés incorporating the benign indifference of the cosmos. (Oddly, today, in a bizarre vocab rehab interchange that could be dialogue in a Beckett play, the word "existential" refers to when a state's existence is militarily threatened.)

As its title implies, Film is also self-referential. For an audio-visual medium that records reality, Film's motley crew are most definitely not ready for their close-ups, C.B.: The actors respond with sheer dread when they know they are being shot by Kaufman's "Eye." It suggests that old cliché of "primitive" people, who believe photography "steals souls."

Beckett's sole excursion into the motion picture art has been debated, as Notfilm notes. Some may consider it an unprofessional student film, while others might think it's a work of experimental, avant-garde pure film that ranks alongside of, say, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's chilling 1929 classic An Andalusian Dog or Maya Deren's 1943 poetic, exquisite Meshes of the Afternoon. Like them, Film has a poetic, cinematic sensibility and dreamlike (or, perhaps, nightmarish?) quality.

In addition to Beckett's script, part of Film's poetic ambiance owes to the cinematography of Boris Kaufman, the renowned director of photography who shot the trancelike 1930s' Jean Vigo classics Zero for Conduct and L'Atalante, plus other non-narrative, experimental films. The Russian went on to emigrate to France and eventually America, where he was DP for notable 1950s films such as On the Waterfront (for which he won an Oscar) and 12 Angry Men.

Interestingly, the great Soviet cameraman Mikhail Kaufman and director Dziga Vertov were Boris' older brothers. In Notfilm Lipman includes clips from their 1929 Man with a Movie Camera and cleverly juxtaposes sequences from this Soviet masterpiece with Keaton's 1928 classic The Cameraman. There are also scenes from 1969's Medium Cool (plus an interview with its recently deceased director Haskell Wexler, a two-time Oscar winner for cinematography). Although very different films, the trio have something in common: the use of the self-reflective lens and a wildly creative, unfettered formalistic cinematic sensibility. The former ties into Beckett's theme in Film and is reminiscent of Vertov and Mikhail's earlier 1924 Kino Eye film.

Lipman, a movie restorationist and indie filmmaker, worked on Notfilm like a man obsessed with an Ahab-like monomania, for seven years, unearthing pieces of celluloid here and film history there. His great white whale is mostly in black and white and includes interviews with notables such as film historian Kevin Brownlow, actor James Karen and critic Leonard Maltin. There is also footage of Charlie Chaplin, to whom, according to Lipman, Beckett offered the lead in Film, which the Little Tramp declined.

Although Beckett's Film actually exists, and was even remade in 1979 by the British Film Institute, Notfilm resurrects not only it but much more. It is a bit like the great new book by Swiss film historian Pierre Smolik called The Freak, which exhaustively recreates in book form what the subtitle calls Chaplin's Last Film. After turning Beckett down and directing his swan song, 1967's A Countess from Hong Kong with Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren, Chaplin worked on a screenplay about an angelic creature, a script which never made it to the screen but which Smolik meticulously, lovingly brings vividly back to life, along with fascinating details chronicling Chaplin.

It's copacetic that Notfilm - which documents one of Keaton's last movies - is being released the same month that Chaplin's World, a movie museum built on the grounds of Charlie's Swiss mansion above Lake Geneva, also opens. Of course, Chaplin's 1952 Limelight paired the Tramp with Keaton, who had been his top rival for the silent cinema's crown of comedy. In Limelight they play vaudevillians who've lost their audience and are reunited for a final performance. Backstage, as they put their makeup and costumes on, Keaton - who was broke and given a job by his former silent screen competitor - says rather poignantly: "I never thought we'd come to this."

In addition to working with Annette Funicello, Frankie Avalon and Zero Mostel in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (based on the Roman playwright Plautus' comedies), as Buster and his career faded out in the 1960s, Keaton worked with one of the stage's greatest geniuses. Although I enjoyed and was fascinated by Beckett's foray into cinema, Lipman's film about Film is arguably better and more interesting than the work that inspired it. The highest compliment I could bestow upon Lipman is that his documentary is worthy of its lofty subjects. This double feature is required viewing for all serious esthetes, film students and lovers of the cinematic stuff that dreams are made of.

Los Angeles Filmforum and American Cinematheque are screening Notfilm and Film on April 1, 8 and 9 at the The Spielberg in the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., L.A. 90028, and at the Aero Theatre, 1328 Montana Ave, Santa Monica 90403, on April 2, with director Ross Lipman. More info here.

There are also four special screenings at the Laemmle Theatres in L.A. from April 4-7. Notfilm and Film are also being screened at Anthology Film Archives, New York, April 1-7. (Director Ross Lipman will be presenting April 1.) See here for other screenings.

Photo: Buster Keaton, Samuel Beckett

"A Singular They”: Intersex drama explores teenage angst

Thu, 31 Mar 2016 14:24:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES - Most coming of age stories don't also involve deciding what gender you want to be. That's the dilemma facing lead character Burbank in A Singular They, a new one-act play by Aliza Goldstein - making her professional debut as a playwright - that is currently receiving its world premiere production by The Blank Theatre.

Overt political references are absent in the play, but we cannot be unaware of the polarized times we live in. The science is here now for people of one gender to transition to another gender with relative ease - well, relative to the vast uncertainties, unknowns and risks that we saw in the recent film, The Danish Girl, which told the story of an early surgical transition in the 1920s. Nowadays, with a combination of counseling, hormones, and operations, a male can become female, and vice versa, and to the larger world it's hardly news any more.

Goldstein's concept suggests to me that besides the fact that the transition is possible, people are choosing to inhabit an entire range of sexuality and gender all the way from cisgender comfort in straight to gay to bi roles, to partial to complete transgender transition, and asking friends, family, and society to accept and legally recognize these choices. It almost seems like a protest against boxing all the limitless potential of humanity into two boring options, F or M. Exquisitely tuned nuance, complexity, individuality, uniqueness - these all make life so much more interesting. The new trans culture forces us to question how important is it really whether you enter the restroom that's labeled Gents or Ladies, and why or whether we even need such labels.

Burbank, née Christine (Lily Nicksay), has chosen a gender-indeterminate name (and how widespread is that phenomenon now!) because she is one of those rare, but not unknown individuals born "off the binary" - an estimated 1 in 3000 - with biological features of both the male and female sex. Appropriately, Burbank has come to the point of asking to be referred to as "they," since neither "he" nor "she" adequately serves to describe who Burbank is. So they becomes, as the title says, a singular they.

"I want to be one of those people with words for the way I feel," says the intersex character.

Burbank has to decide whether or not to continue taking the estrogen the doctors keep prescribing, leading up to an appointment with the knife that will make her indubitably female and thus sexually desirable to others (though still not capable of conception and giving birth). Maybe, they thinks, they is fine just the way they is and doesn't need to be cut open by anyone. "If I have to change my body to be loved, that doesn't sound like love," they says.

But of course they is still a teenager, fretting about haircuts, exams, virginity, friendships, trust, and finding appropriate mentors in a world that hasn't caught up to their issues.

Speaking of birth, Burbank's BFF is her high school classmate Dierdre (Hannah Prichard), who is in fact pregnant, by someone she cares nothing for, and preparing to give her baby up for adoption and get on with her life. Is this the model of femininity to which Burbank is being pushed to aspire? They won't adopt that message wholesale, but nevertheless there is surely some profound wonderment at the miracle of life that the two friends share before moving on. They also agree that once you're born, the first thing you learn is that "the world is bright and loud and it hurts."

The third character is Mr. Mazer, Burbank's biology teacher (Nick Ballard), who is everything a confused high school kid could want in a sympathetic ear and shoulder. Just to make things interesting, the playwright has given him his own baggage that gets bundled with Burbank's in some unexpected ways.

Directed fluently by Christopher J. Raymond, A Singular They moves along with quick changes of scene and acting that captures the essence of awkward teenagerdom. The play takes place in late 2011-early 2012 in Allentown, Penn., but neither time nor place contributes any particular significance.

The Blank always does a bang-up job converting its matchbox stage into the fantasy environment we will enter. For this production, the stage is divided by set designer Aaron Lyons into three discrete playing areas - a high school biology classroom, Burbank's funky bedroom, and a mall eatery.

This is Goldstein's first produced play, an auspicious beginning, and she will grow and learn from it. And if it gets produced elsewhere it is not too late to consider some revisions. Burbank insists on being called "they," and the playwright has gone so far as to elevate this pronoun to the title status of her work. So I needed to hear more about that. It's tossed out once and barely heard from again. No one onstage fumbles over what to say, nor does Burbank recount uncomfortable conversations with offstage characters (who are her parents, by the way?). This missing piece actually reflects the unfamiliarity and often discomfort we in the general public experience when confronted face to face with these issues. It's Burbank's play, but it's the audience that needs as much help as they does.

"It gets better." We have all seen those YouTube videos from celebrities as well as from ordinary people, addressed to LGBTQ teens to let them know that tough as the current bullying and name-calling may be, once they're past high school and either in college or the larger world, or maybe once they've had some mature romantic relationships, life will assuredly turn out fine. So please don't commit any irreversible acts.

The play similarly ends with that kind of upbeat note. It's left unresolved whether they undergoes the operation or not, but either way, Burbank's a singular character and they is gonna be OK.

A Singular They plays through May 1, Fri. and Sat. at 8 pm, and Sun. at 2 pm, at the 2nd Stage Theatre, 6500 Santa Monica Blvd. in Hollywood. For tickets: www.theblank.com or 323.661.9827.

Photo: Lily Nicksay (L) and Hannah Prichard. Photo Credit: Anne E. McGrath

“Batman v Superman”: It’s hero vs. hero, but the audience loses

Thu, 31 Mar 2016 12:45:00 +0000

The latest superheroic blockbuster, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, is meant to kick off numerous franchises and an entire shared universe, but I'm less than enthused. This pseudo-Man of Steel sequel is not so much the dawn of anything as it is the continuation of highbrowed cynicism as a narrative principle. Pallid, forgettable, and an exercise in creative exhaustion, this film is the cinematic equivalent of a child slamming two plastic toy dinosaurs into one another. As you might imagine, the result is quite inconsequential.

This is DC's challenge to rival Marvel Comics, who have built a successful interconnected film universe that began with Iron Man and resulted in The Avengers, and which continues to grow, writing-wise and in terms of popularity. But the Warner Bros.-owned company has made the not-so-brilliant decision to hire Zack Snyder as director to helm most of their franchise development, including this movie. Snyder, who has given us such bloated hyperviolence flicks as 300 and Sucker Punch, is someone who focuses largely on visuals and little on story, applying to his works a boneheaded, vapid approach, to boot. It's a shame, then, that two of the most compelling and beloved comic book characters in the history of pop culture have been left in his hands. Accordingly, they fall to pieces.

Ben Affleck plays an older, more apathetic Bruce Wayne/Batman, who views Superman (Henry Cavill) as a potential threat to humanity, after the Kryptonian inadvertently killed thousands during his battle against General Zod during the previous movie, Man of Steel. To summarize in a spoiler-free manner, you should know that the two iconic heroes are manipulated by Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) into having a modern-day gladiator match, until they are forced to unite along with Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot, who gets way less screen time than she deserves) against a common threat.

A bewildering mishmash

Casting aside the ridiculous idea that Batman, the "World's Greatest Detective," could be stupid enough to be baited into such a fight, you'd think that with such a straightforward synopsis, the writing would follow suit; it does anything but. The first hour is a bewildering mishmash of Superman sequel, Dark Knight origin story, and, essentially, an underlying apology to the audience for what mistakes Snyder thinks he made in this film's (admittedly criticized) predecessor. Then it switches over to the title fight for which it's named, with superhero cameos (obligatory tablesetting for upcoming films) shoehorned into the midst of that narrative. The final portion of the movie, pitting these two guys and Wonder Woman against the villain Doomsday, is more enjoyable, until another poor decision is made in regard to a beloved character at the end.

Part of the problem, I think, is that between disconnected scenes and poorly choreographed fights, it simply cannot maintain the momentum it strives for, and it tries to replicate explosive comic book spreads at the cost of coherency and quality film craftsmanship. But it's more than that. The very DNA of the film is corrupted, as numerous mismatched story arcs from the source material - mostly the Batman and Superman comics - are fused clumsily together here like a Frankenstein's monster, and then expected to flow smoothly; or perhaps the audience is expected not to note the sloppy writing job as they're dazzled by the special effects and wham-bang action.

This is insulting enough to true comic fans, but then Snyder has the nerve to piss on our boots and tell us it's raining; to stretch a tapestry of pomposity over the entire affair, as though he were covering up his own mess or, worse yet, a crime scene. Indeed, the film's high-minded, inflated sense of self-importance carries it along with a stilted cadence that borders on self-parody, though neither the director nor the cast seem privy to the joke. It's possible that Snyder actually thinks he's crafting some sort of operatic splendor, but in actuality, the attempt is something more akin to writing Shakespeare in crayon.

It's supposed to be fun

I have to give credit where it's due, though, because it's not all lofty pseudo-philosophizing. Some of the ideas floated here are actually intriguing. The moral and sociopolitical dilemmas raised by Superman's existence, for example, are actually well-written and affecting. If you isolate them from everything else, that is. But alas, in the greater scheme of things, it's just one more ingredient in this superhero potluck, floating uncertainly beneath a thick, cloudy film of hard-boiled pessimism. Even worse, the rest of the ideas there are - along with whatever muddled allegorical motifs that are woven throughout this mess - just aren't compelling, provocative, or interesting.

Here's the thing: a superhero flick doesn't need to change your worldview or resonate with you, the viewer, on any sort of deep, emotional level. Nor should it, in most cases. It's supposed to be fantasy. It's supposed to be escapism. It's supposed to be fun. Batman v Superman is so concerned with its own thematic hyper-realism that it's forgotten those basic elements.

"Superhero money"

But even the director is not all to blame. This movie feels very corporate, and that makes sense. It's essentially the latest installment meant to guarantee that good old "superhero money" for the film studio, which has had several recent critical and box office flops. Marvel, now owned by Disney, is of course very corporatized as well, but they manage to choose directors, writers, and casts that have creativity and heart.

In the unlikely event that you haven't noticed, the dirty handprints of Warner Bros.' forceful marketing team are smeared all over this project. The subtitle "Dawn of Justice," for example, is there to make you think about the upcoming Justice League, a two-part juggernaut of a film that will unite Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Cyborg, Aquaman, and who knows who else. And needless scenes are scattered throughout this grueling, monotonous, two-and-a-half-hour experience in order to reinforce that brand, to the detriment of the actual story.

Ultimately, Batman v Superman is the result of the hasty catchup game that DC/Warner Bros. is playing as Marvel/Disney outpaces them in theaters. In the race to get from Point A to Point B - and make as much money as possible along the way - they've made a series of poor creative decisions. This movie is very much the product of that; a harsh lesson in what not to do in a comic-based film, and yet another reminder that capitalism is anathema to art.

If you shut off your brain, shorten your attention span, and embrace form over content, you'll find Batman v Superman to be entertaining on a highly superficial level. Whether it's worth purchasing a ticket for or better to wait until it's released on DVD and Blu-Ray is a personal choice, but the latter may be wiser. This is neither what most comic fans wanted nor what general moviegoers deserve, but it is what it is. It's a beautiful disaster. But it's still a bad movie.

Photo: "Batman v Superman" Facebook page

“Madame Butterfly”: The racial/sexual politics of cross-cultural concubinage

Wed, 30 Mar 2016 13:25:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES - First of all, LA Opera's current production of Giacomo Puccini's Madame Butterfly hits not only a homer, but a grand slam. The multi-culti cast and crew organically combine to present this lushly romantic mounting of the 1904 work, one of the most performed and beloved operas of all time.

Puccini adapted David Belasco's 1900 Broadway play of the same name, set in contemporaneous Japan. The opera is the archetypal "East meets West" love story; its influence is stamped on works ranging from the Broadway stage to the Hollywood screen and beyond. The romance between that other Lieutenant - WWII Marine Joe Cable - and the "younger than springtime" Vietnamese beauty Liat he deflowers in the musical and movies based on James Michener's 1947 Pulitzer Prize-winning Tales of the South Pacific is almost certainly derived from Butterfly. Miss Saigon (1989) is an adaptation of Butterfly wherein the titular Vietnamese bargirl replaced the Japanese geisha in what became the 13th-longest running musical on Broadway. Similar plot elements are afoot in David Henry Hwang's 1988 Tony Award-winning play, the similarly-titled M. Butterfly and David Cronenberg's 1993 film adaptation of it, which add a gender bender component to Puccini's cross-cultural angle in a saga also suggested by the real-life affair between a French diplomat and a Peking opera singer.

In the current LA Opera production Puerto Rican soprano Ana María Martínez' flawless performance as the title character, also known as Cio-Cio-San, is heart-melting, with an exquisite rendition of the immortal aria, Un bel di (One Fine Day). Set in the Land of the Rising Sun, Rick Fisher's lighting in Act I, moving from daytime to nighttime during Butterfly and U.S. Naval Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton's (Italian tenor Stefano Secco) wedding night, and in Act II, as Cio-Cio-San passes a sleepless night waiting for her feckless seducer to return to her, superbly evokes the passage of time. (No sexy silhouettes, however, projected upon the closed sliding shoji doors as Pinkerton removes Butterfly's kimono and the marriage is consummated.)

Designer Jean-Marc Puissant's stage is almost minimalist. In Act I the little Nagasaki hilltop traditional Japanese house which Pinkerton has opportunistically leased for 999 years, with a monthly option to break said lease, looks lovely and downright spiffy. But the abode expresses plot in the second act through its shockingly shabby appearance, denoting Pinkerton's three-year absence, after he has shipped out of Japan aboard the gunboat Abraham Lincoln and forsaken poor, pregnant Cio-Cio-San.

In Brigitte Reiffenstuel's costume design, the kimono Butterfly first appears in cleverly suggests wings, as if Cio-Cio-San might take flight. When Pinkerton returns in Act II he's wearing a more ornate uniform than earlier, indicating his rise in the U.S. Navy ranks during those years when bellicose Pres. Teddy Roosevelt urged a newly imperial, ascendant America to "walk softly but carry a big stick."

Bamboo fever

Puccini's rendering of interracial romance is fraught with ethnic and sexual politics and appears to be a critique of then-emerging Yankee "gunboat diplomacy." Puccini employs WASP-y American names and quotes "The Star-Spangled Banner" in the score. When we first meet Pinkerton, he seems to be gaga for Cio-Cio-San, but Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica's libretto quickly reveals Pinkerton's perfidious, opportunistic motivations. He likens the 999-year lease on his home - with its monthly annulment option - to his marital vows to Cio-Cio-San. He views this marriage of convenience - arranged by matrimonial broker Goro (tenor Keith Jameson) - as lasting only during his brief deployment to Japan, until he makes "real" nuptials with "one of his own kind." (Mezzo-soprano Lacey Jo Benter plays Kate Pinkerton.)

The thoughtless, selfish Pinkerton confides in and confesses his treachery to U.S. Consul Sharpless (Korean baritone Kihun Yoon). The randy lieutenant refers to Butterfly as his "plaything"; smitten by her "exoticism" and beauty, he proceeds to seduce her dishonorably, although Sharpless warns him about, and Cio-Cio-San sings of profound feelings for her white husband and believes their marriage to be real and lifelong. (Madame Butterfly is a supreme study in self-deception and denial.)

Ex-geisha Cio-Cio-San is only 15 years old, so by today's standards, Pinkerton could be considered a pedophile, even if it seems consensual. Would audiences be outraged by or accept his seduction of a Caucasian female of that age?

In any case, Pinkerton and Butterfly enjoy what, to paraphrase Spike Lee, could be called "bamboo fever," as East meets West in ecstatic sexual electricity. Pinkerton is clearly charmed by Cio-Cio-San and likens the kimono-clad beauty to art, flowers and insects; she refers to herself as a "goddess." It never seems to occur to Pinkerton that Butterfly is a human being, flesh and blood, with heart, soul, psyche and intellect. Objectified as primarily a sex toy, Cio-Cio-San's very humanity is denied. This child is arguably raped as a symbol of Western conquest.

Puccini is cannily commenting on international relations between imperial Washington and the Third World just as the Yankees spread their wings on the global scene, following the illegal 1893 overthrow and then annexation of the independent Kingdom of Hawaii in 1898, the same year America conquered Spain's empire, from the Caribbean (where it still runs the world's most notorious penal colony at Guantánamo) to the Pacific. The U.S. invaded the Philippines, where it fought a long war against Filipino independence, and the U.S. still occupies one-third of Guam with military installations.

Besides desire, what else motivates Cio-Cio-San? The unfortunate teenager has had to support herself and her family by becoming a geisha since her nobleman father's hara-kiri death: Her early Act I revealing of the blade used for the suicidal deed - given to the family by the Japanese emperor, or Mikado, himself - foreshadows what is to happen. Because of her father's fate and the limited options available to a young lady in early 20th-century Japan, she seeks to escape social restrictions by marrying and becoming an American, thus elevating her status.

Cio-Cio-San turns her back on her ancestral religion, incurring the wrath of the Bonze (bass-baritone Nicholas Brownlee), who disrupts her wedding ceremony and casts a curse upon the star-crossed lovers. The Bonze represents a sort of nationalistic response to Western imperialism in what are definitely not happy days.

Cross-cultural casting

From our 21st-century "post-racial" (as if!) perch it's easy to get up on our high horses and dismiss this early depiction of interracial romance as stereotypical, even racist. But as the 2016 Cloroxed Oscars - widely denounced for its lack of nominations for Black actors and films - demonstrates when it comes to casting, America isn't so enlightened nowadays either. Is it correct to deride Ukrainian soprano Oksana Dyka's 2012 turn and Puerto Rican soprano Martínez's LA Opera Butterfly performances as "Yellowface" - a non-Asian impersonating a character of Asian ancestry through cosmetics, costuming, mannerisms, etc.? And also other "Oriental" roles performed by Caucasians in this production? Such as Texan baritone Daniel Armstrong, who plays Yamadori, plus Serbian mezzo Milena Kitic, who depicts Butterfly's attendant, Suzuki. (Historically, Hispanics such as Ramón Novarro, María Montez, Dolores del Río, Rita Moreno, etc., have often "passed" onscreen as Tinseltown "Polynesians," following the "If-you've-seen-one-'exotic'-person-you've- seen-'em-all" rule.)

In ironic turn-around fair play, Seoul-born Kihun Yoon portrays the white American consul Sharpless. And Patrick Blackwell, an African American bass-baritone, plays the Imperial Commissioner.

What is one to make of this show's multi-culti thespianism? Is it a case of forward thinking "nontraditional casting" which, among other things, gives often underrepresented minorities roles, and thereby work and representation? But what happens when major parts specifically designated for one nationality go to performers from the dominant majority culture (or other ethnic groups), thus depriving, say, Asians, of one of a handful of roles (let alone leads) that portray them? (Indeed, from 1915-20 Japanese opera singer Tamaki Miura played Butterfly in America and Europe.)

Is this cultural correctness gone berserk? Especially since acting is, by its very nature, about pretense and play? And is this all the more true in opera, where voice triumphs over every other consideration, and talent - not ethnicity, nor body size, looks, age, etc. - is the determining (perhaps the sole) factor in who incarnates what persona? The fact is that Martínez is sizzling and stunning as Butterfly, and the entire cast acquits itself well. I don't pretend to have answers - but I do have lots of questions, especially given the brouhaha surrounding this year's whitewashed Academy Awards.

Of race, sex, and class

What was Puccini getting at 112 years ago? Pinkerton's rank is relatively low; he's only a lieutenant, after all. But his skin color and racial pedigree bestowed a social status that outshone that of another suitor, the wealthier aristocrat, Prince Yamadori, who tries to woo Butterfly while her unfaithful "husband" sails the seven seas. His American-ness is the allure for the outcast Cio-Cio-San, who has been spurned by her own people and culture. The opera is subject to interpretation, but I suspect Puccini, who so sympathized with countercultural artistes in La Bohème and political prisoners in Tosca, was criticizing racial superiority, and not interracial love.

Lee Blakeley deftly directs the production, and James Conlon wields his baton with all the finesse of a musical samurai. The final scene seems embellished: Butterfly and Pinkerton's love child (named "Trouble" in the original libretto, but apparently not in this production) is wrapped in Old Glory, and after his mother commits suicide with the same dagger her father used, the boy (alternately played by Nicholas Cuenca Terry and Michael Alspaugh) brandishes the blade at his birth father.

This gesture is not in the original libretto, so if this knife-wielding has been added by those behind this production, what are they getting at? That American recklessness in foreign affairs produces enemies? Secco was good-naturedly booed during the curtain calls as the quintessential ugly American in recognition of his villainy. But without his deception in courting, then abandoning the trusting child Cio-Cio-San, so cruelly caught between two worlds that ultimately crushed her wings, there'd be no story.

Madame Butterfly is being performed Thurs., March 31 at 7:30 pm and Sun., April 3 at 2:00 pm. Another Puccini favorite, La Bohème, is being performed May 14-June 12 at LA Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. For more info: (213) 972-8001; www.laopera.com.

Photo: LA Opera

Open letter to Motion Picture Academy, L.A. Women’s Theater Festival

Mon, 28 Mar 2016 15:23:00 +0000

Dear Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences,

You have come under intense criticism for Cloroxing this year's Oscars, without nominating a single Black-themed film or actor for an Academy Award. As an entertainment/arts reviewer I'd like to help you - and the motion picture industry at large - with this whitewashing conundrum, which also reflects your overwhelmingly Caucasian membership. As the history of professional sports proves, the problem isn't a lack of talent in the Black community, but rather a lack of opportunity. (Can you say "Jackie Robinson?")

So, in order for the Academy to resolve this membership and Oscar snafu, and also for those studio decision makers inhabiting the executive suites who can greenlight motion picture projects, I advise you to please attend the Los Angeles Women's Theatre Festival (LAWTF). While this annual fest is open to women of all ethnic backgrounds who present live solo performances, it does highlight women of color who work onstage. Of course, much of L.A.'s unique live theatre scene is connected to the film and TV world (television currently seems to be far more diverse than movies, as the 2016 Emmys illustrated).

Please send your casting directors, agents, managers, producers, suits, et al, to LAWTF, and I guarantee you that much of the Academy's and the movie industry's colorblindness will be solved, and the national embarrassment and shame of being regarded as racist will dissipate. There are so many Black, Latina, Asian and other talents presenting their artistry at this Festival that you will have a colorful cornucopia of talent to choose from. Chris Rock will no longer be able to mock the Academy for its perceived bias while hosting your live awards ceremony.

The 23rd annual LAWTF just concluded (but see below for deets on an April 30 encore). On opening night (March 24) a musical number was performed by about ten of this year's solo performers, raising the roof together with a song celebrating this year's LAWTF theme of "Telling Our Truths."

Amidst much good-natured banter, this year's hosts - actress Starletta DuPois (Friday After Next, Big Momma's House, South Central, Whitney Houston's mom in Waiting to Exhale) and actor Barry Shabaka Henley (Ali, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Black-ish) - presented this year's LAWTF awards, accompanied by graphics projected onscreen. Writer/producer/director/actress Marja-Lewis Ryan, who called herself "a queer girl from Brooklyn" during her impassioned acceptance speech, won the Maverick Award. (Although one wonders about accepting ovations for being unconventional: Does that defeat the purpose of following the beat of a different drummer?)

The Rainbow Awards for diversity actually went to two winners this year, both Cuban-Americans. Choreographer Ana Maria Alvarez and Dr. Chantal Rodriguez, programming director/literary manager for the Latino Theater Company, each received it.

Curious indeed was the bestowing of the Integrity Award on the executive of a defense contractor, Northrop Grumman. Sandra J. Evers-Manly, their Vice President for Corporate Responsibility, has also been involved with the NAACP Image Awards and was founding president of the Black Hollywood Education Program. As her hyphenated name indicates, she is a cousin of the slain Civil Rights martyr Medgar Evers, who was gunned down at Jackson, Miss., in 1963. On the front page of Northrop Grumman's website are many militaristic images of drones, bombers, rifle-pointing uniformed soldiers and other warlike propaganda. One can't help but wonder what Medgar - a leader in the Civil Rights movement, which espoused nonviolence - would make of his name being associated with such militarism. There's no "integrity" in arming U.S. imperialism!

The late, great Cuban-American actress Elizabeth Peña won the Infinity Award, which is well deserved. I particularly enjoyed her in John Sayles' 1996 Lone Star, where she and her onscreen lover, Chris Cooper, discover that they are actually half-siblings - and what they decide to do about this is pretty quirky and kinky.

Singer and Broadway actress Eloise Laws received the Eternity Award and rocked the house with two songs. However, unlike in previous years, aside from the opening evening's two musical acts, there were no other live dramatic performances by the solo talents participating in LAWTF. The awards ceremony's final speaker was the Festival's co-founder and president, actress Adilah Barnes, whose long list of credits includes 2000's Erin Brockovich and depicting journalist Ida B. Wells opposite Hilary Swank, Anjelica Huston and Vera Farmiga in the 2004 suffragette HBO movie Iron Jawed Angels.

Other co-hosts for this year's LAWTF include the great director/actress/writer Iona Morris, whose father Greg Morris co-starred in the 1960s TV series Mission Impossible. LAWTF ticket buyers travel from near and far to attend, such as the Bay Area's Diane Barnes, who wrote and performs the one-woman show My Stroke of Luck (see: www.dianebarnes415.com/) and has studied with Anna Deavere Smith, maestra of solo shows. This was Barnes's first visit to LAWTF but one suspects not her last - perhaps she'll return as a performer?

For more info and a full schedule, go to: www.lawtf.org. Okay, so no excuses, Academy and movie execs, casting directors, etc.! You know where to go to find the female talent that reflects the true diversity of 21st-century America. And that's telling the truth, Ruth!

Sincerely yours,

Ed Rampell, Your Most Humble and Obedient Reviewer

LAWTF and the City of West Hollywood are presenting Encore! A Day of Theatre starting at noon on April 30 at The Actor's Company, 916 N. Formosa Ave., West Hollywood, CA 90046. Performances include Sandy Brown's Oh, Yes She Did! (which could be the slogan of LAWTF). For schedule information: See www.lawtf.org or call (818) 760-0408.

This week in women’s history: Poet-novelist-activist Marge Piercy turns 80

Mon, 28 Mar 2016 13:26:00 +0000

This week People's World celebrates the 80th birthday of the influential American writer Marge Piercy, born in Detroit on March 31, 1936.

Piercy has written 17 novels, including bestsellers Gone to Soldiers, Braided Lives and The Longings of Women, and the classics Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She and It. Her 19 volumes of poetry include The Hunger Moon: New & Selected Poems 1980-2010, The Crooked Inheritance, and last year's Made in Detroit. Her critically acclaimed memoir is called Sleeping with Cats. Piercey was educated at the University of Michigan and Northwestern, she has received four honorary doctorates, and is active in antiwar, feminist and environmental causes. She was a significant feminist voice in the New Left and Students for a Democratic Society.

Piercy is the master of many genres: historical novels, novels of social comment, and science fiction (He, She, and It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction in the United Kingdom). She has taught, lectured and/or performed her work at over 400 universities around the world. "Marge Piercy is not just an author," says the Boston Globe; "she's a cultural touchstone. Few writers in modern memory have sustained her passion, and skill, for creating stories of consequence."

Her novels and poetry often focus on feminist or social concerns. City of Darkness, City of Light is set during the French Revolution. Others of her novels, such as Summer People and The Longings of Women, are set during the modern day. Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) mixes a time travel story with issues of social justice, feminism, and the treatment of the mentally ill. This novel is considered a classic of utopian "speculative" science fiction as well as a feminist classic.

Marge Piercy was born into a family that had been, like many others, affected by the Depression. Her father grew up in a small town in the soft coal mining region of Pennsylvania. They had not been living in Detroit long. Out of work for some time, he got a job installing and repairing heavy machinery at Westinghouse. When Piercy was little, they moved into a small house in a working-class neighborhood in Detroit which was black and white by blocks.

Piercy's maternal grandfather was a union organizer murdered while organizing bakery workers. Her maternal grandmother, Hannah, of whom Piercy was particularly fond, was born in a Lithuanian shtetl, the daughter of a rabbi. "Grandmother Hannah was a great storyteller. She and my mother told many of the same stories, but always the stories came out differently." Although Piercy's father was not Jewish (raised Presbyterian, but observed no religion), she was raised as Jewish and has remained so.

After completing university studies, Piercy went to France with her first husband, a French Jew who had been active in opposing the war in Algeria. Although he was kind and bright, he expected conventional sex roles in marriage and could not take her writing seriously. After that marriage, Piercy lived in Chicago, supporting herself as a secretary, a switchboard operator, a department store clerk, an artists' model, and part-time faculty instructor. She was involved in the civil rights movement.

In 1962, she married a computer scientist, with whom she moved to Cambridge, then San Francisco, back east to Boston, then Brooklyn. She researched the CIA; helped found the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) and did power structure research. She continued to be active in SDS, starting a "movement" chapter (MDS) in Brooklyn that was the adult off-campus SDS. In 1967, she became an organizer with the SDS regional office in New York.

Her movement community split into warring factions by the late 1960s. It had become infiltrated by violent agent provocateurs; members were wracked by a sense of futility because the war was ongoing despite the fact that they had been opposing it for eight years. Piercy got involved in the women's movement, organizing consciousness raising groups and writing articles.

In 1971 Piercy and her husband moved to Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, and built a house with a garden. She has lived there ever since, although her husband eventually felt isolated and that marriage dissolved. She knew her current husband, Ira Wood, for six years before they married in 1982. He is also a writer.

Piercy has always celebrated whatever she could find to celebrate. Her mother's family taught her early in life to enjoy what you could because trouble is never far away. Pay sharp attention to that trouble looming but don't let it taint your appreciation for life's gifts now. In her poetry, she offers gratitude for what she has been given, and bears witness to what is withheld from us or taken away.

A few short quotes from Marge Piercy:

Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third.

It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover.

Never doubt that you can change history. You already have.

The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.

Sources: MargePiercy.com, Wikipedia.

Photo: Poetry Foundation

“The Americans”: Hostility between two world powers in new episode

Fri, 25 Mar 2016 10:48:00 +0000

Last episode, Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys) was unwillingly tasked with receiving and then handing off a U.S. bioweapon-it's the handing off that proves problematic in "Pastor Tim."

The hostility between superpowers manifests in ways large and small. Some are both. Circa 1983 in the show's narrative, the U.S. is making bioweapons designed to kill vast numbers of human targets; the Soviets need to know what they're dealing with. Philip carries a heavy workload, but this small vial of deadly serum, hidden in a tobacco tin, may be the most burdensome of all.

No wonder he's eager to hand the tin off to a Czech pilot, who is supposed to be the next link in a chain leading back to the Soviet Union. The pilot, however, when they meet in the back of an airport transport bus, is freaked over the situation.

An airport security guard, trained to keep an eye on antsy pilots, boards the bus, which only heightens the pilot's agitation. The guard is suspicious, the bus driver is off on break, and the only other relevant passenger is a new wave girl listening to her Walkman play "Tainted Love."

"Sometimes I feel I've got to get away," the song by Soft Cell goes. But Philip, a travel agent who rarely gets to choose his destination, can't escape his dilemma.

Wearing a nondescript wig and with a prominent birthmark on his cheek, he's thoroughly in undercover mode, and thus ready to kill. The guard's subsequent strangling plays out to the strains of a song warning of dangerous attachments.

After all that, when Philip pokes his head up on the next all-clear, he sees that damned tobacco tin on the adjoining seat, and the Czech pilot long gone. The guard died for nothing, and now Philip must take the deadly tin back home and hide it away in his garage.

Too bad that the couple's spy handler, the courtly Gabriel (Frank Langella) seems to think that the next step will be Philip having to transport the vial out of country. Not Philip's idea of a great vacation getaway, to put it mildly.

As for the dissident scientist who provided the vial, Gabriel describes the man as an antisocial type whose attitude accounts for his not having a high security clearance.

The higher the clearance, the better access to quality intel-yet can Elizabeth and Philip somehow effect a personality transplant for the Grinch? Surely a back of the burner item for now.

Oh, and by the way, here's a brand new computer for the kids. A present via Gabriel, and a reminder of the state of computers back then. Your smart phone is a veritable genius next to it, but Henry, the couple's suddenly adolescent son, will surely get a kick out of '80s cutting edge technology.

Speaking of Henry, he's spending some evenings with the Jennings' FBI neighbor, Stan Beeman, the same man who had a jealous fit last episode when he falsely accused Philip of philandering with Stan's ex. Henry seeks advice from Stan about the opposite sex, specifically a hot teacher with a zipper dress.

This is of course the same Stan Beeman who once carried on a quasi-affair with (and actual sexual exploitation of) Nina, a Soviet embassy employee pushed into doing Stan's bidding.

This is why Stan's not the best adult male you'd want to counsel your child, or offer to provide him a bottle of cologne. Also, since Elizabeth and Phil commented last week on Henry's cologne-and overpowering scent thereof-this strikes me as being an olfactory Chehkov gun.

Basically, it's an Anton Chekhov playwriting rule that if you see a gun in the early goings of a play, it'd better go off by the end. Since the scent Henry's wearing is the same as Stan's absent son, I'm thinking that Henry, who's done some neighborhood prowling in the past, has been rooting around in Stan's house.

Paige may not be the best spy prospect of the Jennings kids. Paige, however, does have a knack for intel, for she did suss out the peculiarities in her parents' lives even before she learned of their true occupation-and nationality.

Elizabeth, already suspicious of Paige's relationship with Pastor Tim, goes ballistic when her wiretap reveals that the minister now knows about her and Philip being Russians. What to do now? Wouldn't Paige suspect her parents if Pastor Tim were to die suddenly?

However, the couple does due diligence by checking out the pastor's getaway cabin, which Elizabeth notes has the kind of gas heater that can be easily jimmied to cause asphyxiation. Although Philip is more dubious than Elizabeth about Paige's spy prospects, he agrees the pastor represents a clear danger.

The couple may have acute points of difference, but they are on the whole honest and supportive of one another. Elizabeth has no problem accepting Philip's explanation that Stan mistook Philip's interaction with Stan's ex-wife. And what about EST, the self-help program Philip is attending? "You learn how to deal with things, life, I guess, everything," Philip stumblingly explains.

"I knew you were going through something," she says, and, primed by her concern, Philip shares his memory of killing at age 10 a thieving bully. It's the first killing that on the surface troubles him, but perhaps it serves as a stand-in for all the others.

Elizabeth, who learns from Gabriel that her mother died back home in Russia, isn't quite the usual rock in the family anymore. "Is this [est] something I could go to?" she asks her husband, who is receptive.

Philip is an undercover soldier who has stayed in the field too long-yet his work in a hostile land continues, as with an American soldier in Iraq.

Or in Afghanistan around 1983, for that matter, which is the predicament for Soviet soldiers in that country. Due to U.S. training and financial support of the oft religiously motivated mujahideen, that conflict drags on. The latest casualty is Soviet intelligence expert Oleg's brother, a soldier who cared so much for his troops he stayed on beyond his period of enlistment.

His brother dead, a mournful Oleg is in no mood for a gabfest with Stan, but talk they do about the one topic on which they agree: the safety and future freedom of their mutual beloved, Nina. Stan bears no good news, as his side remains unwilling to make a trade of prisoners.

Stan says he's sorry to hear about Oleg's brother. "So we're friends now?" Oleg says and slams the car door as he leaves.

Our chain of emotional connections continues with the ever-pensive Nina, who is still working at a Soviet research facility and doing penance for her stateside espionage by befriending an unwillingly extracted Russian defector named Anton.

We see the depths of her commitment to Anton, for she strategically engineers a visit by her husband, Boris, whom she hasn't seen in years. "My world was too small for you," he recalls, but, seeing her current surroundings, perhaps her old world wasn't such a bad perch after all.

Nina has a plan. Back in the day, she and Boris used an intermediary to fence the illegal goods she traded for in the U.S. Now she wants to use that fence to give Anton's family in the U.S. a note saying he is well and being held unwillingly.

The ploy doesn't work. The facility head, a man who earned his current downscale from a U.S. post because of his lack of discretion around Nina, isn't about to forgive her trying to pass a note past the guards.

What if the note, after all, had contained sensitive data about Soviet research instead of homier details? Knowing Nina's history, it makes sense that she might betray her country again.

"You were almost free," he says. "How could you do this?"

"I'm not who I was," Nina replies defiantly. True in one sense, in that she cared more about Anton's situation than her own-but not altogether accurate, for Nina continues to be a nation of one who acts without regard to larger considerations.

It is those larger considerations and smaller links that we return to in the core relationships of this drama, between Philip and Elizabeth, and their loving, yet emotionally torn daughter.

At one point during the episode, Elizabeth is startled by a dream that conflates the images of Paige's pastor with Timushev, the man who raped Elizabeth when she was a young spy trainee. Traumas linger long in one's life, and Elizabeth realizes that whatever they decide to do about the pastor could impact her daughter for life.

Elizabeth has shared with Paige the news of her mother's death, which perhaps precipitates Paige's revelation of what Elizabeth already knows via wiretap-Pastor Tim knows that her parents are spies.

Perhaps a bit stagily, Elizabeth fires away. "This is the one thing we said you couldn't do." Quite a bit more of a problem than, say, overstaying a curfew, but Elizabeth gives it the full treatment. At the end, though, she's a bit more consoling.

"We'll figure this out," she says and then utters the classic "wait until your father gets home."

And so husband and wife sit in their car in the basement, a few feet away from a hidden pathogen. Deadly bioweapons and worrisome children aside, what's first on her mind and on her lips is the death of her mother.

Philip gently embraces her. "We're in trouble," she says.

"I know," Philip replies.

Of all the links explored in this episode, theirs is the strongest.

Tune in next Wednesday for another episode of spycraft and drama at its finest.

Photo: The Americans Facebook page

New opera “Fallujah”: Heartbreaking look at war and PTSD online now

Wed, 23 Mar 2016 15:14:00 +0000

LONG BEACH, Calif. - A new opera by composer Tobin Stokes has just completed its world premiere run of seven performances at the Army National Guard Armory in Long Beach, by the pathbreaking Long Beach Opera.

The company invested tremendous resources to get the word out about Fallujah, the first opera written about the Iraq War. The Los Angeles Times and other media covered it extensively, and the local television station KCET broadcast a complete performance of it during the course of its run.

Named for the principal battle of the Iraq War that decimated the great and ancient city of the Fertile Crescent, Fallujah brings us, through searing performances and highly effective staging and projections, right into the beating heart of a place residents are trying to defend with the last shred of their civic honor, and where U.S. Marines are ordered to kill everything that moves.

The central character is U.S. Marine Corps Lance Corporal Philip (LaMarcus Miller), seen during a 72-hour suicide watch in a veterans' hospital. His buddies check in on him regularly, but are unable to pierce his delirium. His mom Colleen (Suzan Hanson) waits patiently outside his door, hoping he will open it and allow her to listen with compassion to his terrifying memories, fears and fantasies.

On the Iraqi side, there is a parallel relationship between mother Shatha (Ani Maldjian) and her teenage son Wissam (Jonathan Lacayo), who are scared, angry and resentful that the peaceful life their family has enjoyed in Fallujah for 500 years is being destroyed before their eyes.

Other characters are Philip's fellow Marines in various states and stages of calm and anxiety, life and death.

The focus of the opera is on the human experience of war and war's consequences for the families at home. There might be those who would criticize the opera for not placing blame and responsibility on the proper shoulders, but this would have introduced a controversial political element distracting to the central mission of the work, to arouse feelings of understanding and empathy for the suffering on all sides. Viewers will certainly draw their own conclusions without much editorializing from the authors.

The libretto is by Heather Raffo, herself of Iraqi-American background. Two Marine Corps veterans who served in Iraq, Jon Harguindeguy and Michael Hebert, acted as art designers and consultants. Andreas Mitisek was the director and production designer; he is also Long Beach Opera's Artistic and General Director. Lighting was by Dan Weingarten, and Hana S. Kim was the video designer. Kristof van Grysperre conducted a small chamber ensemble.

After each performance the cast and creative partners opened the floor to audience reaction. On the afternoon I attended (March 19), audience members spoke of their tears watching the performance, their empathy with the soldiers and their families, and the insanity - as well as the criminality - of a war of choice that did not need to happen in the first place. Several people in the house said they had marched against the war back in 2003. Clearly, participation in this project was an emotional trial for all the singers: One of them, posed a question about what the opera meant to her, was too choked up to respond.

The entire opera can be seen here and is highly worthwhile. At the same site can be found a number of other features and interviews about the opera. This is an opera unlike any other. One of its closest relatives may be Czech composer Leoš Janáček's bleak, tragic 1927 opera "From the House of the Dead," libretto by the composer, after Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The running time of the opera is 80 minutes, and it is sung in English.

Book review: "Confronting Black Jacobins"

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 17:08:00 +0000

In the introduction to his book, Confronting Black Jacobins, Gerald Horne writes that the 1804 Haitian Revolution "was so profound, so important, so stunning, that it may require an entire school of historians to take its true measure." Arguably, he adds, this revolution - an affront to both slavery and white supremacy, bolstering revolt throughout the slave South - changed the course of history.

Horne, who holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, articulates a number of themes throughout his books, primarily the role of external, international powers in the centuries-long struggle led by African Americans for freedom and equality.

Confronting Black Jacobins builds on Horne's prior work - namely, Negro Comrades of the Crown. In Jacobins, he demonstrates through copious amounts of documentation and research the impact external, international forces had on slave resistance within the "slave-holding republic," the frightened slave owners' response to this external threat and the ever-evolving U.S. policy towards Haiti, the first Black republic.

As the title suggests, Jacobins puts the Haitian Revolution into a larger political context. The former slaves - on what would soon become the first Black republic - saw themselves as revolutionaries continuing the democratic upsurge initiated by the radical Jacobins in France.

While slavery was expanding in the former colonies, and while Great Britain was moving towards abolition - readily making overtures to Blacks in the former colonies, offering arms if they would wear Redcoats - what was soon to become Haiti was in the throes of revolt. Astutely sensing that its northern neighbor had other priorities - foremost, the defense of slavery on the mainland - the Black Jacobins dealt a body blow to their former masters and white supremacy generally by rising-up and exacting bloody revenge, a lesson Southern slave owners were slow to learn.

As Horne writes, "The vaunted Founding Fathers then administering the slave-holding republic seemed incapable of comprehending the world historic forces that were being unloosed at that time," an event undoubtedly comprehended by the enslaved themselves - as evidenced by the steady increased of slave revolts, plots and plans, as well as the on-going chatter about Haitian designs on St. Domingo, thereby literally extending the reach of the Black Republic geographically.

As a contemporary noted in 1824 regarding the Haitian revolt, "human blood was poured forth in torrents" as thousands of slave owners, their families and children were killed, a future Southern plantation owners were desperately trying to avoid. "Literate mainland observers may have been excused if they thought the official name of Haiti - or Hayti - was 'horrors,'" Horne added.

"The wider point," he continued, "is that [Thomas] Jefferson's dystopian fear of Africans taking control of the Caribbean as a prelude to a wider hemispheric domination did not seem like fantasy in the early 19^th century."

"To be sure, there was nervous apprehension about continuing the African slave trade [by some] on the mainland. However," Horne continued, "like hopelessly hooked addicts, the presumed euphoric profits were too extravagant to reject." So the horrific trade in human flesh continued.

Ironically, by 1819 Haiti was becoming a major trading partner with the U.S. Emerging industrial interests in the North, along with a growing abolitionist sentiment, wanted "trade with the island of freedom thereby offend[ing] Dixie and quicken[ing] sectional conflict that eventuated in civil war."

Further, for example, from 1824 to 1826 "at least 6000 Free Negroes" left the mainland. "There was push and pull involved" in this migration, Horne notes.

"Free Negroes were viewed suspiciously for fear that they would join with the enslaved in a mainland version of the Haitian Revolution and getting rid of them by any means necessary was a priority" to white elites, hence the push. "The 'pull,' in short, was embodied in residing in a sovereign African republic, as opposed to a slave-holding republic" and experiencing first-hand the freedom denied their enslaved brethren.

Complicating matters was Great Britain's move towards abolition, especially in its Caribbean colonies. London found its empire stretched too thin, and rationalized that freeing and arming Caribbean's of African descent was the better of numerous bad options. Armed Blacks in Redcoats could then act as a bulwark against Dixie's expansionists' plans, a very real threat to London.

For, at this time Southern slave owners realistically dreamed of not only expanding west - which proved more tangible and pragmatic, at least temporarily - but also south into the Caribbean and Latin America. As James Gadsden - Florida planter, army general and murderer of Seminole Indians -opined, "Have you ever in your visions, dreamt of a great federation of West Indian islands, stimulated in their prosperity and advancement by African slavery as now existing in the Southern States? History has never recorded such a commercial and naval power as Cuba, St. Domingo, Potro Rico [sic], and Jamaica united under one Confederation...," a slave-holding confederation.

Tellingly, Gadsden shared his wretched plans for slavery's expansion with Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederate States.

Jacobins can be summed-up thusly: for decades following independence the U.S. sought "to re-enslave the entire island and liquidate independence...," as "...the revolutionary example of Haiti spread throughout the Americas and created a general crisis of the slave system that could only be resolved - thankfully - with its collapse. As a result, Africans in particular and the international working class in general owe a massive debt of gratitude to the Black Jacobins...," Horne concludes.

Confronting Black Jacobins is a tour de force. Gerald Horne, like the events he writes about, is arguably redefining the historical profession, building a narrative of Black Liberation no serious student of history should ignore.

Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, The Haitian Revolution, And The Origins Of The Dominican Republic

By Gerald Horne

Monthly Review Press, 2015, 423 pages

Available in hardcover, paperback and Kindle editions

New play confronts Alaskan Native and Caucasian worlds

Mon, 21 Mar 2016 13:00:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES - An angry teenager from a troubled home in Juneau is sent to live and work with his Tlingit grandparents in a remote fishing village in Southeast Alaska. He has no clue that the playwright has set him up for a moving coming of age story that forces him to come to terms with his ancestry.

This is the conceit of They Don't Talk Back, a new play by Frank Henry Kaash Katasse that recently received its world premiere production by Native Voices, promoted as "America's leading Native American theatre company," at the Autry, a museum dedicated to exploring the American West, in Los Angeles' Griffith Park.

The theme of Native cultural retention comes up more and more in contemporary art forms. Recently I reviewed the play "Dream Catcher" at L.A.'s Fountain Theatre, and two years ago PW informed readers about an earlier production by Native Voices, "Stand-Off at HWY #37." Native Voices adds to the many other cultural voices now clamoring for greater diversity in our cultural representation.

Like virtually every other Indigenous culture in the world, with its greater or lesser accommodation to modernity, Tlingit customs and language are retained and revered on the one hand, and discarded and forgotten on the other. The essential conflict in They Don't Talk Back is that confrontation between worlds that affects every character, but in different ways and degrees. The great gift of our exposure to "diversity" is that we are able to see the universal in the specific. After the first production of Fiddler on the Roof in Japanese, local audiences found the topic of generational clash and the abandonment of "tradition" so compelling that they wondered if the musical would be understandable in America!

The playwright frankly admits to not having grown up "immersed in Tlingit culture," yet is proud to further Tlingit storytelling in this first play. He is familiar with the whole range of Tlingit people, from those who preserve to others who leave their culture behind in the big city.

The play is cast as a memory, opening with grandfather Paul's Tlingit poem of mourning and remembrance for his wife Linda, a poem that recurs at the conclusion after all is said, heard, sung, danced and done. In the course of two acts, characters define themselves through the stories they tell. Indeed, the most moving elements in the play are these set pieces.

Paul (Duane Minard, a Yurok and Paiute) - or Paul Sr. as he is identified in the program although there is no Paul Jr. - is an experienced fisherman, with a boat he is paying off, a crew, and apparently a steady, lucrative haul. He always seems to have his checkbook handy, though he does not consume conspicuously. (No mention is made of the Alaskan law which grants a substantial annual grant to every citizen of the state, from revenues derived from oil extraction.) Paul is the character with the longest, most accessible memory of his Tlingit heritage. A highlight of the evening is the re-enactment by memory ghosts of his childhood clam-hunting expeditions with his grandfather.

Grandmother Linda (Jennifer Bobiwash, an Ojibway) is a traditional household manager and constant knitter who is quietly but ever more visibly dealing with a serious medical condition. She and Paul are devout Christians of the evangelical "Washed in the Blood of the Lamb" type. They regularly have to remind the youngsters in the household not to take the Lord's name in vain. I don't question their faith as such, but I would say that in the context of a play about the Tlingit people, the playwright might have dealt in greater depth with the effect Western religion and theology exerted on the traditional Indigenous worldview - contradictions, compatibility, loyalties and struggles. The main story Linda tells has to do with faith healing (involving potatoes) as opposed to trusting doctors, a subject that also leaves open many questions about Tlingit vs. Western wisdom that go unexplored.

The roles of a Christian minister and Tim, one of Paul and Linda's children, are played (in different scenes of course) by Brian Pagaq Wescott, Athabascan and Yup'ik. Tim served in the Iraq War (the play is set in 1994) and has come back with severe PTSD. He is barely functional, and incapable of maintaining whatever former roles he had as a husband and father. We see him on one of his rare visits home, mostly to receive some cash infusions Paul and Linda are willing to give him. A lost soul, with powerful dream-memories of his wartime experience - but here again the playwright leaves it to our imagination how this innocent son of the Tlingit people suddenly found himself in a bone-dry desert fighting for the U.S. so far from his well-watered homeland. What's the back story here? His wife in Juneau - unseen in the play but spoken of - has gotten into drugs and is presently in jail.

Now Nick, Tim's son (Román Zaragoza, a Pima), who winds up with his grandparents, apparently against his will, his dad a walking war wreck, his mom an incarcerated druggie. He has found his identity with hip-hop culture and is current with all the music, jargon, body language, dress and attitude of his friends. In tough-love mode, Paul calls Nick "Apple" - red on the outside, white on the inside. It's quite a culture shock when he re-encounters his aged grandparents and is obliged to earn his keep by learning the fishing and boating life. He has some energetic hip-hop monologues that show off his youthful vigor and spunk. He has undefined ambitions, but this interregnum in the village will help clarify them.

Nick has a cousin also presently living with the grandparents, Edward (Kholan Studi, Cherokee). Why he happens to be staying with the old folks is also never explained, another of the strange lacunae in the play that might easily have been dispatched with a few lines of dialogue. He is now helping Paul in the fishing business, and wherever he came from, and whoever his mother and father were (possibly a Paul Jr.?), he seems to be content rebuilding his life in the coastal Tlingit environment. He does have ready access to old videos, and their often viewed episodes have by now just about equaled in their power the ancient Tlingit tales of nature that he also recites with memorable élan.

Although the play is essentially structured around a succession of monologues, its scenes flow into each other relatively seamlessly, each in its own way showing the relationship between individual characters and the society around them. Everyone is on their path toward finding their own identity and authenticity.

Randy Reinholz, an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and a co-founder of Native Voices, directed the play, extracting performances of remarkable range and depth from his five cast members. Important contributions were added by Tom Ontiveros (projection design), Ed Littlefield (Tlingit language advisor, composer and choreographer), and Sara Ryung Clement (scenic and props design), among several others.

They Don't Talk Back is revelatory, with numerous perfectly executed scenes by highly talented actors. The fishing net that ties it all together has some big holes in it, though. We are prepared to suspend our disbelief when we enter the theater. Some open-endedness is fine, but ultimately we are distracted from the playwright's intentions when more than a few questions he puts before us don't get answered.

While the run of performances at the Autry has ended, the play will go on to the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, from May 27 to June 19; and then to the Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, Alaska, for four weekends ion January 2017, and for two weeks in Anchorage in late February 2017.

Photo: (Left to right) Kholan Studi (Cherokee) as Edward, Román Zaragoza (Pima) as Nick. | Credit: Craig Schwartz

“Spies Are Forever”: When genres collide

Fri, 18 Mar 2016 12:29:00 +0000

Set during the Cold War, Spies Are Forever made me scratch my noggin and ponder what happens when there's a playhouse potpourri. While there have been spy spoofs on TV (Get Smart) and in the movies (the 1967 Casino Royale - with Woody Allen, among others, playing James Bond - and the In Like Flint series starring James Coburn, as well as the Matt Helm secret agent comedies featuring Dean Martin) before, this critic has never before seen anything quite like Spies Are Forever.

In this world premiere the conventions of the espionage thriller meet the attributes of the musical, with lots of comedy along the way. What happens when genres collide? Indeed, it seems to me to be neither fish nor fowl but something altogether different that defies neat categorization, a form that alters the definitions of the musical and the spy story.

Book writers Brian Rosenthal, Joey Richter and Corey Lubowich (he also directed the two-acter), aka the Tin Can Brothers and composers/ lyricists Clark Baxtresser and Pierce Siebers, aka TalkFine, have wrought what those other genre benders, Monty Python, had called: "And now, for something completely different."

This reviewer doesn't get paid enough to try and explain this play's pell-mell plot, such as there is. Especially since the motto of the playwrights seems to be: "Consistency causes cancer." For instance: At the end of Act I, protagonist Curt Mega (played by an actor who also, coincidentally, is named Curt Mega) seems to have been seriously shot. Shortly after the curtain proverbially lifts for the second act, said wound magically heals. Instant presto!

And when Curt is in mid-clench with Tatiana Slozhno, she says no - they have to make out to find out they're not really attracted to one another. (But of course, Mary Kate Wiles' wily Russian spy must be named "Tatiana" - her character is probably a homage to Tatiana Romanova, the Soviet agent played by former Miss Rome Daniela Bianchi, who wooed Sean Connery's 007 in the second Bond film, 1963's From Russia With Love.)

Suffice it to say that much of the action of this late 1950s/1960s-set covert comedy seems to involve an Eastern European nation somewhere behind the so-called Iron Curtain named the New Democratic Republics of Old Socialist Prussian-Sloviskia. Then, from out of nowhere, it's move over commies, as neo-Nazis led by the Baron (Brian Rosenthal) try to resurrect the Third Reich. (Actually, since it's three Reichs and you're out, I suppose it would be the fourth Reich? In any case, it's certainly not the Wilhelm Reich.)

There's a hilarious number straight out of Mel Brooks' "Springtime for Hitler and Germany" songbook (or playbook?), wherein Baron and his high-larious Aryan chorus sing: "The Nazis are not so bad." The goosesteppers-cum-Rockettes cut a rug during a droll dance number. However, given the book writers' Ralph Waldo Emerson-like aversion to consistency, that hobgoblin of little (and, you know, like logical and rational) minds, the theme of the rehabilitation of the Nazi empire soon goes the way of agent Mega's wound and his aborted seduction of Tatiana. Go take a hike, Reich! Auf wiedersehen, kameraden!

(Warning: Although the ratzi Nazi scene is "Hitler-ious" along the lines of Charlie Chaplin's 1940 anti-master race masterpiece The Great Dictator and Mel's The Producers, seeing swastikas, German uniforms and other accoutrements of fascist kitsch whipped up by costume designer Allison Dillard might shock and offend some members of the audience.

WWII have ended 71 years ago this May when the Red Army marched into Berlin, but for some, it may still be "too soon" to see Nazi regalia on the live stage - even if it is in jest and at the National "Socialists'" expense. The Trump campaign's raising of the specter of fascism could cause some of the laughs to stick in your mouth, as America is confronted with homegrown authoritarianism. And torture - a favorite of stage and screen since the Bush administration revived one of imperial America's favorite pastimes - is also depicted. Don't get me started!!!)

Along the way, various espionage conventions are lampooned in Forever, short-circuited by being combined with musical and rom com sensibilities. Zany Tessa Netting's Barb plays a mélange of the James Bond characters Q and Miss Moneypenny, a quartermaster who provides Mega with cool gadgets, while yearning/burning for the superspy's attention and affection. Most of the thesps are cast in multiple roles, with the Informant, Susan and others portrayed by an actor credited as Al Fallick (is that really his name or is it meant to be merely symbolic?)

Auds should be aware that amidst the mayhem of this mirthful musical madcap mishmash there is gunplay, swordplay, cigarette smoking (pretty foul-smelling, BTW), and related visual and sound (and nostril) effects. From on high a four-piece band, including TalkFine, rock the house with live music, while there is some wacky dancing choreographed by Lauren Lopez. Forever is more erratic than erotic - this is no Spy Who Loved Me - and Curt Mega is no alpha and omega of spycraft. Some ticket buyers are likely to be stirred, not shaken, by this over-the-top production that pulls out all the stops. And while this about two and half hour rollicking spoof isn't for everybody, most of the opening night audience seemed to enthusiastically enjoy it, as did your gallivanting critic.

Spies Are Forever is being performed through April 3 on Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays at 3:00 p.m. at the NoHo Arts Center, 11136 Magnolia Blvd., N. Hollywood, CA 91601, on Tuesdays, Thursday, For more info: (800)838-3006; http://spiesareforever.diamonds.

And theatergoers should remember that the 23rd annual Los Angeles Women's Theatre Festival takes place March 24-27 at the Electric Lodge, 1416 Electric Avenue, Venice, CA 90291. For info and reservations: (818) 760-0408; www.lawtf.org.

Spies, lies, and glanders: “The Americans” season four premiere

Fri, 18 Mar 2016 10:42:00 +0000

Season four of FX's The Americans begins with a troubling image from Philip Jennings' past. One might think his being a Soviet operative working deep cover in the U.S. would spark many a troubled dream, but the memory haunting Philip is one from his childhood.

Like many Russians during the post-war period, Philip (Matthew Rhys), endured grinding poverty, his much worsened by bullies who stole what little he had.

We know that the Soviet Union fought off Nazis on its own soil with little help from the Allies, losing millions of lives in the process. Another of the Allies, England, also resorted to post-war rationing. But seeing history in action brings a raw immediacy to the subject, for ten-year-old Philip, pushed beyond reason, finds a hunk of brick and kills one of his attackers.

As an adult spy living circa 1983, he's killed several people, but that first one has stuck with him. He awakes in his suburban home next to his beloved wife, Elizabeth (Keri Russell), and still feeling disturbed, diverts her with a real-world problem.

Clark needs to tell his pretend-wife, Martha, about the death of her work friend, Gene, and so Philip-aka Clark-delivers the news. He tells her he had to do it and plant evidence that Gene was the spy in the office. This is not an IBM research lab we're talking about; it's an FBI office complex which has a counterspy operation on which the Soviet Centre wants to keep tabs.

Martha (Alison Wright), who only recently learned Clark is actually a Soviet spy, agreed to continue with the snooping, so learning that Gene's death was the price of her protection came as devastating news.

Philip isn't wearing his nerdy Clark wig when he tells her the news nor is he talking like a smooth operator. Perhaps he does have feelings for Martha. "Clark, we have to make decisions together," she says, choosing wifely loyalty over spousal betrayal.

The next day, she makes copies at work of FBI surveillance records, a deed that pays off later in the episode. When news does hit the office about Gene a. being a spy, and b. an apparent suicide, agent Stan Beeman, who lives across the street from Philip, chats to Martha about Gene.

She responds, "You never really know a person, do you." Truer words never spoken.

Philip and Elizabeth's daughter, Paige, has something in common with Martha: she knows the couple's secret and is troubled by it. Her learning the truth was swiftly followed last season with a visit to West Germany where Soviet helpers managed to sneak in Elizabeth's dying mother for one last visit.

Paige is, understandably, overwhelmed by the knowledge. As a newly minted Christian who still believes that one should never lie, she steps out of a classroom to avoid having to swear the required Pledge of Allegiance.

A more troubling development is her revealing her parents' true pastime to her pastor, Tim. During one visit to his study, she admits she shouldn't have told him. "They trusted me," she says, but when he suggests her parents meet with him, she rebuffs the notion. "We can't tell anybody else, ever."

Unwilling to place faith in Pastor Tim's discretion, Elizabeth sets up a mobile eavesdropping post to listen in on the pastor and Paige. Some mothers have to worry about their daughter's boyfriends. Not Elizabeth. Jesus, Pastor Tim-and Uncle Sam-are what's keeping her up at night.

Elizabeth does have a kindly figure in her life, Gabriel, who is her and her husband's undercover handler. Although Gabriel (the soulful Frank Langella) looks out for the pair by running interference between them and the Centre, he's had his hands full trying to explain away Elizabeth's rogue operation to see her mother. "If you can't work with me, I'll simply go back into retirement and get you another handler," he chides, to which Elizabeth says with chagrin, "We want you to stay."

That piece of business concluded, he's on to the show's main story line, which concerns biological weapons. "We're not allowed to make them, we signed the treaty, but we think the Americans are making them, so we make them, too," he tells the couple, who realize they're now on the case.

President Nixon officially decommissioned the U.S. military's bioweapons program in 1969, and signed the Biological Weapon and Toxin Convention (BWTC) in 1972. Since the show is sticking with its 1983 time frame, its producers are either taking artistic license or reflecting the view of those who claim that the U.S. was and is doing more than making antidotes and vaccines for enemy-delivered bioweapons.

Gabriel explains that a Soviet operative is unable to continue meeting with a dissident bioweapons researchers due to U.S. surveillance having perhaps identified the operative.

We're talking about deadly germs, American-made instruments of terror, so when Gabriel displays syringes of vaccines for meningitis, Philip and Elizabeth wisely roll up their sleeves.

Meanwhile, Nina (Annet Mahendru), the disgraced embassy employee sent back home to face justice last season, is dealing with the impact left by three men in her life, but unlike Elizabeth, she's thus far on the losing end of the equation.

She is still working at the Soviet computer research facility and talking to a renegade scientist who had been forcibly extricated from the US.

He admits that he was a shitty husband to his wife in the U.S., and then talks to Nina about being shown the prototype of an aircraft wing he designed, a type of Stealth fighter wing. Nina, who seems to be continuing her pattern of sex + spying, reports to her project head that the scientist is chiefly interested in his work. She's holding back on giving more details, then she delivers her demand to see her husband.

Husband? That's news to me. She had sex with FBI Stan Beeman at least partly as a means of ensuring the agent didn't rat her out to the Soviets for smuggling, and then seemed to legitimately fall for Oleg, a handsome Soviet embassy official. No mention of a husband, as I recall.

The show has a habit of playing the long game, so although Nina doesn't seem currently relevant to the main players, one suspects this will change.

Over at the Rezidentura (the base of espionage operations), director Arkady is dealing with a mystery of his own, for the radio room keeps being used by security pro Tatiana. Feeling out of the loop, he talks to Oleg about Tatiana, but he knows nothing.

Arkady (Lev Gorn) finally hits up Tatiana about his concerns and learns she's with Department 12, a unit tasked with biological warfare issues. "If there are dangerous things going on, like germs and chemicals, I need to know," he says, but gets nowhere with her.

And so it goes at first for Philip and Elizabeth in their effort to contact the dissident bioweapons researchers. The first street meet is called off at the last second by Philip, who thinks their contact could be under surveillance. On the second try, Elizabeth is the one who detects something is awry.

When later they study intelligence gathered by Martha, they find an open date where the scientist isn't under surveillance. Other military-employed scientists are also being watched by the FBI, but this man is the actual contact.

Finally, Philip, who is wearing a face-swallowing beard, and Elizabeth meet up with the American scientist. Played by Dylan Baker, he comes to realize he's stuck with this pair of strangers. He hands over a vial in a padded tobacco tin and tells them to deliver it to Gabriel within 48 hours.

The pathogen is a weaponized version of the equine disease called glanders. An alarmed Philip points out the shots he and Elizabeth received were to counteract meningitis. The scientist says sardonically, that glanders is "to meningitis what bubonic plague is to a runny nose."

Philip, like his wife, has a lot on his plate, but he finds time to attend a self-help meeting where he shares a highly edited version of his childhood assault on the bully.

The moderator tries to offer guidance but Philip can't share what really happened. Afterward, he meets at a café with Stan's ex-wife, Sandra, a fellow group attendee. The moment, however platonic, is witnessed by Stan's current girlfriend, who's all too happy to run to the agent with intel about his ex-wife.

Stan, a retro male who thinks he's entitled to know about his ex's private life, confronts Philip in the Jennings' garage and slams the smaller man against the wall a couple of times. Guess what Philip has tucked away in his pocket. The tobacco tin? You got it in one. Glanders for the neighborhood, everybody.

Philip decides not to risk damaging the vial, so he contents himself with telling the truth about having attended the self-help meeting where he saw Sandra. Stan seems unconvinced but he leaves.

The vial turns out to be undamaged, but now Phil is even more motivated by episode's end to send the vial on to the next stop on the line.

The next stop for viewers? Next Wednesday on FX.

Photo: FX NOW

“Rosenkavalier”: A still-felt operatic kiss to a dying empire

Thu, 17 Mar 2016 14:37:00 +0000

CHICAGO - Der Rosenkavalier - The Chevalier of the Rose - which premiered in Dresden in 1911, is Richard Strauss's best known and most loved opera. Set in Vienna in the 1740s during the reign of the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa, it is, like most important works of art, to be interpreted as both a commentary on the time in which it is situated and on the era in which it is created. It is often staged in the Belle Epoque or Art Nouveau style of ca. 1900.

Rosenkavalier is a lusty comedy about class with strong elements of masquerade, sexual pursuit, cross-dressing and gender-bending, but with equally high moral purpose, especially in its reflections on sex, love, infatuation, romance, marriage - and their fleeting intersections. With a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, this fifth of Strauss's many stage works is deemed their "Mozart opera" owing to resonances with The Marriage of Figaro. Both operas feature a critical role for a female singer (usually a mezzo) - Cherubino in Mozart, Octavian in Strauss - who plays a male character who then disguises himself as a young girl.

The plot revolves around Baron Ochs [ox] auf Lerchenau, a titled noble of boorish character and limited financial means, who claims he has "enough blue blood for two." Marrying into the rising monied bourgeois class that owns property will bring him the income he lacks and his bride the title her father craves. At the same time, even if betrothed to the young virginal Sophie von Faninal, should that make a sexual lame duck of him? Hardly! On his engagement night he is already actively pursuing a young maid from the provinces. "It's fun being the aggressor," he proclaims.

Ochs is a cousin to the Feldmarschallin, Marie Thérèse, Princess Werdenberg, in her mid-30s, whom we meet in the opening scene in bed with her lover and relation, Octavian, Count Rofrano (the mezzo playing a trouser role), who is only 17. A large supporting cast of court sycophants, relatives, domestic workers and servants surround the quartet of principals in a complex exploration of the different kinds and stages of love. In the highly stratified society of Old Europe, any question about the nature of marriage raises issues of convenience, economics, age, status, "blood" and class position, love being reduced to almost the least consideration.

As the 18th century headed inexorably toward the French Revolution in 1789, the divine right of kings and the aristocracy came under attack. The brash young United States had already reintroduced to the world the classical concept of a republic of its citizens. Although monarchies and empires still reigned, noble rank declined in importance as the upstart European bourgeois made their fortunes in mills, mines, the slave trade, plantations, shipping, manufacturing, and later railroads.

Downton Abbey and the end of an era

These are perhaps the concerns more of thinkers at the beginning of the 20th century than the mid-18th, which is why we can say that Rosenkavalier is a product of its own time, and not principally of the 1740s. The anachronistic use of the waltz - not popular until the mid-19th century - is only one clue that Strauss and Hofmannsthal aimed for verities about the human condition that reflected their own era, transcending rather than capturing time. In their own lives, though they may not have been conscious of it, the great European empires were indeed on the verge of collapse.

The horror of World War I, which erupted only three years after Rosenkavalier's premiere, would spell the end of the various multi-national empires of Europe, the demise of ruling houses, the unforeseen rise of a socialist entity in Soviet Russia, the establishment of new national states in Central Europe in which people were citizens, not subjects. Strauss and Hofmannsthal may not have been able to predict the date for these developments, but surely - "sooner or later," "today or tomorrow," as the Marschallin wistfully muses about the loss of love - it would come.

One of the opera's minor roles is that of Mohammed, the Marschallin's black page (performed in Chicago by Zach Thomas), sporting an Arabic name and turban, reminding us that in 1911 a far-flung Ottoman Empire still abutted the great European powers. It would also, of course, shortly disappear without fanfare.

The popular British television phenomenon of Downton Abbey, set in exactly the era of Rosenkavalier's creation, also depicted the disappearance of one seemingly eternal way of life, and the emergence of new values, new ideas, new classes. Both of these works are a kind of wistful last kiss to empire. A telling moment comes at the end of Act I, when the Marschallin realizes, too late, that she never gave her lover a farewell kiss. Did she intuitively divine somehow that this had been her last chance? Do we ever truly recognize that evanescent moment when one era dissolves into another?

The British writer Osbert Sitwell, in his novel Those Were the Days, described the Rosenkavalier waltz as heard in the salons of London that fateful summer of 1914: "With its seductive rhythms, its carefully hidden cleverness, it was the last song of an era, and the fox-trots and tangos, of which the elder generation so much disapproved, always made way for it."

Lyric Opera of Chicago uses a production originally designed for San Francisco Opera that seems, in its über-traditional sets and staging, a bit of a throwback today, now that audiences are used to innovative costume design, visuals and projections, and even some intentional anachronism in the opera house. The older audience I saw at the final performance of the season (March 13) suggests that a production with a fresher scenic approach might attract more new opera lovers.

But from the musical standpoint, Lyric Opera assembled a dream ensemble studded with accomplished artists. As the Marschallin, we saw the cool, regal, Illinois-born soprano Amanda Majeski, who, more than anyone I've ever seen in the role, asserted her amatory privilege. In her world she demands to be treated with discretion before the obvious fact that she is carrying on serial love affairs behind her husband's back. Already assured of cooperation by her loyal footmen in barring uninvited intruders, she also binds her friends and relations to a tacit code of silence. Rank has its perks.

As Octavian, that chevalier of ambiguous sexuality, mezzo-soprano Alice Coote showed herself a supreme actor capable of assuming the randy excess of adolescent adoration, the stormy clouds of jealousy when Octavian fears the Marschallin may soon dump him, and the manner of a country bumpkin as the maidservant "Mariandel," the lovestruck teenager meeting his true counterpart in Sophie, hardly able to name what hit him, and growing into a scheming plotter to save Sophie from Baron Ochs' lascivious paws. The opera is aptly titled for this character, the centerpiece of the action.

Sophie is a well brought-up young girl who learned her convent school lessons well and is now excited to enter the "holy estate" of marriage arranged by her father. Once she meets her monstrous fiancé, however, she quickly learns to speak up for herself. Soon Sophie understands that marriage changes a man's life far less than a woman's. She was ravishingly sung by German soprano Christina Landshamer in her American operatic debut.

The sexually driven Baron Ochs is often portrayed as an older man befitting the role's lyrical bass setting - perhaps in part because of the experience the part requires, those are the performers mostly available. I have seen him costumed as a bald roué with a generous gut. But in a pleasant departure, Lyric Opera offered the young British bass Matthew Rose in his Lyric Opera debut, returning the role to Strauss and Hofmannsthal's original conception as a rustic lord, sleazy but nevertheless a "gentleman" in his mid-30s. In other words, the age difference between him and Sophie paralleled that between the Marschallin and Octavian. I appreciated the sense of equivalent naughtiness.

Many other roles in this large cast were handsomely performed, but alas too numerous to mention. Attentive details lit up the staging by Martina Weber. In the Marschallin's morning levée, the reception she grants daily to various supplicants and merchants, an Italian singer (René Barbera) auditions for some future court appointment with a pseudo-antique love aria that is one of the jewels of the tenor repertoire, even though this character is on stage for not more than five minutes.

Edward Gardner, most recently the music director of London's English National Opera, conducted with palpable affection for this luscious, swooning, mercurial and often raucous score.

In between Acts I and II Lyric Opera broke the fourth wall between stage and audience by leaving the curtain open for the scene change, showing the stagehands performing the invisible work of the theater, moving furniture, props and flies off and onto the stage. Just as the Art Nouveau style of Strauss and Hofmannsthal's time at the turn of the 20th century would soon yield to the post-war functional Bauhaus esthetic, which reveals the heat and air ducts, the rafters and armature of the construction, we now see that the utilitarian effort of producing an opera is, besides anything else, also the livelihood of trained professional singers, dancers, actors and staging personnel - represented in this case by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE Local 2) and the American Guild of Musical Artists, AFL-CIO (AGMA).

Radical plots in our comics? Marvel goes there

Wed, 16 Mar 2016 13:16:00 +0000

This past weekend, Marvel Studios released the second trailer for Captain America: Civil War. Fans rejoiced at the unexpected cameo of Spider-Man and other favorite heroes. While many remained initially concerned that the film would water down the critical politics of the comic series, it seems that they will actually embrace much of the original content.

Marvel has often used its fictional universe as an allegory for real-life politics. It has previously tackled topics such as racism, class hegemony, LGBTQI issues, and other social movements. While its films haven't always hit their mark, Marvel continues to try and address controversial politics in a way that engages readers and resonates with audiences of all different backgrounds.

Civil War reflects on post 9/11 society

Civil War, one of Marvel's highest grossing comics series of all times, took on the tough task of challenging paradigms of power and accountability. The upcoming film undoubtedly strays from the original comic, but still embodies some of the core political themes of police brutality, government surveillance, and the criminal justice system. The comic version of Civil War is triggered by a sequence of mishaps; the Hulk's deadly rampage in Las Vegas, the attack on Manhattan in "Secret Wars," and a culmination of other superhuman related episodes. Within the series' plot, it is an incident in Stamford, Connecticut, by a group of amateur superheroes, that triggers the eventual split of the Marvel universe. The "heroes" botch the capturing of super villains in an attempt to garner better ratings for a reality TV show. The mistake results in an explosion that destroys several city blocks, including an elementary school, and causes the death of over 600 civilians. This tragedy helps push the Superhuman Registration Act through Congress, a legislative bill which is then passed into law, requiring super-powered individuals to register with the government. The measure proves unpopular within the superhuman community, as it mandates that all masked heroes must reveal their identity to the public and "register" themselves with S.H.I.E.L.D.

The enactment of SRA causes a rift amongst superhumans, forcing several heroes to pick sides. As the leader of the oppositional movement, Captain America leads several superhumans underground in a counter-culture revolution against the government. Luke Cage, Daredevil, Cable, and Black Panther are among the few who join the Anti-Registration movement. Captain America argues that the bill functioned on the basis of presumed criminality. Cap's viewpoints are not only ethically inclined but stem from having lived through several historical wars (as he significantly older than most of the other Avengers). He notes that the violation of superhuman privacy sets precedent for more aggressive government surveillance on a larger scale. It is noteworthy to point out that Civil War came out following passage of the post-9/11 Patriot Act, when the U.S. government began to take excessive steps in ensuring the 'safety' of American citizens.

Iron Man,on the other hand, leads the "pro-registration" team under S.H.I.E.L.D., with the assistance of Black Widow, Dr Reed, Hank Pym (Ant Man), She-Hulk and other 'registered' superheroes. (While Peter Parker [Spiderman] is originally on the 'pro-registration' side, he eventually switches over after realizing that superhumans were being locked away indefinitely.) The 'negative zone' is specifically designed to jail powerful superhumans and is not legally acknowledged by the system, which allows Stark and other S.H.I.E.L.D. members to individually determine the length of prisoners' sentences. This is a morbid reflection of our own 'criminal justice system' and the way in which prisons, like Guantanamo Bay, are established in violation of constitutional laws.

X-Men tackles race and class hegemony

The X-Men were written as remaining neutral during the the bloodshed of the Civil War series. They are not without their own political parallels in real life, however. For years, many fans speculated that early X-Men material was inspired by the tumult of the Civil Rights Movement. Magneto and Charles Xavier were said to have been modeled after political figureheads, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. In 2013, Stan Lee confirmed that he had written X-Men as a commentary on the racism in the United States at the time. The binary relationship between both characters is depicted in the friendship of Magneto and Xavier. When Lee was asked about Magneto's role as an antagonist, he said: "[I] did not think of Magneto as a bad guy. He was just trying to strike back at the people who were so bigoted and racist. He was trying to defend mutants." The original X-Men movie series (2000-2006) directorially paid very little homage to the suggested parallels to civil rights movement. The newer X-Men films, however, (First Class and Days of Future Past) have taken a more conscious effort at giving viewers a glimpse into the complicated past that triggered Magneto's extremist behaviors. This was the first of many steps director Joss Whedon has taken in developing deeper connections between the cultural dynamics and historical elements within the X-Men series.

Beyond the obvious allegory, X-Men also explores issues of poverty and race within the spectrum of marginalized populations. Morlocks, a group of mutant characters introduced in Uncanny X-Men, were created by writer Chris Claremont and and artist Paul Smith. They were based on the subterranean race of H. G. Wells' novel The Time Machine, and introduced as socially-displaced outcasts. The Morlocks are depicted as being physically disfigured, and/or unable to hide their mutations. They chose to live underground in order to escape the constant prejudice and discrimination that they are forced to confront on the surface. While this is seemingly a voluntary choice, the reality of their displacement has left them to live in unsanitized spaces with few resources. In reading the series, it becomes apparent that the Morlocks are a reflection of disenfranchised communities, and a message about how both class (poverty) and mutations (race) are intertwined forms of social disparity.

The Black Panther answers the demand for diversity

As a response to the public demand for diversity and representation in the media, this July will mark the return of a major superhero motion picture starring a black male lead. Production studios have attempted to execute similar projects in the past; firstly with the disastrous rendition of Spawn, and more recently with the successful release of the Blade trilogy. The Black Panther, however, stands as the pinnacle of black excellence for every avid young geek. T'Challa is not only powerful and skilled, but rules over the technologically advanced [fictional] nation of Wakanda; a setting that contradicts images of stereotypically impoverished African countries. His ability to be both diplomatic and effective strays away from caricatures of previous black comic characters before him. He was originally debuted in 1966 as part of the Fantastic Four series but was eventually featured in his own independent material. This proved not only to be a commercial success; it also serves as an allegory for the black nationalist, or anti-colonialist, movement.

The Black Panther tackles themes of resistance and revolution, from T'Challa's fight with Ku Klux Klan to his dismantling of Wakanda's secret police force, the Hatut Zeraze. Readers continue to uncover embedded critiques of the white-colonialist power structure. Black Panther continues to serve as platform for men of color as it was recently announced that National Book Award and Macarthur Genius Fellowship winner, Ta-Nehisi Coates, was contracted to write an eleven-issue series. Coates has become well known for his scathing commentary on diversity and representation in the media. When speaking of the Black Panther, Coates emphasizes the trailblazer's legacy: "There has not been a black super hero in comics books quite like him before, he is tremendously radical."

The film's announcement comes at the heels of a public outcry for more overall diversity in cinema. The studios have since committed to ensuring they address these demands by bringing in a variety of black writers and cast members. Ryan Coogler, an African American filmmaker who wrote and directed the critically-acclaimed Rocky sequel Creed (2015), was recruited to direct the movie. Coogler was a coveted contender and made his directorial debut with the 2003 the award-winning Fruitvale Station (2003). T'Challa will be featured in Captain America: Civil War, and played by actor Chadwick Boseman. So far, the reaction to the casting has been mostly positive and Black Panther fans await further developments on the pre-production process.

Singing for change: Soundtrack of a movement

Wed, 16 Mar 2016 10:39:00 +0000

There is a soundtrack to the rising movement for social change. As activists put their shoulders to the wheel of progress, their voices rise to describe the struggle and urge others to join. The voices are varied. The songs are many. The singers are as diverse as the causes they espouse. But all over the country, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, the rising populism is tracked by the rise of a joyous noise.

Many of the current groups singing for social change trace their roots back to the Freedom Song Network. In 1982, organizer Jon Fromer put out a call for music workers and song sharing as part of the workshop, "Art Works for the People." A couple hundred people answered that call. Many groups ended up being formed out of the workshop. To this day, Freedom Song Network still stands as a clearinghouse for individual singers and groups. Many are still vital voices in the movement for social change.

The group Vukani Mawethu traces its roots back to the Network. It was brought together by Fania and Angela Davis around South African singer, James Madhlope Phillips. A union leader and member of the African National Congress (ANC), Phillips toured the world singing songs of freedom. He and the Davis sisters organized an ensemble for a 1986 concert at the University of California.

Vukani Mawethu grew, over time, to become a multiracial choir singing songs of everyday life as well as celebrations of freedom struggles from Africa and around the world. Their songs, primarily from South Africa, are sung in Zulu, Sethu, Xhosa, and English. The repertoire includes gospel, spirituals, labor songs, and ballads which describe the battle against racism and for social and political freedom.

As Vukani prepares for its thirtieth anniversary, coordinator Andrea Turner looks both to the past and to the future. "We are out in the community more, listening to people," she says, "trying to connect with the future and to bring new voices in, getting youth more involved in these ongoing struggles."

Occupella is of more recent vintage, starting around the Occupy movement. Nancy Schimmel, Bonnie Lockhart, Hali Hammer, Leslie Hassberg, and Betsy Rose started singing and playing at Oakland and Berkeley Occupy sites and outside local banks, particularly for International Women's Day.

The group knew each other from Freedom Song Network and other past work, including Lockhart's days with Red Star Singers, the work of Hammer and Rose in Singing for Peace, Schimmel and Lockhart playing in Plum City Players along with Jose Luis Orozco, and Schimmel's illustrious mother Malvina Reynolds ("Little Boxes," "Morningtown Ride," "What Have They Done to the Rain").

Occupella now sings at Berkeley's weekly Tax the Rich demonstrations, monthly at BART transit stations, as well as on labor picket lines, at climate change rallies, and for workshops of the San Francisco Folk Festival. They conduct song swaps and maintain a useful, handy online songbook of original, topical, and traditional parodies and rewrites. This musical manual is appropriate for all demonstrations and varieties of work toward a better world.

As Nancy Schimmel says, "We sing to promote peace, justice, and an end to corporate domination! If you can think critically, you need to act. If you can talk, you can sing!"

San Francisco's Labor Heritage Rockin' Solidarity Chorus also has roots in the Freedom Song Network. Since 1999, the chorus, made up of workers from many unions, has found homes at local community colleges and sung all over Northern California.

Director Pat Wynne, a labor organizer herself, steers the chorus to picket lines and demonstrations in support of organized labor. A recipient of the Joe Hill Award in 2014, Wynne and her husband Gilbert write performance pieces as well as song books. Her mission, she says, is to create a new canon of labor music that better reflects the diversity of the working class and its concerns.

Wynne, along with Hali Hammer and Liliana Herrera, comprise the allied group The ReSisters. They specialize in political parodies, humorous takes on serious subjects, and satire in three-part harmony. They have truly earned the title, "Divas of Dissent."

The award winning, indefatigable Hammer, who like so many in the movement has played for decades, characterizes not only the group, but the wave as a whole as she describes the music: "We are more than just a sound track; we are the spirit, the humor and the heart of the movement for social change. Our words and actions help change the world and improve people's spirit and lives. Listen to us...but more importantly, join us. There is a lot of work to be done!"

Photo: sffolkfest.org/

"Summer and Smoke": Tennessee's waltz and the blindness of neighbors

Mon, 14 Mar 2016 13:07:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES - Okay, let me get this out of the way, right off the bat: This Actors Co-op production of Tennessee Williams' Mississippi-set Summer and Smoke is well directed by Thom Babbes and well acted by a skilled ensemble. At times Tara Battani fully inhabits the lead character of Miss Alma, from every nervous tic revealing underlying sexual tension to her wistful outpourings of yearnings to her aspirations for culture to her near hysteria. I marveled at Battani the way one does at a magician, wondering: "How does she do it?" Indeed, Battani delivers such a finely etched performance that she brought to mind the ending of that other Southern gothic work about romance gone wrong: "There will always be Tara!" Hers is arguably among the finest acting I've ever seen on the L.A. boards, and is by itself worth the price of admission.

Summer and Smoke was Williams' third major Broadway production, coming hot on the heels of his smash successes, 1944's The Glass Menagerie and 1947's A Streetcar Named Desire. Like Menagerie's Laura and Streetcar's Blanche DuBois, Smoke's Alma seems to be yet another iteration of Williams' stunted, tortured self, crossed by his schizophrenic sister Rose. Here, he reworks similar themes, about sexual repression, troubled childhood, thwarted sexuality, frigidity, impotence, gentleman callers, small-mindedness in the Magnolia State, religion - the whole Tennessee waltz. So it's apropos that this Smoke is being presented at a house of worship.

In 1948, when Smoke had its Broadway premiere at the Music Box Theatre, one imagines its subject matter was very cutting edge, even quite daring. Theatergoers then may have never seen anything like it on Broadway. But, alas, almost 70 years on, Smoke's leitmotifs seem all too passé for audiences that have seen and heard this all before.

No, I'm not opposed to producing the classics. I would not prevent a once provocative play from being played out. The question is, How does one make a vintage work relevant for today's ticket buyers? Now, cranky critic that I am, I often take revisionist mountings of Greek masterpieces to task for their lack of togas. So, it's a tricky business - retaining the essence of a work while breathing new life into it to render the piece applicable for and relatable to contemporary viewers.

In addition to the by now trite sexual politics are Smoke's rather outdated racial politics that might offend. Its Mexican characters are cartoonish examples of typecasting: Mr. Gonzalez (Marco Antonio Garcia) and his daughter, the gold-digging Rosa Gonzalez (Fernanda Rohd), may cause the most susceptible among us to yearn for Citizen Trump to build that darn wall, pronto. Mr. Gonzalez is an extremely violent drunkard. As for Rosa - ah, those dusky maidens, who are so in touch with their carnal desires, unlike their lily-white sisters, like Miss Alma, who are so out of touch with their own libidinous desires and needs. Following the recent brouhaha about the Cloroxed Academy Awards, ethnic representation - and misrepresentation - are currently very prickly issues (and rightfully so).

Alma, as Smoke clumsily reminds us more than once, means "soul" in Spanish, and this play, as Dr. John Buchanan (Gregory James) stresses, is about that anatomy chart, versus the more ethereal self. John and Alma grew up next door to one another, yet their longings for each other are never realized - their yearnings are never in physical and spiritual synch. Several times during the play I felt like shouting out, "Will you two make love already?!" If Streetcar ends with Blanche famously saying, "I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers," Smoke's coda could be about "the blindness of neighbors."

As a Tennessee Williams fan I was interested in seeing this production largely because I thought I'd never seen it before. However, in fact, five years ago I had reviewed A Noise Within's version of it called The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, so the element of discovery was lost for me.

To sum up, this is a fine rendition of a late, great playwright's early two-acter with an outstanding performance by Battani in the lead role. Those who love good acting will likely enjoy this tragedy. So my quibble is not with the cast or crew or company but with the play itself - which is now more smoke and mirrors - and with its outdated bard. The timeliness of this drama for a 21^st-century urbane audience is, shall we say, gone with the wind.

Summer and Smoke is being performed through April 17 on Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 pm and on Sundays at 2:30 pm, with Saturday matinees at 2:30 pm on March 12 and April 16 (and no performances Easter weekend, March 25-27), at the Actors Co-op David Schall Theatre (located on the campus of the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, with free parking across the street on Carlos Ave.), 1760 N. Gower St., Los Angeles 90028. For more info: (322) 462-8460; http://actorsco-op.org/.

Photo: Gregory James and Tara Battani star in the Actors Co-op production of Summer and Smoke. Lindsay Schnebly

Last tango in Kabul? “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” and the embedded reporter

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 10:19:00 +0000

Hot on the heels of Spotlight's Oscars for Best Picture and Original Screenplay comes another feature about reporting. In Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Tina Fey stars as Kim Baker, an unprepared cable TV producer and/or newswriter who is "drafted" to become an embedded war correspondent in Afghanistan. Although Fey is best known as a comedienne due to her Saturday Night Live stint and NBC's droll 30 Rock, plus roles in a variety of movie comedies, and Tango is co-produced by SNL's Lorne Michaels and written by SNL and 30 vet Robert Carlock, this Afghan-set film is actually much more of a drama than a comedy. Indeed, like most of the often lame, nearly completely played out SNL (that zombie of the airwaves that refuses to go away and die), most of Tango isn't funny. MASH this ain't.

But this is by design. Tango is based on the (supposedly) true adventures of war-reporter-in-the-making Kim Barker and her autobiography The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Although the Afghan War winds on forever, paradoxically it is nonetheless largely forgotten by the media and in public discourse. To its credit, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot reminds us of America's longest war, the role of reportage in a conflict zone, and of female journalists in particular. The film firmly establishes Sarah Palin's Doppelgänger Tina Fey as also being a serious actress to be reckoned with in a film about a very serious subject. The 45-year-old Fey is glammed down in the role, playing a character around her actual age who is referred to onscreen as a "4" (on the attractive scale) when in Manhattan but a "10" in war-torn Afghanistan, where Western females are in short supply and high demand. Either Fey has bad skin - or her character was made up to look that way - which enhances a sense of realism in this picture that, among other things, shows the cost of war reporting on a correspondent's love life (or lack of).

But the feature's sense of realism is undercut by the fact that while there appears to be some digital and stock footage of Afghanistan, Tango was mostly shot in that hotbed of Islamicist insurgency, New Mexico, and Morocco, a North African nation thousands of miles away from Kabul. (News flash: Afghanistan is located in Central Asia, not the Middle East - although judging by what U.S. coverage there is of it, one might never be able to discern this.) Of course, shooting on location in Afghanistan - where there is, you know, real shooting - would be far too dangerous. I'm certainly not implying that stars like Fey are chickens for not making movies in conflict zones. But Tango's realism is further diminished because like, say, 2008's Iraq-set The Hurt Locker, it provides viewers with absolutely no context as to how Washington got bogged down in this seemingly never ending quagmire in a nation that has defied empires going all the way back to Alexander the (not so) Great. (A map of Afghanistan accompanies the "Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it" entry in the encyclopedia of fools.)

Tango opens with a scene clearly labeled onscreen as "2006," and the ensuing bombing is, to the best of my ability to hear correctly, blamed on ISIS - although those terrorists du jour did not emerge as such until about five years later. Tango also shows, without disavowing, the cozy relationship between the U.S. military and "embeds," as carefully controlled correspondents report on the troops whom their very lives depend upon. What's next? Having members of movie crews and casts review the films they work on, with independent critics barred from sets, screenings, press days, etc.?

In addition to Fey, whose memorable Palin impression has always tickled the American fancy, the cast includes some notables, including Billy Bob Thornton as General Hollanek, a professional warrior who is PR savvy and cuts deals with Baker. Martin Freeman - who interestingly played pop culture's most famous Afghan War veteran, Holmes' colleague Dr. Watson in Mr. Holmes - portrays Tango's Scottish war correspondent Iain MacKelpie. The Broadway actress Cherry Jones is relegated to a cameo as a TV news executive who clashes with Baker.

The excellent actor Alfred Molina, often cast in a variety of ethnic roles, depicts a high-ranking Afghan politician. In fact, Molina was born in London to an Italian mother and Spanish father. Connecticut-born Christopher Abbott plays another purportedly Afghan character. Sheila Vand, an actress of Iranian ancestry who appeared in 2013's pro-CIA propaganda pic Argo, plays Lebanese journalist Shakira Khar, who quips that Baker's back story is "the most American-white-lady story I've ever heard."

Nevertheless, Tango perpetuates that age-old Hollywood tradition of setting stories (more often than not shot at studio backlots or inauthentic locations) in the "exotic" Third World, starring the story's main characters - Westerners - with a few token supporting characters (played by one "ethnic" type or another, fobbed off as natives) to provide (literally) local color, while the plots revolve around the white stars and their derring-do. Just consider the fact that La-La-land's most famous African character is Lord Greystoke, an English aristocrat. In fact, the next role for Tango co-star Margot Robbie, an Australian actress who plays British war correspondent Tanya Vanderpoel, is as Jane in the upcoming The Legend of Tarzan. As the current debate about diversity (or the lack of) in moviedom continues in the wake of the Cloroxed Oscars, these points should be taken into account.

Some may find redemption in the form of female career and sexual empowerment, and the fact that the overlooked war in Afghanistan receives its due with screen time in Tango (even if shot in New Mexico and Morocco). The flick also has some good, ironic use of rock songs - like countless Vietnam movies, modern American war pictures aren't complete unless they have a rock 'n' roll score full of oldies to boogie to. But Tango sheds more heat than light on the Afghan War debacle. The film's title is never explained, although Whiskey Tango Foxtrot presumably refers to call words that suggest the initials "WTF" - which seems like an appropriate question to ask about imperialist America's endless, losing war in Afghanistan.

Journalism is currently besieged, whether by the Internet and various forms of new media or by protofascist presidential candidates calling for First Amendment restrictions. So films exalting about this beleaguered profession's noble calling are to be welcomed, although in addition to Spotlight, that wonderful ode to investigative reporting, the great Gary Webb anti-CIA biopic Kill the Messenger, and documentaries such as HBO's recent Jim: The James Foley Story, are better films about war correspondents and reporting on the frontline.

Political thriller with music about Japanese HIV scandal impresses L.A.

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 10:12:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES - Seriously? A musical about the HIV-tainted blood supply that killed off an estimated 2,000 unsuspecting Japanese hemophiliacs and others receiving transfusions? Yes, seriously. Unlikely and improbable, but very seriously.

World-renowned film and theater director Robert Allan Ackerman (Google him if you want to know who he is) lived and worked in Tokyo for nearly two decades just when the blood scandal emerged in the early 1980s. At the time, he wrote a screenplay about it, but it never got produced. Now in Los Angeles, working with a group of mostly young, multicultural performers who wanted to be in a play, Ackerman remembered the episode. His script morphed into Blood, a world premiere political thriller with music that he has written and directed. Some of the characters and details have changed, but it is essentially the factual story as it has gradually come to light.

U.S. companies knowingly sold contaminated blood to Japan, where pharmaceutical companies continued to distribute raw blood products despite the existence of heat treatments proven to prevent the spread of infection. The scandal triggered public outrage against the drug industry and the Japanese government officials charged with regulating it. Conspiracy charges were filed against high-ranking officials in the Ministry of Health and Welfare, executives of the manufacturing company involved, and a leading doctor in the field of hemophilia.

The trial lasted over a decade. It wasn't until early 2000 that an Osaka court handed down prison sentences and official apologies were tendered. No defendants on the American side of the corruption were ever brought to justice. There are hints in Blood of right-wing political connections to the scandal, and also of organized crime involvement, but these are not fully explored.

"One of the reasons this case took so long to unfold is that none of the victims or their families were willing to come forward," explains Ackerman, who got to know Japanese culture intimately. "Being polite, softspoken and deferential to authority is ingrained in the culture. To be sick with AIDS was a source of great shame. Even when the case finally went to trial, the plaintiffs testified from behind black curtains. In the end, it was a young boy who broke the silence, although even he did not publicly reveal his name for another 10 years. Today, Ryuhei Kawada, who miraculously survived, serves as a member of the Japanese Parliament."

A member of the House of Councilors since 2007, and active on health, welfare and labor issues, Kawada recalls, "In 1995, at the age of 19, I revealed my real name as a victim of AIDS-tainted blood product, in order to fully fight against the government and the pharmaceutical company in the trial, wishing to never have such a disaster repeated ever again. Today, more than 20 years later and across the ocean in the United States, this stage play is created based on that incident - I am more than thrilled."

Today Blood takes on additional layers of meaning owing to malfeasance surrounding the recent nuclear accident at Fukushima, the methane gas leak at Porter Ranch in California, the discovery of lead in the drinking water in Flint, Michigan, and hospital medical devices, promoted by manufacturers and their bought-off physician advocates, that cannot be adequately cleaned to prevent infection by fatal superbugs.

"If You Want to Know Who We Are..."

An ambitious multimedia semi-documentary event combining elements of kabuki, Japanese dance, ritual and song, projections, portable screens, and a large, hyperactive cast on a postage-stamp stage, Blood incorporates songs such as "If You Want to Know Who We Are...We're the Ministers of Nippon" adapted from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado, which was of course in its day a pointed satire of Victorian officialdom in Great Britain. Other original music, songs and rap are by "The Virgins" bassist Nick Ackerman and "Jet" drummer/vocalist Chris Cester.

Inevitable comparisons can be made to other works that highlight the Japanese-American relationship, such as Sondheim's Pacific Overtures and, naturally, Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly. Blood marks the debut production of The Garage theater company. The fleet-footed ensemble take on multiple roles; ethnic type-casting is not ignored, but is loosely observed.

Alexa Hamilton plays the American reporter Jules Davis who uncovers the story (factually it was a Japanese woman journalist who scooped the scandal), and Sohee Park portrays the Japanese-Korean lawyer who heads up the investigation. (An important side story in Blood is the historic prejudice against non-ethnic Japanese, especially Koreans. The capacity to "come out" about HIV is paralleled by the movement to erase the social stigma over not being of "pure" Japanese, uh, blood.) Other important roles are Takuma Anzai as Ken, Jules' former Tokyo college buddy, and Kazumi Aihara as a hospital nurse who becomes an unwilling witness to unfolding events. Miho Ando portrays Koyo Ninomiya, the young whistle-blower based on Councilor Kawada, and Saki Miata plays his mother.

Toshi Toda's Dr. Kazema is based on the real-life Dr. Takeshi Abe who served as president of Japan's AIDS Research Committee and the Hemophilia Society. He believed that "pure" Japanese were genetically immune to AIDS, so his cavalier experiments on his patients with HIV-tainted blood were perhaps meant to prove a point of racial superiority, even as he saw them dying and even as he covered up their cause of death. Years earlier, during World War II, he was thought to have conducted medical experiments on Chinese and Korean prisoners.

Fast moving, eye-catching, colorful, deeply affecting, cathartic and redemptive, Blood holds your interest from beginning to end. Even if the subject matter as such might not be of particular interest, it's a gift to see such powerful themes and such varied theatrical discipline poured into this absorbing tale. I can't believe that five weeks of this little production will mark the end of this work's saga.

Blood is performed now through April 3, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 pm, and Sundays at 3 pm, at The Complex, 6476 Santa Monica Blvd. Hollywood 90038. For tickets and further information: (323) 960-7745 or www.plays411.com/blood.

Photo: Takaaki Hirakawa,Mika Santoh, Michael Joseph, Miho Ando (center), Ash Ashina, Takuma Anzai. Photo by Ed Krieger.

In Memoriam: Joey Martin Feek

Tue, 08 Mar 2016 13:59:00 +0000

I first saw Joey Martin Feek perform with her husband, Rory, on the 2008 season of Nashville Duet. They finished third on the show, standing out as much for their distinctive attire as for their soft harmonies.

Rory's overalls were a throwback to an earlier, distinctly rural era, as was their musical style. As for Joey, who died recently at age 40 of cancer, she was something of a puzzler to me. Part Native American, she was blessed with striking looks that many a female artist would feel obliged or pressured to accentuate with designer cleavage and layers of makeup.

As the episodes unreeled, I assumed Joey would get with the program. Doll it up, play the game, for heaven's sake don't wear those long-sleeved, pearl button cowboy shirts (even though I always liked them on my late grandfather), but this wasn't what she was about. She gracefully deflected remarks producers made on the show about the need for a makeover.

She defied my expectations and perhaps those in the viewing audience. Joey, aided by her songwriter husband, kept the honesty flowing with their music releases and performances.

They eventually put together a few shows on the RFD channel that wove together Joey's love of cooking, their music, and a little homespun humor.

They recorded hymns, expressing both faith and a spirituality tellingly absent from some shows where the number of children seems to be the selling point.

After the birth of their last child in 2014-Indiana, named for Joey's home state-Joey learned she had cervical cancer. Rounds of treatment failed to slow the cancer's spread, and so she decided against last-ditch measures.

During her last months, Rory and Joey shared their journey via photos and messages, which took another kind of courage, the willingness to not hide the toll the disease and its treatment had taken. In extremis, she would be defined by her love of family, her faith, and grace in action.

Joey + Rory had a career together, but more importantly, they experienced a life well-lived and well-loved. Joey leaves behind family, friends, and fans, and those of us who absorbed a vital message--that what matters in any musical genre and more importantly, in life, is being true to oneself.

This strength of conviction, expressed by a quiet rebel, is a legacy well worth remembering.

Photo: Courtesy Rory Feek